Culture

From high levels of lead found in school drinking water to industry sites releasing toxic heavy metals into the air, over 40 years of regulations in the United States have failed to protect human and environmental health from toxic chemicals.

In a new paper published in BioScience, Portland State University researchers contend that these failures result from the flawed governance over the continued production, use and disposal of toxic chemicals, and lay out a plan for improved policies.

"We keep trying to mitigate, but it hasn't been working for 40 years," said Zbigniew Grabowski, one of the authors and a recent graduate of PSU's Earth, Environment and Society doctoral program. "We should push for something more visionary -- we need a policy framework that goes beyond permitting allowable levels of toxic risk by seeking to eliminate and replace them."

He said investments need to be made into not only investigating the consequences of toxic substances, but more importantly, finding alternative ways of producing goods and services that don't generate those toxic substances.

"You could spend multiple careers trying to assess the public costs of toxic lead in drinking water, but why not work in the same lifetime on figuring out how to produce water systems that don't make people sick?" Grabowski said.

The lead authors, recent doctoral graduates from PSU's environmental science, public administration and political science programs, looked at toxic chemical governance through five high-profile case studies: lead in school drinking water, heavy metals in industry, sulfur and nitrogen oxides emitted by fossil fuel combustion, BPA in packaging that can leach into food and drinks, and glyphosate, one of the most commonly applied pesticides in the U.S.

The researchers said that too often, toxic chemical risks only become known after enough harm has been done to communities to elicit a social response. The U.S.'s current regulatory processes generally only mitigate or act retroactively rather than proactively.

They highlight four major paths forward:

Shift thinking around toxic chemicals management from one of mitigating risk to one of eliminating risk.

Support diverse forms of knowledge. Currently, the knowledge that is used to assess the extent and risk of harm tends to favor industry over public and environmental health advocates.

Increase the representativeness and transparency of democratic processes, and allow for the direct involvement of affected communities in policy design and implementation.

Create policies that identify and incentivize ways of producing substances that meet the goals and needs of society without exposing people to toxic chemicals, and invest in the research and education required to support such innovation

Many dinosaur species are known from scant remains, with some estimates suggesting 75% are known from five or fewer individuals. Auroraceratops rugosus was typical in this regard when it was named in 2005 based upon a single skull from the Gobi Desert in northwestern China. But that is no longer the case.

In the intervening years, scientists have recovered fossils from more than 80 individual Auroraceratops, bringing this small-bodied plant-eater into the ranks of the most completely known dinosaurs. It is now one of the few very early horned dinosaurs known from complete skeletons. In a collection of articles appearing as Memoir 18 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology this week, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Gansu Agricultural University, and other institutions describe the anatomy, age, preservation, and evolution of this large collection of Auroraceratops.

Their analysis places Auroraceratops, which lived roughly 115 million years ago, as an early member of the group Ceratopsia, or horned dinosaurs, the same group to which Triceratops belongs. In contrast to Triceratops, Auroraceratops is small, approximately 49 inches (1.25 meters) in length and 17 inches (44 cm) tall, weighing on average 34 pounds (15.5 kilograms). While Auroraceratops has a short frill and beak that characterize it as a horned dinosaur, it lacks the "true" horns and extensive cranial ornamentation of Triceratops.

"When I first saw this animal back in 2004, I knew instantly it was a new kind that had never been seen before and was very excited about it," says paleontologist Peter Dodson, senior author on the work and a professor with appointments in Penn's School of Veterinary Medicine and School of Arts and Sciences. "This monograph on Auroraceratops is long-awaited."

In 2005, Dodson and his former students Hai-Lu You and Matthew Lamanna named Auroraceratops (in Latin, "dawn's horned face") in honor of Dodson's wife, Dawn Dodson. You, along with fellow Chinese scientist Da-Qing Li--both authors on the current work--and collaborators followed up on the discovery, identifying more than 80 additional examples of the species, from near-hatchlings to adults.

Eric Morschhauser, lead author who is now on the faculty at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, completed his Ph.D. under Dodson at Penn, focused on characterizing Auroraceratops using this robust dataset.

Auroraceratops represents the only horned dinosaur in the group Neoceratopsia (the lineage leading to and including the large bodied ceratopsians such as Triceratops) from the Early Cretaceous with a complete skeleton. This exclusiveness is significant, the researchers say, because horned dinosaurs transitioned from being bipedal, like their ancestors, to being the large rhinoceros-like quadrupedal animals most people think of as horned dinosaurs during the later parts of the Cretaceous.

"Before this study," says Morschhauser, "we had to rely on Psittacosaurus, a more distantly related and unusual ceratopsian, for our picture of what the last bipedal ceratopsian looked like."

Auroraceratops preserves multiple features of the skeleton, like a curved femur and long, thin claws, that are unambiguously associated with walking bipedally in some dinosaurs.

"It can now provide us with a better picture of the starting point for the changes between bipedal and quadrupedal ceratopsians," adds Morschhauser.

Peter Dodson is a professor of anatomy in the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine's Department of Biomedical Sciences and a professor of paleontology in the School of Arts and Sciences' Department of Earth and Environmental Science.

Being friends with an award juror can increase a person's chance of being nominated but decrease their chances of being selected as the victor, according to new research published in the Academy of Management Journal.

The Oscars, the Grammys, and even the Nobel Prize, all peer-judged competitions, are often criticised for the decisions of their jurors; some people go as far as making accusations of bias, partisanship and even cronyism.

In 2010, Quentin Tarantino was infamously accused of favouritism after he led a Venice Film Festival jury which awarded the prize for Best Picture to his former partner, created a new lifetime-achievement award for his mentor Monte Hellman and graced a long-time friend with two prizes, one of which was the award for Best Director.

Defending himself to an outraged Italian press, Tarantino claimed that "a friend on a jury is your worst enemy as they would be too embarrassed to give you a prize" - a lesson he said Mr Hellman taught him in 1992.

The paradox so aptly defined in Tarantino's statement to the press led researchers, Simone Ferriani from Cass Business School, Erik Aadland from BI Norwegian Business School and Gino Cattani from New York University Stern School, to question how social relationships affect reward allocation choices in peer-based evaluative settings.

Combining statistical analysis of eight years' of decision making data from the most prestigious Norwegian advertising industry competition with industry member interviews, researchers sought to understand how relationships between jurors and entrants affect competition results.

Three relationship dynamics were used to understand how jurors' decisions are influenced.

Direct ties
the extent to which jury members tend to favour candidates with whom they have worked in the past.

Reciprocity
the extent to which jury members tend to favour candidates from whom they have themselves been favoured in the past.

Cliquishness
the extent to which jury members tend to favour candidates who are part of the same network clique as the jury members.

The researchers, found that while all three dynamics can improve a candidate's chance of receiving an honourable mention, only reciprocity boosts their chances of being the victor.

"Having a direct tie to, or being a part of the same clique as, an award juror can help candidates be shortlisted or nominated but then actually prevent them winning," Dr Ferriani said.

"This, we believe, is because people in charge of granting prestigious honors may be driven by self-serving relational interests, as much as the genuine desire to signal their moral integrity and deflect potential inauthenticity concerns away.

"Because awards are tremendous drivers of value -- film festival awards may increase box office sales, literary prizes can open doors to exclusive publishers and academic awards may secure more research grants -- understanding how relationships influence the way they are allocated is particularly important, especially amidst calls for transparency in public life.

"These findings should invite some healthy cynicism among those who still have unconditional faith in the universalistic principles that are supposed to inspire meritocratic institutions, but should also come as hopeful news to those who have long lost that faith."

About 3.5 million students are suspended each year, and school punishment has been tied to a variety of negative outcomes. A new study took a longitudinal look at how school suspensions are related to offending behaviors that include assault, stealing, and selling drugs. It found that rather than decreasing subsequent offending, school suspensions increase this behavior.

The study, by researchers at Bowling Green State University and Eastern Kentucky University, is published in Justice Quarterly, a publication of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.

"Our findings suggest that suspending students from school can serve as a negative and harmful turning point in adolescence that increases offending over time," according to Thomas James Mowen, assistant professor of sociology at Bowling Green State University, who led the study. "Intensifying disciplinary strategies--what some have called the criminalization of school discipline--may do more harm than good and could result in more crime in schools, neighborhoods, and communities."

Mowen and his colleagues studied to what extent being suspended from middle and high school was a turning point that led to more deviant behavior. They also examined whether school suspensions, the most common response to youth's misbehavior at school, amplified the likelihood that adolescents would offend as they grew into young adults. Offending was defined as attacking or assaulting someone, possessing a gun, selling illegal substances, destroying property, and stealing.

The study used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) to examine the role, cumulative effect, and impact of school suspensions on subsequent offending. The NLSY97 included 8,984 youth from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds from all 50 states who were between 12 and 18 years at the start of the study. Information about the participants was collected annually; this study focused on the first four years of data because after four years, most of the participants had aged out of school.

Participants were asked if they had been suspended from school as well as how many times they had engaged in offending behavior. Researchers then measured the effect of school suspensions on subsequent offending.

Overall, respondents reported they had been suspended 12.3% of the time, with students who were suspended once likely to report being suspended again. The study also found that exclusionary school discipline (i.e., suspensions) increased subsequent offending, substantially amplifying deviant behavior as the youth moved through adolescence and into adulthood. And repeated suspensions further amplified subsequent offending.

Perhaps most importantly, the study found that suspensions increased offending behaviors over time, even after accounting for prior levels of offending. This means that even among youth who reported offending behaviors prior to being suspended, exclusionary school discipline still contributed to significant increases in offending over time.

The study also found that White youth reported higher levels of offending than Black and Hispanic youth. Because Black and Hispanic youth are far more likely to be suspended than White youth, the researchers suggest that the effects of punitive school discipline may exacerbate differences in offending across racial and ethnic groups over time.

The researchers took into account a variety of factors that influence offending behavior, including whether youth dropped out of school, how youth felt about their schools (e.g., whether they felt safe, thought their teachers were interested in them, believed school discipline was fair), how they felt about their families, and their families' income. The study also considered youth's relationships with their peers (including whether they were members of a gang) and their gender, race, and ethnicity. And it took into account prior levels of offending.

"American schools are relying increasingly on exclusionary sanctions and zero-tolerance policies to maintain control and safety," notes Mowen. "Our findings point to the need for school officials and policymakers to recognize the negative consequences of these approaches, examine the underlying causes of students' behavior, and change how we manage that misbehavior."

The authors note that their study is limited because, as a household-based survey, it did not examine specific characteristics of schools. In addition, the study's reliance on self-reported information (from the students) may limit the accuracy of the data due to respondents' ability to recall past events, desire to provide socially acceptable answers, and other biases. Finally, because school discipline has intensified since the data were collected, the authors posit that their findings may underestimate the effect of suspensions on subsequent offending.

The addition of lateral extra-articular tenodesis to a hamstring autograft in knee surgery in young active patients significantly reduces graft failure and persistent anterolateral rotatory laxity at two years post operatively. The research, presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Orthopedic Sports Medicine Society, received the O'Donoghue Sports Injury Award.

Orthopedic surgeons use an extra-articular lateral tenodesis, which is an extra tendon repair on the outside of the knee, for an anterior cruciate ligament surgery to restore pivot control, which is essential in most sports activity.

Alan M. Getgood, MD, from the Fowler Kennedy Sports Medicine Clinic in London, Ontario presented data from a multicenter randomized clinical trial that sought to determine if adding a lateral extra-articular tenodesis with a single bundle anterior cruciate ligament repair would reduce the risk of persistent rotary laxity in young patients.

Getgood and the other researchers enrolled 624 patients, average age 18.9 years, who had presented pre-operatively with high-grade rotatory laxity, which is the passive response of a joint to an externally applied force or torque. Patients received either standard hamstring graft procedure or standard hamstring graft procedure with lateral extra-articular tenodesis.

The primary outcome was graft failure defined as either the need for revision surgery or symptomatic instability associated with a positive asymmetric pivot shift, indicating persistent rotational laxity.

The group that received standard ligament surgery experienced a 41 percent graft failure rate while only 25 percent of the group that received standard surgery plus lateral extra-articular tenodesis experienced graft failure.

"The addition of LET to a hamstring autograft ACLR in young active patients significantly reduces graft failure and persistent anterolateral rotatory laxity at 2 years post operatively," said Getgood.

Chestnut Hill, Mass. (7/12/2019) - In those split seconds when people witness others in distress, neural pathways in the brain support the drive to help through facets of imagination that allow people to see the episode as it unfolds and envision how to aid those in need, according to a team of Boston College researchers.

The underlying process at work is referred to as episodic simulation, essentially the ability of individuals to re-organize memories from the past into a newly-imagined event simulated in the mind.

Neuroimaging helped the researchers identify multiple neural pathways that explain the relationship between imagination and the willingness to help others, researchers from Boston College and the University of Albany, SUNY, reported recently in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

The team explored two separate brain regions with different functions: the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ), a key brain region thought to be involved in representing the minds of other people, also known as "perspective-taking"; and the medial temporal lobe (MTL) subsystem, a set of brain regions that support the simulation of imagined scenes.

The study discovered evidence for the direct impact of scene imagery on willingness to help, according to Boston College Associate Professor of Psychology Liane Young, a co-author and the principal investigator on the project. While study participants imagined helping scenes, neural activity in MTL predicted overall willingness to help the person in need, according to the article, "A role for the medial temporal lobe subsystem in guiding prosociality: the effect of episodic processes on willingness to help others," which was published in the journal's April 14 edition.

"If we are able to vividly imagine helping someone, then we think we're more likely to actually do it," said Young, director of the Morality Lab at BC. "Imagining the scenery surrounding the situation can also prompt people to take the perspective of the people in the situation who need help, which in turn prompts prosocial action."

This may be because of a phenomenon known as imagination inflation, where humans use the vividness of their imagination as a kind of cue to estimate the likelihood of an event, according to the co-authors, which also included former BC postdoctoral researcher Brendan Gaesser, now an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Albany, SUNY, research assistants Joshua Hirschfeld-Kroen and Emily A. Wasserman, and undergraduate research assistant Mary Horn.

The team set out to learn how the capacity to simulate imagined and remembered scenes of helping motivate individuals to form more altruistic intentions. The goal was to uncover the cognitive and neural mechanisms that explain the relationship between episodic simulation and the enhanced willingness to help those in need. 

In the first experiment, which allowed the team to look at both brain regions, the researchers collected functional brain images as people imagined and remembered helping others in hypothetical scenarios. In the second experiment, while people were imagining helping another person, the team used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to disrupt activity in their right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ), a key brain region thought to be involved in representing the minds of other people.

Neuroimaging revealed that the willingness to help was also predicted by activity in the RTPJ, a critical node that's involved in taking the perspective of other people, according to the researchers. However, in the second experiment, when the team used TMS to temporarily inhibit activity in the RTPJ, they found that the altruistic effect of vividly imagining helping remained significant, suggesting that this effect doesn't depend exclusively on perspective-taking.

"We had initially expected that higher neural activity in the medial temporal lobe subsystem would be associated with a greater willingness to help," the team reported. "Surprisingly, we found the opposite: the more activity a person had in their MTL subsystem while they were imagining helping scenes, the less willing they were to help the person in need."

This contradiction may be explained by lower MTL activity reflecting greater ease of imagining episodes, and that ease of imagination means that participants are more willing to help. Consistent with this account, the team found that when participants reported finding it easier to imagine or remember helping episodes, they also tended to report being more willing to help the person in need.

Young and Gaesser recently found in a separate study, led by BC postdoctoral researcher Jaclyn Ford and Professor Elizabeth Kensinger, that vividly remembering helping was associated with making more generous donations in the wake of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. Next steps in the research will further connect the lab's neuroimaging approach with measures of real-world altruistic behavior.

Young athletes who have anterior cruciate ligament surgery are more likely to need an additional surgery if they received a hamstring graft compared to a bone-patellar tendon-bone graft, according to research presented today at the American Orthopedic Society for Sports Medicine Annual Meeting. The research was conducted by group of clinicians led by Dr. Christopher C. Kaeding of Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.

Kaeding and his team of researchers followed 839 patients aged 14-22 who were injured while participating in a sport such as baseball, football, and soccer. Each patient was followed up with after two- and six-years post operation.

"The purpose of this study was to determine the incidence of subsequent ligament disruption for high school- and college-aged athletes between autograft bone-patellar tendon-bone versus hamstring grafts for anterior cruciate ligament repair," Kaeding said. His group hypothesized that there would be no recurrent ligament failure differences between the two methods.

Instead, the researchers discovered that patients receiving a hamstring graft had twice the risk of an ACL graft revision than patients who were given a bone-patellar tendon-bone graft. For low-risk patients, a hamstring graft can increase the risk of recurrent ACL graft revision by five percentage points, from 5 percent to 10 percent. For high-risk patients, a hamstring graft can increase the risk of recurrent ACL graft revision by 15 percentage points, from 35 percent to 50 percent.

"There is a high rate of subsequent ACL surgery in this young athletic cohort, with evidence suggesting that incidence of ACL graft revisions at six years following index surgery is significantly higher in hamstring autografts compared to bone-patellar tendon-bone autografts, Kaeding reported.

A programme of therapy and coping strategies for people who care for family members with dementia successfully improves the carers' mental health for at least a six-year follow-up, finds a UCL study.

Carers who took part in the programme were five times less likely to have clinically significant depression than carers who were not offered the therapy, according to the findings published in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

The intervention has also been shown to be cost-effective in a prior study.

"Taking care of a family member with dementia can be immensely difficult, particularly as their condition deteriorates and they may not appreciate their carer, so close to four in 10 family carers experience depression of anxiety," said Professor Gill Livingston (UCL Psychiatry), the trial's principal investigator.

"We now can offer an evidence-based approach to support their mental health in the short- and long-term, which benefits both the carer and the person they're caring for."

The START (STrAtegies for RelaTives) programme is delivered by psychology graduates, trained and supervised by the research team, instead of qualified clinicians, making it easy to implement in many settings.

Those delivering the therapy work with carers to develop coping strategies, supporting them to manage their own wellbeing in the long run without needing further therapy sessions. Carers received eight sessions during which there is an emphasis on planning for the future and accessing further support if needed.

260 family carers took part in the trial, most of whom were caring for a family member who had only recently been diagnosed with dementia. 173 of the participants were enrolled in the START programme for a two-year period and the other 87 were randomly assigned to a control group that did not receive the intervention.

Six years after receiving the therapy, the carers who were in the START programme had significantly fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety, and the researchers say the therapy programme appeared to be both preventative and improve existing mental ill-health.

Patient-related costs were close to three times lower among the families in the START programme (averaging £5759 for those in START versus £16 964 in the control group in year six), which the researchers say is likely due to the carers being more able to cope and provide care for their loved one.

The difference of patient-related costs did not reach statistical significance, but the researchers say this is due to the fact medical costs can be very large and variable. However, their results do strongly suggest the programme is not only cost-effective, but could save money for healthcare services.

"We've designed our programme to keep costs low, and our results suggest it could actually result in cost savings in the longer term as dementia patients will have fewer costly medical problems if their family carer is healthy and supported," said Professor Livingston.

The START team have developed manuals to make it easier for any healthcare provider to deliver the intervention, and plan to provide accredited training at UCL in the near future. Alzheimer's Society are supporting the team to explore different options for getting the intervention further implemented into practice, and provided funding to make cultural adaptations to widen access to minority ethnic groups. The training manuals are also available in Japanese and Spanish, and are currently being translated into Urdu.

James Pickett, Head of Research at Alzheimer's Society, said: "Being a carer can be a gruelling job; physically and emotionally demanding, 24 hours a day and often done purely out of love. Unfortunately, depression and anxiety can be an inevitable side effect - with 90% of carers telling us they experience stress and anxiety several times a week. Yet, for the 700,000 carers across the UK, many receive little or no support, despite NICE guidelines recommending that they do.

"This is a major breakthrough. We are absolutely thrilled to see this monumental evidence that START is clinically effective at reducing depression and anxiety in carers, and that the effects can still be seen six years later. This could turn the tide for carers and we would love for it to be available to all people who care for someone with dementia. Alzheimer's Society is delighted to be supporting the further development and implementation of the START programme so as many people can benefit as possible."

Shirley Nurock, a former carer who worked on the project as a liaison with the families, commented: "After my husband developed Alzheimer's disease in his 50s, I spent 15 years caring for him. I was stressed and anxious throughout, feeling powerless as I watched him deteriorate, torn between prioritizing care for him, seeing my children through their teenage years and keeping an eye on my ageing parents.

"I can see now that an intervention like START would have allayed some of my earlier anxieties by giving me appropriate practical information, advice about services, support, coping strategies, and helping me learn how to relax. Learning that it can have such long-term effects is extremely encouraging."

Targeted drugs for breast and lung cancer could be used together to overcome resistance to treatment in several different tumour types, a new study shows.

Scientists discovered that when the breast cancer drug palbociclib was combined with the lung cancer drug crizotinib, the two-drug combination was significantly more effective against cancer cells in the laboratory than either drug used on its own.

Palbociclib has been described as one of the biggest advances in women with advanced breast cancer for two decades - so the prospect of being able to make the treatment even more effective is exciting.

The new findings also suggest that the combination approach could broaden the clinical use of palbociclib - and other drugs that work in the same way - beyond breast cancer to include many other tumour types as well.

Scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and UCL Cancer Institute discovered that resistance to palbociclib is often driven by a protein which is targeted by crizotinib - providing the rationale for using these two drugs together.

Their new study is published today (Friday) in the journal Oncogene and was funded by Wellcome.

Palbociclib is one of a group of drugs which are currently used to treat patients with hormone receptor-positive breast cancer by blocking the function of two proteins - CDK4 and CDK6 - which promote tumour cell division and cancer progression.

However, cancers can become resistant to palbociclib by activating a related molecule called CDK2, which is able to drive cell division in the absence of CDK4/6.

In the new study, the researchers found that CDK2 can compensate for inhibition of CDK4/6 in cancer cells by signalling via a cellular control pathway involving the key molecules MET and FAK.

Based on this discovery, the researchers found that pairing CDK4/6 inhibitors such as palbociclib together with crizotinib - which blocks MET activity - created a combination treatment that was much more effective than either drug on its own against cancer cells grown in the lab or human tumours growing in mice.

The combined agents acted synergistically not only to block cancer cell division but also to induce senescence - a state in which cells are thought to stop growing and dividing but without undergoing cell death.

The researchers achieved promising results in cancer cells derived from different organs in the body - from breast and lung to bowel - indicating that there is potential to expand clinical use of palbociclib and other CDK4/6 inhibitors beyond breast cancer to benefit a wider range of patients.

To reveal the mechanism underlying the resistance, the researchers searched systematically using robotics and sophisticated imaging to identify how CDK2 is activated to allow cells to evade CDK4/6 inhibitors.

They discovered that MET and FAK were critical molecules in the signalling pathway used by cancer cells to survive and develop resistance to palbociclib treatment.

The researchers hope that their discoveries can be translated to patients - initially by evaluating the safety and effectiveness of combining CDK4/6 inhibitors like palbociclib with MET inhibitors such as crizotinib.

It may be possible to develop lab tests to identify which patients would benefit from the use of the crizotinib in this way.

And looking a little further into the future, the researchers also highlight the possibility arising from their research that combining CDK4/6 inhibitors with drugs that block FAK could be even more effective and more generally applicable.

This is because their findings show that FAK is a critical node in the cellular circuitry leading to unwanted CDK2 activation.

FAK inhibitors are already in clinical trials and so this idea could be tested soon.

Combining targeted drugs with different mechanisms of action is one of the central strategies The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) is pursuing as part of a pioneering research programme to combat the ability of cancers to adapt, evolve and become drug resistant.

The ICR - a charity and research institute - is raising the final £15 million of a £75 million investment in a new Centre for Cancer Drug Discovery to house a world-first programme of 'anti-evolution' therapies.

Study co-leader Professor Paul Workman, Chief Executive of The Institute of Cancer Research, London, said:

"Cancer's ability to adapt, evolve and become drug resistant is the biggest challenge we face in creating more effective treatments for the disease. In this study, we sought to understand exactly how resistance occurs to an important family of breast cancer drugs, so that we can stay one step ahead of the cancer.

"We have shown the potential of combining two precision medicines for breast and lung cancer together to create a two-pronged attack that strips cancer cells of their resistance. We still need to do more work to understand the full potential of combination treatment to increase the effectiveness of these drugs, but the approach looks highly promising and has the potential to be effective against several cancer types."

Study co-lead Professor Sibylle Mittnacht, Professor of Molecular Cancer Biology at UCL Cancer Institute, said:

"Our evidence shows that existing medicines could be used to overcome resistance to treatment in a frequent form of breast cancer in women.

"In addition, use of a current breast cancer medicine together with these other medicines could be a new, promising route for the treatment of lung and several other cancers."

Salt intake in China is confirmed to be among the highest in the world, with adults over the past four decades consistently consuming on average above 10g of salt a day, which is more than twice the recommended limit, according to new research led by Queen Mary University of London.

The systematic review and meta-analysis, funded by the National Institute for Health Research and published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, also found that Chinese children aged 3-6 are eating the maximum amount of salt recommended by the World Health Organization for adults (5g a day) while older children eat almost 9g/day.

Excess salt intake raises blood pressure, a major cause of strokes and heart disease, which accounts for approximately 40 per cent of deaths in the Chinese population.

The team reviewed all data ever published on salt intake in China (which involved about 900 children and 26,000 adults across the country) and found that salt intake has been consistently high over the past four decades, with a North-South divide.

While salt intake in northern China is among the highest in the world (11.2g a day) it has been declining since the 1980s when it was 12.8g a day, and most markedly since the 2000s. This could be the result of both governmental efforts in salt awareness education and the lessened reliance on pickled food - owing to a greater year-round availability of vegetables.

However, this trend of decrease was not seen in southern China, which has vastly increased from 8.8g a day in the 1980s to 10.2g a day in the 2010s. This could be due to governmental efforts being mitigated by the growing consumption of processed foods and out-of-home meals. These latest results contradict those of previous studies based on less robust data which reported declines in salt intake across the country.

Potassium, which is naturally found in fruits and vegetables, and is in potassium salt, has the opposite effect of sodium (salt) on blood pressure: while sodium increases blood pressure, potassium lowers it.

The researchers reviewed potassium intake and found that in contrast to salt intake, it has been consistently low throughout China for the past four decades, with individuals of all age groups consuming less than half the recommended minimum intakes.

Lead author Monique Tan from Queen Mary University of London said: "Urgent action is needed in China to speed up salt reduction and increase potassium intake. High blood pressure in childhood tracks into adulthood, leading to cardiovascular disease. If you eat more salt whilst you are young, you are more likely to eat more salt as an adult, and to have higher blood pressure. These incredibly high salt, and low potassium, figures are deeply concerning for the future health of the Chinese population."

Feng J He, Professor of Global Health Research at Queen Mary University of London and Deputy Director of Action on Salt China, added: "Salt intake in northern China declined, but is still over double the maximum intake recommended by the WHO, while salt intake actually increased in southern China. Most of the salt consumed in China comes from the salt added by the consumers themselves while cooking. However, there is now a rapid increase in the consumption of processed foods and of food from street markets, restaurants, and fast food chains, and this must be addressed before the hard-won declines are offset."

Graham MacGregor, Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at Queen Mary University of London and Director of Action on Salt China said: "A coherent, workable, and nationwide strategy is urgently needed in China. As much as a fifth of the world's population lives in China. Achieving salt reduction together with increasing potassium intake across the country would result in an enormous benefit for global health."

The trends found in this latest study partially contradict those of earlier studies which found large declines of salt intake across the whole of China. The researchers say these latest results are far more robust than the previous estimates which have relied on surveys of people's dietary habits. The team instead determined salt intake exclusively with the use of data from urine samples taken over a 24 hour period.

Salt intake assessed by dietary methods is unreliable because most of the salt in the Chinese diet comes from the salt added during home cooking or in sauces, which is highly variable and difficult to quantify. Furthermore, processed and out-of-home foods are increasingly consumed but their salt content tends to be inaccurately reported in food composition tables.

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)
have made the first-ever observations of a circumplanetary disk, the planet-girding belt of dust and gas that astronomers strongly theorize controls the formation of planets and gives rise to an entire system of moons, like those found around Jupiter.

This never-before-seen feature was discovered around one of the planets in PDS 70, a young star located approximately 370 light-years from Earth. Recently, astronomers confirmed the presence of two massive, Jupiter-like planets there. This earlier discovery was made with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT), which detected the warm glow naturally emitted by hydrogen gas accreting onto the planets.

The new ALMA observations instead image the faint radio waves given off by the tiny (about one tenth of a millimeter across) particles of dust around the star.

The ALMA data, combined with the earlier optical and infrared VLT observations, provide compelling evidence that a dusty disk capable of forming multiple moons surrounds the outermost known planet in the system.

"For the first time, we can conclusively see the telltale signs of a circumplanetary disk, which helps to support many of the current theories of planet formation," said Andrea Isella, an astronomer at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and lead author on a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"By comparing our observations to the high-resolution infrared and optical images, we can clearly see that an otherwise enigmatic concentration of tiny dust particles is actually a planet-girding disk of dust, the first such feature ever conclusively observed," he said. According to the researchers, this also is the first time that a planet has been clearly seen in these three distinct bands of light.

Unlike the icy rings of Saturn, which likely formed by the crashing together of comets and rocky bodies relatively recently in the history of our solar system, a circumplanetary disk is the lingering remains of the planet-formation process.

The ALMA data also revealed two distinct differences between the two newly discovered planets. The closer in of the two, PDS 70 b, which is about the same distance from its star as Uranus is from the Sun, has a trailing mass of dust behind it resembling a tail. "What this is and what it means for this planetary system is not yet known," said Isella. "The only conclusive thing we can say is that it is far enough from the planet to be an independent feature."

The second planet, PDS 70 c, resides in the exact same location as a clear knot of dust seen in the ALMA data. Since this planet is shining so brightly in the infrared and hydrogen bands of light, the astronomers can convincingly say that a fully formed planet is already in orbit there and that nearby gas continues to be syphoned onto the planet's surface, finishing its adolescent growth spurt.

This outer planet is located approximately 5.3 billion kilometers from the host star, about the same distance as Neptune from our Sun. Astronomers estimate that this planet is approximately 1 to 10 times the mass of Jupiter. "If the planet is on the larger end of that estimate, it's quite possible there might be planet-size moons in formation around it," noted Isella.

The ALMA data also add one more important element to these observations.

Optical studies of planetary systems are notoriously challenging. Since the star is so much brighter than the planets, it is difficult to filter out the glare, much like trying to spot a firefly next to a search light. ALMA observations, however, don't have that limitation since stars emit comparatively little light at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths.

"This means we'll be able to come back to this system at different time periods and more easily map the orbit of the planets and the concentration of dust in the system," concluded Isella. "This will give us unique insights into the orbital properties of solar systems in their very earliest stages of development."

The internet has its perils with privacy breaches and fake news, but on the plus side, a whole generation of youth have been teaching themselves skills in leadership and community-building, according to a new University of California, Davis, study.

These self-governing internet communities, in the form of games, social networks or informational websites such as Wikipedia, create their own rule systems that help groups of anonymous users work together. They build hierarchies, create punishments, and write and enforce home-grown policies. Along the way, participants learn to avoid autocrats and find the leaders that govern well.

"As scientists learn these lessons vicariously, at scale, self-governance online promises not only to breed more savvy defenders of democracy, but inform the design and growth of healthy, informed, participatory cultures in the real world," said Seth Frey, UC Davis assistant professor of communication and the lead author of a new study published July 11 in PLOS ONE.

For five years, researchers looked at the multiplayer "virtual world" video game Minecraft, one of a few games with a decentralized, amateur-driven hosting model and a large user base. The game involves players interacting with the game world by placing and breaking various types of blocks in a three-dimensional environment. It is known for its open, un-plotted structure, according to the study. In Minecraft, players can build structures, creations and artwork on multiplayer servers and single player worlds across multiple game modes. Research suggests that 80% to 90% of players are males, with a median age of 19.

To conduct the study, researchers designed a program to collect publicly available data from managers of Minecraft communities all over the world. They scanned the internet every two hours for two years, visiting communities to learn how they are run, who visits them and how regularly those visitors return. They observed 150,000 communities, then focused on a subset of 1,800 that they identified as successful.

Minecraft is self-hosted on a public web server. Web servers, like other computers, have limits in processing power, bandwidth and electricity. So, failing to provide any of these services adequately can damage a community, Frey explained.

"Minecraft is especially resource-intensive, making these challenges especially critical." These challenges are difficult enough that most communities, 19 out of 20, fail, he said.

Unlike websites visited by most people, many successful Minecraft servers are not run by professionals in governance or policy design. Instead, amateurs -- players who want control over their own community -- take on the challenge of selecting a system of governance that attracts and supports peers with a common vision, he said. Over time, administrators can install bits of software that implement dimensions of governance, including private property rights, peer monitoring, social hierarchy, trade and many others.

"Picking from an a la carte menu of rule types, players assemble highly variable and individualistic forms of government," Frey said. "Although there are trends in what makes an effective government, especially among the largest communities, one of the major surprises of the study is the diversity of systems that prove viable."

Given the difficulty of building a successful online community, especially in an anonymous youth-driven game such as Minecraft, it is likely that the leadership skills that successful players develop could translate to real-world domains. Proving this transfer of governance ability to real-world environments is a goal of future research, Frey said.

"This analysis of large internet communities shows that in addition to making it easier for giant malevolent agents to undermine democracy, it also brings successful community-building closer, which gives a lot more people experience with leadership and governance and feelings of responsibility to a community," he added.

The Digital Revolution, a term often used to describe broad technological change, has entered the public discourse globally and it is becoming increasingly clear that digital changes are a driving force of societal transformation. However, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which were adopted by the UN in 2015 and provide an aspirational narrative and an actionable agenda to be achieved by 2030, barely mention digitalization. The same applies for the Paris Climate Agreement, in which digitalization is only marginally included. Yet, digitalization can either heavily support or impede the achievement of the SDGs.

"The digital transformation is radically altering all dimensions of global societies and economies and will likely change the interpretation of the sustainability paradigm itself. Sustainable development and digital technology communities are not yet sufficiently linked to fully address these issues. The transformation towards sustainability must be harmonized with the threats, opportunities, and dynamics of the Digital Revolution, the goals of the 2030 Agenda, and the Paris Agreement. Digitalization is not only an instrument that can be used to resolve sustainability challenges, it is also fundamental as a driver of disruptive change on multiple levels," says Nebojsa Nakicenovic, executive director of The World in 2050 (TWI2050) research initiative.

In the newly published TWI2050 report released by IIASA, the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS), and partners titled, The Digital Revolution and Sustainable Development: Opportunities and Challenges, more than 45 authors and contributors from 20 institutions examined the major opportunities and challenges that digital technologies pose to achieving the SDGs. They outline nine key considerations on the linkages between the digital and sustainability revolutions - both positive and negative - and the critical issues that need to be addressed to maximize the opportunities and minimize the risks of digitalization toward a sustainable future for all.

"The mobilization of the enormous potential for a digital sustainability transformation is not an automatic process. In the past one or two decades, digitalization has worked as an accelerator of economic processes that are still predominantly based on fossil energy and resource extraction. However, if course corrections succeed, the disruptive impact of digitization on sustainability can be leveraged to accelerate and enhance a sustainability transformation. We demonstrate in the report how the "missing links" between digitization and sustainability can be created," explains Dirk Messner, Director of UNU-EHS.

The report points out that we find ourselves in a new era in human history characterized by digital systems such as artificial intelligence and deep learning that enhance, and will eventually complement, or perhaps surpass, human cognitive capabilities in certain areas. The authors urge that sustainability transformations need to be developed, implemented, and reconsidered in this new context and that the SDGs should be regarded as mid-points toward achieving a sustainable future for all by 2050 and beyond, rather than as an end in itself.

A further consideration concerns the possibility that digital technologies can enable a disruptive revolution towards a sustainable future. According to the report, these technologies can be beneficial on many fronts, including enabling decarbonization across all sectors and promoting circular and shared economies. This will however not happen by itself and will likely necessitate a radical reversal of current trends to harmonize the disruptive potentials of digitalization with pathways toward sustainability. In this respect the report highlights that there is a huge need for corresponding regulatory policies, incentives, and shifts in perspectives, which currently only exist in a small number of sectors and a limited number of countries. Closely related to this is an urgent need for governance to counteract the effects of the disruptive dynamics of digitalization, which are challenging the absorptive capacities of our societies, and possibly multiplying the already alarming trends of erosion of social cohesion.

The authors further postulate that the Digital Revolution opens the way for a quantum leap for human civilization itself on a variety of fronts, including medical advances that have already seen human lifespans double over the last century. In addition, autonomous technical and decision-making systems based on machine learning and artificial intelligence are set to fundamentally transform all areas of society and the economy in the future. In fact, some of these, such as current weather forecasting systems, spam filtering programs, and Google's search engine, which are all powered by artificial intelligence, have already become an unmissable part of our daily lives.

The new report draws attention to the need for policymakers, researchers, companies, and civil society actors to intensify their efforts to understand and explain the multiple effects of digital systems and anticipate far-reaching structural change to create a basis for sustainability transformations. The authors however caution that there is no silver bullet to shape and govern the digital revolution toward sustainability as the future is inherently uncertain - the challenge is to build responsible, resilient, adaptive, and inclusive knowledge societies.

The new TWI2050 report will be launched during a side-event at the UN High-level Political Forum in New York on 12 July 2019. You can access the report here: http://www.twi2050.org/Report2019

Agriculture contributes to 70% of total emissions by humans of nitrous oxide (N2O), a potent polluting gas and the one to blame for the hole in the ozone layer. The root of this issue is in the widespread use of chemical fertilizers, such as urea and ammonium nitrate. Once these products have been used in soil for crops, a portion of them are lost in the form of N2O, which goes directly into the atmosphere. The pollution problem of fertilizers is heightened with the growing rise in the demand for foods that require these fertilizers in order to attain profitable agricultural production.

The industry continues to search for formulas that reduce this pollution without negatively affecting production. Nevertheless, it is faced with a core problem. The emission of pollutants from fertilizers is very difficult to predict since it depends on factors that are hard to control, such as humidity, temperature, activity of microorganisms in the soil and variability of time and space, among others. If a realistic estimate of emissions from these pollutants cannot be made, it is tough to come up with strategies to reduce these emissions.

An international research group, including University of Cordoba researcher Antonio Rafael Sánchez Rodríguez, studied different mathematical prediction methods to measure the emissions of pollutants from fertilizers, such as urea and ammonium nitrate, in order to find out which one gives data that most closely resemble reality. This research is supported by the UK-China Virtual Joint Centre for Improved Nitrogen Agronomy (CINAg) and members from universities in the UK, Portugal, Australia and Spain have participated. Among those is British researcher Ute Skiba, who collaborates with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to reduce emission factors from pollutants used in agriculture.

In order to find a more efficient method, the research team tested and compared two statistical models. The first, known as the Bayesian method, is based on probability and provides results within a range of values that allows for inferring possible results. The second one, the trapezoidal method, is more widely used but is unable to predict variability of emission factors, since it estimates emission production to be linear, which is not actually the case. Emissions depend on many factors and changes in each one affect the reactions that are involved in emitting polluting gases.

The experiment took place on four experimental fields in the United Kingdom. Fertilizers were applied in the form of ammonium nitrate, urea and a third kind that was a mixture of urea and a potential inhibitor of urease, that minimizes ammonia emissions but, according to several studies, increases the emission of another pollutant, N2O.

The results show that N2O emissions were greater when ammonium nitrate was used, compared to using urea. Moreover, the use of the inhibitor did not show any significant differences in this sense. The research concludes that the Bayesian method offers more realistic predictions regarding nitrous oxide emissions, and therefore it is of great use when choosing more sustainable strategies for agriculture.

In its current condition, the Bayesian method is limited to cases in which fertilization produces a peak of emissions followed by a large drop. However, likewise, it is more useful than traditional methods when choosing a fertilization strategy that emits fewer polluting gases into the atmosphere. From now on, this research group will try applying this method in order to also measure emissions from organic nitrogen fertilizers.

Role of immune cells called macrophages in causing pain in endometriosis revealed

Researchers from the University of Warwick and the University of Edinburgh demonstrate that macrophages increase growth and activation of nerve cells

Endometriosis can lead to significant pain and infertility for women

176 million women worldwide suffer from endometriosis

A key cause for the pelvic pain experienced by women with endometriosis has been uncovered, potentially opening new opportunities for pain relief for the condition.

The Greaves lab, now part of Warwick Medical School at the University of Warwick, along with collaborators at the University of Edinburgh, have discovered how cells in our immune system play a role in stimulating the growth and activity of nerve cells in the condition, leading to increased sensitivity to pain in the pelvic region. The discovery is published today (11 July) in The FASEB Journal and was supported by funding from the Medical Research Council.

Around 176 million women worldwide suffer from endometriosis, in which cells like the internal lining of the uterus (endometrium) grow outside of it in the form of lesions, typically in the pelvic (peritoneal) cavity. It can cause significant pelvic pain and is associated with infertility for some women with the condition. Currently, treatment options are limited to surgical removal of lesions or medical management to suppress ovarian hormone production. New non-hormonal treatments are desperately needed.

For this research the team focused on the role of macrophages, a type of white blood cell found in our immune system, in contributing to the pain caused by endometriosis. Macrophages adapt their functions according to local signals and so become modified by disease. They are drawn more to the endometriosis lesions and are also found in high numbers inside the lesions themselves.

Using a cell culture of these diseased-modified macrophages, the scientists observed increased production of the insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1). Applying this onto nerve cells grown in culture, they found that this encouraged the nerves to grow and also activated them, demonstrating that production of IGF-1 by macrophages plays an important role in generating pain in endometriosis.

To further confirm their results, the researchers examined peritoneal fluid from women with endometriosis and found increased concentrations of IGF-1 compared to those without the condition. Those women also self-reported experiencing greater levels of pain.

Previous studies have shown that macrophages can be involved in other types of chronic pain, but this is the first time that it has been shown to be linked to endometriosis.

Lead author Dr Erin Greaves from Warwick Medical School said: "Endometriosis is sometimes considered a 'hidden disorder' because of a reluctance to discuss what can be passed off as 'women's problems' . Hormonal solutions rely on suppressing ovarian function but are not ideal as they can cause unwanted side effects, and prevent the user from becoming pregnant. We are trying to find non-hormonal solutions.

"If we can learn about the role of macrophages in endometriosis then we can distinguish them from healthy macrophages and target treatment to them. Macrophages are so crucial to our immune system tissue function and we need to know more about their roles, so this research goes some way in defining how macrophages are different in endometriosis."

Macrophages are known to change their function based on their local environment and so adopt a different gene expression in the presence of endometriosis lesions. While this acts to increase the sensitivity to pain in that location, it may also act as a potential marker to target for treatment.

Dr Greaves added: "Endometriosis can affect women throughout their lives and is a very common condition. This discovery will go some way towards finding ways to relieve symptoms for women who suffer from endometriosis. We hope that in the future we can learn exactly how disease-modified macrophages in endometriosis promote disease and how we can target them in order to treat endometriosis."