Introducing play to higher education reduces stress and forms deeper connection material

A new study found higher education students are more engaged and motivated when they are taught using playful pedagogy rather than the traditional lecture-based method. The study was conducted by University of Colorado Denver counseling researcher Lisa Forbes and was published in the Journal of Teaching and Learning.

While many educators in higher education believe play is a method that is solely used for elementary education, Forbes argues that play is important in post-secondary education to enhance student learning outcomes.

Throughout the spring 2020 semester, Forbes observed students who were enrolled in three of her courses between the ages of 23-43. To introduce playful pedagogy, Forbes included games and play, not always tied to the content of that day's lesson, at the start of each class. She then provided many opportunities for role-play to practice counseling skills, and designed competitions within class activities.

During the study, students mentioned they saw more opportunities for growth while learning in a highly interactive environment. Students also described that the hands-on nature of learning through play established a means for skill acquisition, and they were able to retain the content more effectively.

"As we grow older, we're conditioned to believe that play is trivial, childish, and a waste of time," said Forbes. "This social script about play leads to it being excluded from higher education. A more interactive learning approach leads to a deeper and more rigorous connection to the material."

To maintain what Forbes described as "rigor" within higher education, the most common approach tends to be lecture-based learning. However, according to Forbes, this mode of education is counter to the very outcomes educators set out to achieve.

The results of the study suggest there is a unique and powerful classroom experience when play is valued and used in the learning process. According to Forbes, students who participated in this study also indicated that play increased positive emotions and connections with other students and the professor in the course.

"I also saw that when I introduced play, it helped students let their guard down and allowed them to reduce their stress, fear, or anxiety," said Forbes. "Play even motivated students to be vulnerably engaged, take risks, and feel more connected to the content."

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One step towards a daily-use deep UV light source for sterilization and disinfection

Researchers from the Graduate School of Engineering and the Center for Quantum Information and Quantum Biology at Osaka University unveiled a new solid state second-harmonic generation (SHG) device that converts infrared radiation into blue light. This work may lead to a practical daily-use deep ultraviolet light source for sterilization and disinfection.

Recently, deep ultraviolet (DUV) light sources have been attracting much attention in sterilization and disinfection. In order to realize a bactericidal effect while ensuring user safety, a wavelength range of 220-230 nm is desirable. But DUV light sources in this wavelength range that are both durable and highly efficient have not yet been developed. Although wavelength conversion devices are promising candidates, conventional ferroelectric wavelength conversion materials cannot be applied to DUV devices due to absorption edge.

Since nitride semiconductors such as gallium nitride and aluminum nitride have relatively high optical nonlinearity, they can be applied to wavelength conversion devices. Due to its transparency to 210 nm, aluminum nitride is particularly suitable for DUV wavelength conversion devices. However, realizing structures with periodically inverted polarity like conventional ferroelectric wavelength conversion devices has proven quite difficult.

The researchers proposed a novel monolithic microcavity wavelength conversion device without a polarity-inverted structure. A fundamental wave is enhanced significantly in the microcavity with two distributed Bragg reflectors (DBR), and counter-propagating second harmonic waves are efficiently emitted in phase from the one side. As the first step towards a practical DUV light source, a gallium nitride microcavity device was fabricated via microfabrication technology, including dry etching and anisotropic wet etching for vertical and smooth DBR sidewalls. By obtaining a blue SH wave, the effectiveness of the proposed concept was successfully demonstrated.

"Our device can be adapted to use a broader range of materials. They can be applied to deep ultraviolet light emission or even broadband photon pair generation," senior author Masahiro Uemukai says. The researchers hope that because this approach does not rely on materials or periodically inverted structures, it will make future nonlinear optical devices easier to construct.

From Science Daily

New evidence of early SARS-CoV-2 infections in the United States

A new antibody testing study examining samples originally collected through the National Institutes of Health's All of Us Research Program found evidence of SARS-CoV-2 infections in five states earlier than had initially been reported. These findings were published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. The results expand on findings from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study that suggested SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was present in the U.S. as far back as December 2019.

In the All of Us study, researchers analyzed more than 24,000 stored blood samples contributed by program participants across all 50 states between Jan. 2 and March 18, 2020. Researchers detected antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 using two different serology tests in nine participants' samples. These participants were from outside the major urban hotspots of Seattle and New York City, believed to be key points of entry of the virus in the U.S. The positive samples came as early as Jan. 7 from participants in Illinois, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Most positive samples were collected prior to the first reported cases in those states, demonstrating the importance of expanding testing as quickly as possible in an epidemic setting.

"This study allows us to uncover more information about the beginning of the U.S. epidemic and highlights the real-world value of longitudinal research in understanding dynamics of emerging diseases like COVID-19," said Josh Denny, M.D., M.S., chief executive officer of All of Us and an author of the study. "Our participants come from diverse communities across the U.S. and give generously of themselves to drive a wide range of biomedical discoveries, which are vital for informing public health strategies and preparedness."

In studies like these, false positives are a concern, particularly when the prevalence of viral infections is low, as was the case in the early days of the U.S. epidemic. Researchers in this study followed CDC guidance to use sequential testing on two separate platforms to minimize false positive results.

All of Us worked with Quest Diagnostics to test samples on the Abbott Architect SARS-CoV-2 IgG ELISA and the EUROIMMUN SARS-CoV-2 ELISA (IgG) platforms. For a sample to be considered "positive" by the research team, it had to have positive results on both platforms, which target antibodies that bind to different parts of the virus. Both tests have emergency use authorization from the FDA.

"Antibody testing of blood samples helps us better understand the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in the U.S. in the early days of the U.S. epidemic, when testing was restricted and public health officials could not see that the virus had already spread outside of recognized initial points of entry," said Keri N. Althoff, Ph.D., lead author and associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore. "This study also demonstrates the importance of using multiple serology platforms, as recommended by the CDC."

Antibodies are proteins produced in the blood in response to an infection, such as a virus. They play a critical role in fighting infections and are helpful signs that a person may have been exposed to an infection in the past, even if they didn't show symptoms. In the All of Us study, researchers looked in participant samples for a type of antibodies called IgG. These antibodies do not appear until about two weeks after a person has been infected, indicating that participants with these antibodies were exposed to the virus at least several weeks before their sample was taken. In this study, the first positive samples came from participants in Illinois and Massachusetts on Jan. 7 and 8, 2020, respectively, suggesting that the virus was present in those states in late December.

The study authors noted several limitations to their study. While the study included samples from across the U.S., the number of samples from many states was low. In addition, the authors do not know whether the participants with positive samples became infected during travel or while in their own communities. Ideally, this study could be replicated in other populations with samples collected in the initial months of the U.S. epidemic and with multiple testing platforms to compare results.

All of Us expects to release more information following further analysis, and will offer participants whose samples were included in the study an opportunity to receive their individual results. The presence of antibodies in one's blood sample does not guarantee that a person is protected from the infection (has immunity), or that any such protection will last.

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The sun's clock

Not only the very concise 11-year cycle, but also all other periodic solar activity fluctuations can be clocked by planetary attractive forces. This is the conclusion drawn by Dr. Frank Stefani and his colleagues from the Institute of Fluid Dynamics at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and from the Institute of Continuous Media Mechanics in Perm, Russia. With new model calculations, they are proposing a comprehensive explanation of all important known sun cycles for the first time. They also reveal the longest fluctuations in activity over thousands of years as a chaotic process. Despite the planetary timing of short and medium cycles, long-term forecasts of solar activity thus become impossible, as the researchers in the scientific journal Solar Physics assert.

Solar physicists around the world have long been searching for satisfactory explanations for the sun's many cyclical, overlapping activity fluctuations. In addition to the most famous, approximately 11-year "Schwabe cycle," the sun also exhibits longer fluctuations, ranging from hundreds to thousands of years. It follows, for example, the "Gleissberg cycle" (about 85 years), the "Suess-de Vries cycle" (about 200 years) and the quasi-cycle of "Bond events" (about 1500 years), each named after their discoverers. It is undisputed that the solar magnetic field controls these activity fluctuations.

Explanations and models in expert circles partly diverge widely as to why the magnetic field changes at all. Is the sun controlled externally or does the reason for the many cycles lie in special peculiarities of the solar dynamo itself? HZDR researcher Frank Stefani and his colleagues have been searching for answers for years -- mainly to the very controversial question as to whether the planets play a role in solar activity.

Rosette-shaped movement of the sun can produce a 193-year cycle

The researchers have most recently taken a closer look at the sun's orbital movement. The sun does not remain fixed at the center of the solar system: It performs a kind of dance in the common gravitational field with the massive planets Jupiter and Saturn -- at a rate of 19.86 years. We know from the Earth that spinning around in its orbit triggers small motions in the Earth's liquid core. Something similar also occurs within the sun, but this has so far been neglected with regard to its magnetic field.

The researchers came up with the idea that part of the sun's angular orbital momentum could be transferred to its rotation and thus affect the internal dynamo process that produces the solar magnetic field. Such coupling would be sufficient to change the extremely sensitive magnetic storage capacity of the tachocline, a transition region between different types of energy transport in the sun's interior. "The coiled magnetic fields could then more easily snap to the sun's surface," says Stefani.

The researchers integrated one such rhythmic perturbation of the tachocline into their previous model calculations of a typical solar dynamo, and they were thus able to reproduce several cyclical phenomena that were known from observations. What was most remarkable was that, in addition to the 11.07-year Schwabe cycle they had already modeled in previous work, the strength of the magnetic field now also changed at a rate of 193 years -- this could be the sun's Suess-de Vries cycle, which from observations has been reported to be 180 to 230 years. Mathematically, the 193 years arise as what is known as a beat period between the 19.86-year cycle and the twofold Schwabe cycle, also called the Hale cycle. The Suess-de Vries cycle would thus be the result of a combination of two external "clocks": the planets' tidal forces and the sun's own movement in the solar system's gravitational field.

Planets as a metronome

For the 11.07-year cycle, Stefani and his researchers had previously found strong statistical evidence that it must follow an external clock. They linked this "clock" to the tidal forces of the planets Venus, Earth and Jupiter. Their effect is greatest when the planets are aligned: a constellation that occurs every 11.07 years. As for the 193-year cycle, a sensitive physical effect was also decisive here in order to trigger a sufficient effect of the weak tidal forces of the planets on the solar dynamo.

After initial skepticism toward the planetary hypothesis, Stefani now assumes that these connections are not coincidental. "If the sun was playing a trick on us here, then it would be with incredible perfection. Or, in fact, we have a first inkling of a complete picture of the short and long solar activity cycles." In fact, the current results also retroactively reaffirm that the 11-year cycle must be a timed process. Otherwise, the occurrence of a beat period would be mathematically impossible.

Tipping into chaos: 1000-2000-year collapses are not more accurately predictable

In addition to the rather shorter activity cycles, the sun also exhibits long-term trends in the thousand-year range. These are characterized by prolonged drops in activity, known as "minima," such as the most recent "Maunder Minimum," which occurred between 1645 and 1715 during the "Little Ice Age." By statistically analyzing the observed minima, the researchers could show that these are not cyclical processes, but that their occurrence at intervals of approximately one to two thousand years follows a mathematical random process.

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Black holes help with star birth

Research combining systematic observations with cosmological simulations has found that, surprisingly, black holes can help certain galaxies form new stars. On scales of galaxies, the role of supermassive black holes for star formation had previously been seen as destructive -- active black holes can strip galaxies of the gas that galaxies need to form new stars. The new results, published in the journal Nature, showcase situations where active black holes can, instead, "clear the way" for galaxies that orbit inside galaxy groups or clusters, keeping those galaxies from having their star formation disrupted as they fly through the surrounding intergalactic gas.

Active black holes are primarily thought to have a destructive influence on their surroundings. As they blast energy into their host galaxy, they heat up and eject that galaxy's gas, making it more difficult for the galaxy to produce new stars. But now, researchers have found that the same activity can actually help with star formation -- at least for the satellite galaxies that orbit the host galaxy.

The counter-intuitive result came out of a collaboration sparked by a lunchtime conversation between astronomers specializing in large-scale computer simulations and observers. As such, it is a good example for the kind of informal interaction that has become more difficult under pandemic conditions.

Astronomical observations that include taking a distant galaxy's spectrum -- the rainbow-like separation of a galaxy's light into different wavelengths -- allow for fairly direct measurements of the rate at which that galaxy is forming new stars.

Going by such measurements, some galaxies are forming stars at rather sedate rates. In our own Milky Way galaxy, only one or two new stars are born each year. Others undergo brief bursts of excessive star formation activity, called "star bursts," with hundreds of stars born per year. In yet other galaxies, star formation appears to be suppressed, or "quenched," as astronomers say: Such galaxies have virtually stopped forming new stars.

A special kind of galaxy, specimens of which are frequently -- almost half of the time -- found to be in such a quenched state, are so-called satellite galaxies. These are part of a group or cluster of galaxies, their mass is comparatively low, and they orbit a much more massive central galaxy similar to the way satellites orbit the Earth.

Such galaxies typically form very few new stars, if at all, and since the 1970s, astronomers have suspected that something very much akin to headwind might be to blame: Groups and clusters of galaxies not only contain galaxies, but also rather hot thin gas filling the intergalactic space.

As a satellite galaxy orbits through the cluster at a speed of hundreds of kilometers per second, the thin gas would make it feel the same kind of "headwind" that someone riding a fast bike, or motor-bike, will feel. The satellite galaxy's stars are much too compact to be affected by the steady stream of oncoming intergalactic gas.

But the satellite galaxy's own gas is not: It would be stripped away by the oncoming hot gas in a process known as "ram pressure stripping." On the other hand, a fast-moving galaxy has no chance of pulling in a sufficient amount of intergalactic gas, to replenish its gas reservoir. The upshot is that such satellite galaxies lose their gas almost completely -- and with it the raw material needed for star formation. As a result, star-formation activity would be quenched.

The processes in question take place over millions or even billions of years, so we cannot watch them happening directly. But even so, there are ways for astronomers to learn more. They can utilize computer simulations of virtual universes, programmed so as to follow the relevant laws of physics -- and compare the results with what we actually observe. And they can look for tell-tale clues in the comprehensive "snapshot" of cosmic evolution that is provided by astronomical observations.

Annalisa Pillepich, a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA), specializes in simulations of this kind. The IllustrisTNG suite of simulations, which Pillepich has co-led, provides the most detailed virtual universes to date -- universes in which researchers can follow the movement of gas around on comparatively small scales.

IllustrisTNG provides some extreme examples of satellite galaxies that have freshly been stripped by ram pressure: so-called "jellyfish galaxies," that are trailing the remnants of their gas like jellyfish are trailing their tentacles. In fact, identifying all the jellyfish in the simulations is a recently launched citizen science project on the Zooniverse platform, where volunteers can help with the research into that kind of freshly quenched galaxy.

But, while jellyfish galaxies are relevant, they are not where the present research project started. Over lunch in November 2019, Pillepich recounted a different one of her IllustrisTNG results to Ignacio Martín-Navarro, an astronomer specializing in observations, who was at MPIA on a Marie Curie fellowship. A result about the influence of supermassive black holes that reached beyond the host galaxy, into intergalactic space.

Such supermassive black holes can be found in the center of all galaxies. Matter falling onto such a black hole typically becomes part of a rotating so-called accretion disk surrounding the black hole, before falling into the black hole itself. This fall onto the accretion disk liberates an enormous amount of energy in the form of radiation, and oftentimes also in the form of two jets of quickly moving particles, which accelerate away from the black hole at right angles to the accretion disk. A supermassive black hole that is emitting energy in this way is called an Active Galactic Nucleus, AGN for short.

While IllustrisTNG is not detailed enough to include black hole jets, it does contain physical terms that simulate how an AGN is adding energy to the surrounding gas. And as the simulation showed, that energy injection will lead to gas outflows, which in turn will orient themselves along a path of least resistance: in the case of disk galaxies similar to our own Milky Way, perpendicular to the stellar disk; for so-called elliptical galaxies, perpendicular to a suitable preferred plane defined by the arrangement of the galaxy's stars.

Over time, the bipolar gas outflows, perpendicular to the disk or preferred plane, will go so far as to affect the intergalactic environment -- the thin gas surrounding the galaxy. They will push the intergalactic gas away, each outflow creating a gigantic bubble. It was this account that got Pillepich and Martín-Navarro thinking: If a satellite galaxy were to pass through that bubble -- would it be affected by the outflow, and would its star formation activity be quenched even further?

Martín-Navarro took up this question within his own domain. He had extensive experience in working with data from one of the largest systematic surveys to date: the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which provides high-quality images of a large part of the Northern hemisphere. In the publicly available data from that survey's 10th data, he examined 30,000 galaxy groups and clusters, each containing a central galaxy and on average 4 satellite galaxies.

In a statistical analysis of those thousands of systems, he found a small, but marked difference between satellite galaxies that were close to the central galaxy's preferred plane and satellites that were markedly above and below. But the difference was in the opposite direction the researchers had expected: Satellites above and below the plane, within the thinner bubbles, were on average not more likely, but about 5% less likely to have had their star formation activity quenched.

With that surprising result, Martín-Navarro went back to Annalisa Pillepich, and the two performed the same kind of statistical analysis in the virtual universe of the IllustrisTNG simulations. In simulations of that kind, after all, cosmic evolution is not put in "by hand" by the researchers. Instead, the software includes rules that model the rules of physics for that virtual universe as naturally as possible, and which also include suitable initial conditions that correspond to the state of our own universe shortly after the Big Bang.

That is why simulations like that leave room for the unexpected -- in this particular case, for re-discovering the on-plane, off-plane distribution of quenched satellite galaxies: The virtual universe showed the same 5% deviation for the quenching of satellite galaxies! Evidently, the researchers were on to something.

In time, Pillepich, Martín-Navarro and their colleagues came up with a hypothesis for the physical mechanism behind the quenching variation. Consider a satellite galaxy travelling through one of the thinned-out bubbles the central black hole has blown into the surrounding intergalactic medium. Due to the lower density, that satellite galaxy experiences less headwind, less ram pressure, and is thus less likely to have its gas stripped away.

Then, it is down to statistics. For satellite galaxies that have orbited the same central galaxies several times already, traversing bubbles but also the higher-density regions in between, the effect will not be noticeable. Such galaxies will have lost their gas long ago.

But for satellite galaxies that have joined the group, or cluster, rather recently, location will make a difference: If those satellites happen to land in a bubble first, they are less likely to lose their gas then if they happen to land outside a bubble. This effect could account for the statistical difference for the quenched satellite galaxies.

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From milk protein, a plastic foam that gets better in a tough environment

A new high-performance plastic foam developed from whey proteins can withstand extreme heat better than many common thermoplastics made from petroleum. A research team in Sweden reports that the material, which may be used for example in catalysts for cars, fuel filters or packaging foam, actually improves its mechanical performance after days of exposure to high temperatures.

Reporting in Advanced Sustainable Systems, researchers from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm say the research opens the door to using protein-based foam materials in potentially tough environments, such as filtration, thermal insulation and fluid absorption.

The basic building blocks of the material are protein nanofibrils, or PNFs, which are self-assembled from hydrolyzed whey proteins -- a product from cheese-processing -- under specific temperature and pH conditions.

In tests the foams improved with aging. After one month of exposure to a temperature of 150C, the material became stiffer, tougher and stronger, says the study's co-author, Mikael Hedenqvist , professor in the Division of Polymeric Materials at KTH.

"This material only gets stronger with time," he says. "If we compare with petroleum-based, commercial foam materials made of polyethylene and polystyrene, they melt instantly and decompose under the same harsh conditions."

Proteins are often water-soluble, which poses a challenge when developing protein-based materials. Despite this, the material proved water-resistant after the aging process, which polymerized the protein, creating new covalent bonds that stabilized the foams. The foam also resisted even more aggressive substances -- such as surfactants and reducing agents -- that normally decompose or dissolve proteins. The crosslinking also made the foam unaffected by diesel fuel or hot oil.

The material also showed better fire resistance than commonly used polyurethane thermoset.

"This biodegradable, sustainable material can be a viable option for use in aggressive environments where fire resistance is important," Hedenqvist says.

Potential applications include providing support for catalytic metals that operate at higher temperatures, such as platinum catalysts for automobiles. The material could conceivably work as a fuel filter, too.

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Earliest memories can start from the age of two-and-a-half

On average the earliest memories that people can recall point back to when they were just two-and-a-half years old, a new study suggests.

The findings, published in peer-reviewed journal Memory, pushes back the previous conclusions of the average age of earliest memories by a whole year. They are presented in a new 21-year study, which followed on from a review of already-existing data.

"When one's earliest memory occurs, it is a moving target rather than being a single static memory," explains childhood amnesia expert and lead author Dr Carole Peterson, from Memorial University of Newfoundland.

"Thus, what many people provide when asked for their earliest memory is not a boundary or watershed beginning, before which there are no memories. Rather, there seems to be a pool of potential memories from which both adults and children sample.

"And, we believe people remember a lot from age two that they don't realize they do.

"That's for two reasons. First, it's very easy to get people to remember earlier memories simply by asking them what their earliest memory is, and then asking them for a few more. Then they start recalling even earlier memories -- sometimes up to a full year earlier. It's like priming a pump; once you get them started its self-prompting.

"Secondly, we've documented those early memories are systematically misdated. Over and over again we find people think they were older than they actually were in their early memories."

For more than 20 years Dr Peterson has conducted studies on memory, with a particular focus on the ability of children and adults to recall their earliest years.

This latest research reviewed 10 of her research articles on childhood amnesia followed by analyses of both published and unpublished data collected in Dr Peterson's laboratory since 1999. It featured a total of 992 participants, and memories of 697 participants were then compared to the recollections of their parents.

Overall, it shows that children's earliest memories come before when they think it happened, as confirmed by their parents.

In some of the research reviewed by Peterson, the evidence to move our potential memory clock is "compelling." For example, when reviewing a study which interviewed children after two and eight years had passed since their earliest memory they were able to recall the same memory, however in the subsequent interviews gave a later age as to when they occurred.

"Eight years later many believed they were a full year older. So, the children, as they age, keep moving how old they thought they were at the time of those early memories," says Dr Peterson, from the Department of Psychology at Memorial University.

And she believes that the finding is due to something in memory dating called 'telescoping'.

"When you look at things that happened long ago, it's like looking through a lens.

"The more remote a memory is, the telescoping effect makes you see it as closer. It turns out they move their earliest memory forward a year to about three and a half years of age. But we found that when the child or adult is remembering events from age four and up, this doesn't happen."

She says, after combing through all of the data, it clearly demonstrates people remember a lot more of their early childhood and a lot farther back than they think they do, and it's relatively easy to help them access those memories.

"When you look at one study, sometimes things don't become clear, but when you start putting together study after study and they all come up with the same conclusions, it becomes pretty convincing."

It's this lack of clarity which Dr Peterson states is a limitation of the research and, indeed, all research done to-date in the subject area.

"What is needed now in childhood amnesia research are independently confirmed or documented external dates against which personally derived dates can be compared, as this would prevent telescoping errors and potential dating errors by parents," Dr Peterson says.

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Young adults who lost and then restored heart health had lower risk of heart attack, stroke

Preserving good cardiovascular health during young adulthood is one of the best ways to reduce risks of premature heart attack or stroke, according to new research published today in the American Heart Association's flagship journal Circulation.

The number of premature deaths from cardiovascular disease is increasing in many countries including the U.S. While there is a wealth of information available on maintaining good heart health during and after midlife to reduce the risks of heart attack and stroke, data about cardiovascular health during young adulthood is scarce.

"Most people lose ideal cardiovascular health before they reach midlife, yet few young people have immediate health concerns and many do not usually seek medical care until approaching midlife," says the study's senior author Hyeon Chang Kim, M.D., Ph.D., a professor in the department of preventive medicine at Yonsei University College of Medicine in Seoul, South Korea. "We need strategies to help preserve or restore heart health in this population because we know poor heart health in young adults is linked to premature cardiovascular disease."

Using the Korean National Health Insurance Services, a nationwide health insurer database, Kim and colleagues analyzed information collected from more than 3.5 million adults who completed routine health exams in 2003 and 2004. A subgroup of approximately 2.9 million participants underwent a follow-up health examination between 2005 and 2008. Patients' ages ranged from 20 to 39 at the time of the first exam, and 65.5% of the study participants were male.

Participants were categorized according to ideal cardiovascular health (CVH) scores based on the American Heart Association's Life's Simple 7® metrics. Patients received "one point" towards a cardiovascular health (CVH) score for each of the following measures from Life's Simple 7: well-maintained blood pressure, low total cholesterol, acceptable blood sugar levels, an active lifestyle, healthy weight and not smoking. Of note: healthy nutrition and diet, the final measure of Life's Simple 7, was not included in this analysis because dietary information was not collected from participants in this database.

Researchers evaluated the total number of first hospitalizations or death from a heart attack, stroke or heart failure by December 31, 2019 to define outcomes. The researchers found: 

• Rates of premature (younger than 55) cardiovascular events were highest among patients with a CVH score of zero.
• A higher CVH score by one point led to reduced risks for heart attack by 42%, heart failure by 30%, cardiovascular death by 25% and stroke by 24%.
• While people who improved their CVH score over time reduced their risk of hospitalizations or death from a heart attack, stroke or heart failure, people who began with and maintained a higher CVH score ultimately had the least chance of hospitalization or death from a heart attack or stroke during the study period.
• Timely and consistent monitoring of heart health among young adults is important to prevent premature onset of heart disease and reduce the risk of cardiovascular events.

The study's findings may be limited because data was routine health screening data, therefore, it may not be as robust as data collected primarily for a specific study. The study also lacks data on the participants' eating patterns, so researchers modified CVH score metrics to exclude diet. In addition, participants in this study were of Korean ancestry, so the results may not be generalizable to people from other diverse racial or ethnic groups.

From Science Daily

Asteroid 16 Psyche might not be what scientists expected

The widely studied metallic asteroid known as 16 Psyche was long thought to be the exposed iron core of a small planet that failed to form during the earliest days of the solar system. But new University of Arizona-led research suggests that the asteroid might not be as metallic or dense as once thought, and hints at a much different origin story.

Scientists are interested in 16 Psyche because if its presumed origins are true, it would provide an opportunity to study an exposed planetary core up close. NASA is scheduled to launch its Psyche mission in 2022 and arrive at the asteroid in 2026.

UArizona undergraduate student David Cantillo is lead author of a new paper published in The Planetary Science Journal that proposes 16 Psyche is 82.5% metal, 7% low-iron pyroxene and 10.5% carbonaceous chondrite that was likely delivered by impacts from other asteroids. Cantillo and his collaborators estimate that 16 Psyche's bulk density -- also known as porosity, which refers to how much empty space is found within its body -- is around 35%.

These estimates differ from past analyses of 16 Psyche's composition that led researchers to estimate it could contain as much as 95% metal and be much denser.

"That drop in metallic content and bulk density is interesting because it shows that 16 Psyche is more modified than previously thought," Cantillo said.

Rather than being an intact exposed core of an early planet, it might actually be closer to a rubble pile, similar to another thoroughly studied asteroid -- Bennu. UArizona leads the science mission team for NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, which retrieved a sample from Bennu's surface that is now making its way back to Earth.

"Psyche as a rubble pile would be very unexpected, but our data continues to show low-density estimates despite its high metallic content," Cantillo said.

Asteroid 16 Psyche is about the size of Massachusetts, and scientists estimate it contains about 1% of all asteroid belt material. First spotted by an Italian astronomer in 1852, it was the 16th asteroid ever discovered.

"Having a lower metallic content than once thought means that the asteroid could have been exposed to collisions with asteroids containing the more common carbonaceous chondrites, which deposited a surface layer that we are observing," Cantillo said. This was also observed on asteroid Vesta by the NASA Dawn spacecraft.

Asteroid 16 Psyche has been estimated to been worth $10,000 quadrillion (that's $10,000 followed by 15 more zeroes), but the new findings could slightly devalue the iron-rich asteroid.

"This is the first paper to set some specific constraints on its surface content. Earlier estimates were a good start, but this refines those numbers a bit more," Cantillo said.

The other well-studied asteroid, Bennu, contains a lot of carbonaceous chondrite material and has porosity of over 50%, which is a classic characteristic of a rubble pile.

Such high porosity is common for relatively small and low-mass objects such as Bennu -- which is only as large as the Empire State Building -- because a weak gravitational field prevents the object's rocks and boulders from being packed together too tightly. But for an object the size of 16 Psyche to be so porous is unexpected.

"The opportunity to study an exposed core of a planetesimal is extremely rare, which is why they're sending the spacecraft mission there," Cantillo said, "but our work shows that 16 Psyche is a lot more interesting than expected."

Past estimates of 16 Psyche's composition were done by analyzing the sunlight reflected off its surface. The pattern of light matched that of other metallic objects. Cantillo and his collaborators instead recreated 16 Psyche's regolith -- or loose rocky surface material -- by mixing different materials in a lab and analyzing light patterns until they matched telescope observations of the asteroid. There are only a few labs in the world practicing this technique, including the UArizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, where Cantillo worked while in high school.

"I've always been interested in space," said Cantillo, who is also president of the UArizona Astronomy Club. "I knew that astronomy studies would be heavy on computers and observation, but I like to do more hands-on kind of work, so I wanted to connect my studies to geology somehow. I'm majoring geology and minoring in planetary science and math."

"David's paper is an example of the cutting-edge research work done by our undergraduate students," said study co-author Vishnu Reddy, an associate professor of planetary sciences who heads up the lab in which Cantillo works. "It is also a fine example of the collaborative effort between undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and staff in my lab."

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Could all your digital photos be stored as DNA?

On Earth right now, there are about 10 trillion gigabytes of digital data, and every day, humans produce emails, photos, tweets, and other digital files that add up to another 2.5 million gigabytes of data. Much of this data is stored in enormous facilities known as exabyte data centers (an exabyte is 1 billion gigabytes), which can be the size of several football fields and cost around $1 billion to build and maintain.

Many scientists believe that an alternative solution lies in the molecule that contains our genetic information: DNA, which evolved to store massive quantities of information at very high density. A coffee mug full of DNA could theoretically store all of the world's data, says Mark Bathe, an MIT professor of biological engineering.

"We need new solutions for storing these massive amounts of data that the world is accumulating, especially the archival data," says Bathe, who is also an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. "DNA is a thousandfold denser than even flash memory, and another property that's interesting is that once you make the DNA polymer, it doesn't consume any energy. You can write the DNA and then store it forever."

Scientists have already demonstrated that they can encode images and pages of text as DNA. However, an easy way to pick out the desired file from a mixture of many pieces of DNA will also be needed. Bathe and his colleagues have now demonstrated one way to do that, by encapsulating each data file into a 6-micrometer particle of silica, which is labeled with short DNA sequences that reveal the contents.

Using this approach, the researchers demonstrated that they could accurately pull out individual images stored as DNA sequences from a set of 20 images. Given the number of possible labels that could be used, this approach could scale up to 1020 files.

Bathe is the senior author of the study, which appears today in Nature Materials. The lead authors of the paper are MIT senior postdoc James Banal, former MIT research associate Tyson Shepherd, and MIT graduate student Joseph Berleant.

Stable storage

Digital storage systems encode text, photos, or any other kind of information as a series of 0s and 1s. This same information can be encoded in DNA using the four nucleotides that make up the genetic code: A, T, G, and C. For example, G and C could be used to represent 0 while A and T represent 1.

DNA has several other features that make it desirable as a storage medium: It is extremely stable, and it is fairly easy (but expensive) to synthesize and sequence. Also, because of its high density -- each nucleotide, equivalent to up to two bits, is about 1 cubic nanometer -- an exabyte of data stored as DNA could fit in the palm of your hand.

One obstacle to this kind of data storage is the cost of synthesizing such large amounts of DNA. Currently it would cost $1 trillion to write one petabyte of data (1 million gigabytes). To become competitive with magnetic tape, which is often used to store archival data, Bathe estimates that the cost of DNA synthesis would need to drop by about six orders of magnitude. Bathe says he anticipates that will happen within a decade or two, similar to how the cost of storing information on flash drives has dropped dramatically over the past couple of decades.

Aside from the cost, the other major bottleneck in using DNA to store data is the difficulty in picking out the file you want from all the others.

"Assuming that the technologies for writing DNA get to a point where it's cost-effective to write an exabyte or zettabyte of data in DNA, then what? You're going to have a pile of DNA, which is a gazillion files, images or movies and other stuff, and you need to find the one picture or movie you're looking for," Bathe says. "It's like trying to find a needle in a haystack."

Currently, DNA files are conventionally retrieved using PCR (polymerase chain reaction). Each DNA data file includes a sequence that binds to a particular PCR primer. To pull out a specific file, that primer is added to the sample to find and amplify the desired sequence. However, one drawback to this approach is that there can be crosstalk between the primer and off-target DNA sequences, leading unwanted files to be pulled out. Also, the PCR retrieval process requires enzymes and ends up consuming most of the DNA that was in the pool.

"You're kind of burning the haystack to find the needle, because all the other DNA is not getting amplified and you're basically throwing it away," Bathe says.

File retrieval

As an alternative approach, the MIT team developed a new retrieval technique that involves encapsulating each DNA file into a small silica particle. Each capsule is labeled with single-stranded DNA "barcodes" that correspond to the contents of the file. To demonstrate this approach in a cost-effective manner, the researchers encoded 20 different images into pieces of DNA about 3,000 nucleotides long, which is equivalent to about 100 bytes. (They also showed that the capsules could fit DNA files up to a gigabyte in size.)

Each file was labeled with barcodes corresponding to labels such as "cat" or "airplane." When the researchers want to pull out a specific image, they remove a sample of the DNA and add primers that correspond to the labels they're looking for -- for example, "cat," "orange," and "wild" for an image of a tiger, or "cat," "orange," and "domestic" for a housecat.

The primers are labeled with fluorescent or magnetic particles, making it easy to pull out and identify any matches from the sample. This allows the desired file to be removed while leaving the rest of the DNA intact to be put back into storage. Their retrieval process allows Boolean logic statements such as "president AND 18th century" to generate George Washington as a result, similar to what is retrieved with a Google image search.

"At the current state of our proof-of-concept, we're at the 1 kilobyte per second search rate. Our file system's search rate is determined by the data size per capsule, which is currently limited by the prohibitive cost to write even 100 megabytes worth of data on DNA, and the number of sorters we can use in parallel. If DNA synthesis becomes cheap enough, we would be able to maximize the data size we can store per file with our approach," Banal says.

For their barcodes, the researchers used single-stranded DNA sequences from a library of 100,000 sequences, each about 25 nucleotides long, developed by Stephen Elledge, a professor of genetics and medicine at Harvard Medical School. If you put two of these labels on each file, you can uniquely label 1010 (10 billion) different files, and with four labels on each, you can uniquely label 1020 files.

Bathe envisions that this kind of DNA encapsulation could be useful for storing "cold" data, that is, data that is kept in an archive and not accessed very often. His lab is spinning out a startup, Cache DNA, that is now developing technology for long-term storage of DNA, both for DNA data storage in the long-term, and clinical and other preexisting DNA samples in the near-term.

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