NASA's Geotail mission operations come to an end after 30 years

Business Announcement

NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER

 

IMAGE: AN ARTIST'S CONCEPT OF THE GEOTAIL SPACECRAFT. view more 

CREDIT: NASA

After 30 years in orbit, mission operations for the joint NASA-JAXA Geotail spacecraft have ended, after the failure of the spacecraft’s remaining data recorder.

Since its launch on July 24, 1992, Geotail orbited Earth, gathering an immense dataset on the structure and dynamics of the magnetosphere, Earth’s protective magnetic bubble. Geotail was originally slated for a four-year run, but the mission was extended several times due to its high-quality data return, which contributed to over a thousand scientific publications.

While one of Geotail’s two data recorders failed in 2012, the second continued to work until experiencing an anomaly on June 28, 2022. After attempts to remotely repair the recorder failed, the mission operations were ended on November 28, 2022.

“Geotail has been a very productive satellite, and it was the first joint NASA-JAXA mission,” said Don Fairfield, emeritus space scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and NASA’s first project scientist for Geotail until his retirement in 2008. “The mission made important contributions to our understanding of how the solar wind interacts with Earth’s magnetic field to produce magnetic storms and auroras.”

With an elongated orbit, Geotail sailed through the invisible boundaries of the magnetosphere, gathering data on the physical process at play there to help understand how the flow of energy and particles from the Sun reach Earth. Geotail made many scientific breakthroughs, including helping scientists understand how quickly material from the Sun passes into the magnetosphere, the physical processes at play at the magnetosphere’s boundary, and identifying oxygen, silicon, sodium, and aluminum in the lunar atmosphere.

The mission also helped identify the location of a process called magnetic reconnection, which is a major conveyor of material and energy from the Sun into the magnetosphere and one of the instigators of the aurora. This discovery laid the way for the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, or MMS, which launched in 2015.

Over the years, Geotail collaborated with many of NASA’s other space missions including MMS, Van Allen Probes, Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms mission, Cluster, and Wind. With an orbit that took it as far as 120,000 miles from Earth at times, Geotail helped provide complementary data from remote parts of the magnetosphere to give scientists a complete picture of how events seen in one area affect other regions. Geotail also paired with observations on the ground to confirm the location and mechanisms of how aurora form.

Although Geotail is done gathering new data, the scientific discoveries aren’t over. Scientists will continue to study Geotail’s data in the coming years.

By Mara Johnson-Groh

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Researchers measure size-luminosity relation of galaxies less than a billion years after Big Bang

Peer-Reviewed Publication

KAVLI INSTITUTE FOR THE PHYSICS AND MATHEMATICS OF THE UNIVERSE

 

IMAGE: FIGURE 1. TWO EXCEPTIONALLY BRIGHT GALAXIES WERE CAPTURED IN GLASS-JWST PROGRAM. THESE GALAXIES EXISTED APPROXIMATELY 450 AND 350 MILLION YEARS AFTER THE BIG BANG (WITH A REDSHIFT OF APPROXIMATELY 10.5 AND 12.5, RESPECTIVELY), AND SIZES ARE ROUGHLY 500 PARSECS AND 170 PARSECS, RESPECTIVELY. view more 

CREDIT: NASA, ESA, CSA, TOMMASO TREU (UCLA)

An international team of researchers including the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) has studied the relation between galaxy size and luminosity of some of the earliest galaxies in the universe taken by the brand-new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), less than a billion years after the Big Bang, reports a new study in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The result is part of the Grim Lens-Amplified Survey from Space (GLASS) Early-Release Science Program, led by University of California, Los Angeles, Professor Tommaso Treu. It is aimed at studying the early universe when the first stars/galaxies ignited, which ionized the neutral gas in the universe at the time and allowed light to shine through. This is called the epoch of reionization. 

However, details of reionization have remained unknown because telescopes until today have not been capable of observing galaxies in this period of the universe's history in detail. Finding out more about the epoch of reionization would help researchers understand how stars and galaxies have evolved to create today's universe as we see it.

One study, led by Kavli IPMU JSPS Fellow Lilan Yang, and including Project Researcher Xuheng Ding, used multiband NIRCAM imaging data from the GLASS-JWST program to measure galaxy size and luminosity to figure out the morphology and the size-luminosity relation from rest-frame optical to UV. 

"It’s the first time that we can study the galaxy’s properties in rest-frame optical at redshift larger than 7 with JWST, and the size-luminosity is important for determining the shape of luminosity function which indicates the primary sources responsible for the cosmic reionization, i.e., numerous faint galaxies or relatively less bright galaxies. 

“The original wavelength of light will shift to longer wavelength when it travels from the early universe to us. Thus, the rest-frame wavelength is used to clarify their intrinsic wavelength, rather than observed wavelength.

Previously, with Hubble Space Telescope, we know the properties of galaxies only in rest-frame UV band. Now, with JWST, we can measure longer wavelength than UV,” said first author Yang.

The researchers found the first rest-frame optical size-luminosity relation of galaxies at redshift larger than 7, or roughly 800 million years after the Big Bang, allowing them to study the size as function of wavelength. They found the median size at the reference luminosity is roughly 450-600 parsecs and decreased slightly from rest-frame optical to UV. But was this expected?

“The answer is we don’t know what’s to expect. Previous simulation studies give a range of predictions,” said Yang.

The team also found the slope of the size–luminosity relationship was somewhat steeper in the shortest wavelength band when allowing the slope to vary.

“That would suggest higher surface brightness density at shorter wavelength, hence less observational incompleteness correction when estimating luminosity function, but the result is not conclusive. We don’t want to over-interpret here,” said Yang.

The team’s paper was published by The Astrophysical Journal Letters.     

CAPTION

Figure 2: Size–luminosity relationships of galaxies observed in five wavelength bands with fixed slope owing to limited data. The black solid and dashed–dotted lines in the F150W panel show the relation derived from HST data by Shibuya et al. (2015; z ∼ 8) and Huang et al. (2013; z ∼ 5) at a similar rest-frame wavelength, respectively.

CREDIT

Yang et al.

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JOURNAL

The Astrophysical Journal Letters

DOI

10.3847/2041-8213/ac8803 

ARTICLE TITLE

Early Results from GLASS-JWST. V: The First Rest-frame Optical Size–Luminosity Relation of Galaxies at z > 7

Beyond Mendel: FinnGen study sheds new light on well-established theories of genetic inheritance

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI

A large-scale biobank-based study performed in Finland has discovered several new disease genes as well as new insights on how known genetic factors affect disease. The study highlights an underappreciated complexity in the dosage effects of genetic variants.

An international team of scientists led by researchers at the University of Helsinki and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard examined the effects of 44,370 genetic variants on more than 2000 diseases in almost 177,000 Finnish biobank participants. The study focused on so-called coding genetic variants, i.e. variants that are known to change the protein product of the gene. 

The results of the study, published in Nature on January 18, 2023, convey that the reality of genetic inheritance is more complex than the Mendelian inheritance laws taught in biology classes all around the world.

What is special about the study, apart from the size of the data set, is that the team  searched at scale specifically for diseases that one only gets if one inherited a dysfunctional genetic variant from both parents (recessive inheritance). 

“Researchers usually only search for additive effects when they try to find common genetic variants that influence disease risk. It is more challenging to identify recessively inherited effects on diseases as you need very large sample sizes to find the rare occasions where individuals have two dysfunctional variants”, explains Dr Henrike Heyne, first author of the study from the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland FIMM, University of Helsinki (now group leader at HPI, Germany). 

However, the extensive FinnGen study sample, collected from Finland, offers an ideal setting for such studies. The Finnish population has experienced several historical events that have led to a reduction of the population size and also been relatively isolated from other European populations. For this reason, a subset of dysfunctional and therefore potentially disease-causing genetic variants are present at higher frequencies, making the search for new rare disease associations of recessive inheritance easier.

Acknowledging this benefit, the researchers performed genome-wide association studies (GWAS) on 2,444 diseases derived from national healthcare registries, testing both additive and recessive inheritance models. 

As a result, the team was able to detect known and novel recessive associations across a broad spectrum of traits such as retinal dystrophy, adult-onset cataract, hearing loss and female infertility that would have been missed with the traditional additive model.

“Our study showed that the search for recessive effects in genome-wide association studies can be worthwhile, especially if somewhat rarer genetic variants are included, as is the case in the FinnGen study”, says Henrike Heyne. 

In addition, the dataset has provided a new perspective on the inheritance of known disease variants. For rare disease genes, inheritance is traditionally almost exclusively described as recessive or dominant. The study shows, however, that the reality is somewhat more diverse. 

The researchers found, for example, that some variants that are known to cause genetic disease with recessive inheritance also have some attenuated effects when only one disease-causing variant is present, which other studies confirm. They also find genetic variants with beneficial effects (protecting from heart arrhythmia or protecting from hypertension) in genes that are associated with severe disease. 

These results demonstrate that the so-called Mendelian laws based on the experiments with peas done in 1856, in a monastery garden near Brno (today Czech Republic) by the monk Gregor Mendel do not fully capture all aspects of inheritance of rare diseases.

“With the increased usage of carrier screening in the general population, whereby many individuals are learning that they are carriers for multiple pathogenic variants, understanding which of those variants may have mild health effects could be incredibly important for these individuals”, says Heidi Rehm, an author on the paper and Professor of Pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Medical Director of the Broad Clinical Lab. 

The study could contribute to the integration of the traditionally separate but more and more overlapping scientific fields that study either the effect of rare genetic variants on rare disease or the effect of common genetic variants on common disease. The results demonstrate how large biobank studies, particularly in founder populations such as Finland, can broaden our understanding of the sometimes more complex dosage effects of genetic variants on disease.

“This study highlights the importance of integrating the large-scale biobank approach with detailed insights that emerge from rare disease studies. A more complete understanding of the role of genetic variation in each gene only emerges when we take account of all of the perspectives and insights from diverse study designs”, says Mark Daly, senior author on the paper and Director of the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM) and faculty member at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute.

Original publication: Mono- and biallelic variant effects on disease at biobank scale. H. O. Heyne, J. Karjalainen, K. J. Karczewski, S. M. Lemmelä, W. Zhou, FinnGen, A. S. Havulinna, M. Kurki, H. L. Rehm, A. Palotie, M. J. Daly. Nature 2023, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05420-7. 

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JOURNAL

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-022-05420-7 

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Cells

ARTICLE TITLE

Mono- and biallelic variant effects on disease at biobank scale

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

18-Jan-2023

The power of a genetic isolate: Hundreds of novel genetic discoveries from the FinnGen study

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI

New results from the FinnGen research consortium demonstrate the undeniable benefits of Finnish health research environment for genomic research. Among the wealth of novel genetic discoveries are previously unknown genetic risk factors for many debilitating diseases. These findings have potential to facilitate the development of new therapies.

Since initiation in 2017, the FinnGen study has developed into one of the world’s leading biobank-based genomic research projects. Currently FinnGen is completing the construction of a resource that integrates genomic information from 500,000 Finns with more than half a century of national health registry data.

The FinnGen flagship study, just published in Nature, is a convincing demonstration of the opportunities unique to Finnish health data, population structure, legislative frameworks and biobanking organization that in combination exist nowhere else.

Here the FinnGen team describes results based on 224,737 Finnish biobank participants. After performing comprehensive genetic analyses for more than 1,900 diseases, the researchers identify almost 2,500 genomic regions that are linked with at least one of these diseases.

“Even with less than half of the recruited 500,000 participants analyzed at this stage, this snapshot of results describes a wealth of important genetic discoveries emerging from FinnGen, including novel risk and protective variants for both common and rare diseases”, says FinnGen Scientific Director, Professor Aarno Palotie from the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland FIMM, University of Helsinki.

Finland’s health registers and biobanks provide unique opportunities

In Finland, health information such as medical diagnoses, procedures and drug prescriptions are captured for many decades in national electronic health registers for the entire population. This creates unique research opportunities. 

In the flagship publication, the team first demonstrates that with skillful utilization of such register data, the health history of the study participants can be reliably composed and studied. For this, the authors compare the FinnGen results with earlier genetic findings for 15 previously well-studied common diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, asthma and Alzheimer’s disease.

In addition to verifying the validity of register data, the researchers show that identification of novel risk variants in FinnGen is possible with a much smaller number of patients compared to the largest published disease-specific genetic studies.

“The Finnish health registers containing health and medication data throughout an individual's lifetime, allowed us to rapidly and accurately identify disease cases. This accurate phenotyping, coupled with Finnish population history is a very powerful combination for novel genetic discoveries in a wide variety of diseases”, comments Dr. Mitja Kurki, the first author of the study from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the University of Helsinki.

New entry points into the disease biology

Finland’s unique geographic position and linguistic isolation are such that Finns have a distinct ancestry dating back to a small founding population approximately 100-150 generations.  As a result, the modern Finnish population, despite being broadly similar to Europeans genetically, has an unusual and large set of genetic variants not often found elsewhere in the world. Several hundred of the 2,500 disease linked variants described in the study are in this category.

Among these variants, the researchers highlight 29 that are located in genes not previously linked to any disease. One example is a variant in a gene called TNRC18 that predisposes to inflammatory bowel disease and other inflammatory conditions. Other examples include variants increasing the risk of hypothyroidism, hearing loss or endometriosis, and variants that offer protection from arthrosis, glaucoma or heart disease.

“These findings demonstrate the power of bottlenecked populations to find entry points into the biology of common diseases through variants that are rather rare, but have a strong biological impact”, says Mark Daly, the Director of the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland FIMM at the University of Helsinki, the lead organization behind the study.

Additional FinnGen papers published this week provide fascinating examples of findings that increase our understanding of genetic predictors of medication use patterns as well as mechanisms leading to otosclerosis and respiratory infections, among other diseases. Furthermore, another FinnGen paper published in the same issue of Nature highlights that the classical inheritance models traditionally considered in genomic research and clinical diagnostics do not fully capture the range of genetic effects observed in populations.

One of the unique aspects of FinnGen is that in addition to public funding, FinnGen is supported by 13 pharmaceutical companies and has had shared scientific direction from academic and industry partners. The FinnGen study is thus ideally situated to address fundamental research questions with the potential to impact therapeutic development and delivery.

“With all this new information, the genetic composition of the Finnish population is now unquestionably among the best known in the world. However, the impact of our study is much broader and can benefit patients everywhere”, Professor Palotie emphasizes.

About FinnGen

The FinnGen study, launched in autumn 2017, is a broad academic-industrial collaboration between the Finnish biobanks and their respective universities and university hospitals, the Finnish Institute of Health and Welfare (THL), the Finnish Red Cross Blood Service, the Finnish Biobank Cooperative – FINBB and thirteen international pharmaceutical companies. The study is funded by Business Finland and the industrial partners AbbVie, AstraZeneca, Biogen, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol Myers Squibb, Genentech, a member of the Roche Group, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Janssen, Maze Therapeutics, MSD (the tradename of Merck Sharp & Dohme LLC), Novartis, Pfizer and Sanofi. University of Helsinki is the academic organization responsible for the study. As of November 2022, FinnGen has generated genotype and phenotype data from 429,221 biobank samples and is on track to complete the resource construction phase in 2023. The results of the study are publicly available (more information here). For accessing the individual-level biobank samples and data, please visit the Fingenious portal.

Additional information

Short FinnGen video: https://vimeo.com/789679108/943f573ff6

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JOURNAL

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-022-05473-8 

ARTICLE TITLE

FinnGen provides genetic insights from a well-phenotyped isolated population

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

18-Jan-2023

Cannabis and the oral microbiome: Exploring their impacts on the brain

Grant and Award Announcement

MEDICAL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA

Inspiration strikes when you least expect it. For Wei Jiang, M.D., a professor of Microbiology and Immunology at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), inspiration came in 2018 on a smoke-filled boat tour around Amsterdam during an international conference.

“Everyone was smoking cannabis except me,” said Jiang. “I was studying the microbiome at the time, so after talking to them, I figured out their oral health was affected by smoking and wanted to understand this further.”

In the years since, Jiang has focused her research on how smoking cannabis alters the oral microbiome, or the community of bacteria that live in the mouth. The South Carolina Clinical and Translational Research Institute provided pilot funding for Jiang’s research.

Now, with $3.7 million in recent funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), Jiang and her collaborator Sylvia Fitting, Ph.D., from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will dive deeper into the effects of cannabis-caused changes to the oral microbiome and their impacts on neurological disease.

“This will be the first study to investigate the cannabis-altered oral microbiome and its effects on the brain,” said Jiang.

Cannabis is the most widely used drug in the U.S. and can have positive mental effects, such as reducing anxiety. However, long-term use can lead to impaired memory, learning and motor skills, said Jiang. Smoke also contains harmful compounds from combustion that affect oral health.

Changes in oral bacteria have been linked to cardiovascular diseases, preterm birth and even Alzheimer’s disease. Unnatural changes in the oral microbiome, known as dysbiosis, can allow harmful bacteria to thrive in the mouth and even enter the bloodstream, damaging other organs, such as the brain.

Jiang and her collaborators showed in a December 2021 EBioMedicine study that frequent cannabis use alters the oral microbiome. They found unusually high levels of the bacterium Actinomyces meyeri, A.  meyeri, in frequent cannabis users but not in tobacco or cocaine users.

“In general, the amount of A. meyeri should be very low in a healthy oral microbiome,” said Jiang.

Mice orally exposed to A. meyeri for six months showed increased inflammation and more amyloid-beta proteins in their brains. These proteins are thought to be linked to long-term memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease.

“After we saw these changes in mice given this bacterium, we became very intrigued by what was happening in their brains,” said Jiang.

The new grant funding will enable the team to explore the mechanisms underlying the link between high levels of A. meyeri in the oral microbiome of frequent cannabis users and neurological disease.

“Psychological dependency on a drug can have harmful neurological effects, but we don’t know what is driving these effects in heavy cannabis users,” said Jiang. “We know that oral health affects your mental health. However, we don’t know exactly what role the microbiome plays.”

Although Jiang’s earlier work showed that the cannabis-altered oral microbiome played a role in neurological changes, it did not specifically look at what component of cannabis caused those changes. Cannabis contains both psychoactive (THC) and non-psychoactive (CBD) components, which interact with the brain and nervous system in different ways.

“Now, we want to identify the specific effects of THC and CBD on oral microbiome dysbiosis and mental health,” said Jiang.

Jiang plans to expose mice to different levels of THC and CBD to determine their effects on levels of A. meyeri in the oral microbiome.

“We think that long-term exposure to THC, but not CBD, will increase levels of A. meyeri in saliva and lead to harmful neurological effects in mice,” said Jiang.

In the new study, Jiang will also move beyond mouse models to humans with cannabis use disorder to see how changes in their oral microbiomes affect memory.

“We expect memory-related deficits to be associated with greater levels of A. meyeri in frequent cannabis users compared with nonusers,” said Jiang.

Jiang’s research highlights the importance of oral health and its complex relationship with other diseases.

“Anyone using cannabis frequently should pay particular attention to their oral hygiene,” said Jiang.

With support from the NIDA grant, Jiang plans to lay a foundation for developing therapeutics that target the oral microbiome in frequent cannabis users with neurological disorders.

“If our hypothesis is correct, a therapeutic strategy targeting A. meyeri could reduce irregularities in brain function in frequent cannabis users,” said Jiang. “In the future, it may also be useful to screen for certain bacteria as biomarkers of different diseases that affect the brain, such as Alzheimer’s disease.”

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About MUSC

Founded in 1824 in Charleston, MUSC is the state’s only comprehensive academic health system, with a unique mission to preserve and optimize human life in South Carolina through education, research and patient care. Each year, MUSC educates more than 3,000 students in six colleges – Dental Medicine, Graduate Studies, Health Professions, Medicine, Nursing and Pharmacy – and trains more than 850 residents and fellows in its health system. MUSC brought in more than $297.8 million in research funds in fiscal year 2022, leading the state overall in research funding. For information on academic programs, visit musc.edu.

As the health care system of the Medical University of South Carolina, MUSC Health is dedicated to delivering the highest quality and safest patient care while educating and training generations of outstanding health care providers and leaders to serve the people of South Carolina and beyond. Patient care is provided at 14 hospitals with approximately 2,500 beds and five additional hospital locations in development, more than 350 telehealth sites and connectivity to patients’ homes, and nearly 750 care locations situated in all regions of South Carolina. In 2022, for the eighth consecutive year, U.S. News & World Report named MUSC Health the No. 1 hospital in South Carolina. To learn more about clinical patient services, visit muschealth.org.

MUSC and its affiliates have collective annual budgets of $5.1 billion. The nearly 25,000 MUSC team members include world-class faculty, physicians, specialty providers, scientists, students, affiliates and care team members who deliver groundbreaking education, research and patient care.

Association of pediatric cannabis poisonings with legal edible product sales in Canada

JAMA Health Forum

Peer-Reviewed Publication

JAMA NETWORK

About The Study: Following cannabis legalization in Canada, provinces that permitted edible cannabis sales experienced much larger increases in hospitalizations for unintentional pediatric poisonings than the province that prohibited cannabis edibles in this analysis including Canada’s four most populous provinces. In provinces with legal edibles, approximately one-third of pediatric hospitalizations for poisonings were due to cannabis. These findings suggest that restricting the sale of legal commercial edibles may be key to preventing pediatric poisonings after recreational cannabis legalization. 

Authors: Daniel T. Myran, M.D., M.P.H., of the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, is the corresponding author.

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

(doi:10.1001/jamahealthforum.2022.5041)

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Embed this link to provide your readers free access to the full-text article This link will be live at the embargo time https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/10.1001/jamahealthforum.2022.5041?utm_source=For_The_Media&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ftm_links&utm_term=011323

About JAMA Health Forum: JAMA Health Forum is an international, peer-reviewed, online, open access journal that addresses health policy and strategies affecting medicine, health and health care. The journal publishes original research, evidence-based reports and opinion about national and global health policy; innovative approaches to health care delivery; and health care economics, access, quality, safety, equity and reform. Its distribution will be solely digital and all content will be freely available for anyone to read.

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JOURNAL

JAMA Health Forum

ASTHMA IS CAUSED BY AIR POLLUTUION

Asthma is on the rise among teens in states where cannabis is recreationally legal

Increases in asthma also observed among children in some minority racial and ethnic groups in states with recreational legalization

Peer-Reviewed Publication

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY'S MAILMAN SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH

January 11, 2023-- Increases in asthma prevalence were found among teens in states that have legalized cannabis for recreational use, as well as among children in some minority racial and ethnic groups in states with recreational legalization, relative to states that remain fully illegal, according to a new study at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and The City University of New York. The results provide early evidence that legalizing and commercializing adult cannabis use may be related to a potential rise in asthma prevalence. The study is the first to examine the relationship between changes in cannabis policy for adult use and asthma prevalence among children and adolescents. The results are published online in the journal Preventive Medicine.

“Our findings suggest that state-level cannabis policy could have downstream impacts on children’s respiratory health,” said Renee D. Goodwin, PhD, adjunct associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health and professor at The City University of New York. “Cannabis use is increasing among adults with children in the home, particularly in states which have legalized for medical or recreational use. Exposure to secondhand smoke is a key risk factor for asthma among children. This study offers a critical first step in identifying a key children’s health concern emerging in the context of rapid, ongoing changes in cannabis policy that are unaccompanied by clinical or public health guidelines for parents.”

Asthma affects approximately 5 million children and is the most common chronic condition affecting children in the nation. The researchers used data from the 2011-2019 National Survey on Children’s Health, a representative sample of the physical and mental health of non-institutionalized children in the U.S. ages 0-17 years old.

Nationally, a statistically significant decrease in the prevalence of pediatric asthma was reported from 2011-2012 to 2016-2017, with no decline thereafter. Relative to states where cannabis was fully illegal, the prevalence of asthma increased slightly among adolescents 12-17 years old and among children identifying with non-Hispanic minoritized race and ethnic groups in states where cannabis was legal for adult recreational use.

Cannabis use has been increasing among adults with minor children in the home and is more common among those who live in states where cannabis is legal for recreational use. An earlier study by Goodwin found that, among parents with minor children, cannabis use was observed in 12 percent of parents in states with legal cannabis for recreational purposes, followed by parents residing in states with legalized cannabis for medical purposes (9.5 percent), with the lowest prevalence seen in parents in states with no cannabis laws (6 percent).

“Increased adult cannabis use across the U.S. may inadvertently impact asthma among youth. In the context of rapidly increasing legalization of adult (21 and older) use and commercialization in the U.S., an evidence base is urgently needed to inform legislators, policy makers, clinicians and the public on the potential heath impact of increasing secondhand cannabis smoke (SCS) exposure among children. Yet, no clinical nor public education regarding child exposure to SCS is available or routinely offered to parents,” noted Goodwin.

“While tremendous progress has been made in asthma management in concert with tobacco control over the past several decades, the possibility that increased adult cannabis use may pose new risks, requires more in-depth study and, in particular, to learn whether SCS is associated with increases in asthma morbidity, including symptom frequency, use of rescue medicines, impairment—including missed school days -- and emergency medical services.

“We believe that more research is urgently needed to estimate the potential consequences of increased adult use of cannabis in the community for children’s respiratory health and that this work should come before, or at least be done contemporaneously with, the widespread commercialization of cannabis for adult use in U.S. states,” observed Goodwin.”

Co-authors are Katarzyna Wyka, The City University of New York; Man Luo, UC, San Diego; Andrea H. Weinberger, Yeshiva University and Albert Einstein College of Medicine; and Meyer Kattan, Columbia University Irving Medical Center/New York-Presbyterian/Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital.

The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health/National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (grant 1R21HL149773-01).

Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health

Founded in 1922, the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health pursues an agenda of research, education, and service to address the critical and complex public health issues affecting New Yorkers, the nation and the world. The Columbia Mailman School is the fourth largest recipient of NIH grants among schools of public health. Its nearly 300 multi-disciplinary faculty members work in more than 100 countries around the world, addressing such issues as preventing infectious and chronic diseases, environmental health, maternal and child health, health policy, climate change and health, and public health preparedness. It is a leader in public health education with more than 1,300 graduate students from 55 nations pursuing a variety of master’s and doctoral degree programs. The Columbia Mailman School is also home to numerous world-renowned research centers, including ICAP and the Center for Infection and Immunity. For more information, please visit www.mailman.columbia.edu.

 

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JOURNAL

Preventive Medicine

Why chocolate feels so good – it is all down to lubrication

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS

 

IMAGE: A CONFOCAL MICROSCOPE IMAGE OF MOLTEN DARK CHOCOLATE. view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO CREDIT: DR SIAVASH SOLTANAHMADI.

Scientists have decoded the physical process that takes place in the mouth when a piece of chocolate is eaten, as it changes from a solid into a smooth emulsion that many people find totally irresistible.  

By analysing each of the steps, the interdisciplinary research team at the University of Leeds hope it will lead to the development of a new generation of luxury chocolates that will have the same feel and texture but will be healthier to consume. 

During the moments it is in the mouth, the chocolate sensation arises from the way the chocolate is lubricated, either from ingredients in the chocolate itself or from saliva or a combination of the two. 

Fat plays a key function almost immediately when a piece of chocolate is in contact with the tongue. After that, solid cocoa particles are released and they become important in terms of the tactile sensation, so fat deeper inside the chocolate plays a rather limited role and could be reduced without having an impact on the feel or sensation of chocolate. 

Anwesha Sarkar, Professor of Colloids and Surfaces in the School of Food Science and Nutrition at Leeds, said: “Lubrication science gives mechanistic insights into how food actually feels in the mouth. You can use that knowledge to design food with better taste, texture or health benefits.  

“If a chocolate has 5% fat or 50% fat it will still form droplets in the mouth and that gives you the chocolate sensation. However, it is the location of the fat in the make-up of the chocolate which matters in each stage of lubrication, and that has been rarely researched. 

“We are showing that the fat layer needs to be on the outer layer of the chocolate, this matters the most, followed by effective coating of the cocoa particles by fat, these help to make chocolate feel so good.”  

The study - published in the scientific journal ACS Applied Materials and Interface - did not investigate the question of how chocolate tastes. Instead, the investigation focused on its feel and texture. 

Tests were conducted using a luxury brand of dark chocolate on an artificial 3D tongue-like surface that was designed at the University of Leeds. The researchers used analytical techniques from a field of engineering called tribology to conduct the study, which included in situ imaging. 

Tribology is about how surfaces and fluids interact, the levels of friction between them and the role of lubrication: in this case, saliva or liquids from the chocolate. Those mechanisms are all happening in the mouth when chocolate is eaten.  

When chocolate is in contact with the tongue, it releases a fatty film that coats the tongue and other surfaces in the mouth. It is this fatty film that makes the chocolate feel smooth throughout the entire time it is in the mouth.  

Dr Siavash Soltanahmadi, from the School of Food Science and Nutrition at Leeds and the lead researcher in the study, said: “With the understanding of the physical mechanisms that happen as people eat chocolate, we believe that a next generation of chocolate can be developed that offers the feel and sensation of high-fat chocolate yet is a healthier choice.  

“Our research opens the possibility that manufacturers can intelligently design dark chocolate to reduce the overall fat content.  

“We believe dark chocolate can be produced in a gradient-layered architecture with fat covering the surface of chocolates and particles to offer the sought after self-indulging experience without adding too much fat inside the body of the chocolate.” 

Revenue from chocolate sales in the UK is forecast to grow over the next five years, according to research from the business intelligence agency MINTEL. Sales are expected to grow 13% between 2022 and 2027 to reach £6.6 billion.  

The researchers believe the physical techniques used in the study could be applied to the investigation of other foodstuffs that undergo a phase change, where a substance is transformed from a solid to a liquid, such as ice-cream, margarine or cheese.  

This project received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

CAPTION

A confocal microscope showing the structure of the molten chocolate mixed with saliva after it has experienced forces that mimic the eating.

CREDIT

Photo credit: Dr Siavash Soltanahmadi

JOURNAL

ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Insights into the multiscale lubrication mechanism of edible phase change materials

Heat and drought have ‘significant influence’ on food security and agricultural production, new review argues

Heat and drought are the utmost limiting abiotic factors which pose a major threat to food security and agricultural production and are exacerbated by ‘extreme and rapid’ climate change, according to a new paper in CABI Reviews

Peer-Reviewed Publication

CABI

 

IMAGE: MAIZE IS ONE MAJOR WORLD CROP AFFECTED BY ABIOTIC STRESSES INCLUDING EXTREME HEAT AND DROUGHT EXACERBATED BY CLIMATE CHANGE view more 

CREDIT: CABI

Heat and drought are the utmost limiting abiotic factors which pose a major threat to food security and agricultural production and are exacerbated by ‘extreme and rapid’ climate change, according to a new paper in CABI Reviews.

The team of international scientists suggest that it is critical to understand the biochemical, ecological and physiological responses on plants to the stresses of heat and drought in order for more practical solutions and management.

They state that plant responses to these challenges may be divided into three categories: phonological, physiological and biochemical.

Lead researcher Dr Aqarab Husnain Gondal, of the University of Agriculture Faisalabad, Pakistan, argues that due to physical damages, biological disruptions and biochemical abnormalities, sub-optimal water supplies and unusual temperatures negatively impact crop development and yields.

Supported by colleagues from Yarmouk University, Jordan, the National University of Huancavelica, Peru, and the Citrus Research Institute Sagodha, Dr Aqarab Husnain Gondal says a distinctive aspect of the phenomenon is comparing fundamental behaviour with abiotic stresses.

The scientists, referring to a study examining data from research published between 1980 and 2015, state that drought has reduced wheat and maize yields by up to 40% around the world. They also highlight that projections suggest that for every degree Celsius rise in temperature, this would result in a 6% loss in global wheat yields.

Dr Aqarab Husnain Gondal said, “This review gives a thorough description of the adaptation of plants towards heat and drought stress with a particular emphasis on identifying similarities and variations.

“Abiotic stresses are reducing crop yield all around the world. Heat and drought stress causes plants to respond in a variety of ways – the most notable of which is by altering their development and morphology.

“While the capacity of plants to withstand these pressures differs significantly across species, it is worthy to note that recent advances have been achieved in limiting the adverse consequences – either through the use of genetic methods or by the induction of stress tolerance.”

The scientists maintain that despite the fact that heat and drought stress may have a negative impact on the plant’s growth and development, reproductive growth is the most affected.

Anthesis or grain filling stress may have a major impact on crop production if it is mild while damage to the photosynthetic machinery, oxidative stress and membrane instability are also caused by these forces, they say.

 

Additional information

Main image: Maize is one major world crop affected by abiotic stresses including extreme heat and drought exacerbated by climate change (Credit: CABI).

Full paper reference

Aqarab Husnain Gondal, Mohammad Al Zubi, Franklin Ore Areche, Abdul Jabbar, Sana Akram and Denis Dante Corilla Flores, ‘Plants adaptability to climate change and drought stress for crop growth and production,’ CABI Reviews, 18 January (2023). DOI: 10.1079/cabireviews.2023.0004

The paper can be read open access from 00:01hrs UK time 18 January, 2023, here: https://www.cabidigitallibrary.org/doi/10.1079/cabireviews.2023.0004

Media enquiries

For more information and an advance copy of the paper contact:

Dr Aqarab Husnain Gondal, Institute of Soil and Environmental Science, University of Agriculture Faisalabad, Punjab, Pakistan – email: aqarabhusnain944@gmail.com

Wayne Coles, Communications Manager, CABI – email: w.coles@cabi.org

About CABI Reviews

CABI Reviews is a reviews journal covering agriculture, global health, nutrition, natural resources and veterinary science.

About CABI

CABI is an international not-for-profit organization that improves people’s lives by providing information and applying scientific expertise to solve problems in agriculture and the environment.

Through knowledge sharing and science, CABI helps address issues of global concern such as improving global food security and safeguarding the environment. We do this by helping farmers grow more and lose less of what they produce, combating threats to agriculture and the environment from pests and diseases, protecting biodiversity from invasive species, and improving access to agricultural and environmental scientific knowledge. Our 49-member countries guide and influence our core areas of work, which include development and research projects, scientific publishing and microbial services.

We gratefully acknowledge the core financial support from our member countries (and lead agencies) including the United Kingdom (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office), China (Chinese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs), Australia (Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research), Canada (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada), Netherlands (Directorate-General for International Cooperation, and Switzerland (Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation). Other sources of funding include programme/project funding from development agencies, the fees paid by our member countries and profits from our publishing activities which enable CABI to support rural development and scientific research around the world.

 

 

 

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JOURNAL

CABI Reviews

DOI

10.1079/cabireviews.2023.0004 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Literature review

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Plants adaptability to climate change and drought stress for crop growth and production