According to the study, published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence, which evaluated the feasibility of using smartphone sensor data to identify episodes of cannabis intoxication in the natural environment, a combination of time features (tracking the time of day and day of week) and smartphone sensor data had a 90 percent rate of accuracy.

“Using the sensors in a person’s phone, we might be able to detect when a person might be experiencing cannabis intoxication and deliver a brief intervention when and where it might have the most impact to reduce cannabis-related harm,” said corresponding author, Tammy Chung, professor of psychiatry and director of the Center for Population Behavioral Health at the Rutgers Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research.

Cannabis intoxication has been associated with slowed response time, affecting performance at work or school or impairing driving behavior leading to injuries or fatalities. Existing detection measures, such as blood, urine or saliva tests, have limitations as indicators of cannabis intoxication and cannabis-related impairment in daily life.

The researchers analyzed daily data collected from young adults who reported cannabis use at least twice per week. They examined phone surveys, self-initiated reports of cannabis use, and continuous phone sensor data to determine the importance of time of day and day of week in detecting use and identified which phone sensors are most useful in detecting self-reported cannabis intoxication.

They found that time of day and day of week had 60 percent accuracy in detecting self-reporting of cannabis intoxication and the combination of time features and smartphone sensor data had 90 percent accuracy in detecting cannabis intoxication.

Travel patterns from GPS data — at times when they reported feeling high — and movement data from accelerometer that detects different motions, were the most important phone sensor features for detection of self-reported cannabis intoxication.

Researchers used low burden methods (tracking time of day and day of week and analyzing phone sensor data) to detect intoxication in daily life and found that the feasibility of using phone sensors to detect subjective intoxication from cannabis consumption is strong.

Future research should investigate the performance of the algorithm in classifying intoxicated versus not intoxicated reports in those who use cannabis less frequently. Researchers should study reports of intoxication using tools that law enforcement might use showing a stronger correlation with self-reported cannabis use.

Study authors include faculty from Stevens Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Tokyo, Japan, and University of Washington, Seattle.

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

Scientists have previously created superfluids in liquids, solids, and gases, and hope harnessing superfluids’ properties could help lead to discoveries such as a superconductor that works at room temperature. Bhattacharya said such a discovery could revolutionize the electronics industry, where loss of energy due to resistive heating of wires incurs major costs.

However, one of the main problems with studying superfluids is that all available methods of measuring the delicate superfluid rotation bring the motion to a halt. Bhattacharya and his team of RIT postdoctoral researchers teamed up with scientists in Japan, Taiwan, and India to propose a new detection method that is minimally destructive, in situ, and in real-time.

Bhattacharya said the techniques used to detect gravitational waves predicted by Einstein inspired the new method. The basic idea is to pass laser light through the rotating superfluid. The light that emerged would then pick up a modulation at the frequency of superfluid rotation. Detecting this frequency in the light beam using existing technology yielded knowledge of the superfluid motion. The challenge was to ensure the laser beam did not disturb the superflow, which the team accomplished by choosing a light wavelength different from any that would be absorbed by the atoms.

“Our proposed method is the first to ensure minimally destructive measurement and is a thousand times more sensitive than any available technique,” said Bhattacharya. “This is a very exciting development, as the combination of optics with atomic superflow promises entirely new possibilities for sensing and information processing.”

Bhattacharya and his colleagues also showed that the light beam could actively manipulate supercurrents. In particular, they showed that the light could create quantum entanglement between two currents flowing in the same gas. Such entanglement could be useful for storing and processing quantum information.

Bhattacharya’s theoretical team on the paper consisted of RIT postdoctoral researchers Pardeep Kumar and Tushar Biswas, and alumnus Kristian Feliz ’21 (physics). The international collaborators consisted of professors Rina Kanamoto from Meiji University, Ming-Shien Chang from the Academia Sinica, and Anand Jha from the Indian Institute of Technology. Bhattacharya’s work was supported by a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.

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Materials provided by Rochester Institute of Technology. Original written by Luke Auburn. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Following dozens of children over the course of five years, a Boston University researcher has taken the closest look yet at the link between how babies’ brains are structured in infancy and their ability to learn a language at a young age, and to what degree their environment plays a role in brain and language development.

The new research, described in a paper published in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, finds that the brain’s organizational pathways might set a foundation for a child’s language learning abilities within the first year of life. These pathways are known as white matter, and they act as the connectors between the billions of neurons — called gray matter — that comprise the brain tissue. This allows for the exchange of signals and for all of the different tasks and functions we need to perform, as well as all of the biological processes that sustain us.

“A helpful metaphor often used is: white matter pathways are the ‘highways,’ and gray matter areas are the ‘destinations’,” says BU neuroscientist and licensed speech pathologist Jennifer Zuk, who led the study. Zuk, a College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences: Sargent College assistant professor of speech, language, and hearing sciences, says the more someone does a certain task, like learning a new language, the stronger and more refined the pathways become in the areas of the brain responsible for that task, allowing information to flow more efficiently through the white matter highways. Recent evidence suggests that white matter most rapidly develops within the first two years of life, according to Zuk.

In addition to white matter development, scientists have long known that the environment also plays an important role in shaping a person’s language abilities, Zuk says. But many uncertainties remain about whether nature or nurture is more dominant in determining the makeup of white matter and how well a baby learns to communicate.

In their study, Zuk says, she and her colleagues sought answers to several specific questions: from very early on, to what extent does predisposed brain structure play a role in development? Does the brain develop in tandem with language, and is the environment ultimately driving the progress of both? And to what extent does brain structure in early infancy set children up for success with language?

To investigate this, Zuk and Boston Children’s Hospital researcher and study senior author Nadine Gaab met with 40 families with babies to take images of the infants’ brains using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and gather first-of-its-kind data on white matter development. No small feat, considering the babies needed to be sound asleep to allow for crisp capture of their brain activity and structure using MRI.

“It was such a fun process, and also one that calls for a lot of patience and perseverance,” says Zuk, who had to master the challenge of getting 4-to-18-month-old babies comfortable enough to snooze through the MRI process — the loud sounds of an MRI could be very disruptive to a sleeping baby. “There are very few researchers in the world using this approach,” she says, “because the MRI itself involves a rather noisy background…and having infants in a naturally deep sleep is very helpful in accomplishing this pretty crazy feat.”

It’s also the first time that scientists have used MRI to look at the relationship between brain structure and language development in full-term, typically developing children from infancy to school age.

One important white matter pathway the researchers looked at using MRI is called the arcuate fasciculus, which connects two regions of the brain responsible for language production and comprehension. Using MRI, the researchers measured the organization of white matter by looking at how easily water diffuses through the tissue, indicating the pathway’s density.

Five years after first rocking babies to sleep and gently tucking them inside an MRI machine, Zuk and her collaborators met up with the children and their families again to assess each child’s emerging language abilities. Their assessments tested each one’s vocabulary knowledge, their ability to identify sounds within individual words, and their ability to blend individual sounds together to understand the word it makes.

According to their findings, children born with higher indications of white matter organization had better language skills five years later, suggesting that communication skills could be strongly linked to predisposed brain structure. But, Zuk says, this is only the first piece of a very complicated puzzle.

“Perhaps the individual differences in white matter we observed in infancy might be shaped by some combination of a child’s genetics and their environment,” she says. “But it is intriguing to think about what specific factors might set children up with more effective white matter organization early on.”

Although their findings indicate a foundation for language is established in infancy, “ongoing experience and exposure [to language] then builds upon this foundation to support a child’s ultimate outcomes,” Zuk says.

She says this means that during the first year of a child’s life “there’s a real opportunity for more environmental exposure [to language] and to set children up for success in the long term.”

Zuk and her research partners plan to continue investigating the relationship between environmental and genetic components of language learning. Their goal is to help parents and caretakers identify early risk factors in language development in young children and determine strategies for strengthening babies’ communicative skills early on in life.

3D printing, also known as additive manufacturing, is more versatile and efficient than casting. It adds a material with precision, often in complex geometries, with considerably less excess to cut away. Adding low-dimensional nanomaterials such as CNTs, graphene, metal nanoparticles and quantum dots allows 3D-printed materials to adapt to external stimuli, giving them features such as electrical and thermal conductance, magnetism and electrochemical storage.

But 3D printing using plastic, metal or something else entirely isn’t new. What Tech researchers have done differently is use polymer nanocomposites (made of epoxy, carbon nanotubes and nano-clay) and a printing process that doesn’t sacrifice functionality. The junction of material type and morphology — size, shape, structure — in polymer nanocomposite inks is the ultimate in form meeting function.

The exploration of process, morphology and properties of polymeric inks is the subject of an article recently published in the journal Additive Manufacturing by Parisa Pour Shahid Saeed Abadi, an engineer who explores the interface of materials, mechanics and medicine, and graduate student Masoud Kasraie.

Abadi and Kasraie point out that before researchers can sprint off to the races using polymeric inks, they must first learn to walk. The first step is digging into the intersection of the macro scale (how our eyes see a material performing) and the nano scale (what we can’t see, but know is occurring).

Building Understanding Before Market Share

While polymer nanocomposites and 3D-printing products and services both have billion-dollar market values, nanomaterial 3D printing only has a market value of approximately $43 million, Abadi noted.

“For national prosperity and sustaining global leadership in manufacturing, the gap between the real-world applications of 3D printing and nanomaterials versus nanomaterial 3D printing needs to be closed,” Abadi said. “The gap exists due to lack of control of nanocomposite properties in the 3D-printing process, because we don’t fully understand the process-morphology-property relationship.”

The bottleneck is understanding the complex interplay between the macro-scale mechanics of 3D-printing processes and the nano-scale mechanics and physics of nanocomposites. Abadi and Kasraie’s research seeks to loosen the bottleneck by exploring the relationship between 3D-printing process parameters and nanomaterial morphology in nanocomposite printing inks, which is the most important but least explored piece of the puzzle.

The Many Benefits of Nanomaterial Ink

Moving beyond the science of nanocomposite ink, the material holds great promise because of its many functionalities. One advantage of 3D printing is near-complete control over the final product’s shape.

The conductivity of Abadi and Kasraie’s nanomaterial ink is an exceptionally handy trait that gives the printed epoxy the potential to double as electrical wiring — whether in a circuit board, an airplane’s wing or in 3D-printed actuators for guiding catheters in blood vessels. Another useful trait of the nanocomposite polymer ink is its strength.

“In comparison with steel and aluminum, we see 80% weight reduction with epoxy composite with same strength,” Kasraie said.

Finally, in the medical field and aerospace and electronics industries, where defects and damage can spell big trouble, the nanocomposites serve a safety function.

“When something breaks, a tiny crack starts from a microscale defect and progresses until it breaks the entire structure,” Abadi said. “Nanocomposite features make bridges in those cracks and don’t let the cracks grow. This is one of the mechanisms through which carbon nanotubes increase the mechanical strength of the material.”

Property-to-weight ratio, electrical conductivity, increased strength and ease of application are just a few of the many promising reasons why polymer nanocomposite inks will likely replace traditional epoxies.

Now, a new study by a team of scholars from Germany, Italy, USA, Denmark and the UK, sheds light on the origin and legacy of the enigmatic Etruscans with genome-wide data from 82 ancient individuals from central and southern Italy, spanning 800 BCE to 1000 CE. Their results show that the Etruscans, despite their unique cultural expressions, were closely related to their italic neighbors, and reveal major genetic transformations associated with historical events.

An intriguing phenomenon

With an extinct language that is only partly understood, much of what was initially known about Etruscan civilization comes from the commentary of later Greek and Roman writers. One hypothesis about their origins, the one favored by Herodotus, points to the influence of ancient Greek cultural elements to argue that the Etruscans descended from migrating Anatolian or Aegean groups. Another, championed by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, proposes that the Etruscans originated and developed locally from the Bronze Age Villanovan culture and were therefore an autochthonous population.

Although the current consensus among archaeologists supports a local origin for the Etruscans, a lack of ancient DNA from the region has made genetic investigations inconsistent. The current study, with a time transect of ancient genomic information spanning almost 2000 years collected from 12 archaeological sites, resolves lingering questions about Etruscan origins, showing no evidence for a recent population movement from Anatolia. In fact, the Etruscans shared the genetic profile of the Latins living in nearby Rome, with a large proportion of their genetic profiles coming from steppe-related ancestry that arrived in the region during the Bronze Age.

Considering that steppe-related groups were likely responsible for the spread of Indo-European languages, now spoken around the world by billions of people, the persistence of a non-Indo-European Etruscan language is an intriguing and still unexplained phenomenon that will require further archaeological, historical, linguistic and genetic investigation.

“This linguistic persistence, combined with a genetic turnover, challenges simple assumptions that genes equal languages and suggests a more complex scenario that may have involved the assimilation of early Italic speakers by the Etruscan speech community, possibly during a prolonged period of admixture over the second millennium BCE,” says David Caramelli, Professor at the University of Florence.

Periods of change

Despite a few individuals of eastern Mediterranean, northern African, and central Europeanorigins, the Etruscan-related gene pool remained stable for at least 800 years, spanning the Iron Age and Roman Republic period. The study finds, however, that during the subsequent Roman Imperial period, central Italy experienced a large scale genetic shift, resulting from admixture with eastern Mediterranean populations, which likely included slaves and soldiers relocated across the Roman Empire.

“This genetic shift clearly depicts the role of the Roman Empire in the large-scale displacement of people in a time of enhanced upward or downward socioeconomic and geographic mobility,” says Johannes Krause, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Looking at the more recent Early Middle Ages, the researchers identified northern European ancestries spreading across the Italian peninsula following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. These results suggest that Germanic migrants, including individuals associated with the newly established Longobard Kingdom, might have left a traceable impact on the genetic landscape of central Italy.

In the regions of Tuscany, Lazio, and Basilicata the population’s ancestry remained largely continuous between the Early Medieval times and today, suggesting that the main gene pool of present-day people from central and southern Italy was largely formed at least 1000 years ago.

Although more ancient DNA from across Italy is needed to support the above conclusions, ancestry shifts in Tuscany and northern Lazio similar to those reported for the city of Rome and its surroundings suggests that historical events during the first millennium CE had a major impact on the genetic transformations over much of the Italian peninsula.

“The Roman Empire appears to have left a long-lasting contribution to the genetic profile of southern Europeans, bridging the gap between European and eastern Mediterranean populations on the genetic map of western Eurasia,” says Cosimo Posth, Professor at the University of Tübingen and Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment.

The research shows, through multiple avenues, that a shortened version of the gene — a variant known as GHRd3 — may help people survive in situations where resources are scarce or unpredictable.

Findings will be published on Sept. 24 in Science Advances.

Here’s the story the study tells: GHRd3 emerged about 1-2 million years ago, and was likely the overwhelmingly predominant version of the gene in the ancestors of modern humans, as well as in Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Then, “In the last 50,000 years or so, this variant becomes less prevalent, and you have a massive decrease in the frequency of this variant among East Asian populations we studied, where we see the estimated allele frequency drop from 85% to 15% during the last 30,000 years,” says University at Buffalo evolutionary biologist Omer Gokcumen. “So the question becomes: Why? Was this variant favored in the past, and it fell out of evolutionary favor recently? Or is what we are observing just a blip among the complexity of genomes?”

The research provides new insights into the function of GHRd3 that may help explain why these evolutionary changes occurred, demonstrating that the variant may be useful in coping with nutritional stress.

“We think that this variant is beneficial where there are periods of starvation, which was the case for most of human evolution,” says Gokcumen, PhD, associate professor of biological sciences in the UB College of Arts and Sciences. With regard to GHRd3’s waning prominence in recent human history, he speculates that, “Maybe the rapid technological and cultural advances over the past 50,000 years have created a buffer against some of the fluctuations in resources that made GHRd3 so advantageous in the past.”

“GHRd3 is interesting because it is a very common deletion that is variable between you and me among humans,” says Marie Saitou, PhD, tenure-track investigator at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and a former postdoctoral researcher in Gokcumen’s lab at UB. “Normally, these kinds of important fundamental genes do not change between human to human, and are highly conserved in other animals even.”

The work was led by Saitou; Skyler Resendez, PhD, a recent UB graduate in biological sciences who is now a postdoctoral fellow in biomedical informatics in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB; Xiuqian Mu, MD, PhD, associate professor of ophthalmology in the Jacobs School at UB and at the Ross Eye Institute; and Gokcumen. An international team of collaborators contributed perspectives in this study, which integrated advanced population genetics methods with research in a mouse model to understand the complicated history and function of a genetic variant.

A close look at possible functions of GHRd3

The growth hormone receptor gene plays a major role in controlling the body’s response to growth hormone, helping to activate processes that lead to growth.

To study the gene’s evolutionary history, scientists looked at the genomes of many modern humans, as well as those of four archaic hominins — three Neanderthals from different parts of the world, and one Denisovan. (All four had the GHRd3 variant.)

The team also investigated GHRd3’s modern functions. For example, the researchers found that the GHRd3 variant was associated with better outcomes in a group of children who had endured and survived severe malnutrition.

Additionally, studies on mice supported the idea that GHRd3 helps to regulate the body’s response to food scarcity. Male mice with the variant had some biological similarities to mice that had reduced access to food — traits that may be beneficial in surviving nutritional stress, the study found.

And when scientists placed male mice with GHRd3 on a low-calorie diet, the animals were smaller at 2 months old than counterparts without the variant. This may be beneficial in times of nutritional stress, as smaller bodies need less food. Because the effects of GHRd3 were not as prominent in females, male and female mice carrying the variant ended up being the same size when they were on a low-calorie diet (usually, males are significantly larger than females).

“Our study points to sex- and environment-specific effects of a common genetic variant. In the mice, we observed that Ghrd3 leads to a ‘female-like’ expression pattern of dozens of genes in male livers under calorie restriction, which potentially leads to the observed size reduction,” Saitou says.

“Females, already smaller in size, may suffer from negative evolutionary consequences if they lose body weight. Thus, it is a reasonable and also very interesting hypothesis that a genetic variant that may affect response to nutritional stress has evolved in a sex-specific manner,” Mu says.

“Despite its prevalence in human populations, this unique genetic deletion has not been observed in any other living species,” Resendez says. “This makes it difficult to study. However, scientific advancements now give us the ability to edit genomes in a targeted fashion. This allowed us to generate a mouse model containing the deletion so that we could observe its effects closely in a controlled manner.”

“It is an exciting time for doing research on human evolution, where it is now possible to integrate data from ancient genomes, gene editing technologies, and advanced mathematical approaches to tell the human story in all its messy glory,” Gokcumen says.

In addition to Gokcumen, Mu, Resendez and Saitou, the study’s authors included G. Ekin Atilla-Gokcumen and Apoorva Pradhan in the UB Department of Chemistry; Fuguo Wu in the UB Department of Ophthalmology; Natasha Lie and Nancy Hall at the Baylor College of Medicine; Qihui Zhu at The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine; Charles Lee at The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine and First Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University; Laura Reinholdt and Gary Churchill at The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor; Yoko Satta at SOKENDAI; Leo Speidel at University College London and the Francis Crick Institute; Shigeki Nakagome at Trinity College Dublin; and Neil Hanchard at the National Human Genome Research Institute.

The research was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation; the BrightFocus Foundation; the National Eye Institute and National Institute on Aging, both part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health; the Collaborative Learning and Integrated Mentoring in the Biosciences (CLIMB) program at UB; the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service; the First Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University; and the Sir Henry Wellcome fellowship.

The curvature determines the flux

Surprisingly, the microbe was found not to move randomly though the open space. Instead, the average movement pattern was both highly organized and symmetrical: the map of movement patterns showed a defined distribution of probability fluxes. “In particular, the strength of the flux was found to depend on the curvature of the adjacent solid interface: a higher degree of curvature resulted in a stronger flux” explain Jan Cammann and Fabian Schwarzendahl, the lead authors of the study. For practical reasons, all measurements were done in a quasi 2-dimensional environment, meaning that the microbe was confined from the top and bottom to better monitor its movement and avoid defocusing. Observing its movement pattern, the group of Marco Mazza (University of Loughborough and MPIDS) created a model to predicts the probabilities to flow in a certain direction. This model was then applied to compartments with more complex interface curvatures and experimentally verified by the lab of Oliver Bäumchen (MPIDS and University of Bayreuth). “It turns out that the curvature of the interface is the dominating factor which directly determines the flux of the self-propelling microbe.,” Bäumchen summarizes.

A technological implication for the future

As this discovery constitutes a fundamental observation, the model might as well be applied to other areas of active matter physics. “With our model, we can basically statistically predict where the object of interest will be in the next moment,” Mazza reports. “This could not only significantly improve our understanding of the organization of life, but also help to engineer technical devices.”

Understanding the principles behind the organization of active matter therefore can have direct implications on our future technologies. Potential applications of the model could be directing the movement of photosynthetic microorganisms in such a way so their flux can propel a generator, which would be a direct way to convert sunlight into mechanical energy. But also, in the pharmaceutical and healthcare sector, the findings of the scientists might be applied: “A potential application in the medical sector is the development of micro-robots delivering drugs to their specific destination in an efficient manner,” Bäumchen concludes.

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Materials provided by Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.