A Science of Wholeness Awaits Us

Just as the melody is not made up of notes nor the verse of words nor the statue of lines, but they must be tugged and dragged till their unity has been scattered into these many pieces, so with the World to whom I say Thou. — Martin Buber

We creatures of the 21st Century, grandchildren of the Enlightenment, like to think that our particular brand of rationality has finally established a basis for understanding the world in which we live. Of course, we don’t have all the details worked out, but the foundation is solid. 

We might be chastened by the precedent of Lao Tzu and Socrates and Hypatia fof Alexandria and Thomas Aquinas and Lord Kelvin, who thought the same thing. I wonder if the foundation of our world-view is really made of more durable stuff than theirs. In fact, founding our paradigm in the scientific method offers us something that earlier sages did not have: we can actually compare in detail the world we observe and the consequences of our physicalist postulates. The results are not reassuring. In recent decades, the science establishment has willfully ignored observations of phenomena that call into question our foundational knowledge.

Reductionism is the process of understanding the whole as emergent from the parts. The opposite of reductionism is holism: understanding the parts in terms of their contribution to a given whole. It’s fair to say that all of science in the last 200 years has been reductionist. Physical law is the only fundamental description of nature. Chemistry could, in principle, be derived from physics (if only we could solve the Schrödinger equation for hundreds of electrons); living physiology could be understood in terms of chemistry; and ecology could be modeled in terms of individual behaviors. 

Curiously, there are holistic formulations of physics that are mathematically equivalent to the reductionist equations, but in practice, physicists use the differential equations, which are the reductionist version. 

Biological function is explained by a process of evolution through natural selection that made them what they are. Holism in evolution is called “teleology”, and is disparaged as unscientific. But when features of physics appear purposeful, there is no agreement among scientists how to explain them. Most physicists would avoid invoking a creator or embedded intelligence, even at the cost of telling stories about vast numbers of unobservable universes outside our own. This is the most common explanation for the fact that the rules of physics and the very constants of nature—things like the charge on an electron and the strength of the gravitational force—these things seemed eerily to have been fine-tuned to offer us an interesting universe; most other choices for the basic rules of physics might have produced dull uniformity, without stars or galaxies, without chemistry, without life.

But I am racing ahead of the story. The question I want to ask is whether we are missing something in reasoning exclusively from the bottom up, explaining all large-scale patterns as emergent results of small-scale laws. I want to suggest that this deeply-ingrained pattern of thought may be holding science back. Are there large-scale patterns waiting to be discovered? Are there destined outcomes that help us understand the events leading to a predetermined denouement? Even formulating such questions is controversial; and yet, we see hints pointing in just this direction, both from micro-science of quantum mechanics and from studies of the Universe on its largest scale.

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Science is all about observing nature and noticing patterns which might be articulated as theories or laws. When these patterns connect nearby events that can be observed at one time by one person, they are easy to spot. When the patterns involve distant events and stretch over time and space, they may go undetected for a long while. This can lead to an obvious bias. Scientists are more inclined to formulate laws of nature that connect contiguous events than laws that connect events that are separated spatially and temporally, just because these global patterns are harder to see.

The physical laws that were formulated and tested in the 19th and 20th century were all mediated by local action. The idea that all physical action is local was formalized by Einstein, and has been baked into our theories ever since. But there is a loophole, defined by quantum randomness. Roughly speaking, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle says that we can only ever know half the information we need to predict the future from the past at the microscopic level. Is the other half replaced by pure randomness, devoid of any patterns that science might discern? Or might it only appear random, because the patterns are spread over time and space, and difficult to correlate? In fact, the existence of such patterns is an implication of standard quantum theory. (This is one formulation of the theorem about quantum entanglement, proved by J.S. Bell in 1964.) Speculative scientists and philosophers relate this phenomenon to telepathic communication, to the “hard problem” of consciousness, and to the quantum basis of life.

I hope to explore this topic in a new ScienceBlog forum beginning in 2021. Here are four examples of the kinds of phenomena pointing to a new holistic science.

1. Michael Levin and the electric blueprint for your body

We think of the body as a biochemical machine, proteins and hormones turned on in the right places at the right times to give the body its shape. Levin is clear and articulate in making the case that the body develops and takes shape under a global plan, a blueprint, and not just a set of instructions. This is true for humans and other mammals, but it is easier to prove it for animals that regenerate. Humans can grow back part of a liver. An octopus can grow a new leg; a salamander can grow a new leg or tail tail; a zebrafish can grow back a seriously damaged heart; starfish and flatworms can grow back a whole body from a small piece.

Consider the difference between a blueprint and an instruction set. An instruction set says

1. Screw the left side of widget A onto the right side of gadget B.
2. Take the assembly of widget+gadget and mount it in front of doodad C, making sure the three tabs of C fit into the corresponding holes in B
…

A blueprint is a picture of the fully assembled object, showing the relationship of the parts.

Ikea always gives you both. With the instructions only, it is possible to complete the assembly, but only if you don’t make any mistakes. And if the finished object breaks, the instruction set will not be sufficient to repair it. The fact that living things can heal is a strong indication that they (we) contain blueprints as well as instruction sets. The instruction set is in the genome, together with the epigenetic information that turns genes on and off as appropriate; but where is the blueprint?

Prof Michael Levin of Tufts University has been working on this problem for almost 30 years. The answer he finds is in electrical patterns that span across bodies. One of the tools he pioneered is voltage reporter dyes that glow in different colors depending on the electric potential. Here is a map of the voltage in a frog embryo, together with a photomicrograph.

from Levin’s 2012 paper

Levin’s lab has been able to demonstrate that the voltage map determines the shape that the tadpole grows into as it develops. Working with planaria flatworms, rather than frogs, their coup de grace was to modify these voltage patterns “by hand”, creating morphologies that are not found in nature, such as the worm with two heads and no tail.

This is stunning work, documenting a language in biology that is every bit as important as the genetic code. Of course, I am not the first to discover Dr Levin’s work; but it is underappreciated because the vast majority of smart biologists are focusing on biochemistry and it is a stretch for them to step out of the reductionist paradigm.

(I wrote more about Levin’s work two years ago. Here is a video which presents a summary in his own words.)

2. Cold Fusion

Two atomic nuclei of heavy hydrogen can merge to create a single nucleus of helium, and tremendous energy is released. This process is not part of our everyday experience because the hydrogen nuclei are both positively charged and the energy required to push them close enough together that they will fuse is also enormous. So fusion can happen in the middle of the sun, where temperatures are in the millions of degrees, and fusion can happen inside a thermonuclear bomb. But it’s hard as hell to get hydrogen to fuse into helium, and, in fact, physicists have been working on this problem for more than 60 years without a viable solution.

Except that in 1989, the world’s most eminent electrochemist (not exactly a household name) announced that he had made fusion happen on his laboratory bench, using the metal palladium in an apparatus about as complicated as a car battery.

Six months later, at an MIT press conference, scientists from prestigious labs around the world lined up to announce they had tried to duplicate what Fleischmann had reported with no success. The results were un-reproducible. Cold Fusion was dead, and the very word was to become a joke about junk science. Along with the vast majority of scientists, I gave up on Cold Fusion and moved on. 22 years passed. Imagine my surprise when I read in 2011 that an Italian entrepreneur had demonstrated a Cold Fusion boiler, and was taking orders!

The politics of Cold Fusion is a story of its own. I wrote about it in 2012 (not for ScienceBlog). The Italian turned out to be a huckster, but the physics is real.

I began reading, and I became hooked when I watched this video. I visited Cold Fusion labs at MIT, Stanford Research Institute, Portland State University, University of Missouri, and a private company in Berkeley, CA. I went to two Cold Fusion conferences. I became convinced that some of the claims were dubious, and others were convincing. There is no doubt in my mind that Cold Fusion is real.

Physicists were right to be skeptical. The energy for activation is plentiful enough, even at room temperature, but the problem is to concentrate it all in one pair of atoms. Left to its own devices, energy will spontaneously spread itself out— that’s what the science of thermodynamics is all about. To concentrate an eye-blink worth of energy in just two atoms is unexpected and unusual. But things like this have been known to happen, and a few times before they’ve taken physicists by surprise. Quantum mechanics plays tricks on our expectations. A laser can concentrate energy, as billions of light particles all march together in lock step. Superconductivity is another example of what’s called a “bulk quantum effect”. Under extraordinary circumstances, quantum mechanics can leap from the tiny world of the atom and hit us in the face with deeply unexpected, human-scale effects that we can see and touch.

There are now many dozens of labs around the world that have replicated Cold Fusion, but there is still no theory that physicists can agree on. What we do agree is that it is a bulk quantum effect, like superconductivity and lasers. When the entire crystal (palladium deuteride) asks as one quantum entity, strange and unexpected things are possible.

For me, the larger lesson is about the way the science of quantum mechanics developed in the 20th Century. The equations and formalisms of QM are screaming of connectedness. Nothing can be analyzed on its own. Everything is entangled. The quantum formalism defies the reductionist paradigm on which 300 years of previous science had been built.

And yet, physicists were not prepared to think holistically. We literally don’t know how. If you write down the quantum mechanical equations for more than two particles, they are absurdly complex, and we throw up our hands, with no way to solve the equations or even to reason about the properties of the solutions. The many-body quantum problem is intractable, except that progress has been made in some highly symmetrical situations. A laser consists of a huge number of photons, but they all have a single wave function, which is as simple as a wave function can be. Many-electron atoms are conventionally studied as if the electrons were independent (but constrained by the Pauli Exclusion Principle). Solid state physics is built on bulk quantum mechanics of a great number of electrons, and ingenious approximations are used in combination with detailed measurements to reason about how the electrons coordinate their wave state.

Cold Fusion presents a huge but accessible challenge to quantum physicists. Beyond Cold Fusion lie a hierarchy of problems of greater and greater complexity involving quantum effects in macroscopic objects.

In the 21st Century, there is a nascent science of quantum biology. It is my belief that life is a quantum state.

3. Life coordinates on a grand scale

There are many examples of coordinated behaviors that are unexplained or partially explained. This touches my own specialty, evolution of aging. The thesis of my book is that aging is part of an evolved adaptation for ecosystem homeostasis, integrating the life history patterns of many, many species in an expanded version of co-evolution. My thesis is less audacious than the Gaia hypothesis.

• Monarch butterflies hibernate on trees in California or Mexico for the winter. In the spring, they migrate and mate and reproduce, migrate and mate and reproduce, 6 or 7 times, dispersing thousands of miles to the north and east. Then, in the fall, the great great grand offspring of the spring Monarchs undertake the entire migration in reverse, and manage to find the same tree where their ancestor of 6 generations spent the previous winter. [Forest service article]
• Zombie crabs have been observed in vast swarms, migrating hundreds of miles across the ocean floor. Red crabs of Christmas Island pursue an overland migration

• Sea turtles from all over the world arrange for a common rendezvous once a year, congregating on beaches in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Their navigation involves geomagnetism, but a larger mystery is how they coordinate their movements.
• Murmuration behavior in starlings has been modeled with local rules, where each bird knows only about the birds in its immediate vicinity; but I find the simulations unconvincing, and believe our intuition on witnessing this phenomenon: that large-scale communication is necessary to explain what we see.
• Monica Gagliano has written about plants’ ability to sense their biological environment and coordinate behaviors on a large scale. This is her more popular book.

4. The Anthropic Coincidences, or the Improbability of Received Physical Laws

For me, this is the mother of all scientific doors, leading to a radically different perspective from the reductionist world-view of post-enlightenment science. Most physicists believe that the laws of physics were imprinted on the universe at the Big Bang, and life took advantage of whatever they happened to be. But since 1973, there has been an awareness, now universally accepted, that the laws of nature are very special, in that they lead to a complex and interesting universe, capable of supporting life. The vast majority of imaginable physical laws give rise to universes that are terminally boring; they quickly go to thermodynamic equilibrium. Without quantum mechanics, of course, there could be no stable atoms, and everything would collapse into black holes in short order. Without a very delicate balance between the strength of electric repulsion and the strong nuclear force, there would be no diversity of elements. If the gravitational force were just a little weaker, there would be no galaxies or stars, nothing in the universe but spread-out gas and dust. If our world had four (or more) dimensions instead of three, there would be no stable orbits, no solar systems because planets would would quickly fly off into space or fall into the star; but a two-dimensional world would not be able to support life because (among other reasons) interconnected networks on a 2D grid are very limited in complexity.

Stanford Philosophy article
1995 book by Frank Tipler and John Barrow
Just Six Numbers by Martin Rees

Most scientists don’t take account of this extraordinary fact; they go on as if life were an inevitability, an accident waiting to happen. But those who have thought about the Anthropic Principle fall in two camps:

The majority opinion:  There are millions and trillions and gazillions of alternative universes. They all exist. They are all equally “real”. But, of course, there’s no one looking at most of them.  It’s no coincidence that our universe is one of the tiny proportion that can support life; the very fact that we are who we are, that we are able to ask this question, implies that we are in one of the extremely lucky universes.

The minority opinion:  Life is fundamental, more fundamental than matter.  Consciousness is perhaps a physical entity, as Schrödinger thought; or perhaps it exists in a world apart from space-time, as Descartes implied 300 years before Schrödinger; or perhaps there is a Platonic world of “forms” or “ideals” [various translations of Plato’s είδος] that is primary, and that our physical world is a shadow or a concretization of that world.  One way or another, it is consciousness that has given rise to physics, and not the other way around.

If you like the multi-universe idea, you will want to listen to the recent Nobel Lecture of Roger Penrose. He races to summarize his life’s work on General Relativity to end the lecture with evidence from maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background of fossils that came from black holes in a previous universe, before our own beloved Big Bang.

I prefer the minority view, not just because it provides greater scope for the imagination [Anne of Green Gables]; there are scientific reasons that go beyond hubristic disregard of Occam’s razor in postulating all these unobservable universes.

• Quantum mechanics requires an observer.  Nothing is reified until it is observed, and the observer’s probes help determine what it is that is reified.  Physicists debate what the “observer” means, but if we assume that it is a physical entity, paradoxes arise regarding the observer’s quantum state; hence the “observer” must be something outside the laws that determine the evolution of quantum probability waves.  Cartesian dualism provides a natural home for the “observer”.
• Parapsychology experiments provide a great many indications that awareness (and memory) have an existence apart from the physical brain.  These include near-death experiences, telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance.
• Moreover, mental intentions have been observed to affect reality.  This is psychokinesis, from spoon-bending to shading the probabilities dictated by quantum mechanics.

Finally, the idea that consciousness is primary connects to mystical texts that go back thousands of years. 

Dao existed before heaven and earth, before the ten thousand things.  It is the unbounded mother of all living things.

                     — from the Dao De Jing of Lao Tzu

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Please look for my new page at ExperimentalFrontiers.ScienceBlog.com, coming soon.

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Fermilab and partners achieve sustained, high-fidelity quantum teleportation

Quantum information ‘teleported’ at Fermilab, Caltech represents step toward quantum internet

Aviable quantum internet—a network in which information stored in qubits is shared over long distances through entanglement—would transform the fields of data storage, precision sensing and computing, ushering in a new era of communication.

This month, scientists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory—a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory affiliated with the University of Chicago—along with partners at five institutions took a significant step in the direction of realizing a quantum internet.

In a paper published in PRX Quantum, the team presents for the first time a demonstration of a sustained, long-distance teleportation of qubits made of photons (particles of light) with fidelity greater than 90%.

The qubits were teleported over a fiber-optic network 27 miles (44 kilometers) long using state-of-the-art single-photon detectors, as well as off-the-shelf equipment.

“We’re thrilled by these results,” said Fermilab scientist Panagiotis Spentzouris, head of the Fermilab quantum science program and one of the paper’s co-authors. “This is a key achievement on the way to building a technology that will redefine how we conduct global communication.”

The achievement comes just a few months after the U.S. Department of Energy unveiled its blueprint for a national quantum internet at a press conference at the University of Chicago.

Linking particles

Quantum teleportation is a “disembodied” transfer of quantum states from one location to another. The quantum teleportation of a qubit is achieved using quantum entanglement, in which two or more particles are inextricably linked to each other. If an entangled pair of particles is shared between two separate locations, no matter the distance between them, the encoded information is teleported.

The joint team—researchers at Fermilab, AT&T, Caltech, Harvard University, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and University of Calgary—successfully teleported qubits on two systems: the Caltech Quantum Network and the Fermilab Quantum Network. The systems were designed, built, commissioned and deployed by Caltech’s public-private research program on Intelligent Quantum Networks and Technologies, or IN-Q-NET.

“With this demonstration we’re beginning to lay the foundation for the construction of a Chicago-area metropolitan quantum network.”

—Fermilab scientist Panagiotis Spentzouris

“We are very proud to have achieved this milestone on sustainable, high-performing and scalable quantum teleportation systems,” said Maria Spiropulu, the Shang-Yi Ch’en professor of physics at Caltech and director of the IN-Q-NET research program. “The results will be further improved with system upgrades we are expecting to complete by the second quarter of 2021.”

Both the Caltech and Fermilab networks, which feature near-autonomous data processing, are compatible both with existing telecommunication infrastructure and with emerging quantum processing and storage devices. Researchers are using them to improve the fidelity and rate of entanglement distribution, with an emphasis on complex quantum communication protocols and fundamental science.

“With this demonstration we’re beginning to lay the foundation for the construction of a Chicago-area metropolitan quantum network,” Spentzouris said.

The Chicagoland network, called the Illinois Express Quantum Network, is being designed by Fermilab in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory, Caltech, Northwestern University and industry partners.

“The feat is a testament to success of collaboration across disciplines and institutions, which drives so much of what we accomplish in science,” said Fermilab Deputy Director of Research Joe Lykken. “I commend the IN-Q-NET team and our partners in academia and industry on this first-of-its-kind achievement in quantum teleportation.

Citation: “Teleportation Systems Towards a Quantum Internet.” Valivarthi et al., PRX Quantum, Dec. 4, 2020, DOI: 10.1103/PRXQuantum.1.020317

Funding: U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science QuantISED program

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Gum disease-causing bacteria borrow growth molecules from neighbors to thrive

The human body is filled with friendly bacteria. However, some of these microorganisms, such as Veillonella parvula, may be too nice. These peaceful bacteria engage in a one-sided relationship with pathogen Porphyromonas gingivalis, helping the germ multiply and cause gum disease, according to a new University at Buffalo-led study.

The research sought to understand how P. gingivalis colonizes the mouth. The pathogen is unable to produce its own growth molecules until it achieves a large population in the oral microbiome (the community of microorganisms that live on and inside the body).

The answer: It borrows growth molecules from V. parvula, a common yet harmless bacteria in the mouth whose growth is not population dependent.

In a healthy mouth, P. gingivalis makes up a miniscule amount of the bacteria in the oral microbiome and cannot replicate. But if dental plaque is allowed to grow unchecked due to poor oral hygiene, V. parvula will multiply and eventually produce enough growth molecules to also spur the reproduction of P. gingivalis.

More than 47% of adults 30 and older have some form of periodontitis (also known as gum disease), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Understanding the relationship between P. gingivalis and V. parvula will help researchers create targeted therapies for periodontitis, says Patricia Diaz, DDS, PhD, lead investigator on the study and Professor of Empire Innovation in the UB School of Dental Medicine.

“Having worked with P. gingivalis for nearly two decades, we knew it needed a large population size to grow, but the specific processes that drive this phenomenon were not completely understood,” says Diaz, also director of the UB Microbiome Center. “Successfully targeting the accessory pathogen V. parvula should prevent P. gingivalis from expanding within the oral microbial community to pathogenic levels.”

The study, which was published on Dec. 28 in the ISME Journal, tested the effects of growth molecules exuded by microorganisms in the mouth on P. gingivalis, including molecules from five species of bacteria that are prevalent in gingivitis, a condition that precedes periodontitis.

Of the bacteria examined, only growth molecules secreted by V. parvula enabled the replication of P. gingivalis, regardless of the strain of either microbe. When V. parvula was removed from the microbiome, growth of P. gingivalis halted. However, the mere presence of any V. parvula was not enough to stimulate P. gingivalis, as the pathogen was only incited by a large population of V. parvula.

Data suggest that the relationship is one-directional as V. parvula received no obvious benefit from sharing its growth molecules, says Diaz.

“P. gingivalis and V. parvula interact at many levels, but the beneficiary is P. gingivalis,” says Diaz, noting that V. parvula also produces heme, which is the preferred iron source for P. gingivalis.

“This relationship that allows growth of P. gingivalis was not only confirmed in a preclinical model of periodontitis, but also, in the presence of V. parvula, P. gingivalis could amplify periodontal bone loss, which is the hallmark of the disease,” says George Hajishengallis, DDS, PhD, co-investigator on the study and Thomas W. Evans Centennial Professor in the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine.

“It is not clear whether the growth-promoting cues produced by P. gingivalis and V. parvula are chemically identical,” says Diaz. “Far more work is needed to uncover the identity of these molecules.”

Additional investigators include Anilei Hoare, PhD, assistant professor, University of Chile; Hui Wang, PhD, postdoctoral researcher, University of Pennsylvania; Archana Meethil, resident, University of Connecticut; Loreto Abusleme, PhD, assistant professor, University of Chile; Bo-Young Hong, PhD, associate research scientist, Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine; Niki Moutsopoulos, DDS, PhD, senior investigator, National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research; and Philip Marsh, PhD, professor, University of Leeds.

The research was funded by the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research of the National Institutes of Health.

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NIH study uncovers blood vessel damage and inflammation in COVID-19 patients’ brains but no infection

Results from a study of 19 deceased patients suggests brain damage is a byproduct of a patient’s illness.

In an in-depth study of how COVID-19 affects a patient’s brain, National Institutes of Health researchers consistently spotted hallmarks of damage caused by thinning and leaky brain blood vessels in tissue samples from patients who died shortly after contracting the disease. In addition, they saw no signs of SARS-CoV-2 in the tissue samples, suggesting the damage was not caused by a direct viral attack on the brain. The results were published as a correspondence in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“We found that the brains of patients who contract infection from SARS-CoV-2 may be susceptible to microvascular blood vessel damage. Our results suggest that this may be caused by the body’s inflammatory response to the virus” said Avindra Nath, M.D., clinical director at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and the senior author of the study. “We hope these results will help doctors understand the full spectrum of problems patients may suffer so that we can come up with better treatments.”

Although COVID-19 is primarily a respiratory disease, patients often experience neurological problems including headaches, delirium, cognitive dysfunction, dizziness, fatigue, and loss of the sense of smell. The disease may also cause patients to suffer strokes and other neuropathologies.

Several studies have shown that the disease can cause inflammation and blood vessel damage. In one of these studies, the researchers found evidence of small amounts of SARS-CoV-2 in some patients’ brains. Nevertheless, scientists are still trying to understand how the disease affects the brain.

In this study, the researchers conducted an in-depth examination of brain tissue samples from 19 patients who had died after experiencing COVID-19 between March and July 2020. Samples from 16 of the patients were provided by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York City while the other 3 cases were provided by the department of pathology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, Iowa City. The patients died at a wide range of ages, from 5 to 73 years old. They died within a few hours to two months after reporting symptoms. Many patients had one or more risk factors, including diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease. Eight of the patients were found dead at home or in public settings. Another three patients collapsed and died suddenly.

Initially, the researchers used a special, high-powered magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner that is 4 to 10 times more sensitive than most MRI scanners, to examine samples of the olfactory bulbs and brainstems from each patient. These regions are thought to be highly susceptible to COVID-19. Olfactory bulbs control our sense of smell while the brainstem controls our breathing and heart rate. The scans revealed that both regions had an abundance of bright spots, called hyperintensities, that often indicate inflammation, and dark spots, called hypointensities, that represent bleeding.

The researchers then used the scans as a guide to examine the spots more closely under a microscope. They found that the bright spots contained blood vessels that were thinner than normal and sometimes leaking blood proteins, like fibrinogen, into the brain. This appeared to trigger an immune reaction. The spots were surrounded by T cells from the blood and the brain’s own immune cells called microglia. In contrast, the dark spots contained both clotted and leaky blood vessels but no immune response.

“We were completely surprised. Originally, we expected to see damage that is caused by a lack of oxygen. Instead, we saw multifocal areas of damage that is usually associated with strokes and neuroinflammatory diseases,” said Dr. Nath.

Finally, the researchers saw no signs of infection in the brain tissue samples even though they used several methods for detecting genetic material or proteins from SARS-CoV-2.

“So far, our results suggest that the damage we saw may not have been not caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus directly infecting the brain,” said Dr. Nath. “In the future, we plan to study how COVID-19 harms the brain’s blood vessels and whether that produces some of the short- and long-term symptoms we see in patients.”

This study was supported by NIH Intramural Research Program at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NS003130) and an NIH grant (NS109284).

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Allergists offer reassurance regarding potential allergic reactions to COVID-19 vaccines

Reports of possible allergic reactions to the COVID-19 vaccines produced by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, both recently approved for emergency use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), have raised public concern. A team of experts led by allergists at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has now examined all relevant information to offer reassurance that the vaccines can be administered safely even to people with food or medication allergies. The group’s review is published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice.

In response to accounts of potential allergic reactions in some people following COVID-19 vaccination in the United Kingdom, that country’s medical regulatory agency advised that individuals with a history of anaphylaxis to a medicine or food should avoid COVID-19 vaccination. After closer review of the data related to allergic reactions, however, the FDA recommended that the vaccines be withheld only from individuals with a history of severe allergic reactions to any component of the COVID-19 vaccine, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised that all patients be observed for 15 minutes post-vaccination by staff who can identify and manage such reactions. The U.S. agencies do not recommend that people with food or medication allergies avoid vaccination.

To provide insights from allergists’ perspectives, Aleena Banerji, MD, clinical director of the Allergy and Clinical Immunology Unit at MGH and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, and her colleagues have summarized what’s currently known about allergic reactions to vaccines like those developed against COVID-19, and they have proposed detailed advice so that individuals with different allergy histories can safely receive their first COVID-19 vaccine. They also outline steps on safely receiving the second dose in individuals who develop a reaction to their first dose of COVID-19 vaccine.

“As allergists, we want to encourage vaccination by reassuring the public that both FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccines are safe. Our guidelines are built upon the recommendations of U.S. regulatory agencies and provide clear steps to the medical community on how to safely administer both doses of the vaccine in individuals with allergic histories,” says Banerji.

The experts note that allergic reactions to vaccines are rare, with a rate of about 1.3 per 1 million people. They also determined that the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccine allergic reactions will have a similarly low rate of occurrence. They stress that vaccine clinics will be monitoring all patients for 15 to 30 minutes and can manage any allergic reactions that occur. Banerji and her co-authors recommend that individuals with a history of anaphylaxis to an injectable drug or vaccine containing polyethylene glycol or polysorbate speak with their allergists before being vaccinated. They stress that patients with severe allergies to foods, oral drugs, latex, or venom can safely receive the COVID-19 vaccines.

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Blood vessel cells implicated in chronic inflammation of obesity

When fat cells in the body are stuffed with excess fat, the surrounding tissue becomes inflamed. That chronic, low-level inflammation is one of the driving factors behind many of the diseases associated with obesity. Now, UT Southwestern scientists have discovered a type of cell responsible, at least in mice, for triggering this inflammation in fat tissue. Their findings, published in Nature Metabolism, could eventually lead to new ways to treat obesity.

“The inflammation of fat cells in obese individuals is linked to many of the comorbidities we associate with being overweight – cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and infection,” says study leader Rana Gupta, Ph.D., associate professor of internal medicine. “By identifying these cells, we’ve taken a step toward understanding some of the initial events that contribute to that inflammation.”

When a person consumes more calories than needed, the excess calories are stored in the form of triglycerides inside fat tissue, also known as white adipose tissue (WAT). Researchers know that in obese people, WAT becomes overworked, fat cells begin to die, and immune cells become activated. But the exact mechanism by which this inflammation occurs isn’t fully understood.

While many studies have focused on the signaling molecules produced by the fat cells or immune cells in WAT that might contribute to inflammation, Gupta’s team took a different approach. They focused instead on the vessels that carry blood – as well as immune cells and inflammatory molecules – into WAT.

In 2018, Gupta and his colleagues identified a new type of cell lining these blood vessels in mice – an adipose progenitor cell (APC), or precursor cell that goes on to generate mature fat cells. But unlike most APCs, the new cells – dubbed fibro-inflammatory progenitors, or FIPs – produced signals that encouraged inflammation. In the new work, the researchers looked more closely at the role of the FIPs in mediating inflammation.

Within just one day of switching young male mice to a high-fat diet, Gupta and his colleagues discovered that the FIPs quickly increased the number of inflammatory molecules produced. After 28 days on a high-fat diet, they found a substantial increase in the proportion of FIPs compared with other APCs.

“This is the first study to demonstrate that these cells play a very active, early role in being gatekeepers of inflammation in fat tissue,” says Gupta.

To show that the increase in the number and activity of the FIPs was not just a side effect of already-inflamed fat cells, the team removed a key immune signaling gene, Tlr4, from the FIPs in some mice. After five months on a high-fat diet, the mice lacking Tlr4 had gained just as much weight, and just as much fat, as other mice on a high-fat diet. But the genetically engineered mice – with FIPs that could no longer generate the same signals – no longer had high levels of inflammation. Instead, the levels of inflammatory molecules in their WAT were closer to the levels seen in mice on low-fat diets.

Gupta and his colleagues went on to show that increasing levels of a related signaling molecule, ZFP423, in FIPs can also ameliorate the inflammation in mouse fat cells. The findings point toward possible avenues to pursue to lower the risk of disease in people with obesity.

“It looks like ZFP423 could be an important brake in terms of slowing the inflammatory signals in these cells,” says Gupta. “Of course, it remains to be seen if that’s true in humans as well as mice.”

Gupta’s group is planning future experiments to better understand what aspect of a high-fat diet initiates the increased inflammatory signaling in FIPs, as well as whether the results hold true in human fat.

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Scientists explore deficits in processing speed in individuals with spinal cord injury

A team of rehabilitation researchers has studied processing speed deficits in individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI), comparing their brain activation patterns with those of healthy age-matched controls, and older healthy individuals. They found that the SCI group and older controls had similar activation patterns, but the SCI group differed significantly from their age-matched controls.

The article, “The neural mechanisms underlying processing speed deficits in individuals who have sustained a spinal cord injury: A pilot study” (doi: 10.1007/s10548-020-00798-x) was epublished on September 25, 2020 by Brain Topography. The authors are scientists with expertise in research in cognitive rehabilitation and SCI rehabilitation: Glenn Wylie, DPhil, Nancy D. Chiaravalloti, PhD, Erica Weber, PhD, Helen Genova, PhD, and Trevor Dyson-Hudson, MD, from Kessler Foundation, and Jill M. Wecht, EdD, from the James J. Peters VA Medical Center.

Individuals with chronic SCI have an increased risk for cognitive deficits that resemble the deficits associated with the aging process, giving rise to the theory of “accelerated cognitive aging.” As reported previously by this team, the deficits affect processing speed, new learning and memory, and verbal fluency, which are the domains affected during aging. This study is the first to examine the neural mechanisms of higher order cognitive tasks of individuals with SCI. The focus was on processing speed, which is known to be affected by SCI and aging, and is integral to cognitive function and everyday life activities.

The 30 participants were participants of a larger study who underwent optional neuroimaging studies at the Rocco Ortenzio Neuroimaging Center at Kessler Foundation — 10 individuals with cervical SCI, 10 age-matched controls, and 10 healthy older individuals. In addition to traditional neuropsychological testing methods, processing speed was tested in the scanner, using timed letter comparison tasks during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This study was the first to use the modified letter comparison test.

Significant differences in brain activation were found between the SCI group and the age-matched control group, but the SCI and older groups had similar patterns, including activation of the hippocampal, frontal and parietal areas. “This suggests that individuals with SCI are compensating for deficits in processing speed by relying on the areas of the brain involved in executive control and memory,” noted Dr. Chiaravalloti, “which supports the theory of accelerated brain aging after SCI.”

Despite the limitations of sample size and level of injury, the study is an important contribution to our understanding of the impact of SCI on cognition, according to Dr. Wylie, director of the Ortenzio Center. “Our ability to observe brain activation while the individual performs specific cognitive tasks provides new information on the mechanisms that underlie the cognitive deficits that we now know affect a substantial proportion of the SCI population,” Dr. Wylie said. “Developing treatments targeted to these deficits depends on our pursuit of this line of research, which may benefit other populations affected by delayed processing speed.”

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New Theory on ‘Venus’ Figurines

One of world’s earliest examples of art, the enigmatic ‘Venus’ figurines carved some 30,000 years ago, have intrigued and puzzled scientists for nearly two centuries. Now a researcher from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus believes he’s gathered enough evidence to solve the mystery behind these curious totems.

The hand-held depictions of obese or pregnant women, which appear in most art history books, were long seen as symbols of fertility or beauty. But according to Richard Johnson, MD, lead author of the study published today in the journal, Obesity, the key to understanding the statues lays in climate change and diet.

“Some of the earliest art in the world are these mysterious figurines of overweight women from the time of hunter gatherers in Ice Age Europe where you would not expect to see obesity at all,” said Johnson, a professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine specializing in renal disease and hypertension. “We show that these figurines correlate to times of extreme nutritional stress.”

Early modern humans entered Europe during a warming period about 48,000 years ago. Known as Aurignacians, they hunted reindeer, horses and mammoths with bone-tipped spears. In summer they dined on berries, fish, nuts and plants. But then, as now, the climate did not remain static.

Clues in body ratios

As temperatures dropped, ice sheets advanced and disaster set in. During the coldest months, temperatures plunged to minus 10-15 degrees Celsius. Some bands of hunter gatherers died out, others moved south, some sought refuge in forests. Big game was overhunted.

It was during these desperate times that the obese Venus figurines appeared. They ranged between 6 and 16 centimeters in length and were made of stone, ivory, horn or occasionally clay. Some were threaded and worn as amulets.

Johnson and his co-authors, Professor (ret.) of Anthropology John Fox, PhD, of the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, and Associate Professor of Medicine Miguel Lanaspa-Garcia, PhD, of the CU School of Medicine, measured the statues’ waist-to-hip and waist-to-shoulder ratios. They discovered that those found closest to the glaciers were the most obese compared to those located farther away. They believe the figurines represented an idealized body type for these difficult living conditions.

“We propose they conveyed ideals of body size for young women, and especially those who lived in proximity to glaciers,” said Johnson, who in addition to being a physician has an undergraduate degree in anthropology. “We found that body size proportions were highest when the glaciers were advancing, whereas obesity decreased when the climate warmed and glaciers retreated.”

Obesity as a desired condition

Obesity, according to the researchers, became a desired condition. An obese female in times of scarcity could carry a child through pregnancy better than one suffering malnutrition. So the Venus figurines may have been imbued with a spiritual meaning – a fetish or magical charm of sorts that could protect a woman through pregnancy, birth and nursing.

Many Venus figurines are well-worn, indicating that they were heirlooms passed down from mother to daughter through generations. Women entering puberty or in the early stages of pregnancy may have been given them in the hopes of imparting the desired body mass to ensure a successful birth.

“Increased fat would provide a source of energy during gestation through the weaning of the baby and as well as much needed insulation,” the authors said.

Promoting obesity, said Johnson, ensured that the band would carry on for another generation in these most precarious of climatic conditions.

“The figurines emerged as an ideological tool to help improve fertility and survival of the mother and newborns,” Johnson said. “The aesthetics of art thus had a significant function in emphasizing health and survival to accommodate increasingly austere climatic conditions.”

The team’s success in amassing evidence to support its theory came from applying measurements and medical science to archaeological data and behavioral models of anthropology.

“These kinds of interdisciplinary approaches are gaining momentum in the sciences and hold great promise,” Johnson said. “Our team has other subjects of Ice Age art and migration in its research sights as well.”

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Water May be an Effective Treatment for Metabolic Syndrome

Researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus have discovered that fructose stimulates the release of vasopressin, a hormone linked to obesity and diabetes. They also found that water can suppress the hormone and alleviate these conditions in mice.

“The clinical significance of this work is that it may encourage studies to evaluate whether simple increases in water intake may effectively mitigate obesity and metabolic syndrome,” said the study’s lead author Miguel A. Lanaspa, PhD, an associate professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine specializing in renal disease and hypertension.

The study was published today in the journal JCI Insight.

Lanaspa and his colleague, Richard Johnson, MD, also a professor at the CU School of Medicine, wanted to understand why vasopressin, which maintains the body’s water levels, was elevated in those with obesity and diabetes.

They fed mice sugar water, specifically fructose, and found that it stimulated the brain to make vasopressin. The vasopressin in turn stored the water as fat causing dehydration which triggered obesity. Treating the mice with non-sugary water reduced the obesity.

According to Lanaspa, this is the first time scientists have shown how vasopressin acts on dietary sugar to cause obesity and diabetes.

“We found that it does this by working through a particular vasopressin receptor known as V1b,” he said. “This receptor has been known for a while but no one has really understood its function. We found that mice lacking V1b were completely protected  from the effects of sugar.  We also show that the administration of water can suppress vasopressin and both prevent and treat obesity.”

The researchers also discovered that dehydration can stimulate the formation of fat.

“This explains why vasopressin is so high in desert mammals as they do not have easy access to water,” Johnson said. “So vasopressin conserves water by storing it as fat.”

This data fits with observations showing that obese people often have signs of dehydration. It also explains why high salt diets may also cause obesity and diabetes.

The researchers found that water therapy in mice effectively protected against metabolic syndrome – a collection of conditions including high blood pressure, high blood sugar and high triglyceride levels that increase the risk of heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes.

“The best way to block vasopressin is to drink water,” Lanaspa said. “This is hopeful because it means we may have a cheap, easy way of improving our lives and treating metabolic syndrome.”

Johnson summed up the findings this way.

“Sugar drives metabolic syndrome in part by the activation of vasopressin. Vasopressin drives fat production likely as a mechanism for storing metabolic water,” he said. “The potential roles of hydration and salt reduction in the treatment of obesity and metabolic syndrome should be considered.”

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A pursuit of better testing to sort out the complexities of ADHD

The introduction of computer simulation to the identification of symptoms in children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has potential to provide an additional objective tool to gauge the presence and severity of behavioral problems, Ohio State University researchers suggest in a new publication.

Most mental health disorders are diagnosed and treated based on clinical interviews and questionnaires – and, for about a century, data from cognitive tests has been added to the diagnostic process to help clinicians learn more about how and why people behave in a certain way.

Cognitive testing in ADHD is used to identify a variety of symptoms and deficits, including selective attention, poor working memory, altered time perception, difficulties in maintaining attention and impulsive behavior. In the most common class of performance tests, children are told to either press a computer key or avoid hitting a key when they see a certain word, symbol or other stimulus.

Nadja Ging-Jehli

For ADHD, however, these cognitive tests often don’t capture the complexity of symptoms. The advent of computational psychiatry – comparing a computer-simulated model of normal brain processes to dysfunctional processes observed in tests – could be an important supplement to the diagnostic process for ADHD, the Ohio State researchers report in a new review published in the journal Psychological Bulletin.

The research team reviewed 50 studies of cognitive tests for ADHD and described how three common types of computational models could supplement these tests.

It is widely recognized that children with ADHD take longer to make decisions while performing tasks than children who don’t have the disorder, and tests have relied on average response times to explain the difference. But there are intricacies to that dysfunction that a computational model could help pinpoint, providing information clinicians, parents and teachers could use to make life easier for kids with ADHD.

“We can use models to simulate the decision process and see how decision-making happens over time – and do a better job of figuring out why children with ADHD take longer to make decisions,” said Nadja Ging-Jehli, lead author of the review and a graduate student in psychology at Ohio State.

Ging-Jehli completed the review with Ohio State faculty members Roger Ratcliff, professor of psychology, and L. Eugene Arnold, professor emeritus of psychiatry and behavioral health.

The researchers offer recommendations for testing and clinical practice to achieve three principal goals: better characterizing ADHD and any accompanying mental health diagnoses such as anxiety and depression, improving treatment outcomes (about one-third of patients with ADHD do not respond to medical treatment), and potentially predicting which children will “lose” the ADHD diagnosis as adults.

Decision-making behind the wheel of a car helps illustrate the problem: Drivers know that when a red light turns green, they can go through an intersection – but not everyone hits the gas pedal at the same time. A common cognitive test of this behavior would repeatedly expose drivers to the same red light-green light scenario to arrive at an average reaction time and use that average, and deviations from it, to categorize the typical versus disordered driver.

This approach has been used to determine that individuals with ADHD are typically slower to “start driving” than those without ADHD. But that determination leaves out a range of possibilities that help explain why they’re slower – they could be distracted, daydreaming, or feeling nervous in a lab setting. The broad distribution of reactions captured by computer modeling could provide more, and useful, information.

“In our review, we show that this method has multiple problems that prevent us from understanding the underlying characteristics of a mental-health disorder such as ADHD, and that also prevent us from finding the best treatment for different individuals,” Ging-Jehli said. “We can use computational modeling to think about the factors that generate the observed behavior. These factors will broaden our understanding of a disorder, acknowledging that there are different types of individuals who have different deficits that also call for different treatments.

“We are proposing using the entire distribution of the reaction times, taking into consideration the slowest and the fastest reaction times to distinguish between different types of ADHD.”

The review also identified a complicating factor for ADHD research going forward – a broader range of externally evident symptoms as well as subtle characteristics that are hard to detect with the most common testing methods. Understanding that children with ADHD have so many biologically based differences suggests that a single task-based test is not sufficient to make a meaningful ADHD diagnosis, the researchers say.

“ADHD is not only the child who is fidgeting and restless in a chair. It’s also the child who is inattentive because of daydreaming. Even though that child is more introverted and doesn’t express as many symptoms as a child with hyperactivity, that doesn’t mean that child doesn’t suffer,” Ging-Jehli said. Daydreaming is especially common in girls, who are not enrolled in ADHD studies nearly as frequently as boys, she said.

Ging-Jehli described computational psychiatry as a tool that could also take into account – continuing the analogy – mechanical differences in the car, and how that could influence driver behavior. These dynamics can make it harder to understand ADHD, but also open the door to a broader range of treatment options.

“We need to account for the different types of drivers and we need to understand the different conditions to which we expose them. Based on only one observation, we cannot make conclusions about diagnosis and treatment options,” she said.

“However, cognitive testing and computational modeling should not be seen as an attempt to replace existing clinical interviews and questionnaire-based procedures, but as complements that add value by providing new information.”

According to the researchers, a battery of tasks gauging social and cognitive characteristics should be assigned for a diagnosis rather than just one, and more consistency is needed across studies to ensure the same cognitive tasks are used to assess the appropriate cognitive concepts.

Finally, combining cognitive testing with physiological tests – especially eye-tracking and EEGs that record electrical activity in the brain – could provide powerful objective and quantifiable data to make a diagnosis more reliable and help clinicians better predict which medicines would be most effective.

Ging-Jehli is putting these suggestions to the test in her own research, applying a computational model in a study of a specific neurological intervention in children with ADHD.

“The purpose of our analysis was to show there’s a lack of standardization and so much complexity, and symptoms are hard to measure with existing tools,” Ging-Jehli said. “We need to understand ADHD better for children and adults to have a better quality of life and get the treatment that is most appropriate.”

This research was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Aging.

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One psychedelic experience may lessen trauma of racial injustice

A single positive experience on a psychedelic drug may help reduce stress, depression and anxiety symptoms in Black, Indigenous and people of color whose encounters with racism have had lasting harm, a new study suggests.

The participants in the retrospective study reported that their trauma-related symptoms linked to racist acts were lowered in the 30 days after an experience with either psilocybin (Magic Mushrooms), LSD or MDMA (Ecstasy).

Alan Davis

“Their experience with psychedelic drugs was so powerful that they could recall and report on changes in symptoms from racial trauma that they had experienced in their lives, and they remembered it having a significant reduction in their mental health problems afterward,” said Alan Davis, co-lead author of the study and an assistant professor of social work at The Ohio State University.

Overall, the study also showed that the more intensely spiritual and insightful the psychedelic experience was, the more significant the recalled decreases in trauma-related symptoms were.

A growing body of research has suggested psychedelics have a place in therapy, especially when administered in a controlled setting. What previous mental health research has generally lacked, Davis noted, is a focus on people of color and on treatment that could specifically address the trauma of chronic exposure to racism.

Davis partnered with co-lead author Monnica Williams, Canada Research Chair in Mental Health Disparities at the University of Ottawa, to conduct the research.

“Currently, there are no empirically supported treatments specifically for racial trauma. This study shows that psychedelics can be an important avenue for healing,” Williams said.

The study is published online in the journal Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy.

The researchers recruited participants in the United States and Canada using Qualtrics survey research panels, assembling a sample of 313 people who reported they had taken a dose of a psychedelic drug in the past that they believed contributed to “relief from the challenging effects of racial discrimination.” The sample comprised adults who identified as Black, Asian, Hispanic, Native American/Indigenous Canadian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander.

Once enrolled, participants completed questionnaires collecting information on their past experiences with racial trauma, psychedelic use and mental health symptoms, and were asked to recall a memorable psychedelic experience and its short-term and enduring effects. Those experiences had occurred as recently as a few months before the study and as long ago as at least 10 years earlier.

The discrimination they had encountered included unfair treatment by neighbors, teachers and bosses, false accusations of unethical behavior and physical violence. The most commonly reported issues involved feelings of severe anger about being subjected to a racist act and wanting to “tell someone off” for racist behavior, but saying nothing instead.

Researchers asked participants to recall the severity of symptoms of anxiety, depression and stress linked to exposure to racial injustice in the 30 days before and 30 days after the experience with psychedelic drugs. Considering the probability that being subjected to racism is a lifelong problem rather than a single event, the researchers also assessed symptoms characteristic of people suffering from discrimination-related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

“Not everybody experiences every form of racial trauma, but certainly people of color are experiencing a lot of these different types of discrimination on a regular basis,” said Davis, who also is an adjunct faculty member in the Johns Hopkins University Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. “So in addition to depression and anxiety, we were asking whether participants had symptoms of race-based PTSD.”

Participants were also asked to report on the intensity of three common kinds of experiences people have while under the influence of psychedelic drugs: a mystical, insightful or challenging experience. A mystical experience can feel like a spiritual connection to the divine, an insightful experience increases people’s awareness and understanding about themselves, and a challenging experience relates to emotional and physical reactions such as anxiety or difficulty breathing.

All participants recalled their anxiety, depression and stress symptoms after the memorable psychedelic experience were lower than they had been before the drug use. The magnitude of the positive effects of the psychedelics influenced their reduction in symptoms.

“What this analysis showed is that a more intense mystical experience and insightful experience, and a less intense challenging experience, is what was related to mental health benefits,” Davis said.

The researchers noted in the paper that the study had limitations because the findings were based on participant recall and the entire sample of recruited research volunteers had reported benefits they associated with their psychedelic experience – meaning it cannot be assumed that psychedelics will help all people of color with racial trauma. Davis and Williams are working on proposals for clinical trials to further investigate the effects of psychedelics on mental health symptoms in specific populations, including Black, Indigenous and people of color.

“This was really the first step in exploring whether people of color are experiencing benefits of psychedelics and, in particular, looking at a relevant feature of their mental health, which is their experience of racial trauma,” Davis said. “This study helps to start that conversation with this emerging treatment paradigm.”

This work was funded by the University of Ottawa, the Canada Research Chairs Program and the National Institutes of Health. Additional co-authors included Yitong Xin of Ohio State’s College of Social Work; Nathan Sepeda of Johns Hopkins; Pamela Grigas and Sinead Sinnott of the University of Connecticut; and Angela Haeny of Yale School of Medicine.

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A single gene ‘invented’ haemoglobin several times

Thanks to the marine worm Platynereis dumerilii, an animal whose genes have evolved very slowly, scientists from CNRS, Université de Paris and Sorbonne Université, in association with others at the University of Saint Petersburg and the University of Rio de Janeiro, have shown that while haemoglobin appeared independently in several species, it actually descends from a single gene transmitted to all by their last common ancestor. These findings were published on 29 December 2020 in BMC Evolutionary Biology.

Having red blood is not peculiar to humans or mammals. This colour comes from haemoglobin, a complex protein specialized in transporting the oxygen found in the circulatory system of vertebrates, but also in annelids (a worm family whose most famous members are earthworms), molluscs (especially pond snails) and crustaceans (such as daphnia or ‘water fleas’). It was thought that for haemoglobin to have appeared in such diverse species, it must have been ‘invented’ several times during evolution. But recent research has shown that all of these haemoglobins born ‘independently’ actually derive from a single ancestral gene.

Researchers from the Institut Jacques Monod (CNRS/Université de Paris), the Laboratoire Matière et Systèmes Complexes (CNRS/Université de Paris), the Station Biologique de Roscoff (CNRS/Sorbonne Université), the Universities of Saint Petersburg (Russia) and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), conducted this research on Platynereis dumerilii, a small marine worm with red blood.

It is considered to be an animal that evolved slowly, because its genetic characteristics are close to those of the marine ancestor of most animals, Urbilateria(1). Studying these worms by comparing them with other species with red blood has helped in tracing back to the origins of haemoglobins.

The research focused on the broad family to which haemoglobins belong: globins, proteins present in almost all living beings that ‘store’ gases like oxygen and nitric oxide. But globins usually act inside the cells because they do not circulate in the blood like haemoglobin.

This work shows that in all species with red blood, it is the same gene that makes a globin called ‘cytoglobin’ that independently evolved to become a haemoglobin-encoding gene. This new circulating molecule made oxygen transport more efficient in their ancestors, who became larger and more active.

Scientists now want to change scale and continue this work by studying when and how the different specialized cells of bilaterian vascular systems emerged.

(1)Urbilateria is the last common ancestor of bilaterians, i.e. animals with bilateral (left-right) symmetry and complex organs, apart from species with simpler organization such as sponges and jellyfish.

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How and why privileged defendants fare better in criminal court than non-privileged ones.

Race and class make a difference in experiences and outcomes for criminal defendants in a system that emphasizes control and getting defendants to give in, according to sociologist Matthew Clair.

Achance encounter five years ago in a Chicago-area courtroom altered the course of sociologist Matthew Clair’s academic life. While a graduate student researching the criminal justice system, Clair and a colleague often observed courtroom proceedings in cities they were visiting.

While sitting in the gallery of a courtroom one day, Clair was startled to hear the prosecutor say, “Is Clair coming from lockup?” Clair wondered if his last name was more common than he had assumed. His father’s family hailed from Chicago, and Clair had had some contact with them over the years, but he was still shocked when a man who could have been his doppelgänger walked into the courtroom.

“I later found out he was a first cousin,” said Clair, assistant professor of sociology in the School of Humanities and Sciences. “Seeing him, and seeing the possibility of me in him, made me realize again the privilege I’ve had growing up middle class.”

That encounter is one of many with criminal defendants that Clair references in his recently released book, Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court (Princeton University Press, 2020). That unexpected brush with his cousin in the courtroom prompted Clair to pivot his research to examine the experience of defendants in the criminal justice system, specifically the attorney-client relationship, and the different ways that relationship manifests among privileged and disadvantaged defendants.

Privilege and agency

Clair defines non-privileged or disadvantaged people as those who live in neighborhoods with high levels of punitive police surveillance, who have routine and often racist or class-biased experiences with the legal system, limited social ties with people in power and limited access to financial resources. These are typically working-class people of color and the poor. By contrast, privileged people are those who have access to empowered social ties and financial resources and who rarely have negative encounters with police or other legal officials.

While much has been written about mass incarceration in the U.S., few scholars have explored the qualitative differences in the experiences of defendants, based on race and class, in the criminal justice system. What Clair found is that the power asymmetry in the attorney-client relationship plays out in a surprising and seemingly contradictory way for privileged versus disadvantaged defendants.

In mainstream institutions, like schools and doctor’s offices, if people have agency, learn the rules, and assert their rights, they are often rewarded with positive outcomes, prior research has shown. For instance, assertive students are more likely to get an exemption on a homework assignment and assertive patients often have more access to medical care. “Within the cultural sociology literature is the assumption that if only working class and poor people could learn those rules, they’d be treated better,” Clair said.

What Clair discovered is that in the criminal courts it’s exactly the opposite. “When non-privileged people learn the formal rules and their legal rights in the court system, they are punished,” he said. “These institutions have different unwritten norms and logics. Courts are about control and getting people to give in.”

Clair found that in a court setting, compliance often comes more easily to privileged rather than poor defendants. His research shows that privileged defendants, who are better able to hire an attorney, are also generally more trusting of their hired attorney and, therefore, more likely to cooperate and follow the attorney’s advice. Privileged defendants also tend to have had fewer negative experiences with the justice system, so they are less likely to feel the system is stacked against them. Clair also found that for privileged defendants, prior experiences with police are more often positive, including having social relationships with police or having been given a second chance by a police officer.

In contrast, disadvantaged defendants often had prior negative experiences with the police–including prior arrests, surveillance, and racism—and with the criminal justice system. According to Clair, these defendants often view their court-appointed defense attorneys with skepticism, seeing them as overworked, with heavy caseloads, and less inclined to fight hard for them. This often leads poor and working-class defendants of color to withdraw from cooperating with the attorney and instead try to advocate for themselves. They might ask for a new attorney or speak directly to the judge about their circumstances.

“For the disadvantaged, a relationship with a lawyer often results in coercion, silencing, and punishment. For the privileged, a relationship with a lawyer often results in leniency, ease of navigation, and even some rewards,” Clair writes in the book. “Therefore, race and class disparities in legal outcomes likely emerge, in part, from the taken-for-granted and hidden rules of the courts, which discriminate between defendants based on how they interact with their lawyers and present themselves in front of judges.”

Defendants seek respect

Clair draws on courtroom observations and interviews with 63 criminal defendants, representing a range of race and class backgrounds, as well as interviews with court officials, including lawyers and judges, in the Boston area.

“Defense attorneys are focused on mitigating outcomes, and privileged defendants agree with that goal,” Clair said. “One reason is that these defendants generally have respect in their lives, but disadvantaged defendants go back to a neighborhood that’s highly policed and where the police have been allowed to abuse them with impunity.”

For these defendants, achieving respect in terms of how they are treated while in the criminal justice system can be as important as the outcome of the case. So having their grievances against police misconduct heard or having their lawyer file motions on their behalf is an important part of whether they feel like justice has been achieved.

One experience shared by all the defendants that Clair surveyed was a profound sense of alienation during adolescence. “For disadvantaged people, their alienation put them into contact with the criminal justice system earlier on and the ability to have family or a broader social structure that was able to help them from going off the deep end was less available,” he said.

Clair concludes with recommendations for change within and outside of the existing system. These include allowing defendants to pick their own attorneys, encouraging judges to speak up more often to slow the process down and help defendants to feel heard, and teaching attorneys how to build better trust with clients.

He also advocates investing in social welfare programs to support disadvantaged communities and making better use of restorative justice programs, which emphasize the impact and consequences of a crime as well as finding ways for the responsible party to make reparations for the injury that was caused. As Clair concludes, “These alternatives to the existing criminal courts may be imperfect, but they encourage us to imagine how we might deal with social harms in the absence of police, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, and prison guards.”

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The science behind extinction

A collection of research and insights from Stanford experts who are deciphering the mysteries and mechanisms of extinction and survival in Earth’s deep past and painting an increasingly detailed picture of life now at the brink.

An estimated 8 million animal and plant species live on planet Earth. But extinction rates are accelerating. Gorillas, gazelles, frogs, rhinos and whales are among the species now critically endangered, and human activities present the biggest threat.

In mass extinctions, a huge portion of the planet’s species die off over thousands or even millions of years – a geological blink. Scientists have identified five of these events in fossil data going back roughly half a billion years.

Scientists who study past extinction events can find clues about not only the evolution of life on Earth, but also about the effects of extreme changes in our planet’s atmosphere, and how life finds ways to rebound. Stanford scientists and colleagues have uncovered evidence, for example, that the biggest extinction in Earth’s history was caused by global warming that left ocean animals unable to breath.

Other research, coauthored by Stanford geophysicist Sonia Tikoo-Schantz, suggests the crater from the giant asteroid impact linked to the dinosaur extinction some 66 million years ago may have provided niches for life.

“The fossil record is our only archive of past extinction events,” Stanford paleobiologist Jonathan Payne has said. It allows researchers to examine directly which biological traits tend to lead to higher extinction risk under different circumstances, whether in the wake of an asteroid impact or volcanic eruption, or amid global warming.

Many scientists say a sixth mass extinction is now under way. In 2019, following a review of thousands of scientific and government sources, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services reported that approximately 1 million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction. According to the report, more than 40 percent of amphibian species, nearly 33 percent of sharks, shark relatives and reef-forming corals, and upwards of 33 percent of all marine mammals are threatened.

Even parasites are under threat. Up to one-third of the world’s parasite species could go extinct within a few decades – potentially opening new niches for other, invasive parasites to exploit. And losses can snowball. As Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich and colleagues wrote in a recent study suggesting the extinction rate is likely much higher than previously thought, “Extinction breeds extinction.”

When species vanish, benefits to humanity can be lost, too – from economic opportunities related to ecotourism to keeping in check populations of species that can spread infectious disease. The UN report estimated that as much as $577 billion in annual global crops are now at risk from loss of pollinators. The consequences do not fall equally across society. The areas projected to see some of the worst negative effects from biodiversity loss and related changes to ecosystem functions are also home to many of the globe’s poorest communities as well as large concentrations of Indigenous peoples.

This collection covers how scientists are deciphering the mysteries and mechanisms of extinction and survival in Earth’s deep past and painting an increasingly detailed picture of life now at the brink.

Scroll down for extinction research news and insights spanning the future of our own species; the disappearance of our hominid relatives and why the Neanderthals’ fate could have been ours; expanding knowledge of past extinctions; the root causes and ripple effects of the Earth’s ongoing biodiversity crisis; and connections between extinctions and pandemics.

from ScienceBlog.com https://ift.tt/2L7V0uj