Out of the blue

Hungarys sponsorship of the Geneva declaration put the country at the helm of a motley coalition of pro-life hardliners that reject any international obligation on the part of states to finance or facilitate abortion, the document reads.

Most of its 30-odd signatories make up the 20 worst countries around the world for women to live in, according to the Women, Peace and Security Index compiled by Georgetown University. Hungary, ranked 49th, is the third worst among all EU countries and ranks even below the likes of Mongolia and Kazakhstan.

None of the people on the list could care less about women, Gillian Kane from Ipas, an international safe access to abortion advocacy group, summed up for The Guardian newspaper.

The declaration is legally void and does not change any laws already in place. But Hungarys stamp on the family-touting document was still a rude awakening to many, even in the face of the governments years-long pursuit of a policy to spur procreation within predominantly middle-class families with the motif of jumpstarting population growth, Reka Safrany, who chairs the Hungarians Womens Lobby, told BIRN.

Though the governments mounting hostility toward reproduction rights was palpable, we didnt see [the Geneva Consensus Declaration] coming, Safrany added.

Since its return to power in 2010, Orbans government has introduced several obstacles to obtaining an abortion. It wasted no time in slotting language about protecting the foetus since its conception in the constitution, a first for Europe at the time.

Though abortion has remained legal, women can only request the procedure within a narrow set of circumstances, as in the case of grave damage to the foetus, when the mothers health is at risk or when the pregnancy is the result of a crime. Pregnancies can also be mandated by the womans precarious socio-economic situation, which provides a walkable trail for abortions within the public health system in spite of the laws limiting scope, Safrany explained.

The message is clear: if you choose abortion, the state wants you to have it the hard way.

Noa Nogradi, womens rights expert and political philosopher

Women are also subject to mandatory waiting periods and two counselling sessions that are deliberately intended to change minds and dissuade them from going ahead with an abortion. Yet according to research by the PATENT association, a reproductive rights watchdog, these counselling sessions only seem to add to the womens mental strain. Of the more than a hundred women we asked, not a single one came away from it dissuaded. But they all felt humiliated, expert Nogradi, who took part in the study, said.

And its getting harder to book an appointment, even though abortions are extremely time sensitive and you simply cant have the procedure without it, Nogradi added.

Permits for medical abortions that rely on pills have been revoked, leaving many women with surgery as their only option other than going abroad. Nogradi thinks this policy is tinged with ideology. The message is clear: if you choose abortion, the state wants you to have it the hard way.

The past two decades has seen a steady decline in the number of abortions carried out in Hungary. Last year, close to 26,000 pregnancies were surgically terminated in the country, half the tally from 15 years ago, according to the Central Statistical Office. Yet the governments anti-abortion tirade continues.

Minister of Human Resources Miklos Kasler famously blamed abortion for Hungarys population decline, brushing off data that showed the countrys death rate twice outstrips the number of abortions.

And Family Minister Novak has spoken out against abortion in an oft-cited interview with the alt-right website Breitbart. She branded the pro-choice movement as pro-killing and applauded Hungarys family-oriented mentality.

A state-sponsored schoolbook published at the outset of the past academic year reportedly contained several anti-abortion references.

This worldview is reflected in the governments family planning program that offers free in vitro fertilisation to couples in a bid to boost fertility rates. But the policy leaves many people behind, activist Safrany suggests, as its focused on middle-class families. Family planning is also about affordable contraception and adequate education. Why dont these programs have the same backing when many women lack the means to afford them?

The governments family-centric orientation is extreme, Judit Zeller from the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union told BIRN, and could lead to completely shutting out non-married couples or singles from fertilisation treatments.

Conscientious objections to abortions from doctors, often incentivised by government funding, are also on the rise. Yet even in the current legal framework, abortion is a right that should be upheld. After all, abortions are part of the specialists job, thats what they learn at university, Safrany said.

Original post:
Activists Fear Abortion at Risk in Hungary from Orban's Family-First Crusade - Balkan Insight

Due to eight months of mostly-online courses, a number of Queens College campus facilities have been struggling to fulfill their intended roles because there is only a small fraction of students that can utilize them. Among these facilities is the Godwin-Ternbach Museum on campus, a place where the continuation of online studies has prompted the centers first-ever virtual exhibit, which opened on the museums website on September 29th.

The exhibit, titled Human Nature, includes a carefully-ordered progression of portraits in a fashion remarkably similar to that of an in-person gallery. The display opens with a cluster of pieces under the title Realism, which prefaces the rest of the show by introducing the art of portraiture in its purest observational form. The pieces in this section span a great deal of years and media, providing a basis for some of the more unconventional portraits to follow.

In the sections titled The Timeless Gaze and The Male Gaze, observational paintings and sculptures are displayed to further portray the desire of the artist to understand humanity. The former incorporates terra cotta sculptures dating back to at least the fifth century B.C., while the latter includes more recent works detailing the muses of various artists. Despite the vast difference between the dates of creation of the pieces, the longing to understand the subject is evident in each, a feeling that the exhibition describes as an impossible yearning which prompts the artist to mimic the human form.

In the more contemporary section, Pop Art, the viewer observes the active role of portraiture in defining rather than simply observing. The work in this section includes pieces by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, as well as a haunting two-panel painting by Roger Shimomura, which is titled Yellow Rat Bastard (How to Tell the Difference Between Chinese and Japanese). Each panel bursts with a number of crowded faces, marking a transition of the portrait artists role from observer to that of defender and definer of cultures. Similar strategies are implemented in a number of later sections. Pieces from Satire and Caricature and The Honorific Portrait show how portrait artists have the ability to take on a politically and socially relevant role in either criticizing, mocking, or exalting their subject. Meanwhile, work from Describing the Spirit and The Human Condition follow by displaying how an artist may manipulate the subjects of their work to appeal to worshippers or to instill feelings of outrage and injustice.

In Illustrating the Dream, the subjects of the portraits float between reality and possibility, providing the most integral turning point from the observational start of the exhibition to some of the more abstract pieces at the end. Particularly in the heavy-handed reproduction of Georges Rouaults Tte de Pierrot (Head of a Clown), the viewer observes the departure from the traditional portrayal of the human into the realm of vague possibility that can be seen in some of the exhibits later pieces. This transition especially enables the viewer to embrace the pieces in the final section, Self Portraits and Alter Egos, which includes work that spans from the highly realistic William Hogarth Painting the Comic Muse to the somewhat frightening and distorted etching by the artist Paul Klee, titled The Comedian. This group of pieces draws the subject of the portrait inward for the purpose of self-definition. A number of the other pieces in the self-portrait section also refer directly to art as something very clearly tied to the makers identity. A sample of this is the gracefully sketched etching by Picasso titled Peintre Travaillant (Painter Working). In this piece, the painter and his companion are drawn in a bare and complete state of focus on the painters work, a portrayal which depicts the very definition of the artists being.

In light of current circumstances preventing many from viewing art in a traditional museum setting, this exhibition provided those interested with the opportunity to observe and contemplate an artistic portrayal of the human condition throughout a vast timespan and within various media. The topic holds both current relevance and inspiration for the viewer as they undertake the virtual trek from realism toward unearthing the self through the gradual observation of the human condition.

Read more from the original source:
First ever virtual event at the QC Godwin-Ternbach Museum - The Knight News

Earlier, in mice, researchers had identified genes that affected the success of organ transplants: they called this collection of genes the major histocompatibility complex, or MHC, from the Greek histos, for tissue. In the sixties, a human version of the MHC was found. The genes turned out to be a blueprint for a remarkable system designed to distinguish self from non-self. Fragments of proteins built inside our cells are loaded onto tiny molecular rafts, which ferry them to the cell surface for inspection by T cells. Meanwhile, in the thymus, T cells are trained as inspectors: they are presented with rafts containing protein fragments, some of which are natural to the body. Any T cell that ignores its raft, or that goes on the attack in response to self-generated fragments, is destroyed. Competent inspectors are set loose to search for foreign material. They look for cells that display unfamiliar protein parts in their rafts and kill them.

This is how skin grafts are detected and rejected; how incipient cancers are disposed of; how cells that have been co-opted by viruses are rooted out. Together, B cells and T cells allow the human immune system to update itself as fast as our cells can replicate. But their power comes with risks. The immune systems adaptive weapons arent always precise. Allergies affect somewhere between ten and forty per cent of the global population; as many as four per cent of people suffer from debilitating autoimmune diseases. And parasites could find ways to hack the system. The invention of acquired immunity was like escalating a war with an omnipotent opponent, Hedrick, who is a T-cell expert, writes. Our new weapons could be turned against us.

By the late eighties, it no longer made sense to contrast cellularists and humoralists. They had both been right; it was just that they saw different parts of the immune system depending on where and when they looked. Phagocytes were often present at the moment of infection. Antibodies in the blood, which could take days to emerge, pursued invaders outside the bodys cells, while T cells used MHC to peer inside those cells, destroying the ones that had been infected by viruses or corrupted by cancer.

Still, mysteries remained. At a 1989 symposium, the immunologist Charles Janeway described what he called the fields dirty little secret: a vaccine containing an antigen designed to elicit antibodies wouldnt work unless an extra irritant, or adjuvantusually a harmless chemical or bacteriumhad been added. Why wasnt the antigen enough to jump-start the creation of antibodies? To be quite honest, the answer is not known, Janeway said. His suspicion, though, was that the process couldnt begin unless the innate immune systemwith its interferons, cytokines, and epithelial cellshad sounded its alarms first. Without marching orders, the standing army remained on call.

An innate system has to anticipate its enemiesa seemingly impossible task, given their stupendous variety. It wasnt until around 1997 that Janeway began to understand how such anticipation might be accomplished. About a decade earlier, a pair of biologists named Christiane Nsslein-Volhard and EricF.Wieschaus had found a gene that affected development in fruit flies. Nsslein-Volhard had called it Toll, using the German word for great. (Das ist ja toll! she exclaimed, upon making the discovery.) Another scientist, JulesA.Hoffmann, learned that the same gene was involved in the fruit-fly immune response; Janeway, with the help of Ruslan Medzhitov, showed that a version of it was also present in humans, and employed in some of the white blood cells that are the innate immune systems first responders. Through experiments with human cells, they showed that the gene coded for what came to be called a Toll-like receptor, which could recognize a particular molecular motifa building block of bacterial membranes. It was as if evolution had noticed that, while many cells built their houses out of oak or brick, dangerous bacteria always seemed to use pinewood. Why not make a pine detector?

Immunologists soon discovered a second Toll-like receptor, then a third; they started giving them names like TLR4 and TLR5. Whole new families of pattern-recognition receptors were found. Each receptor, ingenious in its design, recognized some characteristic microbial or viral signaturea kink in a viruss RNA, a crenellation in a microbial cell wall.

At long last, a picture of the whole system was coming into focus. It was all interconnected. Innate immunity kicks off the immune response, as cells at the site of infection use their receptors to recognize and combat invaders, and release interferons and cytokines to raise the alarm. Various types of white blood cells respond, having been routed to the infection via the bloodstream. They identify and eat foreign cells, returning the digested bits, via the lymph nodes, to the thymus and the bone marrow, as intel. In the days that follow, antibodies and killer T cellsthe weapons of adaptive immunityare built to spec. Everything plays a double or triple role. Antibodies, for instance, dont just attach to invaders to block their entry into cells; they also tag them so that theyll be easier for white blood cells to find and eat. The innate and adaptive arms ramp up each others destructive abilities.

Here, again, Hedrick sounds a cautious note. Such a scheme should worry any systems analyst, he writes. A potentially lethal mechanism controlled by positive feedback is a recipe for runaway destruction.

In late March, a thirty-two-year-old man of Dutch ancestry was admitted to a hospital in the Netherlands. He had difficulty breathing, and a CT scan showed an opaque haze spreading in his lungs. He was given a diagnosis of COVID-19, and spent sixteen days in intensive care; four days after he was moved out of the I.C.U., one of his lungs collapsed. He recovered enough to be sent home nine days later. His twenty-nine-year-old brother, who lived in a different house, got sick at roughly the same time, and died. Their parents had moderate symptoms.

When scientists learned that a second pair of young brotherstwenty-one and twenty-three years old, of African ancestryhad also had severe cases of COVID-19, they sought to study all four men. By sequencing the genomes of the men and their parents, the researchers hoped to find an anomaly that might explain why some young people, particularly men, had such bad outcomes.

The Dutch team found something that echoed tenOevers theory about the way in which SARS-CoV-2 rewires the cellular alarm system. The four men all had an ineffective variant of TLR7, a Toll-like receptor that recognizes viral RNA. When it works, TLR7 helps produce interferons, which tell nearby cells to increase their antiviral efforts. When it doesnt, the alarm is silent, and the infection spreads. This genetic abnormality had made the viruss work dramatically easier. The raiders had come to an unlocked house.

This spring, a clinical trial in the U.K. gave interferon-beta, a synthetic version of the molecule, to a random selection of a hundred and one patients hospitalized with COVID-19. The trial found that those who received interferon early in their infection were seventy-nine per cent less likely to become seriously ill. Researchers agree that timing is crucial. In the early days of a coronavirus infection, an interferon boost might help your innate immune system contain the virus. Later, though, it might be harmful; at that point, your adaptive immune system could already be out of control, and you might need an immunosuppressant, such as the steroid dexamethasone. (Last month, President Trump received dexamethasone as part of his treatment for COVID-19; he was also given a drug that contained lab-engineered antibodies capable of fighting the virus alongside, or ahead of, his bodys own adaptive response.)

The genes for TLR7 are on the sex-linked X chromosome. That could be a partial explanation for why men suffer from severe COVID-19 more often than women. But a TLR7 deficiency is likely to be rarefar rarer than the incidence of severe COVID-19 among young people. There are almost certainly other genetic or environmental factors that weaken the interferon response. In mid-September, research published in Science showed that some COVID-19 patients with bad outcomes had autoantibodies that were attacking their own interferon; another article published in the same issue outlined a genetic flaw related to TLR3, which is also involved in the interferon response. (As many as fourteen per cent of severe COVID-19 cases may be attributable to one of these two conditions.) The more researchers study our immune response to the virus, the more complexity they find. According to some theories, how things go for you could depend on how many viral particles youve inhaled, and on whether they reach your lungs when you breathe them in. If youve had a cold recently, its possible that the T cells you developed to fight it could partially fit the coronavirus. VitaminD levels might matter, because VitaminD can help control inflammation. Harmful autoantibodies could be responsible for the persistent symptoms suffered by COVID-19 long-haulers. All of this is still being explored.

The immune system uses feedback to stay balanced, like a gymnast on a beam. If a light breeze blows, the gymnast might sway a bit; sensing this, shell shift her weight to return to center. But, given a strong enough push, shes prone to overshoot with her reaction and, from the other side, overshoot again until she falls. Many factors contribute to the slipa tight hip flexor, a strained calf, moisture in the aireach magnifying the force of the shove.

Older gymnasts tend to be less agile. The same goes for the immune system, which is why COVID-19 disproportionately affects the elderly. The already high case fatality rate for sixty-five- to seventy-four-year-olds more than triples in people seventy-five and older. This age distribution is unique to the coronavirus. Kids are more susceptible to the seasonal flu; children and young adults who had the swine flu in 2009 were hospitalized the most, while the pandemic flu of 1918 hit adults in their twenties and thirties the hardest. (Perhaps their immune systems overreacted, or older people had acquired immunity to similar strains.) The difference of risk and profile, young versus oldI dont think anyone has seen an infectious agent behave quite like this before, Richard Hodes, the director of the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health, said, of the coronavirus.

The lopsidedness of the virus means that vaccines might not be as effective in older patients, even with double the dose, or after repeated inoculations. The beauty of a vaccine is that it relieves us of the task of completely understanding the virus; its package of antigens simply presses the On button of the great machine. Helping older people may require a more fine-tuned approach, tailored to the particular way this virus destabilizes the immune system. What we have learned so far suggests that it isnt just that being older makes you weak, and that COVID-19 preys on this weakness; the diseases mechanism of action is actually amplified in the aging body.

For this reason, about a month after beginning their coronavirus investigations, the researchers in tenOevers lab switched from ferrets to hamsters. Ferret immune systems are highly responsive, and the animals were getting better too quickly. They look a lot more like kids, tenOever said. By contrast, some hamsters, when infected with the virus, actually develop respiratory distress. We see a lot more infiltration in their lungs. In older hamsters, as in older people, innate immunity is less likely to contain the virus and adaptive immunity is slower to turn on and off. The hamster ends up wildly dysregulated. The difference between these two outcomes really comes down to, as you get older TenOever paused. Getting older sucks. Everything breaks down, even at the simplest of levels.

As we age, our immune systems stiffen up. If I had to respond to an insultbacteria, a virus, a trauma, a lesionthe response is slower and is less strong, Luigi Ferrucci, who studies the aging process and the immune system at the National Institute on Aging, told me. But, at the same time, the system becomes chronically activated. Cytokines circulate at a constant, high level in the blood, as though the body were at all times responding to some attack. This is true no matter ones health. Even in individuals that are extremely healthy, extremely well nourished, have no disease, and theyre taking no drugs, there are some inflammatory markers whose concentration increases with aging, Ferrucci said. Think of the welt that rises with a bite, then imagine the same processswelling, redness, stiffness, the accumulation of pusslowly pervading the body. Your level of inflammation contributes to your biological agewhich is not always in perfect lockstep with your chronological ageand increases your risk of developing cardiovascular disease, cancer, and dementia; it contributes to what geriatricians call frailty.

A phenomenon known as cellular senescence is partly responsible for the bodys increasing inflammation through time. As cells age and divide, small errors accrete in their DNA. These errors could lead to cancer, among other maladies. And so cells police themselves. When they detect decay in their DNA, they stop replicating and begin emitting cytokines, as though asking the immune system to inspect and destroy them. The accumulation of senescent cells may contribute to severe COVID-19: according to the current theory, Ferrucci said, they could expand tremendously the cytokine storm, in which a runaway feedback loop leads to a sudden spike in inflammation throughout the body.

See the article here:
How the Coronavirus Hacks the Immune System - The New Yorker

Tsetse flies, which miraculously birth young bigger than the mother, show us what science is about.

Image credit: Lee Haines et al. 2020

Across most of the animal kingdom, offspring are born smaller than their parents. Astonishingly, several families of insects, including tsetse flies, break this simple rule, and mothers produce offspring their own size or even larger.

An international team from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and the universities of Bristol, Greenwich, Stellenbosch and California Riverside, have published an essay in BioEssays that describes this extreme reproductive strategy in tsetse flies, how it might have evolved, and what it means for controlling this disease-transmitting insect.

It is difficult to fathom a female giving birth to a single offspring that weighs more than she does.Since we are familiar with human babies, which weigh approximately 6% of the mothers pre-pregnancy weight, this feat is unthinkable. Even a blue whale calf, the largest baby in the world, weighing an impressive 2700 kg at birth, is only 1.5% of the mothers weight.

Now, imagine giving birth to a massive baby every ten days for the rest of your life!Unlike most insects, which are egg-layers, female tsetse flies give birth to only one baby at a time. This results in a slow life history in which the females must be continually pregnant and long-lived to produce sufficient offspring to sustain the species. This type of tremendous maternal investment makes one wonder how natural selection could favor this highly implausible trait.

For tsetse flies, producing enormous offspring is possible thanks to two main factors. First, tsetse have a diet consisting exclusively of protein-rich blood, and they can consume over twice their body weight in blood every few days. This allows the female to produce vast quantities of a highly nutritious, milk-like substance to feed a rapidly growing larva. Second, tsetse do not possess the physiological constraints of mammals, such as the pelvic girdle, which prevent birthing of large babies.

Understanding this strange reproductive strategy can help scientists reduce fly populations and control the diseases tsetse flies transmit. Since tsetse larvae remain protected within their mothers uterus and the pupae are hidden in the soil, controlling tsetse populations is restricted to targeting only adult flies. This contrasts strongly with controlling egg-laying insects, like mosquitoes, where all stages of insect development are susceptible to insect control campaigns. For tsetse, the slow breeding cycle means that you only need to kill a few percent of the adult female flies per day to eradicate a population.

Currently, insecticide applied to cattle and artificial host-like baits, such as tiny targets are used successfully to control tsetse populations in disease-endemic areas, such as Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.These small, easily deployable and low-cost insecticide-impregnated targets kill both male and female adult tsetse upon contact. Other tsetse control strategies, like releasing sterile males or manipulating the fly microbiome, can be more challenging to implement as large numbers of tsetse must first be reared prior to treatment (irradiation or genetic modification of symbiotic bacteria) followed by field release.

Tsetse populations must, undeniably, be controlled to prevent disease transmission.However, they should also be recognized as biologically fascinating creatures in their own right as they contribute to biodiversity and species richness in tsetse-endemic regions. In areas where human and animal health are not threatened, the preservation of these flies will give us insight into the evolution of pregnancy and motherhood.

Using tsetse flies as a model organism to study pregnancy, we can investigate how environmental changes and stress affect the mothers ability to produce high quality offspring. In an analogous situation, if a human mother is malnourished, her baby may not be born strong enough to fight off infectious diseases.

Tsetse flies are a captivating species to study for many reasons beyond their unique reproduction. In the words of Professor Glyn Vale, OBE, who has dedicated his life to the control and eradication of tsetse fly populations in many countries across the African continent:

I went to Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) as a young man wanting to walk with lions and elephants, but I got ambushed by a tsetse fly who reckoned it could give me more fun and a better chance to be useful. It taught me that its distinctive feeding habits have seemingly inevitable chains of consequences that interweave and reach far going through matters such as the amazing reproductive system of the flies, their geographical limits, and their impact on human and animal health.

All of these biological issues ensured that eventually the trail led into lively debates over the appropriateness of widely differing technologies and strategies for control. Thus, the tsetse that I first met 55 years ago has kept its promise to give me, in its own way, exactly what I was really after: a varied, adventurous, and challenging walk on the wild side.

Check out the video Burrowing for knowledge for more background about the project, led by Dr. Sinead English at the University of Bristol and funded by the BBSRC and Royal Society

Reference: Lee R. Haines, et al. Big Baby, Little Mother: Tsetse Flies Are Exceptions to the Juvenile Small Size Principle. BioEssays (2020). DOI: 10.1002/bies.202000049

Read more:
Meet the tsetse fly, the supermom of the insect world - Advanced Science News

The smell of a man has been linked to women who suffer multiple miscarriages, new research shows.

Women who suffer an unexplained miscarriage have brains that react differently to a man's body odour.

They are better at identifying their partner by smell than those who do not experience miscarriages and preferred the smell of their partner to other male odours.

The findings could lead to urgently needed answers for many women who experience repeat miscarriage with no clear underlying explanation.

Scientists suggest women who have suffered unexplained repeated pregnancy loss (uRPL) have altered perceptions and brain responses to male body odours in comparison to those with no history of uRPL.

Around half of women miscarry at conception and 15 per cent of pregnancies also result in miscarriage but only a limited number of these can be explained.

Body odour has been linked to many aspects of healthy human reproduction, such as synchrony of menstruation between women who live together, and the influence of body odours of breastfeeding women on the timing of ovulation and menstruation in others.

Lead author Dr Liron Rozenkrantz, a postdoctoral researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, said: "Given that sense of smell is associated with human reproduction, we hypothesised that it may also be related to disorders of human reproduction.

"We set out to test the hypothesis that perception of smell - known as olfaction - is altered in unexplained pregnancy loss, specifically the smell of body odours."

In the study, the team started by testing the ability to identify mates by smell which is a key olfactory function important in reproduction.

They offered 33 women with uRPL and the same number of women with no history of uRPL three body odour sniff jars, scented with body odour from their partner, another male and one with no odour.

Women with a history of uRPL were twice as likely to correctly identify their spouse than the control women, findings revealed.

Senior author Professor Noam Sobel, from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, said: "We have found that women who experience unexplained pregnancy loss are much more likely to recognise their spouse by smell and rate men's body odour differently than other women."

To see whether this was because the women with a history of uRPL had a better sense of smell, the team compared their ability to smell a range of different odours, such as peanuts and soap.

The women with experience of uRPL were also better at discriminating between the smells, but only marginally.

Next researchers asked whether it was the characteristics of the men's body odours that made the women who have had uRPL better at identifying their spouse by smell.

They asked 36 women, half who have experienced uRPL, to rate men's body odours based on intensity, pleasantness, sexual attraction and fertility.

Based on these criteria, the uRPL group rated non-spouse body odours lower when compared with the other group.

To look at how these perceptions might be controlled, the team used MRI scans to look at brain structure and function.

They found that women with a history of uRPL had smaller olfactory bulbs, which was surprising given their apparent greater ability to perceive and discriminate between different smells.

When they measured brain activity while the women watched an emotional film clip, with or without the subliminal presence of a non-spouse male body odour, they found a remarkable response in the hypothalamus region.

While body odour increased the hypothalamus activity in women with history of uRPL, it decreased this activity in the control group.

Prof Sobel added: "We have also found differences in structural and functional brain patterns, which have not been previously associated with unexplained repeat pregnancy loss.

"We hope our findings will help direct further thinking and research on this condition, which is currently not well understood or managed."

Findings were published in the journal eLife.

Continued here:
Women who suffer miscarriage react differently to the smell of men - Surrey Live

The president has had a life-threatening, infectious disease for over a week, and he and his doctors havent been very transparent about the timeline and course of his affliction. In lieu of detailed disclosures, reporters have to piece together his condition based on the treatments hes been receiving.

Trump was started off on an experimental therapeutic an antibody cocktail and then advanced to another remdesivir. The other biomolecules coursing through Donald Trump's system (and this week's headlines) are corticosteroids, called dexamethasone.

You may have heard of cytokine storms, where the body's immune response to severe COVID-19 bombards healthy cells, making the illness worse. Trump has been given dexamethasone, an immuno-supressant that doctors prescribe to temper that effect. Unlike the other experimental treatments, dexamethasone is common and somewhat easy to access. However, it is rarely administered to a patient with a case as (self-)reportedly mild as Donald Trumps. In an interview with New York Magazine's Intelligencer, the co-author of a recent study testing dexamethasone elaborates:

That lack of evidence is concerning as Trump heads into a critical point in the course of his illness. COVID-19 is known for being a bit of a roller coaster, with intermittent fevers, mysterious symptoms, and rapid declines. Abraar Karan, a physician with experience treating patients with COVID-19, told Monique Brouillette at Scientific American that some people have turned corners and left the hospital, only to come back feeling much sicker, with even worse oxygen levels and possibly other harm to the bodys organs.

It is theoretically possible that the early steroid treatment may ward off a dangerous auto-inflammatory reaction. But beyond the inherent risks of immuno-supression, corticosteroids may also cause behavioral side effects in the President. Trump's cognitive and behavioral state has been a point of concern for years. Potent steroids such as dexamethasone are known to increase appetite, decrease restful sleep, and bring about heightened "maniacal" energy states.

As the nation enters the weekend, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is rolling out a 25th amendment commission, Trump is boasting a miraculous recovery with a Fox News doctor, and the rest of us continue to wait and learn how biology will run its course. For better or worse, the side effects our president experiences may prove to have historical consequences. To my knowledge, roid rage has never been a factor in nuclear geopolitics.

Read this article:
Working-class ants take the reins when the Indian jumping ant queen dies - Massive Science

Utopia spoilers follow.

Amazon's remake of the Channel 4 series Utopia has landed at both the most appropriate and inappropriate time. The series, adapted by Gone Girl's Gillian Flynn, includes the threat of a global flu pandemic and, because it's 2020, it had to come with a disclaimer warning viewers that it was a work of fiction.

But the series is about a lot more than just the threat of a deadly virus. At the centre of its first season is Utopia itself, a graphic novel which holds the secrets of the world's impending doom.

In season one, we discovered that both Utopia and its protagonist Jessica Hyde (Sasha Lane) are real as she teamed up with reluctant helpers Sam (RIP), Ian, Becky, Wilson and Grant to find Utopia and solve the puzzle hidden inside it.

But their search for the book and its answers also led them to Dr Kevin Christie (John Cusack), the CEO of a pharmaceutical company whose plans for the world go far beyond creating a sustainable meat substitute.

Flynn has already confirmed she's working on season two of Utopia, although Amazon is yet to officially announce a second season. But with season one's finale leaving us with more questions than answers, Digital Spy is here to share everything we know about season two and our predictions.

It seems surreal to write that the future of Utopia is up in the air due to a pandemic, but it really is. The first season wrapped filming in October 2019, a year before it aired on Amazon.

Given the scale of the production and the impact of Covid-19 on schedules across the board, we're probably looking at 2022 at the earliest for a second season.

It's safe to assume most of the main cast who survived the finale will return for season two, including the following:

In the season one finale, Arby turned his back on Dr Christie and delivered him (wrapped in duct tape) to Jessica, Wilson, Grant, Ian, Becky and Alice. This looked to be the end for Cusack's character but incredibly, he made it out alive (despite losing his thumb).

Early in the finale, it seemed clear that Christie was Mr Rabbit (he had the tattoo on his side, after all). His plan was to spread a deadly virus while profiting off a vaccine that didn't work. But as the episode went on, his true masterplan was revealed.

The virus that had been spreading through school children is not the actual threat. Instead, it's the vaccine which carries a "world-improving omnivirus" that will not kill but sterilise the population, stopping human reproduction for the next three generations. Christie explained that he believes he is "curing" the world by solving the problem of overpopulation while "saving ourselves from ourselves".

Knowing they must destroy the vaccine before it's delivered en masse across America, Ian Becky, Grant and Alice headed to Christie Labs, while Jessica left to go to Home with Arby, who had discovered his true purpose was to help her. That left Wilson on his own with Christie, with his plan being to record him confessing to all his evils.

But while Wilson had always been the group's biggest conspiracy theorist and the most untrustworthy of the big corporations, he began to come around to his way of thinking when he was left alone with Christie.

As Christie refused to follow Wilson's orders, he appeared to convince him that his plan was actually good for the world. The next we saw them, they were in a car together with Christie now free, having converted a new disciple.

Wilson then picked up Becky, who got into the car and was shocked to see Christie and his son Thomas working alongside Wilson. As they drove off, Christie seemed to have a hunch about where Jessica had disappeared to.

Meanwhile, Grant found himself apprehended by police, after being framed for a mass shooting, while Ian and Alice ended the series very much alive but separated from their group and on the run.

As for Jessica, her season one ending offered another unexpected twist as she followed Arby to Home. Arriving at Christie farms, Jessica went inside her former house, finding her old room with her initials still on the headboard of her bed.

Weakened after being bitten by one of the lab rabbits, Jessica went to lie down, but was woken by Agent Milner. In that moment, it's revealed that he's not a helpful Homeland Agent, after all. Instead, she's intent on capturing Jessica.

And what's more, she had the same symbols as Christie tattooed on her side, leaving us wondering if Mr Rabbit was in fact her all along.

As Jessica tried to escape, she realised she was trapped and threw Utopia out the window. But it was never Utopia that Milner was after, it was Jessica herself, whose back is revealed to be covered in symbols which presumably spell out the key to viruses created by her father.

And in a shocking final twist, Milner headed to the basement, where it was revealed Jessica's father is still alive and looks to be working on a follow-up to Utopia.

Speaking to RadioTimes.com, Flynn described season one's ending as "a very deliberate sort of cliffhanger".

Confirming that work was already under way on season two, Flynn added: "We already are just dipping into season two. And I've told everyone, the world is open, let's see what we want to do."

With so many cliffhangers and swerves in the season one finale, Flynn is certainly left with a lot of directions she can go in.

One of the most pressing questions concerns Milner, who admitted to previously being aligned with Christie.

Speaking to Variety, Flynn said she wanted to leave it to the audience to debate whether Jessica's father was being kept against his will by Milner or for his safety. And with the reveal that Milner also has the tattoo on her side, any certainty about Mr Rabbit's identity has been blown out of the water.

In an interview with IndieWire, Flynn also revealed she wanted to move beyond the pandemic storyline in season two.

"Personally, I like shows that move on and move forward in general," Flynn said. "Aside from whether I want to deal with the current pandemic [in season two], I want the show to move on and go to different objectives."

However, with Christie having made it out alive and finding a new ally in Wilson, it seems unlikely he's going to be walking into the sunset and giving up on his plans to curb the population.

But with the vaccine seemingly destroyed and Stearns leaving Chicago with an egg which holds the last remnants of the virus, he may have to find another way to execute his plan.

Unfortunately, not even Dr Kevin Christie would have the means to bring us a Utopia season two trailer as soon as we'd like it. With the second season mostly likely over a year away, we'll be lucky to get any new footage before the end of 2021.

Utopia season one is available to watch now on Amazon Prime Video.

Digital Spy has launched its first-ever digital magazine with exclusive features, interviews, and videos. Access this edition with a 1-month free trial, only on Apple News+.

Interested in Digital Spy's weekly newsletter? Sign up to get it sent straight to your inbox.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io

See the original post here:
Utopia season 2 on Amazon: Everything you need to know - digitalspy.com

NEW YORK, REHOVOT, Israel and SINGAPORE, Sept. 17, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NEWMEDIAWIRE -- Todos Medical Ltd.(OTCQB: TOMDF), anin vitrodiagnostics company focused on developing and distributing comprehensive solutions for COVID-19, and developing blood tests for the early detection of cancer and Alzheimers disease, today announced that NLC Pharma has added the dietary supplement NLC-001 to its joint venture with Todos Medical. NLC-001 is an orally administered proprietary blend of plant extracts that includes a powerful potential 3CL protease inhibitor that could help support and maintain healthy immune function. The 3CL protease plays a vital role in the intracellular replication of coronaviruses, and 3CL protease inhibition is being evaluated as a potential therapeutic target for coronaviruses.

In looking at the landscape for COVID-19, it is becoming clear that despite the large number of alternatives being investigated and used today, some of our best weapons may in fact be natural oral compounds that help to boost immunity or reduce excessive inflammation, said Jorge Leon, Ph.D., Chief Medical and Scientific Officer for Todos Medical. Using 3CL protease inhibitors to help support immune function against coronaviruses is based on sound science. The role of a 3C protease inhibitor could be to slow or stop viral reproduction. This could support and maintain healthy immune function by giving the body time to recognize a coronavirus and mount an immune response to terminate the virus. Pfizer recentlyannouncedthe development of such an inhibitor as a potential pharmaceutical drug for COVID-19. NLC Pharma had worked in parallel with Agouron (later acquired by Pfizer) for many years to identify 3C inhibitors for Human rhinovirus (HRV). We believe the NLC-001 3CL protease inhibitor may ultimately prove to help support and maintain healthy immune function against various strains of coronaviruses, as it is based on a fundamental mechanism that does not change within the coronavirus family.

Under the terms of the agreement, Todos has been granted exclusive worldwide distribution rights for various formulations of NLC-001, excluding Israel, as well as a right of first refusal to develop pharmaceutical drugs based on the NLC technology. Todos is responsible for all commercial activities, including manufacturing, clinical testing, marketing and distribution outside of Israel. NLC will be responsible for the commercialization of NLC-001 in Israel. NLC-001s active ingredient is on the Israel Ministry of Healths authorized dietary supplement import list. The U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) granted a Certificate of Free Sale for NLC-001 to the Joint Ventures U.S.-based contract manufacturer on August 28, 2020. NLC-001 has not received FDA approval as a prophylactic or as a therapeutic intervention for COVID-19. The companies will work together to meet the remaining regulatory requirements to distribute branded versions of NLC-001 as a dietary supplement to help support and maintain healthy immune function in the United States. NLC Pharma has filed multiple patent applications covering the NLC-001 program worldwide.

We started developing 3C protease inhibitors in 1987 as an antiviral against HRV and since early 2000, when SARS surfaced, we have been diligently advancing both our diagnostic and therapeutic understanding of the 3C protease, said Dorit Arad, Ph.D., President & Chief Scientific Officer of NLC Pharma. At a time when others are focused on a vaccine, we are targeting the reproduction mechanism of the coronavirus. Unlike vaccine targets, this mechanism does not change even when the virus mutates. A safe dietary supplement that can help support and maintain healthy immune function by slowing or stopping viral replication, giving the bodys immune system time to mount an appropriate response, is the best route to re-open economies safely and achieve the desired herd immunity. For this strategy to be effective, screening and diagnostic technologies will become more important than ever, and because of this, we believed that Todos was the right partner for this potentially game-changing dietary supplement.

We are extremely excited to add NLC-001 to our joint venture with NLC Pharma due to its strong safety profile, as demonstrated by being granted a Certificate of Free Sale by the FDA, said Gerald Commissiong, President & CEO of Todos Medical. Selected dietary supplements represent some of the most accessible and close-to-market alternatives to improve immune function. NLC is advancing clinical studies at hospitals in Israel to evaluate the efficacy of NLC-001 in the treatment of hospitalized COVID-19 patients. We believe NLC-001 certainly warrants commercialization in the United States as a dietary supplement, without therapeutic claims. We are currently evaluating the best commercialization path for NLC-001.

Key Scientific Publications related to potential of 3C Protease Inhibitors for COVID-19

Science Translational Medicine

3C-like protease inhibitors block coronavirus replication in vitro and improve survival in MERS-CoVinfected mice (https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/12/557/eabc5332 )

Abstract

Pathogenic coronaviruses are a major threat to global public health, as exemplified by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV), Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), and the newly emerged SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). We describe herein the structure-guided optimization of a series of inhibitors of the coronavirus 3C-like protease (3CLpro), an enzyme essential for viral replication. The optimized compounds were effective against several human coronaviruses including MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV, and SARS-CoV-2 in an enzyme assay and in cell-based assays using Huh-7 and Vero E6 cell lines. Two selected compounds showed antiviral effects against SARS-CoV-2 in cultured primary human airway epithelial cells. In a mouse model of MERS-CoV infection, administration of a lead compound 1 day after virus infection increased survival from 0 to 100% and reduced lung viral titers and lung histopathology. These results suggest that this series of compounds has the potential to be developed further as antiviral drugs against human coronaviruses.

International Journal of Microbial Agents

Potential of coronavirus 3C-like protease inhibitors for the development of new anti-SARS-CoV-2 drugs: Insights from structures of protease and inhibitors (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7286838/ )

Abstract

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), similar to SARS-CoV and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), which belong to the same Betacoronavirus genus, induces severe acute respiratory disease that is a threat to human health. Since the outbreak of infection by SARS-CoV-2 began, which causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the disease has rapidly spread worldwide. Thus, a search for effective drugs able to inhibit SARS-CoV-2 has become a global pursuit. The 3C-like protease (3CLpro), which hydrolyses viral polyproteins to produce functional proteins, is essential for coronavirus replication and is considered an important therapeutic target for diseases caused by coronaviruses, including COVID-19. Many 3CLpro inhibitors have been proposed and some new drug candidates have achieved success in preclinical studies. In this review, we briefly describe recent developments in determining the structure of 3CLpro and its function in coronavirus replication and summarize new insights into 3CLpro inhibitors and their mechanisms of action. The clinical application prospects and limitations of 3CLpro inhibitors for COVID-19 treatment are also discussed.

For information related to Todos Medicals COVID-19 testing capabilities, please visit http://www.todoscovid.com

For testing and PPE inquiries, please email sales@todosmedical.com.

About NLC Pharma

NLC Pharma Ltd., an Israeli company, was founded by Dr. Dorit Arad, a leading physical organic chemist with more than 25 years of experience in the Life Science industry, specifically in research and development of infectious diseases.

NLC is in the process of producing developing and commercializing a COVID-19 rapid detection kit, to prevent further spread of the pandemic. In addition, NLC aims to develop an antiviral solution for prevention and treatment of the disease. Both products the rapid detection kit and the antiviral drug are based on thorough extensive research and development performed on a crucial viral enzyme the 3CLpro, a 3C-like protease that resembles the human Rhinovirus (HRV) 3C protease, which has a central role in the maturation of several coronaviruses, including the 2003 SARS-CoV and the recent SARS-CoV-2. These products can be globally deployed and serve as a platform to inhibit the spread of other viruses and infectious diseases.

About Todos Medical Ltd.

Headquartered in Rehovot, Israel, Todos Medical Ltd. (OTCQB: TOMDF) engineers life-saving diagnostic solutions for the early detection of a variety of cancers. The Company's state-of-the-art and patented Todos Biochemical Infrared Analyses (TBIA) is a proprietary cancer-screening technology using peripheral blood analysis that deploys deep examination into cancer's influence on the immune system, looking for biochemical changes in blood mononuclear cells and plasma. Todos' two internally-developed cancer-screening tests, TMB-1 and TMB-2, have received a CE mark in Europe. Todos recently entered into an exclusive option agreement to acquire U.S.-based medical diagnostics company Provista Diagnostics, Inc. to gain rights to its Alpharetta, Georgia-based CLIA/CAP certified lab and Provista's proprietary commercial-stage Videssa breast cancer blood test. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2020.

Todos is also developing blood tests for the early detection of neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease. The Lymphocyte Proliferation Test (LymPro Test) is a diagnostic blood test that determines the ability of peripheral blood lymphocytes (PBLs) and monocytes to withstand an exogenous mitogenic stimulation that induces them to enter the cell cycle. It is believed that certain diseases, most notably Alzheimer's disease, are the result of compromised cellular machinery that leads to aberrant cell cycle re-entry by neurons, which then leads to apoptosis. LymPro is unique in the use of peripheral blood lymphocytes as a surrogate for neuronal cell function, suggesting a common relationship between PBLs and neurons in the brain. In July 2020, Todos completed the acquired Breakthrough Diagnostics, Inc., the owner of the LymPro Test intellectual property, from Amarantus Bioscience Holdings, Inc. (OTC: AMBS).

Additionally, Todos has entered into distribution agreements with companies to distribute certain novel coronavirus (COVID-19) test kits. The agreements cover multiple international suppliers of PCR testing kits and related materials and supplies, as well as antibody testing kits from multiple manufacturers after completing validation of said testing kits and supplies in its partner CLIA/CAP certified laboratory in the United States. Todos has formed strategic partnerships withMeridian Health,Moto-Para Foundationto deploy COVID-19 testing in the United States.

For more information, please visit https://www.todosmedical.com/.

Forward-looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements. For example, forward-looking statements are used when discussing our expected clinical development programs and clinical trials. These forward-looking statements are based only on current expectations of management, and are subject to significant risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements, including the risks and uncertainties related to the progress, timing, cost, and results of clinical trials and product development programs; difficulties or delays in obtaining regulatory approval or patent protection for product candidates; competition from other biotechnology companies; and our ability to obtain additional funding required to conduct our research, development and commercialization activities. In addition, the following factors, among others, could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements: changes in technology and market requirements; delays or obstacles in launching our clinical trials; changes in legislation; inability to timely develop and introduce new technologies, products and applications; lack of validation of our technology as we progress further and lack of acceptance of our methods by the scientific community; inability to retain or attract key employees whose knowledge is essential to the development of our products; unforeseen scientific difficulties that may develop with our process; greater cost of final product than anticipated; loss of market share and pressure on pricing resulting from competition; and laboratory results that do not translate to equally good results in real settings, all of which could cause the actual results or performance to differ materially from those contemplated in such forward-looking statements. Except as otherwise required by law, Todos Medical does not undertake any obligation to publicly release any revisions to these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. For a more detailed description of the risks and uncertainties affecting Todos Medical, please refer to its reports filed from time to time with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Investor Contact:

Kim Sutton Golodetz

LHA Investor Relations

Senior Vice President

(212) 838-3777

kgolodetz@lhai.com

Corporate Contact:

Daniel Hirsch

Todos Medical

+972.52.6420.126

Dan.h@todosmedical.com

Read more here:
3CL Protease Inhibitor NLC-001 Added to COVID-19-focused Joint Venture Between Todos Medical and NLC Pharma - BioSpace

Its nice to believe that love comes always as a magical thing, a proverbial bolt of lightning across a crowded room. Its comforting to imagine that this most human of emotions has been with us forever, ageless and unchanging.Yet the history of romance reveals something very different; something driven by the technologies that define our era as much as by the chemicals that fuel our brains.

Yes, we human beings have been falling in love since time began. Yes, we probably feel the same rush of excitement and desire that drove our ancestors to distraction, too. But how we find our loves, how we live with them and mate with them and leave them for another, has changed repeatedly over time. And now, with the future crashing into us at ever faster speeds, the ways we live and love and mate are poised to change againmore dramatically, perhaps, than ever before.

Throughout most of human history, love and marriage were only accidentally connected. Beginning with the Agricultural Revolution of around 8000 BC, when marriage as we know it first came into being, young people were paired off by their elders, matched in ways that made sense for their families, their villages, their tribes. Sex was an inherent part of the transaction, since it produced the children who would subsequently farm the fields and inherit them. Romance was not. Instead, for thousands of years, marriage was mostly a businesswitness the traditional dowry or bride priceand courtship a community sport. If there was passion, it occurred either through happenstance, or outside the bounds of marriage.

Things started to change in the 18th century, as the Industrial Revolution yanked millions of people away from the agricultural economy and into a future marked by factories, railroads, and crowded, burgeoning cities. For the first time in history, young people could imagine their lives unfolding differently from what their parents and grandparents had experienced; for the first time, masses of people could move easily from one place to another, and away from the communities that had once defined them. Land was no longer so important once industry emerged, and children no longer so crucial. And as these changes rippled through society, norms of love and marriage began to shift as well. Young people could find each other outside the confines of their village and beyond the prying eyes of their elders. They could support themselves independently and live in smaller units, what we now think of as the nuclear family. They could afford to fall in love, and to build a new narrative of marriage that included not only sex and children, but affection as well.

In the 20th century, the twin innovations of contraception and assisted reproduction transformed things again, unbundling the ancient package of marriage by enabling people to have sex without babies and babies without sexboth of which have become commonplace. Today, premarital sex has become the norm for most men and women; contraception is enthusiastically encouraged by all but the most conservative groups; and same-sex marriages have become a joyful reality across most of the world. Yes, these developments have been driven in part by changing social norms and the advocacy of dedicated activist groups. But they are also the direct result of technological change.

Fast-forward now to our own era, a time in which growing numbers of people are meeting online and a growing array of our most intimate activities are unfolding across the alien landscape of Zoom. What will happen to love and sex and romance as we increasingly live in a digital world? Its too early to know for certain, but a number of signs have already emerged.

What will happen to love and sex and romance as we increasingly live in a digital world?

To begin with, the 20th century model of meeting in person is fast being replaced by the algorithms of online dating sites. Already, nearly 40% of heterosexual couples report having met online; these numbers are even higher for same-sex couples, and for individuals pairing off for more casual encounters. Such interactions are bound to surge during the time of COVID, as closed bars and cancelled classes make online courtship the only viable kind.

Its also clear that the generation coming of age today is marrying later than their parents and grandparents did, having fewer children, and, perhaps surprisingly, less sex. Today, only about half of Americans are married by the time they turn 30. Fertility rates have plummeted to 1.7 (meaning that the average woman will give birth to 1.7 children over the course of her lifetime), well below the natural rate of replacement, and the youngest members of the millennial generation are less sexually active than any generation since those that came of age in the 1960s. According to a recent U.S. survey, more men aged 18 to 34 were living with their parents than with a romantic partner, and thats before COVID-19 pushed even more of them back to their childhood homes.

Finally, it increasingly seems that the ease and infinite variety of online dating presents its users with a double-edged deal. The good news is that nearly all people now have an almost unfathomable array of sexual and romantic choices. Rather than being confined by their parents wishes, or limited by the number of suitable prospects in a single village or community, anyone looking for love (or lust) can scroll through an endless parade of possibilities, all in the palm of their hand. Their initial encounters, therefore, are easy and risk-free. Their ability to mate and marry across social classes is vastly increased. The bad news, though, is that not everyone matches in this free-for-all, and many of those who do report being numbed over time by the sheer weight of so much choice.

Counterintuitively, perhaps, having so many options for romantic encounters is upping the bar on making these relationships work. Unless people feel an immediate attraction, and a sense that it is mutual, many are choosing to pull away from a connection that might have developed, preferring the dull thud of loneliness to the sting of rejection.

Which isnt to say that the future is bleak. On the contrary: Having the technical and societal freedom to unbundle sex from reproduction and love gives individuals an unprecedented level of control over their own lives. Its not surprising that we dont yet know precisely how to handle these choices, or how to rearrange our social structures around them. Thats what happens during revolutionary times. But even if the structures of courtship are exploding right now, even if the traditional package of heterosexual marriage is morphing into a kaleidoscope of alternative arrangements, love itselfthe pings and pangs of dopamine in our animal brainsseems likely to endure. We will find it on Tinder. On Twitter. On Zoom, if we must. And it will shake our days and break our hearts all over again.

Debora Spar is a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School whose research work is focused on issues of gender and technology, and the interplay between technological change and broader social structures. Spar explores these issues in her new book Work Mate Marry Love: How Machines Shape Our Human Destiny published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

The rest is here:
Love in the time of Zoom: Why we're in the midst of a dating revolution - Fast Company

We are all creatures of the technology that has existed in our lifetimes, according to Debora Spar. Not surprisingly, the former president of the private women's liberal arts school, Barnard College, is a champion of modern conveniences that have saved many women from domestic drudgery.

Im a big fan of the refrigerator as a massive technology for womens emancipation, she said with a chuckle.

Not so long ago, chores that were considered womens work feeding a family and washing everybodys clothes by hand were a full-time job.

Its only once you get, particularly washing machines and refrigerators, that womens work actually becomes manageable in something less than a full week, explained Spar, who is now a professor at Harvard Business School.

It was easier for Spar to become a successful working mother because she had access to those liberating inventions, along with a car and contraception, she said.

In a time of social distancing, during the coronavirus pandemic, we may be more aware than ever that our family lives and even our love lives are closely entwined with the technology that is all around us. However, according to Spar, machines have been reinventing humans and their relationships since the days of the ancient plow, which likely led to the birth of marriage itself.

Once weve built these tools, whether theyre farming implements or computers, they begin to shape us in really powerful ways, she explained.

Spar is mostly positive about the rapid technological changes she has witnessed in her lifetime. Her new book, Work Mate Marry Love: How Machines Shape Our Human Destiny, is a journey through the technologies from the plow, to the steam engine, to the refrigerator and beyond that have affected when, how, and with whom we partner up. But it also glimpses into a future where there is no master plan for how the most advanced technologies that humans have built will further evolve and change us.

If that sounds like a scary future, then it should also be a call to action, says Spar.

Take the world of assisted reproduction. While rules for the use of in vitro fertilization (I.V.F.) are more lax in the United States, many countries have strict government guidelines about the procedure.

Spar urges government regulators in the U.S. to start to imagine where these technologies are going to go and then put guidelines around them.

According to Spar, a technology known as in vitro gametogenesis (I.V.G.) might one day allow multiple people, of the same or different sex, to potentially conceive a child together, even though the idea of poly-parenting raises all sorts of ethical concerns.

If we just let technologies evolve on their own, bad things are going to happen along with the good things, she explained. But we have the ability to stop that not to put the technology back into the bottle but to guide it, so that we get the benefits without leaving ourselves open to all of these risks.

Spar also makes a plea for regulators to consider how, without government intervention and cost controls, technological developments could exacerbate inequality.

Rich people will get access to them and poor people wont, she explained. We need governments to step in here and figure out how we can at least soften some of these implications.

Otherwise, she fears we could be pushing towards what begins to feel like revolutionary times.

See the rest here:
From The Plow To Birth Control: How Technology Reshapes Relationships - wgbh.org

A 100-million-year-old chunk of amber has revealed the oldest-ever sample of animal sperm, and each individual cell is enormously long.

Even more impressive, this giant sperm - several times larger than human sperm - comes from a shrimp-like crustacean smaller than a poppyseed.

Just shy of 0.6 millimetres, this ancient bivalve belongs to a still-living class of microcrustacean known as ostracods, which are famous for housing sperm up to ten times larger than themselves.

That might sound impossible, but when these microscopic cells are twisted and tangled up into tiny little balls, they can travel through the female reproductive tract easily, fending off other, smaller tangles in competition.

The studied amber piece showing the position of the specimens. (Wang et al., Proceedings B, 2020)

Using a micro-CT scanner, researchers have now revealed 39 of their ancient crustacean relatives, all in the same slice of amber. Even more astonishing, this frozen community still has some of the same reproductive traits we see in ostracods today, including giant sperm.

Not only were their ancient relatives found with similar male 'claspers', these fossilised bodies also contained sperm pumps, eggs and - best of all - female receptacles filled with sperm.

"The fact that the seminal receptacles of the female are in an expanded state due to being filled with sperm indicates that successful copulation had taken place shortly before the animals became entrapped in the amber," the authors write.

Measuring individual cells in these tangled masses is impossible, the authors admit, but they say at minimum the sperm are at least 200 m long (0.2 mm).That's at least a third of the ancient creature's entire body length.

It's also the oldest sample of animal sperm by a long shot.While other ostracod fossils from a hundred million years ago have shown hints of giant reproductive organs, we've never before gotten our hands on an actual sample from this time.

In 2014, 16-million-year-old freshwater ostracods, discovered in a cave in Australia, were found containing sperm 1.2 mm long.But the new specimen, discovered in Myanmar, is 83 million years older. In fact, it doubles the age of the oldest unequivocal fossil animal sperm.

In all that time, it seems ostracod reproduction has remained largely the same - "a paramount example of evolutionary stasis," as the authors say.

During sexual reproduction, both ancient and modern ostracods probably use their fifth limbs like a 'hook' to grab onto females. Once they have a hold, they can then insert their erectile tissue and pump out an "exceptionally long but immotile sperm", pushing it up two long sperm canals in the female body.

Once these sperm reach the seminal receptacles, the authors think they begin to move, settling into an "organised assemblage" so they can begin fertilising the eggs.

Ancient ostracod sperms in a female. (Wang et al., Proceedings B, 2020)

While it might sound counterintuitive at first, some of the smallest creatures on Earth produce some of the largest sperm. When females copulate with more than one mate, sperm must compete; scientists think having larger units could be more advantageous. That said, giant sperm - like those in ostracods - come at a high price for both males and females.

First and foremost, their sexual machinery simply has to be bigger, and for such a tiny animal already, that's a serious trade-off. Some modern species dedicate a third of their body volume to reproduction alone.

As such, it remains a mystery as to how this giant trait evolved and when it showed up. Direct evidence is truly scarce. While crustaceans have calcified shells that leave behind rich fossil records, finding intact soft tissue in fossils is exceedingly rare.

This discovery is truly remarkable, not only because the amber has preserved soft tissue from several individuals for a hundred million years, but also because of all the similarities.

"The male clasper, sperm pumps, hemipenes and female seminal receptacles with giant sperm of fossil ostracods reveal that the reproduction behavioural repertoire, which is associated with considerable morphological adaptations, has remained unchanged over at least 100 million years," the authorswrite.

The study was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Link:
Oldest Animal Sperm to Date Was Just Discovered in 100-Million-Year-Old Amber - ScienceAlert

A resident dolphin mother and her new calf at the Hilton Waikoloa Village are helping scientists to evaluate the increasing pressures on wild dolphin populations such as Hawaiis spinner dolphins. The University of Hawaii at Mnoas Marine Mammal Research Program (MMRP) and Dolphin Quest are collaborating on a scientific drone study aimed at better understanding the health of dolphin populations.

Scientists are concerned that frequent human activities in the spinner dolphins environment are disrupting the dolphins natural behaviors, which may be adversely affecting their reproduction.

Fabien Vivier, a PhD student with MMRP, has been operating a drone over a pregnant bottlenose dolphin at the Dolphin Quest facility at the Hilton Waikoloa Village on Hawaii Island. He collected baseline data in order to do the same on the open ocean to detect pregnancy in female dolphins. This will help to estimate pregnancy rates for the populations of dolphins in the wild.

Studying dolphins at Dolphin Quest is really helpful, because it allows us to verify our methodologies at a specific known stage of pregnancy, which couldnt be accomplished working only in the wild, Vivier said. This information is quite relevant to studying and conserving other species such as Hawaiis spinner dolphins because, even though the species are different, they share many similarities. If we are able to detect pregnancy from a drone perspective in the bottlenose dolphin, the likelihood of detecting pregnancy in a spinner dolphin is very good.

Scientists said continuing reproduction supports critical wildlife conservation and is also good for the dolphin social group.

Reproduction and calf-rearing is important for dolphin welfare. It is a natural and enriching social behavior for dolphins in the wild and in modern zoos, aquariums and marine life parks, said Dolphin Quest Marine Mammal Reproduction Specialist Holley Muraco. Accredited facilities like Dolphin Quest have excellent reproductive success, which leads to long-term population sustainability and eliminates the need for collection from the wild.

Vivier said the next step of surveying spinner dolphins in the wild is scheduled for October. He plans to tweet about the experience through the MMRPs Twitter account.

The rest is here:
Dolphin reproductive research aided by UH drones - UH System Current News

Pupils wearing facemasks arrive to attend classes at Moor End Academy in Huddersfield, northern England on September 11, 2020.

OLI SCARFF | AFP | Getty Images

LONDON After months out of school, children around the world are returning to the classroom. And while parents feel it's best for their kids, shaking those first-day nerves has been a challenge.

Homeschooling has been the norm for many families over the last five months, as a lot of schools only stayed open to the children of key workers, due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Gillian Harvey, a writer who lives in a small town near Limoges in France, said that she was initially nervous about her five children returning to school.

"I made sure I told them all the facts properly before they went back, but also that they are human and there may well be a time when they forget a hygiene measure (e.g. forget to wash their hands properly) and that it's OK and human and they must just do their best and follow the rules to the best of their ability," Harvey told CNBC via email.

She's started to feel better about the situation since their return.

"I think the schools are handling it well," she said, with the use of social bubbles for younger children, along with social distancing and hand gel for older students.

Children in France returned to schools at the beginning of September. But by the end of the first week, French Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer said 22 schools had closed across the country and in its territories due to virus cases. On Mondayafter the sixteenth straight day of rising hospitalizations school trips and student parties were suspended in Marseille.

To date, France has reported 425,870 cases of Covid-19 and 30,958 related deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

"I always thought there would be a couple of cases at first people are returning from holidays and I wish there'd been some sort of encouragement for families to stay at home the week before term started," Harvey said.

But she added that it was "a horrible time for parents you feel the risk of your decision no matter what it is."

Another mother in London, who preferred to remain anonymous, told CNBC over the phone that she felt her son's school had gone beyond the average measures to ensure a safe return to the classroom.

She welcomed her son's return to school, not only as a parent balancing childcare with working from home these past months, but also for his mental health.

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has emphasized this repeatedly in recent weeks, saying it is "vitally important" for children to return to school in September, with British parents possibly facing fines if they refuse to comply.

The mother CNBC spoke to, however, did indicate that she was concerned about rising infections among the wider public and how transmission could then filter through schools, referring to the reported coronavirus outbreaks in 339 schools in England and Wales last week. In the U.K., 373,559 people have contracted Covid-19 and 41,726 have died from the virus.

She felt that the U.K.'s contact tracing system was "not sufficient."

"I advocate for a strong local contract tracing and informing system, like what (South) Korea has put in the place," she said.

Knowing about an outbreak in a local school, restaurant or supermarket would keep people better informed and help manage community transmission more efficiently, she argued.

Transitional kindergartner Caleb Simon, 4, waits with fellow students outside Weaver Elementary School on the first day of in-person learning in Rossmoor, CA, on Tuesday, September 8, 2020.

Jeff Gritchen | Getty Images

Indeed, experts have highlighted some points that might be reassuring to parents.

Mike Tildesley, an associate professor who specializes in infectious disease control at the University of Warwick in the U.K., told CNBC that the highest risk of transmission was actually "probably within households" with "unregulated mixing" between groups.

He said this was the reason behind a lot of the localized restrictions that have been imposed in the north of England in recent weeks, clamping down on meetings between different households, due to rising cases. The U.K. government announced measures last week that meant from Monday, people were unable to meet socially in groups from other households of more than six people.

Tildesley said that one of the difficulties is that schools are one of the last public areas to re-open.

He said it was "unfortunate timing" with the "R" number the virus' reproduction rate hovering around one, which is when it is considered dangerous. He referred back to research Warwick University published in June that suggested the re-opening of schools alone was unlikely to lead to a second wave of coronavirus cases.

"My real worry is that schools could end up getting the blame for cases starting to rise, because all this other stuff has happened, but actually there's an awful lot that's happened to get to this point," Tildesley added.

Olivia Swann, a clinical lecturer in pediatric infectious disease at the University of Edinburgh, told CNBC via email that she had worked on a study of 138 hospitals across England, Scotland and Wales, looking at children admitted with the coronavirus.

Admissions for children under 19 years' old accounted for less than 1% of those across all age groups. And, of those 651 children that were admitted, six died from the virus all of which had "complex health issues." What's more, more than 40% of children in that study had one or more underlying health conditions, some which were very complex. But Swann added that most did not need intensive care input and made good recoveries.

"As a parent, a children's doctor, and a scientist, I find our study very reassuring at a time when children are returning to school," Swann said. However, she stressed that she was not suggesting people become complacent, but carry on with practices such as physical-distancing and hand washing.

Data published Tuesday by the Department for Education estimated that 12% of state school pupils in England did not attend class in the first week of September. During the last academic year, the overall absence rate was 4.7%.

Examining this estimate together with data from the most recent school census, which reported a state-school pupil population of just over 8 million, indicated that as many as 974,400 pupils were not present at school during the first week of term.

Similar statistics released at the beginning of September by the Scottish Government showed that over 15.5% of pupils missed school on the first Friday backover 100,000 pupilsthough only 22,821 of those absences were designated "Covid-19 related." The data from England's Department for Education includes pupils absent for both Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 related reasons.

Attendance figures for Welsh and Northern Irish schools are yet to be made available by their respective governments.

CNBC's Jordan Butt contributed to this report.

Visit link:
'You feel the risk of your decision no matter what': How parents feel about the return to school - CNBC

Dunselman GA, Vermeulen N, Becker C, Calhaz-Jorge C, D'Hooghe T, De Bie B, et al. ESHRE guideline: management of women with endometriosis. Hum Reprod. 2014;29:40012.

CAS Article Google Scholar

Vetvicka V, Lagan AS, Salmeri FM, Triolo O, Palmara VI, Vitale SG, et al. Regulation of apoptotic pathways during endometriosis: from the molecular basis to the future perspectives. Arch Gynecol Obstet. 2016;294:897904.

CAS Article Google Scholar

Lagan AS, Vitale SG, Salmeri FM, Triolo O, Frange HB, Vrtanik-Bokal E. Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno: a novel, evidence-based, unifying theory for the pathogenesis of endometriosis. Med Hypotheses. 2017;103:1020.

Article Google Scholar

Vitale SG, Capriglione S, Peterlunger I, La Rosa VL, Vitagliano A, Noventa M. The role of oxidative stress and membrane transport systems during endometriosis: a fresh look at a busy corner. Oxidative Med Cell Longev. 2018;7924021.

Schomacker ML, Hansen KE, Ramlau-Hansen CH, Forman A. Is endometriosis associated with irritable bowel syndrome? A cross-sectional study. Eur J Obstet Gynecol Reprod Biol. 2018;231:659.

Article Google Scholar

Culley L, Law C, Hudson N, Denny E, Mitchell H, Baumgarten M, et al. The social and psychological impact of endometriosis on womens lives: a critical narrative review. Hum Reprod Update. 2013;19:62539.

Article Google Scholar

Young K, Fisher J, Kirkman M. Womens experiences of endometriosis: a systematic review and synthesis of qualitative research. J Fam Plan Reprod Heal Care. 2015;41:22534.

Article Google Scholar

Vitale SG, La Rosa VL, Rapisarda AMC, Lagan AS. Endometriosis and infertility: the impact on quality of life and mental health. J Endometr Pelvic Pain Disord. 2017;9(2):1125.

Article Google Scholar

La Rosa VL, De Franciscis P, Barra F, Schiattarella A, Tropea A, Tesarik J. Sexuality in women with endometriosis: a critical narrative review. Minerva Med. 2020;111(1):7989.

PubMed Google Scholar

Jia S-Z, Leng J-H, Shi J-H, Sun P-R, Lang J-H. Health-related quality of life in women with endometriosis: a systematic review. J Ovarian Res. 2012;5:29.

Article Google Scholar

Bourdel N, Chauvet P, Billone V, Douridas G, Fauconnier A, et al. Systematic review of quality of life measures in patients with endometriosis. PLoS One. 2019;14:e0208464.

CAS Article Google Scholar

La Rosa VL, De Franciscis P, Barra F, Schiattarella A, Trk P, Shah M. Quality of life in women with endometriosis: a narrative overview. Minerva Med 2020;111(1):6878.

Guyatt GH, Feeny DH, Patrick DL. Measuring health-related quality of life. Ann Intern Med. 1993;118:6229.

CAS Article Google Scholar

Nnoaham K, Hummelshoj L, Webster P. Europe PMC funders group impact of endometriosis on quality of life and work productivity: a multicenter study across ten countries. Fertil Steril. 2011;96:36673.

Article Google Scholar

Simoens S, Dunselman G, Dirksen C, Hummelshoj L, Bokor A, Brandes I, et al. The burden of endometriosis: costs and quality of life of women with endometriosis and treated in referral centres. Hum Reprod. 2012;27:12929.

Article Google Scholar

De Graaff AA, DHooghe T, Dunselman GA, Dirksen C, Hummelshoj L, Simoens S, et al. The significant effect of endometriosis on physical, mental and social wellbeing: results from an international cross-sectional survey. Hum Reprod. 2013;28:267785.

Article Google Scholar

Grundstrm H, Gerdle B, Alehagen S, Berter C, Arendt-Nielsen L, Kjlhede P. Reduced pain thresholds and signs of sensitization in women with persistent pelvic pain and suspected endometriosis. Acta Obstet Gynecol Scand. 2019;98:32736.

Article Google Scholar

Abbott JA. The effects and effectiveness of laparoscopic excision of endometriosis: a prospective study with 2-5 year follow-up. Hum Reprod. 2003;18:19227.

CAS Article Google Scholar

Marques A, Bahamondes L, Aldrighi JM, Fernandes LF, Augusto K, Brilhante A, et al. Quality of life in Brazilian women with endometriosis assessed through a medical outcome questionnaire. J Reprod Med. 2004;49:11520.

PubMed Google Scholar

Neelakantan D, Omojole F, Clark TJ, Gupta J, Kahn K. Quality of life instruments in studies of chronic pelvic pain: a systematic review. J Obstet Gynaecol. 2004;24:8518.

CAS Article Google Scholar

Jones G, Kennedy S, Barnard A, Wong J, Jenkinson C. Development of an endometriosis quality-of-life instrument: the endometriosis health Profile-30. Obstet Gynecol. 2001;98:25864.

CAS PubMed Google Scholar

van de Burgt TJM, Hendriks JCM, Kluivers KB. Quality of life in endometriosis: evaluation of the Dutch-version endometriosis health profile30 (EHP-30). Fertil Steril. 2011;95:18635.

Article Google Scholar

Vincent K, Kennedy S, Stratton P. Pain scoring in endometriosis: entry criteria and outcome measures for clinical trials. Report from the art and science of endometriosis meeting. Fertil Steril. 2010;93:627.

Article Google Scholar

National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen). National Guidelines For Endometriosis Care (in Swedish). 2018. https://www.socialstyrelsen.se/globalassets/sharepoint-dokument/artikelkatalog/nationella-riktlinjer/2018-12-27.pdf Accessed 28 Feb 2020.

Grundstrm H, Rauden A, Olovsson M. Cross-cultural adaptation of the Swedish version of endometriosis health Profile-30. J Obstet Gynecol. 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/01443615.2019.1676215.

Terwee CB, Bot SDM, de Boer MR, van der Windt D, Knol D, Dekker J, et al. Quality criteria were proposed for measurement properties of health status questionnaires. J Clin Epidemiol. 2007;60:3442.

Article Google Scholar

Cronbach LJ, Warrington WG. Time-limit tests: estimating their reliability and degree of speeding. Psychometrika. 1951;16:16788.

CAS Article Google Scholar

Koo TK, Li MY. A guideline of selecting and reporting intraclass correlation coefficients for reliability research. J Chiropr Med. 2016;15:15563.

Article Google Scholar

Wickstrom K, Spira J, Edelstam G. Responsiveness of the endometriosis health Profile-30 questionnaire in a Swedish sample: an observational study. Clin Exp Obstet Gynecol. 2017;44:4138.

CAS PubMed Google Scholar

Jones G, Jenkinson C, Taylor N, Mills A, Kennedy S. Measuring quality of life in women with endometriosis: tests of data quality, score reliability, response rate and scaling assumptions of the endometriosis health profile questionnaire. Hum Reprod. 2006;21:268693.

Article Google Scholar

Statistics Sweden (Statistiska Centralbyrn) Higher education in Sweden (In Swedish) 2019. https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/sverige-i-siffror/utbildning-jobb-och-pengar/utbildningsnivan-i-sverige/ Accessed 4 Dec 2019.

Chauvet P, Auclair C, Mourgues C, Canis M, Gerbaud L, Bourdel N. Psychometric properties of the French version of the endometriosis health Profile-30, a health-related quality of life instrument. J Gynecol Obstet Hum Reprod. 2017;46:23542.

CAS Article Google Scholar

Jenkinson C, Kennedy S, Jones G. Evaluation of the American version of the 30-item endometriosis health profile (EHP-30). Qual Life Res. 2008;17:114752.

Article Google Scholar

Verket NJ, Andersen MH, Sandvik L, Tanbo TG, Qvigstad E. Lack of cross-cultural validity of the endometriosis health Profile-30. J Endometr Pelvic Pain Disord. 2018;10:10715.

Article Google Scholar

Jia S-Z, Leng J-H, Sun P-R, Lang J-H. Translation and psychometric evaluation of the simplified Chinese-version endometriosis health Profile-30. Hum Reprod. 2013;28:6917.

Article Google Scholar

Khong S-U, Lam A, Luscombe G. Is the 30-item endometriosis health profile (EHP-30) suitable as a self-report health status instrument for clinical trials? Fertil Steril. 2010;94:192832.

Article Google Scholar

Nogueira-Silva C, Costa P, Martins C, Barata S, Alho C, Calhaz-Jorge C. Validation of the Portuguese Version of EHP-30 (The Endometriosis Health Profile-30). Acta Med Port. 2015;28:34756.

Article Google Scholar

Nojomi M, Bijari B, Akhbari R, Kashanian M. The assessment of reliability and validity of Persian version of the endometriosis health profile (EHP-30). Iran J Med Sci. 2011;36:849.

PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar

van de Burgt TJM, Kluivers KB, Hendriks JCM. Responsiveness of the Dutch endometriosis health Profile-30 (EHP-30) questionnaire. Eur J Obstet Gynecol Reprod Biol. 2013;168:924.

Article Google Scholar

Link:
Psychometric evaluation of the Swedish version of the 30-item endometriosis health profile (EHP-30) - BMC Blogs Network

Collection of cases data

We obtained data of confirmed COVID-19 cases that were reported in Guangdong province, Italy and other places in the world from the Health Commission of Guangdong Province, the Ministry of Health of Italy, and the World Health Organization [2831]. The data include infected cases in the world and Europe since January 26 to March 12, 2020, the cumulative confirmed cases, newly reported cases, death cases, and recovered cases in Italy from January 30 to March 13, 2020 and in Guangdong from January 19 to February 26, 2020. The number of cumulative confirmed cases in Italy was 2 between January 30 and February 5, 2020, and was 3 from February 5 to February 19, 2020. The numbers of cumulative death and recovered cases were 0 from January 30 to February 19, 2020. We exclude the data in these periods and will focus on the Italian data between February 20 and March 13 because this is the early stage of the Italian outbreak, which allows us to compare the effectiveness of the prevention and control measures used in Italy and Guangdong by analysis of those datasets.

In Fig.1, we select February 20 as the first day when there were 4 cumulative confirmed cases in Italy, and January 19 as the first day when Guangdong had one cumulative confirmed case. On February 28 Italy closed schools in Lombardy, the most serious epidemic area, when the number of cumulative confirmed cases was already 650 (Fig.1a). This number is similar to the confirmed cases (i.e. 683) in Guangdong on February 2. In comparison, the Guangdong government took Seven Measures policy (e.g. blockade of unnecessary public places) on the third day (January 21) to prevent the spread of the epidemic and shut down all schools on January 28, when there were only 241 cumulative confirmed cases (Fig.1b). Therefore, Italy closed schools about 5 days (January 28 February 2) later than Guangdong. In Fig.1c we see that the number of cumulative cases has already exceeded 10 thousand in Italy, however, the newly confirmed cases in Guangdong began to decline since the 37th day and reached the peak of cumulative cases at only 1347 (Fig.1d). In summary, it took 14 days for Guangdongs reported cases to decline since its cumulative confirmed cases exceeded 1000.

In the early stage of the epidemic in Italy, the government did not take many prevention measures across the country. Thus, to study the epidemic of this stage, we extend the classical deterministic susceptible-exposed-infectious-removed (SEIR) epidemic model by dividing the population into susceptible (S), exposed (E), symptomatic/asymptomatic infected (I/A), confirmed (H) and recovered (R) compartments. The susceptible and exposed populations are further partitioned into quarantined susceptible (Sq) and quarantined suspected individuals (Eq). Based on the previous research [22], we adopt an autonomous model to study the early stage of the outbreak. We assume that the individuals exposed to the virus are quarantined with a proportion q by contact tracing. If the quarantined individuals are successfully infected, they will move to Eq compartment, otherwise they move to the Sq compartment. The individuals who exposed to the virus but were missed in the contact tracing with rate 1q can either move to the compartment E or still stay in compartment S, depending on whether they are infected or not. We assume that the successful transmission probability is and the contact rate is c. The infected individuals can be detected and then isolated at a rate of I or move to the compartment R at the rate of I due to recovery. The death rate of the infectious individuals with symptoms I and the isolated infected individuals H is . We also assume that the asymptomatic infectious is neither dead nor hospitalized. With these assumptions the model can be described by

$$ begin{array}{l} frac{dS}{dt}=-left(beta c+cq(1-beta)right)Sfrac{(I+theta A)}{N}+lambda S_{q},\ frac{dE}{dt}=beta c (1-q)Sfrac{(I+theta A)}{N}-sigma E,\ frac{dI}{dt}=sigma rho E-left(delta_{I}+alpha+gamma_{I}right)I,\ frac{dA}{dt}=sigma(1-rho)E-gamma_{A}A,\ frac{{dS}_{q}}{dt}=(1-beta)cqSfrac{(I+theta A)}{N}-lambda S_{q},\ frac{{dE}_{q}}{dt}=beta cqSfrac{(I+theta A)}{N}-delta_{q}E_{q},\ frac{dH}{dt}=delta_{I}I +delta_{q}E_{q}-left(alpha+gamma_{H}right)H,\ frac{dR}{dt}=gamma_{I}I+gamma_{A}A+gamma_{H}H.\ end{array} $$

(1)

The more detailed definitions of variables and parameters for model (1) are provided in Table1. As the population size is much larger than the size of the outbreak, i.e. S(t)/N1, the basic reproductive number R0 of model (1) is given by the following formula by utilizing the next generation matrix [32].

$$R_{0}=frac{betarho c(1-q)}{delta_{I}+alpha+gamma_{I}}+frac{beta(1-rho) ctheta(1-q)}{gamma_{A}}. $$

The above model will be used to study the early stage of the outbreak. However, with a series of prevention and control measures being implemented by the government, the autonomous model needs to be modified. Because of the difference before and after the implementation of control measures, piecewise functions of the contact rate and diagnosis rate are introduced to the autonomous model.

The contact rate is a constant in the autonomous model, i.e. the average number of susceptible individuals that an exposed people can contact without any control measures in a unit time. As the action of regional or national lockdown came into effect, peoples contact will gradually decrease. Thus, we assume that the contact rate is an exponential decreasing function of time t after the government has taken the control measures. The contact rate c(t) is assumed to take the following form:

$$ c(t)=left{begin{array}{l} c_{0}, tleq t^{*}+tau,\ left(c_{0}-c_{b}right)e^{-r_{1}(t-t^{*}-tau)}+c_{b}, t>t^{*}+tau.\ end{array}right. $$

(2)

Here c0 denotes the contact rate at the initial time without control measures, cb denotes the minimum contact rate under the current control strategies (cb

Similarly, because the efficiency of detection and availability of medical resources vary, we assume that the diagnosis rate is a time-dependent piecewise function rather than a constant. It is an increasing function when medical resources are adequate and a decrease function when they are not. The duration of diagnosis 1/I(t) is given by the following form:

$$ frac{1}{delta_{I}(t)}=left{begin{array}{l} frac{1}{delta_{I0}}, tleq t^{*},\ left(frac{1}{delta_{I0}}-frac{1}{delta_{If}}right)e^{-r_{2}(t-t^{*})}+frac{1}{delta_{If}}, t>t^{*},\ end{array}right. $$

(3)

where I0 is the diagnosis rate at the initial time. If the efficiency of detection is increasing with time t, then the diagnosis rate I(t) will increase. The parameter r2 measures how fast the diagnosis rate increases (i.e. the duration of diagnosis decreases) as more medical equipments or resources become available. The final diagnosis rate If is usually larger than I0. However, if the medical resource is inadequate, the diagnosis rate I(t) can decrease and the final diagnosis rate If can be less than I0.

According to the basic reproductive number R0, time-varying contact rate Eq. (2) and diagnosis rate Eq. (3), the effective reproductive number Rc(t) of time-dependent model is given by the following formula:

$$R_{c}(t)=frac{betarho c(t)(1-q)}{delta_{I}(t)+alpha+gamma_{I}}+frac{beta(1-rho) ctheta(1-q)}{gamma_{A}}. $$

Although the governments mandatory intervention plays a major role in epidemic control, peoples behavior changes such as keeping social distancing, wearing facial masks and washing hands due to media and expert suggestions cannot be ignored. Hence, the piecewise function similar to the previous contact rate and diagnosis rate is applied to the transmission rate . Considering that the impact of behavior change on the spread of the disease is not as great as the government mandatory intervention, the exponential change form is not used. If the number of reported confirmed cases increases, the public will enhance self-protection measures. Thus, we assume that the transmission rate is inversely proportional to reported confirmed cases H(t). The time-dependent transmission rate (t) takes the following form:

$$ beta(t)=left{begin{array}{l} beta_{0}, if frac{1}{klog(H(t))}>1,\ beta_{0}frac{1}{klog(H(t))} \ end{array}right. $$

(4)

where k represents the indicator measures strength of peoples awareness of self-prevention. The larger the value of k, the smaller the transmission rate.

According to the total population of Italy and the epidemic situation on February 20, 2020, we set initial values to be S(0)=60 480 000, H(0)=3 and R(0)=0. According to the WHO [33], the incubation period of COVID-19 is about 7 days. Thus, =1/7. The quarantined individuals were quarantined for 14 days, thus =1/14. We obtain other unknown parameter values by fitting data on reported number of cumulative confirmed cases, death cases and recovery cases from February 20 to March 10 in Italy. We utilized the nonlinear least-square (NLES) method in Matlab to fit model solution to the real data sets, as shown in Fig.2. The estimated parameter values are listed in Table1.

Fitting of the autonomous model to the data of COVID-19 in Italy from February 20 to March 10. (a) shows the number of cumulative confirmed cases, (b) shows the number of death cases, and (c) shows the number of recovered cases

Read the original:
The effect of control measures on COVID-19 transmission in Italy: Comparison with Guangdong province in China - Infectious Diseases of Poverty -...

Sep 14th 2020

OF EARTHS TWO planetary neighbours, Mars and Venus, it is Venus which shines brighter in the sky, comes closer in space, and is more similar in size and physical structurealmost Earths twin. But over the past 60 years it has been to Mars that science has paid the most attention. There are currently six operational spacecraft in orbit around it and two more on its surface; more are on their way. Venus is observed by a single small satellite. Yet following a new discovery made with telescopes on Earth, it is Venus which arguably now looks more likely to harbour the thing that planetary science cares most about: life.

The telescopesthe James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii and ALMA in Chilework not in visible light, but with sub-millimetre- and millimetre-wave radiation, which lies in between infrared light and radio waves. The hot depths of Venuss atmosphere give off a fair bit of radiation at these wavelengths. The molecules in the cooler air above them absorb some of it as it passes out into space; the specific wavelengths absorbed depend on the molecules doing the absorbing. As a team of scientists from various institutions has now reported in Nature Astronomy, one of the chemicals thus revealed appears to be PH3, or phosphine, a molecule composed of phosphorous and hydrogen.

This is a striking anomaly. In an atmosphere composed mostly of carbon dioxide, like Venuss, phosphine should be able to survive only briefly before chemistry destroys it. So for it to be present persistentlythe observers reckon it makes up perhaps 20 parts per billion of the atmospheresomething must be producing it at the same rate as atmospheric chemistry gets rid of it. But what?

On Earth, where there are on average a few parts per trillion of phosphine in the atmosphere, its presence seems to be almost entirely because of chemists (among other things, it is a potentially deadly by-product of badly run meth labs) and microbes. That means it has strong potential as what astrobiologists, who look for life and the things that make it possible in extraterrestrial contexts, call a biomarker.

This would be tantalising enough in itself. What makes it yet more fascinating is that for decades a small band of scientists has been suggesting that Venus might be able to support microbial life. The discovery in the 1960s that the surface of Venus was far hotter than the ovens used to sterilise surgical instruments seemed to rule out any chance of life there; the challenge which the extreme conditions pose both to life and to human technology did a lot to swing attention out towards Mars. But a few scientists wondered if there might be life above the searing surface. The water droplets in Earths clouds contain living bacteria; though Venuss clouds are incredibly acidic, might they too be inhabited by some sort of super-hardy bug? The detection of phosphine is thus a potential sign of life in a place people have previously imagined as habitable.

From the farthest planets to the nearestThe idea of detecting life through an otherwise inexplicable anomaly in a planets spectrum dates back to the 1960s, when it was given voice by James Lovelock, a British chemist and inventor. It came into its own when astronomers started discovering planets around other stars, or exoplanets. Most of these planets are in inhospitably unearthlike orbits, but some sit within what astronomers call the habitable zonethe zone in which, under various conditions, the surface might support liquid water. Astrobiologists like Sara Seager of MIT started putting real effort into working out what anomalous gases might be visible once they got telescopes good enough to analyse the spectra of such planets atmospheres.

A few years ago some of the scientists who work with Dr Seager and in her team started to get interested in phosphine. Though it is not clear how microbes make it, or something which decomposes into it, its association with life is pretty clear (among other things, penguin guano seems rich in the stuff). There seem to be no appreciable mechanisms for making it abiotically either in the depths of the Earth or through the photochemical reactions driven by sunlight which create other short-lived gases in the atmosphere. And it has some nice distinct spectral lines which should be eventually observable in the infrared light from some sorts of exoplanet.

In 2017 Jane Greaves of the University of Cardiff, thinking along similar lines, decided to see if the JCMT could be used to detect longer-wavelength phosphine lines (which are less affected by Earths atmosphere) in the atmosphere of Venusnot an exoplanet, but much easier to study. She and her colleagues saw something in the appropriate part of the spectrum; but the signal was weak. Dr Greaves decided to pursue the idea further using ALMA, an array of 66 antennae in the Atacama Desert which is much more powerful than the JCMT. Those observations, made last year, provided a significantly better signal-to-noise ratio.

After the first observations, Dr Greaves team and Dr Seagers heard about each other and pooled their resources. Dr Seagers team has worked out that any microbial metabolism producing phosphine would probably work best in a very acidic environmentrather like that of Venus, where much of the cloud deck is almost pure sulphuric acid. In the early 2000s some scientists suggested that curious features in the way that the clouds absorb ultraviolet light might be down to microbes making some sort of pigment or other compound to protect themselves from itperhaps pure sulphur, which could be made through photosynthesis. Dr Seager, Dr Greaves and some of their colleagues developed a new model for how such life might function, with cells reproducing in the cloud droplets and turning into desiccated spores as the droplets fall towards the surface; rising winds then bring some of these spores back up to the clouds, where they get absorbed intoor possibly catalyse the creation ofnew droplets in which to reproduce once again. This hypothesis is being published in the journal Astrobiology.

This speculation is fascinating, but also of a sort which might raise alarm bells. The team did not look at the whole spectrum dispassionately to see what was there; it specifically sought out a feature that could be explained by phosphine, a molecule in which at least some of the scientists were already invested, and found what they were looking for. What is more, as they say in their paper, we emphasise that the detection of PH3 is not robust evidence for life, only for anomalous and unexplained chemistry. Two things need to happen before things get truly exciting. Other teams need to make their own observations, ideally at other wavelengths. And a really thorough search for ways of making phosphine without biology under the conditions seen on and above Venus needs to draw a blank.

Mars retreatsOn the first of these two requirements, the history of methane on Mars provides a cautionary tale. In 2004 scientists using three Earth-based telescopes and a spacecraft orbiting Mars all thought they had detected what appeared to be the spectral signature of methane in the planets atmosphere. It was a classic Lovelock anomaly. Chemical models insist that methane does not last all that long in the Martian atmosphere, so these observations suggested there had to be a continuous source of the gas. And on Earth most, though not all, methane is produced by microbes. What was more, there was an increasingly widespread belief that, although there is now only a smidgen of water on the surface of Mars, there might be plenty more below it, perhaps in deep aquifers. On the Earth microbesincluding microbes that produce methaneare found many kilometres below the surface. Maybe Mars had a similar deep biosphere?

Maybe. But if so, there is currently no persuasive evidence that it is producing methane. In 2018 the European Space Agencys ExoMars Orbiter started to look at trace gases in Marss atmosphere with much more sensitive instruments than had been used before. It has seen no evidence of methane at anything like the level previously claimed, which makes it hard to credit the earlier observations. It is true that NASAs Curiosity rover has detected methane more recently; but with ExoMars coming up empty, those detections are hard to take at face value.

This tale of woe makes it very clear that looking through the Earths thick atmosphere for signs of a tiny amount of gas in the atmosphere of another planet is an exacting and error-prone undertaking. Hence the need for observations of phosphine over Venus from other groups using other instruments. At the same time, though, the chain of reasoning which made a deep Martian biosphere plausible applies to theories about life above Venus, too.

Mars appears always to have been a pretty cold, dry place. But in the distant past, when it had a thicker atmosphere, it clearly had running and standing water at its surface, at least sporadically; Curiosity is currently studying mudstones laid down in an ancient lake. As Mars lost its atmosphere its surface became ever more arid and frigid. That put evolutionary pressure on any microbes previously living in those surface waters to migrate deeper and deeper into the still warm and moist subsurface.

The surface of Venus, too, has dried out over its history: but through heating, not cooling. For billions of years the Sun has been growing brighter, thus changing the boundaries of its habitable zone. In the case of Mars, this warming was not enough to offset the cooling effect of losing most of the atmosphere. On Venus, though, it prompted what atmospheric scientists call a runaway greenhouse effect, boiling away the seas which many scientists believe to have graced the planets youth. If there had been microbes in the surface waters of Venus before this catastrophe, evolution would have urged them not into the depths, as it did on Mars, but into the skies, where even today the temperature remains bearable and water remains liquid, though admittedly in droplets not oceans.

This idea has been much further from the mainstream than that of subsurface life on Mars. One reason may be that, though the existence of Earths deep biosphere is quite widely appreciated, beyond some recherch microbiological circles the fact that there are also bacteria busily metabolising up in the sky is widely ignored. And to be fair, the high-biosphere analogy is not perfect. Though bacteria live in Earths cloud droplets there is as yet no evidence that they reproduce there. That may be because actually proving that it is happening is technically very difficult, but it may also be because the aerial microbes have no particular need to do so; the Earths surface, and the creatures that roam across it, provide bacteria with all the locales for reproduction they could possibly require.

The idea of Venuss atmosphere as a refuge is a beguiling story of life finding a way. But it remains very speculative. If the phosphine is indeed present as described, there needs to be a strenuous effort to find, or rule out, non-biological sources. The team behind the detection has done some of this; it argues convincingly that the phosphine cannot come up from volcanoes, drift down from comets, or be made in mid-air through photochemistry. But the chemistry that happens on surfaces can be very different to what happens in mid air, and Venuss atmosphere, as well as offering extremes of temperature, pressure and acidity, has surfaces to spare, both in its cloud decks and in the hazes that float above and below them. Imaginative chemists should have a field day working through ever more abstruse possibilitiesand may make some very interesting discoveries of their own on the way.

Then there is the possibility of going to take a closer look. NASA has not launched a mission to Venus since the 1980s, though some of its spacecraft have swung past it on their way elsewhere. But two Venus missions have reached the final stage of the selection process for the next round of its Discovery program of small planetary missions. One, VERITAS, is an orbiter mainly intended to map the surface in more detail; the other, DAVINCI+, features a small chemistry lab that would descend through the atmosphere beneath a parachute. If it can be made capable of detecting phosphine at a few parts per billion, the case for sending it would become even stronger than it already is. The next mission to Venus, though, is not American but Indian: the Shukrayaan-1 orbiter is currently pencilled in for launch in 2023, which should be enough time to put on a phosphine-optimised instrument.

If you can make it here...Carl Sagan, who wrote a rather remarkable article about the possibility of balloon-like creatures in the clouds of Venus in the 1960s, is well remembered in astrobiological circles for the dictum that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Planetary observations are full of anomalies: you cannot invoke extraterrestrials willy nilly to explain them, creating what the astrobiologist David Grinspoon calls aliens of the gaps.

No one is yet claiming that there is life on Venus, and so the current evidence can get by simply by being intriguing, which it definitely is. But if it does turn out that the phosphine is biological, the first half of Sagans dictum will need re-examining, at least as far as the hunt for life is concerned.

Not that long ago scientists had pretty much given up on finding life anywhere in the solar system beyond Earth. Now astrobiologists are investigating the possibility of life on, in or above Saturns moon Titan, or in the ice covered ocean of one of the planets other moons, Enceladus. Jupiters moon Europa is also a possibility, as are various other bodies which may contain subsurface oceans. And there is always Mars.

If science finds life on or in any of those bodies, the idea that its presence is in itself extraordinary will take a knock. If they find it over hellish Venus as well, or instead, life will come to look yet less like an odd exception. Indeed, at the microbial level at least, life may turn out to be quite ordinary.

But that will make it no less wonderful. In some ways, it may make it more so.

More here:
Scientists find possible signs of life in the clouds of Venus - The Economist

When embryologist Joseph Conaghan arrived at work at San Franciscos Pacific Fertility Center on March 4, 2018, nothing seemed awry. He did routine inspections of the facilitys cryogenic tanks, which store frozen embryos and eggs for clients who hope to someday have biological children.

But what he found was not routine; it was an emergency. Almost all of the liquid nitrogen inside Tank 4 had drained out. Conaghan and his staff tried to save 80 metal boxes of frozen reproductive material, but it was too late. The contents had warmed, damaging or destroying 1,500 eggs and 2,500 embryos.

Some belonged to a couple who traveled cross-country from their farm in Ohio, hoping to build their family from frozen embryos. A single woman in her early 40s was hoping to soon use her preserved eggs with Mr. Right.

For many, infertility is a significant challenge: In 2018, 12.7% of American women sought infertility services, according to a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report. As experts on regulation of the fertility industry, we are concerned about protecting those who need these interventions. There is little oversight in the U.S. of the industry, with no requirement that clinics report problems including tank failures. As Professor Dov Fox of the University of San Diego Law School told a reporter: These tanks specifically, theyre not regulated any better than kitchen appliances or farm tools.

The current age of reproductive technology dates to 1944, when lab technician Miriam Menkin successfully fertilized a human egg in a petri dish. She made history, creating a new method of human conception.

That year, 30 fertility experts founded the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. Today it is a global organization of about 8,000, including doctors, nurses, health care professionals and others.

But it wasnt until 1978 that in vitro fertilization emerged as a groundbreaking and controversial technology. That year marked the birth of Louise Brown, the first test tube baby.

Since then, the procedure has produced more than 8 million children worldwide. Some 80,000 children are born yearly in the U.S. through IVF, accounting for 1.9% of births.

Assisted reproduction is now a multibillion-dollar industry, with more than 440 U.S. clinics. In other industrialized nations, including the U.K., fertility treatment is monitored by independent, comprehensive regulators. In the U.S., government regulation is so light that the U.S. fertility industry has been called the Wild West. U.S. lawmakers have largely steered clear: The contentious battle over abortion has created a political minefield around any issue concerning conception or embryos.

Minimal regulations are scattered among federal, state and professional entities. Meanwhile, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offers limited oversight, auditing or inspecting only a sample of clinics each year, mostly to validate data.

Under a 1992 U.S. federal law, clinics must report assisted reproduction success rates to the CDC. Labs can be certified by one of two accrediting, nonprofit organizations. While some states require fertility labs to be accredited, others do not; certification requires the monitoring of tanks.

Without comprehensive monitoring, there is little known about problems within this industry. Some of the most complete information on frozen embryo mishaps comes from a study analyzing lawsuits from 2009 through 2019.

The authors reported 133 cases of embryo loss. More than half were related to two catastrophic freezer failures, including the San Francisco event and another that occurred, in a bizarre coincidence, on the same day at Ohios Ahuja Medical Center. The Ohio malfunction thawed 4,000 eggs, affecting more than 900 women or families.

But this study only includes cases that can be tracked because of legal filings. Clinics often require patients to sign arbitration agreements that keep cases out of court and out of the public eye.

Cryogenic tank failures should never happen. Although they store often irreplaceable genetic material, this equipment is minimally regulated.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration categorizes these tanks as Class II devices and exempts them from premarket scientific and regulatory review on safety and effectiveness.

There is also little oversight on the equipment while its in use. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine issued guidance on best practices for cryopreservation in 2020, noting that a known source of potential mishaps included human errors, such as a lack of quality control including liquid nitrogen filling schedule and inadequate inventory records.

Basic federal standards for the manufacturing and use of cryopreservation tanks would prevent future storage tank failures and the loss of frozen eggs and embryos. In lieu of federal action, New Jersey became the first state to regulate embryo storage through a law enacted in December 2019.

But ultimately, we believe only federal regulations can ensure uniformity so that standards dont vary from state to state. Clinics also need greater government oversight to ensure prompt communication about errors.

Many who hope to someday have a genetically related child like the couple from Ohio and that single woman looking for the right partner must place their trust in fertility specialists, clinics and equipment manufacturers that provide needed services and devices. Even minimal regulation would help ensure that others are spared from devastating losses in the future.

[Get our best science, health and technology stories. Sign up for The Conversations science newsletter.]

See more here:
The fertility industry is poorly regulated and would-be parents can lose out on having children as a result - The Conversation US

A fathers poor health before conception may increase the risk for pregnancy loss, a new study suggests.

Researchers analyzed records from an employee insurance database that included data on 958,804 pregnancies between 2007 and 2016, along with information on the health of the parents for an average of about four years before conception. The study is in Human Reproduction.

They scored the fathers health based on elements of the metabolic syndrome: diagnoses of hypertension, high cholesterol, obesity or diabetes, plus the presence of other common chronic diseases. About one-fifth of the pregnancies ended in either ectopic pregnancy, spontaneous abortion or stillbirth.

Compared with men who had none of these five indications of ill health, those who had one had a 10 percent increased risk for siring a pregnancy that ended in loss. Having two increased the risk by 15 percent, and men who had three or more had a 19 percent increased risk. The age of the mother made little difference, and the study controlled for other maternal and paternal health and behavioral factors.

We need to think about the father even pre-conception, said the senior author, Michael L. Eisenberg, an associate professor of urology at Stanford. We contribute half the DNA, so it makes sense that that would affect the trajectory of the pregnancy. I want to show that the father is important fertility is a team sport.

The rest is here:
Fathers Health Tied to Pregnancy Loss - The New York Times

Eels were once so abundant that they were considered a pest, but today the ancient creature is threatened by human activity and risks disappearing altogether, scientists and environmentalists warn.

How have eel populations changed?

Eels appear in human mythology and ancient art, and their bones have been found in tombs dating back thousands of years.

Just thirty years ago, they were so common that in France they were even classed a nuisance, accused of damaging salmon stock and destroying fishing lines.

"When I was young, eels were in every river and estuary," said French researcher Eric Feunteun, a leading expert on the creature.

"My grandmother had a cafe... and sometimes customers who were down on their luck would bring a bucket of young eel to pay for their coffee," he said.

In less than half a century, the situation has changed radically: the European eel's population is now just 10 percent of its 1960-70s level.

"We sounded the alarm in the 1980s," explained Feunteun, a marine ecology professor at France's National Museum of Natural History, but it wasn't until 2007 that the European Union required its members to protect the species.

The European eel now appears on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's critically endangered list, with its Japanese and American cousins just one category behind, on the endangered list.

What threatens eel populations?

The eel's complex life cycle makes it vulnerable to a wide range of human activity, including overfishing of a species that is a much-loved delicacy in Asia.

But that pressure is far from the only thing driving eel decline.

"We've known since the 1980s that there are multiple reasons and that fishing probably isn't the main factor," said Feunteun.

He points out that polluting waterways with contaminants like pesticides, medicines and plasticisers has a much greater effect, including on eels' reproductive capacity.

Habitat destruction also plays a significant role, according to Andrew Kerr, president of the Sustainable Eel Group.

He points to the "draining of three quarters of the wetlands of Europe. And then the one million plus barriers to fish migration in the rivers, like dams."

"So we basically destroyed the eel's habitat. And that's what's really killed it off," he told AFP.

Climate change is also a factor, shifting marine currents that carry eels from their spawning grounds in tropical waters to the rivers and estuaries where they will spend most of their lives.

Longer and slower routes mean higher mortality rates for young eels as they drift towards coastlines.

How are eels being protected?

Since 2012, Japan, China, Taiwan and South Korea have cooperated on conserving the Japanese eel found in their waters, including with fishing quotas.

But fishing limits alone are insufficient, experts say.

Other efforts include programs that range from helping eels over migration barriers, to moving young eels from areas where they are abundant to places where they are in decline.

Elsewhere, dams that can trap, injure and kill eels as they migrate have been adapted, and systems to trace them and interrupt trafficking have also been introduced.

More is needed though, experts say, including on habitat protection.

"It won't take long for the other 16 species of eels to get on the endangered list. So we have to have a global approach to safeguarding the eel," said Kerr.

What about artificial reproduction?

The eel has proved resistant to reproducing naturally in captivity and artificial fertilization is possible but expensive.

"The reproductive rate is low and it takes a long time for the (juvenile) glass eels to grow," said Ryusuke Sudo of the Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency in the Izu region, southwest of Tokyo.

Scientists have also never observed eel larvae eating in the wild, so their preferred food remains a mystery. They grow slower in captivity and each eel requires individual human intervention to reproduce.

Could the eel disappear?

Eels are believed to have been around for 60-70 million years, and have not diversified much, with just 19 species and subspecies in the Anguilla genus.

For all their longevity, much about them remains a mystery, with scientists only recently pinpointing the first spawning grounds.

In some ways, eels are "super-adapted", said Feunteun. They are able to breed in areas where most fish could not find food, because eel young can feed on "marine snow", dead and decaying plant and animal matter that drifts down the water column.

But the long distances they migrate and disperse leave them vulnerable.

"Seventy million years of existence and 40 years of decline," as Feunteun puts it.

Still, he holds out some hope.

"It's a species that has shown during previous climatic changes that it can rebound from very few individuals," he said.

See the rest here:
70 million years on earth, 40 years of decline: the endangered eel - Japan Today

23 November 2020

A recent paper published in the journalCell revealed the cautionary finding that unwanted changes are introduced after modifying genesin human embryos with CRISPR/Cas9. The study, led by Dr Dietrich Egli, assistant professor of developmental cell biology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, tested theeffects of CRISPR-based genome editingon embryos carrying a mutationin a gene called EYS (eyes shut homolog) which could lead to hereditary blindness. It shows that applying this potent approachto repair a blindness-causing gene in the formation of an early embryo discards the whole chromosome, or a considerable portion of it, and that the loss of the chromosome is widespread.

CRISPR-based genome editing has revolutionised molecular life sciences. It allows scientists to perform accurate modifications in the genomes of living tissues and may lead to new medical therapies such as innovative cancer treatments and curing hereditary illnesses. In October 2020, CRISPR discoverers (Professors Emmanuelle Charpentier of Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, Germany, and Jennifer Doudna of University of California, Berkeley) were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

However, like most innovative techniques, there are currently technical challenges. For example, it is possible to produce so-called off-target effects, where edits are performed in the wrong area. Researchers are still unsure as to how this might affect patients. Another concern is mosaicism, where some cells carry the edit but others do not. Such changes performed to sperm,egg and embryos can be passed to subsequent generations. In the second international summit on human genome editing, there was broad agreement among the experts in attendance that these risks are high.

Despite these serious concerns, in December 2018, Dr He Jiankui shocked the world by announcing that the first babies had been born with altered genomes (see BioNews 978). His work has attracted a backlash from the international scientific community and various governments. Dr He has been sentenced to three years in jail and fined for performing 'illegal medical practices'.

The new research indicates that CRISPR genome editing is currently not ready for clinical application to correct mutations in this early phase of human development. These findings should deter premature clinical use of genome editing on embryos. Thus, using CRISPR to edit the genomes of embryos is a far-off reality.

Due to the serious ethical concerns, the US government does not allow the use of federal funds to perform research on human embryos. The experiment was sponsored by private funding (the New York Stem Cell Foundation and the Russell Berrie Foundation programme). In Australia, section 15 of the Prohibition of Human Cloning for Reproduction Act 2002 prohibits a person from altering the genome of a human embryo in such a manner that the change is heritable by its descendantsandthe person intended this to be so. The penaltyfor this offence is imprisonment for 15 years.

We need to guide responsible and ethical research to achieve safe and effective use. In November 2020, the members of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) task force were charged with revising the2016 ISSCR Guidelines (the Guidelines for Stem Cell Research and Clinical Translation). The ISSCR is the largest stem cell organisation in the world. As a contribution to the developing and controversial stem cell field, this organisation has developed guidelines that address the global diversity of ethical, legal, ethical, cultural and political perspectives related to stem cell research and its translation to clinical application. The guidelines underscore widely shared principles that call for rigour, oversight and transparency. Strict adherence to these principles assures that such cutting-edge research is being conducted with integrity and that innovative medical treatments are evidence-based. Recent advances in this field include innovations in genome editing, organoidsand chimeras. Responding to these various developments in science, the updates will encompass a broader and more expansive scope of research and clinical endeavour, imposing rigour on every stage of the study, addressing the cost of regenerative medicine products and stressing the need for precise and effective public communication.

The persuasive ISSCR Guidelines have been adopted by some scientists, clinicians and institutions around the world. While mere guidelines do not supersede local laws, they could inform the interpretation as well as the development of local laws and provide guidance for research practices not covered by the law. As these guidelines will be updated soon, it is important that they do not encourage the clinical application of the CRISPR approach on genome-editing human embryos for the time being.

Read this article:
New study on CRISPR: the stake of unintended consequences in embryos - BioNews