Culture

For the third year in a row, the Trump administration has proposed large cuts in science funding across a variety of agencies. Although Congress restored these cuts in the past two years, increased budgetary pressures may discourage them from doing so this year.

Now, new research from the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Connecticut, Boston University, and Harvard University shows that these cuts in federal funding for science might endanger the innovation that increasingly fuels the modern economy. The study was published recently in Science.

By computing new linkages between government grants and tens of millions of U.S. patents and scientific papers from 1926 to 2017, the multi-disciplinary research team demonstrated that almost a third of patents in the U.S. rely on federal research. Although this may be a conservative estimate, this number has increased steadily over the past 90 years.

"Technological progress is seen as a process through which inventions build on one another. In this study we examine the importance of government-supported research as contributing to subsequent inventions," says Hillary Greene, Zephaniah Swift Professor of Law at the UConn School of Law.

Greene, who is an expert in patent law, came to UConn Law in 2007 after having previously served as project director for intellectual property at the Federal Trade Commission's Office of the General Counsel. In addition to having served as the inaugural director of UConn Law's Intellectual Property and Entrepreneurship Law Clinic, she has continued to examine innovation issues from many angles, including writing and teaching extensively on the relationship between innovation and competition policy.

"The fact that Professor Greene is the first UConn Law professor to be featured in Science speaks to her truly impressive body of research," observes Timothy Fisher, dean of the UConn School of Law. "It is one that both spans diverse legal regimes and engages with multiple disciplines to provide valuable insights on topics like the impact of government investment on innovation."

The study, the first of its kind, offers a more holistic view of the impact of federal funding on innovation. Where previous studies established impacts within particular fields, the current work provides a historic and quantitative analysis of all U.S. patents - over a long period of time.

The research also establishes that corporations have steadily increased their reliance on federally supported research. The effect occurs across all fields; as the most extreme example, almost 60 percent of the patents in chemistry and metallurgy rely on federally supported research. Additionally, the team notes that patents that rely on federal research "are more important as measured by future citations, renewal rates, and novel terminology" than patents that do not rely on federal research.

According to Lee Fleming, lead author and professor of industrial engineering and operations research at UC Berkeley, this study is significant because it is the first to quantify the historical sweep of federal science patenting in the U.S. and provide data that illustrate how much the country's patenting has relied on federal science funding since 1926.

Federal research funding is at the heart of the current study in more ways than one. In 2015, Greene and her collaborators were awarded a federal grant from the National Science Foundation in support of this research. The grant was titled "The Reach of the Visible Hand: Government Acknowledgments in U.S. Patents and Technological Change." Fleming and Greene were co-principal investigators on the grant.

"This research is an effort to detect, in a more nuanced way, the myriad fingerprints that U.S. federal research leaves, directly and indirectly, on innovation by others," says Greene. "We hope that it provides insights for the government, corporations, and citizens about where this funding goes and the downstream impact it has on innovation. And let's not forget, that does not include the social and economic impact of federally supported research - but that's for another day."

Many people suffer from a vitamin D deficiency. This can result in brittle bones and an increased risk of respiratory diseases. Chicken eggs are a natural source of vitamin D and one way to, at least partially, compensate for this deficiency. A team of nutritionists and agricultural scientists at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) has found a new way to further increase the vitamin D content of eggs: by exposing chickens to UV light. As the team writes in the scientific journal Poultry Science, the method can be put into practice in henhouses straight away.

Vitamin D assumes many important functions in the human body. During the summer months, people are able to cover about 90 percent of their daily vitamin D requirements themselves since it forms naturally in the skin through exposure to sunlight which containts special bands of light in the UV spectrum. The remainder is ideally consumed through food, such as oily fish or chicken eggs. "However, lifestyle choices prevent many people from getting enough vitamin D. The problem increases even more in the winter months when there is a lack of sunshine," explains nutritionist Dr Julia Kühn from MLU.

The researchers were therefore looking for a way to increase the amount of vitamin D in food, in this case in eggs. "The idea was to stimulate the natural vitamin D production of chickens. Using UV lamps in the henhouses would increase the vitamin D content of the eggs," says Kühn. In earlier studies, the researchers were able to prove the fundamental success of their approach when they illuminated the legs of the chickens with UV light. "However, the experiments were always conducted under ideal conditions. There was only one chicken per lamp. In chicken farms, there is a much higher stocking density than here, in other words: a lot more animals," Kühn continues. The new study aimed to test the practical feasibility of the method and therefore was conducted on two chicken farms. Comparisons were made between two different chicken breeds, assorted lamps and different durations of light exposure per day.

The researchers not only continuously analysed the vitamin D content of the newly laid eggs during the trial period, they also investigated the impact the additional light had on the animals. "Humans cannot see UV light, but chickens can. Therefore, light regimes are a critical aspect in chicken husbandry because light influences behaviour and laying activity," explains Professor Eberhard von Borell, an expert in animal husbandry at MLU. His working group analysed the behaviour of the animals using video recordings. The researchers also inspected the chickens' plumage for injuries by other members in order to assess their potential for activity and aggression.

The research team's idea worked: After only three weeks of UV light exposure for six hours per day, the vitamin D content of the eggs increased three to four-fold. This value did not increase any further in the following weeks. Also, the additional UV light did not cause any obvious problems for the hens. They neither avoided the area around the lamps, nor did they act any differently. As a result, the researchers conclude that their method also works under practical conditions and that this could represent an important step towards supplying the population with vitamin D.

Logging roads are expanding dramatically in the Congo Basin, leading to catastrophic collapses in animal populations living in the world's second-largest rainforest, according to research co-led by a scientist at James Cook University in Australia.

Just as worrying is that the rate of forest destruction caused by new roads in the Congo Basin has risen sharply over time, quadrupling since 2000.

"The situation in the Congo Basin is scary on top of more scariness," said Professor Bill Laurance, who has worked in Africa for 15 years. "New roads are opening a Pandora's box of activities such as illegal deforestation, mining, poaching and land speculation."

Laurance helped lead an international team that exhaustively mapped all roads in the Congo region, using satellite imagery. They found that since 2003, the total length of roads has increased by nearly 100,000 kilometres--from 144,000 to 231,000 kilometres overall.

"Industrial logging is a key economic driver for much of the road building," said Laurance. "Some logging roads are abandoned, but many are used by slash-and-burn farmers and poachers to penetrate deep into surviving rainforests."

"As a result, the global population of forest elephants has collapsed by two-thirds over the past decade," said Laurance. "Elephants, gorillas and chimps hardly have anywhere to hide from poachers now."

Laurance and his team are especially worried about the vast Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC, the largest nation in the Congo Basin.

"When you build a new road, you get 2-3 times more deforestation in the DRC than anywhere else in the Congo Basin," said Laurance.

"That's super-worrying because the DRC has plans to sharply increase logging. Last year, it leased a massive 650,000 hectares (1.6 million acres) of pristine rainforest to aggressive Chinese logging companies," said Laurance. "And that's just the tip of the iceberg."

However, not all the study's findings were negative. One promising result is that, outside of the DRC, many roads inside logging areas are being abandoned and the forest allowed to regenerate after the timber is harvested.

"This suggests that there's considerable scope to make industrial logging less damaging to forests," said Laurance. "An especially promising strategy is for logging companies to block roads or destroy bridges over creeks after they've harvested the timber."

"Of course, we'd greatly prefer to have pristine forests. But African nations must earn money from their forests, and if better managed, selective logging could provide income and be a lot less destructive."

Overall, a key conclusion of the study is that much road building in Africa is extremely harmful, destroying and fragmenting forests and destroying wildlife populations.

"Corruption and a massive influx of aggressive foreign developers is the biggest worry, along with rapid population growth," said Laurance. "It all leads to destructive development and road building."

"China in particular has the most predatory practices for logging, mining and road building in Africa," said Laurance. "Many Africans are starting to see this, and I just hope something can be done in time."

An international group of scientists is making major advances in sustaining the world's environments, untangling the intricate ways in which people and nature depend on each other.

The results are published in today's Nature Sustainability and includes contributions from a team of scientists based at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE).

With major crises such as extinctions and environmental degradation now upon us, the timing of the study is crucial.

"Environmental problems are messy," Dr Michele Barnes from Coral CoE said. "They often involve multiple, interconnected resources and a lot of different people--each with their own unique relationship to nature."

The paper, led by Dr Örjan Bodin from Stockholm University, proposes several advances to a 'network approach' that can better analyse and help solve these problems by identifying the key relationships between people and nature that underpin them.

"Research has traditionally only measured and described problems," Dr Bodin said.

"We are advancing a method that can go beyond this, to find new solutions to environmental challenges," he said.

Prof Graeme Cumming from Coral CoE said social, economic, and ecological aspects all need consideration to govern and manage sustainable ecosystems.

"These elements often interact in complex ways and are mutually dependent," Prof Cumming said. "A rapidly changing world means these interdependencies will only increase at all scales--from local to global."

For example, introducing forest conservation policies in a wealthy country leads to an increase in supply for wood products from a less developed country--leading to de-forestation there.

"Identifying the shortcomings of these human-nature relationships are a relatively easy task. Possible solutions aren't," Dr Barnes said.

"This paper paves a path forward for future studies to better address these issues, with research design guidelines to help scholars move beyond single case studies."

New Rochelle, NY, June 24, 2019--SHERLOCK technology is a new CRISPR-based platform that is rapid and portable and enables detection and quantitation of plant genes to support a variety of agricultural applications. Additional advantages, including the ability to process crude plant extracts with minimal nucleic acid sample preparation required are described in a research article published in The CRISPR Journal, a new peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. Click here to read the full-text article free on The CRISPR Journal website through July 24, 2019.

Feng Zhang, from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (Cambridge, MA) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge), and coauthors Omar Abudayyeh, Jonathan Gootenberg, and Max Kellner, from the Broad Institute, MIT, and Harvard Medical School (Boston, MA) present the recently developed nucleic acid detection system called SHERLOCK in the article entitled "Nucleic Acid Detection of Plant Genes Using CRISPR-Cas13." The platform overcomes many of the limitations of current nucleic acid detection systems and provides single-molecule sensitivity and single-nucleotide specificity with high multiplexing capability.

The paper describes how the refined CRISPR-based tool SHERLOCK was applied for the first time in plants. SHERLOCK has the potential to be an important tool in agriculture for the rapid detection of pathogens or pests and in plant breeding. SHERLOCK is easy to use, portable and field-ready, and low cost. It can generate a fluorescent or colorimetric readout when Cas13 recognizes the target nucleic acid sequence.

Rodolphe Barrangou, PhD, Editor-in-Chief of The CRISPR Journal states: "This is a great example of the expansion of CRISPR-based technologies beyond genome editing per se, with the use of novel Cas molecular machines for the flexible detection of DNA sequences of interest. The applications extend beyond diagnostics and the authors show here how this can be broadly applied in agriculture."

The project gives valuable new insights on how genetic adjustments through evolution have rendered the ruminants one of the most successful groups of animals on the planet. The results have recently been published in three articles in the acknowledged scientific journal Science.

Approx. 20 million years ago, ruminants began to outmatch all other groups of large herbivores. Today ruminants count more than 200 species from all ecosystems and in all sizes, ranging from 2 to 1500 kg.

A collaborative team of Danish and Chinese researchers has generated huge amounts of genome-data from 44 ruminant species, some of which are rare and endangered. The study unravels some of the important enigmas in evolutionary biology and several of the results are of human medical interest.

New DNA-Techniques Reveals the Success of the Ruminants

- 'Our research shows how ruminants have obtained a more efficient use of plant food e.g. by means of a sophisticated immune system that very precisely regulates the bacterial flora in the rumen. Furthermore, we found adjustments in the metabolism of the animals, rendering the animals capable of exploiting the bacteria's ability to digest plant material. Finally, the ruminants have developed specialized teeth that also increase their food uptake. These are some of the reasons to the success of the ruminants', says one of the study leaders, Assistant Professor, Rasmus Heller, Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen.

DNA is the blueprint of Life. Not only does it encode for all biological features, but it records the history of evolutionary adaptations as well.

- 'With the cutting-edge genome sequencing technology, we can decode the genomes for hundreds of species, which was impossible before. By comparing the genomes of the different species, we are now able to answer controversial questions about their evolution. We can detect genes that are essential for the anatomical hallmarks of the ruminants, such as the multi-chambered stomach and headgear. These are found nowhere else in the animal kingdom', says another of the project leaders, Professor Guojie Zhang from Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen.

The Research Provides Exciting Insights

Aside from being of fundamental scientific interest, the results of this project are also of applied relevance. One of the most important aspects of the study is that basic animal research can lead to new surprising discoveries. For example, many wild ruminants are resistant to important and costly cattle diseases such as foot and mouth disease and some might even have developed defense mechanisms against cancer.

For example - and rather surprisingly - the study indicates that the explosive growth of deer antlers (up to 2 cm per day) can be assigned to genes that are involved in a different kind of explosive cell growth, namely cancer. Meanwhile, deer have evolved other gene variants that contribute to keep the cell division in check, preventing it from going out of control and causing damage as seen with cancer. Apparently, deer are able to employ a controlled type of cancer-like cell growth to renew their impressive antlers each year.

-'I am convinced that our data and results will contribute to finding genes of important relevance in livestock production. We have generated new insights to the basis of e.g. bone growth, regenerative biology, and physiological adaptations to climate and environment. These discoveries may prove to be instrumental in our search of treatments of human diseases in the future. At the same time, we have obtained much more knowledge about the development of this important group of animals which has mystified researchers for years', Rasmus Heller says.

The study is one of the most extensive, coherent genome-projects ever made on animals. The three articles in Science comprise the first phase of results from the project and there are more to come.

A University of Oklahoma study explores the so-called 'rainbow wave' of LGBTQ voters that emerged during the Trump presidency. Specifically, the study examines sexual, gender and queer identity gaps in liberalism among a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults collected by Survey Sampling International after the November 2018 polls. The OU study works toward a deeper understanding of the political motivations of LGBTQ people.

"Within the LGBTQ community, political perspectives among many groups are underexplored. The phrase 'rainbow wave' itself is a broad sweeping term for LGBTQ people's voting patterns yet few have taken the time to critically consider the accuracy of this phrase," said Meredith Worthen, professor, Department of Sociology, OU College of Arts and Sciences. "This study goes beyond the few studies that focus only on heterosexual vs. LGB (lesbian, gay and bisexual) people to include the sexual identity gaps in political perspectives of other sexual groups (pansexual vs. gay/lesbian; asexual vs. bisexual.)"

Worthen highlights the importance of considering the unique experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, transgender, non-binary and queer individuals and their political perspectives.

Findings demonstrate tensions between trans individuals and liberalism, while confirming lesbian/gay liberalism, and illuminating three additional groups of liberals: pansexual, non-binary, and queer individuals. These patterns support 'luminous lavender liberalism' among the political perspectives of LGBTQ people.

Years before symptoms of Alzheimer's disease appear, two kinds of damaging proteins silently collect in the brain: amyloid beta and tau. Clumps of amyloid accumulate first, but tau is particularly noxious. Wherever tangles of the tau protein appear, brain tissue dies, triggering the confusion and memory loss that are hallmarks of Alzheimer's.

Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that the link between the two proteins may lie in the brain's immune cells that hem in clumps of amyloid. If the immune cells falter, amyloid clumps, or plaques, injure nearby neurons and create a toxic environment that accelerates the formation and spread of tau tangles, they report.

The findings, in mice and in people, are published June 24 in Nature Neuroscience. They suggest that reinforcing the activity of such immune cells - known as microglia - could slow or stop the proliferation of tau tangles, and potentially delay or prevent Alzheimer's dementia.

"I think we've found a potential link between amyloid and tau that people have been looking for for a long time," said senior author David Holtzman, MD, the Andrew B. and Gretchen P. Jones Professor and head of the Department of Neurology. "If you could break that link in people who have amyloid deposition but are still cognitively healthy, you might be able to stop disease progression before people develop problems with thinking and memory."

While the formation of amyloid plaques and tau tangles have been recognized as key steps in the development of Alzheimer's disease, researchers have struggled to pin down the relationship between the two. By themselves, amyloid plaques do not cause dementia. Many people over age 70 have some amyloid plaques in their brains, including some who are as mentally sharp as ever. But the presence of amyloid plaques seems to lead inexorably to the formation of tau tangles - the true villain of Alzheimer's - and, until now, it wasn't clear how amyloid drives tau pathology.

Holtzman and colleagues - including first authors Cheryl Leyns, PhD, a former graduate student in Holtzman's lab, and Maud Gratuze, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher, as well as co-senior author Jason Ulrich, PhD, an assistant professor of neurology - suspected that microglia could be the link. A rare mutation in a gene called TREM2 leaves people with weak and ineffective microglia, and also increases their risk of developing Alzheimer's by twofold to fourfold.

As part of the study, the researchers used mice prone to developing amyloid plaques and modified in various ways their TREM2 genes to influence the activity of their microglia. The result was four groups of mice: two with fully functional microglia because they carried the common variant of either the human or mouse TREM2 gene, and two with impaired microglia that carried the high-risk human TREM2 variant or no copy of the TREM2 gene at all.

Then, the researchers seeded the mice's brains with small amounts of tau collected from Alzheimer's patients. The human tau protein triggered the tau in mice to coalesce into tangle-like structures around the amyloid plaques.

In mice with weakened microglia, more tau tangle-like structures formed near the amyloid plaques than in mice with functional microglia. Further experiments showed that microglia normally form a cap over amyloid plaques that limits their toxicity to nearby neurons. When the microglia fail to do their job, neurons sustain more damage, creating an environment that fosters the formation of tau tangle-like lesions.

Further, the researchers also showed that people with TREM2 mutations who died with Alzheimer's disease had more tau tangle-like structures near their amyloid plaques than people who died with Alzheimer's but did not carry the mutation.

"Even though we were looking at the brains of people at the end of the Alzheimer's process rather than the beginning, as in the mice, we saw the same kind of changes: more tau in the vicinity of amyloid plaques," Holtzman said. "I'd speculate that in people with TREM2 mutations, tau accumulates and then spreads faster, and these patients develop problems with memory loss and thinking more quickly because they have more of those initial tau tangles."

The converse also may be true, Holtzman said. Powering up microglia might slow the spread of tau tangles and forestall cognitive decline. Drugs that enhance the activity of microglia by activating TREM2 already are in the pipeline. It soon may be possible to identify using a simple blood test people with amyloid buildup but, as yet, no cognitive symptoms. For such people, drugs that break the link between amyloid and tau might have the potential to halt the disease in its tracks.

Scientists from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and their collaborators investigated the mechanism of rapid reactivity of the F + H2 reaction at low temperature and found that rapid reactivity was actually induced by resonance-enhanced tunneling.

This finding explains the observation of HF in interstellar clouds, which is generated only through the F + H2 reaction. The research was published in Nature Chemistry.

Generally, a chemical reaction with an energy barrier can only happen at collision energies higher than the barrier. However, quantum tunneling at energies below the reaction barrier plays a significant role in many chemical processes, especially at low temperature.

Chemical reaction plays an important role in the evolution of interstellar clouds. In interstellar space, temperature is particularly low, thus quantum effects in reactions may play a significant role.

HF in interstellar clouds was first discovered in 1997, and recent observations have found that HF is ubiquitous in the universe. Since the F + H2 reaction, with an energy barrier of 1.8kcal/mol, is the sole source of observed HF at low temperature in interstellar clouds, how does it rapidly proceed? Even considering normal quantum tunneling, the reaction rate is too low to be observed with a reaction barrier of such height (~800K).

With improved molecular crossed beam apparatus, the scientists measured the quantum state specific backward scattering spectroscopy (QSSBSS) as a function of collision energy in the range 1 ~ 35 meV. A peak in QSSBSS was clearly observed at about 5 meV. Using detailed dynamics analysis on an accurate potential energy surfaces (PESs), they found that the peak was produced by the ground resonance state of the F+H2 to HF+H reaction. They also discovered that the oscillations at about 20 meV were produced by the first excited resonance state of the F + H2 reaction.

Further theoretical analysis indicated that if the contribution of the resonance-enhanced tunneling were removed from the reactivity, the reaction rate constant of F + H2 below 10K would be reduced more than three orders of magnitude.

Thus, the reactivity of the F + H2 reaction is almost completely derived from resonance-enhanced tunneling from the ground resonance state. With an accurate PES, the theory provides the reaction rate constant for the F + H2 reaction over a wide temperature range, which is essential to understanding interstellar chemistry.

BELLEVUE, WA --The frigid lakeshores of Saturn's moon Titan might be encrusted with strange, unearthly minerals, according to new research being presented here.

Scientists re-creating Titan-esque conditions in their laboratory have discovered new compounds and minerals not found on Earth, including a co-crystal made of solid acetylene and butane.

Acetylene and butane exist on Earth as gases and are commonly used for welding and camp stove fuel. On Titan, with its extremely cold temperatures, acetylene and butane are solid and combine to form crystals, the new research found.

The new mineral might be responsible for the bathtub rings that are suspected to exist around Titan's hydrocarbon lakes, according to Morgan Cable of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, who will present the new research Monday at the 2019 Astrobiology Science Conference.

Titan's lakes are filled with liquid hydrocarbons. Previous research using images and data gathered during the Cassini mission has shown that lakes in the moon's dry regions near the equator contain signs of evaporated material left behind, like rings on a bathtub.

To create Titan-like conditions in the laboratory, the researchers started with a custom-built cryostat, an apparatus to keep things cold. They filled the cryostat with liquid nitrogen to bring the temperature down. They then warmed the chamber slightly, so the nitrogen turned to gas, which is mostly what Titan's atmosphere contains. Next, they threw in what abounds on Titan, methane and ethane, as well as other carbon-containing molecules, and looked for what formed.

The first things to drop out of their Titan hydrocarbon soup were benzene crystals. Benzene is perhaps best known as a component of gasoline and is a snowflake-shaped molecule made out of a hexagonal ring of carbon atoms. But Titan benzene held a surprise: The molecules rearranged themselves and allowed ethane molecules inside, creating a co-crystal.

The researchers then discovered the acetylene and butane co-crystal, which is probably a lot more common on Titan than benzene crystals, based on what's known about the moon's composition, Cable said.

In the moon's cold climate, the acetylene-butane co-crystals might form rings around the moon's lakes as the liquid hydrocarbons evaporate and the minerals drop out - in the same way that salts can form crusts on the shores of Earth's lakes and seas, according to Cable.

To confirm whether Titan has bathtub rings of co-crystals and other, undiscovered, hydrocarbon crystals, scientists will have to wait until a spacecraft can visit the shorelines of this moon, Cable said.

"We don't know yet if we have these bathtub rings," Cable said. "It's hard to see through Titan's hazy atmosphere."

Islamic values are just as important as the destination, quality and value for money for Muslims when choosing a holiday destination, according to a new study by the University of Portsmouth.

The research found that when choosing a halal holiday (one that allows Muslim tourists to go on a holiday while remaining true to their religion), Muslim's travel destinations are based on a combination of 'consumption' values (associated with accommodation, airline, entertainment), 'personal' values (fun, enjoyment, security) and Islamic religious values, such as Iman (faith).

Islamic values, related to aspects such as halal food, segregated facilities for men and women, prayer facilities and avoiding haram, were found to play a significant role for Muslim's in their expectations of a halal holiday.

The study, published in the latest issue of the International Journal of Tourism Research, recommends that tourism and hospitality companies develop products and services that are Sharia- compliant. With the halal tourism market expected to be worth more than USD 200 billion by 2020 (Global Muslim Travel Index GMTI, 2016), such initiatives would enable tourism and hospitality firms to demonstrate their cultural responsiveness to this emerging sector.

Lead author of the study Dr Padmali Rodrigo, Research Fellow in Marketing at the University of Portsmouth, said: "Given the growth in Halal tourism, understanding the values that influence Muslim consumers travel decisions are important as it would allow companies to provide a unique and authentic travel experience to Muslims, which would make them feel safe, secure and welcomed. Therefore, we argue that consumption values need to be broadened to include religious values such as Islamic values that stem from Iman."

The data for the study was gathered via 21 semi-structured interviews conducted among Sri Lankan Muslims (17 male and 4 female). While the study has limitations, such as interviewees from just one country and the low number of female respondents, the findings provide new insights into expectations of Muslim consumers in the under-represented halal-tourism market (the share of halal tourism is 12 per cent globally).

Co-author Dr Sarah Turnbull, Principal Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Portsmouth, said: "Merely understanding the values associated with basic consumption expectations are not sufficient tourism and hospitality companies need to pay attention to other factors such as religious and personal values that come into play. It is not possible to understand the behaviour of Muslim tourists without incorporating the Islamic attributes."

For the first time, astronomers have found two giant clusters of galaxies that are just about to collide. This observation can be seen as a missing 'piece of the puzzle' in our understanding of the formation of structure in the Universe, since large-scale structures--such as galaxies and clusters of galaxies--are thought to grow by collisions and mergers. The result was published in Nature Astronomy.

Clusters of galaxies are the largest known bound objects and consist of hundreds of galaxies that each contain hundreds of billions of stars. Ever since the Big Bang, these objects have been growing by colliding and merging with each other. Due to their large size, with diameters of a few million light years, these collisions can take about a billion years to complete. After the dust has settled, the two colliding clusters will have merged into one bigger cluster.

Because the merging process takes much longer than a human lifetime, we only see snapshots of the various stages of these collisions. The challenge is to find colliding clusters that are just at the stage of first touching each other. In theory, this stage has a relatively short duration and is therefore hard to find. It is like finding a raindrop that just touches the water surface in a photograph of a pond during a rain shower. Obviously, such a picture would show a lot of falling droplets and ripples on the water surface, but only few droplets in the process of merging with the pond.. Similarly, astronomers found a lot of single clusters and merged clusters with outgoing ripples indicating a past collision, but until now no two clusters that are just about to touch each other.

An international team of astronomers have now announced the discovery of two clusters on the verge of colliding. This enabled astronomers to test their computer simulations, which show that in the first moments a shock wave is created in between the clusters and travels out perpendicular to the merging axis. "These clusters show the first clear evidence for this type of merger shock", says first author Liyi Gu from RIKEN national science institute in Japan and SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research. "The shock created a hot belt region of 100-million-degree gas between the clusters, which is expected to extend up to, or even go beyond the boundary of the giant clusters. Therefore the observed shock has a huge impact on the evolution of galaxy clusters and large scale structures."

Astronomers are planning to collect more 'snapshots' to ultimately build up a continuous model describing the evolution of cluster mergers. SRON-researcher Hiroki Akamatsu: "More merger clusters like this one will be found by eROSITA, an X-ray all-sky survey mission that will be launched this year. Two other upcoming X-ray missions, XRISM and Athena, will help us understand the role of these colossal merger shocks in the structure formation history."

Liyi Gu and his collaborators studied the colliding pair during an observation campaign, carried out with three X-ray satellites (ESA's XMM-Newton satellite, the NASA's Chandra satellite, and JAXA's Suzaku satellite)and two radio telescopes (the Low-Frequency Array, a European project led by the Netherlands, and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope operated by National Centre for Radio Astrophysics of India).

Dying stars that cast off their outer envelopes to form the beautiful yet enigmatic "planetary nebulae" (PNe) have a new heavy-weight champion, the innocuously named PNe "BMP1613-5406". Massive stars live fast and die young, exploding as powerful supernovae after only a few million years. However, the vast majority of stars, including our own Sun, have much lower mass and may live for many billions of years before going through a short lived but glorious PNe phase. PNe form when only a tiny fraction of unburnt hydrogen remains in the stellar core. Radiation pressure expels much of this material and the hot stellar core can shine through. This ionizes the previously ejected shroud creating a PNe and providing a visible and valuable fossil record of the stellar mass loss process (PNe have nothing to do with planets but acquired this name because their glowing spheres of ionized gas around their hot central stars resembled planets to early observers).

PNe theoretically derive from stars in the range 1-8 times the mass of the Sun, representing 90% of all stars more massive than the sun. However, until now, PNe have been proven to derive from stars born with only 1-3 times the mass of our Sun. Professor Quentin Parker, Department of Physics and Director of The Laboratory for Space Research, The University of Hong Kong and his PhD student Miss Fragkou Vasiliki, in collaboration with University of Manchester and South African Astronomical Observatory, have now officially smashed this previous limit and grabbed the proof that a PNe has emerged from a star born with 5.5 times the mass of our Sun. Their journal paper "A high-mass planetary nebula in a Galactic open cluster" has just been published on the Nature Astronomy's website.

But why is this important?

Firstly, PNe provide a unique window into the soul of late stage stellar evolution revealed by their rich emission line spectra that are excellent laboratories for plasma physics. PNe are visible to great distances where their strong lines permit determination of the size, expansion velocity and age of the PN, so probing the physics and timescales of stellar mass loss. They can also be used to derive luminosity, temperature and mass of their central remnant stellar cores, and the chemical composition of the ejected gas.

Secondly, and key here, is that this is an unprecedented example of a star whose proven original "progenitor" mass is close to the theoretical lower limit of core-collapse supernova formation. Our results are the first solid evidence confirming theoretical predictions that 5+ solar mass stars can actually form PNe. This unique case therefore provides the astronomical community with an important tool for fresh insights into stellar and Galactic chemical evolution.

But how did the team from The University of Hong Kong and the University of Manchester claim the heavyweight crown?

The key was the discovery of the PNe in a young, Galactic open cluster called NGC6067. Finding a PNe residing in an open cluster is an extremely rare event. Indeed, only one other PNe, "PHR1615-6555" has ever been previously proven to reside on an open cluster but whose progenitor star had considerably lower mass. Interestingly, this was an earlier discovery from the same led team as here. The proven location of a PN in a cluster provides key and important data that is difficult to acquire otherwise. This includes an accurate distance and a cluster "turn off" mass estimate (i.e. the mass a star must have had when it was born to now be seen evolving off the main sequence in the cluster of known age). High confidence in the PN-cluster association comes from their highly consistent radial velocities (to better tan 1km/s) in a sight-line with a steep velocity-distance gradient, common distances, common reddening and projected and close physical proximity of the PN to the cluster centre.

In summary our exciting results are solid evidence confirming theoretical predictions that 5+ solar mass stars can form planetary nebulae and are, as expected, Nitrogen rich. The PN's cluster membership provides fresh and tight constraints on the lower mass limit for the progenitor mass of core-collapse supernovae and also for the intermediate to high mass end of the white dwarf Initial to Final Mass Relation (IFMR). It also provides an empirical benchmark for evaluating nucleosynthetic (element creation) predictions for intermediate-mass stars. PN BMPJ1613-5406 and its cluster NGC6067 will provide the astronomical community with important insights into stellar and Galactic (chemical) evolution.

AUBURN, Ala. - Auburn University researchers have published a new hypothesis that could provide the foundation for new scientific studies looking into the association of habitat loss and the global emergence of infectious diseases.

They present their research in the paper, "The Coevolution Effect as a Driver of Spillover," in the latest issue of the scientific journal, Trends in Parasitology.

"We provide a new perspective about how habitat loss can facilitate the emergence of infectious diseases in humans," said Sarah Zohdy, assistant professor in the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences and the College of Veterinary Medicine, who coauthored the study with Tonia Schwartz and Jamie Oaks, assistant professors in the Department of Biological Sciences in the College of Sciences and Mathematics.

Globally, scientists believe habitat loss is associated with emerging infectious diseases, or EIDs, spreading from wildlife to humans, such as Ebola, West Nile virus, SARS, Marburg virus and others. The Auburn team developed a new hypothesis, the coevolution effect, which is rooted in ecology and evolutionary biology, to explain the underlying mechanisms that drive this association.

Schwartz said the team integrated ideas from multiple aspects of biology, including disease ecology, evolutionary biology and landscape genetics, to develop the new hypothesis on why diseases are more likely to spill over from wildlife to humans in deforested habitats.

"We provide a testable hypothesis that we hope other researchers will try to test with their data, as we will be doing," Schwartz said. "Whether or not these studies fully support this new hypothesis, we anticipate it will provide a new perspective that other researchers in this field can use and build on, to ultimately push this field forward to understand disease spillover and prevent it."

The field of disease ecology is heavily based on a hypothesis known as the dilution effect, which was released at the turn of this century. It is essentially the idea that biodiversity conservation can protect humans from emerging infectious diseases. Zohdy said the dilution effect highlights the critical role that wildlife conservation can play in protecting human health and has transformed the understanding of zoonotic infectious diseases.

However, until now, even after a wealth of research in the past few decades has explored that hypothesis and found associations between the loss of biodiversity and EIDs, there has been no explanation for where the microbes that cause EIDs come from and how they get to humans.

"Through our hypothesis, we propose that as humans alter the landscape through habitat loss, forest fragments act as islands, and the wildlife hosts and disease-causing microbes that live within them undergo rapid diversification," Zohdy said. "Across a fragmented landscape we would then see an increase in diversity of disease-causing microbes, increasing the probability that any one of these microbes may spill over into human populations, leading to outbreaks."

Oaks said he is encouraged that the research will impact the way these problems are perceived.

"Our paper introduces an evolutionary mechanism to explain the association between habitat fragmentation and disease spillover into human populations, which we hope will complement the ecological perspectives on this global health challenge," he said.

School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences Dean Janaki Alavalapati said the paper's findings are compelling.

"Dr. Zohdy and her fellow researchers provide noteworthy insights in the field of emerging infectious diseases and the driving forces behind them," Alavalapati said. "Their findings could result in a significant shift in the way the origins of these diseases are perceived."

SILVER SPRING, Md.--Advocates for obesity prevention and treatment have designed two new resources for medical educators, healthcare providers and community programs that will enhance the level of care for patients, according to two new studies published online today in Obesity, the flagship journal of The Obesity Society. The resources include the first set of competencies for how to care for patients with obesity for undergraduate and graduate medical education, and a proposed standard of care for people with obesity.

The Obesity Medicine Education Collaborative (OMEC), an intersociety initiative that includes The Obesity Society (TOS), has created 32 obesity-focused competencies to improve obesity medicine education in medical schools and for advanced healthcare providers.

To develop the competencies, the Collaborative used the Six Core Domain Competencies of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education as a guiding framework. The core domains used and the number of competencies for each domain include Practice-Based Learning and Improvement (5); Patient Care and Procedural Skills (5); System-Based Practice (4); Medical Knowledge (13); Interpersonal and Communication Skills (3); and Professionalism (2) for a total of 32 competencies.

The competencies can be applied to the assessment of learners within a training program, or assessment of existing or planned curricula. The competencies can also be used in the assessment of non-training educational environments.

"A major challenge facing medical educators today is adequately training current and future health care providers in the prevention and treatment of obesity," said the study's lead author Robert Kushner, MD, past president of TOS and professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. "The OMEC obesity-focused competencies provide the framework to improve provider education and thus also improve patient care in the treatment of obesity."

Competency-based medical education focuses on the core knowledge and a set of skills that a health professional needs, yet effective and evidence-based obesity care occurs in a variety of settings, including the community and within the health care delivery system. The proposed standard of care for adults with obesity, developed by the Strategies to Overcome and Prevent (STOP) Obesity Alliance, provides health professionals, payors, community organizations, policymakers and those affected by obesity with guidance on foundational components of evidence-based obesity care.

"Our goal was to develop a practical, tangible, measurable and simple standard of care for the treatment of adult obesity, across care settings and representing practices that positively impact the health of people impacted by obesity," said the study's lead author William H. Dietz, Director of the STOP Obesity Alliance. "The core principles governing the standard of care include shared decision-making, when to use adjunctive therapies, and when to move patients to higher intensity treatments, as well as providing assurance that patients have access to appropriate levels of care, regardless of when they enter the healthcare system."