The rush to publish results has resulted in missteps, say Ganesh Mani, an investor, technology entrepreneur and adjunct faculty member in Carnegie Mellon University’s Institute for Software Research, and Tom Hope, a post-doctoral researcher at the Allen Institute for AI. In an opinion article in today’s issue of the journal Patterns, they argue that new policies and technologies are needed to ensure relevant, reliable information is properly recognized.

Those potential solutions include ways to combine human expertise with AI as one way to keep pace with a knowledge base that is expanding geometrically. AI might be used to summarize and collect research on a topic, while humans serve to curate the findings, for instance.

“Given the ever-increasing research volume, it will be hard for humans alone to keep pace,” they write.

In the case of COVID-19 and other new diseases, “you have a tendency to rush things because the clinicians are asking for guidance in treating their patients,” Mani said. Scientists certainly have responded — by mid-August, more than 8,000 preprints of scientific papers related to the novel coronavirus had been posted in online medical, biology and chemistry archives. Even more papers had been posted on such topics as quarantine-induced depression and the impact on climate change from decreased transportation emissions.

At the same time, the average time to perform peer review and publish new articles has shrunk; in the case of virology, the average dropped from 117 to 60 days.

This surge of information is what the World Health Organization calls an “infodemic” — an overabundance of information, ranging from accurate to demonstrably false. Not surprisingly, problems such as the hydroxycholoroquine controversy have erupted as research has been rushed to publication and subsequently withdrawn.

“We’re going to have that same conversation with vaccines,” Mani predicted. “We’re going to have a lot of debates.”

Problems in scientific publication are nothing new, he said. As a grad student 30 years ago, he proposed an electronic archive for scientific literature that would better organize research and make it easier to find relevant information. Many ideas continue to circulate about how to improve scientific review and publication, but COVID-19 has exacerbated the situation.

Some of the speed bumps and guard rails that Mani and Hope propose are new policies. For instance, scientists usually emphasize experiments and therapies that work; highlighting negative results, on the other hand, is important for clinicians and discourages other scientists from going down the same blind alleys. Identifying the best reviewers, sharing review comments and linking papers to related papers, retraction sites or legal rulings are among other ideas they explore.

Greater use of AI to digest and consolidate research is a major focus. Previous attempts to use AI to do so have failed in part because of the often figurative and sometimes ambiguous language used by humans, Mani noted. It may be necessary to write two versions of research papers — one written in a way that draws the attention of people and another written in a boring, uniform style that is more understandable to machines.

Mani said he and Hope have no illusions that their paper will settle the debate about improving scientific literature, but hope that it will spur changes in time for the next global crisis.

“Putting such infrastructure in place will help society with the next strategic surprise or grand challenge, which is likely to be equally, if not more, knowledge intensive,” they concluded.

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Materials provided by Carnegie Mellon University. Original written by Byron Spice. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Dark matter is the invisible glue that keeps stars, dust, and gas together in a galaxy. This mysterious substance makes up the bulk of a galaxy’s mass and forms the foundation of our Universe’s large-scale structure. Because dark matter does not emit, absorb, or reflect light, its presence is only known through its gravitational pull on visible matter in space. Astronomers and physicists are still trying to pin down what it is.

Galaxy clusters, the most massive and recently assembled structures in the Universe, are also the largest repositories of dark matter. Clusters are composed of individual member galaxies that are held together largely by the gravity of dark matter.

“Galaxy clusters are ideal laboratories in which to study whether the numerical simulations of the Universe that are currently available reproduce well what we can infer from gravitational lensing,” said Massimo Meneghetti of the INAF-Observatory of Astrophysics and Space Science of Bologna in Italy, the study’s lead author.

“We have done a lot of testing of the data in this study, and we are sure that this mismatch indicates that some physical ingredient is missing either from the simulations or from our understanding of the nature of dark matter,” added Meneghetti.

“There’s a feature of the real Universe that we are simply not capturing in our current theoretical models,” added Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale University in Connecticut, USA, one of the senior theorists on the team. “This could signal a gap in our current understanding of the nature of dark matter and its properties, as these exquisite data have permitted us to probe the detailed distribution of dark matter on the smallest scales.”

The distribution of dark matter in clusters is mapped by measuring the bending of light — the gravitational lensing effect — that they produce. The gravity of dark matter concentrated in clusters magnifies and warps light from distant background objects. This effect produces distortions in the shapes of background galaxies which appear in images of the clusters. Gravitational lensing can often also produce multiple images of the same distant galaxy.

The higher the concentration of dark matter in a cluster, the more dramatic its light-bending effect. The presence of smaller-scale clumps of dark matter associated with individual cluster galaxies enhances the level of distortions. In some sense, the galaxy cluster acts as a large-scale lens that has many smaller lenses embedded within it.

Hubble’s crisp images were taken by the telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys. Coupled with spectra from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), the team produced an accurate, high-fidelity, dark-matter map. By measuring the lensing distortions astronomers could trace out the amount and distribution of dark matter. The three key galaxy clusters, MACS J1206.2-0847, MACS J0416.1-2403, and Abell S1063, were part of two Hubble surveys: The Frontier Fields and the Cluster Lensing And Supernova survey with Hubble (CLASH) programs.

To the team’s surprise, in addition to the dramatic arcs and elongated features of distant galaxies produced by each cluster’s gravitational lensing, the Hubble images also revealed an unexpected number of smaller-scale arcs and distorted images nested near each cluster’s core, where the most massive galaxies reside. The researchers believe the nested lenses are produced by the gravity of dense concentrations of matter inside the individual cluster galaxies. Follow-up spectroscopic observations measured the velocity of the stars orbiting inside several of the cluster galaxies to therby pin down their masses.

“The data from Hubble and the VLT provided excellent synergy,” shared team member Piero Rosati of the Università degli Studi di Ferrara in Italy, who led the spectroscopic campaign. “We were able to associate the galaxies with each cluster and estimate their distances.”

“The speed of the stars gave us an estimate of each individual galaxy’s mass, including the amount of dark matter,” added team member Pietro Bergamini of the INAF-Observatory of Astrophysics and Space Science in Bologna, Italy.

By combining Hubble imaging and VLT spectroscopy, the astronomers were able to identify dozens of multiply imaged, lensed, background galaxies. This allowed them to assemble a well-calibrated, high-resolution map of the mass distribution of dark matter in each cluster.

The team compared the dark-matter maps with samples of simulated galaxy clusters with similar masses, located at roughly the same distances. The clusters in the computer model did not show any of the same level of dark-matter concentration on the smallest scales — the scales associated with individual cluster galaxies.

“The results of these analyses further demonstrate how observations and numerical simulations go hand in hand,” said team member Elena Rasia of the INAF-Astronomical Observatory of Trieste, Italy.

“With high-resolution simulations, we can match the quality of observations analysed in our paper, permitting detailed comparisons like never before,” added Stefano Borgani of the Università degli Studi di Trieste, Italy.

Astronomers, including those of this team, look forward to continuing to probe dark matter and its mysteries in order to finally pin down its nature.

Expectations are growing stronger for health care to be person-centered, and therefore emanate from a partnership between staff, patients and relatives. But at the same times, the process of introducing and maintaining this way of working is slow and laborious in many places.

We already know that person-centred care can shorten hospital stay and reduce uncertainty in health care. Now, instead, we need to concentrate on how to achieve it, the researchers behind the broad BMJ article argue.

The study offers advice and tools for further research on, and development of, person-centred care. The corresponding author is Axel Wolf, Associate Professor of Health Care Sciences at the Institute of Health and Care Sciences at the Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg. Axel Wolf is also affiliated to the University of Gothenburg Centre for Person-centred Care (GPCC).

“One of the key pieces of advice is that person-centred care must be practiced systematically on an everyday basis. This entails creating the organisational and individual conditions for developing a partnership between the patient, the patient’s relatives if applicable, and the staff at every meeting — not just when it fits into the schedule,” Wolf says.

“To achieve the best clinical effect, it is important for person-centred care not to be just a matter between the patient and the individual professional representative. It has to permeate the whole organisation. There is also a big challenge involved in increasing the understanding of how person-centred care differs from current care practice.”

It is fundamental for health care professionals to take the time to listen to what patients have experienced and wants to achieve in relation to their health. They must let the patient’s goals, such as returning to work or being able to take a walk, guide the wording of a jointly agreed health plan. The patient’s priorities and resources must be reflected in the health-plan, which must also be subject to continuous evaluation. The documentation must then accompany and be accessible to the patient, and this includes any move from hospital to primary care or municipal social care.

Since it set out ten years ago GPCC, a national research centre, has led the way in developing, testing, evaluating and implementing person-centred care in many different health care contexts, in Sweden and abroad.

Together with his colleague Professor Nicky Britten of the University of Exeter in England, Axel Wolf has lead an international research group investigating the enablers and the obstacles experienced by researchers, clinicians, and patients during clinical studies within the GPCC framework, and in everyday implementation of research results.

Among the obstacles described in the current study are hierarchical care structures, rigid occupational roles, and the conviction that one is already working in a person-centred way.

“With the current shift in Swedish health care to “good quality local health care,” which is permeated by person-centred principles, the ethical approach focusing on the person and not only the diagnosis must be practiced constantly to optimize conditions. This requires systematic education and training, lifelong learning, and tools that facilitate the partnership,” Axel Wolf concludes.

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

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory led a team to investigate reactions in PEMFCs, and their discoveries informed the creation of technology that could bring fuel cells one step closer to realizing their full market potential.

PEMFCs rely on hydrogen as a fuel, which is oxidized on the cell’s anode side through a hydrogen oxidation reaction, while oxygen from the air is used for an oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) at the cathode. Through these processes, fuel cells produce electricity to power electric motors in vehicles and other applications, emitting water as the only by-product.

Platinum-based, nano-sized particles are the most effective materials for promoting reactions in fuel cells, including the ORR in the cathode. However, in addition to their high cost, platinum nanoparticles suffer from gradual degradation, especially in the cathode, which limits catalytic performance and reduces the lifetime of the fuel cell.

The research team, which included DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and several university partners, used a novel approach to examine dissolution processes of platinum at the atomic and molecular level. The investigation enabled them to identify the degradation mechanism during the cathodic ORR, and the insights guided the design of a nanocatalyst that uses gold to eliminate platinum dissolution.

“The dissolution of platinum occurs at the atomic and molecular scale during exposure to the highly corrosive environment in fuel cells,” said Vojislav Stamenkovic, a senior scientist and group leader for the Energy Conversion and Storage group in Argonne’s Materials Science Division (MSD). “This material degradation affects the fuel cell’s long-term operations, presenting an obstacle for fuel cell implementation in transportation, specifically in heavy duty applications such as long-haul trucks.”

Starting small

The scientists used a range of customized characterization tools to investigate the dissolution of well-defined platinum structures in single-crystal surfaces, thin films and nanoparticles.

“We have developed capabilities to observe processes at the atomic scale to understand the mechanisms responsible for dissolution and to identify the conditions under which it occurs,” said Pietro Papa Lopes, a scientist in Argonne’s MSD and first author on the study. “Then we implemented this knowledge into material design to mitigate dissolution and increase durability.”

The team studied the nature of dissolution at the fundamental level using surface-specific tools, electrochemical methods, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry, computational modeling and atomic force, scanning tunneling and high-resolution transmission microscopies.

In addition, the scientists relied on a high-precision synthesis approach to create structures with well-defined physical and chemical properties, ensuring that the relationships between structure and stability discovered from studying 2D surfaces were carried over to the 3D nanoparticles they produced.

“We performed these studies — from single crystals, to thin films, to nanoparticles — which showed us how to synthesize platinum catalysts to increase durability,” said Lopes, “and by looking at these different materials, we also identified strategies for using gold to protect the platinum.”

Going for gold

As the scientists uncovered the fundamental nature of dissolution by observing its occurrence in several testbed scenarios, the team used the knowledge to mitigate dissolution with the addition of gold.

The researchers used transmission electron microscopy capabilities at Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials and at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory — both DOE Office of Science User Facilities — to image platinum nanoparticles after synthesis and before and after operation. This technique allowed the scientists to compare the stability of the nanoparticles with and without incorporated gold.

The team found that controlled placement of gold in the core promotes the arrangement of platinum in an optimal surface structure that grants high stability. In addition, gold was selectively deposited on the surface to protect specific sites that the team identified as particularly vulnerable for dissolution. This strategy eliminates dissolution of platinum from even the smallest nanoparticles used in this study by keeping platinum atoms attached to the sites where they can still effectively catalyze the ORR.

Atomic-level understanding

Understanding the mechanisms behind dissolution at the atomic level is essential to uncovering the correlation between platinum loss, surface structure and size and ratio of platinum nanoparticles, and determining how these relationships affect long-term operation.

“The novel part of this research is resolving the mechanisms and fully mitigating platinum dissolution by material design at different scales, from single crystals and thin films to nanoparticles,” said Stamenkovic. “It’s the insights we gained in conjunction with the design and synthesis of a nanomaterial that addresses durability issues in fuel cells, as well as the ability to delineate and quantify dissolution of platinum catalyst from other processes that contribute to fuel cell performance decay.”

The team is also developing a predictive aging algorithm to assess the long-term durability of the platinum-based nanoparticles and found a 30-fold improvement in durability compared to nanoparticles without gold.