Canadian astronomers determine Earth’s fingerprint in hopes of finding habitable planets beyond the Solar System

McGill News, PUBLISHED: 28AUG2019
https://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/channels/news/canadian-astronomers-determine-earths-fingerprint-hopes-finding-habitable-planets-beyond-solar-299976McGill

Canadian astronomers determine Earth’s fingerprint in hopes of finding habitable planets beyond the Solar System

Two McGill University astronomers have assembled a “fingerprint” for Earth, which could be used to identify a planet beyond our Solar System capable of supporting life.

McGill Physics student Evelyn Macdonald and her supervisor Prof. Nicolas Cowan used over a decade of observations of Earth’s atmosphere taken by the SCISAT satellite to construct a transit spectrum of Earth, a sort of fingerprint for Earth’s atmosphere in infrared light, which shows the presence of key molecules in the search for habitable worlds. This includes the simultaneous presence of ozone and methane, which scientists expect to see only when there is an organic source of these compounds on the planet. Such a detection is called a “biosignature”.

“A handful of researchers have tried to simulate Earth’s transit spectrum, but this is the first empirical infrared transit spectrum of Earth,” says Prof. Cowan. “This is what alien astronomers would see if they observed a transit of Earth.”

The findings, published Aug. 28 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, could help scientists determine what kind of signal to look for in their quest to find Earth-like exoplanets (planets orbiting a star other than our Sun). Developed by the Canadian Space Agency, SCISAT was created to help scientists understand the depletion of Earth’s ozone layer by studying particles in the atmosphere as sunlight passes through it. In general, astronomers can tell what molecules are found in a planet’s atmosphere by looking at how starlight changes as it shines through the atmosphere. Instruments must wait for a planet to pass – or transit – over the star to make this observation. With sensitive enough telescopes, astronomers could potentially identify molecules such as carbon dioxide, oxygen or water vapour that might indicate if a planet is habitable or even inhabited.

Cowan was explaining transit spectroscopy of exoplanets at a group lunch meeting at the McGill Space Institute (MSI) when Prof. Yi Huang, an atmospheric scientist and fellow member of the MSI, noted that the technique was similar to solar occultation studies of Earth’s atmosphere, as done by SCISAT.

Since the first discovery of an exoplanet in the 1990s, astronomers have confirmed the existence of 4,000 exoplanets. The holy grail in this relatively new field of astronomy is to find planets that could potentially host life – an Earth 2.0.

A very promising system that might hold such planets, called TRAPPIST-1, will be a target for the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, set to launch in 2021. Macdonald and Cowan built a simulated signal of what an Earth-like planet’s atmosphere would look like through the eyes of this future telescope which is a collaboration between NASA, the Canadian Space Agency and the European Space Agency.

The TRAPPIST-1 system located 40 light years away contains seven planets, three or four of which are in the so-called “habitable zone” where liquid water could exist. The McGill astronomers say this system might be a promising place to search for a signal similar to their Earth fingerprint since the planets are orbiting an M-dwarf star, a type of star which is smaller and colder than our Sun.

“TRAPPIST-1 is a nearby red dwarf star, which makes its planets excellent targets for transit spectroscopy. This is because the star is much smaller than the Sun, so its planets are relatively easy to observe,” explains Macdonald. “Also, these planets orbit close to the star, so they transit every few days. Of course, even if one of the planets harbours life, we don’t expect its atmosphere to be identical to Earth’s since the star is so different from the Sun.”

According to their analysis, Macdonald and Cowan affirm that the Webb Telescope will be sensitive enough to detect carbon dioxide and water vapour using its instruments. It may even be able to detect the biosignature of methane and ozone if enough time is spent observing the target planet.

Prof. Cowan and his colleagues at the Montreal-based Institute for Research on Exoplanets are hoping to be some of the first to detect signs of life beyond our home planet. The fingerprint of Earth assembled by Macdonald for her senior undergraduate thesis could tell other astronomers what to look for in this search. She will be starting her Ph.D. in the field of exoplanets at the University of Toronto in the Fall.

Funding for the research was provided by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies, and a McGill Science Undergraduate Research Award.

“An empirical infrared transit spectrum of Earth: opacity windows and biosignatures,” Evelyn J. R. Macdonald and Nicolas B. Cowan, was published online Aug. 28, 2019, in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Photo: A view of Earth from space taken from the International Space Station. (Credit: NASA/Reid Wiseman.

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Life Science - HRT for menopause increases breast cancer risk

HRT for menopause increases breast cancer risk

Researchers found menopausal hormone therapy (MHT) was responsible for around one million breast cancers in western countries.

By Lucia Binding, Sky News reporter, 

Friday 30 August 2019 09:13, UK

https://news.sky.com/story/hrt-for-menopause-increases-breast-cancer-risk-11797431

Menopausal hormone therapy (MHT) has been linked to an increased risk of breast cancer

Hormonal replacement therapy for the menopause increases the risk of breast cancer and that risk can persist for more than a decade after usage stops.

Researchers from the University of Oxford analysed data from more than 100,000 women with breast cancer from 58 epidemiological studies worldwide.

They concluded that menopausal hormone therapy (MHT) was responsible for around one million breast cancers in western countries - one-twentieth of the total since 1990.

The study, published in The Lancet, also revealed that even after stopping use, the excess risk of breast cancer was found to persist for more than 10 years, with the size of the risk linked to the duration of previous use.

All types of MHT except topical vaginal oestrogens were linked to an increased risk of breast cancer.

Researchers found that the risks were greater for users of oestrogen-progestagen hormone therapy than for oestrogen-only hormone therapy.

Women typically begin MHT at around the time of the menopause, when ovarian function ceases, causing symptoms including hot flushes and discomfort.

Researchers found that the risk was twice as great for women who used MHT for 10 years

Around 12 million women use MHT in Western countries, with approximately six million users in North America, six million in Europe, including one million in the UK.

Five years of MHT use is now common, though regulatory bodies in Europe and the USA recommend it is used for the shortest time that is needed.

Co-author Professor Valerie Beral from the Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of Oxford, said: "Before all we knew was that the risk was increased when they used, the belief was that it went away when they stopped.

"The main finding is that we now know the long-term effects, that the risk persists for more than a decade after stopping."

Researchers also found that the risk was twice as great for women who used MHT for 10 years. However, there was little excess risk after using any form of MHT for less than a year.

Professor Stephen Evans, of London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), said these results should "not cause alarm among women".

He added: "But there is no doubt that they should follow the advice given by the MHRA in the UK and the FDA in the US that MHT be used for the shortest time that it is needed.

"MHT does offer real benefits for menopausal symptoms, but its use beyond one year seems to confer a steadily increasing risk of breast cancer with increasing years of use."

Dr Julie Sharp, head of health and patient information at Cancer Research UK, which funded the study, said: "HRT is an effective treatment for menopause symptoms, and we've known for some time that it raises the risk of breast cancer.

"But this study found the risk may persist for longer after stopping HRT than we previously thought, so women should think carefully about taking it."

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Retire at 55 and live to 80; work till you’re 65 and die at 67.

Startling new data shows how work pounds older bodies.

10th September 2013 by Felicity Duncan

Here’s a very sobering piece from financial planner Alec Riddle, who looks at the relationship between how long you work and how long you’re likely to enjoy your retirement. Citing some interesting research, Alec argues that those who continue to work right up to the maximum retirement age tend to have shorter retirements than their peers who retire younger. This article will certainly make you think about your own retirement plans and strategy, especially if you’re like me and hoping to work until you’re 95.  Felicity Duncan

By Alec Riddle*

Imagine working as long as you possibly can, or until your maximum retirement age, to ensure you have sufficient funds for your Retirement, only to die within two years of retiring?

An actuarial study conducted on some of the larger US Pension Funds including Boeing Aerospace, indicates that employees who retired at the age of 65, died within two years of retirement.

Dr Ephrem (Siao Chung) Cheng provided the results from an Actuarial Study on the correlation between Retirement Age and Longevity.

“Ten working years could cost you twenty years of your Retirement!”

The studies were based on the number of Pension Fund cheques sent to Boeing retirees. The Boeing experience was that employees retiring at age 65 received pension cheques for 18 months, on average, prior to death. A similar experience was discovered at Lockheed Martin, where on average, employees received pension cheques for just 17 months.

Apparently the experiences at Ford Motor Company and Bell Labs were similar to those of Boeing and Lockheed. Statistics at a pre-retirement seminar illustrated that the average age of retirement at most large corporations in the US was 57. So people retiring at age 65 are a minority, but it is still a startling statistic.

The thought is that the hard working late retirees (65) are more than likely putting too much stress on their ageing bodies and minds and due to the stress, they develop a variety of health problems. The associated stress induced health problems lead to them dying within two years of retirement.

Another startling statistic from the same Corporations is that those who retire earlier, say age 55, tend to enjoy their retirement on average for more than 25 years. The chances are that those able to retire earlier have less stress, have planned and managed their lives better, with respect to finances, health and career and are able to retire comfortably.

One important observation is that these younger retirees (55) aren’t necessarily idle in retirement, but they are far less stressed than their working counterparts from age 55 to 65. This means they may be busying themselves with part time work, hobbies and things they enjoy doing, so much so that ‘work’ becomes fun and is done at a more leisurely pace.

Conclusion

People should plan their careers and their finances, enabling them to retire, or at the very least be financially independent, as early as possible. This will ensure they are able to enjoy a longer, happier and more leisurely retirement to age 80 and beyond.

Don’t switch off and be idle when you retire. You can still do things that are of interest to you, or you can get involved in things that are of value to your community, all at a pace you feel comfortable with.

The flip-side of the coin is that you may have to keep on working very hard and under stress, till age 65, before you retire. In that case and if the actuarial studies of some of the world’s largest Corporations hold true, then the chances are that you would probably die within a few years of retirement.

In a nutshell, by putting in 10 more ‘hard’ years, after the age of 55, you could potentially forfeit 20 years of your Retirement. Or saying it differently, for every year you work beyond the age of 55, on average one forfeits two years of life span.

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New UN high-seas treaty must close gaps in biodiversity governance

AUGUST 29, 2019, by Duke University

https://phys.org/news/2019-08-high-seas-treaty-gaps-biodiversity.html

Thousands of fish species could be at risk if a new UN high-seas biodiversity treaty does not include measures to sustainably manage all fish species in international waters, not just the commercial species. Credit: Guillermo Ortuño Crespo, Duke Univ.

Thousands of marine species could be at risk if a new United Nations high-seas biodiversity treaty, now being negotiated in New York, does not include measures to address the management of all fish species in international waters, not just the commercial species, warns an analysis by American, Dutch, Swiss and French researchers.

"Of the 4,018 known species of fish in the deep ocean, more than 95% are non-targeted species whose populations are not assessed by regional fisheries management organizations and are currently not being considered as part of the high-seas biodiversity to be monitored and protected under the new treaty," said Guillermo Ortuño Crespo, a doctoral candidate at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment and lead author of the new analysis.

"We found that only 4.8% of high-seas fish species have stock assessments or analogous forms of population models," he said. "For more than 85%, we have no information at all on their population trends. We simply don't know enough to know if or how they are being affected."

"These findings make a compelling case for covering the full scope of high-seas fish biodiversity in the new agreement," Ortuño Crespo said.

"We are not arguing that the emerging treaty should infringe on the current management mandate of regional fisheries management organizations, but we are calling for negotiators to address biodiversity concerns for the species that are not currently being managed and are slipping through the governance net," emphasized Patrick N. Halpin, professor and director of the Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab at Duke's Nicholas School.

"Fisheries management and the management of overall fish biodiversity are uniquely different processes and activities," Halpin noted.

Ortuño Crespo, Halpin and their colleagues published their analysis August 26 in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

The UN General Assembly has been meeting at its New York headquarters for two weeks to hammer out the final text of the new treaty on marine biodiversity—first proposed almost 20 years ago—under the UN Law of the Sea.

"This is an opportunity of a lifetime to increase the sustainability of human activities in the high seas, which cover 46% of our planet, so we must get it right," Ortuño Crespo said.

Early in the discussion process, parties to the negotiations agreed that any new treaty should not undermine existing agreements or management organizations. Some nations have used this pretext as a way to exclude already managed commercial fisheries and other human activities from the treaty, Ortuño Crespo said. But by excluding such species, the majority of non-commercial fish species in the high seas might not be effectively managed under the treaty.

Fears that expanding the scope of the treaty to include all fish biodiversity would undermine existing agreements and management organizations are unfounded, he added.

"We believe that the new treaty, with the expanded scope we propose, could help regional fisheries management organizations fulfil their conservation and management mandates, and encourage research, monitoring and management of all forms of biodiversity that are currently not being monitored by existing bodies or treaties," he said.

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Bacteria feeding on Arctic algae blooms can seed clouds

AUGUST 29, 2019, by Abigail Eisenstadt, American Geophysical Union

https://phys.org/news/2019-08-bacteria-arctic-algae-blooms-seed.html

A 2009 phytoplankton bloom in the Bering Sea. Cloud seed bacteria may feed on phytoplankton. Credit: NASA, Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center

New research finds Arctic Ocean currents and storms are moving bacteria from ocean algae blooms into the atmosphere where the particles help clouds form.

 These particles, which are biological in origin, can affect weather patterns throughout the world, according to the new study in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Particles suspended in air called aerosols can sometimes accelerate ice crystal formation in clouds, impacting weather climate and weather patterns.

 Such ice-nucleating particles include dust, smoke, pollen, fungi and bacteria.

 Previous research had shown marine bacteria were seeding clouds in the Arctic, but how they got from the ocean to the clouds was a mystery.

In the new study, the researchers took samples of water and air in the Bering Strait, and tested the samples for the presence of biological ice nucleating particles.

 Bacteria normally found near the sea floor was present in the air above the ocean surface, suggesting ocean currents and turmoil help make the bacteria airborne.

Oceanic currents and weather systems brought bacteria feeding off algae blooms to the sea spray above the ocean's surface, helping to seed clouds in the atmosphere, according to the new research.

"These special types of aerosols can actually 'seed' clouds, kind of similar to how a seed would grow a plant.

 Some of these seeds are really efficient at forming cloud ice crystals," said Jessie Creamean, an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, and lead author on the new study.

Understanding how clouds are seeded can help scientists understand Arctic weather patterns.

Pure water droplets in clouds don't freeze until roughly minus 40 degrees Celsius (minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit).

 They are supercooled below their freezing point but still liquid.

 Aerosols raise the base freezing temperature in supercooled clouds to minus five degrees Celsius (23 degrees Fahrenheit), by providing a surface for water to crystalize on, and creating clouds mixed with supercooled droplets and ice crystals.

 Mixed clouds are the most common type of clouds on the planet and the best for producing rain or snow.

"Cloud seeds," like the bacteria found in algae blooms, can create more clouds with varying amounts of ice and water.

 An increase in clouds can affect how much heat is trapped in the atmosphere, which can influence climate.

 The clouds' compositions can affect the Arctic's water cycle, changing the amount of rain and snow that is produced.

 Increasing the number of clouds and changing the composition of Arctic clouds also affects northern weather systems, potentially affecting weather trends worldwide, the authors of the new study said.

This illustration shows how cloud seeds may interact with a phytoplankton bloom and weather events, eventually rising to the atmosphere. Credit: Creamean et al/Geophysical Research Letters/AGU.

Without ice nucleating particles, precipitation from clouds is less likely to happen, Heike Wex, an atmospheric scientist at the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research in Leipzig, Germany, unaffiliated with the new study explained.

From the ocean to the atmosphere

To learn how biological "cloud seeds" travel from ocean depths to the atmosphere, Creamean and her colleagues took samples from 8 meters (26 feet) below the water's surface and air samples roughly 20 meters (66 feet) above the water's surface in the Bering Strait during an algae bloom.

Algae blooms are big increases in photosynthetic plant-like microorganisms that many ocean animals eat, including some kinds of bacteria. The researchers found bacteria known to seed clouds at the bottom of a phytoplankton bloom in the Bering Strait, but not in the surrounding air. The scientists found the same bacteria roughly 250 kilometers (155.3 miles) northwest of the bloom, suggesting a strong current transported the bacteria to a new spot. The bacteria were also in the air above the water. A storm brought the bacteria from the ocean depths to the surface, transporting the bacterial "cloud seeds" into the air in water droplets.

"What existed at the bottom of the ocean was making its way up to the surface waters," Creamean said.

Since the scientists only were able to take samples from 20 meters (66 feet) up, they don't yet know how the ice nucleating particles ascend to cloud elevation, which on average starts at 1.9 kilometers (1.2 miles) above the surface.

The polar regions are experiencing rapid warming from climate change. The Arctic's accelerated warming could cause more algae blooms as well as more bacteria of the type found to seed clouds, in turn further affecting its weather systems, according to the authors.

"This is a piece of the puzzle as to how these clouds form in the Arctic and potentially impact weather patterns all over the world," Creamean said.

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The garden corner

Aug 29, 2019 by ChuckinCardinal

Every week or two and in Canada's winter less often,  I intend to post some garden pictures.  One of the reasons is, I like to  keep my own climate records and the garden does it for me.
 Please do share some of your local garden pics.

Monarch on Zinnia

Thai basil (licorice tasting, big aroma)

The veggie garden

Here's me in the window hiding behind the sun flowers watching the birds here.

The birds love their resort hidden amongts some pots.

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The Log 2: Another year

This is just a pleasant vid of a log across a brook, and some of the wild life that comes to visit
 Enjoy
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Gene-edited albino lizard could cure human eye conditions

The albino lizard, roughly the size of your index finger, was made via a technique that was thought impossible to use on reptiles.

Sky News, Wednesday 28 August 2019 13:40, UK

https://news.sky.com/story/gene-edited-albino-lizard-could-cure-human-eye-conditions-11796135

An albino lizard, the first gene-edited reptile. Pic: Doug Menke

In a world first, scientists have created a gene-edited albino reptile that could help cure eye conditions in humans.

The lizard, roughly the size of an index finger, has been created as humans with albinism often have vision problems, and so scientists hope to use them as a model to study how the loss of the relevant gene impacts retina development.

Scientists created the reptile using a technique that had previously been thought impossible to use on reptiles because it requires reagents - substances used to spark chemical reactions - to be injected directly into newly fertilised eggs.

Lizard eggs fertilise inside the body at unpredictable times, which meant researchers faced an unprecedented challenge to successfully adapt the established CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing process.

University of Georgia professor Doug Menke and his research team identified a solution when they noticed that the membrane covering a lizard's ovary is transparent, allowing them to see all of the developing eggs and work out which were next to be fertilised.

Reagents were injected into the eggs waiting to be fertilised and after a three-month wait for the baby lizards to hatch, the operation proved successful.

Writing in the journal Cell Reports, Mr Menke said: "We had to wait three months for the lizards to hatch, so it's a bit like slow-motion gene editing. But it turns out that when we did this procedure, about half of the mutant lizards that we generated had gene-editing events on the maternal allele and the paternal allele."

The results suggested that the reagents remained active for several days or even weeks within the unfertilised eggs, with between 6% and 9% of cells in the ovary producing offspring with signs of gene-editing.

Mr Menke added: "Relative to the very established model systems that can have efficiencies up to 80% or higher, 6% seems low, but no one has been able to do these sorts of manipulations in any reptile before.

"There's not a large community of developmental geneticists that are studying reptiles, so we're hoping to tap into exciting functional biology that has been unexplored."

Looking further ahead, the gene-editing technique could also be translated for use in other animals.

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Seeing the Beautiful Intelligence of Microbes

Bacterial biofilms and slime molds are more than crude patches of goo. Detailed time-lapse microscopy reveals how they sense and explore their surroundings, communicate with their neighbors and adaptively reshape themselves.

All images by Scott Chimileski and Roberto Kolter (except where indicated)

The slime mold Physarum polycephalum forms a network of cytoplasmic veins as it spreads across a surface.

AUTHORS

---

John Rennie

Deputy Editor

Lucy Reading-Ikkanda

Graphics Edito

r

This very long article, with amazing graphics can be found at:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-beautiful-intelligence-of-bacteria-and-other-microbes-20171113/

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Red wine benefits linked to better gut health, study finds

AUGUST 27, 2019, by King's College London

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-08-red-wine-benefits-linked-gut.html

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

A study from King's College London has found that people who drank red wine had an increased gut microbiota diversity (a sign of gut health) compared to non-red wine drinkers as well as an association with lower levels of obesity and 'bad' cholesterol.

In a paper published today in the journal Gastroenterology, a team of researchers from the Department of Twin Research & Genetic Epidemiology, King's College London explored the effect of beer, cider, red wine, white wine and spirits on the gut microbiome (GM) and subsequent health in a group of 916 UK female twins.

They found that the GM of red wine drinkers was more diverse compared to non-red wine drinkers. This was not observed with white wine, beer or spirits consumption.

First author of the study, Dr. Caroline Le Roy from King's College London said: "While we have long known of the unexplained benefits of red wine on heart health, this study shows that moderate red wine consumption is associated with greater diversity and a healthier gut microbiota that partly explain its long debated beneficial effects on health."

The microbiome is the collection of microorganisms in an environment and plays an important role in human health. An imbalance of 'good' microbes compared to 'bad' in the gut can lead to adverse health outcomes such as reduced immune system, weight gain or high cholesterol.

A person's gut microbiome with a higher number of different bacterial species is considered a marker of gut health.

The team observed that the gut microbiota of red wine consumers contained a greater number of different bacterial species compared to than non-consumers. This result was also observed in three different cohorts in the UK, the U.S. And the Netherlands. The authors took into account factors such as age, weight, the regular diet and socioeconomic status of the participants and continued to see the association.

The authors believe the main reason for the association is due to the many polyphenols in red wine. Polyphenols are defence chemicals naturally present in many fruits and vegetables. They have many beneficial properties (including antioxidants) and mainly act as a fuel for the microbes present in our system.

Lead author Professor Tim Spector from King's College London said: "This is one of the largest ever studies to explore the effects of red wine in the guts of nearly three thousand people in three different countries and provides insights that the high levels of polyphenols in the grape skin could be responsible for much of the controversial health benefits when used in moderation."

The study also found that red wine consumption was associated with lower levels of obesity and 'bad' cholesterol which was in part due to the gut microbiota.

"Although we observed an association between red wine consumption and the gut microbiota diversity, drinking red wine rarely, such as once every two weeks, seems to be enough to observe an effect. If you must choose one alcoholic drink today, red wine is the one to pick as it seems to potentially exert a beneficial effect on you and your gut microbes, which in turn may also help weight and risk of heart disease.

 However, it is still advised to consume alcohol with moderation," added Dr. Le Roy.

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Researchers probe microbiome-cancer treatment link

AUGUST 28, 2019, by Nathan Collins, Stanford University

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-08-probe-microbiome-cancer-treatment-link.html

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Cancer immunotherapies have given patients with particularly intractable cancers new hope, but not everyone benefits.

 One such immunotherapy, known as CAR T-cell therapy, works only in about a third of the people who take it—and the reason may lie in the microbes residing in our guts.

Over the next year, a team of Stanford and University of North Carolina researchers will try to suss out how millions of tiny microbes living inside us might make the difference between a cancer treatment's success and its failure.

"There's a lot of preclinical and circumstantial evidence to suggest that the gut microbiota play a role," said Ami Bhatt, an assistant professor of medicine and of genetics.

 Now, she said, "we're going to try to find a factor, and that factor may be a molecule or it may be a piece of DNA, that's associated with improved responses to therapy."

A new way to treat cancer—and a roadblock
For ages, the best ways to treat cancer were surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, but in the last decade doctors have been working to harness patients' own immune systems to fight cancer.

 One result is called chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy—CAR T for short—in which doctors remove T cells, which are central to the body's immune response to disease, and modify them so they're better prepared to attack cancer cells.

CAR T has now been used to treat previously intractable cancers, including certain lymphomas that are the focus of the new study.

 Yet the treatment only works 30 to 40 percent of the time, said Andrew Rezvani, an assistant professor of medicine who is collaborating on the project.

 The rest of the time, CAR T's effectiveness fades away over time or fails altogether.

No one is exactly sure why that happens, but over the last decade or so there have been tantalizing clues that the microbiome plays a role.

 For example, researchers recently discovered that tumors grow at different rates in laboratory mice purchased from different suppliers, but only when the mice are housed separately.

 Housed together, the differences go away, suggesting a transmissible factor affects cancer progression.

 Add to that the fact that mice eat each other's feces and it starts to look a lot like something in their guts has an impact on cancer, Bhatt said.

Diving into human microbiome
To see whether the effect that's been deduced in mice may also affect cancer progression in people, Bhatt, Rezvani and Tessa Andermann, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina, are piggybacking onto two upcoming CAR T clinical trials at Stanford run by David Miklos, an associate professor of medicine, and Crystal Mackall, a professor of pediatrics and of medicine.

 With help from a Stanford ChEM-H seed grant, they'll analyze blood samples and gather and analyze stool samples from about 100 people with a particularly hard-to-treat blood cancer, diffuse large cell B-cell lymphoma.

Miklos and Mackall's trials "presented a unique opportunity for us to combine stool and blood samples in order to more precisely determine host-microbiome interactions and their effect on CAR T outcomes," Andermann said.

Because no one is exactly sure how human microbiota might affect CAR T's effectiveness, the researchers are planning to cast a wide net.

 They'll look at potential associations with T cells themselves, and with help from ChEM-H's Metabolic Chemistry Analysis Center, they'll study whether chemicals produced in or processed by gut microorganisms might shape CAR T's effectiveness.

The end goal is not just to determine whether or how the microbiome affects CAR T, Rezvani said, but also to determine who might best benefit from immunotherapy and who could be spared the side effects, which include persistent, sometimes severe flu-like symptoms.

"The global question is how can we make CAR T more effective, but as a clinician, we see these patients and some of them will have a great response and some of them won't have any response" to treatment, Rezvani said.

 "Anything that lets us increase the chance that people are going to respond or at least tell people 'you are likely to benefit' or 'this isn't a good therapy for you' would be helpful."

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Two studies reveal benefits of mindfulness for middle school students

AUGUST 26, 2019, by Anne Trafton, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-08-reveal-benefits-mindfulness-middle-school.html

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Two new studies from MIT suggest that mindfulness—the practice of focusing one's awareness on the present moment—can enhance academic performance and mental health in middle schoolers.

 The researchers found that more mindfulness correlates with better academic performance, fewer suspensions from school, and less stress.

"By definition, mindfulness is the ability to focus attention on the present moment, as opposed to being distracted by external things or internal thoughts.

 If you're focused on the teacher in front of you, or the homework in front of you, that should be good for learning," says John Gabrieli, the Grover M. Hermann Professor in Health Sciences and Technology, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, and a member of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

The researchers also showed, for the first time, that mindfulness training can alter brain activity in students.

 Sixth-graders who received mindfulness training not only reported feeling less stressed, but their brain scans revealed reduced activation of the amygdala, a brain region that processes fear and other emotions, when they viewed images of fearful faces.

Together, the findings suggest that offering mindfulness training in schools could benefit many students, says Gabrieli, who is the senior author of both studies.

"We think there is a reasonable possibility that mindfulness training would be beneficial for children as part of the daily curriculum in their classroom," he says. "What's also appealing about mindfulness is that there are pretty well-established ways of teaching it."

In the moment

Both studies were performed at charter schools in Boston. In one of the papers, which appears today in the journal Behavioral Neuroscience, the MIT team studied about 100 sixth-graders.

 Half of the students received mindfulness training every day for eight weeks, while the other half took a coding class.

 The mindfulness exercises were designed to encourage students to pay attention to their breath, and to focus on the present moment rather than thoughts of the past or the future.

Students who received the mindfulness training reported that their stress levels went down after the training, while the students in the control group did not.

 Students in the mindfulness training group also reported fewer negative feelings, such as sadness or anger, after the training.

About 40 of the students also participated in brain imaging studies before and after the training.

 The researchers measured activity in the amygdala as the students looked at pictures of faces expressing different emotions.

At the beginning of the study, before any training, students who reported higher stress levels showed more amygdala activity when they saw fearful faces.

 This is consistent with previous research showing that the amygdala can be overactive in people who experience more stress, leading them to have stronger negative reactions to adverse events.

"There's a lot of evidence that an overly strong amygdala response to negative things is associated with high stress in early childhood and risk for depression," Gabrieli says.
After the mindfulness training, students showed a smaller amygdala response when they saw the fearful faces, consistent with their reports that they felt less stressed.

 This suggests that mindfulness training could potentially help prevent or mitigate mood disorders linked with higher stress levels, the researchers say.

Evaluating mindfulness
In the other paper, which appeared in the journal Mind, Brain, and Education in June, the researchers did not perform any mindfulness training but used a questionnaire to evaluate mindfulness in more than 2,000 students in grades 5-8. 

 The questionnaire was based on the Mindfulness Attention Awareness Scale, which is often used in mindfulness studies on adults.

 Participants are asked to rate how strongly they agree with statements such as "I rush through activities without being really attentive to them."

The researchers compared the questionnaire results with students' grades, their scores on statewide standardized tests, their attendance rates, and the number of times they had been suspended from school.

 Students who showed more mindfulness tended to have better grades and test scores, as well as fewer absences and suspensions.

"People had not asked that question in any quantitative sense at all, as to whether a more mindful child is more likely to fare better in school," Gabrieli says.

 "This is the first paper that says there is a relationship between the two."

The researchers now plan to do a full school-year study, with a larger group of students across many schools, to examine the longer-term effects of mindfulness training.

 Shorter programs like the two-month training used in the Behavioral Neuroscience study would most likely not have a lasting impact, Gabrieli says.

"Mindfulness is like going to the gym.

 If you go for a month, that's good, but if you stop going, the effects won't last," he says. "It's a form of mental exercise that needs to be sustained."

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Did parasite manipulation influence human neurological evolution?

AUGUST 26, 2019,  REPORT by Christopher Packham , Phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2019-08-parasite-human-neurological-evolution.html

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

It seems so obvious that someone should have thought of it decades ago: Since parasites have plagued eukaryotic life for millions of years, their prevalence likely affected evolution.

 Psychologist Marco Del Giudice of the University of New Mexico is not the first researcher to suggest that the evolution of the human brain could have been influenced by parasites that manipulate host behavior.

 But tired of waiting for neurologists to pick up the ball and run with it, he has published a paper in the Quarterly Review of Biology that suggests four categories of adaptive host countermeasures against brain-manipulating parasites and the likely evolutionary responses of the parasites themselves.

 The idea has implications across a host of fields, and may explain human psychology, functional brain network structure, and the frustratingly variable effects of psychopharmaceuticals.

Detailed and gruesomely readable, the paper is a work of theory intended to provide a roadmap for deeper study that is likely to be agonizingly complex, and which will eventually require the involvement of neurologists, evolutionary biologists, psychologists, parasitologists and many others.

Manipulating host behavior

Many parasites manipulate host behavior in order to increase reproductive success and to spread across wider areas.

 Dr. Del Giudice cites such examples as Toxoplasma gondii, which hitches a ride in a rat and induces epigenetic changes in the rodent's amygdala.

 These changes diminish its predator aversion around cats, the protozoan's intended destination, and the only animal in which it can reproduce.

 (As a side effect, it can infect humans—people are a reproductive dead end for T. gondii, but it is also believed to alter human behavior.)

Del Giudice also cites rabies, which increases production of infectious saliva and induces the host's aversion to water, which further concentrates the saliva, and then engenders violent aggression to increase the likelihood of biting, a transmission route.

 And many sexually transmitted pathogens are known to manipulate host sexual behavior.

The point is that parasites are really bad for hosts, and it therefore stands to reason that the evolution of modern humans includes protective countermeasures that were selected for success and likely shaped the stupefyingly complex central nervous system

The paper is organized by four countermeasures hosts have evolved against manipulative parasites: 

restricting access to the brain; 

increasing the costs of manipulation; 

increasing the complexity of signaling;

 and increasing robustness. 

Within each category, Del Giudice suggests evolutionary responses by parasites to these countermeasures.

Restricting access to the brain
For aspiring higher organisms, keeping parasites out of the central nervous system is like Immunology 101; as Del Giudice points out, the adaptive benefits of restricting access to the brain also apply to non-parasitic pathogens.

 So the blood-brain barrier comprises the first line of defense as a layer of physical and chemical security.

Parasites have evolved other options to manipulate behavior from outside of the brain: 

Some produce behavior-altering substances like dopamine and release them into the blood; some manipulate the secretion of hormones; 

others activate specific immune responses in order to manipulate the host.

 Del Giudice also cites a number of parasites that evolved methods of passing through the blood-brain barrier in order to reach the brain physically.

Increasing the costs of manipulation

Some parasites release certain neurochemicals to alter host behavior.

 As a countermeasure, hosts could adapt by increasing the amount of particular neurochemicals required to induce such responses, greatly increasing the metabolic cost to the parasites.

 Since hosts are generally much larger, this increased cost could be completely negligible to the host while overwhelming the parasite's ability to produce enough of the neuroactive substance.

Del Giudice adds, "Since present-day instances of manipulation are mostly of the indirect kind, selection to increase the costs of signaling would have peaked a long time ago, possibly in the early stages of brain evolution…

 Paradoxically, if those countermeasures were so effective that they forced most parasites to adopt indirect strategies, they would have rendered themselves obsolete, eventually becoming a net cost without any prevailing benefits.

 If so, they may have been selected out owing to the relentless pressure for efficiency."

Increasing the complexity of signals

The central nervous system uses neuroactive substances as internal signals between neurons, brain networks and between the brain and other organs.  Parasites can hijack these pathways to alter behavior by producing overriding signals or, as Del Giudice points out, corrupting existing ones.

 This entails breaking the host's internal signaling code.

Thus, a more complex signaling code is more difficult for a parasite to break.   Instances of such a complexity increase include the requirement of joint action of different neurochemicals, or releasing neuroactive substances in specifically timed pulses.

 Expanding the set of transmission molecules and their binding receptors also increases complexity.

 More elaborate internal signals increase the time required to break. From an adaptive standpoint, this can close off the parasite's options, forcing it to develop other means of manipulation.

However, rising complexity raises the metabolic costs for the hosts, though these costs are disproportionately more expensive for parasites.

 And Del Giudice points out that increasing the complexity of a system "tends to create new points of fragility," which may be exploited by adapting parasites.

Increasing robustness

Increasing the robustness of a system basically amounts to damage control.   Higher organisms tend to evolve in such a way that they can maintain normal behavior functionality, even during attack by a parasite.

 Del Giudice discusses a number of passive, reactive and proactive robustness host strategies, including redundancy and modularity of systems;

 so-called bow-tie network architectures;

 feedback-regulated systems that detect perturbations of the system and make corrective adjustments;

 and the monitoring of nonspecific cues such as immune system activities that indicate the presence of a parasitic pathogen.

Largely, robustness adaptations are likely to exclude fixed physiological adjustments, and instead favor the development of "plastic responses triggered by cues of infection.

" The reason is that if brain physiology and behavior are adapted to function best in the presence of a pathogen, then its absence would lead to non-optimal behaviors and reduced survival.

Del Giudice includes in the paper a discussion of the constraints on the evolution of countermeasures by hosts.

 These include metabolic and computational constraints such as energy availability and small body size—animals with larger brains can more easily evolve higher levels of protective complexity.

 This is one reason that behavior-altering parasites are more commonly observed in insects, which have provided fundamental examples of parasite strategies and host countermeasures.

Psychopharmacology

Finally, the author includes a fascinating discussion of the implications of such adaptations for psychopharmacology.

 "Using psychoactive drugs to treat psychiatric symptoms is an attempt to alter behavior by pharmacological means. This is also what manipulative parasites do—even though, in the case of psychiatric treatment, the goal is to benefit the patient," Del Giudice writes.

Thus, adaptive responses to attacks by parasites could explain why antidepressants tend to induce tolerance in some patients—like parasites, the drugs seek to alter the organism's behavior, with the possibility that robust neural systems rebalance behavior pathways that have been altered by the drug.

 "It is worth considering the possibility that at least some of these reactive mechanisms may be specifically designed to detect and respond to parasite intrusions," Del Giudice writes.

"If so, standard pharmacological treatments may unwittingly mimic a parasite attack and trigger specialized defensive responses.

" He adds that certain undesirable side effects of drugs could be metabolically expensive but useful adaptive features during a parasite infection, but detrimental to psychiatric treatment.

The paper is a theoretical exploration of the ideas surrounding parasitism as an evolutionary pressure, and as such, usefully illuminates how complex and difficult the question will be for researchers tackling the already challenging fields of neurophysiology and brain networks.

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