Researchers from UBC’s Okanagan and Vancouver campuses, as well as the University of Calgary, discovered that delivering CBTi during pregnancy significantly reduces postpartum depressive symptoms after a baby arrives.

“Early intervention is crucial for infant and parental mental health,” says Dr. Elizabeth Keys, an Assistant Professor in UBCO’s School of Nursing and a study co-author. “Our research explores how addressing sleep problems like insomnia can lead to better mental health outcomes for families, helping parents and their children thrive.”

CBTi is a therapeutic intervention that identifies thoughts, behaviors and sleep patterns that contribute to insomnia. Treatment includes challenging or reframing misconceptions and restructuring habits to improve sleep quality.

“CBTi is the gold standard for the treatment of insomnia and has consistently been shown to improve symptoms of depression,” says Dr. Keys. “Its treatment effects are similar to antidepressant medications among adults, but with fewer side effects, and is therefore often preferred by pregnant individuals.”

Sixty-two women assessed for insomnia and depressive symptoms participated in the study — with half randomly assigned to an intervention group and half to a control group.

“We found that CBTi during pregnancy significantly improved sleep and reduced postpartum depressive symptoms for participants,” explains Dr. Keys. “These are enormously encouraging results for anyone that has struggled in those early weeks and months with their newborns.”

Results indicate that effective insomnia treatment during pregnancy may serve as a protective factor against postpartum depression.

“Our study adds to the growing evidence that treating insomnia during pregnancy is beneficial for various outcomes,” Dr. Keys says. “It’s time to explore how we can make this treatment more accessible to pregnant individuals across the country to improve sleep health equity.”

The research highlights the interdisciplinary collaborations between researchers across Canada and UBC’s Vancouver and Okanagan campuses. Dr. Elizabeth Keys is from UBCO, while Dr. Lianne M. Tomfohr-Madsen, a Canada Research Chair in Mental Health and Intersectionality, is based at UBC Vancouver.

Dr. Keys and Dr. Tomfohr-Madsen are lead investigators on the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Sleep Equity Reimagined team and Canadian Sleep Research Consortium members.

When light conditions rapidly change, our eyes have to respond to this change in fractions of a second to maintain stable visual processing. This is necessary when, for example, we drive through a forest and thus move through alternating stretches of shadows and clear sunlight. “In situations like these, it is not enough for the photoreceptors to adapt, but an additional corrective mechanism is required,” said Professor Marion Silies of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). “Earlier work undertaken by her research group had already demonstrated that such a corrective ‘gain control’ mechanism exists in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, where it acts directly downstream of the photoreceptors. Silies’ team has now managed to identify the algorithms, mechanisms, and neuronal networks that enable the fly to sustain stable visual processing when light levels change rapidly. The corresponding article has been published recently in Nature Communications.

Rapid changes in luminance challenge stable visual processing

Our vision needs to function accurately in many different situations — when we move in our surroundings as well as when our eyes follow an object that moves from light into shade. This applies to us humans and to many thousand animal species that rely heavily on vision to navigate. Rapid changes in luminance are also a problem in the world of inanimate objects when it comes to information processing by, for example, camera-based navigation systems. Hence, many self-driving cars depend on additional radar- or lidar-based technology to properly compute the contrast of an object relative to its background. “Animals are capable of doing this without such technology. Therefore, we decided to see what we could learn from animals about how visual information is stably processed under constantly changing lighting conditions,” explained Marion Silies the research question.

Combination of theoretical and experimental approaches

The compound eye of Drosophila melanogaster consists of 800 individual units or ommatidia. The contrast between an object and its background is determined postsynaptic of the photoreceptors. However, if luminance conditions suddenly change, as in the case of an object moving into the shadow of a tree, there will be differences in contrast responses. Without gain control, this would have consequences for all subsequent stages of visual processing, resulting in the object appearing different. The recent study with lead author Dr. Burak Gür used two-photon microscopy to describe where in visual circuitry stable contrast responses were first generated. This led to the identification of neuronal cell types that are positioned two synapses behind the photoreceptors.

These cell types respond only very locally to visual information. For the background luminance to be correctly included in computing contrast, this information needs narrow spatial pooling, as revealed by a computational model implemented by co-author Dr. Luisa Ramirez. “We started with a theoretical approach that predicted an optimal radius in images of natural environments to capture the background luminance across a particular region in visual space while, in parallel, we were searching for a cell type that had the functional properties to achieve this,” said Marion Silies, head of the Neural Circuits lab at the JGU Institute of Developmental Biology and Neurobiology (IDN).

Information on luminance is spatially pooled

The Mainz-based team of neuroscientists has identified a cell type that meets all required criteria. These cells, designated Dm12, pool luminance signals over a specific radius, which in turn corrects the contrast response between the object and its background in rapidly changing light conditions. “We have discovered the algorithms, circuits, and molecular mechanisms that stabilize vision even when rapid luminance changes occur,” summarized Silies, who has been investigating the visual system of the fruit fly over the past 15 years. She predicts that luminance gain control in mammals, including humans, is implemented in a similar manner, particularly as the necessary neuronal substrate is available.

This widely known thought-experiment is used to help us understand the principles of probability and randomness, and how chance can lead to unexpected outcomes. The idea has been referenced in pop culture from The Simpsons to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and on TikTok.

However, a new study reveals it would take an unbelievably huge amount of time — far longer than the lifespan of our universe, for a typing monkey to randomly produce Shakespeare. So, while the theorem is true, it is also somewhat misleading.

Mathematicians, Associate Professor Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), decided to examine the theorem using instead the limits of our finite universe.

“The Infinite Monkey Theorem only considers the infinite limit, with either an infinite number of monkeys or an infinite time period of monkey labour,” said Associate Professor Woodcock.

“We decided to look at the probability of a given string of letters being typed by a finite number of monkeys within a finite time period consistent with estimates for the lifespan of our universe,” he said.

The serious but light-hearted study, A numerical evaluation of the Finite Monkeys Theorem, has just been published in the peer-reviewed journal Franklin Open.

For number-crunching purposes, the researchers assumed that a keyboard contains 30 keys including all the letters of the English language plus common punctuation marks.

As well as a single monkey, they also did the calculations using the current global population of around 200,000 chimpanzees, and they assumed a rather productive typing speed of one key every second until the end of the universe in about 10^100 years — that’s a 1 followed by 100 zeros.

The results reveal that it is possible (around a 5% chance) for a single chimp to type the word ‘bananas’ in its own lifetime. However, even with all chimps enlisted, the Bard’s entire works (with around 884,647 words) will almost certainly never be typed before the universe ends.

“It is not plausible that, even with improved typing speeds or an increase in chimpanzee populations, monkey labour will ever be a viable tool for developing non-trivial written works,” the authors muse.

“This finding places the theorem among other probability puzzles and paradoxes — such as the St. Petersburg paradox, Zeno’s paradox, and the Ross-Littlewood paradox — where using the idea of infinite resources gives results that don’t match up with what we get when we consider the constraints of our universe,” said Associate Professor Woodcock.

In the era of generative AI, the Infinite Monkey Theorem, and its finite version, perhaps also challenge readers to consider philosophical questions around the nature of creativity, meaning and consciousness, and how these qualities emerge.

“We’re moving away from this anthropocentric view that ethanol is just something that humans use,” says behavioral ecologist and senior author Kimberley Hockings of the University of Exeter. “It’s much more abundant in the natural world than we previously thought, and most animals that eat sugary fruits are going to be exposed to some level of ethanol.”

Ethanol first became abundant around 100 million years ago, when flowering plants began producing sugary nectar and fruits that yeast could ferment. Now, it’s present naturally in nearly every ecosystem, though concentrations are higher, and production occurs year-round in lower-latitude and humid tropical environments compared to temperate regions. Most of the time, naturally fermented fruits only reach 1%-2% alcohol by volume (ABV), but concentrations as high as 10.2% ABV have been found in over-ripe palm fruit in Panama.

Animals already harbored genes that could degrade ethanol before yeasts began producing it, but there is evidence that evolution fine-tuned this ability for mammals and birds that consume fruit and nectar. In particular, primates and treeshrews have adapted to efficiently metabolize ethanol.

“From an ecological perspective, it is not advantageous to be inebriated as you’re climbing around in the trees or surrounded by predators at night — that’s a recipe for not having your genes passed on,” says molecular ecologist and senior author Matthew Carrigan of the College of Central Florida. “It’s the opposite of humans who want to get intoxicated but don’t really want the calories — from the non-human perspective, the animals want the calories but not the inebriation.”

It’s unclear whether animals intentionally consume ethanol for ethanol’s sake, and more research is needed to understand its impact on animal physiology and evolution. However, the researchers say that ethanol consumption could carry several benefits for wild animals. First and foremost, it’s a source of calories, and the odorous compounds produced during fermentation could guide animals to food sources, though the researchers say it’s unlikely that animals can detect ethanol itself. Ethanol could also have medicinal benefits: fruit flies intentionally lay their eggs in substances containing ethanol, which protects their eggs from parasites, and fruit fly larvae increase their ethanol intake when they become parasitized by wasps.

“On the cognitive side, ideas have been put forward that ethanol can trigger the endorphin and dopamine system, which leads to feelings of relaxation that could have benefits in terms of sociality,” says behavioral ecologist and first author Anna Bowland of the University of Exeter. “To test that, we’d really need to know if ethanol is producing a physiological response in the wild.”

There are a lot of unanswered questions regarding the significance of ethanol consumption to wild animals. In their future research, the team plans to investigate the behavioral and social implication of ethanol consumption in primates and to more deeply examine the enzymes involved in alcohol metabolism.

This research was supported by the Primate Society of Great Britain, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Canada Research Chairs program, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

In order to investigate whether and how nanoplastic particles in the body interact with antibiotics, the research team led by Lukas Kenner (MedUni Vienna), Barbara Kirchner (University of Bonn) and Oldamur Hollóczki (University of Debrecen) linked a common drug with widely used types of plastic. The focus was on the broad-spectrum antibiotic tetracycline, which is used to treat many bacterial infections, such as those of the respiratory tract, skin or intestines. When it came to plastics, the choice fell on polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP) and polystyrene (PS), which are ubiquitous components of packaging materials, as well as nylon 6,6 (N66), which is contained in many textiles such as clothing, carpets, sofa covers and curtains. Nanoplastics are smaller than 0.001millimeters and are considered particularly harmful to humans and the environment due to their small size.

Using complex computer models, the team was able to prove that the nanoplastic particles can bind tetracycline and thus impair the effectiveness of the antibiotic. “The binding was particularly strong with nylon,” emphasizes Lukas Kenner, pointing out a largely underestimated danger indoors: “The micro- and nanoplastic load is around five times higher there than outdoors. Nylon is one of the reasons for this: it is released from textiles and enters the body via respiration, for example.”

Danger of antibiotic resistance

As the study results show, the binding of tetracycline to nanoplastic particles can reduce the biological activity of the antibiotic. At the same time, binding to nanoplastics could lead to the antibiotic being transported to unintended sites in the body, causing it to lose its targeted effect and possibly cause other undesirable effects. “Our finding that the local concentration of antibiotics on the surface of the nanoplastic particles can increase is particularly worrying,” reports Lukas Kenner on another detail from the study. This increase in concentration could lead to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Plastics such as nylon 6,6, but also polystyrene, which bind more strongly to tetracycline, could therefore increase the risk of resistance. “At a time when antibiotic resistance is becoming an ever greater threat worldwide, such interactions must be taken into account,” says Kenner.

The study shows that exposure to nanoplastics is not only a direct health risk, but can also indirectly influence the treatment of diseases. “If nanoplastics reduce the effectiveness of antibiotics, the dosage poses a massive problem,” says Lukas Kenner with a view to future studies looking at the influence of nanoplastics on other drugs.