COVID-19 long-haulers at risk of developing kidney damage, disease

Research continues to mount indicating that many people who've had COVID-19 go on to suffer a range of adverse conditions months after their initial infections. A deep dive into federal health data adds to those concerns, pointing to a significant decline in kidney function among those dubbed COVID-19 long-haulers -- and even among those who had mild infections of the virus.

The data, plumbed by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System, show that those infected with SARS-CoV-2 are at an increased likelihood of developing kidney damage as well as chronic and end-stage kidney diseases.

The study is published online Sept. 1 in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

Known as the silent killer, kidney dysfunction and disease tend to be free of pain and other symptoms -- so much so that the National Kidney Foundation estimates that 90% of people with ailing kidneys don't know it. Kidney disease affects 37 million people in the U.S. and is one of the nation's leading causes of death.

"Our findings emphasize the critical importance of paying attention to kidney function and disease in caring for patients who have had COVID-19," said senior author Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, an assistant professor of medicine at Washington University. "If kidney care isn't an integral part of COVID-19 post-acute care strategy, then we will miss opportunities to help potentially hundreds of thousands of people who have no idea that their kidney function has declined due to this virus. This is in addition to the millions of Americans who suffer from kidney disease not caused by COVID-19."

The findings coincide with a surge in COVID-19 infections spurred by the delta variant. More than 38 million people have been diagnosed with the virus since the pandemic started.

"Based on our research, we believe that 510,000 of those people who have had COVID-19 may have kidney injury or disease," Al-Aly said.

The researchers analyzed de-identified medical records in a database maintained by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the nation's largest integrated health-care delivery system. The researchers created a controlled dataset that included health information from more than 1.7 million healthy and COVID-infected veterans from March 1, 2020, through March 15, 2021. Of those veterans, 89,216 had confirmed COVID-19 diagnoses and made it through the acute phase (the first 30 days of the disease).

The COVID-19 patients in the study were mostly men and in their late 60s; however, the researchers also analyzed data that included 151,289 women -- including 8,817 with COVID-19 -- and adults of all ages. Among the COVID-19 patients, 12,376 (13.9%) required hospitalization, including 4,146 (4.6%) who were admitted to intensive care units (ICUs).

"The risk of decreased kidney function is highest among people who were in the ICU; however, it's important to note that the risk extends to all patients, even those who had milder cases of COVID-19," said Al-Aly, who is also director of the Clinical Epidemiology Center and chief of the Research and Education Service at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System.

Earlier stages of kidney disease often can be treated with medication.

"It's essential to discover kidney dysfunction before the problem progresses and becomes harder to treat," Al-Aly said. "But kidney problems are silent problems that won't be found until somebody checks the bloodwork. Based on our research, it's especially important that health-care providers do this for people who have had COVID-19. Otherwise, we'll miss a lot of people and, sadly, we'll be dealing with more advanced kidney diseases down the road."

Compared with patients who did not become infected, people who contracted the virus but did not need to be hospitalized for it had a 15% higher risk of suffering from a major adverse kidney event such as chronic kidney disease, a 30% higher risk of developing acute kidney injury, and a 215% (more than twofold) higher risk of acquiring end-stage kidney disease. The latter occurs when the kidneys can no longer effectively remove waste from the body. In such cases, dialysis or a kidney transplant is needed to keep patients alive.

The risk increased for patients hospitalized for COVID-19, and considerably so for those who were in the ICU for the virus: seven times the risk of experiencing a major adverse kidney event, eight times the risk of acute kidney injury and 13 times the risk of end-stage kidney disease.

"People who were hospitalized for COVID-19 or needed ICU care are at the highest risk," Al-Aly said. "But the risk is not zero for those who had milder cases. In fact, it's significant. And we need to remember that we don't yet know the health implications for long-haulers in the coming years."

After the initial 30 days of COVID-19 infection, 4,757 (5.3%) of the patients experienced a decrease of 30% or more in glomerular filtration rates (GFR), which physicians use to assess kidney function and, if applicable, determine the severity of kidney disease. The rate is determined by a simple blood test that measures levels of creatinine, a waste product in the blood that is filtered by the kidneys and discarded into urine.

The researchers found that people who had milder COVID-19 cases had 1.09 times the risk of having an estimated GFR decline of 30% or more. For hospitalized COVID-19 patients not in intensive care units, there was two times the risk of having an estimated GFR decrease of 30% or more, while intensive care unit patients were at three times the risk of experiencing an estimated GFR drop of 30% or more.

"The kidney damage was in excess of reduced function caused by normal aging," Al-Aly explained. "A 60-year-old's kidney function is less robust than the kidneys of a 20-year-old. The kidney function decline we've observed in these patients is not graceful aging. It is not normal anything. It is definitely a disease state.

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Newly identified mosasaur was fish-hunting monster

Researchers at the University of Cincinnati identified a new species of mosasaur -- an 18-foot-long fish-eating monster that lived 80 million years ago.

UC assistant professor-educator Takuya Konishi and his student, UC graduate Alexander Willman, named the mosasaur Ectenosaurus everhartorum after paleontologists Mike and Pamela Everhart. The mosasaur inhabited the Western Interior Seaway in what today is western Kansas.

The discovery was announced this week in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences.

The newly identified mosasaur marks only the second species in the genus Ectenosaurus.

"Mosasaurs in western Kansas have been well sampled and well researched. Those two factors create tall odds when you try to find something new," Konishi said.

Mosasaurs were enormous marine reptiles, some as big as school buses. They inhabited oceans around the world during the Cretaceous period around the time of Tyrannosaurus rex. If Ectenosaurus clidastoides with its long, slender jaws resembles a gharial crocodile, Konishi said the new species is closer to a false gharial crocodile with notably blunter jaws.

Konishi, who teaches in the Biological Sciences Department of UC's College of Arts and Sciences, first encountered the fossil in 2004 while working as a graduate student in systematics and evolution. Konishi was studying fossils of Platecarpus, a different genus of mosasaur in storage at Fort Hays State University's Sternberg Museum of Natural History, when he recognized something odd about one specimen.

"It wasn't a platecarpus. The frontal bone above the eye socket was much longer. The bones of Platecarpus should have had a broader triangle," he said. "That was one telltale sign."

Konishi suspected the specimen was a type of ectenosaur, only one species of which had been identified. But the teeth seemed all wrong. The now-empty sockets that would have contained the mosasaur's sharp, curved teeth in the unidentified specimen would have extended around the front of its mouth, unlike other recognized species that has a toothless rostrum, the bony protuberance at the front of the mouth.

For years, the fossils puzzled him.

"Some things just stick in your mind and they're hard to let go," he said.

But the mystery would have to wait because Konishi was busy finishing his doctoral degree and launching an academic career that would bring him to UC's College of Arts and Sciences.

The first mosasaur fossils were found in the Netherlands a half-century before anyone used the term "dinosaur." Mosasaurs began to capture the nation's attention after the Civil War when the nation's premier paleontologists, Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, began to study Cretaceous limestone in Kansas in a partnership that became a bitter public feud. Since then, Kansas has become world-renowned for mosasaur research.

Generations of experts have come to Kansas to study its specimens, which are on display at museums around the world.

"It's a famous place for mosasaur research. It's quite well known," Konishi said. "So I thought I don't have to be the guy to place a stake. I'm sure someone will catch it. But nobody did."

Ectenosaur is unusual for how few specimens have been found in the genus compared to other mosasaurs, Konishi said.

"In western Kansas we have over 1,500 mosasaur specimens. Out of those we can only find one specimen each representing these two species of ectenosaur," Konishi said. "That's sort of crazy."

When Konishi confirmed with the Sternberg Museum that no other researchers were studying the specimen, he asked them to ship the fossils to UC. When he opened the carefully bubble-wrapped contents, his initial impressions were confirmed.

"By then I had looked at all the other known Platecarpus specimens under the sun, as it were. And this specimen was distinct from the others," he said. "To me it was so obvious."

At the same time, Konishi's student Willman inquired about working on a research project. He received a UC Undergraduate STEM Experience grant to help with the taxonomic identification.

"I was beyond excited to be part of the discovery," Willman said.

The third author on the study, Michael Caldwell, is a professor of biology at the University of Alberta, Edmonton.

Willman illustrated the fossils in painstaking detail to help scientists understand the morphological differences that make the mosasaur unique.

"I was very happy with how he brought these broken bones to life," Konishi said. "It helped make our case very convincing to anyone that this is something new that warrants the establishment of a new taxon."

The researchers dedicated the project to the late Dale Russell, whose work has had a profound impact in North American mosasaur paleontology, Konishi said. But they named the mosasaur for the Everharts, a Kansas couple who have spent more than 30 years sharing their fossils with museums and leading research field trips in the fossil-rich Smoky Hill Chalk.

"We're still in a little bit of shock at the news. It's very exciting," Pamela Everhart said.

"It's a great honor," said Mike Everhart, author of "Oceans of Kansas" about mosasaurs and other prehistoric life that inhabited the Western Interior Seaway during the Cretaceous Period.

Mosasaurs are very special to him, he said.

Read more at Science Daily

How people respond to wildfire smoke

As wildfires become commonplace in the western U.S. and around the world, checking the daily air quality warning has become as routine as checking the weather. But what people do with that data -- whether it drives them to slip on a mask before stepping outside or seal up their homes against smoke -- is not always straightforward or rational, according to new Stanford research.

In a case study of Northern California residents, Stanford researchers explored the psychological factors and social processes that drive responses to wildfire smoke. The research, which ultimately aims to uncover approaches for helping people better protect themselves, shows that social norms and social support are essential for understanding protective health actions during wildfire smoke events. The findings appeared this month in the journal Climate Risk Management.

"It's important to understand how people behave so that public health communications professionals can potentially intervene and promote safer behavior that mitigates risk," said lead study author Francisca Santana, a PhD student in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER). "This kind of qualitative work is a first step so that we can learn how people are using information and interacting to make decisions. We can then look at where there might be leverage points or opportunities to promote more protective behavior."

Exposure to wildfire smoke can irritate the lungs, cause inflammation, impact the immune system and increase susceptibility to lung infections, including the virus that causes COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While other studies have examined how people respond to evacuation orders, little has been done to understand what's happening with wildfire smoke exposure if people don't -- or can't -- leave the area, according to senior study author Gabrielle Wong-Parodi, an assistant professor of Earth system science at Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth).

"It resonated with me, the things that people were doing to try to protect themselves in the absence of access to effective ways to reduce their wildfire smoke exposure," Wong-Parodi said, referring to a resident who breathed through a wet bandana in an attempt to filter out toxic smoke particles. "It's urgent that we come up with strategies that are realistic for what people are going through."

Study authors Santana and David Gonzalez, who worked on the study as a PhD student at Stanford, interviewed residents across age, race and income demographics who were affected by wildfire smoke from the 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, California, and subsequent fires in 2019 in Fresno, Santa Clara and Sacramento counties.

They found that individuals responded to wildfire smoke events in three main ways: interpreting information together, protecting vulnerable others and questioning protective actions. Their responses were influenced not only by the Air Quality Index (AQI) but also by what they were personally experiencing -- whether they smelled, saw or tasted smoke in the air.

Just as important were the social factors at play, the researchers found. "Social norms and social support were really influencing how people chose to act on their perceptions of threat," Santana said. "For example, a lot of people talked about observing others wearing masks, and in some cases that observation was enough for them to act by wearing a mask themselves."

Their discussions revealed that the shared rules or standards of behavior within a social group -- social norms -- were a common pathway driving behavior change, in addition to the act of assisting or comforting others within your social group -- social support.

"There were only a handful of people who described looking at the AQI and then changing their behavior based on just that -- it was almost always a conversation they were having with one another," Santana said. "It was very much a social exercise of making sense of limited information or information that was not at the right scale for their community."

The study provides a framework for better understanding wildfire smoke responses by examining social processes while acknowledging that cultural and political contexts, as well as factors like demographics, health status and previous exposure to smoke and air pollution, may also influence individual behaviors.

In the western U.S., climate change has contributed to the risk and extent of wildfires, bringing smoke to regions like the Bay Area, which has historically been less affected than the rest of the state. In some cases, the researchers found that residents were unable to protect themselves because they couldn't access N95 masks or air purifiers or properly seal their homes.

"This research is also important for epidemiologists trying to understand how wildfire smoke affects health," said Gonzalez, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. "This can help us to look at disparities in who's exposed to smoke and whether that leads to poorer health for some populations."

As these events become more common, there could be an opportunity to find policy synergies that help prepare communities for future smoke events, according to the co-authors. For example, programs that are designed to improve household comfort and increase energy efficiency could also include measures to reduce smoke intrusion during wildfire smoke events, Wong-Parodi suggested.

Some of the interviews revealed that residents simply didn't know what to do while experiencing a novel extreme event. But even that revealed how processing uncertainty is a social exercise, not just a cognitive one.

Read more at Science Daily

Learning from a 'living fossil'

As we live and breathe, ancient-looking fish known as bowfin are guarding genetic secrets that that can help unravel humanity's evolutionary history and better understand its health.

Michigan State researchers Ingo Braasch and Andrew Thompson are now decoding some of those secrets. Leading a project that included more than two dozen researchers spanning three continents, the Spartans have assembled the most complete picture of the bowfin genome to date.

"For the first time, we have what's called a chromosome-level genome assembly for the bowfin," said Braasch, an assistant professor of integrative biology in the College of Natural Science. "If you think of the genome like a book, what we had in the past was like having all the pages ripped out in pieces. Now, we've put them back in the book."

"And in order," added Thompson, a postdoctoral researcher in Braasch's lab and the first author of the new research report, published Aug. 30 in the journal Nature Genetics.

This is really important information for a few reasons, the duo said, and it starts with the bowfin being what Charles Darwin referred to as a "living fossil." The bowfin, or dogfish, looks like an ancient fish.

This doesn't mean that the bowfin hasn't evolved since ancient times, but it has evolved more slowly than most fishes. This means that the bowfin has more in common with the last ancestor shared by fish and humans, hundreds of millions of years ago, than, say, today's zebrafish.

Zebrafish -- which are modern, so-called teleost fishes -- are a notable example because they're widely used by scientists as a model to test and develop theories about human health. Having more genetic information about the bowfin helps make the zebrafish a better model.

"A lot of research on human health and disease is done on model organisms, like mice and zebrafish," Thompson said. "But once you identify important genes and the elements that regulate those genes in zebrafish, it can be hard to find their equivalents in humans. It's easier to go from zebrafish to bowfin to human."

For example, one particularly interesting gene is one that's used in developing the bowfin's gas bladder, an organ the fish uses to breathe and store air. Scientists believe that the last common ancestor shared by fish and humans had air-filled organs like these that were evolutionary predecessors to human lungs.

In their new study, the Spartan researchers could see that a certain genetic process in the bowfin's gas bladder development bore striking similarities to what's known about human lung development. A similar process is also present in the modern teleost fishes, but it's been obscured by eons of evolution.

"When you looked for the human genetic elements of this organ development in zebrafish, you couldn't find it because teleost fishes have higher rates of evolution," Thompson said. "It's there in modern fishes, but it's hidden from view until you see it in bowfin and gar."

The gar is another air-breathing fish with "living fossil" status that's studied by Braasch and his team. With both the gar and bowfin genomes, the team was able to show where these genetic elements linked to gas bladder and lung formation were hiding out in the modern teleost fishes. The ancient fish enable researchers to build a better bridge between the established modern fish model organisms and human biology.

"You don't want to base that bridge on one species," said Braasch, who added this finding also strengthens the implications for evolutionary history. "This is another piece of the puzzle that suggests the common ancestor of fish and humans had an air-filled organ and used it for breathing at the water surface, quite similar to what you see in bowfin and gar."

Although these findings have insights that are pertinent to all of humanity, Spartans might feel a special affinity for the bowfin. For starters, male fish turn their fins and throats a bright shade of green during spawning season. Also, famed biologist William Ballard of Dartmouth College studied bowfin development from eggs to larval fish at Michigan State's W.K. Kellogg Biological Station during the 1980s. This was what he called his "Odyssey of Strange Fish," and Braasch's team now uses his work to guide their genomic analyses of bowfin development.

Bowfins are native to Michigan. They could be in the Red Cedar River on MSU's campus now, according to Thompson, but they also can be quite elusive and, sometimes, very aggressive. This made collaborations essential for securing specimens. With colleagues at Nicholls State University in Louisiana, the team caught bowfins for genome sequencing. Amy McCune, a collaborator and professor at Cornell University, knew where to find bowfin eggs in upstate New York and had a graduate student gifted at securing these unique samples for investigating bowfin development.

The Spartans also had connections at other universities and institutions with experts in bowfin biology, chromosome evolution and more. All told, the team included researchers from six states as well as France, Japan and Switzerland. Back in East Lansing, graduate students Mauricio Losilla and Olivia Fitch, research technologist Brett Racicot, and Kevin Childs, director of the MSU Genomics Core facility, also contributed to the study, which comes with an interesting twist at the end.

Almost all vertebrate creatures that grow paired limbs or fins share a common gene.

"Humans use it, mice use it. All fishes that have been studied so far use it," Braasch said. "The naïve expectation would be that bowfin do, too."

But that's not what the team found. The bowfin, the "living fossil," has evolved a different way of growing its paired fins.

Read more at Science Daily

Perceptions of supernatural beings reveal feelings about good and bad in humans

What transpires in comedies and cartoons when a character has a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other is not far off from people's perceptions of the real world, finds a new study from the University of Waterloo.

Intended to illustrate the characters' decision-making dilemma with comedic results, the moral character and motives of the supernatural beings are obvious. And people have similar expectations when it comes to individuals they see as good or bad.

The researchers explored expectations about how good and evil individuals respond to requests. The researchers were interested in understanding why movies and folktales often depict the devil and demons as eager to grant accidental requests, whereas angels are not depicted this way.

Their study indicates that people's beliefs about good and evil characters are influenced by their views of ordinary humans.

"Our results suggest people expect good agents will be sensitive to intentions behind requests whereas they expect evil individuals will be relatively insensitive to these intentions," said Ori Friedman, developmental psychology professor at Waterloo and lead author of the study. "These findings shape people's expectations about requests directed both to regular humans and to supernatural agents."

The study shows that people have distinct ideas of how being good or bad influences the decisions of others. People assume that evil individuals are indifferent about anything that doesn't directly impact their own aims.

These findings support previous research in suggesting that at least some of people's everyday beliefs about supernatural beings could be based on their views of humans.

"One aspect of seeing someone as evil might be that we expect that person to put less emphasis on the intentions of others, and instead focus more on the outcome of people's actions," says Brandon Goulding, a PhD candidate in developmental psychology and co-author of the study. "Whereas we think that a good person will also consider what someone meant to do, and weigh that against what they actually did."

Researchers investigated people's expectations about good and evil agents with five experiments. In the study, 2,231 participants read short stories about a protagonist's request to either a human or supernatural being and rated the likelihood the request would be granted. When the request was directed to someone good, ratings depended on whether the requester actually understood what they were requesting. Evil individuals were expected to grant requests just as often when they were confused and didn't reflect the requester's intentions.

Read more at Science Daily

New mathematical solutions to an old problem in astronomy

For millennia, humanity has observed the changing phases of the Moon. The rise and fall of sunlight reflected off the Moon, as it presents its different faces to us, is known as a "phase curve." Measuring phase curves of the Moon and Solar System planets is an ancient branch of astronomy that goes back at least a century. The shapes of these phase curves encode information on the surfaces and atmospheres of these celestial bodies. In modern times, astronomers have measured the phase curves of exoplanets using space telescopes such as Hubble, Spitzer, TESS and CHEOPS. These observations are compared with theoretical predictions. In order to do so, one needs a way of calculating these phase curves. It involves seeking a solution to a difficult mathematical problem concerning the physics of radiation.

Approaches for the calculation of phase curves have existed since the 18th century. The oldest of these solutions goes back to the Swiss mathematician, physicist and astronomer, Johann Heinrich Lambert, who lived in the 18th century. "Lambert's law of reflection" is attributed to him. The problem of calculating reflected light from Solar System planets was posed by the American astronomer Henry Norris Russell in an influential 1916 paper. Another well-known 1981 solution is attributed to the American lunar scientist Bruce Hapke, who built on the classic work of the Indian-American Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar in 1960. Hapke pioneered the study of the Moon using mathematical solutions of phase curves. The Soviet physicist Viktor Sobolev also made important contributions to the study of reflected light from celestial bodies in his influential 1975 textbook. Inspired by the work of these scientists, theoretical astrophysicist Kevin Heng of the Center for Space and Habitability CSH at the University of Bern has discovered an entire family of new mathematical solutions for calculating phase curves. The paper, authored by Kevin Heng in collaboration with Brett Morris from the National Center of Competence in Research NCCR PlanetS -- which the University of Bern manages together with the University of Geneva -- and Daniel Kitzmann from the CSH, has just been published in Nature Astronomy.

Generally applicable solutions

"I was fortunate that this rich body of work had already been done by these great scientists. Hapke had discovered a simpler way to write down the classic solution of Chandrasekhar, who famously solved the radiative transfer equation for isotropic scattering. Sobolev had realised that one can study the problem in at least two mathematical coordinate systems." Sara Seager brought the problem to Heng's attention by her summary of it in her 2010 textbook.

By combining these insights, Heng was able to write down mathematical solutions for the strength of reflection (the albedo) and the shape of the phase curve, both completely on paper and without resorting to a computer. "The ground-breaking aspect of these solutions is that they are valid for any law of reflection, which means they can be used in very general ways. The defining moment came for me when I compared these pen-and-paper calculations to what other researchers had done using computer calculations. I was blown away by how well they matched," said Heng.

Successful analysis of the phase curve of Jupiter

"What excites me is not just the discovery of new theory, but also its major implications for interpreting data," says Heng. For example, the Cassini spacecraft measured phase curves of Jupiter in the early 2000s, but an in-depth analysis of the data had not previously been done, probably because the calculations were too computationally expensive. With this new family of solutions, Heng was able to analyze the Cassini phase curves and infer that the atmosphere of Jupiter is filled with clouds made up of large, irregular particles of different sizes. This parallel study has just been published by the Astrophysical Journal Letters, in collaboration with Cassini data expert and planetary scientist Liming Li of Houston University in Texas, U.S.A.

New possibilities for the analysis of data from space telescopes

"The ability to write down mathematical solutions for phase curves of reflected light on paper means that one can use them to analyze data in seconds," said Heng. It opens up new ways of interpreting data that were previously infeasible. Heng is collaborating with Pierre Auclair-Desrotour (formerly CSH, currently at Paris Observatory) to further generalize these mathematical solutions. "Pierre Auclair-Desrotour is a more talented applied mathematician than I am, and we promise exciting results in the near future," said Heng.

Read more at Science Daily

Common pesticide may contribute to global obesity crisis

A commonly-used pesticide could be partially responsible for the global obesity epidemic, says a study led by McMaster University scientists.

Researchers discovered that chlorpyrifos, which is banned for use on foods in Canada but widely sprayed on fruits and vegetables in many other parts of the world, slows down the burning of calories in the brown adipose tissue of mice. Reducing this burning of calories, a process known as diet-induced thermogenesis, causes the body to store these extra calories, promoting obesity.

Scientists made the discovery after studying 34 commonly used pesticides and herbicides in brown fat cells and testing the effects of chlorpyrifos in mice fed high calorie diets. Their findings were published in Nature Communications and could have important implications for public health.

"Brown fat is the metabolic furnace in our body, burning calories, unlike normal fat that is used to store them. This generates heat and prevents calories from being deposited on our bodies as normal white fat. We know brown fat is activated during cold and when we eat," said senior author Gregory Steinberg, professor of medicine and co-director of the Centre for Metabolism, Obesity, and Diabetes Research at McMaster.

"Lifestyle changes around diet and exercise rarely lead to sustained weight loss. We think part of the problem may be this intrinsic dialling back of the metabolic furnace by chlorpyrifos."

Steinberg said chlorpyrifos would only need to inhibit energy use in brown fat by 40 calories every day to trigger obesity in adults, which would translate to an extra five lbs of weight gain per year.

He said that while several environmental toxins including chlorpyrifos have been linked to rising obesity rates in both humans and animals, most of these studies have attributed weight gain to increases in food intake and not the burning of calories.

While the use of chlorpyrifos on foods is banned in Canada, imported produce may still be treated with it.

"Although the findings have yet to be confirmed in humans, an important consideration, is that whenever possible consume fruits and vegetables from local Canadian sources and if consuming imported produce, make sure it is thoroughly washed," said Steinberg.

Read more at Science Daily

Insights into how a stroke affects reading could help with rehabilitation

Georgetown University researchers, looking at the ability of people to sound out words after a stroke, found that knowing which region of the brain was impacted by the stroke could have important implications for helping target rehabilitation efforts.

The finding appeared August 30, 2021, in Brain Communications.

"One in five stroke survivors in the United States live with persistent language impairment. Most of these people also struggle with reading," says the study's first author, J. Vivian Dickens, PhD, a Georgetown University MD/PhD student conducting research in the university's Cognitive Recovery Lab and Center for Aphasia Research and Rehabilitation at Georgetown's Medical Center. "Our study clarifies the neuroanatomical and cognitive bases of post-stroke reading and language deficits, which could help facilitate predictions of deficits in stroke survivors and suggest targeted treatments."

The research focus was on phonological processing, which is understanding and being able to use the sounds that comprise language. There are three principal aspects to this processing: auditory, or the ability to recognize the sounds of words, such as judging if words rhyme; motor, which is the ability to produce accurate and clear speech; and auditory-motor translation, which is the translation of sounds heard into speech.

"The goal of this study was to understand how post-stroke difficulties with the three different aspects of phonology relate to difficulties with reading," says Dickens. "There are two broad ways that people read words: one involves sounding out words, which is particularly important for reading new words; the other involves whole-word recognition. People with post-stroke language impairment frequently have specific trouble sounding out words."

The investigators tested reading and phonological abilities in 67 people, 30 of whom had had a stroke and 37 that had not. Advanced MRI techniques allowed the researchers to trace out white matter connections, which are akin to wiring diagrams for the brain, as well as map out stroke locations in the brains of affected study participants.

"We found two different patterns of reading problems. Strokes involving the left frontal lobe caused problems with motor phonology and one of the two ways of reading, specifically sounding out words. In contrast, strokes involving the left temporal and parietal lobes caused problems with auditory-motor translation and both ways of reading," says Dickens. "These results may help clinicians develop therapies focused on specific reading problems that individual stroke survivors often struggle with."

"This study focused on reading aloud single words, a classic measure of reading ability," says Peter E. Turkeltaub, MD, PhD, director of the Cognitive Recovery Lab in the Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery, medical director in the Center for Aphasia Research and Rehabilitation and senior author of the article. "Our results are an important step forward in revealing the mechanisms of translating print to sound, which is crucial for developing rehabilitative therapies for patients who have had strokes."

The investigators are planning studies to help confirm the extent to which these findings can be generalized to silent reading, which relies on the same core psychological processes as oral reading and is more important for reading in daily life. The researchers are also hoping to turn their research tasks into useful clinical tests to diagnose phonological processing.

Read more at Science Daily

Unease beyond the uncanny valley: How people react to the same faces

Increasingly, movies featuring humanoid robots, like Terminator or Ex Machina, are showing the titular "robot" akin to humans not only in intelligence but also appearance. What if Terminator-esque robots became the norm, making it difficult for us to tell them apart from actual human beings?

This is the premise of a new study published in PLOS ONE, which evaluated how human beings respond to images of people with the same face. It is not too far-fetched to imagine a future where human-like androids are mass-produced and are indistinguishable from flesh-and-blood human beings. Robotics and artificial intelligence are advancing at an unprecedented rate, with very closely human-like robots and CG characters, such as Geminoid, Saya, and Sophia already having been produced. Developers are optimistic they will one day create robots that surpass the uncanny valley -- a well-known phenomenon where humanoids elicit unpleasant and negative emotions in viewers when their appearance becomes similar to that of humans.

In such a future, how would we react?

A team of researchers from Kyushu University, Ritsumeikan University, and Kansai University, collaboratively conducted a series of six experiments involving different batches of hundreds of people to try and find that answer.

The first experiment involved rating the subjective eeriness, emotional valence, and realism of a photoshopped photograph of six human subjects with the exact same face (clone image), six people with different faces (non-clone image), and one person (single image). The second experiment comprised rating another set of clone images and non-clone images, while the third experiment consisted of rating clone and non-clone images of dogs. The fourth experiment had two parts: rating clone images of two sets of twins and then rating clone faces of twins, triplets, quadruplets, and quintuplets. The fifth experiment involved clone images of Japanese animation and cartoon characters. And the sixth and final experiment involved evaluating the subjective eeriness and realism of a different set of clone and non-clone images while also answering the Disgust Scale Revised to analyze disgust sensitivity.

The results were striking. Participants from the first study rated individuals with clone faces as eerier and more improbable than those with different faces and a single person's face.

The researchers termed this negative emotional response as the clone devaluation effect.

"The clone devaluation effect was stronger when the number of clone faces increased from two to four," says lead author Dr. Fumiya Yonemitsu from Graduate School of Human-Environment Studies at Kyushu University, who is also a Research Fellow of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. "This effect did not occur when each clone face was indistinguishable, like animal faces in experiment three involving dogs."

According to him, "We also noticed that the duplication of identity, that is the personality and mind unique to a person, rather than their facial features, has an important role in this effect. Clone faces with the duplication of identity were eerier, as the fourth experiment showed. The clone devaluation effect became weaker when clone faces existed in the lower reality of the context, such as in the fifth experiment. Furthermore, the eeriness of clone faces stemming from improbability could be positively predicted by disgust, in particular animal-reminder disgust, as noticed in the sixth experiment. Taken together, these results suggest that clone faces induce eeriness and that the clone devaluation effect is related to realism and disgust reaction."

These results show that human faces provide important information for identifying individuals because human beings have a one-to-one correspondence between face and identity. Clone faces violate this principle, which may make humans misjudge the identity of people with clone faces as being the same.

So, what does this mean for a future in which humanoids are inevitable? According to the researchers, we need to think critically about introducing new technology in robotics or human cloning because of the potential for unpleasant psychological reactions other than the uncanny valley phenomenon.

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Unravelling the mystery of brown dwarfs

Brown dwarfs are astronomical objects with masses between those of planets and stars. The question of where exactly the limits of their mass lie remains a matter of debate, especially since their constitution is very similar to that of low-mass stars. So how do we know whether we are dealing with a brown dwarf or a very low mass star? An international team, led by scientists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) PlanetS, in collaboration with the University of Bern, has identified five objects that have masses near the border separating stars and brown dwarfs that could help scientists understand the nature of these mysterious objects. The results can be found in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Like Jupiter and other giant gas planets, stars are mainly made of hydrogen and helium. But unlike gas planets, stars are so massive and their gravitational force so powerful that hydrogen atoms fuse to produce helium, releasing huge amounts of energy and light.

'Failed stars'

Brown dwarfs, on the other hand, are not massive enough to fuse hydrogen and therefore cannot produce the enormous amount of light and heat of stars. Instead, they fuse relatively small stores of a heavier atomic version of hydrogen: deuterium. This process is less efficient and the light from brown dwarfs is much weaker than that from stars. This is why scientists often refer to them as 'failed stars'.

"However, we still do not know exactly where the mass limits of brown dwarfs lie, limits that allow them to be distinguished from low-mass stars that can burn hydrogen for many billions of years, whereas a brown dwarf will have a short burning stage and then a colder life," points out Nolan Grieves, a researcher in the Department of Astronomy at the UNIGE's Faculty of Science, a member of the NCCR PlanetS and the study's first author. "These limits vary depending on the chemical composition of the brown dwarf, for example, or the way it formed, as well as its initial radius," he explains. To get a better idea of what these mysterious objects are, we need to study examples in detail. But it turns out that they are rather rare. "So far, we have only accurately characterised about 30 brown dwarfs," says the Geneva-based researcher. Compared to the hundreds of planets that astronomers know in detail, this is very few. All the more so if one considers that their larger size makes brown dwarfs easier to detect than planets.

New pieces to the puzzle

Today, the international team characterized five companions that were originally identified with the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) as TESS objects of interest (TOI) -- TOI-148, TOI-587, TOI-681, TOI-746 and TOI-1213. These are called 'companions' because they orbit their respective host stars. They do so with periods of 5 to 27 days, have radii between 0.81 and 1.66 times that of Jupiter and are between 77 and 98 times more massive. This places them on the borderline between brown dwarfs and stars.

These five new objects therefore contain valuable information. "Each new discovery reveals additional clues about the nature of brown dwarfs and gives us a better understanding of how they form and why they are so rare," says Monika Lendl, a researcher in the Department of Astronomy at the UNIGE and a member of the NCCR PlanetS.

One of the clues the scientists found to show these objects are brown dwarfs is the relationship between their size and age, as explained by François Bouchy, professor at UNIGE and member of the NCCR PlanetS: "Brown dwarfs are supposed to shrink over time as they burn up their deuterium reserves and cool down. Here we found that the two oldest objects, TOI 148 and 746, have a smaller radius, while the two younger companions have larger radii."

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