Future doctors and nurses feel unprepared for disasters

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG

 

IMAGE: YOHAN ROBINSON, SAHLGRENSKA ACADEMY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG. view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO BY UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG.

Most students of medicine and nursing in Sweden consider their own knowledge of disaster medicine inadequate. However, students who have been conscripts in the military are at an advantage, a University of Gothenburg study shows.

At present, there is no coherent picture of how much instruction in disaster medicine is included in the professional training courses for doctors and nurses in Sweden. The impact of students’ previous experience, if any, in the Swedish rescue services, police, and Armed Forces is also unknown.

The purpose of the study, published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health, was to attain greater knowledge in the field and identify training needs for disaster medicine on the two study programs.

Using a web-based questionnaire distributed to medical and nursing students, the researchers surveyed the extent of education and training in disaster medicine and of the students’ experience from the rescue services, police, and Armed Forces. Five hundred future doctors and 408 future nurses, at a total of nine Swedish higher education institutions, responded.

Military experience a strength

Of the medical students, 38 (8 percent) had served as conscripts in the Armed Forces. In the group of nursing students, the corresponding number was 20 (5 percent). Ten people, of whom eight were prospective nurses, had experience from the rescue services or the police.

The survey questionnaire asked the students to state how far they regarded themselves as well informed about various issues relating to disaster medicine. These included organization, law, ethics, prioritization of patients, decontamination after chemical or radioactive exposure, hospital evacuation, and much more.

Students with experience from the rescue services, police, and/or military service had a higher self-rated level of knowledge. For medical students on completion of their education, there was also a clear association between their self-reported level of knowledge and the extent of their disaster medicine studies.

Based on these results, the researchers think 40 hours spent studying disaster medicine — significantly more than the students generally get — is reasonably adequate. These results support the most recent recommendations of the National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen), encouraging universities to include five-days of undergraduate disaster medicine education in medical and nursing programs.

Better education and training

The study's first author, Yohan Robinson, is associate professor (docent) and Director of the Center for Disaster Medicine at Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg. He is also Director of the Department for Total Defence at the Swedish Armed Forces Centre for Defence Medicine in Gothenburg.

“The results show that both teaching and conscription had a favorable effect on the students’ self-rated knowledge of disaster medicine. Students who received more extensive instruction and those who had been in military service rated themselves as more knowledgeable.”

Robinson concludes: “The study results may provide insights into how to improve education and training for medical and nursing students to enable them to cope with and face crisis situations better, thus helping to make disaster preparedness more robust and effective.”

Higher education institutions participating in the study, besides the University of Gothenburg, were Blekinge University of Technology, Karolinska Institutet, Linnaeus University, and the Universities of Linköping, Lund, Malmö, Umeå, and Uppsala.

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JOURNAL

Frontiers in Public Health

DOI

10.3389/fpubh.2023.1161114 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Survey

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Teaching extent and military service improve undergraduate self-assessed knowledge in disaster medicine: An online survey study among Swedish medical and nursing students

Innovation methods identify how to address root causes of depression in young people

Reports and Proceedings

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

Institute for Manufacturing (IfM) practitioners at the University of Cambridge have contributed to the report Changing Minds, Changing Lives, which proposes innovative, evidence-based approaches to prevent, diagnose and treat depression in young people.

More young people than ever are suffering from depression. One in seven young people aged 10–19 experiences a mental disorder, accounting for 13% of the global burden of disease in this age group. The condition has a vast and potentially devastating impact on them, their family, and their friends, impairing their physical and mental health and extending into adulthood.

Despite the availability of effective treatments for depression, up to 80% of affected adolescents do not receive appropriate care and 50–75% experience a relapse, even after successful treatment.

A new way forward: Changing Minds, Changing Lives 

Contributing to the need for a new way forward, the Changing Minds, Changing Lives report sets out innovative, evidence-based approaches to help prevent the development of first-episode depression in children and young people, enable their recovery from depression, and allow them to remain in remission.  

The report is the result of a collaboration between researchers from the Institute for Manufacturing (IfM), University of Cambridge, innovation management specialists from IfM Engage (the IfM’s knowledge transfer company) and the William Templeton Foundation for Young People’s Mental Health (YPMH), with funding from the Aviva Foundation and the Waterloo Foundation.

Evidence-based innovation management methods from the IfM’s Centre for Technology Management were used to generate consensus from key stakeholders (schools and colleges, employers, public health organisations, clinicians, researchers, families and the food industry) on factors which cause or could be used to address depression.

“These evidence-based innovation management methods, such as roadmapping and portfolio selection, have been widely used in industry for many years and have a track record of enabling innovation. We are now using them to address complex, multi-stakeholder healthcare issues in the mental health ecosystem”, explains Letizia Mortara from the Centre for Technology Management at the IfM.

“These methods allowed the project team to bring together different parties, including patients, parents, general practitioners, clinical psychologists and psychiatrists, educators and researchers, so that we can build broad partnerships to develop, pilot, validate and implement innovations that meet real needs and better support young people’s mental health and well-being,” she added.

New insights into how to address depression

Peter Templeton, Executive Director of Strategic Development at IfM Engage and founder of YPMH, said: “This report offers new insights into how depression develops in young people, spanning societal factors, individuals’ options and choices, their underlying conditions and experiences, and psychological factors; and related physiological changes.

“It identifies forty-five projects to help enable the prevention, early detection, diagnosis, management and treatment of depression in children and young people.”

The Changing Minds, Changing Lives report provides:

• a model of vulnerability factors and mechanisms for the development of depression in young people over the life course.
• opportunities for collaboration on projects with real potential to make a difference.
• straightforward suggestions for how actors across society can work more effectively to prevent and intervene early to address depression.
• promising areas for further research that have the potential to underpin impactful innovations in the future.

“Taken together, these opportunities can change the current trajectory of depression – and change society for the better,” says Peter.

Identifying ‘gaps’ in the system

Alex Christopoulos, Foundation Lead & Senior Strategic Adviser and Consultant, the Aviva Foundation, reflected on the importance of taking a joined-up approach to understanding the causes of depression:

“By identifying gaps in the system and how they can be fixed, the report identifies the kinds of innovative collaborations needed to make a real difference to young people. It challenges different stakeholders in society – from education to health, policymakers to community leaders, industry and employers – to understand their role in building more supportive, resilient communities that are responsive to the needs of young people.

“The Aviva Foundation is proud to have supported the report. The initiative will make an important contribution to the evidence base that informs how depression in young people is understood, prevented, managed and treated.”

Dr Jon Wilson, Consultant Psychiatrist for Central Norfolk Youth Service, Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust concluded: “This is a fantastic, timely document. It will be essential reading for any policymakers wanting to understand the drivers for our national mental health crisis.”

Sliding out of my DMs: young social media users help train machine learning program to flag unsafe sexual conversations on Instagram

Reports and Proceedings

DREXEL UNIVERSITY

In a first-of-its-kind effort, social media researchers from Drexel University, Vanderbilt University, Georgia Institute of Technology and Boston University are turning to young social media users to help build a machine learning program that can spot unwanted sexual advances on Instagram. Trained on data from more than 5 million direct messages — annotated and contributed by 150 adolescents who had experienced conversations that made them feel sexually uncomfortable or unsafe — the technology can quickly and accurately flag risky DMs. 

The project, which was recently published by the Association for Computing Machinery in its Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, is intended to address concerns that an increase of teens using social media, particularly during the pandemic, is contributing to rising trends of child sexual exploitation.

“In the year 2020 alone, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received more than 21.7 million reports of child sexual exploitation — which was a 97% increase over the year prior. This is a very real and terrifying problem,” said Afsaneh Razi, PhD, an assistant professor in Drexel’s College of Computing & Informatics, who was a leader of the research.

Social media companies are rolling out new technology that can flag and remove sexually exploitative images and helps users to more quickly report these illegal posts. But advocates are calling for greater protection for young users that could identify and curtail these risky interactions sooner.

The group’s efforts are part of a growing field of research looking at how machine learning and artificial intelligence be integrated into platforms to help keep young people safe on social media, while also ensuring their privacy. Its most recent project stands apart for its collection of a trove of private direct messages from young users, which the team used to train a machine learning-based program that is 89% accurate at detecting sexually unsafe conversations among teens on Instagram.

“Most of the research in this area uses public datasets which are not representative of real-word interactions that happen in private,” Razi said. “Research has shown that machine learning models based on the perspectives of those who experienced the risks, such as cyberbullying, provide higher performance in terms of recall. So, it is important to include the experiences of victims when trying to detect the risks.”

Each of the 150 participants — who range in age from 13- to 21-years-old — had used Instagram for at least three months between the ages of 13 and 17, exchanged direct messages with at least 15 people during that time, and had at least two direct messages that made them or someone else feel uncomfortable or unsafe. They contributed their Instagram data — more than 15,000 private conversations — through a secure online portal designed by the team. And were then asked to review their messages and label each conversation, as “safe” or “unsafe,” according to how it made them feel.

“Collecting this dataset was very challenging due to sensitivity of the topic and because the data is being contributed by minors in some cases,” Razi said. “Because of this, we drastically increased the precautions we took to preserve confidentiality and privacy of the participants and to ensure that the data collection met high legal and ethical standards, including reporting child abuse and the possibility of uploads of potentially illegal artifacts, such as child abuse material.”

The participants flagged 326 conversations as unsafe and, in each case, they were asked to identify what type of risk it presented — nudity/porn, sexual messages, harassment, hate speech, violence/threat, sale or promotion of illegal activities, or self-injury — and the level of risk they felt — either high, medium or low.

This level of user-generated assessment provided valuable guidance when it came to preparing the machine learning programs. Razi noted that most social media interaction datasets are collected from publicly available conversations, which are much different than those held in private. And they are typically labeled by people who were not involved with the conversation, so it can be difficult for them to accurately assess the level of risk the participants felt.

“With self-reported labels from participants, we not only detect sexual predators but also assessed the survivors’ perspectives of the sexual risk experience,” the authors wrote. “This is a significantly different goal than attempting to identify sexual predators. Built upon this real-user dataset and labels, this paper also incorporates human-centered features in developing an automated sexual risk detection system.”

Specific combinations of conversation and message features were used as the input of the machine learning models. These included contextual features, like age, gender and relationship of the participants; linguistic features, such as wordcount, the focus of questions, or topics of the conversation; whether it was positive, negative or neutral; how often certain terms were used; and whether or not a set of 98 pre-identified sexual-related words were used.

This allowed the machine learning programs to designate a set of attributes of risky conversations, and thanks to the participant’s assessments of their own conversations, the program could also rank the relative level of risk.

The team put its model to the test against a large set of public sample conversations created specifically for sexual predation risk-detection research. The best performance came from its “Random Forest” classifier program, which can rapidly assign features to sample conversations and compare them to known sets that have reached a risk threshold. The classifier accurately identified 92% of unsafe sexual conversations from the set. It was also 84% accurate at flagging individual risky messages.

By incorporating its user-labeled risk assessment training, the models were also able to tease out the most relevant characteristics for identifying an unsafe conversation. Contextual features, such as age, gender and relationship type, as well as linguistic inquiry and wordcount contributed the most to identifying conversations that made young users feel unsafe, they wrote.

This means that a program like this could be used to automatically warn users, in real-time, when a conversation has become problematic, as well as to collect data after the fact. Both of these applications could be tremendously helpful in risk prevention and the prosecution of crimes, but the authors caution that their integration into social media platforms must preserve the trust and privacy of the users.

“Social service providers find value in the potential use of AI as an early detection system for risks, because they currently rely heavily on youth self-reports after a formal investigation had occurred,” Razi said. “But these methods must be implemented in a privacy-preserving matter to not harm the trust and relationship of the teens with adults. Many parental monitoring apps are privacy invasive since they share most of the teen's information with parents, and these machine learning detection systems can help with minimal sharing of information and guidelines to resources when it is needed.”

They suggest that if the program is deployed as a real-time intervention, then young users should be provided with a suggestion — rather than an alert or automatic report — and they should be able to provide feedback to the model and make the final decision.

While the groundbreaking nature of its training data makes this work a valuable contribution to the field of computational risk detection and adolescent online safety research, the team notes that it could be improved by expanding the size of the sample and looking at users of different social media platforms. The training annotations for the machine learning models could also be revised to allow outside experts to rate the risk of each conversation.

The group plans to continue its work and to further refine its risk detection models. It has also created an open-source community to safely share the data with other researchers in the field — recognizing how important it could be for the protection of this vulnerable population of social media users.

“The core contribution of this work is that our findings are grounded in the voices of youth who experienced online sexual risks and were brave enough to share these experiences with us,” they wrote. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that analyzes machine learning approaches on private social media conversations of youth to detect unsafe sexual conversations.”

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

DOI

10.1145/3579522 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Sliding into My DMs: Detecting Uncomfortable or Unsafe Sexual Risk Experiences within Instagram Direct Messages Grounded in the Perspective of Youth

New report makes recommendations on controversial genetics research

Working group wrestles with ethical implications of social and behavioral genomics; launch event today

NEWS RELEASE 24-APR-2023

THE HASTINGS CENTER

The report, “Wrestling with Social and Behavioral Genomics: Risks, Potential Benefits, and Ethical Responsibility,” produced by The Hastings Center, a bioethics institute, provides direction for research and communications in this area of study with both significant social risks and potential benefits. It is  accompanied by an article that describes a fledgling effort to integrate community perspectives on the ethics of this research.

Research on genetic variants and human social and behavioral characteristics, or phenotypes, including anxiety, subjective well-being, and educational attainment, is increasing. And there is ongoing concern about its misinterpretation and misuse. The report, developed as part of a three-year project, describes the scientific terrain, and puts the potential benefits and risks of such research in historical and social context.

In light of that analysis, the report offers recommendations for how such research can be done responsibly and concludes that research on sensitive social and behavioral phenotypes that attempts to compare groups defined by race, ethnicity, or genetic ancestry (where genetic ancestry could easily be misunderstood as race or ethnicity) would require a compelling justification to be ethically conducted, funded, or published. This justification requires at least a convincing argument that the study’s design could yield scientifically valid results; some of the report’s authors would also require the study to have a socially favorable risk-benefit profile.

The report is a consensus document from a working group of 19 leading scholars who conduct social and behavioral genomics research and/or think critically about it.

The project was led by Erik Parens, a senior research scholar at The Hastings Center, and Michelle N. Meyer, an associate professor and chair of the Department of Bioethics & Decision Sciences at Geisinger.

Areas of Consensus

The group agreed that social and behavioral genomic research has the potential to yield benefits, such as improving social science and clinical trials by using genomic data as control variables; advancing health research; better understanding environmental causes and the limits of genomic influence; and, through these, indirectly improving policies. The group also agreed that this research has risks, such as increasing stigma and discrimination against individuals; distracting policy-makers from more effective ways of understanding or addressing the phenomena investigated by such research; and promoting the erroneous view that the status quo is inevitable or that environmental interventions are futile.

Two kinds of research were identified as warranting special consideration because they are “more ethically fraught than others.”

• Research of heightened concern involves sensitive characteristics that are: very consequential to social status, part of a stereotype that threatens to reify the biologization of social identities, and/or central to a minoritized group’s identity. Examples include: obesity, substance use disorders, intelligence, educational attainment, income, and criminalized behaviors. “At a minimum, heightened obligations of responsible conduct and communication of this research apply,” the report states.
• Research of greatest concern is any study (1) on sensitive characteristics that (2) would compare groups defined by (a) race, (b) ethnicity, or (c) genetic ancestry, where genetic ancestry could easily be misunderstood as race or ethnicity (“group-comparison research”). “All members of the working group have serious doubts about the scientific validity of group comparison research today regarding [social and behavioral genomic] phenotypes,” the report states. “And we all agree that—considering the social risks of group-comparison research—scientific validity should be an ethical precondition of conducting, funding, or publishing it.”

Area of Disagreement

The working group disagreed about whether additional, nonscientific justifications (beyond assurances of responsible conduct and communication) would be needed to justify group-comparison research on sensitive traits if that research is scientifically valid. At present, group comparison research is not scientifically valid. But, if it proves valid in the future, should group comparison of sensitive phenotypes proceed? “While some of us believe that researchers should be free to pursue any scientifically valid research, others of us would additionally require a compelling justification of the study’s risk-benefit profile” the report states.

Research Recommendations

• Engaging with stakeholders

• Justifying the use and definition of “populations”

• Justifying phenotype definition and measurement

• Conducting studies with adequate power

• Replicating findings in hold-out samples

• Conducting within-family analyses, if possible

• Extending research benefits to diverse people

Communications Recommendations

• Developing a “key-points” box that includes how results should(n’t) be (mis)interpreted or (mis)used

• Further diverting misinterpretations or misuse via FAQs, videos, and careful press releases

• Reporting effect sizes in the abstract and avoiding exaggerating them, including in graphs

• Embedding caveats and context in graphs and tables

• Defining and justifying the use of “populations”

• Moving away from population language that is easily conflated with race or ethnicity

The articles are published in The Ethical Implications of Social and Behavioral Genomics, a Hastings Center special report.

The project was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, and JPB Foundation. Additional support comes from Open Philanthropy and The Gil Omenn and Martha Darling Fund for Trusted and Trustworthy Scientific Innovation, a Hastings Center fund.

Working Group

Co-Principal Investigators

Erik Parens, The Hastings Center

Michelle N. Meyer, Geisinger

 

Steering Committee

Paul S. Appelbaum, Columbia University

Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, Columbia University

Daphne Oluwaseun Martschenko, Stanford University

 

Additional Members of the Working Group

Daniel J. Benjamin, University of California, Los Angeles

Shawneequa L. Callier, George Washington University

Nathaniel Comfort, Johns Hopkins University

Dalton Conley, Princeton University

Jeremy Freese, Stanford University

Nanibaa’ A. Garrison, University of California, Los Angeles

Evelynn M. Hammonds, Harvard University

K. Paige Harden, University of Texas at Austin

Alicia R. Martin, Harvard University,

Benjamin M. Neale, Harvard University

Rohan H. C. Palmer, Emory University

James Tabery, University of Utah

Eric Turkheimer, University of Virginia

Patrick Turley, University of Southern California

 

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METHOD OF RESEARCH

Systematic review

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Wrestling with Social and Behavioral Genomics: Risks, Potential Benefits, and Ethical Responsibility

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

21-Apr-2023

Multispectral drone imaging: A convenient new method to determine optimal breeding times in slash pines

Researchers use camera drones and machine learning to track genetic and structural variations in slash pine trees in a time-series monitoring study

Peer-Reviewed Publication

NANJING AGRICULTURAL UNIVERSITY THE ACADEMY OF SCIENCE

 

IMAGE: IN A NEW STUDY, RESEARCHERS SHOWED THE APPLICABILITY OF A NEW DRONE-BASED IMAGING TECHNIQUE THAT CAN PROVIDE REAL-TIME INFORMATION ON GROWTH RATE, BIOCHEMICAL FEATURES, AND GENETIC VARIATIONS IN TREES. view more 

CREDIT: "PHANTOM CRUISING FOREST" BY SAM BEEBE

Plant nutrient content reflects their overall metabolic health and has a direct impact on plant growth, development, and reproduction. Nonstructural carbohydrates (NSCs), for example, are a type of temporary storage for carbohydrates that accumulate in trees and are thought to be indicative of plant carbon availability and supply. Nitrogen (N), a primary component of proteins, chlorophyll, nucleic acids, and vitamins, is required for photosynthesis product storage and transport. However, monitoring these nutrients in trees manually or using traditional methods takes a significant amount of time and effort. This necessitates the development of new, modern, and time-saving approaches to assist plant scientists in extracting maximum information in the shortest amount of time.

To this end, a group of researchers from China and New Zealand, including Assistant Professor Yanjie Li from the Chinese Academy of Forestry, have recently utilized artificial intelligence (AI) for the real-time monitoring of N and NSC in the leaves of pine needles. The team used unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones to perform imaging studies on pine trees, while flying past their canopy. By combining advanced spectroscopic analysis techniques, advanced statistics, and machine learning algorithms, this new approach can provide information about the biochemical properties, growth rate, health and development status, and genetic variations of these trees. The study was published online in the journal Plant Phenomics on 15 March 2023.

“UAV-based remote sensing is nondestructive, high throughput, and quick. It is an efficient technique for measuring plant structure and monitoring canopy physiology content in agriculture and forestry”, says Associate Prof. Li, who is the corresponding author of the study.

The team had previously demonstrated the detection of tree growth parameters and vegetation indices (VIs) using UAV multispectral imagery and used this for genetic variation estimation in slash pines (Pinus elliottii). In the current study, the technique was further refined to gather information on the canopies of slash pine to help with their breeding. A total of 383 trees were monitored for 11 months in a genetically controlled forest of slash pines in China. The drones were used to capture high-quality structural images of N and NSC in the pine leaves, which were then run through a software to screen through possible predictors and arrive at the most likely structures and genetic categories. This was then extrapolated to gather information on the monthly distribution of predicted N and NSC contents at the study site. Next, the best tree families (considered most suitable for breeding) and heritability of N and NSC content was predicted for different months. “We obtained the highest heritability for N and NSC in the months of July and March, which could be the best time for pine breeding”.

The approach could successfully gather information and helped monitor trends for a year, and is a reliable proof of concept that can pave the way for more detailed investigations and advanced technology development. Associate Prof. Li explains, “We plan on repeated assessments in the future, especially to investigate the variations in findings from drought and non-drought years.”

The study not only identified tree families and clusters with high-breeding values, but also the optimal time for breeding. It is cost-effective and less resource-intensive, with enormous scalability and the ability to provide real-time information. It can provide information to plant breeders to optimally decide on the right time and choice of trees to use for artificial breeding.

Such insights coupled with long-term monitoring of natural forests and plantations could lead to significant modernization of technology used in agriculture, horticulture, forestry, and agroforestry.

###

Reference

Authors

Xiaoyun Niu1, Zhaoying Song1,2, Cong Xu3, Haoran Wu1,2 Qifu Luan2, Jingmin Jiang2, and Yanjie Li2

Affiliations

1. College of Landscape Architecture and Tourism, Hebei Agriculture University, Baoding 071000, China.

2. Research Institute of Subtropical Forestry, Chinese Academy of Forestry, No. 73, Daqiao Road, Fuyang, Hangzhou 311400, Zhejiang Province, China.

3. New Zealand School of Forestry, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, 8041 Christchurch, New Zealand.

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JOURNAL

Plant Phenomics

DOI

10.34133/plantphenomics.0028 

ARTICLE TITLE

Prediction of Needle Physiological Traits Using UAV Imagery for Breeding Selection of Slash Pine

For birds, blending in may result in more diversity

 NEWS RELEASE 24-APR-2023

FLORIDA MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

 

IMAGE: HIMALAYAN CUTIAS (TOP) AND RUFOUS-BACKED SIBIAS (BOTTOM) FLOCK TOGETHER IN WESTERN ASIA AND LOOK REMARKABLY SIMILAR, DESPITE BELONGING TO DIFFERENT GENERA. view more 

CREDIT: PHOTOS BY WENYI ZHOU

The saying “Birds of a feather flock together” is being given new meaning by a study published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society b. Flocking birds often travel in groups made up of a single species, in which individuals are nearly indistinguishable from one another, as noted by the proverbial adage. But something strange happens in flocks of two or more species from Southeast Asia. Even when flock species are distantly related, they still seem to converge on the same appearance, as if trying to fit in.

“They all share haphazard traits, like crests or yellow bellies, which makes them almost identical. You can’t really tell them apart without looking at their markings,” said study co-author Scott Robinson, Ordway eminent scholar at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

According to Robinson, this similarity in plumage is likely a type of mimicry, which by itself isn’t uncommon in birds. Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, was the first to suggest that some bird species engage in mimicry when noting the similarities between orioles and friarbirds in Australia. Birds can mimic one another to reduce aggression from a dominant species; to resemble a more formidable adversary to predators; and, in at least one case, to make themselves appear toxic.

But resemblance in multispecies flocks is something different, said lead author Rebecca Kimball, professor of biology at the University of Florida.

“In mimicry, you often want to look like something because there’s an advantage to being that other thing. You want species to think you’re toxic or low-profitable prey,” she said. “In flocking birds, one idea is that this has more to do with a predator’s ability to isolate a target. When there are a bunch of birds moving around, it may be easier for predators to identify an individual that has a distinct color pattern.”

This idea that unrelated birds find safety in collective obscurity was first proposed in the 1960s for flocks along the Andes Mountains. But follow-up studies failed to show conclusive evidence of mimicry in Andean multispecies flocks, and the theory was largely abandoned.

“The idea sat fallow for a long time,” Robinson said. But in 2010, Robinson began working with a Chinese colleague in Yunnan province and observed what appeared to be the same phenomenon that had been described decades earlier.

Robinson and his colleagues spent the next several years documenting similarities in China’s multispecies flocks, uncovering the same pattern again and again. While some of the similarities between species are subtle, the authors points to several visually conspicuous examples.

In western Asia, Himalayan cutias (Cutia nipalensis) look like they’re dressed in mismatched layers, with a mask of black feathers, chestnut wings, and white chests with zebra stripes. This pattern might seem impervious to emulation, yet the rufous-backed sibias (Leioptila annectens) they flock with do a remarkably good impression. Both species have similar behavior, foraging patterns and markings, with the exception of stripes, which the sibias lack.

Some birds also seem capable of mimicking more than one species as they mature. Juvenile white-hooded babblers (Gampsorhynchus rufulus) have rusty head feathers, brown wings and creamy underbellies, similar to the parrotbills they flock with. Adults look like an entirely different species, with white heads and dark brown wings that resemble white-crested laughingthrushes (Garrulax leucolophus), all of which are part of the same flock.

Somewhat counterintuitively, this conformity within multispecies flocks may be contributing to diversity in the region. Not only can birds mimic more than one species at different stages of development, but their appearance can also vary across their range. In eastern China, coal tits tag along with birds with prominent crest feathers, which they mimic. In the Himalayas and Hengduan Mountains farther west, the same species lacks a crest and flocks with other crestless birds.

If these differences persist long enough, Robinson said, it might ultimately result in one species becoming two. “The possible role this type of mimicry plays in speciation is the most interesting idea from our point of view. Many of these birds have huge ranges, and there may be a lot of differentiation in these traits involved in flocking within a species.”

There seem to be two main ingredients required to create this type of mimicry in flocks, both of which might help explain why this pattern appears to be so prominent in China but absent elsewhere.

First, Robinson said, a flock must be composed of just a few species, with some more common than others. “When you have a flock with a really dominant, abundant species, there’s a model worth mimicking. If other birds look like that model, they get the same protection, they get access to the same resources, and they get to travel with a compatible group.”

In other parts of the world, many flocks have more of an open-door policy, weakening the selective forces that contribute to mimicry. Mating pairs of multiple species join together in patchwork groups, often relying on the warning calls of sentries to avoid predators rather than their ability to fade into the background.

The second ingredient is the winnowing fan of predation. For small to medium flocking birds, the biggest source of danger comes from above, in the form of raptors, and the skies above Southeast Asia are especially fraught. The region encompasses only 3% of Earth’s land area, yet it harbors almost 30% of all raptor species. This puts an enormous amount of pressure on flocks, Robinson said, which may promote mimicry.

To determine whether similarity among flocking species is the result of mimicry, the authors say they’ll need to conduct widescale genetic analyses to rule out other potential causes.

“Just how widespread mimicry is in birds is something that's only been appreciated recently," Robinson said. "Taxonomy work is based on appearance, with the assumption that birds are closely related if they look similar. Now that we can study DNA, we're realizing they often look alike because they live together.”

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JOURNAL

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (B )

DOI

10.1098/rstb.2022.0112 

ARTICLE TITLE

Can convergence in mixed-species flocks lead to evolutionary divergence? Evidence for and methods to test this hypothesis

Study finds early RSV infection linked to significantly increased risk of asthma in children

Peer-Reviewed Publication

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER

 

IMAGE: TINA HARTERT, MD, MPH, PROFESSOR OF MEDICINE AND PEDIATRICS, DIRECTOR OF THE CENTER FOR ASTHMA AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES RESEARCH, VICE PRESIDENT FOR TRANSLATIONAL RESEARCH AND THE LULU H. OWEN PROFESSOR OF MEDICINE view more 

CREDIT: VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER

Severe respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infection has long been associated with the onset of childhood wheezing diseases, but the relationship between RSV infection during infancy and the development of childhood asthma has remained unclear.

A new observational study by Vanderbilt University Medical Center researchers has found that RSV infection in the first year of life is associated with a significantly increased risk of asthma in children. The study, the first to look at the effects of RSV infections of all different severities on childhood asthma risk at a population level, was published in the journal The Lancet.

RSV is a seasonal respiratory virus that affects almost all children by the age of 2 and repeatedly throughout life. It is the leading cause of bronchiolitis, a lower respiratory tract infection that presents as coughing and wheezing in infants and young children. The symptoms are mild in most children and usually resolve in about a week, but it can lead to serious illness and death especially in premature or very young infants and those with chronic lung disease or congenital heart disease. 

It is the most common cause of hospitalizations worldwide due to respiratory issues in the first year of life, said Christian Rosas-Salazar, MD, MPH, assistant professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Allergy, Immunology and Pulmonary Medicine, the first author of the study. 

“For 60 years investigators have repeatedly identified the link between severe RSV and asthma; however, we’ve shown that this link is explained in part by shared heredity to both severe RSV and asthma,” said the study’s principal investigator and senior author Tina Hartert, MD, MPH, professor of Medicine and Pediatrics, director of the Center for Asthma and Environmental Sciences Research, Vice President for Translational Research and the Lulu H. Owen Professor of Medicine. “The solution in our study was to understand the link between RSV and asthma by ensuring all RSV infections would be captured using molecular techniques and post-season serology,” she said.

“In our study, among healthy children born at term, not being infected with RSV in the first year of life was associated with a substantially reduced risk of developing childhood asthma, which affects about 8% of the children in the U.S.,” Rosas-Salazar said. “Our findings show an age-dependent association between RSV infection during infancy and childhood asthma.”

“We focused on the first year of life because we think the first year is a very important period of lung and immune development,” Rosas-Salazar said. “We believe that when a child is infected with RSV in the first year of life, when the lungs and immune system are still under development, that could lead to certain abnormalities that can later cause asthma,” he said. 

The INSPIRE (Infant Susceptibility to Pulmonary Infections and Asthma Following RSV Exposure) study included 1,946 eligible healthy infants who were 6 months old or younger at the beginning of RSV season (November to March in Tennessee). The infants were recruited from 11 pediatric practices across Middle Tennessee. Biweekly surveillance and serology tests were used to classify infants as infected or not infected in the first year of life. Fifty-four percent of infants were infected with RSV in the first year of life; 46% were uninfected.

The infants were followed annually and then evaluated for asthma at 5 years old. The study found infants who weren’t infected with RSV in the first year of life had a 26% lower risk of asthma at age 5. 

“We hope the results of this study motivate long-term follow-up of common respiratory outcomes among children in ongoing clinical trials of RSV prevention products, including vaccines and monoclonal antibodies that can decrease the severity of the infection,” Rosas-Salazar said. 

“Showing efficacy of RSV vaccines against childhood asthma would increase public health interest and vaccine uptake,” Hartert said.

The study was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, with an Asthma and Allergic Diseases Clinical Research Center award to Hartert.

The Vanderbilt study team included Tebeb Gebretsadik, MPH, William Dupont, PhD, James Chappell, MD, and Stokes Peebles, MD. Emory University collaborated in the study, providing laboratory services.

DOI

10.1016/S0140-6736(23)00811-5 

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

20-Apr-2023

CityU: world’s first university to manufacture next-generation, self-designed compact electron microscopes

Business Announcement

CITY UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

 

IMAGE: AN ELECTRON MICROSCOPE SYSTEM COMPOSED OF A PULSED ELECTRON SOURCE, A FAST CAMERA, A STAGED PUMPING VACUUM SYSTEM, AND AN ABERRATION CORRECTOR HAS BEEN DEVELOPED BY THE RESEARCH TEAM. view more 

CREDIT: CITY UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

An EM system composed of a pulsed electron source, a fast camera, a staged pumping vacuum system, and an aberration corrector has been developed by a team led by Professor Chen Fu-rong, Chair Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. It is the first time-resolved electron microscope integrated with both scanning and transmission electron microscope modes in a compact format developed by a university-based research team.

The team’s ultimate goal is to develop a miniature high space-time resolved “quantum” EM that can be used to study atom dynamics of beam-sensitive materials.

Since EMs are capable of imaging at a significantly higher resolution than light microscopes and provide measurements and analysis at the micro-nano, and even the atomic scale, they are much sought after, especially in medicine, life science, chemistry, materials, integrated circuits and other research industries.

The team has overcome some longstanding problems in the development of EMs. Currently, EMs cannot overcome the scientific bottleneck of radiation damage on a sample and being limited to a static view of the sample, hindering their capability for studying small molecule and electron beam-sensitive materials. Furthermore, their size limits their application in space-expensive environments, such as space shuttles, and deep sea and deep earth research ships and devices.

To overcome these limitations, the CityU research team innovated a differential pumping design to improve the image quality, and developed the backscattered and secondary electron deflectors to enable basic scanning, magnification, imaging functions and observation of liquid samples and beam-sensitive materials.

The team also designed pulsed electron sources and the fast camera that can be used with a desktop EM. By equipping the fast camera with a deflector, the speed of imaging is not limited to the readout time. This is the first time that such a concept can be verified on a desktop EM system. Besides, the team designed an aberration corrector, which can further improve imaging resolution. 

With innovative designs mentioned above, the novel EM can generate an image of a sample in five minutes, achieving nanoscale spatial resolution and a magnification of over 105 time for observation and analysis in nanoscale.

In the future, with the ability to independently design and hold intellectual property rights, the team will be able to produce customised miniature EMs at a lower cost. For instance, the LaB6 desktop electron microscope is expected to be sold at 60% of the price of similar products on the market.

“The miniaturisation of high-end instruments is an inevitable trend in industrial development,” said Professor Chen, concurrently Director of the Time-Resolved Aberration-Corrected Environmental EM Unit and Director of the Shenzhen Futian Research Institute at CityU.

With the support of the Futian District Government, the team is the only university-based research group to have produced several high-end EMs.

The research team is developing a high spatio-temporal resolution desktop scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) that utilises pulsed hollow cones to enable observation and reconstruction of protein structures in 3D in room temperature and liquid conditions. This overcomes the current limitation of observing protein structures only under extremely low-temperature conditions using cryo-electron microscopy.

The next stage is to establish a world-leading electro-optical design and manufacturing centre in the Greater Bay Area that will focus on technology transfer and research into electron optics technology.

“This centre aims to spin off electron optics-related technologies for established and start-up companies,” said Professor Chen. 

Desktop electron microscopes, self-designed by City University of Hong Kong can be applied in various research industry fields.

CREDIT

City University of Hong Kong

The goal is to stay 15 years ahead of the world’s other EM user facilities in terms of instrumentation and science, he added.

The centre will be organised around novel electron optics for servicing a series of high space/time resolution EMs dedicated to science applications, such as artificial photosynthesis, quantum materials and water science, in environments with a varied range of external stimuli (for example, electric fields, lasers, high temperatures and low temperatures) that are not accessible today. 

This platform will lead to breakthroughs in quantum devices, future energy, life science and medicine, said Professor Chen, thereby helping to transform the team’s research findings into applications with real-world benefits, and stimulating collaboration between industry and academia.

Professor Chan Chi-hou, CityU Acting President, Mr Huang Wei, Secretary of the CPC Futian District Committee, Mr Ouyang Huiyu, Vice-District Mayor of the Futian District People’s Government, and Mr Chen Wenhsien, Chief of Science and Technology Major Project Division, Science, Technology and Innovation Commission of Shenzhen Municipality attended the press conference held on 20 April.

https://www.cityu.edu.hk/research/stories/2023/04/21/cityu-worlds-first-university-manufacture-next-generation-self-designed-compact-electron-microscopes