For the study, rather than examine microbiome activity and composition linked to disease conditions — like anxiety and depression — the researchers wanted to flip the script and study the gut microbiome and brain in healthy, resilient people who effectively cope with different types of stress, including discrimination and social isolation.

“If we can identify what a healthy resilient brain and microbiome look like, then we can develop targeted interventions to those areas to reduce stress,” said Arpana Gupta, PhD, senior author and co-director of the UCLA Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center. This is believed to be the first study to explore the intersection of resiliency, the brain, and the gut microbiome.

Gupta and her team focused on methods to cope with stress because research has shown that untreated stress can increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, obesity, and diabetes. While stress is an inevitable part of life, studying how to handle stress can help prevent developing diseases.

To conduct the study, published in Nature Mental Health, the researchers surveyed 116 people about their resiliency — like trust in one’s instincts and positive acceptance of change — and separated them into two groups. One group ranked high on the resiliency scale and the other group ranked low. The participants also underwent MRI imaging and gave stool samples two or three days before their scans.

The researchers found that people in the high resiliency group were less anxious and depressed, less prone to judge, and had activity in regions of the brain associated with emotional regulation and better cognition compared to the group with low resiliency. “When a stressor happens, often we go to this aroused fight or flight response, and this impairs the breaks in your brain,” Gupta said. “But the highly resilient individuals in the study were found to be better at regulating their emotions, less likely to catastrophize, and keep a level head,” added Desiree Delgadillo, postdoctoral researcher and one of the first authors.

The high resiliency group also had different microbiome activity than the low resiliency group. Namely, the high resiliency group’s microbiomes excreted metabolites and exhibited gene activity associated with low inflammation and a strong and healthy gut barrier. A weak gut barrier, otherwise known as a leaky gut, is caused by inflammation and impairs the gut barrier’s ability to absorb essential nutrients needed by the body while blocking toxins from entering the gut.

The researchers were surprised to find these microbiome signatures associated with the high resiliency group.

“Resilience truly is a whole-body phenomenon that not only affects your brain but also your microbiome and what metabolites that it is producing,” Gupta said. “We have this whole community of microbes in our gut that exudes these therapeutic properties and biochemicals, so I’m looking forward to building upon this research,” Delgadillo said.

The team’s future research will study whether an intervention to increase resilience will change brain and gut microbiome activity. “We could have treatments that target both the brain and the gut that can maybe one day prevent disease,” Gupta said.

A new UCLA Health study has found that resilient people exhibit neural activity in the brain regions associated with improved cognition and regulating of emotions, and were more mindful and better at describing their feelings. The same group also exhibited gut microbiome activity linked to a healthy gut, with reduced inflammation and gut barrier.

For the study, rather than examine microbiome activity and composition linked to disease conditions — like anxiety and depression — the researchers wanted to flip the script and study the gut microbiome and brain in healthy, resilient people who effectively cope with different types of stress, including discrimination and social isolation.

“If we can identify what a healthy resilient brain and microbiome look like, then we can develop targeted interventions to those areas to reduce stress,” said Arpana Gupta, PhD, senior author and co-director of the UCLA Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center. This is believed to be the first study to explore the intersection of resiliency, the brain, and the gut microbiome.

Gupta and her team focused on methods to cope with stress because research has shown that untreated stress can increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, obesity, and diabetes. While stress is an inevitable part of life, studying how to handle stress can help prevent developing diseases.

To conduct the study, published in Nature Mental Health, the researchers surveyed 116 people about their resiliency — like trust in one’s instincts and positive acceptance of change — and separated them into two groups. One group ranked high on the resiliency scale and the other group ranked low. The participants also underwent MRI imaging and gave stool samples two or three days before their scans.

The researchers found that people in the h

Gupta and her team focused on methods to cope with stress because research has shown that untreated stress can increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, obesity, and diabetes. While stress is an inevitable part of life, studying how to handle stress can help prevent developing diseases.

To conduct the study, published in Nature Mental Health, the researchers surveyed 116 people about their resiliency — like trust in one’s instincts and positive acceptance of change — and separated them into two groups. One group ranked high on the resiliency scale and the other group ranked low. The participants also underwent MRI imaging and gave stool samples two or three days before their scans.

The researchers found that people in the high resiliency group were less anxious and depressed, less prone to judge, and had activity in regions of the brain associated with emotional regulation and better cognition compared to the group with low resiliency. “When a stressor happens, often we go to this aroused fight or flight response, and this impairs the breaks in your brain,” Gupta said. “But the highly resilient individuals in the study were found to be better at regulating their emotions, less likely to catastrophize, and keep a level head,” added Desiree Delgadillo, postdoctoral researcher and one of the first authors.

The high resiliency group also had different microbiome activity than the low resiliency group. Namely, the high resiliency group’s microbiomes excreted metabolites and exhibited gene activity associated with low inflammation and a strong and healthy gut barrier. A weak gut barrier, otherwise known as a leaky gut, is caused by inflammation and impairs the gut barrier’s ability to absorb essential nutrients needed by the body while blocking toxins from entering the gut.

The researchers were surprised to find these microbiome signatures associated with the high resiliency group.

“Resilience truly is a whole-body phenomenon that not only affects your brain but also your microbiome and what metabolites that it is producing,” Gupta said. “We have this whole community of microbes in our gut that exudes these therapeutic properties and biochemicals, so I’m looking forward to building upon this research,” Delgadillo said.

The team’s future research will study whether an intervention to increase resilience will change brain and gut microbiome activity. “We could have treatments that target both the brain and the gut that can maybe one day prevent disease,” Gupta said.

A new UCLA Health study has found that resilient people exhibit neural activity in the brain regions associated with improved cognition and regulating of emotions, and were more mindful and better at describing their feelings. The same group also exhibited gut microbiome activity linked to a healthy gut, with reduced inflammation and gut barrier.

For the study, rather than examine microbiome activity and composition linked to disease conditions — like anxiety and depression — the researchers wanted to flip the script and study the gut microbiome and brain in healthy, resilient people who effectively cope with different types of stress, including discrimination and social isolation.

“If we can identify what a healthy resilient brain and microbiome look like, then we can develop targeted interventions to those areas to reduce stress,” said Arpana Gupta, PhD, senior author and co-director of the UCLA Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center. This is believed to be the first study to explore the intersection of resiliency, the brain, and the gut microbiome.

Gupta and her team focused on methods to cope with stress because research has shown that untreated stress can increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, obesity, and diabetes. While stress is an inevitable part of life, studying how to handle stress can help prevent developing diseases.

To conduct the study, published in Nature Mental Health, the researchers surveyed 116 people about their resiliency — like trust in one’s instincts and positive acceptance of change — and separated them into two groups. One group ranked high on the resiliency scale and the other group ranked low. The participants also underwent MRI imaging and gave stool samples two or three days before their scans.

The researchers found that people in the high resiliency group were less anxious and depressed, less prone to judge, and had activity in regions of the brain associated with emotional regulation and better cognition compared to the group with low resiliency. “When a stressor happens, often we go to this aroused fight or flight response, and this impairs the breaks in your brain,” Gupta said. “But the highly resilient individuals in the study were found to be better at regulating their emotions, less likely to catastrophize, and keep a level head,” added Desiree Delgadillo, postdoctoral researcher and one of the first authors.

The high resiliency group also had different microbiome activity than the low resiliency group. Namely, the high resiliency group’s microbiomes excreted metabolites and exhibited gene activity associated with low inflammation and a strong and healthy gut barrier. A weak gut barrier, otherwise known as a leaky gut, is caused by inflammation and impairs the gut barrier’s ability to absorb essential nutrients needed by the body while blocking toxins from entering the gut.

The researchers were surprised to find these microbiome signatures associated with the high resiliency group.

“Resilience truly is a whole-body phenomenon that not only affects your brain but also your microbiome and what metabolites that it is producing,” Gupta said. “We have this whole community of microbes in our gut that exudes these therapeutic properties and biochemicals, so I’m looking forward to building upon this research,” Delgadillo said.

The team’s future research will study whether an intervention to increase resilience will change brain and gut microbiome activity. “We could have treatments that target both the brain and the gut that can maybe one day prevent disease,” Gupta said.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of quantum technologies, ensuring the functionality and reliability of quantum devices is critical. The ability to characterize these devices with high accuracy and speed is essential for their efficient integration into quantum circuits and computers, impacting both fundamental studies and practical applications.

Characterization helps determine if a device operates as expected, which is necessary when devices exhibit anomalies or errors. Identifying and addressing these issues is crucial for advancing the development of future quantum technologies.

Traditionally, scientists have relied on Quantum Process Tomography (QPT), a method that requires a large number of “projective measurements” to reconstruct a device’s operations fully. However, the number of required measurements in QPT scales quadratically with the dimensionality of the operations, posing significant experimental and computational challenges, especially for high-dimensional quantum information processors.

The University of Ottawa research team has pioneered an optimized technique named Fourier Quantum Process Tomography (FQPT). This method allows for the complete characterization of quantum operations with a minimal number of measurements. Instead of performing a large number of projective measurements, FQPT utilises a well-known map, the Fourier transform, to perform a portion of the measurements in two different mathematical spaces. The physical relation between these spaces enhances the information extracted from single measurements, significantly reducing the number of measurements needed. For instance, for processes with dimensions 2d (where d can be arbitrarily high), only seven measurements are required.

To validate their technique, the researchers conducted a photonic experiment using optical polarisation to encode a qubit. The quantum process was realized as a complex space-dependent polarisation transformation, leveraging state-of-the-art liquid-crystal technology. This experiment demonstrated the flexibility and robustness of the method.

“The experimental validation is a fundamental step to probe the technique’s resilience to noise, ensuring robust and high-fidelity reconstructions in realistic experimental scenarios,” said Francesco Di Colandrea, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ottawa.

This novel technique represents a remarkable advancement in quantum computing. The research team is already actively working on extending FQPT to arbitrary quantum operations, including non-Hermitian and higher-dimensional implementations, and in implementing AI techniques to increase accuracy and reduce measurement. This new technique represents a promising avenue for further advancements in quantum technology.

Fortunately, space has dropped a few clues — fragments of objects that formed early in solar system history and plunged through Earth’s atmosphere, called meteorites. The composition of meteorites tells stories of the solar system’s birth, but these stories often raise more questions than answers.

In a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of planetary scientists from UCLA and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory reports that refractory metals, which condense at high temperatures, such as iridium and platinum, were more abundant in meteorites formed in the outer disk, which was cold and far away from the sun. These metals should have formed close to the sun, where the temperature was much higher. Was there a pathway that moved these metals from the inner disk to the outer?

Most meteorites formed within the first few million years of solar system history. Some meteorites, called chondrites, are unmelted conglomerations of grains and dust left over from planet formation. Other meteorites experienced enough heat to melt while their parent asteroids were forming. When these asteroids melted, the silicate part and the metallic part separated due to their difference in density, similar to how water and oil don’t mix.

Today, most asteroids are located in a thick belt between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists think that Jupiter’s gravity disrupted the course of these asteroids, causing many of them to smash into each other and break apart. When pieces of these asteroids fall to Earth and are recovered, they are called meteorites.

Iron meteorites are from the metallic cores of the earliest asteroids, older than any other rocks or celestial objects in our solar system. The irons contain molybdenum isotopes that point toward many different locations across the protoplanetary disk in which these meteorites formed. That allows scientists to learn what the chemical composition of the disk was like in its infancy.

Previous research using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile has found many disks around other stars that resemble concentric rings, like a dartboard. The rings of these planetary disks, such as HL Tau, are separated by physical gaps, so this kind of disk could not provide a route to transport these refractory metals from the inner disk to the outer.

The new paper holds that our solar disk likely didn’t have a ring structure at the very beginning. Instead, our planetary disk looked more like a doughnut, and asteroids with metal grains rich in iridium and platinum metals migrated to the outer disk as it rapidly expanded.

But that confronted the researchers with another puzzle. After the disk expansion, gravity should have pulled these metals back into the sun. But that did not happen.

“Once Jupiter formed, it very likely opened a physical gap that trapped the iridium and platinum metals in the outer disk and prevented them from falling into the sun,” said first author Bidong Zhang, a UCLA planetary scientist. “These metals were later incorporated into asteroids that formed in the outer disk. This explains why meteorites formed in the outer disk — carbonaceous chondrites and carbonaceous-type iron meteorites — have much higher iridium and platinum contents than their inner-disk peers.”

Zhang and his collaborators previously used iron meteorites to reconstruct how water was distributed in the protoplanetary disk.

“Iron meteorites are hidden gems. The more we learn about iron meteorites, the more they unravel the mystery of our solar system’s birth,” Zhang said.

A similar idea is at play in the scientific field of membrane separations, a key process central to industries that include everything from biotechnology to petrochemicals to water treatment to food and beverage.

“Separations lie at the heart of so many of the products we use in our everyday lives,” said Seth Darling, head of the Advanced Materials for Energy Water Systems (AMEWS) Center at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory. ​”Membranes are the key to achieving efficient separations.”

Many commercial processes use membranes to separate out different sizes of solutes, which are substances that are dissolved in water or other fluids. Nearly all commercial membranes are polydisperse, which means that their pore sizes are not consistent. For these membranes, it’s nearly impossible to do a sharp separation of materials as different sizes of solutes can fit through different pores. ​”Essentially all commercial membranes, all membranes that are actually used for anything, have a wide range of pore sizes — little pores, medium pores and big pores,” Darling said.

Darling and his colleagues at Argonne and the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago have been interested in looking at the properties of isoporous membranes, which are membranes in which all the pores are the same size. Previously, scientists had believed there was a limit to the sharpness of the separations that they could achieve at the nanoscale, not only because of variations in pore size, but also a phenomenon called ​”hindered transport.”

Hindered transport refers to the internal resistance of the fluid medium as the solute attempts to go through the pore.

“The water in the pore will create drag on a molecule or particle that’s trying to get through, causing it to slow down,” Darling said. ​”Those slower solutes appear to be rejected by the membrane. Counterintuitively, objects even half the size of the pore will end up being rejected about half the time.” Overcoming rejection created by hindered transport would enable unprecedented selectivity in size-based separations, he explained.

“The regime we’re interested in involves pores approximately 10 nanometers in diameter. With a perfect membrane and proper process design, we believe we could separate solutes with as little as a five percent difference in size. Current membranes have no chance to pull that off,” Darling said.

In a new study, Darling and his colleagues uncovered a dynamic that could only be revealed by studying isoporous membranes, and that gives hope for surmounting hindered transport limitations. ​”Until now, scientists had implicitly assumed that each solute only gets one try to go through a pore, and that hindered transport would produce rejection of many solutes that were smaller than the pore size, causing them to remain in the feed stream rather than the output stream,” Darling added. ​”Although it might seem obvious to some, people never really considered a situation in which the solutes could make multiple attempts to get through a membrane.”

To give the solute molecules multiple chances to get through the pore required cycling the feed solution for multiple weeks. ​”Even with an extended period of experimentation, we’re still only seeing individual solutes trying to get through a pore a couple of times on average, but it makes a big difference in moving the separation curve towards a sharper step-like function,” Darling said. ​”Given longer time, or more likely an improved process design, we believe we will see a clear, sharp separation right where the pore size matched the solute size.”

The insights learned from isoporous membranes could be applicable to existing membrane materials engineered to increase the number of opportunities for solutes to pass through the pores. ​”If these fundamental studies can be successfully transferred to industrial membrane separations, it could have tremendous impact across numerous sectors of our economy,” he said.

The work was supported by DOE’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences.