In Japan, the decline in productivity has become a major social issue as the working-age population is decreasing owing to a lower birthrate and an increase in aging population. Therefore, companies are focusing on “health and productivity management” initiatives to maintain employee health and enhance their work performance. However, lifestyle habits that impact poor work performance of Japanese employees and the manner in which they differ between men and women have not been identified to date.

A multiple regression analysis was conducted using data from 12,526 corporate employees (aged 21-69) to examine the relationship between 11 lifestyle habits (related to smoking, exercise, diet, alcohol consumption, and sleep) and work performance, segmented by gender. The findings indicated that insufficient sleep was most strongly related to poor work performance for both genders.

Additionally, it was noted that lifestyle habits, such as slow walking speed, current smoking, and skipping breakfast, are associated with lower work performance in men, whereas in women, habits such as fast eating speed are influential.

The study suggests that health education and workplace interventions focusing on improved sleep, exercise habits, and dinner timing are vital. Moreover, it highlights the importance of gender-specific support measures.

The funding was provided by Tokio Marine dR Co, Ltd.

In their new study, researchers changed the microenvironment in the eye in a way that enabled them to take stem cells from blood and turn them into retinal ganglion cells that were capable of migrating and surviving into the eye’s retina. They conducted their study on the adult mouse retina, but the work’s implications could one day be applied to human retina, according to the researchers who published their findings November 6th in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

One limitation that prevents the success of current stem cell transplantation strategies in retina studies is that the majority of donor cells remain at the site of injection and do not migrate where they are most needed. To identify an improved solution, the researchers created RGCs out of stem cells, then tested the ability of various signaling molecules known as chemokines to guide these new neurons to their correct positions within the retina. The research team utilized a “big data” approach and examined hundreds of such molecules and receptors to find 12 unique to RGCs. They found stromal derived factor 1 was the best performing molecule for both migration and transplantation.

“This method of using chemokines to guide donor cell movement and integration represents a promising approach to restoring vision in glaucoma patients,” said senior author Petr Baranov, MD, PhD, of Mass Eye and Ear, who is also an assistant professor of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School. “It was an exciting journey to work with a team of talented scientists with unique expertise to develop novel techniques in this study to modify the local environment to guide cell behavior — techniques that potentially be applied to treat other neurodegenerative conditions.”

The study was co-led by members of Baranov’s lab at Mass Eye and Ear including bioengineer and lead study author Jonathan R Soucy, PhD, and lead bioinformatician Emil Kriukov, MD.

In addition to Baranov, Soucy and Kriukov, co-authors of the study include Levi Todd, Monichan Phay, Volha V. Malechka, John Dayron Rivera and Thomas A Reh.

The study was funded by several National Eye Institute (NEI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants — a complete list can be found in the paper — and grants from the Bright Focus Foundation and Gilbert Family Foundation.

The University of Washington discloses a patent incorporating the endogenous reprogramming technology described in this report with inventors LT and TAR.

In a Duke-led study appearing Nov. 17 in Science Advances, the researchers report that the findings create a foundation for a new area of investigation, fueled by the timely impact of environmental factors on human biology.

“Parkinson’s disease has been called the fastest growing neurological disorder in the world,” said principal investigator, Andrew West, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology at Duke University School of Medicine. “Numerous lines of data suggest environmental factors might play a prominent role in Parkinson’s disease, but such factors have for the most part not been identified.”

Improperly disposed plastics have been shown to break into very small pieces and accumulate in water and food supplies, and were found in the blood of most adults in a recent study.

“Our study suggests that the emergence of micro and nanoplastics in the environment might represent a new toxin challenge with respect to Parkinson’s disease risk and progression,” West said. “This is especially concerning given the predicted increase in concentrations of these contaminants in our water and food supplies.”

West and colleagues in Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment and the Department of Chemistry at Trinity College of Arts and Sciences found that nanoparticles of the plastic polystyrene — typically found in single use items such as disposable drinking cups and cutlery — attract the accumulation of the protein known as alpha-synuclein. West said the study’s most surprising findings are the tight bonds formed between the plastic and the protein within the area of the neuron where these accumulations are congregating, the lysosome.

Researchers said the plastic-protein accumulations happened across three different models performed in the study — in test tubes, cultured neurons, and mouse models of Parkinson’s disease. West said questions remain about how such interactions might be happening within humans and whether the type of plastic might play a role.

“While microplastic and nanoplastic contaminants are being closely evaluated for their potential impact in cancer and autoimmune diseases, the striking nature of the interactions we could observe in our models suggest a need for evaluating increasing nanoplastic contaminants on Parkinson’s disease and dementia risk and progression,” West said.

“The technology needed to monitor nanoplastics is still at the earliest possible stages and not ready yet to answer all the questions we have,” he said. “But hopefully efforts in this area will increase rapidly, as we see what these particles can do in our models. If we know what to look out for, we can take the necessary steps to protect ourselves, without compromising all the benefits we reap every day from plastics.”

The study was funded by in part by The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research and the Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s initiative (ASAP-020527).

In addition to West, study authors include Zhiyong Liu, Arpine Sokratian, Addison M. Duda, Enquan Xu, Christina Stanhope, Amber Fu, Samuel Strader, Huizhong Li, Yuan Yuan, Benjamin G. Bobay, Joana Sipe, Ketty Bai, Iben Lundgaard, Na Liu, Belinda Hernandez, Catherine Bowes Rickman, and Sara E. Miller.

Despite this headline finding, the environmental scientists behind the research are quick to underline that this should in no way be taken to mean the world’s governments can take their foot off the brake in their obligations to reduce carbon emissions as fast as possible. Simply planting more trees and protecting existing vegetation is not a golden-bullet solution but the research does underline the multiple benefits to conserving such vegetation.

“Plants take up a substantial amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂) every year, thereby slowing down the detrimental effects of climate change, but the extent to which they will continue this CO₂ uptake into the future has been uncertain,” explains Dr Jürgen Knauer, who headed the research team led by the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment at Western Sydney University.

“What we found is that a well-established climate model that is used to feed into global climate predictions made by the likes of the IPCC predicts stronger and sustained carbon uptake until the end of the 21^st century when it accounts for the impact of some critical physiological processes that govern how plants conduct photosynthesis.

“We accounted for aspects like how efficiently carbon dioxide can move through the interior of the leaf, how plants adjust to changes in temperatures, and how plants most economically distribute nutrients in their canopy. These are three really important mechanisms that affect a plant’s ability to ‘fix’ carbon, yet they are commonly ignored in most global models” said Dr Knauer.

Photosynthesis is the scientific term for the process in which plants convert — or “fix” — CO₂ into the sugars they use for growth and metabolism. This carbon fixing serves as a natural climate change mitigator by reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere; it is this increased uptake of CO₂ by vegetation that is the primary driver of an increasing land carbon sink reported over the last few decades.

However, the beneficial effect of climate change on vegetation carbon uptake might not last forever and it has long been unclear how vegetation will respond to CO₂, temperature and changes in rainfall that are significantly different from what is observed today. Scientists have thought that intense climate change such as more intense droughts and severe heat could significantly weaken the sink capacity of terrestrial ecosystems, for example.

In the study published this week, however, Knauer and colleagues present results from their modelling study set to assess a high-emission climate scenario, to test how vegetation carbon uptake would respond to global climate change until the end of the 21^st century.

The authors tested different versions of the model that varied in their complexity and realism of how plant physiological processes are accounted for. The simplest version ignored the three critical physiological mechanisms associated with photosynthesis while the most complex version accounted for all three mechanisms.

The results were clear: the more complex models that incorporated more of our current plant physiological understanding consistently projected stronger increases of vegetation carbon uptake globally. The processes accounted for re-enforced each other, so that effects were even stronger when accounted for in combination, which is what would happen in a real-world scenario.

Silvia Caldararu, Assistant Professor in Trinity’s School of Natural Sciences, was involved in the study. Contextualising the findings and their relevance, she said:

“Because the majority of terrestrial biosphere models used to assess the global carbon sink are located at the lower end of this complexity range, accounting only partially for these mechanisms or ignoring them altogether, it is likely that we are currently underestimating climate change effects on vegetation as well as its resilience to changes in climate. We often think about climate models as being all about physics, but biology plays a huge role and it is something that we really need to account for.

“These kinds of predictions have implications for nature-based solutions to climate change such as reforestation and afforestation and how much carbon such initiatives can take up. Our findings suggest these approaches could have a larger impact in mitigating climate change and over a longer time period than we thought.

“However, simply planting trees will not solve all our problems. We absolutely need to cut down emissions from all sectors. Trees alone cannot offer humanity a get out of jail free card.”

The team has found that adding small quantities of liquid soap to some classes of pesticides can boost their potency by more than ten-fold.

The discovery is promising news as malaria-carrying mosquitoes display an increasing resistance to current insecticides, said Colince Kamdem, Ph.D., lead author of the study and assistant professor in UTEP’s Department of Biological Sciences.

“Over the past two decades, mosquitoes have become strongly resistant to most insecticides,” Kamdem said. “It’s a race now to develop alternative compounds with new modes of action.”

Both laboratory tests and field trials have shown that neonicotinoids, a special class of insecticide, are a promising alternative to target populations showing resistance to existing insecticides, said UTEP Research Assistant Professor Caroline Fouet, Ph.D., second author of the study. Neonicotinoids, however, do not kill some mosquito species unless their potency is boosted. In this case, Fouet said, soap is the boosting substance.

Malaria is a devastating mosquito-borne disease that is prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America, causing fever, fatigue, headaches and chills; the disease can be fatal. In 2020, there were an estimated 241 million cases of malaria worldwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control, resulting in 627,000 deaths.

Prior to joining UTEP, Kamdem worked at Cameroon’s Centre for Research in Infectious Diseases (CRID); it was there that he first caught on to soap’s potency while conducting routine insecticide testing.

Current protocols from the World Health Organization (WHO) for testing mosquitoes’ susceptibility to some insecticides recommend adding a seed oil-based product to insecticide concoctions. Kamdem noticed when the compound was added, mosquito mortality increased from when the insecticide was used on its own.

“That compound belongs to the same class of substances as kitchen soap,” Kamdem said. “We thought, ‘Why don’t we test products that have same properties?’

He and his team selected three low-cost, linseed-oil based soaps that are prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa — Maître Savon de Marseille, Carolin Savon Noir and La Perdrix Savon — and added them to four different neonicotinoids, acetamiprid, clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam.

The hunch paid off. In all cases, the insecticides drastically enhanced potency, the team wrote in the study. “All three brands of soap increase mortality from 30 percent to 100 percent compared to when the insecticides were used on their own,” said Ashu Fred, first author of the study and Ph.D. student at Cameroon’s University of Yaoundé 1.

The team also tested the addition of soap to a class of insecticides known as pyrethroids. In those cases, however, they saw no benefits.

The team hopes to conduct additional testing to establish exactly how much soap is needed to enhance insecticides.

“We would love to make a soap-insecticide formulation that can be used indoors in Africa and be healthy for users,” Kamdem said. “There are unknowns as to whether such a formulation will stick to materials like mosquito nets, but the challenge is both promising and very exciting.”

Additional authors on the study are doctoral student Marilene M. Ambadiang of CRID and the University of Yaoundé 1; and Professor Veronique Penlap-Beng, Ph.D., of the University of Yaoundé 1.

The project was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

Research from the lab of cancer biologist Tuomas Tammela, MD, PhD shows that some lung cancer cells retain a “memory” of the healthy cell where they came from — one that might be exploited to make an emerging type of lung cancer treatment called KRAS inhibition more effective.

The study looked specifically at lung adenocarcinoma, a type of non-small cell lung cancer that is the most common type of lung cancer in the U.S. and responsible for 7% of all cancer deaths. This cancer is frequently driven by mutations in the KRAS gene.

“For a long time, cancer-driving KRAS proteins were considered ‘undruggable,'” says study co-first author Zhuxuan “Zoe” Li, a doctoral student in the Tammela Lab at MSK’s Sloan Kettering Institute. “Within the last few years, however, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first KRAS inhibitors, with quite a few more in clinical trials. But they don’t work for everyone, and most patients’ cancers eventually acquire resistance to the drugs and come back.”

The team’s findings — co-led by postdoctoral fellow Xueqian Zhuang, PhD — shed important light on lung cancer cells that linger after treatment with a KRAS inhibitor. Importantly, they suggest that separately targeting these cells alongside treatment with a KRAS inhibitor could help prevent recurrence. The study was recently published in Cancer Discovery, a leading journal for biological insights that have important implications for clinical care.

Stem Cells With a Day Job’

To understand the MSK discovery and its implications, it’s helpful to know a little lung biology.

Within the lungs, oxygen is absorbed and carbon dioxide released via air sacs called alveoli. The lining of the alveoli is made of two distinct types of cells — alveolar type 1 (AT1) and alveolar type 2 (AT2).

And while they’re similarly named, these two cells couldn’t be more different.

AT1 cells are long and thin, with a large surface to facilitate gas exchange between the lungs and the bloodstream.

AT2 cells, meanwhile, play a caretaking role, secreting compounds that are important for the health and function of the lungs, as well as helping maintain and repair the lungs by dividing to create replacement AT1 cells.

“You can think of them as stem cells with a day job,” Dr. Tammela says.

The big problem comes when lung cancer cells — which typically develop from AT2 cells — take on some “remembered” properties of the AT1 cells that AT2 cells differentiate into when they’re playing their stem cell role. Scientists call these cancer cells “AT1-like” cells.

Eliminating AT1-Like Cells Improves Response to KRAS Inhibition

In healthy cells, KRAS plays a key role in regulating cell growth and division. But when the gene becomes mutated, it can lead to runaway cell proliferation.

KRAS inhibitors can switch off this explosive growth, greatly diminishing tumors, but they still leave behind pockets of cancer cells that aren’t sensitive to the drug, and that also give the cancer a chance to develop new mutations to resist the drugs’ effects.

The research team painstakingly studied these residual cancer cells to uncover the mechanisms of this resistance using genetically engineered mouse models, mice implanted with patient-derived tumors, and tumor samples from patients.

They discovered that the cancer cells that remained after treatment were these AT1-like cells. They also found these cells have the capacity to reignite the cancer’s runaway growth.

“Importantly, we found that if you get rid of these AT1-like cells, it greatly improves the treatment response to KRAS inhibitors,” Dr. Tammela says.

Eliminating those cells in experimental models is relatively easy, but doing so in the clinic will require further research.

“We actually live in a very exciting time with fantastic pharmacology,” Dr. Tammela says. “We can engineer molecules to bind to a certain cell type and kill them — this is how CAR T cell therapy and antibody drug conjugates work.

“Now that we’ve done these proof-of-concept experiments, the next step would be to find surface proteins that are unique to these AT1-like cells and then develop a therapeutic that can bind to them and kill them,” he adds.

Thanks to the extensive network of cameras, GPS collars and other instruments, park staff and wildlife ecologists had an “unprecedented opportunity” to assemble a minute-by-minute view of how the storm affected the park and how the animals responded, said Hallie Brown, a postdoctoral research associate in Princeton’s Department of Ecology and Environmental Biology and the first author of a new paper in Nature about the hurricane’s impact.

“This is the first study that has ever been able to track the real-time responses of a large-mammal community to a natural disaster,” said Robert Pringle, an EEB professor who has worked with Gorongosa National Park since its inception.

Brown, now a postdoctoral research associate in Pringle’s lab, was a graduate student at the time with Ryan Long, an associate professor of wildlife sciences at the University of Idaho and a former Princeton postdoc. Long and Pringle shared senior author credits on the new Nature paper.

“We watched the waters rise,” Brown recalled. “We watched the animals’ reactions in the hours, days, weeks after the cyclone: how some of them escaped the floodwaters, and some of them didn’t. We used the data we had from before, during and after the storm to create, not just a description of this one event, but a broader set of expectations, so managers can better anticipate the effects of increasingly severe weather events.”

The research team found that the best predictor of survival was size. The tiny oribi, about the size of a greyhound, saw its population plummet by 50%. About half of the slightly larger reedbucks died as well. The bushbucks, which are the smallest species that can wear a GPS collar, saw three of its eight collared animals die — the smallest male and the two smallest females — but only lost 4% of their population overall.

GPS data revealed that the bushbucks looked for hills to climb, including termite mound hillocks that reach up to 16 feet tall (5 meters) and 65 feet long (20 meters), which became islands in the flood. The researchers saw that one survivor hopscotched from mound to mound, passing quickly through the floodwaters in between, before finding safety in the woods at higher elevations. The four largest herbivores wearing GPS collars — nyala, kudu, sable and elephant — had no fatalities.

Body size also offered a secondary protection, the researchers found.

“Not only could the smaller-sized animals not outpace the waters, they were also not able to buffer the nutritional limitation afterwards,” said Brown. “Because the flood was so high for so long, it killed a lot of the grasses and low-lying vegetation. Smaller animals can’t withstand those nutritionally limited periods like larger animals, who have more fat to rely on.”

The only previous study of hurricane effects on island populations looked at lizards and spiders in the Bahamas and found very similar patterns. “It’s incredible how the patterns we found cross taxonomic and geographic lines,” said Brown. “They seem to play out the same ways in our terrestrial ecosystem, with the largest mammals on earth, and with these tiny little invertebrates and reptiles in the Bahamas.”

The researchers have two primary recommendations for other wildlife managers: evacuate the smallest and most ecologically vulnerable creatures to safer areas before storms come, and provide supplementary feed after the storm. Once all of the grasses have drowned, animals will turn to foraging on less-nutritious shrubs and bark, and many small creatures can’t survive that dietary shift.

The few carnivores in the park weathered the storm just fine, Brown said. The wild dogs and leopards benefited from having their prey animals concentrated in the upland areas, and the lions’ primary food source — warthogs — stayed in the uplands for several months but were otherwise largely unaffected by the cyclone.

The research team included institutions from five countries: Princeton University; the University of Idaho-Moscow; the University of California-Merced; Montana State University-Bozeman;Yale University; Archbold Biological Station in Venus, Florida; the University of British Columbia-Vancouver; Gorongosa National Park; the University of Kent; the University of the Witwatersrand-Johannesburg; Associac?a?o Azul Moc?ambique in Maputo, Mozambique.

Other Princeton authors on the paper are then-graduate students Matt Hutchinson, Ph.D. 2021; Justine Atkins Becker, Ph.D. 2020; Arjun Potter, Ph.D. 2022; and then-NSF postdoctoral fellow Meredith Palmer.

“For me, the most exciting thing about this paper is the incredible collaboration between so many groups of researchers, from hydrology to large animal ecology, to create this really integrated piece of science,” Brown said. “The best work happens in collaborative projects.”