FACT CHECK: Antifa was not created by former President Barack Obama and George Soros

Chelsey Cox
USA TODAY
3/27/2021

The claim: Obama and George Soros created antifa

Does anti-fascist movement antifa have ties to the federal government? A Facebook post referencing an alleged Justice Department investigation makes this claim.

The Feb. 4 post is a screenshot of an apparent article or blog entry titled "ANTIFA Leads Directly To Barack Obama."

Former Attorney General William Barr launched an investigation into antifa at the request of former President Donald Trump, according to the claim. Antifa – short for "anti-fascist" – is a political protest group without central leadership. Its members engage in counter-demonstrations at far-right wing events and protests, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

"ANTIFA is the creation of Barack Obama and George Soros," the claim states. "And it is even partially funded with taxpayer money, something that will be coming to a swift end."

USA TODAY reached out to the poster for comment.

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False claim of facial recognition of antifa members during U.S. Capitol riot
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Allegations that PepsiCo donated to antifa are false

Barr started an anti-government extremist task force

The Task Force on Violent Anti-Government Extremists was created to investigate perpetrators of violent acts amid peaceful protests in the wake of George Floyd's death, USA TODAY reported in June.

A memo about the task force released June 26 named the far-right wing "boogaloo" movement and antifa. At the time, members of antifa were not identified among the suspects, USA TODAY reported. The task force was referenced in a Sept. 4 press release about the arrest of two "Boogaloo Bois" for attempting to provide support to a foreign terrorist organization.

USA TODAY reached out to the Justice Department for an update on the task force.

Despite Barr's initiative, there is no evidence suggesting the Justice Department discovered an illicit connection between former President Barack Obama and philanthropist George Soros.
Claim has origins in satire

The screenshot in the Facebook post is of the headline and first paragraph of an article from Obamawatcher.com. The blog is a parody site that hosts satirical content, according to an "About us" page.

Obamawatcher's "Kraven Moorehead" wrote that Barr's lead investigator, Joseph Barron, found Soros recruited Obama to help create antifa in exchange for funding the former president's senatorial and presidential campaigns. Soros, a Hungarian businessman and investor, is a prolific donor to the Democratic Party, according to the BBC.

The writer admitted the story was a satirical fabrication at the end of the article.

"Billions of dollars were flowing into the coffers of ANTIFA, the 'grassroots' movement of liberals and leftists. The completely made-up scenario from the president and his supporters was finally coming together," he wrote. "While Trump hid out in the bunker, Barron concluded that the entire thing was much ado about nothing. It was just… Obama’s fault. That’s what he would tell him."

The Facebook claim's satirical origins were not noted on the screenshot or in the post caption.
Our rating: False

We rate this claim FALSE, based on our research. A Facebook post suggesting anti-fascist group antifa was created by former President Barack Obama and Democratic donor George Soros is derived from a work of satire. The article referenced in the claim is clearly labeled satire on its website of origin, but not in the Facebook post.

Our fact-check sources:

Anti-Defamation League, accessed March 23: "Who are Antifa?"
USA TODAY, June 26, 2020: "Attorney General Barr creates task force to investigate anti-government extremists"
Kerri Kupec June 26, 2020, tweet
BBC News, May 31, 2018: "Profile: Billionaire philanthropist George Soros"
Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Minnesota, Sept. 4, 2020: "Two Self-Described 'Boogaloo Bois' Charged With Attempting To Provide Material Support To Hamas"
Obamawatcher, accessed March 22: "Barr’s Investigation Of ANTIFA Leads Directly To Barack Obama"
Obamawatcher, accessed March 22: "About us"

Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here.

Our fact check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

Amy Coney Barrett’s Originalism as a Denial of the Moral Bond That Connects Us

By  Peter Gabel 

| October 19, 2020

Credit: Anthony Garand on Unsplash

Amy Coney Barrett will not openly base her decisions on the Affordable Care Act, or Roe v. Wade, or the right to gay marriage on whether she herself agrees with the policies behind these cases. Instead, she will purport to base her decisions on her “originalism,” the view that the actual words of Constitution must be interpreted according to the original intent of the so-called Founding Fathers in 1789.

Why? Because according to her and her mentor Antonin Scalia, the only proper democratic interpretation of that document requires “finding the intent” of those who agreed upon it when it was signed (or when the Amendments to it were signed into law). Every broadening of the document beyond this narrow construal of the written words themselves is characterized, according to Scalia and affirmed by Barrett, as undemocratic judicial activism imposed on the document by unelected judges.

I myself heard Scalia say in a videotaped speech to the Federalist Society that there is no way we can know what each other thinks and agrees to besides attributing an objective meaning to words that people state when they write them down: he believed there was no binding moral claim that we have upon each other that can shape constitutional interpretation beyond the special words written mainly in the 18th century.

This worldview means that we human beings today must determine our relations with each other according to what a group of mainly 20 and 30 year-old white men, mostly wealthy slaveholders, thought were good and acceptable social relations about 250 years ago. The worldview has both a psychoanalytic meaning, and a day-to-day bureaucratic meaning within legal reasoning.

The psychoanalytic meaning is that the worldview reflects a fetish for our “Founding Fathers,” whose thoughts had a mystical value and prescience that we lesser beings must follow today.

The bureaucratic meaning reflected in the work of Barrett and others is that the judge must engage in the quite prosaic task of discerning the so-called “objective public meaning” of a group of words penned in and around 1789 and applying that ancient meaning to interpreting the validity of laws and statutes today, as well as to the text of the Constitution itself.

This latter bureaucratic aspect is what will enable Judge Barrett both to strike down progressive legislation like the Affordable Care Act, and refuse to extend constitutional protection to rights and activities not explicitly named in the original document or its amendments (such as the right to abortion and gay marriage). As a kind of legal philologist who simply interprets words from long ago according to their original public meaning, Barrett can say, “this activity is not liberal or conservative and does not reflect my opinions about these matters—it is rather just a matter of interpreting a text the only way it can be interpreted in accordance with democracy.”

Note that there is an irony about this justification of originalism in terms of democracy: Barrett is willingly participating in the grabbing of a Supreme Court seat while a democratic election is actually taking place, in part to determine who has the right to select a Justice for that very seat. If the true meaning of democracy were really of primary concern to her, she would refuse to accept this seat under these anti-democratic circumstances and instead insist upon waiting for the democratic election result.

But in any case, why should we care AT ALL about what a group of mainly 20 and 30-year old white male property-owning, in some cases slaveholders would think—as if we could know that—about what we are doing in the present-day world? Huge upheavals in society and consciousness have occurred in the last 250 years, with magnificent social movements rising up to advance the political and moral understanding of man-and-womankind. The idea that we should discard the wisdom that we have gained across all of that historical time when we today determine the meaning of the Constitution and the validity of democratically-passed legislation is just absurd on its face…or ought to be. Why then does “originalism” seem to have staying power as if it were a “legitimate position” to be solemnly agreed with or disagreed with?

The answer to that question has to do with the psychoanalytic meaning of originalism, the attachment that we are trained to feel toward the Founding Fathers and their Original Intent. I wrote a longer piece about this subject when the Original Intent theory was first being strongly advocated in the early years of the Reagan Revolution. In my article in the Buffalo Law Review called “Founding Father Knows Best,” I showed the relationship between fetishism of the Founding Fathers Original Intent and the growing authoritarianism that began in the early 1980s and is still with us in newer forms today (https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/buffalolawreview/vol36/iss2/4/).

Please here read a briefer statement of the ideas in that article published in the Tikkun magazine piece I wrote under the same title on the selection of Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 (https://www.tikkun.org/the-trouble-with-brett-kavanaugh-founding-father-knows-best). The same points I made there apply, of course, to Amy Coney Barrett’s judicial philosophy, an ideology of unconscious deference to Authority that seeks to impose that deference on the whole of American society. It is that philosophy and its socio-psychological underpinnings that must be engaged with and firmly rejected by progressives trying to build a new and socially just world that thoroughly transcends the moral limitations of the 18th century.

While the 18th century world view reflected in the “original public meaning” of the Constitution did help to advance human consciousness by putting forward a vision of human community that affirmed and protected the liberty of the individual from overt group coercion through government action (with the horrific exception of slavery itself), that world view utterly lacked a commitment to fostering a world based upon empathy and compassion, based upon our deep connection and care for one another and for the Earth as well.

The great social movements of the last 250 years beginning with abolitionism and continuing through the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the LGBTQ movement, and the environmental movements have all carried within them an elevation of collective consciousness calling upon one another to truly see one another and fundamentally embrace each other’s common humanity as well as the sacredness of the natural world.

Contrary to the original meaning of the Constitution, these movements have not been fundamentally about extending individual liberty in an individualistic, monadic world, but rather about recognizing, affirming, and embracing each other’s humanity and our interrelatedness as social beings. It is the deeper social and spiritual awareness illuminated by these social movements that have elevated our collective moral consciousness since the Constitution was written, and it is this very elevated awareness that has been at the heart of the transformation of judicial interpretation of the Constitution, with judges responding to the demands of rising social justice movements to extend the meaning of existing Constitutional provisions like the First and Fourteenth Amendments far beyond long-surpassed original and outdated meanings. 

The constitutional validity of the pro-labor legislation of the New Deal, the legislation inspired by the demands for human equality emerging from the civil rights, women’s movements and LGBTQ movements, and the validity of social welfare legislation like Social Security, Medicare, and now the Affordable Care Act have all been manifestations of our sharing a greater collective wisdom about the moral bonds that unite us as social beings that were not in our collective awareness yet in 1789 and that has decisively influenced our subsequent interpretation of our culture’s foundational legal document.

In truth, this moral development of our collective consciousness is leading us toward the point where we must write a new Constitution or fundamentally transform the current one to place at its center not mere individual liberty in a world of the separated, but rather a new synthesis of individual liberty with caring for each other as moral partners in a sacred and socially-connected world.

The new emphasis on integrating spirituality, law, and social justice appearing in emerging new legal paradigms like Restorative Justice across the legal profession is a harbinger of this future rewriting of our Constitution, an expression of the growing awareness progressively dawning within us that “we the people” are “constituted” not as a mere collection of isolated individuals, but as a moral community founded upon love and mutual recognition and concern.

Until that future time comes when we can reconceive the Constitution altogether, we must embrace the liberal reinterpretations of the Constitution that judges like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, influenced by the transcendental aspect of the movements that have transformed the essence of our national community, have articulated in expanding the meaning of the existing Bill of Rights and the Civil War amendments among other legal doctrines. And we must decisively reject an “originalism” that denies the leaps forward in our common moral awareness that the great social movements of the last 250 years have bequeathed to us, movements of and within our common humanity that have been pointing us toward the Beloved Community that “we the people” must eventually become.


ABOUT PETER GABEL

Peter Gabel is editor-at-large of Tikkun. His most recent book, The Desire for Mutual Recognition: Social Movements and the Dissolution of the False Self (Routledge Press, 2018), was nominated for the Kirkus Prize as Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year.

AOC and Elizabeth Warren skillfully tear Amazon apart for its terrible tweets

Maybe it's time for Amazon to log off of Twitter.
IMAGE: SEAN GALLUP / GETTY IMAGES

BY RACHEL KRAUS

1 DAY AGO

Amazon's public relations Twitter account messed with the wrong lawmakers.

The account, @amazonnews, appears to be trying out a new PR strategy. Over the past few days, it has issued tweets denying labor abuses and (legal) tax dodging, in a tone that can only be described as.... sassy?

RE the whole pee bottle thing, Amazon got ratioed real hard by people tweeting responses with images, documents, and news reports of — what else — pee bottles. Some Amazon factory workers and delivery drivers say they have to resort to peeing in bottles because Amazon's productivity requirements don't give them enough time to go to the bathroom.

One of the people tweeting at Amazon was Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She quote-tweeted Amazon's blithe denial with a letter from an Amazon Logistics employee documenting the phenomenon.

Still apparently Mad and Online, the next day, Amazon actively riled another labor rights advocate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Warren tweeted about her plans to close tax loopholes that allow companies like Amazon to pay lower taxes. Amazon's Twitter account decided to go with a "we're just following the rules" defense.

Warren, of course, was not having it. She responded that Amazon pays buckets of money in lobbying fees to make sure the tax code is favorable to the company. A new report from Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group, says Amazon spends more on lobbying than any corporation in the U.S. besides Facebook (excluding trade groups and "consolidated corporate spenders" like Blue Cross Blue Shield).

The exchange is just another reminder to never pick a fight with Liz.

Maybe it's time to log off, Amazon?

WATCH: The rise of Big Tech monopolies from Microsoft to Google

U.S. police and media humanize mass shooter who killed 8 people
Maitreya Bhakal
CGTN
Opinion 18:00, 27-Mar-2021


A woman holding an anti-hate sign takes part in a candlelight vigil in standing up against Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) hate and violence at Almansor Park in Alhambra, California, the United States, March 20, 2021. /CFP

Editor's note: Maitreya Bhakal is an Indian commentator who writes about China, India, the U.S. and global issues. The article reflects the author's opinions, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

On March 22, 2021, 10 people died in a mass shooting in Boulder, a U.S. city once voted as the happiest in the country. Six days earlier, a white evangelical Christian shooter had killed 8 people in a terror attack in Atlanta, another U.S. city.

The news came as a shock to many but a surprise to exactly no one. The U.S. is a heavily crime-infested and drug-ridden nation, and gun violence is common. People frequently get killed on American streets – by gunmen both with and without a police badge. After a brief pause due to COVID-19 lockdowns (reluctantly enforced and barely followed), many were dreading the usual street violence and mass shootings that would signal the return of normalcy to America.

An epidemic of racism

What made the Atlanta attack unique was that six of the eight victims were women of Asian descent. It came when Asian Americans are being targeted across the nation in a soft riot catalyzed by U.S. propaganda – which falsely accuses China for the pandemic and thus for destroying Americans' lives. The U.S. blames China to divert attention from its own homicidal COVID-19 response. The New York Times called China the "incubator" of disease.

It worked. This gave birth to a new wave of anti-Asian violence, complementing America's existing history of Sinophobic racism. Barely a day goes by without at least one Asian American being assaulted.

The Atlanta gunman reportedly shouted "I want to kill all Asians" while committing the massacre. Seventy-three percent of U.S. respondents in a recent Pew Research survey had negative views of China, the highest in 15 years. In 16 of America's largest cities, overall hate crimes decreased by seven percent, but hate crimes targeting Asians increased by 150 percent.

One of us

U.S. policemen murder about 1,000 civilians a year – many of them from minority groups. Thus, they saw themselves in the Atlanta killer. He had more in common with the police than the victims.

People take part in a protest against Asian hate in New York, U.S., March 21, 2021. /Xinhua

Attempts to humanize the shooter and rationalize the shooting began almost immediately. The authorities' Pavlovian response was to try to grant the killer some moral character and legitimacy. The spokesperson for the local Sheriff's office acted as a spokesperson for the murderer too. The killer, he said, trying to explain his motives, "was pretty much fed up and, kind of, at the end of his rope. Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did."

Apparently, the killer wanted to "eliminate the temptation" of sex addiction by targeting spas and massage parlors. He denied racism as a motive, and the police took the killer for his word.

Many across the globe found a crime being chalked up to the criminal having "bad day" to be beneath contempt, even for America. The subsequent revelation that the spokesperson was a Sinophobe himself came as no surprise. He was after all a veteran, having spent 28 years in service (he has since been removed as a spokesperson on the case).

Killer propaganda

The U.S. media wasn't far behind. The New York Times, a newspaper that recently profiled a Nazi sympathizer in a way that many found a little too sympathetic, invited its readers on a tour of his Life and Times – something that they would probably never have done had the terrorist been Muslim or Black.

Readers were told the tale of the killer's childhood and how he was raised in Christian evangelical culture and how he suffered from sex addiction, which conflicted with his evangelical beliefs. It also told how many evangelicals "heard echoes of their own" in the terrorist's "struggle with sexual purity" and how he repeatedly sought treatment and was consumed with guilt and shame.

Others had their own agenda. Many outlets acknowledged the inter-sectional nature of the massacre, but only partially. They focused on racism and misogyny – while ignoring U.S. anti-Asian imperialism and their own Sinophobic COVID-19 coverage.

The murderer became a looking glass: everyone saw in him what they wanted to see. Some saw a misogynist. Some saw a white-supremacist and a racist. Some saw an evangelical sex addict.

And some just saw someone who was simply having a bad day.

The new normal – same as the old normal

America's recent surge of anti-Asian racism is unlikely to disappear soon. It will dovetail with the country's normal rampage of gun violence and mass murder. That same week witnessed seven mass shootings in seven days. Pandemic or no pandemic, it seems America is back to normal.

Suez Canal: Hilarious Memes Coming Out Of World Trade Concern

The maritime traffic jam at the Suez Canal is costing world trade a loss of Rs 2900 crore per hour.

Outlook Web Bureau 27 March 2021



A giant container ship remains stuck sideways in Egypt's Suez Canal, one of the world's busiest trade routes. The authorities are trying hard to free the ship and reopen traffic in the crucial waterway for global shipping.

The Ever Given, owned by Japanese firm Shoei Kisen KK, got wedged Tuesday in a single-lane stretch of the canal, about 6 kilometers north of the southern entrance, near the city of Suez. While the jam is costing world trade a loss of Rs 2900 crore per hour, the internet is in laughing tears over the incident and having its own meme fest.

The authorities said that tugboats and workers were deployed to dredge the banks and seafloor near the vessel's bow to try to get it afloat again. The maritime traffic jam outside the canal grew to 280 vessels on Saturday.

Hilarious memes using #SuezCanal are flooding social media sites. Here are some of our favourites from Twitter. Have a look (laugh):

 

Clearing of woody weeds in Baringo County, Kenya, may yield major livelihood benefits

A new study suggests that clearing the invasive woody weed Prosopis julifora and grassland restoration in Baringo County, Kenya, may have significant financial benefits for local stakeholders and contribute to climate change mitigation.

CABI

Research News

IMAGE: CLEARING PROSOPIS JULIFLORA, ALONG WITH GRASSLAND RESTORATION, CAN HAVE POSITIVE BENEFITS INCLUDING CLIMATE CHANGE MITIGATION AND PROTECTION OF LIVELIHOODS FOR PASTORALISTS view more 

CREDIT: CABI

A new study suggests that clearing the invasive woody weed Prosopis julifora and grassland restoration in Baringo County, Kenya, may have significant financial benefits for local stakeholders and contribute to climate change mitigation.

Climate change, land degradation, and invasive alien species (IAS) such as Prosopis julifora are major threats to people's livelihoods in arid and semi-arid areas with each of these having negative impacts on ecosystem services - including vegetation biomass, which is a prime resource for pastoralists and agro-pastoralists.

The team, comprising PhD students and established scientists from four countries and different disciplinary backgrounds, developed land use scenarios and assess what the implications of Prosopis management and grassland restoration are for soil carbon accumulation and local communities.

The scientists studied the impacts of Prosopis invasion and grassland degradation on soil organic carbon (SOC) in nine sublocations in Baringo County where it was introduced in the 1980s and promoted by the Kenyan government to provide wind breaks, a source of timber, fuelwood and charcoal.

The study combined data collected by several PhD students of the Woody Weeds project, such as socio-economic data to determine the size of the budget available for Prosopis management (Bekele et al. 2018) and the financial benefits of making charcoal from removed trees, soil measurements to assess changes in SOC following Prosopis removal (Mbaabu et al. 2020) and establishment of grassland. The data were linked to spatially-explicit land cover and land use maps derived from satellite data (Mbaabu et al. 2019). Then, spatially explicit Invasive Alien Species (IAS) management and restoration scenarios were generated.

Dr René Eschen, an ecologist working for CABI in Switzerland and lead author of the paper, said, "While Prosopis does provide these benefits, it has also spread rapidly across a large area, leading to a loss of native vegetation, agricultural areas and grazing land. These changes are primarily driven by Prosopis invasion, along with human activities like deforestation, land clearing, overgrazing, and climate change.

"Our results show that the one-off budget based on the average willingness to pay expressed by inhabitants of Baringo would suffice to manage a considerable area of Prosopis in Baringo in a single year, and that the conversion of invaded areas into grassland would provide significant financial benefits. A sustained effort over several years might enable sustainable management of a large part of the areas invaded with Prosopis in most sublocations.

"The results also indicate what generates the financial benefit and which areas could be prioritized for treatment. Although Prosopis management is expensive, the results suggest that a large part of the costs in Baringo can be offset by immediate financial benefits from the sale of charcoal. This is important, because the affected communities have limited human and financial resources for environmental management."

The researchers also argue that there are financial and immaterial benefits of restoring grasslands that may re-establish within 30 years if they are not overgrazed. They say that part of the benefits could, in fact, be realized within less than 10 years with only the full accumulation of SOC needing three decades.

Dr Sandra Eckert, remote sensing specialist of the Centre for Development and Environment, University of Bern, Switzerland, said, "Grasslands provide non-monetary benefits, including cultural and regulating services including the regulation of climate, floods and erosion. However, the likelihood of grasses establishing depends on suitable climatic conditions and grazing management.

"With climate change and the associated higher variability of the beginning and duration of the various seasons, grass is considered a more secure crop compared to local staple crops like maize or beans; particularly perennial grass species require less rain for completion of a cropping cycle. Growing grass for seed production is widespread in some of the sublocations, and farmers can also sell the hay."

"Spatial and integrative management scenarios should be used more extensively to support land management decisions, especially where natural as well as financial resources are scarce and where the costs and benefits of managing IAS are unequally distributed among local stakeholders."

This study of Prosopis in Baringo County shows that relatively small investment in IAS clearing and restoration of degraded grassland in Eastern Africa may result in significant benefits for local communities managing the land that will support traditional livelihoods and increase SOC in the long term.

Dr Charles Kilawe, an ecologist from Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania, said that the benefits realized from the management of Prosopis juliflora revealed by this study should not be used to promote the introduction of the species to new areas, as this would likely cause serious negative environmental and livelihood impacts.

Dr Eschen concluded, "Addressing climate change and land degradation are major issues that affect livelihoods of many people and that require targeted use of scarce financial resources. This study describes IAS management scenarios using a novel spatial and integrated approach using various detailed data about IAS distribution and density, management costs, financial benefits and land use history.

"Integrating and linking such data may be particularly useful to develop accurate and realistic IAS management scenarios that can be used to illustrate costs and benefits of management interventions, where they are most needed and most cost-effective, and thus help stakeholders select the most appropriate and feasible approach that suits their needs

CAPTION

The benefits of clearing Prosopis julifora and grassland restoration in Baringo County, Kenya

CREDIT

Journal of Applied Ecology

Additional information

Full paper reference

René Eschen, Ketema Bekele, Purity Rima Mbaabu, Charles Kilawe and Sandra Eckert, 'Prosopis juliflora (Sw.) DC. management and grassland restoration in Baringo County, Kenya: Opportunities for soil carbon sequestration and local Livelihoods,' 29 March 2021, Journal of Applied Ecology, DOI: 10.1111/1365-2664.13854

This paper can be viewed open access here:
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.13854

 

Researchers discover why cold induces tooth pain and hypersensitivity -- and how to stop it

Odontoblasts, the cells that form a tooth's dentin, have a newly discovered function: Sensing cold, which can trigger pain in teeth; but scientists have also found a way to block the pathway to cold-sensitive teeth

MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL

Research News

 

IMAGE: THIS ARTIST'S ILLUSTRATION DEPICTS HOW, CENTURIES AGO, PEOPLE BELIEVED THAT SMALL WORMS LIVING WITHIN THE TOOTH CAUSED EXCRUCIATING PAIN VIA THEIR COLD BREATH. PROOF OF TOOTH WORMS CAME WHEN AN... view more 

CREDIT: COPYRIGHT KATHARINA ZIMMERMANN, MD, PHD

BOSTON -- Researchers report in Science Advances that they have uncovered a new function for odontoblasts, the cells that form dentin, the shell beneath the tooth's enamel that encases the soft dental pulp containing nerves and blood vessels. "We found that odontoblasts, which support the shape of the tooth, are also responsible for sensing cold," says pathologist Jochen Lennerz, MD, PhD, one of the paper's senior authors and medical director of the Center for Integrated Diagnostics at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). "This research contributes a new function to this cell, which is exciting from a basic-science standpoint. But we now also know how to interfere with this cold-sensing function to inhibit dental pain."

Teeth that hurt from exposure to cold can occur for many reasons. Many people have experienced intense pain from cold when they have a hole in a tooth from an untreated cavity, for example. But teeth can also become very sensitive to cold from gum erosion due to aging. Some cancer patients treated with platinum-based chemotherapies have extreme cold sensitivity all over their bodies. "A breeze on the face registers as extreme pain in the teeth, which may even cause some patients to stop therapy," says Lennerz.

Tooth pain has been notoriously difficult to study. A tooth's hardness makes it a challenging tissue to study and inducing tooth pain in humans requires opening the tooth. The team of researchers, therefore, conducted experiments on mice whose molars were drilled under anesthesia. Mice with dental injuries manifest pain with their behavior; they drink up to 300% more sugar water than their litter mates without dental injuries, for example. In previous research, the team of investigators had discovered TRCP5, a protein encoded by the TRCP5 gene that is expressed in nerves in many parts of the body. Their earlier discovery allowed the researchers to zero in on TRCP5 as a mediator of pain from cold.

By studying genetically altered mice that did not have the TRCP5 gene, the researchers found that the mice with injured teeth did not manifest the increased drinking behavior and behaved like mice without dental injuries.

"We now have definitive proof that the temperature sensor TRCP5 transmits cold via the odontoblast and triggers nerves to fire, creating pain and cold hypersensitivity," says Lennerz. "This cold sensitivity may be the body's way to protect a damaged tooth from additional injury."

Specifically, in response to cold, the TRCP5 protein opens channels in the membrane of odontoblasts, enabling other molecules, such as calcium, to enter and interact with the cell. If the tooth's pulp is inflamed from a deep cavity, for example, TRCP5 is overabundant, causing increased electrical signaling via the nerves emerging from the root of the tooth and running to the brain, where pain is perceived. When gums recede from aging, teeth can become hypersensitive because the odontoblasts are sensing cold in a newly exposed region of the tooth. "Most cells and tissues slow their metabolism in the presence of cold, which is why donor organs are put on ice," says Lennerz. "But TRPC5 makes cells more active in cold, and the odontoblasts' ability to sense cold via TRPC5 makes this discovery so exciting."

Lennerz confirmed the presence of the TRPCS protein in extracted human teeth, which was a technical tour de force. "Our teeth aren't meant to be cut into ultra-thin layers so they can be studied under the microscope," says Lennerz, who first had to decalcify the teeth and put them in epoxy resin before slicing them and identifying the TRPC5 channels in the odontoblasts.

The research team also identified a pharmacological target for minimizing tooth sensitivity to cold. For centuries, oil of cloves has been used as a remedy for tooth pain. The active agent in oil of cloves is eugenol, which happens to block TRCP5. Toothpastes containing eugenol are already on the market, but the findings of this study may lead to more potent applications to treat teeth that are hypersensitive to cold. And there may be novel applications for eugenol, such as treating patients systemically for extreme cold sensitivity from chemotherapy. "I'm excited to see how other researchers will apply our findings," says Lennerz.

###

Major funding for this research comes from the German Research Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Katharina Zimmermann, MD, PhD, is the study's principal investigator and Heisenberg Professor, physiologist and head of the Nociception and Thermosensation Research Group at the Department of Anesthesiology of Friedrich-Alexander University (FAU) in Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. Lennerz is associate professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School (HMS). Co-senior author David Clapham, MD, PhD, is vice president and chief scientific officer at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and professor of Cardiovascular Research and professor emeritus of Neurobiology at HMS. Co-first author Laura Bernal, PhD, is a doctoral student in the Zimmermann Laboratory and in the Department of Systems Biology, University of Alcalá, Madrid.

About the Massachusetts General Hospital

Massachusetts General Hospital, founded in 1811, is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. The Mass General Research Institute conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the nation, with annual research operations of more than $1 billion and comprises more than 9,500 researchers working across more than 30 institutes, centers and departments. In August 2020, Mass General was named #6 in the U.S. News & World Report list of "America's Best Hospitals."

 

Leveraging the 5G network to wirelessly power IoT devices

Rotman lens-based 'rectenna' capable of millimeter-wave harvesting at 28-GHz with high efficiency from all directions for first time

GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Research News

VIDEO: RESEARCHERS AT GEORGIA TECH'S ATHENA LAB DISCUSS AN INNOVATIVE WAY TO TAP INTO THE OVER-CAPACITY OF 5G NETWORKS, TURNING THEM INTO "A WIRELESS POWER GRID " FOR POWERING INTERNET OF THINGS... view more 

CREDIT: CHRISTOPHER MOORE

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have uncovered an innovative way to tap into the over-capacity of 5G networks, turning them into "a wireless power grid" for powering Internet of Things (IoT) devices that today need batteries to operate.

The Georgia Tech inventors have developed a flexible Rotman lens-based rectifying antenna (rectenna) system capable, for the first time, of millimeter-wave harvesting in the 28-GHz band. (The Rotman lens is key for beamforming networks and is frequently used in radar surveillance systems to see targets in multiple directions without physically moving the antenna system.)

But to harvest enough power to supply low-power devices at long ranges, large aperture antennas are required. The problem with large antennas is they have a narrowing field of view. This limitation prevents their operation if the antenna is widely dispersed from a 5G base station.

"We've solved the problem of only being able to look from one direction with a system that has a wide angle of coverage," said senior researcher Aline Eid in the ATHENA lab, established in Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering to advance and develop novel technologies for electromagnetic, wireless, RF, millimeter-wave, and sub-terahertz applications.

The findings were reported in the Jan.12 issue of the journal Scientific Reports.

The FCC has authorized 5G to focalize power much more densely compared with previous generations of cellular networks. While today's 5G was built for high-bandwidth communication, the high-frequency network holds rich opportunity to "harvest" unused power that would otherwise be wasted.

CAPTION

A Georgia Tech ATHENA group member holds an inkjet-printed prototype of a mm-wave harvester. The researchers envision a future where IoT devices will be powered wirelessly over 5G networks.

CREDIT

Christopher Moore, Georgia Tech

Tapping Into 5G High-frequency Power

"With this innovation, we can have a large antenna, which works at higher frequencies and can receive power from any direction. It's direction-agnostic, which makes it a lot more practical," noted Jimmy Hester, senior lab advisor and the CTO and co-founder of Atheraxon, a Georgia Tech spinoff developing 5G radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology.

With the Georgia Tech solution, all the electromagnetic energy collected by the antenna arrays from one direction is combined and fed into a single rectifier, which maximizes its efficiency.

"People have attempted to do energy harvesting at high frequencies like 24 or 35 Gigahertz before," Eid said, but such antennas only worked if they had line of sight to the 5G base station; there was no way to increase their angle of coverage until now.

Operating just like an optical lens, the Rotman lens provides six fields of view simultaneously in a pattern shaped like a spider. Tuning the shape of the lens results in a structure with one angle of curvature on the beam-port side and another on the antenna side. This enables the structure to map a set of selected radiation directions to an associated set of beam-ports. The lens is then used as an intermediate component between the receiving antennas and the rectifiers for 5G energy harvesting.

This novel approach addresses the tradeoff between rectenna angular coverage and turn-on sensitivity with a structure that merges unique radio frequency (RF) and direct current (DC) combination techniques, thereby enabling a system with both high gain and large beamwidth.

In demonstrations, Georgia Tech's technology achieved a 21-fold increase in harvested power compared with a referenced counterpart, while maintaining identical angular coverage.

This robust system may open the door for new passive, long-range, mm-wave 5G-powered RFID for wearable and ubiquitous IoT applications. The researchers used inhouse additive manufacturing to print the palm-sized mm-wave harvesters on a multitude of everyday flexible and rigid substrates. Providing 3D and inkjet printing options will make the system more affordable and accessible to a broad range of users, platforms, frequencies, and applications.

Replacing Batteries With Over-the-air Charging

"The fact is 5G is going to be everywhere, especially in urban areas. You can replace millions, or tens of millions, of batteries of wireless sensors, especially for smart city and smart agricultural applications," said Emmanouil (Manos) Tentzeris, Ken Byers Professor in Flexible Electronics in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Tentzeris predicts that power as a service will be the next big application for the telecom industry, just as data overtook voice services as a major revenue producer.

The research team is most excited by the prospect of service providers embracing this technology to offer power on demand "over the air," eliminating the need for batteries.

"I've been working on energy harvesting conventionally for at least six years, and for most of this time it didn't seem like there was a key to make energy harvesting work in the real world, because of FCC limits on power emission and focalization," Hester said. "With the advent of 5G networks, this could actually work and we've demonstrated it. That's extremely exciting -- we could get rid of batteries."

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This work was supported by the Air Force Research Laboratory and the National Science Foundation (NSF) - Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation program. The work was performed in part at the Georgia Tech Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology, a member of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI), which is supported by the NSF (Grant ECCS-1542174).

 

Should you take fish oil? Depends on your genotype

UGA-led research shows benefits only with a specific genetic makeup

UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA

Research News

Fish oil supplements are a billion-dollar industry built on a foundation of purported, but not proven, health benefits. Now, new research from a team led by a University of Georgia scientist indicates that taking fish oil only provides health benefits if you have the right genetic makeup.

The study, led by Kaixiong Ye and published in PLOS Genetics, focused on fish oil (and the omega-3 fatty acids it contains) and its effect on triglycerides, a type of fat in the blood and a biomarker for cardiovascular disease.

"We've known for a few decades that a higher level of omega-3 fatty acids in the blood is associated with a lower risk of heart disease," said Ye, assistant professor of genetics in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. "What we found is that fish oil supplementation is not good for everyone; it depends on your genotype. If you have a specific genetic background, then fish oil supplementation will help lower your triglycerides. But if you do not have that right genotype, taking a fish oil supplement actually increases your triglycerides."

Ye's team, including first author and graduate student Michael Francis, examined four blood lipids (fats)--high-density lipoprotein, low-density lipoprotein, total cholesterol and triglycerides--that are biomarkers for cardiovascular disease. The data for their sample of 70,000 individuals was taken from UK Biobank, a large-scale cohort study collecting genetic and health information from half a million participants.

The team divided the sample into two groups, those taking fish oil supplements (about 11,000) and those not taking fish oil supplements. Then they performed a genome-wide scan for each group, testing for 8 million genetic variants to compare. After running over 64 million tests, their results revealed a significant genetic variant at gene GJB2. Individuals with the AG genotype who took fish oil decreased their triglycerides. Individuals with the AA genotype who took fish oil slightly increased their triglycerides. (A third possible genotype, GG, was not evident in enough study volunteers to draw conclusions.)

Determining your genotype is not as far-fetched as it sounds, thanks to direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies. Companies may not report that specific genetic variant yet, but a tech-savvy consumer should be able to download the raw data and look at the specific position to discover the genotype, according to Ye. The ID for the variant is rs112803755 (A>G).

Looking at earlier fish oil studies

The study's findings may also shed light on previous trials, most of which found that fish oil provides no benefit in preventing cardiovascular disease.

"One possible explanation is that those clinical trials didn't consider the genotypes of the participants," Ye said. "Some participants may benefit, and some may not, so if you mix them together and do the analysis, you do not see the impact."

Now that Ye has identified a specific gene that can modify an individual's response to fish oil supplementation, his next step will be directly testing the effects of fish oil on cardiovascular disease.

"Personalizing and optimizing fish oil supplementation recommendations based on a person's unique genetic composition can improve our understanding of nutrition," he said, "and lead to significant improvements in human health and well-being."

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Co-authors for the study include Yitang Sun and Jingqi Zhou at the University of Georgia; Changwei Li and Xiang Li at Tulane University; and J. Thomas Brenna at Cornell University and the University of Texas at Austin.

 

Global evidence for how EdTech can support pupils with disabilities is 'thinly spread'

Report reveals 'astonishing' shortage of information about how rapid advances in educational technology could help pupils with disabilities in low and middle-income countries

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

Research News

 

An 'astonishing' deficit of data about how the global boom in educational technology could help pupils with disabilities in low and middle-income countries has been highlighted in a new report.

Despite widespread optimism that educational technology, or 'EdTech', can help to level the playing field for young people with disabilities, the study found a significant shortage of evidence about which innovations are best-positioned to help which children, and why; specifically in low-income contexts.

The review also found that many teachers lack training on how to use new technology, or are reluctant to do so.

The study was carried out for the EdTech Hub partnership, by researchers from the Universities of Cambridge, Glasgow and York. They conducted a detailed search for publications reporting trials or evaluations about how EdTech is being used to help primary school-age children with disabilities in low- and middle-income countries. Despite screening 20,000 documents, they found just 51 relevant papers from the past 14 years - few of which assessed any impact on children's learning outcomes.

Their report describes the paucity of evidence as 'astonishing', given the importance of educational technologies to support the learning of children with disabilities. According to the Inclusive Education Initiative, as many as half the estimated 65 million school-age children with disabilities worldwide were out of school even before the COVID-19 pandemic, and most face ongoing, significant barriers to attending or participating in education.

EdTech is widely seen as having the potential to reverse this trend, and numerous devices have been developed to support the education of young people with disabilities. The study itself identifies a kaleidoscopic range of devices to support low vision, sign language programmes, mobile apps which teach braille, and computer screen readers.

It also suggests, however, that there have been very few systematic attempts to test the effectiveness of these devices. Dr Paul Lynch, from the School of Education, University of Glasgow, said: "The evidence for EdTech's potential to support learners with disabilities is worryingly thin. Even though we commonly hear of interesting innovations taking place across the globe, these are not being rigorously evaluated or documented."

Professor Nidhi Singal, from the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, said: "There is an urgent need to know which technology works best for children with disabilities, where, and in response to which specific needs. The lack of evidence is a serious problem if we want EdTech to fulfil its potential to improve children's access to learning, and to increase their independence and agency as they progress through school."

The report identifies numerous 'glaring omissions' in the evaluations that researchers did manage to uncover. Around half were for devices designed to support children with hearing or vision difficulties; hardly any addressed the learning needs of children with autism, dyslexia, or physical disabilities. Most were from trials in Asia or Africa, while South America was underrepresented.

Much of the evidence also concerned EdTech projects which Dr Gill Francis, from the University of York and a co-author, described as 'in their infancy'. Most focused on whether children liked the tools, or found them easy to use, rather than whether they actually improved curriculum delivery, learner participation and outcomes. Attention was also rarely given to whether the devices could be scaled up - for example, in remote and rural areas where resources such as electricity are often lacking. Few studies appeared to have taken into account the views or experiences of parents or carers, or of learners themselves.

The studies reviewed also suggest that many teachers lack experience with educational technology. For example, one study in Nigeria found that teachers lacked experience of assistive technologies for students with a range of disabilities. Another, undertaken at 10 schools for the blind in Delhi, found that the uptake of modern low-vision devices was extremely limited, because teachers were unaware of their benefits.

Despite the shortage of information overall, the study did uncover some clear evidence about how technology - particularly portable devices - is transforming opportunities for children with disabilities. Deaf and hard-of-hearing pupils, for instance, are increasingly using SMS and social media to access information about lessons and communicate with peers; while visually-impaired pupils have been able to use tablet computers, in particular, to magnify and read learning materials.

Based on this, the report recommends that efforts to support children with disabilities in low- and middle-income countries should focus on the provision of mobile and portable devices, and that strategies should be put in place to ensure that these are sustainable and affordable for parents and schools - as cost was another concern that emerged from the studies cited.

Critically, however, the report states that more structured evidence-gathering is urgently needed to ensure EdTech meets the UN's stated goal to 'ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning for all'. The authors suggest that there is a need to adopt more robust research designs, which should address a full range of disabilities, and involve pupils, carers and teachers in the process.

"There is no one-size-fits-all solution when working with children with disabilities," Singal added. "That is why the current lack of substantive evidence is such a concern. It needs to be addressed so that teachers, parents and learners are enabled to make informed judgements about which technological interventions work, and what might work best for them."

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