Leaf-mining insects destroyed with the dinosaurs, others quickly appeared

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After the asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous period that triggered the dinosaurs’ extinction and ushered in the Paleocene, leaf-mining insects in the western United States completely disappeared. Only a million years later, at Mexican Hat, in southeastern Montana, fossil leaves show diverse leaf-mining traces from new insects that were not present during the Cretaceous, according to paleontologists.”Our results indicate both that leaf-mining diversity at Mexican Hat is even higher than previously recognized, and equally importantly, that none of the Mexican Hat mines can be linked back to the local Cretaceous mining fauna,” said Michael Donovan, graduate student in geosciences, Penn State.Insects that eat leaves produce very specific types of damage. One type is from leaf miners — insect larvae that live in the leaves and tunnel for food, leaving distinctive feeding paths and patterns of droppings.Donovan, Peter Wilf, professor of geosciences, Penn State, and colleagues looked at 1,073 leaf fossils from Mexican Hat for mines. They compared these with more than 9,000 leaves from the end of the Cretaceous, 65 million years ago, from the Hell Creek Formation in southwestern North Dakota, and with more than 9,000 Paleocene leaves from the Fort Union Formation in North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming. The researchers present their results in today’s (July 24) issue of PLOS ONE.”We decided to focus on leaf miners because they are typically host specific, feeding on only a few plant species each,” said Donovan. “Each miner also leaves an identifiable mining pattern.”The researchers found nine different mine-damage types at Mexican Hat attributable to the larvae of moths, wasps and flies, and six of these damage types were unique to the site.The researchers were unsure whether the high diversity of leaf miners at Mexican Hat compared to other early Paleocene sites, where there is little or no leaf mining, was caused by insects that survived the extinction event in refugia — areas where organisms persist during adverse conditions — or were due to range expansions of insects from somewhere else during the early Paleocene.However, with further study, the researchers found no evidence of the survival of any leaf miners over the Cretaceous-Paleocene boundary, suggesting an even more total collapse of terrestrial food webs than has been recognized previously.”These results show that the high insect damage diversity at Mexican Hat represents an influx of novel insect herbivores during the early Paleocene and not a refugium for Cretaceous leaf miners,” said Wilf. “The new herbivores included a startling diversity for any time period, and especially for the classic post-extinction disaster interval.”Insect extinction across the Cretaceous-Paleocene boundary may have been directly caused by catastrophic conditions after the asteroid impact and by the disappearance of host plant species. While insect herbivores constantly need leaves to survive, plants can remain dormant as seeds in the ground until more auspicious circumstances occur.The low-diversity flora at Mexican Hat is typical for the area in the early Paleocene, so what caused the high insect damage diversity?Insect outbreaks are associated with a rapid population increase of a single insect species, so the high diversity of mining damage seen in the Mexican Hat fossils makes the possibility of an outbreak improbable.The researchers hypothesized that the leaf miners that are seen in the Mexican Hat fossils appeared in that area because of a transient warming event, a number of which occurred during the early Paleocene.”Previous studies have shown a correlation between temperature and insect damage diversity in the fossil record, possibly caused by evolutionary radiations or range shifts in response to a warmer climate,” said Donovan. “Current evidence suggests that insect herbivore extinction decreased with increasing distance from the asteroid impact site in Mexico, so pools of surviving insects would have existed elsewhere that could have provided a source for the insect influx that we observed at Mexican Hat.”Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by Penn State. The original article was written by A’ndrea Eluse Messer. …


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Slow walking speed, memory complaints can predict dementia

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A study involving nearly 27,000 older adults on five continents found that nearly 1 in 10 met criteria for pre-dementia based on a simple test that measures how fast people walk and whether they have cognitive complaints. People who tested positive for pre-dementia were twice as likely as others to develop dementia within 12 years. The study, led by scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and Montefiore Medical Center, was published online on July 16, 2014 in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.The new test diagnoses motoric cognitive risk syndrome (MCR). Testing for the newly described syndrome relies on measuring gait speed (our manner of walking) and asking a few simple questions about a patient’s cognitive abilities, both of which take just seconds. The test is not reliant on the latest medical technology and can be done in a clinical setting, diagnosing people in the early stages of the dementia process. Early diagnosis is critical because it allows time to identify and possibly treat the underlying causes of the disease, which may delay or even prevent the onset of dementia in some cases.”In many clinical and community settings, people don’t have access to the sophisticated tests — biomarker assays, cognitive tests or neuroimaging studies — used to diagnose people at risk for developing dementia,” said Joe Verghese, M.B.B.S., professor in the Saul R. Korey Department of Neurology and of medicine at Einstein, chief of geriatrics at Einstein and Montefiore, and senior author of the Neurology paper. “Our assessment method could enable many more people to learn if they’re at risk for dementia, since it avoids the need for complex testing and doesn’t require that the test be administered by a neurologist. The potential payoff could be tremendous — not only for individuals and their families, but also in terms of healthcare savings for society. All that’s needed to assess MCR is a stopwatch and a few questions, so primary care physicians could easily incorporate it into examinations of their older patients.”The U.S. …


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Researchers work to save endangered New England cottontail

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Scientists with the NH Agricultural Experiment Station are working to restore New Hampshire and Maine’s only native rabbit after new research based on genetic monitoring has found that in the last decade, cottontail populations in northern New England have become more isolated and seen a 50 percent contraction of their range.The endangered New England cottontail is now is at risk of becoming extinct in the region, according to NH Agricultural Experiment Station researchers at the University of New Hampshire College of Life Sciences and Agriculture who believe that restoring habitats is the key to saving the species.”The New England cottontail is a species of great conservation concern in the Northeast. This is our only native rabbit and is an integral component of the native New England wildlife. Maintaining biodiversity gives resilience to our landscape and ecosystems,” said NHAES researcher Adrienne Kovach, research associate professor of natural resources at UNH.New England cottontails have been declining for decades. However, NHAES researchers have found that in the last decade, the New England cottontail population in New Hampshire and Maine has contracted by 50 percent; a decade ago, cottontails were found as far north as Cumberland, Maine.The majority of research on New England cottontails has come out of UNH, much of it under the leadership of John Litvaitis, professor of wildlife ecology, who has studied the New England cottontail for three decades. Kovach’s research expands on this knowledge by using DNA analysis to provide new information on the cottontail’s status, distribution, genetic diversity, and dispersal ecology.The greatest threat and cause of the decline of the New England cottontail is the reduction and fragmentation of their habitat, Kovach said. Fragmentation of habitats occurs when the cottontail’s habitat is reduced or eliminated due to the maturing of forests or land development. Habitats also can become fragmented by roads or natural landscape features, such as bodies of water.”Cottontails require thicketed habitats, which progress from old fields to young forests. Once you have a more mature forest, the cottontail habitat is reduced. A lot of other species rely on these thicket habitats, including bobcats, birds, and reptiles. Many thicket-dependent species are on decline, and the New England cottontail is a representative species for this kind of habitat and its conservation,” Kovach said.Kovach explained that for cottontail and most animal populations to be healthy and grow, it is important for adult animals to leave the place where they were born and relocate to a new habitat, which is known as dispersal. …


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"Lost in translation" issues in Chinese medicine addressed by researchers

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Millions of people in the West today utilize traditional Chinese medicine, including acupuncture, herbs, massage and nutritional therapies. Yet only a few U.S. schools that teach Chinese medicine require Chinese-language training and only a handful of Chinese medical texts have so far been translated into English.Given the complexity of the language and concepts in these texts, there is a need for accurate, high-quality translations, say researchers at UCLA’s Center for East-West Medicine. To that end, the center has published a document that includes a detailed discussion of the issues involved in Chinese medical translation, which is designed to help students, educators, practitioners, researchers, publishers and translators evaluate and digest Chinese medical texts with greater sensitivity and comprehension.”This publication aims to raise awareness among the many stakeholders involved with the translation of Chinese medicine,” said principal investigator and study author Dr. Ka-Kit Hui, founder and director of the UCLA center.The 15-page document, “Considerations in the Translation of Chinese Medicine” was developed and written by a UCLA team that included a doctor, an anthropologist, a China scholar and a translator. It appears in the current online edition of the Journal of Integrative Medicine.Authors Sonya Pritzker, a licensed Chinese medicine practitioner and anthropologist, and Hanmo Zhang, a China scholar, hope the publication will promote communication in the field and play a role in the development of thorough, accurate translations.The document highlights several important topics in the translation of Chinese medical texts, including the history of Chinese medical translations, which individuals make ideal translators, and other translation-specific issues, such as the delicate balance of focusing translations on the source-document language while considering the language it will be translated into.It also addresses issues of technical terminology, period-specific language and style, and historical and cultural perspective. For example, depending on historical circumstances and language use, some translations may be geared toward a Western scientific audience or, alternately, it may take a more natural and spiritual tone. The authors note that it is sometimes helpful to include dual translations, such as “windfire eye/acute conjunctivitis,” in order to facilitate a link between traditional Chinese medical terms and biomedical diagnoses.The final section of the document calls for further discussion and action, specifically in the development of international collaborative efforts geared toward the creation of more rigorous guidelines for the translation of Chinese medicine texts.”Considerations in the Translation of Chinese Medicine,” was inspired by the late renowned translator and scholar Michael Heim, a professor in the UCLA departments of comparative literature and Slavic studies. A master of 12 languages, he is best known for his translation into English of Czech author Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” The new UCLA document is dedicated to him.The document, the authors say, was influenced in large part by the American Council of Learned Societies’ “Guidelines for the Translation of Social Science Texts,” which are intended to promote communications in the social sciences across language boundaries. It was also influenced by Pritzker’s longstanding anthropological study of translation in Chinese medicine, which is detailed in her new book, “Living Translation: Language and the Search for Resonance in U.S. …


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University of Pennsylvania"s Mesothelioma Program Receives $8 Million Grant from NCI

The National Cancer Institute awarded an $8 million grant to the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine to study the effects of photodynamic light therapy (PDT) in patients with malignant pleural mesothelioma. The grant will fund a clinical trial and additional studies looking at the effects of PDT on the patient’s immune response, the mesothelioma tumor cell , and the blood vessels surrounding the tumor.Dr. Eli Glatstein is the principal investigator of the program. He is also the professor and vice chair of Radiation Oncology, and member of Penn’s Mesothelioma and Pleural Program. According to Dr. Glatstein, “This trial represents a major step in understanding the combination of treatment modalities that will offer patients the best hope for survival and extended remission.”The study expects to …


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Intensity of hurricanes: New study helps improve predictions of storm intensity

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They are something we take very seriously in Florida — hurricanes. The names roll off the tongue like a list of villains — Andrew, Charlie, Frances and Wilma.In the past 25 years or so, experts have gradually been improving prediction of the course a storm may take. This is thanks to tremendous advancements in computer and satellite technology. While we still have the “cone of uncertainty” we’ve become familiar with watching television weather reports, today’s models are more accurate than they used to be.The one area, however, where there is still much more to be researched and learned is in predicting just how intense a storm may be. While hurricane hunter aircraft can help determine wind speed, velocity, water temperature and other data, the fact is we often don’t know why or how a storm gets stronger or weaker. There has been virtually no progress in hurricane intensity forecasting during the last quarter century.But, thanks to new research being conducted, all that’s about to change.”The air-water interface — whether it had significant waves or significant spray — is a big factor in storm intensity,” said Alex Soloviev, Ph.D., a professor at Nova Southeastern University’s Oceanographic Center. “Hurricanes gain heat energy through the interface and they lose mechanical energy at the interface.”Soloviev is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (UM RSMAS) and a Fellow at the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies (CIMAS.) He and his fellow researchers used a computational fluid dynamics model to simulate microstructure of the air-sea interface under hurricane force winds. In order to verify these computer-generated results, the group conducted experiments at the UM’s Rosenstiel School Air-Sea Interaction Salt Water Tank (ASIST) where they simulated wind speed and ocean surface conditions found during hurricanes.The study “The Air-Sea Interface and Surface Stress Under Tropical Cyclones” was published in the June 16, 2014 issue of the journal Nature Scientific Reports. Soloviev was the lead author of this study, which was conducted by a multi-institutional team including Roger Lukas (University of Hawaii), Mark Donelan and Brian Haus (UM RSMAS), and Isaac Ginis (University of Rhode Island.)The researchers were surprised at what they found. Under hurricane force wind, the air-water interface was producing projectiles fragmenting into sub millimeter scale water droplets. …


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New brain pathways for understanding type 2 diabetes and obesity uncovered

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Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have identified neural pathways that increase understanding of how the brain regulates body weight, energy expenditure, and blood glucose levels — a discovery that can lead to new therapies for treating Type 2 diabetes and obesity.The study, published in Nature Neuroscience, found that melanocortin 4 receptors (MC4Rs) expressed by neurons that control the autonomic nervous system are key in regulating glucose metabolism and energy expenditure, said senior author Dr. Joel Elmquist, Director of the Division of Hypothalamic Research, and Professor of Internal Medicine, Pharmacology, and Psychiatry.”A number of previous studies have demonstrated that MC4Rs are key regulators of energy expenditure and glucose homeostasis, but the key neurons required to regulate these responses were unclear,” said Dr. Elmquist, who holds the Carl H. Westcott Distinguished Chair in Medical Research, and the Maclin Family Distinguished Professorship in Medical Science, in Honor of Dr. Roy A. Brinkley. “In the current study, we found that expression of these receptors by neurons that control the sympathetic nervous system, seem to be key regulators of metabolism. In particular, these cells regulate blood glucose levels and the ability of white fat to become ‘brown or beige’ fat.”Using mouse models, the team of researchers, including co-first authors Dr. Eric Berglund, Assistant Professor in the Advanced Imaging Research Center and Pharmacology, and Dr. Tiemin Liu, a postdoctoral research fellow in Internal Medicine, deleted MC4Rs in neurons controlling the sympathetic nervous system. …


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The way a room is lit can affect the way you make decisions

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The next time you want to turn down the emotional intensity before making an important decision, you may want to dim the lights first.A new study from the University of Toronto Scarborough shows that human emotion, whether positive or negative, is felt more intensely under bright light. Alison Jing Xu, assistant professor of management at UTSC and the Rotman School of Management, along with Aparna Labroo of Northwestern University, conducted a series of studies to examine the unusual paradox of lighting and human emotion.”Other evidence shows that on sunny days people are more optimistic about the stock market, report higher wellbeing and are more helpful while extended exposure to dark, gloomy days can result in seasonal affective disorder,” says Xu. “Contrary to these results, we found that on sunny days depression-prone people actually become more depressed,” she says, pointing to peaks in suicide rates during late spring and summer when sunshine is abundant. Xu and Labroo asked participants to rate a wide range of things — the spiciness of chicken-wing sauce, the aggressiveness of a fictional character, how attractive someone was, their feelings about specific words, and the taste of two juices — under different lighting conditions.The results: under bright lights emotions are felt more intensely. In the brighter room participants wanted spicier chicken wing sauce, thought the fictional character was more aggressive, found the women more attractive, felt better about positive words and worse about negative words, and drank more of the “favourable” juice and less of the “unfavourable” juice.Xu says the effect bright light has on our emotional system may be the result of it being perceived as heat, and the perception of heat can trigger our emotions. “Bright light intensifies the initial emotional reaction we have to different kinds of stimulus including products and people,” she says.The majority of everyday decisions are also made under bright light. So turning down the light may help you make more rational decisions or even settle negotiations more easily. “Marketers may also adjust the lightening levels in the retail environment, according to the nature of the products on sale,” says Xu. “If you are selling emotional expressive products such as flowers or engagement rings it would make sense to make the store as bright as possible.”Xu notes the effect is likely to be stronger on brighter days around noon when sunlight is the most abundant and in geographic regions that experience sunnier rather than cloudier days.Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by University of Toronto. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


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Eleven new genes affecting blood pressure discovered

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New research from Queen Mary University of London has discovered 11 new DNA sequence variants in genes influencing high blood pressure and heart disease.Identifying the new genes contributes to our growing understanding of the biology of blood pressure and, researchers believe, will eventually influence the development of new treatments. More immediately the study highlights opportunities to investigate the use of existing drugs for cardiovascular diseases.The large international study, published today in the American Journal of Human Genetics, examined the DNA of 87,736 individuals to discover genetic variants associated with blood pressure traits. Validation of these sequence variants was performed in a further 68,368 individuals. This analysis led to the identification of 11 new genes.Worldwide, raised blood pressure is estimated to cause 7.5 million deaths, about 12.8% of the total of all deaths. Genes and lifestyle factors (e.g., salt intake and obesity) are both known to be important risk factors.Patricia Munroe, Professor of Molecular Medicine at Queen Mary University of London, comments: “Discovering these new genetic variants provides vital insight into how the body regulates blood pressure. With further research, we are hopeful it could lead to the development of new treatments for treating blood pressure and heart disease — a leading cause of death worldwide.”Michael Barnes, Director of Bioinformatics, Barts and The London NIHR Cardiovascular Biomedical Research Unit, Queen Mary University of London, comments:”By highlighting several existing drugs that target proteins which influence blood pressure regulation, our study creates a very real opportunity to fast-track new therapies for hypertension into the clinic.”Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by Queen Mary, University of London. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


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Forest model predicts canopy competition: Airborne lasers help researchers understand tree growth

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Out of an effort to account for what seemed in airborne images to be unusually large tree growth in a Hawaiian forest, scientists at Brown University and the Carnegie Institution for Science have developed a new mathematical model that predicts how trees compete for space in the canopy.What their model revealed for this particular forest of hardy native Metrosideros polymorpha trees on the windward slope of Manua Kea, is that an incumbent tree limb greening up a given square meter would still dominate its position two years later a forbidding 97.9 percent of the time. The model described online in the journal Ecology Letters could help generate similar predictions for other forests, too.Why track forest growth using remote sensing, pixel by pixel? Some ecologists could use that information to learn how much one species is displacing another over a wide area or how quickly gaps in the canopy are filled in. Others could see how well a forest is growing overall. Tracking the height of a forest’s canopy reveals how tall the trees are and therefore how much carbon they are keeping out of the atmosphere — that is, as long as scientists know how to interpret the measurements of forest growth.James Kellner, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Brown University, the paper’s lead and corresponding author, noticed what seemed like implausibly large canopy growth in LIDAR images collected by the Carnegie Airborne Observatory over 43 hectares on the windward flank of Manua Kea. In the vast majority of pixels (each representing about a square meter) the forest growth looked normal, but in some places the height change between 2007 and 2009 seemed impossible: sometimes 10 or 15 meters.The data were correct, he soon confirmed, but the jumps in height signaled something other than vertical growth. They signaled places where one tree had managed to overtop another or where the canopy was filling in a bare spot. The forest wasn’t storing that much more carbon; taller trees were growing a few meters to the side and creating exaggerated appearances of vertical growth in the overhead images.Turning that realization into a predictive mathematical model is not a simple matter. Working with co-author Gregory P. Asner at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, Calif., Kellner created the model, which provides a probabilistic accounting of whether the height change in a pixel is likely to be the normal growth of the incumbent tree, a takeover by a neighboring tree, or another branch of the incumbent tree.Tracking treetopsThe model doesn’t just work for this forest but potentially for different kinds of forests, Kellner said, because its interpretation of the data is guided by the data itself. …


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Premature infants benefit from adult talk, study shows

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Research led by a team at Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island and The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University has been published in the February 10, 2014 online edition of Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.The research indicates that premature babies benefit from being exposed to adult talk as early as possible.The research, entitled “Adult Talk in the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) with Preterm Infants and Developmental Outcomes,” was led by Betty Vohr, MD, director of Women & Infants’ Neonatal Follow-Up Program and professor of pediatrics, along with her colleagues Melinda Caskey, MD, neonatologist and assistant professor of pediatrics; Bonnie Stephens, MD, neonatologist, developmental and behavioral pediatrician, and assistant professor of pediatrics; and Richard Tucker, BA, senior research data analyst.The goal of the study was to test the association of the amount of talking that a baby was exposed to at what would have been 32 and 36 weeks gestation if a baby had been born full term, using the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development, 3rd Edition (Bayley — III) cognitive and language scores.It was hypothesized that preterm infants exposed to higher word counts would have higher cognitive and language scores at seven and 18 months corrected age.”Our earlier study identified that extremely premature infants vocalize (make sounds) eight weeks before their mother’s due date and vocalize more when their mothers are present in the NICU than when they are cared for by NICU staff,” explained Dr. Vohr.At 32 weeks and 36 weeks, staff recorded the NICU environment for 16 hours with a Language Environment Analysis (LENA) microprocessor. The adult word count, child vocalizations and “conversation turns” (words of mother or vocalizations of infant within five seconds) between mother and infant are recorded and analyzed by computer.”The follow-up of these infants has revealed that the adult word count to which infants are exposed in the NICU at 32 and 36 weeks predicts their language and cognitive scores at 18 months. Every increase by 100 adult words per hour during the 32 week LENA recording was associated with a two point increase in the language score at 18 months,” said Dr. Vohr.The results showed the hypothesis to be true. Dr. Vohr concluded, “Our study demonstrates the powerful impact of parents visiting and talking to their infants in the NICU on their developmental outcomes. Historically, very premature infants are at increased risk of language delay.The study now identifies an easy to implement and cost effective intervention — come talk and sing to your baby — to improve outcomes.”Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by Women & Infants Hospital. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


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#Adult, #Agriculture, #Alternative-Medicine, #Analysis, #Hospital, #Infants, #Mother, #Professor, #Research, #Rhode, #University

Dangers of ... sitting? Regardless of exercise, too much sedentary time is linked to major disability after 60

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If you’re 60 and older, every additional hour a day you spend sitting is linked to doubling the risk of being disabled — regardless of how much moderate exercise you get, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study.The study is the first to show sedentary behavior is its own risk factor for disability, separate from lack of moderate vigorous physical activity. In fact, sedentary behavior is almost as strong a risk factor for disability as lack of moderate exercise.If there are two 65-year-old women, one sedentary for 12 hours a day and another sedentary for 13 hours a day, the second one is 50 percent more likely to be disabled, the study found.”This is the first time we’ve shown sedentary behavior was related to increased disability regardless of the amount of moderate exercise,” said Dorothy Dunlop, professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and lead author of the study. “Being sedentary is not just a synonym for inadequate physical activity.”Disability affects more than 56 million Americans. It’s defined by limitations in being able to do basic activities such as eating, dressing or bathing oneself, getting in and out of bed and walking across a room. Disability increases the risk of hospitalization and institutionalization and is a leading source of health care costs, accounting for $1 in $4 spent.The study will be published February 19 in the Journal of Physical Activity & Health.The finding — that being sedentary was almost as strong a risk factor for disability as lack of moderate vigorous activity — surprised Dunlop.”It means older adults need to reduce the amount of time they spend sitting, whether in front of the TV or at the computer, regardless of their participation in moderate or vigorous activity,” she said.The study focused on a sample of 2,286 adults aged 60 and older from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. It compared people in similar health with the same amount of moderate vigorous activity. Moderate activity is walking briskly, as if you are late to an appointment.The participants wore accelerometers from 2002 to 2005 to measure their sedentary time and moderate vigorous physical activity. The accelerometer monitoring is significant because it is objective. The older and heavier people are, the more they tend to overestimate their physical activity. Previous research indicated a relationship between sedentary behavior and disability but it was based on self-reports and, thus, couldn’t be verified.Because the study examines data at one point in time, it doesn’t definitively determine sedentary behavior causes disability. …


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Brain signals move paralyzed limbs in new experiment

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To help people suffering paralysis from injury, stroke or disease, scientists have invented brain-machine interfaces that record electrical signals of neurons in the brain and translate them to movement. Usually, that means the neural signals direct a device, like a robotic arm.Cornell University researcher Maryam Shanechi, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, working with Ziv Williams, assistant professor of neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School, is bringing brain-machine interfaces to the next level: Instead of signals directing a device, she hopes to help paralyzed people move their own limb, just by thinking about it.When paralyzed patients imagine or plan a movement, neurons in the brain’s motor cortical areas still activate even though the communication link between the brain and muscles is broken. By implanting sensors in these brain areas, neural activity can be recorded and translated to the patient’s desired movement using a mathematical transform called the decoder. These interfaces allow patients to generate movements directly with their thoughts.In a paper published online Feb. 18 in Nature Communications, Shanechi, Williams and colleagues describe a cortical-spinal prosthesis that directs “targeted movement” in paralyzed limbs. The research team developed and tested a prosthesis that connects two subjects by enabling one subject to send its recorded neural activity to control limb movements in a different subject that is temporarily sedated. The demonstration is a step forward in making brain-machine interfaces for paralyzed humans to control their own limbs using their brain activity alone.The brain-machine interface is based on a set of real-time decoding algorithms that process neural signals by predicting their targeted movements. In the experiment, one animal acted as the controller of the movement or the “master,” then “decided” which target location to move to, and generated the neural activity that was decoded into this intended movement. The decoded movement was used to directly control the limb of the other animal by electrically stimulating its spinal cord.”The problem here is not only that of decoding the recorded neural activity into the intended movement, but also that of properly stimulating the spinal cord to move the paralyzed limb according to the decoded movement,” Shanechi said.The scientists focused on decoding the target endpoint of the movement as opposed to its detailed kinematics. This allowed them to match the decoded target with a set of spinal stimulation parameters that generated limb movement toward that target. …


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#Alzheimer, #Communication, #Cornelluniversity, #Electrical, #Medical, #Nature, #Pregnancy, #Professor, #Shanechi

LGBT youth face greater cancer risks, study shows

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A new study led by City College of New York psychologist Margaret Rosario found that youths of same-sex orientation are more likely to engage in behaviors associated with cancer risk than heterosexuals. The peer-reviewed findings appear in the February 2014 issue of the American Journal of Public Health.Titled “Sexual Orientation Disparities in Cancer-Related Risk Behaviors of Tobacco, Alcohol, Sexual Behaviors, and Diet and Physical Activity: Pooled Youth Risk Behavior Surveys,” the study pooled YRBS (Youth Risk Behavior Survey) data from 2005 and 2007. The YRBS is a national survey of high school students conducted biennially.Dr. Rosario, professor of psychology in CCNY’s Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership and The Graduate Center, CUNY, and her research team then studied 12 cancer-risk behaviors in sexual minorities (youth with same-sex orientation) and heterosexuals in grades 9 through 12. Of an available sample of 65,871 youth, 7.6 percent were found to be a sexual minority.The 12 cancer-risk behaviors included tobacco use, drinking alcohol, early sex, multiple sexual partners, higher body mass index (BMI) and lack of exercise. The report found that for all 12, sexual minorities were more likely than heterosexuals to engage in the risky behavior.”Sexual minorities are at risk for cancer later in life, I suggest, from a host of behaviors that begin relatively early in life,” said Professor Rosario. “No sex or ethnic racial group is at greater risk or protected for these behaviors. Overall, the study underscores the need for early interventions.”Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by City College of New York. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


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Despite unprecedented investment in malaria control, most Africans at high risk of contracting deadly malaria

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Despite unprecedented investment in malaria control in Africa over the past decade, about 57% of the population still live in areas where risk of infection remains moderate to high, according to new research published in The Lancet.However, the findings also show that substantial reductions in malaria transmission have been achieved across most of the malaria-endemic countries of Africa between 2000 and 2010, with more than a quarter of the population (around 218 million people) now living in areas with a much lower risk of infection.In this study, researchers from the Kenya Medical Research Institute, University of Oxford, and WHO Regional Office for Africa complied data from the largest ever collection of 26 746 community-based surveys of parasite prevalence covering 3 575 418 person observations from 44 malaria-endemic countries and territories in Africa since 1980. Using model-based geostatistics they estimated the proportion of the population aged 2-10 years old infected with different levels of the parasite Plasmodium falciparum across Africa soon after the launch of the Roll Back Malaria initiative in 2000 and a decade later.They found reductions in the prevalence of malaria infection in children in 40 of 44 countries in Africa between 2000 and 2010.Over the decade, they estimated that the number of people living in high-transmission areas fell from 2186 million to 1835 million (a 16% drop), but the population living in areas where risk of infection is considered moderate to high increased from 1786 million to 2801 million (a 57% increase).Conversely, the population living in areas where risk is regarded as very low increased from 782 million to 1282 million (a 64% increase), and four countries (Cape Verde, Eritrea, South Africa, and Ethiopia) joined Swaziland, Djibouti, and Mayotte at levels of transmission that make elimination a realistic goal.Nevertheless, says Professor Robert Snow from the Kenya Medical Research Institute-Wellcome Trust Research Programme, 57% of people in Africa still live in areas of moderate-to-high transmission intensity. “Almost all (87%) of those in the two highest endemicity classes are living in just 10 countries. Of these, three (Guinea, Mali, and Togo) are not part of the 10 countries that are the focus of the WHO Malaria Situation Room.”*The authors point out that high population growth rates have reduced some of the proportional gains in transmission reduction, with 200 million extra people now living in malaria-endemic regions compared with in 2000.”The international community has invested heavily in malaria control with finance increasing from around $100 million in 2000 to nearly $2 billion in 2013,” explains Dr Abdisalan Mohamed Noor from the Kenya Medical Research Institute-Wellcome Trust Research Programme and University of Oxford.”Previous attempts at measuring the effects of efforts to control malaria have used changes in deaths from malaria or clinical episodes of infection that rely on imprecise and unreliable methods such as verbal autopsy and limited passive case detection. A more robust alternative is to measure changes in malaria parasite infection rates detected by microscopy or a rapid diagnostic test sampled through random community surveys. In the next decade these surveys should continue to be implemented. At the same time concerted efforts should be invested in rapidly expanding the diagnosis and reporting of clinical cases in Africa.”According to Professor Snow, “In a period of global economic recession, these results emphasise the need for continued support for malaria control, not only to sustain the gains that have been made, but also to accelerate the reduction in transmission intensity where it still remains high. If investments in malaria are not sustained, hundreds of millions of Africans run the risk of rebound transmission, with catastrophic consequences.”Writing in a linked Comment, Professor Sir Brian Greenwood from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Dr Kwadwo Koram from the Noguchi Memorial Institute of Medical Research in Ghana say, “Noor and colleagues have shown that, during the past decade, the reductions in malaria transmission that have been achieved in much of sub- Saharan Africa, although encouraging, have been only modest. Also, these gains are threatened by emerging resistance to the pyrethroid group of insecticides and by the potential appearance of artemisinin-resistant malaria parasites in Africa.”They conclude, “More could be done to improve malaria control in high-risk countries by increasing coverage with proven interventions such as insecticide-treated nets and chemoprevention. However, a focus on elimination must not result in a reduction in support for development of new methods (drugs, insecticides, vaccines, and new approaches to vector control), and improved delivery methods, which will be needed in large areas of sub-Saharan Africa before malaria transmission can be reduced to the level at which elimination becomes a credible prospect.”Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by The Lancet. …


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Nothing so sweet as a voice like your own, study finds

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Have you ever noticed that your best friends speak the same way? A new University of British Columbia study finds we prefer voices that are similar to our own because they convey a soothing sense of community and social belongingness.While previous research has suggested that we prefer voices that sound like they are coming from smaller women or bigger men, the new study — published today in the journal PLOS ONE — identifies a variety of other acoustic signals that we find appealing.”The voice is an amazingly flexible tool that we use to construct our identity,” says lead author Molly Babel, a professor in the Department of Linguistics. “Very few things in our voices are immutable, so we felt that our preferences had to be about more than a person’s shape and size.”Aside from identifying the overwhelming allure of one’s own regional dialects, the study finds key gender differences. Among North Americans, it showed a preference for men who spoke with a shorter average word length. The researchers also found a preference for “larger” sounding male voices, a finding that supports previous research.For females, there was also a strong preference for breathier voices — a la Marilyn Monroe — as opposed to the creakier voices of the Kardashians or actress Ellen Page. The allure of breathiness — which typically results from younger and thinner vocal cords — relates to our cultural obsession with youthfulness and health, the researchers say. A creaky voice might suggest a person has a cold, is tired or smokes regularly.Babel says the findings indicate that our preference for voices aren’t all about body size and finding a mate, it is also about fitting in to our social groups.BackgroundBabel and her colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz asked college-aged participants in California to rate the attractiveness of male and female voices from people living west of the Mississippi River.They found that participants preferred different acoustic signals for males and females — and the strongest predictors of voice preference are specific to the community that you’re a part of.For example, the Californian participants had a strong preference for female voices that pronounced the “oo” vowel sound from a word like “goose” further forward in the mouth. This has been a characteristic of California speech since at least the early 1980′s. In many other regions of North America, people would pronounce the “oo” sound farther back in the mouth, as one might hear in the movie Fargo.The preference for males who had shorter average word length relates to a difference between how men and women speak. In North American English, longer average word length is a style typically used by women while shorter average word length is one used by men. …


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How gut bacteria communicate within our bodies, build special relationship

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Communication is vital to any successful relationship. Researchers from the Institute of Food Research and the University of East Anglia have discovered how the beneficial bacteria in our guts communicate with our own cells.This is a key step in understanding how our bodies maintain a close relationship with the population of gut bacteria that plays crucial roles in maintaining our health, fighting infection and digesting our food.A study, published in the journal Cell Reports, shows that the gut bacteria produce an enzyme that modifies signalling in cells lining the gut. The enzyme also has another role in breaking down food components.”Our study provides a breakthrough in understanding how bacteria communicate across different kingdoms to influence our own cells’ behavior, as well as how we digest our food,” said Dr Regis Stentz from the IFR, which is strategically funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.We all rely on trillions of bacteria in our gut to break down certain components of our diet. One example is phytate, the form phosphorus takes in cereals and vegetables. Broken down phytate is a source of vital nutrients, but in its undigested form it has detrimental properties. It binds to important minerals preventing them being taken up by the body, causing conditions like anemia, especially in developing countries. Phytate also leads to excess phosphorus leaching into the soil from farm animal waste, and feed supplements are used to minimize this.But despite the importance of phytate, we know very little about how it is broken down in our gut. To address this Dr Stentz and colleagues screened the genomes of hundreds of different species of gut bacteria. They found, in one of the most prominent gut bacteria species, an enzyme able to break down phytate. In collaboration with Norwich Research Park colleagues at the University of East Anglia, they crystallized this enzyme and solved its 3D structure. …


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In-hospital formula use deters breastfeeding

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When mothers feed their newborns formula in the hospital, they are less likely to fully breastfeed their babies in the second month of life and more likely to quit breastfeeding early, even if they had hoped to breastfeed longer, UC Davis researchers have found.”We are a step closer to showing that giving formula in the hospital can cause problems by reducing how much women breastfeed later,” says Caroline Chantry, lead author and professor of clinical pediatrics at UC Davis Medical Center. “Despite being highly motivated to breastfeed their babies, in-hospital formula use limits this important practice. Given the benefits of breastfeeding for both mother and baby, this is a public health issue.”"In-Hospital Formula Use Shortens Breastfeeding Duration” was published online in The Journal of Pediatrics today. The study only included women who intended to exclusively breastfeed their babies for at least a week, meaning they did not plan to use formula in the hospital.While previous studies have examined the relationship between formula use and breastfeeding, some have questioned the results, wondering if mothers using formula were simply less committed to breastfeeding. To examine this objection, the UC Davis team surveyed expectant mothers to determine their intentions toward breastfeeding and then followed them closely after delivery to see how they fared.In the study, 210 babies were exclusively breastfed in the hospital (UC Davis Medical Center), while 183 received at least some formula. Over the next two months, breastfeeding dropped dramatically in the formula group. Between the first and second month, 68 percent of the babies receiving in-hospital formula were not fully breastfed, compared to 37 percent of babies who were exclusively breastfed in the hospital. After two months, 33 percent of the formula babies were not being breastfed at all. By contrast, only 10 percent of the hospital breastfed group had stopped breastfeeding.Perhaps most significant, in-hospital formula feeding dramatically reduced the likelihood of later fully breastfeeding as well as any breastfeeding, even after adjusting for the strength of the mothers’ intention to continue these practices. Early formula use nearly doubled the risk of formula use from the first to the second month and nearly tripled the risk of ending all breastfeeding by the end of the second month.The study also found that breastfeeding deterrence was dose dependent. …


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World"s most powerful terahertz laser chip

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University of Leeds researchers have taken the lead in the race to build the world’s most powerful terahertz laser chip.A paper in the Institution of Engineering and Technology’s (IET) journal Electronics Letters reports that the Leeds team has exceeded a 1 Watt output power from a quantum cascade terahertz laser.The new record more than doubles landmarks set by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and subsequently by a team from Vienna last year.Terahertz waves, which lie in the part of the electromagnetic spectrum between infrared and microwaves, can penetrate materials that block visible light and have a wide range of possible uses including chemical analysis, security scanning, medical imaging, and telecommunications.Widely publicised potential applications include monitoring pharmaceutical products, the remote sensing of chemical signatures of explosives in unopened envelopes, and the non-invasive detection of cancers in the human body.However, one of the main challenges for scientists and engineers is making the lasers powerful and compact enough to be useful.Professor Edmund Linfield, Professor of Terahertz Electronics in the University’s School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, said: “Although it is possible to build large instruments that generate powerful beams of terahertz radiation, these instruments are only useful for a limited set of applications. We need terahertz lasers that not only offer high power but are also portable and low cost.”The quantum cascade terahertz lasers being developed by Leeds are only a few square millimetres in size.In October 2013, Vienna University of Technology announced that its researchers had smashed the world record output power for quantum cascade terahertz lasers previously held by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The Austrian team reported an output of 0.47 Watt from a single laser facet, nearly double the output power reported by the MIT team. The Leeds group has now achieved an output of more than 1 Watt from a single laser facet.Professor Linfield said: “The process of making these lasers is extraordinarily delicate. Layers of different semiconductors such as gallium arsenide are built up one atomic monolayer at a time. We control the thickness and composition of each individual layer very accurately and build up a semiconductor material of between typically 1,000 and 2,000 layers. The record power of our new laser is due to the expertise that we have developed at Leeds in fabricating these layered semiconductors, together with our ability to engineer these materials subsequently into suitable and powerful laser devices.”Professor Giles Davies, Professor of Electronic and Photonic Engineering in the School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, said: “The University of Leeds has been an international leader in terahertz engineering for many years. This work is a key step toward increasing the power of these lasers while keeping them compact and affordable enough to deliver the range of applications promised by terahertz technology.”This work was mainly funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by University of Leeds. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


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Artificial leaf jumps developmental hurdle

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In a recent early online edition of Nature Chemistry, ASU scientists, along with colleagues at Argonne National Laboratory, report advances toward perfecting a functional artificial leaf.Designing an artificial leaf that uses solar energy to convert water cheaply and efficiently into hydrogen and oxygen is one of the goals of BISfuel — the Energy Frontier Research Center, funded by the Department of Energy, in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Arizona State University.Hydrogen is an important fuel in itself and serves as an indispensible reagent for the production of light hydrocarbon fuels from heavy petroleum feed stocks. Society requires a renewable source of fuel that is widely distributed, abundant, inexpensive and environmentally clean.Society needs cheap hydrogen.”Initially, our artificial leaf did not work very well, and our diagnostic studies on why indicated that a step where a fast chemical reaction had to interact with a slow chemical reaction was not efficient,” said ASU chemistry professor Thomas Moore. “The fast one is the step where light energy is converted to chemical energy, and the slow one is the step where the chemical energy is used to convert water into its elements viz. hydrogen and oxygen.”The researchers took a closer look at how nature had overcome a related problem in the part of the photosynthetic process where water is oxidized to yield oxygen.”We looked in detail and found that nature had used an intermediate step,” said Moore. “This intermediate step involved a relay for electrons in which one half of the relay interacted with the fast step in an optimal way to satisfy it, and the other half of the relay then had time to do the slow step of water oxidation in an efficient way.”They then designed an artificial relay based on the natural one and were rewarded with a major improvement.Seeking to understand what they had achieved, the team then looked in detail at the atomic level to figure out how this might work. They used X-ray crystallography and optical and magnetic resonance spectroscopy techniques to determine the local electromagnetic environment of the electrons and protons participating in the relay, and with the help of theory (proton coupled electron transfer mechanism), identified a unique structural feature of the relay. This was an unusually short bond between a hydrogen atom and a nitrogen atom that facilitates the correct working of the relay.They also found subtle magnetic features of the electronic structure of the artificial relay that mirrored those found in the natural system.Not only has the artificial system been improved, but the team understands better how the natural system works. This will be important as scientists develop the artificial leaf approach to sustainably harnessing the solar energy needed to provide the food, fuel and fiber that human needs are increasingly demanding.ASU chemistry professors involved in this specific project include Thomas Moore, Devens Gust, Ana Moore and Vladimiro Mujica. The department is a unit of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Key collaborators in this work are Oleg Poluektov and Tijana Rajh from Argonne National Laboratory.This work would not have been possible without the participation of many scientists driven by a common goal and coordinated by a program such as the Energy Frontier Research Center to bring the right combination of high-level skills to the research table.The Department of Chemisry and Biocehmistry is an academic unit in ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by Arizona State University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. …


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