Baby Mantis Shrimp Don’t Pull Their Punches

Mantis shrimp don’t need baby food. They start their life as ferocious predators who know how to throw a lethal punch.

A new study appearing April 29 in the Journal of Experimental Biology shows that larvae of the Philippine mantis shrimp (Gonodactylaceus falcatus) already display the ultra-fast movements for which these animals are known, even when they are smaller than a short grain of rice.

Their ultra-fast punching appendages measure less than 1 mm, and develop right when the larva exhausts its yolk reserves, moves away from its nest and out into the big wide sea. It immediately begins preying on organisms smaller than a grain of sand.

Although they accelerate their arms almost 100 times faster than a Formula One car, Philippine mantis shrimp larvae are slower than larger adults, which goes against the theoretical expectation that smaller is always faster.

“They’re producing amazing speeds and impressive accelerations relative to their body size, but they’re not as fast as adults,” said Jacob Harrison, a PhD candidate in biology at Duke University and lead author of the study.

Mantis shrimps achieve their ultra-fast movements through a tiny spring-actuated mechanism hidden in their punching appendage. A muscle contracts, deforming a tiny segment of their exoskeleton –the rigid cuticle that covers their body. This contraction allows elastic energy to be stored in the locked joint. Once the latch releases, the exoskeleton springs back into its natural position, violently propelling the appendage forward with ultra-fast speeds.

Engineering and physics models predict that smaller organisms, who have a smaller mass to displace, will be faster than larger, heavier, organisms. Mantis shrimp larvae show that biology doesn’t always follow the theory.

“Theoretically, they should be producing the highest acceleration,” said Harrison, “but we don’t find that.”

Harrison explains that this discrepancy may be due to multiple factors. The larvae muscles may be too small to effectively load a very stiff spring, or the water resistance at their small size may be too high for their punches to reach the speed that larger individuals reach, among other possibilities.

“There are limitations to these spring and latch structures that we don’t fully understand,” said Harrison. “But whenever biology moves away from theoretical models it highlights some pretty interesting areas for us to learn.”

Mantis shrimp larvae are an interesting system not only due to their small size, but also due to their color, or lack thereof.

Adult mantis shrimps have opaque exoskeletons, rendering the inner working of their spring-latch mechanisms impossible to observe in action. The exoskeleton of larvae, however, is much thinner and fully transparent, allowing researchers to see precisely how these animals manage to store so much elastic energy in their tiny appendages simply by watching them through a microscope.

“One of the trickiest parts of researching spring-actuated mechanisms is that a lot of those elements are working inside the animal. We can look outside of the animal and see the behavior, measure the kinematics, dissect the animal, and say the mechanism looks like it works like this, but there are always levels of assumption,” said Harrison.

“(Transparency) sets up larval mantis shrimps as systems where we can look at how each of these elements work in concert together,” said Harrison. “It removes assumptions and allows us to understand it on a finer scale.”

Larval mantis shrimps are therefore doubly interesting. They highlight discrepancies between physics and biology, and also offer a true window into a better understanding of the mechanism behind ultra-fast movements.

“When something doesn’t match your predictions, the first gut reaction is always to be incredibly frustrated, but this is actually what highlights new areas of research,” said Harrison.

This work was supported by the Company of Biologists Traveling Fellowship (JEBTF181185), by the National Science Foundation (NSF IOS 1439850 and NSF EPSCoR RII 455 1738567), by the Office of Naval Research (N00014-19-1-2035 and N00014-454 17-1-2062), and by the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. This material is based upon work supported by, or in part by, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the U.S. Army Research Office under contract/grant number W911NF-15-1-058.

CITATION: “Scaling and development of elastic mechanisms: the tiny strikes of larval mantis shrimp,” J. S. Harrison, M. L. Porter, M. J. McHenry, H. E. Robinson, S. N. Patek. Journal of Experimental Biology, April 29, 2021. DOI: 10.1242/jeb.235465

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Spongy Trails

Sluggishly you sweep
across the sea,
ceaselessly stimulating
your supposed sessility
as you secrete spiky streams
through dense, porous skeletons.

Interwoven spicules that
suggest clandestine movements,
swaying in the currents
deep
deep
beneath the surface.

A hidden sanctuary of shifting
shapes that stray from sight;
strategies of survival
below submerged peaks
and shattered sentiments.

Trails left by sponges as they crawl across the seafloor (Image Credit: AWI OFOBS team, PS101).

This poem is inspired by research, which has found that sponges leave trails on the sea floor in the Arctic deep sea.

A sponge is a simple animal with many cells, but no mouth, muscles, heart, or brain. The basic body plan of a sponge is a jelly-like layer sandwiched between two thin layers of cells, and there are over 10,000 species of sponge, most of which live in the ocean and feed on bacteria and other microorganisms, although a few of them also eat tiny crustaceans. Adult marine sponges are usually thought to be stationary, picking a spot on the seafloor while still in their larval stage and sticking to it. Lacking muscles to move around, they are generally referred to as ‘sessile’ (i.e. fixed in one place), as opposed to ‘motile’ (i.e. capable of motion) marine creatures. However, new research has found distinct trails across the Arctic seafloor, made of brown spicules (the spikes that belong to the sponges and which provide them with structural support), indicating that some adult sponges are actually capable of movement.

The researchers in this study examined videos taken by the icebreaker Polarstern on a 2016 mission around the Langseth Ridge in the Arctic Ocean. These videos revealed a densely populated community of sponges, 10° further North than any previously reported observations. Over 70% of the images containing sponges also featured trails, observed as densely interwoven spicules connected directly to the underside of individual sponges, thereby suggesting that they were indeed traces of motility. Three-dimensional modelling of the trails also revealed that the sponges changed direction as they moved, and that they moved uphill, implying that the sponges were moving themselves, rather than being shifted by gravity or strong ocean currents. This is the first time that abundant sponge trails have been both observed in a sponge’s natural habitat and directly attributed to sponge mobility. Further research is now needed to better understand exactly why these sponges would move, although it is believed that they may need to do so in order to better access food in the sparse Arctic environment.

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How to get salt out of water: Make it self-eject

About a quarter of a percent of the entire gross domestic product of industrialized countries is estimated to be lost through a single technical issue: the fouling of heat exchanger surfaces by salts and other dissolved minerals. This fouling lowers the efficiency of multiple industrial processes and often requires expensive countermeasures such as water pretreatment. Now, findings from MIT could lead to a new way of reducing such fouling, and potentially even enable turning that deleterious process into a productive one that can yield saleable products.

The findings are the result of years of work by recent MIT graduates Samantha McBride PhD ’20 and Henri-Louis Girard PhD ’20 with professor of mechanical engineering Kripa Varanasi. The work, reported today in the journal Science Advances, shows that due to a combination of hydrophobic (water repelling) surfaces and heat, dissolved salts can crystallize in a way that makes it easy to remove them from the surface, in some cases by gravity alone.

Play video

When the researchers began studying the way salts crystallize on such surfaces, they found that the precipitating salt would initially form a partial spherical shell around a droplet. Unexpectedly, this shell would then suddenly rise on a set of spindly leg-like extensions grown during evaporation. The process repeatedly produced  multilegged shapes, resembling elephants and other animals, and even sci-fi droids. The researchers dubbed these formations “crystal critters” in the title of their paper.

After many experiments and detailed analysis, the team determined the mechanism that was producing these leg-like protrusions. They also showed how the protrusions varied depending on temperature and the nature of the hydrophobic surface, which was produced by creating a nanoscale pattern of low ridges. They found that the narrow legs holding up these critter-like forms continue to grow upward from the bottom, as the salty water flows downward through the straw-like legs and precipitates out at the bottom, somewhat like a growing icicle, only balanced on its tip. Eventually the legs become so long they are unable to support the critter’s weight, and the blob of salt crystal breaks off and falls or is swept away.

The work was motivated by the desire to limit or prevent the formation of scaling on surfaces, including inside pipes where such scaling can lead to blockages, Varanasi says. “Samantha’s experiment showed this interesting effect where the scale pretty much just pops off by itself,” he says.

“These legs are hollow tubes, and the liquid is funneled down through these tubes. Once it hits the bottom and evaporates, it forms new crystals that continuously increase the length of the tube,” McBride says. “In the end, you have very, very limited contact between the substrate and the crystal, to the point where these are going to just roll away on their own.”

McBride recalls that in doing the initial experiments as part of her doctoral thesis work, “we definitely suspected that this particular surface would work well for eliminating sodium chloride adhesion, but we didn’t know that a consequence of preventing that adhesion would be the ejection of the entire thing” from the surface.

One key, she found, was the exact scale of the patterns on the surface. While many different length scales of patterning can yield hydrophobic surfaces, only patterns at the nanometer scale achieve this self-ejecting effect. “When you evaporate a drop of salt water on a superhydrophobic surface, usually what happens is those crystals start getting inside of the texture and just form a globe, and they don’t end up lifting off,” McBride says. “So it’s something very specific about the texture and the length scale that we’re looking at here that allows this effect to occur.”

This self-ejecting process, based simply on evaporation from a surface whose texture can be easily produced by etching, abrasion, or coating, could be a boon for a wide variety of processes. All kinds of metal structures in a marine environment or exposed to seawater suffer from scaling and corrosion. The findings may also enable new methods for investigating the mechanisms of scaling and corrosion, the researchers say.

By varying the amount of heat along the surface, it’s even possible to get the crystal formations to roll along in a specific direction, the researchers found. The higher the temperature, the faster the growth and liftoff of these forms takes place, minimizing the amount of time the crystals block the surface.

Heat exchangers are used in a wide variety of different processes, and their efficiency is strongly affected by any surface fouling. Those losses alone, Varanasi says, equal a quarter of a percent of the GDP of the U.S. and other industrialized nations. But fouling is also a major factor in many other areas. It affects pipes in water distribution systems, geothermal wells, agricultural settings, desalination plants, and a variety of renewable energy systems and carbon dioxide conversion methods.

This method, Varanasi says, might even enable the use of untreated salty water in some processes where that would not be practical otherwise, such as in some industrial cooling systems. Further, in some situations the recovered salts and other minerals could be salable products.

While the initial experiments were done with ordinary sodium chloride, other kinds of salts or minerals are expected to produce similar effects, and the researchers are continuing to explore the extension of this process to other kinds of solutions.

Because the methods for making the textures to produce a hydrophobic surface are already well-developed, Varanasi says, implementing this process at large industrial scale should be relatively rapid, and could enable the use of salty or brackish water for cooling systems that would otherwise require the use of valuable and often limited fresh water. For example, in the U.S. alone, a trillion gallons of fresh water are used per year for cooling. A typical 600-megawatt power plant consumes about a billion gallons of water per year, which could be enough to serve 100,000 people. That means that using sea water for cooling where possible could help to alleviate a fresh-water scarcity problem.

“This work shows a remarkable and interesting phenomenon,” says Neelesh Patankar, a professor of mechanical engineering at Northwestern University, who was not associated with this research. The findings, he says, “may lead to an entirely new approach to mitigate mineral fouling in industrial processes. Not only is this work interesting from a fundamental science perspective, in my opinion it is also of practical importance.”

The work was supported by Equinor through MIT Energy Initiative, the MIT Martin Fellowship Program, and the National Science Foundation.

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Nearly $500 million a year in Medicare costs goes to 7 services with no net health benefits

A UCLA-led study shows that physicians frequently order preventive medical services for adult Medicare beneficiaries that are considered unnecessary and of “low value” by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force — at a cost of $478 million per year.

The researchers analyzed national survey data over a 10-year period, looking specifically at seven preventive services given a “D” rating by the task force, and discovered that these services were ordered more than 31 million times annually.

BACKGROUND

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel appointed by the Department of Health and Human Services, makes recommendations on the value of clinical preventive services. Services rated D are considered to have no likely health benefit to specific patients and may even be harmful to them. Overall, the utilization of a variety of services considered unnecessary by the task force drives up health care spending by billions of dollars each year.

METHOD

The researchers examined data covering the years 2007 to 2016 from the annual National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey to determine how often, and at what cost, seven specific grade D services were utilized:

• Asymptomatic bacteriuria screening in non-pregnant women
• Cardiovascular disease screening in low-risk adults (rest or stress ECG)
• Cervical cancer screening in women over age 65 (Papanicolaou or HPV test)
• Colorectal cancer screening in those over age 85 (colonoscopy or sigmoidoscopy)
•  Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease screening in asymptomatic patients (peak flow or spirometry)
• Prostate cancer screening in men 75 and older (prostate-specific antigen test)
• Vitamin D supplementation for fracture preventing in postmenopausal women

The researchers note some limitations to the study. For instance, their method of estimating Medicare spending on these services may lack clinical details and therefore might misclassify some instances of appropriate care as low value.

IMPACT

Medicare could save nearly $500 million per year and protect patients against potential harm by no longer providing reimbursements for these services. Under the Affordable Care Act, the secretary of health and human services is authorized to prohibit payment for services rated D by the Preventive Services Task Force. In February 2021, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s Federal Employees Health Benefits Program stopped covering (PDF) grade D services.

AUTHORS

Dr. Carlos Irwin Oronce, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Dr. Catherine Sarkisian and Dr. John Mafi, all of UCLA, and Dr. A. Mark Fendrick of the University of Michigan. Dr. Mafi is also a researcher with Rand Corp.

JOURNAL

The study is published in the peer-reviewed Journal of General Internal Medicine.

FUNDING

The study was funded by the Veterans Affairs Office of Academic Affiliations (through the VA/National Clinician Scholars Program); the National Institute on Drug Abuse; the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities; the National Institute on Aging, the UCLA Resource Center for Minority Aging Research/Center for Health Improvement of Minority Elders; the National Center for Advancing Translational Science; the UCLA Clinical and Translational Science Institute; the UCLA Vatche and Tamar Manoukian Division of Digestive Diseases; and the National Institute on Aging’s  Beeson Emerging Leaders career development award funded this study.

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‘The line is getting fuzzier’: asteroids and comets may be more similar than we think

As anyone who has ever tried to clean a home knows, ridding yourself of dust is a Sisyphean effort. No surface stays free of it for long. It turns out that space is somewhat similar. Space is filled with interplanetary dust, which the Earth constantly collects as it plods around the sun – in orbit, in the atmosphere, and if it’s large enough, on the ground as micrometeorites.

While specimens may not be large, it turns out such dust particles are reforming scientists’ conception of asteroids and comets and are enough to reconstruct entire scenes in the history of the solar system.

Asteroids and comets are primitive bodies left over from early in solar system formation, so the more we can know about their composition, the more we know about where they formed. Those asteroids that formed in the same neighbourhood as comets tend to be closer in composition to them.

Trying to break down the asteroid-comet continuum and categorise how similar asteroids could be to comets is what Dr Pierre Beck is doing in the SOLARYS project at France’s University of Grenoble Alpes.

There are about a million asteroids registered officially and there should be many more, he explains.

‘Traditionally, these objects have been thought of as the most primitive in the solar system. You can look at the ingredients and see what was there, how they were accreted and how they were formed a long time ago.’

Similar primordial material that formed Earth or Mars has experienced geological activity and been fundamentally changed by conditions like heat, pressure and erosion.

‘The most primitive objects therefore don’t come to Earth in the form of rocks, but in the form of dust,’ he said. ‘While the expected (amount) of meteorites that come to Earth in a year may be 5-6 tonnes – for dust it is 40,000 tonnes.’

Using samples of interplanetary dust collected from high in our stratosphere and micrometeorites from pristine locations like Antarctica, Dr Beck is using a new method of infrared spectroscopy combined with atomic force microscopes to examine their spectra and properties on the micrometre-scale.

Like an archaeologist placing artefacts from a dig site, he can then compare those results to existing data from asteroids in space. ‘When you’re a geologist and you find a rock, you have an outcropping and try see the rock in its context,’ Dr Beck said.

‘In the past we thought asteroids are rocks, comets are icy. But now we see that there are comets that are almost inactive…and there are asteroids that are active.’

Dr Jessica Agarwal, Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany

Compounds

Using changes in infrared laser light on samples that are just 10-20 micrometres, his team can for the first time pick out silicate minerals and organic compounds without using harsh chemicals that would disturb the material. They also construct bigger models of the samples in the lab to refine what to look for to identify and categorise asteroids and comets with ground-based telescopes.

What they have found in the dust are complex organic polymers, rich in hydrocarbons and elements like nitrogen and oxygen or sometimes deuterium (heavy water).

‘There is a big debate on how these extra-terrestrial organics were formed. One hypothesis is that ice mixtures were irradiated, but in that case different types of ice mixtures should yield different types of organics,’ said Dr Beck.

Studying the chemical composition of these samples should help him to learn more about asteroids’ origins as well as the difference between D-type asteroids, dark and difficult to detect bodies, some with icy interiors, which originate around Jupiter and beyond, and icy comets.

‘If we understand that, it will tell us what the outer solar system is made of and more about the initial stuff that came into the solar system.’

Knowing where certain organic dust types can be found could even help future space probes.

‘You could view some of these asteroids as a fuel source,’ he said. If there are reduced organic compounds, he says, they could be used as a source of energy.

Comets

The presence of such compounds in interplanetary dust is just one thing making scientists wonder if asteroids and comets aren’t necessarily so different after all. Dr Jessica Agarwal at the CASTRA project thinks there may be overlap for other reasons, too.

Using data from the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe that studied Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko and from astronomical telescopes, Dr Agarwal and her team at the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany looked at how comets and asteroids actively emit material into space.

‘We aim to better understand the processes that lead to changes in the surfaces and interiors of comets and asteroids,’ she said. ‘We also hope to better understand their primitive nature, or how they were 4.5 billion years ago.’

Using data from several instruments onboard Rosetta, Dr Agarwal’s team has been able to model the properties of cometary dust in the environment of Comet 67P. They found that the dust particles could be loose aggregates of micron-sized silicate and sub-micron-sized carbonaceous components.

‘We are also observing huge boulder-size materials coming out from Comet 67P, coming from certain specific places on the surface…a fountain of boulders,’ Dr Agarwal explained.

Active asteroid

Comets are not the only bodies to emit material. Take the case of asteroid 288P. A so-called active asteroid that emits dust, from a distance it looks like a comet with a dusty tail.

‘The weird thing about 288P was that its nucleus looked double…and in the end, I thought, well maybe it’s a binary?’ Dr Agarwal said. ‘We had to wait a couple of years to reobserve it from close up, and then in 2016 we got more Hubble time and really saw that it was two components.’

Their measurements determined that this first-of-its-kind asteroid to be observed is comprised of two similarly-sized pieces, orbiting each other 100 kilometres apart.

‘We found it by chance. We don’t know if there are more systems like it that we don’t see,’ Dr Agarwal said.

They theorise that the asteroids were irradiated by the sun and begin to rotate, splitting in two when they spun too fast to hold together. The distance between the pair may be due to a jet of gas vaporising from the surface that propelled one rock away like a rocket. They are still trying to figure out what causes the tail.

Scientists have long thought that asteroids mainly evolved through collisions, but it’s possible that for smaller asteroids, fast rotation plays just as much of a role.

Their research has revealed a range of active asteroids, from those which have a one-off burst of activity (as if from an impact), to those that emit bursts of dust repeatedly.

‘There is some process happening more or less randomly that triggers the eruption of dust clouds,’ Dr Agarwal said, referring to asteroids which emit the repeated dust bursts. ‘We think maybe it is fast rotation that triggers landslides or something like that.’

The upshot of all of this is that the distinction between comets and asteroids may be more of a spectrum than a hard divide.

‘The line is getting fuzzier. In the past we thought asteroids are rocks, comets are icy. But now we see that there are comets that are almost inactive…and there are asteroids that are active. There is more of a transition between those two populations than we thought in the past,’ Dr Agarwal said.

The research in this article was funded by the EU’s European Research Council. 

Originally published on Horizon Magazine

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Processed Diets Might Promote Chronic Infections Causing Diabetes

Processed diets, which are low in fiber, may initially reduce the incidence of foodborne infectious diseases such as E. coli infections, but might also increase the incidence of diseases characterized by low-grade chronic infection and inflammation such as diabetes, according to researchers in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University.

This study used mice to investigate how changing from a grain-based diet to a highly processed, high-fat Western style diet impacts infection with the pathogen Citrobacter rodentium, which resembles Escherichia coli (E. coli) infections in humans. The findings are published in the journal PLOS Pathogens.

Gut microbiota, the microorganisms living in the intestine, provide a number of benefits, such as protecting a host from infection by bacterial pathogens. These microorganisms are influenced by a variety of environmental factors, especially diet, and rely heavily on complex carbohydrates such as fiber.

The Western-style diet, which contains high amounts of processed foods, red meat, high-fat dairy products, high-sugar foods and pre-packaged foods, lacks fiber, which is needed to support gut microbiota. Changes in dietary habits, especially a lack of fiber, are believed to have contributed to increased prevalence of chronic inflammatory diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease, metabolic syndrome and cancer.

In this study, the researchers found switching mice from a standard grain-based rodent chow to a high-fat, low-fiber Western-style diet resulted in a rapid reduction in the number of gut bacteria. Mice fed the Western-style diet were frequently unable to clear the pathogen Citrobacter rodentium from the colon. They were also prone to developing chronic infection when re-challenged by this pathogen.

The researchers conclude the Western-style diet reduces the numbers of gut bacteria and promotes encroachment of microbiota into the intestine, potentially influencing immune system readiness and the body’s defense against pathogenic bacteria.

“We observed that feeding mice a Western-style diet, rather than standard rodent grain-based chow, altered the dynamics of Citrobacter infection, reducing initial colonization and inflammation, which was surprising. However, mice consuming the Western-style diet frequently developed persistent infection that was associated with low-grade inflammation and insulin resistance,” said Dr. Andrew Gewirtz, senior co-author of the study and professor in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences. “These studies demonstrate potential of altering microbiota and their metabolites by diet to impact the course and consequence of infection following exposure to a gut pathogen.”

“We speculate that reshaping gut microbiota by nutrients that promote beneficial bacteria that out-compete pathogens may be a means of broadly promoting health,” said Dr. Jun Zou, senior co-author of the study and assistant professor in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State.

Additional co-authors of the study include Junqing An, Xu Zhao, Yanling Wang and Juan Noriega.

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the American Diabetes Association.

To read the study, visit https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1009497.

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New space research to survey chimpanzee habitats

New space research at the University of Leicester is set to use remote sensing techniques to survey the habitats of endangered chimpanzees in the Republic of the Congo.

Leicester researchers have signed a memorandum of understanding with the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) and secured Research England funding to explore how remote sensing data, combined with machine learning approaches, can help to map, characterise and develop further understanding about the habitats of chimpanzees in the Tchimpounga Nature Reserve.

The collaboration seeks to advance a number of projects that will provide critical scientific insights about the forest and woodlands of Tchimpounga, in the Congo Basin, which is the home of the Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Center managed by JGI in collaboration with the Republic of Congo’s Ministry of Waters and Forests.

Chimpanzees are listed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List as an endangered species. The Jane Goodall Institute has, for more than 40 years, worked to advance scientific and public understanding of chimpanzees, as well as their conservation through community-driven approaches. JGI’s work in Tchimpounga represents a major part of their footprint in all of these areas.

Terrestrial laser scan of a typical forest, of the kind to be used in the Tchimpounga Nature Reserve.

Professor Kevin Tansey, of the School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, will work closely with colleagues at Space Park Leicester – the first phase of which is now complete – in supporting the research and knowledge exchange programme. He said: “It is a huge honour and privilege to have the opportunity to work with the Jane Goodall Institute.

“The timing allows us to develop the project scope within the context of moving into Space Park Leicester where we can talk with our industry partners who are experts at data collection from drones and aircraft.

“The funding also allows us to recruit a number of our Masters and undergraduate students to short term internships so they can gain important project planning and data analysis skills.”

Lilian Pintea, Vice-President of Conservation Science at the Jane Goodall Institute USA said: “JGI’s vision for the application of science and technology is to explore, innovate, and discover new solutions, technologies, and tools to accelerate the pace and scale of our conservation impact.

“We have been creating research-implementation spaces where scientists, companies, students, communities, policymakers and others could have a dialogue, collaborate, and convert innovative technologies and data into better conservation decisions.”

The projects will focus on the use of laser scanner data, sometimes referred to as LiDAR. Professor Tansey explained: “A laser scanner collects millions of points or hits from objects, natural or constructed, in our environment. Whether placed on a drone or an aircraft for the top down view, or mounted on a tripod or strapped to your back for the ground view, the eye-safe laser scanner points are stored forever. They are then rendered in 3D and classified.

“We will develop clever algorithms to look for structural features that are associated with their nests and, who knows, we may be able to spot the chimpanzee’s themselves. Integration of these data sets with high resolution optical data with short return interval, such as those from Maxar or PLANET can help us develop forest monitoring systems in the future.”

The funding that comes from the University of Leicester’s QR Global Challenges Research Fund (Research England), will support project planning, the collection and analysis of data from a pilot UK site and the delivery of online courses and workshops on laser scanning with JGI and their local partners.

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Using exoplanets as dark matter detectors

In the continuing search for dark matter in our universe, scientists believe they have found a unique and powerful detector: exoplanets.

In a new paper, two astrophysicists suggest dark matter could be detected by measuring the effect it has on the temperature of exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system.

This could provide new insights into dark matter, the mysterious substance that can’t be directly observed, but which makes up roughly 80% of the mass of the universe.

“We believe there should be about 300 billion exoplanets that are waiting to be discovered,” said Juri Smirnov, a fellow at The Ohio State University’s Center for Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

“Even finding and studying a small number of them could give us a great deal of information about dark matter that we don’t know now.”

Smirnov co-authored the paper with Rebecca Leane, a postdoctoral researcher at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University. It was published today (April 22, 2021) in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Smirnov said that when the gravity of exoplanets captures dark matter, the dark matter travels to the planetary core where it “annihilates” and releases its energy as heat. The more dark matter that is captured, the more it should heat up the exoplanet.

This heating could be measured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, an infrared telescope scheduled to launch in October that will be able to measure the temperature of distant exoplanets.

“If exoplanets have this anomalous heating associated with dark matter, we should be able to pick it up,” Smirnov said.

Exoplanets may be particularly useful in detecting light dark matter, Smirnov said, which is dark matter with a lower mass. Researchers have not yet probed light dark matter by direct detection or other experiments.

Scientists believe that dark matter density increases toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy. If that is true, researchers should find that the closer planets are to the galactic center, the more their temperatures should rise.

“If we would find something like that, it would be amazing. Clearly, we would have found dark matter,” Smirnov said.

Smirnov and Leane propose one type of search that would involve looking close to Earth at gas giants – so called “Super Jupiters” – and brown dwarfs for evidence of heating caused by dark matter. One advantage of using planets like this as dark matter detectors is that they don’t have nuclear fusion, like stars do, so there is less “background heat” that would make it hard to find a dark matter signal.

In addition to this local search, the researchers suggest a search for distant rogue exoplanets that are no longer orbiting a star. The lack of radiation from a star would again cut down on interference that could obscure a signal from dark matter.

One of the best parts of using exoplanets as dark matter detectors is that it doesn’t require any new types of instrumentation such as telescopes, or searches that aren’t already being done, Smirnov said.

As of now, researchers have identified more than 4,300 confirmed exoplanets and an additional 5,695 candidates are currently under investigation. Gaia, a space observatory of the European Space Agency, is expected to identify tens of thousands more potential candidates in the next few years.

“With so many exoplanets being studied, we will have a tremendous opportunity to learn more than ever before about dark matter,” Smirnov said.

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Using nanobodies to block a tick-borne bacterial infection

Tiny molecules called nanobodies, which can be designed to mimic antibody structures and functions, may be the key to blocking a tick-borne bacterial infection that remains out of reach of almost all antibiotics, new research suggests.

The infection is called human monocytic ehrlichiosis, and is one of the most prevalent and potentially life-threatening tick-borne diseases in the United States. The disease initially causes flu-like symptoms common to many illnesses, and in rare cases can be fatal if left untreated.

Most antibiotics can’t build up in high enough concentrations to kill the infection-causing bacteria, Ehrlichia chaffeensis, because the microbes live in and multiply inside human immune cells. Commonly known bacterial pathogens like Streptococcus and E. coli do their infectious damage outside of hosts’ cells.

Ohio State University researchers created nanobodies intended to target a protein that makes E. chaffeensis bacteria particularly infectious. A series of experiments in cell cultures and mice showed that one specific nanobody they created in the lab could inhibit infection by blocking three ways the protein enables the bacteria to hijack immune cells.

“If multiple mechanisms are blocked, that’s better than just stopping one function, and it gives us more confidence that these nanobodies will really work,” said study lead author Yasuko Rikihisa, professor of veterinary biosciences at Ohio State.

The study provided support for the feasibility of nanobody-based ehrlichiosis treatment, but much more research is needed before a treatment would be available for humans. There is a certain urgency to coming up with an alternative to the antibiotic doxycycline, the only treatment available. The broad-spectrum antibiotic is unsafe for pregnant women and children, and it can cause severe side effects.

“With only a single antibiotic available as a treatment for this infection, if antibiotic resistance were to develop in these bacteria, there is no treatment left. It’s very scary,” Rikihisa said.

The research is published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The bacteria that cause ehrlichiosis are part of a family called obligatory intracellular bacteria. E. chaffeensis not only requires internal access to a cell to live, but also blocks host cells’ ability to program their own death with a function called apoptosis – which would kill the bacteria.

“Infected cells normally would commit suicide by apoptosis to kill the bacteria inside. But these bacteria block apoptosis and keep the cell alive so they can multiply hundreds of times very rapidly and then kill the host cell,” Rikihisa said.

A longtime specialist in the Rickettsiales family of bacteria to which E. chaffeensis belongs, Rikihisa developed the precise culture conditions that enabled growing these bacteria in the lab in the 1980s, which led to her dozens of discoveries explaining how they work. Among those findings was identification of proteins that help E. chaffeensis block immune cells’ programmed cell death.

The researchers synthesized one of those proteins, called Etf-1, to make a vaccine-style agent that they used to immunize a llama with the help of Jeffrey Lakritz, professor of veterinary preventive medicine at Ohio State. Camels, llamas and alpacas are known to produce single-chain antibodies that include a large antigen binding site on the tip.

The team snipped apart segments of that binding site to create a library of nanobodies with potential to function as antibodies that recognize and attach to the Etf-1 protein and stop E. chaffeensis infection.

“They function similarly to our own antibodies, but they’re tiny, tiny nano-antibodies,” Rikihisa said. “Because they are small, they get into nooks and crannies and recognize antigens much more effectively.

“Big antibodies cannot fit inside a cell. And we don’t need to rely on nanobodies to block extracellular bacteria because they are outside and accessible to ordinary antibodies binding to them.”

After screening the candidates for their effectiveness, the researchers landed on a single nanobody that attached to Etf-1 in cell cultures and inhibited three of its functions. By making the nanobodies in the fluid inside E. coli cells, Rikihisa said her lab could produce them at an industrial scale if needed – packing millions of them into a small drop.

She collaborated with co-author Dehua Pei, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Ohio State, to combine the tiny molecules with a cell-penetrating peptide that enabled the nanobodies to be safely delivered to mouse cells.

Mice with compromised immune systems were inoculated with a highly virulent strain of E. chaffeensis and given intracellular nanobody treatments one and two days after infection. Compared to mice that received control treatments, mice that received the most effective nanobody showed significantly lower levels of bacteria two weeks after infection.

With this study providing the proof of principle that nanobodies can inhibit E. chaffeensis infection by targeting a single protein, Rikihisa said there are multiple additional targets that could provide even more protection with nanobodies delivered alone or in combination. She also said the concept is broadly applicable to other intracellular diseases.

“Cancers and neurodegenerative diseases work in our cells, so if we want to block an abnormal process or abnormal molecule, this approach may work,” she said.

This study was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Additional co-authors, all from Ohio State, include Wenqing Zhang, Mingqun Lin, Qi Yan, Khemraj Budachetri, Libo Hou, Ashweta Sahni, Hongyan Liu and Nien-Ching Han.

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A new treatment that might keep COVID-19 patients off the ventilator

A new treatment is among the first known to reduce the severity of acute respiratory distress syndrome caused by the flu in animals, according to a new study.

Tests in mice infected with high doses of influenza showed that the treatment could improve lung function in very sick mice and prevent progression of disease in mice that were pre-emptively treated after being exposed to the flu.

The hope is that it may also help humans infected with the flu, and potentially other causes of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) such as SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Specific cells in mice are less able to make key molecules after influenza invades the lungs, reducing their ability to produce a substance called surfactant that enables lungs to expand and contract. The shortage of surfactant is linked to ARDS, an illness so serious that it typically requires mechanical ventilation in an ICU.

Researchers bypassed the blocked process in mice by re-introducing the missing molecules alone or in combination as an injected or oral treatment. The results: normalized blood oxygen levels and reduced inflammation in mouse lungs – effects that could make a person well enough for hospital discharge.

“The most important and impressive thing in this study is the fact that we have benefits even when we treat late in the disease process. If we could develop a drug based on these findings, you could take somebody who’s going to have to go on a ventilator and stop that completely,” said Ian Davis, professor of veterinary biosciences at The Ohio State University and senior author of the study. “There’s nothing out there now that can do this for ARDS that will bring them back to that degree, and certainly not for flu.”

ARDS can also result from infections, cancer, trauma and many other ailments. Though this therapy has been tested in the context of the flu, Davis said its reliance on fixing a broken cell function in the host rather than killing the virus suggests it has potential to treat virtually any lung injury.

The study was published online recently in the American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology.

The experimental treatment consists of molecules known as liponucleotides, which are essential for making surfactant in the lungs. Davis analyzed lung cells from flu-infected mice and determined that the pathway to surfactant production was disrupted, with one of the two necessary liponucleotides completely undetectable.

“The thinking before was that the reason there was less surfactant in mice with flu-related ARDS was because cells are dying. This defect is in some ways better – if cells are dying, there’s not much you can do, but if there’s a problem with the cell’s metabolism, maybe you can fix it,” Davis said.

And fix it – in mice – he did, developing therapies containing the missing liponucleotide molecule alone or combined with one or two others.

Davis and colleagues inoculated mice with high doses of H1N1 influenza and then treated some mice with liponucleotides once daily for five days and others just a single time five days after exposure. The mice receiving daily treatment were protected from getting seriously ill, and the very sick mice treated on the fifth day, whose severe blood-oxygen loss and lung inflammation had cause ARDS, showed significant improvement.

“Obviously that’s what you need in someone with severe influenza – we want to take someone who is already in the ICU and help them get out faster, or head going to the ICU off at the pass,” Davis said.

Liponucleotides don’t kill the flu virus – which is the point.

“I’ve always been interested in finding new therapies to treat lung injury,” he said. “The problem with anti-viral drugs is you probably need a different drug for every virus. Also, many viruses can quickly mutate to become resistant to these drugs.

“Our approach is to fix the patient. Once the virus has caused the injury – the inflammation – it doesn’t really matter if it stays or goes away.”

There’s still a lot to learn. The agents have a strong anti-inflammatory effect, but don’t fully restore the surfactant-production process – and Davis isn’t sure why that is. Studies so far have been based on findings in a single type of lung cell, but the scientists haven’t confirmed that those cells are the ones responding to the therapy – any number of other cells in the immune system, blood vessels or heart could also play a role.

Despite the unknowns, Davis said that because the missing liponucleotides naturally exist in mammals, including humans, they are considered safe and unlikely to cause side effects, even if they go unused in the body.

The Ohio State Innovation Foundation has filed patents covering the scope of Davis’ discoveries, which may also extend to patients suffering from other forms of lung damage that cause inflammation and a drop in blood oxygen levels.

This work was supported by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

Co-authors include Lucia Rosas, Lauren Doolittle, Lisa Joseph, Hasan El-Musa and Judy Hickman-Davis of Ohio State’s College of Veterinary Medicine; Michael Novotny from the Cleveland Clinic; and Duncan Hite from the University of Cincinnati.

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Surgical procedure may help restore hand and arm function after stroke

Every year, more than 795,000 people in the United States have a stroke. Of these, approximately 80% lose arm function and as many as 50-60% of this population still experience problems six months later.

Traditionally, stroke patients try to regain motor function through physical rehabilitation, where patients re-learn pre-stroke skills, such as eating motions and grasping. However, most patients eventually plateau and stop improving over time.

Now, results of a clinical trial published in The Lancet gives patients new hope in their recovery.

Patients who received a novel treatment that combines vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) and rehabilitation showed improvement in upper body motor impairment compared to those who received sham (inactive form of) stimulation and rehabilitation. Considered a natural antenna to the brain, the vagus nerve runs from the chest and abdomen to the brainstem and regulates many of the body’s functions.

“This is incredibly exciting news for everyone involved in stroke rehabilitation and functional restoration and represents a unique intersection between neurosurgery and neurorehabilitation,” said Charles Liu, MD, PhD, the lead neurosurgeon of the study and director of the USC Neurorestoration Center of Keck Medicine of USC. “These study results are the first of their kind, and open up new possibilities for stroke patients, allowing them to reclaim more arm function even years after having a stroke.”

In this international, multi-center clinical trial, 53 participants with moderate to severe arm weakness nine months to 10 years post-stroke, received rehabilitation paired with VNS. Fifty-five patients within the same parameters received a sham stimulation. The trial was randomized and triple blind.

Those receiving the nerve stimulation had a wire inserted into their neck that wrapped around the vagus nerve. The wire was then connected to a pulse generator device implanted in the chest. Those receiving the sham received placebo implants.

After the surgical procedure, all patients received six weeks of in-clinic therapy, which included tasks such as reaching and grasping, simulated eating and opening and closing containers. After the in-clinic period, patients continued treatment with a course of daily home therapy.

When the two patient groups were compared, those receiving the nerve stimulation scored higher on several standardized measures of upper arm functionality.

“Not only were the results clinically meaningful, the fact that these patients were at least nine months post-stroke and in some instances years out, points to the possibility that meaningful improvements can be achieved even years after a stroke,” said Liu, who also serves as chief of innovation and research and chair of neurosurgery and orthopedics at Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center.

The device is thought to work by triggering the release of brain neuromodulators – which regulate the body’s responses – to strengthen motor circuits in the brain associated with movement, enabling the brain to effectively relearn tasks. VNS is already used widely for the treatment of epilepsy and plays an increasing role in the treatment of severe depression.

“For too long, stroke patients have faced limited options for recovery,” said Liu. “This new treatment signifies a breakthrough that could be life-changing for many stroke patients and also represents an approach that will certainly be explored for many other functional restoration applications in the future.”

The VNS system utilized for the study is owned by MicroTransponder Inc., a medical device development company, who sponsored the study.

Lead authors on the study include Jesse Dawson, MD, College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences, University of Glasgow in Scotland; Teresa J. Kimberley, PhD, Massachusetts General Hospital; and Navzer Engineer, MD, PhD, of MicroTransponder Inc.

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Human genome editing requires difficult conversations between science and society

In October of 2020, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their discovery of an adaptable, easy way to edit genomes, known as CRISPR, which has transformed the world of genetic engineering.

CRISPR has been used to fight lung cancer and correct the mutation responsible for sickle cell anemia in stem cells. But the technology was also used by a Chinese scientist to secretly and illegally edit the genomes of twin girls — the first-ever heritable mutation of the human germline made with genetic engineering.

“We’ve moved away from an era of science where we understood the risks that came with new technology and where decision stakes were fairly low,” says Dietram Scheufele, a professor of life sciences communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Today, Scheufele and his colleagues say, we’re in a world where new technologies have very immediate and sometimes unpredictable but significant impacts on society. In a paper published the week of April 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers argue that such advanced tech, especially CRISPR, demands more robust and thoughtful public engagement if it is to be harnessed to benefit the public without crossing ethical lines.

The authors say that being thoughtful and transparent about public engagement goals and using evidence from social science can help facilitate the difficult conversations society must have about scientific issues like CRISPR and their societal implications. Effective public engagement, in turn, lays the groundwork for public ownership of advances that do arise from CRISPR.

Life sciences communication Professor Dominique Brossard and graduate student Nicole Krause, along with University of Vienna research assistant Isabelle Freiling, co-authored the report with Scheufele. The paper stems from a 2019 National Academy of Sciences colloquium on CRISPR.

The researchers argue that such advanced tech, especially CRISPR, demands more robust and thoughtful public engagement if it is to be harnessed to benefit the public without crossing ethical lines.

Since 2012, when the CRISPR system was first described, scientists have understood both its genetic engineering potential and the need for public engagement to discuss the possible uses of the technology. Many scientists wanted to avoid rehashing the controversies surrounding genetically modified organisms, which have been harshly criticized as unnatural and unnecessary by some activists despite broad scientific support for their use.

Yet, Krause says, some scientists who supported using CRISPR began by errantly repeating the public engagement methods employed for GMOs, which “assumes that people just need more knowledge, more of an ability to understand the science.” Instead, Krause adds: “Solutions focused on tailoring communications to people’s values would make more sense.”

This values-based public engagement strategy is supported by social science research into how people form and change their opinions around new technologies. Some public engagement methods engage value systems, and encourage thoughtful conversation, more than others.

For example, what researchers term “public involvement” and “public collaboration” are methods of two-way communication involving the joint exchange of information and values and the identification and design of science-based decisions that adhere to those values. That contrasts with “public communication,” which focuses only on the dissemination of scientific information.

This values-based public engagement strategy is supported by social science research into how people form and change their opinions around new technologies.

Scheufele and his colleagues say that such collaborative approaches could help scientists widen the representation of voices in debates around science to groups who are often overlooked, such as people with disabilities or racial minorities.

“As the scientific community, we don’t have a long track record of effective engagement mechanism with these communities,” says Scheufele. This failure to reach broader groups stems in part from the low participation rates of most science engagement events, which also attract highly selective audiences.

Another challenge is rewarding scientists for public engagement. “There’s very little incentive in academia to do this kind of work,” says Scheufele.

A recent report by Brossard and others found that a majority of land-grant faculty felt that public engagement was very important, but believed it was less important to their colleagues. That divide suggests scientists feel their engagement efforts won’t be rewarded by their peers, says Brossard.

Now, Brossard, Krause, Scheufele and colleagues have a grant from the National Science Foundation to research how to depolarize debates around CRISPR. Previous studies suggest that making people accountable for their positions helps them think more critically about their underlying reasoning. And when social scientists emphasize the complexity inherent in people’s values, it helps people consider controversial issues with more nuance.

But engaging a diverse society with pluralistic value systems in deliberations on the latest technologies will never be easy.

“The policymaking process involves a lot more than just science. Science will inform how we regulate technologies, and so will religious, political, ethical, regulatory and economic considerations,” says Scheufele. “And so the ability to actually do engagement in this much broader setting where we meaningfully contribute and guide the debate with the best available science is a major challenge.”

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (grant SES-1827864).

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COVID-19 Made it Clear We Need to Care for Caregivers

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, life was plenty busy for Jason Trujillo and his family.

He and his wife, Sherrie Jong, had two children, ages 4 and 1. Jong — a civil engineer — was the family’s breadwinner as Trujillo completed his first year at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles. As the couple raised their family and juggled work and school, Jong’s parents, Engie and Monty, were getting older; 82-year-old Monty especially struggled to see and hear.

When they found out Monty had Alzheimer’s disease, the family knew he needed someone to care for him. That job fell to Trujillo. At first, he resented the stressful and unexpected role. But his mother helped him put things in perspective. “She said, ‘I didn’t raise you to leave an old man that needs help. Take care of this,’” he recalls. “She was 100% right.”

Trujillo paused law school and became his father-in-law’s main caregiver, making sure Monty saw his doctors, got his medication and stayed connected to the family. When his condition worsened, Monty moved to an assisted living facility and Trujillo visited him every day.

Then came COVID-19. Around the world, the pandemic abruptly separated residents of assisted living facilities from their loved ones. Caregivers like Trujillo face an increasingly difficult and isolating task as they try to offer support from afar while taking care of kids at home. Even with video calls and other technology, staying in touch — especially with people who have dementia and may not fully understand the situation — has been tough.

The devastating impact on seniors has pushed caregiving to a crisis point. But according to USC researchers, the pandemic isn’t the cause of this societywide problem — it’s only amplifying challenges that have been there all along. And for these experts in aging, it has never been more urgent to address the social, racial and economic inequities behind these issues and pave a way forward. Now is the time to care for caregivers.

Family Caregivers Remain an Overlooked Community

Caregiving is a huge yet relatively underdiscussed aspect of society, says Donna Benton, research associate professor at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology.

One in 5 Americans provided unpaid assistance with daily living or medical needs to an adult or a child with special needs last year, according to a 2020 National Alliance on Caregiving report. Those 53 million caregivers, nearly 10 million more than reported in 2015, are needed in large part because of the rapidly aging U.S. population.

Raising children while also caring for an older family member puts Trujillo in the “sandwich generation” — adults who find themselves between multiple generations in need of caregiving and support. About 12% of all U.S. parents with children under 18 also care for an adult, according to a 2018 report from the Pew Research Center.

It’s a tough balancing act even in the best of times. Though many cherish the sense of fulfillment and purpose that comes from caring for loved ones, it can lead to physical, mental and financial strain as well. For Trujillo, it meant withdrawing from law school and waiting more than two years before he could start classes again, this time at the University of West Los Angeles.

During the pandemic, many families lost critical support systems as adult day health care centers closed and professional in-home visits stopped. They took over daily errands and other responsibilities for otherwise independent seniors now being urged to stay home.

With these changes, it’s no surprise that caregivers have fared much worse than non-caregivers during the pandemic. They report worse psychological distress and physical symptoms such as fatigue, headaches, body aches and stomach discomfort, according to a Harvard-led data analysis of USC’s Understanding America Study. In a Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregiving survey, 83% of caregivers reported that the pandemic has increased their stress. Nearly half said it’s much harder to find other caregivers to help relieve the burden.

1 OF EVERY 5 CAREGIVERS REPORTED FEELING ALONE, EVEN IF THEY LIVED WITH THE PERSON FOR WHOM THEY CARED.

Feelings of loneliness and exhaustion are also on the rise among caregivers. One survey noted that 1 of every 5 caregivers reported feeling alone, even if they lived with the person for whom they cared.

COVID-19’s impact has been devastating. It’s also been unevenly distributed. Two months after the first stay-at-home order began in Los Angeles, the USC Family Caregiver Support Center checked in with more than 800 client families throughout the county. Latino and Black families were about twice as likely as white families to experience financial strain or difficulties getting adequate resources, including food.

The pandemic has also been particularly hard on women, who make up 61% of the Americans who are caring for someone over 18. Gema Zamarro, an adjunct senior economist with the Center for Economic and Social Research at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, analyzed data from the Understanding America Study and found that women, particularly those without a college degree, have suffered more job losses, took on more responsibility for child care and experienced much more psychological distress than their male partners.

“We’ve never had a crisis like this that affects child care so drastically,” Zamarro says. With school closures and virtual learning putting increased pressure on parents, women in the sandwich generation may feel especially pressured to leave the workforce. When coupled with the higher proportion of women who have lost their jobs due to COVID-19, she says, it could prove to be a huge setback for gender equality. “Once they are out of the labor force for a while, it’s often very hard for them to come back.”

Connections Count for Older Adults and Caregivers

The isolation caused by pandemic lockdowns in senior living facilities is extremely tough for both older adults and their caregivers, says Anne Katz, a clinical professor of social work at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. “People might think, ‘Oh, you placed your loved one in a facility. That’s the end. You can finally have a life,’” she says. “No, they’re constantly thinking about their loved one. There’s often a lot of guilt.”

Trujillo, for one, never wavered in his commitment to helping his father-in-law, even as Monty moved into assisted living. Prior to the pandemic, Trujillo visited daily, making sure Monty showered and ate. He ensured Monty calmed down after episodes of fear or confusion, had clean clothes and other supplies, and felt updated on everything happening with the family. The visits provided reassurance and a familiar face for his father-in-law.

The family is lucky, Trujillo says, because his wife went to college with Yvonne Kuo, a family care navigator with the USC Family Caregiver Support Center. Kuo and her colleagues connect Los Angeles County residents with information and training, counseling and wellness services, support groups, and legal and financial support. They also offer respite care for loved ones so caregivers can take a break.

After Monty’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, the family reached out to Kuo, who helped them research assisted living and memory care facilities. She also enrolled Trujillo in a support group that has offered everything from practical advice to a sympathetic ear during tough times. The support group has been invaluable even as it has gone virtual, he says.

“All of these things have come from people’s experiences that went before me,” Trujillo says. “We’re paying this knowledge forward and we’re helping others.”

During the pandemic, USC’s caregiver support center and similar organizations have made a dramatic pivot, not only bringing their operations online but also helping families connect with emergency resources, find personal protective equipment and enroll in delivery services for meals, medications and supplies. Donna Benton, director of the center, says she’s proud of how her staff changed their operations so quickly for the families they serve.

“We were trying to address the need as quickly as we could,” she says. “The USC community really stepped forward to help with the program.”

USC’s efforts to care for caregivers in its neighborhoods includes the Community Resource Center for Aging at USC Verdugo Hills Hospital. Funded by a grant from the Navigage Foundation, the center opened in October 2020 to connect older adults and their caregivers with a broad array of home- and community-based resources. The center has helped people sign up for meal and medication deliveries, find safe transportation and even learn how to use Zoom and other popular software and technology.

As a social worker and gerontologist, I’ve never put technology on a care plan the way I have now. Embracing tech, from telehealth services to food delivery apps, is a necessity in the current situation.

ADRIA NAVARRO

“As a social worker and gerontologist, I’ve never put technology on a care plan the way I have now,” says Program Manager Adria Navarro PhD ’11. “Embracing tech, from telehealth services to food delivery apps, is a necessity in the current situation.”

At USC, the Center for Work and Family Life also has turned to virtual services to help the university’s staff and faculty cope with the pressures of caregiving during the pandemic. The center provides confidential phone and Zoom counseling appointments for USC employees, along with virtual wellness classes and drop-in Zoom support groups for parents.

Program Manager Angela DiBlasi is based on the USC Health Sciences Campus, and her counseling clients include Keck Medicine of USC frontline health care professionals working amid COVID-19. Many struggle with heightened stress and the pandemic’s impact on the health care system. Before vaccines were available, they also had to consider whether to fulfill their family caregiving responsibilities — and risk carrying the virus home — or leave these responsibilities to their loved ones, she says.

DiBlasi often asks her clients to acknowledge that the situation is tough and focus on what they can control. Try to find creative ways to bring joy, she suggests. Simple acts like holding physically distanced or drive-by gatherings and sharing thoughtful gifts with isolated loved ones can be mood boosters. She is heartened to see her clients take care of their patients’ physical health while also providing emotional support, like helping them make video calls to stay in touch with worried family members who can’t visit.

“These people go over and beyond, and they care so much,” DiBlasi says. “Not only are they putting their health on the line but they’re making that connection for everybody.”

Building Up Caregiver Resources in Los Angeles and Beyond

As many caregiving resources like daycare centers closed during the pandemic, USC’s caregiver support center helped families find emergency resources and supplies. (Illustration/Keith Negley)

Many experts agree that the pandemic has magnified caregiving-related challenges that have existed for years. But there is one difference now, says Kathleen Wilber, professor of gerontology and holder of the Mary Pickford Foundation Chair at the USC Leonard Davis School. COVID-19 has made these problems all but impossible for policymakers to ignore.

The gerontology school’s Secure Old Age Laboratory, led by Wilber, provided administrative support for the California Task Force on Family Caregiving, established in 2015 by the state legislature. The task force featured two other USC experts: Benton, who served as chair, and Karen Lincoln, associate professor of social work. The recommendations they published in 2018 bolstered a $30 million increase in funding for caregiver resource centers throughout California. Task force recommendations were also included in the state’s first-ever Master Plan for Aging, a policy blueprint that included recommendations for more aging-oriented housing, health and care programs.

The goal is to help seniors like Monty and caregivers like his son-in-law thrive. As the pandemic went on, Trujillo had to tightly manage his time. Helping his kids with virtual schooling, reading cases for his own classes and checking in with his older in-laws ate up his daylight hours. His law school courses took up the evenings. It was a tough schedule, but he and his wife, who also balanced professional and child care duties, made it work.

Sadly, Monty succumbed to COVID-19 in December 2020, just weeks after his 87th birthday. Trujillo had to keep up his grueling time management even as he grieved: Monty’s passing happened during final exams.

Despite the sadness of his father-in-law’s death, Trujillo says he chooses to focus on the happy memories. He’s also sharing the lessons he learned about caregiving with others, because too few people know about caregiving until they’re thrust into it themselves. And as he nears the end of law school, he’s preparing to specialize in elder care law.

“I’m going to miss him forever, but it’s OK because I got time with him,” Trujillo says. “There were a lot of things that I didn’t get to do because I was his caregiver, but there are a lot of things that I would have never experienced if I wasn’t.”

5 Ways to Care for Caregivers

Donna Benton, director of the USC Family Caregiver Support Center and a research associate professor at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, shares suggestions for how people can advocate for caregivers’ well-being.

1. Support respite care

“We need policies that help relieve some of that care when we’re not able to do the caregiving so that we don’t always have to make a choice between a paycheck and caring for someone, or between being able to sleep and caring for our relative.”

2. Tackle social disparities

“The pandemic has really removed that very thin veil that was covering up the disparities in health and in the social determinants of health. … Racism has always pushed our African American, Latino and other ethnic and racial groups to the margins.”

3. Address mental health needs

“Almost 50% of family caregivers express some form of depression or anxiety, and they could really benefit from being with somebody who understands caregiving and who can talk to them and help them with their depression or anxiety.”

4. Encourage caregivers to embrace the title

“Many people say, ‘I’m the mother,’ ‘I’m the daughter,’ or ‘I’m the spouse,’ but they don’t say ‘and I’m a caregiver.’ Once caregivers identify themselves, then they can ask for things like, ‘If I’m caring for someone, can I be eligible for respite so that I can take a break and have somebody else come in for safety, so that I can go to my own doctor’s appointments?’”

5. Share stories with policymakers

“People get scared about talking to a legislator or their elected official, but you don’t have to come up with the policy wording. What you can do is tell your struggle and why you do what you do.”

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Trust me. I’m a medical researcher.

I recently wrote an April Fool piece about an imaginary drug company that invested a billion dollars in a COVID vaccine, but when they ran it through Phase 3 clinical trials it fell just short of statistical significance for effectiveness. “Shucks! Back to the drawing board.” They report the results exactly as the occurred and abandon the vaccine. The joke, of course, is that no drug company behaves in this way. From our vantage out here in consumerland, all vaccine trials are successful. Can you call it “science” if there is only one acceptable outcome of the experiment? Banks that are “too big to fail” cost the public hundreds of billions of dollars. Drugs that are “too big to fail” can cost hundreds of thousands of lives. 

How did we get to this place, where medical companies vie with tobacco companies for the least trusted industry in America? where, nevertheless, the companies that have a ginormous conflict of interest end up with the responsibility for safety-testing their own products? Where America’s radio and TV stations are so dependent on direct-to-consumer drug ads for their largest single source of revenue that they shy away from reporting news that might have a negative impact on the bottom lines of Big Pharma?  

Limited Hangout (definition) An exposé of a corrupt official or company that is actually sponsored by the target of the exposé. Hyperbolic language is used to condemn the target, but in fact, the worst abuses are omitted, leaving the impression that the official or company is less corrupt than, in fact, he is.

Gerald Posner was known to me as a muckraking journalist who pulled punches. His twin assassination narratives concealed the roles played by US Intelligence services in arranging the murders of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

His latest book, Pharma paints a devastating portrait of America’s most profitable industry. If Pharma is a limited hangout, then God help us!

Have you heard of the Sackler family? Forbes lists them as #30 among America’s wealthiest, but their style is to keep a low profile. In the middle years of the last century, Arthur Sackler built his empire in pharmaceuticals, medical research, advertising, and philanthropy (!) while creating a new model for a vertically integrated industry.

Sackler’s genius was to create dozens of “independent” companies and non-profits, all of which listed their headquarters as 17 E 62nd St in Manhattan. His echo chamber gave the impression of independent messages about his drug offerings that came from many directions, when in fact, there were many voices singing from the same hymnsheet. He reached for control of every aspect of the pharmaceutical business,

• “Charitable” support for research at the world’s best medical schools
• Ownership of journals that published their results
• Ad agencies that did marketing campaigns for new drugs and slur campaigns against anyone who questioned their safety
• Drug companies placed expensive ads in the “independent” journals, until the journals grew dependent on ad revenue.
• Opening the revolting door for FDA regulators, so that this year’s “regulators” on a fixed government salary became next year’s corporate executives with perks and stock options.
• Astroturf patient advocacy groups that demanded access to drugs and insurance coverage to pay for them
• The largest lobbying force of any industry, in DC and as well as state capitals
• “Educational seminars” for doctors including expense-paid junkets at luxury golf and beach resorts
• A computerized prescription-tracking system from the days before the Worldwide Web that supported…
• An army of commission-based salesmen, paid in proportion to the number of prescriptions written by their client doctors.
• PBMs purchased and controlled by drug companies. A PBM or “pharmacy benefits manager” negotiates drug discounts on behalf of insurance companies—unless they are in the pocket of the same drug companies.

Arthur Sackler was an American success story. He grew up in the same Brooklyn neighborhood as my father, raised by a Jewish immigrant couple from Eastern Europe who ran a grocery store before the Great War. He worked his way through medical school writing copy for a medical advertising agency, in the good old days when medical advertising was directed only at doctors and was grounded in facts and data. He completed a residency in psychiatry and advanced in the research world before his ambitions broadened to encompass research, advertising, drug development, and medical publishing.

Sackler pioneered the “patent extension” strategy for making tiny modifications to a drug’s appearance or packaging the year before a patent was due to expire. When lethal side-effects were discovered in the course of clinical trials, the companies would routinely make a coldhearted decision about how much the eventual discovery of their deception would cut into corporate profits.  Billions of dollars in fines and lawsuits for wrongful death were just a cost of doing business

When Sackler started his career, drugs were associated with diseases, prescribed for people who were sick. Another of Sackler’s innovations was to realize that the market of well people was far larger than people with diseases. At a time when W.H. Auden was writing poetry about the Age of Anxiety as a cultural malady, Sackler realized the profit potential in medicalizing anxiety as a nervous disorder. The Rolling Stones “little yellow pill” was at one time taken by tens of millions of America’s housewives, before the stories of abuse, addiction, and overdoses leaked out.

The book culminates in an extensive account of Oxycontin. This was the one drug that was completely controlled by the Sackler family, developed and marketed by their private family firm, Purdue Pharma. Purdue is the source of the wealth that earned the Sacklers’ place on the Forbes list; and Oxycontin has been responsible for the greatest public health disaster in American history. At the same time the drug was aggressively marketed with “discount cards” that offered first prescriptions free, Oxycontin pills were fueling an epidemic of addiction and overdose deaths.

Armies of Purdue sales reps were paid according to the number of Oxycontin prescriptions their physician-clients prescribed. “That physicians are susceptible to pseudoscience was, of course, something that Mortimer and Raymond [Sackler, Arthur’s brothers] had learned decades earlier from Arthur and his major drug launches.”

Limited Hangout?

After this devastating account of callous cupidity and a 50-year rape of American public health, is there anything missing? What could be worse?

Vaccines.

• Vaccines are the single most profitable component of the pharmaceutical empire.
• Vaccines are the only drug exempted from placebo-controlled safety testing.
• Dozens of vaccines are mandated by law, administered to every child as a requirement for entering school
• And drug companies as well as doctors and hospitals have no liability when health problems, including irreversible neurological damage and chronic auto-immune diseases, are triggered by vaccines.
• Vaccines are the subject of the biggest taboo in journalism. Questioning the safety or efficacy of any vaccine product is the surest way to be blacklisted and censored. Armies of trolls commenting in social media help to enforce the ban on questioning the science of vaccines. If you ask any questions about vaccine safety, you must be “anti-science”.

Since the explosion in mandated vaccines, starting around 1990, America has suffered two epidemic explosion in childhood disease:

• Autism has increased in prevalence from 0.04% in 1980 to 1.70% as of 2018
• Auto-immune disorders have increased more modestly, but from a much larger base. 11% of Americans suffered auto-immune diseases in 1990, compared to 16% today.

Plausible biological mechanisms make the connection between vaccines and both these disorders. Are vaccines responsible for increases in autism and autoimmunity? These are legitimate questions, but we are in an environment where anyone who asks them is being attacked and discredited.

Do you, dear reader, know that this 2019 study is the only long-term analysis of general effects of vaccination on children’s health? The picture it paints is not pretty.

Pfizer has a long and sordid history of defrauding the FDA when applying for drug approvals. But who is casting a skeptical eye on their claim that the COVID mRNA vaccine is 95% effective, with only short-term side-effects? Here is an editorial by Peter Doshi, senior editor of the British Medical Journal. Pfizer’s application for FDA emergency approval is supported by just 170 COVID cases in all. They reported that only 8 were in the vaccine group and 162 in the placebo group. Sounds pretty good until you hear that there were an additional 3410 cases that were “suspected” COVID, but were not investigated further and not included in the study. These data were not disclosed to FDA. These “suspected” cases were split almost equally between vaccine group and placebo group. Do we really trust that Pfizer would resist the temptation to cherry-pick which cases were “suspected” and which were investigated?

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