The study found that different areas of the brain start with a similar organization rather than already being specialized in early development. This suggests that the brain might use a single shared blueprint to guide early development.

“Throughout life, the brain continually builds on the foundations set earlier in development. This strong similarity in early development across very different areas of the brain suggests that neurodevelopmental disorders — such as autism or schizophrenia, which affect many different parts of the nervous system — may act similarly across these different brain areas,” said Gordon Smith, Ph.D., assistant professor at the U of M Medical School and principal investigator on the study. Dr. Smith is also a member of the Medical Discovery Team on Optical Imaging and Brain Science.

In collaboration with the Frankfurt Institute of Advanced Studies, the research team used advanced optical imaging techniques to measure spontaneous activity in diverse brain areas. They found that even in different parts of the brain — such as those responsible for hearing, seeing and feeling touch — as well as in areas linked to thinking in both the front and back part of the brain, the activity in networks of brain cells showed a very similar organization during early development. Researchers discovered that nerve cells in these areas work together in small, synchronized groups. These groups are part of bigger networks that cover millimeters in each part of the brain.

“This type of organization has long been a hallmark of visual brain areas, but finding it in other regions — especially in non-sensory regions like the prefrontal cortex — was a surprise,” said Dr. Smith.

Ongoing research will examine other brain regions at different stages of development to determine how the common blueprint identified in this study changes over time.

Funding for this study was provided by the National Institutes of Health’s National Eye Institute [R01EY030893-01], Whitehall Foundation, National Science Foundation and Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

The research team, made of members from The University of Texas at Arlington and 25 other institutions, are now a quarter of the way through inputting nearly 30,000 media files to the open-source repository MorphoSource. This will allow researchers and scholars to share findings and improve access to material critical for scientific discovery.

“Thanks to this exciting openVertebrate project, also called oVert, anyone — scientists, researchers, students, teachers, artists — can now look online to research the anatomy of just about any animal imaginable without leaving home,” said Gregory Pandelis, collections manager of UT Arlington’s Amphibian and Reptile Diversity Research Center. “This will help reduce wear and tear on many rare specimens while increasing access to them at the same time.”

A summary of the project has just been published in the peer-reviewed journal BioScience reviewing the specimens that have been scanned to date and offering a glimpse of how the data might be used in the future.

For example, one research team has used the data to conclude that Spinosaurus, a massive dinosaur that was larger than Tyrannosaurus rex and thought to be aquatic, would have actually been a poor swimmer, and thus likely stayed on land. Another study revealed that frogs have evolved to gain and lose the ability to grow teeth more than any other animal.

The value of oVert extends beyond scientific inquiry. Artists are using the 3D models to create realistic animal replicas. Photographs of oVert specimens have been displayed as part of museum exhibits. In addition, specimens have been incorporated into virtual reality headsets that allow users to interact with the animals.

Educators also are able to use oVert models in their classrooms. From the outset of the project, the research team placed a strong emphasis on K-12 outreach, organizing workshops where teachers could learn how to use the data in their classrooms.

“As a kid who loved all things science- and nature-related and had a particular interest in skeletal anatomy, I would go through great pains to collect, preserve and study skulls and other specimens for my childhood natural history collection, the start of my scientific inspiration,” Pandelis said. “Realizing that you could study these things digitally with just a few clicks on a computer was eye-opening for me, and it opened up the path to my current research using CT scans of snake specimens to study their skull evolution. Now, this wealth of data has been opened and made publicly accessible to anyone who has a professional, recreational or educational interest in anatomy and morphology. Natural history specimens have never been so accessible and impactful.”

In the next phase of the research project, the team will be creating sophisticated tools to analyze the data collected. Since researchers have never had digital access to so many 3D natural history specimens before, it will take further developments in machine learning and supercomputing to use them to their full potential.

The method can detect gravitational waves that oscillate just once every thousand years, 100 times slower than any previously measured gravitational waves.

“These are waves reaching us from the farthest corners of the universe, capable of affecting how light travels,” said Jeff Dror, Ph.D., an assistant professor of physics at the University of Florida and co-author of the new study. “Studying these waves from the early universe will help us build a complete picture of our cosmic history, analogous to previous discoveries of the cosmic microwave background.”

Dror and his co-author, University of California, Santa Cruz postdoctoral researcher William DeRocco, published their findings Feb. 26 in Physical Review Letters.

Gravitational waves are akin to ripples in space. Like sound waves or waves on the ocean, gravitational waves vary in both frequency and amplitude, information that offers insights into their origin and age. Gravitational waves that reach us can be oscillating at extremely low frequencies, much lower than those of sound waves detectable with the human ear. Some of the lowest frequencies detected in the past were as low as one nanohertz.

“For reference,” Dror explained, “the frequency of sound waves created by an alligator roar are about 100 billion times higher than this frequency — these are very low-pitched waves.”

Their new method of detection is based on analyzing pulsars, neutron stars that emit radio waves at highly regular intervals. Dror hypothesized that searching for gradual slowdown in the arrivals of these pulses could reveal new gravitational waves. By studying existing pulsar data, Dror was able to search for gravitational waves with lower frequencies than ever before, increasing our “hearing range” to frequencies as low as 10 picohertz, 100 times lower than previous efforts that detected nanohertz-level waves.

While gravitational waves with frequencies around a nanohertz have been detected before, not much is known about their origin. There are two theories. The leading idea is that these waves are the result of a merger between two supermassive black holes, which, if true, would give researchers a new way to study the behavior of these giant objects that lie at the heart of every galaxy.

The other main theory is that these waves were created by some sort of cataclysmic event early in the universe’s history. By studying gravitational waves at even lower frequencies, they may be able to differentiate these possibilities.

“Looking ahead, the next step is to analyze newer data sets,” Dror said. “The datasets we used were primarily from 2014 and 2015, and a huge number of pulsar observations have been undertaken since that time.”

Dror also plans to run simulations on mock data using UF’s HiPerGator supercomputer to further unravel cosmic history. The supercomputer can efficiently run large, complex simulations, significantly reducing the time required to analyze data.

This study was supported in part by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.

Data on more than 2,700 disadvantaged secondary (high) school students shows that minimizing pupil numbers in classrooms does not lead to better grades. Reducing class sizes could even decrease the odds of children achieving the best results, say the study authors.

The quantity of teachers also does not increase the odds of pupils from the poorest backgrounds achieving academically, despite concerns over staff shortages in schools.

Instead, the researchers say that resilience is guaranteed by the quality of teachers such as those with high discipline standards and who use their expertise to improve learning.

The study authors, who looked at data from China and Japan, are now urging policymakers to invest more in high-quality teachers and not to waste resources on cutting down the number of children in each class.

“This study supports the view that the quality of teachers, rather than the quantity, is the primary guarantee of students’ resilience,” says lead author Professor Tao Jiang, of Taizhou University whose research team also included experts from his institution and other China-based universities Northwest Normal, and Southwest.

“Quality teachers who effectively used teaching methods and managed classroom discipline increased the odds that individuals became resilient students.

“On the other hand, emphasizing the reduction of class sizes in schools may not benefit resilience. Smaller classes either had no relevance to resilience or were disadvantageous for resilience.

“Excessive emphasis on reducing class sizes is unnecessary, as it is detrimental to the emergence of students with high levels of resilience. Instead of allocating financial resources to reduce class sizes, it would be more effective to invest in providing high-quality science teachers.”

Academic resilience is defined as an individual’s ability to resist adversity and do well in school. It’s not fixed, and therefore can be improved, and is linked to what happens in schools and classrooms.

The authors of this study set out to identify the qualities and characteristics of 1,594 disadvantaged science students in Japan and 1,114 in the Macau region of China. Ages ranged from 15 to 16 years approximately and class size from 15 pupils (or fewer) to more than 50.

The participants were grouped into low, medium, or high-level resilience. The researchers looked at what classroom factors, school resources and school culture increased the odds of being in the high-level group.

All students in the study had participated in the 2015 Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA), an international questionnaire-based survey. PISA measures a pupil’s ability to use their reading, mathematics, and science knowledge.

Teacher discipline and support levels were among the many issues assessed by PISA. Pupils were also scored on motivation and how anxious they became during exams.

Results showed overall that a third of students displayed high-level resilience, a quarter low, and the rest medium.

High-resilience students were very positive towards school, science, and their future careers. They also dedicated more time to learning science than others but did experience anxiety about exams.

Science teachers and their teaching methods ‘play a crucial role’ in building students’ resilience, according to the authors. The findings show that these students benefited from classroom discipline, teacher-directed instruction, inquiry-based teaching, and teacher support.

In Japan, the most robust predictor of high-level resilience was inquiry-based teaching, while in Macau, it was teacher-directed instruction.

As for the impact of class size, smaller classes either had no impact on resilience such as in Macau or had a negative effect as in Japan. Conversely, an increase in class size by just one rank raised the odds of disadvantaged pupils in Japan attaining the best rather than the lowest grades by 1.2 times.

Other findings from the study show that misbehavior in the classroom or school in general undermines resilience.

The messages from the study for teachers include the need to guide pupils to conform to rules, to maintain discipline and prepare lessons in line with the needs of students.

The study did not analyze changes in how classrooms are managed now compared with before the pandemic. On this basis, the authors suggest further studies are needed on how COVID-19 has affected teaching in the context of student resilience.

Since a single spike epitope is recognized by multiple T-cell clones, the mRNA vaccination-induced T-cell response may consist of multiple spike-reactive clones. Thus, it is important to understand the mechanism of mRNA vaccination-induced cellular immune response. However, to address this clonal-resolution analysis on T-cell responses to mRNA vaccination has not been performed yet.

To bridge this gap, a team of researchers, led by Associate Professor Satoshi Ueha, including Professor Kouji Matsushima from the Tokyo University of Science (TUS), Japan, Mr. Hiroyasu Aoki from the University of Tokyo, and Professor Toshihiro Ito from Nara Medical University, aimed to develop a kinetic profile of spike-reactive T-cell clones during repetitive mRNA vaccination. For this, they performed a longitudinal TCR sequencing on peripheral T cells of 38 participants who had received the Pfizer vaccine from before the vaccine to after the third vaccination and then analyzed the single-cell gene expression and epitope specificity of the clonotypes.

Their findings, published in Cell Reports on March 7, 2024, revealed that while the primary T-cell response of naïve T cells generally peaked 10-18 days after the first shot, expansion of “early responders” was detected on day 7 after the first shot, suggesting that these early responders contain memory T cells against common cold coronaviruses. They also found a “main responder” that expanded after the second shot and did not expand early after the first shot and a “third responder” that appeared and expanded only after the third shot.

By longitudinally tracking the total frequency of each response pattern, it was observed that, after the second shot, a shift among the clonotypes occurred, wherein the major population changed from early responders to main responders, suggestive of a shift in clonal dominance. A similar shift of responding clones was also observed in CD4⁺ T cells.

Expanding upon the research process, Prof. Ueha says, “We next analyzed the phenotype of main responders after the second and the third vaccination. The results showed that the main responders after the second and third shots mostly consist of effector-memory T cells (T_EM), with more terminally differentiated effector memory-like phenotype after the third shot.”

The researchers then examined the repertoire changes of main responders, revealing that the expansion of main responders, which occurred after the second shot, diminished following the third shot, and the clonal diversity decreased and was partially replaced by the third responders. This may potentially mean that the third vaccination selected better-responding clones.

Due to the vaccination-induced shift in immunodominance of spike epitopes, the study supports the inter-epitope shift model. In addition, there were intra-epitope shifts of vaccine-responding clonotypes within spike epitopes.

Prof. Ueha explains the significance of these results, “Our analysis suggests that T cells can “re-write” themselves and reshape their memory populations after successive vaccinations. This re-writability not only maintains the number of memory T cells but also maintains diversity that can respond to different variants of pathogens. Moreover, by tuning the replacement of memory cells, more effective vaccines can be developed that can also be tailored to an individual’s unique immune response.”

Overall, this study provides important insights into mRNA vaccine-induced T-cell responses, which will be crucial for developing next-generation vaccines for more effective and broad protection against viruses.