Pregnant people with schizophrenia have threefold risk of interpersonal violence

Peer-Reviewed Publication

CANADIAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION JOURNAL

Pregnant and postpartum people with schizophrenia have a more than threefold increase in the risk of an emergency department visit for interpersonal violence, compared with those without schizophrenia, according to a new study in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) https://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.220689.

Interpersonal violence can include physical, sexual and psychological abuse by a family member, intimate partner, acquaintance or stranger.

"Though we found a threefold increased risk for individuals with schizophrenia, we also found that the majority of people, both with and without schizophrenia, are screened for interpersonal violence during pregnancy," says lead author Kelly Leslie, a fourth-year psychiatry resident at the University of Toronto. "This suggests there are many opportunities for health care providers to intervene and prevent harm to these patients and their children."

About 1 in 5 (20.7%) women with schizophrenia experience physical or sexual violence during their lifetime, about 9 times the risk for those without serious mental illness. However, little is known about their risk during the perinatal period.

Led by researchers from ICES and Women's College Hospital, the study included more than 1.8 million pregnant people aged 15–49 years, of whom 4470 had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. People with schizophrenia were more likely to live in a lower-income neighbourhood, to have other psychiatric and chronic medical conditions, and to have had an emergency department (ED) visit for interpersonal violence in the 2 years before their pregnancy.

Key findings:

• Overall, 3.1% of people with schizophrenia had an ED visit for interpersonal violence during pregnancy and the first year postpartum, versus 0.4% of those without schizophrenia.
• Pregnant individuals with schizophrenia were equally likely to be screened for (74.3% v. 73.8%), yet more likely to self-report (10.2% v. 2.4%), interpersonal violence.
• Among study participants who were screened and did not disclose interpersonal violence in pregnancy, schizophrenia was associated with a sixfold increase in the risk of experiencing an ED visit for interpersonal violence in both pregnancy and postpartum.

The study suggests "that routine violence screening in antenatal care settings is an important opportunity for intervention to prevent severe physical, psychological and social harm to these patients and their children," writes Dr. Simone Vigod, head of psychiatry, Women's College Hospital and a professor at the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, with coauthors.

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JOURNAL

Canadian Medical Association Journal

DOI

10.1503/cmaj.220689 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Risk of interpersonal violence during and after pregnancy among people with schizophrenia: a population-based cohort study

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

6-Mar-2023

As urban populations soar wastewater treatment struggles to find sustainable solutions

Activated sludge comes of age

Book Announcement

WORLD SCIENTIFIC

 

IMAGE: COVER OF "ACTIVATED SLUDGE: DEVELOPMENTS AND SUSTAINABLE SOLUTIONS" view more 

CREDIT: WORLD SCIENTIFIC

Globally, activated sludge treats the majority of urban wastewaters; yet it is one of the most complex biological processes used. It is a sophisticated microbial process fraught with operational problems leading to occasional failures in achieving required effluent quality standards. With the increasing problem of partially treated and raw sewage entering rivers and estuaries, the pressure on the process to cope with ever increasing volumes of wastewater has never been so great.

With increasing volumes of dilute wastewater entering treatment plants the high variability in hydraulic and organic loadings cause significant problems to operators of activated sludge plants, often resulting in untreated wastewater entering rivers. There is a long delay between design, funding and construction of wastewater treatment plants, including retrofitting, and so the problem of surface water pollution is on the rise, This is exacerbated by rapid housing developments in areas where there is insufficient wastewater treatment capacity or where receiving waters are insufficient to cope with increased loadings requiring increasingly higher levels of treatment. The better the effluent quality the more costly wastewater becomes to treat in terms of capital cost, energy usage and greenhouse gas emissions. The challenge for operators, designers, consultants and researchers is to find novel solutions that are reliable, sustainable and able to rapidly increase treatment capacity at minimum cost. This is a tall order and requires a firm understanding of the process and, in particular, how bacterial flocs are formed, develop and respond to different operating conditions.

Activated Sludge: Developments and Sustainable Solutions explores in detail the microbial basis of activated sludge, especially the fascinating process of floc formation and development, the role of the organisms, and how a new understanding of the biology of the process has led to the creation of many new innovative process designs. Developments in basin design have created multiple reactor stages allowing a range of anaerobic, anoxic and aerobic zones to capitalize on a wider range of organisms able to remove nitrogen and phosphorus as well as organic matter. The high energy intensive conventional systems are now replaced with highly controlled reactors operating at low dissolved oxygen concentrations using a new generation of aeration devices. Underlying all this are the increasing challenges of ever-increasing loadings, climate change, nanoparticles, microplastics, pathogen removal and antibiotic gene transfer. The development of membrane bioreactors has removed the problems of settleability thereby increasing process reliability and effluent quality, while integrated fixed-film activated-sludge processes are more efficient and compact. Activated sludge is over a hundred years old as a process and is being reimagined into a highly efficient, reliable, and increasingly sustainable treatment process. The book concludes by exploring how activated sludge can become even more sustainable, for example, by carbon harvesting and by product recovery.

This interdisciplinary book is essential reading for both engineers and scientists whether training at university or practitioners and consultants in the wastewater industry. Activated Sludge: Developments and Sustainable Solutions retails for US$168 / £150 (hardcover) and is also available in electronic formats. To order or know more about the book, visit http://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/Q0408.

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About the Author

Professor Nick Gray is a founding member and former Director of the Trinity Centre for the Environment, a hub for interdisciplinary research and teaching at Trinity College Dublin. He is an expert hydrobiologist specializing in biological wastewater treatment and water pollution control. He combines his research and experience as a consultant environmental engineer and scientist into his teaching and writing. He has written over 180 papers in 49 different journals and is the author of 15 books and numerous book chapters.

About World Scientific Publishing Co.

World Scientific Publishing is a leading international independent publisher of books and journals for the scholarly, research and professional communities. World Scientific collaborates with prestigious organisations like the Nobel Foundation and US National Academies Press to bring high quality academic and professional content to researchers and academics worldwide. The company publishes about 600 books and over 160 journals in various fields annually. To find out more about World Scientific, please visit www.worldscientific.com.

For more information, contact WSPC Communications at communications@wspc.com.

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DOI

10.1142/q0408 

Death rates from lung cancer will fall overall in the EU and UK in 2023, but rise among women in France, Italy and Spain

Peer-Reviewed Publication

EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR MEDICAL ONCOLOGY

A total of 1,261,990 people will die from cancer in 2023 in the EU (EU-27). A further 172,314 people will die from the disease in the UK, according to new research published in the leading cancer journal Annals of Oncology [1] today (Monday).

 

Researchers led by Carlo La Vecchia (MD), a professor at the University of Milan (Italy), estimate there will be a 6.5% fall in cancer death rates in men and a 3.7% fall in women between 2018 and 2023.

 

They predict that death rates from the ten most common cancers will continue to fall in most European countries in 2023, although the numbers of people dying will go up due to aging populations. A greater proportion of elderly people in the population means there is a greater number at the age where they are more likely to develop and die from cancer.

 

Compared to a peak in cancer death rates in 1988, the researchers calculate that nearly 5.9 million deaths will have been avoided in the 35 years between 1989 and 2023 in the EU-27. In the UK, 1.24 million deaths will have been avoided.

 

Prof. La Vecchia said: “If the current trajectory of declining cancer death rates continues, then it is possible there could be a further 35% reduction by 2035. More smokers quitting contribute to these favourable trends. In addition, greater efforts need to be made to control the growing epidemic in overweight, obesity and diabetes, alcohol consumption and infections, together with improvements in screening, early diagnosis and treatments.

 

“The advances in tobacco control are reflected in the favourable lung cancer trends but more could be done in this respect, particularly among women, as lung cancer death rates continue to rise among them. No deaths from lung cancer have been avoided in women, both in the EU-27 and the UK, during the period between 1989 and 2023.

 

“Pancreatic cancer is also a cause for concern, as death rates from this disease will not fall among men and will rise by 3.4% in women in the EU and 3.2% in women in the UK. Smoking can explain between about a quarter to a third of these deaths, and women, particularly in the middle and older age groups, did not give up smoking as early as men.”

 

The researchers analysed cancer death rates in the EU 27 Member States [2] as a whole and separately in the UK. They also looked at the five most populous EU countries (France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain) and, individually, for stomach, intestines, pancreas, lung, breast, uterus (including cervix), ovary, prostate, bladder and leukaemias for men and women [3]. Prof La Vecchia and his colleagues collected data on deaths from the World Health Organization and Eurostat databases from 1970 to 2018 for most of the EU-27 and the UK. This is the thirteenth consecutive year the researchers have published these predictions.

 

In the EU-27 countries the researchers predict that will be an age standardised rate (ASR) [4] of 123.8 deaths per 100,000 men by the end of 2023. In women, the age standardised death rate will be 79.3 per 100,000. In the UK, the death rates will be 106.5 and 83.5 per 100,000 for men and women, respectively.

 

Cancer death rates will fall for all cancers in men in the EU-27 and the UK. They will also fall for women in the UK. Among EU women, death rates will rise by 3.4% to nearly six per 100,000 for pancreatic cancer, and to just over 1% to 13.6 per 100,00 for lung cancer. Although there will be a 13.8% drop in lung cancer death rates among women in the UK, the death rate of 16.2 per 100,000 is still higher than among EU women because more UK women started smoking earlier than those in the EU. Lung cancer now kills more women in the UK than breast cancer, which has a death rate of 13.5 per 100,000.

 

When the researchers looked specifically at lung cancer death rates in five EU countries as well as the UK, they found that, although death rates are predicted to fall in men for all six countries, for women they will rise by nearly 14% in France, 5.6% in Italy and 5% in Spain. Among women in different age groups, the researchers found a decrease in predicted death rates from lung cancer among those aged 25 to 64, but an increase in those aged 65 to over 75 years, and consequently an increase overall.

 

“This is because women now aged 45 to 65, born in the 1960s and 1970s, have smoked less and stopped earlier than those born in the 1950s, who were in their twenties in the 1970s when smoking among young women was most prevalent,” said Prof. Eva Negri from the University of Bologna (Italy), co-leader of the research.

 

Colorectal (bowel) cancer will be the third biggest killer for women in both the EU and the UK: eight and ten per 100,000, respectively. Prostate cancer will be the third biggest killer for men: 9.5 and 11.2 per 100,000 in the EU and UK, respectively.

 

The researchers say that organised screening programmes using low dose computed tomography (CT scans) could reduce deaths from lung cancer by up to 20%. However, there are no such organised programmes in Europe, and it is too early to evaluate the impact of screening in the UK, following the Lung Cancer Screening trial.

 

The researchers highlight the role that overweight and obesity plays in cancers such as post-menopausal breast, endometrial (womb) cancer, stomach and colorectal cancer. Although death rates from stomach cancer are falling overall, mainly because of improved methods of food preservation, healthier diets and a decline in Helicobacter pylori infection, approximately a third of stomach cancers now occur in the cardia, the entrance to the stomach, and are associated with overweight and obesity and, hence, reflux, which is a risk factor for the development of cancer at this site. For colorectal cancer, death rates are falling in the EU but the decline has slowed in the UK.

 

“This is concerning as increases in both incidence and mortality from colorectal cancer in young women have been recorded in the UK. This can be partly explained by the prevalence of overweight and obesity, and alcohol and tobacco consumption,” said Prof. Negri.

 

The researchers caution that their estimates do not take account of the COVID pandemic, which occurred after the dates when data were available on cancer deaths. “The COVID-19 pandemic may have an effect on cancer mortality in 2023 as a result of delayed visits and procedures, influencing both secondary prevention and treatment, and disease management for cancer,” they write.

 

(ends)

Notes:

[1] “European cancer mortality predictions for the year 2023 with focus on lung cancer”, by M. Malvezzi et al. Annals of Oncology, doi: 10.1016/j.annonc.2023.01.010

[2] At the time of this analysis, the EU had 27 member states, with the UK leaving in 2020. Cyprus was excluded from the analysis due to excessive missing data.

[3] The paper contains individual tables of cancer death rates for each of the six countries.

[4] Age-standardised rates per 100,000 of the population reflect the annual probability of dying adjusted to reflect the age distribution of a population.

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JOURNAL

Annals of Oncology

DOI

10.1016/j.annonc.2023.01.010 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

European cancer mortality predictions for the year 2023 with focus on lung cancer

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

6-Mar-2023

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for LUNG CANCER 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for LUNG CANCER WOMEN 

Physical activity and tailored support fails to deliver lasting benefits for smokers not ready to quit

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF PLYMOUTH

Promoting physical activity and other behavioural support can help people wanting to reduce their smoking to quit in the short-term.

However, after nine months, physical activity delivers no noticeable benefits – compared with offering no additional support – in the rates of people stopping smoking, according to the findings of a major national study.

The Trial of physical Activity and Reduction of Smoking (TARS) study, led by the University of Plymouth with funding from the National Institute for Health and Care Research, took place across four cities – Plymouth, Nottingham, Oxford and London – before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Its aim was to provide a definitive answer as to whether future NHS services should be adapted to provide additional support to smokers not ready to quit but who do wish to reduce their smoking, with the hope of increasing sustained abstinence from smoking and associated health benefits.

The study also sought to look into previous suggestions that behavioural support for these smokers can lead to smoking reduction and more attempts to quit.

To answer these questions, half the 915 smokers recruited into the study were offered up to eight, weekly face-to-face or phone motivational support sessions to reduce their smoking and increase moderate to vigorous physical activity. It was an approach which had previously shown encouraging signs in a Plymouth pilot study, and was contrasted against the other half of participants who were offered the usual NHS advice on quitting.

The study showed that engaging with the motivational support had some short-term benefits, with 19% of those receiving the additional support saying they had at least halved the number of cigarettes smoked by three months – 14% had still halved their smoking after nine months. By contrast, around 10% of those receiving the standard advice reported having halved their cigarette intake at both milestones.

However, just 2% of those who received the additional support had abstained from smoking between three and nine months. Less than 1% of those receiving the standard advice managed to abstain from smoking for those six months.

In addition, while after three months people receiving the additional support took part in 81 minutes more physical activity each week than those receiving no support, researchers did not find evidence of sustained differences in physical activity at nine months.

With the additional support costing health services in the region of £240 per person, the study’s authors say their findings show the approach is neither effective for long-term smoking cessation or cost-effective.

The research, published in the journal Addiction, also involved the University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust, St George’s University of London, University of Oxford, University of Nottingham, University of Exeter, and Plymouth City Council.

Adrian Taylor, Professor in Health Services Research within the University of Plymouth’s Peninsula Medical School, is the study’s lead author. He said: “Generally, the smokers in our study were enthusiastic about the support they received to help reduce their smoking and increase physical activity, which avoided pressuring them to quit. However, they were unable to maintain increases in physical activity and smoking reduction did not lead to more smokers giving up completely, which is the best thing for an individual’s health. Helping smokers to move from wanting to reduce to quitting completely is far more challenging than other less rigorous studies had suggested.”

“This is a further demonstration of the scale of the challenge facing society if we are to achieve the UK Government’s stated aim of being smoke free by 2030. However, it is potentially only through additional difficult national policy decisions such as even higher taxation on tobacco, the subsidised promotion of vaping, and increasing the legal age of tobacco purchasing, in line with other countries such as New Zealand, that the huge costs of smoking for our NHS Services will be reduced.”

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JOURNAL

Addiction

DOI

10.1111/add.16129 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Randomized controlled/clinical trial

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of behavioural support for prolonged abstinence for smokers wishing to reduce but not quit: Randomised controlled trial of physical activity assisted reduction of smoking (TARS)

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

6-Mar-2023

Potential treatment of autoimmune diseases revealed in new study

Scientists have uncovered a chemical compound that holds potential as a therapeutical for various autoimmune diseases, and they’ve used it to treat mice.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

OKINAWA INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY (OIST) GRADUATE UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: MICE THAT HAVE NEUROINFLAMMATION CAUSED BY AUTOIMMUNITY WERE TREATED WITH PEP. THE RESULTS FOUND THAT PEP-TREATED MICE SHOWED IMPROVED SIGNS OF RECOVERY, IN COMPARISON TO MICE THAT WEREN’T TREATED WITH PEP. view more 

CREDIT: TSUNG-YEN HUANG (OIST)

Scientists in Japan have revealed a chemical compound that could be used for the treatment of various autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. These diseases occur when the body’s immune response goes wiry. The immune system, which normally attacks pathogens and infections, instead attacks healthy cells and tissues. For the millions of people who suffer from autoimmune diseases worldwide, the result can be debilitating—rheumatoid arthritis causes excessive joint pain, while multiple sclerosis can disable one’s brain and spinal cord function.

“The key to the development of autoimmune diseases, and thus the way to inhibit this development, lies in our cells, but the underlying mechanism has always been unclear,” stated Prof. Hiroki Ishikawa, who leads the Immune Signal Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST). “Now, our recent research has shed light on a compound that could suppress the development of these diseases.”

Prof. Ishikawa went on to explain that this research, published in Cell Reports, could lead to the development of treatments for autoimmune diseases.

The research focused on T helper 17 cells, or Th17 cells. Th17 cells are a type of T cell—a group of cells, which form major parts of the immune system. These cells, which exist in high numbers in our guts, evolved to help us fight invasive pathogens but, sometimes, they’re overactivated and mistake normal, healthy tissue as pathogens, resulting in autoimmunity. The generation of Th17 cells requires glycolysis, a metabolic process in which glucose is broken down and converted to energy to support the metabolic needs of cells. Glycolysis is essential for the growth of not only Th17 cells but also a variety of cells in our body.

“What’s interesting in that excessive glycolysis seems to suppress Th17 cell activity,” stated first author, Mr. Tsung-Yen Huang, a PhD candidate in the Immune Signal Unit. “So, we hypothesized that molecules produced during glycolysis may inhibit the cells.”

Enter phosphoenolpyruvate, or PEP for short. This chemical compound is a metabolite produced when glucose is converted to energy. Since it is part of such an important process, PEP is generated every day in our bodies. The researchers found that treatment with PEP can inhibit the maturation of TH17 cells, leading to resolution of inflammatory response.

Mr. Huang explained how this was, at first, a confusing result, as it went against all other research on the topic, but he decided to persevere and take a closer look at what could be occurring.

The research led them to a protein called JunB, which is essential for the maturation of Th17 cells. JunB promotes Th17 maturation by binding to a set of specific genes. The researchers found that PEP treatment inhibits the generation of Th17 cells by blocking JunB activity.

Armed with this knowledge, the researchers went on to treat mice that had neuroinflammation caused by autoimmunity with PEP. This disease is very similar to multiple sclerosis and these mice showed positive signs of recovery. The scientists have now filed a patent to continue with this research.

“Our results show the clinical potential of PEP,” explained Mr. Huang. “But first we need to increase its efficiency.”

In the past, researchers who were interested in developing a treatment for autoimmune diseases, often looked at inhibiting glycolysis and thus Th17 cells. But glycolysis is essential to various types of cells in the body and inhibiting it could have significant side-effects. PEP has the potential to be used as a treatment without resulting in such side-effects.

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JOURNAL

Cell Reports

DOI

10.1016/j.celrep.2023.112205 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Cells

ARTICLE TITLE

Phosphoenolpyruvate regulates the Th17 transcriptional program and inhibits autoimmunity

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

28-Mar-2023

Humanity’s quest to discover the origins of life in the universe

Reports and Proceedings

ETH ZURICH

 

IMAGE: DIDIER QUELOZ, NOBEL LAUREATE, PROFESSOR OF ASTROPHYSICS, DIRECTOR OF ETH ZURICH'S CENTRE FOR ORIGIN AND PREVALENCE OF LIFE, AND DIRECTOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE'S LEVERHULME CENTRE FOR LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE. view more 

CREDIT: ETH ZURICH / MARCO ROSASCO PHOTOGRAPHY

“We are living in an extraordinary moment in history,” says Didier Queloz, who directs ETH Zurich’s Centre for Origin and Prevalence of Life and the Leverhulme Centre for Life in the Universe at Cambridge. While still a doctoral student Queloz was the first to discover an exoplanet - a planet orbiting a solar-type star outside of Earth’s solar system. A discovery for which he would later receive a Nobel Prize in physics. Within a generation, scientists have now discovered more than 5,000 exoplanets and predict the potential existence of trillions more in the Milky Way galaxy alone. Each discovery inspires more questions than answers about how and why life emerged on Earth and whether it exists elsewhere in the universe. Technological advancements, such as the James Webb Space Telescope and interplanetary missions to Mars, accelerate access to an overwhelming volume of new observations and data, such that it will take the convergence of a multidisciplinary network to understand the emergence of life in the universe.

ETH Zurich, Cambridge, Harvard, and Chicago found the “Origins Federation”

Joining forces with chemist and fellow Nobel Laureate, Jack Szostak and astronomer, Dimitar Sasselov, Didier Queloz announced the founding of a new “Origins Federation” during the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). While a fictional interstellar federation might immediately spring to mind, this international alliance brings together the expertise of researchers working in the origins of life centers and initiatives at ETH Zurich, University of Cambridge, Harvard University, and The University of Chicago.

Together, scientists will explore the chemical and physical processes of living organisms and environmental conditions hospitable to supporting life on other planets. “The Origins Federation,” Queloz commented, “builds upon a long-standing collegial relationship strengthened through a shared collaboration in a recently completed project with the Simons Foundation.”

What humanity could learn from extra-terrestrial biosignatures

Such collaborations support the work of researchers like Zoology professor, Emily Mitchell. Mitchell, who works with Queloz in Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for Life in the Universe is an ecological time traveler. She uses field-based laser-scanning and statistical mathematical ecology on 580-million-year-old fossils of deep-sea organisms to determine the driving factors that influence the macro-evolutionary patterns of life on Earth. Speaking during ETH Zurich’s Origins of Life session at the AAAS, Mitchell took participants back in time to 4-billion years ago when Earth’s early atmosphere - devoid of oxygen and steeped in methane – showed its first signs of microbial life. She spoke about how life survives in extreme environments and then evolves offering potential Astro-biological insights into the origins of life elsewhere in the universe.

“As we begin to investigate other planets, through the Mars missions,” Mitchell says, “biosignatures could reveal whether or not the origin of life itself and its evolution on Earth is just a happy accident or part of the fundamental nature of the universe, with all its biological and ecological complexities.”

Colonizing space with synthetic cells

While complex biological cells are not yet fully understood, synthetic cells allow biochemists, like Kate Adamala, University of Minnesota’s Protobiology Lab to deconstruct complex systems into simpler parts. Parts that allow scientists to understand the basic principles of life and evolution not only on Earth, but potentially life on other planets in the solar system.

Adamala launched her quest to build life from scratch as a graduate student at Harvard working with Nobel Laureate, Jack Szostak. She endeavors to create simple, cell-like bioreactors resembling the earliest forms of life by applying the principles of engineering to biology. During the AAAS, Adamala explained how synthetic cells allow scientists to study the past, present, and future of life in the universe. Unlike biological cells, it is possible to digitalize synthetic cells and transmit them across vast distances to create, for example, on demand medication or vaccines – an “Astro-pharmacy” that could potentially support life on spaceship, or even a future Martian colony. Until such time, synthetic cells offer practical applications for humanity in terms of sustainable energy systems, higher crop yields, and biomedical therapies.

What is life?

While there is not yet a comprehensive definition of life, the quest to discover its origins has inspired enthusiasm, new collaborations, and opened the doors within the scientific community’s most hallowed halls.

 

Special thanks to Carl Zimmer, a columnist for The New York Times and author of “Life’s Edge: The search for what it means to be alive” for moderating ETH Zurich’s Origins of Life discussion during the AAAS.

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Public Announcement

Embargoed until March 4th, 2023, 1 PM ET / 6 PM GMT / 19hrs CET

Origins Federation

Researchers from four leading institutions are pleased to announce their intent to create a research consortium with the goal of facilitating efficient multidisciplinary and innovative collaborative research to advance our understanding of the emergence and early evolution of life, and its place in the cosmos.

The following centers establish the Origins Federation:

• The Origins of Life Initiative (Harvard University),
• Centre for Origin and Prevalence of Life (ETH Zurich),
• Center for the Origins of Life (The University of Chicago),
• Leverhulme Centre for Life in the Universe (University of Cambridge).

The Origins Federation will pursue scientific research topics of interest to its founding centers with a long-term perspective and common milestones. It will strive to establish a stable funding platform to create opportunities for creative and innovative ideas, and to enable young scientists to make a career in this new field.

The Origins Federation is open to new members, both centers and individuals, and is committed to developing the mechanisms and structure to achieve that aim.

The Origins Federation inaugural science conference will take place at Harvard University on September 12 – 15, 2023.

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ARTICLE TITLE

Humanity’s quest to discover the origins of life in the universe

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

4-Mar-2023

New breakthrough enables perfectly secure digital communications

Reports and Proceedings

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

• Researchers have achieved a breakthrough to enable ‘perfectly secure’ hidden communications for the first time.
• The method uses new advances in information theory methods to conceal one piece of content inside another in a way that cannot be detected.
• This may have strong implications for information security, besides further applications in data compression and storage.

A group of researchers has achieved a breakthrough in secure communications by developing an algorithm that conceals sensitive information so effectively that it is impossible to detect that anything has been hidden.

The team, led by the University of Oxford in close collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, envisage that this method may soon be used widely in digital human communications, including social media and private messaging. In particular, the ability to send perfectly secure information may empower vulnerable groups, such as dissidents, investigative journalists, and humanitarian aid workers.

The algorithm applies to a setting called steganography: the practice of hiding sensitive information inside of innocuous content. Steganography differs from cryptography because the sensitive information is concealed in such a way that this obscures the fact that something has been hidden. An example could be hiding a Shakespeare poem inside an AI-generated image of a cat.

Despite having been studied for more than 25 years, existing steganography approaches generally have imperfect security, meaning that individuals who use these methods risk being detected. This is because previous steganography algorithms would subtly change the distribution of the innocuous content.

To overcome this, the research team used recent breakthroughs in information theory, specifically minimum entropy coupling, which allows one to join two distributions of data together such that their mutual information is maximised, but the individual distributions are preserved.

As a result, with the new algorithm, there is no statistical difference between the distribution of the innocuous content and the distribution of content that encodes sensitive information.

The algorithm was tested using several types of models that produce auto-generated content, such as GPT-2, an open-source language model, and WAVE-RNN, a text-to-speech converter. Besides being perfectly secure, the new algorithm showed up to 40% higher encoding efficiency than previous steganography methods across a variety of applications, enabling more information to be concealed within a given amount of data. This may make steganography an attractive method even if perfect security is not required, due to the benefits for data compression and storage.

The research team has filed a patent for the algorithm, but intend to issue it under a free licence to third parties for non-commercial responsible use. This includes academic and humanitarian use, and trusted third-party security audits. The researchers have published this work as a preprint paper on arXiv, as well as open-sourced an inefficient implementation of their method on Github. They will also present the new algorithm at the premier AI conference, the 2023 International Conference on Learning Representations in May.

AI-generated content is increasingly used in ordinary human communications, fuelled by products such as ChatGPT, Snapchat AI-stickers, and TikTok video filters. As a result, steganography may become more widespread as the mere presence of AI-generated content will cease to arouse suspicion.

Co-lead author Dr Christian Schroeder de Witt (Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford) said: ‘Our method can be applied to any software that automatically generates content, for instance probabilistic video filters, or meme generators. This could be very valuable, for instance, for journalists and aid workers in countries where the act of encryption is illegal. However, users still need to exercise precaution as any encryption technique may be vulnerable to side-channel attacks such as detecting a steganography app on the user’s phone.’

Co-lead author Samuel Sokota (Machine Learning Department, Carnegie Mellon University) said: ‘The main contribution of the work is showing a deep connection between a problem called minimum entropy coupling and perfectly secure steganography. By leveraging this connection, we introduce a new family of steganography algorithms that have perfect security guarantees.’

Contributing author Professor Jakob Foerster (Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford) said: ‘This paper is a great example of research into the foundations of machine learning that leads to breakthrough discoveries for crucial application areas. It's wonderful to see that Oxford, and our young lab in particular, is at the forefront of it all.’

Besides Dr Christian Schroeder de Witt, Samuel Sokota  and Professor Jakob Foerster, the study involved Prof. Zico Kolter at Carnegie Mellon University, USA, and Dr Martin Strohmeier from armasuisse Science+Technology, Switzerland. The work was partially funded by a EPSRC IAA Doctoral Impact fund hosted by Professor Philip Torr, Torr Vision Group, at the University of Oxford.

DOI

10.48550/arXiv.2210.14889 

The planet that could end life on Earth

Experiment demonstrates solar system’s fragility

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - RIVERSIDE

 

IMAGE: SOLAR SYSTEM MONTAGE OF THE NINE PLANETS AND MOONS OF JUPITER IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM. view more 

CREDIT: NASA/JPL/ASU

A terrestrial planet hovering between Mars and Jupiter would be able to push Earth out of the solar system and wipe out life on this planet, according to a UC Riverside experiment.

UCR astrophysicist Stephen Kane explained that his experiment was meant to address two notable gaps in planetary science. 

The first is the gap in our solar system between the size of terrestrial and giant gas planets. The largest terrestrial planet is Earth, and the smallest gas giant is Neptune, which is four times wider and 17 times more massive than Earth. There is nothing in between. 

“In other star systems there are many planets with masses in that gap. We call them super-Earths,” Kane said. 

The other gap is in location, relative to the sun, between Mars and Jupiter. “Planetary scientists often wish there was something in between those two planets. It seems like wasted real estate,” he said. 

These gaps could offer important insights into the architecture of our solar system, and into Earth’s evolution. To fill them in, Kane ran dynamic computer simulations of a planet between Mars and Jupiter with a range of different masses, and then observed the effects on the orbits of all other planets. 

The results, published in the Planetary Science Journal, were mostly disastrous for the solar system. “This fictional planet gives a nudge to Jupiter that is just enough to destabilize everything else,” Kane said. “Despite many astronomers having wished for this extra planet, it’s a good thing we don’t have it.”

Jupiter is much larger than all the other planets combined; its mass is 318 times that of Earth, so its gravitational influence is profound. If a super-Earth in our solar system, a passing star, or any other celestial object disturbed Jupiter even slightly, all other planets would be profoundly affected.

Depending on the mass and exact location of a super-Earth, its presence could ultimately eject Mercury and Venus as well as Earth from the solar system. It could also destabilize the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, tossing them into outer space as well. 

The super-Earth would change the shape of this Earth’s orbit, making it far less habitable than it is today, if not ending life entirely.

If Kane made the planet’s mass smaller and put it directly in between Mars and Jupiter, he saw it was possible for the planet to remain stable for a long period of time. But small moves in any direction and, “things would go poorly,” he said. 

The study has implications for the ability of planets in other solar systems to host life. Though Jupiter-like planets, gas giants far from their stars, are only found in about 10% of the time, their presence could decide whether neighboring Earths or super-Earths have stable orbits. 

These results gave Kane a renewed respect for the delicate order that holds the planets together around the sun. “Our solar system is more finely tuned than I appreciated before. It all works like intricate clock gears. Throw more gears into the mix and it all breaks,” Kane said. 

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JOURNAL

The Planetary Science Journal

DOI

10.3847/PSJ/acbb6b 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

ARTICLE TITLE

The Dynamical Consequences of a Super-Earth in the Solar System