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Just how old is the universe? Astrophysicists have been debating this question for decades. In recent years, new scientific measurements have suggested the universe may be hundreds of millions of years younger than its previously estimated age of approximately 13.8 billions of years.
Now new research published in a series of papers by an international team of astrophysicists, including Neelima Sehgal, PhD, from Stony Brook University, suggest the universe is about 13.8 billion years old. By using observations from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile, their findings match the measurements of the Planck satellite data of the same ancient light.
The ACT research team is an international collaboration of scientists from 41 institutions in seven countries. The Stony Brook team from the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences, led by Professor Sehgal, plays an essential role in analyzing the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — the afterglow light from the Big Bang.
“In Stony Brook-led work we are restoring the ‘baby photo’ of the universe to its original condition, eliminating the wear and tear of time and space that distorted the image,” explains Professor Sehgal, a co-author on the papers. “Only by seeing this sharper baby photo or image of the universe, can we more fully understand how our universe was born.”
Obtaining the best image of the infant universe, explains Professor Sehgal, helps scientists better understand the origins of the universe, how we got to where we are on Earth, the galaxies, where we are going, how the universe may end, and when that ending may occur.
The ACT team estimates the age of the universe by measuring its oldest light. Other scientific groups take measurements of galaxies to make universe age estimates.
The new ACT estimate on the age of the universe matches the one provided by the standard model of the universe and measurements of the same light made by the Planck satellite. This adds a fresh twist to an ongoing debate in the astrophysics community, says Simone Aiola, first author of one of the new papers on the findings posted to arXiv.org.
“Now we’ve come up with an answer where Planck and ACT agree,” says Aiola, a researcher at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City. “It speaks to the fact that these difficult measurements are reliable.”
In 2019, a research team measuring the movements of galaxies calculated that the universe is hundreds of millions of years younger than the Planck team predicted. That discrepancy suggested that a new model for the universe might be needed and sparked concerns that one of the sets of measurements might be incorrect.
The age of the universe also reveals how fast the cosmos is expanding, a number quantified by the Hubble constant. The ACT measurements suggest a Hubble constant of 67.6 kilometers per second per megaparsec. That means an object 1 megaparsec (around 3.26 million light-years) from Earth is moving away from us at 67.6 kilometers per second due to the expansion of the universe. This result agrees almost exactly with the previous estimate of 67.4 kilometers per second per megaparsec by the Planck satellite team, but it’s slower than the 74 kilometers per second per megaparsec inferred from the measurements of galaxies.
“I didn’t have a particular preference for any specific value — it was going to be interesting one way or another,” says Steve Choi of Cornell University, first author of another paper posted to arXiv.org. “We find an expansion rate that is right on the estimate by the Planck satellite team. This gives us more confidence in measurements of the universe’s oldest light.”
As ACT continues making observations, astronomers will have an even clearer picture of the CMB and a more exact idea of how long ago the cosmos began. The ACT team will also scour those observations for signs of physics that doesn’t fit the standard cosmological model. Such strange physics could resolve the disagreement between the predictions of the age and expansion rate of the universe arising from the measurements of the CMB and the motions of galaxies.
The ACT research is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the NSF also funds the work of Professor Sehgal and colleagues at Stony Brook.
Editor’s Note: The papers from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope researchers are available online at: https://act.princeton.edu/publications
Older women who eat more than one to two servings a week of baked or broiled fish or shellfish may consume enough omega-3 fatty acids to counteract the effects of air pollution on the brain, according to a new study published in the July 15, 2020, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
Researchers found that among older women who lived in areas with high levels of air pollution, those who had the lowest levels of omega-3 fatty acids in their blood had more brain shrinkage than women who had the highest levels.
“Fish are an excellent source of omega-3 fatty acids and easy to add to the diet,” said study author Ka He, M.D., Sc.D., of Columbia University in New York. “Omega-3 fatty acids have been shown to fight inflammation and maintain brain structure in aging brains. They have also been found to reduce brain damage caused by neurotoxins like lead and mercury. So we explored if omega-3 fatty acids have a protective effect against another neurotoxin, the fine particulate matter found in air pollution.”
The study involved 1,315 women with an average age of 70 who did not have dementia at the start of the study. The women completed questionnaires about diet, physical activity, and medical history.
Researchers used the diet questionnaire to calculate the average amount of fish each woman consumed each week, including broiled or baked fish, canned tuna, tuna salad, tuna casserole and non-fried shellfish. Fried fish was not included because research has shown deep frying damages omega-3 fatty acids.
Participants were given blood tests. Researchers measured the amount of omega-3 fatty acids in their red blood cells and then divided the women into four groups based on the amount of omega-3 fatty acids in their blood.
Researchers used the women’s home addresses to determine their three-year average exposure to air pollution. Participants then had brain scans with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure various areas of the brain including white matter, which is composed of nerve fibers that send signals throughout the brain, and the hippocampus, the part of the brain associated with memory.
After adjusting for age, education, smoking and other factors that could affect brain shrinkage, researchers found that women who had the highest levels of omega-3 fatty acids in the blood had greater volumes of white matter than those with the lowest levels. Those in the highest group had 410 cubic centimeters (cm3) white matter, compared to 403 cm3 for those in the lowest group. The researchers found that for each quartile increase in air pollution levels, the average white matter volume was 11.52 cm3 smaller among people with lower levels of omega-3 fatty acids and 0.12 cm3 smaller among those with higher levels.
Women with the highest levels of omega-3 fatty acids in the blood also had greater volumes of the hippocampus.
“Our findings suggest that higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids in the blood from fish consumption may preserve brain volume as women age and possibly protect against the potential toxic effects of air pollution,” said He. “It’s important to note that our study only found an association between brain volume and eating fish. It does not prove that eating fish preserves brain volume. And since separate studies have found some species of fish may contain environmental toxins, it’s important to talk to a doctor about what types of fish to eat before adding more fish to your diet.”
A limitation of the study was that most participants were older white women, so the results cannot be generalized to others. Also, researchers were only able to examine exposures to later-life air pollution, not early or mid-life exposures, so future studies should look at exposures to air pollution across a person’s lifespan.
The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
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Materials provided by American Academy of Neurology. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Some dog breeds have higher risk of developing certain cancers and joint disorders if neutered or spayed within their first year of life. Until now, studies had only assessed that risk in a few breeds. A new, 10-year study by researchers at the University of California, Davis, examined 35 dog breeds and found vulnerability from neutering varies greatly depending on the breed. The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Veterinary Science.
“There is a huge disparity among different breeds,” said lead author Benjamin Hart, distinguished professor emeritus at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. Hart said there is no “one size fits all” when it comes to health risks and the age at which a dog is neutered. “Some breeds developed problems, others didn’t. Some may have developed joint disorders but not cancer or the other way around.”
Researchers analyzed 15 years of data from thousands of dogs examined each year at the UC Davis Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital to try to understand whether neutering, the age of neutering, or differences in sex when neutered affect certain cancers and joint disorders across breeds. The joint disorders examined include hip dysplasia, cranial cruciate ligament tears and elbow dysplasia. Cancers examined include lymphoma; hemangiosarcoma, or cancer of the blood vessel walls; mast cell tumors; and osteosarcoma, or bone cancer.
In most breeds examined, the risk of developing problems was not affected by age of neutering.
BREED DIFFERENCES BY SIZE AND SEX
Researchers found that vulnerability to joint disorders was related to body size.
“The smaller breeds don’t have these problems, while a majority of the larger breeds tend to have joint disorders,” said co-author Lynette Hart, professor at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.
One of the surprising exceptions to this was among the two giant breeds — great Danes and Irish wolfhounds — which showed no increased risk to joint disorders when neutered at any age.
Researchers also found the occurrence of cancers in smaller dogs was low, whether neutered or kept intact. In two breeds of smaller dogs, the Boston terrier and the shih tzu, there was a significant increase in cancers with neutering.
Another important finding was that the sex of the dog sometimes made a difference in health risks when neutered. Female Boston terriers neutered at the standard six months of age, for example, had no increased risk of joint disorders or cancers compared with intact dogs, but male Boston terriers neutered before a year of age had significantly increased risks.
Previous studies have found that neutering or spaying female golden retrievers at any age increases the risk of one or more of the cancers from 5 percent to up to 15 percent.
DISCUSS CHOICES WITH VETERINARIANS
Dog owners in the United States are overwhelmingly choosing to neuter their dogs, in large part to prevent pet overpopulation, euthanasia or reduce shelter intake. In the U.S., surgical neutering is usually carried out by six months of age.
This study suggests that dog owners should carefully consider when and if they should have their dog neutered.
“We think it’s the decision of the pet owner, in consultation with their veterinarian, not society’s expectations that should dictate when to neuter,” said Benjamin Hart. “This is a paradigm shift for the most commonly performed operation in veterinary practice.”
The study lays out guidelines for pet owners and veterinarians for each of 35 breeds to assist in making a neutering decision. See details in journal publication below.
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Materials provided by University of California – Davis. Original written by Amy Quinton. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
The decline in immunisations against some diseases is the first in nearly 30 years, the UN says.
It’s tempting to try to keep your options open. People often assume that having more options is equivalent to having more freedom. But actually the opposite tends to be true when it comes to making aligned decisions. When you keep your options too open, you keep your standards too low.
When people have too many options to intelligently assess, they tend to settle for choices that are good enough but not great.
But when you narrow the range to a few options that you can reasonably consider one by one, you’re more likely to go for the best choice, at least among those options.
Consider buying a new piece of tech. If you’re only considering two or three models, it’s easier to identify the best one for your needs. But if you have hundreds or thousands of options available, picking the optimal one for you seems hopeless.
This is a common issue when it comes to finding an aligned career path or an aligned relationship. When you have too few constraints, you have too many options. This can make you feel doubtful or even paralyzed about making a decent decision.
It may seem counterintuitive to narrow your options by adding more constraints, but it works well in practice, especially when you choose constraints that elevate your standards.
When I’m ready to buy a new phone, laptop, tablet, or watch, for instance, I’m only going to consider Apple products. I’ve been using products in their ecosystem for many years, and I’m pleased with them. So when making such purchase decisions, I wouldn’t consider stepping outside the Apple space unless something goes really wrong. My last 4 phones, last 3 laptops, last 4 tablets, and last 3 watches were all iPhones, MacBook Pros, iPads, and Apple Watches, respectively.
This simple constraint creates a pathway to investing more deeply in a relationship with Apple too. I’m on a first-name basis with a member of the business team at the local Apple Store, and she regularly arranges discounts for me. So constraints can lead to more depth and efficiency for related future decisions.
What about finding an intimate relationship partner? First consider how to rule out partial matches and mismatches.
For me to be deeply involved with a woman, she must be a committed vegan. She has to be interested in open relationships. She has to be into D/s play. She must be into personal growth. By narrowing the vast field of possibilities down to a relatively small number of options, I can eliminate many risks related to partial matches, such as the risk of over-investing in a connection that isn’t going to work well.
If you want to date around a lot and aren’t feeling too particular, you can keep your options open, but you may find that approach dissatisfying or disappointing after a while. When you’d rather find a really strong match to invest in, add more constraints to narrow your options and raise your standards. It may surprise you how well this works, especially by helping you quickly decline partial matches.
Same goes for career options and income-generating opportunities. Start by eliminating options that aren’t fascinating, stimulating, and fun. Rule out whatever doesn’t feel purposeful and heart-aligned. Drop ideas that aren’t likely to be highly lucrative. Dump the possibilities that aren’t creative and growth-oriented. Keep narrowing your options till you start wondering if your standards might be too high.
In this particular area, I found it helpful to establish a minimum standard for considering business deals. For a while I didn’t consider any deal that would be worth less than $10K. Eventually I bumped that to $20K. Later I held it around $50K for a while. These days I tend not to bother considering business deals or projects unless they’re financially worth $100K or more. And on top of that, they still have to be fun, creative, stimulating, purposeful, etc.
Interestingly, this makes life easier and improves the odds of discovering really good options. It keeps me from getting bogged down in partial matches.
When thinking about relationship matches, consider the perspective of a really good match who’s looking for someone just like you. Does it make sense for them to remain receptive to less than what you can offer? I’d rather connect with a vegan who’s looking for a fellow vegan, not a vegan with lower standards. Would you rather be what someone is looking for… or what they’re settling for?
You may not be sure about how to identify or recognize an optimal solution, but what can you be pretty sure about? Start by adding some constraints where you are confident in your desires. Relationship-wise I can say it wouldn’t work out if I tried to get seriously involved with a non-vegan woman – our ethics and values wouldn’t align well enough. That by itself isn’t enough to guarantee a good match, but it’s an easy way to rule out a large swath of partial matches.
What are some equivalents for you? What constraints would help to steer you closer to a really strong match and away from partial matches?
If you do this right, you’re going to turn off partial matches. Some may feel a bit miffed that you’re excluding them without giving them a chance. But you’re also doing them a favor. You’re making it clear that you wouldn’t be a good investment in some dimension of life, so you’re saving them time, energy, and false hope. If you want to clarify your investment worthiness for an aligned option, you’d better be willing to disappoint partial matches up front. The smarter ones will actually respect you for this preventative no.
Aim for true success here. Don’t waffle on what you really want. Don’t pre-settle for less. Challenge your brain to figure out how to invite and experience what you really want. Start by ruling out whatever would feel a bit dissatisfying or disappointing – whatever feels like settling. What’s the relationship or career equivalent of a sad Android phone? 😉
Constraints are very freeing – they free you of the nasty traps of partial matches.
A leading Covid-19 vaccine contender has passed its early safety trial with flying colours.
The vaccine, created by Moderna, produced an immune response in all 45 healthy participants who received two shots 28 days apart, according to findings reported July 14 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The vaccine (named mRNA-1273 for now) uses messenger RNA, or mRNA, to trigger an immune response to the Covid-19 coronavirus in patients.
Genetically derived from the virus, the mRNA vaccine essentially mimics a natural Covid-19 infection, tricking the body into producing antibodies that hopefully will protect against future infections.
More than half of the people given the vaccine developed some side effects, including fatigue, chills, headache and muscle pain. However, only people given the highest dose reported severe adverse effects, and no major safety concerns were identified.
“The results are promising but obviously need further confirmation and elaboration in later-stage clinical trials,” said Dr Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore.
“There is a lot of interest in the ability of mRNA vaccines to be the quickest route to a vaccine for emerging pathogens and hopefully this aspiration will be borne out with this vaccine.”
Moderna announced last week that it had completed enrollment for phase 2 clinical trials of mRNA-1273, including 300 healthy adults aged 18 to 55, along with 300 adults aged 56 and older.
This next phase is designed to tell doctors more about how well it works, as well as continuing to gather evidence on its safety. Participants will randomly receive either a low dose of the vaccine, a high dose or a placebo, and researchers will track the progress of all three groups.
The United States has agreed to provide up to $483m to Moderna as part of Operation Warp Speed, a federal effort to make coronavirus vaccines and treatments available to the American public as quickly as possible.
The US National Institutes of Health is funding the mRNA-1273 clinical trials
Image credit: Unsplash
One in four inpatients with influenza in a given season showed signs of having become infected during care. This is clear from a University of Gothenburg thesis about the spread of influenza in hospitals and how this problem can be remedied.
One of the studies in the thesis is based on a review of the medical records of all 435 hospitalized adult patients at Sahlgrenska University Hospital who had laboratory-confirmed influenza (flu) during the 2016-2017 season.
Of these patients, 114 cases (26 percent) were classified as healthcare-associated. These patients had been admitted for other reason, and the onset of their flu symptoms did not take place until 48 hours or more after admission.
A detailed genetic analysis of virus samples was also performed. This analysis showed a close genetic relationship between flu viruses in samples taken from patents staying in the same ward within a single week.
“Besides the association in time and space, a kind of DNA evidence, like from a crime scene, was used. Overall, teher’s strong support for transmission of infection within the hospital,” says Martina Sansone, PhD a recent PhD graduate at Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, and a consultant in infectious diseases and hospital hygiene at Sahlgrenska University Hospital.
“The proportion who became infected within the hospital was even higher than I thought it would be — and after all, this is my job,” she continues. “This research area isn’t especially well explored.”
Twenty-six people in the study group died. The majority were older patients with cardiac or pulmonary diseases, and the seasonal flu of 2016-2017 was considered relatively severe.
Based on her doctoral studies in their entirety — including a flu outbreak at Kungälv Hospital — Sansone concludes that transmission of influenza in hospital wards is common.
The shortage of beds is identified as a key factor in the context. The lack of single rooms also leads to more transfers of patients within a hospital and this, in turn, can add to the spread of infection.
“There has been an exaggerated focus on measurable lead times in the emergency room, and on cutting wait times. Sometimes the decision to hospitalize a patient is taken too quickly, before the diagnosis is complete and the risk of a person being infectious is known to exist. I also think the staff sometimes finds it hard to grasp the fact that one patient can represent a danger to another.”
The parallels with COVID-19 are obvious, Sansone thinks. Respiratory tract symptoms are common and may be mild. In the flu season too, planned care may be postponed and patients need to be kept isolated in the hospital environment.
“In Sweden our hospitals have been extremely open, to family members as well as others, with lots of people coming and going. Why not have separate flu wards, in the same way as we have COVID-19 wards?” she wonders.
“The crucial needs are for us to reduce numbers of contacts, carry out prompt flu testing in the emergency room, and increase the vaccination rates. Today, around 50 percent of the elderly population in Sweden are vaccinated against the seasonal flu, well below the WHO target of 75 percent,” Sansone says.
Title: Epidemiology of viral respiratory infections with focus on in-hospital influenza transmission; http://hdl.handle.net/2077/63619
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Materials provided by University of Gothenburg. Original written by Margareta Gustafsson Kubista. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Blocking a newly identified “immune memory checkpoint” in immune cells could improve immunotherapy and help prevent cancers from recurring, according to new findings in mice and human samples by researchers at the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. The research was published this week in Nature Immunology.
Immunotherapy drugs that harness the body’s own immune system to fight cancer have revolutionized the treatment of many cancers. They work by blocking checkpoint inhibitor proteins like PD1, removing the brakes from cancer-killing T cells in the immune system. However, only about a third of patients respond to these drugs.
“There is still much work to be done to improve cancer immunotherapy because only a small group of people benefit, and even among those, we see many tumors relapsing,” said Dario A.A. Vignali, Ph.D., who holds the Frank Dixon Chair in Cancer Immunology at Pitt’s School of Medicine and is the co-leader of the Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy program at the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center. “Our findings point to an important new biological anti-tumor mechanism that we can exploit to provide durable, long-term immune response against tumors.”
Vignali and his colleagues discovered that a protein called Neuropilin-1 (NRP1) plays an important role in suppressing immune responses to cancer.
“We knew NRP1 was present on the surface of other T cells, but we wondered whether it somehow altered the function of the killer T cells,” said Chang “Gracie” Liu, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher in Vignali’s lab and first author of the publication. “We thought it might function like any other immune checkpoint molecule and that blocking it would prevent tumors from growing.”
Liu and her colleagues created a genetically modified mouse that had NRP1 removed specifically from the surface of only killer T cells. When they grafted tumor cells to this mouse model, they expected that the tumors would not grow or grow more slowly when compared to normal animals, as they had seen when blocking other checkpoint proteins. Instead, they saw no difference at all.
“We were a bit disappointed and thought we had hit a dead end because it looked like removing NRP1 did not impact anti-tumor immunity,” said Liu. “But instead of giving up, we asked a different question — does NRP1 change the capability of the immune system to remember the tumor?”
They removed the tumor, waited and grafted cancer cells again in a different location, mimicking how a tumor might come back in a patient who had surgery. They saw a dramatic effect. Mice that had NRP1 genetically deleted on killer T cells were better protected against the secondary tumor and responded more positively to anti-PD1 immunotherapy when compared to normal mice.
Further experiments revealed that neuropilin was controlling the fate of how T cells develop and establish immune memory. Having NRP1 caused the killer T cells to become exhausted and ineffective in fighting cancer cells, particularly long-term, while removing NRP1 resulted in T cells having an increased immune memory — the ability of the immune response to respond more potently when it “sees” a tumor again.
These findings in mice also correlated with studies of T cells isolated from the blood of patients with skin cancer or head and neck cancer. Patients with advanced stage head and neck cancer had higher levels of NRP1 on a subset of “memory” killer T cells and fewer of these cells compared to those with earlier stage disease. In patients with advanced skin cancer treated with various immunotherapies, higher NRP1 levels on killer T cells were associated with a poorer response to treatment and a smaller pool of memory T cells.
“This is a completely new area of understanding of how anti-tumor immunity is controlled and will present new therapeutic opportunities to promote and enhance a more durable, long-term anti-tumor response in cancer patients,” says Vignali.
Drugs that target NRP1 are already being tested in the clinic in combination with anti-PD1 immunotherapies, and these clinical trials will reveal much more about the role of immune memory in fighting cancer, says Vignali. “This is why persistence pays off. When our initial hypothesis turned out to be incorrect, we kept pursuing other possibilities and ended up with an important new discovery.”
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Materials provided by University of Pittsburgh. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
In a world with a consistently growing population and a climate crisis, food shortage is a looming threat. To alleviate this threat, crop scientists, botanists, genetic engineers, and others, have been exploring ways of boosting crop productivity and resilience. One way to control plant growth and physiology is to regulate the levels of “phytohormones” or plant hormones.
However, much remains to be known about the mechanisms that underlie this hormonal regulation in plants, limiting advancement in this direction. Now, in a study led by Nagoya University Japan, a team of scientists has discovered, using rice plants as the study model, that a process called “allosteric regulation” is involved in maintaining the phytohormonal balance in plants. Their findings, published in Nature Communications, could hold the key to significantly advancing the research on plant growth and development, providing a potential solution for food security.
Plants survive by adapting their development and physiology to their surrounding environments by controlling the levels of enzymes driving the synthesis of two phytohormones, gibberellin and auxin. Enzymes are proteins that bind to one or more reactant chemicals and speed up a reaction process. The binding site is called the activation site. In 1961, it was discovered that in bacteria, enzyme activity is enhanced or inhibited via allosteric regulation, which essentially is the binding of a molecule called the “effector” at a site other than the active site of the enzyme. In allosteric regulation, the structure of the enzyme changes to either support or hinder the reaction that the enzyme enables.
Professor Miyako Ueguchi-Tanaka of Nagoya University, lead scientist in the team that has now observed allosteric regulation in plants for the first time, explains their research findings, ”We used a technique called X-ray crystallography and found that, as molecules of the enzymes (gibberellin 2-oxidase 3 [GA2ox3], and auxin dioxygenase [DAO]) bind to gibberellin and auxin (respectively), they interact among themselves and form ‘multimeric’ structures, comprising four and two units respectively. As the amounts of gibberellin and auxin increase, so does the rate of multimerization of the enzymes. And multimerization enhances the activity of the enzymes, enabling greater degradation of gibberellin and auxin. Synchronous structural changes and activity enhancement are typical of allosteric-regulation events.”
The scientists further carried out “phylogenetic” analysis of GA2ox3 and DAO, which revealed that plants independently developed this hormone regulation mechanism at three separate time-points over the course of the evolutionary process.
Enthusiastic about the future prospects of these findings, Prof Ueguchi says, “The activity control system revealed here can be used to artificially regulate the activity of the growth inactivating hormones in plants. As a result, rice crop productivity can be improved and high-biomass plants can be produced in the event of food shortage or an environmental crisis.”
Of course, this study is only a stepping stone for now, and much remains to be done to see how the findings of this study can be applied practically in agricultural lands. However, these findings certainly are encouraging, and they signal the coming of a new era of sustainable development fueled by biotechnological advancements.
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Materials provided by Nagoya University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
