The authors conclude that people might be able to reduce their risk of atrial fibrillation (AF) by avoiding certain triggers.

The study is published in JAMA Cardiology and was presented November 14, 2021, at the annual Scientific Sessions of the American Heart Association.

Researchers were surprised to find that although most of the things that participants thought would be related to their AF were not, those in the intervention group still experienced less arrhythmia than the people in a comparison group that was not self-monitoring.

“This suggests that those personalized assessments revealed actionable results,” said lead author Gregory Marcus, MD, professor of medicine in the Division of Cardiology at UCSF. “Although caffeine was the most commonly selected trigger for testing, we found no evidence of a near-term relationship between caffeine consumption and atrial fibrillation. In contrast, alcohol consumption most consistently exhibited heightened risks of atrial fibrillation.”

Atrial fibrillation contributes to more than 150,000 deaths in the United States each year, reports the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with the death rate on the rise for more than 20 years.

To learn more about what patients felt was especially important to study about the disease, researchers held a brainstorming session in 2014. Patients said researching individual triggers for AF was their top priority, giving rise to the I-STOP-AFib study, which enabled individuals to test any presumed AF trigger. About 450 people participated, more than half of whom (58 percent) were men, and the overwhelming majority of whom were white (92 percent).

Participants in the randomized clinical trial utilized a mobile electrocardiogram recording device along with a phone app to log potential triggers like drinking alcohol and caffeine, sleeping on the left side or not getting enough sleep, eating a large meal, a cold drink, or sticking to a particular diet, engaging in exercise, or anything else they thought was relevant to their AF. Although participants were most likely to select caffeine as a trigger, there was no association with AF. Recent research from UCSF has similarly failed to demonstrate a relationship between caffeine and arrhythmias — on the contrary, investigators found it may have a protective effect.

The new study demonstrated that consumption of alcohol was the only trigger that consistently resulted in significantly more self-reported AF episodes.

The individualized testing method, known as n-of-1, did not validate participant-selected triggers for AF. But trial participants did report fewer AF episodes than those in the control group, and the data suggest that behaviors like avoiding alcohol could lessen the chances of having an AF episode.

“This completely remote, siteless, mobile-app based study will hopefully pave the way for many investigators and patients to conduct similar personalized “n-of-1″ experiments that can provide clinically relevant information specific to the individual,” said Marcus.

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Materials provided by University of California – San Francisco. Original written by Elizabeth Fernandez. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The study, conducted at the University of Plymouth, centred around the Sustainability Hub — a pre-1970s building on the university campus — and compared how effectively two sections of its walls retained heat.

Despite being on the same west-facing elevation, one of those sections had been retrofitted with an exterior living wall façade, comprised of a flexible felt fabric sheet system with pockets allowing for soil and planting.

After five weeks of measurements, researchers found the amount of heat lost through the wall retrofitted with the living façade was 31.4% lower than that of the original structure.

They also discovered daytime temperatures within the newly-covered section remained more stable than the area with exposed masonry, meaning less energy was required to heat it.

The study is one of the first to ascertain the thermal influence of living wall systems on existing buildings in temperate scenarios and was conducted by academics associated with the University’s Sustainable Earth Institute.

Writing in the journal Building and Environment, they say while the concept is relatively new, it has already been shown to bring a host of benefits such as added biodiversity.

However, with buildings directly accounting for 17% of UK Greenhouse Gas Emissions — and space heating accounting for over 60% of all energy used in buildings — these new findings could be a game-changer in helping the UK achieve its net-zero commitments.

Dr Matthew Fox, a researcher in sustainable architecture and the study’s lead author, said: “Within England, approximately 57% all buildings were built before 1964. While regulations have changed more recently to improve the thermal performance of new constructions, it is our existing buildings that require the most energy to heat and are a significant contributor to carbon emissions. It is therefore essential that we begin to improve the thermal performance of these existing buildings, if the UK is to reach its target of net zero carbon emission by 2050, and help to reduce the likelihood of fuel poverty from rising energy prices.”

Supported by an investment from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the three-year £2.6 million programme is exploring low carbon solutions through research and support for local enterprises.

Specifically, this aspect of the project is looking to optimise the performance and sustainability of external living walls in sustainable building design through research on the thermal properties, and carbon sequestration, offered by different plant and soil types.

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Materials provided by University of Plymouth. Original written by Alan Williams. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Published in Scientific Reports, the study builds on the team’s previous work*, which showed daily three-minute exposure to longwave deep red light ‘switched on’ energy producing mitochondria cells in the human retina, helping boost naturally declining vision.

For this latest study, scientists wanted to establish what effect a single three-minute exposure would have, while also using much lower energy levels than their previous studies. Furthermore, building on separate UCL research in flies** that found mitochondria display ‘shifting workloads’ depending on the time of day, the team compared morning exposure to afternoon exposure.

In summary, researchers found there was, on average, a 17% improvement in participants’ colour contrast vision when exposed to three minutes of 670 nanometre (long wavelength) deep red light in the morning and the effects of this single exposure lasted for at least a week. However, when the same test was conducted in the afternoon, no improvement was seen.

Scientists say the benefits of deep red light, highlighted by the findings, mark a breakthrough for eye health and should lead to affordable home-based eye therapies, helping the millions of people globally with naturally declining vision.

Lead author, Professor Glen Jeffery (UCL Institute of Ophthalmology), said: “We demonstrate that one single exposure to long wave deep red light in the morning can significantly improve declining vision, which is a major health and wellbeing issue, affecting millions of people globally.

“This simple intervention applied at the population level would significantly impact on quality of life as people age and would likely result in reduced social costs that arise from problems associated with reduced vision.”

Naturally declining vision and mitochondria

In humans around 40 years old, cells in the eye’s retina begin to age, and the pace of this ageing is caused, in part, when the cell’s mitochondria, whose role is to produce energy (known as ATP) and boost cell function, also start to decline.

Mitochondrial density is greatest in the retina’s photoreceptor cells, which have high energy demands. As a result, the retina ages faster than other organs, with a 70% ATP reduction over life, causing a significant decline in photoreceptor function as they lack the energy to perform their normal role.

In studying the effects of deep red light in humans, researchers built on their previous findings in mice, bumblebees and fruit flies, which all found significant improvements in the function of the retina’s photoreceptors when their eyes were exposed to 670 nanometre (long wavelength) deep red light.

“Mitochondria have specific sensitivities to long wavelength light influencing their performance: longer wavelengths spanning 650 to 900nm improve mitochondrial performance to increase energy production,” said Professor Jeffery.

Morning and afternoon studies

The retina’s photoreceptor population is formed of cones, which mediate colour vision, and rods, which adapt vision in low/dim light. This study focused on cones*** and observed colour contrast sensitivity, along the protan axis (measuring red-green contrast) and the tritan axis (blue-yellow).

All the participants were aged between 34 and 70, had no ocular disease, completed a questionnaire regarding eye health prior to testing, and had normal colour vision (cone function). This was assessed using a ‘Chroma Test’: identifying coloured letters that had very low contrast and appeared increasingly blurred, a process called colour contrast.

Using a provided LED device all 20 participants (13 female and 7 male) were exposed to three minutes of 670nm deep red light in the morning between 8am and 9am. Their colour vision was then tested again three hours post exposure and 10 of the participants were also tested one week post exposure.

On average there was a ‘significant’ 17% improvement in colour vision, which lasted a week in tested participants; in some older participants there was a 20% improvement, also lasting a week.

A few months on from the first test (ensuring any positive effects of the deep red light had been ‘washed out’) six (three female, three male) of the 20 participants, carried out the same test in the afternoon, between 12pm to 1pm. When participants then had their colour vision tested again, it showed zero improvement.

Professor Jeffery said: “Using a simple LED device once a week, recharges the energy system that has declined in the retina cells, rather like re-charging a battery.

“And morning exposure is absolutely key to achieving improvements in declining vision: as we have previously seen in flies, mitochondria have shifting work patterns and do not respond in the same way to light in the afternoon — this study confirms this.”

For this study the light energy emitted by the LED torch was just 8mW/cm2, rather than 40mW/cm2, which they had previously used. This has the effect of dimming the light but does not affect the wavelength. While both energy levels are perfectly safe for the human eye, reducing the energy further is an additional benefit.

Home-based affordable eye therapies

With a paucity of affordable deep red-light eye-therapies available, Professor Jeffery has been working for no commercial gain with Planet Lighting UK, a small company in Wales and others, with the aim of producing 670nm infra-red eye ware at an affordable cost, in contrast to some other LED devices designed to improve vision available in the US for over $20,000.

“The technology is simple and very safe; the energy delivered by 670nm long wave light is not that much greater than that found in natural environmental light,” Professor Jeffery said.

“Given its simplicity, I am confident an easy-to-use device can be made available at an affordable cost to the general public.

“In the near future, a once a week three-minute exposure to deep red light could be done while making a coffee, or on the commute listening to a podcast, and such a simple addition could transform eye care and vision around the world.”

Study limitations

Despite the clarity of the results, researchers say some of the data are “noisy.” While positive effects are clear for individuals following 670nm exposure, the magnitude of improvements can vary markedly between those of similar ages. Therefore, some caution is needed in interpretating the data. It is possible that there are other variables between individuals that influence the degree of improvement that the researchers have not identified so far and would require a larger sample size.

This research was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, and Sight Research UK.

To help meet the costs of this research and future research, Professor Glen Jeffery’s Lab at the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology receives donations via UCL’s Give Now platform.

*Declining eyesight improved by looking at deep red light & Journals of Gerontology

** ‘A day in the life of mitochondria reveals shifting workloads’ in Scientific Reports

***Only cones not rods were tested in this study; similar previous research identified a comparable effect on cones and rods, satisfying the team any effect on cones could be translated to rods.

The researchers showed that by starting from seemingly common materials, a radically new quantum state of matter can appear. The discovery emerged from their efforts to create a quantum spin liquid which they could use to investigate emergent quantum phenomena such as gauge theory. This involves fabricating a single layer of atomically thin tantalum disulphide, but the process also creates islands that consist of two layers.

When the team examined these islands, they found that interactions between the two layers induced a phenomenon known as the Kondo effect, leading to a macroscopically entangled state of matter producing a heavy-fermion system.

The Kondo effect is an interaction between magnetic impurities and electrons that causes a material’s electrical resistance to change with temperature. This results in the electrons behaving as though they have more mass, leading these compounds to be called heavy fermion materials. This phenomenon is a hallmark of materials containing rare earth elements.

Heavy fermion materials are important in several domains of cutting-edge physics, including research into quantum materials. ‘Studying complex quantum materials is hindered by the properties of naturally occurring compounds. Our goal is to produce artificial designer materials that can be readily tuned and controlled externally to expand the range of exotic phenomena that can be realized in the lab,’ says Professor Peter Liljeroth.

For example, heavy fermion materials could act as topological superconductors, which could be useful for building qubits that are more robust to noise and perturbation from the environment, reducing error rates in quantum computers. ‘Creating this in real life would benefit enormously from having a heavy fermion material system that can be readily incorporated into electrical devices and tuned externally,’ explains Viliam Va?o, a doctoral student in Liljeroth’s group and the paper’s lead author.

Although both layers in the new material are tantalum sulphide, there are subtle but important differences in their properties. One layer behaves like a metal, conducting electrons, while the other layer has a structural change that causes electrons to be localized into a regular lattice. The combination of the two results in the appearance of heavy fermion physics, which neither layer exhibits alone.

This new heavy fermion material also offers a powerful tool for probing quantum criticality. ‘The material can reach a quantum-critical point when it begins to move from one collective quantum state to another, for example, from a regular magnet towards an entangled heavy fermion material,’ explains Professor Jose Lado. ‘Between these states, the entire system is critical, reacting strongly to the slightest change, and providing an ideal platform to engineer even more exotic quantum matter.’

‘In the future, we will explore how the system reacts to the rotation of each sheet relative to the other and try to modify the coupling between the layers to tune the material towards quantum critical behaviour,’ says Liljeroth.

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Function follows form when it comes to understanding the properties of a material. How its atoms are chemically bonded to each other, and their resulting structural arrangement, determines a material’s physical qualities — both those that are observable by the naked eye and those that are only revealed by scientific probing.

Carbon is unrivaled in its ability to form stable structures — alone and in combination with other elements. Some forms of carbon are highly organized, with repeating crystalline lattices. Others are more disordered, a quality termed amorphous.

The type of bond holding a carbon-based material together determine its hardness. For example, soft graphite has two-dimensional bonds and hard diamond has three-dimensional bonds.

“The synthesis of an amorphous carbon material with three-dimensional bonds has been a long-standing goal,” explained Fei. “The trick is to find the right starting material to transform with the application of pressure.”

“For decades Carnegie researchers have been at the forefront of the field, using laboratory techniques to generate extreme pressures to produce novel materials or mimic the conditions found deep inside planets,” added Carnegie Earth and Planets Laboratory Director Richard Carlson.

Because of its extremely high melting point, it’s impossible to use diamond as the starting point to synthesize diamond-like glass. However, the research team, led by Jilin University’s Bingbing Liu and Mingguang Yao — a former Carnegie visiting scholar — made their breakthrough by using a form of carbon composed of 60 molecules arranged to form a hollow ball. Informally called a buckyball, this Nobel Prize-winning material was heated just enough to collapse its soccer-ball-like structure to induce disorder before turning the carbon to crystalline diamond under pressure.

The team used a large-volume multi-anvil press to synthesize the diamond-like glass. The glass is sufficient large for characterization. Its properties were confirmed using a variety of advanced, high-resolution techniques for probing atomic structure.

“The creation of a glass with such superior properties will open the door to new applications,” Fei explained. “The use of new glass materials hinges on making large pieces, which has posed a challenge in the past. The comparatively lower temperature at which we were able to synthesize this new ultrahard diamond glass makes mass production more practical.”

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