New research could hold the key to tackling global crisis of malnutrition

The University of Bristol is today (15 December) launching an ambitious research project which promises to address the common drivers of both obesity and under-nutrition in China and Southeast Asia.

Malnutrition is the leading cause of disease and mortality globally in Southeast Asia and carries substantial social and economic burdens.

The multi-nation project: Systems Actions to Malnutrition in All Its Forms in Chinese and Southeast Asian Cities – Developing Double Duty, Population-Level Interventions (SYSTAM CHINA-SEACS) is funded by the Medical Research Council in the UK and will be led by Dr Bai Li at the University of Bristol.

Through this world-first initiative, Dr Li plans to demonstrate that by developing systemic solutions to tackle under nutrition, governments and policy-makers can also prevent obesity and non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as cancer, diabetes and stroke.

This approach is known as double-duty, and involves identifying interventions, programs and policies that can simultaneously reduce the burden of both undernutrition (including wasting, stunting and micronutrient deficiency or insufficiency) and overweight, obesity or diet-related NCDs.

The study will be piloted in the Chinese city of Fang Cheng Gang, which has been designated an international medical innovation city by President Xi Jinping and is the permanent host of the China-ASEAN Nutrition forum.

Dr Li said: "It is a privilege to have the opportunity to work with China Guangxi and Fang Chang Gang local authorities, world-leading academics and other partners, to demonstrate the power of a systems approach to improving population nutrition. Our world-first research will build empirical evidence for and practical understanding of this new approach, so policy-makers and researchers in Asia and other parts of the world can better address the double burden of malnutrition."

Local decision makers will own the process of intervention development and form local ‘delivery Action Groups’ to maximize feasibility, impact and sustainability. The aim is to close the gap between intervention development and delivery, allow a more coordinated use of existing resources and introduce a new way of working. Researchers will report practical lessons learnt in Fang Cheng Gang to policy makers of 11 SEA countries with a vision to scale up the work in this region.

Childhood trauma linked to psychotic symptoms in young cannabis users

Childhood trauma may increase the chance of young people experiencing psychotic symptoms when using cannabis, University of Queensland research has found.

UQ School of Psychology Honorary Fellow, Dr Molly Carlyle, said childhood trauma was a major factor in cannabis use problems and psychosis in young people.

“Our research found cannabis use was associated with more psychotic-like experiences, and this association was stronger for people with more experiences of childhood trauma,” Dr Carlyle said.

“Similarly, people who experienced more childhood trauma were more likely to engage in more harmful cannabis use.

“They also experienced more dysphoria/paranoia when using cannabis, which was also linked to psychotic-like experiences.

“Any history of childhood trauma should be addressed as part of treatment services for cannabis use problems and psychotic disorders.”

The research team analyzed responses from 2630 young people about their use of the drug, history of childhood trauma, psychotic-like experiences and subjective effects such as euphoria, dysphoria or paranoia when using cannabis.

Protein test could lead to earlier and better diagnosis of Parkinson’s

Scientists at the Oxford Parkinson's Disease Centre (OPDC) have been able to use a highly-sensitive method called α-synuclein real-time quaking-induced conversion (αSyn-RT-QuIC) to observe the clumping of alpha-synuclein in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) taken from people with Parkinson’s. The findings offer hope that a pioneering new clinical test could be developed to diagnose Parkinson’s correctly in its early stages.

Alpha-synuclein is a protein known to form sticky clumps, known as Lewy bodies, in the brain cells of people with Parkinson’s and some types of dementia. These clumps are associated with the death of dopamine producing nerve cells which causes the motor symptoms associated with Parkinson’s, including freezing, tremors and slowness of movement along with the ‘hidden’ symptoms such as anxiety and memory problems.

Funded by the charity Parkinson’s UK, the study investigated whether the αSyn-RT-QuIC method could be used as an early diagnostic test or measure of progression for Parkinson’s. The study was carried out in people with Parkinson’s taking part in the Discovery study of the OPDC, which is collecting a wealth of data from a specific group of people over time to better understand Parkinson's. Previous studies have shown potential for this test as a way to identify people with the conditions.¹

In a recent survey of more than 2,000 people with Parkinson’s carried out by Parkinson’s UK, more than a quarter (26 per cent) reported they were misdiagnosed with a different condition before receiving the correct Parkinson’s diagnosis.² The signs and symptoms of Parkinson’s can overlap with other conditions such as multiple system atrophy (MSA) and essential tremor. By having a tool for diagnosis that can be used in the clinic to distinguish between people who have MSA and Parkinson’s but also measure the progression of the condition, delayed diagnosis can be avoided.

Europe’s Earliest Female Infant Burial Reveals a Mesolithic Society that Honored Its Youngest Members

Photo Credit: TK

Working in a cave in Liguria, Italy, an international team of researchers uncovered the oldest documented burial of an infant girl in the European archaeological record. The richly decorated 10,000-year-old burial included over 60 pierced shell beads, four pendants, and an eagle-owl talon alongside the remains. The discovery offers insight into the early Mesolithic period, from which few recorded burials are known, and the seemingly egalitarian funerary treatment of an infant female.

“The evolution and development of how early humans buried their dead as revealed in the archaeological record has enormous cultural significance,” says Jamie Hodgkins, PhD, paleoanthropologist and associate professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado Denver.

The new study is published in Scientific Reports.

The crew first discovered the burial in 2017 and fully excavated the delicate remains in July 2018. Hodgkins worked alongside her husband Caley Orr, PhD, paleoanthropologist and anatomist at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Their team of project co-directors included Italian collaborators Fabio Negrino, University of Genoa, and Stefano Benazzi, University of Bologna, as well as researchers from the University of Montreal, Washington University, University of Ferrara, University of Tubingen, and the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University.

Marathon experiment reveals quirks of quarks

University of Adelaide experts, who are part of the international community of researchers investigating the fundamental physical properties of atoms, may have come across a new paradigm for the way atomic nuclei are built.

“We have been working on the theoretical analysis of an amazing experiment, Marathon, which took 20 years from conception to publication,” said Professor Anthony Thomas, Elder Professor of Physics, the University of Adelaide.

“The original aim was to accurately measure the distribution of quarks, especially the down quark, as a function of momentum.”

A quark is a type of elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. All commonly observable matter is composed of up quarks, down quarks and electrons.

“Understanding how quarks work in relation to a proton’s momentum is a fundamental property which defied measurement ever since quarks were discovered 50 years ago,” said Professor Thomas.

“It tests our understanding of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the fundamental theory of the strong force.”

All the known forces of nature can be traced to four fundamental forces: gravitational, electromagnetic, strong, and weak. They govern how objects or particles interact and how certain particles decay.

"Our analysis of the Marathon data that we started 20 years ago has provided the first experimental hint for the existence of this isovector EMC effect."Professor Anthony Thomas

Argonne scientists advance global climate models by embarking on two new field campaigns

Climate projections suggest that rising global temperatures will increase the intensity of extreme weather, such as droughts, hurricanes and heat waves. But when, where or how specifically these events will emerge is still uncertain.

To better predict future changes, scientists need to improve the accuracy of their weather and climate models, and for that they need data. One way they’re obtaining this data is through the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility, a multi-laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility.

“One of the scientific goals of SAIL is to understand, from the top of the Earth’s atmosphere to the bedrock of the Rocky Mountains, how moisture, rainfall and snowfall make their way through the atmosphere into the layers of rock and soil, and then eventually into the Colorado River.” — Argonne atmospheric scientist Scott Collis

Scientists from DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, and from laboratories and universities across the country, use ARM to obtain data to better represent climate-related processes in global-scale models. Through two new field campaigns — Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL) and Tracking Aerosol Convection Interactions ExpeRiment (TRACER) — Argonne researchers will work with multidisciplinary teams to gather data on key climate-related processes such as precipitation, cloud formation and aerosols interactions.

“These insights will serve to enhance our basic understanding of climate and be used to improve the accuracy of climate and weather models and simulations,” said Argonne atmospheric scientist Scott Collis, a co-investigator in both campaigns.

Mountain watersheds provide 60 to 90% of water resources worldwide, but there is still much that scientists don’t know about the physical processes and interactions that affect hydrology in these ecosystems. (Video by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.)

Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL)

Video by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

SAIL will deploy more than four dozen instruments across the East River Watershed in Crested Butte, Colorado. The region includes portions of the Rocky Mountains and tributaries that drain into the Colorado River, which supports over 40 million people.

Mountainous watersheds, like the one at East River, hold the majority of the world’s water reserves. Scientists need to learn a lot more about how climate change will impact their future water supply to make models more precise. Addressing this gap, the SAIL campaign will focus on analyzing the full life cycle of water within the region.

“One of the scientific goals of SAIL is to understand, from the top of the Earth’s atmosphere to the bedrock of the Rocky Mountains, how moisture, rainfall and snowfall make their way through the atmosphere into the layers of rock and soil, and then eventually into the Colorado River,” Collis said. In order to accomplish this goal, SAIL will collocate ARM atmospheric observations with the ongoing surface and subsurface hydrologic observations from the DOE Watershed Function Science Focus Area (SFA) managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).

During the two-year campaign, scientists will analyze atmospheric processes and land-atmosphere interactions that impact water delivery. These include things like cloud formation, precipitation, snowfall or rainfall interactions with plants and roots, and the mechanics of underground water transport.

Parker Solar Probe data bolsters theories in long-running solar riddle

Data collected by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe bolsters theories previously put by University of Michigan researchers about one of the sun’s greatest mysteries—why its outer atmosphere is hotter than its fiery surface.

Two years ago, U-M engineers predicted when the probe would pass a constantly moving, invisible barrier in the sun’s upper atmosphere called the Alfven point. They also anticipated a strange phenomenon beyond that point, which heats elements to different temperatures.

Findings announced by NASA, contained in a trio of research papers, support the accuracy of both predictions. The data behind those studies expands what we know about the sun’s corona, helping hone predictive modeling to protect Earth’s power grid from potentially damaging solar activity—when the sun hurls gobs of its plasma at our planet.

“While we don’t know how the heating happens, we were able to predict where it happens, and now Parker Solar Probe has entered this zone of heating,” said Justin Kasper, U-M professor of climate and space sciences, a principal investigator for the Parker mission and first author of one of the papers appearing in Physical Review Letters.

“It’s hard to overstate how important this is for our understanding of space weather, as now we know the spacecraft will be able to see how heating happens in the corona. Imagine trying to predict weather patterns and finally being able to measure how the air is heating before a storm.”

Researchers test physics of coral as an indicator of reef health

New research shows that physics measurements of just a small portion of reef can be used to assess the health of an entire reef system. The findings may help scientists grasp how these important ecosystems will respond to a changing climate.

Vast amounts of energy flow around the ocean as waves, tides and currents, eventually impacting coasts, including coral reefs that provide food, income and coastal protection to more than 500 million people. This water movement is foundational to reef success, bringing nutrients and food and removing waste, yet far less research has been focused on the physics in comparison to the biology of these living communities.

Stanford scientists recently addressed this imbalance by demonstrating that measuring the physics of just a small portion of reef with a single instrument can reveal insights about the health of an entire reef system. The findings point to low-cost methods for scaling up monitoring efforts of these enigmatic living structures, which are at risk of devastation in a changing climate. The results appeared in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans Dec. 14.

“This approach is like building a weather station for coral reefs,” said lead study author Mathilde Lindhart, a PhD student in civil and environmental engineering. “If we have a couple of weather stations around, we can then determine the weather everywhere on the reef.”

Milky Way’s supermassive black hole in deepest images

These annotated images, obtained with the GRAVITY instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) between March and July 2021, show stars orbiting very close to Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. One of these stars, named S29, was observed as it was making its closest approach to the black hole at 13 billion kilometers, just 90 times the distance between the Sun and Earth. Another star, named S300, was detected for the first time in the new VLTI observations.  To obtain the new images, the astronomers used a machine-learning technique, called Information Field Theory. They made a model of how the real sources may look, simulated how GRAVITY would see them, and compared this simulation with GRAVITY observations. This allowed them to find and track stars around Sagittarius A* with unparalleled depth and accuracy. 
Credit: ESO/GRAVITY collaboration

The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (ESO’s VLTI) has obtained the deepest and sharpest images to date of the region around the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. The new images zoom in 20 times more than what was possible before the VLTI and have helped astronomers find a never-before-seen star close to the black hole. By tracking the orbits of stars at the center of our Milky Way, the team has made the most precise measurement yet of the black hole’s mass.

New resistance-busting antibiotic combination could extend the use of ‘last-resort’ antibiotics

New resistance-busting antibiotic combination could extend the use of ‘last-resort’ antibiotics

Scientists have discovered a new potential treatment that has the ability to reverse antibiotic resistance in bacteria that cause conditions such as sepsis, pneumonia, and urinary tract infections.

Carbapenems, such as meropenem, are a group of vital often ‘last-resort’ antibiotics used to treat serious, multi-drug resistant infections when other antibiotics, such as penicillin, have failed. But some bacteria have found a way to survive treatment with carbapenems, by producing enzymes called metallo-beta-lactamases (MBLs) that break down the carbapenem antibiotics, stopping them from working.

Highly collaborative research, conducted by scientists from the Ineos Oxford Institute (IOI) for Antimicrobial Research at the University of Oxford and several institutions across Europe, found that the new class of enzyme blockers, called indole carboxylates, can stop MBL resistance enzymes working leaving the antibiotic free to attack and kill bacteria such as E. coli in the lab and in infections in mice.

The new research, published in Nature Chemistry, was funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) through the European Lead Factory (ELF) and the European Gram-Negative Antibacterial Engine (ENABLE) programs.