According to recent research published in Frontiers in Nutrition, young people who eat nutritious breakfasts at home have better psychosocial health. Although prior studies have noted the significance of a healthy meal, this is the first study to examine the reported impacts of whether children eat breakfast as well as where and what they eat. These findings provide valuable insight and recommendations for parents and their kids.

“Our results suggest that it is not only important to eat breakfast, but it’s also important where young people eat breakfast and what they eat,” states first author Dr. José Francisco López-Gil of the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Cuenca, Spain.

“Skipping breakfast or eating breakfast away from home is associated with increased likelihood of psychosocial behavioral problems in children and adolescents. Similarly, consumption of certain foods/drinks is associated with higher (eg, processed meat) or lower (eg, dairies, cereals) odds of psychosocial behavioral problems.”

Eating breakfast matters

López-Gil and his colleagues analyzed data from the 2017 Spanish National Health Survey for this study. This survey included questionnaires regarding children’s breakfast choices as well as their psychosocial health, which included aspects like self-esteem, mood, and anxiety. 3,772 Spanish individuals aged four to fourteen participated in the survey, which was answered by the parents or guardians of the children.

Among the most noteworthy findings, López-Gil and his colleagues discovered that having breakfast away from home was almost as bad as missing it entirely. The authors speculate that this could be because eating out is typically less healthy than eating at home.

The findings also indicated a link between decreased behavioral issue risk and the consumption of coffee, milk, tea, chocolate, cocoa, yogurt, bread, toast, cereals, and pastries. Unexpectedly, greater chances of these problems were associated with eating eggs, cheese, and ham.

Impacts beyond nutrition

Although this study is confined to Spain, the results are consistent with other studies performed elsewhere. The availability of healthy meals in schools is likely to have an impact on the results in certain locations.

However, other variables, such as social and familial support that young people might get at home at breakfast, may also play a role in the reported benefits. The authors underline the need for more research to understand the cause-and-effect relationships behind their data, but they still suggest the use of these findings.

“The fact that eating breakfast away from home is associated with greater psychosocial health problems is a novel aspect of our study,” said López-Gil. “Our findings reinforce the need to promote not only breakfast as part of a healthy lifestyle routine but also that it should be eaten at home. Also, to prevent psychosocial health problems, a breakfast that includes dairy and/or cereals, and minimizes certain animal foods high in saturated fat/cholesterol, could help to decrease psychosocial health problems in young people.”

Source: SciTechDaily

https://scitechdaily.com/skipping-breakfast-may-increase-a-childs-risk-of-psychosocial-health-problems/

Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) captured this mosaic image stretching 340 light-years across. It displays the Tarantula Nebula star-forming region in a new light, including tens of thousands of never-before-seen young stars that were previously shrouded in cosmic dust. Appearing pale blue, the most active region appears to sparkle with massive young stars. Scattered among them are still-embedded stars, appearing red, yet to emerge from the dusty cocoon of the nebula. NIRCam is able to detect these dust-enshrouded stars thanks to its unprecedented resolution at near-infrared wavelengths.
At the top of the nebula’s cavity, to the upper left of the cluster of young stars, an older star prominently displays NIRCam’s distinctive eight diffraction spikes, an artifact of the telescope’s structure. Following the top central spike of this star upward, it almost points to a distinctive bubble in the cloud. Young stars still surrounded by dusty material are blowing this bubble, beginning to carve out their own cavity. Astronomers used two of Webb’s spectrographs to take a closer look at this region and determine the chemical makeup of the star and its surrounding gas. This spectral information informs astronomers about the age of the nebula and how many generations of star birth it has seen.
Farther from the core region of hot young stars, cooler gas takes on a rust color, revealing to astronomers that the nebula is rich with complex hydrocarbons. This dense gas is the material that will form future stars. As winds from the massive stars sweep away gas and dust, some of it will pile up and, with gravity’s help, form new stars.
NIRCam was built by a team at the University of Arizona and Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team

A New Story of Star Formation Unfolds

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope presents a new perspective on the Tarantula Nebula, or 30 Doradus, a region well-known to astronomers studying star formation. Its nickname originated from its resemblance to the spider itself. However, in Webb’s view, the overall region takes on the appearance of a tarantula’s home—a burrow lined with its own spun silk. The Tarantula Nebula shelters thousands of young and still-forming stars, many revealed by Webb for the first time.

Working together, a range of Webb’s high-resolution infrared instruments reveal the stars, structure, and composition of the nebula with a level of detail not previously possible. Astronomers will use Webb throughout its mission to gain insight into star formation and the stellar lifecycle. The implications of this extend to our own star, the Sun, as well as the formation of the heavy chemical elements that are essential to life as we know it.

At the longer wavelengths of light captured by its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), Webb focuses on the area surrounding the central star cluster and unveils a very different view of the Tarantula Nebula. In this light, glowing gas and dust come forward as the young hot stars of the cluster fade in brilliance. Abundant hydrocarbons light up the surfaces of the dust clouds, shown in blue and purple. Much of the nebula takes on a more ghostly, diffuse appearance because mid-infrared light is able to show more of what is happening deeper inside the clouds. Still-embedded protostars pop into view within their dusty cocoons, including a bright group at the very top edge of the image, left of center.
Other areas appear dark, like in the lower-right corner of the image. This indicates the densest areas of dust in the nebula, that even mid-infrared wavelengths cannot penetrate. These could be the sites of future, or current, star formation.
MIRI was contributed by ESA and NASA, with the instrument designed and built by a consortium of nationally funded European Institutes (The MIRI European Consortium) in partnership with JPL and the University of Arizona.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team

A Cosmic Tarantula, Caught by NASA’s Webb Space Telescope

Once upon a space-time, a cosmic creation story unfolded: Thousands of never-before-seen young stars were spotted in a stellar nursery called 30 Doradus, captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Nicknamed the Tarantula Nebula for the appearance of its dusty filaments in previous telescope images, the nebula has long been a favorite for astronomers studying star formation. In addition to young stars, Webb reveals distant background galaxies, as well as the detailed structure and composition of the nebula’s gas and dust.

 

Located just 161,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy, the Tarantula Nebula is the largest and brightest star-forming region in the Local Group, the galaxies nearest our Milky Way. It is home to the hottest, most massive stars known to astronomers. Three of Webb’s high-resolution infrared instruments were focused on the Tarantula. Viewed with Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), the region resembles a burrowing tarantula’s home, lined with its silk. The nebula’s cavity centered in the NIRCam image has been hollowed out by blistering radiation from a cluster of massive young stars, which sparkle pale blue in the image. Only the densest surrounding areas of the nebula resist erosion by these stars’ powerful stellar winds, forming pillars that appear to point back toward the cluster. These pillars contain forming protostars, which will eventually emerge from their dusty cocoons and take their turn shaping the nebula.

 

Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) reveals what is really going on in a fascinating region of the Tarantula Nebula. Scientists focused the powerful instrument on what looked like a small bubble feature in the image from Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). However, the spectra reveal a very different picture from a young star blowing a bubble in its surrounding gas.
The signature of atomic hydrogen, shown in blue, shows up in the star itself but not immediately surrounding it. Instead, it appears outside the “bubble,” which spectra show is actually “filled” with molecular hydrogen (green) and complex hydrocarbons (red). This is an indication that the bubble is actually the top of a dense pillar of dust and gas that is being blasted by radiation from the cluster of massive young stars to its lower right (see the full NIRCam image). It does not appear as pillar-like as some other structures in the nebula because there is not much color contrast with the area surrounding it.
The harsh stellar wind from the massive young stars in the nebula is breaking apart molecules outside the pillar, but inside they are preserved, forming a cozy cocoon for the star. This star is still too young to be clearing out its surroundings by blowing bubbles – NIRSpec has captured it just beginning to emerge from the protective cloud from which it was formed. Without Webb’s resolution at infrared wavelengths, the discovery of this star birth in action would not have been possible.
NIRSpec was built for the European Space Agency (ESA) by a consortium of European companies led by Airbus Defence and Space (ADS) with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center providing its detector and micro-shutter subsystems.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team

 

Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) caught one very young star doing just that. Astronomers previously thought this star might be a bit older and already in the process of clearing out a bubble around itself. However, NIRSpec showed that the star was only just beginning to emerge from its pillar and still maintained an insulating cloud of dust around itself. This episode of star formation-in-action could not have been revealed, without Webb’s high-resolution spectra at infrared wavelengths.

 

When viewed in the longer infrared wavelengths detected by Webb’s Mid-infrared Instrument (MIRI), the region takes on a different appearance. The hot stars fade, and the cooler gas and dust glow. Within the stellar nursery clouds, points of light indicate embedded protostars, still gaining mass. While shorter wavelengths of light are absorbed or scattered by dust grains in the nebula, and therefore never reach Webb to be detected, longer mid-infrared wavelengths penetrate that dust, ultimately revealing a previously unseen cosmic environment.

 

One of the reasons the Tarantula Nebula is interesting to astronomers is that the nebula has a similar type of chemical composition as the gigantic star-forming regions observed at the universe’s “cosmic noon.” This was when the cosmos was only a few billion years old and star formation was at its peak. Star-forming regions in our Milky Way galaxy are not producing stars at the same furious rate as the Tarantula Nebula, and have a different chemical composition. This makes the Tarantula the closest (i.e., easiest to see in detail) example of what was happening in the universe as it reached its brilliant high noon. Webb will provide astronomers the opportunity to compare and contrast observations of star formation in the Tarantula Nebula with the telescope’s deep observations of distant galaxies from the actual era of cosmic noon.

 

Despite humanity’s thousands of years of stargazing, the star-formation process still holds many mysteries. Many of them are due to our previous inability to get crisp images of what was happening behind the thick clouds of stellar nurseries. Webb has already begun revealing a universe never seen before, and it is only getting started on rewriting the stellar creation story.

 

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.

 

Source: SciTechDaily

https://scitechdaily.com/nasas-webb-space-telescope-captures-a-cosmic-tarantula/

According to research, a set of amino acids that normally maintain brain function play a crucial role in the brain deterioration that could occur after a stroke or traumatic brain injury.

According to Dr. Sergei Kirov, a neuroscientist in the Department of Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine at the Medical College of Georgia, the new study for the first time provides surprising evidence that four common nonexcitatory amino acids, which are typically used to make proteins that are crucial for brain function, instead cause irreversible, destructive swelling of both the astrocytes that support neurons and the neurons themselves.

“There are many ways to kill neurons. This is one that people have not thought about,” says Kirov, corresponding author of the study published in the journal GLIA.

Dr. Sergei Kirov and first-author Dr. Iris Álvarez-Merz. Credit: Mike Holahan, Augusta University

 

A stroke caused by a burst or blocked blood vessel in the brain, as well as traumatic brain injury, or TBI, both disrupt the brain’s unique, super-tightly woven endothelial cells, which help guarantee that nothing harmful escapes from our blood. The protective barrier is known as the blood-brain barrier, and after these sorts of significant brain events, the protective barrier can become leaky and its components can escape.

Plasma, the fluid component of blood, is an early escapee into the already stressed neighboring brain regions, bringing with it these amino acids that form proteins, a fundamental component of our cells and muscle. Small molecules, such as oxygen, can normally flow through the blood-brain barrier, however, bigger molecules, such as these amino acids, have a closely controlled system that guarantees the proper quantity of the right factor is delivered directly to the cells that need them.

Transporters inside the membranes of the endothelial cells enable select items, including amino acids as well as glucose, to be delivered and may carry some other molecule out on the return trip.

Transporters also deliver the most common excitatory amino acid glutamate, which, as its name indicates, excites neurons to action. Glutamate is a chemical messenger or neurotransmitter that binds to the NMDA receptor, which plays an important role in a myriad of key functions like learning and memory as well as breathing. It functions by activating channels that allow calcium, sodium, and potassium to enter the body. However, like with most things in the body, too much activation of the receptor results in too much calcium and sodium, followed by too much fluid, which is known to be fatal to neurons.

Kirov’s research team opted to investigate the less-studied nonexcitatory amino acids.

They used sophisticated technology including two photon laser microscopy, which allows them to look in real-time into living tissue, in this case, brain slices, and high-resolution images enabled by electron microscopy to directly examine the tissue for evidence of injury to astrocytes and neurons from four of these nonexcitatory amino acids, which are some of the most abundant in plasma: L-alanine, glycine, L-glutamine, and L-serine.

Once the blood-brain barrier became leaky, the astrocytes and neurons became inundated with these amino acids. The brain cells literally overfilled with them, which, in turn, increased sodium inside cells. The sodium attracted water, so the expanded brain cells took up more space, which alone is dangerous in the closed confines of the skull.

Astrocytes, accustomed to taking care of neurons, now tried to protect themselves by opening channels that allow excess water and molecules to escape. Glutamate also escaped at that point, which overstimulated the NMDA receptors, which overstimulated the neurons that can become injured, dramatically enlarged, burst, and die, in a vicious, deadly circle.

“We used electron microscopy to look at synapses where transmission happens and everything was messed up,” says Kirov, who was very surprised by the amount of damage induced by the nonexcitatory amino acids.

To confirm the surprising findings, they removed the nonexcitatory amino acids, and the ability of neurons to communicate was restored after 30 minutes of adequate oxygen, rather than the worsening damage that occurred when they were present.

When they inhibited the NMDA receptors during hypoxia, the nonexcitatory amino acids again did not have the same deleterious impact.

“No one was expecting these nonexcitatory amino acids would cause that much damage,” Kirov reiterates. He anticipated that at the worst, the scientific team would find that the usual function of these amino acids would be wasted because the usual dynamic in the brain had been altered by a stroke or TBI.

But their overt role in the destruction that resulted makes an intervention in the vicious circle a clearly novel target in the destruction that follows a stroke or TBI, Kirov says. The transporters that move the amino acids may be a good first target, he says, with some sort of localized pharmacologic intervention to prevent or reduce their activity in the immediate aftermath of a stroke or TBI.

He notes that this new approach would likely be in conjunction with existing approaches that include, for example, surgical measures to reduce pressure inside the skull when it gets too high.

Dr. Iris Álvarez-Merz, neuroscientist and the paper’s first author, was a graduate student at the Universidad Autόnoma de Madrid, who worked with Kirov at MCG for several months and conducted the sophisticated testing that identified the resulting damage. She had some preliminary findings based on less sophisticated electrophysiology studies which look only at extracellular electrical activity, but more advanced techniques, like those available in Kirov’s lab, were needed to make clear associations between the nonexcitatory amino acids and the brain damage that can follow stroke and TBI.

Up to 90% of patients with these brain injuries experience collateral damage to brain tissue adjacent to the site of the injury, called the penumbra, hours and sometimes even days later, worsening damage and potential recovery prospects.

Glutamate, the most abundant excitatory neurotransmitter, is normally recycled continuously by the body. Astrocytes convert it into glutamine, an amino acid, which is taken up by neurons that convert it back to glutamate. Too much glutamate is associated with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Source: SciTechDaily

https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-discover-a-surprising-culprit-worsens-stroke/

Wolfgang “Wolfi” Mittig and Yassid Ayyad began their search for dark matter—also referred to as the missing mass of the universe—in the heart of an atom around three years ago.

Even though their exploration did not uncover dark matter, the scientists nonetheless discovered something that had never been seen before that defied explanation. Well, at least an explanation on which everyone could agree.

“It’s been something like a detective story,” said Mittig, a Hannah Distinguished Professor in Michigan State University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy and a faculty member at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, or FRIB.

“We started out looking for dark matter and we didn’t find it,” he said. “Instead, we found other things that have been challenging for theory to explain.”

In order to make their finding make sense, the team went back to work, conducting further tests and accumulating more data. Mittig, Ayyad, and their colleagues reinforced their argument at Michigan State University’s National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory or NSCL.

The researchers discovered a new route to their unanticipated destination while working at NSCL, which they revealed in the journal Physical Review Letters. Additionally, they revealed intriguing physics at work in the ultra-small quantum realm of subatomic particles.

The scientists showed, in particular, that even when an atom’s center, or nucleus, is overcrowded with neutrons, it can find a route to a more stable configuration by spitting out a proton instead.

Shot in the dark

Dark matter is one of the most well-known yet least understood things in the universe. Scientists have known for decades that the universe contains more mass than we can perceive based on the motions of stars and galaxies.

Six times as much unseen mass as regular matter that we can see, measure, and classify is required for gravity to hold celestial objects to their courses. Although researchers are certain that dark matter exists, they have yet to find where and devise how to detect it directly.

“Finding dark matter is one of the major goals of physics,” said Ayyad, a nuclear physics researcher at the Galician Institute of High Energy Physics, or IGFAE, of the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

Speaking in round numbers, scientists have launched about 100 experiments to try to illuminate what exactly dark matter is, Mittig said.

“None of them has succeeded after 20, 30, 40 years of research,” he said.

“But there was a theory, a very hypothetical idea, that you could observe dark matter with a very particular type of nucleus,” said Ayyad, who was previously a detector systems physicist at NSCL.

This theory centered on what it calls a dark decay. It posited that certain unstable nuclei, nuclei that naturally fall apart, could jettison dark matter as they crumbled.

So Ayyad, Mittig, and their team designed an experiment that could look for a dark decay, knowing the odds were against them. But the gamble wasn’t as big as it sounds because probing exotic decays also lets researchers better understand the rules and structures of the nuclear and quantum worlds.

The researchers had a good chance of discovering something new. The question was what that would be.

Help from a halo

When people imagine a nucleus, many may think of a lumpy ball made up of protons and neutrons, Ayyad said. But nuclei can take on strange shapes, including what are known as halo nuclei.

Beryllium-11 is an example of a halo nuclei. It’s a form, or isotope, of the element beryllium that has four protons and seven neutrons in its nucleus. It keeps 10 of those 11 nuclear particles in a tight central cluster. But one neutron floats far away from that core, loosely bound to the rest of the nucleus, kind of like the moon ringing around the Earth, Ayyad said.

Beryllium-11 is also unstable. After a lifetime of about 13.8 seconds, it falls apart by what’s known as beta decay. One of its neutrons ejects an electron and becomes a proton. This transforms the nucleus into a stable form of the element boron with five protons and six neutrons, boron-11.

But according to that very hypothetical theory, if the neutron that decays is the one in the halo, beryllium-11 could go an entirely different route: It could undergo a dark decay.

In 2019, the researchers launched an experiment at Canada’s national particle accelerator facility, TRIUMF, looking for that very hypothetical decay. And they did find a decay with unexpectedly high probability, but it wasn’t a dark decay.

It looked like the beryllium-11’s loosely bound neutron was ejecting an electron like normal beta decay, yet the beryllium wasn’t following the known decay path to boron.

The team hypothesized that the high probability of the decay could be explained if a state in boron-11 existed as a doorway to another decay, to beryllium-10 and a proton. For anyone keeping score, that meant the nucleus had once again become beryllium. Only now it had six neutrons instead of seven.

“This happens just because of the halo nucleus,” Ayyad said. “It’s a very exotic type of radioactivity. It was actually the first direct evidence of proton radioactivity from a neutron-rich nucleus.”

But science welcomes scrutiny and skepticism, and the team’s 2019 report was met with a healthy dose of both. That “doorway” state in boron-11 did not seem compatible with most theoretical models. Without a solid theory that made sense of what the team saw, different experts interpreted the team’s data differently and offered up other potential conclusions.

“We had a lot of long discussions,” Mittig said. “It was a good thing.”

As beneficial as the discussions were — and continue to be — Mittig and Ayyad knew they’d have to generate more evidence to support their results and hypothesis. They’d have to design new experiments.

The NSCL experiments

In the team’s 2019 experiment, TRIUMF generated a beam of beryllium-11 nuclei that the team directed into a detection chamber where researchers observed different possible decay routes. That included the beta decay to proton emission process that created beryllium-10.

For the new experiments, which took place in August 2021, the team’s idea was to essentially run the time-reversed reaction. That is, the researchers would start with beryllium-10 nuclei and add a proton.

Collaborators in Switzerland created a source of beryllium-10, which has a half-life of 1.4 million years, that NSCL could then use to produce radioactive beams with new reaccelerator technology. The technology evaporated and injected the beryllium into an accelerator and made it possible for researchers to make a highly sensitive measurement.

When beryllium-10 absorbed a proton of the right energy, the nucleus entered the same excited state the researchers believed they discovered three years earlier. It would even spit the proton back out, which can be detected as a signature of the process.

“The results of the two experiments are very compatible,” Ayyad said.

That wasn’t the only good news. Unbeknownst to the team, an independent group of scientists at Florida State University had devised another way to probe the 2019 result. Ayyad happened to attend a virtual conference where the Florida State team presented its preliminary results, and he was encouraged by what he saw.

“I took a screenshot of the Zoom meeting and immediately sent it to Wolfi,” he said. “Then we reached out to the Florida State team and worked out a way to support each other.”

The two teams were in touch as they developed their reports, and both scientific publications now appear in the same issue of Physical Review Letters. And the new results are already generating a buzz in the community.

“The work is getting a lot of attention. Wolfi will visit Spain in a few weeks to talk about this,” Ayyad said.

An open case on open quantum systems

Part of the excitement is because the team’s work could provide a new case study for what is known as open quantum systems. It’s an intimidating name, but the concept can be thought of like the old adage, “nothing exists in a vacuum.”

Quantum physics has provided a framework to understand the incredibly tiny components of nature: atoms, molecules, and much, much more. This understanding has advanced virtually every realm of physical science, including energy, chemistry, and materials science.

Much of that framework, however, was developed considering simplified scenarios. The super small system of interest would be isolated in some way from the ocean of input provided by the world around it. In studying open quantum systems, physicists are venturing away from idealized scenarios and into the complexity of reality.

Open quantum systems are literally everywhere, but finding one that’s tractable enough to learn something from is challenging, especially in matters of the nucleus. Mittig and Ayyad saw potential in their loosely bound nuclei and they knew that NSCL, and now FRIB could help develop it.

NSCL, a National Science Foundation user facility that served the scientific community for decades, hosted the work of Mittig and Ayyad, which is the first published demonstration of the stand-alone reaccelerator technology. FRIB, a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science user facility that officially launched on May 2, 2022, is where the work can continue in the future.

“Open quantum systems are a general phenomenon, but they’re a new idea in nuclear physics,” Ayyad said. “And most of the theorists who are doing the work are at FRIB.”

But this detective story is still in its early chapters. To complete the case, researchers still need more data and more evidence to make full sense of what they’re seeing. That means Ayyad and Mittig are still doing what they do best and investigating.

“We’re going ahead and making new experiments,” said Mittig. “The theme through all of this is that it’s important to have good experiments with strong analysis.”

Source: SciTechDaily

https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-uncover-new-physics-in-the-search-for-dark-matter/

• A study of adolescent eating habits found that certain ultra-processed foods, such as candy, prepackaged pastries, and frozen desserts, may act as a “gateway” and lead to increased consumption of other unhealthy foods.
• 43% of the adolescents estimated that they increased their intake of ultra-processed foods between 2019, before pandemic restrictions were implemented, compared to 2022, after pandemic restrictions were lifted.
• 57% of adolescents estimated that they decreased their intake of ultra-processed foods between 2019 and 2022.

Candy, pastries, frozen desserts, and certain other ultra-processed foods may be “gateway” foods for adolescents, leading them to eat higher quantities of other unhealthy foods. This is according to new research presented at the American Heart Association’s Hypertension Scientific Sessions 2022, September 7-10, 2022 in San Diego. The meeting is the premier scientific exchange focused on recent advances in basic and clinical research on high blood pressure and its relationship to cardiac and kidney disease, obesity, stroke, and genetics.

According to the research, reducing the intake of key gateway foods could make an impact in the overall consumption of ultra-processed foods, which are high in sugar, salt, unhealthy trans fat, and artificial flavors and colors. Ultra-processed foods such as cereals, bread, desserts, sodas, and processed meats make up more than 60% of the calories Americans eat each day. Previous studies have linked high consumption of ultra-processed foods with weight gain, hypertension, increased risk of heart disease, and premature death.

“Ultra-processed foods are designed to be hyper-palatable, or engineered to be as addictive as possible,” said Maria Balhara. She is the lead researcher of this study and a student at Broward College in Davie, Florida. “They’re also cheap and convenient, which makes them hard to resist. Most people are eating too many of these foods without realizing it.”

Balhara has a unique perspective regarding adolescent eating behavior because she’s 16 years old. She led the study while dual-enrolled at Broward College while attending Cooper City High School.

Balhara collected data on how frequently adolescents consumed 12 ultra-processed food products during the previous 8 weeks. Ultra-processed foods included prepackaged cookies, chips, candy, chocolate, frozen desserts, energy drinks, soda, store-bought pastries, store-bought smoothies, syrup-sweetened coffee or tea, white bread, and processed meat. Study participants included 315 teens, ages 13-19 recruited from 12 high schools in South Florida between February and April 2022.

The average BMI among participants was 22.8 (indicating normal body weight), and 56% of participants self-identified as white, 25.2 % as Hispanic, and 7.6% as Black. Additionally, 52.2% of participants identified as female, 41.6% male, 3.2% nonbinary, and the rest did not specify their gender.

Study participants completed a survey Balhara developed called the Processed Intake Evaluation (PIE). The survey assessed the frequency of their consumption of the 12 processed foods during the previous 8 weeks in 2022. It also included questions to gauge their 2022 consumption (after COVID-19 restrictions were lifted) compared with their estimated consumption in 2019 (before COVID restrictions were implemented). The survey asked the students to report “true” or “false” responses to statements, such as “I often drank soda during the preceding 8 weeks in 2022,” and “I often drank soda prior to the pandemic in 2019.” Their answers were used to compute a PIE score of 0-100, with 8.33 points given for answers of “often” or 0 points otherwise. Their scores for 2022 consumption were compared to their scores for estimated 2019 pre-pandemic consumption.

Candy, prepackaged pastries, and frozen desserts were discovered to act as a possible “gateway” to drive increased (or decreased) consumption of other processed food products. Teenagers who changed their consumption of these “gateway” foods were more likely to change their consumption of all other ultra-processed foods as well.

The analysis found that among the identified gateway foods:

• increased consumption frequency of frozen desserts was associated with an 11% increase in consumption of all other ultra-processed foods;
• increased consumption of pastries was associated with a 12% increase in consumption of all other ultra-processed foods; and
• increased consumption of candy was associated with a 31% increase in consumption of all other ultra-processed foods.

The report also found that 43% of the adolescents estimated that they increased how frequently they consumed ultra-processed foods after pandemic restrictions were lifted compared with their consumption before the pandemic, while 57% estimated a decrease in consumption as measured by PIE score.

Among other foods in the survey, decreased consumption of processed meats among study participants was linked with an 8% decrease in consumption of all other ultra-processed foods. Decreased consumption of white bread was associated with a 9% decrease in consumption of all other ultra-processed foods. Decreased consumption of prepackaged cookies was linked with a 10% decrease in consumption of all other ultra-processed foods.

“For teenagers whose consumption of ultra-processed foods has not yet been established, certain gateway foods such as candy, store-bought pastries and frozen desserts should be avoided, since increased consumption of these foods appears to lead to increased consumption of other processed foods,” Balhara said.

“The good news,” she adds, “is that even small changes, such as reducing how often you eat a few gateway foods, may reduce overall consumption of unhealthy foods and have a big impact on your overall health.”

“I commend Ms. Balhara for her project, which highlights the importance of establishing good dietary patterns early in life,” said Donna K. Arnett, Ph.D., the executive vice president for academic affairs and provost at the University of South Carolina, and a former American Heart Association president. “The relationship between poor dietary quality and cardiovascular risk factors is well-established. While this is a small, preliminary study, it’s an important topic to continue to investigate and help us understand ways we can influence dietary behaviors to promote optimal cardiovascular health for all ages.”

Among the study’s limitations were its limited generalizability to all adolescent populations and that the information gathered was self-reported. In addition, the PIE survey has not been validated, and the study did not include health data such as blood tests to determine the impacts of participants’ dietary choices.

Source: SciTechDaily

https://scitechdaily.com/ultra-processed-gateway-foods-may-lead-to-unhealthy-teen-eating/

A new study has found that the window of opportunity to maximize the use of biomass from plants, wood, and waste as a renewable energy source and an alternative to petrochemicals is closing as temperatures rise from climate change.

Published today (September 7, 2022) in the journal Nature and led by researchers at the universities of York and Fudan in China, the study investigated the sustainability of biomass exploitation.

If urgent action is not taken to reduce fossil fuels in favor of bioenergy and other renewables, climate change will decrease crop yields, reducing the availability of biomass feedstocks, according to the researchers. They also say that reducing food production is also likely to incentivize cropland expansion, increasing greenhouse gas emissions from land use change and further accelerating the rate of climate change.

Co-author of the paper, Professor James Clark from the University of York Department of Chemistry, said: “Biomass fuels and feedstocks offer a renewable source of energy and a viable alternative to petrochemicals, but the results of our study act as a stark warning about how climate change will put their availability at risk if we continue to allow global temperatures to rise.

“There is a tipping point where climate change will severely impede our ability to mitigate against its worst effects. Biomass with carbon capture and storage including the manufacture of bio-based chemicals must be used now if we are to maximize its advantage.”

In many assessments of climate mitigation, including the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) has been highlighted as a crucial element of the strategy for meeting the target of 2 °C or 1.5 °C warming set out in the Paris Agreement.

The researchers used global data to model the responses of crop yields to rising average temperatures, nitrogen fertilization intensity, atmospheric CO2 concentration, and precipitation. They discovered that if a switch to BECCS is delayed to the second half of this century, biomass production would be largely reduced by climate change. This would result in a failure to achieve the 2 °C goal and jeopardize global food security.

For example, when BECCS is delayed from 2040 to 2060, the scientists found that reduced yields of agricultural residue for biomass technologies would decrease the capacity of BECCS and increase global warming from 1.7 to 3.7 °C by 2200, with a decline in global average daily crop calories per capita from 2.1 million calories to 1.5 million calories.

The scientists calculate that in this scenario the scale of the food trade would need to increase by 80% from 2019 levels in order to avoid severe food shortages in many parts of the developing world worst affected by climate change.

Professor Clark added: “If negative-carbon mitigation technologies relying on biomass could be widely deployed in the short term, there is still hope that we can alleviate global warming and a global food crisis.”

Source: SciTechDaily

https://scitechdaily.com/availability-of-vital-renewable-energy-source-at-risk-from-climate-change/

The best vaccines contain a piece of the spike, or genetic data about the spike, either of which can spur an immune response. Not to be outdone, the virus has been mutating—with many of the changes occurring on that same spike.

But other parts of the virus are changing, too. Now, for the first time, a team of scientists has scrutinized these changes—and voiced a warning.

“With each major variant that has been identified, we are seeing mutations outside of [the] spike that we are trying to figure out,” Matthew Frieman, a University of Maryland School of Medicine immunologist and microbiologist and lead author of the new study, told The Daily Beast.

It’s possible the virus is accumulating non-spike mutations in an attempt to gain some advantage over our collective immunity as the COVID pandemic grinds toward its fourth year. These new mutations might not make the virus more infectious the way spike mutations do, but they could be associated with longer infections.

If this trend continues—and there’s no reason to believe it won’t—we might eventually need new antiviral drugs and new vaccine formulations that aren’t so specifically focused on the spike.

Vaccine developers weren’t wrong to focus their initial efforts on the spike protein, Frieman and his co-authors explained in their peer-reviewed study, which was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and appeared online on Tuesday. “The spike protein is the immunodominant antigen,” they wrote. In other words, it’s the part of the virus most likely to produce a strong immune response.

Moreover, the major variants and subvariants of SARS-CoV-2—Delta then the various forms of Omicron including BA.4 and BA.5—have piled up mutations on the spike. As the spike evolves, the virus gets better and better at grabbing onto our cells despite the presence of antibodies.

That’s one reason why the vaccines have been getting somewhat less effective, and we’re seeing more and more breakthrough cases in vaccinated people. And it should come as no surprise that one of the leading contenders for the next dominant subvariant, a spinoff of Omicron called BA.4.6, features a particularly worrying mutation on the spike called R346T.

But there have been hints that non-spike mutations are becoming a bigger factor, too. Geneticists noted that BA.5, currently the dominant subvariant, doesn’t just have mutations along its spike—it features changes all across its structure.

There had to be a reason for those mutations, Frieman explained. “Viruses don’t do things by accident.” Instead, they try out small changes, over and over, until some combination of changes helps it survive and spread. The resulting variant or subvariant then outcompetes other forms of the pathogen until it becomes dominant—and the likely basis for the next set of mutations.

To understand the reason for, and effects of, the non-spike mutations, Frieman’s team cloned SARS-CoV-2 then started deleting the spike proteins and testing the resulting “deletion viruses” on mice, assessing how contagious the viruses were and how severe the infections were.

Their conclusion? “Mutations outside of [the] spike may be driving critical phenotypes of SARS-CoV-2 infection and disease.” That is to say, changes beyond the spike are beginning to define the virus.

For now, it seems the spike and non-spike mutations are working together. The spike mutations make the virus steadily more contagious. “Mutations in [the] spike have been identified in every major variant that then out-competes the previous variant,” Frieman explained.

Meanwhile, the non-spike mutations appear to prolong infection. This in turn gives the pathogen more time to mutate inside a particular person, and also spread to other people. “We hypothesize that this balance is critical for further evolution of SARS-CoV-2,” Frieman’s team wrote.

As the virus continues trying out mutations in order to stay ahead of our spike-focused immunity, it might further emphasize changes beyond the spike. BA.5, with its wide breadth of mutations, is a sign that’s already happening.

Take this as an urgent call for further study of non-spike mutations. “As more variants emerge, we will identify additional mutations outside of [the] spike that contribute significantly to viral replication, transmission and pathogenesis,” Frieman and his coauthors wrote.

Frieman said his goal is to scrutinize these non-spike mutations in order to “figure out what they do, how they do it [and] why they make the virus better at being a virus.” “Then we can use that information to make drugs,” including new antiviral therapies and vaccine formulations.

Speed matters. The Omicron variant and its rapid-fire subvariants, each coming just a couple months after the last, was a warning that our pharmaceutical research-and-development processes might be too slow. Note that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration just last week green-lit Omicron-specific vaccine boosters—a full 10 months after the initial Omicron variant first became dominant. “Omicron and its lineages”—another term for subvariants—“taught us a lesson for the need to be more agile in modifying the vaccine,” Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington Institute for Health, told The Daily Beast.

That problem could get worse if the rate of non-spike mutations accelerates. Our vaccine R&D is too slow even when it’s narrowly focused on the spike.

What happens when it needs to broaden its scope to combat a virus that’s learning to mutate across its structure?

There’s another wrinkle. These accumulating mutations across the novel-coronavirus—on the spike and not on the spike—could start to mess with the polymerase chain-reaction tests we use to detect and track the virus.

PCR tests and sequencing use primers tailored for a certain range of viral characteristics. Too many mutations “can mess with the PCR test,” Niema Moshiri, a geneticist at the University of California-San Diego, told The Daily Beast.

Pay attention, but don’t panic. It’s really no surprise that SARS-CoV-2 is trying out mutations on different parts of the virus. That’s what viruses do—adapt. The trick for us, the novel-coronavirus’s host, is to adapt at least as quickly.

We did it before by rapidly developing vaccines and therapies targeting the most dangerous part of the virus. We can do it again as the virus finds new ways to evolve. It just takes political will… and money.

Source

Because Pfizer and Moderna hold the patents for the current vaccines, researchers would likely have to get the companies’ permission to use them for research into products like nasal or pan-coronavirus vaccines. Right now, Pfizer isn’t sharing its vaccines for research purposes, a spokesperson confirmed to STAT. Moderna didn’t comment when we asked.

Pfizer’s stance is legal and in line with the company’s commercial interests, said Ana Santos Rutschman, a professor of law at Villanova University.

“If you use this thing that has been patented, what you’re doing doesn’t matter. Even if you’re trying to cure cancer, the law is pretty rigid,” she said.

But some university researchers argue the posture slows global progress toward more effective vaccines in the future, especially since the United States has already wasted tens of millions of doses of the Covid-19 vaccines.

Yale University virologist and immunologist Akiko Iwasaki has designed a study of nasal vaccines against Covid-19, which she argues could provide better protection against infection and transmission than shots alone. The ideal study would be conducted on subjects that have already had a primary vaccine series, to simulate real-world scenarios. She inquired with Pfizer about obtaining some vaccine to use in her study of nasal vaccines, but has not received any.

“In order for us to develop a better vaccine, we need a comparator. For that reason, everyone who’s doing research in this area is in the same boat, we don’t have access to do a comparison,” Iwasaki said.

Iwasaki brought the issue up briefly at the White House’s summit on the future of Covid vaccines on July 26, and presidential science adviser Francis Collins said at the time that he “would not have thought of that” hurdle.

California Institute of Technology professor Pamela Bjorkman said her lab has had similar troubles obtaining existing Covid-19 vaccines that would otherwise be discarded in order to research a vaccine candidate that could provide protection against a variety of Covid-19 variants.

“Whatever policy prevents using such vials does a great disservice to global efforts to develop new and improved vaccines,” Bjorkman said.

When asked whether Pfizer has provided any vaccines for research purposes, spokesperson Sharon Castillo said, “We are not accepting or reviewing applications for possible clinical research that studies the Covid-19 vaccine.”

Another Pfizer spokesperson also said the company has its own “extensive studies” of the vaccine underway, and will continue to share information from those studies as it becomes available.

Source

"Proteins in the blood are under constant and changing pressure because of the different ways blood flows throughout the body," says Marassi. "For example, blood flows more slowly through small blood vessels in the eyes compared to larger arteries around the heart. Blood proteins need to be able to respond to these changes, and this study gives us fundamental truths about how they adapt to their environment, which is critical to targeting those proteins for future treatments."

There are hundreds of proteins in our blood, but the researchers focused on vitronectin, one of the most abundant. In addition to circulating in high concentrations in the blood, vitronectin is found in the scaffolding between cells and is also an important component of cholesterol.

Vitronectin is a key player in many age-related diseases, but for Marassi's team, the most promising target is macular degeneration, which affects as many as 11 million people in the United States. This number is expected to double by 2050.

"This protein is an important target for macular degeneration because it accumulates in the back of the eye, causing vision loss. Similar deposits appear in the brain in Alzheimer's disease and in the arteries in atherosclerosis," says Marassi. "We want to understand why this happens and leverage this knowledge to develop new treatments."

To approach this question, the researchers were interested in learning how the protein changes its structure at different temperatures and under different levels of pressure, approximating what happens in the human body.

"Determining the structure of a protein is the most important part of determining its function," adds Marassi.Through detailed biochemical analysis, the researchers found that the protein can subtly change its shape under pressure. These changes cause it to bond more easily to calcium ions in the blood, which the researchers suggest leads to the buildup of calcified plaque deposits characteristic of macular degeneration and other age-related diseases.

"It's a very subtle rearrangement of the molecular structure, but it has a big impact on how the protein functions," says Marassi. "The more we learn about the protein on a structural and mechanistic level, the better chance we have of successfully targeting it with treatments."

These structural insights will streamline the development of treatments for macular degeneration because it will allow researchers and their partners in the biotech industry to custom-design antibodies that selectively block the protein's calcium binding without disrupting its other important functions in the body.

"It will take some time to convert it into a clinical treatment, but we hope to have a working antibody as a potential treatment in a few years' time," says Marassi. "And since this protein is so abundant in the blood, there may be other exciting applications for this new knowledge that we don't even know about yet."

Additional authors on the study include Ye Tian, Ph.D., Kyungsoo Shin, Ph.D., Alexander E. Aleshin, Ph.D., Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute and Wonpil Im, Lehigh University.

Source

This fall, Apple will make some of its flagship iPhones outside China for the first time, a small but significant change for a company that has built one of the most sophisticated supply chains in the world with the help of the Chinese authorities. But the development of the iPhone 14, which is expected to be unveiled on Wednesday, shows how complicated it will be for Apple to truly untangle itself from China.

More than ever, Apple’s Chinese employees and suppliers contributed complex work and sophisticated components for the 15th year of its marquee device, including aspects of manufacturing design, speakers and batteries, according to four people familiar with the new operations and analysts. As a result, the iPhone has gone from being a product that is designed in California and made in China to one that is a creation of both countries.

The critical work provided by China reflects the country’s advancements over the past decade and a new level of involvement for Chinese engineers in the development of iPhones. After the country lured companies to its factories with legions of low-priced workers and unrivaled production capacity, its engineers and suppliers have moved up the supply chain to claim a bigger slice of the money that U.S. companies spend to create high-tech gadgets.

The increased responsibilities that China has assumed for the iPhone could challenge Apple’s efforts to decrease its dependency on the country, a goal that has taken on increased urgency amid rising geopolitical tensions over Taiwan and simmering concerns in Washington about China’s ascent as a technology competitor.

Chinese companies with operations in India will still play a key role in Apple’s plan to make some iPhones in the country. In Chennai, India, the Taiwanese supplier Foxconn, which already manufactures iPhones in factories throughout China, will lead Indian workers’ assembly of the device with support from nearby Chinese suppliers including Lingyi iTech, which has subsidiaries to supply chargers and other components for iPhones, according to two people familiar with the plans. China’s BYD is setting operations to cut glass for displays, as well, these people said.

“They want to diversify, but it’s a hard road,” said Gene Munster, managing partner of Loup Ventures, a technology research firm. “They depend on China for so much.”

Apple declined to comment. Foxconn, BYD and Lingyi iTech didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Covid-related disruptions have exacerbated Apple’s predicament. When China closed its borders in 2020, Apple was forced to overhaul its operations and abandon its practice of flying hordes of California-based engineers to China to design the assembly process for flagship iPhones.

Instead of subjecting staff to lengthy quarantines, Apple began empowering and hiring more Chinese engineers in Shenzhen and Shanghai to lead critical design elements for its best-selling product, according to the four people familiar with the operations.

The company’s manufacturing and product design teams began holding late-night video calls with counterparts in Asia. After travel resumed, Apple tried to encourage its staff to return to China by offering a stipend of $1,000 a day during the two weeks of quarantine and four weeks of work, these people said. Though the payout could be as much as $50,000, many engineers were reluctant to go because of uncertainty over how long they would have to quarantine.

In the absence of travel, the company has encouraged staff in Asia to lead meetings that colleagues in California once led, these people said. The staff also assumed responsibility for the selection of some Asian suppliers of future iPhone parts.

The company is now increasingly tapping China to supply high-wage workers to do these jobs, these people said. This year, Apple has posted 50 percent more jobs in China than it did during all of 2020, according to GlobalData, which tracks hiring trends across tech. Many of those new hires are Western-educated Chinese citizens, these people said.

The change in the way Apple works has coincided with an increase in the number of Chinese suppliers it uses. A little over a decade ago, China contributed little value to the production of an iPhone. It primarily provided the low-wage workers who assembled the device with components shipped in from the United States, Japan and South Korea. The work accounted for about $6 — or 3.6 percent — of the iPhone’s value, according to a study by Yuqing Xing, an economics professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo.

Gradually, China nurtured homegrown suppliers that began to displace Apple’s suppliers from around the world. Chinese companies began making speakers, cutting glass, providing batteries and manufacturing camera modules. Its suppliers now account for more than 25 percent of the value of an iPhone, according to Mr. Xing.

The gains illustrate how China has expanded its mastery of the smartphone supply chain, said Dan Wang, an analyst with Gavekal Dragonomics, an independent economic research firm. “That trend isn’t slowing down,” he said.

Through most of the pandemic, China has rewarded Apple’s reliance on the country for manufacturing. Its steady production — even as other countries’ shut down for periods in 2020 and 2021 — helped Apple increase its smartphone market share and sell its most iPhones ever, according to analysts, a remarkable achievement for a decades-old electronics device that has shifted from offering revolutionary innovations to incremental improvements.

This year, analysts expect Apple to release four iPhones that have smaller notches for its Face ID feature than previous models. It is unveiling the phones a week earlier than usual, which could boost revenue in the current quarter by adding a week of sales. It also is expected to increase the price of its iPhone 14 Pro models by $100 to more than $1,600 to offset the higher costs of some components.

Apple expects the iPhone 14 to build on the success of past years. While other smartphone manufacturers are cutting production as the global economy sputters, Apple has called for its suppliers to make more phones than it did a year ago, according to Susquehanna International Group, a financial firm.

The increased manufacturing order is a testament to the resilience of Apple’s affluent customers, whose deep pockets allow them to buy high-priced smartphones despite rising inflation and the economic downturn.

“There’s a huge wealth gap in consumer spending in the smartphone industry,” said Wayne Lam, a tech analyst with CCS Insight. “Apple is safe relative to the competition.”

When the news media and employees gather Wednesday at the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., for the product’s debut, Apple will accentuate the phone’s abilities — not how it’s made. The only signs of changes to that process will be visible in the flights coming and going from nearby San Francisco International Airport.

Apple once spent $150 million annually on flights with United Airlines, according to a United promotional banner. Former employees recall that before the pandemic, they boarded flights to Shanghai and Hong Kong in which business class seats were filled with people who worked at Apple.

Now, United no longer offers nonstop flights from San Francisco to Hong Kong. It flies direct to Shanghai four days a week.

Source

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In the latest flex of China’s economy-killing “zero Covid” policy, at least 34 cities are now partially or completely locked down after a total of 6,696 cases were identified across the country of 1.4 billion earlier this month.

Tianjin municipal city and provincial cities including Sichuan’s Chengdu, Tibet’s Lhasa, Qinghai’s Xining, Xinjiang’s Urumqi, Henan’s Shijiazhuang, Guizhou’s Guiyang and Heilongjiang’s Harbin have locked down many of their city districts.

Meanwhile, certain districts in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen have also adopted so-called “silent management mode” policies to slow virus transmission. Caixin reported late Sunday (September 4) that the measures have affected over 65 million people nationwide.

While most Western countries ended their quarantine and social distancing rules earlier this year, China has been reluctant to abandon its “zero Covid” policy and adopt the West’s “living with the virus” strategy.

After the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) announced last week its plan to hold its 20th National Congress on October 16, China Central TV said in an opinion piece that the West’s “living with the virus” strategy was like “dancing with the demons.”

Citing World Health Organization data, it said over one million people Covid patients had died so far this year.

Many Chinese cities have recently adopted a new “silent management mode” policy in which residents are required to take daily Covid tests, avoid leaving home except for essential reasons and refrain from gatherings.

Chengdu is under the spotlight as it has just gone through an extremely hot and dry summer and then a power shortage caused by insufficient hydropower output. Now it is suffering from lockdowns, as well as an earthquake that hit on Monday morning.  

Shanghai, China’s largest commercial city with a population of 26 million, was locked down between mid-March and mid-May. As a result, China’s second quarter GDP grew a meager 0.4% year on year, missing the market consensus forecast of 1.0% and slowing sharply from the 4.8% growth recorded in the first quarter.

Health workers in Tianjin in a file photo. Photo: Twitter

In late June, the State Council unveiled a series of measures to stimulate the economy and create jobs, mainly by starting new infrastructure projects. Local governments also relaxed their property curbs and encouraged people to buy new cars and home appliances.

Many economists, health experts and pundits had earlier predicted China’s Covid policies would become more flexible to avoid hurting the economy. But politics could be a driving force behind the latest lockdowns.

The People’s Daily reported on August 31 that the standing committee of the politburo of the CCP Central Committee held a meeting on August 30 and decided to hold the 20th Party Congress on October 16. Before that, the 19th Central Committee, which has 204 members, will hold its seventh meeting on October 9.
 
The CCP holds its National Congress every five years, usually in October or November, to elect its top leaders and decide the country’s policy directions. More than 2,000 party members from different parts of the country will hold a week-long meeting in Beijing and approve the establishment of the 20th Central Committee, which has about 200 members.

The 20th Central Committee will then hold its first meeting to select a politburo with 25 people and a standing committee with seven people. The new leaders will start their terms after the National People’s Congress holds an annual meeting in March 2023.

It has been widely predicted that CCP secretary Xi Jinping will win an unprecedented third term as president at the Party Congress.

Chinese state media has reiterated the importance of maintaining strict Covid policies and reported that at least 34 cities had been locked down after the announcement of congress’s official schedule. Yet only a few hundred cases have recently been reported in mainland China each day.

Liu Xiaofeng, deputy head of the Beijing municipal disease prevention and control center, said Tuesday: “The risk of virus transmission is increasing as it is now at the end of the summer vacation and the start of the back-to-school period.

“The recent virus outbreaks related to colleges and universities once again showed that the epidemic prevention and control situation is grim.”

Liu said in the coming week, students and teachers in primary and secondary schools and colleges should avoid gathering and reduce activities while testing regularly for Covid.

These measures were implemented after the Beijing University of Chemical Technology Changping identified one positive case and five preliminary cases on Tuesday.

Yang Xiaoguang, head of Chengdu’s health commission, said: “The number of new cases has shown an upward trend since August 26, but it has been stabilized at between 120 and 160 cases per day recently.

“As the number is still above 100, Chengdu has not yet achieved a basic clearance at the community level. Our anti-epidemic measures cannot be eased for the moment.”

Since September 1, about 20 million people in Chengdu have completed three rounds of Covid tests. All students have to study online while residents are urged to stay home.

In Shanghai, the city’s health commission held a press conference on Tuesday after an 11-year-old girl tested positive. The city isolated 98 people who had close contact with the girl. Four places are now categorized as mid- and high-risk areas. People in Jing’An and Putuo districts will have to complete two Covid tests within three days.

On September 2, six districts in Shenzhen said they had started to adopt the “silent management mode” policy. All entertainment premises have or will be shut down while workers are encouraged to work from home if available. Dining-in services at restaurants and most subway lines have been stopped.

The Shenzhen government stressed that the measures were not a “lockdown” and it was wrong to say that the entire city was under “silent management.”

On Monday, the city recorded 27 Covid infections and nine asymptomatic cases. Its neighbor Hong Kong reported 9,373 cases on Tuesday.

Hong Kong previously maintained one of the strictest quarantine regimes in the world but has recently loosened up. Photo: AFP via Getty Images / Bertha Wang

Mainland China currently requires incoming travelers to be isolated at hotels for seven days and then three more days at home. Hong Kong requires incoming travelers to be quarantined at hotels for three days.

From September 1, Taiwan has allowed only visitors to be quarantined at home for three days. The self-governing island, where 85% of its 24 million people are fully vaccinated with Western vaccines, reported 36,393 Covid cases and 21 deaths on Tuesday.

In mainland China, 90% of its 1.4 billion people have been fully inoculated with the country’s domestically-produced vaccines, which studies and reports indicate have lower protection rates than Western-made shots.

Source: Asia Times

https://asiatimes.com/2022/09/china-locks-down-34-cities-for-a-smidgen-of-covid-cases/

Nvidia said last Friday it had been informed by the US government that it must stop exporting its graphics processing unit (GPU) chips, namely A100 and H100, to China and Russia. It said its DGX, an AI server, was also barred from being shipped to China if a unit contained the two chips. 

At the same time, media reports said the US had also restricted sales of AMD’s MI250 Accelerator AI chip to China.

China’s Foreign Ministry said the US had typically exerted its “sci-tech hegemony” and violated the rules of the market economy with its latest chip-export restrictions.

Most IT columnists and experts in mainland China said the ban would deal a heavy blow to China’s AI sector, which currently relies on Nvidia and AMD chips. A few said that, due to the ban, Chinese IT giants would boost expenses in research and development to make their own AI chips.

Last October, US Trade Representative Katherine Tai said the US would “deploy all tools and explore the development of new ones, including through collaboration with other economies and countries,” to address fundamental concerns related to China’s trade practices.

Tai said China had already dominated the world’s steel and solar cell production through its “unfair” policies and was planning to do the same in the semiconductor industry by 2030.

She said the US had to take a new, holistic and pragmatic approach in its relationship with China.

US Trade Representative Katharine Tai. Photo: US-China Business Council

Last month, the US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security banned the export to China of electronic computer-aided design (ECAD) software that is used for designing 3-nanometer (nm) chips.

Handel Jones, founder and chief executive of International Business Strategies (IBS), wrote in a report that the ban would have an impact on the trade between China and the US greater than the combined impact of all other actions taken to date.

Jones said the limitation on software affected certain EDA tools for gate-all-around, a transistor structure, including the 2nm technology of TSMC and Intel as well as the 3nm and 2nm technologies of Samsung Electronics.

He added that the restriction would also hurt US companies as they would lose sales in the China market.

In early 2020, Washington had already stopped the Netherlands from exporting its extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography equipment to China, meaning that China could not mass produce high-end chips between 22 nm and 7nm since then.

Hong Shibin, an IT industry expert, wrote in an article on August 15: “The US wants China to be stopped at 5-nm in chip design and 7-nm in chip manufacturing so China’s growth in high-speed computing and AI will slow.”

On August 9, US President Joe Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act to boost domestic semiconductor production and scientific research to enhance US competitiveness vis-a-vis China. The new law grants US$54 billion of subsidies and tax benefits to US-based chip makers over the next five years.

Last week, when the US government ordered Nvidia and AMD to stop exporting their GPU and AI chips to China and Russia, it explained to Nvidia that its A100 and H100 chips could be used in, or diverted to, a “military end use” or “military end user” in the two countries. Nvidia said it did not sell products to customers in Russia.

Chinese IT columnist Li Wei said China’s internet giants would no longer be able to obtain the most cutting-edge chips from Nvidia and AMD, meaning that their developments in high-speed computing and AI would be slowed. Li said it would be difficult for these companies to maintain their advantages in the global AI sector.

In the three months ended July 31 this year, Nvidia’s revenue from the data center segment jumped 61% to $3.81 billion from a year ago. That accounted for 57% of the company’s total revenue.

Statistic.com said Nvidia generated 26.4% of its revenue from China in the fiscal year ended January 30, compared with 31.7% from Taiwan and 16.2% from the US.

Nvidia has a 80.6% share in the global market for artificial intelligence processors used in the cloud and in data centers in 2020, according to Omdia, a data service provider.

In recent years, many AI chip makers have been emerging in China domestically. Cambrian Technologies Corp and Changsha Jingjia Microelectronics Co Ltd have been listed in Shanghai and Shenzhen, respectively. Newcomers include Biren Technology, Moore Threads, Iluvatar CoreX and Shanghai Enflame Technology.

Zhao Lidong, chief executive and founder of Shanghai Enflame Technology, said at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on September 1 that Chinese chip makers were lagging behind their counterparts in the US and Europe, which had spent decades in research and development.

Zhao Lidong, chief executive and founder of Shanghai Enflame Technology. Photo: Yicai Global

However, Zhao added that he believed Chinese chip-design firms would succeed one day if they continued to innovate over the long run.

Guo Yiwu, Secretary-General of Shanghai Integrated Circuit Industry Association, said it would take a very long time for Chinese GPU makers to catch up with Nvidia. Guo said Chinese chips could only compete with the international ones in a few areas.

Chinese media reports said Cambrian, established in 2016, had been a rising star in the industry a few years ago as its neural processing unit (NPU) module was used as a part of Huawei Kirin 970 in 2017.

They said Cambrian had burnt more than 2 billion yuan ($288 million) in R&D between 2017 and 2020 but then the company had faced a widening loss after its major customer Huawei Technologies shifted to use its own Da Vinci AI chip architecture in 2020.

An IT columnist said that what Chinese chip makers lack is not the technology needed to design high-end chipsets but, rather, an ecosystem that could support their growth.

Since Chinese internet giants now cannot obtain the most advanced GPUs from the US, he said, they will boost their investments to make their own AI chips. He said Baidu’s Kunlun, Alibaba’s RISC-V and Tencent’s Zixiao AI chips are catching up.

Source: Asia Times

https://asiatimes.com/2022/09/us-chip-export-ban-throws-wrench-into-china-ai-works/

Denise Jones quit her job because she was losing her hair. Diagnosed with the autoimmune disease alopecia areata, she saw her hair falling out in patches, bald spots dotting her scalp. The snarky comments and backhanded compliments had already started at her workplace, and she wasn’t sure how much more she could take. So she left.

According to her physician, Luis Garza, a professor of dermatology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the US, Denise (whose name has been changed to protect her privacy) is far from alone in experiencing stress and anxiety over hair loss. Hair, he explains, is a fundamental aspect of identity, deeply intertwined with our body image and sense of self. That’s why baldness can, quite literally, change a person’s life.

Yet despite more than 50 percent of women and 85 percent of men in the US experiencing balding during their lives, there still aren’t effective treatments for hair loss. “None of them work really well,” Garza says. For common baldness, the two drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—finasteride and minoxidil—promote hair growth only slightly, must be used daily, and can cause side effects like depression and decreased libido. Another popular option is hair transplantation, where hair follicles are moved from one part of the scalp to another. But the procedure is invasive, expensive (costing $4,000 to $15,000 out of pocket in the US), and limited by how much hair can be moved. Given these lackluster options, most people can’t do anything meaningful about their hair loss.

But that may soon change. In a study published in Developmental Cell last month, Maksim Plikus, professor of developmental and cell biology at the University of California, Irvine, and chief scientific officer of hair biotech company Amplifica, uncovered the role of a potent signaling molecule called SCUBE3. This protein might reshape how physicians approach baldness.

With its roughly half a million hair follicles, you can think of your scalp as a gigafactory of 3D printers. According to Plikus, nearly all these follicles need to be constantly “printing” in order to create a full mop of hair. But in common baldness, these printers start shutting down, leading to hair thinning (if roughly 50 percent have switched off) and balding (when more than 70 percent are off). By activating stem cells present in people’s scalps, SCUBE3 hacks hair follicles to restart the production line and promote rapid growth.

Plikus’ research began because he wanted to better understand dermal papilla cells, which are located at the bottom of hair follicles. It’s notoriously difficult to experiment with them, so to learn more about how they work, his team used a genetic tool to target a signaling pathway (a series of molecular reactions that involve certain proteins) that these cells use to drive hair growth. The goal was to get this pathway, in a set of hairless mice, to stay always switched on. Once he and his team got the tool to work, the genetically modified mice started rapidly growing hair.

But Plikus and his team didn’t know what exactly in this pathway was driving growth, so using single-cell RNA sequencing—a technique that lets you see what genes are active in a cell, and thus what proteins are being created—they compared cells from the genetically modified mice and control mice. They found that SCUBE3 was being expressed in the mutant mice but not in the controls. That didn’t mean anything on its own, however, because SCUBE3 could’ve just been a bystander molecule. So they performed a series of experiments with this protein, first deleting it from mice, then injecting it into normal mice, and then injecting it into mice with human hair follicles grafted to their skins. These all showed that SCUBE3 drives hair growth and, crucially with the last experiment, human hair growth.

 

Blue microbeads soaked in SCUBE3 protein induce new hair growth in mice (right). No hair growth is seen around microbeads soaked with a control protein with no known effect on follicles (left).Courtesy of Maksim Plikus lab, University of California Irvine

While Plikus recognizes that much work is needed to go from mouse models to an FDA-approved treatment, he’s already envisioning a future in which patients might go to their dermatologist to get SCUBE3 microinjected into their scalps. “You have a patient sitting in a dentist-like chair, they close their eyes, and then you go tch, tch, tch, tch,” Plikus says as he mimics a syringe being pressed into the patient’s head. SCUBE3 would be dispensed less than a millimeter deep, with only micrograms needed, so the procedure would be short (under 20 minutes) and fairly painless, he predicts.

The cost might be similar to Botox, so not cheap, but certainly less expensive than a hair transplant. In addition, the therapy would probably need to be repeated two or three times a year to ensure continued hair growth. “Pharma would love the model,” Plikus says, because booster therapy is an attractive mix of real efficacy and repeat customers; the popularity of Botox and dermal fillers demonstrates this well. If things take off, SCUBE3 would also be easy to scale, given that culturing proteins is cheap and already widely done, as it is for insulin.

“I think it’s a realistic vision,” says Maria Kasper, associate professor of cell and molecular biology at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. However, she emphasizes that it’s too early to say whether Plikus’ findings will lead to a new treatment for hair loss and notes that alternative therapeutic approaches are being developed as well.

Turn Biotechnologies, for instance, is developing a treatment that uses messenger RNA (mRNA), following the same basic principles as the Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines—delivering genetic instructions to our cells to have them build useful substances. According to cofounder Vittorio Sebastiano, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford University in the US, Turn’s goal is to deliver mRNA encoding for a cocktail of proteins that can turn back the clock on hair follicles. Their treatment, TRN-001, would be delivered to follicles inside liquid nanoparticles and help reset stem cells there, making the follicles functionally younger. “I would be happy to get my hair back to when I was 30,” Sebastiano jokes, “so that would be 15 years of rejuvenation.”

Sebastiano is hoping to start clinical trials in humans by the end of next year or early 2024, envisioning a future in which TRN-001 is applied topically with microinjections, much like Plikus imagines for SCUBE3. But while an mRNA-based approach might be more potent, since it forces cells to make relevant proteins themselves, Sebastiano recognizes that this technology’s newness makes the cost and periodicity of treatment difficult to predict and the regulatory landscape more challenging.

In fact, Kevin McElwee, associate professor of dermatology at the University of British Columbia in Canada and chief scientific officer of hair biotech company RepliCel, says that’s why his team isn’t going down the mRNA route: “the regulatory issues with the FDA are huge.” Instead, RepliCel—and a competitor, HairClone—are working on a cell-based approach to baldness, where hair cells from one part of the scalp are moved to another in order to kickstart growth. First, hair follicles are harvested from the back of a person’s scalp, then the relevant cells (dermal papilla cells for HairClone, dermal sheath cup cells for RepliCel) are dissected out and cultured, and finally these multiplied cells are microinjected into a person’s balding head. Some of these cells are also cryopreserved for future injections.

“The problem with hair transplantation is that it’s one for one; you still have the same number of hairs, just spread out,” says HairClone CEO Paul Kemp. With these multiplying techniques, you can instead increase the volume of hair. However, Kemp and McElwee both estimate that for the patient, the process might take one to two months from start to finish and, at least initially, cost more than hair transplants, given the manual labor involved. But this treatment might also be more successful, Kemp says, because “it’s a personalized cell therapy, unlike Plikus’ approach, which is a one-size-fits-all.” RepliCel’s therapy has begun to be tested in patients in Japan, while HairClone hopes to start human trials in the UK by early 2023; both countries have more flexible clinical trial requirements than the US.

Nonetheless, whether it’s with molecular, RNA, or cell-based approaches, new hair-loss treatments are coming soon. It’s just impossible to know when. “Despite decades of trying, it’s always that the next therapy for hair loss is five years away,” Garza jokes. The problem is the “valley of death” between preclinical studies and commercialization, where hair biotech companies have long crashed and burned, he says, because baldness is so poorly understood—to this day. “They’re trying to build skyscrapers in a swamp.”

Kasper emphasizes the need for basic scientific research to establish a stronger foundation. Her lab at the Karolinska Institute, for instance, studies how to make new hair follicles inside skin—from scratch—which is an admittedly more challenging question than how to hack existing follicles. Beyond offering opportunities to better understand hair biology, this research emphasizes the complexity of hair loss: SCUBE3, TRN-001, and cloned cells can’t help patients who don’t have hair follicles in the first place. The only way to help such patients, who may have burns, large wounds, or scarring alopecia, is with new follicles.

In all likelihood, none of these are going to be a magic bullet. Instead, the future is probably one of multiple treatments used together, each with complementary strengths and limitations. But Garza would be happy with even just one, because in the therapeutic black hole of baldness, his patients are becoming increasingly desperate and helpless. “The state of art is terrible right now,” he says.

This Follicle-Hacking Drug Could One Day Treat Baldness

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Astounding new Webb image reveals tens of thousands of young stars

Vampire folklore across cultures is filled with various tips on how to keep a recently deceased person from rising from the grave as an undead fiend who preys on the living. Now archaeologists have uncovered an unusual example of people using these tips in a 17th-century Polish cemetery near Bydgoszcz: a female skeleton buried with a sickle placed across her neck, as well as a padlock on the big toe of her left foot.

Tales of vampire-like creatures date back at least 4,000 years to ancient Mesopotamia. For instance, the Assyrians feared a demon goddess called Lamastu (literally, “she who erases”), who they said killed babies in their cribs or while still in the womb. Ancient Jewish texts mention a similar creature, Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who steals away infants and unborn children. Neither of these could be considered “vampires” in the modern sense, but they are the precursors to the Greek legend of Lamia, an immortal monster who sucked the blood from young children.

In Chinese folklore, another type of proto-vampire, called the k’uei, were reanimated corpses that rose from the grave and preyed on the living, as were the Russian upir, Indian vetala, Romanian strigoi, and Greek vrykolakas. News reports specifically referencing vampires didn't appear in English until 1732, as suspected "epidemics" of vampirism caused a mass hysteria that swept across Eastern Europe. By the 19th century, most of Europe was consumed by vampire hysteria, inspiring writers like John Polidori ("The Vampyre," 1819), Sheridan LeFanu (Carmilla, 1872), and of course, Bram Stoker, whose Dracula (1897) pretty much spawned the modern vampire genre.

Naturally, the fear evoked by the presumed existence of such creatures inspired many different approaches to ensuring that the dead stayed dead. In the early Middle Ages, Russian villagers would exhume suspect corpses and destroy the body by cremation, decapitation, or by driving a wooden stake through the heart. Stakes were often secured above corpses upon burial, so the creature would impale itself if it tried to escape.

In Germany and the western Slavic regions, suspected vampires were decapitated, and the head was buried between the feet or away from the body. Other strategies included burying corpses upside down, severing the tendons at the knees, or—in the case of Greek vrykolakas—placing crosses and inscribed pottery fragments on the chest of the deceased. In places where vampires were believed to suffer from arithmomania, poppy seeds or millet seeds would be scattered at the site of a suspected vampire. (The X-Files episode "Bad Blood" humorously used this bit of folklore with Mulder's favorite snack, sunflower seeds.)

The first early medieval graves in the region near Bydgoszcz were discovered between 2005 and 2009, when archaeologists recovered jewelry, semi-precious stones, a bronze bowl, and fragments of silk clothing. Dariusz Poliński of the Nicholas Copernicus University led the archaeological team that returned to the site earlier this year in hopes of discovering more artifacts. That didn't happen, so they turned their attention to a nearby 17th-century cemetery in the village of Pień instead.

That's when the researchers identified the grave containing the female skeleton. Other examples of anti-vampire burials have been found in Poland, according to Poliński. Several skeletons with severed heads were found in 2008, for example, and a body with a brick forced into the mouth and holes drilled through the legs was also found. “Ways to protect against the return of the dead include cutting off the head or legs, placing the deceased face down to bite into the ground, burning them, and smashing them with a stone," said Poliński.

Nonetheless, this latest find is unique. While there have been reports of people placing scythes or sickles near a grave as an offering to prevent demons from entering the body, the placement of this sickle was different. “It was not laid flat but placed on the neck in such a way that if the deceased had tried to get up, most likely the head would have been cut off or injured,” said Poliński. As for the padlock on the big toe, "This symbolizes the closing of a stage and the impossibility of returning."

Another unusual feature is that the skeleton appears to be that of a woman of high social status, given the care with which she was buried. There were also remnants of a silk cap on her head, which would not have been affordable for a member of a lower class. As for why she would have been buried in such a way, Poliński said that she had very noticeable protruding front teeth. This may have made her appearance different enough that she was deemed a witch or vampire by superstitious locals.

Source: Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/archaeologists-unearth-remains-of-17th-century-female-vampire-in-poland/

A study conducted by scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis shows that an experimental drug therapy protects mice against sudden death brought on by the rupture of a major blood vessel in the abdomen.

The research, which was published in the journal Biomaterials Advances, could lead to a new approach to treating abdominal aortic aneurysms, a condition in which the wall of the abdominal aorta, a major blood vessel that carries blood from the heart to the rest of the body, weakens and bulges outward. Without notice, the weak spot can begin to leak blood or possibly burst, causing a serious emergency that, if not treated quickly, almost always ends in death. The larger the aneurysm, the more probable it may burst unexpectedly.

“When people are identified with a medium or small aneurysm, we monitor them,” said senior author Christine T. N. Pham, MD, the Guy and Ella Mae Magness Professor of Medicine and director of the Division of Rheumatology. “Large aneurysms can be repaired surgically, but for smaller aneurysms, there’s no treatment other than waiting for them to get to a size that can be repaired surgically. Our findings in mice illustrate a potentially relevant therapy that could prevent rupture of the aneurysm.”

Pham treats patients at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in St. Louis.

Nanoparticles (red) are taken up by immune cells (green with blue nuclei). Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have shown that an experimental nanoparticle-based drug therapy protects mice from sudden death due to the rupture of a major blood vessel in the abdomen, pointing the way toward a new strategy for treating deadly abdominal aortic aneurysms. Credit: Huimin Yan/Washington University

 

Every year, around 200,000 individuals in the United States are diagnosed with abdominal aortic aneurysm, also known as triple A, the majority of whom are older males who smoke. Such aneurysms often don’t show any symptoms until they abruptly and catastrophically rupture, killing 15,000 people annually in the United States alone. All men aged 65 to 75 who have ever smoked should get ultrasound scans to test for triple A, according to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a group of independent experts in disease prevention and evidence-based medicine supported by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

For decades, scientists have known that inflammation in blood vessels causes the progression of triple A, but efforts to treat the disease with immunosuppressive therapies have failed. The immune system is a critical component of the body’s infection defenses. It is difficult to strike a careful balance between reducing inflammation in the aorta sufficiently to prevent aneurysms from worsening without suppressing the immune system in the rest of the body to the point where a person becomes susceptible to severe infections.

In this study, the researchers used nanoparticles to deliver anti-inflammatory payloads directly to inflamed blood vessels. The nanoparticle is based on a fragment of a protein called melittin and optimized to carry the payload: small bits of RNA. The modified protein fragment forms a complex with RNA that, when given to the mice, accumulates primarily in inflamed tissues. There, the protein fragment unloads the bits of RNA and assists their entry into the cells’ main compartment, where the RNA suppresses inflammation by interfering with the expression of an important inflammatory protein, NF-kappaB.

Co-author Samuel A. Wickline, MD, formerly of Washington University School of Medicine and now a professor at the University of South Florida and the chief scientific officer at the biotechnology company Altamira Therapeutics, created the basic version of the nanoparticle while at Washington University. This study involves an optimized version of the nanoparticle that was created by Wickline, Pham, and their Washington University co-authors Hua Pan, Ph.D., an associate professor of medicine, and first author Huimin Yan, MD, Ph.D., a staff scientist.

The researchers used the nanoparticles to carry so-called small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) targeting two subunits of NF-kappaB: p50 and p65. The researchers studied male mice that developed a triple A-like condition that ruptures about half the time. They treated the mice with nanoparticles containing p50 siRNA, p65 siRNA, or an irrelevant siRNA for comparison. Suppressing p50 did not halt the progression of the aneurysms, but significantly increased the mice’s chances of survival, from 53% to 85%. Treatment also delayed the onset of rupture, from day seven to day twelve. In contrast, suppressing p65 did not have a significant effect.

“Optimization of the nanoparticle allowed us to use a fraction of the previously established dose of siRNA, which means we can achieve a therapeutic effect at a level that is less likely to cause adverse effects,” Pan said. “By targeting p50 and p65 separately, we pieced out the individual contributions of the different subunits and found the one (p50) that we think will be more protective with less potential adverse effects. Altogether, these results are very encouraging. They suggest that it may be possible to develop a therapy to reduce the risk of rupture and death from triple A without unacceptable adverse effects.”

Wickline is the principal investigator and Pham the Washington University site lead on a Small Business Technology Transfer grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) involving the original nanoparticle technology created by Wickline and his team at Washington University. The grant supports a project to develop and commercialize the technology as a treatment for inflammatory disease in collaboration with Altamira Therapeutics.

“For that grant, we are looking at rheumatoid arthritis, not triple A,” Pham said. “But once you have the technology approved for one disease, it is a lot easier to apply it to other diseases. I’m hopeful that one day, in the not-too-distant future, we’ll have a treatment to offer people to stabilize the aneurysm, reducing the risk of rupture and sudden death. The technology is still being tested, but there’s more hope now.”

Source: SciTechDaily

https://scitechdaily.com/new-experimental-drug-protects-against-sudden-death/

You Get Sick Often

Vitamin C is an antioxidant, which protects cells from oxidative stress and helps your body fight infections. This antioxidant vitamin also helps with wound healing and supports healthy collagen production. Collagen is a protein that helps keep your joints healthy and your skin firm and wrinkle-free.

If you’re catching every respiratory infection and virus that comes around, you might need more vitamin C in your diet. Also, if you’re not eating fruits and vegetables, one of the best sources of vitamin C, your body may be crying out for vitamin C.

You can’t store vitamin C, so you need to get some in your diet daily. Vitamin C may help you avoid the latest viruses, but it’s also important to rule out other causes of increased susceptibility to infection with blood work and a physical exam.

You’re Tired All the Time

One possible sign that you need more vitamin C is fatigue. If you’re feeling tired all the time and haven’t changed anything in your diet or lifestyle recently, it may be due to low levels of vitamin C in your body and the early stages of scurvy. However, there are many causes of fatigue. If you’re feeling tired, see your physician for an exam and bloodwork to determine the cause of your tiredness and whether you need more vitamin C.

Your Gums Are Bleeding

Vitamin C is a powerful antioxidant that can help prevent gum disease. One study found that people low in vitamin C were 1.16 times more likely to experience bleeding gums. Gum bleeding can also be a sign of scurvy, a vitamin C deficiency disease. If you have bleeding gums, eat more vitamin C-rich foods but also see your dentist to rule out gum disease.

You’re Bruising Easily

If you’ve noticed more bruises than usual, vitamin C deficiency could be to blame. The vitamin helps with blood clotting and keeps the body’s tissues strong. If you don’t have enough of it in your system, it can lead to easy bruising. So, if getting bumped while going through your morning routine leaves behind that dreaded black-and-blue mark, consider increasing your intake. It may take a few weeks for your body to absorb enough vitamin C from foods or supplements. A low platelet count is another cause of bruising, so get a full check-up and a blood count before assuming you’re deficient in vitamin C.

Slow Healing Wounds

If you’re struggling to heal from surgery, cuts, or other wounds, consider adding more vitamin C to your diet. Studies show that over half of patients who were given high doses of vitamin C after surgery recovered more quickly than those who weren’t taking the supplement.

Vitamin C helps maintain healthy collagen, a protein that keeps skin smooth and elastic. Without enough vitamin C, you don’t produce enough new collagen as you age — that’s why older people often have wrinkles on their faces and hands. So, if you want young-looking skin (and who doesn’t?), make sure you’re getting plenty of fruits like kiwis or oranges.

Your Joints Ache

Joint pain is one of the most common signs of vitamin C deficiency. It can affect any joint, but it’s most common in the knees and hips. Why does vitamin C deficiency cause joint aches? Vitamin C helps build healthy collagen for joint support. When you don’t consume enough, your joints may suffer. Symptoms include painful joints when you move, stiffness, swelling and bruising around your joints, and aching muscles or tendons close to your joints.

If you have these symptoms, it’s important to see a doctor because they might be caused by something else, like one of the more than 100 types of arthritis. But make sure you’re getting enough vitamin C in your diet to keep your joints healthy,

Skin Changes

If you have a vitamin C deficiency, you may have some skin changes that are easy to spot. The most common symptoms of low vitamin C levels in the body include:

• Red or discolored patches on your skin
• Bruising easily, especially in places where there are normally no bruises (like the insides of elbows)
• Dryness and cracking of the corners of your mouth

These symptoms usually go away when you increase your intake. If not, there’s likely another cause. You can get more vitamin C from foods like citrus fruits and bell peppers, or from vitamin C supplements.

Conclusion

If you’re noticing any of these symptoms, be aware that vitamin C deficiency could play a role. Even if you don’t have these signs or symptoms, ensure you’re getting enough vitamin C in your diet by eating lots of vitamin C-rich produce.

Source: SciTechDaily

https://scitechdaily.com/7-signs-you-may-need-more-vitamin-c/

Online gaming and other types of online social interaction have become increasingly popular during the COVID pandemic. This trend is likely to continue due to increased remote working and investments in social technology.

Previous research has shown that people’s brains activate in a similar and simultaneous way during social interaction. Such inter-brain neural synchronization has been associated with empathy and cooperation in face-to-face situations. However, its role in online, remote interaction has remained unknown.

A new study conducted at the University of Helsinki investigated brainwave synchronization while pairs of subjects played a game in which they controlled a racing car together. The subjects were physically separated into two soundproof rooms. The researchers investigated the connection of synchronization with interaction and performance in the game. 

Based on the results, inter-brain synchronization occurs during cooperative online gaming. Furthermore, increased synchrony in the alpha and gamma frequency bands is connected with better performance. The connection between performance and gamma-synchronization could be observed continuously over time.

“We were able to show that inter-brain phase synchronization can occur without the presence of the other person. This opens up a possibility to investigate the role of this social brain mechanism in online interaction,” says Doctoral Researcher Valtteri Wikström.

Toward better online interaction

Our social brain has developed in face-to-face communication. Increased screen time has caused concern in many people, especially among parents, teachers, and legislators.

“If we can build interactive digital experiences which activate fundamental mechanisms of empathy, it can lead to better social relationships, well-being, and productivity online,” says Project Manager Katri Saarikivi.

Wikström suggests that measures of physiological synchrony and cooperative performance might be used to assess the quality of social interaction. Finding out which features of the interfaces enhance understanding and connectedness can drive the development in a positive direction.

“This study shows that inter-brain synchronization happens also during cooperative online gaming, and that it can be reliably measured. Developing aspects in games that lead to increased synchronization and empathy can have a positive impact even outside of gaming,” Wikström adds.

Source: SciTechDaily

https://scitechdaily.com/researchers-demonstrate-brainwave-synchronization-without-physical-presence/

According to a University of Portsmouth study, a new physics law could allow for the early prediction of genetic mutations.

The study discovers that the second law of information dynamics, or “infodynamics,” behaves differently from the second law of thermodynamics. This finding might have major implications for how genomic research, evolutionary biology, computing, big data, physics, and cosmology develop in the future.

Lead author Dr. Melvin Vopson is from the University’s School of Mathematics and Physics. He states “In physics, there are laws that govern everything that happens in the universe, for example how objects move, how energy flows, and so on. Everything is based on the laws of physics. One of the most powerful laws is the second law of thermodynamics, which establishes that entropy – a measure of disorder in an isolated system – can only increase or stay the same, but it will never decrease.”

This is an undisputed law relating to the arrow of time, which demonstrates that time only moves in one direction. It can only flow in one direction and cannot travel backward.

He explains, “Imagine two transparent glass boxes. In the left side, you have red gas molecules, which you can see, like red smoke. In the right side, you have blue smoke, and in between them is a barrier. If you remove the barrier, the two gases will start mixing and the color will change. There is no process that this system can undergo to separate by itself blue and red again. In other words, you cannot lower the entropy or organize the system to how it was before without energy expense, because the entropy only stays constant or increases over time.”

Dr. Vopson is an information physicist. His research focuses on information systems, which can range from a laptop’s hard drive to the DNA and RNA found in living organisms. He partnered with Dr. Serban Lepadatu from the University of Central Lancashire to write this paper.

Dr. Vopson adds, “If the second law of thermodynamics states that entropy needs to stay constant or increase over time, I thought that perhaps information entropy would be the same. But what Dr. Lepadatu and I found was the exact opposite – it decreases over time. The second law of information dynamics works exactly in opposition to the second law of thermodynamics.”

According to Dr. Vopson, this could be the cause of biological organisms’ genetic mutations.

“The worldwide consensus is that mutations take place at random and then natural selection dictates whether the mutation is good or bad for an organism”, he explained. If the mutation is beneficial for an organism, it will be kept. But what if there is a hidden process that drives these mutations? Every time we see something we don’t understand, we describe it as ‘random’ or ‘chaotic’ or ‘paranormal’, but it’s only our inability to explain it. If we can start looking at genetic mutations from a deterministic point of view, we can exploit this new physics law to predict mutations – or the probability of mutations – before they take place.”

Dr. Vopson and colleagues analyzed Covid-19 (Sars-CoV-2) genomes and discovered that their information entropy reduced with time: “The best example of something that undergoes a number of mutations in a short space of time is a virus. The pandemic has given us the ideal test sample as Sars-CoV-2 mutated into so many variants and the data available is unbelievable.”

He continues, “The Covid data confirms the second law of infodynamics and the research opens up unlimited possibilities. Imagine looking at a particular genome and judging whether a mutation is beneficial before it happens. This could be game-changing technology which could be used in genetic therapies, the pharmaceutical industry, evolutionary biology, and pandemic research.”

Source: SciTechDaily

https://scitechdaily.com/unlimited-possibilities-new-law-of-physics-could-predict-genetic-mutations/

The immune system has evolved to safeguard the body from an incredibly diverse range of potential threats. Among these are bacterial diseases, including plague, diphtheria, cholera, and Lyme disease, and viral contagions such as influenza, Ebola virus, and SARS CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19).

Despite the remarkable power of the immune system’s complex defense network, there is one type of threat that is especially challenging to combat. This arises when the body’s own native cells turn rogue, leading to the phenomenon of cancer. Even though the immune system frequently engages to try to rid the body of malignant cells, its efforts are often thwarted, leaving the disease to progress unchecked.

In new research published on August 25, 2022, in the journal Cancer Cell, corresponding authors Grant McFadden, Masmudur Rahman, and their colleagues propose a new line of attack that shows promise for treatment-resistant cancers.

The strategy involves a combination of two methods that have each shown considerable success against some cancers on their own. The study explains how oncolytic virotherapy, a technique using cancer-fighting viruses, can act in concert with existing immunotherapy techniques to boost the immune capacity to effectively target and destroy cancer cells.

Grant McFadden directs the Biodesign Center for Immunotherapy, Vaccines and Virotherapy. He is also a center director and professor at the School of Life Sciences. Credit: The Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University

 

Oncolytic viruses represent an exciting new avenue of cancer therapy. Such therapeutic viruses have the remarkable ability to hunt and terminate cancer cells while leaving healthy cells unharmed. They also enhance the immune system’s ability to recognize and terminate cancer cells.

One such virus, known as myxoma, is the focus of the current study and an area of expertise for the research team. The study reveals that the use of T-cells infected with myxoma virus can induce a form of cancer cell death not previously observed.

Known as autosis, this form of cell destruction may be especially useful against solid tumors that have proven treatment-resistant to various forms of cancer therapy, including immunotherapy alone.

“This work affirms the enormous potential of combining virotherapy with cell therapy to treat currently intractable cancers,” McFadden says.

McFadden directs the Biodesign Center for Immunotherapy, Vaccines and Virotherapy at Arizona State University.

Internal sentries

The human immune system is composed of a range of specialized cells designed to patrol the body and respond to threats. It is involved in an endless arms race against pathogens, which evolve sophisticated techniques to attempt to outwit immune defenses, propagate in the body, and cause disease. Cancer presents a unique challenge to the immune system as tumor cells often lack the identifying cell features that enable the immune system to attack them by distinguishing self from non-self.

Masmudur Rahman is a researcher in the Biodesign Center for Immunotherapy, Vaccines and Virotherapy. Credit: The Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University

 

Through a range of evasive strategies, cancer cells can further short-circuit immune efforts to hunt and destroy them. Scientists hope to help the immune system to overcome cancer’s notorious tactics of disguise, by developing new experimental techniques belonging to a category known as adoptive cell therapy, or ACT.

Such methods often involve extracting a collection of cancer-fighting white blood cells known as T-cells, modifying their seek-and-destroy capacities, and reinjecting them in patients. Two forms of ACT immunotherapy are described in the new study: CAR T-cell therapy (CART) and T Cell Receptor Engineering (TCR). In each case the basic idea is the same: treating cancer with activated T lymphocytes extracted from the patient.

New method delivers a one-two punch to tumor cells

The development of these therapies has been nothing short of revolutionary. In fact, some cancer patients facing grim prospects have made remarkable recoveries following the use of immunotherapy. However, techniques like CART and TCR nevertheless have their limitations and are frequently ineffective against advanced solid tumors. In such cases, cancer cells often manage to evade destruction by T-cells by downregulating or losing the surface antigens or MHC proteins that T-cells use to identify them.

The new research highlights the ability of immunotherapy when it is coupled with virotherapy to break through the wall of cancer resistance, specifically using myxoma-equipped T-cells. The myxoma can target and kill cancer cells directly, but more usefully, can induce an unusual form of T-cell-directed cell death known as autosis. This form of cell death augments two other forms of programmed cancer cell death induced by T-cells, known as apoptosis and pyroptosis.

During myxoma-mediated autosis, cancerous cells in the proximity of those targeted by the therapy are also destroyed in a process known as bystander killing. This effect can considerably enhance the dual therapy’s aggressive eradication of cancer cells, even in notoriously hard-to-treat solid tumors.

A combined myxoma-immunotherapy approach, therefore, holds the potential to turn so-called “cold tumors,” which fly under the immune system’s radar, into “hot tumors” that immune cells can identify and destroy, allowing CAR T-cells or TCR cells to enter the tumor environment, proliferate and activate.

“We are at the edge of discovering newer aspects of the myxoma virus and oncolytic virotherapy,” Rahman says. “In addition, these findings open the door for testing cancer-killing viruses with other cell-based cancer immunotherapies that can be used in cancer patients.”

A new frontier for the treatment of this devastating disease is rising with the ability to radically reengineer oncolytic viruses like myxoma to target a range of resistant cancers.

Source: SciTechDaily

https://scitechdaily.com/using-viruses-to-turbocharge-the-immune-system-against-cancer/

Inheritance, as it pertains to genetics, refers to a trait or variants encoded in DNA and transferred from parent to child during reproduction.

The discovery indicates that epigenetic inheritance could occur more frequently than previously believed.

A fundamental discovery concerning a driver of healthy development in embryos might rewrite our understanding of what we can inherit from our parents and how their life experiences shape us. The new study reveals that epigenetic information, which sits on top of DNA and is typically reset between generations, is more commonly passed down from mother to child than previously thought.

The research, led by researchers from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, Australia, greatly expands our knowledge of which genes have epigenetic information passed from mother to offspring and which proteins are critical for controlling this peculiar process.

Epigenetics is a rapidly expanding field of science that studies how our genes are turned on and off to enable one set of genetic instructions to produce hundreds of different cell types in our body. Environmental factors such as our nutrition can impact epigenetic changes, but these changes do not alter DNA and are not generally passed down from parent to child.

Despite the fact that a small subset of “imprinted” genes may pass epigenetic information down the generations, relatively few other genes have up to this point been shown to be influenced by the mother’s epigenetic state. According to recent research, the supply of a certain protein in the mother’s egg may have an impact on the genes that drive the skeletal patterning of children.

Chief investigator Professor Marnie Blewitt said the findings initially left the team surprised.

“It took us a while to process because our discovery was unexpected,” Professor Blewitt, Joint Head of the Epigenetics and Development Division at WEHI, said. “Knowing that epigenetic information from the mother can have effects with life-long consequences for body patterning is exciting, as it suggests this is happening far more than we ever thought. It could open a Pandora’s box as to what other epigenetic information is being inherited.”

The study, led by WEHI in collaboration with Associate Professor Edwina McGlinn from Monash University and The Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute, was recently published in the journal Nature Communications.

Natalia Benetti (left) and Professor Marnie Blewitt (right). Credit: WEHI

Astonishing discovery

The current research concentrated on the Hox genes, which are essential for normal skeletal development, and the protein SMCHD1, an epigenetic regulator discovered by Professor Blewitt in 2008. During embryonic development in mammals, Hox genes determine the identity of each vertebra, while the epigenetic regulator prevents these genes from being activated too early.

According to the findings of this study, the quantity of SMCHD1 in the mother’s egg impacts the activity of the Hox genes and the patterning of the embryo. Without maternal SMCHD1 in the egg, children were born with altered skeletal structures.

This is clear proof, according to the first author and Ph.D. researcher Natalia Benetti, that epigenetic information rather than only blueprint genetic information was passed from the mother.

“While we have more than 20,000 genes in our genome, only that rare subset of about 150 imprinted genes and very few others have been shown to carry epigenetic information from one generation to another,” Benetti said.

“Knowing this is also happening to a set of essential genes that have been evolutionarily conserved from flies through to humans is fascinating.”

The research showed that SMCHD1 in the egg, which only persists for two days after conception, has a life-long impact.

Variants in SMCHD1 are linked to the developmental disorder Bosma arhinia microphthalmia syndrome (BAMS) and facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD), a form of muscular dystrophy. The researchers say their findings could have implications for women with SMCHD1 variants and their children in the future.

A drug discovery effort at WEHI is currently leveraging the SMCHD1 knowledge established by the team to design novel therapies to treat developmental disorders, such as Prader Willi Syndrome and the degenerative disorder FSHD.

Reference: “Maternal SMCHD1 regulates Hox gene expression and patterning in the mouse embryo” by Natalia Benetti, Quentin Gouil, Andres Tapia del Fierro, Tamara Beck, Kelsey Breslin, Andrew Keniry, Edwina McGlinn and Marnie E. Blewitt, 25 July 2022, Nature Communications.

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-32057-x

The study was funded by the NHMRC, a Bellberry-Viertel Senior Medical Research fellowship, the Victorian Government, and the Australian Government.

Source: SciTechDaily

https://scitechdaily.com/rewriting-our-understanding-of-epigenetics-scientists-reveal-we-inherit-more-than-previously-thought/

The new inoculation was developed by Bharat Biotech, which had already developed an intravenous product greenlit by the World Health Organization last November.

India's drug regulator gave the new product emergency authorisation on Tuesday, which will allow it to be used as a primary dose by any unvaccinated or partially vaccinated adult, but not as a booster.

"This step will further strengthen our collective fight against the pandemic," health minister Mansukh Mandaviya said on Twitter.

Bharat Biotech said in a statement last month that it had conducted two successful efficacy trials for the vaccine.

Data from the trials has yet to be given a wider release and it remains unclear when the product will be available for public use.

The announcement comes just two days after China launched the world's first inhalable coronavirus vaccine, Convidecia Air, which is administered through a nebuliser.

India was hit by a devastating spike in COVID cases last year that brought its health care system close to collapse, with oxygen supplies running out and patients scrambling to source medicine from depleted pharmacies.

More than 200,000 people died within a few weeks, according to official figures, though experts believe the real toll is several times higher.

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India has since administered more than two billion vaccine doses, fully inoculating more than two-thirds of its 1.4 billion population.

With fall and winter looming, along with an anticipated seasonal surge in Covid cases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention greenlit a new tool for battling the pandemic: updated booster shots. The Food and Drug Administration authorized the shots earlier this week.

The new shots target the Omicron subvariant BA.5, the dominant version of the virus. Here’s what you need to know.

When will new boosters be available?

The updated boosters could roll out within days.

It typically takes around one to two weeks after you get the shot for your antibodies to “kick in,” Aubree Gordon, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, said.

Where can I get the new booster shot?

The new vaccine will most likely be available at pharmacies, doctors’ offices and community health centers. Many mass-vaccination clinics across the country have closed, so you may have to seek out a new vaccination site. You can search a directory of sites at vaccines.gov.

Who is eligible?

The F.D.A. authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech booster for anyone 12 or older who received an initial vaccination or booster shot at least two months ago. Adults 18 or older can get the Moderna vaccine if it has been at least two months since their last vaccination. The C.D.C. recommended the same eligibility guidelines as the F.D.A.

What is the difference between the Pfizer and Moderna boosters?

Beyond the difference in age criteria, there is no practical difference between shots, said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. “From your body’s immune system perspective, it doesn’t remember which brand it is,” he said.

Will this Omicron-specific booster entirely replace the other boosters?

The new booster shot is a bivalent vaccine, meaning that it targets two versions of the coronavirus: the original strain, and the Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5. The previous booster shot targeted only the original version of the virus.

The new shots will most likely become the only available boosters. The F.D.A. no longer authorizes the previous booster doses for people in the approved age groups. People who have not received their first doses of the vaccine will still receive the original vaccines that were rolled out in late 2020.

How long should I wait to get the new booster if I recently had a shot or got Covid?

The F.D.A. authorized the updated boosters for people who were at least two months out from their last shot (whether that was the original vaccine or a booster), but you might want to wait longer. An advisory panel to the C.D.C. voted to recommend the same interval between doses, although several members voiced concerns that two months was too short.

Doctors and immunologists said that in general, people should wait around four to six months after immunization or infection.

That’s because your body will probably not generate much of an immune response so soon after a previous encounter with the virus, Dr. Gordon said.

“Your immunity level is so high that you’ll just neutralize immediately the antigen that’s being produced — you kind of reach a ceiling,” she said. “You don’t have that much higher to go.”

Does the new booster offer better protection than past ones?

The previous booster shots provided robust protection against severe disease. There were, however, people who had breakthrough infections even shortly after receiving booster shots, including President Biden.

Doctors expect the newest iteration of boosters to offer more protection against breakthrough infections, but they won’t be bulletproof. “It’s not a game-changer,” Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, said. “But it is going to be better.”

There is not yet real-world data on how these bivalent vaccines perform in humans. Infectious disease experts compared the process of creating the new boosters to that of the annual flu shot, which is updated each year and primarily tested on animals, not humans.

“I’m not worried at all,” Dr. Chin-Hong said. “They’re not using any new ingredients. It’s like you’re still making brownies — you’re still using chocolate, sugar, flour. Maybe now you’re using more chocolate.”

Will there be more boosters in the future?

It’s unclear whether this will be the last Covid booster offered, or whether there will be new boosters on a regular basis. The United States could offer the vaccine each year around the fall, similar to the flu vaccine, if the virus surges become predictable, Dr. Chin-Hong said.

But the pandemic’s trajectory has been anything but straightforward, and it’s hard to anticipate the state of the virus over the next few months, let alone the next few years. If the virus had not evolved, we probably would not need any new shots now, Dr. Crotty said, adding, “It’s really up to the virus.”

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