To address this, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine conducted a randomized clinical trial comparing the leading treatment program, Family-Based Treatment (FBT), with a new Guided Self-Help (GSH) program designed to provide similar resources in a less intensive and more accessible way.

The study, publishing June 17, 2022 in Pediatrics, found that GSH and FBT were similarly effective in supporting pediatric weight loss, but families were more likely to maintain attendance in GSH.

In the clinical trial, 164 children and their parents were randomly assigned to one of the two programs. Participants were recruited from two clinic sites in San Diego County, which primarily serve Latino families. The prevalence of childhood obesity in these neighborhoods (Escondido and Chula Vista) is 38 percent.

The traditional FBT program consists of 20 one-hour group sessions over six months. FBT is held at academic research centers, which adds geographical constraints. Attrition rates in these programs are high, with many parents noting scheduling issues, transportation difficulties and competing work and family responsibilities as contributing factors.

In response to these challenges, the GSH model was developed to provide shorter treatment sessions and greater scheduling flexibility. The new program consists of 14 visits, each 20 minutes in length and held at the child’s primary care clinic. Families are given material to practice between sessions in a self-directed manner, and then meet individually with a health coach to review and troubleshoot strategies.

Both programs teach families how to self-monitor food intake, set healthy goals and modify the home environment to promote behavioral change. Additional sessions address topics of body image, bullying and emotional health.

“The program is not framed around weight loss per se, but about developing healthy lifestyle behaviors,” said the study’s corresponding author Kyung E. Rhee, MD, professor of pediatrics at UC San Diego School of Medicine.

Nevertheless, children in both groups showed significant reductions in their body mass index percentiles, which were largely maintained at the time of the six-month follow-up. However, families assigned to GSH showed a nearly 70 percent lower risk of attrition, and reported greater satisfaction and convenience. GSH participants attended more than half of the treatment sessions while FBT participants only attended one in five sessions on average.

“The success of the Guided Self-Help program is really promising for both patients and physicians,” said Rhee. “It’s always rewarding to hear that families were so appreciative of our help, but we were also surprised by how grateful the physicians were to have this program available in their office. These can be difficult conversations for them to initiate during standard checkups, but knowing they had a clear and effective way to provide care was really empowering for them.”

In the current program, GSH health coaches were trained and employed by the research team. To sustain the program, Rhee said health care groups will have to work within the current primary care system to identify individuals who can provide these services on location. The goal, she said, is to work toward a collaborative care model in which clinics employ their own behavioral counselors and support the delivery of additional services at schools and community centers.

“We cannot make a difference if the families can’t show up for treatment,” said Rhee, “so we owe it to them to make these programs as accessible and effective as possible.”

Co-authors include: Lourdes Herrera, David Strong, Eastern Kang-Sim, Yuyan Shi and Kerri N. Boutelle, all at UC San Diego.

The Gaia space mission of the European Space Agency ESA is constructing an ultraprecise three-dimensional map of our Milky Way galaxy, observing almost two billion stars or roughly one percent of all the stars in our galaxy. Gaia was launched in December 2013 and has collected science data from July 2014. On Monday, June 13, ESA released Gaia data in Data Release 3 (DR3). Finnish researchers were strongly involved in the release.

Gaia data allows, for example, for the derivation of asteroid and exoplanet orbits and physical properties. The data helps unveil the origin and future evolution of the Solar System and the Milky Way and helps understand stellar and planetary-system evolution and our place in the cosmos.

Gaia revolves about its axis slowly in about six hours and is composed of two optical space telescopes. Three science instruments allow for accurate determination of stellar positions and velocities as well as the spectral properties. Gaia resides at about 1,5 million kilometers from the Earth in the anti-Sun direction, where it orbits the Sun together with the Earth in the proximity of the so-called Sun-Earth Lagrange L2-point.

Gaia DR3 on June 13, 2022 was significant across astronomy. Some 50 scientific articles are being published with DR3, of which nine articles have been devoted to underscoring the exceptionally significant potential of DR3 for future research.

The new DR3 data comprises, for example, the chemical compositions, temperatures, colors, masses, brightnesses, ages, and radial velocities of stars. DR3 includes the largest ever binary star catalog for the Milky Way, more than 150 000 Solar System objects, largely asteroids but also planetary satellites, as well as millions of galaxies and quasars beyond the Milky Way.

“There are so many revolutionary advances that it is difficult to pinpoint a single most significant advance. Based on Gaia DR3, Finnish researchers will change the conception of asteroids in our Solar System, exoplanets and stars in our Milky Way galaxy, as well as galaxies themselves, including the Milky Way and its surrounding satellite galaxies. Returning to our home planet, Gaia will produce an ultraprecise reference frame for navigation and positioning,” says Academy Professor Karri Muinonen from the University of Helsinki.

Gaia and asteroids

The ten-fold increase in the number of asteroids reported in Gaia DR3 as compared to DR2 means that there is a significant increase in the number of close encounters between Gaia-detected asteroids. These close encounters can be utilized for asteroid mass estimation and we expect a significant increase in the number of asteroid masses to be derived by using Gaia DR3 astrometry, in particular, when combined with astrometry obtained by other telescopes.

In the conventional computation of an asteroid’s orbit, the asteroid is assumed to be a point-like object and its size, shape, rotation and surface light scattering properties are not taken into account. The Gaia DR3 astrometry is, however, so accurate that the angular offset between the asteroid’s center of mass and the center of the area illuminated by the Sun and visible to Gaia must be accounted for. Based on Gaia DR3, the offset has been certified for asteroid (21) Lutetia (Figure 2). The ESA Rosetta space mission imaged Lutetia during the flyby on July 10, 2010. With the help of the Rosetta Lutetia imagery and ground-based astronomical observations, a rotation period, rotational pole orientation, and detailed shape model were derived. When the physical modeling is incorporated into orbit computation, the systematic errors are removed and, contrary to conventional computation, all observations can be incorporated into the orbit solution. Consequently, the Gaia astrometry provides information about the physical properties of asteroids. These properties need to be taken into account using physical models or empirical error models for the astrometry.

The Gaia DR3 includes, for the first time, spectral observations. The spectrum measures the color of the target, meaning the brightness at different wavelengths. One especially interesting feature is that the new release contains about 60 000 spectra of asteroids in our Solar System (Figure 3). The asteroid spectrum contains information on their composition and, thus, about their origin and the evolution of the whole Solar System. Before the Gaia DR3, there has been only few thousand asteroid spectra available, so Gaia will multiply the amount of data by more than an order of magnitude.

Gaia and exoplanets

Gaia is expected to produce detections of up to 20 000 giant exoplanets by measuring their gravitational effect on the movement of their host stars. This will enable finding virtually all Jupiter-like exoplanets in the Solar neighbourhood over the coming years and determining how common are Solar System -like architectures. The first such astrometric Gaia detection was a giant exoplanet around epsilon Indi A, that corresponds to the nearest Jupiter-like exoplanet only 12 light years away. The first such detections are possible because acceleration observed in radial velocity surveys can be combined with movement data from Gaia to determine the orbits and planetary masses.

Gaia and galaxies

The microarcsecond resolution of Gaia DR3 provides precise measurements of the motions of stars, not only within our own Milky Way galaxy, but also for the many satellite galaxies that surround it. From the motion of stars within the Milky Way itself, we can accurately measure its mass, and together with the proper motion of satellites, we can now accurately determine their orbits. This lets us look both into the past and into the future of the Milky Way galaxy system. For example, we can find out which of the galaxies that surround the Milky Way are true satellites, and which are just passing by. We can also investigate if the evolution of the Milky Way conforms to cosmological models, and in particular, whether the satellite orbits fit the standard dark matter model.

Gaia and reference frames

The International Celestial Reference Frame, ICRF3, is based on the position of a few thousand quasars determined by Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) at radio wavelengths. ICRF3 is used to obtain the coordinates of celestial objects and to determine the orbits of satellites. Quasars of ICRF3 are also fixed points on the sky that can be used to determine the precise orientation of the Earth in space at any time. Without this information, for example, satellite positioning would not work.

Gaia’s data contain about 1,6 million quasars, which can be used to create a more accurate Celestial Reference Frame in visible light replacing the current one. In the future, this will have an impact on the accuracy of both satellite positioning and measurements of Earth-exploring satellites.

Biologists from the University of Cincinnati are retracing two exhaustive surveys conducted 100 years apart to see how the Queen City’s plant diversity has changed over the past two centuries. They focused their attention on undeveloped parts of cemeteries, banks of the Mill Creek and public parks that have remained protected from development during the last 200 years.

The study, titled “The rise of nonnative plants in wooded natural areas in southwestern Ohio,” was published in June in the journal Ecological Restoration.

UC’s latest survey follows in the footsteps of Cincinnati botanist Thomas G. Lea, who conducted a plant survey in Cincinnati between 1834 and 1844. During that time, he built up an herbarium of specimens that went to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Lea identified some 714 species before he died in 1844. His work was published posthumously in 1849 by his brother.

A century later, famed UC botanist E. Lucy Braun retraced Lea’s path, conducting a second plant survey in Cincinnati that found more than 1,400 species in her 1934 study published in The American Midland Naturalist. She leaned on Lea’s meticulous notes to return to the places he visited, many of which had been developed into homes, roads or apartment buildings over the decades.

UC biologist Denis Conover and his co-author Robert Bergstein retraced the steps of Braun and Lea in southwest Ohio in places where city development did not pave over natural areas. They found that many species purposely introduced as landscaping plants are flourishing in the wild.

“The spread of nonnative invasive species into wooded natural areas in southwestern Ohio threatens the continued survival of native flora and fauna. Efforts by park managers and volunteers to control invasive plant species has become a major part of their duties. This effort will be required in perpetuity and will be at great expense both monetarily and timewise due to collateral damage to native plants, wildlife and humans caused by the extensive use of herbicides, chainsaws and other mechanical equipment,” the study concluded.

Horticulturists introduced most of the nonnative plants from Europe and Asia as ornamentals. Their seeds eventually spread in the wild.

The biggest culprit? Amur honeysuckle, a woody shrub that has taken over many eastern forests.

“It has escaped into the wild and is propagating on its own,” said Conover, a professor of biology in UC’s College of Arts and Sciences.

Not to be confused with native trumpet honeysuckle, which grows in southern states and is referenced in the works of American writers William Faulkner and Robert Frost, Amur honeysuckle is a shrub from Asia that has delicate white flowers in the spring and red berries in the fall.

“Amur honeysuckle is now the most abundant woody plant in Hamilton County,” he said. “One bush can produce thousands of seeds that get dispersed by birds and mammals.”

A survey by Braun in 1961 found Amur honeysuckle starting to grow in some parts of Hamilton County but not yet spreading in the wild in other Ohio counties. Today, it is a dominant woody plant found ubiquitously throughout the state, crowding out virtually all other low-lying vegetation, the study found.

“In some woodlands, the Amur honeysuckle layer is so dense that the only native species remaining are older trees whose canopy is already growing above the shrub layer,” the study said.

“It leafs out before native woody plants and holds its leaves longer into the fall,” Conover said.

Some invasive plants are successful because they produce chemicals that hinder the growth or germination of nearby competitors, an insidious weapon called allelopathy, he said.

Conover said where these introduced plants are found, there is often far less biodiversity to support wildlife and the food chain. Once they take hold, eradicating plants like Amur honeysuckle is labor-intensive, expensive and time consuming.

“Native plants just don’t have a chance. Everything that depends on the native plants — insects, birds — can be lost,” Conover said. “When they introduce nonnative plants to the United States, they can also import fungal diseases that can wipe out native trees, which is what happened with the American chestnut.”

Callery pear trees with their pretty spring flowers and quick growing times were a favorite tree to plant in front yards of new subdivisions. Today, they grow wild along highways and forests.

Ohio lawmakers plan to phase in a ban on the sale of Callery pear trees in 2023.

The UC survey found dozens of other examples of foreign species that have taken root in southwest Ohio’s woods, including porcelain berry, tree of heaven, winged euonymus, European buckthorn, Oriental bittersweet, common privet and lesser periwinkle. It also found Norway maple, Amur cork tree and white poplar along with herbaceous species such as lesser celandine, garlic mustard, Japanese knotweed and Japanese stilt grass.

Every year in the United States, nearly two million Americans sustain a traumatic brain injury (TBI). Survivors can live with lifelong physical, cognitive and emotional disabilities. Currently, there are no treatments.

One of the biggest challenges for neuroscientists has been to fully understand how a TBI alters the cross-talk between different cells and brain regions.

In the new study, researchers improved upon a process called iDISCO, which uses solvents to make biological samples transparent. The process leaves behind a fully intact brain that can be illuminated with lasers and imaged in 3D with specialized microscopes.

With the enhanced brain clearing processes, the UCI team mapped neural connections throughout the entire brain. The researchers focused on connections to inhibitory neurons, because these neurons are extremely vulnerable to dying after a brain injury. The team first looked at the hippocampus, a brain region responsible for learning and memory. Then, they investigated the prefrontal cortex, a brain region that works together with hippocampus. In both cases, the imaging showed that inhibitory neurons gain many more connections from neighboring nerve cells after TBI, but they become disconnected from the rest of the brain.

“We’ve known for a long time that the communication between different brain cells can change very dramatically after an injury,” said Robert Hunt, PhD, associate professor of anatomy and neurobiology and director of the Epilepsy Research Center at UCI School of Medicine whose lab conducted the study, “But, we haven’t been able to see what happens in the whole brain until now.”

To get a closer look at the damaged brain connections, Hunt and his team devised a technique for reversing the clearing procedure and probing the brain with traditional anatomical approaches.

The findings surprisingly showed that the long projections of distant nerve cells were still present in the damaged brain, but they no longer formed connections with inhibitory neurons.

“It looks like the entire brain is being carefully rewired to accommodate for the damage, regardless of whether there was direct injury to the region or not,” explained Alexa Tierno, a graduate student and co-first author of the study. “But different parts of the brain probably aren’t working together quite as well as they did before the injury.”

The researchers then wanted to determine if it was possible for inhibitory neurons to be reconnected with distant brain regions. To find out, Hunt and his team transplanted new interneurons into the damaged hippocampus and mapped their connections, based on the team’s earlier research demonstrating interneuron transplantation can improve memory and stop seizures in mice with TBI.

The new neurons received appropriate connections from all over the brain. While this may mean it could be possible to entice the injured brain to repair these lost connections on its own, Hunt said learning how transplanted interneurons integrate into damaged brain circuits is essential for any future attempt to use these cells for brain repair.

“Our study is a very important addition to our understanding of how inhibitory progenitors can one day be used therapeutically for the treatment of TBI, epilepsy or other brain disorders,” said Hunt. “Some people have proposed interneuron transplantation might rejuvenate the brain by releasing unknown substances to boost innate regenerative capacity, but we’re finding the new neurons are really being hard wired into the brain.”

Hunt hopes to eventually develop cell therapy for people with TBI and epilepsy. The UCI team is now repeating the experiments using inhibitory neurons produced from human stem cells.

“This work takes us one step closer to a future cell-based therapy for people,” Hunt said, “Understanding the kinds of plasticity that exists after an injury will help us rebuild the injured brain with a very high degree of precision. However, it is very important that we proceed step wise toward this goal, and that takes time.”

Jan C. Frankowski, PhD; Shreya Pavani; Quincy Cao and David C. Lyon, PhD also contributed to this study. Funding was provided by the National Institutes of Health.

The new cluster compound is a hydroxy-iodide (HSbOI) and is unusual, as it has large, positively charged clusters. Only a handful of such positively charged cluster compounds have been found and studied.

“In science, the discovery of new material or molecule can create a new science,” says Kyoto University chemist Hiroshi Kageyama. “I believe that these new positively charged clusters have great potential.”

The first metal oxide cluster was discovered in 1826. Chemists have since synthesised hundreds of compounds with negatively charged clusters, which have properties useful in magnetism, catalysis, ionic conduction, biological applications and quantum information. Their properties make them useful in diverse fields from catalysis to medicine and chemical synthesis.

In more recent years, scientists have focused their attention on synthesising compounds with positively charged clusters and learning their properties.

Kageyama and his colleague Ryu Abe found their positive cluster by accident. Since 2016, the two scientists — Kageyama, a solid-state chemist and Abe, a catalytic chemist — have been on a quest to develop new compounds that can absorb visible light for photocatalysis. They were studying a chlorine-containing (Sb₄O₅Cl₂) compound and trying to replace the chlorine atom with iodine.

“However, a new material that was completely different from what we expected was obtained accidentally,” says Kageyama.

What the scientists expected was a material that contains 22 atoms in the unit cell. What they got instead was a compound that contains 800 atoms in its unit cell.

At the beginning, the scientists could not unravel the chemical’s structure. A traditional technique called powder X-ray diffraction failed when faced with the material’s complexity. After a year, Kageyama thought he could use three-dimensional electron tomography, a cutting-edge electron microscopy technique that has attracted recent attention as a tool to image the structure of proteins. The scientists approached Artem Abakumov and Joke Hadermann at University of Antwerp, Belgium, to work on the structure. And when their collaborators sent the data back, the scientists were thrilled to see large clusters.

Further lab work showed the hydroxyiodide molecule contained acidic protons, which is important in catalysis.

“This finding may open up new possibilities in the design of solid-state catalysts,” says Kageyama.

Their work will be published in Science Advances.

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Rabies vaccines, rather than treatments, are much more affordable and easier to administer. But those vaccines also come with a massive downside:

“Rabies vaccines don’t provide lifelong protection. You have to get your pets boosted every year to three years,” says LJI Professor Erica Ollmann Saphire, Ph.D. “Right now, rabies vaccines for humans and domestic animals are made from killed virus. But this inactivation process can cause the molecules to become misshapen — so these vaccines aren’t showing the right form to the immune system. If we made a better shaped, better structured vaccine, would immunity last longer?”

Saphire and her team, in collaboration with a team led by Hervé Bourhy, Ph.D., at the Institut Pasteur, may have discovered the path to better vaccine design. In a new study, published in Science Advances, the researchers share one of the first high-resolution looks at the rabies virus glycoprotein in its vulnerable “trimeric” form.

“The rabies glycoprotein is the only protein that rabies expresses on its surface, which means it is going to be the major target of neutralizing antibodies during an infection,” says LJI Postdoctoral Fellow Heather Callaway, Ph.D., who serves as the study’s first author.

“Rabies is the most lethal virus we know. It is so much a part of our history — we’ve lived with its specter for hundreds of years,” adds Saphire, who also serves as LJI’s President and CEO. “Yet scientists have never observed the organization of its surface molecule. It is important to understand that structure to make more effective vaccines and treatments — and to understand how rabies and other viruses like it enter cells.”

Rabies the shapeshifter

Scientists don’t know exactly why rabies vaccines don’t provide long-term protection, but they do know that its shape-shifting proteins are a problem.

Like a Swiss Army knife, the rabies glycoprotein has sequences that unfold and flip upward when needed. The glycoprotein can shift back and forth between pre-fusion (before fusing with a host cell) and post-fusion forms. It can also fall apart, changing from a trimer structure (where three copies come together in a bundle) to a monomer (one copy by itself).

This shapeshifting gives rabies a kind of invisibility cloak. Human antibodies are built to recognize a single site on a protein. They can’t follow along when a protein transforms to hide or move those sites.

The new study gives scientists a critical picture of the correct glycoprotein form to target for antibody protection.

Capturing the glycoprotein at last

Over the course of three years, Callaway worked to stabilize and freeze the rabies glycoprotein in its trimeric form. This “pre-fusion” form is the shape the glycoprotein takes before it infects human cells.

Callaway paired the glycoprotein with a human antibody, which helped her pinpoint one site where the viral structure is vulnerable to antibody attacks. The researchers then captured a 3D image of the glycoprotein using cutting-edge cryo-electron microscope equipment at LJI.

The new 3D structure highlights several key features researchers hadn’t seen before. Importantly, the structure shows two key pieces of the virus structure, called the fusion peptides, the way they appear in real life. These two sequences link the bottom of the glycoprotein to the viral membrane, but project into the target cell during infection. It is very hard to get a stable image of these sequences. In fact, other rabies researchers have had to cut them off to try to get images of the glycoprotein.

Callaway solved this problem by capturing the rabies glycoprotein in detergent molecules. “That let us see how the fusion sequences are attached before they snap upward during infection,” says Saphire.

Now that scientists have a clear view of this viral structure, they can better design vaccines that tell the body how to make antibodies to target the virus.

“Instead of being exposed to four-plus different protein shapes, your immune system should really just see one — the right one,” says Callaway. “This could lead to a better vaccine.”

Preventing a family of viruses

Saphire hopes stronger, broader immunity could help people in regular contact with animals, such as veterinarians and wildlife workers, as well as the billions of people who may accidentally come in contact with a rabid animal. Rabies is endemic across every continent except Antarctica and infects numerous species including dogs, racoons, bats, and skunks.

This new work may also open the door to a vaccine to protect against the whole lyssavirus genus, which includes rabies and similar viruses that can spread between humans and other mammals.

The next step in this work is to capture more images of rabies virus and its relatives together with neutralizing antibodies. Callaway says scientists are working on solving several of these structures, which could reveal antibody targets that lyssaviruses have in common.

“Because we didn’t have these structures of the rabies virus in this conformational state before, it’s been hard to design a broad-spectrum vaccine,” says Callaway.

Additional authors of the study, “Structure of the rabies virus glycoprotein trimer bound to a pre-fusion specific 4 neutralizing antibody,” include Dawid Zyla, Florence Larrous, Guilherme Dias de Melo, Kathryn M. Hastie, Ruben Diaz Avalos, Alyssa Agarwal and Davide Corti.

This study was supported by the National Institutes of Health (grants 5T32AI07244-36 and 5F32AI147531-03) and a Swiss National Science Foundation Early Postdoc Mobility Fellowship (P2EZP3_195680). A portion of this research was supported by NIH grant U24GM129547 and performed at the 742 PNCC at OHSU and accessed through EMSL (grid.436923.9), a DOE Office of Science User Facility sponsored by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research. Confocal microscopy on the Zeiss LSM 880 was supported by equipment grant NIH 745 S10OD021831.

The study, published May 28 in the journal Ecosystem Services, used methods from the risk and insurance industry to provide rigorous valuations of these natural defenses and show that they can deliver a positive return on investment, with the benefits from reduced flood damage exceeding the costs of restoration.

The results point toward new opportunities to support restoration efforts with funds from sources that support hazard mitigation, climate adaptation, and disaster recovery, including the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

“We identify a number of funding sources that have traditionally supported artificial ‘gray infrastructure,’ such as concrete sea walls, and that could be applied to nature-based solutions,” said lead author Michael Beck, a research professor in the Institute of Marine Sciences at UC Santa Cruz who holds the AXA Chair in Coastal Resilience.

Coastal ecosystems such as coral reefs and mangroves act as natural barriers to waves and storm surges and reduce flood damages to people and property. In many places, however, degradation of reefs and coastal wetlands has reduced their natural ability to protect coastlines from flooding and erosion. Effective strategies exist for restoring these critical ecosystems, but funding for restoration projects can be hard to find.

Beck noted that the global spending on disaster recovery is more than 100 times larger than the spending on conservation. “Recovery funding will grow as climate change increases the impacts from storms, and environmental funding will likely shrink as national budgets are strained by natural disasters,” he said.

The study highlights opportunities to align conservation, flood risk reduction, and climate adaptation to reduce storm risks. “Funding for artificial infrastructure such as seawalls can be redirected to natural defenses, which provide multiple benefits beyond coastal protection,” Beck said.

The study’s results for return on investment are robust to changes in discount rates and the timing of flood protection benefits, he added. “This may sound esoteric, but it can be critical to getting funding for restoration projects from sources such as FEMA,” he said.

The researchers identified specific sites where there could be significant returns on investment for coral reef and mangrove restoration across the Caribbean.

In addition to Beck, the coauthors of the paper include Nadine Heck, Siddharth Narayan, Pelayo Menéndez, Borja G. Reguero, and Stephan Bitterwolf at UC Santa Cruz; Saul Torres-Ortega and Iñigo J. Losada at the University of Cantabria, Spain; Glenn-Marie Lange at the World Bank; Kerstin Pfliegner at ERM, Germany; and Valerie Pietsch McNulty at the Nature Conservancy.

This work was supported in part by the Kingfisher Foundation, the World Bank, AXA XL, AXA Research Fund, the Nature Conservancy, and Germany’s Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety.

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