The lure of cheaper prescription drugs is driving many Americans to Canada or other countries. By either a bus trip north or Internet and mail-order pharmacies, an estimated one million Americans are finding ways to reduce their medical costs. Prices for prescription drugs in Canada can be less than half as much as the cost in the U.S. , so it's not just penny-pinchers interested in this trend. Even a few states and cities are looking into purchasing drugs across the border for their employees to help relieve their budget woes. Springfield , Mass.w, already has such a program in place.
Canadian drugs prices are so much lower due to government price controls. But taking advantage of our thrifty neighbors to the north is actually illegal, according to a law against importing prescription drugs. For the most part, customs agents have let this transgression by individuals slip by them without notice. Some lawmakers and states, under pressure from their constituents, are pushing to have the law rewritten to allow Americans to buy cheaper drugs out of the country. For now, though, the current administration has no plans to allow this. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has even gone so far as to say they would consider legal action if cities and states defy the ban. With the help of a federal judge, the FDA recently shut down a pharmacy chain that imported Canadian prescription drugs.
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American drug companies are concerned about this trend as well. Their U.S. prices are set high, in part, to defray their revenue loss because of Canadian price controls. To protect their income at home, some drug makers are beginning to curb the ability of Canadian pharmacies to buy their drugs. They are also imposing restrictions on the sale of their drugs out of the country. These strategies have actually begun to affect the price of drugs in Canada .
The FDA is concerned about drug imports because they have no way of overseeing the safety of the drugs. This is a valid fear that consumers should pay attention to as well.
When you purchase a drug at a storefront in Canada or through a foreign Internet or mail-order company, you don't know if what is in the bottle is actually what the label says it is. You have no way of knowing about the qualifications of the pharmacist serving you or the source of their drugs. You may be taking the wrong amount, the wrong drug, or a pill with no active ingredient at all. In the U.S. , pharmacies and their pharmacists undergo a high level of scrutiny to ensure your safety. By importing drugs through various suppliers, you also don't have one pharmacist looking out for you and taking note of your various prescriptions and the possible interactions between them.
You can save money on your prescription drugs in other, less risky, ways. Try these ideas:
Switch to generic medications when possible; these are oftentimes less expensive than buying name-brand drugs in Canada .
Switch to a medication provided at lower cost by your insurance provider.
Use a mail-order pharmacy offered by your insurance provider. Often you can get supplies for 90 days at the cost of one month.
Talk to your doctor or pharmacist about cutting higher-dose pills in half to get the dose size you need. This way your medication lasts twice as long.
Your doctor may know about special offers from pharmaceutical companies that provide certain medications at reduced or no cost. Ask about these.
Take a look at your prescription list with your doctor and make sure all the medications are still necessary.
Lawmakers are well aware of the need to help citizens lower their health care costs. Hopefully, there will be some changes in the not-too-distant future. Until then, be wary of purchasing any medication that has not had government oversight into its source and safety.
How medications can affect your balance
Medications make a difference — generally a positive one — in the lives of many people. But at the same time, all drugs carry side effects — and with many medications, one or more of those side effects can alter your balance. How? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, common problems include vision changes, dizziness or lightheadedness, drowsiness, and impaired alertness or judgment. Some medications can even affect the inner ear, spurring a balance disorder.
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Some of the commonly prescribed medications that can affect balance include:
antidepressants
anti-anxiety drugs
antihistamines prescribed to relieve allergy symptoms
blood pressure and other heart medications
pain relievers, both prescription and non-prescription
sleep aids (over-the-counter and prescription forms)
Sometimes the problem isn't a single drug, but a combination of medications being taken together. Older adults are especially vulnerable because drugs are absorbed and broken down differently as people age.
If you are concerned about how your medications may be affecting your balance, call your doctor and ask to review the drugs you're taking, their doses, and when you take them. It is never a good idea to just stop taking a medication without consulting your doctor first.
10 Things: Mars Helicopter
When our next Mars rover lands on the Red Planet in 2021, it will deliver a groundbreaking technology demonstration: the first helicopter to ever fly on a planetary body other than Earth. This Mars Helicopter will demonstrate the first controlled, powered, sustained flight on another world. It could also pave the way for future missions that guide rovers and gather science data and images at locations previously inaccessible on Mars. This exciting new technology could change the way we explore Mars.
1. Its body is small, but its blades are mighty.
One of the biggest engineering challenges is getting the Mars Helicopter’s blades just right. They need to push enough air downward to receive an upward force that allows for thrust and controlled flight — a big concern on a planet where the atmosphere is only one percent as dense as Earth’s. “No helicopter has flown in those flight conditions – equivalent to 100,000 feet (30,000 meters) on Earth,” said Bob Balaram, chief engineer for the project at our Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
2. It has to fly in really thin Martian air.
To compensate for Mars’ thin atmosphere, the blades must spin much faster than on an Earth helicopter, and the blade size relative to the weight of the helicopter has to be larger too. The Mars Helicopter’s rotors measure 4 feet wide (about 1.2 meters) long, tip to tip. At 2,800 rotations per minute, it will spin about 10 times faster than an Earth helicopter.
At the same time, the blades shouldn’t flap around too much, as the helicopter’s design team discovered during testing. Their solution: make the blades more rigid. “Our blades are much stiffer than any terrestrial helicopter’s would need to be,” Balaram said.
The body, meanwhile, is tiny — about the size of a softball. In total, the helicopter will weigh just under 4 pounds (1.8 kilograms).
3. It will make up to five flights on Mars.
Over a 30-day period on Mars, the helicopter will attempt up to five flights, each time going farther than the last. The helicopter will fly up to 90 seconds at a time, at heights of up to 10 to 15 feet (3 to 5 meters). Engineers will learn a lot about flying a helicopter on Mars with each flight, since it’s never been done before!
4. The Mars Helicopter team has already completed groundbreaking tests.
Because a helicopter has never visited Mars before, the Mars Helicopter team has worked hard to figure out how to predict the helicopter’s performance on the Red Planet. “We had to invent how to do planetary helicopter testing on Earth,” said Joe Melko, deputy chief engineer of Mars Helicopter, based at JPL.
The team, led by JPL and including members from JPL, AeroVironment Inc., Ames Research Center, and Langley Research Center, has designed, built and tested a series of test vehicles.
In 2016, the team flew a full-scale prototype test model of the helicopter in the 25-foot (7.6-meter) space simulator at JPL. The chamber simulated the low pressure of the Martian atmosphere. More recently, in 2018, the team built a fully autonomous helicopter designed to operate on Mars, and successfully flew it in the 25-foot chamber in Mars-like atmospheric density.
Engineers have also exercised the rotors of a test helicopter in a cold chamber to simulate the low temperatures of Mars at night. In addition, they have taken design steps to deal with Mars-like radiation conditions. They have also tested the helicopter’s landing gear on Mars-like terrain. More tests are coming to see how it performs with Mars-like winds and other conditions.
5. The camera is as good as your cell phone camera.
The helicopter’s first priority is successfully flying on Mars, so engineering information takes priority. An added bonus is its camera. The Mars Helicopter has the ability to take color photos with a 13-megapixel camera — the same type commonly found in smart phones today. Engineers will attempt to take plenty of good pictures.
6. It’s battery-powered, but the battery is rechargeable.
The helicopter requires 360 watts of power for each second it hovers in the Martian atmosphere – equivalent to the power required by six regular lightbulbs. But it isn’t out of luck when its lithium-ion batteries run dry. A solar array on the helicopter will recharge the batteries, making it a self-sufficient system as long as there is adequate sunlight. Most of the energy will be used to keep the helicopter warm, since nighttime temperatures on Mars plummet to around minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 90 Celsius). During daytime flights, temperatures may rise to a much warmer minus 13 to minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit to (minus 25 to minus 50 degrees Celsius) — still chilly by Earth standards. The solar panel makes an average of 3 watts of power continuously during a 12-hour Martian day.
7. The helicopter will be carried to Mars under the belly of the rover.
Somewhere between 60 to 90 Martian days (or sols) after the Mars 2020 rover lands, the helicopter will be deployed from the underside of the rover. Mars Helicopter Delivery System on the rover will rotate the helicopter down from the rover and release it onto the ground. The rover will then drive away to a safe distance.
8. The helicopter will talk to the rover.
The Mars 2020 rover will act as a telecommunication relay, receiving commands from engineers back on Earth and relaying them to the helicopter. The helicopter will then send images and information about its own performance to the rover, which will send them back to Earth. The rover will also take measurements of wind and atmospheric data to help flight controllers on Earth.
9. It has to fly by itself, with some help.
Radio signals take time to travel to Mars — between four and 21 minutes, depending on where Earth and Mars are in their orbits — so instantaneous communication with the helicopter will be impossible. That means flight controllers can’t use a joystick to fly it in real time, like a video game. Instead, they need to send commands to the helicopter in advance, and the little flying robot will follow through. Autonomous systems will allow the helicopter to look at the ground, analyze the terrain to look how fast it’s moving, and land on its own.
10. It could pave the way for future missions.
A future Mars helicopter could scout points of interest, help scientists and engineers select new locations and plan driving routes for a rover. Larger standalone helicopters could carry science payloads to investigate multiple sites at Mars. Future helicopters could also be used to fly to places on Mars that rovers cannot reach, such as cliffs or walls of craters. They could even assist with human exploration one day. Says Balaram: “Someday, if we send astronauts, these could be the eyes of the astronauts across Mars.”
Open Access may help enlighten society on the social value of robotics and AI
By Giorgio Metta
Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) promise to be the next technological revolution. There is some debate between those who believe that it would enable our digital technology to address concrete societal problems, and those who want to limit it based on ignorance and fear. One way to help clear the debate is by spreading knowledge about robotics and AI through Open Access publishing. The open release of information and the results (and implications) to the general public could help enlighten them to the see the social value of robotics and AI through the eyes of the scientists who work in the field.
The European Commission believes robotics and AI will contribute to address the most pressing societal challenges of our time, such as, in fully automated and intelligent factories which will make for energetically sustainable production, in the creation of robot surgeons or rehabilitation robotics to improve long-term health care, as well as, to intervene in case of disaster such as in Fukushima or in the Gulf of Mexico disasters.
The first signs that this “revolution” is happening can be seen in our consumer devices. Smart phones are an example where sophisticated software is delivering value at an increasing pace. Work scheduling and organization is becoming simpler as the device connects continuously to the network to bring about the best possible planning, recommendation, route, travel option or restaurant.
Computer vision is becoming successful as testified by the release of vision controlled videogame consoles. Cameras and lasers help drivers to park, brake and monitor their attention level warning at the first sign of sleep or any other dangerous behavior. Above all, Google researchers (and others) have clocked hundreds of thousands of miles in cars without a human driver and more importantly without accidents on California roads. Driverless cars will deliver the promise of reducing the heavy death toll due to personal mobility (which history will compare to the worst of the wars).
Small robots are helping for the first time in taking care of cleaning floors, swimming pools and large industrial warehouses automatically. Human-friendly robots are being delivered to industry as we speak (e.g. BMW) to cooperate in assembly tasks. The idea of the robotic co-worker is finally believed to be feasible and economically viable. Exoskeletons and other similar rehabilitation devices are now commonplace in advanced hospitals and rehab centers worldwide.
Undeniably, the social value of robotics and AI, that is the transformation of information technology into something “physical” that can act in the world and, the opportunity to bring the robots to a new level of autonomy and safety, is an enormous opportunity.
Robotics and AI is not just a “revolution” in terms of bringing to fruition a new set of technologies. They are game changers as they affect humanity’s progress and its “evolution”. Robotics and AI will help trading labor for quality of life. Robots will first help in our daily chores, later they will help when we get older to support quality of life in the third and fourth age.
Scaremongers on the contrary seem to fear the possibility of greater labor displacement and social dislocation. Although there is no way to seriously predict the overall outcome in the long term, the Economist reports that technology in the past had generally led to an increase of the quality of life and pro-capita riches.
Conversely, estimates of the European Commission depict a dire scenario. By 2050, for each person beyond working age (>65) there is going to be only two productive persons (>16). About 29% of the total GDP will be spent to support pension, health care and long-term care. We will witness a declining workforce (rather than unemployment) and a chronic inability to support the less fortunate segments of the population. In the emerging economies and depressed areas of the planet (5/6 of Earth population), robotics and AI, together with optimized production and low-cost fabrication technologies can become the ideal companion to energy and health care policies.
The other common fear of robotics and AI is the controllability of technology, its potential for military use and in the case of AI, whether it can be controlled at all. This is a recurring argument after any new technology (genetics, nanotechnology, etc.). Anything we build has a potential for misuse and regretfully history has shown a long trail of such misuses. There is no way to counteract these dangers but with research and scientific knowledge. Having the knowledge to understand what we build and predict its behavior (even when this is an autonomous machine) is a proper research question that needs to be investigated.
Paraphrasing Carl Sagan’s last TV interview*, there is only one possible rational argument, that is, we have to shed lights into robotics and AI technologies through research so that later we can make informed choices. Fearing robotics because of either jobs displacement or misuse does not look a viable option. We need these new technologies. We have therefore to invest in research more than ever to base decisions on facts and, simultaneously, in communicating results as broadly as possible.
Open publication and release of the results of science (and their implications), education and a new general public scientific dissemination are a fundamental aspect of our mission as scientists. Widespread knowledge to everyone interested in the discussion but nonetheless scientifically sound knowledge is fundamental to avoid the risk of basing future research policies on myth or fear.
About Giorgio Metta:
Giorgio Metta is the Specialty Chief Editor of Frontiers in Humanoid Robotics. He is also the director of the iCub Facility department at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) where he coordinates the development of the iCub robotic platform/project and is deputy director of IIT delegate to the international relations and external funding. Giorgio Metta is the author of approximately 250 scientific publications and his research activities are in the fields of biologically motivated and humanoid robotics and, in particular, in developing humanoid robots that can adapt and learn from experience.
Fighting sexual harassment in science may mean changing science itself A recent report highlights just how prevalent harassment is in academic science
The #MeToo movement has revealed sexual and gender harassment in every corner of American life. Science hasn’t been immune. High profile cases — such as decades’ worth of complaints against astronomer Geoff Marcy, and allegations that geologist David Marchant verbally and physically abused women scientists in Antarctica — make headlines. But it is the often underreported gender harassment, both serious and subtle, that contributes most to the scope of the problem. And efforts to recruit more women into scientific fields fall awfully flat when those women end up harassed out of their careers.
A report published on June 12 by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine offers an exhaustive, 311-page look into just how pervasive the problem really is: More than 50 percent of women in academia say they have experienced sexual harassment. “I am sure that many were aware of the issue, but were perhaps surprised by the magnitude of the problem,” says Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences.
The report offers a list of recommendations to combat harassment, many of which are focused on changing the culture of science to create an environment where there is more civility and safety. But when the entire scientific training system is based on huge power imbalances between professors and trainees, creating that environment will involve more than team-building exercises and casual Fridays.
Real change may mean changing everything about the way scientific training works.
Feudal lords of science
One of the most shocking statistics out of the report was actually an old number. It was from a 2003 review estimating that 58 percent of academic employees had experienced sexual harassment. The only field with worse numbers? The military (at 69 percent).
A taxonomy of sexual harassment
Sexual harassment comes in many forms. All of them contribute to a hostile environment in academic science, engineering and medicine.
Sexual coercion
Promising professional rewards in return for sexual favors
Threatening professional consequences if sexual demands aren’t met
Unwanted sexual attention
Rape and sexual assault
Unwanted groping
Pressure for sex or dates
Gender harassment
Offensive physical remarks
Gendered insults
Source: Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, 2018.
That number may be 15 years old, but Kathryn Clancy, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a member of the committee responsible for the NAS report, is confident it’s still accurate. “People have been doing this research for 30 years,” she says. “Generally, in male dominated work environments, about three-quarters of women experience harassment. That hasn’t changed.”
The reason the military and academia top the list for prevalence of sexual harassment isn’t just because academia and the military are both male-dominated professions. Instead, it’s because they both work in similar ways.
Both have a hierarchical structure in which someone has a lot of power over someone else. In the military, that’s the commanding officer. In academic science, for undergraduates, graduate students and postdocs, it’s the professor. That professor is responsible for training and guiding the trainee’s research. But that leader is also, often, paying the student’s tuition and stipend through research funding.
“I fund my grad students through National Science Foundation grants,” explains Erika Marín-Spiotta, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “[Trainees] contribute to the research, and [the research grant] pays their health insurance, access to the field and access to conferences.” It may also pay a trainee’s tuition and stipend. The research grant technically goes to the university, but from there, it goes to the professor. “I hire and supervise the students,” she says. “It’s dependent on me.”
Medicine can be similar, notes Reshma Jagsi, a physician and social scientist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. But, she notes, hierarchies can serve a crucial purpose. “It’s very important for patient safety to have a clear line of command. In some ways medicine is like the military: It requires some degree of hierarchy.”
The model can be extremely positive. “A good mentor is out in front of the students saying ‘this is what the path looks like for you and these are things that should be on your radar,’” explains Sarah Myhre, a paleoceanographer at the University of Washington in Seattle. The right mentor can make a good young scientist into a great one. “The mentorship I had, particularly from women scientists, has fundamentally changed my career. It has made my career and built my career.” But the system also ends up being “very personality-driven,” she notes. “People build their own fiefdoms.”
Harassment culture on campus
A 2015 survey of the Penn State University system showed that students in the undergraduate, graduate and medical programs all experience high rates of sexual harassment from faculty and staff.
Prevalence of harassment
And if the mentor/mentee relationship goes sour, a trainee is stuck. It’s not just her career or her current research project, but potentially her rent check at stake. “The way in which a student’s entire career success rests on a single person causes a lot of problems,” agrees Clancy. The relative powerlessness of trainees can silence victims of sexual harassment. Even when the perpetrator isn’t your direct boss, is filing a complaint worth the potentially career-ending reprisals?
Most of the time, that abuse of power is not sexual coercion or unwanted sexual attention, as the report points out. Instead, it’s sexist hostility and crude behavior creating an unfriendly environment. In a 2015 survey of the Penn State University system, almost 31 percent of undergrads, 41 percent of graduate students and 50 percent of medical students reported experiencing sexist hostility from faculty and staff — nasty jokes or comments about how women aren’t smart enough to succeed, for example. Between 13 and 23 percent of women reported crude behavior (such as sexist insults). Each instance may seem relatively minor, but together they contribute to an environment where women feel devalued and unwelcome, the report concludes.
That hostile environment is perpetuated by a focus on the science — and not on the people doing it. “We think we work with data, not with people, but we work with [other] people all the time,” Marín-Spiotta notes. “We haven’t been trained in how to manage people; we’re training how to analyze stats and run instruments. We never receive mentoring or management training.”
Granted, mentoring and management training may be on offer through a university or institute. But why take time from the lab to do it? Managerial skills aren’t how scientists get promoted — research is. “It’s not how good of a mentor are we but how much money and how many publications we’re producing,” she explains. “It is a system where people are bodies to produce data.”
But scientists are people, not robots. And people live in a culture that has its own biases, notes Myhre. Biases — such as sexism and racism — that seep into the ivory tower. “I have a deep love and affection for my colleagues and friends who are scientists. But I think the culture has a lack of civility. It is a culture of abuse of power,” she says. “I think if institutions don’t actively counteract these forces, if there’s no active participation and counteraction, then of course these dynamics of power and abuse play out.”
When scientists train in tiny, all powerful fiefdoms, it’s easy for those power abuses to persist, Marín-Spiotta says. “Often we’re like, ‘I’m not going to be involved in how my colleague is treating his or her students, it’s not my business,’” she explains. “We need to make it our business.”
Flattening the org chart
Creating a better environment, the National Academy of Sciences report concludes, involves breaking down the feudal system. The report offers 14 recommendations to reduce sexual harassment in academic science, engineering and medicine. Some of the recommendations promote civility. Others note that accountability belongs to everyone and reporting needs to be transparent.
But recommendation five is a single sentence: “Academic institutions should consider power-diffusion mechanisms (i.e., mentoring networks or committee-based advising and departmental funding rather than funding only from a principal investigator) to reduce the risk of sexual harassment.”
That would mean a fundamental change to the way students are mentored, funded and advised. Currently, graduate students in the sciences generally have a single primary mentor, and a committee of other professors that oversees their progress and (in theory) diffuses the mentor’s influence.
In reality, though, those committees may meet only once or twice a year. “The input of the other faculty members varies a lot,” says Marín-Spiotta. In the face of a powerful, charismatic professor, the suggestions of the committee may be toothless. And at the postdoctoral level, the trainee often works for one professor — no committee involved.
To make sure the student has people other than their adviser to turn to, graduate students and other trainees may need to have more than one adviser — a situation that is relatively uncommon, especially at the postdoctoral level. “Students should have academic advisers as well as research advisers, to broaden the people to whom the student has access,” says Sheila Widnall, an aerospace engineer at MIT and cochair of the committee that issued the report.
It would also mean formalizing many of the informal arrangements that make up graduate and postdoctoral training structures. It might involve adding professors to a mentorship team, and making sure those extra people aren’t only mentors on paper. “If we could institutionalize it, [if] it’s a team of mentors so [the trainee] always has more than one person to go to, they’re not at the mercy of one particular person,” says Marín-Spiotta.
Even in medicine’s traditional hierarchies, such a change would also benefit everyone, Jagsi says. “We’ve seen medical care teams where multiple providers are working together. It can be very effective in creating an environment less conducive to a single individual’s bad behavior,” she notes.
The report also recommends funding students through departments or institutions, not the professor’s pocket. This would change where young scientists look for their paychecks. About one in five young scientists are paid for by their professors’ grants, a 2015 survey of science and engineering graduate students and postdocs showed. In biomedical fields funded by the National Institutes of Health, 59 percent of trainees, including both graduate students and postdocs, were supported by their professor’s grants that same year.
If funding comes from departments or institutions, and not from the professor, “I think that gives a lot more leverage to funding institutes,” says BethAnn McLaughlin, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Then, she says, if harassment occurred, the funding institute — such as the NIH or NSF — could swoop in and take away the university’s money. “It would send a message that would be heard immediately by every other training program that if you don’t get these bad actors out, you will lose all your money, and don’t bother coming back for more.”
Changing the existing system will take time. “I want to burn it down,” Clancy says. “But I also recognize that would be harmful to the people I’m trying to help.” Efforts to encourage the careers of women and people of color in the existing system would have to be built into any new architecture. “Dismantling the system immediately, given the way sexism and racism still operate, means we wouldn’t have a clear lane for success,” Clancy says.
Changing the power structures — the structures in which science functions — is a big enough change. But it’s also a change within a bigger context. Academic science, engineering and medicine can change their funding and mentorship, Myhre says, “but changing how men behave? That would solve a lot of the problem.”
Google Glass app helps autistic children with social interactions
A prototype Google Glass app for children with autism spectrum disorder can recognize conversational prompts and provide suitable responses.
— by Tania Fitzgeorge-Balfour
A prototype software application, to be used with the optical head-mounted display Google Glass, has been designed as a social-skills coach for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
A new study published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI finds that the wearable technology can recognize conversational prompts and provide the user with suitable responses in return. Moreover, children find it easy to operate and enjoy using it.
Autism spectrum disorder is a life-long condition that affects 1 in 68 people. A defining feature of ASD is difficulties with social communication — which can include initiating and maintaining conversations with others.
“We developed software for a wearable system that helps coach children with autism spectrum disorder in everyday social interactions,” says Azadeh Kushki, an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto, and Scientist at the Bloorview Research Institute, Toronto, Canada. “In this study, we show that children are able to use this new technology and they enjoy interacting with it.”
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Children with autism spectrum disorder are often drawn to technological devices and find them highly motivating tools for delivering interventions designed to help them. The problem with existing technology, however, is that using human-to-computer interaction to teach social skills can have the opposite effect to its goal, in that the user becomes socially isolated.
“The interesting thing about our new technology is that we are not trying to replace human-to-human interactions; instead, we use this app to coach children who are communicating with people in real-world situations,” explains Professor Kushki. “Children can practice their skills outside of their normal therapy sessions and it can provide them with increased independence in everyday interactions.”
Professor Kushki and her colleagues developed the app, named Holli, to be used with wearable technology such as Google Glass — a head-mounted display in the shape of eyeglasses. It listens to conversations and prompts the user with an appropriate reply.
For example, if the user is greeted by a person who says ‘Welcome’, Holli will provide various responses to choose from, such as ‘Hey’, ‘Hello’ or ‘Afternoon’. When Holli recognizes the user’s response, the prompts disappear and Holli waits for the next exchange in conversation.
To assess the usability of the prototype software, the researchers asked 15 children with autism spectrum disorder to be guided by Holli when interacting socially. They saw that Holli could complete most conversations without error, and that children could follow the prompts to carry on a social interaction. In fact, Holli was often able to understand what the user was saying before/he she finished saying it, which helped the conversation to flow naturally. As well as demonstrating its feasibility, the children also said how much they liked using it; they enjoyed the prompts and found it easy to use.
“This study shows the potential of technology-based intervention to help children with ASD,” says Professor Kushki. “These systems can be used in everyday settings, such as home and school, to reinforce techniques learned in therapeutic settings.”
It is hoped that further developments will allow customization for individual users, such as changing prompt location, size and medium, to cater to each child’s unique preference and ability. In addition, more work is needed to improve Holli’s ability to deal with speech differences that can affect those with autism spectrum disorder.
“Technology has tremendous potential to change the way we think about delivering services to those with autism spectrum disorder. It can augment existing face-to-face interventions to make services accessible in a timely and cost-effective way and help increase treatment effectiveness,” concludes Professor Kushki.
Artificial intelligence tricked by optical illusion, just like humans
The study suggests that predictive coding theory is the basis of illusory motion
— By National Institutes of Natural Sciences, Japan
Artificial intelligence (AI) is tricked by optical illusions, find researchers working on deep neural networks (DNNs). The study is published in Frontiers in Psychology.
Developed with reference to the network structures and the operational algorithms of the brain, DNNs have achieved notable success in a broad range of fields — including computer vision, in which they have produced results comparable to, and in some cases superior to, human experts.
DNNs are based on predictive coding theory. This assumes that the internal models of the brain predict the visual world at all times and that errors between the prediction and the actual sensory input further refine the internal models. If the theory substantially reproduces the visual information processing of the brain, then the DNNs can be expected to represent the human visual perception of motion.
In this research, the DNNs were trained with natural-scene videos of motion from the point of view of the viewer. The motion prediction ability of the obtained computer model was then verified using a rotating propeller in unlearned videos and the “Rotating Snake Illusion” (image above).
The computer model accurately predicted the magnitude and direction of motion of the rotating propeller in the unlearned videos. Surprisingly, it also represented the rotational motion for the illusion images that were not physically moving — much like human visual perception. While the trained network accurately reproduced the direction of illusory rotation, it did not detect motion components in negative control pictures wherein people do not perceive illusory motion.
Associate professor Eiji Watanabe of the National Institute for Basic Biology, who led the research team, said: “This research supports the exciting idea that the mechanism assumed by the predictive coding theory is a basis of motion illusion generation. Using sensory illusions as indicators of human perception, deep neural networks are expected to contribute significantly to the development of brain research.”
On Jupiter, lightning flashes from storms swirling at the poles The planet’s heat distribution explains why lightning doesn’t strike near the equator
When Voyager 1 revealed lightning on Jupiter in 1979, something about the flashes didn’t make sense. From a distance, it seemed like the radio waves from the massive planet’s lightning bolts didn’t reach the high frequency emitted by lightning on Earth.
But the Juno spacecraft, which has been orbiting much closer to Jupiter’s surface for the last two years, has helped solve the mystery. The radio waves emitted by the planet’s lightning are, in fact, in a similar frequency range as our lightning at home, mission scientists report in the June 6 Nature. Astronomers couldn’t detect anything but the lower frequencies, called “whistlers,” until now.
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And while solving that mystery, the researchers discovered another twist: Jupiter’s lightning may have a similar frequency as Earth’s, but it is focused at the planet’s poles instead of nearer to the equator, as on Earth.
“Jupiter continues to surprise us,” says Shannon Brown, a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and lead author of the new study. Brown says the difference in location of the lightning strikes has to do with how the two planets distribute heat. Earth receives most of its heat from the sun, and that heat is focused around the equator. Jupiter, much farther from the sun, creates most of its heat internally, leading to different convection patterns that drive lightning to the poles (SN: 3/31/18, p. 10).
Juno had been scheduled to take a mission-ending plunge into Jupiter’s atmosphere in July, but on June 6 the mission was extended for another three years — plenty of time to catch more great lightning shows (SN: 6/24/17, p. 14).
Find your passion? If only it were that simple New study challenges the idea that your lifelong pursuit is just buried inside you somewhere — but a new mindset can help.
It's the stuff of earnest college graduation speeches: "Find your passion and follow it!" It follows that if you do work that you're passionate about, you'll be a happier and more successful person.
Sounds great, doesn't it? In fact, finding your passion has become a big business, with colleges, self-help books and courses, and experts lined up to help people discover their one true path. But for many people, that specific passion can be awfully elusive. That's because, contrary to how the idea is popularly understood, most people don't just magically find their passion one morning. That truth can be frustrating and discouraging. But even those who have ferreted out their passion can find themselves stuck in a narrow path.
That's because the very thinking behind the idea of a pre-ordained passion is a limiting way to understand yourself. Psychologists call thinking in this manner a fixed mindset. Luckily, there's another way to do it.
Fixed vs. growth
Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, defines fixed vs. growth mindsets in kids (but it applies to all of us):
"When children are in a fixed mindset, they believe that their intelligence and talents are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that’s that. However, when they’re in a growth mindset, they believe that their intelligence or talents can be developed — through hard work, good strategies and help from others. They don’t necessarily believe that everyone’s equally smart or talented, but they believe that everyone can grow."
So the idea of "finding your passion" depends on this fixed mindset — that your passion is hiding inside you, that everyone has one, and that once you find it, you are set for life. That kind of thinking about your life's interests is too limiting. Instead, they suggest a healthier (and more realistic) way to approach the problem.
So what does that look like? Dweck, along with her colleague at Stanford, Gregory Walton, and postdoc Paul O'Keefe, looked at five previous studies in a new analysis. By analyzing the previous studies — which looked at different aspects of the mindsets in various groups — they were able to draw conclusions about the impact of fixed vs. growth ways of thinking.
The researchers found that, "a fixed theory was more likely to dampen interest in areas outside people’s existing interests. Those endorsing a fixed theory were also more likely to anticipate boundless motivation when passions were found, not anticipating possible difficulties." Fixed-theory thinkers were also less likely to do cross-disciplinary thinking, which is more important than ever in an information-based work world. "Many advances in sciences and business happen when people bring different fields together, when people see novel connections between fields that maybe hadn’t been seen before," Walton said in a release from Stanford. "If you are overly narrow and committed to one area, that could prevent you from developing interests and expertise that you need to do that bridging work," Walton said.
All-or-nothing approach doesn't work
Fixed mindsets cause other problems too: In most of the more complex work we engage in today, challenges are common. If you believe that your passion should give you some kind of super-power to avoid or power through challenges, that could cause you to give up. When you aren't able to meet every challenge, your belief in your passion can wane. "Urging people to find their passion may lead them to put all their eggs in one basket but then to drop that basket when it becomes difficult to carry," wrote the researchers in their paper's abstract.
Conversely, a growth mindset looks like this: "If you look at something and think, 'that seems interesting, that could be an area I could make a contribution in,' you then invest yourself in it," said Walton. Instead of finding your passion, you're developing it by wrestling with it over time. "You take some time to do it, you encounter challenges, over time you build that commitment." Thinking this way — developing your passion instead of somehow magically "discovering" it, means failure, small and large, is understood as a normal part of digging deep into what you love or are at least really interested in.
A growth mindset also allows you to pursue new paths when the time is right: In most industries, you should be changing jobs every three years, or at least assessing where you are and where you want to go. Developing new and emerging interests will keep you competitive and personally interested in new challenges as they come your way.
With this new system, robots can ‘read’ your mind Directing bots with brain waves and muscle twitches could make for a speedier response time
Getting robots to do what we want would be a lot easier if they could read our minds.
That sci-fi dream might not be so far off. With a new robot control system, a human can stop a bot from making a mistake and get the machine back on track using brain waves and simple hand gestures. People who oversee robots in factories, homes or hospitals could use this setup, to be presented at the Robotics: Science and Systems conference on June 28, to ensure bots operate safely and efficiently.
Electrodes worn on the head and forearm allow a person to control the robot. The head-worn electrodes detect electrical signals called error-related potentials — which people’s brains unconsciously generate when they see someone goof up — and send an alert to the robot. When the robot receives an error signal, it stops what it is doing. The person can then make hand gestures — detected by arm-worn electrodes that monitor electrical muscle signals — to show the bot what it should do instead.
MIT roboticist Daniela Rus and colleagues tested the system with seven volunteers. Each user supervised a robot that moved a drill toward one of three possible targets, each marked by an LED bulb, on a mock airplane fuselage. Whenever the robot zeroed in on the wrong target, the user’s mental error-alert halted the bot. And when the user flicked his or her wrist left or right to redirect the robot, the machine moved toward the proper target. In more than 1,000 trials, the robot initially aimed for the correct target about 70 percent of the time, and with human intervention chose the right target more than 97 percent of the time.
The team plans to build a system version that recognizes a wider variety of user movements. That way, “you can gesture how the robot should move, and your motion can be more fluidly interpreted,” says study coauthor Joseph DelPreto, also a roboticist at MIT.
Issuing commands via brain and muscle activity could work especially well in noisy or poorly lit places like factories or outdoors. In such areas, other hands-off means of directing robots, such as visual cues or verbal instructions, may not work as well, says Alexandre Barachant, a brain-computer interface researcher at CTRL-Labs in New York City. This technique could also be used to direct robots that assist people who can’t speak or can hardly move, such as patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS (SN: 11/16/13, p. 22).
What’s more, the system can correct robot errors almost instantly. Error-related potentials in the brain are discernible a few hundred milliseconds after a person notices a mistake, and electrical muscle signals can be detected before actual movement, Barachant says. This feature could be useful in situations where quick reaction time is key for the safety of the bot and others — as with self-driving cars or manufacturing machines.
For this system to enter widespread use, though, the equipment that tracks users’ brain activity would need to be more broadly accessible than it is now, Barachant says. This mind-monitoring device can cost thousands of dollars, and electrode caps are hardly the most comfortable headwear. But if researchers could measure brain waves with cheaper, more comfortable headsets, the system could provide a relatively quick, easy way for average users to make a robot do their bidding.
The life-changing magic of tidying up your electronic life Marie Kondo's ideas work for your phone and computer too.
I'm a fan of Marie Kondo and her book “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing." As Starre Vartan notes, “It sounds like hyperbole, but for devotees of the KonMari Method of housecleaning, pioneered by Marie Kondo (who named it after herself), it’s reality.”
I used to be a packrat and never throw anything out, and am not particularly tidy — despite all my talk about minimalism. I also had a house with a basement and a third floor that I could fill with everything. I found myself in big trouble when we seriously downsized and I no longer had anywhere to put anything. No endless filing cabinets, no basement, no empty third floor. And only four drawers in our new built-in dressers to put all of my clothing. There was no way it was going to fit.
So I went all Kondo on it. Marie Kondo’s key takeaway is simple: Think about what you really want to keep, not what you want to get rid of. She writes:
I came to the conclusion that the best way to choose what to keep and what to throw away is to take each item in one’s hand and ask: “Does this spark joy?” If it does, keep it. If not, dispose of it. This is not only the simplest but also the most accurate yardstick by which to judge….Keep only those things that speak to your heart. Then take the plunge and discard all the rest. By doing this, you can reset your life and embark on a new lifestyle.
I Kondoed my drawers, and now have one that is almost empty. I Kondoed my books, and learned that I really like the old ones and am far less attached to the newer. As Marie notes, you should “Keep only those books that will make you happy just to see them on your shelves, the ones that you really love.”
But I could not Kondo my wife; she still sparks joy, but she's just not interested in the KonMari method. She no longer puts my clothes away after she does the wash, leaving them for me to do the complicated folding. So it's often now messier than it was before, at least until I get around to it. So my Kondo campaign was very personal and had pretty much run its course.
Then I read Christopher Mims in the Wall Street Journal on The Magic of Tidying Up - Digitally, where he brilliantly applies the Kondo principles to his iPhone.
A funny thing happened when I touched each app on my phone and considered tapping the “x” that would delete it. I instantly knew which sparked joy. In just a few minutes, I had Kondo’d my phone just as thoroughly as my closet. I dumped more than a dozen apps from a device whose contents I thought I had already trimmed to the bone. I recommend you try it.
I did. It was a revelation; since I own the basic phone, I have always been bumping up against its limits. Now it has gigs to spare. It FEELS lighter.
Then I hit my MacBook and did the same thing. Until the new Apple Photo cloud storage thing started, I always was fighting for megabytes, but now it too feels lighter, fresher, faster, newer after I dump everything that did not bring me joy. Like Chris, much of my stuff is now in the cloud, which has become the giant storage locker in the sky that someday I won’t make a payment on and they will dump the contents out onto the street (I can’t wait for the digital version of "Storage Wars"), but for now my MacBook and my phone are back to their minimalist roots.
Finally, I Kondoed my Gmail inbox with Unroll.me, which Chris suggested as a way of easily unsubscribing from newsletters and promotional emails, and there's a little frisson of pleasure each time I hit the unsubscribe button. It’s brilliant.
Sometimes it's hard to take Marie Kondo seriously, such as when she suggests that we talk to our clothing when we hang it up and say “thank you for keeping me warm all day.” Or her purse: “It’s thanks to you that I got so much work done today.”
I thought it silly, the idea of thanking objects that supported me through the day. But when I think of my phone and computer, I want to thank them all the time for making my job and my life possible in the way that it is right now. And after being Kondoed, they all seem happier and fitter than they were before. So thank you, Marie and Chris. You have both given me joy this week.
Each year painted lady butterflies cross the Sahara — and then go back again They migrate 12,000 km annually, the longest known butterfly migration route
Move over, monarchs. The painted lady butterfly (Vanessa cardui) now boasts the farthest known butterfly migration.
Though found across the world, the orange-and-brown beauties that live in Southern Europe migrate into Africa each fall, crossing the Sahara on their journey (SN Online: 10/12/16). But what happened after was a mystery because the butterflies disappeared. Researchers hypothesized that the insects either remained in Africa or made a round-trip, but there was no evidence either way.
A new chemical analysis of butterfly wings suggests that the butterflies head back to Europe in the spring. The round-trip, which usually plays out over several generations, is an annual journey of 12,000 kilometers, about 2,000 more than successive generations of monarchs are known to travel in a year (SN: 4/14/18, p. 22).
Researchers were surprised when they detected chemical markers from Africa on some European butterflies’ wings. Those markers told where an individual had eaten when it was still a caterpillar. The study, reported in the June 13 Biology Letters, provides evidence that the creatures return from Africa each year. Some tenacious individuals even make the return trip in a single lifetime.
Raw fruit and vegetables provide better mental health outcomes
New study identifies the top 10 raw foods related to better mental health: carrots, bananas, apples, dark leafy greens such as spinach, grapefruit, lettuce, citrus fruits, fresh berries, cucumber, and kiwifruit.
— By University of Otago
Seeking the feel good factor? Go natural.
That is the simple message from University of Otago researchers who have discovered raw fruit and vegetables may be better for your mental health than cooked, canned and processed fruit and vegetables.
Dr. Tamlin Conner, Psychology Senior Lecturer and lead author, says public health campaigns have historically focused on aspects of quantity for the consumption of fruit and vegetables (such as 5+ a day).
However, the study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, found that for mental health in particular, it may also be important to consider the way in which produce was prepared and consumed.
“Our research has highlighted that the consumption of fruit and vegetables in their ‘unmodified’ state is more strongly associated with better mental health compared to cooked/canned/processed fruit and vegetables,” she says.
Dr. Conner believes this could be because the cooking and processing of fruit and vegetables has the potential to diminish nutrient levels.
“This likely limits the delivery of nutrients that are essential for optimal emotional functioning."
For the study, more than 400 young adults from New Zealand and the United States aged 18 to 25 were surveyed. This age group was chosen as young adults typically have the lowest fruit and vegetable consumption of all age groups and are at high risk for mental health disorders.
The group’s typical consumption of raw versus cooked and processed fruits and vegetables were assessed, alongside their negative and positive mental health, and lifestyle and demographic variables that could affect the association between fruit and vegetable intake and mental health (such as exercise, sleep, unhealthy diet, chronic health conditions, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and gender).
“Controlling for the covariates, raw fruit and vegetable consumption predicted lower levels of mental illness symptomology, such as depression, and improved levels of psychological wellbeing including positive mood, life satisfaction and flourishing. These mental health benefits were significantly reduced for cooked, canned, and processed fruits and vegetables.
“This research is increasingly vital as lifestyle approaches such as dietary change may provide an accessible, safe, and adjuvant approach to improving mental health,” Dr. Conner says.
Stem cells from adults function just as well as those from embryos
Stem cells from elderly donors can be used for personalized treatment of age-related chronic and degenerative diseases, concludes a new review
— By Emma Duncan
Donor age does not appear to influence the functionality of stem cells derived from adult body tissues, concludes a new review. The analysis of research on induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) finds that not only are typical signs of aging reversed in iPSCs, but cells derived from both older and younger donors show the same ability to differentiate into mature body cells. This validates iPSCs as a viable alternative to embryonic stem cells in personalized regenerative medicine. Published in Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine, the study highlights the enormous potential of iPSCs derived from elderly patients to treat their age-related diseases — and indicates future areas of research for this relatively new field.
“As average life expectancy continues to rise, so does the rate of age-related chronic and degenerative diseases,” explains Dr. Nicolle Kränkel from Charité, a medical university in Germany. “Organ replacement and other cell-based treatments could increase longevity and improve the quality of life for elderly people with heart disease, kidney failure and even Alzheimer’s disease. Our analysis of current knowledge on iPSCs indicates that stem cells derived from older patients are suitable for personalized regenerative therapies as well as for modeling genetic disease.”
Unlike most cells in the body, stem cells have the potential to develop into different cell types. Their discovery opened the possibility of growing specific cells to treat damaged tissues and organs, as well as genetic diseases.
Stem cells can be derived from two sources: embryos and adult tissues. It was commonly believed that embryonic stem cells (ESCs) are the only reliable source, as these “young” cells have not accumulated the same level of cell damage as older cells. However, embryonic stem cells also have limitations. These include ethical concerns, immunological rejection of transplanted tissue derived from ESCs, and limited availability of donated material.
The 2006 discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells — which can be derived directly from a patient — offers an attractive alternative. Their use has already been proved in a young patient: a boy suffering from a rare genetic disease, in which the skin blisters and tears off, recovered completely after receiving a skin transplant grown from his own gene-corrected stem cells.
However, questions remained about the impact of donor age on iPSC functionality — an especially relevant point given that the elderly stand to benefit the most from these stem cells. Kränkel and colleagues therefore critically analyzed the available research to date, to summarize what is known and identify future research needs.
The analysis revealed that the age of the donor may reduce the efficiency at which their body cells can be reprogrammed into iPSCs. However, once generated, the stem cells appear to be rejuvenated – with typical signs of aging reversed.
“iPSCs show improved functionality compared to the donor’s regular body cells, and can be differentiated into mature body cells with a similar efficiency to younger stem cell donors,” says Kränkel. “This means that stem cells from an elderly patient can be developed into other cells and returned to the patient for treatment.”
Despite this promising conclusion, it is still a matter of debate as to whether cells from older donors have accumulated more damaging mutations than those of younger donors. “This seems logical,” says Elisabeth Strässler, co-author of the study. “There is also the issue of whether such mutations persist during the transformation to stem cells, or whether they are repaired.”
Other important questions also remain unanswered.
“The field of iPSC research is still rather ‘young’ and more research is
Risk factors involved in the early onset and severity of childhood obesity
Childhood obesity is linked to a family history of obesity, cardiovascular and metabolic disease, with the most severely obese children showing insulin resistance.
— By Tania FitzGeorge-Balfour
A family history of obesity, high blood pressure, high blood lipid levels, type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease should all be considered high risk factors for the early onset and severity of obesity in children, reveals a new study.
The research, which assessed these risk factors together from children’s parents, siblings and grandparents, also finds the youngest children to be the most severely obese. Furthermore, children suffering from severe obesity show signs of insulin resistance, which can lead to the development of type 2 diabetes. Published in Frontiers in Endocrinology, the study hopes to increase the awareness of how strong an influence a family history of obesity and associated diseases can have on childhood obesity — one of the major public health issues worldwide.
“Our research suggests a link between childhood obesity and a family history of obesity and cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, which includes high blood pressure, high blood lipid levels, type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease,” says lead author Dr. Domenico Corica, based at the University of Messina, Italy.
“We also show that the problem of childhood obesity is not simply related to an increase in the number of diagnoses, but also the severity of obesity in younger children. If this obesity persists over time, these children will have a higher risk of developing cardiovascular and metabolic complications in young adulthood.”
For this study, more than 250 overweight and obese children, aged between two and 17-years old, were referred by their family pediatricians to the Pediatric Endocrinology Outpatient Clinic at the University of Messina for a medical assessment. This involved measurements of height and weight, blood samples to show glucose and lipid profiles, as well as information on the parent’s, sibling’s and even grandparent’s history of obesity and a variety of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases.
“These assessments were made after the first referral by their family pediatrician, which allowed us to determine if there was the presence of metabolic complications, such as insulin resistance, in an obese child at first assessment,” explains Corica.
In agreement with previous studies, the researchers showed that a family history of obesity increases the risk of childhood obesity — but the extra detail of their research revealed more.
If parents, siblings and grandparents suffered cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, it increased the likelihood of the early onset and severity of obesity in the children. Splitting the children up into 3 different age ranges, the researchers also found the children under 8-years old were the most severely obese. As childhood obesity is associated with an increased risk of severe long-term health complications, this is of grave concern for the children’s future health if this condition were to continue into adulthood.
Corica adds, “I would like to highlight that we found the most severely obese children, even those who were very young, were showing insulin resistance. This is a very important finding that underlines the need for early intervention care programs involving health providers, schools and other government institutions, primarily to modify the lifestyle — i.e. eating habits, physical activity, screen time — of obese children and their families.”
Although the study involved many children, across a wide range of ages, the patients were all based in southern Italy, so Corica hopes to expand this research to other areas.
“We look forward to increasing the number of children and expanding the geographic area, as well as evaluating other aspects that may influence the onset and severity of childhood obesity,” he concludes.
One step closer to a DNA vaccine against dengue virus
A recent study published in Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology sheds new light on the development of a DNA vaccine against dengue virus.
— By Anna Sigurdsson
Story in brief:
In a new study, researchers inoculated mice with a new DNA vaccine candidate (pVAX1-D1ME) in order to evaluate its efficiency. They found that the vaccine candidate was able to induce persistent humoral and cellular immune responses and provided efficient protection against lethal challenge from one of the four serotypes of dengue virus (DV1). They also evaluated the immunoprotective potential of a combined (bivalent) DNA vaccine, which was found to generate a balanced immunogenic response to two serotypes of dengue virus (DV1 & DV2). These results are encouraging for the future development of a tetravalent vaccine that could provide efficient protection against all four serotypes of the virus.
“Our DNA vaccine candidate induced effective immune responses and protection in mice. Importantly, the bivalent vaccine generated a balanced immunity against DV1 and DV2 infection, which emits light for development of new type of tetravalent vaccine against dengue viruses,” says corresponding author Dr. Jing An (Capital Medical University, China). “However, it was noted that the end-point titers of anti-DV1 and anti-DV2 in the bivalent vaccine-immunized mice were lower than those in the monovalent vaccine-immunized mice, indicating interference between the DV1 and DV2 vaccine candidates. This evidence should be considered in further research on dengue virus tetravalent vaccine.”
Dengue virus is a mosquito-borne pathogen that causes dengue fever (DF) – one of the most rapidly spreading mosquito-borne diseases worldwide according to the WHO. Although the recombinant, live, attenuated, tetravalent dengue vaccine (CYD-TDV) has been approved for use in some countries, the vaccine appears to increase the risk of severe dengue in younger vaccine recipients. Thus, it is still necessary to develop safer, more economical and effective vaccines against dengue infection specifically.
“As a major public health problem, dengue is considered to be one of the fastest growing epidemics. Among the four distinct serotypes of dengue viruses (DV1-4), DV1 and DV2 are especially predominant serotypes,” explains Dr. An. “In 2014, the Guangdong province of China suffered from the most serious dengue outbreak in its history and co-circulation of DV1 and DV2 was identified. Dengue became endemic in China – its prevention is a long-term effort.
DNA vaccination is a novel and rapidly developing approach for prevention and therapy of disease, which utilizes genetically modified plasmids with added genetic sequences that encode specific antigens and allows the body to produce them. Although this method is still in development and no licensed DNA vaccine is currently available for humans, it would offer a number of potential advantages including inexpensiveness, improved vaccine stability and ease of production. Dr. An and the research team are hoping that their research will pave the path for further advances in the research for a vaccine against all four serotypes of dengue virus.
“We are developing a dengue tetravalent DNA vaccine and evaluating the immunogenicity in animal models,” says Dr. An. “Finally, we try to translate the DNA vaccine candidates for further clinical application. Our preliminary research data are open, and we would like the results to be used by not only universities and researchers, but also by companies for further cooperation.”
Mass vaccinations will not prevent Ebola virus outbreaks
The necessary vaccination rate to achieve herd immunity is not yet possible — meaning that control of Ebola outbreaks will depend on surveillance and the isolation of cases for the foreseeable future.
— University of Kent
Prophylactic mass vaccination programs are not a realistic option in the battle to prevent new Ebola virus outbreaks, concludes a study published in Frontiers in Immunology. The findings come as a new Ebola virus outbreak continues in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The research team analyzed the prospects for various Ebola virus vaccines and found that, for the foreseeable future at least, Ebola virus outbreak control depends on surveillance and the isolation of cases.
The researchers’ analysis revealed that very high proportions of potentially affected populations would need to be protected by vaccination to establish herd immunity, i.e. the level of immunity that prevents virus transmission within a population.
The study identified that, in the critical phases of many Ebola virus outbreaks, the average infected individual infects four or more other people, which enables the virus to spread rapidly.
At this level, 80% of a population would need to be immunized to prevent outbreaks, even if a highly effective vaccine that protects 90% of individuals after vaccination was available.
Such vaccination rates are currently not achievable. In a vaccination trial during the West African Ebola virus epidemic, only 49% of individuals who had been in contact with Ebola virus patients could be vaccinated. Thirty-four per cent of contacts refused vaccination although they had been exposed to the disease.
Related news: Measles vaccine increases child survival beyond protecting against measles
There are currently no clinical vaccine candidates available that protect against all four human-pathogenic Ebola viruses. It also remains unclear, say the researchers led by Professor Martin Michaelis, of the University of Kent’s School of Biosciences, whether the available vaccine candidates provide the long-term protection that is required for the sort of prophylactic mass vaccination program that could prevent Ebola, which becomes repeatedly introduced into the human population from animal reservoirs.
A large vaccination program would also be costly and impractical, the study points out. Costs for current Ebola virus vaccine candidates are estimated to be in a range of US$ 15-20 per dose, with some 462 million people living in the areas affected by Ebola virus outbreaks, many of them in very remote rural areas.
In the absence of a realistic prophylactic mass vaccination program, the researchers conclude that clinical vaccine candidates will need to be focused on health care workers who are often involved in disease transmission, potentially in combination with the vaccination of patient contacts.
It may take a village (of proteins) to turn on genes
Inside a cell’s nucleus, fast-moving groups of floppy proteins crowd together around gene control switches and coalesce into droplets to turn on genes, Ibrahim Cissé of MIT and colleagues report June 21 in two papers in Science.
Researchers have previously demonstrated that proteins form such droplets in the cytoplasm, the cell’s jellylike guts. Some, including Cissé’s MIT colleagues Richard Young and Phillip Sharp, have proposed that this process — called phase separation — could also happen in the nucleus when cellular machinery turns genes on, which involves copying DNA instructions into RNA messages.
If confirmed, the discovery challenges earlier ideas that gene activity is controlled by single molecules of stable protein complexes that remain stuck to DNA for long periods.
Cissé and colleagues used super-resolution microscopy to view single molecules of protein in live mouse embryonic stem cells. In particular, they were interested in RNA polymerase II, an enzyme that copies DNA into RNA, and parts of the Mediator complex, a group of proteins that help kick-start that copying process, called transcription. The researchers tagged the proteins with a fluorescent protein and watched what happened.
RNA polymerases II and Mediator proteins each formed large clusters, each with about 200 to 400 molecules. Those clusters had properties of phase-separated droplets: Each cluster formed distinct dots when viewed through the microscope. Those dots could fuse together, like oil droplets merging in water. And the droplets could be dispersed with alcohol. That’s convincing evidence that Cissé sees phase-separated condensates, says Anthony Hyman, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany. He was not involved in the work.
While these clusters seem stable, the researchers found that individual polymerase or Mediator proteins were constantly darting in or out of the cluster. About 90 percent of polymerase molecules and 60 percent of Mediator molecules spent onlyabout 10 seconds in the clusters, the team found.
That’s a sharp contrast to previous studies suggesting that RNA polymerase II stays at a gene for minutes to hours, says single-cell biochemist Robert Tjian, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of California, Berkeley. “The biggest surprise is how fast these things are happening,” Tjian says. He and colleagues also found that these proteins interact only briefly, most for just five to 20 seconds.
These protein mobs are drawn together by their floppy bits, called low complexity or intrinsically disordered regions, Tjian and colleagues report June 21 in Science. Floppy, intrinsically disordered proteins are needed for a wide variety of cellular processes (SN: 2/9/13, p. 26).
In Cissé’s studies, Mediator proteins clustered with groups of gene control switches called super-enhancers. Typically, super-enhancers are located far from the genes they regulate, and may control several genes, sometimes simultaneously. Droplets containing Mediator proteins and the super-enhancers may interact with RNA polymerase II-containing droplets to spur transcription, the findings suggest.
Sudden coalescence of proteins into droplets could help explain why genes turn on in a flash, Hyman says. Bubbles of enhancers might interact with multiple bubbles of RNA polymerase II to turn on several genes at once, something that was hard to explain if single protein molecules were responsible.
Tjian doesn’t call what he sees phase separation, even though his results are similar to Cissé’s. It’s not necessary to concentrate proteins so densely that they will form droplets in order to get transcription started, he says. Instead, proteins clustered in hubs can spur transcription at a range of concentrations, he found.
But Julie Forman-Kay, a biophysical chemist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, says Tjian is making a semantic argument. “What he calls a hub is, in my book, evidence for phase separation,” she says. All of the studies show the same thing, she says: Clusters of floppy proteins concentrate in particular locations to turn on genes.
But the association between phase separation and transcription hasn’t been proven yet, says biochemist Danny Reinberg of New York University Langone Health. He agrees with Tjian’s findings that weak interactions between proteins can add up to a strong push to do something, in this case to copy DNA into RNA. But he needs more evidence that transcription is spurred by phase separation into droplets, as Cissé and colleagues describe. “I’m not saying it’s not happening,” Reinberg says. “I’m saying it can happen, it might be happening, but there’s no proof of that in these two papers.”
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