Conducted in partnership with the University of Canberra, the finding is part of a study published in Current Psychology, which examined how early childhood experiences relate to different developmental pathways, and how these might be associated with poor mental health.

Given that both positive and negative childhood experiences were found to manifest as anxiety or other mental health disorders into adulthood, researchers believe that it’s our ability to adapt — or rather not adapt — to unexpected scenarios that might be influencing mental health.

In Australia, almost 50 per cent of the population will experience mental illness at some point in their lives, with an estimated 314,000 children aged 4-11 (almost 14 per cent) experiencing a mental disorder.

The national recurrent expenditure on mental health-related services is estimated at $9.9 billion or about $400 per person.

While the study reaffirmed that people who had adverse and unpredictable early life experiences had elevated symptoms of poor mental health (including depression and paranoia), it also found that children who grew up in stable and supportive environments were also at risk of experiencing symptoms of anxiety in adulthood.

Lead researcher, and PhD candidate, UniSA’s Bianca Kahl, says the study highlights the indiscriminate nature of mental illness and reveals key insights about potential risk factors for all children.

“As the prevalence of mental health conditions expands, it’s imperative that we also extend our knowledge of this very complex and varied condition,” Kahl says.

“This research shows that mental health conditions are not solely determined by early life events, and that a child who is raised in a happy home, could still grow up to have a mental health disorder.

“There’s certainly some missing factors in understanding how our childhood environment and early life experiences might translate into mental health outcomes in adulthood.

“We suspect that it’s our expectations about our environments and our ability to adapt to scenarios when our expectations are not being met, that may be influencing our experiences of distress.

“If, as children, we learn how to adapt to change, and we learn how to cope when things do not go our way, we may be in a better position to respond to stress and other risk factors for poor mental health.

“Testing this hypothesis is the focus of the next research study.”

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Published in the journal Nature, the study,”Structural and Spectroscopic Characterization of an Einsteinium Complex,”was co-led by Berkeley Lab scientist Rebecca Abergel and Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Stosh Kozimor, and included scientists from the two laboratories, UC Berkeley, and Georgetown University, several of whom are graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. With less than 250 nanograms of the element, the team measured the first-ever einsteinium bond distance, a basic property of an element’s interactions with other atoms and molecules.

“There’s not much known about einsteinium,” said Abergel,who leads Berkeley Lab’sHeavy Element Chemistry groupand is an assistant professor in UC Berkeley’s Nuclear Engineering department. “It’s a remarkable achievement that we were able to work with this small amount of material and do inorganic chemistry. It’s significant because the more we understand about its chemical behavior, the more we can apply this understanding for the development of new materials or new technologies, not necessarily just with einsteinium, but with the rest of the actinides too. And we can establish trends in the periodic table.”

Short-lived and hard to make

Abergel and her team used experimental facilities not available decades ago when einsteinium was first discovered — theMolecular Foundryat Berkeley Lab and theStanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL)at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, both DOE Office of Science user facilities — to conduct luminescence spectroscopy and X-ray absorption spectroscopy experiments.

But first, getting the sample in a usable form was almost half the battle. “This whole paper is a long series of unfortunate events,” she said wryly.

The material was made at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s High Flux Isotope Reactor, one of only a few places in the world that is capable of making einsteinium, which involves bombarding curium targets with neutrons to trigger a long chain of nuclear reactions. The first problem they encountered was that the sample was contaminated with a significant amount of californium, as making pure einsteinium in a usable quantity is extraordinarily challenging.

So they had to scrap their original plan to use X-ray crystallography — which is considered the gold standard for obtaining structural information on highly radioactive molecules but requires a pure sample of metal — and instead came up with a new way to make samples and leverage element-specific research techniques. Researchers at Los Alamos provided critical assistance in this step by designing a sample holder uniquely suited to the challenges intrinsic to einsteinium.

Then, contending with radioactive decay was another challenge. The Berkeley Lab team conducted their experiments with einsteinium-254, one of the more stable isotopes of the element. It has a half-life of 276 days, which is the time for half of the material to decay. Although the team was able to conduct many of the experiments before the coronavirus pandemic, they had plans for follow-up experiments that got interrupted thanks to pandemic-related shutdowns. By the time they were able to get back into their lab last summer, most of the sample was gone.

Bond distance and beyond

Still, the researchers were able to measure a bond distance with einsteinium and also discovered some physical chemistry behavior that was different from what would be expected from the actinide series, which are the elements on the bottom row of the periodic table.

“Determining the bond distance may not sound interesting, but it’s the first thing you would want to know about how a metal binds to other molecules. What kind of chemical interaction is this element going to have with other atoms and molecules?” Abergel said.

Once scientists have this picture of the atomic arrangement of a molecule that incorporates einsteinium, they can try to find interesting chemical properties and improve understanding of periodic trends. “By getting this piece of data, we gain a better, broader understanding of how the whole actinide series behaves. And in that series, we have elements or isotopes that are useful for nuclear power production or radiopharmaceuticals,” she said.

Tantalizingly, this research also offers the possibility of exploring what is beyond the edge of the periodic table, and possibly discovering a new element. “We’re really starting to understand a little better what happens toward the end of the periodic table, and the next thing is, you could also envision an einsteinium target for discovering new elements,” Abergel said. “Similar to the latest elements that were discovered in the past 10 years, like tennessine, which used a berkelium target, if you were to be able to isolate enough pure einsteinium to make a target, you could start looking for other elements and get closer to the (theorized)island of stability,” where nuclear physicists have predicted isotopes may have half-lives of minutes or even days, instead of the microsecond or less half-lives that are common in the superheavy elements.

Study co-authors were Korey Carter, Katherine Shield, Kurt Smith, Leticia Arnedo-Sanchez, Tracy Mattox, Liane Moreau, and Corwin Booth of Berkeley Lab; Zachary Jones and Stosh Kozimor of Los Alamos National Laboratory; and Jennifer Wacker and Karah Knope of Georgetown University. The research was supported by the DOE Office of Science.

There is nothing new about humans and all other vertebrates having evolved from fish. The conventional understanding has been that certain fish shimmied landwards roughly 370 million years ago as primitive, lizard-like animals known as tetrapods. According to this understanding, our fish ancestors came out from water to land by converting their fins to limbs and breathing under water to air-breathing.

However, limbs and lungs are not innovations that appeared as recent as once believed. Our common fish ancestor that lived 50 million years before the tetrapod first came ashore already carried the genetic codes for limb-like forms and air breathing needed for landing. These genetic codes are still present in humans and a group of primitive fishes.

This has been demonstrated by recent genomic research conducted by University of Copenhagen and their partners. The new research reports that the evolution of these ancestral genetic codes might have contributed to the vertebrate water-to-land transition, which changes the traditional view of the sequence and timeline of this big evolutionary jump. The study has been published in the scientific journal Cell.

“The water-to-land transition is a major milestone in our evolutionary history. The key to understanding how this transition happened is to reveal when and how the lungs and limbs evolved. We are now able to demonstrate that the genetic basis underlying these biological functions occurred much earlier before the first animals came ashore,” stated by professor and lead author Guojie Zhang, from Villum Centre for Biodiversity Genomics, at the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Biology.

A group of ancient living fishes might hold the key to explain how the tetrapod ultimately could grow limbs and breathe on air. The group of fishes includes the bichir that lives in shallow freshwater habitats in Africa. These fishes differ from most other extant bony fishes by carrying traits that our early fish ancestors might have had over 420 million years ago. And the same traits are also present in for example humans. Through a genomic sequencing the researchers found that the genes needed for the development of lungs and limbs have already appeared in these primitive species.

Our synovial joint evolved from fish ancestor

Using pectoral fins with a locomotor function like limbs, the bichir can move about on land in a similar way to the tetrapod. Researchers have for some years believed that pectoral fins in bichir represent the fins that our early fish ancestors had.

The new genome mapping shows that the joint which connects the socalled metapterygium bone with the radial bones in the pectoral fin in the bichir is homologous to synovial joints in humans — the joints that connect upper arm and forearm bones. The DNA sequence that controls the formation of our synovial joints already existed in the common ancestors of bonefish and is still present in these primitive fishes and in terrestrial vertebrates. At some point, this DNA sequence and the synovial joint was lost in all of the common bony fishes — the socalled teleosts.

“This genetic code and the joint allows our bones move freely, which explains why the bichir can move around on land,” says Guojie Zhang.

First lungs, then swim bladder

Moreover, the bichir and a few other primitive fishes have a pair of lungs that anatomically resembles ours. The new study reveals that the lungs in both bichir and alligator gar also function in a similar manner and express same set of genes as human lungs.

At the same time, the study demonstrates that the tissue of the lung and swim bladder of most extant fishes are very similar in gene expression, confirming they are homologous organs as predicted by Darwin. But while Darwin suggested that swim bladders converted to lungs, the study suggests it is more likely that swim bladders evolved from lungs. The research suggests that our early bony fish ancestors had primitive functional lungs. Through evolution, one branch of fish preserved the lung functions that are more adapted to air breathing and ultimately led to the evolution of tetrapods. The other branch of fishes modified the lung structure and evolved with swim bladders, leading the evolution of teleosts. The swim bladders allow these fishes to maintain buoyancy and perceive pressure, thus better survive under water.

“The study enlightens us with regards to where our body organs came from and how their functions are decoded in the genome. Thus, some of the functions related to lung and limbs did not evolve at the time when the water-to-land transition occurred, but are encoded by some ancient gene regulatory mechanisms that were already present in our fish ancestor far before landing. It is interesting that these genetic codes are still present in these ‘living-fossil” fishes, which offer us the opportunity to trace back the root of these genes,” concludes Guojie Zhang.

FACT BOX 1: Not just limbs and lungs, but also the heart

Primitive fish and humans also share a common and critical function in the cardio-respiratory system: The conus arteriosus, a structure in the right ventricle of our heart which might allow the heart to efficiently deliver the oxygen to the whole body, and which is also found in the bichir. However, the vast majority of bony fish have lost this structure. The researchers discovered a genetic element that appears to control the development of the conus arteriosus. Transgenic experiments with mice showed that when researchers removed this genetic element, the mutated mice died due to thinner, smaller right ventricles, which lead to congenital heart defects and compromised heart function.

FACT BOX 2:

• The vast majority of extant fish species belong to the ray-finned fishes, a subclass of bony fish. These are typically fish with gills, fins and a swim bladder.
• The terrestrial group of vertebrates are known as tetrapod. The tetrapod includes all vertebrates that descended from the first animals adapted to a life on land by developing four limbs and lungs, i.e., all mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians.
• The researchers’ theory is that the air-breathing ability in these primitive fishes allowed them to survive the second mass extinction roughly 375-360 million years ago. At that time, oxygen depletion in Earth’s oceans caused a majority of species to be wiped out. Lungs allowed some fish to survive on land.
• The study has been published in the scientific journal Cell. The research team also contributed to another paper which reported the genome for another primitive fish, the lungfish. The genome is the biggest vertebrate genome decoded so far. This paper was published in Cell at the same time.
• The research is supported by the Villum Foundation, among others.

“Physical discipline and cognitive deprivation are well-established risks to child development. However, it is rare that these experiences are examined in relation to each other,” said lead author Carmel Salhi, ScD, an Assistant Professor at the Department of Health Sciences, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA. “Our study allowed us to explore how these experiences co-occur in childhood internationally and whether they relate to different aspects of child development.

“This is important as recent research in neuroscience suggests that experiences, which provoke fear, have different effects on a child’s neurodevelopment than cognitive deprivation.”

A sample of 29,792 children between the ages of 3 — 6 years old and their caregivers, across 17 countries completed measures of physical discipline, cognitive deprivation and risk of developmental delay. Factors used to determine physical discipline included spanking or slapping on the arm, hand, or leg. Cognitive deprivation included not counting or reading with a child over the past 3 days and the absence of books in the home.

“To see if this framework has the potential to inform policy and public health interventions, we conducted the first large-scale epidemiological study using this conceptual framework,” Dr. Salhi added.

Physical discipline was associated with 50 percent higher odds for risk of socioemotional delay, at least 2.5 times higher than the risk of any of the experiences of cognitive deprivation. Not counting or not reading with the child were associated with 47 percent and 62 percent higher odds, respectively, for risk of cognitive delay. Physical discipline did not confer any risk of cognitive delay.

These findings suggest that the distinction between fear and deprivation in child development, established in clinical neuroscience, is important to public health research and interventions. Furthermore, a large body of evidence links both physical discipline and experiences of cognitive deprivation with poverty and social marginalization. Taken together, this suggests that redistributive policies that alleviate socioeconomic strain can have demonstrably positive effects across a range of child developmental outcomes within a population.

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