Published in Sleep Health: The Journal of The National Sleep Foundation, the paper is the latest to link prenatal cannabis use to developmental problems in children and the first to suggest it may impact sleep cycles long-term.

It comes at a time when — while the number of pregnant women drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes has declined in the United States — It has risen to 7% of all pregnant women as legalization spreads and more dispensaries recommend it for morning sickness.

“As a society, it took us a while to understand that smoking and drinking alcohol are not advisable during pregnancy, but it is now seen as common sense,” said senior author John Hewitt, director of the Institute for Behavioral Genetics at CU Boulder. “Studies like this suggest that it is prudent to extend that common sense advice to cannabis, even if use is now legal.”

A landmark study

For the study, Hewitt and lead author Evan Winiger analyzed baseline data from the landmark Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, which is following 11,875 youth from age 9 or 10 into early adulthood.

As part of an exhaustive questionnaire upon intake, participants’ mothers were asked if they had ever used marijuana while pregnant and how frequently. (The study did not assess whether they used edibles or smoked pot). The mothers were also asked to fill out a survey regarding their child’s sleep patterns, assessing 26 different items ranging from how easily they fell asleep and how long they slept to whether they snored or woke up frequently in the night and how sleepy they were during the day.

About 700 moms reported using marijuana while pregnant. Of those, 184 used it daily and 262 used twice or more daily.

After controlling for a host of other factors, including the mother’s education, parent marital status and family income and race, a clear pattern emerged.

“Mothers who said they had used cannabis while pregnant were significantly more likely to report their children having clinical sleep problems,” said Winiger, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.

Those who used marijuana frequently were more likely to report somnolence symptoms (symptoms of excess sleepiness) in their children, such as trouble waking in the morning and being excessively tired during the day.

The authors note that, while their sample size is large, the study has some limitations.

“We are asking mothers to remember if they smoked marijuana 10 years ago and to admit to a behavior that is frowned upon,” said Winiger, suggesting actual rates of prenatal use may have been higher.

While the study doesn’t prove that using cannabis while pregnant causes sleep problems, it builds on a small but growing body of evidence pointing to a link.

For instance, one small study found that children who had been exposed to marijuana in-utero woke up more in the night and had lower sleep quality at age 3. Another found that prenatal cannabis use impacted sleep in infancy.

And, in other previous work, Hewitt, Winiger and colleagues found that teenagers who frequently smoked marijuana were more likely to develop insomnia in adulthood.

The fetal brain on THC

Researchers aren’t sure exactly how cannabis exposure during vulnerable developmental times might shape future sleep. But studies in animals suggest that THC and other so-called cannabinoids, the active ingredients in pot, attach to CB1 receptors in the developing brain, influencing regions that regulate sleep. The ABCD study, which is taking frequent brain scans of participants as they age, should provide more answers, they said.

Meantime, mothers-to-be should be wary of dispensaries billing weed as an antidote for morning sickness. According to CU research, about 70% of Colorado dispensaries recommend it for that use. But mounting evidence points to potential harms, including low birth weight and later cognitive problems. With marijuana on the market today including far higher THC levels than it did a decade ago, it’s impacts on the fetal brain are likely more profound than they once were.

“This study is one more example of why pregnant women are advised to avoid substance use, including cannabis,” said Hewitt. “For their children, it could have long-term consequences.”

Text is backward. Clocks run counterclockwise. Cars drive on the wrong side of the road. Right hands become left hands.

Intrigued by how reflection changes images in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, a team of Cornell University researchers used artificial intelligence to investigate what sets originals apart from their reflections. Their algorithms learned to pick up on unexpected clues such as hair parts, gaze direction and, surprisingly, beards — findings with implications for training machine learning models and detecting faked images.

“The universe is not symmetrical. If you flip an image, there are differences,” said Noah Snavely, associate professor of computer science at Cornell Tech and senior author of the study, “Visual Chirality,” presented at the 2020 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, held virtually June 14-19. “I’m intrigued by the discoveries you can make with new ways of gleaning information.”

Zhiqui Lin is the paper’s first author; co-authors are Abe Davis, assistant professor of computer science, and Cornell Tech postdoctoral researcher Jin Sun.

Differentiating between original images and reflections is a surprisingly easy task for AI, Snavely said — a basic deep learning algorithm can quickly learn how to classify if an image has been flipped with 60% to 90% accuracy, depending on the kinds of images used to train the algorithm. Many of the clues it picks up on are difficult for humans to notice.

For this study, the team developed technology to create a heat map that indicates the parts of the image that are of interest to the algorithm, to gain insight into how it makes these decisions.

They discovered, not surprisingly, that the most commonly used clue was text, which looks different backward in every written language. To learn more, they removed images with text from their data set, and found that the next set of characteristics the model focused on included wrist watches, shirt collars (buttons tend to be on the left side), faces and phones — which most people tend to carry in their right hands — as well as other factors revealing right-handedness.

The researchers were intrigued by the algorithm’s tendency to focus on faces, which don’t seem obviously asymmetrical. “In some ways, it left more questions than answers,” Snavely said.

They then conducted another study focusing on faces and found that the heat map lit up on areas including hair part, eye gaze — most people, for reasons the researchers don’t know, gaze to the left in portrait photos — and beards.

Snavely said he and his team members have no idea what information the algorithm is finding in beards, but they hypothesized that the way people comb or shave their faces could reveal handedness.

“It’s a form of visual discovery,” Snavely said. “If you can run machine learning at scale on millions and millions of images, maybe you can start to discover new facts about the world.”

Each of these clues individually may be unreliable, but the algorithm can build greater confidence by combining multiple clues, the findings showed. The researchers also found that the algorithm uses low-level signals, stemming from the way cameras process images, to make its decisions.

Though more study is needed, the findings could impact the way machine learning models are trained. These models need vast numbers of images in order to learn how to classify and identify pictures, so computer scientists often use reflections of existing images to effectively double their datasets.

Examining how these reflected images differ from the originals could reveal information about possible biases in machine learning that might lead to inaccurate results, Snavely said.

“This leads to an open question for the computer vision community, which is, when is it OK to do this flipping to augment your dataset, and when is it not OK?” he said. “I’m hoping this will get people to think more about these questions and start to develop tools to understand how it’s biasing the algorithm.”

Understanding how reflection changes an image could also help use AI to identify images that have been faked or doctored — an issue of growing concern on the internet.

“This is perhaps a new tool or insight that can be used in the universe of image forensics, if you want to tell if something is real or not,” Snavely said.

The research was supported in part by philanthropists Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, and Wendy Schmidt.

Results published in Chem demonstrate a fabrication method for membrane materials that can overcome current bottlenecks in selectivity and permeability, key variables that drive carbon-capturing performance in real environments.

“Often there is a trade-off in how selective or how permeable you can make membranes that filter out carbon dioxide without allowing other gases to pass through. The ideal scenario is to create materials with high permeability and selectivity,” said Zhenzhen Yang of UT’s Department of Chemistry.

Gas membranes are a promising but still developing technology for reducing post-combustion or flue gas emissions produced by fossil-fueled industries.

The concept is simple: a thin, porous membrane acts as a filter for exhaust gas mixtures, selectively allowing carbon dioxide, or CO₂, to flow through freely into a collector that is kept under reduced pressure, but preventing oxygen, nitrogen and other gases from tagging along.

Unlike existing chemical methods to capture CO₂ from industrial processes, membranes are easy to install and can operate unattended for long periods with no additional steps or added energy costs. The catch is that new, cost-effective materials are needed to scale up the technology for commercial adoption.

“Gas membranes need pressure on one side and typically a vacuum on the other to maintain a free-flow environment, which is why materials’ selectivity and permeability are so important to developing the technology,” said Ilja Popovs of ORNL’s Chemical Sciences Division. “Underperforming materials require more energy to push gases through the system, so advanced materials are key to keeping energy costs low.”

No natural and only a few synthetic materials have exceeded what is called the Robeson upper limit, a known boundary that constrains how selective and permeable most materials can be before these rates start to drop.

Materials with sufficiently high selectivity and permeability for efficient gas separations are rare and often made from expensive starting materials whose production requires either long and tedious synthesis or costly transition metal catalysts.

“We set out to test a hypothesis that introducing fluorine atoms into membrane materials could improve carbon-capture and separation performance,” Yang said.

The element fluorine, used to make consumer products such as Teflon and toothpaste, offers carbon dioxide-philic properties that make it attractive for carbon-capture applications. It is also widely available, making it a relatively affordable option for low-cost fabrication methods. Research on fluorinated gas membranes has been limited because of fundamental challenges of incorporating fluorine into materials to realize its carbon-loving functionality.

“Our first step was to create a unique fluorine-based polymer using simple chemical methods and commercially available starting materials,” Yang said.

Next, researchers transformed, or carbonized, the material using heat to give it the porous structure and functionality needed for capturing CO₂. The two-step process preserved the fluorinated groups and boosted CO₂ selectivity in the final material, overcoming a fundamental hurdle encountered in other synthetic methods.

“The approach resulted in a carbon dioxide-philic material with high surface area and ultra-micropores that is stable in high-temperature operating conditions,” Yang said. “All of these factors make it a promising candidate for carbon-capture and separation membranes.”

The material’s novel design contributes to its exceptional performance, observed in high selectivity and permeability rates that exceed the Robeson upper limit, something only a handful of materials have accomplished.

“Our success was a material achievement that demonstrates feasible routes for leveraging fluorine in future membrane materials. Moreover, we achieved this goal using commercially available, inexpensive starting materials,” Popovs said.

The basic discovery expands the limited library of practical options for carbon-capture membranes and opens new directions for developing fluorinated membranes with other task-specific functionalities.

Researchers aim to next investigate the mechanism by which fluorinated membranes absorb and transport CO₂, a fundamental step that will inform the design of better carbon-capture systems with materials purposely tailored to grab CO₂ emissions.

A new technique could help reduce antibiotic prescribing by predicting which drugs could be effective in fighting bacteria within minutes.

Scientists at the University of Exeter have developed the method, which allows users to see whether a bacterium is likely to respond to antibiotics. The research is currently in early stages of development, and the team hope the miniaturised devices they use for this research could one day be based in clinics, reducing the number of different antibiotics prescribed to patients.

The technique works by examining whether fluorescent qualities of the antibiotics are taken up by bacteria. If so, the bacteria glow brighter under the microscope, revealing that the antibiotic has infiltrated the membrane and could be effective. The research, published in the journal Lab on a Chip, could contribute to efforts to reduce prescribing, and also enable the development of more effective antibiotics, to help fight the global threat of antibiotic resistance.

Antibiotic resistance is recognised as a major global threat. As these drugs increasingly fail to work, around 10 million people are predicted to die annually of infections by 2050.

The new technique uses a special microscope and a miniaturised device into which a sample of the bacteria is injected, along with the antibiotic. To date, the team has used the antibiotic ofloxacin, which glows fluorescent under ultraviolet light. Bacteria also glow when the antibiotic is taken up. However, if they remain dark, the antibiotic has no chance of working and killing the bacteria.

Dr Stefano Pagliara, a biophysicist in the Living Systems Institute, leading this research at the University of Exeter, said: “We’re really excited about the potential for this technique to make a meaningful reduction in prescribing, helping to fight the global threat of antibiotic resistance. At the moment, it can take days for clinicians to get a lab result, which involves growing bacteria, but there is still some guess work involved. Our technique could reduce the use of multiple antibiotics to try and fight a bacterial infection.”

Dr Jehangir Cama, an industry research fellow at the Living Systems Institute, who performed the experimental work of this research, said: “Our next step is to further develop this exciting new method by combining it with more advanced microscopy techniques, to see where exactly the antibiotics go when they enter the bacteria.”

The team is now working on expanding the technique, by manipulating the fluorescent qualities of other forms of antibiotics so they can work in the same way. Further research in this area has been funded by QUEX, a partnership between the University of Exeter and The University of Queensland in Australia. The Queensland team, led by Dr Mark Blaskovich, Director of the Centre for Superbug Solutions at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, is developing fluorescent versions of other antibiotics so they can be tested in a similar manner. Blaskovich adds “I am enthused about the opportunities to improve our fundamental understanding of the interactions between antibiotics and bacteria and how this leads to antimicrobial resistance, by combining our novel antibiotic-derived probes with the cutting edge single cell analysis capabilities of the Exeter group.”

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Exposure to EDCs, chemicals that disrupt the body’s natural hormones, is most often associated with industrial pollution, contaminated food and water, or personal and home care products. Less appreciated is the fact that some medications and medical devices also contain these harmful chemicals. This includes both prescribed and over-the-counter medications as well as medical equipment used in the hospital, including among the most vulnerable patients in the neonatal intensive care unit. Unfortunately, most healthcare providers are unaware of these risks, and patients are unaware of their exposure.

“Through the prescribing of medications and the use of medical supplies, health care providers expose patients to chemicals that can disrupt the body’s natural hormones,” said the study’s lead author, Robert Michael Sargis, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Illinois at Chicago in Chicago, Ill. “In order to provide ethically sound medical care, the health care community must be made aware of these risks, manufacturers must strive to identify and eliminate endocrine-disrupting chemicals from their products, and patients must be empowered with knowledge and options to make informed decisions that limit their exposure to potentially harmful chemicals. As clinicians, we have an ethical imperative to act on this issue to protect our patients.”

The authors are calling on physicians to become educated about their role in exposing patients to these chemicals. They express the need for better patient education and a commitment on the part of physicians to live up to their ethical mandates to discuss the risks of EDC exposure. Regulatory agencies and manufacturers also need to identify and eliminate EDCs in medications and medical devices and develop safer alternatives.

“As health care providers, we need to do a better job of limiting the threats of chemical exposures to our patients’ health by ending our complicity in mediating those exposures,” Sargis said.

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Materials provided by The Endocrine Society. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.