Making ‘true’ equine IVF a reproducible success

A new method developed by Katrin Hinrichs and colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania resulted in the birth of three healthy foals. The technique opens the door to new insights in the basic biology of horse reproduction

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

 

IMAGE: AFTER A DECADES-LONG QUEST FOR AN EFFICIENT WAY TO PERFORM “TRUE” IN VITRO FERTILIZATION IN HORSES, RESEARCHERS FROM PENN VET HAVE DEVELOPED A NEW, SUCCESSFUL TECHNIQUE, RESULTING IN THE BIRTH OF THREE HEALTHY FOALS. view more 

CREDIT: MATHEUS FELIX/PENN VET

Assisted reproduction has become an invaluable technique for horse owners hoping to pass on to another generation the characteristics of cherished and successful animals. But for decades, one of the most common methods used in assisted reproduction in humans and other animals—standard in vitro fertilization (IVF)—has been stubbornly difficult to achieve.

“It’s a frustrating thing,” says Katrin Hinrichs, professor of reproduction at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, who, alongside her other research programs, has tried for more than three decades to tackle conventional equine IVF, in essence, convincing a sperm to fertilize an egg in a Petri dish. “When we put horse sperm with eggs, they don’t even try to penetrate them. They just swim happily about ignoring the egg, leaving us with a zero-fertilization rate.”

Hinrichs and others have developed techniques to produce embryos using intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), a method of fertilization that requires the technically challenging injection of a single sperm into a single oocyte, or egg, aided by a high-power microscope and manipulation equipment. However, supporting sperm to achieve “true” IVF—in which sperm incubated in a Petri dish fertilize an oocyte without further manipulation, as they would naturally inside a mare—proved elusive.

Until now. Hinrichs and colleagues report in the journal Biology of Reproduction a major achievement in equine reproduction: a conventional IVF technique with a 90% fertilization rate, with 74% of the fertilized eggs giving rise to blastocysts, the rapidly dividing ball of cells that develops into the embryo and placenta. The three mares into which resultant embryos were transferred each carried healthy foals to term.

“The demand for assisted reproductive technologies like IVF is getting larger and larger in the horse breeding community,” Hinrichs says. “The approach we’ve developed would allow more veterinary practices to offer IVF, as it doesn’t require the expensive equipment and training needed to do it the way it’s done now, by injecting each sperm into each egg. But for me the fun part is just nailing this down. I’ve been a horse person all my life, and for decades we have tried to figure out why this doesn’t work in horses. And now we have a repeatable method that does work, so we can explore the ‘why.’”

Threads of progress

Assisted reproduction in horses has been a focus of Hinrichs’ career. Her contributions to the field have earned her numerous awards, including the honor of being inducted into the Equine Research Hall of Fame last month.

Her interest dates back to her training at Penn Vet, where she earned a Ph.D. in 1988, studying early equine pregnancy. Only a handful of years before, at Penn Vet’s New Bolton Center, the first calf produced by IVF had been born. “I worked with Virgil, the first IVF calf, when I was doing my residency here. There was a culture at Penn around studying IVF,” Hinrichs says. Toward the end of her doctoral studies, Hinrichs began working with unfertilized oocytes in horses, to determine how they influenced the outcome of IVF.

In 1990, a group in France led by Eric Palmer reported the first live foal born from IVF. The researchers produced one additional foal the next year, then gave up working with the technique as they could not make it efficient or repeatable. Many other groups tried to develop equine IVF procedures and failed, also unable to establish something replicable.

Other methods for assisted reproduction, producing foals from an unfertilized oocyte recovered from a donor mare, met with more success but were laborious. In one strategy, used for valuable mares unable to produce embryos, clinicians could extract an oocyte from the mare, surgically place it in the oviduct of a recipient mare, and then inseminate the recipient mare. While a faculty member at Tufts University, Hinrichs completed the first of these procedures for clinical use. “We were able to get pregnancies from isolated oocytes,” she says, “but the techniques involved were ponderous and invasive.”

Another approach, which has been the most successful form of IVF in horses to date, is ICSI, using a tiny needle to pick up a sole sperm and inject it into an oocyte. In the early 2000s, Hinrichs, then at Texas A&M University, increased the efficiency of that procedure and developed methods to culture the resulting embryo in the laboratory until it could be easily transferred without surgery to a recipient mare. By around 2009, Hinrichs’ clinic offered this, and specialized facilities around the world continue to do so.

Still, Hinrichs kept pursuing the development of a simplified, conventional IVF procedure. After her lab had devoted considerable energy to studying oocytes, around 2011 she turned attention to the other party involved: sperm. For sperm to fertilize an egg they must undergo a series of physiological changes in a process known as capacitation. In 2019, a researcher in Hinrichs’ lab, Matheus Felix, now chief embryologist in the Penn Equine Assisted Reproduction Laboratory, began investigating how long it takes for horse sperm to capacitate and what conditions support that process.

Tying it together

The team had gathered clues that sperm from horses might need more time than that of other species, such as mice, to fertilize eggs. So they tried a longer-than-normal incubation. “Horse sperm are finicky and like to die in culture,” Hinrichs says, “but we had done some previous work that suggested factors that could prolong their life during incubation.”

When Felix employed a complex medium for incubating them, which contains the compounds penicillamine, hypotaurine, and epinephrine (PHE), the team finally found a way to keep sperm alive in culture for more than a few hours. “He tried to culture the sperm overnight under these conditions, and by gosh it worked,” Hinrichs says. “The sperm were alive the next day, which is a triumph.”

When Felix tried again, incubating the sperm overnight and then adding an oocyte, he documented signs of fertilization. “Because typical results in the horse are zero, this one fertilized oocyte was a sign that the process could work, and we were off on our journey to develop the procedure,” Hinrichs says.

“This work was really the result of an intersection of Matheus’ ideas on the time needed for capacitation and all of these little bits of information that had come through unsuccessful trials that we had done dating back all the way to the 1990s,” Hinrichs says. “Matheus’ dedication to getting it right was the vital factor in the final success of the project.”

Using the fledgling procedure as the basis for optimizing equine IVF, the research team found that pre-incubating the sperm for 22 hours in the PHE medium, then co-incubating it with oocytes for 3 hours, led to the greatest efficiency, including a 74% rate of production of blastocysts, three of which were transferred to mares that are part of the Penn Vet research herd. Three healthy foals were born as a result.

There is still room to improve on the methods, Hinrichs says. The approach only worked well with fresh sperm; frozen sperm, which is the most practical method for clinical IVF, did not result in impressive fertilization rates. And the PHE medium is cumbersome to make, meaning slight variations could compromise the procedure’s success.

“For the first time, we have a method that works, and we can use it as a basis to explore what it is that makes it work and what variations are possible: how to make the procedure simpler and more applicable to practice,” Hinrichs says.

Indeed, as satisfying as it is to have solved this decades-long puzzle, what excites Hinrichs most are the new questions it enables her and her group to interrogate.

“What’s been driving me for 30 years are these physiological questions that we don’t know the answer to,” she says. “What happens in a mare during fertilization? Why are equine sperm so resistant to procedures that work in other species? What do equine sperm need to capacitate? Do they have the same changes as do sperm of other species? These are the questions I find fascinating.”

Katrin Hinrichs is the Harry Werner Endowed Professor of Equine Medicine, chair of the Department of Clinical Studies-New Bolton Center, and professor of reproduction in the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.

Hinrichs’ coauthors on the study were Penn Vet’s Matheus R. Felix, Regina M. Turner, and Tamara Dobbie.

The study was supported by the clinical ICSI program of the Penn Equine Assisted Reproduction Laboratory

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JOURNAL

Biology of Reproduction

DOI

10.1093/biolre/ioac172 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Successful in vitro fertilization in the horse: production of blastocysts and birth of foals after prolonged sperm incubation for capacitation

Illinois Tech researchers extract personal information from anonymous cell phone data using machine learning, raising data security and privacy concerns

A research team at Illinois Institute of Technology has extracted personal information from anonymous cell phone data using machine learning and artificial intelligence, raising data security concerns

Peer-Reviewed Publication

ILLINOIS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

 

IMAGE: [TOP] THE RESEARCH TEAM’S APPROACH TO MODELING SUMMARY FOR THE PROJECT. [BOTTOM] A FEEDFORWARD NEURAL NETWORK OF HOW THE INFORMATION MOVES IN THE PROJECT view more 

CREDIT: ILLINOIS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

A research team at Illinois Institute of Technology has extracted personal information, specifically protected characteristics like age and gender, from anonymous cell phone data using machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms, raising questions about data security.

The research was conducted by an interdisciplinary team of three Illinois Tech faculty including Vijay K. Gurbani, research associate professor of computer science; Matthew Shapiro, professor of political science; and Yuri Mansury, associate professor of social sciences. They were joined by Illinois Tech alumni Lida Kuang (M.S. CS ’19) and Samruda Pobbathi (M.S. CS ’19) who worked with Gurbani to publish “Predicting Age and Gender from Network Telemetry: Implications for Privacy and Impact on Policy” in PLOS One. The researchers used data from a Latin American cell phone company to successfully estimate the gender and age of individual users through their private communications with relative ease.

The team developed a neural network model to estimate gender with 67 percent accuracy, which outperforms modern techniques such as decision tree, random forest, and gradient boosting models by a significant margin. They also were able to estimate the age of individual users with an accuracy rate of 78 percent by using the same model.

“Age and gender information does seem innocuous, but this information is used in nefarious ways by people, many times with devastating consequences,” Shapiro says. “When someone with bad intentions targets young children for anything, ranging from sales to sexual predation, it violates a number of laws designed to protect minors, such as the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and HIPAA. At the other end of the age spectrum, seniors are targeted by sophisticated spam and phishing efforts given their susceptibility and their access to savings.”

This information was extrapolated using commonly accessible computing equipment. The team used a Linux (Fedora) operating system with 16 GB memory and an Intel i5-6200U CPU with four cores to run the neural network model.

“The laptop we used for this work is not exclusive at all,” Gurbani says. “To a well-resourced adversary, there will be much more powerful machines available, including access to cluster computing, where multiple computers are configured in a cluster to provide the computer power for the AI/ML models.”

The data set used to conduct the research is not publicly available, but Gurbani says an adversary could collect a similar data set by capturing data through public Wi-Fi hotspots or by attacking service providers’ computing infrastructure.

“As we mentioned in our paper, such attacks unfortunately do occur and are not rare,” Gurbani says. “The process to collect this data would not be easy, but it would not be impossible either.”

The aim of the paper is to start a dialogue that critically examines the impact that emerging machine learning and AI techniques have on privacy regulations. There are no nationwide privacy regulations in the United States, so the researchers looked at how these techniques chip away at the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation articles, which are designed to protect consumers from the imminent threat of privacy violations.

“Machine learning and automated decision making will be a mainstream of business processes,

and there is no escaping that reality,” Gurbani says. “The issue at hand is how to protect individual privacy as well as societal and economic interests from fraud using the appropriate regulatory framework.”

One way to do that, Mansury says, is to provide consumers with the “opt-out option” to keep their personal information private when installing an app.

Recommendations include using synthetic data rather than user observation for machine learning models, for data holders to work with machine learning specialists to develop best practices, to build a regulatory framework that allows users to opt out of data sharing to keep personal information private, and to update existing non-compliance protocols. In other words, there is a lot more work to be done to address the policy gaps as well as the ethics of AI.

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JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0271714 

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Predicting age and gender from network telemetry: Implications for privacy and impact on policy

Data show Mass General Brigham’s ‘Clinics on Wheels’ increased access to COVID-19 services for underserved populations

Initiative vaccinated a significantly higher rate of young people, non-white populations, and Hispanic people than the average for the state and target communities

Peer-Reviewed Publication

BRIGHAM AND WOMEN'S HOSPITAL

 

IMAGE: MASS GENERAL BRIGHAM IS PROVIDING COVID VACCINATIONS TO UNDERSERVED POPULATIONS LIVING IN THE GREATER BOSTON AREA BY SENDING MOBILE HEALTH UNITS TO 12 PREDOMINANTLY LOW-INCOME AND RACIAL/ETHNIC MINORITY COMMUNITIES IN MASSACHUSETTS view more 

CREDIT: MASS GENERAL BRIGHAM

• Mobile COVID-19 health units delivered an average of more than 150 vaccine doses per week during the study period
• Initiative vaccinated a significantly higher rate of young people, non-white populations, and Hispanic people than the average for the state and target communities
• Adaptable program also offers COVID-19 counseling and testing and can be expanded to address additional community health needs

Two new papers from Mass General Brigham demonstrate the effectiveness of bringing COVID-19 health care services to where people need them the most. At the beginning of May 2021, a team from Mass General Brigham began providing COVID vaccinations to underserved populations living in the greater Boston area by sending mobile health units to 12 predominantly low-income and racial/ethnic minority communities in Massachusetts. Using community health vans, teams offered easily accessible vaccination on a walk-in basis without regard to insurance, immigration status, or ability to pay. In a paper published today in The American Journal of Public Health, Mass General Brigham authors describe the success and challenges of the new program, which had higher vaccination rates among adolescents, non-white populations, and people of Hispanic ethnicity compared to vaccination rates in the state and in the local communities.

“To date, our program has provided almost 20,000 COVID-19 vaccination doses,” said corresponding author Priya Sarin Gupta, MD, MPH, medical director of the Mass General Brigham and Kraft Center Community Care Van Initiatives. “Our goal was to take COVID-19 health and vaccination services to the community and meet people where they are. The data from the first few months of Mass General Brigham’s Community Care Vans, sometimes called our ‘clinics on wheels,’ show us that if you build it — and you build it well — they will come.”

In their AJPH paper, Sarin Gupta and colleagues outline what it took to build their program well and implement it effectively. Key elements to the program included:

• Engaging and partnering with community nonprofit organizations, local departments of health, and school board representatives;
• Staffing vans with trained, multilingual staff members and engaging a large volunteer network;
• Identifying the right places and times to reach communities that have been hardest hit by COVID-19. 

The program also used a “double equity” model, engaging with a local transportation company that was at risk of downsizing because of economic losses during the pandemic.

In a companion paper recently published in Preventive Medicine, investigators analyzed results from the first three months of the program. From May 20 to Aug. 18, 2021, the community health vans held 130 sessions and administered 2,622 COVID-19 vaccine doses. During the study, just 20 percent of people who received a vaccine from one of the mobile clinics self-identified as white. More than 56 percent listed their ethnicity as Hispanic (compared to the state’s vaccination rate of about 18 percent). Additionally, participants were more likely to be adolescents — the average age of people vaccinated at the mobile clinics was 31 years old. These early findings allowed the program to iterate and expand to more communities to maximize the program’s reach to communities serving people of color and those with high rates of health-related social needs.

The authors note that mobile health units could be used to help address other community health needs beyond – and sometimes entangled with — COVID-19. The vans are now expanding their offerings to include a menu of services to offer care for preventable and chronic conditions, including offering high-blood pressure screening.

“Already, we are seeing participants come to us who are interested in getting vaccinated, and also get screened for high-blood pressure while they are there — and vice versa,” said Sarin Gupta. “Some participants ask us, ‘What are you going to provide next?’ It gives me hope. If we can provide care with cultural humility and ensure that everyone has access, we can begin to overcome barriers such as mistrust.”

From May 20 to Aug. 18, 2021, the community health vans held 130 sessions and administered 2,622 COVID-19 vaccine doses.

CREDIT

Mass General Brigham

Funding: This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH; RADx-Up grant NIH P50 CA244433-02S1), the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Kraft Center for Community Health, and Mass General Brigham.

Paper cited: Sarin Gupta, P et al. “Mobile health services for COVID-19: counseling, testing, and vaccination for medically underserved populations.” Am J Public Health DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2022.307021

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JOURNAL

American Journal of Public Health

DOI

10.2105/AJPH.2022.307021 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Mobile health services for COVID-19: counseling, testing, and vaccination for medically underserved populations

Word and face recognition can be adequately supported with half a brain, study finds

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH

 

IMAGE: MARLENE BEHRMANN, PH.D. view more 

CREDIT: COURTESY OF MARLENE BEHRMANN

PITTSBURGH, Oct. 25, 2022 – An unprecedented study of brain plasticity and visual perception found that people who, as children, had undergone surgery removing half of their brain correctly recognized differences between pairs of words or faces more than 80% of the time. Considering the volume of removed brain tissue, the surprising accuracy highlights the brain’s capacity—and its limitations—to rewire itself and adapt to dramatic surgery or traumatic injury.

The findings, published by University of Pittsburgh researchers today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), is the first-ever attempt to characterize neuroplasticity in humans and understand whether a single brain hemisphere can perform functions typically split between the two sides of the brain.

“The question of whether the brain is prewired with its functional capabilities from birth or if it dynamically organizes its function as it matures and experiences the environment drives much of vision science and neurobiology,” said senior author Marlene Behrmann, Ph.D., professor of ophthalmology and psychology at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. “Working with hemispherectomy patients allowed us to study the upper bounds of functional capacity of a single brain hemisphere. With the results from this study, we now have a foot in the door of human neuroplasticity and can finally begin examining the capabilities of brain reorganization.”

Neuroplasticity is a process that allows the brain to change its activity and rewire itself, either structurally or functionally, in response to changes in the environment. And even though brain plasticity peaks early in development, our brains continue to change well into adulthood.

As humans age, the two halves of our brains, called hemispheres, become increasingly specialized. Even though this division of labor is not absolute, the two hemispheres adopt distinct chief responsibilities: The left hemisphere matures into the primary place for reading printed words, and the right hemisphere matures into the primary place for recognizing faces.

But neuroplasticity has limitations, and this hemispheric preference becomes more rigid over time. In some cases, adults who develop a brain lesion because of stroke or a tumor might experience a reading impairment or become face blind, depending on whether the left or right hemisphere of the brain is affected.

But what happens when the brain is forced to change and adapt while it is still highly plastic? To answer this question, researchers looked at a special group of patients who had undergone a complete hemispherectomy—or a surgical removal of one hemisphere to control epileptic seizures—during childhood.

Top row: Removal of the left hemisphere. Bottom row: Removal of the right hemisphere.

CREDIT

Sophia Robert

Because hemispherectomies are relatively rare, scientists seldom have access to more than a handful of patients at a time. But the Pitt team found an unexpected silver lining of the COVID-19 pandemic: the normalization of telemedicine services, which made it possible to enroll 40 hemispherectomy patients, an unprecedented number for studies of this kind.

To assess word recognition capacity, researchers presented their participants pairs of words, each differing by only one letter, such as “soap” and “soup” or “tank” and “tack.” To test how well the children recognized different faces, scientists showed them pairs of photos of people. Either stimulus appeared on the screen for only a fraction of a second, and the participants had to decide whether the pair of words or the pair of faces were the same or different.

Astoundingly, the single remaining hemisphere supported both of those functions. The capacity for word and face recognition between control subjects and people with hemispherectomies differed, but the differences were less than 10%, and the average accuracy exceeded 80%. In direct comparisons between matching hemispheres in patients and controls, patients’ accuracy on both face and word recognition was comparable regardless of the hemisphere removed.

“Reassuringly, losing half of the brain does not equate to losing half of its functionality,” said first author Michael Granovetter, Ph.D., a student in the Medical Scientist Training Program at Pitt’s School of Medicine. “While we can’t definitively predict how any given child might be affected by a hemispherectomy, the performance that we see in these patients is encouraging. The more we can understand plasticity after surgery, the more information, and perhaps added comfort, we can provide to parents who are making difficult decisions about their child’s treatment plan.”

Additional authors of this paper are Sophia Robert, B.S., and Leah Ettensohn, B.S., both of Carnegie Mellon University.

This research was supported by the National Eye Institute (R01EY027018), the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (T32GM081760) and the American Epilepsy Society (847556). This research was also supported by a National Eye Institute P30 CORE award EY08098  and unrestricted supporting funds from Research to Prevent Blindness and the Eye & Ear Foundation of Pittsburgh. 

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2212936119 

ARTICLE TITLE

With childhood hemispherectomy, one hemisphere can support—but is suboptimal for—word and face recognition

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

25-Oct-2022

Nestling birds recognize their local song ‘dialect’

Peer-Reviewed Publication

STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: THE RESEARCHERS DISCOVERED THAT THE JUVENILE FLYCATCHERS CLEAR RESPONSE TO THEIR OWN SONG DIALECT HELPED THEM AVOID LEARNING SONGS FROM OTHER SPECIES IN THE ENVIRONMENT. PHOTO: TOM WALLIS view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO: TOM WALLIS

A recent study, published in Current Biology, led by researchers at Stockholm University and Uppsala University, has shown that juvenile songbirds react to hearing the songs they will eventually produce as adults, even when they are as young as 12 days old. Experiments conducted on nestling pied flycatchers across Europe demonstrate that they preferentially respond to songs from their own species and, remarkably, their own population. 

Like human children learning language, juvenile songbirds learn their songs by listening to those produced by their parents and other adults. In both human language and songbird song, the learning process gives rise to small changes from one generation to the next, which leads to characteristic differences among populations, called dialects. 

Broadcasted songs to nestlings
The study shows that pied flycatcher songs from 7 European populations form clearly defined dialects. By broadcasting songs to almost 2000 nestlings and observing their responses, the researchers demonstrate that young flycatchers respond to songs that are more similar to those from their own dialect by begging for food.

 “These results establish that birds are ‘tuned’ from a young age to recognize their own populations’ songs, which focuses subsequent learning”, says David Wheatcroft, Associate Professor at the Department of Zoology, Stockholm University, who is the lead author of the study.

How are nestlings able to do this? One possibility is that nestling songbirds listen to their fathers’ songs and thereby learn about the local dialect. However, 100s of hours of recordings at flycatcher nests at Stockholm University’s Tovetorp Research Station revealed that nestlings hear extremely few songs, and, moreover, that nestlings whose fathers sing most often respond most weakly to the local dialect. 

“An alternative is that nestlings recognize their own dialect innately”, says David Wheatcroft.

CAPTION

A baby flycatcher looks out of one of the birdhouses used in the study. Photo: David Wheatcroft

CREDIT

Photo: David Wheatcroft

Local dialect helps attract partners
He hopes these results will lead to future studies investigating how these dialect-specific responses develop and their consequences. 

“If differences in early song responses among populations are truly innate, it would suggest a remarkable co-evolution between a cultural trait and the genes underlying it. Singing the local dialect is thought to help adults attract appropriate mates.”

The researchers also found that dialect-specific responses may help prevent learning the songs of surrounding species. Pied flycatcher nestling responses to the songs of a closely related species, the collared flycatcher, were as weak as those to songs from other pied flycatcher dialects. Thus, the ability to discriminate against the songs of other species arises as a by-product of strong respondes to the local dialect. 

These results demonstrate that even when behaviours, such as songs, are learned, they can be tuned in remarkably specific ways when there are benefits of getting it right.

CAPTION

Newborn flycatchers in their nest. Photo: David Wheatcroft

CREDIT

Photo: David Wheatcroft

More information
The article “Species-specific song responses emerge as a by-product of tuning to the local dialect” is published in the scientific journal Current Biology: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.09.063

In addition to Swedish researchers, this work involved collaborations with researchers from the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (the Netherlands), University of the Basque Country (Spain), University of Turku (Finland), Instituto de Investigación en Recursos Cinegéticos (Spain), University of Exeter (UK), and Instituto Pirenaico de Ecología (Spain).

Contact
David Wheatcroft, Associate Professor at the Department of Zoology, Stockholm University
Telephone: +46 7 222 38 327
E-mail: david.wheatcroft@zoologi.su.se

CAPTION

David Wheatcroft, Associate Professor at the Department of Zoology, Stockholm University, at one of the birdhouses he has used in the project. Photo: Annika Hallman/Stockholm University

CREDIT

Photo: Annika Hallman/Stockholm University

JOURNAL

Current Biology

DOI

10.1016/j.cub.2022.09.063 

ARTICLE TITLE

“Species-specific song responses emerge as a by-product of tuning to the local dialect”

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

25-Oct-2022

Jason Momoa expresses support for Brazil's Lula

Issued on: 25/10/2022 - 

US actor Jason Momoa has thrown his support behind Lula in the knife-edge Brazilian election VALERIE MACON AFP/File
1 min

Los Angeles (AFP) – Aquaman star Jason Momoa has become the latest Hollywood celebrity to throw his support behind Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil's knife-edge election, joining Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo and "Star Wars" actor Mark Hamill.

Lula, Brazil's leftist former president, is facing off against far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, whose policies have been blamed for rampant destruction of the Amazon rainforest.

Momoa, 43, took to Instagram on Monday, posting hearts over a news headline showing Lula's lead widening over Bolsonaro as the pair head into Sunday's all-important run-off.

Fellow superhero actor Mark Ruffalo, who stars as the Hulk in Marvel's "Avengers" franchise, last month released a video endorsing Lula.

He urged Brazilians to think of the "global implication to your election" with regards to the Amazon rainforest and its role in helping fight climate change.

"What happens to the rainforest and Indigenous people that are there will impact the rest of the world for millennia to come," said Ruffalo.

He added: "Right now, the leader that's best positioned to protect the rainforest is Lula."

With just days to go until the October 30 vote, the two bitter rivals are scrambling to win over undecided voters in a historically tight race.

Lula has 52 percent of the vote heading into the runoff, to 48 percent for Bolsonaro, according to a recent poll.

Momoa is the latest celebrity to come out against Bolsonaro, whose tenure has been marked by increased deforestation, more logging and the supplanting of Indigenous people in the Amazon.

Ahead of the first round of elections, Luke Skywalker actor Mark Hamill tweeted "The future is YOURS, Brasil", along with a caricature of the former president captioned "Lula Skywalker".

Leonardo DiCaprio, who has a long track record of environmentalism, has encouraged Brazilians to vote, citing the importance of the Amazon.

Bolsonaro is seeking a second term after a four-year mandate in which he was excoriated for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and his controversial statements on women, the press, minorities, and perceived enemies such as the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile Lula, Brazil's president from 2003 to 2010, is seeking a comeback after spending more than a year in jail on controversial, since-overturned charges stemming from the investigation of a massive graft scheme centered on state-run oil company Petrobras.

© 2022 AFP

UCP members on Saturday vote down controversial anti-racism teaching ban

Lisa Johnson - Saturday

Danielle Smith speaks at UCP annual general meeting beside Lethbridge East MLA Nathan Neudorf, Deputy Premier, Infrastructure Minister and Deputy Premier and Minister of Skilled Trades and Professions, Kaycee Madu on Saturday, Oct. 22, 2022 at the River Cree Resort and Casino. Greg Southam-Postmedia© Provided by Edmonton Journal

Alberta’s United Conservatives during the first annual general meeting under Premier Danielle Smith defeated a controversial policy proposal that aimed to ban teaching anti-racism, diversity or critical race theory.

The meeting, held at River Cree Resort at Enoch, just west of Edmonton, saw 1,800 registrations in advance of the weekend. Members voted on 20 policy resolutions Saturday afternoon following a keynote speech from Smith.

The proposal, put forward by the Edmonton West-Henday riding association, called for a “halt” to what it deemed differential treatment due to ethnic heritage, and “any student being taught that by reason of their ethnic heritage they are privileged, they are inherently racist or they bear historic guilt due to said ethnic heritage or that all of society is a racist system.”

However, the resolution failed to get majority approval. David Parker, executive director of third-party advertiser Take Back Alberta, told Postmedia following the vote that he didn’t think the wording of the resolution highlighted what people are really worried about, which he said is an indoctrination of their children in schools.

“(The resolution) was just way too broad. Also, even though I think a lot of right-wing people care a lot about this issue, I think we have to be open as a party to understand that there’s a lot of diverse views and we have to be very clear that we support minority groups. We care about them, we care about what they’ve suffered,” said Parker, who spoke against the resolution during debate.

“Because of how it would make people feel excluded, we can’t do that,” he said.

The resolution’s rationale points to an incident in 2021, when Edmonton’s public school division reported what it described as a “hate-filled” Instagram account to city police. The account used Strathcona High School’s name and images, and called for an end to “anti-white racism.” Edmonton Public School Board (EPSB) Chairwoman Trisha Estabrooks said at the time that it demonstrated the need for anti-racism education.

During the hours-long policy debate, another resolution from Airdrie East, which focused on parental choice, and called for the party to, among other things, “uphold the rights of parents and caregivers so as not to require them to affirm or socially condition a child in a gender identity that is incongruent with the child’s birth sex,” passed overwhelmingly.

“Barring evidence of criminal neglect or abuse, we start with the assumption that parents are best suited to guide their child’s development,” the rationale reads.

Also passing was a resolution that aims to direct the Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO) to not implement the federal government’s net-zero power grid plan, which involves getting Canada’s electricity systems to net-zero emissions by 2035.

However, a proposal to fire up to 700 management and administrative positions at Alberta Health Services based on pay, cutting those on the “sunshine list” earning more than $140,000 per year, was defeated.

Resolution passed aiming to see municipal officials register as lobbyists

A party resolution that has raised concerns among some municipal politicians was one of 12 to pass Saturday. Championed by the Calgary-North West constituency association, it calls for the province to ask councillors, administration and staff from municipalities to register as political lobbyists when dealing with the province.

Currently, Alberta asks consultant lobbyists and organizational lobbyists to put their names on a provincial registry. They include private consultants who lobby for a living, and representatives from companies, unions or other organizations that are meeting with government officials to lobby for changes.

Bonnyville-Cold Lake MLA David Hanson spoke against the resolution, and told Postmedia following the vote it would create an onerous amount of work that could get in the way of elected officials doing their jobs, which includes sometimes lobbying the provincial government.

“They’re elected to advocate for their communities — who’s going to keep track of that?”

Another resolution that aimed to see Alberta move away from using the term environmental, social and governance goals (ESG) was carried.

Even if a policy resolution is passed through a membership vote, it’s not guaranteed to become government policy.

Meanwhile, all nine candidates that were endorsed by Take Back Alberta for executive positions won their votes Saturday.

“I love it. Now we’re going to be moving into making sure we defeat the NDP, obviously,” said Parker, adding that the group, which worked to help build support for Smith during her leadership campaign, counts 30,000 members.

lijohnson@postmedia.com
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Air pollution and stress contribute to low-birth-weight babies for Hispanic women in Los Angeles

Newborns with low birth weight face increased risks of mortality and long-term disease

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNI

Fetal growth — which is delicate and precisely programmed — may be disrupted by a mother’s exposure to air pollution and psychological stress during early to mid-pregnancy, a new USC study shows.

The findings, published today in JAMA Network Open, suggest that protecting pregnant women from air pollution may improve birth weight, especially among stressed-out mothers living in environmentally burdened neighborhoods.

“Although air pollution has a harmful effect on many different populations, our study identified the effects on expectant mothers who are already most vulnerable,” said Zhongzheng (Jason) Niu, postdoctoral scholar and research associate at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, and the study’s first author. “The addition of high perceived stress is another factor contributing to this issue. We already know air pollution is linked to low birth weight and future disease risk. Protecting pregnant women from these risks would ultimately protect future generations.”

Newborns with low birth weight face increased risk of neonatal mortality and potential complications such as breathing problems, bleeding in the brain, jaundice and infections. Low birth weight is also associated with long-term disease risks including diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, intellectual and developmental disabilities, metabolic syndrome and obesity.

Identifying at-risk mothers

Data from 628 predominantly low-income Hispanic women pregnant with a single baby was collected between 2015 to 2021 as part of USC’s MADRES (Maternal and Developmental Risks from Environmental and Social Stressors) Center.

Patients were recruited primarily from Eisner Health in downtown Los Angeles and the LAC + USC prenatal clinic. Biospecimen data, medical records and residential information were collected during clinic visits. Participants completed a Perceived Stress Scale questionnaire to gauge their perceptions of stress. Their neighborhood-level stressor was measured by the CalEnviroScreen Score, a California statewide screening tool to identify neighborhoods that have been disproportionately burdened by multiple sources of pollution and population vulnerability.

The average age of participants was 28 years; 73% self-identified as Hispanic and 32% listed Spanish as their preferred language. Twenty-one percent of the mothers reported high levels of stress in their lives. More than 60% of the participants lived in a neighborhood with a CalEnviroScreen Score greater than 50, indicating a high cumulative burden.

Microscopic particles threaten developing babies

Three components of polluted air were examined: PM2.5, PM10 and NO2. Levels of the pollutants were monitored from ambient air quality data (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Air Quality System) with an average of four monitoring stations within 8 kilometers to 14 kilometers of each participant’s residential address.

Emissions from the combustion of gasoline, oil, diesel fuel or wood produce particles of PM2.5, which has a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or less — 30 times smaller than a strand of hair. PM10 has a diameter of less than 10 micrometers and can be found in dust and smoke.

Nitrogen dioxide, or NO2, is another pollutant released when fossil fuels are burned at high temperatures.

Daily estimates of 24-hour average NO2 and particulate matter were assigned to each participant’s residential location, from 12 weeks before conception to 36 weeks into pregnancy.

Conclusions

Exposures to particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide in early to mid-pregnancy are significantly associated with lower birth weight, researchers found. On average, birth weight was 9.5 grams lower each interquartile range increase (4 µg/m3) of PM2.5 exposure during the 14- to 22-week gestational period.

Even more concerning, mothers with high stress scores who also live in the most environmentally burdened neighborhoods experienced greater decreases in birth weight. In this group, mothers exposed to the highest levels of PM2.5 at four to 20 weeks delivered babies weighing 34 grams, or 1 ounce, less in birth weight and mothers exposed to highest PM10 at nine to 14 gestational weeks delivered babies weighing 39.4 grams less, on average.

In the same group, exposure to NO2 from nine to 14 gestational weeks was associated with a 40.4-gram decrease in birth weight. Exposure at 33 to 36 gestational weeks reported the greatest decrease in birth weight: 117.6 grams, or 4.1 ounces.

“Despite reductions in air pollution in California, we are still seeing harmful effects of air pollutants on birth weight, a key indicator of baby’s future health, in vulnerable populations,” said last author Carrie Breton, a professor of population and public health sciences at the Keck School of Medicine. “The most vulnerable women are those who are hit with multiple types of stressors, and experience stress in different ways. The combination of stressors and pollutants is important to consider in protecting babies’ health. Continuing to monitor air pollutants still needs to be a priority. Reducing individual and neighborhood stressors should also be a priority, particularly at the policy level.”

About the Study

In addition to Niu and Breton, other authors of the study include Theresa M. Bastain, Thomas A. Chavez, Genevieve F. Dunton, Sandrah P. Eckel, Shohreh F. Farzan, Rima Habre, Jill Johnston, Claudia M. Toledo-Corral, Tingyu Yang of the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California; Laila Al-Marayati and Brendan H. Grubbs, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, University of Southern California; Kiros Berhane, Department of Biostatistics, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University; Deborah Lerner, Eisner Health Los Angeles; and Fred Lurmann and Nathan Pavlovic, Sonoma Technology Inc.

The research was supported by NIH grants P50MD015705, P50 ES026086, UH3OD023287, P30ES007048, R01ES027409 and EPA grant 83615801–0.

 

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JOURNAL

JAMA Network Open

DOI

10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.38174