It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, April 18, 2024
New perspective on morality as cooperation points to nuances in values in different political ideologies
THE POLISH ASSOCIATION OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
While social psychology has long been interested in learning more about how one’s moral values relate to one’s political views, most of the research to date has used quite the same perspective.
So far, these studies would rather rely on one’s self-identification on the liberal-conservative or left-right political spectrum. Over the past 15 years, most have used questionnaires based on the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), which claims that there are several innate, evolutionary ancient values (i.e. care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity and liberty), which are universal across cultures, and sit at the core of humanity’s “intuitive ethics”. Furthermore, this theory assumes that morals are the cause of politics.
First, instead of relying on data about people’s self-reported political identity, they sought to place them on the liberal-conservative spectrum by using their attitudes towards particular policies (e.g., traditional marriage, welfare benefits).
Then, instead of the moral foundations theory, the research team turned to the theory of morality as cooperation. According to the latter, humanity has long learned to value and pursue cooperation as a building block of a prospering society. As a result, to retain this mutually-beneficial social interaction, humans developed a collection of cooperative rules, which philosophers then called morality.
Having analysed existing survey data from the USA, Denmark and the Netherlands, and then added to it an analysis of more than 1,300 users of the social network platform Reddit, they concluded that the theory of morality as cooperation can be successfully used to reveal new insights into the relation between politics and morality.
The alternative view on morality and politics allowed for the research team to explore the nuances setting apart family values (i.e. loyalty and commitment to one’s family) and group values (i.e. loyalty and commitment to other groups one feels that belongs to) that traditionally have been assumed to overlap with each other, and - as such - were both linked to conservatism. Likewise, conclusions based on the moral foundations theory made no difference between fairness values (e.g. valuing redistribution, sharing, equality) and reciprocity values (e.g. valuing social exchange, obligations to return favours). However, in the present study, the research team confirmed there was indeed a difference between these sets of values and how they related to different political ideologies.
Nevertheless, the authors point out that there is need for further studies and additional measures that will make it possible to map the relation between morality and politics. Future research will also need to evaluate how cultural differences affect these variables.
Original source:
van Leeuwen, F., van Lissa, C. J., Papakonstantinou, T., Petersen, M. B., & Curry, O. S. (2024). Morality as Cooperation, Politics as Conflict. Social Psychological Bulletin, 19, 1-22. https://doi.org/10.32872/spb.10157
Machine learning algorithm reveals long-theorized glass phase in crystal
Scientists have found evidence of an elusive, glassy phase of matter that emerges when a crystal’s perfect internal pattern is disrupted
DOE/ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY
IMAGE:
SLICE OF X-RAY SCATTERING DATA (BACKGROUND). MACHINE LEARNING RAPIDLY ANALYZES HOW THE INTENSITIES OF A BILLION 3D PIXELS IN THE DATA VARY WITH TEMPERATURE (LEFT), GROUPING PIXELS WITH SIMILAR TEMPERATURE VARIATIONS (RIGHT) AND ULTIMATELY REVEALING BRAGG GLASS BEHAVIOR.
CREDIT: (IMAGE BY RAY OSBORN/ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY.)
X-ray technology and machine learning converge to shed light on the nature of complex materials.
A dish made of crystal and a dish made of glass might look similar from the outside, but internally, their structures differ significantly. Crystals consist of perfectly ordered, repeating patterns of atoms, while glasses display a more disordered, fluid-like structure.
For decades, scientists have been puzzled by glasses — how they form, what they are and why they behave the way they do. Glasses exist right at the intersection of liquid and solid, which makes their nature elusive to traditional ways of classifying and understanding material behavior.
Even more perplexing and elusive is a phase of matter called a Bragg glass. It displays both the ordered properties of crystals and the disordered nature of glasses at the same time. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, along with collaborators at Cornell University and Stanford University, have recently found experimental evidence of a Bragg glass phase present in a material.
The team discerned the subtle features of a Bragg glass within large volumes of X-ray scattering data using a new machine learning data analysis tool, X-ray temperature clustering, developed at Cornell.
Their result contributes to a larger effort in modern materials science to investigate the nature of glasses, whose mysterious structures give rise to useful material properties for applications in electronics, aerospace engineering, architecture, medicine, nuclear waste management and much more. The study also demonstrates the potential of machine learning algorithms as powerful tools for discovery in the era of big data.
“We can collect massive amounts of X-ray data in short periods of time, and analyzing the data manually can make it impossible to see the forest for the trees,” said Ray Osborn, a senior physicist in Argonne’s Materials Science division and an author on the study. “With the combination of cutting-edge X-ray and computational technology, we were able to uncover a signature that is unique to the Bragg glass phase.”
The atomic structures of all crystals — including diamonds, table salt and even snowflakes — display what scientists call long-range order, where a certain pattern of atoms is repeated in three dimensions across the material. In this study, the researchers searched for the Bragg glass state in a crystal based on ErTe3, which has a particular long-range order to its structure that scientists refer to as a charge density wave (CDW).
“With the combination of cutting-edge X-ray and computational technology, we were able to uncover a signature that is unique to the Bragg glass phase.” — Senior Physicist Ray Osborn
About thirty years ago, it was theorized that CDW materials could host Bragg glass states if a little bit of chaos is introduced to their otherwise ordered structures. When creating the samples used in this experiment, Stanford University scientists randomly distributed palladium atoms into the ErTe3 crystals to impose this type of disorder.
Scientists at Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source (APS), a DOE Office of Science user facility, used the 6-ID-D beamline to perform X-ray scattering on the samples, measuring hundreds of gigabytes of 3D structural data for each crystal.
In X-ray scattering experiments, when a pattern in a sample’s structure repeats, scientists see what’s called a Bragg peak in the data. “The term Bragg glass is almost an oxymoron. ‘Bragg’ refers to the sharp Bragg peaks you see with perfect crystals, which indicate long-range order. And in a glass, you see broader, more diffuse features that indicate local patterns,” said Matthew Krogstad, an assistant physicist at the APS and author on the study. “But in a Bragg glass, you see each type of feature simultaneously.”
The team took X-ray scattering measurements of the samples at temperatures ranging from 30 K to 300 K, recording how their structures changed. After the fact, the machine learning analysis conducted at Cornell confirmed that at a certain transition temperature, the samples froze into a state that maintained a significant amount of long-range order, while also displaying the local features that characterize a Bragg glass.
“You can think of a regular crystal as a perfect pattern of squares side by side,” said Krogstad. “When you introduce random palladium atoms, the pattern changes a bit because of the randomness, but it’s not completely disrupted, either. The structure can accommodate a little randomness.”
The discovery answers a long-held question of whether a disordered CDW sample will lose its crystalline order and break up into little patches when cooled, or become Bragg glass. Insight into the structure and behavior of Bragg glasses has the potential to inform the design of useful materials down the line.
A paper on the study, “Bragg glass signatures in PdxErTe3 with X-ray diffraction temperature clustering,”was published in Nature Physics. This work was supported by DOE’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering. In addition to Krogstad and Osborn, authors include Krishnanand Mallayya, Joshua Straquadine, Maja D. Bachmann, Anisha G. Singh, Stephan Rosenkranz, Ian R. Fisher and Eun-Ah Kim.
About the Advanced Photon Source
The U. S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory is one of the world’s most productive X-ray light source facilities. The APS provides high-brightness X-ray beams to a diverse community of researchers in materials science, chemistry, condensed matter physics, the life and environmental sciences, and applied research. These X-rays are ideally suited for explorations of materials and biological structures; elemental distribution; chemical, magnetic, electronic states; and a wide range of technologically important engineering systems from batteries to fuel injector sprays, all of which are the foundations of our nation’s economic, technological, and physical well-being. Each year, more than 5,000 researchers use the APS to produce over 2,000 publications detailing impactful discoveries, and solve more vital biological protein structures than users of any other X-ray light source research facility. APS scientists and engineers innovate technology that is at the heart of advancing accelerator and light-source operations. This includes the insertion devices that produce extreme-brightness X-rays prized by researchers, lenses that focus the X-rays down to a few nanometers, instrumentation that maximizes the way the X-rays interact with samples being studied, and software that gathers and manages the massive quantity of data resulting from discovery research at the APS.
This research used resources of the Advanced Photon Source, a U.S. DOE Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.
Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation’s first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America’s scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science.
A geo-environmental scientist from Japan has composed a string quartet using sonified climate data. The 6-minute-long composition—entitled “String Quartet No. 1 “Polar Energy Budget”—is based on over 30 years of satellite-collected climate data from the Arctic and Antarctic and aims to garner attention on how climate is driven by the input and output of energy at the poles. The backstory about how the composition was put together publishes April 18 in the journal iScience as part of a collection “Exploring the Art-Science Connection.”
“I strongly hope that this manuscript marks a significant turning point, transitioning from an era where only scientists handle data to one where artists can freely leverage data to craft their works,” writes author and composer Hiroto Nagai, a geo-environmental scientist at Rissho University.
Scientist-composer Hiroto Nagai asserts that music, as opposed to sound, evokes an emotional response and posits that “musification” (as opposed to sonification) of data requires some intervention by the composer to build tension and add dynamics. For this reason, Nagai was more liberal in adding a “human touch” compared to previous data-based musical compositions, aiming to meld sonification with traditional music composition.
“As a fundamental principle in music composition, it is necessary to combine temporal sequences from tension-building to resolution in various scales, from harmonic progressions to entire movements,” Nagai writes. “So far, there haven’t been published attempts and open discussion on sonification-based music composition, nor attempts to demonstrate the methodology required to intentionally affect the audience’s emotions with an artistic piece.”
To do this, he first used a program to sonify environmental data by assigning sounds to different data values. The publicly available data was collected from four polar locations between 1982 and 2022: an ice-core drilling site in the Greenland ice sheet, a satellite station in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, and two Japanese-owned research stations in the Antarctic (Showa Station and Dome Fuji Station). For each of the sites, Nagai used data on monthly measurements of short- and longwave radiation, precipitation, surface temperature, and cloud thickness.
In the next step, he transformed this collection of sounds into a musical composition to be played by two violins, a viola, and a cello. This process involved many steps, including manipulating the pitch of different datapoints and assigning sections of data to the different instruments, overlaying passages created from different data, and introducing musical playing techniques such as pizzicato and staccato. Nagai also intervened in more artistic ways by introducing rhythm, deliberately removing certain sounds, and introducing handwritten (non-data derived) parts into the composition.
The quartet’s premiere live performance was shared at Waseda University in Tokyo in March 2023 followed by a panel discussion. A filmed performance of the piece by PRT Quartet, a Japanese professional string quartet, was also released on YouTube in March 2023.
“Upon listening, my initial reaction was like, ‘What is this?’ It felt like a typical contemporary piece,” said Haruka Sakuma, the professional violinist who performed 2nd violin. “The flow of the music was a bit hard to memorize quickly, and it was quite challenging at first.”
Nagai says that, in contrast to graphical representations of data, music elicits emotion before intellectual curiosity and suggests that using graphical and music representations of data in conjunction might be even more powerful.
“It grabs the audiences’ attention forcefully, while graphical representations require active and conscious recognition instead,” Nagai writes. “This reveals the potential for outreach in the Earth sciences through music.”
This photograph is a still from the performance of String Quartet No. 1 “Polar Energy Budget," composed by Hiroto Nagai.
This is a photograph of Hiroto Nagai, composer of String Quartet No. 1 “Polar Energy Budget."
CREDIT
Courtesy of Hiroto Nagai
This research was supported by the Remote Sensing Technology Center of Japan.
iScience (@iScience_CP)is an open-access journal from Cell Press that provides a platform for original research and interdisciplinary thinking in the life, physical, and earth sciences. The primary criterion for publication in iScience is a significant contribution to a relevant field combined with robust results and underlying methodology. Visit http://www.cell.com/iscience. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.
String Quartet No. 1 “Polar Energy Budget” - Music composition using Earth observation data of polar regions
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
18-Apr-2024
Materials follow the 'Rule of Four', but scientists don’t know why yet
NATIONAL CENTRE OF COMPETENCE IN RESEARCH (NCCR) MARVEL
Scientists are normally happy to find regularities and correlations in their data – but only if they can explain them. Otherwise, they worry that those patterns might just be revealing some flaw in the data itself, so-called experimental artifacts.
The two collections include over 80,000 electronic structures of experimental as well as predicted materials, and in principle all types of structures should be equally represented. But scientists noticed that around 60 per cent of structures in both databases have primitive unit cells (the smallest possible cell in a crystal structure) made out of a multiple of 4 atoms. The scientists named this recurrence the “Rule of Four” and started looking for an explanation.
“A first intuitive reason could come from the fact that when a conventional unit cell (a larger cell than the primitive one, representing the full symmetry of the crystal) is transformed into a primitive cell, the number of atoms is typically reduced by four times”, says Elena Gazzarini, a former INSPIRE Potentials fellow in the Laboratory of Theory and Simulation of Materials (THEOS) at EPFL and now at CERN in Geneva. “The first question we asked was whether the software used to ‘primitivize’ the unit cell had had done it correctly, and the answer was yes”.
From a chemical point of view, another possible suspect was the coordination number of silicon (the number of atoms that can bind to its atom), which is four. “We could expect to find that all the materials following this rule of four included silicon” says Gazzarini. “But again, they did not”.
The Rule of Four could not either be explained by the formation energies of the compounds. “The materials that are most abundant in nature should be the most energetically favoured, which means the most stable ones, those with negative formation energy” says Gazzarini. “But what we saw with classic computational methods was that there was no correlation between the rule of four and negative formation energies”.
Because the materials space covered by the two databases is huge, going from small unit to very large cells with dozens of different chemical species, there was still a chance that a more refined analysis looking for a correlation between formation energies and chemical properties may provide an explanation. So, the team involved Rose Cernosky, a machine-learning expert at the University of Wisconsin, who developed an algorithm to group structures according to their atomic properties and look at formation energies within classes of materials sharing some chemical similarities. But again, this method did not provide a way to distinguish the rule-of-four compliant materials from the non-compliant ones.
Similarly, the abundance of multiple of fours does not even correlate with highly symmetric structures, but rather with low symmetries and loosely packed arrangements.
In the end, the resulting article innpj Computational Materialsis the rare example of a scientific paper describing a negative result: the researchers could only describe the phenomenon and rule out several possible causes, without finding one. But negative results can be just as important as positive ones for scientific advancement, because they point to difficult problems – which is why scientists often complain that journals should publish more such studies.
The failure to find a compelling explanation did not prevent the group from predicting, through a Random Forest algorithm, with an accuracy of 87% whether a given compound will follow the Rule of Four or not. “This is interesting because the algorithm uses only local rather than global symmetry descriptors, which suggests that there may be small chemical groups in the cells (still to be found) that may explain the rule of four” says Gazzarini.
Department of Energy announces $16 million for traineeships in accelerator science & engineering
Research projects will partner students with DOE national labs to help students develop hands-on research experience
DOE/US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $16 million in funding for four projects providing classroom training and research opportunities to train the next generation of accelerator scientists and engineers needed to deliver scientific discoveries.
U.S. global competitiveness in discovery science relies on increasingly complex charged particle accelerator systems that require world-leading expertise to develop and operate. These programs will train the next generation of scientists and engineers, providing the expertise needed to lead activities supported by the DOE Office of Science. These programs will develop new curricula and guide a diverse cadre of graduate students working towards a master’s or Ph.D. thesis in accelerator science and engineering.
“Particle accelerator technology enables us to tackle challenges at the frontiers of science and benefits our nation’s high-tech industries, modern medicine, and national security,” said Regina Rameika, DOE Associate Director of Science for High Energy Physics. “The awards announced today will help to develop the workforce to advance the state-of-the-art in accelerator technology while helping deploy these technologies in commercial applications in the health, security, environmental, and industrial sectors. These programs at American universities will help ensure that our nation has a skilled and diverse workforce to develop the accelerator technology needed to meet the scientific challenges of the future.”
Research projects will partner students with DOE national labs to help students develop hands-on research experience. These projects include opportunities for graduate research across a broad range including beam physics at the systems level, technologies of large accelerators, high reliability design and failure analysis, and the fundamentals of project management. Students may also explore the material science, design methodology, fabrication techniques, and operations constraints needed to produce and operate superconducting radiofrequency accelerators. Additional research opportunities in the areas of high-reliability, high-power radiofrequency systems and large-scale cryogenic systems, particularly liquid helium systems, are available through these programs.
The projects were selected by competitive peer review under the DOE Funding Opportunity Announcement for DOE Traineeship in Accelerator Science & Engineering.
Total funding is $16 million for projects lasting up to five years in duration, with $3 million in Fiscal Year 2024 dollars and outyear funding contingent on congressional appropriations. Funding is provided by the High Energy Physics and the Accelerator R&D and Production programs. The list of projects and more information can be found on the High Energy Physics program homepage and the Accelerator R&D and Production program homepage.
Selection for award negotiations is not a commitment by DOE to issue an award or provide funding. Before funding is issued, DOE and the applicants will undergo a negotiation process, and DOE may cancel negotiations and rescind the selection for any reason during that time.
Teaching a computer to type like a human
A new typing model simulates the typing process instead of just predicting words
AALTO UNIVERSITY
An entirely new predictive typing model can simulate different kinds of users, helping figure out ways to optimize how we use our phones. Developed by researchers at Aalto University, the new model captures the difference between typing with one or two hands or between younger and older users.
‘Typing on a phone requires manual dexterity and visual perception: we press buttons, proofread text, and correct mistakes. We also use our working memory. Automatic text correction functions can help some people, while for others they can make typing harder,’ says Professor Antti Oulasvirta of Aalto University.
The researchers created a machine-learning model that uses its virtual ‘eyes and fingers’ and working memory to type out a sentence, just like humans do. That means it also makes similar mistakes and has to correct them. (video)
‘We created a simulated user with a human-like visual and motor system. Then we trained it millions of times in a keyboard simulator. Eventually, it learned typing skills that can also be used to type in various situations outside the simulator,’ explains Oulasvirta.
The predictive typing model was developed in collaboration with Google. New designs for phone keyboards are normally tested with real users, which is costly and time-consuming. The project’s goal is to complement those tests so keyboards can be evaluated and optimized more quickly and easily.
For Oulasvirta, this is part of a larger effort to improve user interfaces overall and understand how humans behave in task-oriented situations. He leads a research group at Aalto that uses computational models of human behaviour to probe these questions.
‘We can train computer models so that we don’t need observation of lots of people to make predictions. User interfaces are everywhere today – fundamentally, this work aims to create a more functional society and smoother everyday life,’ he says.
The researchers will present their findings at the CHI Conference in May, the most prestigious scientific publication forum in the field of human-computer interaction. The peer-reviewed study is already available online.
RNA's hidden potential: New study unveils its role in early life and future bioengineering
Study sheds light on the molecular evolution of RNA and its potential applications in nanobiotechnology.
TOKYO UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE
IMAGE:
RESEARCHERS FROM TOKYO UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE HAVE ENGINEERED A RIBOZYME STRUCTURE WHICH MIMICS THE EARLY RNA WORLD AND PROVIDES NOVEL INSIGHTS ON THE ROLE OF RNA IN PRIMITIVE LIFE, TO ITS VARIOUS REAL-WORLD APPLICATIONS.
CREDIT: PROFESSOR KOJI TAMURA, TOKYO UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE
The beginning of life on Earth and its evolution over billions of years continue to intrigue researchers worldwide. The central dogma or the directional flow of genetic information from a deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA) template to a ribose nucleic acid (RNA) transcript, and finally into a functional protein, is fundamental to cellular structure and functions. DNA functions as the blueprint of the cell and carries genetic information required for the synthesis of functional proteins. Conversely, proteins are required for the synthesis of DNA. Therefore, whether DNA emerged first or protein, continues to remain a matter of debate.
This molecular version of the “chicken and egg” question led to the proposition of an “RNA World.” RNAs in the form of ‘ribozymes’ or RNA enzymes carry genetic information similar to DNA and also possess catalytic functions like proteins. The discovery of ribozymes further fueled the RNA World hypothesis where RNA served dual functions of “genetic information storage” and “catalysis,” facilitating primitive life activities solely by RNA. While modern ribosomes are a complex of RNAs and proteins, ribozymes during early evolutionary stages may have been pieced together through the assembly of individual functional RNA units.
To test this hypothesis, Professor Koji Tamura, along with his team of researchers at the Department of Biological Science and Technology, Tokyo University of Science, conducted a series of experiments to decode the assembly of functional ribozymes. For this, they designed an artificial ribozyme, R3C ligase, to investigate how individual RNA units come together to form a functional structure. Giving further insight into their work published on 17 April 2024, in Life, Prof. Tamura states, “The R3C ligase is a ribozyme thatcatalyzes the formation of a 3’,5’-phosphodiester linkage between two RNA molecules. We modified the structure by adding specific domains that can interact with various effectors.”
Within ribosomes, which are the site of protein synthesis, RNA units assemble to function as Peptidyl Transferase Center (PTC) in a way such that they form a scaffold for the recruitment of amino acids (individual components of a peptide/protein) attached to tRNAs (featured in Nature magazine (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00574-4)). This is an important insight into the evolutionary history of protein synthesis systems, but it is not sufficient to trace the evolutionary pathway based on the RNA World hypothesis.
To explore if the elongation of RNA, achieved by linking individual RNA units together, is regulated allosterically, the researchers altered the structure of the R3C ligase. They did this by incorporating short RNA sequences that bind adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a vital energy carrier molecule in cells, into the ribozyme. The team noted that R3C ligase activity was dependent on the concentration of ATP, with higher activity observed at higher concentrations of ATP. Further, an increase in the melting temperature (Tm value) indicated that the binding of ATP to R3C ligase stabilized the structure, which likely influenced its ligase activity.
Similarly, on fusing an L-histidine-binding RNA sequence to the ribozyme, they noted an increase in ligase activity at increasing concentrations of histidine (a key amino acid). Notably, the increase in activity was specific to increasing concentrations of ATP or histidine; no changes were observed in response to other nucleotide triphosphates or amino acids. These findings suggest that ATP and histidine act as effector molecules that trigger structural conformational changes in the ribozyme, which further influence enzyme stability and activity.
ATP is the central energy carrier of the cell which supports numerous molecular processes, while, histidine is the most common amino acid found in the active site of enzymes, and maintains their acid-base chemistry. Given, the important roles of ATP and histidine in RNA interactions and molecular functions, these results provide novel insights into the role of RNA in early evolution, including the origin of the genetic code. Furthermore, engineered ribozymes such as the one developed in this study hold significant promise in a myriad of applications including targeted drug delivery, therapeutics, nano-biosensors, enzyme engineering, and synthesis of novel enzymes with uses in various industrial processes.
Overall, this study can offer insights into how the transition from the RNA World to the modern “DNA/Protein World” occurred. A fundamental understanding of the RNA World in turn, can enhance their use in real-life applications.
“This study will lead to the elucidation of the process of ‘allostericity-based acquisition of function and cooperativity’ in RNA evolution. The RNA-RNA interactions, RNA-amino acid interactions, and allostericity applied in this research can guide the fabrication of arbitrary RNA nanostructures, with various applications,” concludes Prof. Tamura.
About The Tokyo University of Science Tokyo University of Science (TUS) is a well-known and respected university, and the largest science-specialized private research university in Japan, with four campuses in central Tokyo and its suburbs and in Hokkaido. Established in 1881, the university has continually contributed to Japan’s development in science through inculcating the love for science in researchers, technicians, and educators. With a mission of “Creating science and technology for the harmonious development of nature, human beings, and society,” TUS has undertaken a wide range of research from basic to applied science. TUS has embraced a multidisciplinary approach to research and undertaken intensive study in some of today’s most vital fields. TUS is a meritocracy where the best in science is recognized and nurtured. It is the only private university in Japan that has produced a Nobel Prize winner and the only private university in Asia to produce Nobel Prize winners within the natural sciences field.
About Professor Koji Tamura from Tokyo University of Science Dr. Koji Tamura is a Professor at the Department of Biological Science and Technology at the Tokyo University of Science with 18 years of teaching experience. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo and did his postdoctoral work at The Scripps Research Institute with Professor Paul Schimmel. His research involves multidisciplinary study of the origin of life on Earth. His area of interest lies in the subjects like analyses of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases mediated aminoacylation of tRNA, its relationship to the origin of the genetic code, and the origin of peptide bond formation on the ribosome, as well as the evolution of the RNA world.
Funding information This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP21K06293 (to K.T.) and JP19K16204 (to H.M.-A.).
Development of Allosteric Ribozymes for ATP and L-Histidine Based on the R3C Ligase Ribozyme
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
17-Apr-2024
Young people living in deprived coastal areas have worst health
Young people living in deprived coastal areas are likely to become unhealthier young adults than those living in deprived inland communities, according to new research.
UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX
Young people living in deprived coastal areas are likely to become unhealthier young adults than those living in deprived inland communities, according to new research.
The study, led by the University of Essex’s Centre for Coastal Communities, is thought to be the first of its kind to map the impact of living in a disadvantaged coastal community as a teenager and how it relates to developing poorer health in adulthood.
Using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Survey, Understanding Society, the researchers compared the data of nearly 5,000 English teenagers living in deprived areas – more than 4,000 from inland areas and more than 750 from coastal areas.
In four out of five measures of health, the research found teenagers who had lived in poorer, coastal areas were worse off in terms of their health as young adults.
“Given that it has been widely reported that living near ‘blue space’ is linked to better health and wellbeing, it is unclear why young adults living in the most deprived coastal communities have worse health than equivalent places inland,” said lead author Dr Emily Murray.
As Director of Essex’s Centre for Coastal Communities, Dr Murray and her team will now focus their research on identifying the key drivers of poor mental health in these areas.
“There is a global youth mental health crisis, and to find that in England, this is a particular issue with mental health amongst young people in deprived coastal areas is striking and needs to be addressed urgently,” Dr Murray added.
According to the UK Office for National Statistics, half of all coastal towns in England and Wales are deprived – compared to 30% of non-coastal towns.
Recent UK policy initiatives – such as the current ‘levelling-up’ agenda – have taken into account that where people live is related to their health.
“However, an excess of poor health in deprived coastal communities is a conundrum and a concern,” added Dr Murray. “Our findings suggest that strategies to level up the health of the English population need to pay particular attention to the health of young people living in these deprived coastal areas.
“We need to look at what is driving poorer health amongst coastal young adults and design effective solutions to reduce this health inequality.”
The research, which also involved Dr Cara Booker, from the Institute for Social and Economic Research, and colleagues from University College London, is published in the journal Health and Placeand was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.
