Virginia Tech researchers address the grand challenges of pandemic prediction and prevention

Grant and Award Announcement

VIRGINIA TECH

 

IMAGE: PREDICTIVE INTELLIGENCE FOR PANDEMIC PREVENTION GRANT TEAM MEMBERS (FROM LEFT) INCLUDE X.J. MENG, NEETI GANDHI, T.M. MURALI, BLESSY ANTONY, PADMA RAJAGOPALAN, ANDREW CHAN, SARAH GOUGER, LISA M. LEE, AND JIE BU. NOT PICTURED ARE SANKET DESHMUKH, KATHY HOSIG, LAURA HUNGERFORD, ANUJ KARPATNE, PAUL SKOLNIK, JAMES WEGER-LUCARELLI, KRISTINA JILES, CHARLIE PLATE, NURE TASNINA, AND KATIE TILLER. view more 

CREDIT: VIRGINIA TECH

Complex, ill-structured, and thorny challenges require a convergence of expertise to advance beyond disciplinary boundaries and develop new frameworks for problem-solving.

One such challenge continues to loom large on the global stage: SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

While COVID-19 is only one among many zoonotic viral diseases (those transmissible between animals and humans), its spread to pandemic proportions has highlighted important scientific, societal, and ethical aspects that require consideration for the successful prediction and prevention of further pandemics.

T.M. Murali, a professor in the Department of Computer Science, along with several colleagues from across Virginia Tech, has received a $1 million National Science Foundation grant to tackle grand challenges in the prediction and prevention of infectious disease pandemics. The award comes from the Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention (PIPP) program, which provides an opportunity for multidisciplinary teams to work across scientific and other disciplinary divides to implement an effective approach to pandemic predictive intelligence.

Murali, principal investigator in the grant, and the research team use the convergent power of their expertise to identify expedient, efficient, cost-effective options for the prevention and containment of zoonotic viruses.

“Virginia Tech is a great place to do this research,” said Murali. “It is challenging and exciting and all of the researchers are eager to work together to see how they can contribute value.”

X.J. Meng, co-principal investigator, University Distinguished Professor of Molecular Virology at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine and professor of internal medicine at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, said the university is well positioned to meet this challenge, citing the interdisciplinary and collaborative research taking place in the Center for Emerging, Zoonotic, and Arthropod-borne Pathogens (CeZAP), one of the four core centers within the Fralin Life Sciences Institute.

“With the establishment of CeZAP in 2020, and now with this PIPP Phase I center award on pandemic prevention led by Dr. Murali, Virginia Tech is on an upward trajectory to become a leader in infectious disease research and pandemic prevention,” said Meng.

Over the next 18 months, this team of experts will be scaling up coordination and mapping convergence opportunities to build the research capacity that will make Virginia Tech highly competitive for a national-level center. With the goal of predicting and preventing future pandemics using novel approaches to research and transdisciplinary problem-solving, the team will use its professional and technical expertise to develop a common discourse and shared research agenda across three cross-cutting themes. The work conducted in each theme will inform and be informed by the discoveries in the other themes.

Theme 1: Computational prediction of viral adaptation to human cells

James Weger-Lucarelli, an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology in the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, and Anuj Karpatne, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, will lend their expertise to developing computational and experimental methods to analyze the genomic sequences of viruses that currently infect animals. Determining how those viruses evolve in order to cross species barriers will lead to the development of predictive, science-guided machine learning models necessary for the effective development of interventions.

Critical to the development of these predictive models of zoonotic viral behaviors is work conducted by Padma Rajagopalan, the Robert E. Hord, Jr. professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and the program director for the interdisciplinary graduate program on Computational Tissue Engineering.  Rajagopalan shares her expertise in 3D tissues, also known as organoids. “These organoids are lab-assembled and comprise almost all the cells found in a specific tissue,” she said. “We need these kind of tissues because they are the closest we can get before doing animal testing. Because they are 3D in nature, they can provide knowledge and insight as to what happens inside the body.”

Theme 2: Rapid repurposing and redesign of drugs to prevent viral replication

Determining the evolutionary behaviors of viruses that move between animal and human hosts and their subsequent actions on tissues provides foundational data to support the identification, repurposing, and redesign of existing drugs that may be used in the prevention and replication of zoonotic viruses.

Sanket Deshmukh, an associate professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering; Laura Hungerford, professor of veterinary public health and epidemiology and the department head for the Department of Population Health Sciences in the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine; and Paul R. Skolnik, infectious disease physician and professor at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, all contribute their expertise to explore the appropriateness of existing drug compounds, chemistry, design, and effectiveness to prevent viruses from evolving and/or replicating. 

Theme 3: Community-informed research

Despite the successful development and approval of multiple effective vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, the adoption of new pharmaceutical interventions has proven to be a barrier.

Specifically in the United States, societal resistance to vaccination has considerably hindered the ability of public health agencies to curb infections. Murali believes that one of the distinctive factors setting Virginia Tech’s proposal apart from its peers was the deep integration of community engagement.

“What we realized in the COVID-19 pandemic is that health professionals have to build trust with the community and scientists need to be informed about what the concerns are,” said Murali. As such, the investigators will engage with the community at large to develop an understanding of societal and ethical concerns of the research.

For Kathy Hosig, an associate professor in the Department of Population Health Sciences and director of the Virginia Tech Center for Public Health Practice and Research, this work is vitally important to public health, particularly for alleviating health inequities. “Bringing transdisciplinary teams together to tackle public health issues such as pandemic prediction and prevention will build capacity for both researchers and communities to efficiently and effectively address current and future health threats,” she said.

Murali; Hosig;h Lisa Lee, a research professor in the Department of Population Health Sciences, associate vice president for research and innovation, and director of the Division of Scholarly Integrity and Research Compliance; and Kristina Jiles, research assistant professor and public health extension specialist in the Center for Public Health Practice and Research, will lead community engagement studios between researchers and group members. The studios provide an atmosphere where researchers can describe their project in lay terms to patients, community members, and health care professionals with trained facilitators to moderate the discussion. The studios will launch later this fall or during the spring 2023 semester.

The success of interdisciplinary research programs and centers at Virginia Tech is evidence of the university’s commitment to becoming a global leader for the improvement of the quality of life and the human condition by inspiring and empowering people to learn, innovate, and serve beyond boundaries. Hosig credits this success to the passionate researchers, such as Murali, who are committed to transdisciplinary research and rigorous training for students to tackle sticky issues. She also acknowledges the Virginia Tech Graduate School and its support and flexibility to establish creative graduate certificates and to develop new strategies for training graduate students.

Vaginal immune activity increases after first-time intercourse

A study suggests the immune system in the vagina becomes more active after young women start having intercourse, which may increase or decrease sexually transmitted infection risk.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

ELIFE

The changes detected may have important implications for sexually transmitted infection (STI) risk. But the authors do not yet know if the changes increase or decrease the risk of acquiring an STI. 

Girls and young women between the ages of 15 and 24 have a higher risk of acquiring an STI than older women. However, it has not been determined if riskier behavioural choices or physiological factors may explain the increased risk. 

“We measured immune changes in young women before and after initiating sex to determine if immune changes may play a role in increased STI vulnerability,” says lead author Sean Hughes, a research scientist in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, US.

Hughes and colleagues compared vaginal samples collected from 95 adolescent women in Kenya before or after they began having sexual intercourse. They found a sharp increase in proteins that control the immune response, including IL-1β, IL-2, and CXCL8, during the first year after the participants became sexually active. These changes were confirmed to not be due to pregnancy or having an STI.

The team reviewed data collected in two other studies to verify the result. One included 93 young women in Belgium, and another included 19 participants in the US. The combined data from those two studies also showed elevated levels of immune-controlling proteins, including IL-1β, IL-2, and CXCL8, after participants became sexually active. 

“The initiation of sexual activity was associated with higher levels of immune mediators, but we don’t know for sure if the start of sexual activity caused the changes,” says co-senior Florian Hladik, professor in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, Seattle, Washington. “Other factors associated with the timing of sex initiation, such as socioeconomic status, could have contributed to immune system changes.”

The consequences of this immune activation are also not clear. The immune changes detected in the study may help boost fertility or may be a protective defence against sexually transmitted infections. If it is an attempt at defence, it may inadvertently increase young women’s vulnerability to HIV infection by recruiting the CD4 T immune cells targeted by the virus to the vagina. More studies are needed to confirm the connection between the start of sexual activity and these immune changes and understand their consequences for young women’s sexual health. 

“More research on the immune changes associated with the initiation of sexual activity may help us understand the elevated STI risk in young women,” says co-senior author Alison Roxby, Associate Professor of Infectious Disease and Global Health at the University of Washington School of Medicine. “It may also help us identify new ways to prevent STIs in this vulnerable population.” 

 

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About eLife

eLife transforms research communication to create a future where a diverse, global community of scientists and researchers produces open and trusted results for the benefit of all. Independent, not-for-profit and supported by funders, we improve the way science is practised and shared. From the research we publish, to the tools we build, to the people we work with, we’ve earned a reputation for quality, integrity and the flexibility to bring about real change. eLife receives financial support and strategic guidance from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the Max Planck Society and Wellcome. Learn more at https://elifesciences.org/about.

To read the latest Immunology & Inflammation research published in eLife, visit https://elifesciences.org/subjects/immunology-inflammation.

And for the latest in Medicine, see https://elifesciences.org/subjects/medicine.

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JOURNAL

eLife

DOI

10.7554/eLife.78565 

ARTICLE TITLE

Starting to have sexual intercourse is associated with increases in cervicovaginal immune mediators in young women: a prospective study and meta-analysis

Predicting mortality risks using smartphones

Peer-Reviewed Publication

CARL R. WOESE INSTITUTE FOR GENOMIC BIOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN

 

IMAGE: MEASURING HEALTH WITH A CARRIED SMARTPHONE, USING THE CHARACTERISTIC MOTION OF A HUMAN BODY THAT HAS BEEN COMPUTED FROM A PHONE SENSOR view more 

CREDIT: QIAN CHENG

Healthcare professionals have long recognized the association of physical activity with mortality risk—those who engage in more moderate-to-vigorous activity have lower mortality rates. In a new study, researchers across the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have shown that smartphones suffice to monitor people’s walking activity. They used sensor data from 100,000 participants to construct models of health status and mortality risk.

Measuring physical activity usually falls into three categories: self-reported questionnaires, walking a fixed distance under timed observation, and wearing activity monitors. The first two focus on quality of movement instead of quantity. However, sensor-based methods are the most advantageous because they measure physical activity during daily living. Unfortunately, access to such wearable sensors is limited due to health inequities.  

To circumvent this problem, the researchers turned to smartphones. According to the Pew Research Center, 97% of the US population own a cell phone, and 83% possess a smartphone that contains motion sensors. Since mobile phones are often carried while walking, they could be used to measure physical activity. Although the total measure of activity over 24 hours may not be possible, smartphones can be used to measure the quality of walking.

For their study, the researchers used the UK Biobank, which is the largest national cohort with sensor records that span the last 20 years. They studied 100,000 participants who were demographically representative of the UK population. The categories that were considered included age, sex, race, health disorders, previous hospitalizations, lifestyles, education levels, and income.

Each participant wore activity monitors with motion sensors for one week. Although the wrist sensor was worn differently than how an equivalent smartphone sensor is carried, the motion sensors were able to obtain information on walking intensity from short bursts of normal walking. The researchers analyzed these datasets to model the characteristic motions of these walking sessions to predict mortality risk. The UK Death Registry was used to determine which participants had passed away over a five-year timeframe.

Using Biocluster2, a high-performance computing resource at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, the team was able to successfully validate predictive models of mortality risk using only 6 minutes per day of steady walking measured by the sensor. This time period is a vast improvement over the activity monitors, which assume the participants wear the sensors for 10 hours per day. The accuracy achieved was similar to physical measures such as gait speed during short walks, as well as similar to activity monitors that measure total activity.

"Our work is a big advance in health equity,” said Bruce Schatz (EIRH), a professor of library administration in the university library. “Smartphones are ubiquitous in high-income countries and increasingly common in low-income countries. Showing that they can predict mortality as accurately as existing methods implies that health monitors at a population scale are now feasible.”  

There are limitations to the study that the researchers would like to address in their future studies. Although they chose a demographically representative population, low-income lifestyles differ from high-income lifestyles even when age and sex are the same. Consequently, walking tests may differ since the 6 minutes of steady walking was chosen to mimic walk tests for hospital patients with cardiopulmonary disorders. The researchers will also broaden their population samples to include the US Precision Medicine Initiative, where the participants will be representative of the US national population, which is more diverse than that of the UK.  Since the models rely only on machine learning from sensor inputs, other types of health status may also be accurately predictable, such as cardiac health or asymptomatic detection of infectious diseases like COVID-19.

The research team consisted of Schatz; Haowen Zhou, a visiting scholar in the Schatz group at the IGB and now a graduate student in statistics at the University of Virginia; Ruoqing Zhu (CGD), an associate professor of statistics; Anita Ung, a staff physician at the McKinley Health Center.  During this research, Schatz and Ung were faculty in the College of Medicine at the University of Illinois, using the IGB facility to collaborate with the Department of Statistics.

The study “Population analysis of mortality risk: Predictive models from passive monitors using motion sensors for 100,000 UK Biobank participants” was published in PLOS Digital Health and can be found at https://journals.plos.org/digitalhealth/article?id=10.1371/journal.pdig….

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JOURNAL

PLOS Digital Health

DOI

10.1371/journal.pdig.0000045 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Population analysis of mortality risk: Predictive models from passive monitors using motion sensors for 100,000 UK Biobank participants

MIT Press journal Open Mind is now a diamond open access publication

With the removal of all financial publishing barriers, the cognitive science journal provides free access for both readers and scholars

Business Announcement

THE MIT PRESS

The MIT Press is pleased to announce that Open Mind is now a diamond open access journal, eliminating all article processing fees for scholars. By embracing the diamond open access (OA) model, the Journal strives to encourage the publication of new research by more diverse voices and better serve the greater cognitive science community. 

Since its founding in 2017, Open Mind has been a venue for the highest quality, most innovative work in cognitive science, delivering permanent and free access to its articles for readers. The Journal covers the broad array of content areas within cognitive science, including cognitive psychology, computer science and mathematical psychology, cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology, comparative psychology and behavioral anthropology, decision sciences, and theoretical and experimental linguistics. With the elimination of processing fees for authors, Open Mind hopes to increase the rate of submissions across these content areas and aid researchers in publishing their scholarship open access. 

“We have seen a hurdle in the form of costs associated with publishing open access,” said Edward Gibson, editor of Open Mind and professor, department of brain & cognitive Sciences, MIT. “Even though our open access charge was very low, we think that this was a major deterrent to cognitive science researchers. We are optimistic that these changes will lead to many more submissions to Open Mind, and we hope that the rate of submissions will grow much more over the coming months.”

“We are thrilled to have Open Mind join the diamond OA scholarly ecosystem,” says Nick Lindsay, director of journals and open access at the MIT Press. “With this move, the Journal joins a growing number of diamond OA publications at the MIT Press that are removing financial barriers to make scholarly communications more equitable.”

In July, Samuel J. Gershman, professor of psychology, Harvard University joined Gibson as co-editor of Open Mind. With Gershman on board, Open Mind aims to better service the broader computational cognitive science community. Gershman explains, “We are hoping researchers from many more domains within cognitive science will see the Journal as a good place to report their projects. We are currently working on special issues on computational cognitive neuroscience, principles of intelligence, and information theory in cognitive systems, with the first scheduled to publish in Spring 2023.”

To support the sustainability of the diamond OA model, Open Mind will be utilizing Janeway for submission and peer review management. Janeway is an inexpensive, open source publishing platform developed by the Centre for Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London, to support the goals of the Open Library of Humanities, an open access academic publisher.

To learn more Open Mind, visit https://direct.mit.edu/opmi. 

About The MIT Press
Established in 1962, The MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design.

UCF researchers create lunar regolith bricks that could be used to construct Artemis base camp

Using resources found in space to construct off-world structures can drastically reduce the need to transport building materials for programs like Artemis

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA

 

VIDEO: UCF MECHANICAL AND AEROSPACE ENGINEERING ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR RANAJAY GHOSH AND GRADUATE RESEARCH ASSISTANT PETER WARREN EXPLAIN THE PROCESS THEY USED TO CREATE CYLINDRICAL BRICKS USING SIMULATED LUNAR AND MARTIAN REGOLITH. view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA.

Using resources found in space to construct off-world structures can drastically reduce the need to transport building materials for programs like Artemis.

ORLANDO, Oct. 25, 2022 – As part of NASA’s Artemis program to establish a long-term presence on the moon, it aims to build an Artemis base camp that includes a modern lunar cabin, rover and mobile home. This fixed habitat could potentially be constructed with bricks made of lunar regolith and saltwater, thanks to a recent discovery from a team of UCF researchers.

Associate Professor Ranajay Ghosh of UCF’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and his research group found that 3D-printed bricks of lunar regolith can withstand the extreme environments of space and are a good candidate for cosmic construction projects. Lunar regolith is the loose dust, rocks and materials that cover the moon’s surface.

The results of their experiments are detailed in a recent issue of Ceramics International and were also featured in New Scientist magazine prior to publication.

“It is always an honor to be able to publish our work in a prestigious journal such as Ceramics International, and we are quite delighted that New Scientist picked our research to publish in their magazine,” Ghosh says. “Considering UCF’s special place as a space grant university, we feel privileged to contribute to the great tradition of scientific knowledge.”

To create the bricks, Ghosh’s team in the Complex Structures and Mechanics of Solids (COSMOS) Lab used a combination of 3D printing and binder jet technology (BJT), an additive manufacturing method that forces out a liquid binding agent onto a bed of powder. In Ghosh’s experiments, the binding agent was saltwater, and the powder was regolith made by UCF’s Exolith Lab.

“BJT is uniquely suitable for ceramic-like materials that are difficult to melt with a laser,” Ghosh says. “Therefore, it has great potential for regolith-based extraterrestrial manufacturing in a sustainable way to produce parts, components and construction structures.”

The BJT process resulted in weak cylindrical bricks called green parts that were then baked at high temperatures to produce a stronger structure. Bricks baked at lower temperatures crumbled, but those exposed to heat of up to 1200 degrees Celsius were able to withstand pressure of up to 250 million times the Earth’s atmosphere.

Ghosh says the work paves a path for the use of BJT in the construction of materials and structures in space. Their findings also demonstrate that off-world structures can be built using resources found in space, which can drastically reduce the need to transport building materials for missions like Artemis.

“This research contributes to the ongoing debate in space exploration community on finding the balance between in-situ extraterrestrial resource utilization versus material transported from Earth,” Ghosh says. “The further we develop techniques that utilize the abundance of regolith, the more capability we will have in establishing and expanding base camps on the moon, Mars, and other planets in the future.”

The first author of the paper is Peter Warren, Ghosh’s graduate research assistant. Co-authors include mechanical engineering doctoral candidate Nandhini Raju, mechanical engineering alumnus Hossein Ebrahimi ’21PhD, mechanical engineering doctoral student Milos Krsmanovic, and aerospace engineering professors Seetha Raghavan and Jayanta Kapat.

Ghosh joined UCF in 2016 as an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and is a researcher with MAE’s Center for Advanced Turbomachinery and Energy Research. He manages the Complex Structures and Mechanics of Solids Laboratory, better known as the COSMOS Lab, where he and his team fabricate and design novel materials with the aid of computer models and experiments. He earned his doctorate in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Cornell University in 2010 and is a recipient of the U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

Writer: Marisa Ramiccio, University of Central Florida

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JOURNAL

Ceramics International

DOI

10.1016/j.ceramint.2022.07.329 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Effect of sintering temperature on microstructure and mechanical properties of molded Martian and Lunar regolith

TanSat’s first attempt to detect human-caused CO2 is successful

Chinese and European satellite missions to advance global carbon dioxide monitoring

Peer-Reviewed Publication

INSTITUTE OF ATMOSPHERIC PHYSICS, CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

 

IMAGE: Ａ COORDINATE MEASUREMENT ON ANTHROPOGENIC CO2 EMISSION FROM TANSAT (CHINA) AND SENTINEL-5P (EUROPE) view more 

CREDIT: DONGXU YANG

An international research team has analyzed measurements from the TanSat mission and the Copernicus Sentinel-5 Precursor mission to identify carbon dioxide from human activities. This is the first attempt to use TanSat measurements to detect anthropogenic, or human-caused, carbon dioxide emission signatures. Quantifying anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions is one of the most important requirements needed for greenhouse gases to be monitored on a global basis.

 

The team, with researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Finnish Meteorological Institute, published their research in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences on October 25.

 

Carbon dioxide is recognized as the most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas because of its significant impact on global warming and climate change. Because of this, a number of satellite missions dedicated to atmospheric greenhouse measurements have been developed in the last decade.

 

At the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Paris in 2015, participants agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to prevent global surface temperature increases. Slowing down global warming represents a challenge faced by the global population in the 21st century. Concentrations of carbon dioxide continue to rise because of anthropogenic activities such as fossil fuel combustion and land-use change. The emissions related to the combustion of fossil fuels are particularly localized, with urban areas being the dominant contributor responsible for more than 70% of global emissions. Yet it has been especially challenging for scientists to obtain the high precision measurements they needed to study anthropogenic emissions from cities.

 

TanSat, launched in 2016, is China's first global carbon dioxide monitoring satellite. Tan is Chinese pronunciation of carbon. While TanSat has been providing researchers with data for several years, new algorithms were recently added to the TanSat instruments that greatly improved TanSat’s measurement precision.

 

The team conducted their study looking at two sets of measurements collected over two cities. The team used TanSat carbon dioxide data captured in May 2018 near Tangshan, China, and in March 2018 near Tokyo, Japan. They compared the TanSat data to nitrogen dioxide measurements captured by the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument onboard the Copernicus Sentinel-5 Precursor satellite on the same dates over the same cities.

 

 “We analyzed TanSat data in synergy with European Copernicus Sentinel-5 Precursor TROPOMI nitrogen dioxide observations to help the detection of anthropogenic plumes and to analyze the carbon dioxide-to-nitrogen dioxide ratio,” said Dongxu Yang, from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

 

Their two case studies show TanSat carbon dioxide measurements have the capability to capture the anthropogenic variations in the plume and have spatial patterns like that of the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument’s nitrogen dioxide observations. In addition, the carbon dioxide-to-nitrogen dioxide ratio in Tangshan, China, and Tokyo, Japan, align with the emission inventories.

 

 “This is an important step in TanSat data analysis. The next step is to infer emissions and to prepare for the TanSat-2 constellation including the joint analysis of CO2 and NO2 plumes,” said Janne Hakkarainen, from the Finnish Meteorological Institute.

 

Looking ahead, the team has plans to expand this research. “The TanSat is our first attempt on global carbon monitoring. The next generation of China’s Global Carbon Dioxide Monitoring Satellite mission, TanSat-2, is now in the design phase,” said Yi Liu, from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

 

According to Liu, TanSat-2’s target measurements will focus on cities with an 800–1000 kilometer wide swath to record the gradient of carbon dioxide from city central to rural areas using an imaging process and a 500 meter footprint size to improve the emission estimation accuracy. TanSat-2 will be a constellation of satellites distributed into at least two orbits in the morning and afternoon to cover a city or a point source twice a day.

 

“Our goal is to use satellite measurements to improve our knowledge on carbon cycle and to further analyze and constraint the carbon dioxide sources and sinks and their uncertainties,” said Liu.

 

The research team includes Dongxu Yang, Yi Liu, Zhaonan Cai, from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Janne Hakkarainen, Iolanda Ialongo, and Johanna Tamminen, from the Finnish Meteorological Institute.

 

This research is funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Finland.

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JOURNAL

Advances in Atmospheric Sciences

DOI

10.1007/s00376-022-2237-5 

ARTICLE TITLE

Detection of Anthropogenic CO2 Emission Signatures with TanSat CO2 and with Copernicus Sentinel-5 Precursor (S5P) NO2 Measurements: First Results

European project to explore pathways towards post-growth economics

Grant and Award Announcement

UNIVERSITAT AUTONOMA DE BARCELONA

Could societies shift away from growth-oriented economics and sustain human well-being within planetary boundaries? A new international study led by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) and the University of Lausanne (UNIL) in Switzerland will address this important question thanks to a €10 million grant from the European Research Council (ERC).

Over the next 6 years, ICTA-UAB researchers Giorgos Kallis and Jason Hickel, alongside Professor Julia Steinberger from the Institute of Geography and Sustainability of the University of Lausanne (UNIL), will develop the project "A Post-Growth Deal" (REAL), which promises to advance ecological economics in radical new directions.

To reduce emissions fast enough to meet the Paris targets, and to reverse other ecological pressures, high-income economies will need to dramatically reduce their use of energy and material resources. But sufficient reductions may be difficult to achieve if countries continue to pursue economic growth - ever-increasing levels of industrial production - as a primary objective.

Scientists increasingly recognize the need to explore post-growth pathways. Recent calls for post-growth transition have been discussed in major reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN panel on biodiversity (IPBES), and the European Environment Agency. But the existing knowledge base cannot yet meet this demand. The REAL project will advance the science so that post-growth pathways can be fully described and successfully implemented.

To this end, the ERC has awarded them a €9.9 million Synergy Grant - a highly competitive grant and one of the most prestigious awards for advanced research in Europe. With this funding, scientists will join their respective expertise to explore “how dramatic reductions in energy and resource use can be achieved, while at the same time ending poverty and ensuring decent lives for all”. They aspire to propose new models of politics, policies and provisioning systems in a post-growth direction, and engage with questions of development in the global South. The goal here, explains Jason Hickel, economic anthropologist at ICTA-UAB, is “convergence between the global North and South, and within countries, to a level of resource use that is sufficient for high human development and compatible with planetary boundaries”.

The “Post-Growth Deal” refers to the need for a new political and institutional compact between government and citizens equivalent to that of the New Deal, or the welfare state, but now geared around the security of well-being in an era of prolonged economic stagnation and unfolding climate breakdown. Creating such a “dDea”’, requires new research, new data, and new models that the REAL project intends to develop.   

“It’s the first time that a project of such scale and scope is granted on the topic of post-growth”, says Giorgos Kallis, environmental scientist at ICTA-UAB. “This is a recognition and validation of the efforts many isolated researchers have made for years - against mainstream opposition, and with little institutional or financial support. It is an opportunity that carries significant responsibility”. Kallis emphasized also the importance of synergy: “Every time the three of us meet, we feel like the different pieces of a puzzle coming together. This is a truly inter-disciplinary project. We hope to set a new paradigm for how to approach questions of planetary importance“. 

“This project is nothing short of revolutionary”, said Julia Steinberger, ecological economist at the University of Lausanne. “It gives us what we think is the best chance to explore the transformative ideas necessary to protect humanity from the intertwined crises of the coming decades: to reorient our economies away from risky growth dependence, and towards human flourishing.”

 

Lack of access to healthy food may raise risk of death from heart failure

A new study in the journal Circulation: Heart Failure has found an association between not having healthy food available in communities and increased rates of death from heart failure

Peer-Reviewed Publication

AMERICAN HEART ASSOCIATION

DALLAS, Oct. 25, 2022 — A study reviewing data from nearly 3,000 counties in the United States has found that living in a community with easy access to grocery stores and affordable, healthy food is associated with lower heart failure death rates, according to new research published today in Circulation: Heart Failure, an American Heart Association journal.

Food insecurity occurs when healthy food is not readily available on a daily basis, due to poverty or socioeconomic challenges, causing people to go hungry or eat food that is of reduced quality, variety or desirability. While previous research has confirmed that food insecurity is associated with adverse cardiovascular outcomes, little research is available about the local food environment and its potential relationship to death from heart failure. A 2019 paper published in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that, on a county level in the U.S., poverty was the strongest socioeconomic factor associated with heart failure and coronary heart disease, and the association was stronger for heart failure than coronary heart disease.

“Heart failure mortality is on the rise in populations that live in socioeconomic deprivation, and, importantly, we believe that nutrition plays a role in heart failure mortality, and food insecurity may be particularly detrimental in this population,” said lead study author Keerthi T. Gondi, M.D., an internal medicine resident at the University of Michigan Health System in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “We know that important relationships exist among food access and food affordability and heart health. This will have to be addressed in order to make changes to the burden of cardiovascular disease in populations that live in socioeconomic deprivation moving forward.”

This study is one of the first analyses to investigate the association between local food environments and heart failure mortality. Heart failure is a chronic, progressive condition in which the heart muscle becomes so weak it no longer pumps blood as it should. According to Gondi, he and his colleagues examined the death rate from heart failure because it is a consistent metric reported across all US counties, providing an ability to comprehensively evaluate heart failure outcomes at the population level. In 2019, heart failure death accounted for nearly more than 86,000 deaths in the U.S., according to the Association’s Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics Update for 2022.

The researchers sought to determine whether food environment by county level was associated with heart failure death rates. They reviewed 2018 data from the National Vital Statistics System – a database of all births and deaths in the U.S. – and examined the potential for associations among the heart failure death rates in each county with the county’s 2018 Food Insecurity Percentage score and Food Environment Index score.

The researchers collected each county’s Food Insecurity Percentage score — the percentage of the population who lack adequate, consistent access to healthy food — and Food Environment Index score — an index ranked from 0 (worst) to 10 (best) based on a composite of metrics including affordability of nutritious food, food insecurity, grocery store proximity, transportation and socioeconomic factors — from the USDA’s Food Environment Atlas and the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation County Health Rankings. The Food Environment Atlas assembles statistics on food environment indicators and provides a spatial overview of a community's ability to access healthy food.

Evaluated together, the Food Insecurity Percentage and Food Environment Index provide a clear picture of a population’s food environment.

Of the 2,956 counties in the study, the analysis found:

• The average Food Insecurity Percentage was 13% for all counties, and the average Food Environment Index score was 7.8.
• Counties with a Food Insecurity Percentage above the national median of 13.7% had a higher rate of deaths from heart failure compared to counties with a Food Insecurity Percentage below the median (30.7 deaths versus 26.7 deaths per 100,000 people, respectively).
• After adjusting for a range of socioeconomic and health factors – including the poverty rate, income inequity, rural vs. urban locations, Type 2 diabetes, obesity and smoking - a 1% decrease in Food Insecurity Percentage by county was associated with a 1.3% lower heart failure death rate. Similarly, a 1-unit increase in the Food Environment Index score by county was associated with a 3.6% decrease in the heart failure death rate.
• On the county level, decreases in the Food Environment Index and increases in the Food Insecurity Percentage were found to have a stronger association with the death rate from heart failure than with the death rate for other subtypes of cardiovascular disease, as well as with the all-cause death rate.
• The strongest association between food environment and heart failure death rate was found in counties with the highest income inequity and the highest poverty rate.

“The findings of this study are unfortunate yet not surprising. These results are consistent with prior studies that have demonstrated the association of cardiovascular disease and food insecurity,” said Anne Thorndike, M.D., M.P.H., FAHA, who was not involved in this study, director of the Cardiac Lifestyle Program at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, immediate past chair of the Association’s Nutrition Committee and a member of the Association’s Lifestyle Council. “This study provides a robust evaluation of the food environment by U.S. counties and shows that characteristics of the food environment are strongly associated with death from heart failure.”

A limitation of the study is that it only captures data from one year, before the COVID-19 pandemic, therefore, it may have limited generalization at this time. More studies are needed to examine these associations over a longer period of time.

The study also revealed that counties with higher heart failure death rates also had fewer food stores, poorer access to healthy foods for adults older than age 65 and a lower participation rate in SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. SNAP is the U.S. government’s program that supplements food budgets to help reduce food insecurity for families and individuals who have an annual income level at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty criteria (for a family of three, those with annual income below $29,940 quality for SNAP).

According to the Association’s Life’s Essential 8, dietary intake, which is affected by food insecurity, is one of the key contributors to cardiovascular disease risk, and the low prevalence of ideal diet drives the overall low prevalence of ideal cardiovascular health in the U.S. Better cardiovascular health helps lower the risk for heart disease, stroke and other major health problems.

“Food insecurity and lack of access to healthy food are key contributors to poor dietary quality and what is referred to as ‘nutrition insecurity,’” Thorndike said. “The American Heart Association and others are now acknowledging that to help Americans achieve ideal cardiovascular health, particularly ideal diet, we need to broaden our efforts to address both the psychological and social determinants of our health behaviors and well-being. These efforts need to include policy, health care, and community interventions that improve access to nutritious food for people at every stage of life.”

Co-authors are John Larson, M.D.; Aaron Sifuentes, M.D.; Neil B. Alexander, M.D., M.S.; Matthew C. Konerman, M.D.; Kali S. Thomas, Ph.D., M.A.; and Scott L. Hummel, M.D. Authors’ disclosures are listed in the manuscript.

The authors reported no funding sources for this study.

Statements and conclusions of studies published in the American Heart Association’s scientific journals are solely those of the study authors and do not necessarily reflect the Association’s policy or position. The Association makes no representation or guarantee as to their accuracy or reliability. The Association receives funding primarily from individuals; foundations and corporations (including pharmaceutical, device manufacturers and other companies) also make donations and fund specific Association programs and events. The Association has strict policies to prevent these relationships from influencing the science content. Revenues from pharmaceutical and biotech companies, device manufacturers and health insurance providers and the Association’s overall financial information are available here.

Additional Resources:

• Available multimedia is on right column of release link https://newsroom.heart.org/news/lack-of-access-to-healthy-food-may-raise-risk-of-death-from-heart-failure?preview=2ae30ca930314946bd1c129cf7b3ff45
• After Oct. 25, view the manuscript and editorial online.
• AHA news release: “Gateway” foods like candy, pastries and frozen treats may lead to unhealthy teen eating (September 2022)
• AHA news release: Policy recommendations offer strategies to close ‘significant gaps’ in nutrition security (May 2022)
• AHA resource: The American Heart Association Diet and Lifestyle Recommendations
• AHA resource: What is Heart Failure?
• Follow AHA/ASA news on Twitter @HeartNews
• Follow news from the AHA’s Circulation: Heart Failure journal @CircHF

About the American Heart Association

The American Heart Association is a relentless force for a world of longer, healthier lives. We are dedicated to ensuring equitable health in all communities. Through collaboration with numerous organizations, and powered by millions of volunteers, we fund innovative research, advocate for the public’s health and share lifesaving resources. The Dallas-based organization has been a leading source of health information for nearly a century. Connect with us on heart.org, Facebook, Twitter or by calling 1-800-AHA-USA1.

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JOURNAL

Circulation Heart Failure

DOI

10.1161/CIRCHEARTFAILURE.122.009651 

ARTICLE TITLE

Health of the Food Environment Is Associated With Heart Failure Mortality in the United States

Novel insecticides are bad news for bee health and their guts

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MARTIN-LUTHER-UNIVERSITÄT HALLE-WITTENBERG

 

IMAGE: BEES ARE OFTEN EXPOSED TO MULTIPLE PESTICIDES IN NATURE. view more 

CREDIT: UNI HALLE / MARKUS SCHOLZ

Insecticides containing flupyradifurone and sulfoxaflor can have devastating effects on honey bee health. The substances damage the insects' intestinal flora, especially when used in conjunction with a common fungicide, making them more susceptible to disease and shortening their life span. This was recently proven in a study conducted at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), as published in Science of the Total Environment. The two insecticides were considered harmless to bees and bumblebees when approved, but their use has since been severely restricted.

For the study, honey bees that were free from environmental influences were first bred in the laboratory. "We wanted to control every aspect of the bees’ lives - from their diet to their exposure to pathogens or pesticides", says Dr Yahya Al Naggar, the biologist who led the project at MLU and who now works at Tanta University in Egypt. In the first few days, all bees were given the same food: sugar syrup. They were then divided into several groups and various pesticides were added to their food. One group was given flupyradifurone, while another was given sulfoxaflor. Both substances are approved insecticides in Germany, but their use is now limited to greenhouses.

As pesticides are often used as a mixture, the scientists also took this into account in their laboratory experiment by enriching the food administered to two other groups not only with the insecticides mentioned, but also with azoxystrobin, which has been used to protect plants from harmful fungi for many decades. The concentration of the substances was well below the legal requirements in each case. "Our approach was based on the realistic concentrations that might be found in pollen and nectar from plants that have been treated with the pesticides", says Al Naggar. A control group continued to receive the normal sugar syrup without additives.

Over a period of ten days, the team observed whether the substances had any effects on the bees and, if so, what. They found that the pesticides are anything but harmless: Around half of all bees whose diet had been supplemented with flupyradifurone died during the study - and even more when combined with azoxystrobin. While sulfoxaflor produced similar effects, more insects survived the diet. 

The scientists also analysed the bees’ intestinal flora, i.e. the bacteria and fungi living in their digestive tract. "The fungicide azoxystrobin led to a significant reduction in naturally occurring fungi. That was to be expected, as fungicides are used to control fungi", says Dr Tesfaye Wubet from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), who is also a member of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig. Over the course of the ten-day study, however, the team was able to show that the mixture of fungi and bacteria detected in the insects differed greatly from the control group depending on the substances used. According to the researchers, the bacterium Serratia marcescens was able to spread alarmingly well in the digestive tract of the treated insects. "These bacteria are pathogenic and harmful to bees’ health. They can make it harder for the insects to fight off infection, leading to premature death", explains Al Naggar. 

As the study was conducted in a laboratory in Halle to exclude the number of external influences, it is unclear whether the same results can be found in nature. "The effects of the pesticides could well be even more dramatic - or the bees might be able to fully or at least partially compensate for the negative effects", concludes Wubet. With this in mind, the team calls for the potential effects of new pesticides on beneficial insects to be researched more rigorously before they are approved and for their effects on aspects such as intestinal flora to be included as standard in the risk assessment.

The study was funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation with additional support via the EU-funded project "Poshbee". 

Study: Al Naggar Y., Singavarapu B., Paxton R.J. & Wubet T.. Bees under interactive stressors: the novel insecticides flupyradifurone and sulfoxaflor along with the fungicide azoxystrobin disrupt the gut microbiota of honey bees and increase opportunistic bacterial pathogens. Science of the Total Environment (2022). doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.157941

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JOURNAL

Science of The Total Environment

DOI

10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.157941 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Bees under interactive stressors: the novel insecticides flupyradifurone and sulfoxaflor along with the fungicide azoxystrobin disrupt the gut microbiota of honey bees and increase opportunistic bacterial pathogens