It is difficult for us to succeed in whatever we set out to do if we lack motivation. We usually need it as a driving force to achieve both short- and long-term goals, from household chores to getting a degree. However, because of the ongoing pandemic, our lifestyles have been subjected to drastic and dynamic changes, and many work- and study-related activities are now carried out online exclusively. This, among other complex factors, have made it difficult for some people to stay focused and motivated, and psychology researchers are trying to find effective and widely applicable solutions to address such problems.

In a recent study published in BMC Psychology, researchers from Ritsumeikan University and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Japan, have explored a simple strategy to increase motivation in college students by nurturing a positive emotion: gratitude. Many studies have shown that even short “gratitude interventions,” which are activities that increase an individual’s awareness of feelings of gratitude, can have a lasting positive effect on that person’s mood, satisfaction, and well-being. However, based on previous studies, the available evidence on the effect of such interventions on academic motivation is somewhat inconclusive. This prompted the researchers to test the effects of a different type of gratitude intervention: daily gratitude journaling.

“Our main hypothesis was that engaging in an online gratitude journal by writing down up to five things one felt grateful for each day could make students be more aware of their academic opportunities — their ‘blessings’ — and help them re-evaluate their motives and goals, ultimately improving their motivation,” explains Dr. Norberto Eiji Nawa from NICT, first author of the study. They recruited 84 participants, all Japanese college students, and divided them into a control group and an intervention group. Over the course of two weeks, students in both groups had to evaluate aspects of their daily life through online questionnaires each day, but only the intervention group had to keep the online daily gratitude journal. At the start of the intervention and after 1, and 2 weeks, and 1 and 3 months, the participants had to complete the Academic Motivation Scale (AMS), a tried-and-tested tool for measuring different aspects of academic motivation.

The results were certainly promising; through statistical analyses, the researchers found that the gratitude intervention through daily journaling significantly increased the students’ academic motivation. Most notably, this robust positive effect was not restricted only to the two-week period of the intervention, as the increased level of academic motivation was maintained even after three months. In addition, through an exploratory analysis, the researchers established that the enhancement in academic motivation was mostly driven by a decrease in “amotivation scores.” Amotivation, in this context, refers to the state in which a person perceives that their own actions are irrelevant to the resulting outcomes, leading to feelings of helplessness and incompetence.

Academic motivation can be one of the primary determinants of both academic achievements and satisfaction with school life, and developing widely applicable intervention strategies is critical to foster student growth. “Online interventions have the advantage of being more accessible, scalable and affordable to large portions of the population. Gathering solid evidence to support their deployment will be essential to unleash their true potential in the future,” concludes Professor Noriko Yamagishi from Ritsumeikan University. Fortunately, it appears that the positive impact of gratitude interventions extends well beyond the already-documented effects on individual well-being.

This study was partly supported by a research grant from the Ritsumeikan Inamori Philosophy Research Center. This Center aims to promote multidisciplinary research on the management philosophy advocated by Dr. Kazuo Inamori, a prominent Japanese entrepreneur and renowned philanthropist. With this major goal in mind, Professor Yamagishi, alongside Dr. Nawa, have been working on the scientific elucidation of the emotions of “altruism” and “gratitude” from the perspective of cognitive psychology and neuroscience. This particular study was conducted as part of this more overarching research. Until the day these human emotions become clearer, we can safely give this piece of advice: remember to count your blessings.

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These conditions include a one dose vaccine effectiveness (efficacy) of 80% or higher and vaccination rates of 0.1% to 0.3% of the population per day. If these conditions apply, the researchers say the strategy could prevent between 47 and 26 deaths per 100,000 people, respectively.

Both the Pfizer and Moderna covid-19 vaccines in a standard two dose schedule are highly effective at preventing symptomatic infections and death. But immunity worldwide remains low, partly owing to low vaccination rates.

The longer it takes to effectively vaccinate the global population, the greater the likely risk of vaccine resistant strains developing. This has led to calls to prioritise single dose vaccination for as many people as possible, even if this means delaying a second dose beyond the studied time frame.

The justification for this relies on the assumption that meaningful protection against covid-19 can be achieved after a single dose of vaccine, but this is the subject of intense debate.

To explore this further, a team of US researchers set out to measure the impact of delayed second dose vaccine policies on infections, hospital admissions, and deaths compared with the current on-schedule two dose regimen.

Using a simulation model based on a “real-world” sample population of 100,000 US adults, they ran a series of scenarios to forecast potentially infectious interactions under different conditions over a six-month period.

These included varying levels of vaccine efficacy and administration rates, and varying assumptions as to whether the vaccine prevents transmission and serious symptoms or only prevents serious symptoms, including death.

They also examined the impact of delaying second doses for those younger than 65, but not before fully vaccinating older people.

The results suggest that under specific conditions a decrease in cumulative mortality, infections, and hospital admissions can be achieved when the second vaccine dose is delayed.

The study replicated the simulations several times and used that data to estimate different population-level outcomes. For example, for a first dose efficacy of 80% and a daily vaccine administration rate of 0.1%, 0.3% and 1% of the population, the estimated total mortality per 100,000 for the delayed versus standard second-dose administration were 402 versus 442, 204 versus 241, and 86 versus 50, respectively.

These results suggest that a delayed second dose strategy is optimal for vaccination rates at or lower than 0.3% population per day if the vaccine efficacy from one dose is 80% or greater.

What’s more, the delayed second dose strategy for people under 65 performed consistently well under all vaccination rates tested, resulting in absolute cumulative mortality reductions up to an estimated 48 per 100,000.

These two conditions seem reasonable on the basis of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate of first dose vaccine efficacy being 80% and only a couple countries such as the US and UK reaching a vaccination rate close to 1%, explain the researchers.

They acknowledge some study limitations based on assumptions used in the model, but they aimed to capture the relevant complex human interaction that are critical in covid-19 transmission, across a timeframe that is useful to decision makers. As such, they say these results may be broadly informative for covid-19 vaccine strategy.

“Decision makers will need to consider their local vaccination rates and weigh the benefits of increasing these rates by delaying a second dose versus the risks associated with the remaining uncertainty in this strategy,” they write. “These decisions should continue to be re-evaluated as new data become available,” they add.

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What they found suggests the Arctic 40,000 years ago maintained a broader diversity of plants that, in turn, supported both more — and more diverse — big animals.

The Arctic today is spartan compared to the wildlife-rich landscape during the ice ages of the Pleistocene epoch between 12,000 and 2.6 million years ago when wild horses, mammoths, bison and other big animals roamed the steppes and grasslands of what is now northern Canada, northern Europe, Alaska and Siberia. Short-faced bears, ground sloths and even cave lions called the 49th State home.

The Arctic supported greater populations as well, even compared to today’s spectacular herds of caribou that can number more than 750,000 animals. The area supported between six and 10 times as many large animals as today’s Arctic.

“In the Pleistocene, the diversity of wildlife was so much greater than we see today,” UC assistant professor Joshua Miller said. “It looked completely different. A key question is why the the Arctic so depauperate by comparison today?”

The study was published in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.

Researchers studied two of the most common big animals living between 12,000 and 40,000 years ago in what is now Alaska: horses and steppe bison, both of which went extinct due to climate change, human hunting or a combination of both.

UC doctoral student and lead author Abigail Kelly made dental casts of fossil specimens obtained from the University of Alaska Museum and subjected the fossil teeth to dental-wear analysis to evaluate the diet of these extinct animals.

“Because foods have different textures and interact with the enamel surface in different ways, we can look at different diets,” Kelly said.

Teeth of plant-eating animals show different signs of wear depending on the type of food they chew. Grass is particularly abrasive because it contains silica that can wear down teeth over time. To the naked eye, grass-eating animals have teeth with blunter wear profiles (called mesowear). When viewed with a microscope, the teeth show parallel scratches. Animals that eat less grass and more leaves from trees, herbs and shrubs have relatively sharper teeth with fewer microscopic scratches.

UC researchers found the wear patterns on the teeth of steppe bison had fewer scratches than modern plains bison that eat mostly grass but more scratches than European bison, which likely feed on more woody plants. Similarly, prehistoric horses had teeth that bore different wear patterns compared to modern horses, suggesting their diet contained fewer abrasive grasses. Prehistoric bison and horses probably ate a more varied diet rich in broadleaf herbaceous plants than today’s bison and horses.But the researchers said the microwear patterns could be a reflection of the seasonal foods the animal ate in the months before it died.?

The study suggested the Arctic had a broader mix of vegetation than exists today.

“It seems like the diets of bison and horses were not that different. They were eating similarly textured foods,” Miller said. “But their physiology is quite different. Bison are foregut fermenters that digest food differently compared to hindgut fermenters such as horses. So there is potential for species to get different levels of nutrition from the same food.”

The study has pressing relevance for conservation of wood bison, which were hunted to extinction in the United States in the 1900s. Populations from Canada were reintroduced to Alaska in 2015. North America’s largest land animal, the wood bison, is a descendant of plains bison that migrated northward about 10,000 years ago and briefly coexisted with the steppe bison before replacing them.

Biologist and study co-author Tom Seaton is overseeing the reintroduction of wood bison for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. He said their analysis offers important perspectives on how diverse populations of herbivores coexisted on the Alaska landscape thousands of years ago that could help biologists understand the needs of wood bison today.

Steppe bison survived thousands of years longer than horses, even though both relied on similar foods, according to UC’s tooth analysis.

But it’s likely the bison and horses evolved to use the landscape’s resources in different ways — a phenomenon called “niche partitioning.” Horses and bison also have important differences in the way they digest food.

“This study provides insights for Alaska’s wood bison restoration project through perspectives of niche partitioning between large herbivores on Alaska’s modern landscape,” Seaton said. “My hope is that this study will provide one more piece in the puzzle of bison restoration in the north.”

While grazers like horses and bison went extinct in the Arctic, browsers such as moose and caribou that subsist mostly on leaves and woody plants still persist.

“What’s interesting is why it’s the grazers that go extinct while the browsers make it through,” Miller said.

Miller has led numerous research expeditions deep into the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge by rigid inflatable boat to collect caribou antlers to track their historic migrations.

“The impacts of climate on vegetation can create a sudden shift,” he said. “The cooler, drier environments of the late Pleistocene allowed megafauna to thrive. But the warm and wet climates of the Holocene led to today’s wet tundra vegetation.”

For her next project, doctoral student Kelly will take a closer look at bison and horses in the Yukon that lived around the same time.

“We’ll be focusing on the story of how bison responded to the environmental changes of the last 50,000 years, as northern climates swung from relatively mild conditions, to extremely cold and dry during the last Glacial period, and finally rapid warming to the boreal forest climate we see today,” she said. “Are bison able to change their diets in response to changing vegetation, or are they fixed within one niche?”

For decades, researchers have tried to harness the potential of solid-state, lithium-metal batteries, which hold substantially more energy in the same volume and charge in a fraction of the time compared to traditional lithium-ion batteries.

“A lithium-metal battery is considered the holy grail for battery chemistry because of its high capacity and energy density,” said Xin Li, Associate Professor of Materials Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS). “But the stability of these batteries has always been poor.”

Now, Li and his team have designed a stable, lithium-metal solid state battery that can be charged and discharged at least 10,000 times — far more cycles than have been previously demonstrated — at a high current density. The researchers paired the new design with a commercial high energy density cathode material.

This battery technology could increase the lifetime of electric vehicles to that of the gasoline cars — 10 to 15 years — without the need to replace the battery. With its high current density, the battery could pave the way for electric vehicles that can fully charge within 10 to 20 minutes.

The research is published in Nature.

“Our research shows that the solid-state battery could be fundamentally different from the commercial liquid electrolyte lithium-ion battery,” said Li. “By studying their fundamental thermodynamics, we can unlock superior performance and harness their abundant opportunities.”

The big challenge with lithium-metal batteries has always been chemistry. Lithium batteries move lithium ions from the cathode to the anode during charging. When the anode is made of lithium metal, needle-like structures called dendrites form on the surface. These structures grow like roots into the electrolyte and pierce the barrier separating the anode and cathode, causing the battery to short or even catch fire.

To overcome this challenge, Li and his team designed a multilayer battery that sandwiches different materials of varying stabilities between the anode and cathode. This multilayer, multimaterial battery prevents the penetration of lithium dendrites not by stopping them altogether but rather by controlling and containing them.

Think of the battery like a BLT sandwich. First comes the bread — the lithium metal anode — followed by lettuce — a coating of graphite. Next, a layer of tomatoes — the first electrolyte — and a layer of bacon — the second electrolyte. Finish it off with another layer of tomatoes and the last piece of bread — the cathode.

The first electrolyte (chemical name Li5.5PS4.5Cl1.5 or LPSCI) is more stable with lithium but prone to dendrite penetration. The second electrolyte, (Li10Ge1P2S12 or LGPS) is less stable with lithium but appears immune to dendrites. In this design, dendrites are allowed to grow through the graphite and first electrolyte but are stopped when they reach the second. In other words, the dendrites grow through the lettuce and tomato but stop at the bacon. The bacon barrier stops the dendrites from pushing through and shorting the battery.

“Our strategy of incorporating instability in order to stabilize the battery feels counterintuitive but just like an anchor can guide and control a screw going into a wall, so too can our multilayer design guide and control the growth of dendrites,” said Luhan Ye, co-author of the paper and graduate student at SEAS. “The difference is that our anchor quickly becomes too tight for the dendrite to drill through, so the dendrite growth is stopped,” Li added.

The battery is also self-healing; its chemistry allows it to backfill holes created by the dendrites.

“This proof-of-concept design shows that lithium-metal solid-state batteries could be competitive with commercial lithium-ion batteries,” said Li. “And the flexibility and versatility of our multilayer design makes it potentially compatible with mass production procedures in the battery industry. Scaling it up to the commercial battery wont’ be easy and there are still some practical challenges, but we believe they will be overcome.”

The research was supported by Dean’s Competitive Fund for Promising Scholarship at Harvard University and Harvard Data Science Initiative Competitive Research Fund. Further developments of this project will be supported by Harvard Physical Sciences and Engineering Accelerator Award and Harvard Climate Change Solutions Fund.

For the first time, researchers have deciphered the brain activity associated with trying to write letters by hand. Working with a participant with paralysis who has sensors implanted in his brain, the team used an algorithm to identify letters as he attempted to write them. Then, the system displayed the text on a screen — in real time.

The innovation could, with further development, let people with paralysis rapidly type without using their hands, says study coauthor Krishna Shenoy, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at Stanford University who jointly supervised the work with Jaimie Henderson, a Stanford neurosurgeon.

By attempting handwriting, the study participant typed 90 characters per minute — more than double the previous record for typing with such a “brain-computer interface,” Shenoy and his colleagues report in the journal Nature on May 12, 2021.

This technology and others like it have the potential to help people with all sorts of disabilities, says Jose Carmena, a neural engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study. Though the findings are preliminary, he says, “it’s a big advancement in the field.”

Brain-computer interfaces convert thought into action, Carmena says. “This paper is a perfect example: the interface decodes the thought of writing and produces the action.”

Thought-powered communication

When an injury or disease robs a person of the ability to move, the brain’s neural activity for walking, grabbing a cup of coffee, or speaking a sentence remain. Researchers can tap into this activity to help people with paralysis or amputations regain lost abilities.

The need varies with the nature of the disability. Some people who have lost the use of their hands can still use a computer with speech recognition and other software. For those who have difficulty speaking, scientists have been developing other ways to help people communicate.

In recent years, Shenoy’s team has decoded the neural activity associated with speech in the hopes of reproducing it. They have also devised a way for participants with implanted sensors to use their thoughts associated with attempted arm movements to move a cursor on a screen. Pointing at and clicking on letters in this way let people type about 40 characters per minute, the previous speed record for typing with a brain computer interface (BCI).

No one, however, had looked at handwriting. Frank Willett, a neuroscientist in Shenoy’s group, wondered if it might be possible to harness the brain signals evoked by putting pen to paper. “We want to find new ways of letting people communicate faster,” he says. He was also motivated by the opportunity to try something different.

The team worked with a participant enrolled in a clinical trial called BrainGate2, which is testing the safety of BCIs that relay information directly from a participant’s brain to a computer. (The trial’s director is Leigh Hochberg, a neurologist and neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital, Brown University, and the Providence VA Medical Center.) Henderson implanted two tiny sensors into the part of the brain that controls the hand and arm, making it possible for the person to, for example, move a robotic arm or a cursor on a screen by attempting to move their own paralyzed arm.

The participant, who was 65 years old at the time of the research, had a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed from the neck down. Using signals the sensors picked up from individual neurons when the man imagined writing, a machine learning algorithm recognized the patterns his brain produced with each letter. With this system, the man could copy sentences and answer questions at a rate similar to that of someone his age typing on a smartphone.

This so-called “Brain-to-Text” BCI is so fast because each letter elicits a highly distinctive activity pattern, making it relatively easy for the algorithm to distinguish one from another, Willett says.

A new system

Shenoy’s team envisions using attempted handwriting for text entry as part of a more comprehensive system that also includes point-and-click navigation, much like that used on current smartphones, and even attempted speech decoding. “Having those two or three modes and switching between them is something we naturally do,” he says.

Next, Shenoy says, the team intends to work with a participant who cannot speak, such as someone with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative neurological disorder that results in the loss of movement and speech.

The new system could potentially help those suffering from paralysis caused by a number of conditions, Henderson adds. Those include brain stem stroke, which afflicted Jean-Dominique Bauby, the author of the book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. “He was able to write this moving and beautiful book by selecting characters painstakingly, one at a time, using eye movement,” Henderson says. “Imagine what he could have done with Frank’s handwriting interface!”

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcApwQxbagg

CAUTION: Investigational Device. Limited by Federal law to investigational use.