Culture

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - Both Democratic and Republican Party front-runners benefited from preferential visual coverage during the televised 2016 presidential primary debates, according to a new study published by University of Arkansas political scientists. But the researchers say Donald Trump was the clear winner in terms of visual techniques used by the media, such as camera time and solo shots.

"Although the questions asked and the speaking time given to the candidates can certainly influence how the candidates convey themselves and their policy positions, perhaps a more primal, subtle and pervasive means by which the media affects public perceptions of candidates is how they visually depict each candidate," wrote researchers Patrick A. Stewart, associate professor of political science, and graduate students Austin Eubanks and Jason Miller. The study was published in the journal Politics and the Life Sciences.

Researchers studied the first two 2016 Republican and Democratic debates frame-by-frame, keeping track of aggregate camera time, average shot time, and the type of shot (solo, split screen, side-by-side, multiple candidate and audience reaction) for each candidate. Their premise is that how media producers visually depict a candidate in a debate provides viewers subtle, non-verbal information about the candidate's leadership abilities and traits. More time in solo or side-by-side shots, as opposed to being alongside many other candidates, imparts an impression of authority.

Among Republicans, the researchers found that Trump garnered the most camera time by far in both 2016 debates, followed by Jeb Bush. The rankings matched the candidates' polling numbers at the time, with Trump polling highest and Bush in second. The drop in camera time from these two contenders to the rest of the field was substantial.

Trump spent proportionately less screen time than any other Republican candidate in group shots by a generous margin, with camera shots focusing on him either as a leader or the premier competitor for leadership.

"The visual framing findings in this study suggest that in debates with numerous candidates on stage, there were big winners and big losers," the researchers wrote. "During the early debates of the 2016 presidential election, the big winner was Donald Trump."

Among Democrats, Hillary Clinton received the greatest amount of camera time in both debates, followed by Bernie Sanders. Clinton likewise spent proportionately less time in multiple candidate shots, although the Democratic field of candidates was smaller.

"If seeing is believing, then who chooses what and who we see, and how we see them, has enormous influence and responsibility for a functioning republic," Stewart said.

The world is dependent on energy both for human wellbeing and society's continued development. Energy use is however also one of the human systems that is most directly influenced by changes in climate, which makes it crucial to gain insight into the impacts of climate change on energy demand.

Most previous studies explored this topic for a single country or continent, or for a single sector (mostly households). In addition, researchers only employed climate projections from either a single, or just a few climate models. In this new study, the authors did a global analysis using temperature projections from 21 climate models, and population and economy projections for five socioeconomic scenarios. This information was fed into a statistical model to calculate changes in demand for three fuels and four economic sectors, to determine how energy demand would shift relative to today's climate under modest and high-warming scenarios around 2050.

The findings indicate that, compared to baseline scenarios in which energy demand is driven by population and income growth alone, climate change increases the global demand for energy around 2050 by 11-27% with modest warming, and 25-58% with vigorous warming. Large areas of the tropics, as well as southern Europe, China, and the USA, are likely to experience the highest increases. The largest changes in demand are due to electricity needed for cooling, and occur in the industry and service sectors of the economy.

The magnitude of the increase depends on three uncertain factors: the future pathways of global greenhouse gas emissions, the different ways that climate models use this information to project future hot and cold temperature extremes in various world regions, and the manner in which countries' energy consumption patterns change under different scenarios of future increases in population and income.

"An important way in which society will adapt to rising temperatures from climate change is by increasing cooling during hot seasons and decreasing heating during cold seasons. Changes in space conditioning directly impact energy systems, as firms and households demand less natural gas, petroleum, and electricity to meet lower heating needs, and more electricity to satisfy higher cooling needs," explains study coauthor Enrica de Cian from the Ca' Foscari University of Venice and the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC).

"Whether future warming will cause the demand for energy to increase or decrease is a crucial question," adds study coauthor Ian Sue Wing, a researcher at Boston University. "If energy use rises and leads to additional emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, increased energy consumption for space conditioning could make it more difficult and costly to mitigate future warming. Quantifying this risk requires understanding how the demand for energy by different types of consumers in different climates will be affected by warming. The results of our study can in the future be used to calculate how energy market dynamics will ultimately determine changes in energy consumption and emissions."

According to the authors, an important qualification is that the study's findings represent the initial impacts of global warming. They do not account for the additional adjustments in fuel supplies and prices, and subsequent substitution responses by producers and consumers across the world that impacts will trigger. While these forces are likely to lead to ultimate changes in energy consumption that are less extreme, they also incur adaptation costs that will affect the broader economy and household incomes.

"The lower the level of income per person, the larger the share of income that families need to spend to adapt to a given increase in energy demand," says Bas van Ruijven, a researcher with the IIASA Energy Program and lead author of the study. "Some scenarios in our study assume continued population growth and in those cases temperature increases by 2050 could expose half a billion people in the lowest-income countries in the Middle-East and Africa to increases in energy demand of 25% or higher. The poor face challenges to adaptation that are not only financial -- in areas that have unreliable electricity supplies, or lack grid connections altogether, increased exposure to hot days increases the risk of heat-related illnesses and mortality."

While societies are doing their best to mitigate climate change, policymakers have to be aware that even moderate levels of climate change will lead to increases in energy demand for several areas around the world. Economic development in impoverished countries will be essential to help people adapt to the impacts of climate change.

Oral steroid use in patients with the inflammatory diseases polymyalgia rheumatica and/or giant cell arteritis significantly increased the risk of infection, and the risk increased with higher doses, found a study in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

In a large study of almost 40 000 adult patients with polymyalgia rheumatica or giant cell arteritis in England, researchers found higher absolute risks of infection when patients were taking oral steroids than when they were not taking them. The mean age of patients in the study was 73 years. Steroids included prednisolone, prednisone, hydrocortisone and cortisone. The risk of infection increased with higher doses and was elevated even with low daily doses of less than 5 mg of prednisolone.

"In periods with prescribed medication, patients' risk was 50% higher than when it was not prescribed," writes Dr. Mar Pujades-Rodriguez, Leeds Institute of Data Analytics, at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom, with coauthors. "Increases in risk ranged from 48% for fungal to 70% for bacterial infections."

More than half of patients (22 234, 56%) had infections during 138 412 person-years of follow up, with the most common infections being lower respiratory tract infections (27%), conjunctivitis (9%) and shingles (7%). More than one-quarter (27%) of patients were admitted to hospital and 7% died within a week of diagnosis of infection.

"Patients and clinicians should be educated about the risk of infection, need for symptom identification, prompt treatment, timely vaccination and documentation of history of chronic infection (e.g. herpes zoster)," write the authors.

They suggest that estimates of dose-response (i.e., the magnitude of risk related to steroid dosing) can be useful for policy-makers in assessing new glucocorticoid-sparing drugs for patients with these inflammatory diseases.

Long ago, during the European Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci wrote that we humans "know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot." Five hundred years and innumerable technological and scientific advances later, his sentiment still holds true.

But that could soon change.

In a report published in Nature Communications a team of scientists from the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) detailed the first-ever successful use of a technique called BONCAT to isolate active microbes present in a sample of soil - an achievement could enable a tidal wave of new research.

"Soils are probably the most diverse microbial communities on the planet," said Estelle Couradeau, first author of the study. "In every gram of soil, there are billions of cells from tens of thousands of species that, all together, perform important Earth nutrient cycles. They are the backbone of terrestrial ecosystems, and healthy soil microbiomes are key to sustainable agriculture. We now have the tools to see who these species are, but we don't yet know how they do what they do. This proof-of-concept study shows that BONCAT is an effective tool that we could use to link active microbes to environmental processes."

For the past two years, Couradeau, her co-authors, and many other researchers from around the U.S. have been collaborating in a Berkeley Lab-led scientific focus area called ENIGMA (for Ecosystems and Networks Integrated with Genes and Molecular Assemblies) in order to dig deeper into the inner-workings of soil microbiomes. ENIGMA's projects are a high priority for biologists and energy and Earth scientists not only because they help fill gaps in our knowledge of how the environment functions, but also because these fundamental insights could help applied scientists more effectively harness microbiomes to improve drought-resistance in crops, remove contaminants from the environment, and sustainably produce fuels and other bioproducts.

However, because most soil microbes won't grow in cultures in a laboratory, and because of their truly mind-boggling abundance in their natural habitats, investigating which microbial species do what is incredibly difficult. "There are many barriers to measuring microbial activities and interactions," said Trent Northen, lead author and director of biotechnology for ENIGMA. "For example, soil microbiomes that remove waste from underground water reservoirs are found hundreds of feet below the surface. And in some ecosystems, up to 95% of the microbes are inactive at any given time."

Because direct observation is off the table, microbiologists typically collect environmental samples and rely on indirect approaches such as DNA sequencing to characterize the communities. However, most of the commonly used techniques fail to differentiate active microbes from those that are dormant or from the plethora of free-floating bits of DNA found in soil and sediment.

BONCAT, short for Bioorthogonal Non-Canonical Amino Acid Tagging, was invented by Caltech geneticists in 2006 as a way to isolate newly made proteins in cells. In 2014, Rex Malmstrom, Danielle Goudeau, and others at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI), an Office of Science user facility managed by Berkeley Lab, collaborated with Victoria Orphan's lab at Caltech to adapt BONCAT into a tool that could identify active, symbiotic clusters of dozens to hundreds of marine microbes within ocean sediment. After further refining their approach, called BONCAT Fluorescent Activated Cell Sorting (BONCAT+FACS), they were able to detect individual active microbes.

As the name suggests, BONCAT+FACS allows scientists to sort single-cell organisms based on the presence or absence of fluorescent tagging molecules, which bind to a modified version of the amino acid methionine. When fluid containing the modified methionine is introduced to a sample of microbes, only those that are creating new proteins - the hallmark of activity - will incorporate the modified methionine into cells.

In addition to being far more streamlined and reliable than previous methods of microbial identification, the entire process takes just a few hours - meaning it can tag active cells even if they are not replicating.

Given that some soil microbes are notoriously slow-growing, many scientists were immediately interested in applying BONCAT+FACS to terrestrial soils. After three months of experimentation and optimization, the team of ENIGMA and JGI researchers devised a protocol that works smoothly and, most importantly, gives very reproducible results.

"BONCAT+FACS is a powerful tool that provides a more refined method to determine which microbes are active in a community at any particular time," said Malmstrom, who is also an author of the current study. "It also opens the door for us to experiment, to assess which cells are active under condition A and which cells become active or inactive when switched to condition B."

Moving forward, BONCAT+FACS will be a capability available to researchers who wish to collaborate through the JGI's user programs. Northen and Malmstrom have already received several proposals from research groups eager to start working with the tool, including groups from Berkeley Lab who hope to use BONCAT to assess how environmental changes stimulate groups of microbes. "With BONCAT, we will be able to get immediate snapshots of how microbiomes react to both normal habitat fluctuations and extreme climate events - such as drought and flood - that are becoming more and more frequent," said Northen.

According to Couradeau, the team expects the approach will catalyze a variety of other important and intriguing lines of study, such as improving agricultural land practices, assessing antibiotic susceptibility in unculturable microbes, and investigating the completely unknown roles of Candidatus Dormibacteraeota - a phylum of soil bacteria, found across the world, that appear to remain dormant most of the time.

Reflecting on how he and his colleagues achieved a goal that many have been pursuing, Malmstrom cited the diversity of scientists within ENIGMA and JGI. "This a true example of team science, because no single person had or will ever have the expertise to do it all."

Vienna, 24 June 2019: Zillionaires like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos who see the 'colonisation' of space as an answer to the Earth's ever threatened resources will be reassured to learn that human sperm retains its complete viability within the different gravitational conditions found in outer space.

In a study reported today at the 35th Annual Meeting of ESHRE investigators said that the lack of difference in a range of sperm characteristics observed in frozen sperm samples exposed to microgravity and those maintained in ground conditions 'open the possibility of safely transporting male gametes to space and considering the possibility of creating a human sperm bank outside Earth'.

The results are presented here in Vienna by Dr Montserrat Boada from Dexeus Women's Health in Barcelona, whose group worked with microgravity engineers from the Polytechnic University of Barcelona. The Aeroclub Barcelona-Sabadell of Spain was responsible for the parabolic flights to create microgravity conditions.

As background to the study, Dr Boada explained that, while the effects of microgravity on the cardiovascular, musculo-skeletal and central nervous systems are well known and tested in space flight, relatively little is known about the effects of different gravitational environments on human sperm and eggs. 'Some studies suggest a significant decrease in the motility of human fresh sperm samples,' said Dr Boada, 'but nothing has been reported on the possible effects of gravitational differences on frozen human gametes, in which state they would be transported from Earth to space.'

The study was performed using a small aerobatic training aircraft (CAP10), which can provide short-duration hypogravity exposure. The plane executed a series of 20 parabolic manoeuvres, providing 8 seconds of microgravity for each parabola. Overall, ten sperm samples obtained from ten healthy donors were analysed after exposure to the different microgravities found in space and ground gravity.

The sperm analysis comprised a full range of measurements currently performed for fertility testing - concentration, motility, vitality, morphology and DNA fragmentation - and results found no difference whatsoever in any of the parameters between the microgravity space samples and the control group samples from Earth. Indeed, said Dr Boada, there was 100% concordance in DNA fragmentation rate and vitality, and 90% concordance in sperm concentration and motility. These minor differences, she added, 'were more probably related to heterogeneity of the sperm sample than to the effect of exposure to different gravity conditions'.

Dr Boada described this as a preliminary study and her group will now move on to validate the results and then to larger sperm samples, longer periods of microgravity and even fresh sperm. 'But we do need to know,' she added. 'If the number of space missions increases in the coming years, and are of longer duration, it is important to study the effects of long-term human exposure to space in order to face them. It's not unreasonable to start thinking about the possibility of reproduction beyond the Earth.'

Dr Boada noted that one reason for using frozen sperm in this study was the known effect of radiation on fresh sperm. 'Radiation impairs the quality and viability of human sperm,' she explained, 'and these effects are expected to be greater on fresh sperm than on frozen samples, which are cryopreserved in special cryostraws and transported in cryotanks. So our first step was to investigate gravity conditions and frozen sperm samples. Our best option will be to perform the experiment using real spaceflight, but access is very limited.'

San Francisco, CA - June 23, 2019 - New research has found that Cannnabidiol is active against Gram-positive bacteria, including those responsible for many serious infections (such as Staphyloccocus aureus and Streptococcus pneumoniae), with potency similar to that of established antibiotics such as vancomycin or daptomycin. The research is presented at ASM Microbe, the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.

Cannabidiol, the main non-psychoactive chemical compound extracted from cannabis and hemp plants, has been approved by FDA for the treatment of a form of epilepsy, and is being investigated for a number of other medical conditions, including, anxiety, pain and inflammation. While there is limited data to suggest Cannabidiol can kill bacteria, the drug has not been thoroughly investigated for its potential as an antibiotic.

Work led by Dr Mark Blaskovich at The University of Queensland's Institute for Molecular Bioscience's Centre for Superbug Solutions, in collaboration with Botanix Pharmaceuticals Ltd, an early stage drug discovery company investigating topical uses of synthetic cannabidiol for a range of skin conditions, found that Cannabidiol was remarkably effective at killing a wide range of Gram-positive bacteria, including bacteria that have become resistant to other antibiotics, and did not lose effectiveness after extended treatment.

"Given cannabidiol's documented anti-inflammatory effects, existing safety data in humans, and potential for varied delivery routes, it is a promising new antibiotic worth further investigation," said Dr. Blaskovich. "The combination of inherent antimicrobial activity and potential to reduce damage caused by the inflammatory response to infections is particularly attractive."

Importantly, the drug retained its activity against bacteria that have become highly resistant to other common antibiotics. Under extended exposure conditions that lead to resistance against vancomycin or daptomycin, Cannabidiol did not lose effectiveness. Cannabidiol was also effective at disrupting biofilms, a physical form of bacteria growth that leads to difficult-to-treat infections.

The project was co-funded by Botanix and Innovation Connections, an Australian government grant scheme to commercialize new products, processes and services. The paper will be presented on Sunday June 23rd from 11am-1 pm at the annual conference of the American Society for Microbiology, ASM Microbe 2019, at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.

San Francisco, CA - June 23, 2019 - Researchers have now shown that patients who are heavily colonized with Candida auris on their skin can shed the fungus and contaminate their surroundings. This finding provides an explanation for the extensive contamination that often occurs in healthcare facilities with C. auris outbreaks. These results can help inform infection control efforts. The research is presented at ASM Microbe, the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.

C. auris is an emerging fungal pathogen that can cause large outbreaks in healthcare facilities. Understanding how C. auris spreads in healthcare facilities is essential for infection control. Because C. auris can be present on the skin without causing symptoms, it has been hypothesized that the spread of C. auris occurs as patients naturally shed their skin cells. This process could lead to substantial contamination of the surrounding environment and therefore increase chances of transmitting C. auris.

To test this hypothesis, the researchers developed methods to count C. auris in samples collected from patients' skin and their rooms. We found that patients can have very high concentrations of C. auris on their skin, and higher levels of C. auris on their skin were correlated with higher levels of C. auris on the patient's bed.

"This finding supported our hypothesis that patients are actively shedding C. auris cells into their environment," said Joe Sexton, ORISE post-doctoral fellow in the Mycotic Diseases Branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who designed and led the study. The researchers were able to culture live C. auris from the beds of all patients who tested positive, and even beds that were previously, but no longer, occupied by patients with C. auris.

"These results should be considered in developing more effective strategies for infection control efforts during a C. auris outbreak," said Dr. Sexton.

Patient and environmental samples were processed in the Mycotic Diseases Branch laboratory in Atlanta by Joe Sexton, Meghan Bentz, and Rory Welsh and Anastasia Litvintseva, who served as a principal investigator (PI). These samples were collected by the City of Chicago's Public Health Department led by Massimo Pacilli.

Additional groups within CDC also supported this work including the Department of Scientific Resources and the Division of Healthcare Quality and Promotion, and the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education. This work will be presented at American Society of Microbiology (ASM) Microbe 2019 conference in San Francisco, California (June 20-24, 2019).

San Francisco, CA - June 23, 2019 - Researchers from the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) have discovered bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, living in their kitchen sponges. As the threat of antibiotic resistance increases, bacteriophages, or phages for short, may prove useful in fighting bacteria that cannot be killed by antibiotics alone. The research is presented at ASM Microbe, the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.

A kitchen sponge is exposed to all kinds of different microbes, which form a vast microbiome of bacteria. Phages are the most abundant biological particles on the planet and are typically found wherever bacteria reside. With this understanding, kitchen sponges seemed a likely place to find them.

Students in a research class isolated bacteria from their own used kitchen sponges and then used the bacteria as bait to find phages that could attack it. Two students successfully discovered phages that infect bacteria living in their kitchen sponges. "Our study illustrates the value in searching any microbial environment that could harbor potentially useful phages," said Brianna Weiss, a Life Sciences student at New York Institute of Technology.

The researchers decided to "swap" these two phages and see if they could cross-infect the other person's isolated bacteria. Consequently, the phages did kill the other's bacteria. "This led us to wonder if the bacteria strains were coincidentally the same, even though they came from two different sponges," said Weiss.

The researchers compared the DNA of both isolated strains of bacteria and discovered that they were both members of the Enterobacteriaceae family. These bacteria belong to a rod-shaped group of microbes commonly found in feces, where some cause infections in hospital settings. Although the strains are closely related, when performing biochemical testing they found chemical variations between them.

"These differences are important in understanding the range of bacteria that a phage can infect, which is also key to determining its ability to treat specific antibiotic-resistant infections," said Weiss. "Continuing our work, we hope to isolate and characterize more phages that can infect bacteria from a variety of microbial ecosystems, where some of these phages might be used to treat antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections."

This project began as part of an undergraduate research class with seven students at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) in Old Westbury, New York. The course was funded through internal grants provided by (NYIT), which also supported our later work to further characterize the isolated bacteria and bacteriophages. This second phase of our work will be presented on a poster at ASM Microbe on Sunday, June 23rd.

San Francisco, CA - June 22, 2019 - Antibiotic-resistant infections are a threat to global public health, food safety and an economic burden. To prevent these infections, it is critical to understand how antibiotic-resistant bacteria and their genes are transmitted from both meat and plant-foods. Researchers have now shown how plant-foods serve as vehicles for transmitting antibiotic resistance to the gut microbiome. The research is presented at ASM Microbe, the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that of the 2 million antibiotic-resistant infections per year in the U.S., 20 percent are linked to agriculture. This estimate is based on patients who directly acquire antibiotic-resistant superbugs from eating meat. Little has been done to determine how eating plants contributes to the spread of antibiotic-resistant "superbugs."

"Our findings highlight the importance of tackling foodborne antibiotic-resistance from a complete food chain perspective that includes plant-foods in addition to meat," said Marlène Maeusli, PhD candidate at Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, who is the lead author on the study.

Spread of antibiotic-resistant superbugs from plants to humans is different from outbreaks of diarrheal illnesses caused immediately after eating contaminated vegetables. Superbugs can asymptomatically hide in (or "colonize") the intestines for months or even years, when they then escape the intestine and cause an infection, such as a urinary infection.

The researchers developed a novel, lettuce-mouse model system that does not cause immediate illness to mimic consumption of superbugs with plant-foods. They grew lettuce, exposed the lettuce to antibiotic-resistant E. coli, fed it to the mice and analyzed their fecal samples over time.

"We found differences in the ability of bacteria to silently colonize the gut after ingestion, depending on a variety of host and bacterial factors," said Maeusli. "We mimicked antibiotic and antacid treatments, as both could affect the ability of superbugs to survive passage from the stomach to the intestines."

Exposure to one type of antibiotic did not increase the ability of superbugs to hide in the mouse intestines, whereas a second antibiotic resulted in stable gut colonization after ingestion. Ingestion of bacteria with food also changed colonization, as did administering an antacid before ingesting the bacteria.

"We continue to seek the plant characteristics and host factors that result in key microbial community shifts in the gut that put us at risk for colonization and those that prevent it," said Maeusli. "The environment and human health - in this context via agriculture and microbiomes - are inextricably linked."

San Francisco, CA - June 22, 2019 - Swimming in the ocean alters the skin microbiome and may increase the likelihood of infection, according to research presented at ASM Microbe 2019, the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.

"Our data demonstrate for the first time that ocean water exposure can alter the diversity and composition of the human skin microbiome," said Marisa Chattman Nielsen, MS, a PhD student at the University of California, Irvine, the lead author on the study. While swimming normal resident bacteria were washed off while ocean bacteria were deposited onto the skin."

The researchers detected ocean bacteria on all participants after air drying and at six and 24 hours post-swim, but some participants had acquired more ocean bacteria and/or had them persist for longer.

The research was motivated by previous studies which have shown associations between ocean swimming and infections, and by the high prevalence of poor water quality at many beaches, due to wastewater and storm water runoff. Recent research has demonstrated that changes in the microbiome can leave the host susceptible to infection, and influence disease states. Exposure to these waters can cause gastrointestinal and respiratory illness, ear infections, and skin infections.

The investigators sought 9 volunteers at a beach who met criteria of no sunscreen use, infrequent exposure to the ocean, no bathing within the last 12 hours, and no antibiotics during the previous six months. The researchers swabbed the participants on the back of the calf before they entered the water, and again after subjects had air dried completely following a ten-minute swim and at six and 24 hours post swim.

Before swimming, all individuals had different communities from one-another, but after swimming, they all had similar communities on their skin, which were completely different from the "before swim" communities. At six hours post swim, the microbiomes had begun to revert to their pre-swim composition, and at 24 hours, they were far along in that process.

"One very interesting finding was that Vibrio species--only identified to the genus level--were detected on every participant after swimming in the ocean, and air drying," said. Nielsen. (The Vibrio genus includes the bacterium that causes cholera.) At six hours post swim, they were still present on most of the volunteers, but by 24 hours, they were present only on one individual.

"While many Vibrio are not pathogenic, the fact that we recovered them on the skin after swimming demonstrates that pathogenic Vibrio species could potentially persist on the skin after swimming," said Nielsen. The fraction of Vibrio species detected on human skin was more than 10 times greater than the fraction in the ocean water sample, suggesting a specific affinity for attachment to human skin.

Skin is the body's first line of defense, both physically and immunologically, during exposure to contaminated water. "Recent studies have shown that human skin microbiome plays an important role in immune system function, localized and systemic diseases, and infection," said Nielsen. "A healthy microbiome protects the host from colonization and infection by opportunistic and pathogenic microbes."

Alexandria, Va., USA - At the 97th General Session & Exhibition of the International Association for Dental Research (IADR), held in conjunction with the 48th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Dental Research (AADR) and the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association for Dental Research (CADR), Dandara Haag, University of Adelaide, Australia, gave an oral presentation on "Indigenous Oral Health Inequalities Begin in Childhood: A Multi-country Study." The IADR/AADR/CADR General Session & Exhibition is held at the Vancouver Convention Centre West Building in Vancouver, BC, Canada from June 19-22, 2019.

There is limited documentation on the magnitude of oral health inequalities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people across a range of countries and comparable oral health indicators that focus specifically on children. This study compared relative oral health inequalities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous children and adolescents ages five to 15 years-old from Brazil, New Zealand and Australia.

Data were collected from the most recent nationally representative oral health surveys in each country and gingival inflammation, dental caries experience, untreated decayed teeth and missing and filled teeth were assessed in the primary and permanent dentitions. Parent-reported child oral health was also evaluated.

The authors found that irrespective of country, Indigenous children had worse oral health than their non-Indigenous counterparts in all indicators. The magnitude of these differences was greatest in Australia for the proportion with dental caries experience, untreated decay or gingival inflammation. For missing teeth, filled teeth and poor parent-reported child oral health, the magnitude of inequality was greatest among Brazilian children. These findings suggest that Indigenous and non-Indigenous oral health inequalities begin in childhood. This reinforces the need for equity in social and economic policies, along with culturally appropriate and early oral health interventions.

This oral presentation, #3470, was held on Saturday, June 22, 2019 at 2:45 p.m. in Room 303 of the Vancouver Convention Centre West Building, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

CHAPEL HILL, North Carolina -- Efforts to control health care costs in the United States often focus on the listed prescription drug prices, but a perspective published by the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that unregulated pharmacy benefit manager practices also may contribute to escalating expenses.

Researchers from the University of North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and Boston University Questrom School of Business examined the impact of Ohio Medicaid's switch in 2011 from a fee-for-service model to a managed care model to administer its outpatient prescription drug benefits.

They report that an independent audit in 2018 found the change to a managed care program, which uses pharmacy benefit managers, saved the Ohio Medicaid $145 million annually. Pharmacy benefit managers are intermediaries in the drug supply chain that function as third-party administrators of pharmacy benefits. The savings were largely derived by the lower prescription claims prices the pharmacy benefit managers billed.

These savings, however, came at a cost, said Trevor Royce, MD, MS, MPH, the paper's corresponding author and an assistant professor of Radiation Oncology at UNC School of Medicine and UNC Lineberger. His coauthors were Sheetal Kircher, MD, MS, of Northwestern and Rena M. Conti, PhD, of Boston University.

"Ohio policymakers should be applauded for their empirical approach in tackling the cost of prescription drugs," said Royce. "The Ohio audit found pharmacy benefit managers engage in opaque pricing practices that likely contribute to the rising costs of care and prescription drugs."

The authors identified several issues of concern. Ohio pharmacists believed pharmacy benefit managers used anti-competitive practices and manipulated drug pricing. This included offering different drug pricing to affiliated pharmacies than independent pharmacies. Some pharmacy benefit managers implemented "gag clauses" that prevented pharmacies from counseling patients on the most cost-effective medication options. A more controversial practice, said Royce, was the use of "spread pricing," in which pharmacy benefit managers charged Ohio Medicaid a high price for a drug but paid pharmacies a lower price.

The pricing difference could produce significant revenue for the pharmacy benefit managers. An analysis in 2017 found that a 30-day supply of the generic form of imatinib mesylate, a drug to treat leukemia, cost $3,859, but Ohio Medicaid was charged $7,201.

The independent review of pharmacy benefit manager practices commissioned by Ohio found an 8.8 percent difference between what the pharmacy benefit managers billed to Ohio Medicaid managed care plans and what it paid to the pharmacies between March 2017-2018. The more than 39 million prescription transactions produced a spread pricing difference of $223.7 million.

Ohio officials have implemented several policy changes following the audit. The state's managed care plans ended its contracts with pharmacy benefit managers. They also implemented a "pass through" pricing model in which the managed care plan pays the pharmacy benefit managers the exact amount paid to the pharmacy for a prescription drug plus a dispensing fee and an administrative fee.

They also tried to ban the gag clauses used by pharmacy benefit managers, but the Ohio Senate didn't vote on the bill before the legislative session ended in 2018. This was remedied on the federal level in October 2018, when the Patient Right to Know Drug Prices Act and Know the Lowest Prices Act, which banned gag clauses, were signed into law.

Royce said other states wanting to reduce health care costs can learn from what took place in Ohio.

"The Ohio Medicaid experience provides an important window into pharmacy benefit manager practices," said Royce. "Efforts to address drug pricing tend to focus on the pharmaceutical company or the drug manufacturer, while traditionally the pharmacy benefit managers may be overlooked. This is likely changing as a growing number of states have introduce bills pertaining to pharmacy benefit manager practices, and more are surely to come."

More than three decades ago, scientists discovered that a chemical found in a synthetic opioid, MPTP, induced the onset of a form of Parkinson's disease. In a new study led by scientists from the School of Veterinary Medicine, researchers found that an enzyme in the body can metabolize compounds formed in the brain from alkaloids present in certain foods and tobacco into MPTP-like chemicals, triggering a neurodegenerative condition in mice.

The researchers, led by Narayan Avadhani and Mrittika Chattopadhyay, suggest that the enzyme, mitochondrial CYP2D6, presents a potentially powerful new target for Parkinson's treatment.

"Over the past two or three decades, researchers have tried inhibiting the process by which they believed MPTP was metabolized, with mixed success," says Avadhani. "We believe that mitochondrial CYP2D6 is the more direct drug target, which might prove better in treating idiopathic Parkinson's disease."

The study, which appears in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, investigates the mechanism of Parkinson's disease when a specific cause cannot be pinpointed, which is a majority of examples of the chemically induced disease.

Previous studies have shown that MPTP and similar toxic compounds induce Parkinson's disease in rodents and primates. The mechanism of action, as scientists understood it, involved the compounds being oxidized to form MPP+, a toxic metabolite. The enzyme that was believed to be responsible is called monoamine oxidase B (MAO-B), present in the nervous system's glial cells. In that conception of the mechanism, MPP+ was thought to then be transferred to dopamine neurons by dopamine transporter proteins, and, indeed, Parkinson's is characterized by unusually low dopamine levels in the brain.

Researchers have tried to stem the effects of Parkinson's by targeting two players in this presumed pathway, both MAO-B and the dopamine transporter protein, with only mixed success.

Yet the Penn-led study implicates an entirely separate mechanism. In earlier work, Avadhani and colleagues had shown that the enzyme CYP2D6, localized to the body's energy factories, the mitochondria, could play a role in metabolizing MPTP to MPP+. In the new investigation, they took a closer look at beta-carbolines and isoquinolines, toxins that resemble MPTP which the body produces from substances found in tobacco smoke, alcohol, and some foods.

They found that, instead of MAO-B, it was mitochondrial CYP2D6 that activate the beta-carbolines and isoquinolines inside the dopamine-producing neurons, rather than the glial cells. This route of activation, in a mouse model, results in neuronal damage and oxidative stress, symptoms akin to Parkinson's.

"CYP2D6 is known to play a role in influencing the activity of a number of drugs," says Avadhani.

In an attempt to target this pathway, the researchers showed that mice lacking CYP2D6 did not exhibit the severe symptoms that mice with the protein did. In addition, an inhibitor of CYP2D6 prevented neuronal damage in the nice.

"The CYP2D6 inhibitor ajmalicine is a member of the reserpine family of alkaloids, found in the plant Rauwolfia serpentine and was long used in India for treating mental illness, such as paranoia and schizophrenia," Avadhani says. "Mitochondrial targeting of such compounds is likely to be effective in treating Parkinson's patients, and pursuing that is our future strategy."

As students learn a new concept, measuring how well they grasp it has often depended on traditional paper and pencil tests. Dartmouth researchers have developed a machine learning algorithm, which can be used to measure how well a student understands a concept based the student’s brain activity patterns. The findings are published in Nature Communications.

The study is one of the first to look at how knowledge learned in school is represented in the brain. To test knowledge of concepts in STEM, Dartmouth researchers examined how novices and intermediate learners' knowledge and brain activity compared when testing mechanical engineering and physics concepts, and then developed a new method to assess their conceptual understanding.

"Learning about STEM topics is exciting but it can also be quite challenging. Yet, through the course of learning, students develop a rich understanding of many complex concepts. Presumably, this acquired knowledge must be reflected in new patterns of brain activity. However, we currently don't have a detailed understanding of how the brain supports this kind of complex and abstract knowledge, so that's what we set out to study," said senior author David Kraemer, an assistant professor of education at Dartmouth College.

Twenty-eight Dartmouth students participated in the study, broken into two equal groups: engineering students and novices. Engineering students had taken at least one mechanical engineering course and an advanced physics course, whereas novices had not taken any college-level engineering or physics classes. The study was comprised of three tests, which focused on how structures are built and assessed participants' understanding of Newton's third law--for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Newton's third law is often used to describe the interactions of objects in motion, but it also applies to objects that are static, or nonmoving: all of the forces in a static structure need to be in equilibrium, a principle fundamental to understanding whether a structure will collapse under its own weight or whether it can support more weight.

At the start of the study, participants were provided with a brief overview of the different types of forces in mechanical engineering. In an fMRI scanner, they were presented with images of real-world structures (bridges, lampposts, buildings, and more) and were asked to think about how the forces in a given structure balanced out to keep the structure in equilibrium. Then, participants were prompted with a subsequent image of the same structure, where arrows representing forces were overlaid onto the structure. Participants were asked to identify if the Newtonian forces had been labeled correctly in this diagram. Engineering students (intermediate learners) answered 75 percent of the diagrams correctly and outperformed the novices, who answered 53.6 percent correctly.

Before the fMRI session, participants were also asked to complete two standardized, multiple-choice tests that measured other mechanical engineering and physics knowledge. For both tests, the engineering students had significantly higher scores than the novices with 50.2 percent versus 16.9 percent, and 79.3 percent versus 35.9 percent.

In cognitive neuroscience, studies on how information is stored in the brain often rely on averaging data across participants within a group, and then comparing their results to those from another group (such as experts versus novices). For this study, the Dartmouth researchers wanted to devise a data-driven method, which could generate an individual "neural score" based on the brain activity alone, without having to specify which group the participant was a part of. The team created a new method called an informational network analysis, a machine learning algorithm which "produced neural scores that significantly predicted individual differences in performance" testing knowledge of specific STEM concepts. To validate the neural score method, the researchers compared each student's neural score with his/her performance on the three tests. The results demonstrated that the higher the neural score, the higher the student scored on the concept knowledge tests.

"In the study, we found that when engineering students looked at images of real-world structures, the students would automatically apply their engineering knowledge, and would see the differences between structures such as whether it was a cantilever, truss or vertical load," explained Kraemer. "Based on the similarities in brain activity patterns, our machine learning algorithm method was able to distinguish the differences between these mechanical categories and generate a neural score that reflected this underlying knowledge. The idea here is that an engineer and novice will see something different when they look at a photograph of a structure, and we're picking up on that difference," he added.

The study found that while both engineering students and novices use the visual cortex similarly when applying concept knowledge about engineering, they use the rest of the brain very differently to process the same visual image. Consistent with prior research, the results demonstrated that the engineering students' conceptual knowledge was associated with patterns of activity in several brain regions, including the dorsal frontoparietal network that helps enable spatial cognition, and regions of ventral occipitotemporal cortex that are implicated in visual object recognition and category identification.

The informational network analysis could also have broader applications, as it could be used to evaluate the effectiveness of different teaching approaches. The research team is currently testing the comparison between hands-on labs versus virtual labs to determine if either approach leads to better learning and retention of knowledge over time.

San Antonio, Texas (June 19, 2019) - The global obesity epidemic is so far-reaching it now has an overarching name: globesity. Texas Biomed Staff Scientist Raul Bastarrachea, M.D., is part of a team that discovered a new mutation in the gene that regulates the key hormone suppressing hunger called leptin. This new mutation could help researchers understand why people develop excess of body fat. Dr. Bastarrachea's research is aimed at helping tackle metabolic disorders like cardiovascular disease and diabetes which are fueled by obesity and impact millions of people around the world.

"We keep learning more and more about the role of fat in normal-weight people," Bastarrachea said. "By researching what goes wrong when genes don't code correctly for the production of leptin, we are coming closer to answers that could help millions of people with metabolic disorders."

In the field of metabolic diseases, the pinpointing of the protein Leptin in the year 2000 was a huge breakthrough. Researchers at Rockefeller University found this hormone was missing in rats that randomly became extremely fat in a laboratory setting. Humans also need adequate leptin circulating levels to inform the brain that their body fat content is enough and they do not need to keep eating more food. In other words, leptin signals mammals to stop eating.

Leptin is a protein produced by fat cells (also known as adipose tissue). It travels through the circulation to the brain where the hormone hooks up to a leptin receptor in the hypothalamus to signal to the body that there is enough fat and no more food is needed. In other words, it is a hunger-suppressing hormone. The name leptin is derived from the Greek work "leptos" meaning thin. It is sometimes referred to as the "Fat Controller."

A congenital leptin deficiency is a recessive genetic disorder associated with severe early-onset obesity. In an article in the journal Genes, Dr. Bastarrachea and his co-investigators examined the case of two sisters in Colombia who started off their lives as normal weight babies but who quickly suffered from childhood-onset severe obesity. Prior cases have studied people whose genetics can be traced to Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, India and China. This is the first case studied in the Americas.

What scientists found is that these two women - now in their 20s - have a mutation in the leptin gene on chromosome 7. The sisters' leptin levels were so low they were below the detection limit of the manufactured test kit.

The gene mutation caused the Leptin proteins to be "misfolded," rendering them ineffective and destroying their function.

When researching the genetics of the family, scientist noted these women were children of lineal consanguinity which means several generations before them married blood relatives. This is a common practice in about a fifth of the world population, mostly in the Middle East, West Asia and North Africa. However, health risks for children of these unions include rare diseases caused by recessive genes.

While more work is needed to figure out how to combat leptin deficiencies on a large scale, the two Colombian women are in the queue to take Metreleptin - a synthetic analog of leptin - a very expensive injected drug. Its effects, however, can be quite dramatic and life changing.

With obesity now a global problem, scientists around the world are searching for ways to keep the issue from becoming a healthcare burden for years to come. Texas Biomed is playing an important role.