Another view that can be captured by Suomi NPP satellite is a false-color image. The false-color image is collected by the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) instrument suite using corrected reflectance bands. Burned areas or fire-affected areas are characterized by deposits of charcoal and ash, removal of vegetation and/or the alteration of vegetation structure. When bare soil becomes exposed, the brightness in Band 1 may increase, but that may be offset by the presence of black carbon residue; the near infrared (Band 2) will become darker, and Band 7 becomes more reflective. When assigned to red/brown in the image, Band 7 will show burn scars as deep or bright reddish brown depending on the type of vegetation burned, the amount of residue, or the completeness of the burn. It is hard to see clearly due to the massive amounts of smoke covering the landscape.

Inciweb reports the following weather concerns for this fires: “Hot and dry conditions persist. Smoke remains very thick in the lower valleys with visibility reduced under a mile. Temperatures will be 88-93 in the valleys and 75 to 80 in the higher elevations. The humidity will be 10-15% with 4-8 mph wind.”

NASA’s satellite instruments are often the first to detect wildfires burning in remote regions, and the locations of new fires are sent directly to land managers worldwide within hours of the satellite overpass. Together, NASA instruments detect actively burning fires, track the transport of smoke from fires, provide information for fire management, and map the extent of changes to ecosystems, based on the extent and severity of burn scars. NASA has a fleet of Earth-observing instruments, many of which contribute to our understanding of fire in the Earth system. Satellites in orbit around the poles provide observations of the entire planet several times per day, whereas satellites in a geostationary orbit provide coarse-resolution imagery of fires, smoke and clouds every five to 15 minutes. For more information visit: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/fires/main/missions/index.html

NASA’s Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) Worldview application provides the capability to interactively browse over 700 global, full-resolution satellite imagery layers and then download the underlying data. Many of the available imagery layers are updated within three hours of observation, essentially showing the entire Earth as it looks “right now.” Actively burning fires, detected by thermal bands, are shown as red points. Image Courtesy: NASA Worldview, Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS). Caption: Lynn Jenner with information from Inciweb.

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While much remains to be learned about the intersection of cancer and COVID-19, the new paper, published online by Cancer Cell, represents the most comprehensive survey to date about what physicians have learned, and what research is suggesting, about the interrelationship between the two diseases, the authors say.

“COVID-19 has been responsible for killing more than one million people worldwide. Among those most at risk of developing severe forms of the illness are patients with cancer,” says Ziad Bakouny, MD, MSc, of Dana-Farber, the co-lead author of the study with Jessica Hawley, MD, of Columbia University Medical Center. “Research into why patients with cancer are at heightened risk is moving very quickly. In this paper, we look at the state of the science in this area and others related to these two illnesses.”

The paper summarizes findings in four areas: the interconnected biology of cancer and COVID-19; changes in patient care prompted by the pandemic; effects on cancer research; and insights from cancer research applicable to the treatment of COVID-19.

COVID-19 and cancer biology

In patients with cancer, COVID-19 can be especially harsh. This is likely because many patients have a weakened immune system — either as a result of the cancer itself or the therapies used to treat it — and are therefore less able to fight off infection by the novel coronavirus. Several studies have examined whether systemic cancer therapies such as chemotherapy and targeted therapies increase patients’ vulnerability to COVID-19. The results so far are mixed, Bakouny says, possibly because such studies have focused on systemic therapies as a group rather than on specific agents. Future studies will attempt to tease out the effects of particular drugs.

One of the most dangerous consequences of COVID-19 is an overaggressive immune response known as a “cytokine storm,” which can damage lung and other tissues. Patients with cancer treated with immune-stimulating therapies such as immune checkpoint inhibitors, chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies and bi-specific T-cell engagers (BiTEs) are at risk for complications if the immune response produced by these therapies results in an attack on normal, healthy tissue. Patients treated with CAR T-cell therapies and BiTEs, in particular, can develop a side effect known as cytokine release syndrome, which is similar to the cytokine storm in patients with COVID-19. Researchers have theorized that COVID-19 could exacerbate cytokine release syndrome in patients treated with certain immunotherapies, but studies have not definitely shown that this is happening, the new report states.

Although patients may be understandably concerned about facing an increased risk from COVID-19 as a result of cancer therapy, they shouldn’t let this deter them from seeking treatment for their cancer, Bakouny says. “Therapies for cancer can prolong life and even be curative in many cases,” he remarks. “It’s very important to be mindful of the goals of therapy and discuss with your doctor the risks and benefits of therapy in your own particular case.”

COVID-19 and cancer care

Around the world, efforts to thwart the spread of COVID-19 included steps to decrease in-person visits between patients and physicians. Among these was a jump in the use of telemedicine, which, some studies indicate, can be just as effective as in-person meetings. One study involving patients with breast cancer found that telehealth was associated with a higher quality of life and less depression and distress compared with usual care. While virtual visits offer a variety of benefits — less need to travel to physician appointments and incur the costs and inconvenience associated with travel — they’re valuable only insofar as they don’t take the place of in-person visits for exams, treatment, or diagnosis, research shows.

“It is also important to consider the unintended consequences of widespread adoption of technology,” Bakouny says. “There is a serious potential risk of compounding health disparities between patients of different socioeconomic status, if telehealth services are mandated.”

On the negative side, studies have shown a sharp decline in cancer diagnoses and screening during the peak of the pandemic. One study found that routine screening dropped by 85-90%. Delays in diagnosing cancer are likely to have long-term ripple effects. A British study estimates that, because of diagnostic delays, deaths five years from now may be 4-17% higher, depending on tumor type, than they would have been had the pandemic not occurred.

COVID-19 and cancer research

To limit the opportunities for viral transmission, many research centers enacted policies limiting the number of lab workers allowed on-site, putting many studies on hold. For the most part, research projects funded by government appropriations have not been hobbled by the pandemic, but some projects supported by private philanthropy face a funding gap. COVID-19 has drastically decreased donations to cancer-focused philanthropic organizations. The American Cancer Society, for example, expects a $200 million decrease in donations this year and has not been able to accept applications for research grants for the Fall grant cycle.

Clinical cancer research, in which potential new therapies are tested in patients, has also experienced difficulties as a result of COVID-19. Some cancer centers halted enrollment on clinical trials entirely during the height of the pandemic. A survey of dozens of clinical investigators in March found that nearly 60% of respondents had halted screening and/or enrollment in certain trials, and that half of their institutions had ceased collection of blood and other tissue for research purposes.

Despite these challenges, investigators found a variety of ways to adapt to straitened circumstances so trials could continue. These included leveraging telehealth to limit in-person visits, use of e-signatures for trial documentation, shipping oral medications to trial participants rather than requiring them to be picked up at the clinic, and allowing laboratory tests to be done at outside labs.

“The relaxation of some of the regulatory requirements associated with clinical research has been accomplished without compromising patient safety,” Bakouny remarks. “Many investigators see this as a plus — something that could be part of clinical research going forward, to reduce the cost of trials and facilitate the arrival of new therapies for patients.”

COVID-19 and lessons from cancer

Some promising approaches to treating COVID-19 have come, perhaps surprisingly, from cancer research, the paper’s authors write. While cancer and COVID-19 are fundamentally different in their origin, development, and effect on the body, some of the insights gained in decades of research in cancer are showing relevance to fighting the new coronavirus.

A variety of drugs used to alleviate cytokine release syndrome in cancer patients are being evaluated for effectiveness against cytokine storm in patients with COVID-19. Other drugs in the anti-cancer arsenal are undergoing tests of their potential value against COVID-19. An example is acalabrutinib, which is used in the treatment of lymphoid cancers. In one trial, it resulted in rapid improvements in oxygen requirements and a sharp drop in inflammation in patients with COVID-19.

Another potential point of connection between cancer and COVID-19 involves a protein called TMPRSS2. When the coronavirus is breathed in, it binds to lung cells and is split by TMPRSS2, allowing it to enter and infect the cells. Research has shown that in prostate cancer, TMPRSS2 is regulated by the androgen receptor, a cell structure that signals the cell to grow in response to androgen. The androgen receptor is found not only on prostate cells but on cells of the lung as well. It isn’t clear yet whether the receptor regulates TMPRSS2 in lung tissue, but if it does, it could open the way to a new treatment for COVID-19. Androgen-targeting therapies already used to treat prostate cancer could block TMPRSS2 from entering lung cells, preventing COVID-19 at its source.

“Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve accumulated a substantial amount of evidence about the dynamic between cancer and COVID-19,” Bakouny remarks. “This review gave us an opportunity to take a step back and take stock of what we’ve learned — to get a sense of the most promising directions for patients, as well as where more study is needed, what we need to dig deeper into.”

The senior author of the study is Corrie Painter, PhD, of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Co-authors are Toni Choueiri, MD, of Dana-Farber; Solange Peters, MD, PhD, of the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois, in Lausanne, Switzerland; and Brian Rini, MD, and Jeremy Warner, MD, MS, of Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

The research was partly funded by VUMC CCSG grant P30 CA068485.

In a study that asked prospective donors to consider whether and how much to give to a local food bank to help fight hunger during the coronavirus pandemic, researchers found that donors were more likely to give when heartfelt messages were written in typefaces that looked like handwriting, and when messages that talked about the power of an organization were written in typeface that looked more business-like.

In other words, make the font match the message to get more donations, the researchers said.

“Our research suggests that simply changing the typeface of appeals messages could make those appeals stronger and encourage people to make donations,” said Huiling Huang, a consumer sciences doctoral student at The Ohio State University and lead author of the study, which was published last month in the International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management.

When the message was a warm one, with a tone that played up the emotions of what the fundraising organization could do, donors were more likely to give when the message was written in font that looked like handwriting.

When the message was focused on the competency of the organization, on its efficiency and on its power, donors were more likely to give when the message was written in a font that was clearly generated by a computer — much like the font you’re reading now.

Previous research in this area has found that donation requests that utilize warmth-focused messages emphasize friendliness, care and love — characteristics that convey good intentions and a desire to help others. Donation requests that focus on an organization’s capabilities, efficiency and effectiveness, on the other hand, convey that organization’s ability to achieve a goal. Both are effective fundraising techniques, but this new study indicates that those appeals can be even more effective if paired with the appropriate typeface.

Huang said previous analyses have shown that most donation appeals are printed in a business-like font. Depending on the message, she said, those organizations might be leaving donations on the table.

For this study, researchers asked study participants to imagine that they were picking up takeout from a local restaurant, and that, in the drive-through line, there was a flyer stating that the restaurant had partnered with a local food bank to collect donations to offset the pressures the food bank faced because of the pandemic.

Researchers offered the “prospective donors” two sets of requests for donations. One set’s message focused on the strength and competence of the organization. The other’s message focused on warmth and the organization’s ability to positively affect lives. Each was written in two different typefaces: One that looked similar to a person’s handwriting, and one that was clearly computer-generated.

Then, the researchers asked the study participants how likely they were to make a donation. They also asked questions about how deeply the participants trusted and would be loyal to the hypothetical restaurant, based only on the donation appeal.

They found that study participants were more likely to give, by a factor of about one-sixth, when the message matched the typeface — warm messages with handwritten font, competence-based messages with computer-generated font.

Study participants also reported feeling more trust toward the restaurant asking for donations when the typeface matched the tone of the appeal. The researchers measured trust because many businesses have turned to raising money or awareness for social causes — what researchers call “Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)” marketing — to build loyalty in their brands.

Studies have shown that consumer trust in a business is related to loyalty.

“We focused on a restaurant for this study, but I think our findings can be applied to a broader context way beyond restaurants and hospitality,” said Stephanie Liu, senior author on the paper and an assistant professor of hospitality management at Ohio State.

“A lot of companies are using social responsibility messaging to enhance customer loyalty, and brands who solicit any types of donation can benefit from these findings. By matching the message to the font, they can build trust, which leads to loyalty.”

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Materials provided by Ohio State University. Original written by Laura Arenschield. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Researchers discovered the exciting behavior while studying the so-called electron spins in the compound ruthenium trichloride. Their findings, published today in the journal Nature Physics , show that electron spins interact across the material, effectively lowering the overall energy. This type of behavior — consistent with a quantum spin liquid — was detected in ruthenium trichloride at high temperatures and in high magnetic fields.

Spin liquids, first theorized in 1973, remain something of a mystery. Despite some materials showing promising signs for this state of matter, it is extremely challenging to definitively confirm its existence. However, there is great interest in them because scientists believe they could be used for the design of smarter materials in a variety of applications, such as quantum computing.

This study provides strong support that ruthenium trichloride is a spin liquid, said physicist Kim Modic, a former graduate student who worked at the MagLab’s pulsed field facility and is now an assistant professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria.

“I think this paper provides a fresh perspective on ruthenium trichloride and demonstrates a new way to look for signatures of spin liquids,” said Modic, the paper’s lead author.

For decades, physicists have extensively studied the charge of an electron, which carries electricity, paving the way for advances in electronics, energy and other areas. But electrons also have a property called spin. Scientists want to also leverage the spin aspect of electrons for technology, but the universal behavior of spins is not yet fully understood.

In simple terms, electrons can be thought of as spinning on an axis, like a top, oriented in some direction. In magnetic materials, these spins align with one another, either in the same or opposite directions. Called magnetic ordering, this behavior can be induced or suppressed by temperature or magnetic field. Once the magnetic order is suppressed, more exotic states of matter could emerge, such as quantum spin liquids.

In the search for a spin liquid, the research team homed in on ruthenium trichloride. Its honeycomb-like structure, featuring a spin at each site, is like a magnetic version of graphene — another hot topic in condensed matter physics.

“Ruthenium is much heavier than carbon, which results in strong interactions among the spins,” said MagLab physicist Arkady Shekhter, a co-author on the paper.

The team expected those interactions would enhance magnetic frustration in the material. That’s a kind of “three’s company” scenario in which two spins pair up, leaving the third in a magnetic limbo, which thwarts magnetic ordering. That frustration, the team hypothesized, could lead to a spin liquid state. Their data ended up confirming their suspicions.

“It seems like, at low temperatures and under an applied magnetic field, ruthenium trichloride shows signs of the behavior that we’re looking for,” Modic said. “The spins don’t simply orient themselves depending on the alignment of neighboring spins, but rather are dynamic — like swirling water molecules — while maintaining some correlation between them.”

The findings were enabled by a new technique that the team developed called resonant torsion magnetometry, which precisely measures the behavior of electron spins in high magnetic fields and could lead to many other new insights about magnetic materials, Modic said.

“We don’t really have the workhorse techniques or the analytical machinery for studying the excitations of electron spins, like we do for charge systems,” Modic said. “The methods that do exist typically require large sample sizes, which may not be available. Our technique is highly sensitive and works on tiny, delicate samples. This could be a game-changer for this area of research.”

Modic developed the technique as a postdoctoral researcher and then worked with MagLab physicists Shekhter and Ross McDonald, another co-author on the paper, to measure ruthenium trichloride in high magnetic fields.

Their technique involved mounting ruthenium trichloride samples onto a cantilever the size of a strand of hair. They repurposed a quartz tuning fork — similar to that in a quartz crystal watch — to vibrate the cantilever in a magnetic field. Instead of using it to tell time precisely, they measured the frequency of vibration to study the interaction between the spins in ruthenium trichloride and the applied magnetic field. They performed their measurements in two powerful magnets at the National MagLab.

“The beauty of our approach is that it’s a relatively simple setup, which allowed us to carry out our measurements in both a 35-tesla resistive magnet and a 65-tesla pulsed field magnet,” Modic said.

The next step in the research will be to study this system in the MagLab’s world-record 100-tesla pulsed magnet.

“That high of a magnetic field should allow us to directly observe the suppression of the spin liquid state, which will help us learn even more about this compound’s inner workings,” Shekhter said.

The single-celled Plasmodium parasites that cause 200 million cases of malaria each year can withstand feverish temperatures that make their human hosts miserable. And now, a Duke University-led team is beginning to understand how they do it.

Assistant professor of chemistry Emily Derbyshire and colleagues have identified a lipid-protein combo that springs into action to gird the parasite’s innards against heat shock.

Understanding how the malaria parasite protects its cells against heat stress and other onslaughts could lead to new ways to fight resistant strains, which have evolved ways to survive the drugs traditionally used to kill them, the researchers say.

Nearly half of the world’s population is at risk of contracting malaria. The disease kills 400,000 people a year, most of them children.

Long before the cause of malaria was identified, the disease’s harrowing fevers were well known. References to them have been found on 5,000-year-old clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia. The Greek poet Homer wrote about their misery. Hippocrates too.

The Duke team, collaborating with professor of biological engineering Jacquin Niles at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wanted to know how the malaria parasites inside a person’s body make it through these fevers unscathed.

When the parasites enter a person’s bloodstream through the bite of an infected mosquito, the temperature around them jumps from the balmy mid-70s of the mosquito to 98.6 degrees in the human. The human host’s body temperature can then rocket to 105 degrees or higher before dropping back down to normal two to six hours later, a roller coaster pattern that repeats itself every two to three days.

“It’s like going from room temperature water to a hot tub,” said first author Kuan-Yi Lu, who earned his Ph.D. in molecular genetics and microbiology in Derbyshire’s lab at Duke.

For the paper, published Sept. 25 in the journal eLife, Lu spent hundreds of hours peering at parasites under the microscope, trying to figure out what happens inside them when temperatures seesaw.

To mimic malarial fever in the lab, the researchers placed malaria-infected red blood cells in an incubator heated to 104 degrees Fahrenheit for six hours before bringing them back down to normal body temperature, 98.6 degrees.

They found that when temperatures rise, the parasites produce more of a lipid molecule called phosphatidylinositol 3-phosphate, or PI(3)P.

This substance builds up in the outer wall of a tiny sac inside the parasite’s cells called the food vacuole — the protist’s version of a gut. There, it recruits and binds to another molecule, a heat shock protein called Hsp70, and together they help shore up the food vacuole’s outer walls.

Without this lipid-protein boost, the team found that heat can make the food vacuole start to leak, unleashing its acidic contents into the gel-like fluid that fills the cell and possibly even digesting the parasite from the inside.

The findings are important because they could help researchers make the most of existing malaria drugs.

Previous research has shown that malaria parasites with higher-than-normal PI(3)P levels are more resistant to artemisinins, the leading class of antimalarials. Since artemisinins were first introduced in the 1970s, partial resistance has been increasingly reported in parts of Southeast Asia, raising fears that we may be losing one of our best weapons against the disease.

But the Duke-led study raises the possibility that new combination therapies for malaria — artemisinins combined with other drugs that reduce the parasite’s PI(3)P lipid levels and disrupt the food vacuole’s membrane — could be a way to re-sensitize resistant parasites, breaking down their defenses so the malaria treatments we already have are effective again.

“If there is an alternative way to increase the permeability of the digestive vacuole, it could make the digestive vacuole more accessible to those drugs again,” Lu said.

The findings also suggest caution in giving malaria patients ibuprofen for fever if they’re already taking artemisinin-based compounds, Derbyshire said. That’s because artemisinins kill malaria parasites by damaging their cell’s survival machinery, including the machinery that makes PI(3)P. If artemisinins suppress PI(3)P levels, and thereby make malaria parasites more vulnerable to heat stress, then fever reducers could prolong the time it takes for artemisinin-based drugs to kill the parasites, as some reports have suggested.

Much remains to be learned, Derbyshire said. “There’s more work to do to establish the mode of action. But you could imagine designing new combination therapies to try and extend the life of artemisinin and prolong its effectiveness,” Derbyshire said.

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (DP2AI138239) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (OPP1132312, OPP1162467).

“We believe there’s a Goldilocks effect with folic acid. Too little is not good, too much is not good; you have to get it just right,” said Ralph Green, UC Davis distinguished professor of pathology and medicine and a corresponding author of the study.

The research, published Sept. 30 in Cerebral Cortex, involved pregnant mice who were given either a normal amount of folic acid, 10 times the recommended amount, or none. The offspring of the mice that received the largest amount showed significant brain changes.

“It’s not subtle. It’s substantial,” said Konstantinos Zarbalis, associate professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and also a corresponding author of the research. “It makes a marked difference in brain structure if you take very high amounts of folic acid.”

Paradoxically, changes in the brain due to too much folic acid mimicked those associated with a deficiency of folic acid. “This, to me, was an even more important insight,” said Zarbalis, who is also on the UC Davis MIND Institute faculty. He noted that in humans, research shows that impaired folate uptake into the brain can cause cerebral folate deficiency, a syndrome that is often associated with the development of autism.

Folic acid and pregnancy

Folic acid (the synthetic form of vitamin B9, or folate) supplementation is widely recommended for women of child-bearing age. It has been shown to substantially reduce the risk of neural tube defects, such as spina bifida, in children. Research, including studies at the MIND Institute, has also shown that prenatal vitamins that include folic acid have a protective effect against the development of autism and other disorders.

Green was on the panel with the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine (now called the National Academy of Medicine) that determined the recommended daily intake of folic acid (400 mcg) and the maximum daily safe upper limit (1000 mcg). He was also on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) panel that recommended adding folic acid to foods, which led to the fortification of all cereals and grains with folic acid mandated by the Federal Government in 1998.

“Addition of folic acid to the diet was a good thing, and I’ve supported fortification, but there is a ‘best amount’ of folic acid, and some people may be getting more than is optimal,” said Green.

Women who have given birth to a child with neural tube defects or who have certain conditions like epilepsy and take anticonvulsants, have generally been advised to take much higher doses of folic acid.

“In animal models, we have indications that very high amounts of folic acid can be harmful to brain development of the fetus, and the clinical community should take this indication seriously, to support research in this area to reevaluate the amount of folic acid that is optimal for pregnant women,” said Zarbalis.

Zarbalis and Green suspect that the problem lies in the way folic acid is metabolized by the body and have plans to investigate the phenomenon further.