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Tag: PLOS

  • Study reveals Zika’s shape-shifting machinery—and a possible vulnerability

    Study reveals Zika’s shape-shifting machinery—and a possible vulnerability

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    Newswise — Viruses have limited genetic material—and few proteins—so all the pieces must work extra hard. Zika is a great example; the virus only produces 10 proteins. Now, in a study published in the journal PLOS Pathogens, researchers at Sanford Burnham Prebys have shown how the virus does so much with so little and may have identified a therapeutic vulnerability.

    In the study, the research team showed that Zika’s enzyme—NS2B-NS3—is a multipurpose tool with two essential functions: breaking up proteins (a protease) and dividing its own double-stranded RNA into single strands (a helicase).

    “We found that Zika’s enzyme complex changes function based on how it’s shaped,” says Alexey Terskikh, Ph.D., associate professor at Sanford Burnham Prebys and senior author of the paper. “When in the closed conformation, it acts as a classic protease. But then it cycles between open and super-open conformations, which allows it to grab and then release a single strand of RNA—and these functions are essential for viral replication.”

    Zika is an RNA virus that’s part of a family of deadly pathogens called flaviviruses, which include West Nile, dengue fever, yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis and others. The virus is transmitted by mosquitoes and infects uterine and placental cells (among other cell types), making it particularly dangerous for pregnant women. Once inside host cells, the virus re-engineers them to produce more Zika.

    Understanding Zika on the molecular level could have an enormous payoff: a therapeutic target. It would be difficult to create safe drugs that target the domains of the enzyme needed for protease or helicase functions, as human cells have many similar molecules. However, a drug that blocks Zika’s conformational changes could be effective. If the complex can’t shape-shift, it can’t perform its critical functions, and no new Zika particles would be produced.

    An efficient machineResearchers have long known that Zika’s essential enzyme was composed of two units: NS2B-NS3pro and NS3hel. NS2B-NS3pro carries out protease functions, cutting long polypeptides into Zika proteins. However, NS2B-NS3pro’s abilities to bind single-stranded RNA and help separate the double-stranded RNA during viral replication were only recently discovered.

    In this study, the researchers leaned on recent crystal structures and used protein biochemistry, fluorescence polarization and computer modeling to dissect NS2B-NS3pro’s life cycle. NS3pro is connected to NS3hel (the helicase) by a short amino acid linker and becomes active when the complex is in its closed conformation, like a closed accordion. The RNA binding happens when the complex is open, whereas the complex must transition through the super-open conformation to release RNA.

    These conformational changes are driven by the dynamics of NS3hel activity, which extends the linker and eventually “yanks” the NS3pro to release RNA. NS3pro is anchored to the inside of the host cell’s endoplasmic reticulum (ER)—a key organelle that helps shepherd cellular proteins to their appropriate destinations—via NS2B and, while in the closed conformation, cuts up the Zika polypeptide, helping generate all viral proteins.

    On the other side of the linker, NS3hel separates Zika’s double-stranded RNA and conveniently hands a strand over to NS3pro, which has positively charged “forks” to grab on to the negatively charged RNA.

    “There’s a very nice groove of positive charges,” says Terskikh. “So, RNA just naturally follows that groove. Then the complex shifts to the closed conformation and releases the RNA.”

    As NS3hel reaches forward to grab the double-stranded RNA, it pulls the complex with it; however, since the NS3pro is anchored in the ER membrane, and the linker can only extend so far, the complex snaps into the super-open conformation and releases RNA. The complex then relaxes back to the open conformation, ready for a new cycle.

    Meanwhile, when NS3pro detects a viral polypeptide to cut, it forces the complex into the closed conformation, becoming a protease. The authors call this process “reverse inchworm,” because grabbing and releasing the single-stranded RNA resembles inchworm movements, but backward with the jaws (the protease) trailing behind.

    In addition to providing a possible therapeutic target for Zika, this detailed understanding could be applied to other flaviviruses, which share similar molecular machinery.

    “Versions of the NS2B-NS3pro complex are found throughout the flaviviruses,” says Terskikh. “It could potentially constitute a whole new class of drug targets for multiple viruses.”

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    Additional authors include Sergey A. Shiryaev, Piotr Cieplak, Anton Cheltsov and Robert C. Liddington.

    This study was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (5R21AI134581 and R01 NS105969).

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    Sanford Burnham Prebys

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  • Birds in the desert lay bigger eggs with increased helpers.

    Birds in the desert lay bigger eggs with increased helpers.

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    Newswise — Desert birds lay larger eggs when they have more helpers to feed their chicks, new research shows.

    White-browed sparrow weavers live in family groups in which only a dominant pair breeds and their grown-up offspring, particularly females, help to feed nestlings.

    The study, by researchers at the University of Exeter, found that mothers increased the size of their eggs when they had more female helpers on hand.

    The number of male helpers did not affect egg size, probably because male helpers feed chicks at substantially lower rates than female helpers.

    “We don’t yet fully understand why helped mothers are laying heavier eggs, but our results point towards one likely explanation,” said lead author Dr Pablo Capilla-Lasheras, now at the University of Glasgow.

    “Helpers may allow mothers to invest more in offspring at the egg stage by lightening maternal workloads at the chick-feeding stage.

    “Our findings support this, as mothers with more female helpers did indeed enjoy significantly lighter workloads at the chick-feeding stage.”

    This study is one of the first to show that mothers in cooperatively breeding birds actually change the size of their egg according to their social environment.

    “Helpers feed offspring after they hatch in birds, or are born in mammals, but our findings highlight that helpers could have hitherto unexplored beneficial effects on offspring even before they are born, by triggering an increase in maternal investment before birth,” said DrAndy Young, senior author on the study at the University of Exeter.

    “This discovery has potential implications for other cooperative species too, including ourselves, because this maternal strategy of increasing investment in offspring before birth when helped, whether in the egg or in the womb, could be something that occurs more widely across cooperative species.”

    These findings stem from a remarkable continuous decade-long field study of 40 family groups of sparrow weavers in the Tswalu Kalahari Reserve, South Africa.

    The environment is harsh, with unpredictable patterns of rainfall, and it is thought that the birds’ cooperative breeding strategy helps to reliably rear chicks despite these conditions.

    Nearly 10% of the world’s birds have non-breeding “helpers” of this kind.

    Sparrow weavers are among the most cooperative of birds, however, with breeding pairs being assisted by up to 10 helpers.

    Remarkably, the helpers completely forego their own reproduction, remaining within their family as non-breeding adults for up to six years, helping to rear their parents’ young.

    The study was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

    The paper, published in the journal PLOS Biology, is entitled: “Mothers in a cooperatively breeding bird increase investment per offspring at the pre-natal stage when they will have more help with post-natal care.”

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    University of Exeter

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  • Pioneering wartime deepfake study unveils influence on news media.

    Pioneering wartime deepfake study unveils influence on news media.

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    Newswise — A first ever study of wartime deepfake videos reveals their impact on news media and outlines implications for social media companies, media organisations and governments.  

    Deepfakes are artificially manipulated audio-visual material. Most deepfake videos involve the production of a fake ‘face’ constructed by Artificial Intelligence, that is merged with an authentic video, in order to create a video of an event that never really took place. Although fake, they can look convincing and are often produced to imitate or mimic an individual. 

    Researchers at University College Cork (UCC) examined tweets during the current Russian-Ukrainian war, in what is the first analysis of the use of deepfakes in wartime misinformation and propaganda. The study is published today (25th October – link will be live when embargo lifts) in PLOS ONE. 

    ‘A new type of weapon in the propaganda war’ 

    Close to 5,000 tweets on X (formerly Twitter) in the first seven months of 2022 were analysed in the UCC study to explore how people react to deepfake content online, and to uncover evidence of previously theorised harms of deepfakes on trust. As deepfake technology becomes increasingly accessible, it is  important to understand how such threats emerge over social media.  

    The Russo-Ukrainian War presented the first real-life example of deepfakes being used in warfare. The researchers highlight examples of Deepfake videos during this war including, the use of video game footage as evidence of the urban myth fighter pilot “The Ghost of Kyiv”, a deepfake of Russian president Vladimir Putin, showing the Russian, president announcing peace with Ukraine, and the hacking of a Ukrainian news website to display a deepfaked message of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky surrendering.  

    Undermining trust  

    The study found fears of deepfakes often undermined users trust in the  footage they were receiving from the conflict to the point where they lost trust in any footage coming from the conflict. The study is also the first of its kind to find evidence of online conspiracy theories which incorporate deepfakes. 

    The researchers  found much real media was labelled as deepfakes. The study showed that the lack of deepfake literacy led to significant misunderstandings of what constitutes a deepfake, showing the need to encourage literacy in these new forms of media. However, the study demonstrates that efforts to raise awareness around deepfakes may undermine trust in legitimate videos. News media and governmental agencies need to weigh the benefits of educational deepfakes and pre-bunking against the risks of undermining truth, the study asserts. Similarly, news companies and  media should be careful in how they label suspected deepfakes in case they cause suspicion for real  media.  

    The study was led by UCC School of Applied Psychology researcher John Twomey and co-written with fellow researcher Didier Ching, along with Supervisors Dr Conor Linehan and Dr Gillian Murphy of UCC, Dr Matthew Aylett of CereProc Ltd. and Heriot-Watt University, and Prof. Michael Quayle of the University of Limerick. 

    “Much of the misinformation the team analysed in the X (formerly Twitter) discourse dataset surprisingly came from the labelling of real media as deepfakes. Novel findings about deepfake scepticism also emerged, including a connection between deepfakes fuelling conspiratorial beliefs and unhealthy scepticism. The evidence in this study shows that efforts to raise awareness around deepfakes may undermine our trust in legitimate videos. With the prevalence of deepfakes online, this will cause increasing challenges for news media companies who should be careful in how they label suspected deepfakes in case they cause suspicion around real media” ” states John Twomey, UCC researcher 

    News coverage needs to focus on educating people 

    “News coverage of deepfakes needs to focus on educating people on what deepfakes are, what their potential is, and both what their current capabilities are and how they will evolve in the coming years” states John Twomey, UCC researcher. 

    “Researchers and commentators have long feared that deepfakes have the potential to undermine truth, spread misinformation, and undermine trust in the accuracy of news media. Deepfake videos could undermine what we know to be true when fake videos are believed to be authentic and vice versa.” states Dr Conor Linehan, in UCC’s School of Applied Psychology. 

    This study is part of broader work by UCC’s School of Applied Psychology examining the psychological impact of deepfakes, and is funded by Science Foundation Ireland through LERO – the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software (www.lero.ie) 

    Ends  

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    University College Cork

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  • How mosquito-controlling bacteria might also enhance insect fertility

    How mosquito-controlling bacteria might also enhance insect fertility

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    Newswise — A new study reveals biological mechanisms by which a specific strain of bacteria in the Wolbachia genus might enhance the fertility of the insects it infects—with potentially important implications for mosquito-control strategies. Shelbi Russell of the University of California Santa Cruz, US, and colleagues report these findings in the open access journal PLOS Biology on October 24th.

    Different strains of Wolbachia bacteria naturally infect a number of different animals worldwide, such as mosquitos, butterflies, and fruit flies. Wolbachia can manipulate the fertility of their hosts through a specific biological mechanism that aids the spread of Wolbachia within host populations. In recent years, people have harnessed that mechanism in strategies to deliberately infect mosquitos with a specific Wolbachia strain, reducing targeted mosquito populations and thereby potentially reducing the spread of human viruses carried by mosquitos, such as dengue or Zika.

    Research in fruit flies suggests that that same strain, which is native to fruit flies, may also enhance insect fertility, with potentially important implications for mosquito control. Evidence suggests that biological processes involving the fruit-fly protein meiotic-P26 (“mei-P26″), which is essential for fruit-fly reproduction, may underlie this enhanced fertility. However, these processes have remained unclear.

    To investigate, Russell and colleagues bred fruit flies with various defects affecting mei-P26—resulting in reduced fruit-fly fertility—and examined what happened when they then infected the flies with the fruit-fly-native Wolbachia strain.

    They found that Wolbachia infection restored fertility in fruit flies with various mei-P26 defects, enabling them to produce more offspring than uninfected flies. Further experiments revealed how Wolbachia may restore fertility by mitigating certain perturbing effects of mei-P26 defects on specific genes and proteins, thereby resolving problems with the stem cells that produce fruit fly eggs and sperm.

    In additional experiments, Wolbachia infection also enhanced the fertility of fruit flies without mei-P26 defects, resulting in higher egg lay and hatch rates.

    These findings help to resolve the mystery of how this particular Wolbachia strain enhances fruit-fly fertility. Further research will be needed to better understand these effects and their potential implications for strategies that employ this strain to control mosquito populations.

    Russell adds, “Wolbachia endosymbionts exist at high infection frequencies in many host populations, despite exhibiting weak gene drive systems and unobserved impacts on host fitness. Here, we show that the wMel strain of Wolbachia is able to rescue and reinforce host fertility, demonstrating their capacity to function as a beneficial symbiont.”

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    In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Biology: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002335

    Press-only preview: https://plos.io/3tudL1r

     

    Image Caption: A mei-P26 mutant Drosophila melanogaster ovariole infected with wMel bacterial symbionts. DNA is stained in red, anti-Vasa protein is stained blue, and anti-Hu-li tai shao ring canal protein is stained cyan.

    Image Credit: Shelbi Russell (CC-BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

    Image URL: https://plos.io/459VWBV

    Citation: Russell SL, Castillo JR, Sullivan WT (2023) Wolbachia endosymbionts manipulate the self-renewal and differentiation of germline stem cells to reinforce fertility of their fruit fly host. PLoS Biol 21(10): e3002335. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002335

    Author Countries: United States

    Funding: This work was supported by the UC Santa Cruz Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship and the NIH (R00GM135583 to SLR; R35GM139595 to WTS). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

    Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

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    PLOS

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  • Dingoes granted ‘almost-human’ status in pre-colonial Australia.

    Dingoes granted ‘almost-human’ status in pre-colonial Australia.

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    Newswise — It’s said that a dog is a man’s best friend, but the wild dingo is much maligned in Australia. This may not always have been the case though, with new research led by experts at The Australian National University and The University of Western Australia suggesting that dingoes were buried – and even domesticated – by First Nations people prior to European colonisation. 

    The researchers examined remains at the Curracurrang archaeological site, south of Sydney, where radiocarbon dating of dingo bones revealed the animals were buried alongside humans as far back as 2,000 years ago. 

    The care taken to bury the animals suggests a closer relationship between humans and dingoes than many previously realised, according to lead researcher Dr Loukas Koungoulos. 

    “Not all camp dingoes were given burial rites, but in all areas in which the burials are recorded, the process and methods of disposal are identical or almost identical to those associated with human rites in the same area,” Dr Koungoulos said. 

    “This reflects the close bond between people and dingoes and their almost-human status.” 

    The burials weren’t the only sign that Australia’s First Peoples domesticated wild dingoes, however, with severely worn teeth found at the site suggesting a diet heavy in large bones, likely from scraps from human meals. 

    The researchers also identified remains of dingoes of varying ages at the site – from pups to animals aged six to eight years. This shows that First Nations people didn’t just care for young dingoes before they returned to the wild, but that they built much more substantial relationships, the researchers argued. 

    “These findings mark an important development in our understanding of the relationship between Australia’s First Peoples and dingoes,” co-author Professor Susan O’Connor said. 

    “By the time Europeans settled in Australia, the bond between dingoes and Indigenous people was entrenched. This is well known by Indigenous people and has been documented by observers. 

    “Our work shows that they had long-lasting relationships prior to European colonisation, not just the transient, temporary associations recorded during the colonial era.” 

    The research is published in PLOS One. 

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    Australian National University

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  • Mental health challenges for Canadian ulcer patients in COVID-19 pandemic

    Mental health challenges for Canadian ulcer patients in COVID-19 pandemic

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    Newswise — Toronto, ON — New research from the University of Toronto has revealed the mental health toll of the COVID-19 pandemic on older adults with peptic ulcer disease (PUD), a painful condition in which gastric sores develop in the lining of the stomach or upper portion of the small intestine.

    The researchers examined a subsample of older adults from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging, a national dataset of older Canadians. The sample consisted of 1,140 older adults with PUD, of whom 689 had a pre-pandemic history of depression and 451 had no history of depression. By using longitudinal data, the researchers were able to compare the mental health trajectories of those with and without a history of depression.  The article was published this week in PLOS ONE.

    Among older adults with PUD and no lifetime history of depression, approximately 1 in 8 (13.0%) developed depression for the first time during the COVID-19 pandemic. These numbers were substantially higher when compared to depression levels before the pandemic (2015-2018).

    “Although individuals with peptic ulcers were already known to be vulnerable to depression, our findings show that the pandemic severely exacerbated this vulnerability,” said lead author Esme Fuller-Thomson, Professor at the University of Toronto’s Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work (FIFSW) and director of the Institute for Life Course & Aging (ILCA). “COVID-19 introduced many unforeseen stressors for people with chronic health conditions, such as higher levels of stress and lower levels of physical activity and social support, which may contribute to their worsening mental health.”

    When the analysis was limited to those who had a lifetime history of depression, approximately 1 in 2 (46.6%) experienced recurrent or persistent depression during the pandemic.

    “One of the major risk factors for depression in later life is having a previous history of depressive episodes,” said co-author Hannah Dolhai, a former research assistant at the ILCA. “Older adults with a history of depression who also had to navigate challenges with managing their chronic illness during the pandemic are a vulnerable subpopulation of Canadians.”

    The researchers also identified several risk factors for depression among those with PUD, such as experiencing difficulty accessing healthcare.

    “We found that individuals who reported challenges with healthcare access during the pandemic had a higher risk for depression. It’s important to think about the potential cascading mental health consequences of the healthcare restrictions that occurred during COVID-19,” said co-author Andie MacNeil, a research assistant at the FIFSW and Institute for Life Course and Aging. “While the shift towards telemedicine helped maintain healthcare continuity for many individuals, it is not always accessible or preferable for some patients”

    Other risk factors for depression among older adults with PUD included feeling lonely at the beginning of the pandemic and experiencing functional limitations.

    “Loneliness is a well-established risk factor for depression. For many older adults, the physical distancing limitations early in the pandemic meant increased time alone and declines in social support. Although these guidelines were important to protect the health of Canadians, they can also had unintended mental health consequences. It is important to find ways to foster social connection even when staying apart,” said co-author Grace Li, PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of Victoria.

    Co-author Ying Jiang, Senior Epidemiologist at the Public Health Agency of Canada points out that previous research on the relationship between PUD and depression has highlighted how symptoms like chronic pain can severely disrupt functional status and dramatically reduce quality of life in patients. “It is unsurprising that this relationship persisted into the pandemic, and that those with reduced functional status faced a higher risk of depression,” Jiang said.

    Women were also found to have a higher risk of depression when compared to men.

    “During the pandemic, many women experienced increased household labour and caregiving responsibilities due to school closures and restrictions in other community services, like older adult day programs. This exacerbation of gender-role stress may have impacted the mental health of many women,” said co-author Margaret de Groh, Scientific Manager at the Public Health Agency of Canada.

    “By drawing attention to those with the highest risk for depression, we hope our findings will help inform targeted screening and intervention. Many older adults may still need mental health support in the post-COVID era,” said Fuller-Thomson.

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    University of Toronto

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  • Artificial intelligence helps to simplify lung cancer risk prediction

    Artificial intelligence helps to simplify lung cancer risk prediction

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    Newswise — Machine learning models to identify the simplest way to screen for lung cancer have been developed by researchers from UCL and the University of Cambridge, bringing personalised screening one step closer.

    The model was found to be as good or better at predicting an individual’s risk of getting lung cancer within five years compared to the best risk models available, and was able to do so using just a quarter of the information needed.

    Lung cancer is the most common cause of cancer death worldwide, with poor survival in the absence of early detection. It is estimated that there were 1.8 million lung cancer deaths globally in 20201.

    Screening for lung cancer amongst those at high-risk could reduce lung cancer-specific mortality by 20-24% amongst those screened, but the ideal way to determine if someone is high-risk remains uncertain and existing approaches are resource intensive.

    The UK is currently planning a national screening programme for lung cancer, which will include people aged 55-74 who have ever smoked, using a risk model based on 17 questions. This information is complex and time-consuming to gather and will require a 50-100 person-strong call centre to collect the data from one million people.

    In this study, researchers from UCL and the University of Cambridge used data from the UK Biobank and US National Lung Screening Trial to develop models to simplify the prediction of a person getting lung cancer within the next five years.

    The team used the datasets to experiment with over 60 different machine learning pipelines to see which were the most effective at predicting lung cancer risk using just three variables – age, how many years the individual smoked for, and the average number of cigarettes per day.

    From these, they selected four model pipelines and combined them into an ‘ensemble’ that was able to predict lung cancer risk with the same or improved accuracy, compared to the best available models currently is use2. Importantly, they were able to achieve this accuracy using only a third of the variables, greatly simplifying the process of gathering the data required.

    Dr Tom Callender (UCL Medicine), first author of the study, said: “Screening for cancer and other diseases saves lives and we are increasingly able to personalise this process. But such personalised screening and disease prevention programmes present important logistical challenges at scale. Our study shows that artificial intelligence can be used to accurately predict lung cancer risk using just three pieces of information that would be easy to gather during routine GP appointments, online or via apps. This approach has the potential to greatly simplify population level screening for lung cancer and help to make it a reality.”

    The models used in the study were externally validated in the US Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian Cancer Screening Trial and benchmarked against models that are either in use or have performed strongly in previous analyses. The authors believe the same approach could be viable for simplifying screening process for other diseases, such as type-2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

    Professor Mihaela van der Schaar, an author of the study from the University of Cambridge, said: “This research is a prime example of how machine learning tools such as AutoPrognosis, combined with innovative clinical researchers, can make a real impact in healthcare at a population level. While AutoPrognosis has already been applied for risk prediction and prognosis in numerous diseases, this is the first time it has been used to determine the minimal information needed to screen patients. I think this is the future of preventive medicine and I’m optimistic that the same approach could be applied to screening for other diseases.”

    The authors hope the findings will be used to make any national lung cancer screening programme quicker, easier and cheaper to implement, while still achieving the primary aim of reducing lung cancer mortality.

    Professor Sam Janes (UCL Medicine), senior author of the study, said: “It’s great news that the UK is working towards a national screening programme for lung cancer, which remains the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in this country as it does across the world. But as we’ve seen in the US, whose screening programme uptake is just eight per cent, there are hurdles to overcome. For any national screening programme to work, it will need to be feasible to run and succeed in getting people to participate. Our findings are good news on both counts.”

    This work was supported by Wellcome, the National Science Foundation, the Medical Research Council and Cancer Research UK.

    Notes to Editors:

    1 For more information on lung cancer, see the WHO website.

    2 The current NHS pilot combines two of the best-performing models available, the US Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian Cancer Screening Trial 2012 (PLCOm2012) and Liverpool Lung Project version 2 (LLPv2).

    Publication:

    Thomas Callender et al. ‘Assessing eligibility for lung cancer screening using parsimonious ensemble machine learning models: A development and validation study’ will be published in PLOS Medicine and is strictly embargoed until 3 October 2023 19:00 BST / 14:00 ET.

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1004287

    About UCL – London’s Global University

    UCL is a diverse global community of world-class academics, students, industry links, external partners, and alumni. Our powerful collective of individuals and institutions work together to explore new possibilities.

    Since 1826, we have championed independent thought by attracting and nurturing the world’s best minds. Our community of more than 50,000 students from 150 countries and over 16,000 staff pursues academic excellence, breaks boundaries and makes a positive impact on real world problems.

    The Times and Sunday Times University of the Year 2024, we are consistently ranked among the top 10 universities in the world and are one of only a handful of institutions rated as having the strongest academic reputation and the broadest research impact.

    We have a progressive and integrated approach to our teaching and research – championing innovation, creativity and cross-disciplinary working. We teach our students how to think, not what to think, and see them as partners, collaborators and contributors.  

    For almost 200 years, we are proud to have opened higher education to students from a wide range of backgrounds and to change the way we create and share knowledge.

    We were the first in England to welcome women to university education and that courageous attitude and disruptive spirit is still alive today. We are UCL.

    www.ucl.ac.uk | Follow @uclnews on Twitter | Read news at www.ucl.ac.uk/news/ | Listen to UCL podcasts on SoundCloud | View images on Flickr | Find out what’s on at UCL Minds

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  • Computer model predicts who needs lung cancer screening

    Computer model predicts who needs lung cancer screening

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    Newswise — A machine learning model equipped with only data on people’s age, smoking duration and the number of cigarettes smoked per day can predict lung cancer risk and identify who needs lung cancer screening, according to a new study publishing October 3rd in the open access journal PLOS Medicine by Thomas Callender of University College London, UK, and colleagues.

    Lung cancer is the most common cause of cancer death worldwide, with poor survival in the absence of early detection. Screening for lung cancer among those at highest risk could reduce lung cancer deaths by nearly a quarter, but the ideal way to determine the high-risk population has been unclear. The current standard-of-care model of lung cancer risk requires 17 variables, few of which are routinely available in electronic health records.

    In the new study, researchers used data on 216,714 ever-smokers from the UK Biobank cohort and 26,616 ever-smokers participating in the US National Lung Screening Trial to develop new models of lung cancer risk.

    A machine learning model used three predictors — age, smoking duration and pack-years — to calculate people’s odds of both developing lung cancer and dying of lung cancer over the next five years. The researchers tested the new model on a third set of data, from the US Prostate, Lung, Colorectal and Ovarian Screening Trial. The model predicted lung cancer incidence with an 83.9% sensitivity and lung cancer deaths with an 85.5% sensitivity. All versions of the model had a higher sensitivity than the currently used risk prediction formulas at an equivalent specificity.

    Callender adds, “We know that screening for those who have a high chance of developing lung cancer can save lives. With machine learning, we’ve been able to substantially simplify how we work out who is at high risk, presenting an approach that could be an exciting step in the direction of widespread implementation of personalised screening to detect many diseases early.”

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    PLOS

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  • Social Media May Be Used to Combat COVID Vaccine Hesitancy in Nigeria

    Social Media May Be Used to Combat COVID Vaccine Hesitancy in Nigeria

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    Newswise — WASHINGTON (Sept 15, 2023)–A social media campaign launched in 2022 helped encourage some Nigerians to roll up their sleeves for a COVID vaccine, according to a study published today in PLOS ONE. 

    “Our research suggests that a social media campaign can reduce vaccine hesitancy and increase the vaccination rates in Nigeria and possibly other low-income countries,” said Doug Evans, the lead author of the paper and a professor of prevention and community health at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health.

    The COVID pandemic has been a challenge for public health officials in Nigeria and other low and middle income countries where misinformation and hesitancy about the safety of the vaccines has slowed uptake of the protective shots. Evans and his colleagues designed and executed a large-scale social media campaign and launched it in six Nigerian states. The team compared Nigerian vaccination rates over a ten month period in states where the campaign ran to those in control states.

    The team concluded that the campaign produced measurable and meaningful positive effects on social norms around vaccination and vaccination status. The team also noted that the use of a social media campaign, and social media based data collection, may prove to be an important innovation that has great potential in future public health research.

    Evans says the study findings may also apply in the United States or other settings. “A social media campaign based on an influencer model could be used to combat vaccine hesitancy in the  U.S. and anywhere there is high social media usage,” he says.

    The paper, “Outcomes of a social media campaign to promote COVID-19 vaccination in Nigeria,” was published Sept. 15 in the journal PLOS ONE. The research was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

    -GW-

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    George Washington University

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  • The scale of emissions inequality in U.S. society

    The scale of emissions inequality in U.S. society

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    Newswise — Researchers have linked US household income data to greenhouse gas emissions generated in creating that income, and found that 40% of total emissions are associated with income for the highest 10% of households. The paper, published in PLOS Climate suggests that an income or shareholder-based carbon tax focused on investments may have equity advantages over traditional consumer-facing cap-and-trade or carbon tax options.

    Human created climate change is an existential threat, and there is a disconnect between those facing the worst impacts and those that drive the greatest greenhouse gas emissions.

    Jared Starr of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and colleagues, took 30 years of US household-level income data, from 1990-2019, and linked it to the emissions generated in that income. They look at both income from direct emissions, such as industries like power plants, and income related to industries supplying services or commodities to those industries – such as finance or fossil fuel suppliers.

    In general, white non-Hispanic households had the highest emissions linked to income, and Black households had the lowest, predominantly because of the racial inequity of income distribution. In terms of age, emissions tend to increase with age until peaking within the 45 – 54 age group before declining again.

    Among the highest earning 1% of households, whose income is linked to 15 – 17% of national emissions, investment holdings account for 38 – 43% of their emissions. The team also identifies “super emitters” with extremely high overall emissions, and these are almost exclusively among the top 0.1% of households, which are overrepresented in finance, real estate, and insurance; manufacturing; mining and quarrying.

    The research offers a new perspective on emissions responsibility and climate finance and could be a useful policy tool to encourage decarbonization while raising revenue for climate finance.

    Starr adds: “The scale of emission disparity is quite striking. Just fifteen days of income-based emissions from an average top 0.1% household is equal to a lifetime of emissions from a bottom decile household. I find that morally troubling, especially since low-income households face disproportionate climate harms.

    I think we need to make sure that our climate policies take these disparities into account. One way to do that is to make sure that those who are financially benefitting thanks to emissions are properly incentivized to both reduce their emissions and pay for the damage caused by those emissions. I believe that an income or asset-based carbon tax would focus the minds of corporate executives, board members, and large shareholders to decarbonize their industries in order to reduce their taxes. In essence it is decarbonization and divestment out of self-interest. At the same time it would generate much needed revenue for climate finance. While no tool is perfect, I think this could be a useful new approach to encourage the most economically and politically powerful in our society to focus their minds on decarbonization.”

     

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    PLOS

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  • Rapid Adaptation of Acinetobacter baumannii to Novel Environments

    Rapid Adaptation of Acinetobacter baumannii to Novel Environments

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    Newswise — FRANKFURT. Each year, over 670,000 people in Europe fall ill because of antibiotic-resistant pathogens, and 33,000 die from the infections. Especially feared are pathogens with resistances against multiple, or even all, known antibiotics. One of these is the bacterium Acinetobacter baumannii, feared today above all as the “hospital superbug”: According to estimates, up to five percent of all hospital-acquired and one tenth of all bacterial infections resulting in death can be attributed to this pathogen alone. This puts A. baumannii right at the top of a list of pathogens for which – according to the World Health Organization (WHO) – there is an urgent need to develop new therapies.

    Understanding which characteristics make A. baumannii a pathogen is one of the prerequisites for this. To this end, bioinformaticians led by Professor Ingo Ebersberger of Goethe University Frankfurt and the LOEWE Center for Translational Biodiversity Genomics (LOEWE-TBG) are comparing the genomes and the proteins encoded therein across a wide range of different Acinetobacter strains. Conclusions about which genes contribute to pathogenicity can be drawn above all from the differences between dangerous and harmless strains.

    Due to a lack of suitable methods, corresponding studies have so far concentrated on whether a gene is present in a bacterial strain or not. However, this neglects the fact that bacteria can acquire new characteristics by modifying existing genes and thus also the proteins encoded by them. That is why Ebersberger’s team has developed a bioinformatics method to track the modification of proteins along an evolutionary lineage and has now applied this method for the first time to Acinetobacter in collaboration with microbiologists from the Institute for Molecular Biosciences and the Institute of Medical Microbiology and Infection Control at Goethe University Frankfurt.

    In the process, the researchers concentrated on hair-like cell appendages, known as type IVa (T4A) pili, which are prevalent in bacteria and that they use to interact with their environment. The fact that they are present in harmless bacteria on the one hand and have even been identified as a key factor for the virulence of some pathogens on the other suggests that the T4A pili have repeatedly acquired new characteristics associated with pathogenicity during evolution.

    The research team could show that the protein ComC, which sits on the tip of the T4A pili and is essential for their function, shows conspicuous changes within the group of pathogenic Acinetobacter strains. Even different strains of A. baumannii have different variants of this protein. This leads bioinformatician Ebersberger to compare the T4A pili to a multifunctional garden tool, where the handle is always the same, but the attachments are interchangeable. “In this way, drastic functional modifications can be achieved over short evolutionary time spans,” Ebersberger is convinced. “We assume that bacterial strains that differ in terms of their T4A pili also interact differently with their environment. This might determine, for example, in which corner of the human body the pathogen settles.”

    The aim is to use this knowledge of the unexpectedly high diversity within the pathogen to improve the treatment of A. baumannii infections, as Ebersberger explains: “Building on our results, it might be possible to develop personalized therapies that are tailored to a specific strain of the pathogen.” However, the study by Ebersberger and his colleagues also reveals something else: Previous studies on the comparative genomics of A. baumannii have presumably only unveiled the tip of the iceberg. “Our approach has gone a long way towards resolving the search for possible components that characterize pathogens,” says Ebersberger.

    https://aktuelles.uni-frankfurt.de/english/how-the-hospital-pathogen-acinetobacter-baumannii-quickly-adapts-to-new-environmental-conditions/

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    Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt am Main

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  • Long-Term Study Discovers Nitrogen Fixation Hotspots in Atlantic Seaweed

    Long-Term Study Discovers Nitrogen Fixation Hotspots in Atlantic Seaweed

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    Newswise — A new study by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill examined nitrogen fixation among diazotrophs—microorganisms that can convert nitrogen into usable form for other plants and animals—living among sargassum. Sargassum, a brown macroalgae in the seaweed family, floats on the surface of the open ocean and provides habitat for a colorful array of marine life such as small fish, brine shrimp and other microorganisms. Previous studies have overlooked diazotrophs associated with sargassum, which could mean a historical underestimation of nitrogen fixation in the Atlantic nitrogen budget. The study, published today in PLOS ONE, found that nitrogen fixation in sargassum communities was significant.

    “The findings of this study are exciting, especially given much of the recent news regarding sargassum is about the negative effects of its overgrowth in Florida and the Caribbean,” said Lindsay Dubbs, a research associate professor and director of the Outer Banks Field Site at the UNC Institute for the Environment and research associate at East Carolina University’s Coastal Studies Institute. “We were able to show sargassum’s role in nitrogen fixation as meaningful in supporting marine productivity.”

    Nitrogen is critical for life. Plants and animals need it for growth. More nitrogen in the ocean means greater biological productivity and growth. Sargassum mats provide an important habitat for organisms to perform nitrogen fixation, but few studies have measured it in sargassum communities.

    “Only four studies have been published detailing rates of nitrogen fixation by epiphytes on pelagic sargassum and none in over 30 years,” said Claire Johnson, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Earth, Marine, and Environmental Sciences in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences and a graduate research assistant at the Coastal Studies Institute. “It’s really exciting for us to be able to contribute this long-term dataset which provides an updated view of this process and, in doing so, will hopefully bring attention to something which has been overlooked for decades.”

    The team compared the nitrogen fixation rate with other marine sources, including commonly studied nitrogen fixing organisms such as planktonic diazotrophs and coastal epiphytes—plants that grow on other plants—and found the sargassum communities outpaced them—contributing significantly to the marine nitrogen cycle and potentially to sargassum blooms.

    Collecting this type of data can be difficult, but the team’s proximity to the Gulf Stream from their lab at the Coastal Studies Institute on East Carolina University’s Outer Banks campus on Roanoke Island made it possible for them to make day-long trips to collect samples seasonally and process them quickly. The team was able to collect whole fronds of the seaweed and process them with minimal handling, better keeping the microorganisms intact for the study. Each piece was carefully managed in large tubs at the laboratory, where they collected data on nitrogen fixation rates. The team collected samples over a six-year period.

    Sargassum is typically abundant in the Caribbean Sea, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf Stream and Sargasso Sea. The team’s work in North Carolina provides a comprehensive view of how nitrogen fixation rates vary over time, but understanding how they could vary across a wider geographic range could be a next step for further research.

    “This research is even more critical now given the sargassum blooms in the South Atlantic,” said Johnson. “If nitrogen is being fixed by epiphytes on sargassum in this population on a scale anywhere near what we are seeing here, it would almost certainly have a significant impact on the Atlantic marine nitrogen budget.”

    “There is so much to be learned about this plant, the other life that it supports, and the factors that contribute to it becoming a nuisance in some places. I am optimistic that our long-term dataset will continue to reveal new insights about its importance and complexity,” Dubbs added.

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    University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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  • Researchers prefer same-gender co-authors, study confirms

    Researchers prefer same-gender co-authors, study confirms

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    Newswise — ITHACA, N.Y. – Researchers are more likely to pen scientific papers with co-authors of the same gender, a pattern that cannot be simply explained by the varying gender representation across scientific disciplines and time, according to joint research from Cornell University and the University of Washington.

    Mining a digital corpus of 560,000 published research articles over a 50-year period, the research team observed consistent gender homophily – the tendency of authors to collaborate with others who share their gender. While this observation by itself is not new, the researchers went further, using novel methods to rule out seemingly logical explanations – like a field’s gender balance, say, or a field’s authorship norms for writing research papers. 

    The team’s findings suggest a behavioral component is in play when scientists seek out collaborators.

    “One might posit that the gender homophily observed when considering a broad scientific landscape may be due to varying levels of gender representation,” said Y. Samuel Wang, assistant professor of statistics and data science and author of “Gender-Based Homophily in Collaborations Across a Heterogeneous Scholarly Landscape,” which was published in PLOS One. “However, our findings suggest that something beyond that is going on.”

    Comprising scholars in statistics, information science, biology and philosophy, the team mined a massive corpus of articles published between 1960 and 2011 from the online repository JSTOR. To help link genders to more than 800,000 author names, the team relied on social security records and crowdsourced data. Because of the limitations in the data set, this research was limited to men and women authors and didn’t factor in nonbinary identities, researchers said.

    From there, the team grouped authors from the same fields and eras, creating 50,000 hypothetical reconfigurations of authors.

    “We re-simulated hypothetical datasets. Our thinking was: How different is what we actually observed versus these hypothetical scenarios that we constructed?” said Wang, also an assistant professor of social statistics in the ILR School. “Very different, it turns out. This suggests that some other source of homophily is occurring in the data we observed.”

    As to why researchers tend to collaborate with those of the same gender, Wang and his team can’t say definitively. Data science methods can’t measure intent – why collaborators choose who they choose, but the team’s findings suggest that consideration of gender may be a factor, Wang said.

    Wang’s University of Washington co-authors are: Carole J. Lee, associate professor of philosophy; Jevin D. West, associate professor in the Information School; Carl T. Bergstrom, professor of biology, and Elena A. Erosheva, professor of statistics and social work.

    This research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the University of Washington’s Royalty Research Fund.

    For additional information, see this Cornell Chronicle story.

    -30-

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    Cornell University

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  • Chagas Disease remains underdiagnosed in Spain

    Chagas Disease remains underdiagnosed in Spain

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    Newswise — A high percentage of people from Latin America are infected with the parasite that causes Chagas disease. This is the conclusion of an analysis of nearly 3,000 people from countries where the disease is endemic and who attended the International Health Service at Barcelona’s Hospital Clinic, over a 17-year period. The study, published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, was led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), an institution supported by “la Caixa” Foundation.

    Nearly 7 million people in the world are estimated to be infected with Trypanosoma cruzi, the parasite that causes Chagas disease. Although the vector that transmits the parasite (the kissing bug) is endemic in 21 Latin American countries, the parasite has spread globally due to migratory flows. In non-endemic countries, the parasite can be transmitted vertically, from mother to child or, less commonly, through blood or organ donations. In 30-40% of cases, the infection ends up damaging the heart and digestive system, causing Chagas disease. 

    “It is therefore recommended that Latin Americans arriving in the country be tested in order to treat them if they are infected and, in the case of women of childbearing age, to prevent the vertical transmission of the parasite,” explains Irene Losada, coordinator of the Chagas Initiative and first co-author of the study, along with Pedro Laynez-Roldán, ISGlobal researcher and physician at the Clínic’s International Health Service.

    This retrospective study describes one of the largest samples of people at risk of infection in a non-endemic country: 2,820 Latin Americans, the vast majority from Bolivia, who attended the International Health Service of the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona between 2002 and 2019. Of the total number of people analysed, almost half (47%) were infected with T. cruzi and 17% had heart lesions typical of the disease. Although in most cases an electrocardiogram was sufficient to detect the lesions, an echocardiogram was needed in 10% of cases. “These results reinforce the importance of echocardiograms in the initial assessment of patients with T. cruzi infection,” says Laynez-Roldán.

    An underdiagnosis problem

    The authors note that many people arriving from highly endemic regions of Latin America, such as Bolivia, had never been tested before. “The infection is clearly under-diagnosed even in Spain, one of the European countries with the highest diagnostic coverage,” warns Maria Jesús Pinazo, last author of the study, former researcher at ISGlobal and currently at DNDi.

    The majority of the cases are women of working age, reflecting the migratory flows of recent years, which allows for better targeting of screening and prevention programmes.

     

    Reference

    Laynez-Roldán P, Losada-Galván I, Posada E et al. Characterization of Latin American migrants at risk for Trypanosoma cruzi infection in a non-endemic setting. Insights into initial evaluation of cardiac and digestive involvement. Plos NTD. 2023.

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    Barcelona Institute for Global Health, ISGlobal

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  • Getting adults on board with messy nature play

    Getting adults on board with messy nature play

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    Newswise — Climbing trees, making mud pies, or simply playing outside, parents and educators know that being in nature is an important part of every childhood. But when it comes to messy or risky play, it’s a whole different story according to new research from the University of South Australia.

    Talking to parents and early childhood educators, researchers found that parents and educators will happily open the door to ‘safe’ or ‘clean’ nature play but are more reluctant to let children engage in ‘messy’ activities or play that may be perceived as ‘risky’.

    UniSA researcher and PhD candidate Kylie Dankiw says that parents and educators act as important gatekeepers when it comes to nature play.

    “Nature play is well known for its positive effects on children’s health, development, and wellbeing,” Dankiw says, “and this was a common theme when interviewing parents and carers alike.

    “Nature play helps improve emotional regulation, physical skills, and learning outcomes, and can encourage children to develop their creativity and imagination.

    “Parents and educators also identified that nature play can help children form a connection with the natural world and learn about sustainable practices.

    “Importantly, parents and carers felt that nature play experiences could be used to offset technology use such as TV and screens.

    “But despite the known benefits, parents and carers can find it difficult when it comes to engaging children in nature play, especially if activities are messy or dirty (such as water or mud play) or are thought of as being risky (such as climbing).

    “Educators tell us that safety regulations and time restrictions can limit what they choose as outdoor activities, especially when they need to change children’s clothes after muddy play, or when parents expect for their child to come home clean from childcare.

    “There can be a conflict between encouraging children to experience nature, and what adults need to deal with in the so-called aftermath.”

    Nearly 50% of Australia’s children aged 0-12 years (two million) spend time in formal or informal early childhood education care, with long day care being the most common type of care for children aged 0-4 years.

    Paediatric expert UniSA’s Dr Margarita Tsiros says given the large number of children in care, further education and training for both  early childhood educators and parents could help overcome some of the challenges that might be linked with nature play.

    “Our research highlights that opportunities for young children to engage in nature play is influenced by other people in their lives,” Dr Tsiros says.

    “While parents and educators recognise the benefits of nature play, they can struggle with certain aspects of being in nature, particularly risk.

    “Understanding these barriers can help inform strategies to promote nature play for different age groups. It can also help inform policies and practices to promote enabling factors.

    “A key move will be to boost educators’ knowledge about nature-based learning, what constitutes nature play, and how they can use natural resources to facilitate nature play experiences.

    “In a time where screens threaten to consume children’s interest, it’s vital that we present opportunities for them to engage in nature play, and to achieve this, we need to have parents and educators on board.” 

    …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

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    University of South Australia

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  • Neanderthal cave engravings are oldest known – over 57,000 years old

    Neanderthal cave engravings are oldest known – over 57,000 years old

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    Newswise — Markings on a cave wall in France are the oldest known engravings made by Neanderthals, according to a study published June 21, 2023 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Jean-Claude Marquet of the University of Tours, France and colleagues.

    Research in recent decades has revealed a great deal about the cultural complexity of Neanderthals. However, relatively little is known about their symbolic or artistic expression. Only a short list of symbolic productions are attributed to Neanderthals, and the interpretation of these is often the subject of debate. In this study, Marquet and colleagues identified markings on a cave wall in France as the oldest known Neanderthal engravings.

    The cave is La Roche-Cotard in the Centre-Val de Loire of France, where a series of non-figurative markings on the wall are interpreted as finger-flutings, marks made by human hands. The researchers made a plotting analysis and used photogrammetry to create 3D models of these markings, comparing them with known and experimental human markings. Based on the shape, spacing, and arrangement of these engravings, the team concluded that they are deliberate, organized and intentional shapes created by human hands.

    The team also dated cave sediments with optically-stimulated luminescence dating, determining that the cave became closed off by infilling sediment around 57,000 years ago, well before Homo sapiens became established in the region. This, combined with the fact that stone tools within the cave are only Mousterian, a technology associated with Neanderthals, is strong evidence that these engravings are the work of Neanderthals.

    Because these are non-figurative symbols, the intent behind them is unclear. They are, however, of a similar age with cave engravings made by Homo sapiens in other parts of the world. This adds to a growing body of evidence that the behavior and activities of Neanderthals were similarly complex and diverse as those of our own ancestors.

    The authors add: “Fifteen years after the resumption of excavations at the La Roche-Cotard site, the engravings have been dated to over 57,000 years ago and, thanks to stratigraphy, probably to around 75,000 years ago, making this the oldest decorated cave in France, if not Europe!”

     

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    PLOS

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  • Cancer: Balancing certainty and probability

    Cancer: Balancing certainty and probability

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    Newswise — An LMU study reveals: Whether patients are able to correctly assess risks depends partly on how physicians convey statistical information to them.

    Medical results are not always easy to understand – and the risk statements that come with them perhaps even less so. Communicating statistical information to patients is no easy task.

    A team of scientists from the domains of medicine, medical education, and mathematics education at LMU has published a study in the journal PLOS ONE investigating how communication between doctors and patients about actual risks can be made more effective.

    After all, it is not always easy to grasp what certain numbers really mean. “Even doctors sometimes have difficulties in determining the right predictive value. And if the data is difficult for the doctor to interpret, it’s even harder to communicate the information accurately to patients in a way they will understand,” says mathematics educationalist Karin Binder one of the authors of the study.

    The following case will serve as an example: A patient has just received a conspicuous sonographic finding of his thyroid. Does this mean he has thyroid cancer? Not necessarily, because there is a certain probability that the result of the examination will be positive even though the patient does not have thyroid cancer.

    To explain to patients what the statistical picture looks like after such a positive test result, there are two approaches. One of them requires some lateral thinking, while the other is much easier to interpret from the patient’s perspective, as the researchers were able to demonstrate.

    Bayesian vs. diagnostic information

    The commonly used Bayesian approach proceeds from the number of patients who actually have the disease. First of all, the doctor explains how frequently the disease occurs overall – for example: “out of 1,000 patients, 50 have thyroid cancer.” Then the doctor lays out: a) for how many of these patients with thyroid cancer, the test result is positive (20 out of 50) and b) how many people who do not have thyroid cancer nonetheless have a positive test result (110 out of the remaining 950).

    This is generally the information the doctor either knows or can easily research. Positive tests as a proportion of people with the disease is also known as sensitivity – a term we may be familiar with from the Covid-19 pandemic, when it was used, for example, as a quality criterion for rapid tests. Unfortunately, however, positive tests as a proportion of people with the disease is often confused with people with the disease as a proportion of positive tests! And these two percentages can greatly differ depending on the situation.

    So what do the numbers quoted above mean in relation to a person with a positive test result? How many people who test positive actually have the disease? If for you the answer is not immediately apparent, you are not alone: Without further information, only 10% of participants were able to calculate how many people with positive results actually had the disease.

    “Diagnostic” communication of information proceeds very differently: First of all, the doctor explains how many patients have positive test results, irrespective of whether they actually have the disease or not. In our example, this would be 130 people with a conspicuous thyroid ultrasound (out of 1,000 people examined). Next, the doctor explains how many of these people with positive tests actually have the disease (20 out of 130) and how many of the people with negative test results have the disease (30 out of 870).

    The relevant information is contained here directly and without the need for mental arithmetic: If my result is positive, then the probability is a 20 out of 130 that I actually have thyroid cancer. When communicated in this form, 72% of study participants were capable of arriving at this conclusion, compared to 10% with the Bayesian approach.

    What is the best way of communicating statistical information?

    “With Bayesian communication, moreover, participants were considerably slower in reaching the correct result, if they got there at all,” says Karin Binder. “And in busy doctor’s offices and hospitals, this time is often not available.” The team of authors therefore calls on doctors to use diagnostic information communication more readily in future. This would go some way to avoiding confusion, misinterpretation, and wrong decisions.

    It would be even better, however, to take the time to give patients a full picture of the situation, containing both diagnostic and Bayesian information. Only this can explain the surprising phenomenon whereby even a medical test with outstanding quality criteria can have very limited predictive power under certain circumstances (e.g., routine screenings).

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    Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen (Munich)

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  • Romantic relationships between coworkers may deteriorate workplace culture

    Romantic relationships between coworkers may deteriorate workplace culture

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    Newswise — Workplace ostracism refers to an employee’s perception of being excluded, ignored, or rejected in the workplace. A study published in PLOS ONE by Jun Qiu at School of Nanchang, Institute of Technology, Nanchang, Jiangxi, China and colleagues suggests that romantic relationships between coworkers are associated with perceived ostracism and knowledge sabotage by other colleagues.

    Workplace romance can impact employees’ work-related attitudes and behaviors, such as performance outcomes and job satisfaction. However, the relationship between workplace romance and workplace ostracism is unclear. 

    To better understand whether romantic relationships between coworkers can lead them to ostracize others, social science researchers conducted a multisource, time-lagged research design to collect data from service sector employees in Pakistan. They administered questionnaires to participants every eight weeks, three times, ultimately collecting responses from 343 individuals for a response rate of 69%. The surveys questioned participants about their relationship status, and attempted to measure workplace ostracism, such as being ignored at work, as well as knowledge sabotage, for example, a coworker supplying the wrong information or document. After collecting the final surveys, researchers analyzed the data using statistical software.

    The researchers found that romantically involved coworkers were associated with feeling ostracized and sabotaged by other employees who may view their relationship unfavorably. However, future studies are needed to determine the generalizability of the experiment as the participants were all employed in Pakistan’s service sector, which could be confounded by cultural variables. Additionally, the researchers did not state how many of the 343 individuals were currently involved in a workplace romance. Gender may also play a role in perceived ostracism. Future studies should also consider examining whether perceived ostracism increases after a workplace relationship ends.

    According to the authors, “Though workplace romance should be a cornerstone of organizational interventions, a review of existing literature accentuates that only a few organizations maintain a workplace romance policy. Workplace romance is a committed and consensual relationship among two members and can have a range of implications on the constructive spectrum, too. Organizations should conduct interpersonal training, which helps employees discern acceptable versus unacceptable behaviors in the workplace”. 

    The authors add: “An intimate relationship may disrupt an intimate flow of knowledge in the absence of appropriate HR policies.” 

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    Press-only preview: https://plos.io/3o1POfB 

    In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS ONE: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0285837

     

    Citation: Qiu J, Sultana F, Iqbal S, Ayub A (2023) Intimate but not intimate: The perils of workplace romance in fostering knowledge sabotage. PLoS ONE 18(5): e0285837. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0285837

     

    Author Countries: China, Pakistan

     

    Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.

     

    Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

     

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    PLOS

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  • Researchers study links land use changes to water quality & quantity

    Researchers study links land use changes to water quality & quantity

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    Newswise — AMHERST, Mass. – Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently published a study in the journal PLOS Water that focuses on the Sudbury-Assabet and Concord watershed in eastern Massachusetts, and which links hydrological changes, including floods, drought and runoff, to changing patterns of land use.

    “We all live in a watershed” says Timothy Randhir, professor of environmental conservation at UMass Amherst and the paper’s senior author. “We’re constantly modifying our landscape, turning what were once forests into roads, parking lots and backyards. We’re changing the landscape from one that was once hydrologically resilient to one that pushes water downstream.”

    But it can be hard to see the complex links between changes in land use and changes in the hydrological cycle. For instance, much of Massachusetts is now subject to the paradoxical situation in which summer drought follows spring flooding. Surely if there’s enough extra water to flood the streets in towns throughout the state then there should be plenty of groundwater left for drinking, lawn watering and maintaining the levels of streams and lakes?

    This is where thinking like a watershed comes in. “Every drop of rain has two pathways when it falls,” says Randhir. “It can either run off the land into a stream, or it can infiltrate the soil and slowly trickle down to the water table.” But by paving over large swaths of land, burying swamps and wetlands and channelizing rivers, we have made it far more difficult for rain to infiltrate the soil, increasing the likelihood of drought. At the same time, all that runoff pours into streams and rivers, which in turn grows into a deluge as it thunders downstream, fed by even more runoff as it progresses.

    To make the links between land use and hydrological effect visible, and to project these effects into the future, Randhir and his graduate student, first author Ammara Talib, focused on the Sudbury-Assabet and Concord watershed in eastern Massachusetts, an area that incorporates both rural areas and suburbs of Boston. The pair fed historical data describing the changing land-use into a model which projected the trends for the years 2035, 2065 and 2100. The team then fed the results of the land-use model into a hydological model called the Hydrological Simulation Program-FORTRAN.

    What they found was that, by 2100, the total forested area will decrease by 51% and impervious areas (roads and parking lots) will increase 75%. These changes will increase annual stream flow by 3%, while runoff will grow by a whopping 69% annually. All this increased runoff will mean more topsoil and other solids in the water (an increase of 54%), and 12% and 13% increases in phosphorous and nitrogen concentrations, respectively.

    But none of this need happen.

    “We can plan for the future on the watershed scale,” says Randhir, by urban planning that implements best practices for sustainable and site-specific land-use measures. These can include creating rain gardens, using permeable pavement in large parking lots and employing vegetated swales to slow the runoff.

    “The watershed is a signature of the health of the landscape,” says Randhir. “The quality of life in any particular landscape depends on how the watershed is functioning.”

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    University of Massachusetts Amherst

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  • Vaccination against chickenpox is estimated to significantly reduce varicella cases and deaths in both children and adults and would be cost-effective

    Vaccination against chickenpox is estimated to significantly reduce varicella cases and deaths in both children and adults and would be cost-effective

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    Press-only preview: https://plos.io/42H3PPj

    Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/globalpublichealth/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgph.0001743

    Article Title: Universal varicella vaccination in Denmark: Modeling public health impact, age-shift, and cost-effectiveness

    Image Caption: A) Total and B) breakthrough varicella incidence over time, by vaccination strategy. Panel A: Total varicella incidence, including natural and breakthrough cases, over 50 years after the start of universal childhood varicella vaccination. Panel B: Breakthrough varicella incidence over 50 years. In both panels, varicella incidence with strategies E and F were the same as for strategies C and D, respectively. Strategy A: V-MSD (12 months) + V-MSD (15 months); Strategy B: V-GSK (12 months) + V-GSK (15 months); Strategy C: V-MSD (15 months) + V-MSD (48 months); Strategy D: V-GSK (15 months) + V-GSK (48 months); Strategy E: V-MSD (15 months) + MMRV-MSD (48 months); Strategy F: V-GSK (15 months) + MMRV-GSK (48 months).

    Image Credit: Burgess et al., 2023, PLOS Global Public Health, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

    Image Link: https://plos.io/3FYjWxX

    Author Countries: Denmark, USA

    Funding: This study was funded by Merck Sharp & Dohme LLC, a subsidiary of Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ, USA. The funder provided support in the form of salaries or consulting fees for CB, SS, TL, CSL, and MP, but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

    Competing Interests: I have read the journal’s policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interest: MP and SS are employees of Merck Sharp & Dohme LLC, a subsidiary of Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ, USA and own stock in Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ, USA. CB is a contractor with Merck Sharp & Dohme LLC, a subsidiary of Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ, USA and was compensated for her work. TL is an employee of MSD Denmark and owns stock in Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ, USA. CSL was paid an honorarium for consultation on this study.

     

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