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Researchers at the University of Edinburgh tested the general intelligence of more than 500 people aged approximately 70 years using a test they had all completed at the age of 11 years.

The participants then repeated the same test at the ages of 76 and 79 years.

A record of where each person had lived throughout their life was used to estimate the level of air pollution they had experienced in their early years.

The team used statistical models to analyse the relationship between a person’s exposure to air pollution and their thinking skills in later life.

They also considered lifestyle factors, such as socio-economic status and smoking.

Findings showed exposure to air pollution in childhood had a small but detectable association with worse cognitive change between the ages of 11 and 70 years.

This study shows it is possible to estimate historical air pollution and explore how this relates to cognitive ability throughout life, researchers say.

Dr Tom Russ, Director of the Alzheimer Scotland Dementia Research Centre at the University of Edinburgh, said: “For the first time we have shown the effect that exposure to air pollution very early in life could have on the brain many decades later. This is the first step towards understanding the harmful effects of air pollution on the brain and could help reduce the risk of dementia for future generations.”

Researchers say until now it has not been possible to explore the impact of early exposure to air pollution on thinking skills in later life because of a lack of data on air pollution levels before the 1990s when routine monitoring began.

For this study researchers used a model called the EMEP4UK atmospheric chemistry transport model to determine pollution levels — known as historical fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentrations — for the years 1935, 1950, 1970, 1980, and 1990. They combined these historical findings with contemporary modelled data from 2001 to estimate life course exposure

The participants were part of the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936 study, a group of individuals who were born in 1936 and took part in the Scottish Mental Survey of 1947.

Since 1999, researchers have been working with the Lothian Birth Cohorts to chart how a person’s thinking power changes over their lifetime.

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Materials provided by University of Edinburgh. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business and West Virginia University’s John Chambers College of Business and Economics set out to understand gift giving dynamics in these settings and how a giver’s and a recipient’s evaluation of the giver’s gift is influenced by the other gifts the recipient receives.

Across 12 studies examining the behavior of giving and receiving gifts in a multi-giver gift giving setting, the researchers demonstrated that recipients are consistently focused on the thoughtfulness of a gift. Gift givers, however, incorrectly assume recipients’ focus is on relative gift value.

“We found that, often times, gift givers believe the recipient’s focus is on relative gift value. For example, if I gave one bottle of cheap wine as a gift, but another person gave a bottle of expensive wine, I would incorrectly assume that the recipient would appreciate the gesture of giving the expensive bottle more than mine,” said Jeff Galak, associate professor of marketing at the Tepper School of Business who co-authored the paper. “As a result of this misconception, when givers know beforehand others will be giving gifts, they are more likely to spend additional money upgrading their gifts or even to skip the gift-giving occasion altogether.”

Christopher Olivola, associate professor of marketing at the Tepper School who co-authored the paper, added, “The next time you find yourself fixating on how your gift might compare to other gifts, consider instead how you would feel if you were in the recipient’s shoes. If you are like most consumers, the gift giving gesture is what would really matter to you, and chances are the recipient feels the same.”

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Materials provided by Carnegie Mellon University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Adaptation is a fundamental biological process driving organisms to change their traits and behavior to better fit their environment, whether it be the famed diversity of finches observed by pioneering biologist Charles Darwin or the many varieties of bacteria that humans coexist with. While antibiotics have long helped people prevent and cure bacterial infections, many species of bacteria have increasingly been able to adapt to resist antibiotic treatments.

Banerjee’s research at Carnegie Mellon and in his previous position at the University College London (UCL) has focused on the mechanics and physics behind various cellular processes, and a common theme in his work has been that the shape of a cell can have major effects on its reproduction and survival. Along with researchers at the University of Chicago, he decided to dig into how exposure to antibiotics affects the growth and morphologies of the bacterium Caulobacter crescentus, a commonly used model organism.

“Using single-cell experiments and theoretical modelling, we demonstrate that cell shape changes act as a feedback strategy to make bacteria more adaptive to surviving antibiotics,” Banerjee said of what he and his collaborators found.

When exposed to less than lethal doses of the antibiotic chloramphenicol over multiple generations, the researchers found that the bacteria dramatically changed their shape by becoming wider and more curved.

“These shape changes enable bacteria to overcome the stress of antibiotics and resume fast growth,” Banerjee said. The researchers came to this conclusion by developing a theoretical model to show how these physical changes allow the bacteria to attain a higher curvature and lower surface-to-volume ratio, which would allow fewer antibiotic particles to pass through their cellular surfaces as they grow.

“This insight is of great consequence to human health and will likely stimulate numerous further molecular studies into the role of cell shape on bacterial growth and antibiotic resistance,” Banerjee said.

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Materials provided by Carnegie Mellon University. Original written by Ben Panko. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Shigeki Watanabe of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, a familiar face at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) as a faculty member and researcher, is hot on the trail of describing how glutamate signaling works in the brain to enable neuronal communication. In a paper last fall, Watanabe (along with several MBL Neurobiology course students) described how glutamate is released from neural synapses after the neuron fires. And today, Watanabe published a follow-up study in Nature Communications.

“With this paper, we uncover how signals are transmitted across synapses to turn on the switch for plasticity,” Watanabe says. “We demonstrate that glutamate is first released near AMPA-type glutamate receptors, to relay the signal from one neuron to the next, and then near NMDA-type receptors immediately after the first signal to activate the switch for synaptic plasticity.”

This new study was also partly conducted in the MBL Neurobiology course, where Watanabe is a faculty member. “It began in 2018 with (course students) Raul Ramos and Hanieh Falahati, and then we followed up in 2019 with Stephen Alexander Lee and Christine Prater. Shuo Li, the first author, was my teaching assistant for the Neurobiology course for both years,” Watanabe says. He will be returning to the MBL this summer to teach in the course — and discover more.

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Materials provided by Marine Biological Laboratory. Original written by Diana Kenney. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

But existing methods require multiple steps performed at high temperatures over a lengthy period of time in order to produce a catalyst with the needed efficiency. That requires substantial amounts of energy and drives up the cost.

Researchers from the University of Houston have reported an oxygen evolving catalyst that takes just minutes to grow at room temperature on commercially available nickel foam. Paired with a previously reported hydrogen evolution reaction catalyst, it can achieve industrially required current density for overall seawater splitting at low voltage. The work is described in a paper published in Energy & Environmental Science.

Zhifeng Ren, director of the Texas Center for Superconductivity at UH (TcSUH) and corresponding author for the paper, said speedy, low-cost production is critical to commercialization.

“Any discovery, any technology development, no matter how good it is, the end cost is going to play the most important role,” he said. “If the cost is prohibitive, it will not make it to market. In this paper, we found a way to reduce the cost so commercialization will be easier and more acceptable to customers.”

Ren’s research group and others have previously reported a nickel-iron-(oxy)hydroxide compound as a catalyst to split seawater, but producing the material required a lengthy process conducted at temperatures between 300 Celsius and 600 Celsius, or as high as 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit. The high energy cost made it impractical for commercial use, and the high temperatures degraded the structural and mechanical integrity of the nickel foam, making long-term stability a concern, said Ren, who also is M.D. Anderson Professor of physics at UH.

To address both cost and stability, the researchers discovered a process to use nickel-iron-(oxy)hydroxide on nickel foam, doped with a small amount of sulfur to produce an effective catalyst at room temperature within five minutes. Working at room temperature both reduced the cost and improved mechanical stability, they said.

“To boost the hydrogen economy, it is imperative to develop cost-effective and facile methodologies to synthesize NiFe-based (oxy)hydroxide catalysts for high-performance seawater electrolysis,” they wrote. “In this work, we developed a one-step surface engineering approach to fabricate highly porous self-supported S-doped Ni/Fe (oxy)hydroxide catalysts from commercial Ni foam in 1 to 5 minutes at room temperature.”

In addition to Ren, co-authors include first author Luo Yu and Libo Wu, Brian McElhenny, Shaowei Song, Dan Luo, Fanghao Zhang and Shuo Chen, all with the UH Department of Physics and TcSUH; and Ying Yu from the College of Physical Science and Technology at Central China Normal University.

Ren said one key to the researchers’ approach was the decision to use a chemical reaction to produce the desired material, rather than the energy-consuming traditional focus on a physical transformation.

“That led us to the right structure, the right composition for the oxygen evolving catalyst,” he said.

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Materials provided by University of Houston. Original written by Jeannie Kever. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Perivascular spaces are involved in clearing waste and toxins from the brain and may be associated with the brain changes associated with aging.

The study involved 414 people with an average age of 80. Participants took cognitive tests of thinking and memory skills and were assessed for the presence of dementia at the beginning of the study and every two years for eight years. The participants had MRI brain scans to check for enlarged perivascular spaces in two key areas of the brain at the start of the study and then every two years for eight years. The top quarter of the people with the largest number of enlarged perivascular spaces, designated as severe cases, were compared to those with fewer or no enlarged spaces.

“Severe perivascular space disease may be a marker for an increased risk of cognitive decline and dementia,” said study author Matthew Paradise, MB.Ch.B., M.Sc., of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. “More research is needed to understand how these enlarged spaces develop, as they could be an important potential biomarker to help with early diagnosis of dementia.”

Researchers found that people with the largest number of enlarged perivascular spaces in both areas of the brain were nearly three times more likely to develop dementia during the study than people with fewer or no enlarged spaces.

A total of 97 people, or 24%, were diagnosed with dementia during the study. Of the 31 people with severe cases in both areas of the brain, 12 people, or 39%, were diagnosed with dementia.

The people with severe enlargement of perivascular spaces in both areas of the brain were also more likely to have greater decline four years later on their overall scores of cognition than the people with mild or absent enlargement of spaces.

The results persisted after researchers adjusted for other factors that could affect either scores on tests or the development of dementia, such as age, high blood pressure and diabetes. The researchers also took into account other signs of disease in the small blood vessels in the brain, which can also be a sign of risk of dementia.

“These results suggest that there is an independent mechanism for the perivascular spaces as a biomarker of cognitive impairment and dementia apart from being a general marker of disease in the small vessels,” Paradise said. “For example, enlarged perivascular spaces may be a biomarker of impaired waste clearance in the brain.”

Paradise noted that the study does not prove that enlarged perivascular spaces cause these thinking and memory problems over time; it only shows an association.

Limitations of the study include that cognitive test data was only available over four years and that imaging data could have missed some enlarged perivascular spaces in the brain.

The study was supported by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council and the Josh Woolfson Memorial Scholarship.

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Materials provided by American Academy of Neurology. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The researchers report their findings in the journal Nature Communications.

The study adds to the evidence that a broader selection of genome-editing tools is needed to target all parts of the genome, said Huimin Zhao, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who led the new research.

“CRISPR is a very powerful tool that led to a revolution in genetic engineering,” Zhao said. “But it still has some limitations.”

CRISPR is a bacterial molecule that detects invading viruses. It can carry one of several enzymes, such as Cas-9, that allow it to cut viral genomes at specific sites. TALEN also scans DNA to find and target specific genes. Both CRISPR and TALEN can be engineered to target specific genes to fight disease, improve crop plant characteristics or for other applications.

Zhao and his colleagues used single-molecule fluorescence microscopy to directly observe how the two genome-editing tools performed in living mammalian cells. Fluorescent-labeled tags enabled the researchers to measure how long it took CRISPR and TALEN to move along the DNA and to detect and cut target sites.

“We found that CRISPR works better in the less-tightly wound regions of the genome, but TALEN can access those genes in the heterochromatin region better than CRISPR,” Zhao said. “We also saw that TALEN can have higher editing efficiency than CRISPR. It can cut the DNA and then make changes more efficiently than CRISPR.”

TALEN was as much as five times more efficient than CRISPR in multiple experiments.

The findings will lead to improved approaches for targeting various parts of the genome, Zhao said.

“Either we can use TALEN for certain applications, or we could try to make CRISPR work better in the heterochromatin,” he said.

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Materials provided by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, News Bureau. Original written by Diana Yates. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

This study, led by Professor Jae-Woong Jeong, is a step forward from the wireless head-mounted implant neural device he developed in 2019. That previous version could indefinitely deliver multiple drugs and light stimulation treatment wirelessly by using a smartphone.

For the new upgraded version, the research team came up with a fully implantable, soft optoelectronic system that can be remotely and selectively controlled by a smartphone. This research was published on January 22, 2021 in Nature Communications.

The new wireless charging technology addresses the limitations of current brain implants. Wireless implantable device technologies have recently become popular as alternatives to conventional tethered implants, because they help minimize stress and inflammation in freely-moving animals during brain studies, which in turn enhance the lifetime of the devices. However, such devices require either intermittent surgeries to replace discharged batteries, or special and bulky wireless power setups, which limit experimental options as well as the scalability of animal experiments.

“This powerful device eliminates the need for additional painful surgeries to replace an exhausted battery in the implant, allowing seamless chronic neuromodulation,” said Professor Jeong. “We believe that the same basic technology can be applied to various types of implants, including deep brain stimulators, and cardiac and gastric pacemakers, to reduce the burden on patients for long-term use within the body.”

To enable wireless battery charging and controls, researchers developed a tiny circuit that integrates a wireless energy harvester with a coil antenna and a Bluetooth low-energy chip. An alternating magnetic field can harmlessly penetrate through tissue, and generate electricity inside the device to charge the battery. Then the battery-powered Bluetooth implant delivers programmable patterns of light to brain cells using an “easy-to-use” smartphone app for real-time brain control.

“This device can be operated anywhere and anytime to manipulate neural circuits, which makes it a highly versatile tool for investigating brain functions,” said lead author Choong Yeon Kim, a researcher at KAIST.

Neuroscientists successfully tested these implants in rats and demonstrated their ability to suppress cocaine-induced behaviour after the rats were injected with cocaine. This was achieved by precise light stimulation of relevant target neurons in their brains using the smartphone-controlled LEDs. Furthermore, the battery in the implants could be repeatedly recharged while the rats were behaving freely, thus minimizing any physical interruption to the experiments.

“Wireless battery re-charging makes experimental procedures much less complicated,” said the co-lead author Min Jeong Ku, a researcher at Yonsei University’s College of Medicine.

“The fact that we can control a specific behaviour of animals, by delivering light stimulation into the brain just with a simple manipulation of smartphone app, watching freely moving animals nearby, is very interesting and stimulates a lot of imagination,” said Jeong-Hoon Kim, a professor of physiology at Yonsei University’s College of Medicine. “This technology will facilitate various avenues of brain research.”

The researchers believe this brain implant technology may lead to new opportunities for brain research and therapeutic intervention to treat diseases in the brain and other organs.

This work was supported by grants from the National Research Foundation of Korea and the KAIST Global Singularity Research Program.

Medicines based on nanoscopic particles have the promise to be more effective than current therapies while reducing side effects. But subtle complexities have confined most of these particles to research labs and out of clinical use, said Mahmoudi, an assistant professor in the Department of Radiology and the Precision Health Program.

“There’s been a considerable investment of taxpayer money in cancer nanomedicine research, but that research hasn’t successfully translated to the clinic,” Mahmoudi said. “The biological effects of nanoparticles, how the body interacts with nanoparticles, remain poorly understood. And they need to be considered in detail.”

Mahmoudi’s team has now introduced a unique combination of microscopy techniques to enable more detailed consideration of those biological effects, which the researchers described in the journal Nature Communications, published online on Jan. 25.

The team’s methods let researchers see important differences between particles exposed to human plasma, the cell-free part of blood that contains biomolecules including proteins, enzymes and antibodies.

These biological bits latch onto a nanoparticle, creating a coating referred to as a corona (not to be confused with the novel coronavirus), the Latin word for crown. This corona contains clues about how nanoparticles interact with a patient’s biology. Now, Mahmoudi and his colleagues have shown how to get an unprecedented view of that corona.

“For the first time, we can image the 3-D structure of the particles coated with biomolecules at the nano level,” Mahmoudi said. “This is a useful approach to get helpful and robust data for nanomedicines, to get the kind of data that can affect scientists’ decisions about the safety and efficacy of nanoparticles.”

Although work like this is ultimately helping move therapeutic nanomedicines into the clinic, Mahmoudi is not optimistic that broad approval will happen any time soon. There’s still much to learn about the particles. Furthermore, one of the things that researchers do understand very well — that minute variations in these diminutive drugs can have outsized impact — was underscored by this study.

The researchers saw that the coronas of nanoparticles from the same batch, exposed to the same human plasma, could provoke a variety of reactions by a patient to a single dose.

Still, Mahmoudi sees an opportunity in this. He believes these particles could shine as diagnostics tools instead of drugs. Rather than trying to treat diseases with nanoscale medicine, he believes that persnickety particles would be well suited for the early detection of disease. For example, Mahmoudi’s group has previously shown this diagnostic potential for cancers and neurodegenerative diseases.

“We could become more proactive if we used nanoparticles as a diagnostic,” he said. “When you can detect disease at the earlier stages, it becomes easier to treat them.”

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Materials provided by Michigan State University. Original written by Matt Davenport. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.