But there’s another, older model that’s been mostly ignored by the young men of America: the HPV vaccine.

Using data from the 2010-2018 National Health Interview Surveys, Michigan Medicine researchers found that just 16% of men who were 18 to 21 years old had received at least one dose of the HPV vaccine at any age. In comparison, 42% of women in the same age bracket had gotten at least one shot of the vaccine.

The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommends two doses of the vaccine at 11 or 12 years old, but Americans can still benefit from the HPV vaccine if they receive it later, as long as they get three doses by age 26.

In the U-M study, however — even among those who were vaccinated after turning 18 — less than a third of men received all three vaccine doses, and about half of women did.

“Eighteen- to 21-year-olds are at this age where they’re making health care decisions on their own for the first time,” says Michelle M. Chen, M.D., a clinical lecturer in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery and the first author of the study. “They’re in a period of a lot of transition, but young adult men especially, who are less likely to have a primary care doctor, are often not getting health education about things like cancer prevention vaccines.”

The HPV vaccine was designed to prevent reproductive warts and cancers caused by the most common sexually transmitted infection in the United States. The FDA approved the vaccine for women in 2006 and expanded it to men in 2009.

Preventing cervical cancer was the primary focus at that time, so girls and women were more likely to hear about it from their pediatricians or OBGYNs. Yet oropharyngeal cancer, which occurs in the throat, tonsils, and back of the tongue, has now surpassed cervical cancer as the leading cancer caused by HPV — and 80% of those diagnosed with it are men.

“I don’t think that a lot of people, both providers and patients, are aware that this vaccine is actually a cancer-prevention vaccine for men as well as women,” Chen says. “But HPV-associated oropharyngeal cancer can impact anyone — and there’s no good screening for it, which makes vaccination even more important.”

Chen believes a dual-prong approach is necessary to up the HPV vaccination rate for those who are male, with renewed pushes from pediatricians to target kids and outreach from university health services and fraternity houses for the young adult population who may have missed getting the vaccine when they were younger. Pharmacists as well as urgent care and emergency room providers could also be helpful allies.

Story Source:

Materials provided by Michigan Medicine – University of Michigan. Original written by Mary Clare Fischer. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Interfaces in solids form the basis for much of modern technology. For example, transistors found in all our electronic devices work by controlling the electrons at interfaces of semiconductors. More broadly, the interface between any two materials can have unique properties that are dramatically different from those found within either material separately, setting the stage for new discoveries.

Like semiconductors, superconducting materials have many important implications for technology, from magnets for MRIs to speeding up electrical connections or perhaps making possible quantum technology. The vast majority of superconducting materials and devices are 3D, giving them properties that are well understood by scientists.

One of the foundational questions with superconducting materials involves the transition temperature — the extremely cold temperature at which a material becomes superconducting. All superconducting materials at regular pressures become superconducting at temperatures far below the coldest day outside.

Now, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have discovered a new way to generate 2D superconductivity at a material interface at a relatively high — though still cold — transition temperature. This interfacial superconductor has novel properties that raise new fundamental questions and might be useful for quantum information processing or quantum sensing.

In the study, Argonne postdoctoral researcher Changjiang Liu and colleagues, working in a team led by Argonne materials scientist Anand Bhattacharya, have discovered that a novel 2D superconductor forms at the interface of an oxide insulator called KTaO₃ (KTO). Their results were published online in the journal Science on February 12.

In 2004, scientists observed a thin sheet of conducting electrons between two other oxide insulators, LaAlO₃ (LAO) and SrTiO₃ (STO). It was later shown that that this material, called a 2D electron gas (2DEG) can even become superconducting — allowing the transport of electricity without dissipating energy. Importantly, the superconductivity could be switched on and off using electric fields, just like in a transistor.

However, to achieve such a superconducting state, the sample had to be cooled down to about 0.2 K — a temperature that is close to absolute zero (- 273.15 °C), requiring a specialized apparatus known as a dilution refrigerator. Even with such low transition temperatures (T_C), the LAO/STO interface has been heavily studied in the context of superconductivity, spintronics and magnetism.

In the new research, the team discovered that in KTO, interfacial superconductivity could emerge at much higher temperatures. To obtain the superconducting interface, Liu, graduate student Xi Yan and coworkers grew thin layers of either europium oxide (EuO) or LAO on KTO using state-of-the-art thin film growth facilities at Argonne.

“This new oxide interface makes the application of 2D superconducting devices more feasible,” Liu said. “With its order-of-magnitude higher transition temperature of 2.2 K, this material will not need a dilution refrigerator to be superconducting. Its unique properties raise many interesting questions.”

A strange superconductor

Surprisingly, this new interfacial superconductivity shows a strong dependence on the orientation of the facet of the crystal where the electron gas is formed.

Adding to the mystery, measurements suggest the formation of stripe-like superconductivity in lower doping samples where rivulets of superconducting regions are separated by normal, nonsuperconducting regions. This kind of spontaneous stripe formation is also called nematicity, and is usually found in liquid crystal materials used for displays.

“Electronic realizations of nematicity are rare and of great fundamental interest. It turns out that EuO overlayer is magnetic, and the role of this magnetism in realizing the nematic state in KTO remains an open question,” Bhattacharya said.

In their Science paper, the authors also discuss the reasons why the electron gas forms. Using atomic resolution transmission electron microscopes, Jianguo Wen at the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne, along with Professor Jian-Min Zuo’s group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, showed that defects formed during the growth of the overlayer may play a central role.

In particular, they found evidence for oxygen vacancies and substitutional defects, where the potassium atoms are replaced by europium or lanthanum ions — all of which add electrons to the interface and turn it into a 2D conductor. Using ultrabright X-rays at the Advanced Photon Source (APS), Yan along with Argonne scientists Hua Zhou and Dillon Fong, probed the interfaces of KTO buried under the overlayer and observed spectroscopic signatures of these extra electrons near the interface.

“Interface-sensitive X-ray toolkits available at the APS empower us to reveal the structural basis for the 2DEG formation and the unusual crystal-facet dependence of the 2D superconductivity. A more detailed understanding is in progress,” Zhou said.

Beyond describing the mechanism of 2DEG formation, these results point the way to improving the quality of the interfacial electron gas by controlling synthesis conditions. Being that the superconductivity occurs for both the EuO and LAO oxide overlayers that have been tried thus far, many other possibilities remain to be explored.

“There’s a folk psychology or tacit assumption that what anesthesia does is simply ‘turn off’ the brain,” said Earl Miller, Picower Professor of Neuroscience and co-senior author of the study in eLife. “What we show is that propofol dramatically changes and controls the dynamics of the brain’s rhythms.”

Conscious functions, such as perception and cognition, depend on coordinated brain communication, in particular between the thalamus and the brain’s surface regions, or cortex, in a variety of frequency bands ranging from 4 to 100 Hz. Propofol, the study shows, seems to bring coordination among the thalamus and cortical regions down to frequencies around just 1 Hz.

Miller’s lab, led by postdoc Andre Bastos and former graduate student Jacob Donoghue, collaborated with that of co-senior author Emery N. Brown, who is Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience and an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. The collaboration therefore powerfully unified the Miller lab’s expertise on how neural rhythms coordinate the cortex to produce conscious brain function with the Brown lab’s expertise in the neuroscience of anesthesia and statistical analysis of neural signals.

Brown said studies that show how anesthetics change brain rhythms can directly improve patient safety because these rhythms are readily visible on the EEG in the operating room. The study’s main finding of a signature of very slow rhythms across the cortex offers a model for directly measuring when subjects have entered unconsciousness after propofol administration, how deeply they are being maintained in that state, and how quickly they may wake up once propofol dosing ends.

“Anesthesiologists can use this as a way to better take care of patients,” Brown said.

Brown has long studied how brain rhythms are affected in humans under general anesthesia by making and analyzing measurements of rhythms using scalp EEG electrodes and to a limited extent, cortical electrodes in epilepsy patients. Because the new study was conducted in animal models of those dynamics, the team was able to implant electrodes that could directly measure the activity or “spiking” of many individual neurons and rhythms in the cortex and thalamus. Brown said the results therefore significantly deepen and extend his findings in people.

For instance, the same neurons that they measured chattering away with spikes of voltage 7-10 times a second during wakefulness routinely fired only once a second or less during propofol-induced unconsciousnesss, a notable slowing called a “down state.” In all, the scientists made detailed simultaneous measurements of rhythms and spikes in five regions: two in the front of the cortex, two toward the back, and the thalamus.

“What’s so compelling is we are getting data down to the level of spikes,” Brown said. “The slow oscillations modulate the spiking activity across large parts of the cortex.”

As much as the study explains how propofol generates unconsciousness, it also helps to explain the unified experience of consciousness, Miller said.

“All the cortex has to be on the same page to produce consciousness,” Miller said. “One theory about how this works is through thalamo-cortical loops that allow the cortex to synchronize. Propofol may be breaking the normal operation of those loops by hyper synchronizing them in prolonged down states. It disrupts the ability of the cortex to communicate.”

For instance, by making measurements in distinct layers of the cortex, the team found that higher frequency “gamma” rhythms, which are normally associated with new sensory information like sights and sounds, were especially reduced in superficial layers. Lower frequency “alpha” and “beta” waves, which Miller has shown tend to regulate the processing of the information carried by gamma rhythms, were especially reduced in deeper layers.

In addition to the prevailing synchrony at very slow frequencies, the team noted other signatures of unconsciousness in the data. As Brown and others have observed in humans before, alpha and beta rhythm power was notably higher in posterior regions of the cortex during wakefulness, but after loss of consciousness power at those rhythms flipped to being much higher in anterior regions.

The team further showed that stimulating the thalamus with a high frequency pulse of current (180Hz) undid propofol’s effects.

“Stimulation produced an awake-like cortical state by increasing spiking rates and decreasing slow-frequency power,” the authors wrote in the study. “In all areas, there was a significant increase in spiking during the stimulation interval compared to pre-stimulation baseline.”

Researchers from the Institute of Neurosciences of the University of Barcelona (UBNeuro) and the Sant Joan de Déu Research Institute (IRSJD) have created a new methodology to try to answer this basic question on human development.

The results, published in the Nature’s open-access journal Scientific Reports, confirm that newborn neural encoding of voice pitch is comparable to the adults’ sabilities after three years of being exposed to language. However, there are differences regarding the perception of spectral and temporal fine structures of sounds, which consists on the ability to distinguish between vocal sounds such as /o/ and /a/. Therefore, according to the authors, neural encoding of this sound aspect, recorded for the first time in this study, is not found mature enough after being born, but it needs a certain exposure to the language as well as stimulation and time to develop.

According to the researchers, knowing the level of development typical in these neural encoding processes from birth will enable them to make an “early detection of language impairments, which would provide an early intervention or stimulus to reduce future negative consequences.”

The study is led by Carles Escera, professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology of the UB, and has been carried out at the IRSJD, in collaboration with Maria Dolores Gómez Roig, head of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology of Hospital Sant Joan de Déu. The study is also signed by the experts Sonia Arenillas Alcón, first author of the article, Jordi Costa Faidella and Teresa Ribas Prats, all members of the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group (Brainlab) of the UB.

Decoding the spectral and temporal fine structure of sound

In order to distinguish the neural response to speech stimuli in newborns, one of the main challenges was to record, using the baby’s electroencephalogram, a specific brain response: the frequency-following response (FFR). The FFR provides information on the neural encoding of two specific features of sound: fundamental frequency, responsible for the perception of voice pitch (high or low), and the spectral and temporal fine structure. The precise encoding of both features is, according to the study, “fundamental for the proper perception of speech, a requirement in future language acquisition.”

To date, the available tools to study this neural encoding enabled researchers to determine whether the newborn’s baby was able to encode inflections in the voice pitch, but it did not when it came to the spectral and temporal fine structure. “Inflections in voice pitch contour are very important, especially in tonal variations like in Mandarin, as well as to perceive the prosody from speech that transmits emotional content of what is said. However, the spectral and temporal fine structure of sound is the most relevant aspect in language acquisition regarding non-tonal languages like ours, and the few existing studies on the issue do not inform about the precision with which a newborn’s brain encodes it,” note the authors.

The main cause of this lack of studies is the technical limitation caused by the type of sounds used to conduct these tests. Therefore, authors have developed a new stimulus (/oa/) whose internal structure (increasing change in voice pitch, two different vocals) allows them to evaluate the precision of the neural encoding of both features of the sound simultaneously using the FFR analysis.

An adapted test to the limitations of the hospital environment

One of the most highlighted aspects of the study is that the stimulus and the methodology are compatible to the typical limitations of the hospital environment in which the tests are carried out. “Time is essential in the FFR research with newborns. On the one hand, because recording time limitations determine the stimuli they can record. On the other hand, for the actual conditions of the situation of newborns in hospitals, where there is a frequent and continuous access to the baby and the mother so they receive the required care and undergo evaluations and routine tests to rule out health problems,” authors add. Considering these restrictions, the responses of the 34 newborns that were part of the study were recorded in sessions that lasted between twenty and thirty minutes, almost half the time used in common sessions in studies on speech sound discrimination.

A potential biomarker of learning problems

After this study, the objective of the researchers is to characterize the development f neural encoding of the spectral and temporal fine structure of speech sounds over time. To do so, they are currently recording the frequency-following response in those babies that took part in the present study, who are now 21 months old. “Given that the two first years of life are a critical period of stimulation for language acquisition, this longitudinal evaluation of the development will enable us to have a global view on how these encoding skills mature over the first months of life,” note the researchers.

The aim is to confirm whether the observed alterations -after birth- in neural encoding of sounds are confirmed with the appearance of observable deficits in infant language development. If that happens, “that neural response could be certainly considered a useful biomarker in early detection of future literacy difficulties, just like detected alterations in newborns could predict the appearance of delays in language development. This is the objective of the ONA project, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation,” they conclude.

In a new study, “Modeling human migration under environmental change: a case study of the effect of sea level rise in Bangladesh,” researchers led by Maurizio Porfiri, an engineer at the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, apply data science to predict how the cascading effects of the migration in Bangladesh will ultimately affect 1.3 million people across the country by 2050. The work has implications for coastal populations worldwide.

The new study, co-authors of which include first author Pietro De Lellis, an engineer at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy, and Manuel Ruiz Marin, a mathematician at the Technical University of Cartagena, Spain, presents a mathematical model of human migration that considers not just economic factors but also human behavior — whether people are unwilling or unable to leave and if they later return home. It also considers the cascading effects of migration, as migrants repeatedly move to find new opportunities, and original inhabitants are displaced. The research is published in Earth’s Future, AGU’s journal for interdisciplinary research on the past, present and future of our planet and its inhabitants

“We are not only looking at a snapshot, but we are trying to reconstruct the trajectory of the migration and looking at its evolution,” said Porfiri, who is also an Institute Professor of mechanical and aerospace, biomedical, and civil and urban engineering at NYU Tandon.

According to the new model, the districts in the south along the Bay of Bengal will be the first to be impacted by sea-level rise, causing a migration that will ripple across the country and affect all 64 districts. Some migrants will likely be rejected by the existing residents — or displace them — triggering further migrations. While the population of the capital, Dhaka, initially will surge, the results suggest that movement away from the inundated capital region will ultimately cause its population to shrink.

Bangladesh is especially susceptible to sea-level rise because it is a low-lying country crisscrossed with rivers, and already experiences frequent flooding during the summer monsoon season. Its coastline on the Bay of Bengal measures about 580 kilometers (360 miles), with a large portion consumed by the Ganges river delta. An estimated 41 percent of its 163 million people live at elevations lower than 10 meters (about 32 feet).

The work follows upon a 2020 study by Porfiri and Ruiz Marin that examined population migrations in Bangladesh due to sea level rise as a way to verify an approach to detect spatial associations from small datasets, through the use of specific principles of information theory.

The authors emphasize that the new model can be used to study migration in response to any environmental disturbance that causes unrest, such as droughts, earthquakes or wildfires. Additionally, it is relatively simple and can make reliable predictions based on little data.

An earlier migration model using the same data predicted that the central region of Bangladesh, including its capital, Dhaka, would receive the greatest number of migrants. The new study agrees, but finds that the ripple effects from that migration will ultimately cause people to leave the capital, leading to a population decline.

Porfiri explained that the team’s approach to mathematical modeling for reliably predicting environmental migration in Bangladesh can be applied anywhere.

“Droughts, desertification, floods, earthquakes, and wildfire threaten livelihood worldwide; from wealthy to developing economies, every country is vulnerable to environmental change,” he said. “Mathematical models can assist in providing reliable predictions of environmental migration, which are critical for devising effective policy initiatives and improving our preparedness for future migration patterns.”

De Lellis added that the outputs from the model can help governments plan and prepare for the impacts of environmental disturbances by allocating resources to the most hard-hit regions and ensuring that cities are adequately equipped to deal with the influx of environmental migrants.

“Mathematical modeling is the only way we have to ground our future decisions,” said De Lellis. “Migration has lots of sources — [environmental disasters,] political tensions — but in the end, we need to use science to provide useful tools for decision-makers.”

The research is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), Groups of Excellence of the region of Murcia, the Fundación Séneca, Science and Technology Agency, and Compagnia di San Paolo, Istituto Banco di Napoli — Fondazione, project ACROSS.