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People high in antagonistic personality traits—Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy—are more likely to endorse negative beliefs about homosexual and transgender people, research finds.

Those negative beliefs include the conviction that gay men should not be allowed to work with children and that gender affirmation surgery is morally wrong.

In an article in the Journal of Homosexuality, University of Oregon doctoral students Cameron Kay and Sarah Dimakis share insights into what types of people harbor prejudice against gay, nonbinary and transgender people, and why.

They report that much of the difference in the beliefs seen between people low in antagonistic personality traits and people high in antagonistic personality traits can be explained by the morals they emphasize or de-emphasize.

“People high in these traits seem to adopt these beliefs because they downplay the importance of equality and are less interested in protecting others,” says Kay, a personality psychologist.

“I’m really interested in why and how we categorize people as good or bad,” says Dimakis, a social psychologist who focuses on morality. “So, how we observe people’s behavior, make inferences about what they’re thinking, and then use that information to get the sense of who they are, whether they are a good person or someone to avoid.”

While this is not Kay and Dimakis’ first personality-based project, it hasn’t been without its challenges. For Dimakis, a difficulty has been gathering a balanced, representative sample.

“We’re not just looking for people who don’t hold prejudicial beliefs,” Dimakis says. “We also need to collect a sample of people who do hold prejudicial beliefs, and those people are difficult to obtain in the traditional samples that you can gather easily from undergraduate students.”

For Kay, gathering people with those prejudicial beliefs also has its flip side regarding the ethical restraints of the project.

“I think most people would agree that these beliefs are terrible,” Kay says. “You’re trying to assess these beliefs and you’re having to ask people, ‘Okay, do you believe in this thing?’ It can often be kind of a difficult situation.”

Kay says the findings from the project can help the psychology field develop solid concepts of prejudice and expand the connection between personality and prejudicial beliefs.

“At the broadest level, there is very little conceptualization of prejudice within personality,” Kay says. “It isn’t really thought of as an aspect of personality. In the past, people have shown that certain personality traits are associated with racism or associated with xenophobia towards immigrants, and this is kind of an additional piece in that puzzle, telling us there is a way we can predict prejudice. It’s through personality.”

Source: University of Oregon

Astronomers have captured a radio signal from a distant galaxy at a specific wavelength known as the 21 cm line.

With the help of the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India, this is the first time this type of radio signal has been detected at such a large distance.

How do stars form in distant galaxies? Astronomers have long been trying to answer this question by detecting radio signals emitted by nearby galaxies. However, these signals become weaker the further away a galaxy is from Earth, making it difficult for current radio telescopes to pick up.

“A galaxy emits different kinds of radio signals. Until now, it’s only been possible to capture this particular signal from a galaxy nearby, limiting our knowledge to those galaxies closer to Earth,” says Arnab Chakraborty, a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University under the supervision of Matt Dobbs, a professor in the physics department.

“But thanks to the help of a naturally occurring phenomenon called gravitational lensing, we can capture a faint signal from a record-breaking distance. This will help us understand the composition of galaxies at much greater distances from Earth.”

“It’s the equivalent to a look-back in time of 8.8 billion years.”

For the first time, the researchers were able to detect the signal from a distant star-forming galaxy known as SDSSJ0826+5630 and measure its gas composition. The researchers observed the atomic mass of the gas content of this particular galaxy is almost twice the mass of the stars visible to us.

The signal the team detected was emitted from this galaxy when the universe was only 4.9 billion years old, allowing the researchers to glimpse into the secrets of the early universe.

“It’s the equivalent to a look-back in time of 8.8 billion years,” says Chakraborty.

“Gravitational lensing magnifies the signal coming from a distant object to help us peer into the early universe. In this specific case, the signal is bent by the presence of another massive body, another galaxy, between the target and the observer.

“This effectively results in the magnification of the signal by a factor of 30, allowing the telescope to pick it up,” says coauthor Nirupam Roy, an associate professor in the physics department at the Indian Institute of Science.

According to the researchers, these results demonstrate the feasibility of observing faraway galaxies in similar situations with gravitational lensing. It also opens exciting new opportunities for probing the cosmic evolution of stars and galaxies with existing low-frequency radio telescopes.

The study appears in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope was built and is operated by NCRA-TIFR. The research was funded by McGill University and the Indian Institute of Science.

Source: McGill University

Researchers are developing a dissolvable patch that uses antibodies grown from tobacco plants could prevent unwanted pregnancies and HIV.

When it comes to birth control options for women, little has changed in the past couple of decades. In fact, according to Planned Parenthood, there are only three birth control methods that are over 95% effective at preventing an unintended pregnancy: the birth control implant, the intrauterine device (IUD), and the birth control shot. All of them require time at a doctor’s office, and none of them protects against getting or spreading sexually transmitted infections. The “newest” of the trio—the Depo-Provera shot—started to become available to women in the 1990s.

“There’s a need for good on-demand nonhormonal contraceptives,” says Deborah Anderson, professor of medicine at the Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. Anderson leads the university’s Contraceptive Research Center, which is one of only three federally mandated contraceptive labs in the country.

Anderson is working on the use of monoclonal antibodies—lab-made proteins that act like the body’s natural antibody defense system—as a means of protection. She calls her manufactured antibodies “plantibodies,” because they’re grown in tobacco plants.

Her team’s lab-made contraceptive and STI-prevention antibodies, though far from hitting the shelves of your local pharmacy, have been under development for more than a decade, with promising results coming from the first phases of clinical trials last year.

“Our ultimate goal is to have a contraceptive that also protects women against sexually transmitted infections,” Anderson says.

The center’s products are administered as topical films—almost like a Listerine strip—that go inside the vagina, dissolve, and quickly release monoclonal antibodies. The contraceptive film releases antibodies that target sperm, rendering them immobile before they can reach the ovaries. An STI-prevention film contains antibodies against herpes simplex virus (HSV) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), two viruses that, once contracted, stay with a person for life.

The two lines of monoclonal antibodies are being tested separately, with the goal of combining them to make an effective reversible birth control—that also provides protection from HIV and HSV. The research team is also working to make birth control applicable to people who don’t have vaginas.

“There is an enormous gender disparity in the use of and adherence to contraception,” says Matt Geib, a PhD student in the Boston University College of Engineering’s materials science and engineering division. He works with Anderson on optimizing the material of their dissolvable birth control film and is also researching how to use the antibodies in personal lubricants that can be marketed to men. “The burden most often lands directly on people who could get pregnant,” he says.

Abortion has become heavily restricted in the United States and some policymakers have also proposed limiting access to reproductive health care, including birth control. The race to create noninvasive, nonhormonal, reversible contraception has become even more urgent, Anderson says.

“Unintended pregnancies have so many adverse effects on women physically, economically, and psychologically,” Anderson says. “A lot of young women find themselves without protection.” It’s been estimated that about 48% of pregnancies worldwide are unintended, she points out.

“There is a huge gap in both accessibility of contraception and education on fertility management,” says Emilie Mausser, a PhD candidate in the medical school’s molecular and translational medicine program, who focuses on better understanding how the monoclonal antibodies interact with immune cells in the vagina, and how to make them more effective. “People should be able to access many contraceptive options and choose one that’s best for them,” she says.

The idea of using monoclonal antibodies as a means of contraception may sound revolutionary, but these sperm-attacking proteins have a surprisingly long history. Anderson was part of a team of scientists in the 1980s that tested over 200 monoclonal antibodies against sperm. The group narrowed the list down to the two most effective, Anderson says, and the one used in her work today is one of those original two.

Anderson partners with a small company in San Diego, California, ZabBio, to cultivate antibodies using tobacco plants. The leaves of the plant act almost like a Petri dish—the plant’s cells are given the human antibody genes, and the leaves produce the antibodies. Anderson and ZabBio used this technique to make anti-HIV and anti-HSV plantibodies first, and contraception plantibodies came next.

Data from the first clinical trial using plantibodies against HIV and HSV showed that it was safe and offered protection for 24 hours and possibly longer. They also tested the participants’ blood to make sure the antibodies were localized to the vagina, finding no trace of them elsewhere in the body. Those findings appear in PLOS Medicine.

The team recently completed a second clinical trial with the contraceptive antibody film. One of the methods used to test the effectiveness of a contraceptive is a postcoital test, Anderson says. Her lab partnered with Eastern Virginia Medical School, where eight heterosexual couples were evaluated, given an ovulation kit, and returned to the clinic for three consecutive months at peak fertility.

All of the women in the study were ligated (commonly called having their “tubes tied”), so there was no risk of accidental pregnancy; all of the men involved were fertile. The women would insert the contraception film, have sex, and then return to the clinic within two hours. They saw that in the month when the women applied the product, there were essentially zero motile (or moving) sperm in their cervical mucus, compared to about 50 per microscope field when it wasn’t used in the first and third month of the test.

“It was about as clear-cut as you can get,” Anderson says. The paper with those results is expected to be published soon.

She estimates that it will be another 5 to 10 years before their work is available to the public. By the end of the latest round of NIH funding, the team hopes to be ready to run a large efficacy clinical trial—when products are given to hundreds of women for real-life use, with close monitoring.

In the meantime, Anderson and the team plan to work on combining their contraception antibody with the STI-preventing antibodies, and create more birth control options for men—aiming to take the burden off women and make on-demand birth control more accessible to everyone.

“I am hoping that the future holds a wealth of new contraception options, not just male birth control,” Geib says. “We should always strive to give everyone an option. I hope that the future of contraceptives will hold less invasive, more effective, and more equitable options.”

A grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Child Health and Human Development will support additional work on the project.

Source: Boston University