The study appears in the journal Med.

The human microbiota consists of trillions of bacteria, viruses, fungi and other microorganisms — some beneficial, some harmful — that live in and on our bodies. Women naturally provide these pioneer colonizers to their babies’ sterile bodies during labor and birth, helping their immune system to develop. But antibiotics and C-sections disturb this passing of microbes and are related to increased risks of obesity, asthma and metabolic diseases.

The researchers followed 177 babies from four countries over the first year of their lives — 98 were born vaginally and 79 were born by C-section, 30 of which were swabbed with a maternal vaginal gauze right after birth.

Lab analysis showed that the microbiota of the C-section babies swabbed with their mother’s vaginal fluids was close to that of vaginally born babies. Also, the mother’s vaginal microbiomes on the day of birth were similar to other areas of their bodies (gut, mouth and skin), showing that maternal vaginal fluids help to colonize bacteria across their babies’ bodies.

This was the first large observational study to show that restoring a C-section baby’s natural exposure to maternal vaginal microbes at birth normalizes the microbiome development during their first year of life. The researchers said the next step is conducting randomized clinical trials to determine if the microbiota normalization translates into disease protection.

“Further research is needed to determine which bacteria protect against obesity, asthma and allergies, diseases with underlying inflammation,” said senior author Maria Gloria Dominguez Bello, a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. “Our results support the hypothesis that acquiring maternal vaginal microbes normalizes microbiome development in the babies.”

According to the World Health Organization, C-section is needed in about 15 percent of births to avoid risking the life of the mother or child, but in many countries such as in Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Iran and China, C-section is performed in more than 70% of urban births.

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“The ink used in the biosensors is biocompatible and provides a user-friendly design with excellent workable time frames of more than one day,” said Kwan-Soo Lee, of Los Alamos’ Chemical Diagnostics and Engineering group.

The new biosensors allow for simultaneous recording and imaging of tissues and organs during surgical procedures.

“Simultaneous recording and imaging could be useful during heart surgery in localizing critical regions and guiding surgical interventions such as a procedure for restoring normal heart rhythms,” said Chi Hwan Lee, the Leslie A. Geddes Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and, by courtesy, of Materials Engineering at Purdue University.

Los Alamos was responsible for formulating and synthesizing the bio-inks, with the goal of creating create an ultra-soft, thin and stretchable material for biosensors that is capable of seamlessly interfacing with the surface of organs. They did this using 3D-printing techniques.

“Silicone materials are liquid and flow like honey, which is why it is very challenging to 3D-print without sagging and flowing issues during printing,” Kwan-Soo Lee said. “It is very exciting to have found a way to create printed inks that do not have any shape deformation during the curing process.”

The bio-inks are softer than tissue, stretch without experiencing sensor degradation, and have reliable natural adhesion to the wet surface of organs without needing additional adhesives.

Craig Goergen, the Leslie A. Geddes Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Purdue University, aided with the in vivo assessment of the patch via testing in both mice and pigs. The results showed the biosensor was able to reliably measure electrical signal while not impairing cardiac function.

The research was published today in Nature Communications. It was funded by Science Campaign 2.

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A Henry Ford Health System study published in The Laryngoscope, shows that head and neck injuries caused by use of e-scooters have been on the rise since rideshare systems were introduced to the public in late 2017.

Kathleen Yaremchuk, M.D., Chair of the Department of Otolaryngology — Head and Neck Surgery and the study’s senior author, said that a review of emergency visits in the last three years showed e-scooter injuries have increased significantly with many related to head and neck injuries. “Since e-scooters became a popular form of transportation in major cities, the number of injuries jumped significantly because they’ve become more available to more people,” said Dr. Yaremchuk.

Henry Ford researchers looked at available data from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and found that between January 2009 and December 2019 there were more than 100,000 e-scooter related injuries reported. The study found that head and neck injuries made up nearly 28% of the total e-scooter related injuries reported.

Dr. Yaremchuk hopes that local and national regulations can be developed to increase ride safety.

Researchers found that since the introduction of rideshare e-scooters, motorized vehicles that can reach speeds of up to 35 miles per hour, injuries have increased as more people gravitate to the inexpensive and convenient form of transportation used mostly in crowded urban centers and on college campuses.

“We hope our findings will help educate users of rideshare e-scooters about the potential for serious head and neck injuries and the safety precautions they should take,” said Dr. Yaremchuk.

E-scooters are part of the Micromobility revolution that has been called the future of urban transportation. Serious injuries, though, are mounting among riders who find themselves unguarded against cars and bicycles and fixed street ornaments like light poles and signs.

The study found common types of e-scooter related head and neck injuries included:

• Internal organs, including brain injuries, 32.5%
• Lacerations, 24.9%
• Contusions and abrasions, 15.6%
• Concussions, 11.1%
• Fractures, 7.8%

“As a physician, I would recommend that people who use this mode of transportation wear a helmet and apply the same approach as when driving a car,” said Samantha Tam, M.D., a Henry Ford otolaryngologist and study co-author.

If you plan to ride an electric scooter, here are a few safety tips to reduce your risk for injury:

• Wear a helmet, knee and elbow pads
• Wear appropriate clothing that won’t constrict your body while riding
• Understand the specifications, features and capabilities of the specific e-scooter you are riding
• Observe traffic laws, focus on the path ahead and watch for pedestrians, cars and other obstacles

Safety research has shown that e-scooter accidents involved cars and ground obstacles such as curbs, poles and even manhole covers. Other factors that led to accidents include mechanical problems such as failing brakes and wheels, and distracted riders.

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Purpose in life, or a sense that your life is guided by personally meaningful values and goals — which could involve family ties, religion, activism, parenthood, career or artistic ambitions, or many other things — has been associated in prior research with a wide range of positive health outcomes, both physical and psychological.

“In the face of adversity, people with a stronger sense of purpose in life tend to be more resilient because they have a clear sense of goals that motivate actions that are aligned with personal values,” says Yoona Kang, Ph.D., lead author and a Research Director of the Communication Neuroscience Lab. “People with strong purpose may also experience less conflict when making health decisions. We felt that the COVID-19 pandemic was an important context to test whether purpose in life relates to individuals’ willingness to engage in behaviors to protect themselves and others.”

Based on their prior research, Kang and her collaborators expected that people with higher sense of purpose would be more likely to engage in COVID-19 prevention behaviors than individuals with a lower sense of purpose. In order to test their theory, the researchers surveyed more than 500 adult participants to capture their levels of purpose in life, their current and pre-pandemic levels of loneliness, and the degrees to which they intended to engage in behaviors known to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

They found that higher levels of loneliness made people be less focused on protecting themselves from COVID-19, and more skeptical that behaviors to prevent COVID-19 would be effective. However, having a stronger sense of purpose was associated with lower levels of loneliness and a greater desire to take action to protect themselves from COVID-19. Those with a higher sense of purpose also expressed a stronger belief that COVID-19 prevention behaviors would work. Even when people who had a strong sense of purpose did report being lonely, they still felt strongly about taking precautions to prevent COVID-19.

“When faced with extreme loneliness and social isolation, like during the COVID-19 pandemic, wanting to connect with other people, despite the health risks, is a natural response,” Kang says. “And yet, amidst this drastic shift in social life, we found that people with a higher sense of purpose were more likely to engage in prevention behaviors. This is striking because it shows that purpose in life can empower people to make life-saving health decisions that protect their own health and those around them.”

Additionally, the researchers found that older people expressed less loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic than younger people. Kang sees this as a sign of the resilience of older adults, and she hopes to further study how to enhance purpose in life and resilience in aging populations.

“Having a stronger sense of purpose was associated with really important, positive outcomes across the lifespan,” says Emily Falk, senior author, Director of the Communication Neuroscience Lab, and Professor of Communication, Psychology, and Marketing. “Our upcoming work will test interventions to increase their sense of purpose, in hopes of bringing these benefits to more people.”

The study, published this month in The Gerontologist, is entitled “Purpose in Life, Loneliness, and Protective Health Behaviors during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” In addition to Kang and Falk, authors include Danielle Cosme, Ph.D.; Rui Pei, Ph.D.; Prateekshit Pandey; and José Carreras-Tartak.

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While there are few known instances of disease-causing viruses jumping directly from bats to humans, some viruses carried by bats may jump to other animals and then become transmitted to humans. For instance, SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, is thought to have originated from a virus that was transmitted from a bat to another animal before infecting humans.

Monitoring the viruses harbored by bats around the world could improve understanding and detection of those that pose risk to humans. However, while previous research has investigated viruses carried by bats in several different countries, none have focused on Switzerland.

To fill that knowledge gap, Hardmeier and colleagues investigated viruses carried by more than 7,000 bats living in Switzerland. Specifically, they analyzed DNA and RNA sequences of viruses found in organ, fecal, or stool samples collected from the bats.

This genomic analysis revealed the presence of 39 different families of viruses, including 16 families previously found to be able to infect other vertebrates, and which therefore could potentially be transmitted to other animals or humans. Further analysis of viruses with this risk revealed that one of the studied bat colonies harbored a near-complete genome of a virus known as Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)-related coronavirus (CoV). While the MERS-CoV-related virus is not known to cause disease in humans, MERS-CoV has been responsible for an epidemic in 2012.

The authors note that genomic analysis of bat stool samples could be a useful tool to continuously monitor viruses harbored by bats, including the MERS-CoV-related virus. This type of tracking could potentially detect accumulations of viral genetic mutations that could increase the risk of transmission to other animals, enabling earlier detection of viruses that pose danger to humans.

The authors add: “Metagenomic analysis of bats endemic to Switzerland reveals broad virus genome diversity. Virus genomes from 39 different virus families were detected, 16 of which are know to infect vertebrates, including coronaviruses, adenoviruses, hepeviruses, rotaviruses A and H, and parvoviruses.”

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“The biggest challenges with moving through the ground are simply the forces involved,” said Nicholas Naclerio, a graduate student researcher in the lab of UC Santa Barbara mechanical engineering professor Elliot Hawkes and lead author of a paper on the cover of the journal Science Robotics. Whereas air and water offer little resistance to objects moving through them, he explained, the subterranean world is another story.

“If you’re trying to move through the ground, you have to push the soil, sand or other medium out of the way,” Naclerio said.

Fortunately, the natural world provides numerous examples of underground navigation in the form of plants and fungi that build underground networks and animals that have mastered the ability to tunnel directly through granular media. Gaining a mechanical understanding of how plants and animals have mastered subterranean navigation opens up many possibilities for science and technology, according to Daniel Goldman, Dunn Family Professor of Physics at Georgia Tech.

“Discovery of principles by which diverse organisms successfully swim and dig within granular media can lead to development of new kinds of mechanisms and robots that can take advantage of such principles,” he said. “And reciprocally, development of a robot with such capabilities can inspire new animal studies as well as point to new phenomena in the physics of granular substrates.”

The researchers had a good head start with a vine-like soft robot designed in the Hawkes Lab that mimics plants and the way they navigate by growing from their tips, while the rest of the body remains stationary. In the subterranean setting, tip extension, according to the researchers, keeps resisting forces low and localized only to the growing end; if the whole body moved as it grew, friction over the entire surface would increase as more of the robot entered the sand until the robot could no longer move.

Burrowing animals, meanwhile, serve as inspiration for an additional strategy called granular fluidization, which suspends the particles in a fluid-like state and allows the animal to overcome the high level of resistance presented by sand or loose soil. The southern sand octopus, for instance, expels a jet of water into the ground, and uses its arms to pull itself into the temporarily loosened sand. That ability made its way onto the researchers’ robot in the form of a tip-based flow device that shoots air into the region just ahead of the growing end, enabling it to move into that area.

“The biggest challenge we found and what took the longest to solve was when we switched to horizontal burrowing, our robots would always surface,” Naclerio said. Whereas gases or liquids evenly flow over and under a traveling symmetric object, he explained, in fluidized sand, the distribution of forces is not as balanced, and creates a significant lift force for the horizontally travelling robot. “It’s much easier to push the sand up and out of the way than it is to compact it down.”

To understand the robot’s behavior and the largely unexplored physics of air-aided intrusions, the team took drag and lift measurements as a result of different angles of airflow into from the tip of a solid rod shoved horizontally into sand.

“Frictional force response in granular materials greatly differs from that of Newtonian fluids, as intruding into sand can compact and stress large swaths of terrain in the direction of motion due to high friction,” said Andras Karsai, a graduate student researcher in Goldman’s lab. “To mitigate this, a low-density fluid that lifts and pushes grains away from an intruder will often reduce the net frictional stress it has to overcome.”

Unlike with gas or liquid, where a downward fluid jet would create lift for the travelling object, in sand the downward air flow reduced the lift forces and excavated the sand below the robot’s growing tip. This, combined with inspiration from the sandfish lizard, whose wedge-shaped head favors downward movement, allowed the researchers to modulate the resisting forces and keep the robot moving horizontally without rising out of the sand.

A small, exploratory, soft robot such as this has a variety of applications where shallow burrowing through dry granular media is needed, such as soil sampling, underground installation of utilities and erosion control. Tip extension enables changes in direction, while also allowing the body of the robot to modulate how firmly anchored it is in the medium — control that could become useful for exploration in low gravity environments. In fact, the team is working on a project with NASA to develop burrowing for the moon or even more distant bodies, like Enceladus, a moon of Jupiter.

“We believe burrowing has the potential to open new avenues and enable new capabilities for extraterrestrial robotics,” Hawkes said.

Research for this paper was conducted also by Mason Murray-Cooper, Yasemin Ozkan-Aydin and Enes Aydin at Georgia Institue of Technology.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1nmNDtqs4Q