A new study takes a closer look at this particular self-defense mechanism in plants, and how the production of the active metabolite of aspirin – salicylic acid – is regulated.

Where salicylic acid has been used by humans for centuries as a treatment for pain and inflammation, in plants, it plays a fundamental role in signaling, regulation, and pathogen defense.

Produced in chloroplasts (the tiny green organelles where the process of photosynthesis is carried out), it is typically generated in response to stress.

"It's like plants use a painkiller for aches and pains, just like we do," says plant biologist Wilhelmina van de Ven from the University of California, Riverside (UCR).

To better understand the complex chain of reactions that plants perform when under stress, van de Ven and her team performed biochemical analyses on plants mutated to block the effects of key stress signaling pathways.

Environmental stresses produce reactive oxygen species (ROS) in all living organisms. One example you might be familiar with is sunburn on your skin if you spend too long exposed to direct sunlight without any sunscreen.

In the case of plants, these stresses include unfriendly insects, drought, and excessive heat. While high levels of ROS in plants can be lethal, smaller amounts have an important safety function – and so regulation is key.

Researchers used Rockcress or Arabidopsis as the model plant for the experiments. They focused on an early warning molecule called MEcPP, which has also been seen in bacteria and malaria parasites.

It seems that as MEcPP is accumulated in a plant, it triggers a chemical reaction and response, which includes salicylic acid.

That knowledge could help us modify plants to be more resistant to environmental hazards in the future.

"At non-lethal levels, ROS are like an emergency call to action, enabling the production of protective hormones such as salicylic acid," says plant geneticist Jin-Zheng Wang from UCR. "ROS are a double-edged sword."

"We'd like to be able to use the gained knowledge to improve crop resistance. That will be crucial for the food supply in our increasingly hot, bright world."

There's still a lot that we don't know about the MEcPP molecule and its function, but understanding how this mechanism works could help scientists harness it for their own use: producing plants that are better able to cope with stresses and strains.

We know that plants, as well as animals, are under an increasing amount of pressure from a warming world, and it's not clear how many species are going to be able to survive as average temperatures keep on climbing.

As the researchers point out, the stresses examined in this study – reactions to high heat, constant sunlight, and a lack of water – are all being experienced by plants out in the world right now... and of course, if plants are in trouble, so are we.

"Those impacts go beyond our food," says molecular biochemist Katayoon Dehesh from UCR.

"Plants clean our air by sequestering carbon dioxide, offer us shade, and provide habitat for numerous animals. The benefits of boosting their survival are exponential."

The research has been published in Science Advances.

Source

So psychologist Aviva Philipp-Muller, now at Simon Fraser University, and colleagues dug into the scientific literature on persuasion and communication, to try and outline an up-to-date and cohesive overview on how to tackle this wicked problem.

One of the biggest myths about communicating science is that merely presenting people with knowledge will lead to them acting accordingly with logic.

This is known as the information deficit model, and the mode of communication we're using here, but between the global pandemic and climate crisis we now have countless examples of how this often doesn't work.

"Vaccinations used to be a standard thing that everyone accepted," says Ohio State psychologist Richard Petty. "But there have been a few developments in recent years that have made it easier to persuade people against the scientific consensus on vaccinations and other issues."

While that may be hard for many of us to swallow, people do have plenty of legitimate reasons for their distrust.

For starters, industries are degrading trust in science by hijacking scientific credentials, using "sciency" sounding claims to bolster their clout for profits; pharmaceutical companies have most certainly given us plenty of reasons not to trust them. What's more, science doesn't always get things right, and large factions of the media are stoking sentiments against "elitist" experts and bolstering anti-science views.

All this doubt, conflict, and information overload are eroding people's trust in scientists, and those of us often responsible for conveying scientific information to the public, like the media and government officials, are fairing even worse on the trust scales.

This distrust of the source of information is one of the four main barriers to accepting science Philipp-Muller and colleagues identify in their review.

When information challenges a person's core beliefs, challenges the group they identify with, or doesn't match their learning style are the other main barriers the team highlighted.

"What all four of these bases have in common is they reveal what happens when scientific information conflicts with what people already think or their style of thought," explains Petty.

1. Distrust in the information source

As mentioned above, lack of trust in the information source comes up time and time again as one of the key reasons people don't accept scientific information.

Legitimate and robust scientific debate can also confuse people who are not familiar with the scientific process, further damaging trust when it spills into the public domain.

To combat these trust issues the researchers suggest highlighting the communal nature of science and emphasizing the wider, prosocial goals of research. Honestly acknowledging other people's positions and any drawbacks in your own, rather than brushing them away, can also go a long way to better establishing trust, the team explains.

"Pro-science messages can acknowledge that there are valid concerns on the other side, but explain why the scientific position is preferable," says Philipp-Muller.

2. Tribal loyalty

The way our thinking is wired as an obligatorily social species makes us very vulnerable to sometimes blindly believing those we identify with as part of our own cultural group – no matter how much education we have had. This phenomenon is called cultural cognition.

"Work on cultural cognition has highlighted how people contort scientific findings to fit with values that matter to their cultural identities," write Philipp-Muller and colleagues.

Political polarization and social media have only enhanced this. For example, conservatives are more likely to believe scientists that appear on Fox News, and liberals are more likely to trust those on CNN.

"Social media platforms like Facebook provide customized news feeds that means conservatives and liberals can get highly varied information," explains Philipp-Muller.

To combat this we need to find common ground, create information that's framed for specific target audiences, and collaborate with communities holding anti-science views, including people traditionally marginalized by science.

3. Information goes against personal beliefs

The internal conflicts created by information that challenges our social or personal beliefs such as morals and religion, lead to logical fallacies and cognitive biases such as cognitive dissonance.

"Scientific information can be difficult to swallow, and many individuals would sooner reject the evidence than accept information that suggests they might have been wrong," the team wrote in their paper. "This inclination is wholly understandable, and scientists should be poised to empathize."

So key strategies to counter this include showing an understanding of the other person's viewpoint.

"People get their defenses up if they think they are being attacked or that you're so different from them that you can't be credible," says Petty. "Find some places where you agree and work from there."

Counterintuitively, increasing someone's general scientific literacy can actually backfire, because it provides the skill to better bolster their pre-existing beliefs. Increasing scientific reasoning and media literacy skills, prebunking, or inoculating people against misinformation are advised instead, as is framing information in line with what matters to your audience and using relatable personal experiences.

4. Information is not being presented in the right learning style

This problem is the most straightforward of the four bases – a simple mismatch in how information is being presented and the style best suited to the receiver. This includes things like preferring abstract compared to concrete information, or being promotion or prevention focused.

Here, Philipp-Muller and team suggest making use of some of the same tactics that anti-science forces have been using. For example, like the technology and advertising industry, researchers should be using metadata to better target messaging based on people's profiles according to personal online habits.

While the current level of public acceptance of research can be disappointing, the good news is that trust in scientists has fallen it is still relatively high compared to other information authorities.

As much as we pride ourselves on being logical beings, in reality, we humans are animals with messy minds that are just as governed by our social alliances, emotions, and instincts as our logic. Those of us involved with science, whether as supporters or practitioners, must understand and account for this.

The review was published in PNAS.

Source

You can see Jupiter, its Great Red Spot, its moon Europa, and Europa’s shadow next to the Great Red Spot Image: NASA

After dazzling the world with the first images from the powerful James Webb Space Telescope this week, NASA released even more photos from the observatory yesterday, this time pictures from within our own Solar System. The space agency revealed the telescope’s images of the planet Jupiter, as well as an asteroid, used as reference targets when engineering teams were calibrating the observatory’s instruments.

The pictures serve as a small teaser of the images we should be getting from our Solar System in the months and years to come. The James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, may be known for its ability to peer into some of the deepest recesses of the Universe, but scientists will also be using the telescope to study our own cosmic neighborhood in greater detail.

Because these images of Jupiter were used as guides for JWST engineers, they aren’t as sparkly as the highly processed, full-color photos that NASA released this week of distant nebulas and galaxies. But the pictures do show the kind of precision we can expect from JWST’s images of the outer Solar System. Jupiter’s iconic storm feature, the Great Red Spot, can be clearly seen in the photos, as well as the planet’s icy moon Europa. And Jupiter’s thin rings, which often go overlooked in images of the gas giant, make a very faint appearance.

The images prove that JWST will be able to see relatively faint objects like the rings and moons surrounding particularly bright planets in our outer Solar System, like Jupiter and Saturn. And that’s going to be useful in our ongoing hunt for possible signs of life near Earth. For instance, scientists believe that both Europa and Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus harbor liquid oceans underneath their crusts, reservoirs that may have the right materials for life to exist. JWST might be able to observe these moons and any icy plumes of water erupting from underneath their surfaces, according to NASA.

An animation of asteroid 6481 Tenzing being tracked by JWST Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, and B. Holler and J. Stansberry (STScI)

The photos of an asteroid that NASA released also showcase JWST’s ability to track fast-moving objects. Scientists want to use the observatory to track objects like asteroids, comets, and more. To test this ability out, the commissioning team locked onto an asteroid in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter, proving they could keep an eye on it with JWST. Ultimately, they found the observatory can keep track of objects moving twice as fast as what they expected to be able to track. It’s “similar to photographing a turtle crawling when you’re standing a mile away,” NASA wrote in a blog post.

Jupiter photos from NASA’s new space telescope are teaser of Solar System images to come

This has mainly to do with how closely sleep and the body’s temperature regulation are linked. Our internal temperature, which is normally around 37 degrees Celsius, naturally drops a little at night to make us fall asleep. About 1 degree of heat is redistributed from the core of the body to the hands and feet, which have large surface areas and specialized blood vessels to allow this heat to dissipate. The hormone melatonin plays an important role in this: When it’s dark, melatonin is secreted from the pineal gland in the brain and serves as a timer for our internal clock. It widens the blood vessels in the hands and feet to allow the body to rid itself of heat faster and help us nod off.

That is, if the ambient temperature doesn’t mess things up. The ideal bedroom temperature for adults is somewhere between 15 and 19 degrees Celsius (59 and 66 degrees Fahrenheit), depending on the person, and the body has to work harder to regulate its own temperature when this isn’t achieved. And if the room temperature doesn’t fall sufficiently after a hot day, then our ability to regulate our body temperature is impaired. Not only do we then have trouble falling asleep, but the hot air can interrupt our sleep stages too.

Our brain cycles through four stages of sleep—awake, light, deep, and rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep—for an average of 90 minutes, repeating the cycle four to six times each night.

Deep sleep is particularly important. During this stage, breathing and brain activity slow down, with the brain using this time to form and consolidate memories. It’s also this sleep stage that leaves us feeling refreshed. Unfortunately, it is particularly sensitive to temperature.

“We know that cooler temperatures support deep sleep,” says Christine Blume, a sleep scientist at the University of Basel in Switzerland. So when our ability to regulate body temperature is impaired because it is too warm, this leads to us not getting into the deep-sleep phase, she explains. “And if deep sleep is missing, then we simply lack rest,” she says.

Sleep in a hot room and the fourth stage of sleep might be disrupted too. A 2020 study found that higher bedroom temperature is also associated with a shorter duration of REM sleep. When REM sleep is interrupted, the sleep cycle has to start over again. The exact role of REM sleep is still under debate, but it’s been hypothesized to play a role in memory formation, learning new motor skills, and regulating emotions.

Being sleep-deprived over the course of several days can affect your mental state and cause you to be irritable and angry, says Michelle Miller, an associate professor of biochemical medicine at the University of Warwick. “In a heat wave, I would be more concerned about short-term effects, such as cognitive function, impaired performance and judgment, and mood changes,” she says. People who plan to drive or who work in high-pressure occupations where cognitive function is important—such as police or health services, finance, or professions that involve operating machinery—should be especially aware of these effects, she adds.

Getting less than seven hours of sleep a night regularly, the minimum benchmark for adults, has also been associated with heart problems, obesity, and type 2 diabetes, among other conditions. “People try to do short sleeps during the week and then catch up on the weekend, but you never fully catch up on the health and cognitive benefits of sleeping properly throughout the week,” says Miller.

And with climate change, hot, sleepless nights are now being experienced by many people around the world. Compared to the beginning of the 21st century, nighttime temperatures today are hotter, meaning that, across the globe, each person is losing on average 44 hours of sleep per year compared to what they were getting in 2010. This also means that, on average, adults are experiencing 11 additional nights each year when they get less than the seven hours of sleep they need.

As air temperatures continue to rise, people could be missing out on even more. A recent study linked the sleep-tracking wristbands of more than 47,000 people in 68 countries to local meteorological data and predicted that individuals could lose 50 hours of sleep per year by the end of the century, compared to 2010. Six additional lost hours spread over the year between now and then may not seem like much, but this would result in around 13 additional short nights of sleep, which is hardly welcome.

The study’s researchers also looked at whose sleep was disrupted the most. “We hypothesized and expected that people who were already living in warm climates would be better adapted to nighttime temperature increases,” says Kelton Minor, a PhD candidate at the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Social Data Science and the lead author of the study. “What we found was the exact opposite.” A 1-degree rise at night appears to affect residents of the world’s warmest climates more than twice as much as residents of the coldest regions, according to the analysis, which was based on data from 2015 to 2017.

They also found that sleep loss per degree of warming appeared to be greater among women, the elderly, and people in low-income countries. Although the study design didn’t allow for causal inferences as to why this is so, some conjecture can be made based on existing research: Women’s bodies usually cool down earlier in the evening to prepare for sleep than men’s, so women will face hotter, more disruptive temperatures when their sleep wave kicks in. Women also have higher levels of subcutaneous fat, which may slow the cooling process at night, making controlling body temperature in heat waves harder. And as we age, the body secretes less melatonin, which may explain why older people have even more difficulty regulating their body temperature when it’s too hot.

Fans and air conditioners can help to remove heat from the body or cool a bedroom, but in lower-income countries most people do not have access to such devices. Apart from that, sleep researcher Blume has no single recipe for getting enough sleep on hot nights. “Anything that helps lower the body temperature would make sense from a sleep physiology perspective,” she says. Even something as simple as sleeping with a thin cover or without one at all, or taking a cooling hand and foot bath before bedtime, is useful—as long as the water is not too cold, because otherwise the body starts to compensate and produce heat, she says.

Removing electronic devices (which emit heat) from your room, keeping curtains, blinds, and windows shut during the day, and staying hydrated can all help too. “You just have to try things out. The main thing is to relax,” says Blume. But as you lie there sweltering, damp with sweat, that’s easier said than done.

How Heat Waves Are Messing Up Your Sleep

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Stars in the new images from the James Webb Space Telescope look sharper than they did before. And I’m not just talking about the image quality, which is astounding. I’m talking about the fact that many of the bright stars in the images have very distinct Christmas-ornament-looking spikes or, as one of my colleagues put it, “It looks like a J.J. Abrams promo poster, and I love it.”

But this isn’t a case of too much lens flare. Those are diffraction spikes, and if you look closely, you’ll see that all bright objects in the JWST images have the same eight-pointed pattern. The brighter the light, the more prominent the feature. Dimmer objects like nebulae or galaxies don’t tend to see quite as much of this distortion.

This pattern of diffraction spikes is unique to JWST. If you compare images taken by the new telescope to images taken by its predecessor, you’ll notice that Hubble only has four diffraction spikes to JWST’s eight. (Two of JWST’s spikes can be very faint, so it sometimes appears as though there are six.)

The shape of the diffraction spikes is determined by the telescope’s hardware, so let’s start with a quick refresher of the important bits. Both Hubble and JWST are reflecting telescopes, which means that they collect light from the cosmos using mirrors. Reflecting telescopes have a large primary mirror that gathers the light and reflects it back to a smaller secondary mirror. The secondary mirror on space telescopes helps guide that light toward the science instruments that turn it into all the cool images and data we’re seeing now.

Both the primary and secondary mirrors contribute to the diffraction spikes but in slightly different ways. Light diffracts, or bends, around objects like mirror edges. So the shape of the mirror itself can result in these spikes of light as light interacts with the edges of the mirror. In Hubble’s case, the mirror was round, so it didn’t add to the spikiness. But JWST has hexagonal mirrors that result in an image with six diffraction spikes.

Image: NASA

There’s also the secondary mirror. Secondary mirrors are smaller than primary mirrors and are held in place some distance away from the primary mirror by struts. In the case of JWST, the struts are 25 feet long. Light passing by these struts gets diffracted, resulting in more spikes, each one perpendicular to the strut itself.

In Hubble’s case, its four struts resulted in the four distinct spikes you see in Hubble pictures. JWST has three struts holding up its secondary mirror, resulting in another six spikes.

JWST with its struts during cryogenic testing on Earth. Image: NASA

That’s a lot of distortion. To minimize the number of diffraction spikes, JWST was engineered so that four of the spikes caused by the struts would overlap with four of the spikes caused by the mirror. That leaves the eight soon-to-be-iconic diffraction spikes of a JWST image.

Some of the spikes will look more or less visible depending on which instrument is processing the light as well. This is most noticeable in the JWST images of the Southern Ring Nebula, which were released this week.

Two JWST views of the Southern Ring Nebula. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

The image on the left was taken by JWST’s NIRCam, which gathers near-infrared light. The one on the right was taken by the telescope’s MIRI instrument, which picks up mid-infrared light instead. “In near-infrared light, stars have more prominent diffraction spikes because they are so bright at these wavelengths,” an explanation posted by the Space Telescope Science Institute says. “In mid-infrared light, diffraction spikes also appear around stars, but they are fainter and smaller (zoom in to spot them).”

If you want a visual of how diffraction spikes on JWST work, check out the handy infographic below from NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute:

This infographic includes a lot of text. For a text-based description, please click here. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, Leah Hustak (STScI), Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

Why stars look spiky in images from the James Webb Space Telescope

Slow-motion video of pecking by the pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus). The original video was recorded at 1600 frames per second. Credit: Robert Shadwick & Erica Ortlieb/University of British Columbia

 

Check out almost any popular science article about woodpeckers and you'll likely find some mention of why the birds don't seem to suffer concussions, despite energetically drumming away at tree trunks all day with their beaks. Conventional wisdom holds that the structure of the woodpecker's skull and beak acts as a kind of built-in shock absorber, protecting the bird from injury. But a new paper published in the journal Current Biology argues that this is incorrect and that woodpecker heads behave more like stiff hammers than shock absorbers.

 

“While filming the woodpeckers in zoos, I have witnessed parents explaining to their kids that woodpeckers don’t get headaches because they have shock absorbers built into their head,” said co-author Sam Van Wassenbergh of Universiteit Antwerpen, Belgium. “This myth of shock absorption in woodpeckers is now busted by our findings.”

 

As for why this particular myth has endured for so long, Van Wassenbergh told Ars, "To us humans, the first thing that comes to our mind when watching an animal violently smashing their head against trees is to wish the animal had some kind of a built-in cushioning to prevent it from getting headaches or concussions. It is logical for us to think of such action in terms of protection and safety, as if it is an accident."

 

The shock-absorber hypothesis was not completely lacking in scientific merit. (One 2002 study even won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2006. I've written about the topic in the past.) It started with a 1976 Lancet paper by Philip R.A. May et al., proposing the woodpecker as a natural model for investigating the mechanisms of head injury and its prevention. Other studies have shown that woodpeckers can hammer on trees as much as 12,000 times a day during their mating season, an average of between 18 to 22 pecks per second.

 

Black woodpecker that was filmed for the study, photographed at Alpenzoo Innbruck, Austria.

Sam Van Wassenbergh/Universiteit Antwerpen

 

That kind of sudden, sharp blow can produce deceleration forces as high as 1,200 g's. A human being will suffer a concussion with a sudden deceleration of 100 g's. A 2006 study proposed that the orientation of the woodpecker's brain within the skull increased the area of contact when pecking, thereby reducing stress on the brain. The birds' small size is also a boon, given those acceleration speeds.

 

Micro-CT scans have revealed that woodpecker skulls boast thick muscles in the neck, sponge-like bones, and a third inner eyelid to keep the eyeball in place, which scientists assumed would work together to absorb impact and prevent injury from the incessant drumming. One 2011 study found that there is also another springy structure in the back of the skull called a hyloid, which could work in concert with cerebrospinal fluid to further suppress vibrations. Most recently, a 2021 study posited that the bird's jaw apparatus might also act as a cushion during the pecking process.

 

Enter Van Wassenbergh, who decided to conduct his own research into the topic after being struck by the paradoxical nature of the shock absorber hypothesis. He reasoned that any absorption or dissipation of the head's kinetic energy would actually impair the bird's ability to hammer away incessantly. Since this drumming behavior is so central to the woodpecker's ability to communicate and attract mates, it seemed unlikely that a built-in shock absorber would have evolved via natural selection.

 

"There was already skepticism in the scientific literature for a long time," Van Wassenbergh said, dating all the way back to May's 1976 paper. "May wrote, 'If the beak absorbed much of its own impact, the unfortunate bird would have to pound even harder.' The notion that the woodpecker head primarily needs to be a functional hammer made sense to me. From reading the literature, it appeared to me that cranial shock absorption has never been confirmed for live birds performing their natural behavior, despite that many sources reported this as a fact. This spurred me into conducting research on this topic."

 

High-speed video recording setup at the University of British Columbia to record pecking by the pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus).

 

Frame sequence from a high-speed video of pecking in the pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus).

 

The first step was testing whether there was any measurable evidence of shock absorption occurring between a woodpecker's beak and brain as it pecked, via in vivo kinematics. Van Wassenbergh and his colleagues recorded six woodpeckers from three different species—Dryocopus Martius, Dryocopus pileatus, and Dendrocopus major—housed in aviaries as they hammered into wood posts. The resulting 109 videotaped pecks enabled the researchers to track, frame by frame, two distinctive marks on the beak and eye (and, for D. pileatus, an additional painted dot on the skin covering the skull posterior of the eye).

 

The team also wanted to quantify how varying the degree of shock to the skull would impact the ability of a woodpecker to hammer effectively. So they built biomechnical models of D. martius based on anatomical measurements gleaned from CT scans. They determined the average speed of the head at impact and the duration of the beak's deceleration from the recordings made during the kinematic experiments, calculating hammering performance using the same physics as driving a nail into wood.

 

The results showed that while woodpecker skulls experience deceleration shocks above the threshold for concussion in monkeys and humans, the fact that they have smaller brains means they have a higher concussion threshold. They might exceed that threshold if they pecked full force on metal, according to Wassenbergh et al., but not when pecking on tree trunks. “The absence of shock absorption does not mean their brains are in danger during the seemingly violent impacts,” said Van Wassenbergh. “Even the strongest shocks from the over 100 pecks that were analyzed should still be safe for the woodpeckers’ brains as our calculations showed brain loadings that are lower than that of humans suffering a concussion.”

 

This may also explain why there are no species of woodpeckers with significantly larger heads and neck muscles. The birds' beaks do sometimes get stuck in the trunks, and the birds have evolved a strategy for freeing themselves by alternating the movement of the upper and lower halves of their beaks—a topic of future study for the team.

 

Skull reconstruction from a CT-scan of a black woodpecker (Dryocopus martius).

 

Skull reconstruction from a CT-scan of a black woodpecker (Dryocopus martius).

 

Comparison of brain loading magnitudes during a sudden deceleration of the head, showing considerably higher pressures in the human at a deceleration shock just enough to cause a concussion (left) compared to the woodpeckers at the maximum head decelerations.

 

So what does this mean for researchers keen on designing shock-absorbent materials for helmets and protective gear for pro athletes, among other practical applications? For instance, the Q collar was developed around 2016 to mimic how the woodpecker's long tongue can wrap around the head and pinch the jugular vein. This increases blood volume in the skull to create a protective cushion, like bubble wrap. There's less room for the brain to slosh around in the cranial cavity, thereby reducing the risk of concussion.

 

Perhaps the shock-absorption approach has been disproven, but Van Wassenbergh believes there could still be useful insights to be gained from ongoing studies. "It is still interesting to look at woodpecker brains and how they are adapted to repeated inertial loading events even though the hits of woodpeckers are below the concussion level," said Van Wassenbergh. "The Q collar, if I understand it correctly—I'm not an expert in this field—would protect against strong blood flows to or from the head. Our study certainly does not invalidate such approaches."

 

Victor Hugo once observed that science has the first word on everything but the last word on nothing. Science is a process. So no doubt there will be more experiments to put Van Wassenbergh et al.'s findings to the test. "Time will tell if this is the definite view," said Van Wassenbergh. "But I think that our study gives strong evidence across multiple species and also explained the findings from an adaptive point of view by showing that shock absorption would only have energetic disadvantages for hammering birds."

 

DOI: Current Biology, 2022. 10.1016/j.cub.2022.05.052  (About DOIs).

 

Current_Biology_Video_Abstract_1920p

 

Listing image by Erica Ortlieb & Robert Shadwick/University of British Columbia

 

New research into why woodpeckers don’t get concussions busts a popular myth

As many as one in three Australian adults may have vitamin D deficiency. It can lead to fatigue, aches, muscle weakness, mood changes and an increased risk of contracting respiratory infections.

The main source of vitamin D is exposure to sunlight. Many Australians don't get enough sun during winter. But dark-skinned people, people who need to stay indoors and people who cover their skin for religious or cultural reasons may also have difficulty keeping their vitamin D levels up year-round.

"Vitamin D deficiency can have a negative impact on bone health as the key function of vitamin D is to promote calcium absorption," says research lead, IPAN's Professor Robin Daly.

Calcium is crucial for healthy bones. Long-term vitamin D deficiency can lead to osteoporosis, a condition that decreases the density of your bones. People with osteoporosis are more likely to suffer bone breaks or fractures. Older Australians are particularly at risk.

Pregnant people are also at risk, as low vitamin D could interfere with their baby's bone development.

"Vitamin D deficiency may also increase the risk of other non-skeletal diseases such as type 2 diabetes, hypertension, depression and Alzheimer's disease," Prof. Daly says.

Vitamin D is difficult to source from foods. People with low vitamin D levels are often prescribed supplements. Eggs are one of the few foods that are a naturally rich source of vitamin D.

"Weekly consumption of seven eggs was an effective dietary approach to optimize vitamin D levels during the winter months when sunlight hours decline," says Prof. Daly of the IPAN study's findings.

Published in The Journal of Nutrition, the study is the first to investigate the dose-response relationship between eating commercially available free-range eggs and blood vitamin D levels in Australian adults.

Fifty-one adults aged 25–40 years were randomly assigned to three groups that were asked to consume either two, seven or 12 eggs per week for 12 weeks.

But won't eating an egg every day increase your blood cholesterol? As well as measuring blood vitamin D levels, the research team also looked at changes in blood lipids. Prof Daly said there were no significant adverse effects on cholesterol.

Participants found it relatively easy to eat the eggs as part of their daily diets.

"The simple strategy of eating an egg a day is in line with current Australian dietary guidelines and could help prevent health complications caused by vitamin D deficiencies."

Source

Specifically, drinking seven or more "units" of alcohol per week is associated with higher iron levels in the brain -- and iron accumulation is linked with Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. It also is seen as a potential mechanism for alcohol-related cognitive decline.

That's according to a study of nearly 21,000 people published Thursday in the journal PLOS Medicine.

"The significance is this is the first study showing higher brain iron -- and in turn this is associated with worse cognition -- in 'moderate' drinkers," Anya Topiwala, the study's lead author, told UPI in an email.

The "practical advice is to try to keep your drinking at low levels, and of course spreading out consumption not bingeing it," said Topiwala, senior clinical researcher in the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford in England.

Topiwala explained just how modest a person's alcohol intake may have to be to avoid ill health effects.

One unit of alcohol in the United Kingdom is defined as 8 grams (10 milliliters) of pure alcohol/ethanol. "So seven units is approximately two large, 250 ml., glasses of 14% wine or two to three beers a week," she said.

The study found that alcohol consumption above seven units per week was "associated with markers of higher iron in the basal ganglia, a group of brain regions associated with control of motor movements, procedural learning, eye movement, cognition, emotion, and more," according to a news release about the study.

Topiwala said she found the results surprising, adding, "I did not think we would find evidence of higher brain iron at such low drinking levels."

In fact, the study found much higher levels of drinking among the 20,965 participants, who self-reported the amounts -- a method researchers said was needed in such a large group, but conceded most likely resulted in underreporting.

Although 2.7% characterized themselves as non-drinkers, the average intake was around 18 units per week, which translates to about 7½ cans of beer or 6 large glasses of wine, according to the news release.

All of the study's participants -- who are part of a biomedical database of one-half million people in the United Kingdom called the UK Biobank -- had brain scans using magnetic resonance imaging. Nearly 7,000 also had MRI imaging of their livers to assess their levels of systemic iron.

All of the participants also completed a series of tests to assess cognitive and motor function. Their mean age was 55, and it was an even split between males and females.

In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention points to the federal government's 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans with respect to safe levels of alcohol intake.

The guidelines recommend that adults who choose to imbibe should "drink in moderation by limiting intake to two drinks or less in a day for men or one drink or less in a day for women, on days when alcohol is consumed."

The CDC noted that 2 in 3 adult drinkers report drinking above moderate levels at least once a month.

Topiwala said the idea of focusing on iron accumulation was interesting to her because it had not been examined in "moderate" drinkers previously.

"Plus we have medicines that can reduce iron levels in the body," she explains, "so if it is proven that iron is responsible for damage, we might have a way to reduce the damage."

Topiwala noted that researchers did not directly measure iron in the brain, but instead analyzed other aspects of the brain scan, such as changes in magnetic field that are generally linked to iron changes.

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As the planet warms due to humanity's inability to stem greenhouse gas emissions, scientists around the world continue to study possible impacts. In recent years, a host of studies have shown that cutting down the trees in rain forests and other forests to make way for crops is detrimental to climate—forests produce oxygen and absorb carbon dioxide from the air and sequester it. Less work has been conducted to learn more about the impact of global warming on forests, though it has been noted that increases in temperatures and reduced moisture could make it difficult for some forests to survive. In this new effort, the researchers wondered whether such changes might also be making forests less resilient, degrading their ability to withstand temporary challenges such as floods, pests, droughts or pollution. To find out, they turned to years of satellite imagery.

To learn more about the resilience of the world's forests, the researchers used a learning algorithm to sift through massive amounts of satellite data showing vegetation covering regions of the planet over the years 2000 to 2020. In their effort, they defined resilience as the ability of a forest to bounce back after a disruptive event. When such efforts fail, they note, the vegetation changes from forest to something else, such as savannah.

They found that over half of all the forests in the world today show signs of decreases in resilience. They also found that global warming seems to be improving resilience in some trees, such as those in boreal forests in the northern latitudes. The researchers found that the biggest factors in reducing resilience in forests were increases in average heat and decreases in available water.

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At a whopping 1.6 billion Tesla, a pulsar called Swift J0243.6+6124 smashes the previous records of around 1 billion Tesla, discovered surrounding the pulsars GRO J1008-57 and 1A 0535+262.

For a bit of context, your average novelty fridge magnet comes in at around 0.001 Tesla. The more powerful MRI machines manage to hit around 3 Tesla.

A few years ago, engineers earned a pat on the back for achieving a semi-respectable 1,200 Tesla, sustaining it for a blink of just 100 microseconds.

So it stands to reason that 1.6 billion Tesla is going to demand some truly mind-blowing physics. The kind only achievable by massive objects crammed into impossible volumes and spun at incredible speeds, fast enough to accelerate electrons to ridiculous velocities.

Swift J0243.6+6124 was already regarded as a star worth paying attention to. A type of super-compact cosmic heavyweight known as a pulsar, it's the only X-ray source in our galaxy to fall into the ultra-luminous category.

It's also the only example in the Milky Way of an X-ray pulsar with a Be-type companion star feeding it matter fast enough to generate radio-emitting jets of matter from its poles.

Those features alone add up to a unique opportunity in our galactic backyard astronomers can't help but study in detail.

Measuring the magnetic field of a far-distant object is easier said than done, though. As strong as they are, those fields quickly weaken to become undetectable over distances of thousands of light years.

Fortunately clues can be found in the way that the ultra-bright glow of X-rays scatters from the electrons whizzing down the magnetic racetrack, something known as a cyclotron resonance scattering feature.

China's launch of the X-ray observatory Insight-HXMT in 2017 provides astrophysicists with a way to capture signatures like these in distant emissions, leading to the measure of electron energies in the GRO J1008-57 field in 2020.

Fortunately, an outburst of activity in Swift J0243.6+6124 following Insight-HXMT's launch also provided a glimpse into its own high-strength magnetic field, with a cyclotron resonance scattering feature buried within its X-ray spectrum.

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Sun Yat-Sen University in China, and the University of Tübingen in Germany, subsequently analyzed the feature to calculate the energy of its electrons to peak at an astonishing 146 kiloelectron volts, blitzing the 90 and 100 kiloelectron volts of the previous record holders.

Given Swift J0243.6+6124 is the only ultra-luminescent X-ray pulsar in our galaxy, having a precise measure on its magnetic field gives astronomers a better idea of what might be happening close to its surface.

As a type of neutron star, pulsars like Swift J0243.6+6124 are made of atoms squished into configurations far beyond anything we can create on Earth. Its magnetic properties help exclude or support various models that explain how its highly compact crust behaves.

Specifically, the nature of the neutron star's magnetism confirms the likelihood that its field is complex, consisting of multiple poles.

That's a solid win for astrophysicists keen to understand the mysteries of some of the most exotic objects in space.

For the rest of us, it's enough just to try to imagine the might of a 1.6 billion Tesla magnet stuck to our fridge.

This research was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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The Justice Department is likely to reject concessions offered by Alphabet, the report said. (https://www.bloomberg.com/technology?sref=ZoyErlU1)

DoJ did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment and Google declined to comment.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google has offered concessions to avoid a potential U.S. antitrust lawsuit, including a proposal to spin off parts of its business that auctions and places ads on websites and apps into a separate company under Alphabet.

However, a Google spokesperson told Reuters on Friday that it was engaging with regulators to address their concerns, adding that it has no plans to sell or exit the ad-tech business.

The DoJ has been investigating Google's ad-tech practices since 2019 and expedited the inquiry into the advertising market in recent months under the supervision of antitrust division's official Doha Mekki, the report said.

The Justice Department sued Google in October 2020, accusing the company of illegally using its market muscle to hobble rivals, in the biggest challenge to the power and influence of Big Tech in decades.

(Reporting by Chavi Mehta in Bengaluru; Editing by Devika Syamnath and Shinjini Ganguli)

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The report, released July 12, synthesizes lab and hospital-admission data to reach a grim conclusion: From 2019 through 2020, the number of antibiotic-resistant infections occurring in hospitals, and resulting deaths, each increased by at least 15 percent. For some of the most hard-to-treat pathogens, the increases shot up 26 percent to 78 percent. And those figures are even worse than they appear, because in the years immediately preceding the pandemic, resistant infections in hospitals across the US had been forced down by almost a third—meaning that Covid wiped out years of progress in reducing one of health care’s most stubborn threats to patients.

“The pandemic created the perfect storm for this to happen,” says Arjun Srinivasan, a physician and associate director of the CDC’s health-care-associated infection-prevention programs. “You had large numbers of patients needing very advanced care, oftentimes in intensive care units—needing central lines, needing urinary catheters, needing mechanical ventilation; all of those increasing risks for infection, all of those increasing risks for infections with antibiotic-resistant organisms.”

But medical experts say that hidden within the dismaying trend—and this isn’t present in the CDC’s report—is a surprising bright spot. Some US hospitals managed to reduce their patients’ vulnerability to superbugs because they kept supporting prevention programs they had set in motion before the pandemic started, and especially because they kept those programs’ personnel from being diverted to different tasks.

Any use of an antibiotic carries the possibility of provoking resistance, because bacteria adapt to defend themselves. So hospitals run programs, broadly known as antibiotic stewardship, that monitor which drugs are being used and reserve the most precious compounds as last-report options. Simultaneously, they maintain infection-prevention teams to protect patients against infections that can arise when medical devices accidentally conduct bacteria inside the body, or drug treatments suppress the immune system, or pathogens are carried between patients on staffers’ gowns or hands.

When masks and protective equipment ran short during the first waves, health care workers couldn’t swap out their gear as they normally would have. In deluged wards, they may have skipped safety steps to try to save lives. And as desperately ill patients overwhelmed ICUs, clinicians preemptively put them on antibiotics—not to control Covid, because the virus isn’t affected by these drugs, but to ward off other infections. The CDC analysis finds that in 2020 almost 80 percent of Covid patients received at least one antibiotic during their hospital stay, a far higher percentage than normal.

Uneasy predictions during the past two years suggested this might happen. In the first months of the pandemic, multiple experts, including a former CDC director, published warnings that broad use of antibiotics among the earliest Covid patients was lighting the fuse on a time bomb. In March 2021, a project of the Pew Charitable Trusts predicted that resistance rates were sure to rise, because so many Covid patients were receiving antibiotics. And by the end of that year, evidence began to arrive that they were right. A CDC analysis last September revealed that Covid’s pressures on health care reversed years of progress in reducing infections in already-hospitalized people. This May, researchers from pharmaceutical giant Merck and medical-technology company Becton Dickinson presented preliminary data showing that rates of resistant infections in 271 US hospitals rose in 2020 and 2021—in patients with and without Covid—compared to 2019.

So the CDC’s findings this week ought to come as no surprise. They confirm spikes in incidence of dangerous bacteria and fungi, including carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter (up by 78 percent), multidrug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa (up by 32 percent), and the multi-drug-resistant fungus Candida auris (up by 60 percent).

Some stewardship and infection-prevention programs were dented by Covid care because their specialists possessed expertise that easily could be redeployed. “People who work in stewardship have logistical and organizational skills and understand infrastructure and health care systems, so a lot of time they simply got moved over to the Covid response,” says Cornelius J. Clancy, a physician and professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh who researches antibiotic utilization. “Likewise, there’s only so many people working in infection prevention in a given hospital, and there’s only so many hours in the day—and all the time they were spending scouring for PPE and putting protocols together got diverted from other hospital [infection prevention].”

“A lot of personnel—the pharmacists, the infectious disease physicians—were diverted to the frontline response, and that’s a representation of how thin resources were to begin with,” agrees David Hyun, a physician who leads the Pew Trusts’ resistance project. “But we’ve also heard, anecdotally, of hospital leadership and administrations that had invested in stewardship programs and protected their time.”

A few examples: The University of Michigan Health System managed to keep its stewardship program supported by protecting them as a research team. In the earliest days, when antivirals weren’t available and treatment pathways weren’t clear, the group chased historical data on bacterial and viral co-infections. They also compared notes with health care workers at other institutions, and then developed their own protocols.

“We didn’t want a cookie-cutter thing,” says Payal Patel, a physician and assistant professor who is also medical director of antimicrobial stewardship at the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System. “So every person who came in with Covid got a consult with an infectious disease physician, looking at the patient, looking at the care, and then giving advice. Oh, I see that they're on antibiotics. You know, you probably don't need those.” Within three months, the Michigan team helped reduce the hospitals’ Covid antibiotic use, cutting short misuse that could lead to the emergence of superbugs.

The University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore took a similar tack, making sure the advice of its stewardship team—three pharmacists and a physician focused on infectious disease—was consulted at the start of any Covid patient’s care. “We have long-standing institutional antimicrobial use guidelines—we have them on a web platform, and they're also in a mobile app,” says Emily Heil, pharmacy director for its antimicrobial stewardship program and an associate professor of medicine and pharmacy. “So we built our Covid treatment recommendations right into that platform, where physicians are already used to going to get real-time information.”

That meant the teams treating pandemic patients were served advice about restricting antibiotics at the same moment that they received the newest recommendations about Covid care. It also meant that, once scarce antivirals arrived, clinicians could order them through the same system they would use to request last-resort antibiotics, so prioritization and triage processes were already familiar.

Among hospitals and at the CDC, there’s no confidence that this episode of superbug resurgence has ended, though the Covid pandemic has morphed from a full-on emergency into a wearying slog. New hospital admissions are at the same level they were in July 2020, yet there are fewer health care workers; between the start of 2020 and the end of 2021, 18 percent quit, according to one survey. One of the challenges of the recovery will be to coach more institutions into making stewardship and infection prevention central to care.

“You get what you pay for, and we have paid for not-the-best system when it comes to antimicrobial-resistance monitoring and prevention,” Srinivasan says. “We have underinvested in both the public health side, to have the data and the expertise to help health care facilities monitor these trends. And we underinvested in the health care side, making sure that they had systems in place to provide safe care, even when the system is strained.”

Just restoring what existed pre-pandemic won't work, because that didn’t keep programs from being cannibalized when institutions were under stress. “It's not sufficient to go back to how it was before,” Hyun says. “As we're rebuilding, we need to think about: How do we make all this more resilient, so that it can be sustainable during the next public health emergency?”

The Pandemic Fueled a Superbug Surge. Can Medicine Recover?

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But there’s always room for improvement. Metals conduct electricity because they contain free electrons that aren’t tethered to any particular atoms. The more electrons that flow, and the faster they go, the better a metal conducts. So to improve that conductivity—crucial for preserving the energy produced at a power plant or stored within a battery—materials scientists are typically on the hunt for more perfect atomic arrangements. Their chief aim is purity—to remove any bits of foreign material or imperfections that break the flow. The more a hunk of gold is gold, the more a copper wire is copper, the better it will conduct. Anything else just gets in the way.

“If you want something really highly conductive, then you’ve just got to go pure,” says Keerti Kappagantula, a materials scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Lab. Which is why she considers her own research rather “wonky.” Her goal is to make metals more conductive by making them less pure. She’ll take a metal like aluminum and throw in additives like graphene or carbon nanotubes, producing an alloy. Do that in just the right way, Kappagantula has found, and the extra material can have a weird effect: It can push the metal past its theoretical limit of conductivity.

The point, in this case, is to create aluminum that can compete with copper in electrical devices—a metal that’s nearly twice as conductive, but also costs about twice as much. Aluminum has benefits: It’s much lighter than copper. And as the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust—a thousand times more so than copper—it’s also cheaper and easier to dig up.

Copper, on the other hand, is getting harder to source as the world transitions to greener energy. Though long ubiquitous in wiring and motors, demand for it is surging. An electric vehicle uses about four times as much copper as a conventional car, and still more will be required for the electrical components for renewable power plants and the wires that connect them to the grid. Analysts at Wood Mackenzie, an energy-focused research firm, estimated that offshore wind farms will demand 5.5 megatons of the metal over 10 years, mostly for the massive system of cables within generators and for carrying the electrons the turbines produce to the shore. In recent years, the price of copper has spiked, and analysts project a growing shortfall of the metal. Goldman Sachs recently declared it “the new oil.”

Some companies are already swapping it out for aluminum where they can. In recent years, there has been a multibillion-dollar shift in the components of everything from air conditioners to car parts. High-voltage power lines already use aluminum wires, because they are both cheap and lightweight, which allows them to be strung over longer distances. That aluminum is typically in its most pure and highly conductive form.

But this conversion has recently slowed—in part because the swap has already been made for the applications where aluminum makes the most sense, says Jonathan Barnes, a principal analyst in copper markets at Wood Mackenzie. For use in a wider array of electrical applications, conductivity is the major limit. Which is why researchers like Kappagantula are trying to reengineer the metal.

Engineers usually design alloys to improve a metal’s other qualities, like strength or flexibility. But these concoctions are less conductive than the pure stuff. Even if a particular additive is especially good at transporting electricity (which is the case for the carbon-based materials Kappagantula works with), the electrons within the alloy typically have trouble leaping from one material to another. The interfaces between them are the sticking points.

It’s possible to design interfaces where that isn’t the case, but this has to be done with care. The usual ways of making aluminum alloys don’t cut it. Aluminum metal has been produced for more than a century using processes that may ring familiar if you remember your high school chemistry textbook: the Bayer process to get aluminum oxide out of bauxite (the sedimentary rock in which the element is chiefly found), followed by the Hall-Héroult process to smelt the material into aluminum metal.

That second process involves heating the metal to nearly 1,000 degrees Celsius so that it becomes molten—a not-so-climate-friendly procedure that is a large part of why it takes roughly four times as much energy to produce aluminum as it takes to produce copper. And at these temperatures, problems arise for making suitably nuanced alloys. It’s much too hot for an additive like carbon, which will lose its carefully designed structure and wind up distributed unevenly through the metal. The molecules of the two substances realign to form what's known as an intermetallic—a hard and brittle material that acts as an insulator. The electrons can’t make the jump from one side to the other.

Instead, the PNNL researchers turned to a process called solid-phase manufacturing, which uses a combination of shearing forces and friction at lower temperatures to layer the new carbon material into the metal. The key is to do this at a temperature that’s high enough for the aluminum to become flexible—in a so-called “plastic” state—but not molten. This allows Kappagantula to carefully control the distribution of the materials, which are then verified with computer simulations that model the atomic structures of the new alloys.

It will be a lengthy process to move those materials out of the lab. The team’s first step has been to produce wires made of the new alloys—first a few inches long, and then a few meters. Next they’ll create bars and sheets that can be run through a range of tests to make sure they’re not just more conductive, but also strong and flexible enough to be useful for industrial purposes. If it passes those tests, they’ll work with manufacturers to produce greater volumes of the alloy.

But to Kappagantula, reinventing the two-centuries-old process of making aluminum is worth the trouble. “We need a lot of copper, and we’re quickly going to be hitting shortages,” she says. “This research tells us that we’re on the true right path.”

Can Reengineered Aluminum Help Fill the Demand for Copper?

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A tiny working model of a human ventricle could open fresh new ground in developing novel drugs and therapies, and for studying the development of cardiovascular conditions, giving researchers an ethical, more accurate alternative to existing approaches.

Researchers from the University of Toronto and University of Montreal in Canada reverse-engineered a millimeter-long (0.04 inches) vessel that not only beats like the real deal, but pumps fluid just like the muscular exit-chamber of a human embryo's heart.

"With our model, we can measure ejection volume – how much fluid gets pushed out each time the ventricle contracts – as well as the pressure of that fluid," says University of Toronto biomedical engineer, Sargol Okhovatian.

"Both of these were nearly impossible to get with previous models."

There are typically just a handful of options for studying the ways a diseased or healthy heart channels blood.

Organs that are no longer fully functional, such as those removed in an autopsy, provide authenticity without the activity. Tissue cultures might provide a window into biochemical functionality, but they don't fully capture the hydraulics of a three-dimensional, pulsing mass.

An animal model allows researchers to test how a living heart functions as a pump under the influence of newly developed treatments, but isn't always the most ethical option.

Joining a wave of 3D models of body parts that develop and behave just as nature intended (without unfolding into fully functional organs), this new heart-like organ was grown in a lab using a mix of synthetic and biological materials.

The cells themselves were derived from the cardiovascular tissues of young rats, and then grown on a layer of scaffold printed out of a polymer with grooves for directing the tissue's growth.

This flat mesh forced the structure to mimic the alignment of heart muscle fibers of a human left ventricle – the bulky final chamber that launches blood into the aorta with one mighty squeeze.

To turn the triple-layered stack of heart cells into something that more resembles a pulsing chamber, the team used a cone-shaped shaft they dubbed a mandrel. A quick roll in the tissue sample, and presto – a simple ventricle. All that was required to make this itty-bitty tube of cardiac muscle cells beat was a series of small electrical shocks.

"Until now, there have only been a handful of attempts to create a truly 3D model of a ventricle, as opposed to flat sheets of heart tissue," says senior author Milica Radisic, a chemist from the University of Toronto.

"Virtually all of those have been made with a single layer of cells. But a real heart has many layers, and the cells in each layer are oriented at different angles. When the heart beats, these layers not only contract, they also twist, a bit like how you twist a towel to wring water out of it. This enables the heart to pump more blood than it otherwise would."

With an internal diameter of just half a millimeter (0.02 inches), the vessel barely manages to eject liquid at a pressure of around 5 percent of an adult's heart.

Still, the model is a great proof of concept, one that could in time be bulked up to include more tissue layers to represent a stronger system.
It's even possible that with time the scaffold could be removed and a medley of human-derived tissues could be incorporated, not just improving the structure as a model but leading the way to a fully functional, transplantable organ.

"With these models, we can study not only cell function, but tissue function and organ function, all without the need for invasive surgery or animal experimentation," says Radisic.

"We can also use them to screen large libraries of drug candidate molecules for positive or negative effects."

This research was published in Advanced Biology.

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Electric cars are doomed if fast charger reliability doesn’t get better

Researchers zero in on the source of fast radio bursts

A sea cucumber, lying innocently on a bed of sand, looks kind of like a blob, and feels almost plushy. But although the creatures seem squishy and defenseless, they have evolved fascinating strategies to keep themselves safe. Anne Osbourn, a biologist at the John Innes Center in England, recently published a paper in Nature Chemical Biology that uncovered chemical compounds through which sea cucumbers protect themselves from attack—and themselves from being destroyed by their own poison. Her team believes that understanding how to synthesize these valuable compounds can allow for the design and mass production of molecules that might be useful for human health.

Despite their unassuming demeanor, sea cucumbers are equipped with clever chemical tricks. When threatened by predators, one of the strategies these animals can use is to expel their thread-like internal organs—known as Cuvierian tubules—through their anus. These tubules immobilize the predator in a sticky, toxic embrace. The toxicity comes from saponins: chemical compounds that are known for their antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. Saponins are commonly found in plants as an antimicrobial defense mechanism, and they are used to fend off pathogens such as fungi. Their antifungal activity comes from their ability to bind with cholesterol­—a key component of the cell membrane­—and poke holes in it, causing cell death.

But saponins are much less common in animals. Having originally studied these compounds in plants, Osbourn was intrigued to find that they existed in sea cucumbers—specifically a variety of saponins that are built from terpenoids, organic ring-like scaffolds. (These triterpenoid saponins differ chemically from other classes, due to the attachment of methyl groups at specific carbon positions. And, as Osbourn puts it, “They look a bit like chicken wire.”)

To figure out exactly which saponins the sea cucumber makes, the scientists extracted chemical compounds from stores of dried sea cucumber as well as from the tissues of live sea cucumbers (P. parvimensis and A. japonicus) at various stages of development. Reconstituting a dried sea cucumber was relatively simple: “You just put one sea cucumber in a petri dish, put some water, come back a day later, and it becomes a real sea cucumber,” says coauthor Ramesha Thimmappa, formerly a postdoctoral scholar in Osbourn’s lab. “It swells!”

Then, the scientists used liquid chromatography mass spectrometry, where individual compounds in the extracts are separated into charged particles and shot into a mass spectrometer. The instrument measures the speed at which the particles travel to determine each one’s weight, which can then be used to identify each compound’s molecular composition.

They discovered several saponin compounds, some of which, Osbourn says, “tend to be in the outer walls of the sea cucumber: in the tentacles, the body wall, the feet. In the outer tissues, it’s the right place to provide protection.” They found others that were primarily present in the early growth stages of the sea cucumbers. “We think that they may protect the eggs against predators—fish and various other grazing creatures,” she says.

But this chemical defense creates a big problem for sea cucumbers: They need to avoid killing themselves with their own toxins. And that means their own cells can’t contain cholesterol, the target that the saponins bind to and pierce. Instead, they have evolved two kinds of cholesterol alternatives: lathosterol and 9(11) sterols, which probably fulfill the same function of maintaining cell membrane stability. The scientists believe that the sea cucumbers’ ability to make saponins—and these saponin-resistant sterols—evolved concurrently. “We think it’s a self-defense strategy,” Osbourn says. “If you can produce these toxic compounds, you have to be able to not poison yourself.”

As it turns out, these unique evolutionary capabilities hinged upon a single point. Sea cucumbers are part of the echinoderm family, along with sea stars and sea urchins. They all share a common ancestor, but sea urchins don’t have the same saponin defense superpowers. So to figure out how the sea cucumbers had diverged genetically from the rest of the group, Osbourn and Thimmappa (now an assistant professor of genome engineering at Amity University) compared their genomes to those of their echinoderm counterparts. Specifically, the researchers were interested in studying lanosterol synthase, a highly evolutionarily conserved enzyme that is critical for sterol and saponin biosynthesis. It folds their precursor molecules into intricate origami-like shapes.

The team discovered that sea cucumbers just don’t have it. Instead, they have two enzymes that are from the same family but are drastically different in biological function: One gives rise to the saponins found in juvenile sea cucumbers, the other creates their cholesterol alternative and also generates saponins found in their outer walls. One change from the traditional lanosterol synthase sequence in the amino acid chain was all it took to create these two sea cucumber-specific enzymes with completely different functions—an evolutionary adaptation that was “simple, but very elegant,” says Thimmappa.

This work of characterizing and determining the functions of single chemical compounds in sea cucumbers is “super cool,” says Leah Dann, a PhD student at the University of Queensland who studies island conservation and was unaffiliated with the study. For sea cucumbers, which don’t have adaptive immunity (the ability to generate antibodies that can prevent future diseases), these saponins might help protect against harmful microbes or fungi. And, since they don’t have a spiny outer shell, these chemical defenses may explain why many organisms leave them alone. “They look so yummy,” Dann says. “But most fish will not touch them.”

“They explained why sea cucumbers have triterpenoid saponins,” says Lina Sun, a professor at the Institute of Oceanology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. (Sun is unaffiliated with the study, and her comments have been translated from Chinese.) Discovering and characterizing the two synthase pathways that generate these saponins and special sterols is “very important,” she adds. From this work, Sun is interested to see how, in other echinoderm species, the genes associated with saponin biosynthesis might differ from those in sea cucumbers.

A compound that attacks cholesterol has some intriguing implications for human health care. “Sea cucumbers are highly valued both for food and for health,” Osbourn says. “Sea cucumber extracts, which are rich in saponins, are very valuable.” They have long been harvested as a culinary delicacy—and revered for their antioxidant and anti-inflammatory health benefits. (The saponin dosage in certain sea cucumbers, while sometimes lethal for fish and other small critters, can be edible and even beneficial for humans.) Studies have previously found that sea cucumber saponins can reduce cholesterol and inhibit inflammation to alleviate atherosclerotic plaques in mice, and have been connected with anti-tumor activity against cancer.

Saponins also have other uses for home and personal care, like for making soap. Originally named after their presence in the roots of the soapwort plant (Saponaria), saponins can dissolve in water to create a frothy broth. “Nature is so good at making chemicals,” Osbourn says admiringly.

In the future, she and her team are interested in learning how to synthesize more of these naturally derived compounds—to recreate them on a larger scale without having to harm any sea cucumbers, and to “harness all of the triterpene diversity that’s out there in nature.” Ultimately, she thinks, such molecules could be designed and made on demand, to be used as medicines, or commercialized as foaming agents or emulsifiers.

In the meantime, though, one of the most likely places you’ll find sea cucumbers and their compounds is in soup—something Osbourn was once served for lunch when attending a conference in China. “It was quite chewy,” she says. “I’m sure it was good for me.”

What Humans Can Learn From the Sea Cucumber’s Toxic Arsenal

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As cars get more expensive to make and profit margins dwindle, automakers are coming up with new and loathsome ways to squeeze more money out of their customers. Subscription-based access to vehicle features, like heated seats or remote-start key fobs, are the latest attempt to charge people for things their car already came with. The question is whether customers are going to lay down and take it.

Earlier this week, some media outlets noticed that BMW was selling $18-a-month subscriptions to heated seats in a number of countries, including South Korea. The German automaker had previously tried and failed to get customers to pay $80 a month for access to Apple CarPlay and Android Auto — features that are otherwise free in other companies’ vehicles. But even after BMW reversed its decision to force people to pay for something that used to be free, it was clear that it wouldn’t stop there.

Cars are more full of computers and software than ever before, which has made it possible for automakers to add new features or patch problems on the fly with over-the-air software updates. This has also presented these automakers with new ways of making money. BMW isn’t alone — Volkswagen, Toyota, Audi, Cadillac, Porsche, and Tesla have all dabbled in subscription models for certain options, such as driver-assist features or voice recognition. It’s a troubling trend, considering how much people freaking hate it.

Earlier this year, Cox Automotive conducted a survey of 217 people who intend to buy a new car over the next two years. Only 25 percent said they’d be willing to pay a monthly or annual fee to unlock a feature in their vehicle. The remaining 75 percent said piss off.

Of those 25 percent that don’t mind subscription, the features they’d be willing to pay an annual or monthly fee generally fell into three buckets: safety features like lane-keep assist or automatic emergency braking (although automakers have agreed to make the latter standard in new vehicles starting this year); vehicle performance features, like extra torque or horsepower; and creature comforts, like heated or cooling seats or steering wheels.

“For automakers to achieve their revenue aspirations by charging consumers extra for features and services, they have work to do,” Cox’s Michelle Krebs said.

Most of the subscription plans seem to be coming mainly from luxury automakers, which makes sense given that their customers are mostly rich and can more easily absorb an annual or monthly fee. But industry analysts have said that subscriptions are coming to mass-market vehicles as mainstream automakers look for new revenue streams to help fund their enormously expensive plans to build vehicles that are electric, connected, and autonomous.

Last year, General Motors said it earned over $2 billion in in-car subscription service revenue, a number the company expects to grow to $25 billion by the end of the decade. That would essentially put GM in the same league as Netflix, Spotify, and Peloton.

Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

GM has approximately 16 million vehicles on the road in the US, about a quarter of which include features for which customers are paying subscriptions. “Our research indicates that with the right mix of compelling offerings, customers are willing to spend $135 per month on average for products and services,” Alan Wexler, SVP of innovation and growth at GM, said during a presentation at the company’s investor event in December 2021.

This would represent a titanic shift in how vehicles are marketed and sold. Typically, a car’s factory-equipped options are permanent, regardless of whether it’s 10 years old or whether it’s been sold two or three times over.

That’s changed in recent years, thanks in some part to the popularity of Tesla and the advent of over-the-air software updates. Elon Musk’s company pioneered microtransactions and currently sells access to a variety of features after purchase. It even used to ship cars with battery packs that had their range limited by software, and owners could pay a fee to unlock the full capacity. Some experts predict this could actually encourage automakers to provide more software updates to help vehicles evolve after purchase. But the idea that automakers will keep their worst impulses in check seems naive on the surface.

For a while, it seemed like the car itself would become a subscription. A number of automakers thought they could charge people a monthly fee to access a variety of different models as an alternative to ownership or vehicle leases. Turns out that people weren’t into it: Ford, BMW, Cadillac, and Mercedes-Benz have all pulled the plug on their vehicle subscription services. Other companies are still plugging away, but the ideal price point remains elusive.

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge

This may all seem preordained, but it’s not a guarantee, especially if car companies flub the sales pitch. In the case of heated seats or range-limited battery packs, customers are essentially paying companies to remove a software block on a functionality that already exists. Some customers might be persuaded to pay an extra fee on something that requires constant software updates, like automated traffic alerts. Other stuff, like heated steering wheels or Apple CarPlay, just looks like automakers trying to bilk their customers for stuff they should only have to pay for once.

“Automakers sure want customers to get used to this, but frankly, I’m skeptical this will fly,” said Sam Abuelsamid, principal analyst at Guidehouse Insights, an industry consulting firm.

Abuelsamid noted that cars are more expensive than ever, with the average car price cresting $48,000 for the first time ever this month. And with the industry shifting to producing more electric vehicles, that average cost is expected to rise even more. People are already feeling squeezed by dealers, so it’s not likely they will embrace the idea of paying even more money on a recurring basis for access to certain comfort features.

Unless automakers lower the purchase price of new vehicles to offset the subscriptions, customers aren’t likely to afford all the nickel and diming, Abuelsamid said. “I think automakers will have to back down on either pricing or how many things they want to turn into subscriptions,” he said.

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NASA’s latest flagship space telescope, developed in collaboration with the European and Canadian space agencies, follows in the footsteps of Hubble, Spitzer, and Chandra. The first trove of spectacular images of nebulae and distant galaxies, as well as a spectrum of an exoplanet’s atmosphere, highlight just what the telescope can really do.

Even the Biden administration joined the excitement, praising the Webb team and releasing one image on Monday, a day early. “This telescope is one of humanity’s great engineering achievements, and the images we will see today are a testament to the amazing work done by the thousands of workers across our nation who dedicated years to this project,” said Vice President Kamala Harris at the White House briefing.

“It's a new window into the history of our universe, and today we’ll get a glimpse of the first light to shine through that window,” President Joe Biden said at the same event. He then presented an image of a cluster of galaxies in vivid detail, a cosmic structure so massive that it bends light, acting like a lens to probe even more distant objects of the early universe.

“This image is remarkable because of the number of galaxies that you see, and it’s not the deepest that Webb is capable of, so we’ll see even more. This is definitely the hors d'oeuvres, and the main course will be coming out over the months and years ahead,” says Jonathan Lunine, a Cornell University astrobiologist on the JWST team.

The mission didn’t get off to an easy start: The nearly $10 billion project overran its budget and endured many years of delays. And the telescope’s name has continued to be a source of criticism; its namesake, James Webb, allegedly enforced homophobic policies while leading NASA in the 1960s. (Many astronomers prefer to refer to the telescope simply by its acronym, JWST.)

After the JWST launched last Christmas, scientists moved it into position and began about six months of detailed work setting up and testing the telescope’s instruments, which include sensitive near- and mid-infrared cameras, as well as spectrographs, which spread the measured light into its component wavelengths. Now this work is bearing fruit, as exquisite images arrive allowing astronomers to begin their scientific analysis.

The new images provide a taste of what scientists can achieve with the powerful telescope. Research programs will use these images to measure the universe’s expansion rate, study the first galaxies to assemble, and examine what exoplanets are made of. As the science programs unfold over the next few months, a library of images will begin to accumulate on NASA’s public JWST website, Lunine says.

Here are the five images NASA released Tuesday morning.

A Massive Cluster of Galaxies

Photograph: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI

This image of the galaxy cluster known as SMACS 0723 reveals thousands of galaxies in the distant universe, in a region of the sky now called Webb’s First Deep Field. It was taken with JWST’s near-infrared camera, NIRCam, showing the cluster as it appeared some 4.6 billion years ago. It acts as a gravitational lens, bending light and bringing fainter and even more distant objects into focus.

A Spectrum of a Giant Exoplanet

Illustration: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI

JWST also comes with a spectrograph, able to probe the contents of planets’ atmospheres. WASP-96 is a gas giant about half the size of Jupiter, and is about 1,150 light-years away. It orbits its star every 3.4 days. JWST is able to infer the presence of clouds and hazes around the planet.

The Nebula of a Dying Star

Photograph: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI

This image shows the spectacular Southern Ring Nebula in the near- and mid-infrared wavelengths: a dying star expelling waves of clouds of gas and dust, which could later become the material for new stars. Many of Hubble’s now-iconic images were also of nebulae, like the Crab Nebula and Horsehead Nebula.

A Compact Group of Galaxies

Photograph: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI

This image of a tight grouping of five galaxies known as Stephan’s Quintet shows in detail the first compact galaxy group ever discovered. Such close galaxies are locked in a cosmic dance, frequently brushing against each other, twisting each other, and pulling each other apart, as can be seen by spiral galaxies with elongated arms.

A Nebula of Young Stars

Photograph: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI

This image shows part of the Carina Nebula, one of the largest and brightest nebulae, packed with young and massive stars which are gobbling up gas and dust as they grow. JWST’s sensitive cameras reveal hundreds of newborn stars in the nebula that had never been seen before, as well as galaxies lurking in the background.

The James Webb Telescope's First Photos Show Its Extraordinary Power

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"This study represents the most rigorous and comprehensive systematic analysis of the modern day literature regarding health and spirituality to date," said Tracy Balboni, lead author and senior physician at the Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women's Cancer Center and professor of radiation oncology at Harvard Medical School. "Our findings indicate that attention to spirituality in serious illness and in health should be a vital part of future whole person-centered care, and the results should stimulate more national discussion and progress on how spirituality can be incorporated into this type of value-sensitive care."

"Spirituality is important to many patients as they think about their health," said Tyler VanderWeele, the John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology in the Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Harvard Chan School. "Focusing on spirituality in health care means caring for the whole person, not just their disease."

The study, which was co-authored by Balboni, VanderWeele, and senior author Howard Koh, the Harvey V. Fineberg Professor of the Practice of Public Health Leadership at Harvard Chan School, will be published online in JAMA on July 12, 2022. Balboni, VanderWeele, and Koh are also co-chairs of the Interfaculty Initiative on Health, Spirituality, and Religion at Harvard University.

According to the International Consensus Conference on Spiritual Care in Health Care, spirituality is "the way individuals seek ultimate meaning, purpose, connection, value, or transcendence." This could include organized religion but extends well beyond to include ways of finding ultimate meaning by connecting, for example, to family, community, or nature.

In the study, Balboni, VanderWeele, Koh, and colleagues systematically identified and analyzed the highest-quality evidence on spirituality in serious illness and health published between January 2000 and April 2022. Of the 8,946 articles concerned with serious illness, 371 articles met the study's strict inclusion criteria, as did 215 of the 6,485 articles focused on health outcomes.

A structured, multidisciplinary group of experts, called a Delphi panel, then reviewed the strongest collective evidence and offered consensus implications for health and health care.

They noted that for healthy people, spiritual community participation–as exemplified by religious service attendance—is associated with healthier lives, including greater longevity, less depression and suicide, and less substance use. For many patients, spirituality is important and influences key outcomes in illness, such as quality of life and medical care decisions. Consensus implications included incorporating considerations of spirituality as part of patient-centered health care and increasing awareness among clinicians and health professionals about the protective benefits of spiritual community participation.

The 27-member panel was composed of experts in spirituality and health care, public health, or medicine, and represented a diversity of spiritual/religious views, including spiritual-not-religious, atheist, Muslim, Catholic, various Christian denominations, and Hindu.

According to the researchers, the simple act of asking about a patient's spirituality can and should be part of patient-centered, value-sensitive care. The information gleaned from the conversation can guide further medical decision-making, including but not limited to notifying a spiritual care specialist.

Spiritual care specialists, such as chaplains, are trained to provide clinical pastoral care to diverse patients–whether spiritual-not-religious or from various religious traditions. Chaplains themselves represent a variety of spiritual backgrounds, including secular and religious.

"Overlooking spirituality leaves patients feeling disconnected from the health care system and the clinicians trying to care for them," said Koh. "Integrating spirituality into care can help each person have a better chance of reaching complete well-being and their highest attainable standard of health."

Other Harvard Chan co-authors include Stephanie Doan-Soares and Katelyn Long.

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