“When your posture is tall and erect, the muscles of your back can easily support the weight of your head and neck — as much as 12 pounds,” explains San Francisco State University Professor of Holistic Health Erik Peper. “But when your head juts forward at a 45 degree angle, your neck acts like a fulcrum, like a long lever lifting a heavy object. Now the muscle weight of your head and neck is the equivalent of about 45 pounds. It is not surprising people get stiff necks and shoulder and back pain.”

Peper, Associate Professor of Health Education Richard Harvey and their colleagues, including two student researchers, tested the effects of head and neck position in a recent study published in the journal Biofeedback. First they asked 87 students to sit upright with their heads properly aligned on their necks and asked them to turn their heads. Then the students were asked to “scrunch” their necks and jut their heads forward. Ninety-two percent reported being able to turn their heads much farther when not scrunching. In the second test, 125 students scrunched their necks for 30 seconds. Afterwards, 98 percent reported some level of pain in their head, neck or eyes.

The researchers also monitored 12 students with electromyography equipment and found that trapezius muscle tension increased in the scrunched, head forward position.

So if you suffer from headaches or neck and backaches from computer work, check your posture and make sure your head is aligned on top of your neck, as if held by an invisible thread from the ceiling. “You can do something about this poor posture very quickly,” said Peper. To increase body awareness, Peper advises purposefully replicating the head-forward/neck scrunched position. “You can exaggerate the position and experience the symptoms. Then when you find yourself doing it, you can become aware and stop.”

Other solutions he offers include increasing the font on your computer screen, wearing computer reading glasses or placing your computer on a stand at eye level, all to make the screen easier to read without strain.

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Materials provided by San Francisco State University. Original written by Lisa Owens Viani. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The resulting “hot spot” maps show regions of the world with high diversity of potential wildlife hosts of flaviviruses — viruses mostly spread by mosquitoes and ticks. These include regions where flaviviruses have not been detected but that have wildlife species with the potential to harbor them.

The information provides scientists and health authorities with a road map for disease detection and surveillance efforts.

“Tomorrow, if there’s an outbreak anywhere in the world, we now know which wildlife species are most likely to be infected in addition to humans,” said lead author Pranav Pandit, a postdoctoral scholar with the UC Davis One Health Institute’s EpiCenter for Disease Dynamics in the School of Veterinary Medicine.

PREDICTING POTENTIAL HOSTS

The findings are reported in a recent study published in the journal Nature Communications.

Recently Zika virus emerged and continues to circulate in South America and Southeast Asia. The study predicts potential wildlife hosts in these regions with the ability to maintain Zika virus transmission in nature.

There is also rising concern that Japanese encephalitis virus will emerge and establish in Europe. The study identifies Europe as one of the regions with a high richness of potential Japanese encephalitis hosts, including many common bird species.

For the study, researchers collected all the published data on wildlife species that have tested positive for flaviviruses. They identified important host traits, such as environmental and physiological features. Then they used a machine-learning model that considered the roughly 10,400 avian and 5,400 mammal species in order to identify the most likely species to host viruses.

The model predicted hundreds of previously unobserved host species. For example, it predicted 173 host species for dengue virus, of which 139 have not been previously recognized.

HELPING HUMANS AND OTHER PRIMATES

Co-leading author and UC Davis professor Christine Kreuder Johnson said the modeling work can help researchers identify which primate species could be potential virus hosts. For example, the model indicated that primates are the main hosts of Zika and yellow fever, but only nine of the 21 primate species predicted to be hosts have been detected with either of those viruses due to limited surveillance activities among these species to date.

UC Davis One Health Institute scientists have established noninvasive sampling techniques for primates, such as collecting saliva from sticks and plants chewed by primates or from ropes coated with strawberry jam. But flaviviruses can be difficult to detect, especially in wildlife.

“We needed this modeling technique to help us understand the most likely hosts for these viruses in their natural habitat,” said Johnson, director of the EpiCenter for Disease Dynamics. “That’s important for both global health and wildlife conservation. Many of these primates are already endangered, and these diseases burden an already strained population.”

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Materials provided by University of California – Davis. Original written by Kat Kerlin. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and Harvard University have found that the deep Pacific Ocean lags a few centuries behind in terms of temperature and is still adjusting to the entry into the Little Ice Age. Whereas most of the ocean is responding to modern warming, the deep Pacific may be cooling.

“These waters are so old and haven’t been near the surface in so long, they still ‘remember’ what was going on hundreds of years ago when Europe experienced some of its coldest winters in history,” said Jake Gebbie, a physical oceanographer at WHOI and lead author of the study published Jan. 4, 2019, in the journal Science.

“Climate varies across all timescales,” adds Peter Huybers, Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University and co-author of the paper. “Some regional warming and cooling patterns, like the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period, are well known. Our goal was to develop a model of how the interior properties of the ocean respond to changes in surface climate.”

What that model showed was surprising.

“If the surface ocean was generally cooling for the better part of the last millennium, those parts of the ocean most isolated from modern warming may still be cooling,” said Gebbie.

The model is, of course, a simplification of the actual ocean. To test the prediction, Gebbie and Huybers compared the cooling trend found in the model to ocean temperature measurements taken by scientists aboard the HMS Challenger in the 1870s and modern observations from the World Ocean Circulation Experiment of the 1990s.

The HMS Challenger, a three-masted wooden sailing ship originally designed as a British warship, was used for the first modern scientific expedition to explore the world’s ocean and seafloor. During the expedition from 1872 to 1876, thermometers were lowered into the ocean depths and more than 5,000 temperature measurements were logged.

“We screened this historical data for outliers and considered a variety of corrections associated with pressure effects on the thermometer and stretching of the hemp rope used for lowering thermometers,” said Huybers.

The researchers then compared the HMS Challenger data to the modern observations and found warming in most parts of the global ocean, as would be expected due to the warming planet over the 20th Century, but cooling in the deep Pacific at a depth of around two kilometers.

“The close correspondence between the predictions and observed trends gave us confidence that this is a real phenomenon,” said Gebbie.

These findings imply that variations in surface climate that predate the onset of modern warming still influence how much the climate is heating up today. Previous estimates of how much heat the Earth had absorbed during the last century assumed an ocean that started out in equilibrium at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. But Gebbie and Huybers estimate that the deep Pacific cooling trend leads to a downward revision of heat absorbed over the 20th century by about 30 percent.

“Part of the heat needed to bring the ocean into equilibrium with an atmosphere having more greenhouse gases was apparently already present in the deep Pacific,” said Huybers. “These findings increase the impetus for understanding the causes of the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age as a way for better understanding modern warming trends.”

This research was funded by the James E. and Barbara V. Moltz Fellowship and National Science Foundation grants OCE-1357121 and OCE-1558939.

In an advance that could lead to new treatments for lung disease, MIT researchers have now designed an inhalable form of mRNA. This aerosol could be administered directly to the lungs to help treat diseases such as cystic fibrosis, the researchers say.

“We think the ability to deliver mRNA via inhalation could allow us to treat a range of different disease of the lung,” says Daniel Anderson, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering, a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), and the senior author of the study.

The researchers showed that they could induce lung cells in mice to produce a target protein — in this case, a bioluminescent protein. If the same success rate can be achieved with therapeutic proteins, that could be high enough to treat many lung diseases, the researchers say.

Asha Patel, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor at Imperial College London, is the lead author of the paper, which appears in the Jan. 4 issue of the journal Advanced Materials. Other authors of the paper include James Kaczmarek and Kevin Kauffman, both recent MIT PhD recipients; Suman Bose, a research scientist at the Koch Institute; Faryal Mir, a former MIT technical assistant; Michael Heartlein, the chief technical officer at Translate Bio; Frank DeRosa, senior vice president of research and development at Translate Bio; and Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT and a member of the Koch Institute.

Treatment by inhalation

Messenger RNA encodes genetic instructions that stimulate cells to produce specific proteins. Many researchers have been working on developing mRNA to treat genetic disorders or cancer, by essentially turning the patients’ own cells into drug factories.

Because mRNA can be easily broken down in the body, it needs to transported within some kind of protective carrier. Anderson’s lab has previously designed materials that can deliver mRNA and another type of RNA therapy called RNA interference (RNAi) to the liver and other organs, and some of these are being further developed for possible testing in patients.

In this study, the researchers wanted to create an inhalable form of mRNA, which would allow the molecules to be delivered directly to the lungs. Many existing drugs for asthma and other lung diseases are specially formulated so they can be inhaled via either an inhaler, which sprays powdered particles of medication, or a nebulizer, which releases an aerosol containing the medication.

The MIT team set out to develop a material that could stabilize RNA during the process of aerosol delivery. Some previous studies have explored a material called polyethylenimine (PEI) for delivering inhalable DNA to the lungs. However, PEI doesn’t break down easily, so with the repeated dosing that would likely be required for mRNA therapies, the polymer could accumulate and cause side effects.

To avoid those potential side effects, the researchers turned to a type of positively charged polymers called hyperbranched poly (beta amino esters), which, unlike PEI, are biodegradable.

The particles the team created consist of spheres, approximately 150 nanometers in diameter, with a tangled mixture of the polymer and mRNA molecules that encode luciferase, a bioluminescent protein. The researchers suspended these particles in droplets and delivered them to mice as an inhalable mist, using a nebulizer.

“Breathing is used as a simple but effective delivery route to the lungs. Once the aerosol droplets are inhaled, the nanoparticles contained within each droplet enter the cells and instruct it to make a particular protein from mRNA,” Patel says.

The researchers found that 24 hours after the mice inhaled the mRNA, lung cells were producing the bioluminescent protein. The amount of protein gradually fell over time as the mRNA was cleared. The researchers were able to maintain steady levels of the protein by giving the mice repeated doses, which may be necessary if adapted to treat chronic lung disease.

Broad distribution

Further analysis of the lungs revealed that mRNA was evenly distributed throughout the five lobes of the lungs and was taken up mainly by epithelial lung cells, which line the lung surfaces. These cells are implicated in cystic fibrosis, as well as other lung diseases such as respiratory distress syndrome, which is caused by a deficiency in surfactant protein. In her new lab at Imperial College London, Patel plans to further investigate mRNA-based therapeutics.

In this study, the researchers also demonstrated that the nanoparticles could be freeze-dried into a powder, suggesting that it may be possible to deliver them via an inhaler instead of nebulizer, which could make the medication more convenient for patients.

TranslateBio, a company developing mRNA therapeutics, partially funded this study and has also begun testing an inhalable form of mRNA in a Phase 1/2 clinical trial in patients with cystic fibrosis. Other sources of funding for this study include the United Kingdom Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the Koch Institute Support (core) Grant from the National Cancer Institute.

Now, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have unveiled a clue into the cuprates’ unusual properties — and the answer lies within an unexpected source: the electron spin. Their paper describing the research behind this discovery was published on Dec. 13 in the journal Science.

Adding electron spin to the equation

Every electron is like a tiny magnet that points in a certain direction. And electrons within most superconductor materials seem to follow their own inner compass. Rather than pointing in the same direction, their electron spins haphazardly point every which way — some up, some down, others left or right.

When scientists are developing new kinds of materials, they usually look at the materials’ electron spin, or the direction in which the electrons are pointing. But when it comes to making superconductors, condensed matter physicists haven’t traditionally focused on spin, because the conventionally held view was that all of the properties that make these materials unique were shaped only by the way in which two electrons interact with each other through what’s known as “electron correlation.”

But when a research team led by Alessandra Lanzara, a faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and a Charles Kittel Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley, used a unique detector to measure samples of an exotic cuprate superconductor, Bi-2212 (bismuth strontium calcium copper oxide), with a powerful technique called SARPES (spin- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy), they uncovered something that defied everything they had ever known about superconductors: a distinct pattern of electron spins within the material.

“In other words, we discovered that there was a well-defined direction in which each electron was pointing given its momentum, a property also known as spin-momentum locking,” said Lanzara. “Finding it in high-temperature superconductors was a big surprise.”

A new map for high-temperature superconductors

In the world of superconductors, “high temperature” means that the material can conduct electricity without resistance at temperatures higher than expected but still in extremely cold temperatures far below zero degrees Fahrenheit. That’s because superconductors need to be extraordinarily cold to carry electricity without any resistance. At those low temperatures, electrons are able to move in sync with each other and not get knocked by jiggling atoms, causing electrical resistance.

And within this special class of high-temperature superconductor materials, cuprates are some of the best performers, leading some researchers to believe that they have potential use as a new material for building super-efficient electrical wires that can carry power without any loss of electron momentum, said co-lead author Kenneth Gotlieb, who was a Ph.D. student in Lanzara’s lab at the time of the discovery. Understanding what makes some exotic cuprate superconductors such as Bi-2212 work at temperatures as high as 133 Kelvin (about -220 degrees Fahrenheit) could make it easier to realize a practical device.

Among the very exotic materials that condensed matter physicists study, there are two kinds of electron interactions that give rise to novel properties for new materials, including superconductors, said Gotlieb. Scientists who have been studying cuprate superconductors have focused on just one of those interactions: electron correlation.

The other kind of electron interaction found in exotic materials is “spin-orbit coupling” — the way in which the electron’s magnetic moment interacts with atoms in the material.

Spin-orbit coupling was often neglected in the studies of cuprate superconductors, because many assumed that this kind of electron interaction would be weak when compared to electron correlation, said co-lead author Chiu-Yun Lin, a researcher in the Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and a Ph.D. student in the Department of Physics at UC Berkeley. So when they found the unusual spin pattern, Lin said that although they were pleasantly surprised by this initial finding, they still weren’t sure whether it was a “true” intrinsic property of the Bi-2212 material, or an external effect caused by the way the laser light interacted with the material in the experiment.

Shining a light on electron spin with SARPES

Over the course of nearly three years, Gotlieb and Lin used the SARPES detector to thoroughly map out the spin pattern at Lanzara’s lab. When they needed higher photon energies to excite a wider range of electrons within a sample, the researchers moved the detector next door to Berkeley Lab’s synchrotron, the Advanced Light Source (ALS), a U.S. DOE Office of Science User Facility that specializes in lower energy, “soft” X-ray light for studying the properties of materials.

The SARPES detector was developed by Lanzara, along with co-authors Zahid Hussain, the former ALS Division Deputy, and Chris Jozwiak, an ALS staff scientist. The detector allowed the scientists to probe key electronic properties of the electrons such as valence band structure.

After tens of experiments at the ALS, where the team of researchers connected the SARPES detector to Beamline 10.0.1 so they could access this powerful light to explore the spin of the electrons moving with much higher momentum through the superconductor than those they could access in the lab, they found that Bi-2212’s distinct spin pattern — called “nonzero spin — was a true result, inspiring them to ask even more questions. “There remains many unsolved questions in the field of high-temperature superconductivity,” said Lin. “Our work provides new knowledge to better understand the cuprate superconductors, which can be a building block to resolve these questions.”

Lanzara added that their discovery couldn’t have happened without the collaborative “team science” of Berkeley Lab, a DOE national lab with historic ties to nearby UC Berkeley. “This work is a typical example of where science can go when people with expertise across the scientific disciplines come together, and how new instrumentation can push the boundaries of science,” she said.