While most people with MS are first diagnosed with relapsing-remitting MS, marked by symptom flare-ups followed by periods of remission, many people with relapsing-remitting MS eventually transition to secondary progressive MS, which does not have wide swings in symptoms but instead a slow, steady worsening of the disease.

The study involved autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplants, which use healthy blood stem cells from the participant’s own body to replace diseased cells.

“So far, conventional treatments have prevented people with MS from experiencing more attacks and worsening symptoms, but not in the long term,” said study author Matilde Inglese, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Genoa in Italy and a member of the American Academy of Neurology. “Previous research shows more than half of the people with MS who take medication for their disease still get worse over a 10-year period. Our results are exciting because they show hematopoietic stem cell transplants may prevent someone’s MS disabilities from getting worse over the longer term.”

The study looked at 210 people with MS who received stem cell transplants from 1997 to 2019. Their average age was 35. Of those people, 122 had relapsing-remitting MS and 86 had secondary progressive MS and two had primary progressive MS.

Researchers assessed participants at six months, five years and 10 years after their transplants.

Five years into the study, researchers found that 80% of the people experienced no worsening of their MS disability. At the 10-year mark, 66% still had not experienced a worsening of disability.

When looking at just the people with the most common form of MS, researchers found 86% of them experienced no worsening of their disability five years after their transplant. Ten years later, 71% still experienced no worsening of their disability.

Also, people with progressive MS benefited from stem cell transplants. Researchers found that 71% of the people with this type of MS experienced no worsening of their disability five years after their transplants. Ten years later, 57% experienced no worsening of their disability.

“Our study demonstrates that intense immunosuppression followed by hematopoietic stem cell transplants should be considered as a treatment for people with MS, especially those who don’t respond to conventional therapy,” Inglese said.

Limitations of the study include that it was retrospective, did not include a control group and the clinicians who helped measure participants’ disability were aware that they had received stem cell transplants, so that could have led to bias. Inglese said these limitations will be addressed in future research.

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Materials provided by American Academy of Neurology. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Idiopathic intracranial hypertension is when the pressure in the fluid surrounding the brain rises. It can mimic the symptoms of a brain tumor, causing chronic, disabling headaches, vision problems and in rare cases, vision loss. It is most often diagnosed in women of childbearing age. Treatment is often weight loss. In some cases, surgery may be required.

“The considerable increase in idiopathic intracranial hypertension we found may be due to many factors but likely mostly due to rising obesity rates,” said study author William Owen Pickrell, Ph.D., M.R.C.P., of Swansea University in Wales in the United Kingdom and a member of the American Academy of Neurology. “What is more surprising from our research is that women who experience poverty or other socioeconomic disadvantages may also have an increased risk independent of obesity.”

For the study, researchers used a national healthcare database in Wales to analyze 35 million patient years of data over a 15-year period, between 2003 and 2017. They identified 1,765 people with idiopathic intracranial hypertension during that time. Of the group, 85% were women. Researchers recorded body mass index measurements for study participants. Body mass index is calculated by dividing weight by height. For every one person with the disorder, researchers compared three people without it who were matched for gender, age and socioeconomic status.

The socioeconomic status of each person with the disorder was determined by where they live, using a national scoring system that considers factors like income, employment, health, education and access to services. People in the study were then divided into five groups ranging from those with the fewest socioeconomic advantages to those with the most.

Overall, researchers found a six-fold increase in the number of cases of the disorder over the course of the study. In 2003, for every 100,000 people, 12 were living with the disorder, compared to 76 people in 2017. Also, in 2013, for every 100,000 people, two were diagnosed during that year, compared to eight people in 2017.

Researchers found that the increasing number of people living with the disorder corresponded to rising obesity rates in Wales during the study, with 29% of the population being obese in 2003 compared to 40% in 2017.

“The worldwide prevalence of obesity nearly tripled between 1975 and 2016, so while our research looked specifically at people in Wales, our results may also have global relevance,” said Pickrell.

There were strong links for both men and women between body mass index and risk of the disorder. For women, there were 180 cases per 100,000 people during the study for those with high body mass index compared to 13 women with a body mass index considered to be ideal. For men, there were 21 cases per 100,000 among those with a high body mass index compared to eight cases for those with an ideal body mass index.

Researchers also found that for women only, socioeconomic factors were linked to risk. There were 452 women in the group with the fewest socioeconomic advantages compared to 197 in the group with the most. The women in the group with the fewest had a 1.5 times greater risk of developing the disorder than women in the group with the most, even after adjusting for body mass index.

“Of the five socioeconomic groups of our study participants, women in the lowest two groups made up more than half of the female participants in the study,” said Pickrell. “More research is needed to determine which socioeconomic factors such as diet, pollution, smoking or stress may play a role in increasing a woman’s risk of developing this disorder.”

A limitation of the study was that researchers identified the socioeconomic status of participants by the regions in which they lived instead of obtaining individual socioeconomic information for each participant.

There was the title of a 1993 book by Nobel laureate Leon Lederman that dubbed the Higgs “The God Particle.” There was the search for the Higgs particle that launched after 2009’s first collisions inside the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. There was the 2013 announcement that Peter Higgs and Francois Englert won the Nobel Prize in Physics for independently theorizing in 1964 that a fundamental particle — the Higgs — is the source of mass in subatomic particles, making the universe as we know it possible.

(Plus, there are the Iowa State University physicists on the author list of a 2012 research paper describing how the ATLAS Experiment at the collider observed a new particle later confirmed to be the Higgs.)

And now Jigang Wang, a professor of physics and astronomy at Iowa State and a senior scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory, and a team of researchers have discovered a form of the famous particle within a superconductor, a material capable of conducting electricity without resistance, generally at very cold temperatures.

Wang and his collaborators — including Chang-Beom Eom, the Raymond R. Holton Chair for Engineering and Theodore H. Geballe Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Ilias Perakis, professor and chair of physics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham; and Eric Hellstrom, professor and interim chair of mechanical engineering at Florida State University — report the details in a paper recently published online by the journal Nature Communications.

They write that in lab experiments they’ve found a short-lived “Higgs mode” within iron-based, high-temperature (but still very cold), multi-energy band, unconventional superconductors.

A quantum discovery

This Higgs mode is a state of matter found at the quantum scale of atoms, their electronic states and energetic excitations. The mode can be accessed and controlled by laser light flashing on the superconductor at terahertz frequencies of trillions of pulses per second. The Higgs modes can be created within different energy bands and still interact with each other.

Wang said this Higgs mode within a superconductor could potentially be used to develop new quantum sensors.

“It’s just like the Large Hadron Collider can use the Higgs particle to detect dark energy or antimatter to help us understand the origin of the universe,” Wang said. “And our Higgs mode sensors on the table-top have the potential help us discover the hidden secrets of quantum states of matter.”

That understanding, Wang said, could advance a new “quantum revolution” for high-speed computing and information technologies.

“It’s one way this exotic, strange, quantum world can be applied to real life,” Wang said.

Light control of superconductors

The project takes a three-pronged approach to accessing and understanding the special properties, such as this Higgs mode, hidden within superconductors:

Wang’s research group uses a tool called quantum terahertz spectroscopy to visualize and steer pairs of electrons moving through a superconductor. The tool uses laser flashes as a control knob to accelerate supercurrents and access new and potentially useful quantum states of matter.

Eom’s group developed the synthesis technique that produces crystalline thin films of the iron-based superconductor with high enough quality to reveal the Higgs mode. Hellstrom’s group developed deposition sources for the iron-based superconducting thin film development.

Perakis’ group led the development of quantum models and theories to explain the results of the experiments and to simulate the salient features that come from the Higgs mode.

The work has been supported by a grant to Wang from the National Science Foundation and grants to Eom and Perakis from the U.S. Department of Energy.

“Interdisciplinary science is the key here,” Perakis said. “We have quantum physics, materials science and engineering, condensed matter physics, lasers and photonics with inspirations from fundamental, high-energy and particle physics.”

There are good, practical reasons for researchers in all those fields to work together on the project. In this case, students from the four research groups worked together with their advisors to accomplish this discovery.

“Scientists and engineers,” Wang wrote in a research summary, “have recently come to realize that certain materials, such as superconductors, have properties that can be exploited for applications in quantum information and energy science, e.g., processing, recording, storage and communication.”

In Biointerphases, published by AIP Publishing, researchers from Wageningen University in the Netherlands show how the design can use softer materials and still be strong enough to work.

Probabilistic fasteners work, because they are designed with a tiny pattern on one surface that interlocks with features on the other surface. Currently available fasteners, like Velcro and 3M, are called hook and loop fasteners. That design requires harder, stiff material, which is what causes the loud ripping sound when they are peeled off and why they can damage delicate surfaces, such as fabrics, when attached to them.

The team believes a 3D mushroom design can be made with softer, more flexible materials. The half-spherical mushroom shapes provide sufficient interlocking force on the fabric and hold strong.

For the study, the authors used 3D printing combined with molding to create soft surfaces patterned with the tiny mushrooms. That material was then safely attached to three different fabrics and removed without causing damage to them.

“We wanted to prove that, if you go toward these less stiff features, they can be used to attach and detach to soft and delicate surfaces, like fabrics, without damage. It can be used in many applications such as for diapers or silent fasteners for military use,” author Preeti Sharma said. “There is still a lot of research to be done, but the mushroom-shaped design worked quite well for soft mechanical fasteners.”

The design could lead to advances in the field of soft robotics. Soft robotics aims to build robots with designs that mimic living creatures like octopuses, caterpillars, and worms.

In that kind of robotics, interfaces play a significant role. With advances that make the current mushroom design stronger but keep its softness, it could be used to help robots walk on walls and ceilings like a gecko — an animal that can do that because of an attachment-detachment process that’s similar to how probabilistic fasteners work.

The design also could be used on grippers for robots used in farming and other agricultural jobs, Sharma said.

Sharma said more research into the design is needed before it is ready to be used in a commercially available product. Minor changes to the mushroom shape, possibly lengthening or shortening it to make it more effective, could lead to an even better product, she said.

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Materials provided by American Institute of Physics. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and led by the University of Notre Dame, combined satellite imagery with agricultural surveys as well as household dietary datasets of 160 large-scale land acquisitions across four continents between 2005 and 2015. It is the first comprehensive global analysis of the impact of the land acquisitions of its kind.

“These land deals have been happening for the last two decades on a massive scale,” said Marc Muller, assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences at Notre Dame and lead author of the study. “Our goal was to use empirical data to sort out whether or not large-scale land acquisitions have improved food security by using empirical data. But what we found was that there was either no impact or a negative impact. There was no positive impact.”

Following a global food crisis during the early 2000s, foreign investors purchased more than 220 million acres of land in middle-income and developing countries, according to the study’s estimates, to increase crop production and contribute to the global food supply.

“In many countries throughout the world land is being commodified, so it is becoming easier to buy and sell land. Those, and rising food prices, were drivers for these companies,” Muller said.

There are two competing arguments when it comes to land acquisitions. Proponents view the multinational companies that purchased the land as better positioned to improve production and increase crop yields. But those who oppose argue that the acquisitions encroach on natural resources, lead to displacement of local farm workers and can have a negative impact on local residents — including giving rise to livelihood losses, social instability and/or violence in those regions.

While scientists have analyzed these types of acquisitions using modeling studies, and others have looked at specific situations as a result of the land deals through case studies, Muller said this is the first global analysis of this scale.

Muller and his team analyzed land deals across Latin America, eastern Europe, Africa and Asia. By combining satellite imagery, researchers could see whether crop lands expanded and/or intensified. “We also used data from agriculture surveys to identify what types of crops had been planted in and around those lands prior to the acquisition compared to after, to account for potential transitions from local crops to export-bound crops, and crops that can also be used for biofuel,” such as palm oil and sugar cane, Muller said.

According to the study, trends differed depending on the region — and in some cases the acquisitions had a negative effect on household diets.

In Latin America and eastern Europe — where countries are considered middle-income — investors purchased land in intensified agricultural areas, where crops were already export-bound and local residents already consumed food from global markets. “So, in that sense, these land deals didn’t really change much,” said Muller. “They didn’t increase crop production and they didn’t cause more damage to local food insecurity than what was already taking place. In Africa and Asia, things looked very different.”

The research showed that those land acquisitions increased cropland, cultivating previously uncultivated land, and showed a clear transition from local staple crops such as tapioca to export-bound crops such as wheat and flex crops for potential use as biofuel.

“These crops are interesting for investors because if the price of food is low and the price of energy is high, you can then use the crops for energy,” said Muller. “But these types of crops are not nutrient dense, so it’s not great in terms of food security. As a matter of fact, the data from the household surveys we studied showed a consistent decrease in diet diversity after the deals took place.”

The study is the first in a series the research team will produce based on their analysis. Forthcoming studies will look at the impact of large-scale land acquisitions in relation to water, energy and environment.

Muller is an affiliated member of Notre Dame’s Environmental Change Initiative and a faculty fellow with the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.

Co-authors of the study include Gopal Penny, also at Notre Dame; Meredith T. Niles at the University of Vermont; Vincent Ricciardi at the University of British Columbia; Davide Danilo Chiarelli and Maria Cristina Rulli at the Polytechnic University of Milan; Kyle Frankel Davis at the University of Delaware; Jampel Dell’Angelo at the University of Amsterdam; Paolo D’Odorico and Lorenzo Rosa at the University of California, Berkeley; and Nathan D. Mueller at Colorado State University.

The National Science Foundation, the United States Agency for International Development and the Mava Foundation funded the study.