A study in Science Advances presents a framework to accurately predict if a person will change their opinion about a certain topic. The approach estimates the amount of dissonance, or mental discomfort, a person has from holding conflicting beliefs about a topic.

Santa Fe Institute Postdoctoral Fellows Jonas Dalege and Tamara van der Does built on previous efforts to model belief change by integrating both moral and social beliefs into a statistical physics framework of 20 interacting beliefs.

They then used this cognitive network model to predict how the beliefs of a group of nearly 1,000 people, who were at least somewhat skeptical about the efficacy of genetically modified foods and childhood vaccines, would change as the result of an educational intervention.

Study participants were shown a message about the scientific consensus on genetic modification and vaccines. Those who began the study with a lot of dissonance in their interwoven network of beliefs were more likely to change their beliefs after viewing the messaging, but not necessarily in accordance with the message. On the other hand, people with little dissonance showed little change following the intervention.

“For example, if you believe that scientists are inherently trustworthy, but your family and friends tell you that vaccines are unsafe, this is going to create some dissonance in your mind,” van der Does says. “We found that if you were already kind of anti-GM foods or vaccines to begin with, you would just move more towards that direction when presented with new information even if that wasn’t the intention of the intervention.”

While still in an early stage, the research could ultimately have important implications for communicating scientific, evidence-based information to the public.

“On the one hand you might want to target people who have some dissonance in their beliefs, but at the same time this also creates some danger that they will reduce their dissonance in a way that you didn’t want them to,” Dalege says. “Moving forward, we want to expand this research to see if we can learn more about why people take certain paths to reduce their dissonance.”

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In a study featured on the cover of the Journal of Urology (Official Journal of the American Urological Association), researchers from the Mays Cancer Center and Department of Urology at UT Health San Antonio show that robotic IVC thrombectomy (removal of cancer from the inferior vena cava) is not inferior to standard open IVC thrombectomy and is a highly safe and effective alternative approach. The affected kidney is removed along with the tumor during surgery, which is performed at UT Health San Antonio’s clinical partner, University Hospital.

Harshit Garg, MD, urologic oncology fellow in the Department of Urology, is first author of the study, and Dharam Kaushik, MD, urologic oncology fellowship program director, is the senior author. Kaushik is an associate professor and the Stanley and Sandra Rosenberg Endowed Chair in Urologic Research at UT Health San Antonio.

The open surgery requires an incision that begins 2 inches below the ribcage and extends downward on both sides of the ribcage. “It looks like an inverted V,” Kaushik said. Next, organs that surround the IVC, such as the liver, are mobilized, and the IVC is clamped above and below the cancer. In this way, surgeons gain control of the inferior vena cava for cancer resection.

“Open surgery has an excellent success rate, and most cases are performed in this manner,” Kaushik said. “But now, with the robotic approach, we can achieve similar results with smaller incisions. Therefore, we need to study the implications of utilizing this newer approach.”

The study is a systematic review and meta-analysis of data from 28 studies that enrolled 1,375 patients at different medical centers. Of these patients, 439 had robotic IVC thrombectomy and 936 had open surgery. Kaushik and his team collaborated with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York; Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles; and the University of Washington, Seattle, to perform this study.

“We pulled the data together to make conclusions because, before this, only small studies from single institutions had been conducted to compare the IVC thrombectomy approaches,” Kaushik said.

Findings

The results are encouraging and indicate further study of robotic IVC thrombectomy is warranted. The robotic approach in comparison with open was associated with:

• Fewer blood transfusions: 18% of robotic patients required transfusions compared to 64% of open patients.
• Fewer complications: 5% of robotic patients experienced complications such as bleeding compared to 36.7% of open thrombectomy patients.

These large, technically challenging surgeries last eight to 10 hours and involve a multidisciplinary team of vascular surgeons, cardiac surgeons, transplant surgeons and urologic oncology surgeons, Kaushik said.

“This study is the largest meta-analysis analyzing the outcomes of robotic versus open IVC thrombectomy,” Kaushik said. “In more than 1,300 patients, we found that overall complications were lower with the robotic approach and the blood transfusion rate was lower with this approach.

“That tells us there is more room for us to grow and refine this robotic procedure and to offer it to patients who are optimal candidates for it,” Kaushik said. “Optimal candidacy for a robotic surgery should be based on a surgeon’s robotic expertise, the extent and burden of the tumor, and the patient’s comorbid conditions. The open surgical approach remains the gold standard for achieving excellent surgical control.”

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory realized that task would be perhaps the ultimate exercise in ultra-low light photography.

But a SLAC team that included Stanford graduate students Sanha Cheong and Murtaza Safdari, SLAC Professor Ariel Schwartzman, and SLAC scientists Michael Kagan, Sean Gasiorowski, Maxime Vandegar, and Joseph Frish found a simple way to do it: mirrors. By arranging mirrors in a dome-like configuration around an object, they can reflect more light towards the camera and image multiple sides of an object simultaneously.

And, the team reports in the Journal of Instrumentation, there’s an additional benefit. Because the camera now gathers views of an object taken from many different angles, the system is an example of “light-field imaging,” which captures not just the intensity of light but also which direction light rays travel. As a result, the mirror system can help researchers build a three-dimensional model of an object, such as an atom cloud.

“We’re advancing the imaging in experiments like MAGIS-100 to the newest imaging paradigm with this system,” Safdari said.

An unusual photographic challenge

The 100-meter-long Matter-wave Atomic Gradiometer Interferometric Sensor, or MAGIS-100, is a new kind of experiment being installed in a vertical shaft at DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Known as an atom interferometer, it will exploit quantum phenomena to detect passing waves of ultralight dark matter and free-falling strontium atoms.

Experimenters will release clouds of strontium atoms in a vacuum tube that runs the length of the shaft, and then shine laser light on the free-falling clouds. Each strontium atom acts like a wave, and the laser light sends each of these atomic waves into a superposition of quantum states, one of which continues on its original path while the other one is kicked much higher up.

When re-combined, the waves create an interference pattern in strontium atom wave, similar to the complex pattern of ripples that emerges after skipping a rock on a pond. This interference pattern is sensitive to anything that changes the relative distance between the pairs of quantum waves or the internal properties of the atoms, which might be influenced by the presence of dark matter.

To see the interference patterns, researchers will literally take pictures of a cloud of strontium atoms, which comes with a number of challenges. The strontium clouds themselves are small, only about a millimeter across, and the details that researchers need to see are about a tenth of a millimeter across. The camera itself must sit outside a chamber and peer through a window across a relatively long distance to see the strontium clouds within.

But the real problem is light. To illuminate the strontium clouds, experimenters will shine lasers on the clouds. However, if the laser light is too intense, it can destroy the details scientists want to see. If it’s not intense enough, light from the clouds will be too dim for the cameras to see.

“You’re only going to collect as much light as falls on the lens,” said Safdari, “which is not a lot.”

Mirrors to the rescue

One idea is to use a wide aperture, or opening, to let more light into the camera, but there’s a tradeoff: A wide aperture creates what photographers call a narrow depth of field, where only a narrow slice of the picture is in focus.

Another possibility would be to position more cameras around a cloud of strontium atoms. This could gather more of the reemitted light, but it would require more windows or, alternatively, fitting the cameras inside the chamber, and there isn’t much space in there for a bunch of cameras.

The solution popped up, Schwartzman said, during a brainstorming session in the lab. As they were bouncing ideas around, staff scientist Joe Frisch came up with the idea of mirrors.

“What you can do is reflect the light travelling away from the cloud back into the camera lens,” said Cheong. As a result, a camera can gather not just much more light but also more views of an object from different angles, each of which shows up on the raw photograph as a distinct spot on a black background. That collection of distinct images, the team realized, meant they had devised a form of so-called ‘light-field imaging’ and might be able to reconstruct a three-dimensional model of the atom cloud, not just a two-dimensional image.

3D printing an idea

With support from a Laboratory Directed Research and Development grant, Cheong and Safdari took the mirror idea and ran with it, designing an array of tiny mirrors that could redirect light from all around an atom cloud back toward a camera. Using some algebra and ray-tracing software developed by Kagan and Vandegar, the team calculated just the right positions and angles that would allow the mirror to keep many different images of the cloud in focus on the camera. The team also developed computer vision and artificial intelligence algorithms to use the 2D images to perform 3D reconstruction.

It’s the sort of thing that might seem obvious in retrospect, but it took a lot of thought to achieve, said Schwartzman. “When we first came up with this, we thought, ‘People must have done this before,'” he said, but in fact it’s novel enough that the group have applied for a patent on the device.

To test out the idea, Cheong and Safdari made a mock-up with a 3D printed scaffold holding the mirrors, then fabricated a micro-3D printed fluorescent object that spells out “DOE” when viewed from different angles. They took a picture of the object with their mirror dome and showed that they could, in fact, gather light from a number of different angles and keep all of the images in focus. What’s more, their 3D reconstruction was so accurate that it revealed a small flaw in the fabrication of the “DOE” object — an arm of the “E” that was bent slightly downward.

The next step, the researchers said, is to build a new version to test the idea in a smaller atom interferometer at Stanford, which would produce the first 3D images of atom clouds. That version of the mirror dome would sit outside the chamber containing the atom cloud, so if those tests are successful the team would then build a stainless-steel version of the mirror scaffold suitable for the vacuum conditions inside an atom interferometer.

Schwartzman said the ideas Cheong, Safdari and the rest of the team developed could be useful beyond physics experiments. “It’s a novel device. Our application is atom interferometry, but it may be useful in other applications,” he said, such as quality control for small-object fabrication in industry.

The research was supported by the Department of Energy, Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program. MAGIS-100 is supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the DOE Office of Science.

They published the results of their randomized, controlled study on July 30 in Pain Management Nursing.

“Continuing education is essential to maintain and increase nurses’ proficiency in neonatal pain assessment and treatment,” said corresponding author Mio Ozawa, associate professor in the Graduate School of Biomedical and Health Science at Hiroshima University. “Our results showed that e-learning programs were more effective as compared to no training.”

The researchers randomly divided recruited certified neonatal intensive care nurses from across Japan into two groups. One group received four weeks of online training in pain measurement, using structured scales designed for pre-term newborns, called the e-Pain Management of Neonates program. The other group did not receive training. Participants in both groups took a pre- and post-test. While there were no differences in knowledge or skill in the pre-test scores between the two groups, the e-learning group scored higher for both knowledge and skill.

The research builds on a prior pilot study, in which 52 nurses completed the e-learning program and improved their test scores. However, without a control group for comparison, the evidence was not sufficient to illustrate the intervention’s effectiveness, according to Ozawa.

“In the current study, we tested the e-learning program with a randomized control trial, a more powerful research design than used with the pilot study,” Ozawa said. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such trial that investigates the effects of e-learning on the knowledge and skill in neonatal pain measurement for certified nurses across NICUs across multiple hospitals.”

The e-learning program consists of four modules, each of which takes about 15 minutes to complete. Participants could save their progress and return at any point, as well as review as many times as they wanted. While more nurses were more likely to access the program in the middle of the day or late at night on a weekday, participants still accessed the program at odd hours and over the weekend.

“An e-learning program may be a more efficient method as nurses can participate in the program at their own convenience,” Ozawa said. “In comparison with other health care professionals, NICU nurses stay at the bedside of newborns for the longest time to provide care, including invasive procedures. It is vital for nurses to be educated and train in using the neonatal pain management scale.”

Ozawa emphasized that while this study did not demonstrate e-learning’s superiority as a learning method compared to traditional approaches, such as in-person training, it does indicate that e-learning can improve skills and knowledge.

“Learning in this program would allow nurses to acquire knowledge and skills concerning

newborn pain, which is preferred over no education,” Ozawa said. “Further research is needed to determine how nurses’ training through e-learning programs is related to patient outcomes, such as more frequent pain assessment of infants by nurses and improved pain management.”

Other contributors include Kotomi Yamashita, assistant professor, Graduate School of Health Sciences, Okayama University, and Reo Kawano, associate professor, Clinical Research Center in Hiroshima, Hiroshima University Hospital.

The Japan Society for the Promotion of Science supported this research.

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Their findings, available online now, will also be published in the November issue of Chemical Engineering Journal.

“Waste products like corncobs, wood pulp, cotton and tomato peels often end up in landfills or in compost,” said corresponding author Amir Sheikhi, assistant professor of chemical engineering. “We wanted to transform these waste products into micro- or nanoscale particles capable of extracting rare earth elements from electronic waste.”

Rare earth metals are used to manufacture strong magnets used in motors for electric and hybrid cars, loudspeakers, headphones, computers, wind turbines, TV screens and more. However, mining these metals proves challenging and environmentally costly, according to Sheikhi, as large land areas are required to mine even small amounts of the metals. Instead, efforts have turned to recycling the metals from electronic waste items like old computers or circuit boards.

The challenge lies in efficiently separating the metals from refuse, Sheikhi said.

“Using the organic materials as a platform, we created highly functional micro- and nanoparticles that can attach to metals like neodymium and separate them from the fluid that surrounds them,” Sheikhi said. “Via electrostatic interactions, the negatively-charged micro- and nano-scale materials bind to positively-charged neodymium ions, separating them.”

To prepare the experiment, Sheikhi’s team ground up tomato peel and corncob and cut wood pulp and cotton paper into small, thin pieces and soaked them in water. Then, they chemically reacted these materials in a controlled fashion to disintegrate them into three distinct fractions of functional materials: microproducts, nanoparticles and solubilized biopolymers. Adding the microproducts or nanoparticles to neodymium solutions triggered the separation process, resulting in the capture of neodymium samples.

In this most recent paper, Sheikhi improved upon the separation process demonstrated in previous workand extracted larger sample sizes of neodymium from less concentrated solutions.

Sheikhi plans to extend his separation mechanism into real-world scenarios and partner with interested industries to further test the process.

“In the near future, we want to test our process on realistic industrial samples,” Sheikhi said.

“We also hope to tune the selectivity of the materials toward other rare earth elements and precious metals, like gold and silver, to be able to separate those from waste products as well.”

In addition to Sheikhi, Mica Pitcher, Penn State doctoral student in chemistry and first author on the paper; Breanna Huntington, Penn State undergraduate student in agricultural and biological engineering; and Juliana Dominick, Penn State undergraduate student in biomedical engineering, contributed to the paper.

Penn State supported this work.

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An international research team says the eruption should serve as a wake-up call for international groups looking to protect people from similar events in future, claiming that detection and monitoring systems for volcano-based tsunamis are ’30 years behind’ comparable tools used to detect earthquake-based events.

Dr Mohammad Heidarzadeh, Secretary-General of the International Tsunami Commission and a senior lecturer in the University of Bath’s Department of Architecture & Civil Engineering, authored the research alongside colleagues based in Japan, New Zealand, the UK and Croatia.

By comparison, the largest tsunami waves due to earthquakes before the Tonga event were recorded following the Tōhoku earthquake near Japan in 2011 and the 1960 Chilean earthquake, reached 10 metres in initial height. Those were more destructive as they happened closer to land, with waves that were wider.

Dr Heidarzadeh says the Tonga tsunami should serve as a wake-up call for more preparedness and understanding of the causes and signs of tsunamis cause by volcanic eruptions. He says: “The Tongan tsunami tragically killed five people and caused large scale destruction, but its effects could have been even greater had the volcano been located closer to human communities. The volcano is located approximately 70 km from the Tongan capital Nuku’alofa — this distance significantly minimized its destructive power.

“This was a gigantic, unique event and one that highlights that internationally we must invest in improving systems to detect volcanic tsunamis as these are currently around 30 years behind the systems we used to monitor for earthquakes. We are under-prepared for volcanic tsunamis.”

The research was carried out by analysing ocean observation data recordings of atmospheric pressure changes and sea level oscillations, in combination with computer simulations validated with real-world data.

The research team found that the tsunami was unique as the waves were created not only by the water displaced by the volcano’s eruption, but also by huge atmospheric pressure waves, which circled around the globe multiple times. This ‘dual mechanism’ created a two-part tsunami — where initial ocean waves created by the atmospheric pressure waves were followed more than one hour later by a second surge created by the eruption’s water displacement.

This combination meant tsunami warning centres did not detect the initial wave as they are programmed to detect tsunamis based on water displacements rather than atmospheric pressure waves.

The research team also found that the January event was among very few tsunamis powerful enough to travel around the globe — it was recorded in all world’s oceans and large seas from Japan and the United States’ western seaboard in the North Pacific Ocean to the coasts within the Mediterranean Sea.

The paper, co-authored by colleagues from New Zealand’s GNS Science, the Association for the Development of Earthquake Prediction in Japan, the University of Split in Croatia and at London’s Brunel University, was published this week in Ocean Engineering.

Dr Aditya Gusman, Tsunami Modeller at the New Zealand-based geoscience service, says: “The 2018 Anak Krakatau volcano and 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano eruptions clearly showed us that coastal areas surrounding volcano islands are at risk of being hit by destructive tsunamis. Although it may be preferable to have low-lying coastal areas completely clear from residential buildings, such a policy may not be practical for some places as volcanic tsunamis can be considered infrequent events.”

Co-author Dr Jadranka Šepić, from the University of Split, Croatia, adds: “What is important is to have efficient warning systems, which include both real-time warnings and education on what to do in a case of a tsunami or warning — such systems save lives. In addition, at volcanic areas, monitoring of volcanic activity should be organized, and more high-quality research into volcanic eruptions and areas at hazard is always a good idea.”

Separate research led by the University of Bath atmospheric physicist Dr Corwin Wright published in June found that the Tonga eruption triggered atmospheric gravity waves that reached the edge of space.

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The results of the study, which included 10 patients, were published today in Molecular Psychiatry.

“This is something that people have been trying to do for a long time, but we have not always been very successful with using DBS for psychiatric illnesses,” said first author Christopher Conner, MD, PhD, a former neurosurgery resident in the Vivian L. Smith Department of Neurosurgery at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston. “But this PET study shows that we’re altering how the brain is functioning long term and we are starting to change the way brain starts to organize itself and starts to process information and data.” Conner is currently a fellow with the University of Toronto.

For years, DBS has been used to treat patients suffering from movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, tremor, and dystonia, and studied as a possible treatment for patients with treatment-resistant depression. In DBS, electrodes are implanted into certain brain areas, where they generate electrical impulses to affect brain activity.

However, finding what part of the brain needs to be targeted to treat depression long term has been challenging.

“We targeted a bundle of fibers that leave this small area in the brainstem to travel to other areas throughout the brain,” Conner said. “The PET scans indicated that this small target area has very diffuse downstream effects. It’s not one single effect because there’s not one single area of the brain linked to depression. The whole brain needs to be changed and through this one small target, that’s what we were able to do.”

Researchers performed an initial PET scan before the DBS procedure on the 10 patients in the study for a baseline image. They performed additional PET scans at six and 12 months to assess changes after treatment. Scans of 8 of the 10 patients showed a response.

“A responder to the treatment means that your depression potentially decreases at least 50%; you’re feeling much better,” said co-author João de Quevedo, MD, PhD, professor in the Louis A. Faillace, MD, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at McGovern Medical School. “So, for patients with severe chronic treatment-resistant depression, decreasing our symptoms by half is a lot. It’s the difference between being disabled to being able to do something. Correlating with the PET image changes, our patients reported that their depression lessened after the treatment.” De Quevedo also serves as director of the Translational Psychiatry Program and the Treatment-Resistant Depression Program, part of the Center of Excellence on Mood Disorders.

Jair Soares, MD, PhD, professor and the Pat R. Rutherford, Jr. Chair in Psychiatry in the Faillace Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, was a co-author. Albert J. Fenoy, MD, former associate professor of neurosurgery with McGovern Medical School, was senior and corresponding author.

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In 2014, senior author Eran Elinav an immunologist and microbiome researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science and the German National Cancer Center (DKFZ) and his team found that non-nutritive sweeteners affected the microbiomes of mice in ways that could impact their glycemic responses. The team was interested in whether these results would also be found in humans.

To address this important question, the research team carefully screened over 1300 individuals for those who strictly avoid non-nutritive sweeteners in their day-to-day lives, and identified a cohort of 120 individuals. These participants were broken into six groups: two controls and four who ingested well below the FDA daily allowances of either aspartame, saccharin, stevia, or sucralose.

“In subjects consuming the non-nutritive sweeteners, we could identify very distinct changes in the composition and function of gut microbes, and the molecules they secret into peripheral blood. This seemed to suggest that gut microbes in the human body are rather responsive to each of these sweeteners,” says Elinav. “When we looked at consumers of non-nutritive sweeteners as groups, we found that two of the non-nutritive sweeteners, saccharin and sucralose, significantly impacted glucose tolerance in healthy adults. Interestingly, changes in the microbes were highly correlated with the alterations noted in people’s glycemic responses.”

To establish causation, the researchers transferred microbial samples from the study subjects to germ-free mice — mice that have been raised in completely sterile conditions and have no microbiome of their own.

“The results were quite striking,” says Elinav. “In all of the non-nutritive sweetener groups, but in none of the controls, when we transferred into these sterile mice the microbiome of the top responder individuals collected at a time point in which they were consuming the respective non-nutritive sweeteners, the recipient mice developed glycemic alterations that very significantly mirrored those of the donor individuals. In contrast, the bottom responders’ microbiomes were mostly unable to elicit such glycemic responses,” he adds. “These results suggest that the microbiome changes in response to human consumption of non-nutritive sweetener may, at times, induce glycemic changes in consumers in a highly personalized manner.”

Elinav says that he expects the effects of the sweeteners will vary person to person because of the incredibly unique composition of our microbiome. “We need to raise awareness of the fact that non-nutritive sweeteners are not inert to the human body as we originally believed. With that said, the clinical health implications of the changes they may elicit in humans remain unknown and merit future long-term studies.”

“In the meantime, we need to continue searching for solutions to our sweet tooth craving, while avoiding sugar, which is clearly most harmful to our metabolic health,” says Elinav. “In my personal view, drinking only water seems to be the best solution.”

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