Category: Science

Any unseasonably hot day—no matter the time of year—can lead to a rush of gun violence, research finds.

When temperatures sizzle, so do tempers. Across the United States, headlines lamenting a summer spike in shootings—a “gun violence emergency” in Portland, Oregon, “another summer of mayhem” in Philadelphia—have become a depressing feature of the season.

According to the researchers, mitigating the impacts of climate change and helping residents adjust to rising temperatures could help curb shootings.

Published in the journal JAMA Network Open, the study finds a consistent relationship between higher temperatures and higher risk of shootings in 100 of the country’s most populated cities.

The comprehensive study reveals that nearly 7% of shootings can be attributed to above-average daily temperatures, even after adjusting for seasonal patterns. The paper’s findings—the first to show that heat-attributable shootings are a nationwide problem—indicate that the Northeast and Midwest regions experience the sharpest increases in gun violence on hotter-than-normal days. Gun violence is the leading cause of death among children and teens—a situation that only worsened during the pandemic.

“Our study provides strong evidence that daily temperature plays a meaningful role in gun violence fluctuations,” says study senior author Jonathan Jay, assistant professor of community health sciences and director of Boston University’s Research on Innovations for Safety and Equity (RISE) Lab. “Even though some regions showed larger or smaller effects, the general pattern is remarkably consistent across cities.”

As climate change threatens to raise daily temperatures even more, the researchers say their findings underscore the need for ongoing policies and programs that acclimate communities to heat and mitigate the risk of heat-attributable gun violence.

“Our study really highlights the importance of heat adaptation strategies that can be used all year, as well as a need for specific regional awareness and attention in regions where this relationship is strongest,” says Vivian Lyons, study lead author and a research scientist in the Social Development Research Group at the University of Washington’s School of Social Work.

For the study, the research team used publicly available data from the Gun Violence Archive, a national repository of gun violence information. They analyzed daily temperatures and more than 116,000 shootings, from 2015 to 2020, in 100 of the most populous US cities with the highest number of assault-related shootings. Accounting for seasonality and regional climate differences, they found that 7,973 shootings were attributable to above-average temperatures.

The temperatures associated with increased gun violence varied considerably across cities. For example, both Seattle and Las Vegas experienced the highest elevated risk of gun violence during days when the temperature soared within the 96th percentile range of average daily temperatures—but for Seattle, that temperature was 84 degrees, while in Las Vegas, it was 104 degrees.

“Cities with high rates of firearm violence should continue to implement firearm-prevention strategies broadly, including credible messenger programs and hospital-based violence intervention programs,” Lyons says. “What our study suggests is that for cities with more heat-attributable shootings, implementing heat adaptation strategies at the community level—such as greening efforts that have been effective at reducing urban heat islands and have some association with reductions in firearm violence—may be particularly important.”

So, what might be driving this association between heat and gun violence? “It could be that heat causes stress, which makes people more likely to use aggression,” says Jay, who’s also a partnering faculty member at the BU Center for Climate and Health. “Or it could be that people are more likely to get out on warmer days and have more interactions, which creates more opportunities for conflict and violence. Most likely, it’s a combination of both.”

Regionally, heat-attributable gun violence may be most pronounced in the Northeast and Midwest due to sharper fluctuations in temperature in those areas, even within seasons, or because cities in those regions are less acclimated to heat, the researchers say. But those regions are also more racially segregated than other parts of the country. The study findings should be interpreted within the context of structural racism and racial inequities in exposure to gun violence and heat, says Jay.

“The Northeast and Midwest regions are where we see some of the starkest differences in the built environment and other resources, according to race—to me, these inequities are the most interesting and important direction of this work,” Jay says. “We know that segregation and disinvestment lead communities of color, especially Black communities, to have greater exposure to adverse environmental conditions that contribute to gun violence risk, such as abandoned buildings, liquor stores, lack of green space, and more intense urban heat islands.”

Healthy tree canopy and other heat mitigation strategies can serve as part of a mission that’s “part racial justice, part climate change mitigation, and part gun violence prevention,” he says. “These are all urgent issues where we need to continue to partner with communities and work across disciplines.”

The researchers will next study differences in heat-related gun violence among neighborhoods in a project funded by the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research.

The study had funding from Washington state; Jay also had support from the Boston University Clinical & Translational Science Institute.

Source: Boston University

In an important step toward a medical technology that could help restore independence of people with paralysis, researchers find the investigational BrainGate neural interface system has low rates of associated adverse events.

More than two decades ago, a team researchers set out with an ambitious goal to provide people with paralysis a revolutionary neurotechnology capable of turning thoughts about movement into actual action, using a tiny device that would one day be implanted in the surface of the brain.

Their work led to an ongoing effort to create the BrainGate brain-computer interface, designed to allow clinical trial participants with paralysis to control assistive devices like computers or robotic limbs just by thinking about the action they want to initiate.

Now, after decades of advancements, researchers are getting their best glimpse yet at the safety profile for this promising technology and what it means for long-term use by people affected by neurologic disease or paralysis.

The team’s new study analyzes more than 17 years of safety data on clinical trials testing the BrainGate technology. The study found a low rate of adverse events associated with the implanted brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and concluded that the technology should continue to be evaluated for its potential to help people with paralysis regain lost neurologic function.

“In the largest ongoing trial of intracortical brain-computer interfaces, the interim safety profile reported today supports the possibility that these systems may become restorative neurotechnologies for people with paralysis,” says Leigh R. Hochberg, an engineering and brain science professor at Brown University, a critical care neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, and director of the BrainGate academic consortium leading the development and testing of the technology.

The new study is an important step for the BrainGate consortium and other BCI research as the current BrainGate clinical trial enters its 14th year.

“Intracortical brain-computer interfaces have so much promise for restoring communication and mobility,” says Hochberg, who also directs the VA Rehabilitation Research and Development Center for Neurorestoration and Neurotechnology in Providence, Rhode Island.

“Translating these advances in neural engineering to patient care will depend largely on whether the devices are accompanied by an acceptably low degree of risk.”

The BrainGate device is a type of BCI that is implanted in a part of the brain that controls limb movement. The microelectrode array—called a “Utah” array—is smaller than a contact lens and is placed into the surface of the motor cortex. It works by detecting neural signals associated with intended movements, sending them out to a small nearby computer that then uses algorithms to translate the signals into movement commands.

The ultimate goal of BrainGate is to restore communication, mobility, and independence for people with tetraplegia. Previous studies by BrainGate researchers have shown that the BCI can enable people to move robotic arms or even move their own paralyzed arm and hand.

The new BrainGate study evaluated a total of 12,203 days of safety data from 14 clinical trial participants with quadriparesis resulting from spinal cord injury, brainstem stroke, or ALS. Participants were ages 18 to 75 and were enrolled in BrainGate’s trials between 2004 to 2021. In that span, the study found, there were 68 device-related adverse events—the most common was skin irritation around the small portion of the device on top of a user’s head that connects the neural sensor array implanted in the brain to the nearby neural decoding system.

There were six serious adverse events determined to be related to the BrainGate device or surgical procedure. Two participants, both of whom had a history of traumatic brain injury, had brief post-operative seizures, which were easily treated. The researchers say none of the adverse events documented in the study were unanticipated, resulted in permanently increased disability, required removal of the device, or led to infections in the nervous system.

Data from the clinical trials came from seven sites across the US, including Mass General and the Providence VA Researchers at Mass General led the study in collaboration with colleagues from Brown, the VA, Stanford University, and several other institutions in the BrainGate consortium. The scientists write in the study that while the safety profile is a big step forward, there is still much work to be done to reach their ultimate goals for the technology.

“Overall, we are reassured by our findings over the past 17 years that the investigational BrainGate Neural Interface system is being deployed safely,” the researchers write. “Both our group and others continue to work on components and systems that would permit [BCIs] to become fully implanted, available to users around-the-clock, and incorporating a suite of design characteristics previously proposed.”

“In the future, I hope that BrainGate becomes an option for everyone with paralysis,” says John Donoghue, a professor at Brown. “The golden day would be when somebody who is paralyzed gets a BrainGate-like system implanted, and they go play basketball.”

The new study appears in Neurology. The research received support from the US Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Institutes of Health, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, the Carney Institute for Brain Science at Brown University, and several additional funders noted in the paper.

Source: Brown University

Young Asian and white men without college education are paid more—sometimes far more—than both Black men and women of all racial groups, according to a new study.

The study finds that young Black men with no college education earn barely half of what their Asian American and white counterparts make. Latinx, Asian, and Black women lag even further.

“…rather than wasting time blaming workers’ choices or attitudes, we might get further by identifying discriminatory labor market processes.”

“Earnings are an important factor to study because they’re related to other outcomes, like health, engagement with the criminal justice system and family development,” says study leader Byeongdon Oh, a postdoctoral researcher in the University of California, Berkeley’s Social Sciences D-Lab. “So we focus on the non-college population at an early age. They are already disadvantaged economically—they have very low earnings. If there’s a sizable racial or ethnic earnings disparity in this population, there may be severe consequences.”

The study appears in the journal Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. It provides the first detailed look at the earnings of young adults with no college experience as their working lives take shape.

In recent years, about one-third of young Americans have stopped their education after high school. That projects to roughly 1 million less-educated young people every year entering a job market that increasingly requires advanced education and training to earn even a middle-class salary. Latinx and Black people are over-represented in this group.

To understand their experience, Oh and colleagues Daniel Mackin Freeman and Dara Shifrer from Portland State University studied data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, tracing racial and ethnic earnings disparities among men and women who had never attended college. In 2016, they were in their early 20s.

“Striking” was the word the authors used to describe the earnings gaps revealed in the core data:

• Young Asian American men with no college education earned an average of $24,837 in 2016, followed by white men at $22,056 and Latinx men at $17,984. Young Black men averaged just $12,573—barely half the wages earned by Asian Americans and whites.
• A similar, but less severe, disparity was evident among young women with no college experience. White women on average earned $14,766, followed by Latinx women at $12,465, Asian American women at $10,935, and Black women at $10,871.
• The gap between these women and men was vast, with young Black women on average earning only 44 cents for every dollar earned by Asian American men with similar levels of education.

How to explain these racial and gender gaps in earning?

Oh says the data did not allow the researchers to determine the causes. They did find, however, that a range of possible factors—from family background and home location to high school grades and criminal records—rarely account for the earnings gaps.

But, he explains, racial discrimination in the workforce cannot be ruled out as the cause.

Oh suggests that complex social and economic factors may sort people of color into lower-paying job sectors, but the estimated earnings gaps among groups of people in the same occupation are still dramatic. These earning disparities, he says, may reflect employer bias against women and Black men.

The findings “suggest that, like their more educated counterparts, young non-college-educated women may face pernicious earnings discrimination in the labor market, regardless of their race/ethnicity,” the authors write.

They add: “The results may indicate that employers devalue the work of young Black men without a college education to a greater degree than they do the work of white, Latinx, and Asian men without a college education.”

According to Oh, the pay disparity between Asian and white men on one side and Black men on the other may actually be worse than the data suggest. A disproportionate number of young men who did not go to college are Black. A disproportionate number of young Black men have been incarcerated, he explains, and incarcerated men were not tracked in the survey data.

“And so our findings on the earnings gap are conservative—it may be larger,” he says.

The new study opens up a range of new questions for Oh and other researchers. Understanding the experience of the young workers would require more targeted surveys and in-person interviews. Those would allow the researchers to understand whether discrimination is to blame, and if so, how it works, Oh says.

“I hope the contribution of our research is to make people ask why we have these striking earnings gaps,” he says. “Then, rather than wasting time blaming workers’ choices or attitudes, we might get further by identifying discriminatory labor market processes.”

Source: UC Berkeley

Toddlers will go out of their way to help dogs, especially pups struggling to access out-of-reach treats and toys, according to new research.

The finding shows that young children notice and understand dogs’ goals, using that knowledge to help them.

“It’s been known for a long time that toddlers will go out of their way to help struggling humans, even strangers,” says Henry Wellman, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Michigan.

“But perhaps such altruism is specially evolved for and targeted toward other humans (who after all might help them back). But no, it applies to other animals too, like dogs they will never see again.”

Wellman and colleagues conducted experiments with three dogs—Fiona, Henry, and Seymour—at the University of Michigan’s child laboratory between 2015 and 2020 to determine if young children spontaneously helped a pet.

The researchers studied 97 children (51 girls and 46 boys) ages 2 and 3 years, 44 of whom had dogs as pets. In the lab, the children met one of the friendly dogs in an enclosed baby gate fence while a treat or toy was placed outside it. Dogs reacted naturally, either showing interest (either pawing or begging) in accessing the item or ignoring it.

Children provided dogs with out-of-reach items 50% of the time when dogs showed interest rather than ignored items, indicating sensitivity to the dog’s goals, the study shows.

In addition, children who lived with pet dogs were more likely to provide items to the pups in the experiment if two scenarios were present: the dogs were lively and engaged rather than subdued, and if the item was a treat rather than a toy.

“These findings lend support to our hypothesis that children’s early-developing proclivities for goal-reading and prosociality extend beyond humans to other animals,” says lead author and alumna Rachna Reddy, who is now a postdoctoral fellow in evolutionary anthropology at Duke University.

The researchers believe children’s willingness to help goes beyond dogs; it likely extends to cats, birds, horses, pigs, ducks, sheep, and more. But demonstrating that will take future research, Wellman says.

The study appears in the journal Human-Animal Interactions.

Source: University of Michigan

Red squirrels that gamble at the game of reproduction outperform their counterparts, even if it costs them in the short term, research finds.

Imagine overhearing the Powerball lottery winning numbers, but you didn’t know when those numbers would be called—just that at some point in the next 10 years or so, they would be. Despite the financial cost of playing those numbers daily for that period, the payoff is big enough to make it worthwhile.

Animals that live in highly variable environments play a similar lottery when it comes to their Darwinian fitness, or how well they are able to pass on their genes.

Natural selection favors female squirrels that have large litters in years when food is abundant because they contribute lots of babies to the gene pool, says Lauren Petrullo, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral research fellow in biopsychology at the University of Michigan.

“We were surprised to find that some females have large litters in years when there won’t be enough food for their babies to survive the winter,” she says. “Because it’s biologically expensive to produce offspring, we wanted to know why these females make what appears to be an error in their reproductive strategy.”

The red squirrels studied live in the Canadian Yukon and experience a “mast year,” or boom in their main food source—seeds from the cones of white spruce trees—once every four to seven years. Squirrels forecast the large mast crop of food before it occurs and increase litter sizes in the months prior, ensuring better future survival for their babies and better fitness for themselves.

“There is a constant tug-of-war between the trees and the squirrels at our study site,” Petrullo says, “with each player trying to deceive the other for its own fitness gain.”

Petrullo and Ben Dantzer, associate professor of psychology and of ecology and evolutionary biology, used data collected by the Kluane Red Squirrel Project, a collaborative, 34-year-old field study involving the University of Michigan, the University of Colorado, the University of Alberta, and the University of Saskatchewan.

“This is exciting because it suggests that squirrels are eavesdropping on the trees.”

“Each year, we collect data on how many babies squirrels produce and how many spruce cones the squirrels eat,” Dantzer says.

The scientists quantified the reproduction of female squirrels during both food booms and busts, discovering differences in their fitness whether they gambled with their reproductive strategy or not. While some squirrels played it safe by keeping litter sizes small each year, those that took a “pie in the sky” approach by having large litters even when food was scarce enjoyed greater lifetime fitness if they got to experience a mast year, the research showed.

Unlike the Powerball example, though, squirrels aren’t guaranteed to eventually win.

“In some ways, this strategy of gambling with litter sizes is like playing with fire,” Petrullo says. “Because the average squirrel lifespan is 3.5 years and masts only happen every four to seven, a female could potentially be sabotaging her fitness by having too many babies in low-food years, hoping for a mast when she may die before she ever gets to experience a mast at all. This could be pretty costly.”

Alternatively, for squirrels, the cost of not gambling at all in the game of reproduction can be insurmountable if they end up missing their shot at the jackpot.

“It’s essentially impossible for a female to recuperate the fitness costs of not ramping up reproduction in a mast year, so the stakes are extremely high,” Petrullo says.

Females that increased litter sizes in low-food years did take a short-term hit to their fitness. But they were more likely to increase litter sizes if and when they experienced a mast, taking home the ultimate prize of greater lifetime reproductive success, she says.

The squirrels’ best bet, according to the researchers, is to take their chances and suffer short-term fitness costs in order to avoid the unmatched cost of missing the fitness jackpot completely.

“Determining the relative costs of different types of errors is key to understanding why animals make what look to us like mistakes,” Petrullo says.

Scientists are still unsure exactly how the squirrels are able to forecast future food production. The animals may be eating parts of the spruce trees that affect their physiology and alter the number of babies they produce, Dantzer says.

“This is exciting because it suggests that squirrels are eavesdropping on the trees, but we still have much more to do to solve this puzzle,” he says.

Because many animals use cues about things like food in their environment to make reproductive decisions, and the reliability of these cues is declining due to global climate change, scientists also wonder how the costs of these types of errors will alter what is the best reproductive strategy.

“If the predictability of a food boom is reduced and squirrels can no longer forecast the future, this could impact the number of squirrels out there in the Boreal forest,” Dantzer says. “This could be problematic given that squirrels are prey for many predators.”

The research, which appears in Science, had partial funding from the National Science Foundation and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Source: University of Michigan

Warming waters and heat waves have contributed to the loss of an economically and culturally important fishery, the production of bay scallops, according to a new study.

As climate change intensifies, heat waves are becoming more and more common across the globe. In the face of such repeated events, animals will acclimate, migrate, or perish.

Since 2019, consecutive summer mass die-offs of bay scallops in the Peconic Estuary on Long Island, New York, have led to the collapse of the bay scallop fishery in New York and the declaration of a federal fishery disaster, with landings down more than 99%.

The findings in Global Change Biology reveal that extreme summer temperatures, becoming more frequent under climate change, exacerbate the vulnerability of bay scallops to environmental stress and has played a role in the recurrent population crashes.

The study reports the mass die-off of all scallops at a New York site in 2020, when an eight-day summer heat wave event coincided with repeated episodes of low oxygen. Yet, scallops at locales with higher oxygen or lower temperatures survived. Further investigation that year confirmed that the combination of high temperatures and low oxygen reduced feeding and energy reserves, causing mortality in ecosystem and laboratory scenarios.

“Global warming is happening at an uneven pace in space and time. It just so happens that summer water temperatures in the Northeast are increasing at a rate more than three times the global average, leaving organisms adapted to cooler temperatures endangered,” says senior author Christopher Gobler, chair of coastal ecology and conservation at Stony Brook University.

By using a combination of satellite temperature and long-term environmental records, field and laboratory experiments, and measurements of scallop heartbeat rates in an ecosystem setting because scallops heartbeat rates vary with water temperatures, the researchers demonstrated that coastal waters from New York to Massachusetts—home to the nation’s northern bay scallop fisheries—are rapidly warming and that bay scallops have become increasingly susceptible to the combination of high temperatures and impaired water quality.

The bay scallop fishery was formerly one of the largest shellfisheries on the East Coast and has progressively vanished from regions south of New York. With the New York fishery collapsed, the only remaining commercial US fishery is in Massachusetts.

The study also reveals that although Massachusetts waters are still in the safe range for bay scallops, they have warmed at a rate even faster than New York waters and could be threatened in the future.

Stephen Tomasetti, a graduate of Stony Brook’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences and currently a visiting assistant professor of environmental studies at Hamilton College, points to other examples of heat-induced mass mortality on the East Coast, like the loss of lobsters in Long Island Sound and blue mussels in coastal bays south of Delaware.

“Commercial shellfisheries are a vital part of our blue economy, and shellfish habitats are changing rapidly,” he says. “Mitigating further warming by transitioning to clean energy is critical. But while these global efforts are underway, committing to practices that will improve our local water quality like reducing nutrient pollution is also important.”

Warmer waters physically hold less oxygen, so increasing the baseline oxygen levels in the estuary by improving water quality will help offset future oxygen loss from increased temperature.

The authors warn that warming in the Northeast US is projected to continue at a faster pace than the global average. The populations of mobile species like fish can respond by moving to waters with more tolerable temperatures.

But for populations of bay scallops and other economically important shellfish species, movement is limited by their ability to disperse through spawning and the availability of suitable habitat. Populations forced to cope with temperature extremes may be more vulnerable to mass mortality events.

Source: Stony Brook University

Astronomers suggest more galaxies formed in the early universe than previously thought.

In their new study, the researchers discovered 87 galaxies that could be the earliest known galaxies in the universe.

“…we might need to revise our previous understanding of galaxy formation.”

The finding gets the astronomers one step closer to finding out when galaxies first appeared in the universe—about 200-400 million years after the Big Bang, says Haojing Yan, associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Missouri and lead author of the study.

The researchers used data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Early Release Observations.

“Finding such a large number of galaxies in the early parts of the universe suggests that we might need to revise our previous understanding of galaxy formation,” Yan says. “Our finding gives us the first indication that a lot of galaxies could have been formed in the universe much earlier than previously thought.”

In the study, the astronomers searched for potential galaxies at “very high redshifts.” Yan says the concept of redshifts in astronomy allows astronomers to measure how far away distant objects are in the universe—like galaxies—by looking at how the colors change in the waves of light that they emit.

“If a light-emitting source is moving toward us, the light is being ‘squeezed,’ and that shorter wavelength is represented by blue light, or blueshift,” Yan says. “But if that source [of light] is moving away from us, the light it produces is being ‘stretched,’ and changes to a longer wavelength that is represented by red light, or redshift.”

Yan says Edwin Hubble’s discovery in the late 1920s that our universe is ever-expanding is key to understanding how redshifts are used in astronomy.

“Hubble confirmed that galaxies external to our Milky Way galaxy are moving away from us, and the more distant they are, the faster they are moving away,” Yan says. “This relates to redshifts through the notion of distances—the higher the redshift an object is at, such as a galaxy, the further away it is from us.”

Therefore, Yan says the search for galaxies at very high redshifts gives astronomers a way to construct the early history of the universe.

“The speed of light is finite, so it takes time for light to travel over a distance to reach us,” Yan says. “For example, when we look at the sun, we aren’t looking at it what it looks like in the present, but rather what it looked like some eight minutes ago. That’s because that’s how long it takes for the sun’s radiation to reach us. So, when we are looking at galaxies which are very far away, we are looking at their images from a long time ago.”

Using this concept, Yan’s team analyzed the infrared light captured by the JWST to identify the galaxies.

“The higher the redshift a galaxy is at, the longer it takes for the light to reach us, so a higher redshift corresponds to an earlier view of the universe,” Yan says. “Therefore, by looking at galaxies at higher redshifts, we are getting earlier snapshots of what the universe looked like a long time ago.”

The JWST was critical to this discovery because objects in space like galaxies that are located at high redshifts—11 and above—can only be detected by infrared light, according to Yan. This is beyond what NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope can detect because the Hubble telescope only sees from ultraviolet to near-infrared light.

“JWST, the most powerful infrared telescope, has the sensitivity and resolution for the job,” Yan says. “Up until these first JWST data sets were released [in mid-July 2022], most astronomers believed that the universe should have very few galaxies beyond redshift 11. At the very least, our results challenge this view. I believe this discovery is just the tip of the iceberg because the data we used only focused on a very small area of the universe. After this, I anticipate that other teams of astronomers will find similar results elsewhere in the vast reaches of space as JWST continues to provide us with a new view of the deepest parts of our universe.”

The research appears in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Additional coauthors are from the University of Missouri, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences South America Center for Astronomy and National Astronomical Observatories of China.

Source: University of Missouri

People aren’t eating pulses—a category of food that includes beans, lentils, and peas—due to lack of awareness and tradition, research in Europe finds.

Pulses, which have two- to three-times the protein as cereals, could replace meat protein while being sustainable and climate friendly.

Pulses have a unique ability to capture nitrogen from the air and fix it to soil to create fertilizer, which benefits other plants as well. This makes the need for additional fertilizer negligible, as well as the crop’s greenhouse gas emissions.

In her studies, Katharina Henn aimed to get an overview of pulse consumption across Europe, and in doing so, identify the obstacles that challenge consumers. The findings appear in the journals Food Quality and Preference, Food Research International, and Future Foods.

Pulses in Denmark, Germany, Poland, Spain, and the UK

People in Denmark have roughly average knowledge of pulses, they come in last place for quantity and variety of pulses eaten.

“There is nothing bad to say about them.”

Conversely, while pulse awareness among the British is at the low end, consumption is midway to the top, below Poland and Spain. The results don’t explain whether this is because baked beans are popular in the UK. However, UK health authorities do include baked beans among their daily fruit and vegetable intake recommendations.

According to Henn, “there’s nothing wrong with canned beans. It’s a common misconception among consumers that canned foods are unhealthy. They may come in a sugary sauce, but the beans are fine.”

Spain is at the top of the class when it comes to awareness, the variation of pulses used and total consumption. The country’s historic interaction with Middle Eastern culinary traditions could be the reason. Regardless, pulses are a natural part of Spain’s Mediterranean diet, notes Henn. In Germany, her own country, the traditions have been forgotten.

“In Germany, there were once many traditional dishes that included pulses, such as lentil and sausage stew. But they’ve gone out of fashion. This partly explains why Germans know so much about pulses, but don’t have a matching appetite for them,” explains Henn.

Henn thinks that the solution to the low consumption is to build European traditions instead of focusing on meat-like substitutes.

“There is a lot of interest in meat substitutes because the industry thinks that consumers need products which resemble familiar foods, like burger patties. But from a nutritional perspective, we don’t need these imitation products. In fact, our studies show that consumers would often prefer pulses just as they are,” says Henn, who continues:

“Pulses have been a traditional foodstuff for a long time, so including them in a wider variety of products would be welcome. But there’s no need for loads of adaptation and innovation. Not to the extent needed with regards to insects or lab-grown meat for example. What is really needed is knowledge and inspiration to prepare them, so that people begin to consider pulses when planning meals.”

CO₂ from protein sources

The studies also included a life cycle assessment for pulses which lays out their greenhouse gas footprints from production to consumption—start to finish. This underscored the huge potential of pulses, particularly at a time when our planet demands it.

Average greenhouse gas emissions (in CO₂) for various pulses:

• Dried beans: 11 kg CO₂/kg protein
• Canned beans: 23 kg CO₂/kg protein
• Beef: 499 kg CO₂/kg protein
• Lamb: 198.5 kg CO₂/kg protein
• Protein: 190 kg CO₂/kg protein
• Cheese: 108 kg CO₂/kg protein

“Our global population has just reached 8 billion and we are amid a climate crisis. This calls for three things that pulses can deliver: Food production that can nourish a growing population; that can be climate friendly without significant greenhouse gas emissions; and do so in a future with more difficult growing conditions that includes drought, among other things,” says Henn.

“Now may be the time for a conversation about pulses in Europe, a cheap food that is nutritious and benefits climate and environment. There is nothing bad to say about them,” she says.

The work had support from the European Union Framework Program for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020 under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Training Network “FOODENGINE.”

Source: Kristian Bjørn-Hansen for University of Copenhagen

A new study provides insights into the immune system’s weapons-development facilities, known as germinal centers.

Formed in response to infection and vaccination, these microscopic training grounds allow B cells to perfect the antibodies they deploy against specific viruses and bacteria.

Figuring out how germinal centers work is therefore crucial to understanding immunity and developing more effective vaccines. The new study reveals why some germinal centers persist for months rather than weeks, providing insights that could inform future vaccine design.

Beefing up B cells

Germinal centers form in the body’s lymphatic tissues shortly after vaccination or infection. Once inside a germinal center, B cells undergo rapid mutations and, through a process of natural selection, only B cells with antibodies that most effectively bind to their target antigens survive. These superior B cells then become either plasma cells, antibody factories that secrete copious amounts of antibodies into serum, or memory B cells, which patrol the body for signs of return of the pathogen they evolved to fight.

“The goal of the germinal center is to generate high-affinity plasma cells and memory B cells, that it then exports,” says Renan V.H. de Carvalho, a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Gabriel D. Victora at Rockefeller University.

In mice, most germinal centers shut down after a few weeks, having accomplished their goal of producing high-affinity B cells. But those that form in response to certain respiratory infections, including the flu, can stay in business for more than six months, roughly a quarter of a mouse’s normal lifespan. De Carvalho and his colleagues wanted to understand why these germinal centers are so long-lived, and what precisely goes on inside them.

For the study, the researchers first infected mice with influenza and SARS-CoV-2 viruses, waited for them to form germinal centers, and then sequenced the antibody genes of B cells harvested from those centers over the course of 24 weeks. Much to their surprise they found that, rather than continuously evolving at a steady clip, antibody optimization peaked after 12 weeks and then apparently regressed, even as the center remained active. This puzzling drop-off was due to the continuous introduction of unevolved “naïve” B cells into the germinal centers, researchers later found.

As weeks turned into months, a more complete picture began to form: the founder B cells that had initially seeded the long-lived germinal centers were being gradually replaced by naïve ones, so that only a tiny fraction of late germinal centers were made of the descendants of the B cells that started them.

Vets and new recruits

These new recruits did not behave like the original B cells in the germinal center. Subsequent experiments showed that, while the naïve B cells also underwent evolution inside the germinal centers, they did not produce antibodies that could bind to flu or SARS-CoV2 antigens.

“We used to think of infection-induced germinal centers as a single reaction targeting antigens from a particular pathogen,” de Carvalho says. “Apparently it’s not, at least in the case of these long-lived germinal centers.”

But the few original B cells that remained on site were enough to produce efficient immunity against the initial pathogen. When the researchers re-exposed the mice to flu antigens 3 months after they were first infected—effectively mimicking a repeat infection or booster shot—they demonstrated that many of the memory B cells which began pumping out antibodies were descended from the few founder cells that lingered in germinal centers for many months, and not their naïve replacements.

“Even though they constitute a small fraction of the total number of cells later on, the founder cells that stay in the germinal center for a long time are still doing their job,” de Carvalho says. But just how well those founder B cells do their jobs, and whether naïve recruits cramp their style and reduce their efficacy, remains to be seen. Future studies from the Victora lab will address this question.

Meanwhile, the findings already have implications for our general understanding about how germinal centers operate. Understanding the dynamic between founder and naïve B cells could help researchers leverage long-lived germinal centers to produce more effective antibodies against dangerous respiratory viruses, like the flu and SARS-CoV-2.

“The invasion of ongoing germinal center structures by sequential waves of B cells may turn out to be an important factor in predicting germinal center outcomes, possibly well beyond this particular influenza model,” Victora says, “and might give us some insight into how to coax germinal centers to produce the antibodies we need them to.”

The new study appears in Cell.

Source: Rockefeller University

A newly-designed peptide can suppress the damaging lung inflammation seen in acute respiratory distress syndrome, or ARDS, research with mice shows.

The new study, which appears in iScience, describes the first specific treatment designed to prevent the deadly disease, which can appear in patients with severe lung injury from infections with bacteria and viruses, like pneumonia, flu, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and COVID-19.

The study reveals how the C6 peptide blocks voltage-gated Hv1 proton channels in white blood cells called neutrophils, suppressing the production of damaging reactive oxygen species, proteases, and cytokines. This inhibited infiltration of the lung tissue by these cells that trigger uncontrolled inflammation and fluid buildup seen in severely damaged lungs.

ARDS occurs when the lungs become inflamed following injury or infections. Inflammation and fluid buildup damage the lung tissue, decreasing how much oxygen can reach the bloodstream. People with ARDS have shortness of breath and failure of oxygenation that is so severe that they are often require support from a ventilator.

Numerous studies over the past decade show that ARDS affects approximately 200,000 adults and 8,000 children each year in the US, causing 75,000 and 1,500 deaths, respectively. ARDS survivors often have long-lasting adverse outcomes, including cognitive dysfunction, mental health issues, and physical impairments. In fact, only 50% of ARDS patients discharged from the hospital return to their jobs in the first two years.

“Despite five decades of effort, there are no disease-modifying drugs that can treat patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome,” says Steven A. N. Goldstein, professor of pediatrics, physiology and biophysics, and pharmaceutical sciences at the University of California, Irvine, who is also the vice chancellor of health affairs at UC Irvine. “The C6 peptide shows promise as a therapy for this damaging lung disease, giving hope to patients where so little exists now.”

In an established mouse model, the researchers administered the C6 peptide in a clinically relevant manner to mice to suppress disease. In addition, they showed that C6 inhibits Hv1 in human neutrophils—the predominant inflammatory cell type accumulating in the lungs of ARDS patients—shutting down the same inflammatory signaling pathways that it did in mice.

The absence of apparent toxic side effects in the mice suggests that targeting Hv1 will be tolerated in humans as a therapeutic approach to ARDS and that C6 may also be useful in treating other inflammatory diseases.

The researchers first created the novel C6 peptide in 2018 and found in 2022 that it could become a more potent therapeutic when linking together two of the peptides.

Peptides are small chains of amino acids and are becoming more widely used as drugs in recent years. They constitute a subset of medications called biologics that are proving desirable for drug discovery. They differ from proteins like antibodies, which are made from longer, more complex amino acid chains.

Goldstein says the next steps include further study of C6, C6 derivatives, and small molecule mimetics his team has isolated to treat inflammatory diseases of the lungs and other tissues, including assessment of how long the peptide stays in the body and how it gets eliminated.

Additional coauthors are from UCLA and UC Irvine. The National Institutes of Health and the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation supported the work.

Source: UC Irvine