The study was published in the journal Development, and was conducted by physician-scientists and researchers at the UMSOM Department of Otorhinolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery and the UMSOM Institute for Genome Sciences (IGS), in collaboration with researchers at the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University in Israel.

Hearing relies on the proper functioning of specialized cells within the inner ear called hair cells. When the hair cells do not develop properly or are damaged by environmental stresses like loud noise, it results in a loss of hearing function.

In the United States, the prevalence of hearing loss doubles with every 10-year increase in age, affecting about half of all adults in their 70s and about 80 percent of those who are over age 85. Researchers have been focusing on describing the developmental steps that lead to a functional hair cell, in order to potentially generate new hair cells when old ones are damaged.

Hair cells in the inner ear

To conduct her latest study, Dr. Hertzano and her team utilized cutting-edge methods to study gene expression in the hair cells of genetically modified newborn mice that did not produce GFI1. They demonstrated that, in the absence of this vital protein, embryonic hair cells failed to progress in their development to become fully functional adult cells. In fact, the genes expressed by these cells indicated that they were likely to develop into neuron-like cells.

“Our findings explain why GFI1 is critical to enable embryonic cells to progress into functioning adult hair cells,” said Dr. Hertzano. “These data also explain the importance of GFI1 in experimental protocols to regenerate hair cells from stem cells. These regenerative methods have the potential of being used for patients who have experienced hearing loss due to age or environmental factors like exposure to loud noise.”

Dr. Hertzano first became interested in GFI1 while completing her M.D., Ph.D. at Tel Aviv University. As part of her dissertation, she discovered that the hearing loss resulting from mutations in another protein called POU4F3 appeared to largely result from a loss of GFI1 in the hair cells. Since then, she has been conducting studies to discover the role of GFI1 and other proteins in hearing. Other research groups in the field are now testing these proteins to determine whether they can be used as a “cocktail” to regenerate lost hair cells and restore hearing.

“Hearing research has been going through a Renaissance period, not only from advances in genomics and methodology, but also thanks to its uniquely collaborative nature among researchers,” said Dr. Herzano.

The new study was funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It was also funded by the Binational Scientific Foundation (BSF).

“This is an exciting new finding that underscores the importance of basic research to lay the foundation for future clinical innovations,” said E. Albert Reece, MD, PhD, MBA, Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs, UM Baltimore, and the John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor and Dean, University of Maryland School of Medicine. “Identifying the complex pathways that lead to normal hearing could prove to be the key for reversing hearing loss in millions of Americans.”

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Materials provided by University of Maryland School of Medicine. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Alcoholic cirrhosis can happen after years of drinking too much alcohol. According to the researchers, discovering more about this illness couldn’t come at a more important time.

“Based on U.S. data, alcohol-associated liver disease is on the rise in terms of the prevalence and incidents and it is happening more often in younger patients,” said Suthat Liangpunsakul, MD, professor of medicine, dean’s scholar in medical research for the Department of Medicine Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, and one of the principal investigators of the study. “There’s a real public health problem involving the consumption of alcohol and people starting to drink at a younger age.”

The team describes their findings in a new paper published in Hepatology. The GenomALC Consortium was funded by the National Institutes on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the National Institute of Health (NIH). This genome-wide association study began several years ago and is one of the largest studies related to alcoholic cirrhosis ever performed. DNA samples were taken from over 1,700 patients from sites in the United States, several countries in Europe and Australia and sent to IU School of Medicine where the team performed the DNA isolation for genome analysis. The patients were divided into two groups — one made up of heavy drinkers that never had a history of alcohol-induced liver injury or liver disease and a second group of heavy drinkers who did have alcoholic cirrhosis.

“Our key finding is a gene called Fas Associated Factor Family Member 2, or FAF2,” said Tae-Hwi Schwantes-An, PhD, assistant research professor of medical and molecular genetics and the lead author of the study. “There’s this convergence of findings now that are pointing to the genes involved in lipid droplet organization pathway, and that seems to be one of the biological reasonings of why certain people get liver disease and why certain people do not.”

The researchers are anticipating to study this gene more closely and looking at its relationship to other, previously-discovered genes that can make a person more likely to develop alcoholic cirrhosis.

“We know for a fact those genes are linked together in a biological process, so the logical next step is to study how the changes in these genes alter the function of that process, whether it’s less efficient in one group of people, or maybe it’s inhibited in some way,” Schwantes-An said. “We don’t know exactly what the biological underpinning of that is, but now we have a pretty well-defined target where we can look at these variants and see how they relate to alcoholic cirrhosis.”

As their research continues, the team hopes to eventually find a way to identify this genetic factor in patients with the goal of helping them prevent alcoholic cirrhosis in the future or developing targeted therapies that can help individuals in a more personalized way.

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Materials provided by Indiana University School of Medicine. Original written by Christina Griffiths. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The group made the discovery at the 75-acre site of Tel Kabri in Israel, which contains the ruins of a Canaanite palace and city that dates back to approximately 1900-1700 B.C. The excavations, located on land belonging to Kibbutz Kabri in the western Galilee region, are co-directed by Assaf Yasur-Landau, a professor of Mediterranean archaeology at the University of Haifa, and Eric Cline, a professor of classics and anthropology at the George Washington University.

“We wondered for several years what had caused the sudden destruction and abandonment of the palace and the site, after centuries of flourishing occupation,” Yasur-Landau said. “A few seasons ago, we began to uncover a trench which runs through part of the palace, but initial indications suggested that it was modern, perhaps dug within the past few decades or a century or two at most. But then, in 2019, we opened up a new area and found that the trench continued for at least 30 meters, with an entire section of a wall that had fallen into it in antiquity, and with other walls and floors tipping into it on either side.”

According to Michael Lazar, the lead author of the study, recognizing past earthquakes can be extremely challenging in the archaeological record, especially at sites where there isn’t much stone masonry and where degradable construction materials like sun-dried mud bricks and wattle-and-daub were used instead. At Tel Kabri, however, the team found both stone foundations for the bottom part of the walls and mud-brick superstructures above.

“Our studies show the importance of combining macro- and micro-archaeological methods for the identification of ancient earthquakes,” he said. “We also needed to evaluate alternative scenarios, including climatic, environmental and economic collapse, as well as warfare, before we were confident in proposing a seismic event scenario.”

The researchers could see areas where the plaster floors appeared warped, walls had tilted or been displaced, and mud bricks from the walls and ceilings had collapsed into the rooms, in some cases rapidly burying dozens of large jars.

“It really looks like the earth simply opened up and everything on either side of it fell in,” Cline said. “It’s unlikely that the destruction was caused by violent human activity because there are no visible signs of fire, no weapons such as arrows that would indicate a battle, nor any unburied bodies related to combat. We could also see some unexpected things in other rooms of the palace, including in and around the wine cellar that we excavated a few years ago.”

In 2013, the team discovered 40 jars within a single storage room of the palace during an expedition also supported by a National Geographic Society grant. An organic residue analysis conducted on the jars indicated that they held wine; it was described at the time as the oldest and largest wine cellar yet discovered in the Near East. Since then, the team has found four more such storage rooms and at least 70 more jars, all buried by the collapse of the building.

“The floor deposits imply a rapid collapse rather than a slow accumulation of degraded mud bricks from standing walls or ceilings of an abandoned structure,” Ruth Shahack-Gross, a professor of geoarchaeology at the University of Haifa and a co-author on the study, said. “The rapid collapse, and the quick burial, combined with the geological setting of Tel Kabri, raises the possibility that one or more earthquakes could have destroyed the walls and the roof of the palace without setting it on fire.”

The investigators are hopeful that their methodological approach can be applied at other archaeological sites, where it can serve to test or strengthen cases of possible earthquake damage and destruction.

UC visiting assistant professor of biology Michael Booth studied the migration patterns of steelhead, a subpopulation of rainbow trout that migrates to the Pacific Ocean, where the growing fish hunt and feed until they return to their natal freshwater streams to spawn.

While working at the United Water Conservation District, Booth used 19 years of records from a designated fish trap on southern California’s Santa Clara River to identify potential environmental drivers that spur some fish to make the arduous trip to the Pacific Ocean. The trap is part of a diversion off the river where fish can be counted and, if necessary, relocated downstream past the river’s low or dry spots.

He found that steelhead migration was triggered by the lengthening daylight of spring rather than factors like recent rains, which had little correlation to migration.

The study was published in the North American Journal of Fisheries Management.

The Santa Clara River is one of the largest coastal watersheds in southern California. It’s an important source of water for Ventura County’s $2 billion agriculture industry, famed for its strawberries, lemons, peppers and avocados.

But sections of the river often go dry completely, isolating fish in upstream tributaries until the seasonal rains return.

“The Santa Clara River is a massive desert river,” Booth said. “The river channel is braided with sand and gravel. It’s about 1,000 feet wide in its lower sections and it’s always changing.”

The river is fed by cold-water mountain streams typically associated with rainbow trout. Some of the fish remain in these tributaries their entire lives, spawning and dying not far from where they hatched. Others undergo physiological changes that allow them to tolerate the saltwater of the Pacific Ocean. While rainbow trout are typically green and pink, steelhead can take on a silvery sheen, giving them their name.

Steelhead in southern California are federally protected as an endangered species. Anglers must release any they catch.

Booth said there are big genetic benefits to making the dangerous trip to the Pacific Ocean. Steelhead grow much faster in the food-rich ocean than trout that remain in the freshwater streams. Fish that migrate to the ocean have an advantage in passing on their genes to subsequent generations when they return to spawn, he said.

“A 3-year-old resident trout might be a foot long, but a steelhead might be 3 feet long,” he said. “Their fecundity is directly related to size. So the bigger the fish, the more eggs it can make. There’s a really strong genetic advantage to making more babies.”

The study recommended limiting the extraction of water from the Santa Clara River during the migration months of mid-March to May. Likewise, Booth said the water flow in the river should be maintained where possible to allow late migrating steelhead to return upstream.

The trout’s migration opportunities might shrink from climate change, the study warned.

“There are a lot of challenges in the Santa Clara River. The water levels go up and down,” he said. “This river has a massive sediment load. During a big storm, the river bed can erode 20 feet. The water looks like a smoothie coming downstream.”

Booth said steelheads likely wait for sediment-choked river water to settle before migrating.

Since the river in most years is only navigable after storms get water flowing again, Booth hypothesized that heavy rains triggered the steelhead’s movement to the ocean.

“We thought the fish would migrate when the river was flowing and wouldn’t migrate in years without storm events,” Booth said. “It turned out that wasn’t the case. They migrated regardless of whether the river was flowing to the ocean.”

Booth isn’t sure if the fish that reach dry spots head back upstream or simply perish in the main stem of the river.

The study is significant because it could help wildlife managers and government regulators make more informed decisions about water use. The Santa Clara River is a major source of water for agriculture and people who live in the watershed. Knowing what months are crucial for steelhead migration could help wildlife managers avoid conflicts.

“It’s really hard for a water manager to decide this is when we can and can’t divert water if you have no data on when the fish are migrating,” Booth said.

For fish that miss the narrow window to navigate the Santa Clara while it’s running, there are few practical solutions, Booth said.

“This is a very wicked problem. The water available is dependent on rain, snowfall and the recharge of the groundwater,” he said. “We can avoid taking water from the river or reducing extractions but there isn’t an extra water source to make the river flow during droughts.”

But Booth is optimistic the steelhead will persist in the Santa Clara River, at least for now.

“Steelhead are very resilient. They’ve been holding on for a while,” he said

In a new study published recently in The Planetary Science Journal, a team of researchers from Arizona State University (ASU) and the University of Chicago have determined that some carbon-rich exoplanets, given the right circumstances, could be made of diamonds and silica.

“These exoplanets are unlike anything in our solar system,” says lead author Harrison Allen-Sutter of ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration.

Diamond exoplanet formation

When stars and planets are formed, they do so from the same cloud of gas, so their bulk compositions are similar. A star with a lower carbon to oxygen ratio will have planets like Earth, comprised of silicates and oxides with a very small diamond content (Earth’s diamond content is about 0.001%).

But exoplanets around stars with a higher carbon to oxygen ratio than our sun are more likely to be carbon-rich. Allen-Sutter and co-authors Emily Garhart, Kurt Leinenweber and Dan Shim of ASU, with Vitali Prakapenka and Eran Greenberg of the University of Chicago, hypothesized that these carbon-rich exoplanets could convert to diamond and silicate, if water (which is abundant in the universe) were present, creating a diamond-rich composition.

Diamond-anvils and X-rays

To test this hypothesis, the research team needed to mimic the interior of carbide exoplanets using high heat and high pressure. To do so, they used high pressure diamond-anvil cells at co-author Shim’s Lab for Earth and Planetary Materials.

First, they immersed silicon carbide in water and compressed the sample between diamonds to a very high pressure. Then, to monitor the reaction between silicon carbide and water, they conducted laser heating at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, taking X-ray measurements while the laser heated the sample at high pressures.

As they predicted, with high heat and pressure, the silicon carbide reacted with water and turned into diamonds and silica.

Habitability and inhabitability

So far, we have not found life on other planets, but the search continues. Planetary scientists and astrobiologists are using sophisticated instruments in space and on Earth to find planets with the right properties and the right location around their stars where life could exist.

For carbon-rich planets that are the focus of this study, however, they likely do not have the properties needed for life.

While Earth is geologically active (an indicator habitability), the results of this study show that carbon-rich planets are too hard to be geologically active and this lack of geologic activity may make atmospheric composition uninhabitable. Atmospheres are critical for life as it provides us with air to breathe, protection from the harsh environment of space, and even pressure to allow for liquid water.

“Regardless of habitability, this is one additional step in helping us understand and characterize our ever- increasing and improving observations of exoplanets,” says Allen-Sutter. “The more we learn, the better we’ll be able to interpret new data from upcoming future missions like the James Webb Space Telescope and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to understand the worlds beyond on our own solar system.”

“We found that different aged individuals have different H3N2 flu virus antibody specificities,” Hensley said. “Our studies show that early childhood infections can leave lifelong immunological imprints that affect how individuals respond to antigenically distinct viral strains later in life.”

Most humans are infected with influenza viruses by three to four years of age, and these initial childhood infections can elicit strong, long lasting memory immune responses. H3N2 influenza viruses began circulating in humans in 1968 and have evolved substantially over the past 51 years. Therefore, an individual’s birth year largely predicts which specific type of H3N2 virus they first encountered in childhood.

Researchers completed a serological survey — a blood test that measures antibody levels — using serum samples collected in the summer months prior to the 2017-2018 season from 140 children (ages one to 17) and 212 adults (ages 18 to 90). They first measured the differences in antibody reactivity to various strains of H3N2, and then measured for neutralizing and non-neutralizing antibodies. Neutralizing antibodies can prevent viral infections, whereas non-neutralizing antibodies can only help after an infection takes place. Samples from children aged three to ten years old had the highest levels of neutralizing antibodies against contemporary H3N2 viruses, while most middle-aged samples had antibodies that could bind to these viruses but these antibodies could not prevent viral infections.

Hensley said his team’s findings are consistent with a concept known as “original antigenic sin” (OAS), originally proposed by Tom Francis, Jr. in 1960. “Most individuals born in the late 1960s and 1970s were immunologically imprinted with H3N2 viruses that are very different compared to contemporary H3N2 viruses. Upon infection with recent H3N2 viruses, these individuals tend to produce antibodies against regions that are conserved with older H3N2 strains and these types of antibodies typically do not prevent viral infections.”

According to the research team, it is possible that the presence of high levels of non-neutralizing antibodies in middle-aged adults has contributed to the continued persistence of H3N2 viruses in the human population. Their findings might also relate to the unusual age distribution of H3N2 infections during the 2017-2018 season, in which H3N2 activity in middle-aged and older adults peaked earlier compared to children and young adults.

The researchers say that it will be important to continually complete large serological surveys in different aged individuals, including donors from populations with different vaccination rates. A better understanding of immunity within the population and within individuals will likely lead to improved models that are better able to predict the evolutionary trajectories of different influenza virus strains.

“Large serological studies can shed light on why the effectiveness of flu vaccines varies in individuals with different immune histories, while also identifying barriers that need to be overcome in order to design better vaccines that are able to elicit protective responses in all age groups,” said Sigrid Gouma, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher of Microbiology and first author on the paper.

Other Penn authors include Madison Weirick and Megan E. Gumina. Additional authors include Angela Branche, David J. Topham, Emily T. Martin, Arnold S. Monto, and Sarah Cobey.

This work was supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (1R01AI113047, S.E.H.; 1R01AI108686, S.E.H.; 1R01AI097150, A.S.M.; CEIRS HHSN272201400005C, S.E.H., S.C., E.T.M., A.S.M. A.B., D.J.T.) and Center for Disease Control (U01IP000474, A.S.M.). Scott E. Hensley holds an Investigators in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease Awards from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

A research team led by University of California, Berkeley, archaeologists has discovered that unglazed ceramic cookware can retain the residue of not just the last supper cooked, but, potentially, earlier dishes cooked across a pot’s lifetime, opening a window onto the past.

The findings, reported in the journal Scientific Reports, suggest that gastronomic practices going back millennia — say, to cook Aztec turkey, hominy pozole or the bean stew likely served at the Last Supper — can be reconstructed by analyzing the chemical compounds adhering to and absorbed by the earthenware in which they were prepared.

“Our data can help us better reconstruct the meals and specific ingredients that people consumed in the past which, in turn, can shed light on social, political and environmental relationships within ancient communities,” said study co-lead author Melanie Miller, a researcher at Berkeley’s Archaeological Research Facility and a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

In a yearlong cooking experiment led by Miller and Berkeley archaeologist Christine Hastorf, seven chefs each prepared 50 meals made from combinations of venison, maize (corn) and wheat flour in newly purchased La Chamba ceramic pots. This robust, burnished black clay cookware dates back to pre-Columbian South America, and the handcrafted vessels remain popular for preparing and serving traditional foods today.

The group came up with the idea in Hastorf’s Archaeology of Food graduate seminar at Berkeley. By analyzing the chemical residues of the meals cooked in each pot, the researchers sought to learn whether the deposits found in ancient cooking vessels would reflect the remains of only the last dish cooked, or previous meals, as well.

In addition to receiving donated deer roadkill, they purchased large quantities of whole grains and a mill, which Hastorf set up in her garage, to grind them. The group then developed a repertoire of six recipes using deer meat and whole and milled grain.

They picked staple ingredients that could be found in many parts of the world. For example, two recipes focused on hominy, which is made from soaking maize in an alkaline solution, while two others used wheat flour.

“We chose the food based on how easy it would be to distinguish the chemicals in the food from one another and how the pots would react to the isotopic and chemical values of the food,” said Hastorf, a Berkeley professor of anthropology who studies food archaeology, among other things.

Each of the seven chefs cooked an experimental meal weekly in a La Chamba pot using the group’s designated ingredients. “The mushy meals were bland, and we didn’t eat them,” Miller noted.

Every eighth meal was charred to replicate the kinds of carbonized residues that archaeologists often encounter in ancient pots and to mimic what would normally happen in a pot’s lifetime. Between each meal, the pots were cleaned with water and a branch from an apple tree. Surprisingly, none of them broke during the course of the study.

At Berkeley’s Center for Stable Isotope Biogeochemisty, the team conducted an analysis of the charred remains and the carbonized patinas that developed on the pots. Stable isotopes are atoms whose composition does not decay over time, which is useful for archaeological studies. An analysis of the fatty lipids absorbed into the clay cookware was performed at the University of Bristol in England.

Overall, chemical analyses of the food residues showed that different meal time scales were represented in different residues. For example, the charred bits at the bottom of a pot contained evidence of the latest meal cooked, while the remnants of prior meals could be found in the patina that built up elsewhere on the pot’s interior and in the lipid residue that was absorbed into the pottery itself.

These results give scientists a new tool to study long-ago diets and also provide clues to food production, supply and distribution chains of past eras.

“We’ve flung open the door for others to take this experiment to the next level and record even longer timelines in which food residues can be identified,” Miller said.

In addition to Miller and Hastorf, co-authors of the study are Alexandra McCleary and Geoffrey Taylor at UC Berkeley; Helen Whelton, Simon Hammann, Lucy Cramp and Richard Evershed at the University of Bristol; Jillian Swift at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Hawai’i; Sophia Maline at the University of Southern California; Kirsten Vacca at the University of Hawai’i-West O’ahu and independent scholar Fanya Becks.

A new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder suggests that such volcanic ash may also have a larger influence on the planet’s climate than scientists previously suspected.

The new research, published in the journal Nature Communications, examines the eruption of Mount Kelut (or Kelud) on the Indonesian island of Java in 2014. Drawing on real-world observations of this event and advanced computer simulations, the team discovered that volcanic ash seems to be prone to loitering — remaining in the air for months or even longer after a major eruption.

“What we found for this eruption is that the volcanic ash can persist for a long time,” said Yunqian Zhu, lead author of the new study and a research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at CU Boulder.

Lingering ash

The discovery began with a chance observation: Members of the research team had been flying an unmanned aircraft near the site of the Mount Kelut eruption — an event that covered large portions of Java in ash and drove people from their homes. In the process, the aircraft spotted something that shouldn’t have been there.

“They saw some large particles floating around in the atmosphere a month after the eruption,” Zhu said. “It looked like ash.”

She explained that scientists have long known that volcanic eruptions can take a toll on the planet’s climate. These events blast huge amounts of sulfur-rich particles high into Earth’s atmosphere where they can block sunlight from reaching the ground.

Researchers haven’t thought, however, that ash could play much of a role in that cooling effect. These chunks of rocky debris, scientists reasoned, are so heavy that most of them likely fall out of volcanic clouds not long after an eruption.

Zhu’s team wanted to find out why that wasn’t the case with Kelut. Drawing on aircraft and satellite observations of the unfolding disaster, the group discovered that the volcano’s plume seemed to be rife with small and lightweight particles of ash — tiny particles that were likely capable of floating in the air for long periods of time, much like dandelion fluff.

“Researchers have assumed that ash is similar to volcanic glass,” Zhu said. “But what we’ve found is that these floating ones have a density that’s more like pumice.”

Disappearing molecules

Study coauthor Brian Toon added that these pumice-like particles also seem to shift the chemistry of the entire volcanic plume.

Toon, a professor in LASP and the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at CU Boulder, explained that erupting volcanos spew out a large amount of sulfur dioxide. Many researchers previously assumed that those molecules interact with others in the air and convert into sulfuric acid — a series of chemical reactions that, theoretically, could take weeks to complete. Observations of real-life eruptions, however, suggest that it happens a lot faster than that.

“There has been a puzzle of why these reactions occur so fast,” Toon said.

He and his colleagues think they’ve discovered the answer: Those molecules of sulfur dioxide seem to stick to the particles of ash floating in the air. In the process, they may undergo chemical reactions on the surface of the ash itself — potentially pulling around 43% more sulfur dioxide out of the air.

Ash, in other words, may hasten the transformation of volcanic gases in the atmosphere.

Just what the impact of those clouds of ash are on the climate isn’t clear. Long-lasting particles in the atmosphere could, potentially, darken and even help to cool the planet after an eruption. Floating ash might also blow all the way from sites like Kelut to the planet’s poles. There, it could kickstart chemical reactions that would damage Earth’s all-important ozone layer.

But the researchers say that one thing is clear: When a volcano blows, it may be time to pay a lot more attention to all that ash and its true impact on Earth’s climate.

“I think we’ve discovered something important here,” Toon said. “It’s subtle, but it could make a big difference.”