The method, detailed in the Journal of Economic Entomology, uses a pleasant-smelling chemical released by forest trees called pinene that reminds western drywood termites of their food. They follow the scent to a spot of insecticide injected into wood.

“We saw significant differences in the death rates using insecticide alone versus the insecticide plus pinene,” said UCR entomologist Dong-Hwan Choe, who led the discovery. “Without pinene, we got about 70% mortality. When we added it in, it was over 95%.

Native to North America, western drywood termites are environmentally important. They are drawn to dead wood above ground, and consume it with the help of microorganisms in their guts. “They are recyclers,” Choe said. “And they’re very common.”

Unfortunately for humans, the insects are unable to distinguish between dead trees and the wood used to build homes. Of particular concern in California and Florida, as well as parts of Canada and Mexico, no dwelling is immune to them. “It’s only a matter of time before termites attack a house, especially in warmer parts of the states,” Choe said.

Fumigation is one of the most common drywood termite control techniques. Homes are covered with tents and then bombed with gas that kills the insects. In the U.S., California uses this method more than any other state.

The pest control industry is under pressure to find new methods because the chemical, sulfuryl fluoride, is both a greenhouse gas and is also toxic to humans. Additionally, fumigation is an expensive process that does not provide lasting protection against termites.

“Even though it is very thorough, a home can be infested again soon after fumigation is completed,” Choe said. “Some people fumigate every three to five years because it doesn’t protect structures from future infestations.”

Localized injection is an alternative strategy to control drywood termites that does not involve gas. Technicians drill holes into the infested wood to reach the termite “gallery” or lair, then inject poison into the hole to inundate the bugs.

“This is a more localized treatment, and in theory, it is a better strategy when you want to control drywood termites with fewer chemicals. It’s less expensive, and the treated wood may also stay protected from future infestations,” Choe said.

The challenge with localized injection is figuring out exactly where the bugs are hiding. Typically, this method uses a contact-based insecticide, meaning the insects must touch the poison for it to work.

Using an attractant like pinene eliminates the need to hunt for the termites. “Even at low concentrations, pinene is good at attracting termites from a distance,” Choe said.

“We don’t think it’s functioning as a pheromone,” Choe said. “We think the scent is more associated with their food. Smells nice… dinner time! That’s the concept that we had in mind.”

The insecticide they used, fipronil, is also used to control ant infestations. It can be toxic to aquatic insects and pollinators if it gets into the environment. In this case it is injected into the wood, so chances of off-target effects are low.

Choe’s laboratory generally studies the chemical communication systems of urban insect pests to develop strategies like this one for western drywood termites.

“Our study shows that if you understand insect behavior better, it’s interesting by itself,” Choe said. “Then there are also important implications for more effective pest management, so we can use fewer chemicals without compromising efficiency.”

Meteorites that formed roughly 1.3 billion years ago and then ejected from Mars have been collected by scientists from sites in Antarctica and Africa in recent decades. Scripps Oceanography geologist James Day and his colleagues report May 31 in the journal Science Advances on analyses of the chemical compositions of these samples from the Red Planet.

These results are important for understanding not only how Mars formed and evolved, but also for providing precise data that can inform recent NASA missions like Insight and Perseverance and the Mars Sample Return, said study lead Day.

“Martian meteorites are the only physical materials we have available from Mars,” said Day. “They enable us to make precise and accurate measurements and then quantify processes that occurred within Mars and close to the martian surface. They provide direct information on Mars’ composition that can ground truth mission science, like the ongoing Perseverance rover operations taking place there.”

Day’s team assembled its account of Mars’ formation using meteorite samples that all came from the same volcano, known as nakhlites and chassignites. Some 11 million years ago, a large meteor impact on Mars sheared away parts of the planet and sent the rocks hurtling into space. Some of those landed on Earth in the form of meteorites, with the first of these being discovered in 1815 in Chassigny, France and then in 1905 in Nakhla, Egypt.

Since then, more such meteorites have been discovered in locations including Mauritania and Antarctica. Scientists are able to identify Mars as their place of origin because these meteorites are relatively young, so come from a recently active planet, have distinct compositions of the abundant element oxygen compared to Earth, and retain the composition of Mars’ atmosphere measured on the surface by the Viking landers in the 1970s.

The team analyzed the two keystone nakhlite and chassignite meteorite types. Nakhlites are basaltic, similar to lavas erupting in Iceland and Hawaii today, but are rich in a mineral called clinopyroxene. Chassignites are almost exclusively made of the mineral olivine. On Earth, basalts are a main component of the planet’s crust, especially under the oceans, while olivines are abundant in its mantle.

The same is true on Mars. The team showed that these rocks are related to each other through a process known as fractional crystallization within the volcano in which they were formed. Using the composition of these rocks, they also show that some of the then-molten nakhlites incorporated portions of crust close to the surface that also interacted with Mars’ atmosphere.

“By determining that nakhlites and chassignites are from the same volcanic system, and that they interacted with martian crust that was altered by atmospheric interactions, we can identify a new rock type on Mars,” said Day. “With the existing collection of martian meteorites, all of which are volcanic in origin, we are able to better understand the internal structure of Mars.”

The team was able to do this because of the distinctive chemical characteristics of nakhlites and chassignites, as well as the characteristic compositions of other martian meteorites. These reveal an atmospherically altered upper crust to Mars, a complex deeper crust and a mantle where plumes from deep within Mars have penetrated to the base of the crust, while the interior of Mars’, formed early in its evolution have also melted to produce distinct types of volcanoes.

“What’s remarkable is that Mars’ volcanism has incredible similarities, but also differences, to Earth,” said Day. “On the one hand, nakhlites and chassignites formed in similar ways to recent volcanism in places like Oahu in Hawaii. There, newly formed volcanoes press down on the mantle generating tectonic forces that produce further volcanism.”

“On the other hand, the reservoirs in Mars are extremely ancient, separating from one another shortly after the Red planet formed. On Earth, plate tectonics has helped to remix reservoirs back together over time. In this sense, Mars provides an important link between what the early Earth may have looked like from how it looks today.”

Besides Day, Marine Paquet of Scripps Oceanography and colleagues from the University of Nevada Las Vegas and the French National Centre for Scientific Research contributed to the study. The NASA Solar Systems Workings and Emerging Worlds program funded the research.

Seasonal flu vaccines cover influenza B and the more common influenza A but do not stimulate the broadest possible range of immune responses against both viruses. In addition, people whose immune systems have been weakened by age or illness may not respond effectively to the flu shot.

Small-molecule drugs that block neuraminidase, a major surface glycoprotein of the influenza virus, can help treat early infection, but they provide limited benefit when the infection is more severe, and they are generally less effective in treating influenza B infections. Thus, another way to combat this virus is needed.

Reporting in the journal Immunity, the VUMC researchers describe how, from the bone marrow of an individual previously vaccinated against influenza, they isolated two groups of monoclonal antibodies that bound to distinct parts of the neuraminidase glycoprotein on the surface of influenza B.

One of the antibodies, FluB-400, broadly inhibited virus replication in laboratory cultures of human respiratory epithelial cells. It also protected against influenza B in animal models when given by injection or through the nostrils.

Intranasal antibody administration may be more effective and have fewer systemic side effects than more typical routes — intravenous infusion or intramuscular injection — in part because intranasal antibodies may “trap” the virus in the nasal mucus, thereby preventing infection of the underlying epithelial surface, the researchers suggested.

These findings support the development of FluB-400 for the prevention and treatment of influenza B and will help guide efforts to develop a universal influenza vaccine, they said.

“Antibodies increasingly have become an interesting medical tool to prevent or treat viral infections,” said the paper’s corresponding author, James Crowe Jr., MD. “We set out to find antibodies for the type B influenza virus, which continues to be a medical problem, and we were happy to find such especially powerful molecules in our search.”

Crowe, who holds the Ann Scott Carell Chair, is University Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics and director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center, which has isolated monoclonal antibodies against a host of viral infections, including COVID-19.

The paper’s first author, Rachael Wolters, DVM, PhD, is a former graduate student in the Crowe lab. Other VUMC co-authors are Elaine Chen, PhD, Ty Sornberger, Luke Myers, Laura Handal, Taylor Engdahl, Nurgen Kose, Lauren Williamson, PhD, Buddy Creech, MD, and Katherine Gibson-Corley, DVM, PhD.

This study was supported in part by National Institutes of Health grants T32AI112541, K01OD036063 and U01AI150739, NIH-HHS contracts 75N93019C00074 and 75N93019C00073, and the Collaborative Influenza Vaccine Innovation Centers program of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

In the first two years of life, children experience a somewhat narrow set of objects and faces, but with many different viewpoints and under varying lighting conditions. Inspired by this developmental insight, the researchers introduced a new machine learning approach that uses information about spatial position to train AI visual systems more efficiently. They found that AI models trained on the new method outperformed base models by up to 14.99%. They reported their findings in the May issue of the journal Patterns.

“Current approaches in AI use massive sets of randomly shuffled photographs from the internet for training. In contrast, our strategy is informed by developmental psychology, which studies how children perceive the world,” said Lizhen Zhu, the lead author and doctoral candidate in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State.

The researchers developed a new contrastive learning algorithm, which is a type of self-supervised learning method in which an AI system learns to detect visual patterns to identify when two images are derivations of the same base image, resulting in a positive pair. These algorithms, however, often treat images of the same object taken from different perspectives as separate entities rather than as positive pairs. Taking into account environmental data, including location, allows the AI system to overcome these challenges and detect positive pairs regardless of changes in camera position or rotation, lighting angle or condition and focal length, or zoom, according to the researchers.

“We hypothesize that infants’ visual learning depends on location perception. In order to generate an egocentric dataset with spatiotemporal information, we set up virtual environments in the ThreeDWorld platform, which is a high-fidelity, interactive, 3D physical simulation environment. This allowed us to manipulate and measure the location of viewing cameras as if a child was walking through a house,” Zhu added.

The scientists created three simulation environments — House14K, House100K and Apartment14K, with ’14K’ and ‘100K’ referring to the approximate number of sample images taken in each environment. Then they ran base contrastive learning models and models with the new algorithm through the simulations three times to see how well each classified images. The team found that models trained on their algorithm outperformed the base models on a variety of tasks. For example, on a task of recognizing the room in the virtual apartment, the augmented model performed on average at 99.35%, a 14.99% improvement over the base model. These new datasets are available for other scientists to use in training through www.child-view.com.

“It’s always hard for models to learn in a new environment with a small amount of data. Our work represents one of the first attempts at more energy-efficient and flexible AI training using visual content,” said James Wang, distinguished professor of information sciences and technology and advisor of Zhu.

The research has implications for the future development of advanced AI systems meant to navigate and learn from new environments, according to the scientists.

“This approach would be particularly beneficial in situations where a team of autonomous robots with limited resources needs to learn how to navigate in a completely unfamiliar environment,” Wang said. “To pave the way for future applications, we plan to refine our model to better leverage spatial information and incorporate more diverse environments.”

Collaborators from Penn State’s Department of Psychology and Department of Computer Science and Engineering also contributed to this study. This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, as well as the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences at Penn State.

The findings will improve clinical diagnostic services for patients with neurodevelopmental disorders.

Through rigorous genetic analysis, the researchers discovered that mutations in a small non-coding gene called RNU4-2 cause a collection of developmental symptoms that had not previously been tied to a distinct genetic disorder. Non-coding genes are parts of DNA that do not produce proteins. The investigators used whole-genome sequencing data in the United Kingdom’s National Genomic Research Library to compare the burden of rare genetic variants in 41,132 non-coding genes between 5,529 unrelated cases with intellectual disability and 46,401 unrelated controls.

The discovery is significant, as it represents one of the most common single-gene genetic causes of such disorders, ranking second only to Rett syndrome among patients sequenced by the United Kingdom’s Genomic Medicine Service. Notably, these mutations are typically spontaneous and not inherited, providing important insights into the nature of the condition.

“We performed a large genetic association analysis to identify rare variants in non-coding genes that might be responsible for neurodevelopmental disorders,” says the study’s first author Daniel Greene, PhD, Assistant Professor of Genetics and Genomics Sciences at Icahn Mount Sinai and a Visitor at the University of Cambridge. “Nowadays, finding a single gene that harbors genetic variants responsible for tens of thousands of patients with a rare disease is exceptionally unusual. Our discovery eluded researchers for years due to various sequencing and analytical challenges.”

More than 99 percent of genes known to harbor mutations that cause neurodevelopmental disorders encode proteins. The researchers hypothesized that non-coding genes, which don’t produce proteins, could also host mutations leading to intellectual disability. Neurodevelopmental disorders, which often appear before grade school, involve developmental deficits affecting personal, social, academic, or occupational functioning. Intellectual disability specifically includes significant limitations in intellectual functioning (e.g., learning, reasoning, problem-solving) and adaptive behavior (e.g., social and practical skills).

“The genetic changes we found affect a very short gene, only 141 units long, but this gene plays a crucial role in a basic biological function of cells, called gene splicing, which is present in all animals, plants and fungi,” says senior study author Ernest Turro, PhD, Associate Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at Icahn Mount Sinai and a Visitor at the University of Cambridge. “Most people with a neurodevelopmental disorder do not receive a molecular diagnosis following genetic testing. Thanks to this study, tens of thousands of families will now be able to obtain a molecular diagnosis for their affected family members, bringing many diagnostic odysseys to a close.”

Next, the researchers plan to explore the molecular mechanisms underlying this syndrome experimentally. This deeper understanding aims to provide biological insights that could one day lead to targeted interventions.

“What I found remarkable is how such a common cause of a neurodevelopmental disorder has been missed in the field because we’ve been focusing on coding genes,” says Heather Mefford, MD, PhD, of the Center for Pediatric Neurological Disease Research at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital who was not involved with the research. “This study’s discovery of mutations in non-coding genes, especially RNU4-2, highlights a significant and previously overlooked cause. It underscores the need to look beyond coding regions, which could reveal many other genetic causes, opening new diagnostic possibilities and research opportunities.”

The paper is titled “Mutations in the U4 snRNA gene RNU4-2 cause one of the most prevalent monogenic neurodevelopmental disorders.”

The remaining authors of the paper are Chantal Thys (KU Leuven, Belgium); Ian R. Berry, MD (University of Bristol, UK); Joanna Jarvis, MD (Birmingham Womens’ Hospital, UK); Els Ortibus, MD, PhD (KU Leuven, Belgium); Andrew D. Mumford, MD (University of Bristol, UK); and Kathleen Freson, PhD (KU Leuven, Belgium).

The work was supported, in part, by NIH awards R01HL161365 and R03HD111492.

The virus, called Apocryptovirus odysseus, along with 18 others that are closely related to it, was discovered through a computational screen of human neuron data — an effort aimed at elucidating the connection between RNA viruses and neuroinflammatory disease. The virus is associated with severe inflammation in humans infected with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, leading the team to hypothesize that it exacerbates toxoplasmosis disease.

“We discovered A. odysseus in human neurons using the open-science Serratus platform to search through more than 150,000 RNA viruses” said Purav Gupta, first author on the study, recent high school graduate and current undergraduate student at U of T’s Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research. “Serratus identifies RNA viruses from public data by flagging an enzyme called RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, which facilitates replication of viral RNA. This enzyme allows the virus to reproduce itself and for the infection to spread.”

The study was published recently in the journal Virus Evolution.

The parasite T. gondii is far-reaching, infecting an estimated one-third of the global population. It can live in any non-blood cell type, including neurons, forming cysts inside cells. The parasite is transmitted to nearby cells when the infected cell ruptures.

T. gondii infections often go unnoticed because they only lead to symptoms in rare cases. Regardless, toxoplasmosis merits investigation considering how widespread it is and the potential effects it may have on pregnant women and those who are immunocompromised, Gupta said.

“We believe the virus and parasite work hand-in-hand to cause disease in the human host, where the virus hides inside the parasite, like a soldier in a trojan horse, to gain entry to the human brain,” said Gupta. “Our research marks the first time that scientists have connected toxoplasmosis to a virus.”

The newly discovered A. odysseus is found in two hypervirulent strains of the T. gondii parasite, referred to as RUB and COUGAR.

RUB has been documented in French Guinea to cause severe fever and organ failure, while COUGAR has been shown in British Columbia to be connected to ocular toxoplasmosis — the leading cause of infectious blindness. Researchers found the strains in different geographical locations at different times, demonstrating their potentially wide-ranging impacts.

Symptoms of toxoplasmosis can be aggravated by a hyperactivated human immune response. The virus-carrying parasite triggers this type of response when the immune system senses the foreign RNA of the virus.

“The group of 19 RNA viruses we found are strong biomarkers for parasitic infection,” said Artem Babaian, principal investigator on the study and assistant professor of molecular genetics at the Donnelly Centre and the Temerty Faculty of Medicine. “It’s obvious now that the A. odysseus virus could be a valuable marker of disease-causing infections, like severe toxoplasmosis, in humans or other animals. The next step is to test if this raises the possibility that treating a parasite’s viruses could be an effective means of treating symptoms that arise from parasitic infections.”

Zoonotic viruses that infect other living things in our environment in order to reach us are expected to cause the majority of emerging infectious diseases in humans, Babaian noted. “This study underscores the importance of looking beyond the viruses that infect humans directly into the extended virome,” he said.

This research was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Additionally, the brain’s response to serotonin stimulation is strongly linked to the distribution of serotonin receptors (proteins activated by serotonin) and the connection patterns of DRN serotonin neurons. “We clearly see from the high-field MRI images which areas in the brain are activated and deactivated during the awake state and under anesthesia when we activate serotonin neurons in the DRN,” lead author Dr. Hiroaki Hamada said. “A previous study showed that the cerebral cortex and the basal ganglia were mostly deactivated under anesthesia, which we also observed, however, in awake states these areas are significantly activated.”

Our brains are made of tens of billions of nerve cells called neurons. These cells communicate with each other through biomolecules called neurotransmitters. Serotonin, a type of neurotransmitter, is produced by serotonin neurons in our brains and influences many of our behavioral and cognitive functions such as memory, sleep, and mood.

“Learning about the brain’s serotonin system can help us understand how we adapt our behaviors and how mood therapy medication works. But it was hard to study how serotonin from the DRN affects the entire brain. First, because electric stimulation of the DRN can also activate neurons that don’t use serotonin to communicate with each other, and second, using drugs can affect other serotonin in the brain,” explained Dr. Hiroaki Hamada, a former PhD student at OIST’s Neural Computation Unit and lead author of a paper on this study published in the journal Nature Communications.

Previous studies by researchers at the Neural Computation Unit have shown that serotonin neurons in the DRN promote adaptive behaviors in mice associated with future rewards. Dr. Hamada and his collaborators wanted to understand the mechanisms in the brain that cause these adaptive behaviors.

“We knew that DRN serotonin activation has strong effects on behavior, but we didn’t know how this serotonin activation affects different parts of the brain,” Prof. Kenji Doya, leader of the Neural Computation Unit, stated.

Observing the entire brain’s response to DRN serotonin activation

The researchers used a novel technique called opto-functional MRI to address this question. They used a method called optogenetics to selectively activate serotonin neurons in the DRN with light and observed the entire brain’s response using functional MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging). They utilized the latest MRI scanner with a strong magnetic field to achieve the high resolution needed to study the small brains of mice. The mice were put in the MRI scanner and serotonin neurons were stimulated at regular intervals to see how this affected the whole brain.

They found that DRN serotonin stimulation causes activation of the cerebral cortex and the basal ganglia, brain areas involved in many cognitive functions. This result was very different from a previous study performed under anesthesia. Additionally, the brain’s response to serotonin stimulation is strongly linked to the distribution of serotonin receptors (proteins activated by serotonin) and the connection patterns of DRN serotonin neurons.

“We clearly see from the high-field MRI images which areas in the brain are activated and deactivated during the awake state and under anesthesia when we activate serotonin neurons in the DRN,” Dr. Hamada said. “A previous study showed that the cerebral cortex and the basal ganglia were mostly deactivated under anesthesia, which we also observed, however, in awake states these areas are significantly activated.”

The cerebral cortex and the basal ganglia are parts of the brain critical for many cognitive processes, including motor activity and behaviors to gain rewards such as food and water. Activation of DNR serotonin neurons can therefore lead to changes in motivation and behavior.

Patience and stimulating your own serotonin

Combining the new technique of high field MRI and optogenetics presented many obstacles that Dr. Hamada had to overcome. “We introduced and adapted a method previously used by our collaborators and established many new procedures at OIST. For me, the main challenge was using the new MRI machine at the time, so I needed to have patience and stimulate my own serotonin. I started doing a lot of exercise after that,” he laughed.

Seeing activations in the DRN for the first time was a standout moment for Dr. Hamada. In the beginning, he used the same light intensity that his collaborators used, but this was too weak to see the brain responses in the MRI. He then used bigger optical fibers and increased the intensity to stimulate the DRNs.

Prof. Doya noted that the next important milestone to achieve is understanding exactly how this brain-wide activation of serotonin occurs: “It’s important to find out what is the actual molecular mechanism allowing this activation in our brain. People who would like to get better at adjusting their behavior and thinking in different situations could also find it helpful to learn more about how serotonin helps control our moods.”

Today’s commercial charging infrastructure can be a jungle. The market is dynamic and complex with a variety of subscriptions and free competition between providers. At some fast charging stations, congestion and long queues may even occur. In a new study, researchers at Chalmers have created a mathematical model to investigate how fast charging stations controlled by artificial intelligence, AI, can help by offering electric car drivers personalised prices, which the drivers can choose to accept or refuse. The AI uses algorithms that can adjust prices based on individual factors, such as battery level and the car’s geographic location.

“The electric car drivers can choose to share information with the charging station providers and receive a personal price proposal from a smart charging station. In our study, we could show how rational and self-serving drivers react by only accepting offers that are beneficial to themselves. This leads to both price and waiting times being minimized,” says Balázs Kulcsár, professor at the department of electrical engineering at Chalmers.

In the study, the drivers always had the option to refuse the personal price, and choose a conventional charging station with a fixed price instead. The personal prices received by the drivers could differ significantly from each other, but were almost always lower than the market prices. For the providers of charging stations, the iterative AI algorithm can find out which individual prices are accepted by the buyer, and under which conditions. However, during the course of the study, the researchers noted that on some occasions the algorithm raised the price significantly when the electric car’s batteries were almost completely empty, and the driver consequently had no choice but to accept the offer.

“Smart charging stations can solve complex pricing in a competitive market, but our study shows that they need to be developed and introduced with privacy protection for consumers, well in line with responsible-ethical AI paradigms,” says Balázs Kulcsár.

More about the study

The researchers created a mathematical model of the interaction between profit-maximising fast charging stations and electric car users. The “charging stations” could offer public market prices or AI-driven profit-maximising personal prices, which the “electric car users” could then accept or reject based on their own conditions and needs. In most cases, the results were promising, as the AI-generated prices were lower than the market prices.