A large international study of migraine reveals new biological pathways for treatment

Peer-Reviewed Publication

DECODE GENETICS

 

IMAGE: 

KARI STEFANSSON CEO OF DECODE GENETICS AND GYDA BJORNSDOTTIR LEADER OF THE PROJECT ON BEHALF OF DECODE GENETICS.

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CREDIT: DECODE GENETICS

Reykjavik, 26. October 2023.

A large international study led by deCODE Genetics on the genetics of migraine provides novel insights into the biology of migraine enabling detection of rare variants protecting against migraine, opening an avenue for potential development of novel drug targets.
In a study published today in Nature Genetics  a group of international scientists led by deCODE Genetics in Iceland, a subsidiary of Amgen Inc, analyzed genetic data from over 1,3 million participants of which 80 thousand had migraine. The scientists focused on detecting sequence variants associated with the the two main subtypes of migraine: migraine with aura (often referred to as classical migraine) and migraine without aura. The results highlight several genes that affect one of these migraine subtypes over the other, and point to new biological pathways that could be targeted for therapeutic developments.

Migraine is among the most common chronic pain disorders worldwide, with up to 20% of adults affected. Although recent advances have been made in studies of the genetics and underlying biology of migraine and new treatments recently developed that are effective for many migraine sufferers, they do not work for all types of migraine

The study revealed associations with 44 variants, 12 of which are novel. Four novel migraine with aura associations were revealed and 13 variants associated primarily with migraine without aura. Of particular interest were three rare variants with large effects pointing to distinct pathologies underlying different types of migraine. Thus, a rare frameshift variant in the PRRT2 gene confers a large risk of migraine with aura and with another brain disease, epilepsy, but not of migraine without aura. In SCN11A, a gene known to play a key role in pain sensation, the scientists detected several rare loss-of-function variants associated with protection effects against migraine, while a common missense variant in the same gene is associated with modest risk of migraine. Finally, a rare variant pointing to the KCNK5 gene, confers large protection against severe migraine and brain aneurysms, either identifying a common pathway between the two diseases or suggesting that some cases of early brain aneuryisms may be misclassified as migraine.  „What makes our study unique is that it includes large datasets from sequenced individuals enabling detection of rare variants protecting against migraine, potentially opening an avenue for development of novel drug targets,“ says Kari Stefansson CEO of deCODE genetics..

The joint effort of the international research team was led by scientists at deCODE genetics in Iceland and included collaborating scientists from the Copenhagen Hospital Biobank and Danish Blood Bank Study, the HUSK study in Norway, the Intermountain Health study in the US, and data generated by the large population-based studies from the UK Biobank and FinnGen.

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Based in Reykjavik, Iceland, deCODE is a global leader in analyzing and understanding the human genome. Using its unique expertise and population resources, deCODE has discovered genetic risk factors for dozens of common diseases. The purpose of understanding the genetics of disease is to use that information to create new means of diagnosing, treating and preventing disease. deCODE is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amgen (NASDAQ:AMGN).

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JOURNAL

Nature Genetics

DOI

10.1038/s41588-023-01538-0 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Meta-analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Rare variants with large effects provide functional insights into the pathology of migraine subtypes with and without aura

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

26-Oct-2023

 

To navigate the world, we all shimmy like these electric fish

Peer-Reviewed Publication

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

 

VIDEO: 

AN OBSERVATION TANK ILLUMINATED BY INFRARED SHOWS ELECTRIC KNIFEFISH BEHAVIOR WITH THE LIGHTS ON (TOP) AND LIGHTS OFF (BOTTOM).

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CREDIT: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY.

An electric knifefish shimmies in the water for the same reason a dog sniffs or a human glances around a new place — to make sense of their surroundings. For the first time, scientists demonstrate that a wide range of organisms, even microbes, perform the same pattern of movements in order to sense the world.

“Amoeba don’t even have a nervous system, and yet they adopt behavior that has a lot in common with a human’s postural balance or fish hiding in a tube,” said author Noah Cowan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins. “These organisms are quite far apart from each other in the tree of life, suggesting that evolution converged on the same solution through very different underlying mechanisms.”

The research, which has implications for cognition and robotics, is published in Nature Machine Intelligence.

The findings stem from the team’s efforts to figure out what the nervous system does when animals move to improve their perception of the world, and whether that behavior could be translated to robotic control systems.

While watching electric knifefish in an observation tank, the researchers noticed how when it was dark, the fish shimmied back and forth significantly more frequently. When lights were on, the fish swayed gently with only occasional bursts of rapid movement.

Knifefish in the wild are hardwired to find refuge to avoid predators. They emit weak electric discharges to sense their location and find shelter. Wiggling rapidly allows them to actively sense their surroundings, especially in dark water. In the light, they still make such rapid movements, just far less frequently.

“We found that the best strategy is to briefly switch into explore mode when uncertainty is too high, and then switch back to exploit mode when uncertainty is back down,” said first author Debojyoti Biswas, a Johns Hopkins postdoctoral researcher.

This is the first time scientists deciphered this mode-switching strategy in fish. It’s also the first time anyone has linked this behavior across species.

The team created a model that simulates the key sensing behaviors, and using work from other labs, spotted the same sensory dependent movements in other organisms. Creatures that shared the behavior with the fish included amoeba, moths, cockroaches, moles, bats, mice, and humans.

“Not a single study that we found in the literature violated the rules we discovered in the electric fish, not even single-celled organisms like amoeba sensing an electric field,” Cowan said.

Scientists are just beginning to understand how animals control sensing movements unconsciously. The team suspects all organisms have a brain computations that manage uncertainty.

“If you go to a grocery store, you’ll notice people standing in line will change between being stationary and moving around while waiting,” Cowan said. “We think that’s the same thing going on, that to maintain a stable balance you actually have to occasionally move around and excite your sensors like the knifefish. We found the statistical characteristics of those movements are ubiquitous across a wide range of animals, including humans.”

The team expects the findings can be used to improve search and rescue drones, space rovers, and other autonomous robots.

Next they will test whether their insights hold true for other living things — even plants.

Authors include Andrew Lamperski of University of Minnesota Minneapolis; Yu Yang of Johns Hopkins; Kathleen Hoffman of University of Maryland, Baltimore County; John Guckenheimer of Cornell University; and Eric S. Fortune of New Jersey Institute of Technology.

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JOURNAL

Nature Machine Intelligence

DOI

10.1038/s42256-023-00745-y 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Mode switching in organisms for solving explore-versus-exploit problems

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

26-Oct-2023

 

How do animals know it’s lunchtime?

Scientists discover molecular pathways that fix mealtimes and how they sync to days

Peer-Reviewed Publication

TOKYO METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: 

THE TEAM FOUND THAT QSM REGULATED SYNCING TO LIGHT/DARK CYCLES WHILE MOLECULAR CLOCKS IN NEURONS TOOK OVER THE ROLE IN CONSTANT DARKNESS. ON THE OTHER HAND, CLK/CYC GENES HELPED KEEP FEEDING/FASTING CYCLES.

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CREDIT: TOKYO METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY

Tokyo, Japan – Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have used fruit flies to study how daily eating patterns are regulated. They found that the quasimodo (qsm) gene helped sync feeding to light/dark cycles, but not in constant darkness: instead, the genes clock (clk) and cycle (cyc) keep eating/fasting cycles, while other “clocks” in nerve cells help sync it to days. Deciphering the molecular mechanism behind eating cycles helps us understand animal behavior, including our own.

Many members of the animal kingdom eat at roughly the same times each day. This is born out of the need to adapt to aspects of the environment, including how much light there is, temperature, the availability of food, the chance that predators are around, all of which are vital for survival. It is also important for efficient digestion and metabolism, thus for our general wellbeing.

But how do such a wide range of organisms know when to eat? An important factor is circadian rhythm, an approximately daily physiological cycle shared by organisms as diverse as animals, plants, bacteria and algae. It serves as a “master clock” which regulates rhythmic behavior. But animals are full of other timing mechanisms, known as “peripheral clocks,” each with its own different biochemical pathways. These can be reset by external factors, such as feeding. But the specific way in which these clocks govern animal feeding behavior is not yet clear.

Now a team led by Associate Professor Kanae Ando of Tokyo Metropolitan University have addressed this problem using fruit flies, a model organism that mirrors many of the features of more complex animals, including humans. They used a method known as a CAFE assay, where flies are fed through a microcapillary to measure exactly how much individual flies eat at different times. Firstly, they looked at how flies synced their eating habits to light. Studying flies feeding in a light/dark cycle, previous work already showed that flies feed more during the daytime even when mutations were introduced to core circadian clock genes, period (per) and timeless (tim). Instead, the team looked at quasimodo (qsm), a gene that encodes for a light-responsive protein that controls the firing of clock neurons. By knocking down qsm, they found that flies had their daytime feeding pattern significantly affected. For the first time, we know that the syncing of feeding to a light-mediated rhythm is affected by qsm.

This was not the case for flies feeding in constant darkness. Flies with mutations in their core circadian clock genes suffered severe disruption to their daily feeding patterns. Of the four genes involved, period (per), timeless (tim), cycle (cyc) and clock (clk), loss of cyc and clk was far more severe. In fact, it was found that clk/cyc was necessary in creating bimodal feeding patterns i.e. eating and fasting periods, particularly those in metabolic tissues. But how did these cycles sync up with days? Instead of metabolic tissues, molecular clock genes in the nerve cells played the dominant role.

The team’s discoveries give us a first glimpse into how different clocks in different parts of an organism regulate feeding/fasting cycles as well as how they match up with diurnal rhythms. An understanding of the mechanisms behind feeding habits promises new insights into animal behavior, as well as novel treatments for eating disorders.

This work was supported by the Farber Institute for Neurosciences and Thomas Jefferson University, the National Institutes of Health [R01AG032279-A1], a Takeda Foundation Grant, and the TMU Strategic Research Fund.

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JOURNAL

iScience

DOI

10.1016/j.isci.2023.108164 

ARTICLE TITLE

Dissecting the daily feeding pattern: Peripheral CLOCK/CYCLE generate the feeding/fasting episodes and neuronal molecular clocks synchronize them

 

Study shows simple diet swaps can cut carbon emissions and improve your health

Making one small diet change -- chicken instead of beef, plant milk instead of cow's milk -- could significantly curb carbon emissions and increase the healthfulness of your diet.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

TULANE UNIVERSITY

Curbing carbon emissions and eating healthier may both start at the dinner table.

According to a new study co-authored by a Tulane University researcher and published in the journal Nature Food, making simple substitutions like switching from beef to chicken or drinking plant-based milk instead of cow’s milk could reduce the average American’s carbon footprint from food by 35%, while also boosting diet quality by between 4-10%, according to the study.

These findings highlight the potential of a “small changes” approach that researchers believe could encourage more consumers to adopt climate-friendly eating habits. Food production accounts for 25-33% of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions with beef production being a primary contributor.

“This study shows that cutting dietary carbon emissions is accessible and doesn’t have to be a whole lifestyle change,” said Diego Rose, senior author and nutrition program director at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. “It can be as simple as ordering a chicken burrito instead of a beef burrito when you go out to eat. When you’re at the grocery store, move your hand one foot over to grab soy or almond milk instead of cow’s milk. That one small change can have a significant impact.”

 

The study, which analyzed diet data from over 7,700 Americans, identified commonly eaten foods with the highest climate impact and simulated replacing them with nutritionally similar, lower-emission options.

“For us, substitutes included swapping a beef burger for a turkey burger, not replacing your steak with a tofu hotdog,” said Anna Grummon, lead author and assistant professor of pediatrics and health policy at Stanford University. “We looked for substitutes that were as similar as possible.”

The largest projected reductions in emissions were seen in mixed dishes: burritos, pastas and similar popular dishes where it’s easy to substitute a lower-impact protein instead of beef.

The study expanded on past research by including dietary data for children. Whereas it may be more effective for an adult to focus on protein swaps, Grummon said switching children to plant-based milk can have a “meaningful impact on the carbon footprint” and help start positive habits earlier.

Identifying healthy alternatives to high-carbon foods was not the intent of the study. And yet, swapping to lower carbon foods showed “sizable improvements in how healthy the diets were.”

While these substitutes are not intended as a cure-all for climate objectives or personal health goals, they are evidence that small changes can have a large impact.

“There is overlap between sustainable diets and healthy diets,” Grummon said. “Our study shows that changing just one ingredient, making one swap, can be a win-win, resulting in meaningful changes in both climate outcomes and how healthy our diets are.”

Other co-authors of the study included Cristina Lee and Thomas Robinson of Stanford University and Eric Rimm of Harvard University.

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JOURNAL

Nature Food

DOI

10.1038/s43016-023-00864-0 

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Simple dietary substitutions can reduce carbon footprints and improve dietary quality across diverse segments of the US population

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

26-Oct-2023

COI STATEMENT

T.N.R. receives research grant support from the National Institutes of Health and the Stanford Maternal and Child Health Institute for nutrition- and health-related research and served as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of WW International, Inc. until December 2022. D.R. currently receives grant support from the DHHS Health Resources and Services Administration and from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. He has received grants in the past for his diet-sustainability research from Wellcome Trust, the National Cancer Institute and the Center for Biological Diversity. The other authors declare no competing interests.

 

Stunting in infancy linked to differences in cognitive and brain function

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA

Children who are too short for their age can suffer reduced cognitive ability arising from differences in brain function as early as six months of age, according to new research from the University of East Anglia.

Researchers compared the ‘visual working memory’ – the memory capacity that holds visual cues for processing – in children who had stunted growth with those having typical growth.

Published today in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, the study found that the visual working memory of infants with poor physical growth was disrupted, making them more easily distracted and setting the stage for poorer cognitive ability one year later.

Stunted growth had previously been linked with poor cognitive outcomes later in life, but this is the first time that this association has been found in infancy. It is also the first time stunted growth has been linked to functional differences in how the brain works in early development.

Led by Prof John Spencer of UEA’s School of Psychology, the team of researchers studied more than 200 children in the first ever brain imaging study of its kind.

“We expected that poor growth might impact cognition in early development, but it was striking to see this at the level of brain function,” said Prof Spencer.

“Typically-developing infants in our study showed engagement of a working memory brain network - and this brain activity predicted cognitive outcomes one year later. But the stunted infants showed a very different pattern suggesting that they were quite distractable.”

“This distractability was associated with a brain network typically involved in the allocation of attention to objects or tasks, suppressing distraction, and maintaining items in working memory” said Dr Sobana Wijeakumar, first author of the study. Dr. Wijeakumar is an Assistant Professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Nottingham.

The brain activity and cognitive abilities of the infants were assessed at six to nine months, and cognitive ability was followed up one year later. The results showed that infants with so-called ‘stunted growth’, often caused by poor nutrition or ill-health, had significantly poorer cognitive abilities at both stages than their typically-developing counterparts.

Interestingly, the children who bucked the trend and did well in their second year of cognitive testing despite having restricted growth were those whose visual memory had been unexpectedly strong at the six to nine months stage.  

The discovery suggests that efforts to improve working memory and tackle distractibility in children during their crucial early months may reduce or prevent cognitive disadvantages later in life. This research also highlights the importance of studying brain function in early development.

The research was led by the University of East Anglia in collaboration with the University of Nottingham, the Community Empowerment Lab, Durham University, University of Iowa, Rhode Island Hospital, Brown University, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

‘Stunting in infancy is associated with atypical activation of working memory and attention networks’ is published by Nature Human Behaviour.

This publication is based on research funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The findings and conclusions contained within are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect positions or policies of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Further funding came from the US National Institutes of Health and the Leverhulme Trust.

ENDS

EDITOR’S NOTES

1/ For more information or to request an interview, please contact the UEA communications office at communications@uea.ac.uk.

Prof John Spencer: j.spencer@uea.ac.uk

2/ A copy of the paper can be downloaded from the following Dropbox link: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/x25r6jbwrpn853872xtkw/h?rlkey=0sbx2in5igaamnmub0ut6lc2l&dl=0

The DOI number for this paper will be 10.1038/s41562-023-01725-3. Once the paper has been published online, it will be available at the following URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01725-3. This link will go live after the embargo ends.

3/ The University of East Anglia (UEA) is a UK Top 25 university (Complete University Guide and HESA Graduate Outcomes Survey) and a UK Top 30 university in the Sunday Times Good University Guide. It also ranks in the UK Top 20 for research quality (Times Higher Education REF2021 Analysis) and the UK Top 10 for impact on Sustainable Development Goals. Known for its world-leading research and good student experience, its 360-acre campus has won seven Green Flag awards in a row for its high environmental standards. The University is a leading member of Norwich Research Park, one of Europe’s biggest concentrations of researchers in the fields of environment, health and plant science. www.uea.ac.uk.  

 

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JOURNAL

Nature Human Behaviour

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Stunting in infancy is associated with atypical activation of working memory and attention networks

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

26-Oct-2023

 

Parent-perceived benefits and harms associated with internet use by adolescent offspring

JAMA Network Open

Peer-Reviewed Publication

JAMA NETWORK

About The Study: This survey study of attitudes of 1,005 parents of children and adolescents ages 9 to 15 revealed both perceived benefits (e.g., family connectedness) and concerns (e.g., cyberbullying, addiction) of internet use. Twice as many parents reported specific concerns about internet addiction than substance addiction. 

Authors: Michael Peter Milham, M.D., Ph.D., of the Child Mind Institute in New York, is the corresponding author. 

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ 

(doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.39851

Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.

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About JAMA Network Open: JAMA Network Open is an online-only open access general medical journal from the JAMA Network. On weekdays, the journal publishes peer-reviewed clinical research and commentary in more than 40 medical and health subject areas. Every article is free online from the day of publication. 

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JOURNAL

JAMA Network Open

 

How adults understand what kids are saying

It’s not easy to parse young children’s words, but adults’ beliefs about what children want to communicate helps make it possible, a new study finds

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- When babies first begin to talk, their vocabulary is very limited. Often one of the first sounds they generate is “da,” which may refer to dad, a dog, a dot, or nothing at all.

How does an adult listener make sense of this limited verbal repertoire? A new study from MIT and Harvard University researchers has found that adults’ understanding of conversational context and knowledge of mispronunciations that children commonly make are critical to the ability to understand children’s early linguistic efforts. 

Using thousands of hours of transcribed audio recordings of children and adults interacting, the research team created computational models that let them start to reverse engineer how adults interpret what small children are saying. Models based on only the actual sounds children produced in their speech did a relatively poor job predicting what adults thought children said. The most successful models made their predictions based on large swaths of preceding conversations that provided context for what the children were saying. The models also performed better when they were retrained on large datasets of adults and children interacting.

The findings suggest that adults are highly skilled at making these context-based interpretations, which may provide crucial feedback that helps babies acquire language, the researchers say.

“An adult with lots of listening experience is bringing to bear extremely sophisticated mechanisms of language understanding, and that is clearly what underlies the ability to understand what young children say,” says Roger Levy, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. “At this point, we don’t have direct evidence that those mechanisms are directly facilitating the bootstrapping of language acquisition in young children, but I think it’s plausible to hypothesize that they are making the bootstrapping more effective and smoothing the path to successful language acquisition by children.”

Levy and Elika Bergelson, an associate professor of psychology at Harvard, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Nature Human Behavior. MIT postdoc Stephan Meylan is the lead author of the paper.

Adult listening skills are critical

While many studies have investigated how children learn to speak, in this project, the researchers wanted to flip the question and study how adults interpret what children say. 

“While people have looked historically at a number of features of the learner, and what is it about the child that allows them to learn things from the world, very little has been done to look at how they are understood and how that might influence the process of language acquisition,” Meylan says.

Previous research has shown that when adults speak to each other, they use their beliefs about how other people are likely to talk, and what they’re likely to talk about, to help them understand what their conversational partner is saying. This strategy, known as “noisy channel listening,” makes it easier for adults to handle the complex task of deciphering the acoustic sounds they’re hearing, especially in environments where voices are muffled or there is a lot of background noise, or when speakers have different accents.

In this study, the researchers explored whether adults can also apply this technique to parsing the often seemingly nonsensical utterances produced by children who are learning to talk.

“This problem of interpreting what we hear is even harder for child language than ordinary adult language understanding, which is actually not that easy either, even though we’re very good at it,” Levy says. 

For this study, the researchers made use of datasets originally generated at Brown University in the early 2000s, which contain hundreds of hours of transcribed conversations between children ages 1 to 3 and their caregivers. The data include both phonetic transcriptions of the sounds produced by the children and the text of what the transcriber believed the child was trying to say.

The researchers used other datasets of child language (which included about 18 million spoken words) to train computational language models to predict what words the children were saying in the original dataset, based on the phonetic transcription. Using neural networks, they created many different models, which varied in the sophistication of their knowledge of conversational topics, grammar, and children’s mispronunciations. They also manipulated how much of the conversational context each model was allowed to analyze before making its predictions of what the children said. Some models took into account just one or two words spoken before the target word, while others were allowed to analyze up to 20 previous utterances in the exchange.

The researchers found that using the acoustics of what the child said alone did not lead to models that were particularly accurate at predicting what adults thought children said. The models that did best used very rich representations of conversational topics, grammar, and beliefs about what words children are likely to say (ball, dog or baby, rather than mortgage, for example). And much like humans, the models’ predictions improved as they were allowed to consider larger chunks of previous exchanges for context. 

A feedback system

The findings suggest that when listening to children, adults base their interpretation of what a child is saying on previous exchanges that they have had. For example, if a dog had been mentioned earlier in the conversation, “da” was more likely to be interpreted by an adult listener as “dog.”

This is an example of a strategy that humans often use in listening to other adults, which is to base their interpretation on “priors,” or expectations based on prior experience. The findings also suggest that when listening to children, adult listeners incorporate expectations of how children commonly mispronounce words, such as “weed” for “read.”

The researchers now plan to explore how adults’ listening skills, and their subsequent responses to children, may help to facilitate children’s ability to learn language.

“Most people prefer to talk to others, and I think babies are no exception to this, especially if there are things that they might want, either in a tangible way, like milk or to be picked up, but also in an intangible way in terms of just the spotlight of social attention,” Bergelson says. “It’s a feedback system that might push the kid, with their burgeoning social skills and cognitive skills and everything else, to continue down this path of trying to interact and communicate.”

One way the researchers hope to study this interplay between child and adult is by combining computational models of how children learn language with the new model of how adults respond to what children say.

“We now have this model of an adult listener that we can plug into models of child learners, and then those learners can leverage the feedback provided by the adult model,” Meylan says. “The next frontier is trying to understand how kids are taking the feedback that they get from these adults and build a model of what these children expect that an adult would understand.” 

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The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and a CONVO grant to MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences from the Simons Center for the Social Brain.

 

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JOURNAL

Nature Human Behaviour

DOI

10.1038/s41562-023-01698-3 

ARTICLE TITLE

How adults understand what young children say

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

26-Oct-2023

 

NSF awards up to $21.4M for design of next-gen telescopes to capture earliest moments of universe

Instruments would help us understand the beginning, history, and makeup of the universe

Grant and Award Announcement

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

 

IMAGE: 

THE SOUTH POLE TELESCOPE

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CREDIT: UCHICAGO

The National Science Foundation has awarded $3.7 million to the University of Chicago for the first year of a grant that may provide up to $21.4 million for the final designs for a next-generation set of telescopes to map the light from the earliest moments of the universe—the Cosmic Microwave Background.

Led by the University of Chicago and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the collaboration seeks to build telescopes and infrastructure in both Antarctica and Chile to search for what are known as “primordial” gravitational waves—the vibrations from the Big Bang itself. It would also map the microwave light from the cosmos in incredible detail and reveal how the universe evolved over time, as well as investigate the mystery known as dark matter.

This award will fund the continuing designs for the telescopes and cameras, working towards construction readiness. The entire project, known as CMB-S4, is proposed to be jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy; it is expected to cost on the order of $800M and to come fully online in the early 2030s. The collaboration currently involves 450 scientists from more than 100 institutions, spanning 20 countries.

“With these telescopes we will be testing our theory of how our entire universe came to be, but also looking at physics at the most extreme scales in a way we simply cannot do with particle physics experiments on Earth,” said John Carlstrom, the Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar Distinguished Service Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics and Physics, who serves as the project scientist for CMB-S4.

The biggest questions

The cosmic microwave background is the light still traveling across the universe from the earliest moments after the Big Bang. Because it carries information about the birth of the universe, scientists have built incredibly complex instruments to map that light, from spacecraft and from the ground in the Chilean Atacama Plateau and at the NSF’s South Pole Station—including the current South Pole Telescope, which has been operating since 2007.

But we need to build a new generation of telescopes in order to answer the biggest questions—like whether our universe began with a burst of expansion at the dawn of time, known as inflation, which would have stretched miniscule quantum-mechanical fluctuations into the initial seeds of all of the structure in the universe today.

CMB-S4 would involve telescopes in two locations: a large telescope and nine smaller ones in Antarctica, and two large telescopes in the mountains of Chile. Each site plays an essential role in achieving the project’s scientific goals.

The telescopes in Chile would conduct a wide survey of the sky, trying to capture a fuller and more precise picture of the cosmic microwave background—and through it, helping us to understand the evolution and distribution of matter in the universe. The project can also look for evidence of “relic” light particles that many theories suggest may have existed in the early universe. CMB-S4 should provide clues on the nature of the mysterious stuff known as dark matter, as well as the dark energy that is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.

Meanwhile, the telescopes at NSF’s South Pole Station would take a very deep, sustained look at a smaller part of the sky. “The South Pole is the only location that allows a telescope to look at one place in the sky continuously, because it’s at the pole where the rest of the Earth spins around,” explained Jeff Zivick, deputy project manager for CMB-S4.

This would allow the telescopes to look for evidence of what are called primordial gravitational waves—the ripples in space-time that would have been created if the universe really did explode into being from a space much smaller than a single subatomic particle. These ripples would interact with the cosmic microwave background, creating a distinct but extremely faint signature.

This is an ambitious goal. “In many ways, the theory of inflation looks good, but most of the experimental evidence is somewhat circumstantial,” said Jim Strait, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the project director for CMB-S4. “Finding primordial gravitational waves would be what some people have called ‘the smoking gun’ for inflation.”

Primordial gravitational waves would also be evidence to connect the force of gravity with the laws of quantum mechanics. The mismatch between the two theories, one which applies at the very largest scales in the universe and the other at the very smallest, has been plaguing scientists for decades.

South Pole Telescope lens

CREDIT

University of Chicago

Finalizing designs

The new award from the National Science Foundation will help to fund the design work for the new telescopes and infrastructure at the sites. Going from conceptual design to final design involves analysis, simulations and modeling, and testing components of the telescopes. Although the underlying technology is well understood and has been field-tested, the design work for CMB-S4 is especially important because several of the telescopes will be the most complex of their kind ever built.

CMB-S4 is expected to have nearly 500,000 superconducting detectors, a significant increase over all precursor cosmic microwave background experiments combined. Carlstrom explained that the detectors are already so sensitive that the noise in the measurement is dominated by the background noise of everything else in the sky and atmosphere. The plan, therefore, is to greatly increase the number of measurements and average them to provide a precise measurement of the signal level and greatly reduce the noise.

The increased number of detectors will also require many other components of the project to scale up in size. “For example, we will need to build multiple cryostats, larger than we have ever built before, to effectively cool all these detectors to a temperature near absolute zero,” said Assoc. Prof. Brad Benson, a scientist at UChicago and Fermilab who is leading the effort to design the large camera cryostats for CMB-S4.

The CMB-S4 project is expected to be funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. The National Science Foundation portion of the project is led by the University of Chicago, while the Department of Energy’s portion is led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.