It comes down to the behavior of T cells, a type of immune cell. When a person — or a mouse — develops asthma, their T cells become activated. In a new mouse study, researchers discovered that asthma causes the T cells to behave in a way that induces lung inflammation but prevents the growth of brain tumors. What’s bad news for the airways may be good news for the brain.

The findings, available online in Nature Communications, suggest that reprogramming T cells in brain tumor patients to act more like T cells in asthma patients could be a new approach to treating brain tumors.

“Of course, we’re not going to start inducing asthma in anyone; asthma can be a lethal disease,” said senior author David H. Gutmann, MD, PhD, the Donald O. Schnuck Family Professor of Neurology. “But what if we could trick the T cells into thinking they’re asthma T cells when they enter the brain, so they no longer support brain tumor formation and growth? These findings open the door to new kinds of therapies targeting T cells and their interactions with cells in the brain.”

The idea that people with inflammatory diseases, such as asthma or eczema, are less prone to developing brain tumors was first proposed more than 15 years ago, based on epidemiologic observations. But there was no obvious reason why the two very different kinds of diseases would be linked, and some scientists questioned whether the association was real.

Gutmann is an expert on neurofibromatosis (NF), a set of complex genetic disorders that cause tumors to grow on nerves in the brain and throughout the body. Children with NF type 1 (NF1) can develop a kind of brain tumor known as an optic pathway glioma. These tumors grow within the optic nerves, which carries messages between the eyes and the brain. Gutmann, director of the Washington University NF Center, noted an inverse association between asthma and brain tumors among his patients more than five years ago but didn’t know what to make of it. It wasn’t until more recent studies from his lab began to reveal the crucial role that immune cells play in the development of optic pathway gliomas that he began to wonder whether immune cells could account for the association between asthma and brain tumors.

Jit Chatterjee, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher and the paper’s first author, took on the challenge of investigating the association. Working with co-author Michael J. Holtzman, MD, the Selma and Herman Seldin Professor of Medicine and director of the Division of Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine, Chatterjee studied mice genetically modified to carry a mutation in their NF1 genes and form optic pathway gliomas by 3 months of age.

Chatterjee exposed groups of mice to irritants that induce asthma at age 4 weeks to 6 weeks, and treated a control group with saltwater for comparison. Then, he checked for optic pathway gliomas at 3 months and 6 months of age. The mice with asthma did not form these brain tumors.

Further experiments revealed that inducing asthma in tumor-prone mice changes the behavior of their T cells. After the mice developed asthma, their T cells began secreting a protein called decorin that is well-known to asthma researchers.

In the airways, decorin is a problem. It acts on the tissues that line the airways and exacerbates asthma symptoms. But in the brain, Chatterjee and Gutmann discovered, decorin is beneficial. There, the protein acts on immune cells known as microglia and blocks their activation by interfering with the NFkappaB activation pathway. Activated microglia promote the growth and development of brain tumors.

Treatment with either decorin or caffeic acid phenethyl ester (CAPE), a compound that inhibits the NFkappaB activation pathway, protected mice with NF1 mutations from developing optic pathway gliomas. The findings suggest that blocking microglial activation may be a potentially useful therapeutic approach for brain tumors.

“The most exciting part of this is that it shows that there is a normal communication between T cells in the body and the cells in the brain that support optic pathway glioma formation and growth,” said Gutmann, who is also a professor of genetics, of neurosurgery and of pediatrics. “The next step for us is to see whether this is also true for other kinds of brain tumors. We’re also investigating the role of eczema and early-childhood infections, because they both involve T cells. As we understand this communication between T cells and the cells that promote brain tumors better, we’ll start finding more opportunities to develop clever therapeutics to intervene in the process.”

Machine learning and neural networks have become all the rage in recent years, and quite understandably so, considering their many successes in image recognition, medical diagnosis, e-commerce and many other fields. Still though, this software-based approach to machine intelligence has its drawbacks, not least because it consumes so

Mimicking the human brain

This power issue is one of the reasons that researchers have been trying to develop computers that are much more energy efficient. And to find a solution many are finding inspiration in the human brain, a thinking machine unrivalled in its low power consumption due to how it combines memory and processing.

Neurons in our brain communicate with one another through so-called synapses, which are strengthened each time information flows through them. It is this plasticity that ensures that humans remember and learn.

“In our research, we have taken this model to develop a robot that is able to learn to move through a labyrinth,” explains Imke Krauhausen, PhD student at the department of Mechanical Engineering at TU/e and principal author of the paper.

“Just as a synapse in a mouse brain is strengthened each time it takes the correct turn in a psychologist’s maze, our device is ‘tuned’ by applying a certain amount of electricity. By tuning the resistance in the device, you change the voltage that control the motors. They in turn determine whether the robot turns right or left.”

So how does it work?

The robot that Krauhausen and her colleagues used for their research is a Mindstorms EV³, a robotics kit made by Lego. Equipped with two wheels, traditional guiding software to make sure it can follow a line, and a number of reflectance and touch sensors, it was sent into a 2 m² large maze made up out of black-lined hexagons in a honeycomb-like pattern.

The robot is programmed to turn right by default. Each time it reaches a dead end or diverges from the designated path to the exit (which is indicated by visual cues), it is told to either return or turn left. This corrective stimulus is then remembered in the neuromorphic device for the next effort.

“In the end, it took our robot 16 runs to find the exit successfully,” says Krauhausen. “And, what’s more, once it has learned to navigate this specific route (target path 1), it can navigate any other path that it is given in one go (target path 2). So, the knowledge it has acquired is generalizable.”

Part of the success of the robot’s ability to learn and exit the maze lies in the unique integration of sensors and motors, according to Krauhausen, who cooperated closely with the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz for this research. “This sensorimotor integration, in which sense and movement reinforce one another, is also very much how nature operates, so this is what we tried to emulate in our robot.”

Smart polymers

Another clever thing about the research is the organic material used for the neuromorphic robot. This polymer (known as p(g2T-TT)) is not only stable, but it also is able to ‘retain’ a large part of the specific states in which it has been tuned during the various runs through the labyrinth. This ensures that the learned behaviour ‘sticks’, just like neurons and synapses in a human brain remember events or actions.

The use of polymer instead of silicon in the field of neuromorphic computing was pioneered by Paschalis Gkoupidenis of the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz and Yoeri van de Burgt of TU/e, both co-authors of the paper.

In their research (dating from 2015 and 2017), they proved that the material can be tuned in a much larger range of conduction than inorganic materials, and that it is able to ‘remember’ or store learned states for extended periods. Since then, organic devices have become a hot topic in the field of hardware-based artificial neural networks.

Bionic hands

Polymeric materials also have the added advantage that they can be used in numerous biomedical applications. “Because of their organic nature, these smart devices can in principle be integrated with actual nerve cells. Say you lost your arm during an injury. Then you could potentially use these devices to link your body to a bionic hand,” says Krauhausen.

Another promising application of organic neuromorphic computing lies in small so-called edge computing devices where data from sensors is processed locally outside of the cloud. Van de Burgt: “This is where I see our devices going in the future, our materials will be very useful because they are easy to tune, use much less power, and are cheap to make.”

So will neuromorphic robots one day be able to play a soccer game, just like TU/e’s soccer robots?

Krauhausen: “In principle, that is certainly possible. But there’s a long way to go. Our robots still rely partly on traditional software to move around. And for the neuromorphic robots to execute really complex tasks, we need to build neuromorphic networks in which many devices work together in a grid. That’s something that I will be working on in the next phase of my PhD research.”

A ‘human-like’ brain helps a robot out of a maze: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O05YVljxrtg

A catalyst is a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change.

The findings are significant because the production of hydrogen is important for “many aspects of our life, such as fuel cells for cars and the manufacture of many useful chemicals such as ammonia,” said the OSU College of Engineering’s Zhenxing Feng, a chemical engineering professor who led the research. “It’s also used in the refining of metals, for producing human-made materials such as plastics and for a range of other purposes.”

Producing hydrogen by splitting water via an electrochemical catalytic process is cleaner and more sustainable than the conventional method of deriving hydrogen from natural gas via a carbon-dioxide-producing process known as methane-steam reforming, Feng said. But the cost of the greener technique has been a barrier in the marketplace.

The new findings, which describe ways to design catalysts that can greatly improve the efficiency of the clean hydrogen production process, were published in Science Advances and JACS Au.

In facilitating reaction processes, catalysts often experience structural changes, Feng said. Sometimes the changes are reversible, other times irreversible, and irreversible restructuring is believed to degrade a catalyst’s stability, leading to a loss of catalytic activity that lowers reaction efficiency.

Feng, OSU Ph.D. student Maoyu Wang and collaborators studied the restructuring of catalysts in reaction and then manipulated their surface structure and composition at the atomic scale to achieve a highly efficient catalytic process for producing hydrogen.

An active phase of a catalyst based on amorphous iridium hydroxide exhibited efficiency 150 times that of its original perovskite structure and close to three orders of magnitude better than the common commercial catalyst, iridium oxide.

“We found at least two groups of materials that undergo irreversible changes that turned out to be significantly better catalysts for hydrogen production,” Feng said. “This can help us produce hydrogen at $2 per kilogram and eventually $1 per kilogram. That’s less expensive than the polluting process in current industries and will help achieve the United States’ goal of zero emissions by 2030.”

Feng notes that the U.S. Department of Energy Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office has established benchmarks of technologies that can produce clean hydrogen at $2 per kilogram by 2025 and $1 per kilogram by 2030 as part of the Hydrogen Energy Earthshot target of cutting the cost of clean hydrogen by 80%, from $5 to $1 per kilogram, in one decade.

The water electrolysis technology for clean hydrogen production that Feng’s group is focused on uses electricity from renewable sources to split water to make clean hydrogen. However, the efficiency of water splitting is low, he said, mainly due to the high overpotential — the difference between the actual potential and the theoretical potential of an electrochemical reaction — of one key half-reaction in the process, the oxygen evolution reaction or OER.

“Catalysts are critical to promoting the water-splitting reaction by lowering the overpotential, and thus lowering the total cost for hydrogen production,” Feng said. “Our first study in JACS Au laid the foundation for us, and as demonstrated in our Science Advances article we now can better manipulate atoms on surface to design catalysts with the desired structure and composition.”

The National Science Foundation supported Feng’s research through the Northwest Nanotechnology Infrastructure site at OSU, and the Department of Energy provided funding as well.

Collaborating with Feng and Wang were researchers from Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Texas, Peking University, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Northwestern University, South China University of Technology, the University of Cambridge, the University of California, Berkeley, and Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.

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Materials provided by Oregon State University. Original written by Steve Lundeberg. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Personal care and beauty products contain several ingredients that often include a wide range of endocrine-disrupting chemicals like phthalates, parabens, phenols, parabens and toxic metals. These chemicals interact with hormone systems, influencing synthesis, regulation, transport, metabolism and hormone reception, which are all especially vulnerable during pregnancy.

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and National Institutes of Health-funded study, published in Environmental Research, examined the association between personal care product use and the levels of sex steroid hormones, including estrogens and progesterone and thyroid hormones among pregnant women. The researchers also explored how demographic factors impact the use of certain personal care products.

Researchers collected blood samples from 1,070 pregnant women between 18 and 40 years of age enrolled in the Puerto Rico PROTECT Cohort, an ongoing prospective birth study designed to examine environmental exposures in pregnant women and their children who live in the northern karst zone of Puerto Rico.

As part of the study, participants underwent physical exams and completed a series of questionnaires providing their demographics, occupation, lifestyle and use of personal care products like fragrances, lotions, cosmetics, nail polish, shaving cream, mouthwash, shampoo and other hair products, such as bleach, relaxers and mousse. Participants also provided blood samples twice throughout their pregnancies, which were analyzed for nine sex steroid and thyroid hormones.

The researchers found that the use of hair products, particularly hair dyes, bleach, relaxers and mousse are associated with lower levels of sex steroid hormones, which have a critical role maintaining pregnancy and fetal development. Disruptions of these hormones may contribute to adverse maternal and pregnancy outcomes like growth restriction, preterm birth and low birth weight.

“Alterations in hormone levels, especially during pregnancy, can have vast consequences beyond health at birth including changes in infant and child growth, pubertal trajectories and may influence development of hormone-sensitive cancers such as breast, uterine and ovarian cancer,” says the study’s lead author, Zorimar Rivera-Núñez, an assistant professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health. “Additional research should address the public health impact of exposure to chemicals in hair products in pregnant populations.”

The researchers also found that socioeconomic variables, such as income, education and employment status, influence the use of personal care products among pregnant women in Puerto Rico. For example, participants who reported a household income greater than $100,000 used personal care products more often than participants with lower household incomes. Additionally, employed participants reported using more cosmetics than those who were unemployed.

“Prior research has shown that non-pregnant populations have also reported associations between frequency of use and socioeconomic markers, such as household income and education,” Rivera-Núñez said. “A strong culture of beauty influences Latina women, which may impact consistent use of cosmetics through pregnancy. This data is important because it will allow us to identify populations who are at an increased risk of chemical exposures associated with personal care product use.”

The researchers, who include individuals from the Rutgers Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute, University of Michigan, University of Puerto Rico, University of Georgia and Northeastern University, recommend that primary physicians and obstetricians should speak to reproductive-age women about the potential health impact of endocrine disrupting chemicals, like those found in hair products.

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Materials provided by Rutgers University. Original written by Michelle Edelstein. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The way we instinctively speak to babies — higher pitch, slower speed, exaggerated pronunciation — not only appeals to them, but likely helps them learn to understand what we’re saying. New research from the University of Florida suggests that baby talk can have another, previously unknown benefit: helping babies learn to produce their own speech. By mimicking the sound of a smaller vocal tract, the researchers think, we’re cluing babies in to how the words should sound coming out of their own mouths.

“It seems to stimulate motor production of speech, not just the perception of speech,” said Matthew Masapollo, Ph.D., an assistant professor in UF’s Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences and director of the UF Laboratory for the Study of Cognition, Action, and Perception of Speech in the College of Public Health and Health Professions. “It’s not just goo-goo ga-ga.”

In the study, the researchers changed the frequency sounds to mimic either an infant or adult vocal tract, and then tested how infants reacted. Six- to eight-month-old babies “displayed a robust and distinct preference for speech with resonances specifying a vocal tract that is similar in size and length to their own,” they wrote.

Four- to six-month old babies didn’t have that preference, suggesting that older babies’ dawning ability to control their voices and make words out of babble could be what makes the infant-like sounds more appealing.

Though baby talk may sound simple, it’s accomplishing a lot, says coauthor Linda Polka, Ph.D., of McGill University.

“We’re trying to engage with the infant to show them something about speech production,” she said. “We’re priming them to process their own voice.”

While parents are sometimes discouraged from engaging in baby talk, Masapollo and Polka’s research shows the patterns associated with that speaking style — which scientists call “infant-directed speech” — could be a key component in helping babies make words.

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Materials provided by University of Florida. Original written by Alisson Clark. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

One of the obstacles to developing these “living biotherapeutics” is that many of the species that could be beneficial are harmed by oxygen, making it difficult to manufacture, store, and deliver them. MIT chemical engineers have now shown that they can protect those bacteria with a coating that helps them to survive the manufacturing process.

In a study appearing today in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the researchers showed they could use the coating on a strain of E. coli as well as another species that may aid in digestion of plant starches. The coating could be applied to many other species as well, they say.

“We believe this coating could be used to protect pretty much any microbe of interest,” says Ariel Furst, the Raymond and Helen St. Laurent Career Development Professor of Chemical Engineering and the senior author of the new study. “We think there are microbes out there that can help with a variety of diseases, and that we can protect them for manufacture and production.”

MIT postdoc Gang Fan is the lead author of the study. Pris Wasuwanich, an MIT undergraduate, and Mariela Rodriguez-Otero, a former MIT Materials Research Laboratory Summer Scholar, are also authors of the paper.

Protective coating

Most of the microbes that live in the human gut are anaerobic, and they have varying degrees of sensitivity to oxygen. Some can tolerate a little bit of oxygen, while for others, oxygen is deadly.

This makes it difficult to test their potential as treatments for human disease, because bacteria need to be freeze-dried and formulated as capsules in order to be used therapeutically. In this study, Furst and her colleagues decided to try protecting anaerobic bacteria by coating them with a material made from metal ions and organic compounds called polyphenols.

When polyphenols and metal ions are put into a solution, they form a two-dimensional, grid-like sheet. For this study, the researchers used iron, which is safe for human consumption, and three polyphenols that are all classified as GRAS (generally regarded as safe) by the Food and Drug Administration: gallic acid, tannic acid, and epigallocatechin (EGCG), all of which are found in tea and other plant products.

If bacteria are also added to the solution, the material self-assembles into a coating on individual bacterial cells. This coating protects bacteria during the freeze-drying and manufacturing process. The researchers showed that the coated cells were healthy and able to perform normal cellular activities, although their growth was temporarily inhibited.

When exposed to an acidic environment, such as that of the stomach, the coating breaks down and releases the bacteria.

Deploying bacteria

One of the strains that the researchers used to test the coating is Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron. This species, which has enzymes specialized to digest carbohydrates, appears to be more abundant in the gut microbiome of healthy people. However, it has been difficult to study how these bacteria might promote health if given as biotherapeutics, because they are very sensitive to oxygen.

Bacteria with this type of protective coating could also be useful for agricultural applications such as helping to make crops more stress-tolerant. Another possible application for the coating is to use it to protect microbes that are used as vaccines. The BCG vaccine, which consists of the bovine version of the microbe that causes tuberculosis, is difficult to produce and must be stored at low temperatures. Coating it with a protective layer could eliminate the need for cold storage and make distribution easier, Furst says.

“If we can remove the need for cold storage and transport, we think it would make a lot of therapeutics more widely available,” she says.

The research was funded by the MIT-Deshpande Center, the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program at MIT, and the MIT Materials Research Laboratory MRSEC Program of the National Science Foundation.

Unsuccessful efforts have been made for more than 20 years to develop field emission guns using theoretically high-performance nano materials. It has been found challenging to integrate a nanowire-based field emission gun into an electron microscope without undermining its physical properties, such as lives and stability. For this reason, commercially available field emission guns are still equipped with tungsten needles developed more than half a century ago.

This NIMS-JEOL research team 1) developed techniques to chemically synthesize and grow high-purity, single-crystal nanowires of LaB₆, known to be an excellent electron-emitting hot cathode material, 2) designed an electron source mechanism capable of efficiently emitting electrons and 3) developed techniques to extract a single nanowire and integrate it into an optimized electron source structure.

The LaB₆ nanowire-based electron source has a number of advantages: relatively moderate vacuum condition requirements, very high current stability, low extraction voltage, narrow electron beam energy distribution width and high brightness. This electron source may be applicable to the development of next-generation field emission electron microscopes with higher spatial and energy resolution — potentially valuable tools in the semiconductor and medical fields.

This project was carried out by a team of NIMS researchers (Han Zhang, Cretu Ovidiu, Koji Kimoto, Takeshi Kasaya, Hideki T. Miyazaki, Naohito Tsujii, Hongxin Wang, Yasushi Yamauchi and Daisuke Fujita) and JEOL researchers (Yu Jimbo, Akira Niwata, Akihiro Ikeda, Akira Yasuhara, Shin-ichi Kitamura and Hironobu Manabe).

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Materials provided by National Institute for Materials Science, Japan. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

In experiments at Washington State University, scientists have developed a technique to see these matter wave caustics by placing attractive or repulsive obstacles in the path of a cold atom laser. The results are curving cusps or folds, upward or downward “V” shapes, which the researchers describe in a paper for Nature Communications.

While it is foundational research, these caustics have potential applications for highly precise measurement or timing devices such as interferometers and atomic clocks.

“It’s a beautiful demonstration of how we can manipulate matter waves in a way that is very similar to how one would manipulate light,” said Peter Engels, WSU Yount distinguished professor and the paper’s senior author. “An atom is accelerated by gravity, so therefore, we can mimic effects that would be very difficult to see with light. Also, since atoms respond to many different things, we can potentially exploit this for new types of sensors that are particularly good at detecting magnetic fields, gradients in electric fields or in gravity.”

To achieve these effects, first the scientists had to create one of the coldest places on Earth, which they were able to accomplish in the Fundamental Quantum Physics lab at WSU. Engels and his colleagues used optical lasers to take energy out of an atomic cloud trapped inside a vacuum chamber, cooling it very close to absolute zero (?273.15 degrees Celsius or ?459.67 degrees Fahrenheit).

This extreme cold makes atoms behave quantum mechanically in ways very different from the familiar laws of nature. In these conditions, instead of behaving like particles of matter, the atoms move like waves. Clouds formed of such atoms are known as Bose-Einstein condensates, named after the theorists whose work first predicted this state of matter, Albert Einstein and Satyendra Nath Bose.

In the process of exploring these condensates, the researchers at WSU created a cold atom laser, meaning the wave-like atoms started lining up in a column and moving together.

“A light laser is a collimated, coherent stream of photons, and we’re essentially doing that with atoms,” said Maren Mossman, the paper’s first author who worked on the project as a WSU post-doctoral fellow and is now the Clare Boothe Luce assistant professor of physics at the University of San Diego. “The atoms sort of walk together and behave as one object. So then, we decided to see what happens if we poked this.”

For this study, the researchers ‘poked’ at the atom laser by putting optical obstacles in its path, essentially shining specific wavelengths of laser lights onto the accelerating stream of atoms. One obstacle type repelled the atoms and made caustics in downward fold shapes; another attracted them making caustics in upward cusp shapes.

The system is also very tunable, the researchers said, meaning they can change how fast the atoms accelerate.

“Caustics in atom lasers have never really been studied with this flexibility,” said Engels.

In addition to Engels and Mossman, the co-authors include Michael Forbes, WSU associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and Thomas Bersano, a former WSU post-doctoral fellow now at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

This study was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation.

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Materials provided by Washington State University. Original written by Sara Zaske. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.