Culture

Bottom Line: In a new recommendation, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommends clinicians offer preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP) with effective antiretroviral therapy to people at high risk of acquiring HIV to decrease their risk of infection with the virus that causes AIDS. The USPSTF routinely makes recommendations about the effectiveness of preventive care services. This recommendation statement comes after a review of the evidence on the benefits of PrEP to prevent HIV infection. There were more than 38,000 new diagnoses of HIV infection reported in the United States in 2017. HIV is now treatable but there is no cure and the virus can have significant health consequences.

(doi:10.1001/jama.2019.6390)

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

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

In a search for clues to what may delay or prevent Alzheimer's disease, Johns Hopkins Medicine scientists report that smarter, more educated people aren't protected from the disease, but do get a cognitive "head start" that may keep their minds functioning better temporarily.

Put another way, the investigators say, those who start out with greater cognitive reserve -- a baseline of higher mental functioning -- may have more they can afford to lose before Alzheimer's disease symptoms begin to interfere with their daily lives compared with those who don't have as much schooling or participate regularly in mentally challenging tasks.

The findings, published in the April issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, suggest -- but don't prove -- that exercising your brain might help keep people cognitively functional longer, but won't ward off the inevitable decline of Alzheimer's disease.

"Our study was designed to look for trends, not prove cause and effect, but the major implication of our study is that exposure to education and better cognitive performance when you're younger can help preserve cognitive function for a while even if it's unlikely to change the course of the disease," says Rebecca Gottesman, M.D., Ph.D., professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

About 5 million people in the U.S. live with Alzheimer's disease, a number expected to triple by 2060, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Because effective treatment options aren't available for Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia, researchers are interested in identifying ways to prevent or delay disease. Earlier studies suggested that people with higher intelligence or more education might have lower rates of these diseases, and Gottesman's team designed a study to test the idea.

For the study, the researchers used data from the federally funded Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study, in which nearly 16,000 healthy participants in midlife from Washington County, Maryland; Forsyth County, North Carolina; Jackson, Mississippi; and Minneapolis, Minnesota, were enrolled from 1987 to 1989 and followed over the next decades. Twenty years into the study, participants were an average of 76 years old. About 57% were women, and 43% were African American, with the remaining participants white.

The investigators focused on a group of 331 participants without dementia who were part of an additional study, the ARIC-PET study, in which participants underwent specialized brain imaging. Some 54 had less than a high school education, 144 had completed high school or earned their GED diploma, and 133 had some college or more formal education.

Twenty years in, all participants underwent MRIs and positron emission tomography (PET) scans of their brains to measure levels of amyloid beta protein accumulated in the brain, a standard marker of Alzheimer's disease. The average PET scan score indicating the amount of amyloid beta protein in the brain after being compared with a part of the brain where amyloid beta doesn't accumulate was 1.2. Some 171 participants were categorized as having elevated values greater than this standard, and the remaining participants were assigned to the nonelevated amyloid beta values category.

In late life (ages 65-84), each participant's cognition was assessed with 10 standard tests of memory, language and other intellectual function. Three of these tests were administered at about the 10-year timepoint as well. The average score indicating normal cognition was set to zero for statistical purposes, with a value of 1 indicating an above-average score, and -1 indicating a below average score.

Participants with any level of amyloid beta and with college, postgraduate or professional schooling had average cognitive scores of about one or more standard units higher than those who had less than a high school education, regardless of beta amyloid levels in the brain. Gottesman says these data suggest that education seems to help preserve cognition, since those with education scored higher.

Gottesman noted that cognition scores in midlife weren't associated with elevated levels of amyloid beta protein in the brain in late life. White participants with higher late-life cognition scores had a 40% lower risk of having elevated amyloid beta protein in the brain. This general trend was observed in African American participants too, but to a lesser degree (around 30% lower risk).

"Our data suggest that more education seems to play a role as a form of cognitive reserve that helps people do better at baseline, but it doesn't affect one's actual level of decline," says Gottesman. "This makes studies tricky because someone who has good education may be less likely to show a benefit of an experimental treatment because they are already doing well."

What this means for future research into developing therapies for Alzheimer's disease, Gottesman says, is that it's important to focus on some sort of independent and specific biomarker to show actual treatment benefit. She also says studies must look at trends in performance over time rather than at one timepoint.

Myocardial infarction (MI) results in the localized death of the muscle cells that are essential for the heart's pumping function. Depending on the extent of the damage, MI may initiate a progressive deterioration of cardiac function that ultimately leads to heart failure. Following an acute infarction, cells of the immune system induce an inflammatory reaction in the heart muscle, which promotes clearance of the damaged tissue. "Many novel post-infarct therapies are designed to inhibit the inflammation," says Professor Oliver Söhnlein of the Institute for Cardiovascular Prevention at LMU. "However, inflammatory reactions everywhere in the body are normally self-limiting. So we set out to develop a therapeutic approach which makes use of the endogenous processes that enable the inflammation to be turned off," he explains. A new study, which appears in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, reports how much progress Söhnlein and his team have made so far.

At the core of their strategy is the protein annexin A1 (AnxA1), which plays an important role in the regulation of the innate immune response - in particular in the switch from the damage-disposal phase of inflammation to the restorative processes that lead to its resolution and healing. In the new study, the authors used two strains of mice. One lacked the ability to synthesize AnxA1, while the other served as the positive control. In mice that were unable to produce AnxA1, the inflammatory reaction induced by MI was more widespread and persistent, and the degree of impairment of cardiac function was greater, than in the control mice. Furthermore, therapeutic administration of AnxA1 following heart damage was found to promote myocardial repair in wild type mice.

The protein causes immune cells called macrophages to secrete the signal protein VEGF-A, which stimulates the formation of new blood vessels. "This in turn helps to increase blood flow, which is a crucial factor in the healing process after myocardial infarction," says Söhnlein. He and his colleagues have observed similar positive effects of AnxA1 on the repair of heart damage in pigs. "So the annexin A1-based therapy looks like a promising approach to mitigating the effects of acute heart attacks."

DALLAS, June 11, 2019 - Specialized risk scores derived from testing that calculates the cumulative effect of an individual's entire DNA sequence, the genome, may reliably predict heart disease in people who have not yet had a heart attack, according to new research in Circulation: Genomic and Precision Medicine, an American Heart Association journal.

The study is the latest to use polygenic risk scores (PRSs) based on an individual's entire genome sequence as biomarkers to predict the risk to develop coronary artery disease and heart attack. Several published studies have used PRSs with high accuracy in people of European ancestry. Researchers in this most recent study set out to determine if the results would translate to a different population, in this case French Canadians.

Researchers studied two similar PRSs in 3,639 French Canadian adults with cardiovascular disease and 7,382 adults without heart disease. They found that the PRSs developed and tested in other populations also had the sensitivity and specificity for predicting heart disease in French Canadians.

"PRSs, built using very large data sets of people with and without heart disease, look for genetic changes in the DNA that influence disease risk, whereas individual genes might have only a small effect on disease predisposition," said Guillaume Lettre, Ph.D., lead author of the study and an associate professor at the Montreal Heart Institute and Université de Montréal in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. "The PRS is like having a snapshot of the whole genetic variation found in one's DNA and can more powerfully predict one's disease risk. Using the score, we can better understand whether someone is at higher or lower risk to develop a heart problem."

Early prediction would benefit prevention, optimal management and treatment strategies for heart disease. Because PRSs are simple and relatively inexpensive, their implementation in the clinical setting holds great promises. For heart disease, early detection could lead to simple yet effective therapeutic interventions such as the use of statins, aspirin or other medications.

Results from the study also confirmed original reports showing that the PRSs can identify about 6% to 7% individuals at high risk for cardiac disease. Lettre said this risk was similar to the high heart disease risk among people with familial hypercholesterolemia, a rare but severe disease that predisposes people to very high levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL or bad) cholesterol, which puts them at a high risk of heart attack.

"Using the polygenic risk score, even in a normal population, we can find people whose risk is as high as those who have this rare disease," Lettre said.

PRSs, however, did not perform as well in predicting new events in people who had already had heart attacks, possibly because the participants were older and 76% of those them were on statin treatment which could impact PRS performance.

More research needs to be done before PRSs go mainstream for determining individual heart disease risk, according to Lettre.

The next step is to test the genetic scoring systems long term in large clinical studies to determine if managing and treating people based on their risk scores improves individuals' heart health. Researchers should also do studies to better understand how to integrate polygenic risk scores with the other known risk factors, such as blood pressure, diabetes and cholesterol levels, but also to extend these studies to non-European ancestry populations, he said.

The American Heart Association named the use of polygenic risk scores as one of the biggest advances in heart disease and stroke research in 2018.

"Eventually, clinicians could use polygenic risk scores along with family history, cholesterol and blood pressure to determine heart disease risk. Used early in a person's life it might help clinicians more precisely tailor treatment aimed at preventing a heart attack in later years," said Jennifer Hall, Ph.D., Chief of the American Heart Association's Institute for Precision Medicine. "This type of research is the basis for the work we are doing within the Institute of Precision Medicine."

"There is a lot of interest not only in the science arena but also in the general community about using genetics to capture information about disease risk," Lettre said. "This research is exciting, as genetic testing is becoming more powerful, affordable and it's easy - often requiring only a swab of one's saliva."

The biorefinery technology uses biomass as a feedstock and converts it to energy and other beneficial byproducts. It is drawing attention as an eco-friendly and sustainable technology to prepare for depletion of fossil fuels. However, the types of biomass that can be used for this technology are very limited. Starch crops such as corns are utilized as biomass (mainly glucose), but they are easily consumed by microorganism. Such processes have limitations in satisfying the growing demands of bioproducts, for example, the consumption of food resources and limited cultivation capabilities.

To overcome such limitations, the joint research team of POSTECH and Seoul National University developed a new microorganism, which they named as Vibrio sp. dhg. In their study, they successfully demonstrated that Vibrio sp. dhg can be a promising microbial platform for the biorefinery of brown macroalgae which can replace starch-crop biomass. Their research is published in the latest publication of the world-renowned journal, Nature Communications on June 6th, 2019.

Continuing efforts on studying utilization of non-edible biomass have been made and brown macroalgae have been suggested as an alternative feedstock. Brown macroalgae grow two to three times faster than the starch crops and only require light and seawater to grow. Although they are only consumed in a few countries such as Korea, they are not eaten in most of the countries. Because of these advantages, they seem to be a reasonable alternative choice. However, there was no industrial microorganism that can easily metabolize polysaccharides like alginic acid in algae and it was difficult to develop the process for utilizing algae as biomass.

To solve this problem, Prof. Gyoo Yeol Jung and his research team at POSTECH and Prof. Sang Woo Seo and his research group at Seoul National University successfully developed a new microorganism, Vibrio sp. dgh, that can rapidly metabolize alginic acid in algae and genetic engineering techniques optimized for this new microorganism based on omics analysis. In addition, they succeeded in developing biorefinery processes that directly produce ethanol (biofuel), 2,3-butanediol (raw material for plastics), lycopene (physiologically active substance) and other various chemical products by artificially manipulating the metabolic pathway of Vibrio sp. dhg.

Especially, the new artificial microorganism they found has many advantages and brings great expectations of its future usage. For example, Vibrio sp. dhg can not only use brown macroalgae as biomass but also other various biomass more efficiently than the conventional industrial microorganisms (E. coli, yeast). Also, their growth rate is two times faster and they convert biomass more rapidly. Therefore, it is expected to be used for improving the efficiency of microbial fermentation process using not only algae but also conventional gluose-based biomass.

Prof. Jung who led the research team explained, "The microorganism that we found, Vibrio sp. dhg can rapidly metabolize algae-derived carbon sources. So, it can be utilized in producing eco-friendly value-added chemicals. Also, it can convert raw materials to high value-added chemicals exceptionally faster than the existing industrial microorganism. Therefore, we expect that this will exceedingly improve the efficiency and economic feasibility of microbial fermentation process which has been studied globally."

On the land where Cordoba is located in the 21st century, two cities coexisted in the past, each on a hill. An Iberian city was located where Cruz Conde Park lies today, and a Roman city, which was founded at a later time, was located about 500 meters away. Archaeology has had to depend upon geological studies up to now in order to determine how the city developed throughout history, but now, thanks to LiDAR technology, 3D images have been obtained that show what the land was like where Cordoba lies before humans arrived.

Antonio Monterroso, an Art History, Archaeology and Music Department researcher at the University of Cordoba, used data from a specific LiDAR flight for the first time. This flight was performed by the National Geographic Institute (abbreviated to IGN in Spanish) in 2016 and covered all of Spain. The data was used to analyze the morphology of an already built city. These data are publicly accessible and have led to the aerial detection of several archaeological sites outside of urban enclaves in Spain, but this tool's potential was underestimated when it came to analyzing historical cities.

Aerial laser LiDAR technology is a recent development. A small plane flies over an area and casts millions of points of light and uses them to calculate the height at which objects they collide with are located. These objects could be trees, mountains or buildings. This provides a three-dimensional image of the area being studied.

Cordoba is a built-up city, so these data apparently do not provide any archaeological information, due to the fact that most ruins are buried underneath new buildings. However, if these data are filtered and only the ones that hit the ground are chosen, while disregarding the points that collided with urban features, they can be used to generate a 3D picture of the actual land where the city lies.

In this way, Antonio Monterroso Checa was able to digitally recreate the geomorphology of the area where Cordoba is located before it was covered with buildings. In the images, one can clearly see how first the Iberian city and later the Roman one both took advantage of the shape of the land in order to build their settlements. The former was located on a hill, which is named Los Quemados Hill today, while the latter was built on a less steep hill farther to the northeast. The images also show how these two settlements were located next to the old Guadalquivir riverbed, which was farther north than it is today. In Roman and medieval times, once the river took its current shape, the city spread over what had once been the old riverbed, and high foundations and fortifications were built to avoid flooding.

Up until now, the traces of this old Guadalquivir riverbed had only been revealed by means of archaeologial studies that detected signs of flooding in the area and the presence of underground sand. Thanks to Monterroso's research, we can now see this evidence digitally in a clearer and more graphic way.

This is the first part of a much broader scope of research that Antonio Monterroso is performing on the province of Cordoba. He is currently immersed in studying LiDAR data from the IGN around the Medina Azahara historical site and its surroundings. The aim of this work is to continue to uncover new information about the world heritage that the historical city of Cordoba holds.

CLEVELAND--Studying the sediment of a mountain river can reveal thousands of years or more of a waterway's history, including new threats from more frequent wildfires and increased precipitation brought by climate change.

And understanding those challenges may provide insight into other waterways, including the Cuyahoga River.

Those climate-induced threats are among the findings recently published in the journal Nature Communications from Nicholas Sutfin, a visiting assistant professor of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences at Case Western Reserve University. Sutfin is a fluvial geomorphologist--a scientist who studies how rivers interact with surrounding landforms, especially in relation to how they move sediment.

Sutfin has focused so far on the streams of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, where he conducted research as an extension of his PhD dissertation with mentor and co-author Ellen Wohl, Colorado State University Distinguished Professor.

Those high-elevation mountain streams have often been seen as machines of erosion, wearing down the surrounding landscape. But they also retain sediment along their bottoms and banks for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years; and the higher the stream, the older the sedimentary record.

But that ancient history is being disturbed more frequently. Among the recent findings from Sutfin and Wohl is that three trends in "floodplain disturbance"--forest type, precipitation patterns and frequency and intensity of wildfires--all are expected to shift under a changing climate.

"There will definitely be an influence from climate change," Sutfin said. "Snow pack decreases and melts much sooner; larger floods are likely to occur and large forests fires are becoming more common. Sediment will now likely erode more rapidly."

Wildfires, in particular, may be responsible for reducing how long sediment remains in place because a fire can strip the land of its ability to slowly and effectively filter water, Sutfin said. Instead, surface water from rainfall simply rushes into the river.

How it applies to the Cuyahoga, other rivers

Sutfin's work could help inform a wider and universal understanding of rivers. That includes massive systems like the Mississippi, to more localized rivers like the Cuyahoga.

Suftin is also a Northeast Ohio native with a keen interest in not only the Cuyahoga, but also the Chagrin and the Black rivers (the latter of which flows through his home county of Lorain).

"Urban rivers are generally under-studied," he said. "The increase in frequency and intensity of large storms is true here in Northeast Ohio just as it is in the Rockies."

Even the effects of fire on the landscape and river flow can be applied to understand development and other land-use around urban streams, he said.

"When a site is burned by wildfire, the effect is similar to what happens with urbanization, when we pave over the land with impervious surfaces," Sutfin said. "Then, rainfall goes right into the river, causing more flow, more erosion and more movement of sediment--so the parallels are evident."

During the Iron Age around 300 AD something extraordinary was initiated in Levänluhta area in Isokyrö, SW Finland. The deceased were buried in a lake, and this habit was continued for at least 400 years. When trenches were dug in the local fields in mid-1800's skulls and other human bones were surfacing. These bones had been preserved almost intact in the anoxic, ferrous water. Archaeologists, historians and locals have been wondering about these finds for over 150 years now.

In 2010, a multidisciplinary research group at the University of Helsinki decided to re-investigate the mystery of Levänluhta. The site, thought to be e.g. a sacrificial spring, is exceptional even in global scale and has yielded altogether c. 75 kg human bone material. The research group, led by docent Anna Wessman, had an ambitious aim: to find who the deceased buried in Levänluhta were, and why they were exceptionally buried under water so far from dwelling sites. Now, after several years of scientific work, the group reports their results in the most recent issue of Nature. The results are part of a more extensive international study shedding light on the colonization and population history of Siberia with DNA data from ancient - up to 31 000 years old - human bones.

"In our part, we wanted especially to find out the origins of the Iron Age remains found from Levänluhta," says the group leader Anna Wessman.

New results with DNA sequencing technology

This was investigated using cutting edge ancient DNA sequencing technology, which Department of Forensic Medicine is interested in due to the forensic casework performed at the department. Professor Antti Sajantila explains that the early phases of this project were demanding.

"Unability to repeat even our own results was utterly frustrating," Sajantila tells about the first experiments in the laboratory.

The methods were developing rapidly during the international co-operation, and ultimately the first Finnish results were shown to be accurate. Yet, it was surprising that the genomes of three Levänluhta individuals clearly resembled those of the modern Sámi people.

"We understood this quite early, but it took long to confirm these findings," tells docent Jukka Palo.

Locals or by-passers?

The results were suggesting that the Isokyrö region was inhabited by Sámi people in ancient times - according to carbon datings the bones belonged to individuals that had died 500 - 700 AD. This would be a concrete proof of Sámi in southern Finland in the past. But were the people locals, recent immigrants or haphazard by-passers? To find out, other techniques than DNA were needed. The solution lied in the enamel of teeth.

Curator Laura Arppe from the Finnish Museum of Natural History tells that strontium isotopes found in the enamel strongly suggest that the individuals grew up in the Levänluhta region.

The current genomes of the people in Finland carry both eastern Uralic and western Scandinavian components, and the genome of one the Levänluhta individuals examined had clear ties to present day Scandinavians. As a whole the replacement of the Sámi people in southern and central Finland reflects the replacement processes in Siberia, clarified in the present article. This has probably been a common feature in the Northern latitudes.

"The Levänluhta project demands further studies, not only to broaden the DNA data but also to understand the water burials as a phenomenon. The question "Why?" still lies unanswered," ponders the bone specialist, docent Kristiina Mannermaa.

Bacteria are everywhere. They are the most abundant form of life on our planet. Pick up just about any surface and its likely covered in bacteria. The aquatic environment is no different. Indeed, the ocean is full of small particles and debris, some inert, some highly nutritious. But how do bacteria differentiate between these surfaces, how do they hold onto them in moving water and how do they recognise each other so that they can work together?

Take the cholera bacterium, Vibrio cholerae, which infects the small intestine, causing diarrhoea and severe dehydration. It lives in salty water, such as seas, oceans, and estuaries, attaching itself to the shells of crustaceans. These exoskeletons are composed of a sugary polymer called chitin, and provide a rich source of food for the cholera bacterium - allowing it to grow and survive in the environment.

To do all this, V. cholerae uses an appendage that's "a bit like a grappling hook'' says lead researcher David Adams. "The idea is that bacteria can throw out these long ropes, hook onto something, and reel it back in''. These 'ropes' are actually the product of highly versatile nano-machines known as type IV pili, which are used by many different bacterial species for motility, sensing surfaces and sticking to them, and even taking up DNA from neighbouring bacteria. Consequently, type IV pili are considered critical for the environmental survival and pathogenesis of not just V. cholerae but a wide range of bacteria.

Over the course of the last decade or so, the group of Melanie Blokesch established that V. cholerae produces these 'DNA-uptake' pili only when growing on chitinous surfaces and showed that they are essential for DNA-uptake. But how exactly they functioned and what else they might be capable of doing had remained somewhat elusive and was therefore the focus of the current study published in Nature Microbiology.

To directly observe the DNA-uptake pili in live V. cholerae bacteria, the researchers used a technique called cysteine labelling. With that, they were able to establish that, as predicted, the pili are highly dynamic, extending and retracting to take up DNA. "This was an important milestone'' says laboratory head Melanie Blokesch "even though we'd established some time ago that these structures were there, to see them moving in real-time was something quite special''.

The biggest insight came however, when researchers disrupted the motor that powers pilus retraction, revealing that these ropes could also self-interact with each other, and in doing so, allow cells to stick together. Curiously, different strains of V. cholerae produce slightly different variants of the PilA subunit, which forms the major building block of the pilus. Remarkably, this creates a set of highly specific interactions that can be used as an identifier between strains ensuring that like only pairs with like.

Finally, when researchers visualised V. cholerae growing under more realistic conditions upon chitin surfaces, they revealed that these DNA-uptake pili naturally form dense networks of self-interacting pili. These pili bind tightly to the chitin surface and are required for the bacterium to stay attached during water flow. Thus, the DNA-uptake pilus is a multifunctional toolkit for chitin surface colonisation and kin recognition and the results of this work will help to advance our understanding of how the cholera bacterium survives in the natural environment. This knowledge, on the other hand, is important to better understand the transmission to humans in cholera endemic regions.

A recent forecast of the size of the "Dead Zone" in the northern Gulf of Mexico for late July 2019 is that it will cover 8,717-square-miles of the bottom of the continental shelf off Louisiana and Texas. The unusually high Mississippi River discharge in May controls the size of this zone, which will likely be the second largest zone since systematic measurements began in 1985. The water mass with oxygen concentrations less than 2 parts per million forms in bottom waters each year primarily as a result of nitrogen and phosphorus loading from the Mississippi River watershed, which fertilizes the Gulf of Mexico's surface waters to create excessive amounts of algal biomass. The decomposition of this plant material in the bottom layer leads to oxygen loss.

The low oxygen conditions in the gulf's most productive waters stresses organisms and may even cause their death, threatening living resources, including fish, shrimp and crabs caught there. Low oxygen conditions started to appear 50 years ago when agricultural practices intensified in the Midwest. No reductions in the nitrate loading from the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico have occurred in the last few decades.

The predicted hypoxic area is about the size of the land area of New Hampshire and about 4.5 times the size of the Hypoxia Action Plan goal. This estimate assumes that there are no significant tropical storms in the two weeks before the monitoring cruise or during the cruise. The estimate is made each year by LSU scientists Eugene Turner and Nancy Rabalais. The report is posted at https://gulfhypoxia.net/research/shelfwide-cruise/?y=2019&p=hypoxia_fc.

In the eternal search for understanding what makes us human, scientists found that our brains are more sensitive to pitch, the harmonic sounds we hear when listening to music, than our evolutionary relative the macaque monkey. The study, funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, highlights the promise of Sound Health, a joint project between the NIH and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts that aims to understand the role of music in health.

"We found that a certain region of our brains has a stronger preference for sounds with pitch than macaque monkey brains," said Bevil Conway, Ph.D., investigator in the NIH's Intramural Research Program and a senior author of the study published in Nature Neuroscience. "The results raise the possibility that these sounds, which are embedded in speech and music, may have shaped the basic organization of the human brain."

The study started with a friendly bet between Dr. Conway and Sam Norman-Haignere, Ph.D., a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University's Zuckerman Institute for Mind, Brain, and Behavior and the first author of the paper.

At the time, both were working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Conway's team had been searching for differences between how human and monkey brains control vision only to discover that there are very few. Their brain mapping studies suggested that humans and monkeys see the world in very similar ways. But then, Dr. Conway heard about some studies on hearing being done by Dr. Norman-Haignere, who, at the time, was a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Josh H. McDermott, Ph.D., associate professor at MIT.

"I told Bevil that we had a method for reliably identifying a region in the human brain that selectively responds to sounds with pitch," said Dr. Norman-Haignere,

That is when they got the idea to compare humans with monkeys. Based on his studies, Dr. Conway bet that they would see no differences.

To test this, the researchers played a series of harmonic sounds, or tones, to healthy volunteers and monkeys. Meanwhile, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to monitor brain activity in response to the sounds. The researchers also monitored brain activity in response to sounds of toneless noises that were designed to match the frequency levels of each tone played.

At first glance, the scans looked similar and confirmed previous studies. Maps of the auditory cortex of human and monkey brains had similar hot spots of activity regardless of whether the sounds contained tones.

However, when the researchers looked more closely at the data, they found evidence suggesting the human brain was highly sensitive to tones. The human auditory cortex was much more responsive than the monkey cortex when they looked at the relative activity between tones and equivalent noisy sounds.

"We found that human and monkey brains had very similar responses to sounds in any given frequency range. It's when we added tonal structure to the sounds that some of these same regions of the human brain became more responsive," said Dr. Conway. "These results suggest the macaque monkey may experience music and other sounds differently. In contrast, the macaque's experience of the visual world is probably very similar to our own. It makes one wonder what kind of sounds our evolutionary ancestors experienced."

Further experiments supported these results. Slightly raising the volume of the tonal sounds had little effect on the tone sensitivity observed in the brains of two monkeys.

Finally, the researchers saw similar results when they used sounds that contained more natural harmonies for monkeys by playing recordings of macaque calls. Brain scans showed that the human auditory cortex was much more responsive than the monkey cortex when they compared relative activity between the calls and toneless, noisy versions of the calls.

"This finding suggests that speech and music may have fundamentally changed the way our brain processes pitch," said Dr. Conway. "It may also help explain why it has been so hard for scientists to train monkeys to perform auditory tasks that humans find relatively effortless."

Earlier this year, other scientists from around the U.S. applied for the first round of NIH Sound Health research grants. Some of these grants may eventually support scientists who plan to explore how music turns on the circuitry of the auditory cortex that make our brains sensitive to musical pitch.

RIVERSIDE, CA - Scientists may need to rethink their estimates for how many planets outside our solar system could host a rich diversity of life.

In a new study, a UC Riverside-led team discovered that a buildup of toxic gases in the atmospheres of most planets makes them unfit for complex life as we know it.

Traditionally, much of the search for extraterrestrial life has focused on what scientists call the "habitable zone," defined as the range of distances from a star warm enough that liquid water could exist on a planet's surface. That description works for basic, single-celled microbes -- but not for complex creatures like animals, which include everything from simple sponges to humans.

The team's work, published today in The Astrophysical Journal, shows that accounting for predicted levels of certain toxic gases narrows the safe zone for complex life by at least half -- and in some instances eliminates it altogether.

"This is the first time the physiological limits of life on Earth have been considered to predict the distribution of complex life elsewhere in the universe," said Timothy Lyons, one of the study's co-authors, a distinguished professor of biogeochemistry in UCR's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and director of the Alternative Earths Astrobiology Center, which sponsored the project.

"Imagine a 'habitable zone for complex life' defined as a safe zone where it would be plausible to support rich ecosystems like we find on Earth today," Lyons explained. "Our results indicate that complex ecosystems like ours cannot exist in most regions of the habitable zone as traditionally defined."

Using computer models to study atmospheric climate and photochemistry on a variety of planets, the team first considered carbon dioxide. Any scuba diver knows that too much of this gas in the body can be deadly. But planets too far from their host star require carbon dioxide -- a potent greenhouse gas -- to maintain temperatures above freezing. Earth included.

"To sustain liquid water at the outer edge of the conventional habitable zone, a planet would need tens of thousands of times more carbon dioxide than Earth has today," said Edward Schwieterman, the study's lead author and a NASA Postdoctoral Program fellow working with Lyons. "That's far beyond the levels known to be toxic to human and animal life on Earth."

The new study concludes that carbon dioxide toxicity alone restricts simple animal life to no more than half of the traditional habitable zone. For humans and other higher order animals, which are more sensitive, the safe zone shrinks to less than one third of that area.

What is more, no safe zone at all exists for certain stars, including two of the sun's nearest neighbors, Proxima Centauri and TRAPPIST-1. The type and intensity of ultraviolet radiation that these cooler, dimmer stars emit can lead to high concentrations of carbon monoxide, another deadly gas. Carbon monoxide binds to hemoglobin in animal blood -- the compound that transports oxygen through the body. Even small amounts of it can cause the death of body cells due to lack of oxygen.

Carbon monoxide cannot accumulate on Earth because our hotter, brighter sun drives chemical reactions in the atmosphere that destroy it quickly. Although the team concluded recently that microbial biospheres may be able to thrive on a planet with abundant carbon monoxide, Schwieterman emphasized that "these would certainly not be good places for human or animal life as we know it on Earth."

Scientists have confirmed nearly 4,000 planets orbiting stars other than the sun, but none of them will be possible to visit in person. They are simply too far away. Closest is Proxima Centauri b, which would take 54,400 years for current spacecraft to reach. Using telescopes to detect abundances of certain gases in their atmospheres is one of the only ways to study these so-called exoplanets.

"Our discoveries provide one way to decide which of these myriad planets we should observe in more detail," said Christopher Reinhard, a former UCR graduate student now an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, co-author of this study, and co-leader of the Alternative Earths team. "We could identify otherwise habitable planets with carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide levels that are likely too high to support complex life."

Findings from the team's previous work is already informing next-generation space missions such as NASA's proposed Habitable Exoplanet Observatory. For example, because oxygen is essential to complex life on Earth and can be detected remotely, the team has been studying how common it may be in different planets' atmospheres.

Other than Earth, no planet in our solar system hosts life that can be characterized from a distance. If life exists elsewhere in the solar system, Schwieterman explained, it is deep below a rocky or icy surface. So, exoplanets may be our best hope for finding habitable worlds more like our own.

"I think showing how rare and special our planet is only enhances the case for protecting it," Schwieterman said. "As far as we know, Earth is the only planet in the universe that can sustain human life."

A grape variety still used in wine production in France today can be traced back 900 years to just one ancestral plant, scientists have discovered.

With the help of an extensive genetic database of modern grapevines, researchers were able to test and compare 28 archaeological seeds from French sites dating back to the Iron Age, Roman era, and medieval period.

Utilising similar ancient DNA methods used in tracing human ancestors, a team of researchers from the UK, Denmark, France, Spain, and Germany, drew genetic connections between seeds from different archaeological sites, as well as links to modern-day grape varieties.

It has long been suspected that some grape varieties grown today, particularly well-known types like Pinot Noir, have an exact genetic match with plants grown 2,000 years ago or more, but until now there has been no way of genetically testing an uninterrupted genetic lineage of that age.

Dr Nathan Wales, from the University of York, said: "From our sample of grape seeds we found 18 distinct genetic signatures, including one set of genetically identical seeds from two Roman sites separated by more than 600km, and dating back 2,000 years ago.

"These genetic links, which included a 'sister' relationship with varieties grown in the Alpine regions today, demonstrate winemakers' proficiencies across history in managing their vineyards with modern techniques, such as asexual reproduction through taking plant cuttings."

One archaeological grape seed excavated from a medieval site in Orléans in central France was genetically identical to Savagnin Blanc. This means the variety has grown for at least 900 years as cuttings from just one ancestral plant.

This variety (not to be confused with Sauvignon Blanc), is thought to have been popular for a number of centuries, but is not as commonly consumed as a wine today outside of its local region.

The grape can still be found growing in the Jura region of France, where it is used to produce expensive bottles of Vin Jaune, as well as in parts of Central Europe, where it often goes by the name Traminer.

Although this grape is not so well known today, 900 years of a genetically identical plant suggests that this wine was special - special enough for grape-growers to stick with it across centuries of changing political regimes and agricultural advancements.

Dr Jazmín Ramos-Madrigal, a postdoctoral researcher from the University of Copenhagen, said: "We suspect the majority of these archaeological seeds come from domesticated berries that were potentially used for winemaking based on their strong genetic links to wine grapevines.

"Berries from varieties used for wine are small, thick-skinned, full of seeds, and packed with sugar and other compounds such as acids, phenols, and aromas - great for making wine but not quite as good for eating straight from the vine. These ancient seeds did not have a strong genetic link to modern table grapes.

"Based on writings by the Roman author and naturalist, Pliny the Elder, and others, we know the Romans had advanced knowledge of winemaking and designated specific names to different grape varieties, but it has so far been impossible to link their Latin names to modern varieties.

"Now we have the opportunity to use genetics to know exactly what the Romans were growing in their vineyards."

Of the Roman seeds, the researchers could not find an identical genetic match with modern-day seeds, but they did find a very close relationships with two important grape families used to produce high quality wine.

These include the Syrah-Mondeuse Blanche family - Syrah is one of the most planted grapes in the world today - and the Mondeuse Blanche, which produces a high quality AOC (protected regional product) wine in Savoy, as well as the Pinot-Savagnin family - Pinot Noir being the "king of wine grapes".

Dr Wales said: "It is rather unconventional to trace an uninterrupted genetic lineage for hundreds of years into the past. Instead of exploring broad patterns in genetic ancestry, as in most ancient DNA projects, we had to think like forensics scientists and find a perfect match in the database.

"Large databases of genetic data from modern crops and optimized palaeogenomic methods have vastly improved our ability to analyse the history of this and other important fruits.

"For the wine industry today, these results could shed new light on the value of some grape varieties; even if we don't see them in popular use in wines today, they were once highly valued by past wine lovers and so are perhaps worth a closer look."

The researchers now hope to find more archaeological evidence that could send them further back in time and reveal more grape wine varieties.

New Rochelle, NY, May 28, 2019--A new study has shown that obese adolescents are not only significantly more likely to experience bullying, but they are also more likely to be both victims and perpetrators of bullying compared to their healthy weight peers. The study also found that overweight or obese adolescents who are either victims or perpetrators of bullying, or both, have significantly greater odds of having depression, behavioral problems, and difficulty making friends. The detailed findings are published in Childhood Obesity, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. Click here to read the full-text article free on the Childhood Obesity website through June 28, 2019.

The article entitled "Bullying Perpetration and Victimization among Adolescents with Overweight and Obesity in a Nationally Representative Sample" was coauthored by Kristie Rupp, PhD, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York (NY) and Stephanie McCoy, PhD, MPH, University of Southern Mississippi (Hattiesburg).

The researchers first compared bullying behavior among obese and healthy weight teens and whereas they found significant differences for bullying victimization and both being a victim and a perpetrator, there was no link between obesity and being a perpetrator of bullying alone. The second component of the study involved comparing obese teens who were either victims, perpetrators, or both and their likelihood of experiencing behavioral conduct problems, depression, and excessive arguing, and having difficulty making friends.

"While it is clear that as a group the obese have been more involved in bullying than other groups, it has not been clear the extent to which the obese are the victims of bullying or the source? In a large nationally representative sample, Rupp and McCoy determined that the obese were both victims and perpetrators, after controlling for likely confounders," says Childhood Obesity Editor-in-Chief Tom Baranowski, PhD, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX. "Thus, significantly, programs for the obese need to address both bullying victimization and perpetration."

Newly-built planet-finding instrument installed on Very Large Telescope, Chile, begins 100-hour observation of nearby stars Alpha Centauri A and B, aiming to be first to directly image a habitable exoplanet

Breakthrough Watch, the global astronomical program looking for Earth-like planets around nearby stars, and the European Southern Observatory (ESO), Europe's foremost intergovernmental astronomical organisation, today announced "first light" on a newly-built planet-finding instrument at ESO's Very Large Telescope in the Atacama Desert, Chile.

The instrument, called NEAR (Near Earths in the AlphaCen Region), is designed to hunt for exoplanets in our neighbouring star system, Alpha Centauri, within the "habitable zones" of its two Sun-like stars, where water could potentially exist in liquid form. It has been developed over the last three years and was built in collaboration with the University of Uppsala in Sweden, the University of Liège in Belgium, the California Institute of Technology in the US, and Kampf Telescope Optics in Munich, Germany.

Since 23 May ESO's astronomers at ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) have been conducting a ten-day observing run to establish the presence or absence of one or more planets in the star system. Observations will conclude tomorrow, 11 June. Planets in the system (twice the size of Earth or bigger), would be detectable with the upgraded instrumentation. The near- to thermal-infrared range is significant as it corresponds to the heat emitted by a candidate planet, and so enables astronomers to determine whether the planet's temperature allows liquid water.

Alpha Centauri is the closest star system to our Solar System, at 4.37 light-years (about 25 trillion miles) away. It consists of two Sun-like stars, Alpha Centauri A and B, plus the red dwarf star, Proxima Centauri. Current knowledge of Alpha Centauri's planetary systems is sparse. In 2016, a team using ESO instruments discovered one Earth-like planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. But Alpha Centauri A and B remain unknown quantities; it is not clear how stable such binary star systems are for Earth-like planets, and the most promising way to establish whether they exist around these nearby stars is to attempt to observe them.

Imaging such planets, however, is a major technical challenge, since the starlight that reflects off them is generally billions of times dimmer than the light coming to us directly from their host stars; resolving a small planet close to its star at a distance of several light-years has been compared to spotting a moth circling a street lamp dozens of miles away. To solve this problem, in 2016 Breakthrough Watch and ESO launched a collaboration to build a special instrument called a thermal infrared coronagraph, designed to block out most of the light coming from the star and optimised to capture the infrared light emitted by the warm surface of an orbiting planet, rather than the small amount of starlight it reflects. Just as objects near to the Sun (normally hidden by its glare) can be seen during a total eclipse, so the coronagraph creates a kind of artificial eclipse of its target star, blocking its light and allowing much dimmer objects in its vicinity to be detected. This marks a significant advance in observational capabilities.

The coronagraph has been installed on one of the VLT's four 8-metre-aperture telescopes, upgrading and modifying an existing instrument, called VISIR, to optimise its sensitivity to infrared wavelengths associated with potentially habitable exoplanets. It will therefore be able to search for heat signatures similar to that of the Earth, which absorbs energy from the Sun and emits it in the thermal infrared wavelength range. NEAR modifies the existing VISIR instrument in three ways, combining several cutting-edge astronomical engineering achievements. First, it adapts the instrument for coronagraphy, enabling it to drastically reduce the light of the target star and thereby reveal the signatures of potential terrestrial planets. Second, it uses a technique called adaptive optics to strategically deform the telescope's secondary mirror, compensating for the blur produced by the Earth's atmosphere. Third, it employs novel chopping strategies that also reduce noise, as well as potentially allowing the instrument to switch rapidly between target stars --- as fast as every 100 milliseconds -- maximising the available telescope time.

Pete Worden, Executive Director of the Breakthrough Initiatives, said: "We're delighted to collaborate with the ESO in designing, building, installing and now using this innovative new instrument. If there are Earth-like planets around Alpha Centauri A and B, that's huge news for everyone on our planet."

"ESO is glad to bring its expertise, existing infrastructure, and observing time on the Very Large Telescope to the NEAR project," commented ESO project manager Robin Arsenault.

"This is a valuable opportunity, as -- in addition to its own science goals -- the NEAR experiment is also a pathfinder for future planet-hunting instruments for the upcoming Extremely Large Telescope," says Markus Kasper, ESO's lead scientist for NEAR.

"NEAR is the first and (currently) only project that could directly image a habitable exoplanet. It marks an important milestone. Fingers crossed -- we are hoping a large habitable planet is orbiting Alpha Cen A or B" commented Olivier Guyon, lead scientist for Breakthrough Watch.

"Human beings are natural explorers," said Yuri Milner, founder of the Breakthrough Initiatives, "It is time we found out what lies beyond the next valley. This telescope will let us gaze across."

Notes

The data from the NEAR experiment are publicly available from the ESO archive under programme ID 2102.C-5011. A pre-processed and condensed package of all the data will be made available shortly after the campaign concludes. In addition, the Python-based high-contrast imaging data reduction tool PynPoint has been adapted to process NEAR data, and will be provided to members of the astronomical community who would like to use the data but do not have their own data reduction tools.

https://pynpoint.readthedocs.io/en/latest/near.html

Breakthrough Watch is a global astronomical programme aiming to identify and characterise planets around nearby stars. The programme is run by an international team of experts in exoplanet detection and imaging.

https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/initiative/4

The Breakthrough Initiatives are a suite of scientific and technological programmes, founded by Yuri Milner, investigating life in the Universe. Along with Breakthrough Watch, they include Breakthrough Listen, the largest ever astronomical search for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth, and Breakthrough Starshot, the first significant attempt to design and develop a space probe capable of reaching another star.

https://breakthroughinitiatives.org

Yuri Milner founded Mail.ru Group in 1999 and under his leadership it became one of Europe's leading internet companies. He took that business public in 2010 and founded DST Global to focus on global internet investments. DST Global became one of the world's leading technology investors and its portfolio has included some of the world's most prominent internet companies, such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Airbnb, Spotify, Alibaba, and others. Yuri lives in Silicon Valley with his family.

Yuri graduated in 1985 with an advanced degree in theoretical physics and subsequently conducted research in quantum field theory. Yuri and his wife Julia, partnered with Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Pony Ma, and Anne Wojcicki to fund the Breakthrough Prizes -- the world's largest scientific awards, honouring important, primarily recent, achievements in Fundamental Physics, Life Sciences and Mathematics. In July 2015, together with Stephen Hawking, Yuri launched the $100 million Breakthrough Listen initiative to reinvigorate the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the Universe, and in April 2016 they launched Breakthrough Starshot -- a $100 million research and engineering programme seeking to develop a technology for interstellar travel.

http://www.yurimilner.com

ESO is the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organisation in Europe and the world's most productive ground-based astronomical observatory by far. It has 16 Member States: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, along with the host state of Chile and with Australia as a Strategic Partner. ESO carries out an ambitious programme focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities enabling astronomers to make important scientific discoveries. ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organising cooperation in astronomical research. ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope and its world-leading Very Large Telescope Interferometer as well as two survey telescopes, VISTA working in the infrared and the visible-light VLT Survey Telescope. Also at Paranal ESO will host and operate the Cherenkov Telescope Array South, the world's largest and most sensitive gamma-ray observatory. ESO is also a major partner in two facilities on Chajnantor, APEX and ALMA, the largest astronomical project in existence. And on Cerro Armazones, close to Paranal, ESO is building the 39-metre Extremely Large Telescope, the ELT, which will become "the world's biggest eye on the sky".

ESO's Very Large Telescope (https://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/paranal-observatory/vlt/) (VLT) has recently added to its suite of advanced instruments, with a newly modified instrument VISIR (https://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/paranal-observatory/vlt/vlt-instr/visir/) (VLT Imager and Spectrometer for mid-Infrared). On 21 May 2019, it made its first observations since being modified to aid in the search for potentially habitable planets in the Alpha Centauri system.

Links

* NEAR overview in The Messenger - https://www.eso.org/sci/publications/messenger/archive/no.169-sep17/messenger-no169-16-20.pdf

* Breakthrough Initiatives website - https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/

* PynPoint Data Reduction Tool - https://pynpoint.readthedocs.io/en/latest/near.html

Contacts

Janet Wootten
Rubenstein Communications, Inc.
New York, USA
Tel: +1 212 843 8024
Email: jwootten@rubenstein.com

Mariya Lyubenova
Head of ESO Media Relations Team
Garching bei München, Germany
Tel: +49 89 3200 6188
Email: pio@eso.org