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Tag: Newswise

  • Susan G. Komen® Applauds House Introduction of Bipartisan Metastatic Breast Cancer Access to Care Act

    Susan G. Komen® Applauds House Introduction of Bipartisan Metastatic Breast Cancer Access to Care Act

    Newswise — Susan G. Komen®, the world’s leading breast cancer organization, applauds House lawmakers for their leadership on bipartisan legislation that would make financial benefits and health insurance immediately available to people living with metastatic breast cancer. In the 117th Congress, this bill was supported by more than 50 percent of members of the House of Representatives.

    The Metastatic Breast Cancer Access to Care Act (H.R.549) waives a five-month waiting period for Social Security Disability Insurance and a subsequent 24-month waiting period for Medicare benefits. People diagnosed with MBC, on average, don’t live long enough to receive both benefits, yet most face thousands of dollars in medical expenses every month without the means to pay their bills.

    “Many living with metastatic breast cancer do not have the luxury of waiting for the health care services and financial support they need. Those receiving this devastating diagnosis face enough challenges without the added burden of long and arduous waiting periods, which create barriers to the care patients so desperately need, and need now,” said Molly Guthrie, Vice President of Advocacy and Public Policy at Susan G. Komen.

    An estimated 168,000 Americans live with MBC, breast cancer that has spread beyond the breast to other parts of the body – often the brain, bones, lungs and liver. Treatments exist for MBC but there is no cure for it. The average life expectancy is three years after diagnosis and MBC is responsible for the majority of the breast cancer deaths each year.

    “In New York, over 16,800 women are diagnosed with breast cancer each year and about 2,500 women die from the disease annually. Long Island has among the highest occurrences of breast cancer in the country. These numbers and the real people they represent make this issue deeply personal for me and for my constituents. Roughly 90 percent of breast cancer deaths are a result of metastatic disease and the life expectancy of an individual with metastatic breast cancer is anywhere between 4 and 36 months. Given this timeframe, it is outrageous to double the suffering of those living with this horrible disease by making them wait to gain access to health benefits that they are immediately eligible for. This bill waives these onerous waiting periods, relieving the potential financial burden on those with the disease, and allowing them to focus on fighting the cancer,” said Rep. Andrew R. Garbarino (R-NY-02), bill sponsor.

    Added Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL-14), original co-sponsor of the bill, “The statistics are startling. In 2022, it is estimated that 43,780 people died from breast cancer in the United States – 90 percent as a result of metastatic breast cancer (MBC). To save lives and improve breast cancer outcomes, we must invest in treatments and cures and increase access to affordable, quality care for individuals with MBC. Immediately connecting recently-diagnosed individuals with access to treatment can improve outcomes, and our bipartisan bill would eliminate barriers and reduce current health disparities in care. People diagnosed with MBC should not have to worry about long waiting periods for eligibility to care and I look forward to working with my colleague, Rep. Andrew Garbarino, to deliver financial security and critical care to families.”

    Passage of the MBC Access to Care Act is a top legislative priority for Susan G. Komen this year. “Komen applauds Reps. Garbarino and Castor for their leadership in reintroducing the Metastatic Breast Cancer Access to Care Act on behalf of those living with MBC,” Guthrie added. “We look forward to building off of previous support for this legislation and passing the bill as soon as possible to provide much-needed help to those who are living with the disease now and will be diagnosed in the future.”

    Susan G. Komen

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  • Reducing anesthetics during surgery decreases greenhouse gases without affecting patient care, study shows

    Reducing anesthetics during surgery decreases greenhouse gases without affecting patient care, study shows

    Newswise — ORLANDO, Fla. — Anesthesiologists can play a role in reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming by decreasing the amount of anesthetic gas provided during procedures without compromising patient care, suggests new research being presented at the American Society of Anesthesiologists’ ADVANCE 2023, the Anesthesiology Business Event.

    Inhaled anesthetics used during general anesthesia are estimated to be responsible for 0.01% to 0.10% of the total worldwide carbon dioxide equivalent emission. For example, an hour of surgery using the inhaled anesthetic desflurane is equivalent to driving up to 470 miles, according to one study.1 Carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse gas that traps heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, contributing to global warming.

     “Global warming is affecting our daily life more and more, and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions has become crucial,” said Mohamed Fayed, M.D., M.Sc., lead author of the study and senior anesthesia resident at Henry Ford Health in Detroit. “No matter how small each effect is, it will add up. As anesthesiologists, we can contribute significantly to this cause by making little changes in our daily practice — such as lowering the flow of anesthetic gas — without affecting patient care.”

    While most general anesthesia procedures require high fresh gas flow (FGF) at the beginning and end of the procedure to achieve the desired effect quickly, it is safe and effective to lower the flow during the rest of the procedure, Dr. Fayed said. As part of the initiative to reduce FGF overall, the researchers educated anesthesiologists at their institution about the benefits of dialing down the anesthetic gas flow during the procedure, including through departmental presentations, newsletter articles, posters placed in work areas and emails. They also removed desflurane from their operating rooms because it produces the most significant carbon dioxide emissions from among the existing inhaled anesthetics.

    In the study of more than 13,000 patients, the authors set a goal of an average FGF of 3 liters per minute (L/min) or less for procedures. In March 2021, prior to the intervention, authors determined that FGF was 5-6 L/min in many cases, and only 65% of cases achieved an FGF of3 L/min or less. By July 2021, they recorded an average FGF of 3 L/min or less in 93% of cases. The researchers now are aiming to reduce the FGF to less than 2 L/min throughout the system.   

    The initiative is part of a quality improvement project called the Multicenter Perioperative Outcome Group, which includes more than 60 anesthesia practices. The ultimate goal is to measure actual carbon footprints from anesthetic agent waste for each surgical case, Dr. Fayed noted, but that will require significant modifications and costs.

    Provided through a mask, inhaled anesthetics such as desflurane, sevoflurane and isoflurane are given to patients during general anesthesia so that they are unconscious during a major operation, such as open-heart surgery. Another inhaled anesthetic, nitrous oxide, sometimes is given during childbirth or during dental procedures. Inhaled anesthetics are not used for patients who undergo sedation, which is typically used for minimally invasive procedures, such as colonoscopies. Nor is it used during regional anesthesia, which is used for childbirth or surgeries of the arm, leg or abdomen and numbs only part of the body with the patient remaining aware.

    “For a long time, there was a notion that the greenhouse effect caused in health care settings was an inevitable and unavoidable cost of providing patient care,” said Dr. Fayed. “But we have learned that reducing anesthetic gas flow is one of the many ways health care can lessen its contribution to the global warming crisis, along with reducing waste, turning off lights and equipment when not in use and challenging practice habits, as long as they don’t compromise patient care.”

    Masakatsu Nanamori, M.D., is the lead attending physician on the study.

    THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF ANESTHESIOLOGISTS

    Founded in 1905, the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) is an educational, research and scientific society with more than 56,000 members organized to raise and maintain the standards of the medical practice of anesthesiology. ASA is committed to ensuring physician anesthesiologists evaluate and supervise the medical care of patients before, during and after surgery to provide the highest quality and safest care every patient deserves.

    For more information on the field of anesthesiology, visit the American Society of Anesthesiologists online at asahq.org. To learn more about the role physician anesthesiologists play in ensuring patient safety, visit asahq.org/MadeforThisMoment. Like ASA on Facebook, follow ASALifeline on Twitter.

    1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3522493/#:~:text=Using%20desflurane%20for%201%20hour,driving%2C%20according%20to%20the%20study.&text=The%20optimal%20(lowest%20environmental%20impact,it%20would%20minimize%20anesthetic%20use

    American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA)

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  • Gum infection linked to increased risk of heart arrhythmia

    Gum infection linked to increased risk of heart arrhythmia

    Newswise — Periodontitis, a gum disease, can cause various dental problems such as bad breath, bleeding gums, and tooth loss. Additionally, research suggests it may also be linked to more serious health issues, such as those related to the heart.

    Team found a significant correlation between periodontitis and fibrosis scarring to an appendage of the heart’s left atrium that can lead to an irregular heartbeat called atrial fibrillation in a sample of 76 patients with cardiac disease. 

    “Periodontitis is associated with a long-standing inflammation, and inflammation plays a key role in atrial fibrosis progression and atrial fibrillation pathogenesis. Researcher hypothesized that periodontitis exacerbates atrial fibrosis. This histological study of left atrial appendages aimed to clarify the relationship between clinical periodontitis status and degree of atrial fibrosis.

    The left atrial appendages were surgically removed from the patients, and the researchers analyzed the tissue to establish the correlation between severity of the atrial fibrosis and severity of the gum disease. They found that the worse the periodontitis, the worse the fibrosis, suggesting that the inflammation of gums may intensify inflammation and disease in the heart. 

    Study provides basic evidence that periodontitis can aggravate atrial fibrosis and can be a novel modifiable risk factor for atrial fibrillation. According to researcher,for  improving other risk factors such as weight, activity levels, tobacco and alcohol use, periodontal care could aid in comprehensive atrial fibrillation management. However, she cautioned that this study did not establish a causal relationship, meaning that while gum disease and atrial fibrosis degrees of severity appear connected, researchers have not found that one definitively leads to the other. 

    While research suggests a connection between periodontitis and atrial fibrosis, further evidence is needed to establish a causal relationship and to determine if periodontal care can reduce fibrosis. The goal of the study is to confirm that periodontitis is a modifiable risk factor for atrial fibrillation and to encourage dental specialists to play a role in comprehensive atrial fibrillation management. Periodontitis is an easily modifiable risk factor with lower cost compared to other known atrial fibrillation risk factors, thus the results of this study could have a significant impact on the health of people worldwide.

    Next, the researchers said they hope to conduct future clinical trials to clarify if periodontal intervention reduces atrial fibrillation occurrence and improves patient outcomes. 

    Hiroshima University

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  • DiCaprio and Sheth name new species of tree-dwelling snakes, threatened by mining

    DiCaprio and Sheth name new species of tree-dwelling snakes, threatened by mining

    Newswise — Five new drop-dead-gorgeous tree-dwelling snake species were discovered in the jungles of Ecuador, Colombia, and Panama. Conservationists Leonardo DiCaprio, Brian Sheth, Re:wild, and Nature and Culture International chose the names for three of them in honor of loved ones while raising awareness about the issue of rainforest destruction at the hands of open-pit mining operations. The research was conducted by Ecuadorian biologist Alejandro Arteaga, an Explorers Club Discovery Expedition Grantee, and Panamanian biologist Abel Batista.

    The mountainous areas of the upper-Amazon rainforest and the Chocó-Darién jungles are world-renowned for the wealth of new species continually discovered in this region. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that they also house some of the largest gold and copper deposits in the world. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the proliferation of illegal open-pit gold and copper mining operations in the jungles of Ecuador, Colombia, and Panama reached a critical level and is decimating tree-dwelling snake populations.

    Neotropical snail-eating snakes (genera Sibon and Dipsas) have a unique lifestyle that makes them particularly prone to the effects of gold and copper mining. First, they are arboreal, so they cannot survive in areas devoid of vegetation, such as in open-pit mines. Second, they feed exclusively on slugs and snails, a soft-bodied type of prey that occurs mostly along streams and rivers and is presumably declining because of the pollution of water bodies.

    “When I first explored the rainforests of Nangaritza River in 2014, I remember thinking the place was an undiscovered and unspoiled paradise,” says Alejandro Arteaga, author of the research study on these snakes, which was published in the journal ZooKeys. “In fact, the place is called Nuevo Paraíso in Spanish, but it is a paradise no more. Hundreds of illegal gold miners using backhoe loaders have now taken possession of the river margins, which are now destroyed and turned into rubble.”

    The presence of a conservation area may not be enough to keep the snail-eating snakes safe. In southeastern Ecuador, illegal miners are closing in on Maycu Reserve, ignoring landowner rights and even making violent threats to anyone opposed to the extraction of gold. Even rangers and their families are tempted to quit their jobs to work in illegal mining, as it is much more lucrative. A local park ranger reports that by extracting gold from the Nangaritza River, local people can earn what would otherwise be a year’s salary in just a few weeks. “Sure, it is illegal and out of control, but the authorities are too afraid to intervene,” says the park ranger. “Miners are just too violent and unpredictable.”

    In Panama, large-scale copper mining is affecting the habitat of two of the new species: Sibon irmelindicaprioae and S. canopy. Unlike the illegal gold miners in Ecuador and Colombia, the extraction in this case is legal and at the hands of a single corporation: Minera Panamá S.A., a subsidiary of the Canadian-based mining and metals company First Quantum Minerals Ltd. Although the forest destruction at the Panamanian mines is larger in extent and can easily be seen from space, its borders are clearly defined and the company is under the purview of local environmental authorities.

    “Both legal and illegal open-pit mines are uninhabitable for the snail-eating snakes,” says Arteaga, “but the legal mines may be the lesser of two evils. At the very least they respect the limit of nearby protected areas, answer to a higher authority, and are presumably unlikely to enact violence on park rangers, researchers, and conservationists.”

    Sibon canopy, one of the newly described species, appears to have fairly stable populations inside protected areas of Panama, although elsewhere nearly 40% of its habitat has been destroyed. At Parque Nacional Omar Torrijos, where it is found, there has been a reduction in the number of park rangers (already very few for such a large protected area). This makes it easier for loggers and poachers to reach previously unspoiled habitats that are essential for the survival of the snakes.

    Lack of employment and the high price of gold aggravate the situation. No legal activity can compete against the “gold bonanza.” More and more often, farmers, park rangers, and indigenous people are turning to illegal activities to provide for their families, particularly during crisis situations like the COVID-19 pandemic, when NGO funding was at its lowest.

    “These new species of snake are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of new species discoveries in this region, but if illegal mining continues at this rate, there may not be an opportunity to make any future discoveries,” concludes Alejandro Arteaga.

    Fortunately, three NGOs in Ecuador and Panama (Khamai, Nature and Culture International, and Adopta Bosque) have already made it their mission to save the snake’s habitat from the emerging gold mining frenzy. Supporting these organizations is vital, because their quest for immediate land protection is the only way to save the snakes from extinction.

     

    Original source:

    Arteaga A, Batista A (2023) A consolidated phylogeny of snail-eating snakes (Serpentes, Dipsadini), with the description of five new species from Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama. ZooKeys 1143: 1-49. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.1143.93601

     

    Support Khamai Foundation’s mission to save the upper Amazon rainforest from gold mining: https://www.khamai.bio/save_amazon_rainforest_from_gold_mining.html

    Support Nature and Culture International: https://www.natureandculture.org

    Support Fundación Adopta Bosque: https://adoptabosque.org

    Pensoft Publishers

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  • Spinal Cord Injury: Can Brain and Nerve Stimulation Restore Movement?

    Spinal Cord Injury: Can Brain and Nerve Stimulation Restore Movement?

    Newswise — NEW YORK, NY–A nerve stimulation therapy developed at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons is showing promise in animal studies and may eventually allow people with spinal cord injuries to regain function of their arms.

    “The stimulation technique targets the nervous system connections spared by injury,” says Jason Carmel, MD, PhD, a neurologist at Columbia University and NewYork-Presbyterian who is leading the research, “enabling them to take over some of the lost function.”

    The findings were published in December in the journal Brain.

    A personal quest to develop treatments for people with paralysis

    In 1999, when Carmel was a second-year medical student at Columbia, his identical twin brother suffered a spinal cord injury, paralyzing him from the chest down and limiting the use of his hands.

    Carmel’s life changed that day, too. His brother’s injury ultimately led Carmel to become a neurologist and a neuroscientist, with the goal of developing new treatments to restore movement in people living with paralysis.

    In recent years, some high-profile studies of spinal cord electrical stimulation have allowed a few people with incomplete paralysis to begin to stand and take steps again.

    Carmel’s approach is different because it targets the arm and hand and because it pairs brain and spinal cord stimulation, with electrical stimulation of the brain followed by stimulation of the spinal cord. “When the two signals converge at the level of the spinal cord, within about 10 milliseconds of each other, we get the strongest effect,” he says, “and the combination appears to enable the remaining connections in the spinal cord to take control.”

    In his latest study, Carmel tested his technique—called spinal cord associative plasticity (SCAP)—on rats with moderate spinal cord injuries. Ten days after injury, the rats were randomized to receive 30 minutes of SCAP for 10 days or sham stimulation. At the end of the study period, rats that received SCAP targeted to their arms were significantly better at handling food, compared to those in the control group, and had near-normal reflexes.

    “The improvements in both function and physiology persisted for as long as they were measured, up to 50 days,” Carmel says.

    The findings suggest that SCAP causes the synapses (connections between neurons) or the neurons themselves to undergo lasting change. “The paired signals essentially mimic the normal sensory-motor integration that needs to come together to perform skilled movement,” says Carmel. 

    From mice to people

    If the same technique works in people with spinal cord injuries, patients could regain something else they lost in the injury: independence. Many spinal cord stimulation studies focus on walking, but “if you ask people with cervical spinal cord injury, which is the majority, what movement they want to get back, they say hand and arm function,” Carmel says. “Hand and arm function allows people to be more independent, like moving from a bed to a wheelchair or dressing and feeding themselves.”

    Carmel is now testing SCAP on spinal cord injury patients at Columbia, Weill Cornell, and the VA Bronx Healthcare System in a clinical trial sponsored by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. The stimulation will be done either during a clinically indicated surgery or noninvasively, using magnetic stimulation of brain and stimulation of the skin on the front and back of the neck. Both techniques are routinely performed in clinical settings and are known to be safe.

    In the trial, the researchers hope to learn more about how SCAP works and how the timing and strength of the signals affect motor responses in the fingers and hands. This would lay the groundwork for future trials to test the technique’s ability to meaningfully improve hand and arm function.

    Looking farther ahead, the researchers think that the approach could be used to improve movement and sensation in patients with lower-body paralysis.

    In the meantime, Jason Carmel’s twin is working, married, and raising twins of his own. “He has a full life, but I’m hoping we can get more function back for him and other people with similar injuries,” says Carmel.

     

    More information

    The study is titled “Spinal cord associative plasticity improves forelimb sensorimotor function after cervical injury.”

    Other contributors: Ajay Pal, HongGeun Park, Aditya Ramamurthy, Ahmet S. Asan, Thelma Bethea, and Meenu Johnkutty (all at Columbia).

    The study was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (R01NS115470) and the Travis Roy Foundation.

    Jason Carmel is a co-inventor of a patent for the use of softening spinal electrodes. He also has equity in Backstop Neural, which seeks to commercialize the devices for humans. The authors declare no other competing financial interests.

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    Columbia University Irving Medical Center

    Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC) is a clinical, research, and educational campus located in New York City, and is one of the oldest academic medical centers in the United States. CUIMC is home to four professional colleges and schools (Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, Mailman School of Public Health, College of Dental Medicine, and School of Nursing) that are global leaders in their fields. CUIMC is committed to providing inclusive and equitable health and medical education, scientific research, and patient care, and working together with our local upper Manhattan community—one of New York City’s most diverse neighborhoods. For more information, please visit cuimc.columbia.edu.  

     

    Columbia University Irving Medical Center

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  • A New Assay Screening Method Shows Therapeutic Promise for Treating Auto-Immune Disease

    A New Assay Screening Method Shows Therapeutic Promise for Treating Auto-Immune Disease

    Newswise — Oak Brook, IL (January 27, 2022) – The January 2023 issue of SLAS Discovery contains a collection of four full-length articles and one technical brief covering cancer research, high-throughput screening (HTS) assay development and other drug discovery exploration.

    This month’s featured article, “A high-throughput MALDI-TOF MS biochemical screen for small molecule inhibitors of the antigen aminopeptidase ERAP1,” by Müller, et al, presents a newly developed matrix assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) drug discovery assay for the endoplasmic reticulum aminopeptidase 1 (ERAP1). The dysregulation of ERAP1 has been associated with various auto-immune and auto-inflammatory diseases, making ERAP1 a high-profile target in drug discovery.

    The research team behind this study utilized an existing ERAP1 RapidFire MS (RF MS) assay on which to base their MALDI-TOF assay, producing greater assay stability, reproducibility and robustness for the MALDI-TOF platform. When results were compared between the pre-established RF MS and the MALDI-TOF platforms, shorter sample cycle times, reduced reagent consumption and a lower tight-binding limit were all advantages of the MALDI-TOF platform.

    Read this original research article to learn how the MALDI-TOF platform may detect other difficult targets, along with more research articles in the January issue of SLAS Discovery.

    The January issue of SLAS Discovery includes these additional articles:

    Access to the January issue of SLAS Discovery is available at https://www.slas-technology.org/issue/S2472-6303(22)X0007-1

    *****

    SLAS Discovery reports how scientists develop and use novel technologies and/or approaches to provide and characterize chemical and biological tools to understand and treat human disease. The journal focuses on drug discovery sciences with a strong record of scientific rigor and impact, reporting on research that:

    • Enables and improves target validation
    • Evaluates current drug discovery technologies
    • Provides novel research tools
    • Incorporates research approaches that enhance depth of knowledge and drug discovery success

    SLAS (Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening) is an international professional society of academic, industry and government life sciences researchers and the developers and providers of laboratory automation technology. The SLAS mission is to bring together researchers in academia, industry and government to advance life sciences discovery and technology via education, knowledge exchange and global community building.

    SLAS Discovery: Advancing the Science of Drug Discovery, 2021 Impact Factor 3.341. Editor-in-Chief Robert M. Campbell, Ph.D., Redona Therapeutics, Watertown, MA (USA).

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    SLAS

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  • Brookhaven Lab Battery Scientist, Hydrogeologist, and DOE Site Office Manager Among Secretary of Energy’s 2022 Honorees

    Brookhaven Lab Battery Scientist, Hydrogeologist, and DOE Site Office Manager Among Secretary of Energy’s 2022 Honorees

    Newswise — UPTON, NY—On January 24, 2023, U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm honored 44 teams with the Secretary of Energy Achievement Award and five individuals for their work. Among the recipients are Distinguished Professor Esther Takeuchi, a battery researcher with a joint appointment at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University; Douglas Paquette, a hydrogeologist in Brookhaven Lab’s Environmental Protection Division; and Robert Gordon, manager of the DOE-Brookhaven Site Office that oversees operations at Brookhaven Lab.

    “These awards are among the highest forms of internal, non-monetary recognition DOE Federal and contractor employees can receive,” Secretary Granholm said in a statement. “They are bestowed on individuals and teams in recognition of service which goes above and beyond, and for contributions having lasting impacts on both DOE and on our great Nation. Along with the entire DOE leadership team, I am so proud of the accomplishments of our award recipients. Their commitment to achieving DOE’s mission is an inspiration.”

    Takeuchi was honored for her role on an 80-member team of scientists and support staff from across the DOE National Laboratory complex who facilitated eight virtual panel discussions as part of a Congressional briefing series entitled “Driving U.S. Competitiveness & Innovation: A New Era of Science for Transformative Industry.” The team created a platform for American industry leaders and National Laboratory scientists to speak directly with Congressional staffers. Their goal was to discuss the productivity of public-private collaborations to accelerate emergent technologies and American leadership in artificial intelligence, microelectronics, quantum information sciences, the bioeconomy, and materials and chemistry for clean energy.

    This effort highlighted how capabilities at DOE National Laboratories and their User Facilities (including the National Synchrotron Light Source II and Center for Functional Nanomaterials at Brookhaven Lab) have been used to advance cutting-edge industries and American technical leadership. The discussions also emphasized how partnerships between DOE-supported researchers and American companies can accelerate the Nation’s competitiveness and innovation and address workforce development challenges to prepare for these emergent industries in ways that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.

    “I was delighted to participate in the topic of ‘Materials and Chemistry for Clean Energy,’” Takeuchi said. “This forum provided a venue to discuss the opportunity for impact of federally funded research and the national labs in strengthening U.S. industrial competitiveness. My discussions featured energy storage as critical to the clean energy transformation including electrifying transportation and adoption of clean energy generation.”

    Paquette and Gordon both served on a team honored for helping DOE formulate a strategy for addressing the impacts of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). PFAS are a class of widely manufactured chemicals that in recent years have been identified as emerging contaminants of concern in many communities across the United States. Historically, they have been widely used in products such as nonstick pans, water-repellent clothing, and firefighting foams. 

    National focus on PFAS has led to a wide array of Federal and state-level regulatory approaches and policy initiatives. The PFAS Policy Development Team, made up of representatives from multiple DOE offices, coordinated efforts within the DOE and with external stakeholders to better understand and manage the regulations, risks, and liabilities associated with these substances.

    This work enabled DOE to gather information about current and past uses of PFAS; develop policies, guidance documents, and educational materials to support more effective efforts to manage PFAS-related liabilities and constructively engage with internal and external stakeholders; and identify research needs and opportunities to support DOE efforts to develop solutions to PFAS challenges. The coordinated efforts of this team have positioned DOE to engage constructively on an issue of high-level national concern in an informed, proactive, and effective manner.

    “I am honored to be part of the team that was recognized by the Secretary of Energy,” Paquette said. “Over the past four years, the DOE has been proactive in trying to understand the extent of PFAS contamination resulting from past operations and to prevent any new impacts to the environment.”

    The PFAS team recently produced three noteworthy documents including the DOE PFAS Roadmap, the DOE Initial site-by-site PFAS survey, and the DOE Initial PFAS Research and Development Plan. These documents can be found on DOE’s PFAS website at Energy.gov/pfas.

    “Each of these documents highlights Brookhaven Lab’s contributions to PFAS R&D solutions, novel approaches to PFAS remediation, and transparency with the community and regulators,” said Gordon. “It’s not a coincidence that Brookhaven Lab is prominent in DOE’s key PFAS documents; it is because of Brookhaven’s recognized expertise, experience, and willingness to serve as a resource across the DOE enterprise.”

    Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.

    Follow @BrookhavenLab on Twitter or find us on Facebook.

    Brookhaven National Laboratory

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  • Celebrating the Upcoming sPHENIX Detector

    Celebrating the Upcoming sPHENIX Detector

    Newswise — UPTON, NY— Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, Director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science, visited DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory on Jan. 27 to celebrate the fast-approaching debut of a state-of-the-art particle detector known as sPHENIX. The house-sized, 1000-ton detector is slated to begin collecting data at Brookhaven Lab’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a DOE Office of Science User Facility for nuclear physics research, this spring.

    Like a massive, 3D digital camera, sPHENIX will capture snapshots of 15,000 particle collisions per second to provide scientists with data to better understand the properties of quark-gluon plasma (QGP)—an ultra-hot and ultra-dense soup of subatomic particles that are the building blocks of nearly all visible matter. RHIC collisions briefly recreate the conditions of the universe a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, some 14 billion years ago. Studying QGP can help physicists learn about the origins of matter as we know it and how nature’s strongest force binds quarks and gluons into protons and neutrons, the particles that make up ordinary atomic nuclei.  

    “Brookhaven National Laboratory continues to be a central hub of nuclear physics expertise, making it the world’s premier facility for studying the quark gluon plasma,” said Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, DOE’s Director of the Office of Science. “The sPHENIX detector, and the talented collaboration that will operate it, will strive to give us that answer and the final piece of the quark-gluon puzzle.”

    Brookhaven Lab Director Doon Gibbs said, “sPHENIX marks a key milestone in the RHIC science program. It will allow us to explore many questions raised by incredible discoveries already made at RHIC, especially the surprising liquid nature of the quark-gluon plasma, and lay the foundation for future discoveries at the Electron-Ion Collider. I congratulate and thank all the scientists, engineers, technicians, and support staff at Brookhaven—and sPHENIX collaborators around the world—who have worked together to make this detector possible.”

    At the core of sPHENIX is a 20-ton cylindrical superconducting magnet that will bend the trajectories of charged particles produced in RHIC collisions. The magnet is surrounded and filled with subsystems that include complex silicon detectors, a Time Projection Chamber, and calorimeters that will capture details of particle jets, heavy quarks, and rare, high-momentum particles fast and accurately. These advanced particle tracking systems will allow nuclear physicists to probe properties of the quark-gluon plasma with higher precision than ever before to understand how the interactions between quarks and gluons give rise to the unique, liquid-like behavior of QGP.

    “Our detector employs 100,000 silicon photomultipliers, calorimeter elements built using 3-D printing techniques and a 300 million channel radiation-hard silicon detector that has its sensor and electronics integrated into a monolithic device,” said sPHENIX project director Ed O’Brien.

    Many sPHENIX detector components build on experience gained throughout RHIC operations and draw on expertise throughout the nuclear and particle physics communities, including running experiments at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider.

    “These technologies were barely on the drawing board when RHIC began operations over 20 years ago,” O’Brien said. “Now they are a reality in sPHENIX.”

    “We’ve pulled together the field’s most sophisticated technologies and pushed them to new limits to design a detector unlike any that have come before,” said Brookhaven Lab physicist and sPHENIX co-spokesperson David Morrison. “It’s really a technological marvel.”

    sPHENIX will generate an enormous amount of data to realize its science goals. Developing the capabilities to collect, store, share, and analyze that data will help push the limits of data handling in ways that could benefit other fields including climate modeling, public health, and any fields that require the analysis of huge datasets.

    Learn more about sPHENIX and watch as some of its components came together.

    sPHENIX was built by an international collaboration of physicists, engineers, and technicians from 80 universities and labs from 14 countries—close to 400 collaborators overall, including students. Students, for example, joined efforts to assemble and test complex detector subsystems, studied cost-effective materials for high-speed electronics, and contributed to accelerator improvements that will increase collision rates at RHIC.

    “These hands-on educational experiences are providing valuable training for our nation’s future scientists, technicians, and engineers,” said sPHENIX co-spokesperson Gunther Roland, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Their expertise and future work may impact fields well beyond fundamental physics that rely on similar sophisticated electronics and cutting-edge technologies—including medical imaging and national security.”

    sPHENIX and operations at RHIC are funded by the DOE Office of Science (NP). 

    Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov. 

    Follow @BrookhavenLab on Twitter or find us on Facebook. 

    Brookhaven National Laboratory

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  • Cultural historian, writer named director of UIC’s Jane Addams Hull-House Museum

    Cultural historian, writer named director of UIC’s Jane Addams Hull-House Museum

    Newswise — The College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts at the University of Illinois Chicago has announced that Liesl Olson has accepted the position of director of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, effective March 1, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees.

    Olson is a respected scholar, cultural leader and social justice advocate who most recently built and directed the Chicago Studies program at the Newberry Library. This innovative series of public events, institutes for teachers, workshops and seminars leveraged the library’s unique archival collection to bring Chicago’s rich and complex history to life. It is distinguished by its many partnerships and far reach and has focused on such historical subjects as the neighborhood of Hull-House, the legacy of protest and riots in Chicago, the Great Migration, and the history of artists, writers and performers in Chicago and the Midwest.

    Rebecca Rugg, dean of UIC’s College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts, hailed Olson’s appointment.

    “The promise of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in the 21st century relies on the stewardship of Addams’ prescient ideals and public practice through visionary programming for diverse audiences. Liesl Olson has demonstrated her leadership in this capacity through the Newberry’s Chicago Studies program, and she will do the same at UIC. We are thrilled to welcome her,” Rugg said.

    A commitment to social justice and public engagement is a fundamental component of Olson’s work to date. Her writing has amplified and yielded new insights to the contributions of women and makers of color in Chicago, past and present. Olson extends her research and perspectives far beyond the academy into robust public practice through her service as board member of and participant in the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, workshops for teachers, and lively talks on PBS and NPR.

    In 2020, Olson helped spearhead Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots, a programming series in partnership with 10 Chicago cultural organizations that explored the history and legacy of Chicago’s red summer. Recognizing the Chicago 1919’s ambition and accomplishments, Olson and her Newberry colleagues were awarded the 2020 Outstanding Public History Project Award from the National Council on Public History.

    “I am honored and thrilled to lead the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum into an exciting new era. I have long admired Hull-House for the way it exemplifies the historic intersection between the arts and activism in Chicago,” Olson said. “I hope to bring the distinctiveness of this city’s cultural life into conversations that help us broaden our understanding of the city’s history and its contemporary challenges. I look forward to working with the extraordinary staff at Hull-House, with students, faculty and staff at UIC, and with neighborhood partners across the city. Together we can carry forth a vision of social justice that inspired one of my great heroes, the feminist, activist, and champion of the arts, Jane Addams.”

    Important exhibitions and projects led by Olson include the fall 2021 Newberry Chicago Avant-Garde: Five Women Ahead of Their Time exhibition and catalogue about remarkable women — Gertrude Abercrombie, Gwendolyn Brooks, Katherine Dunham, Ruth Page and Katharine Kuh — who made indelible contributions to 20th century art history. Since 2013, Olson has directed five National Endowment for the Humanities summer institutes that explore the art and culture of Chicago, including the summer 2022 institute Making Modernism: Literature, Dance, and Visual Culture in Chicago, 1893-1955.

    Olson is also the author of the award-winning “Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis and Modernism and the Ordinary” and is frequently invited to write and speak about Chicago cultural history for scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers, television and radio. She was awarded a Public Scholars Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2022.

    Lisa Yun Lee, a former Hull-House Museum director and current National Public Housing Museum executive director, is on the faculty of UIC’s art history department and served on the search committee.

    “UIC students, faculty and the Chicago public will be the beneficiaries of Olson’s appointment,” Lee said. “She espouses the values that Jane Addams embodies and the commitment to social justice the museum advances every day. Her proven ability to bring history to life and make it relevant for diverse audiences distinguishes her in the field.”

    As director, Olson will work closely with the dean of the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts to serve internal UIC audiences and external constituencies, while activating the mission and collections of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.

    The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum serves as a dynamic memorial to social reformer Jane Addams, the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and her colleagues whose work changed the lives of their immigrant neighbors as well as national and international public policy. The museum preserves and develops the original Hull-House site for the interpretation and continuation of the historic settlement house vision, linking research, education and social engagement. The museum is located in two of the original settlement house buildings — the Hull Home, a National Historic Landmark, and the Residents’ Dining Hall, a beautiful Arts and Crafts building that has welcomed some of the world’s most important thinkers, artists and activists.

    University of Illinois Chicago

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  • Penguins, Robots, The Ocean and more

    Penguins, Robots, The Ocean and more

    Newswise — Fieldwork in Antarctica is tricky, just ask University of Delaware scientist Matthew Breece. There is the 10-day trek to get there from Delaware, which includes a sometimes stomach-revolting four-day sail through Drake Passage, heavy research equipment to manage, limits on what you can pack. The temperatures are cool, averaging just above freezing at around 36 degrees Fahrenheit in the austral summer from October to February. Weather can change rapidly, too, relegating researchers indoors when conditions are poor and making for very long days in the field when conditions are pristine.

    But if you ask a scientist…or student…if the effort is worth it, the answer is a resounding YES!

    Marine biology students at Caesar Rodney High School in Camden, Delaware, got a firsthand look at what it’s like to conduct field research on penguins in Antarctica on Tuesday, Jan. 24, during a live video call with Matthew Breece, a research scientist in marine science and policy at the University of Delaware.

    “It’s fun, but also a lot of hard work,” said Breece, who guided the nearly 50 students through a virtual tour of Palmer Station, a United States research station situated on Anvers Island, Antarctica.

    Breece showed the students glaciers, laboratory experiments, research equipment and common areas, like the library, and shared stories and answered questions about living among wildlife including penguins, whales and seals. 

    “Wildlife have the right of way here,” said Breece, explaining how researchers were scrambling over rocks to get to their research vessels earlier in the week, while a crab-eater seal sunned itself on the boat dock. Gentoo penguins can swim 22 miles per hour, which is faster than the research boats can go, while Adélie penguins can only swim 10-12 mph.

    Breece and his colleagues are examining the feeding habits and predator-prey interactions of Adélie and Gentoo penguins in the region using an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). The AUV, called a REMUS, is equipped with a high-resolution echosounder that uses sonar to collect data about food resources that are available to marine animals in Palmer Deep Canyon on the West Antarctic Peninsula.

    Besides hearing from Breece, students also saw dramatic photographs from Antarctica and scientific charts used in the research.

    The new echosounder gives researchers a birds-eye view of what’s for lunch in the water. It was developed by Mark Moline, Maxwell P. and Mildred H. Harrington Professor of Marine Studies at UD and principal investigator on the project, and project co-PIs Kelly Benoit-Bird, senior scientist at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and Megan Cimino, assistant researcher at the Institute of Marine Sciences and assistant adjunct professor of ocean sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

    “We switched to shorter wavelength frequencies to look at smaller things,” said Moline. “So, not only looking at the oceanography, but also the high-resolution food distribution of krill, copepods, fish and the species that eat them, like penguins.”

    The UD work complements the National Science Foundation’s ongoing Palmer Station Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) study related to penguin population sizes and foraging ranges. The seabird component of the Palmer LTER research is led by Cimino, a UD alumna.

    Cimino has a second project with Carlos Moffat, a UD coastal physical oceanographer who also is in Antarctica serving as chief scientist of the Palmer LTER program, which has been collecting long-term ecological data for over 30 years. Collaborating institutions on the broader Palmer LTER study, led by Rutgers University and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS), include researchers from UD, University of Virginia, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, University of Colorado, and University of California, Santa Cruz.

    Moffat also is conducting physical oceanography work as part of his NSF CAREER award to understand the dynamics of melting glaciers and how that impacts the ocean circulation and properties, such as salinity and temperature of the coastal ocean.

    “As the atmosphere is warming in this region of Antarctica, sea ice is decreasing and more glaciers are melting from the coast, physically changing the environment marine organisms are living in,” said Moffat. “One big question is what this means long term for marine organisms that live in these places, such as penguins, whales, seals and other wildlife. I see my contribution as trying to help them understand how the physical environment impacts the entire ecosystem.”

    From Antarctica to Delaware

    Lessons learned in Antarctica can help shed light on uncertainties about how sea level rise will evolve in other parts of the world, too. For instance, Delaware is a low-lying state with no area of the state more than eight miles from tidal waters. It is considered a big hotspot of sea level rise along the U.S. East Coast. And while sea levels are increasing on average around the world, due to ocean warming and melting ice from the continents, the distribution of sea level is very uneven. 

    “To understand what is going to happen in the future, we need to understand why sea levels are increasing and how it’s going to change over time,” said Moffat. “Antarctica is a good place to study this because change is happening very rapidly.”

    For most of the 20th century, the Palmer Station region was considered the fastest changing region in the southern hemisphere, while the Weddell Sea, which is located just around the corner of the Antarctic peninsula, had not changed as much. Over the last few years, researchers have begun to wonder whether the Weddell Sea has any influence on the West Antarctic Peninsula region or whether the regions are changing independently.

    To better understand these processes, Moffat’s team deployed two AUVs called gliders to sample the circulation close to the coast along the Antarctic peninsula, which is heavily influenced by the melting of glaciers. He and his students recovered oceanographic moorings that have been capturing data, such as water circulation currents, temperature and salinity, since early 2022. This is part of the West Antarctic Peninsula that has never been sampled before, so the team is eager to analyze the data.

    “I am particularly excited about the glider measurements, which I plan to add to my dissertation,” said Frederike (Rikki) Benz, a doctoral student in the Moffat lab. “It is especially interesting to be involved in the whole process from preparing, shipping and deploying to publishing.”

    Classrooms beyond campus

    For students, field research offers the opportunity for hands-on experience with sophisticated research instruments, data collection and analysis, troubleshooting and networking with researchers from other institutions. Sometimes those activities occur in remote regions of the world — like Antarctica.

    “The rarity of this experience comes with a sense of humility and responsibility to not take any moment for granted, a responsibility to ensure more opportunities are available for future students and scientists,” said Evan Quinter, who is pursuing a master’s degree in physical ocean science and engineering in the Moffat Lab.

    At Caesar Rodney High School, marine biology teachers Cristine Taylor and Sandra Ramsdell have just begun covering marine animals with their students. It is a fitting coincidence that made the live call with UD researchers both timely and meaningful.

    “Spending a day in class speaking with researchers was an awesome experience for our students,” said Taylor. “We are trying to encourage them to look at everything that goes into marine careers. Not every person is a marine biologist, there are computer scientists and engineers, ship captains and crew, and so many more people who can work in marine research.”

    University of Delaware

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  • Digital Reporting Tool Aims to Protect Fire Investigators and Boost Public Safety

    Digital Reporting Tool Aims to Protect Fire Investigators and Boost Public Safety

    Newswise — After a fire, investigators charged with determining the cause of the blaze sometimes stumble on unstable surfaces, breathe in toxins, or face other health and safety risks. But they had no central place to document their exposure to hazards at work, and researchers had no central place to evaluate that data to try to mitigate those risks — until now.

    This week, researchers with Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center are launching an online tool that allows fire investigators to voluntarily document accidents and near misses — part of an effort to improve conditions for the first responders who are vital to public safety.

    The outreach comes from the Firefighter Cancer Initiative, housed at Sylvester at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, the only National Cancer Institute-designated center in South Florida. The program developed the digital reporting tool with the International Association of Arson Investigators (IAAI), a Maryland-based group with more than 10,000 members.

    “Fire investigation is ultimately about protecting the lives and property of the citizens we serve,” said IAAI President Randy Watson. “To do that, we have to first protect ourselves.”

    Documenting Exposure to Toxins

    Sylvester researchers formed the Firefighter Cancer Initiative in 2015 after noticing elevated cancer rates among Miami-Dade County firefighters, including exposure to carcinogens in plumes of smoke. A multidisciplinary team found a greater incidence of cancer among firefighters across Florida than in the state’s population at large, including thyroid, prostate, colorectal, skin and other types of cancer. Women firefighters also had a higher incidence of cervical cancer, the data showed.

    The researchers then developed tools to better understand and characterize those risks and exposures, starting with an annual health survey for firefighters. They also created a free, online Personal Exposure Reporter (PER) tool for individual firefighters to document the conditions they had been exposed to that might spur health problems and insurance claims later, said Alberto J. Caban-Martinez, Ph.D., D.O., M.P.H., an epidemiologist and deputy director of the Firefighter Cancer Initiative.

    “That individual reporting is important, because in Florida, if a firefighter developed cancer, basically they were on their own. They had to use their own health insurance, cover payments, and then demonstrate to the insurance company that the cancer was occupationally related because of what they’d been exposed to,” said Dr. Caban-Martinez. “Firefighters didn’t have a way to document their exposures before this.”

    The PER tool was crafted after extensive consultations with firefighters using a “user-centered design approach,” said PER project Director Barbara Millet, Ph.D., an industrial engineer who helms the University of Miami’s User Experience (UX) Lab. Dr. Millet is also assistant professor or interactive media at the School of Communication.

    Adapted for Fire Investigators

    Now, that reporting tool has been adapted collaboratively for fire investigators, who analyze the cause of blazes. The risks for their work have typically drawn less attention than risks for peers who fight fires directly, making fire investigators an “underserved population,” said IAAI President Watson.

    “In the 2000s, we began to notice that many in our industry were developing cancer and dying,” said Watson. “It took a while for us to wake up and see the connection to what we did.”

    In 2016, the IAAI formed a committee focused on health and safety. Members reached out to Dr. Caban-Martinez as an advisor. The group was concerned that it lacked data on work accidents and near misses that could be used to reduce risks. “You don’t know what you don’t know,” said Jeff Pauley, current chairman of the committee. Dr. Caban-Martinez and Dr. Millet suggested adapting the existing PER tool instead of starting from scratch.

    The IAAI, together with Sylvester, now offers the Fire Investigator Exposure Reporter to collect data specifically on those job accidents and near misses. Filling out the free, online form or reporting via the Personal Exposure Reporter app should take no more than 10 minutes, said Dr. Millet, who designed the module.

    Data from the reports should help the association improve training, handle insurance claims, and seek policy changes if needed, said Pauley.

    “There’s nothing else in the U.S. that provides this information for our fire investigator population,” said Pauley, expressing hope that the new reports can help reduce future accidents. “If we don’t mitigate workplace risks, there’s a real cost, from insurance rates going up to lost wages that adversely affect families.”

    Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center

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  • KIMM develops the world’s first electrode design for lithium-ion battery that improves smartphone·laptop battery performance

    KIMM develops the world’s first electrode design for lithium-ion battery that improves smartphone·laptop battery performance

    Newswise — KIMM has announced the development of the design and process technology for the world’s first battery electrode that significantly improves the performance and stability of batteries used in electronic devices such as smartphones, laptops, and electric vehicles.

    A joint research team led by principal researcher Seungmin Hyun of the Department of Nano-Mechanics at the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (President Sang-jin Park, hereinafter referred to as KIMM), an institution under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Science and ICT, and Professor Hoo-jeong Lee of Sungkyunkwan University (President Ji-beom Yoo, hereinafter referred to as SKKU) have developed a new battery technology that uses an electrode (Anode) structure that enhances the reliability and performance of traditional lithium-ion batteries. The results of their research achievement were published in the leading journal Advanced Functional Materials (IF: 19.924)*.

    *Publication title: Design Strategies toward High-Performance Hybrid Carbon Bilayer Anode for Improved Ion Transport and Reaction Stability (Publication date: 2022.11.10)

    In order to develop a design and process technology that maintains high performance and reliability even when the electrode of the lithium-ion battery is thick, the KIMM-SKKU joint research team formed a bilayered anode. Additionally, the anode is designed with grooves allowing small materials with improved ion conductivity and electrical conductivity to be placed between high-capacity materials

    In general, lithium-ion battery electrodes are manufactured by coating and drying a slurry* so that it can be evenly distributed over the entire electrode. As such, it is the uniformity of the slurry that determines the performance of battery. The thicker the electrode, the lower the energy density and uniformity, making it difficult to maintain performance in a high-power environment.

    *Slurry: A mixture of solids and liquids. Specifically, this refers to a mixture of active materials that chemically react to generate electrical energy when a battery is discharged, binders that are added for the structural stabilization of electrodes, and conductive materials that are added to improve electric conductivity.

    However, with the anode structure of this newly developed battery. Uniform reaction stability can be achieved while maintaining high energy density throughout the electrode, even if the electrode is thick. This is particularly helpful in improving the performance and lifespan of batteries.

    Principal researcher Seungmin Hyun stated that this achievement is an efficient method to improve the performance and lifespan of batteries by applying a new design to traditional lithium-ion battery materials and processes. He added that the team will continue to make efforts to apply this new technology to electric vehicles and soft robots that require high energy density in high-power environments, as well as to electronic devices such as commercial smartphones and laptops.

    This research study was carried out with the support of the Nano and Material Technology Development Project (No. 2021M3H4A1A02099352) from the Ministry of Science and ICT, and with the support of the Nano-based Omni-TEX Manufacturing Technology Development Project from KIMM.

     

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    The Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (KIMM) is a non-profit government-funded research institute under the Ministry of Science and ICT. Since its foundation in 1976, KIMM is contributing to economic growth of the nation by performing R&D on key technologies in machinery and materials, conducting reliability test evaluation, and commercializing the developed products and technologies.

    This research study was carried out with the support of the Nano and Material Technology Development Project (No. 2021M3H4A1A02099352) from the Ministry of Science and ICT, and with the support of the Nano-based Omni-TEX Manufacturing Technology Development Project from KIMM.

    National Research Council of Science and Technology

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  • Risks associated with control of blood sugar in the ICU

    Risks associated with control of blood sugar in the ICU

    Newswise — Efforts by hospital intensive-care unit teams to reduce glucose readings of patients with diabetes might do more harm than good, according to an analysis published today in Diabetes Care.

    Dr. Michael Schwartz, lead author and a UW Medicine endocrinologist, said he decided to study the phenomenon after talking with Dr. Irl Hirsch, a colleague who had witnessed problems emerge among his patients in the ICU. 

    Schwartz and co-authors found that, among patients with diabetes, efforts to reduce blood glucose levels to what is considered normal in a non-diabetic person may actually harm the patients by triggering a dangerous reaction.

    The article noted that relative hypoglycemia – or a decrease in glucose greater than or equal to 30% below prehospital admission levels – “has emerged as a major clinical concern because the standard glycemic target recommended for patients in the intensive care unit is associated with an increased mortality risk among some of the critically ill patients with diabetes.”

    Low blood glucose, or hypoglycemia, can be dangerous because the brain depends on a steady supply of glucose to function. When someone’s blood glucose levels fall below a level of approximately 40 mg/dL to 60 mg/dL, the sympathetic nervous system triggers the release of hormones and other chemical signals to drive blood glucose back up. This phenomenon is known as a counterregulatory response. 

    While this response can help return the blood glucose level to normal, in parallel it also increases the heart rate and blood pressure, and perhaps activates the immune system. Schwartz and others in this review suspect this counterregulatory response may be the cause of higher death rates among ICU patients with diabetes who are treated for a high glucose level.

    Patients with diabetes generally have a higher blood sugar level (100 to 200 mg/dL) than patients without diabetes, the study noted. For a patient without diabetes, normal levels are 70 to100 mg/dL

    “The target range that is established in in the ICUs doesn’t differentiate between a patient with diabetes and a patient without diabetes,” Schwartz said. To establish the best blood sugar range, he said, a randomized clinical trial would need to determine the ideal glycemic level for ICU patients with, and without, diabetes.

    People with diabetes usually have higher than normal blood sugar levels. Over time their bodies get used to these high blood sugar levels. As a consequence, when their blood sugars levels are brought into the normal range with treatment, their bodies incorrectly perceive the levels to be dangrously low, thereby triggering the counter regulatory response. Schwartz and his colleagues are studying how the body monitors and regulates blood sugar levels to try to understand how this response might be prevented or corrected.

    While the brain can clearly sense when blood sugar is too low, exactly how this occurs is not well understood.For many years, it was thought that cells responsible for monitoring and regulating blood glucose levels resided in the brain. But work by the UW Medicine researchers now indicate that blood glucose sensing neurons reside outside of the brain, located in places like the liver and along blood vessels. These sensors monitor glucose concentrations in the blood and other tissues and send signals to brain centers that then respond to changes in levels, the study noted.

    “We anticipate that future strategies aimed at reversing the underlying defect can ameliorate or even eliminate the problem of relative hypoglycemia in patients with diabetes,” the authors conclude, “To achieve this goal will require an improved understanding of how brain glucose sensing works in normal individuals and how it becomes impaired with patients with diabetes.”

    University of Washington School of Medicine and UW Medicine

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  • Glaucoma Research Foundation Hosts 12th Annual Glaucoma 360 New Horizons Forum in San Francisco

    Glaucoma Research Foundation Hosts 12th Annual Glaucoma 360 New Horizons Forum in San Francisco

    Newswise — SAN FRANCISCO, CA – January 26, 2023: Glaucoma Research Foundation (GRF) will host the 12th Annual Glaucoma 360 New Horizons Forum on February 3rd at San Francisco’s iconic Westin St. Francis Hotel.   

    Attracting nearly 400 participants annually, this unique gathering unites leaders in the field of glaucoma for a full day of informative presentations, inspiring discussions, and vital networking opportunities. Clinicians, industry leaders, entrepreneurs, venture capital financiers, FDA representatives, key opinion leaders, glaucoma patients — all meet, learn, share ideas, and collaborate at the only event of its kind, aimed at speeding the development of new therapies and diagnostics for glaucoma patients.

    Glaucoma visionary Malik Kahook, MD, Chief of the Sue Anschutz-Rogers Eye Center at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, will deliver the Drs. Henry and Frederick Sutro Memorial Lecture, the Forum’s keynote address. Dr. Kahook will shed light on advances in sustained drug delivery that can help overcome barriers to care and empower clinicians with better ways to deliver needed therapy. The lecture, “Sustained Drug Delivery for Glaucoma: From Promise to Reality,” will cover current drug delivery mechanisms as well as new ways to deliver known therapeutics to targeted tissues.

    In addition to Dr. Kahook, more than 50 speakers have been invited from companies and institutions across the US and around the world.  

    “We will once again feature early-stage companies and their new technologies and approaches to glaucoma care. The amount of innovation that is flourishing in the glaucoma space right now is phenomenal,” said Adrienne Graves, PhD, a Glaucoma Research Foundation board member, and event co-founder.

    Dr. Graves added, “As a result, there are more therapeutic options than ever before to help patients. Glaucoma 360 is an important catalyst to bring all the important elements together that can advance a promising idea into clinical use.” 

    Andrew Iwach, MD, Glaucoma Research Foundation board chair and co-founder of Glaucoma 360 with Dr. Graves, believes New Horizons Forum offers exclusive rewards for clinicians and others willing to visit San Francisco for some in-person, immersive networking. “One of the most important things we can do for our patients is stay up to date on new and upcoming solutions,” he says. “At New Horizons and other Glaucoma 360 events, you can do that — and help usher in the next generation of care.” 

    Past participants say the New Horizons Forum is a not-to-be missed meeting of the minds — an outstanding blend of basic science, clinical insight, and industry perspective, all in a congenial atmosphere conducive to collaboration.

    New Horizons Forum is the centerpiece of Glaucoma 360, GRF’s signature three-day series of events planned for February 2 to 4, 2023. Glaucoma 360 kicks off with the Annual Gala to benefit GRF’s research and patient education programs and will honor leaders in glaucoma research and the visionaries and catalysts who share Glaucoma Research Foundation’s mission to cure glaucoma and restore vision through innovative research.

    Glaucoma 360 concludes with two continuing medical education symposia for ophthalmologists and optometrists. At the 27th annual Glaucoma Symposium CME on February 4, the Shaffer-Hetherington-Hoskins Keynote Lecture will be presented by Mildred M.G. Oliver, MD, Senior Associate Dean at the University of Ponce, St. Louis, and will highlight the need for improved health equity in glaucoma. 

    About Glaucoma Research Foundation

    Founded in San Francisco in 1978, Glaucoma Research Foundation is America’s oldest and most experienced institution dedicated to its mission to cure glaucoma and restore vision through innovative research. The Foundation has a proven track record of pioneering, results-oriented research and produces definitive educational materials used by eye care professionals across the country. The Glaucoma Research Foundation website, www.glaucoma.org, provides valuable information about glaucoma to 3 million visitors annually.

    For more information about Glaucoma Research Foundation and Glaucoma 360 events, please contact, Brizette Castellanos at 415.986.3162, ext. 221 or [email protected] or visit www.glaucoma360.org.

    Glaucoma Research Foundation

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  • Study finds most U.S. children use potentially toxic makeup products, often during play

    Study finds most U.S. children use potentially toxic makeup products, often during play

    Newswise — A study by scientists at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Earthjustice found that most children in the United States use makeup and body products that may contain carcinogens and other toxic chemicals.

    Results are published in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.  

    The study, based on more than 200 surveys, found that 79 percent of parents say their children 12 or younger use makeup and body products marketed to children, like glitter, face paint, and lip gloss.

    Prior research has shown that these products often have toxic chemicals, like lead, asbestos, PFAS, phthalates, and formaldehyde in them. Toxic chemicals found in children’s makeup and body products (CMBP), like heavy metals, are especially harmful to infants and children. These chemicals, whether intentionally added or present as contaminants, have been linked to cancer, neurodevelopmental harm, and other serious and irreversible health effects.

    “There is increasing evidence of harmful ingredients often included in adult cosmetics and CMBPs, and children are more biologically susceptible to the effects of toxicants,” says study co-first author Eleanor A. Medley, who co-led the study with Kendall E. Kruchten while both completed their MPHs in environmental health sciences at Columbia Mailman. 

    “In this context, it is important to uncover how makeup and body products are being used by children to characterize risk and improve safety,” adds Kruchten.

    According to the Columbia and Earthjustice’s study, of the surveyed children, about 54 percent use CMBP at least monthly, 12 percent use CMBP daily, about 20 percent use CMBP for eight hours or more at a time, and a third of them reported unintentionally ingesting the products in the last year. Over one-third of the surveyed children are Latino and 65 percent of those children use CMBP. Compared to other racial groups, Latino children reported using CMBP more often and more for play.

    This study comes as some states, like New York and Washington, consider tightening their consumer regulations around toys, makeup, and personal care products.

    “Children are particularly vulnerable to adverse health risks associated with chemicals often found in makeup and body products,” says study senior author Julie Herbstman, PhD, professor of environmental health sciences and director of the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. “In addition to dermal exposure through the skin, behavioral patterns such as hand-to-mouth activity may increase exposure to products through unintentional ingestion. Additionally, children’s small body size, rapid growth rate, developing tissues and organs, and immature immune systems make them biologically susceptible to the effects of toxicants.”

    “It is alarming that industry is being allowed to sell makeup and body products marketed to children that contain extremely toxic chemicals. Findings from this study can help federal agencies better understand how children are using these products and will hopefully spur agencies to act to protect children from toxic chemical exposures,” said Earthjustice Attorney Lakendra Barajas. “Unfortunately, currently little is being done at the federal level to protect children from toxic chemicals in children’s makeup and body products.”

    Co-authors include Miranda J. Spratlen, Maricela Ureño, Anabel Cole—all at Columbia Mailman—as well as Rashmi Joglekar at Earthjustice.

    This work was supported in part by the Marisla Foundation.

    The authors declare no conflict of interest.

    Columbia University, Mailman School of Public Health

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  • Farming more seaweed to be food, feed and fuel

    Farming more seaweed to be food, feed and fuel

    Newswise — A University of Queensland-led study has shown that expanding global seaweed farming could go a long way to addressing the planet’s food security, biodiversity loss and climate change challenges.

    PhD Candidate Scott Spillias, from UQ’s School of Earth and Environmental Science, said seaweed offered a sustainable alternative to land-based agricultural expansion to meet the world’s growing need for food and materials.

    “Seaweed has great commercial and environmental potential as a nutritious food and a building block for commercial products including animal feed, plastics, fibres, diesel and ethanol,” Mr Spillias said.

    “Our study found that expanding seaweed farming could help reduce demand for terrestrial crops and reduce global agricultural greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) by up to 2.6 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent per year.”

    Researchers mapped the potential of farming more of the 34 commercially important seaweed species using the Global Biosphere Management Model.

    They estimated the environmental benefits of a range of scenarios based on land-use changes, GHG emissions, water and fertiliser use, and projected changes in species presence by 2050.

    “In one scenario where we substituted 10 per cent of human diets globally with seaweed products, the development of 110 million hectares of land for farming could be prevented,” Mr Spillias said.

    “We also identified millions of available hectares of ocean within global exclusive economic zones* (EEZs), where farming could be developed.

    “The largest share of suitable ocean was in the Indonesian EEZ, where up to 114 million hectares is estimated to be suitable for seaweed farming.

    “The Australian EEZ also shows great potential and species diversity, with at least 22 commercially viable species and an estimated 75 million hectares of ocean being suitable.”

    Mr Spillias said many native species of seaweed in Australian waters had not yet been studied from a commercial production perspective.

    “The way I like to look at this is to think about ancestral versions of everyday crops – like corn and wheat – which were uninspiring, weedy things,” he said.

    “Through thousands of years of breeding we have developed the staple crops that underpin modern societies and seaweed could very well hold similar potential in the future.”

    UQ study collaborator Professor Eve McDonald-Madden said the seaweed solution would have to be carried out with care, to avoid displacing problems from the land to the ocean.

    “Our study points out what could be done to address some of the mounting problems of global sustainability facing us, but it can’t be implemented without exercising extreme caution,” she said.

    This research was published in Nature Sustainability.

    UQ acknowledges the collaborative efforts of researchers from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, CSIRO and the University of Tasmania.

    *An area of the sea in which a sovereign state has special rights regarding the exploration and use of marine resources, including energy production from water and wind.

    University of Queensland

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  • Department of Energy Announces $9.1 Million for Research on Quantum Information Science and Nuclear Physics

    Department of Energy Announces $9.1 Million for Research on Quantum Information Science and Nuclear Physics

    Newswise — WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $9.1 million in funding for 13 projects in Quantum Information Science (QIS) with relevance to nuclear physics. Nuclear physics research seeks to discover, explore, and understand all forms of nuclear matter that can exist in the universe – from the subatomic structure of nucleons, to exploding stars, to the emergence of the quark-gluon plasma seconds after the Big Bang.

    Quantum computers have the potential for computational breakthroughs in classically unsolvable nuclear physics problems. Quantum sensors exploit distinct quantum phenomena that do not have classical counterparts, to acquire, process, and transmit information in ways that greatly exceed existing capabilities or sensitivities.

    “Although we are just beginning to develop the knowledge and technology needed to power a revolutionary paradigm shift to quantum computing, there is a clear line of sight on how to proceed,” said Tim Hallman, DOE Associate Director of Science for Nuclear Physics. “These awards will contribute to advancing nuclear physics research and to pressing future quantum computing developments forward.”

    The selected projects are at the forefront of interdisciplinary research in both fundamental research and use-inspired challenges at the interface of nuclear physics and QIS technologies. Projects include advancing the development of next generation materials and architectures for high coherence superconducting quantum bits, or “qubits,” and a solid-state quantum simulator for applications in nuclear theory. Projects will also develop quantum sensors to enhance sensitivity to new physics beyond the Standard Model and improve precision measurements of nuclear decays. The quantum computing projects explore difficult nuclear physics problems using hardware advantages offered by different near-term quantum platforms.

    The projects were selected by competitive peer review under the DOE Funding Opportunity Announcement for Quantum Horizons: QIS Research and Innovation for Nuclear Science.

    Total funding is $9.1 million for projects lasting up to 3 years in duration. The list of projects and more information can be found here.

    Department of Energy, Office of Science

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  • Events Serve as “Stepping Stones” en Route to Retrieved Memories

    Events Serve as “Stepping Stones” en Route to Retrieved Memories

    Newswise — “Dang it, I lost my keys!” 

    One solution to this frustratingly common scenario is to retrace your steps. This can be done by physically moving through the space where you suspect your elusive keychain is hiding or, as explored in recent research in Psychological Science, scanning your memory to find them. 

    Humans structure memories of these kinds of continuous experiences using event boundaries, according to lead author Sebastian Michelmann, who conducted this research with Uri Hasson and APS Fellow Kenneth A. Norman (Princeton University). 

    “Intuitively, we perceive structure in the form of events in continuous experience. A ‘restaurant visit’ and a ‘train ride’ are examples of such events,” Michelmann said in an interview. “When one event ends and another begins, people perceive an event boundary, and human observers agree substantially on the exact moments when an event boundary happens.” 

    Michelmann and colleagues’ research suggests that people use these event boundaries as “stepping stones” to scan their memories when attempting to recall certain facts or bits of information. In the case of the lost keys, he said, this might involve reaching back to the last moment you clearly remember having your keys—say, as you walked in the front door—before skipping ahead to a “phone call” event and then a “watching TV” event, at which point you might recall placing the keys next to the remote. 

    “When people search through continuous memories, they can do that slowly and thoroughly, but they can also skip ahead to the next event boundary when they decide that the answer that they are looking for is not in the current event,” Michelmann said. “Event boundaries are important access points for this skipping, which is why we refer to them as stepping stones in the memory search process.” 

    Michelmann, Hasson, and Norman examined this process through a series of three online studies in which participants were tasked with scanning their memories for details about two seven-minute abridged versions of the film Gravity.  

    In the first study, the researchers established event boundaries within each short film by having 104 participants press a button each time they perceived an event to have ended. As in previous research, the participants’ perceptions of event boundaries were highly consistent. 

    In the second study, 180 participants answered questions about the events in both short films. Each question started by identifying an anchor event in the film before asking the participant to recall information that occurred after this point. For example, “In the space station, we see little flames flying into the hallway. When is the next time we see fire?” The questions were designed to involve either a single isolated event or a specific number of event boundaries with a set run time. After being presented with the question, participants were instructed to click a “Respond” button as soon as they remembered the answer. 

    By comparing the actual run time of each event or set of events with how long it took participants to click the response button, Michelmann and colleagues determined that individuals were able to scan 1 second of an event in about 48 milliseconds. Participants scanned, on average, just 1.9 second of an event before skipping ahead to the next one if they did not find the information they were looking for. The researchers found their stepping-stones model of memory scanning, which accounts for the time at which the target information appears within an event and, consequently, the target’s distance to event boundaries, to be a better fit for participants’ responses than a model based only on the length of each event being scanned. 

    “The stepping-stones model predicts that the target’s distance to the previous event boundary makes a high relative contribution to [response times] because a low skipping threshold ensures that little time is spent within each event; the final event, however, is searched without skipping,” Michelmann and colleagues wrote. 

    The researchers further tested this model through a third study of 100 participants. This time, participants were asked to mentally simulate or “replay” everything that happened between two event boundaries in each film. Although participants still engaged in some amount of temporal compression, they took more time to review fully simulated events than participants did when looking for information, suggesting that we recall events with a higher skipping threshold when simulating versus scanning our memories. 

    “Search time can be explained using a model in which participants skip through all events except the last one, which needs to be played through in its entirety to find the sought-after memory that it contains,” Michelmann and colleagues wrote. 

    In future work, Michelmann would like to explore how schematic knowledge about information in our environment interacts with episodic memory to support recall of specific versus typical experiences. Remembering what a typical birthday party is like could support recall of specific details about an individual’s 30th birthday celebration, for example, but relying too much on these schemata could also cloud our memories of unique details, he said. 

    Reference 

    Michelmann, S., Hasson, U., & Norman, K. A. (2023). Evidence that event boundaries are access points for memory retrieval. Psychological Science. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09567976221128206 

    Journalists: Request a copy of this article by emailing [email protected]

    Association for Psychological Science

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  • Attributing the rising costs of groceries to “price gouging” is not accurate

    Attributing the rising costs of groceries to “price gouging” is not accurate

    Fact Check By:
    Craig Jones, Newswise

    Truthfulness: Mostly False

    Claim:

    Grocery stores need to be brought to heel over food prices. This isn’t ‘inflation’ because it isn’t caused by monetary oversupply. It’s just price gouging and we know that because we can literally see that they’re all reporting surplus profits.

    Claim Publisher and Date: Twitter user emmy rākete among others on 2023-01-21

    On social media, complaints regarding the rising costs of groceries are trending. It’s no surprise after all, the price of groceries has gone up around 13% compared to last year. According to the data from the Labor Department, the price of fruits and vegetables increased by 10.4 percent annually, while milk rose 15.2 percent and eggs soared 30.5 percent. Like other sectors of the economy, food prices are susceptible to supply chain complications and geopolitical unrest including the war in Ukraine. But some people have expressed their disdain for grocery store companies, accusing them of “price gouging” to increase their profits, which have been reaching exorbitant heights (corporate profits are at their highest levels in nearly 50 years, according to CBS MoneyWatch).

    For example, this tweet shared by thousands blames the rising prices of groceries on retailers engaged in price gouging: “Grocery stores need to be brought to heel over food prices. This isn’t ‘inflation’ because it isn’t caused by monetary oversupply. It’s just price gouging and we know that because we can literally see that they’re all reporting surplus profits.” 

    Is putting the blame on grocery store managers for your rising costs of orange juice accurate? It’s not quite that simple. The claim of “price gouging” at the grocery store is misleading because of the complex nature of the grocery business. Professor Lisa Jack, School of Accounting, Economics and Finance and lead of the Food Cultures in Transition (FoodCiTi) research group at the University of Portsmouth explains…

    Supermarket profits are complex and care should be taken with attributing them to any one cause. There are three main factors:

    1. Commercial income, also known as suppliers payments or back margin, contributes heavily to supermarket profits. These payments and support from suppliers to the supermarket include volume discounts and marketing fees. These can represent as much as 7% of a supermarket’s income: bottom line profits can average around 1-2% of income. Primary producers are seeing rapidly increasing costs for all inputs and having been squeezed to breaking point over the last 20 years, have no choice but to increase the prices of their output. Similarly for processors, packagers, distributors and every other business supplying supermarkets. The supermarkets themselves claim to be fighting on behalf of consumers to be keeping prices down and there is evidence that they are refusing price increase requests, which implies that commercial income is still being maintained. 
    1. In the last few years, supermarkets have been increasing profits by cutting overhead costs at head offices and in support services. Counterintuitively, the only economy of scale they have is bargaining power – see above. All their activities, including large stores, increase the overhead costs which can be as much as 75% of their spend. A significant amount of recent ‘soaring profits’ come from job losses, which are not sustainable in the long run. 
    1. Since their emergence in the 1920s, the business model for supermarkets has been to sell basics at little or no profit relying on high volumes to break even. Profits come from enticing customers to buy at least one impulse, premium item of food and non-grocery items. 8 of the 10 best sellers in supermarkets are the cheaper (but still higher profit margin) alcohol, confectionery and snacks. Since the pandemic and the cost of living crisis hit, more of us are exchanging going out for buying in ready-meals, alcohol and other treats, and buying more of our non-grocery items from supermarkets. These are where the profits come from, and they are being taken away from other sectors. Unsurprisingly, the food businesses that have the highest margins are those that produce brands of alcohol, confectionery etc – ‘Big Food’.

    Note to Journalists/Editors: The expert quotes are free to use in your relevant articles on this topic. Please attribute them to their proper sources.

    Newswise

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  • Fear of Public Places Is Common in Adults with Epilepsy

    Fear of Public Places Is Common in Adults with Epilepsy

    Newswise — About 5.1 million people in the U.S. have a history of epilepsy, which causes repeated seizures. According to the Epilepsy Foundation, epilepsy is the fourth most common neurological disorder. While current research has shown an increase in anxiety and depression among people with epilepsy, little is known about this population and agoraphobia, an anxiety disorder that involves the fear of being in a public place or in a situation that might cause panic or embarrassment.

    However, a recent study from Heidi Munger Clary, M.D., M.P.H., associate professor of neurology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, shows that phobic and agoraphobic symptoms are common and associated with poor quality of life in people with epilepsy.

    The study appears online in Epilepsy Research.

    “We know that agoraphobia can lead to delays in patient care because of a reluctance to go out in public, which includes appointments with health care providers,” said Munger Clary, the study’s principal investigator. “So, this is an area that needs more attention in clinical practice.”

    In the study, researchers conducted a cross-sectional analysis of baseline clinical data from a neuropsychology registry cohort study. Researchers analyzed a diverse sample of 420 adults, ages 18 to 75, with epilepsy who underwent neuropsychological evaluation over a 14-year period at Columbia University Medical Center in New York.

    “More than one-third of the participants reported significant phobic/agoraphobic symptoms,” Munger Clary said. “We also found that phobic/agoraphobic symptoms, along with depression symptoms, were independently associated with poor quality of life, but generalized anxiety symptoms were not.” 

    According to Munger Clary, because phobic/agoraphobic symptoms are not routinely assessed by clinicians, the findings may suggest a need for future studies to develop more comprehensive screeners for psychiatric comorbidity in epilepsy.

    “Symptoms of agoraphobia do not fully overlap with generalized anxiety or depression symptoms that are often screened in routine practice,” Munger Clary said. “Providers might want to consider more robust symptom screening methods to identify and better assist these patients. This may be important to improve health equity, given other key study findings that show those with lower education and non-white race/ethnicity had increased odds of significant phobic/agoraphobic symptoms.”

    This work was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health under grants R01 NS035140, KM1 CA156709, UL1 TR001420 and 5KL2TR001421-04. 

    Wake Forest University School of Medicine

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