Tree rings and strontium point researchers to the provenance of 400-year-old timber

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN - FACULTY OF HUMANITIES

 

IMAGE: SAMPLE FROM A HOUSE IN THE TOWN OF HORSENS IN DENMARK. THE ANALYSIS SHOWS THAT THE WOOD ORIGINALLY CAME FROM SWEDEN. view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO: AOFIE DALY, UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN

Tree-ring analysis – so-called dendrochronological analysis – has been part of archaeology for many years and has made it possible for archaeologists to date old wooden objects with great precision. And in many cases, they have also been able to determine the provenance of the wood.

But it has proven difficult for researchers to determine timber’s place of origin when the historic timber was imported into Denmark from further afield to serve as building material.

In a new study in the journal PLOS ONE, Associate Professor Aoife Daly and Dr Alicia Van Ham-Meert from the University of Copenhagen show that combining analyses of strontium and tree rings in timber can provide a more detailed picture of the origin of timber.

“Dendrochronology is a powerful tool for identifying the region of origin of historic timber. One of the potential biases in the method is the use of a dataset that in itself has a history of transport and re-use. This phenomenon is clear, for example, when timber particularly from urban centres are from varying sources. This is where strontium enters the picture,” says Aoife Daly and adds: 

"Specifically, we have taken timber samples from three old houses in the Danish towns of Aalborg and Horsens. A good example is a sample from a house in Horsens, where the dendrochronological analysis mistakenly showed that the wood was Danish; the strontium signature, however, precisely matched a location in southern Sweden, which indicates that the timber had been transported from southern Sweden to Horsens and used to build the house there. This is not surprising in as much as Sweden was part of the Kingdom of Denmark at the time, but it is important for us to be able to distinguish between places of origin of the objects we find.”

Busy timber trade along the south coast of Sweden
Gothenburg used to be regarded as the central shipping port for the timber trade during this period. However, the new results suggest that other ports also played a role in the very lively timber trade in the region: 

"The fact that some of the samples have been found to originate from southern Sweden is important because it tells us that the timber trade was spread out over a much larger area than we have previously believed. And the strontium signatures point to an area around the Göta River, which must have been an important transport route for the timber traders,” concludes Aoife Daly.

Dendrochronology 
Dendrochronology, also called tree-ring analysis, is the scientific discipline concerned with dating and interpreting past events based on the analysis of tree rings. The rings are counted and measured, and the sequence of rings is correlated with sequences from other trees.    

 

Strontium 
Strontium is a chemical element found in the Earth's crust, but its prevalence varies depending on the geology of each region. Humans, animals and plants absorb strontium through water and food. In this way, strontium works a bit like a satnav: by analysing the strontium isotopes in archaeological artefacts, you can determine where in the world they originate from, because their strontium isotope signature will reflect the region the artefacts come from.   

 

The article "Provenancing 16th and 17th century CE building timbers in Denmark – combining dendroprovenance and Sr isotopic analysis" has just been published in the journal PLOS ONE.

The study is part of the TIMBER research project, which is funded by the European Research Council (ERC).

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JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0278513 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Content analysis

ARTICLE TITLE

Provenancing 16th and 17th century CE building timbers in Denmark–combining dendroprovenance and Sr isotopic analysis

Association of structural fires in New York City with inequities in safe heating for immigrant communities

JAMA Network Open

Peer-Reviewed Publication

JAMA NETWORK

About The Study: This study found that the frequency of heating complaints was significantly associated with the frequency of structural fires in New York City. Importantly, this association varied across community districts, with more fires occurring in districts with greater proportions of Black and Latinx residents. 

Authors: Clifford C. Sheckter, M.D., of the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, California, is the corresponding author. 

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.

This link will be live 

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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

Skilled nursing facilities continued to provide high quality care for those hospitalized during the pandemic

Peer-Reviewed Publication

HEBREW SENIORLIFE HINDA AND ARTHUR MARCUS INSTITUTE FOR AGING RESEARCH

Older adults who entered skilled nursing facilities (SNF) for care after hospitalizations after the pandemic received rehabilitation care comparable to the levels of care that were provided pre-pandemic, according to research published in the JAMA Health Forum.

Despite exceptional challenges during the pandemic, SNFs provided post-acute rehabilitation with only a modest decline in intensity, said the researchers. This suggests that SNFs were largely able to adapt and provide post-acute care rehabilitation to older adults.

“During the pandemic we knew that fewer people went to skilled nursing facilities after hospitalizations, and it seemed like the ones that went were overall sicker, with more cognitive impairment and higher risk overall,” said Sandra M. Shi, MD, MPH.  “This study helps to demonstrate that despite caring for a sicker population with scarce resources, SNFs were still largely able to provide post-acute rehabilitation for patients.”

“Our goal was to characterize changes in rehabilitation services provided by SNFs during COVID-19”, said Sarah Berry, MD, MPH.  “Rehabilitation services overall decreased, but only by about a half day on average.”

The article, “Post-Acute Care Rehabilitation Services and Outcomes in Skilled Nursing Facilities Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic”, was published in the JAMA Health Forum and was authored by Sandra M. Shi, MD, MPH, Hinda and Arthur Marcus Institute for Aging Research, Hebrew SeniorLife; Cyrus M. Kosar, PhD, Brown School of Public Health; Natalia Gouskovia, PhD, Hinda and Arthur Marcus Institute for Aging Research, Hebrew SeniorLife; and Sarah Berry, MD, MPH, Hinda and Arthur Marcus Institute for Aging Research, Hebrew SeniorLife.

About Hebrew SeniorLife
Hebrew SeniorLife, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, was founded in 1903 and today is a national leader dedicated to empowering seniors to live their best lives. Hebrew SeniorLife cares for more than 3,000 seniors a day across six campuses throughout Greater Boston. Locations include: Hebrew Rehabilitation Center-Boston and Hebrew Rehabilitation Center-NewBridge in Dedham; NewBridge on the Charles, Dedham; Orchard Cove, Canton; Simon C. Fireman Community, Randolph; Center Communities of Brookline; and Jack Satter House, Revere. Hebrew SeniorLife also trains more than 1,000 future health care professionals each year, and conducts influential research into aging at the Hinda and Arthur Marcus Institute for Aging Research, which has a robust research portfolio whose NIH funding in 2021 places it in the top 10% of NIH-funded institutions. For more information about Hebrew SeniorLife, visit our website or follow us on our blog, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

 

About the Hinda and Arthur Marcus Institute for Aging Research
Scientists at the Marcus Institute seek to transform the human experience of aging by conducting research that will ensure a life of health, dignity, and productivity into advanced age. The Marcus Institute carries out rigorous studies that discover the mechanisms of age-related disease and disability; lead to the prevention, treatment, and cure of disease; advance the standard of care for older people; and inform public decision-making.

 

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JOURNAL

JAMA Health Forum

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Post-Acute Care Rehabilitation Services and Outcomes in Skilled Nursing Facilities Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

3-Mar-2023

COI STATEMENT

Drs Shi and Kosar reported grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)/National Institute on Aging (NIA) during the conduct of the study. Dr. Gouskova reported grants from NIH during the conduct of the study. No other disclosures were reported.

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of new

New sound navigation technology enables the blind to navigate - challenging Nobel Prize winning theory and providing hope for slowing down dimentia

Peer-Reviewed Publication

REICHMAN UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: PROF. AMIR AMEDI, DIRECTOR OF THE BRAIN COGNITION AND TECHNOLOGY INSTITUTE view more 

CREDIT: GILAD KVALARCHIK

New Sound Navigation Technology Enables the Blind to Navigate - challenging Nobel Prize Winning Theory and Providing Hope for Slowing Down Dimentia

A new study by researchers at Reichman University’s Brain Cognition and Technology Institute directed by Prof. Amir Amedi has shown that visual navigation areas in the brain can be activated using sound. By traversing mazes using sound information instead of visual information after training, visual navigation areas were activated. This finding has numerous exciting implications, among them the findings chip away at the Nobel Prize winning theory of critical periods and provide new avenues for cognitive training to potentially detect and prevent Alzheimer’s disease.

 

The team conducted a series of studies over the past years that challenge conventional beliefs about the human brain's functioning; claiming that the brain is divided by tasks, rather than the commonly accepted division by senses (seeing area, hearing area, etc...). These studies utilized Sensory Substitution Devices (SSDs), which are remarkable tools that transfer sensory information from one sense through another sense. For example, SSDs can help visually impaired individuals "see" by converting visual information into sounds. Following training, individuals can identify shapes, object locations, words, letters, and even faces when represented through sound. Training on SSDs has been shown to be effective on people even in their 40’s - 60’s+, calling to question the idea that there are critical periods for development of senses. The classic theory of critical periods suggests that the senses can only be developed early in life, during childhood, through exposure to sights, sounds, and so on. And if they do not develop during this period, they cannot be used later in life. The fact that SSDs can be used for effective training well into adulthood, suggests that the theory of critical periods needs to be revised. Taking this to the extreme, this body of research has shown that the brain can be reprogrammed through this training so that visual areas in the brain can be activated even in people with zero visual experience.

 

These non-invasive devices, SSDs, offer researchers unique opportunities to observe how different brain regions respond when relevant information comes from another sense. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fmri), the researchers in this new study examined the impact of using SSDs on visual retinotopically organized areas of the brain, in this case specifically Area V6, which is responsible for visual navigation and motion perception. The results of this study indicate that through short training with the EyeCane, an SSD that conveys spatial information about the visual surroundings through sounds, even those who are congenitally blind can develop selective activation in Area V6. The study further supports the idea that, despite years or a lifetime of blindness, the brain has the potential to process visual tasks and properties if the right technologies and training are employed. Additionally, the study found that the area contains motor neurons responsible for egocentric navigation.

Importantly, the findings from this study may have implications for improving detection and prevention of Alzheimer's disease. Spatial deficits are a common early symptom of Alzheimer's disease and navigation and spatial cognition rely on V6 among other brain regions. The fact that V6 can develop its selectivity for navigation in the absence of visual experience, as seen in the congenitally blind participants using the EyeCane SSD, suggests that there may be ways to train and enhance navigation abilities in individuals at risk for Alzheimer's disease, such as older adults or those with mild cognitive impairment. Furthermore, by better understanding the neural mechanisms underlying development and functioning of spatial navigation, we may be able to identify early biomarkers and targets for interventions aimed at preventing or slowing the progression of Alzheimer's disease.

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JOURNAL

Current Biology

DOI

10.1016/j.cub.2023.02.025 

Grant fuels project to highlight untold history across Appalachia

The Monuments Across Appalachian Virginia project is part of a $250 million initiative that the Andrew Mellon Foundation launched in 2020 to support public projects across the United States.

Grant and Award Announcement

VIRGINIA TECH

 

IMAGE: EMILY SATTERWHITE (AT LEFT) POINTS OUT AREAS OF APPALACHIA ON A MAP THAT SHE EXPECTS TO HIGHLIGHT AS PART OF A $3 MILLION PROJECT TO COMMEMORATE THE REGION'S NEGLECTED HISTORY. SATTERWHITE AND KATRINA POWELL (AT RIGHT), BOTH FACULTY IN THE COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS AND HUMAN SCIENCES, ARE LEADERS OF THE PROJECT. PHOTO BY MARY CRAWFORD FOR VIRGINIA TECH. view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO BY MARY CRAWFORD FOR VIRGINIA TECH.

From working with Appalachian communities to examining issues of displacement for refugees, two Virginia Tech faculty have made it their life and scholarly mission to recognize the people that society often overlooks.

Now a prestigious national foundation is giving them significant resources to tell the hidden historical stories of communities throughout Southwest Virginia, an opportunity to put their passion into action.

Emily Satterwhite and Katrina Powell received a $3 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a three-year project to work with communities across the state’s Appalachia region to commemorate neglected histories.

Their project, Monuments Across Appalachian Virginia, is part of a $250 million initiative that the New York-based nonprofit foundation launched in 2020 to support public projects across the United States. The focus of the foundation’s Monuments Project is to commemorate stories of populations that have been denied historical recognition.

The foundation, with an endowment of approximately $8.2 billion in 2020, awards grants in four areas: arts and culture, humanities in place, public knowledge, and higher learning.

Examples of other Monuments Projects across the country include the completion of Freedom Park in North Carolina, which honors the history of Black North Carolinians, and the expansion of artist Judith Baca’s Great Wall of Los Angeles, a large mural depicting the city’s history.

Now, Virginia Tech joins the work to recognize Appalachia.

“There’s so much attention right now to monuments, what's out there and what stories they tell and what other stories deserve to be told,” said Satterwhite, an associate professor and director of Appalachian Studies in the Department of Religion and Culture. “People are already talking about what’s been hidden that needs to be made visible and to be passed on to the next generation, and what stories might otherwise be lost. We are telling more complex stories about Appalachia and its history to help people reimagine it not as a white, static, simple, rooted place but as dynamic, with migration being central to its story and many groups of people being central to its story.”

For the next three years, Powell and Satterwhite plan to meet with community groups, nonprofits, government officials, and many others first to pinpoint untold stories and then help to create projects that represent them.

The idea is not to do all of the work themselves but to work alongside the organizations and faculty partners.

“It’s a mindset of how to work with the community, not coming in and saying, ‘This is how you should build a monument to your history,’ but as a university, we have resources and we’d like to work with you on what you see is important to your community,” said Powell, a professor of rhetoric and writing in the Department of English, and founding director of the Center for Refugee, Migrant, and Displacement Studies at Virginia Tech.

Powell and Satterwhite have worked with the Council on Virginia Tech History. The group  explores how the university might recognize and acknowledge its history in the context of the Beyond Boundaries vision for the future.

With this new project, Powell and Satterwhite’s work could take a variety of forms — from public art or historical markers to theatrical performances or festivals. They hope to build on relationships that informed existing public exhibits, such as The Land Speaks, a digital exhibition hosted by University Libraries at Virginia Tech about the history of the Monacan Indian Nation.

Ultimately, the Monuments Across Appalachian Virginia project aims to “reimagine what a monument is, not necessarily a big statue in the middle of town, but something that might be located in our everyday experiences of our communities,” said Powell.

Project awards will be made in two phases. First round projects will be proposed in June by faculty who work closely with community collaborators. Second round projects will be community-initiated, with initial proposals due in early 2024. Communities throughout Appalachian Virginia are eligible to participate, as are representatives for Eastern Siouan Indigenous peoples whose relationship with these lands predate colonization.

Likely project themes will include the diversity of Appalachian communities, movement across the landscape via migration and population displacement, and struggles for social justice including feminist, anti-racist, environmental justice, and pro-labor movements.

Currently, Powell and Satterwhite are circulating calls for faculty and community participation and building their team, which will include a project coordinator, postdoctoral fellow, communications manager, undergraduate and graduate students, and an advisory board.

“This award is a powerful testament to the fierce commitment to Appalachian communities that Drs. Powell and Satterwhite have made a defining focus of their professional careers and personal lives,” said Laura Belmonte, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. “Our region is replete with stories of incredible courage, resilience, and creativity that will be honored and made more visible thanks to the marvelous grant from the Mellon Foundation. Their generosity will significantly advance the innovative work in the humanities at Virginia Tech that is occurring in the classroom, in scholarly output, and in our larger communities.”

Some of their work will be weaved into the classroom, depending on the course.

Satterwhite said the foundation’s grant validates the importance of Appalachia.

“Oftentimes there’s a stigma attached to Appalachia,” she said. “So for a cultural institution as prestigious as Mellon to say these people matter and their histories matter, and for Mellon to recognize that other kinds of traditions and practices and beliefs have merit and deserve appreciation and attention, that’s really cool. Hopefully it helps some people rethink their judgments.”

Ultimately, the project uplifts Virginia Tech’s mission.

“It fulfills what we believe to be the land-grant university mission, education for all publics, not a certain kind of public, including those publics on whose land we are sitting,” Powell said. “I hope the project can exemplify the way Virginia Tech can be a great partner with communities.”

Augmenting the human body with a wearable robotic arm

Approaching the cognitive challenges of equipping healthy individuals with an extra robotic arm.

Meeting Announcement

ECOLE POLYTECHNIQUE FÉDÉRALE DE LAUSANNE

Washington, AAAS Annual Meeting. Imagine having a third arm –  a robotic one – to assist you with daily living. Silvestro Micera from EPFL, Switzerland, is engineering the human nervous system to make this a possibility.

For decades, professor Silvestro Micera of EPFL has dedicated his research to helping people with sensory and motor deficits to re-gain independence and quality of life by developing wearable and implantable technologies. But this is changing, as he begins to explore what it means to augment the human body.

The neuroengineer has thus far avoided the subject of transhumanism, which is a movement to enhance the human body and cognition with the help of technology. Now, this year AAAS in Washington, Micera will be presenting his “third arm” research that aims to equip health individuals with a robotic arm, essentially giving them a third arm to control.  The third-arm project aims to provide a wearable robotic arm to assist in daily tasks, using non-invasive techniques. The challenges are both technical and cognitive, but he believes that third-arm control is no longer a thing of the future.

“Research on three arm control could help us understand how learning is achieved in activities of daily living but these devices could also be used in logistics to facilitate complicated tasks,” explains Micera.

Micera is known for being the first to provide sensory feedback –  in real-time – to an amputee, with a bionic hand, during clinical trials that took place in 2013 with results that were published in 2014. This bionic technology relied on providing sensory feedback via transversal electrodes that were surgically implanted into major nerves in the amputee’s arm. Since then, he and colleagues have been building on that technology, providing improved touch resolution of textures with a bionic fingertip, improved embodiment of the prosthetic limb, and working towards a permanent, wearable prosthetic hand. This technology will be soon used to restore other motor and sensory function in other cases such as spinal cord injury or stroke.

While Micera’s initial work about intelligent neuroprosthetics continue in parallel, one cannot help but imagine a future that is entering the realm of science-fiction. Will we be equipping healthy individuals with transversal electrodes with sensory feedback, allowing them to control a third robotic arm as an extension of their own body?

https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2023/meetingapp.cgi/Session/29964

https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2023/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/30741

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News you can use—to better predict food crisis outbreaks

Machine-learning model analyzes articles’ content and frequency to make precise predictions on where next hunger scourge will occur

Peer-Reviewed Publication

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: EACH OF THE ILLUSTRATION’S BOXES CONTAIN AN EXAMPLE OF A SENTENCE IN WHICH THE MODEL DETECTED A RELEVANT KEYWORD (HIGHLIGHTED IN COLOR). THE 167 TEXT FEATURES PREDICTIVE OF FOOD INSECURITY EPISODES ARE GROUPED INTO 12 CATEGORIES OF RISK FACTORS INDICATED IN THE LEGEND AND MAPPED INTO A NETWORK. A NODE’S SIZE IS PROPORTIONAL TO THE TEXT FEATURE’S FREQUENCY IN NEWS ARTICLES, AND AN EDGE’S WIDTH ENCODES THE SEMANTIC PROXIMITY BETWEEN NODES. view more 

CREDIT: SAMUEL FRAIBERGER AND ALICE GRISHCHENKO

A team of researchers has developed a machine learning model that draws from the contents of news articles to effectively predict locations that face risks of food insecurity. The model, which could be used to help prioritize the allocation of emergency food assistance across vulnerable regions, marks an improvement over existing measurements. 

“Our approach could drastically improve the prediction of food crisis outbreaks up to 12 months ahead of time using both real-time news streams and a predictive model that is simple to interpret,” says Samuel Fraiberger, a visiting researcher at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, a data scientist at the World Bank, and an author of the study, which appears in the journal Science Advances. 

“Traditional measurements of food insecurity risk factors, such as conflict severity indices or changes in food prices, are often incomplete, delayed, or outdated,” adds Lakshminarayanan Subramanian, a professor at the Courant Institute and one of the paper’s authors. “Our approach takes advantage of the fact that risk factors triggering a food crisis are mentioned in the news prior to being observable with traditional measurements.”

Food insecurity threatens the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the number of undernourished increased from 624 million people in 2014 to 688 million in 2019. Conditions, the paper’s authors note, have deteriorated since then due to the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, and armed conflicts—in 2021, between 702 and 828 million people worldwide faced hunger. Moreover, severe food insecurity increased both globally and in every region in 2021. 

Despite the acute and widespread nature of this affliction, current methods to detect future food crises rely on risk measures that are insufficient, hindering efforts to address them. 

In working to develop a better model, the paper’s authors, who also included Ananth Balashankar, a Courant doctoral graduate, considered the possibility that news coverage, which offers real-time, on-the-ground accounts of local developments, could serve as an early-warning system for impending food crises. 

The researchers collected text from more than 11 million news articles focused on nearly 40 food-insecure countries that were published between 1980 and 2020. They then developed a method to extract particular phrases in these articles related to food insecurity and in ways that capture journalistic assessment in notable detail. Specifically, the tool accounts for nearly 170 text features in order to correctly gauge the semantics of the phrases pertaining to food insecurity and to mark when the articles appear. The following is an example from South Sudan, which outlines both location and risk factors: “Famine may return to some parts of the country, with eastern Pibor county, where floods and pests have ravaged crops, at particular risk.” 

They then considered data on a range of food-insecurity risk factors—such as conflict fatality counts, rainfall, vegetation, and changes in food prices—to determine if there was correlation between news mentions of these factors and their occurrence in the studied countries and regions. Here, they found a high correlation between the nature of the coverage and the on-the-ground occurrences of these factors, indicating that news stories are an accurate indicator of the studied conditions.

But to determine if news articles were, in fact, a good predictor of subsequent food crises, the team needed to know if the nature of the coverage was a viable indicator of future crises and if these stories did so more accurately than traditional measurements. Using a smaller set of news stories, the researchers found that from 2009 to 2020 and across 21 food-insecure countries, news coverage yielded more accurate predictions at the local level of food insecurity—and did so up to 12 months ahead of time—than traditional measurements that did not include news story text. Notably, they also found that supplementing traditional predictive measures with news coverage further improved the accuracy of food-crisis predictions, suggesting the value of “hybrid” models.

The researchers also see potential larger uses for their work.

“News indicators could be extended to the prediction of disease outbreaks and the future impact of climate change,” observes Balashankar.

An image depicting the work is available on Google Drive.

DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abm3449

# # #

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JOURNAL

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.abm3449 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Predicting food crises using news streams

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

3-Mar-2023

Detecting anaemia earlier in children using a smartphone

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON

Researchers at UCL and University of Ghana have successfully predicted whether children have anaemia using only a set of smartphone images.

The study, published in PLOS ONE, brought together researchers and clinicians at UCL Engineering, UCLH and Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, Ghana to investigate a new non-invasive diagnostic technique using smartphone photographs of the eye and face.

The advance could make anaemia screening more widely available for children in Ghana (and other low- and middle-income countries) where there are high rates of the condition due to iron deficiency, as the screening tool is much cheaper than existing options and delivers results in one sitting.

The paper builds on previous successful research undertaken by the same team exploring use of an app – neoSCB - to detect jaundice in newborn babies.

Anaemia is a condition causing a reduced concentration of haemoglobin in the blood, which means oxygen is not transported efficiently around the body.

It affects two billion people globally and can have a significant impact on developmental outcomes in children, increasing their susceptibility to infectious diseases and impairing their cognitive development.

The most common cause of anaemia globally is iron deficiency, but other conditions such as blood loss, malaria and sickle-cell disease also contribute.

First author, PhD candidate Thomas Wemyss (UCL Medical Physics & Biomedical Engineering) said: “Smartphones are globally popular, but research using smartphone imaging to diagnose diseases shows a general trend of experiencing difficulty when transferring results to different groups of people.

“We are excited to see these promising results in a group which is often underrepresented in research into smartphone diagnostics. An affordable and reliable technique to screen for anaemia using a smartphone could drive long-term improvements in quality of life for a large amount of people.”

Traditionally, diagnosis of anaemia requires blood samples to be taken, which can be costly for patients and healthcare systems. It can create inequalities related to the expense of travelling to hospital for a blood test. Often families need to make two trips, to have a blood sample taken and then to collect their results, due to samples being transported between the clinic and the laboratory for analysis.

In the 1980s a handheld device, the HemoCue, was developed to provide more immediate results, but this carries significant upfront and ongoing costs, as well as still needing a finger-prick blood sample.

The researchers knew that haemoglobin has a very characteristic colour due to the way it absorbs light, so aimed to develop a procedure to take smartphone photographs and use them to predict whether anaemia is present.

They analysed photos taken from 43 children aged under four who were recruited to take part in the study in 2018. The images were of three regions where minimal skin pigmentation occurs in the body (the white of the eye, the lower lip and the lower eyelid).

The team found that when these were evaluated together to predict blood haemoglobin concentration, they were able to successfully detect all cases of individuals with the most severe classification of anaemia, and to detect milder anaemia at rates which are likely to be clinically useful.

Principal investigator Dr Terence Leung (UCL Medical Physics & Biomedical Engineering) said: “Since 2018, we’ve been working with University of Ghana on affordable ways to improve healthcare using smartphones. Following our success in screening neonatal jaundice, we are so excited to see that the smartphone imaging technique can also apply to anaemia screening in young children and infants.”

Senior author Dr Judith Meek (UCLH) added: “Anaemia is a significant problem for infants, especially in low- and middle-income countries, and we hope this sort of technology will lead to earlier detection and treatment in the near future.”

The study was funded by the EPSRC via the UCL Global Challenges Research Fund and UCL Centre for Doctoral Training in Intelligent, Integrated Imaging in Healthcare.

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JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0281736 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Imaging analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Feasibility of smartphone colorimetry of the face as an anaemia screening tool for infants and young children in Ghana

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

3-Mar-2023

Israel: the origin of the world's grapevines

Peer-Reviewed Publication

ARIEL UNIVERSITY

A recent study on the genetic makeup of grapevine has revealed fascinating insights into its domestication and evolution. The study, published in the journal Science, suggests that the harsh climate during the Pleistocene era resulted in the fragmentation of wild ecotypes, which paved the way for the domestication of grapevine about 11,000 years ago in the Near East (Israel) and the Caucasus.

The research team sequenced the genomes of 3525 grapevine accessions (2503 V. vinifera (domesticated) and 1022 V. sylvestris (wild) accessions of grapevine, to identify the genetic changes that occurred during domestication and evolution of grapevine in Euro-Asia.

According to the study, the Near East (Israel) wild grapevine population (Syl-E1) is the source for the domestication of table grapes, which then dispersed into Europe with early farmers, introgressed with ancient wild western ecotypes, and diversified into unique western wine grape ancestries by the late Neolithic.

Furthermore, the study shows that hybridization with local V. sylvestris was common in creating extant European wine grapes. However- when these introgression events occurred, remain unknown.

Dr Elyashiv Drori, Head of the Samson Family Grape and Wine Research Centre at Ariel University and Eastern Regional R&D Center says, "Our findings provide important insights into the domestication and evolution of grapevine, which is a religiously, culturally and economically important crop.

The indigenous grapevine population we have collected in the last 12 years, containing both wild and domesticated subpopulations, have central importance in this research. The Israeli wild grapevines (Syl -E1) were found to be the source of domestication for all the cultivated group of table grapes (CG1), which includes the Israeli domesticated grapevines. This initial group of grapevine varieties then were dispersed to eastern and western Europe, to form most of the known winegrapes.  We now aim to deeply study the characteristics of Israel's indigenous grapevine, which were developed in the dry and harsh conditions of the Levant, and may pose a repository for resistance genes.

With climate change and emerging diseases threatening vineyards worldwide, the study's findings may help in developing new strategies to protect and sustain the wine industry for future generations.

Prof Ehud Weiss, head of the archaeobotanical lab at Martin (Szuss) Department of Land of Israel, Bar Ilan University, a specialist in the domestication of crops and archaeobotany, gave important insights as to the domestication history. Prof Weiss adds "this is a research breakthrough in the field of the beginning of agriculture as well. The accepted view was that annual crops, like wheat, barley, and legumes, were domesticated some 10,000 years ago, while perennials were domesticated thousands of years later. Current research changes this view and demonstrates these transitions occurred simultaneously, and moreover, with the same species, some 1,600 kilometers apart – a phenomenon we have never met."

Two Israeli scientists collaborated with Dr. Drori's team in this project. Prof Ehud Weiss collaborated with Dr. Drori to identify the varieties used by ancestors in the land of Israel using genetic and morphological tools. Dr. Sariel Hubner from Migal is a bioinformatician. Dr. Hubner is working with Dr. Drori's group on the population genetics of the Israeli wild and domesticated grapevines. This collaborative research group published the first research paper describing the possible local domestication of grapevine in Israel in 2021 (Sivan 2021). 

This is a ground-breaking study also in the field of the beginnings of agriculture. This is the first research proof that the domestication of a perennial plant happened at the same time as the domestication of annuals, wheat, barley, legumes, and flax. Until today, it was common to say that fruit trees were domesticated several thousand years later. In addition, the double domestication of the same species into two varieties, in our case the edible grape variety and the wine grape variety, happened at the same time in two separate geographical centers - a phenomenon we had not known until now. 

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JOURNAL

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.add8655 

ARTICLE TITLE

Dual domestications and origin of traits in grapevine evolution

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

3-Mar-2023

Researchers study how underserved farmers can improve crop, impact climate change

Grant and Award Announcement

UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON

University of Houston researchers are developing a program to teach small-scale, underserved and limited resources (SULR) farmers how to improve their crop production by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and increasing carbon removal.

The work is supported by a nearly $5 million grant from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service. Researchers will partner with colleagues from Prairie View A&M University, Texas A&M University and Michigan Aerospace Corp. to study how best to implement a Climate-Smart Sustainability Certificate program for SULR farmers. UH research projects will receive almost $700,000 during the funding period.

“These farmers are the most disadvantaged in the current agricultural system and most vulnerable to the negative impacts of climate change,” said Abdul Latif Khan, assistant professor in the UH College of Technology’s Department of Engineering Technology.

The study will allow the USDA to track the success of Climate-Smart farming practices. The team will quantify the benefits and costs of growing specialty crops under precision technology-assisted climate-smart practices and compare them with conventional production practices. In addition, the study will provide information on sustainable farming practices.

“Climate changes hinder the desired natural plant productivity and threaten food security,” said Venkatesh Balan, associate professor of engineering technology at UH. “For example, higher temperature stress will significantly limit plant growth, biomass and yield. It also influences soil health and moisture flux.”

According to Khan, estimations are that an increase of 3-4 degrees (Celsius) would reduce plant productivity by 15%-35% before the end of the 21st century.

Through this project, the researchers from partnering institutions will collect data on three central Climate Smart interventions that sequesters carbon dioxide – silicon, algae and rock powder. In addition, SULR farmers will learn practices like adding rock dust to the soil to speed up the chemical reactions that sequester carbon.

The project will also focus on existing practices that protect the soil from erosion, pests, weeds and diseases, while increasing soil fertility and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. When the harvest is over, crop cover will be grown to protect the soil from erosion. In addition, farmers will employ new water management practices and reduce soil tilling.

“The results of these interventions and strategies will educate SURL farmers and encourage them to implement climate-smart production practices on working lands,” said Ram Ray of Prairie View A&M University, a partner in the project.

“We will measure, monitor, report and verify the carbon and greenhouse gas reduction benefits,” added Xiaonan Shan, assistant professor of electrical engineering at UH Cullen College of Engineering.

The team will share results with farmers to provide data-driven evidence in support of adopting climate-smart practices.

“Farmers will be given incentives at a specified rate for practicing interventions during the duration of the project,” Ray said.

The team believes farmers will embrace Climate-Smart sustainability practices when they see the increased crop production that results from their efforts.

—Dennis Spellman