1,700-year-old spider monkey remains discovered in Teotihuacán, Mexico

Researchers found thousands of other items, but the skeletal remains of the monkey point to the earliest evidence of primate captivity, translocation, and gift diplomacy between Teotihuacán and Mayan elite

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - RIVERSIDE

 

IMAGE: COMPLETE SKELETAL REMAINS OF A 1,700 YEAR-OLD FEMALE SPIDER MONKEY FOUND IN TEOTIHUACÁN, MEXICO. view more 

CREDIT: NAWA SUGIYAMA, UC RIVERSIDE.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- The complete skeletal remains of a spider monkey — seen as an exotic curiosity in pre-Hispanic Mexico — grants researchers new evidence regarding social-political ties between two ancient powerhouses: Teotihuacán and Maya Indigenous rulers. 

The discovery was made by Nawa Sugiyama, a UC Riverside anthropological archaeologist, and a team of archaeologists and anthropologists who since 2015 have been excavating at Plaza of Columns Complex, in Teotihuacán, Mexico. The remains of other animals were also discovered, as well as thousands of Maya-style mural fragments and over 14,000 ceramic sherds from a grand feast. These pieces are more than 1,700 years old.

The spider monkey is the earliest evidence of primate captivity, translocation, and gift diplomacy between Teotihuacán and the Maya. Details of the discovery will be published in the journal PNAS. This finding allows researchers to piece evidence of high diplomacy interactions and debunks previous beliefs that Maya presence in Teotihuacán was restricted to migrant communities, said Sugiyama, who led the research. 

“Teotihuacán attracted people from all over, it was a place where people came to exchange goods, property, and ideas. It was a place of innovation,” said Sugiyama, who is collaborating with other researchers, including Professor Saburo Sugiyama, co-director of the project and a professor at Arizona State University, and Courtney A. Hofman, a molecular anthropologist with the University of Oklahoma. “Finding the spider monkey has allowed us to discover reassigned connections between Teotihuacán and Maya leaders. The spider monkey brought to life this dynamic space, depicted in the mural art. It’s exciting to reconstruct this live history.”

Researchers applied a multimethod archaeometric (zooarchaeology, isotopes, ancient DNA, paleobotany, and radiocarbon dating) approach to detail the life of this female spider monkey. The animal was likely between 5 and 8 years old at the time of death.

Its skeletal remains were found alongside a golden eagle and several rattlesnakes, surrounded by unique artifacts, such as fine greenstone figurines made of jade from the Motagua Valley in Guatemala, copious shell/snail artifacts, and lavish obsidian goods such as blades and projectiles points. This is consistent with evidence of live sacrifice of symbolically potent animals participating in state rituals observed in Moon and Sun Pyramid dedicatory caches, researchers stated in the paper.

Results from the examination of two teeth, the upper and lower canines, indicate the spider monkey in Teotihuacán ate maize and chili peppers, among other food items. The bone chemistry, which offers insight to the diet and environmental information, indicates at least two years of captivity. Prior to arriving in Teotihuacán, it lived in a humid environment, eating primarily plants and roots.

The research is primarily funded by grants awarded to Sugiyama from the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities. Teotihuacán is a pre-Hispanic city recognized as an UNESCO World Heritage site and receives more than three million visitors annually. 

In addition to studying ancient rituals and uncovering pieces of history, the finding allows for a reconstruction of greater narratives, of understanding how these powerful, advanced societies dealt with social and political stressors that very much reflect today’s world, Sugiyama said. 

“This helps us understand principles of diplomacy, to understand how urbanism developed … and how it failed,” Sugiyama said. “Teotihuacán was a successful system for over 500 years, understanding past resilience, its strengths and weaknesses are relevant in today’s society. There are many similarities then and now. Lessons can be seen and modeled from past societies; they provide us with cues as we go forward.” 

The University of California, Riverside is a doctoral research university, a living laboratory for groundbreaking exploration of issues critical to Inland Southern California, the state and communities around the world. Reflecting California's diverse culture, UCR's enrollment is more than 26,000 students. The campus opened a medical school in 2013 and has reached the heart of the Coachella Valley by way of the UCR Palm Desert Center. The campus has an annual impact of more than $2.7 billion on the U.S. economy. To learn more, visit www.ucr.edu.

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2212431119 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animal tissue samples

ARTICLE TITLE

Earliest evidence of primate captivity and translocation supports gift diplomacy between Teotihuacan and the Maya

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

21-Nov-2022

Dust transport in the upper levels of the atmosphere

New study shows that particles from central South America were the main source of iron in the South Pacific during the last two glacial periods

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF OLDENBURG

Dust from the dry Puna Plateau in northwestern Argentina was an important source of iron for the nutrient-deficient South Pacific in the last two glacial cycles – especially at the beginning of these cycles. This was the key finding of a study presented in science journal PNAS by a team of researchers led by geochemist Dr Torben Struve from the University of Oldenburg. According to the team's theory, the jet stream circulation – powerful air currents flowing from west to east at an altitude of several kilometres – picked up the fine mineral particles on the east side of the Andes and transported them almost all the way around the Antarctic continent to the Southeast Pacific. Using a sediment core from the seafloor as a climate archive, the researchers were able to reconstruct the contributions from various dust sources located on the surrounding continents.

Atmospheric dust is a key component of the climate system. On the one hand, fine dust particles influence the Earth's energy budget, because they reflect incoming sunlight at high altitude which has a cooling effect. On the other hand, mineral particles can carry nutrients such as iron and manganese to remote ocean areas where they stimulate the growth of algae. When the algae die and sink to the deep ocean, they remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which also has a cooling effect. These mechanisms can be particularly effective in the remote and iron-deficient subpolar Southern Ocean so that changes in the Southern Hemisphere dust cycle are ascribed a significant role in  the natural alternation between cold glacial and warm interglacial periods in the past. Therefore, the sources and transport pathways of dust have been the subject of intensive research for some time now.

Dust from South America dominated throughout the study period

Struve's team analysed a sediment core from the seafloor of the subpolar South Pacific in which the deposits date all the way back to 260,000 years ago, thus covering two glacial cycles. Using the geochemical fingerprint of the dust fraction in the core, the researchers were able to determine the proportion of particles from South America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand in the different phases of the two glacial cycles. “We were surprised to find that dust from South America dominated throughout the study period, even though it had to travel a very long distance from the source to our sampling site,” says Struve, lead author of the paper.

According to the analysis, up to two-thirds of the particles originated there, and this proportion was particularly high at the beginning of the glacial cycles. Land masses located closer to the sampling site, such as Australia and New Zealand, contributed only just over half of the deposited dust, and over relatively short periods of time. Their contributions increased particularly towards the end of the glacial periods, when global temperatures started to increase again.

The researchers conclude from this data that the South American dust was emitted from the high elevation source regions of the eastern Andes into the jet stream and travelled around Antarctica in the upper levels of the atmosphere. In contrast, dust particles from the low-elevation source regions in Australia and New Zealand were washed out of the atmosphere more quickly with the rain so they rarely reached such heights for long-distance transport.

The study showed that most of the South American dust came from regions in the Andes spanning the northwest of present-day Argentina and southern Bolivia and located at altitudes of up to 5,000 metres. This area includes parts of the Puna-Altiplano Plateau and the dry high valleys of the Central Andes. Until now, however, it has received little attention from researchers as a potential source of iron for the Southern Ocean. The team reports  that the dust originating from this region contained higher proportions of bioavailable iron during the ice ages, probably due to increased glacial activity in the source regions.

Dust production from all sources increased in the glacial periods

The study concludes that dust production from all sources increased in the glacial periods compared to the warmer interglacial periods, with the result that the iron input from dust increased by a factor of three to six – a finding that confirms earlier studies according to which it was drier and presumably also windier in cooler climates than in warm periods. The team also found evidence in the data that the westerly winds that prevail around Antarctica shifted southwards or slowed down at the end of the ice ages and during the warm interglacial periods.

These findings could contribute to a better understanding of the alternation between glacial and interglacial periods in the Southern Hemisphere, notes Struve: “How exactly natural iron fertilization in the Southern Ocean amplified these climatic changes is not yet fully understood,” the geochemist adds, but he underlines that the new data offers valuable insights and can be incorporated into current Earth system models, which in turn would provide a more detailed picture of the involved processes.

However, the question of whether it makes sense to artificially fertilize nutrient-deficient ocean areas with iron to reduce the current rate of climate change cannot be answered with this study, Struve stresses. “I would be very cautious about that – to achieve a significant effect you would need to supply remote ocean areas with bioavailable iron over long periods of time and on a large scale. That hardly seems feasible.”

In addition to the researchers from the University of Oldenburg’s Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment, a scientist from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven and another scientist from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York State participated in the study.  

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2206085119 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Systematic changes to circumpolar dust transport to the Subantarctic Pacific Ocean Over the last two glacial cycles

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

21-Nov-2022

Corals saving corals

Disease-resistant corals can help ‘rescue’ vulnerable ones

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - DAVIS

 

IMAGE: UC DAVIS ASSISTANT PROFESSOR ANYA BROWN DIVES IN A CORAL REEF IN LITTLE CAYMAN AS PART OF A RESEARCH STUDY. view more 

CREDIT: JULIE MEYER/UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

Under the right living arrangement, disease-resistant corals can help “rescue” corals that are more vulnerable to disease, found a study from the University of California, Davis, that monitored a disease outbreak at a coral nursery in Little Cayman, Cayman Islands. 

The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, found that when people grow corals of the same genotype — or genetic makeup — together, those corals are more vulnerable to disease than corals that grow among a mixture of genotypes. The study further found that some vulnerable corals can be “rescued” by resistant genotypes.

“We saw that some corals were more resistant to disease just by being around other corals that were particularly resistant,” said lead author Anya Brown, an assistant professor at the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory in the Department of Evolution and Ecology. “Proximity to these resistant genotypes helped buffer the susceptible corals from the effects of the disease.”

The findings provide further evidence that genetic diversity can help reduce disease transmission among corals, while also showing that it’s important to consider how corals are arranged in nurseries and reef restoration projects to prevent the spread of disease.

Coral exam

After an outbreak of white band disease spread through its coral nursery in Little Cayman, the nonprofit Central Caribbean Marine Institute worked together with the study’s academic authors to monitor its population of endangered Caribbean staghorn coral, A. cervicornis.

Before the outbreak, the nursery had attached coral fragments to plastic PVC frames to propagate them. Some frames held coral from a single donor colony. Other frames hosted corals from multiple donor colonies representing a mixture of genotypes.

After tracking the presence of the disease across 650 coral fragments for more than five months, the researchers found that corals living on frames with a mixture of genotypes were substantially more resistant to white band disease, a devastating bacterial disease that nearly wiped out A. cervicornis in the 1980s.

Diversity and disease resistance

The ability of resistant coral to help protect vulnerable individuals is similar to how vaccinations work among humans: Vaccinated individuals resist a disease, erecting a barrier that weakens its ability to move through them and on to the next susceptible person. 

As for the genetic diversity piece, agricultural lands provide another comparison: Monocrops, where the same crop is planted in the same place each year, tend to be more susceptible to disease than diverse systems. This research suggests a similar dynamic is at play among the ocean’s coral reefs.

An ideal arrangement

Brown hopes these concepts and this study will be integrated into coral nursery and reef restoration projects.

“I hope people working with coral nurseries use this as a springboard to see how this influences the spread of disease,” Brown said. “Nurseries that intentionally arrange corals with mixtures of genotypes can help corals vulnerable to disease thrive. This can help build coral resilience by repopulating reefs with a diverse genetic mixture of corals.”

The study’s co-authors include Dagny-Elise Anastasiou, Sophia MacVittie and Carrie Manfrino of Central Caribbean Marine Institute; Monica Schul, Lindsay Spiers and Julie Meyer of University of Florida; and Thomas Frazer of University of South Florida.

The study was financially supported by the John H. and Katherine C. Ewel Fellowship, the University of Florida and the Central Caribbean Marine Institute.

Caribbean staghorn coral show signs of white band disease. The disease first appears as white bands on live corals, and the infected tissue sloughs off, leaving only the coral's skeleton.

White band disease infects endangered A. cervicornis, a Caribbean staghorn coral. (Dagny Anastassiou/CCMI)

CREDIT

Dagny Anastassiou/CCMI

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JOURNAL

Scientific Reports

DOI

10.1038/s41598-022-23457-6 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

ARTICLE TITLE

Mixtures of genotypes increase disease resistance in a coral nursery

PRISON NATION U$A

Internal medicine physicians call for improved access and quality in health care for incarcerated patients

Peer-Reviewed Publication

AMERICAN COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS

1. Internal medicine physicians call for improved access and quality in health care for incarcerated patients Abstract: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M22-2370 Note: Sound bites from ACP President Ryan Mire, MD, MACP available for download at https://www.dssimon.com/MM/ACP-Incarceration Adequately funded policies and procedures are needed to reduce health care disparities in access to, and quality of, health care for the U.S. jail and prison population says the American College of Physicians (ACP). Health Care During Incarceration: A Policy Position Paper of the American College of Physicians details recommendations to improve the health and wellbeing of individuals incarcerated in adult correctional facilities. The paper is published in Annals of Internal Medicine. ACP’s recommendations include adequate funding for, and timely access to, necessary health care services that are evidence-based and meet community standards. They also recommend measures to ensure adequate nutrition; opportunity for physical activity; smoke-free policies and smoking cessation interventions; and access to recommended preventive health services. ACP further calls for policies to adequately treat both chronic noncommunicable diseases and infectious diseases. This should include infectious disease prevention and control programs developed with public health authorities. In addition, all persons entering correctional facilities should be screened for substance use disorders and behavioral health conditions and provided with treatment if necessary. ACP also supports policies that promote the treatment of patients with substance use disorders as an alternative incarceration. The paper also details recommendations for population segments within correctional facilities. This includes recommendations for how to better meet the needs of incarcerated women; LGBTQ+ patients; aging patients and those living with disabilities or life-limiting illnesses; and immigrant populations. Lastly, the paper details how health care needs must be included in community re-entry planning for individuals who are released from jail or prison, so that they are able to continue to access health care and social services once they return to their communities. ACP specifically makes recommends for policies that would help to facilitate or reinstate state Medicaid enrollment. Media contacts: For an embargoed PDF, please contact Angela Collom at acollom@acponline.org. To speak with someone from ACP, please contact Jaquelyn Blaser at jblaser@acponline.org. ---------------------------- 2. Climate change contributing to an expected rise in fungal pathogens over the next decade Abstract: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M22-2371 URL goes live when the embargo lifts Endemic mycoses, or fungal pathogens that lead to a wide range of diseases in humans, are expected to become more common in the coming decade, partly due to climate change. The increasing spread of these pathogens increases the possibility that clinicians without familiarity of the mycoses may encounter them in daily practice. This is important because endemic mycoses may be erroneously diagnosed as bacterial infections, leading to inappropriate use of antibiotics and other prescriptions that provide no relief to the patient. The commentary is published in Annals of Internal Medicine. Stopping the spread of fungal pathogens is a public health priority being increasingly recognized by international public health efforts. In October 2022, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the creation of the WHO fungal priority pathogens list (WHO FPPL), a new effort to “systematically prioritize fungal pathogens, considering their unmet research and development (R&D) needs and perceived public health importance.” Authors from the University of California-Davis and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highlight the increasing spread of blastomycosis, coccidioidomycosis, and histoplasmosis, the endemic mycoses that are most prevalent in North America. All three pathogens have been traced outside of their original endemic regions due to both climate change and more thorough identification. The authors highlight the current lack of guidelines for testing and treatment of mycoses, unlike when clinicians encounter infections like community-acquired pneumonia. Patients who have been infected with these pathogens may experience long periods of illness between initial infection and diagnosis, leading to increased healthcare costs and frequent antibiotic overprescription. The authors say that improvements in our epidemiologic understanding of disease and the ability to capture changes in disease incidence at the county level would enable directed educational efforts, public health campaigns, and quality improvement initiatives to reduce the time to diagnosis and receipt of appropriate antifungal therapy. Media contacts: For an embargoed PDF, please contact Angela Collom at acollom@acponline.org. To speak with the corresponding author, George R. Thompson III, MD, please contact Nadine Yehya, PhD, MBA at nyehya@ucdavis.edu. ---------------------------- 3. More than half of pivotal FDA trials recruit from lower middle income countries, but country enrollment is rarely reported Abstract: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M22-1857 URL goes live when the embargo lifts An analysis of 144 pivotal trials for U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved medications in cancer, cardiovascular disease, and neurology has found that more than half of the studies recruit patients from low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). However, available country data for trials are sparse, contributing to problems with both study verification and participant recruitment ethics. The analysis is published in Annals of Internal Medicine. Drugs sold in North America are often tested abroad, including LMICs. Recruitment from LMICs for trials intended to inform North American health care has scientific and ethical implications. Drug effects can vary because of geographic differences in patient baseline characteristics, diet, and comorbid conditions. Recruitment in LMICs also raises ethical issues. Trials require extra clinic visits, procedures, and exposure to unproven treatments, including unknown risks. The FDA does not require sponsors to report or publicly disclose which countries participants are recruited from. Researchers from the Department of Equity, Ethics and Policy, McGill University, conducted a cross-sectional analysis of 66 new drugs and 144 pivotal clinical trials. The authors evaluated 29 approved cardiovascular trials, 26 approved neurologic trials, and 61 approved cancer trials. They found that among all analyzed trials, 56 percent in cancer, 79 percent in cardiovascular disease, and 56 percent in neurology recruited from LMICs. The authors also report that country-level enrollment figures were not available for 55 percent of multi-country trials. According to the authors, although recruitment is often reported by region or continent, such groupings can obscure important differences among host countries. They emphasize that sporadic availability of country enrollment can frustrate the valid interpretation of pivotal trial findings. It can also limit the ability to monitor and hold research sponsors accountable for fair participant selection. They urge journals, regulators, and ClinicalTrials.gov to establish policies that require public reporting of country-level information on recruitment. Media contacts: For an embargoed PDF, please contact Angela Collom at acollom@acponline.org. To speak with corresponding author Jonathan Kimmelman, PhD, email jonathan.kimmelman@mcgill.ca. ----------------------------

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JOURNAL

Annals of Internal Medicine

DOI

10.7326/M22-2370 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Health Care During Incarceration: A Policy Position Paper From the American College of Physicians

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

22-Nov-2022

Physicians urged to consider fungal infections as possible cause for lung inflammation

Climate change widens spread of Valley fever, other fungal diseases beyond typical hot spots

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - DAVIS HEALTH

Infectious diseases expert George Thompson has been studying and treating fungal diseases for over two decades. He monitors their spread, symptoms and relative risks. Lately, he has been more concerned about a rising threat:  the spread of disease-causing fungi outside of their traditional hot spots.

In a commentary published in Annals of Internal Medicine, Thompson and his co-author from the Mycotic Diseases Branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Tom Chiller raised the alarm. They noted the expanding presence and emerging risks from three endemic fungal diseases: histoplasmosis, blastomycosis and coccidioidomycosis (Valley fever).

“These three fungal diseases usually inhabit specific U.S. regions conducive to their survival,” said Thompson. He is a professor at the UC Davis School of Medicine in the Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases, and the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology. “Recently, we are finding more cases of these diseases outside their known areas, taking clinicians and patients by surprise.”

Fungal infections are an emerging global threat

Fungi are microorganisms found abundantly in nature. They include yeasts, molds, mushrooms and more. While most fungi are harmless to humans, some can cause diseases (known as mycoses) that could wreak havoc on patients and the health system.

Recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) released its fungal priority pathogens list, identifying the most concerning fungi that can cause infections for which drug resistance or other treatment challenges exist. These pathogens are projected to lead to even more problems over the next decade.

Climate change increasing spread of fungal infections

Endemic fungi have traditionally had distinct geographic distributions. Climate changes in temperature and rain are affecting where these fungi thrive.

The authors noted the expanding regions hosting the endemic fungi. Valley fever, for example, was found in Nebraska, way east of its traditional hot spots in California and Arizona.

“The organisms are probably much more widespread than we originally thought. There is an increasing likelihood that clinicians who are not familiar with these organisms will encounter them during their daily practice,” Thompson said.

Clinicians commonly miss fungal infection diagnosis

The three endemic mycoses have many symptoms, including fever, chills, cough, night sweats and fatigue. They may also cause lung infections that mimic pneumonia. As such, they can easily be mistaken for more common viral and bacterial lung infections.

Current guidelines on pneumonia from the American Thoracic Society and the Infectious Diseases Society of America do not offer specific testing or treatment recommendations for endemic mycosis. Most practitioners may have little experience in the recognition and treatment of these fungal lung infections.

About 20% of pneumonia cases in some parts of California and Arizona are caused by Valley fever. Yet, it usually takes more than three weeks after symptoms start to get the right diagnosis. It might take even longer to diagnose histoplasmosis and blastomycosis.

Fungal infections are also commonly misdiagnosed as bacterial. When this misdiagnosis happens, the patient is prescribed antibiotics that are ineffective for fungal diseases. This also exposes them to unneeded medications and contributes to the rise of antimicrobial resistance in the community. The authors urged physicians to take a thorough travel history and run more testing to rule out fungal infection before giving patients a second round of antibiotics.

“In regions where these fungal diseases flourish, doctors need to consider the diagnosis and testing for mycoses in all patients with suggestive illness,” Thompson recommended.

The authors identified several factors that might contribute to these diagnostic and treatment delays. One is the variation in clinicians’ knowledge of disease diagnosis and management. Another is the lack of point-of-care diagnostics. Panels typically used for the diagnosis of respiratory infections do not include the endemic mycoses. Serum antibody and urinary antigen tests for the endemic mycoses are typically available only from certain laboratories.

Plan of action to deal with endemic mycoses

The authors see an opportunity to improve fungal diagnostic and treatment practices through better surveillance and continuing medical education on these regional infections. They suggested a multifaceted approach to help with the preventive efforts and the timely recognition and treatment of these diseases. They called for:

1) national surveillance and disease reporting of endemic mycoses in both humans and animals

2) educational efforts for patients and providers

3) inclusion of endemic mycoses in future pneumonia guidelines

4) development of point-of-care diagnostic tools

5) exploration of a pan-endemic mycoses vaccine to prevent infection

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JOURNAL

Annals of Internal Medicine

DOI

10.7326/M22-2371 

ARTICLE TITLE

Endemic Mycoses: Underdiagnosed and Underreported

Illinois Tech Team wins 2022 Keysight Innovation Challenge with novel IoT device to optimize tree planting for carbon sequestration

Illinois Institute of Technology students take top prize with Tree of Life carbon capture device to monitor carbon emissions and optimize tree planting for carbon sequestration

Grant and Award Announcement

ILLINOIS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

 

IMAGE: (FROM LEFT) JEFF HARRIS, VICE PRESIDENT, KEYSIGHT CORPORATE AND PORTFOLIO MARKETING, THE WINNING ILLINOIS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY TEAM (FROM LEFT), CHLOE RUBINOWICZ, COLIN PROCHNOW, SAURABH SALUJA, AND KATARZYNA STARON WITH THEIR PROTOTYPE, AND MARK PIERPOINT, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT AND PRESIDENT OF NETWORK APPLICATIONS AND SECURITY AT KEYSIGHT (RIGHT). view more 

CREDIT: IMAGE PROVIDED BY KEYSIGHT TECHNOLOGIES

CHICAGO—A team of Illinois Institute of Technology students has won the top prize in the Keysight Innovation Challenge 2022 for their novel “Tree of Life” technology—an Internet of Things device that will monitor soil and atmospheric conditions to help users decide which plants to grow to best sequester carbon and combat climate change.

The team of six Illinois Tech students presented their design to a panel of esteemed judges in Santa Rosa, California, on October 29, 2022, as part of the annual competition organized by Keysight Technologies Inc. The Illinois Tech team came in first out of 52 teams from around the globe and won $30,000 in cash, plus $10,000 worth of Keysight test equipment for Illinois Tech.

The team includes Chloe Rubinowicz (EE, M.S. EE 5th Year), Saurabh Saluja (CPE, M.S. CPE 5th Year), Colin Prochnow (CCSE, M.S. CPE 5th Year), Kaya Jones (CS 2nd Year), Anthony Banuelos (CCSE, M.A.S. CYF 5th Year), and Katarzyna Staron (ME, M.S. ME 5th Year).

“Our team learned and experienced more from this project than anything else we’ve done before,” says Chloe Rubinowicz (EE, M.S. EE 5th Year). “This has served as a pivotal moment for us, learning to work with a team to develop an idea and actualize it. Winning this competition has been surreal, and we’re so excited to see where our team goes from here.”

The team says Tree of Life was designed as a response to the urgent need for solutions to curb carbon emissions. 

“If we don’t act now, the consequences will be irreversible,” says Rubinowicz, lead of the Illinois Tech team. 

True to its name, the team’s groundbreaking device resembles a small tree. It’s “planted” in soil, where the in-ground sensor measures moisture level, electrical conductivity, temperature, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and pH. Above ground, the device reads temperature, humidity, and carbon dioxide concentration, as well as GPS data and images from four cameras. Using that data and a database of more than 2,000 trees, an algorithm will determine what plants will grow best in the environment and remove the most CO2 from the atmosphere. The analyses and recommendations provided can also be scaled to large areas using additional inputs such as satellite imagery.  

“According to NASA, it would take 500 billion trees to offset the carbon emissions since 1990, which is a great undertaking. Luckily with our device, we can decrease the amount of trees by 30 percent,” says Saurabh Saluja (CPE, M.S. CPE 5th Year). “There’s no better time to start than now.”

The team has also built a website for the device that provides further analysis of the data collected including the estimated impact of planted trees, cost estimates, and recommendations of local nurseries where recommended trees can be purchased.

“At Illinois Tech, students are called  to be purpose-driven citizens. Our university was born to liberate the collective power of difference to drive innovation for all,” says Illinois Tech President Raj Echambadi. “The team’s fantastic work in producing this innovation to tackle one of the grand challenges of our time perfectly exemplifies the kind of drive to discovery we aim to develop in our students.”

The Keysight Innovation Challenge is a design competition challenging graduate and undergraduate engineering and computer science students to conceptualize an Internet of Things (IoT) device or network of devices that will provide carbon neutrality monitoring at the community or corporate level. The contest supported Keysight's goal to achieve carbon neutrality within its Corporate Social Responsibility policies. It aimed to inspire innovation to help the world reach net zero by 2050 and required each team to be woman-led to encourage gender diversity in STEM.

“It was fascinating to see the wide range of innovative solutions each student team created when posed the same challenge: to design an IoT device that will help the world reach net zero,” said Jeff Harris, vice president of portfolio and corporate marketing at Keysight, who also served as a judge and co-sponsor of the Keysight Innovation Challenge. “Each team looked at the question from a different angle and formed a unique solution. I’m excited for the future when we see this level of innovation and enthusiasm from our next generation of engineers.”

A panel of eight semifinal judges evaluated teams on metrics such as sensor effectiveness, AI capabilities, and cybersecurity resilience, with device prototypes evaluated by Keysight’s IoT Security Assessment software. The general public also played a role in judging by voting for their favorite design entries. These votes contributed to 10 percent of each entrant’s overall score.

For more information about the 2022 Innovation Challenge, check out the competition video or go to the event website at: www.keysightinnovationchallenge.com. For images of finalists, media can visit: www.keysight.com/find/innowinner-2022-images

Image caption: (from left) Jeff Harris, Vice President, Keysight Corporate and Portfolio Marketing, the winning Illinois Institute of Technology team (from left), Chloe Rubinowicz, Colin Prochnow, Saurabh Saluja, and Katarzyna Staron with their prototype, and Mark Pierpoint, Senior Vice President and President of Network Applications and Security at Keysight (right).

Blood pressure highly likely to cause neurotic personality trait

Keeping it under control can help curb neuroticism, anxiety, and cardiovascular disease

Peer-Reviewed Publication

BMJ

Diastolic blood pressure—the lower of the two numbers in a blood pressure reading—is highly likely to cause neurotic personality trait, finds research published in the open access journal General Psychiatry.

And keeping it under control can help curb neurotic behaviours, anxiety, and heart and circulatory diseases, conclude the researchers.

High blood pressure is a major risk for cardiovascular disease and thought to be associated with psychological factors, such as anxiety, depression, and neuroticism—a personality trait characterised by susceptibility to negative emotions, including anxiety and depression. 

But which causes which isn’t entirely clear.

In a bid to find out, the researchers used a technique called Mendelian randomisation. This uses genetic variants as proxies for a particular risk factor—in this case, blood pressure—to obtain genetic evidence in support of a causal relationship, reducing the biases inherent in observational studies. 

Between 30% and 60% of blood pressure is down to genetic factors, and over 1000 genetic single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs for short, are associated with it. SNPs help predict a person's response to certain drugs, susceptibility to environmental factors, and their risk of developing diseases.

The researchers drew on 8 large-scale study datasets containing whole genome DNA extracted from blood samples from people of predominantly European ancestry (genome-wide association studies).

They applied Mendelian randomisation to the 4 traits of blood pressure—systolic blood pressure (736,650 samples), diastolic blood pressure (736,650), pulse pressure (systolic minus diastolic blood pressure; 736,650), and high blood pressure (above 140/90 mm Hg; 463,010) with 4 psychological states—anxiety (463,010 samples), depressive symptoms (180,866), neuroticism (170,911) and subjective wellbeing (298,420).

The analysis revealed that high blood pressure and diastolic blood pressure had significant causal effects on neuroticism, but not on anxiety, depressive symptoms, or subjective wellbeing. 

But after adjusting for multiple tests, only diastolic blood pressure was significantly associated with neuroticism (over 90%), based on 1074 SNPs.  

The researchers acknowledge certain limitations to their findings. For example, it wasn’t possible to completely exclude pleiotropy–where one gene can affect several traits. And the findings may not be more widely applicable beyond people of European ancestry. 

But blood pressure links the brain and the heart, and so may promote the development of personality traits, they explain. 

“Individuals with neuroticism can be sensitive to the criticism of others, are often self-critical, and easily develop anxiety, anger, worry, hostility, self-consciousness, and depression. 

“Neuroticism is viewed as a key causative factor for anxiety and mood disorders. Individuals with neuroticism more frequently experience high mental stress, which can lead to elevated [blood pressure] and cardiovascular diseases,” they write.

And they suggest: “Appropriate surveillance and control of blood pressure can be beneficial for the reduction of neuroticism, neuroticism-inducing mood disorders, and cardiovascular diseases.”

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JOURNAL

General Psychiatry

DOI

10.1136/gpsych-2022-100877 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Investigating genetic causal relationships between blood pressure and anxiety, depressive symptoms, neuroticism and subjective well-being

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

21-Nov-2022

Consumers feel left out of national debate on cyber attacks and data security

Australian public want more active role in detection and digital resilience

Peer-Reviewed Publication

FLINDERS UNIVERSITY

Illegal cyber attacks on thousands of citizens’ personal data in Australia has heightened awareness of the hazards of insecure digital systems – and Flinders University researchers say consumers want to play a more active role in building more resilient systems to reduce risks caused by hacking, online deception, bots and other threats.

Their study of a nationally representative sample of 1500 Australian citizens in 2020 – and focus groups comprising 62 people in three states – investigated attitudes to institutional trust, understanding of resilience, digital literacy and perceptions of cyber threats.

Even before the escalation in recent cyber breaches of Optus and Medibank Private customer bases, citizens in the surveys were clearly not confident or optimistic that Australia is keeping pace with cyber threats and interference in the country’s economy, politics or society.

“Not only are these citizens concerned about the technological capabilities of government – often citing poor experiences using online government services – but they also showed doubts about investment in skills and commitments to cybersecurity among businesses,” says Flinders University researcher Dr Josh Holloway.

“Quite reasonably, they tended to have little awareness of which public institutions and authorities are taking leadership in managing cyber threats and, collectively, expressed broad scepticism of social media and tech companies, media organisations, the federal government and public service generally.”

While survey participants wanted more capability and responsibility from the public sector and corporations, their trust in this process was low.

The findings, published in the journal Defence Studies, highlights the gap between Australian citizens’ knowledge and engagement and the broad response to cyber threats from top-down, technocratic and elite-driven agencies.

Co-author Associate Professor Robert Manwaring says Australian citizens’ confusion and lack of trust is not necessarily their fault.

“There’s generally little meaningful strategic effort to engage citizens in government-led responses, overlooking what’s often called the ‘social layer’ of cybersecurity,” says Associate Professor Manwaring. 

“We need to encourage a genuinely whole-of-society approach – something which like Sweden and Finland are making considerable inroads.”

The media also should play a greater role in informing the public and public debate around cyber threats.

“There’s clear scope for more nuanced, regular coverage of cyber risks – and one that is less focused on international ‘spectacle’ and reactive coverage.

“Australians need to be informed of the reality of cyber risk, and given the tools and information to participate in strategic efforts to enhance Australia’s cyber resilience, rather than just hearing about the fallout of successful cyber-attacks.”

The article, ‘Resilience to cyber-enabled foreign interference: citizen understanding and threat perceptions’ 2022 by Rob Manwaring and Josh Holloway has been published in Defence Studies DOI: 10.1080/14702436.2022.2138349.

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JOURNAL

Defence Studies

DOI

10.1080/14702436.2022.2138349 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Survey

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Resilience to cyber-enabled foreign interference: citizen understanding and threat perceptions’