Flying around the world may have become an unappealing prospect or a distant dream for most people during the coronavirus crisis.

If you are a Manx shearwater, however, there is no limit to your long-distance travel, and one of these small seabirds from the Hebridean isle of Rm was last year clocked journeying more than 7,564 miles from its Scottish breeding colony to the seaside resort of Las Grutas in Argentina.

An arctic skua from Scotland flew to Brazil a straight line of 6,845 miles while a swallow covered at least 6,400 to reach South Africa. A sanderling and a sandwich tern also made journeys of a similar length from Britain to South Africa.

The records were collected thanks to uniquely numbered rings fitted by volunteers to more than 1 million birds in Britain during 2019, enabling individuals to be identified for the rest of their lives.

The records, collected by the British Trust for Ornithology, provide insights into the remarkable migrations of birds but also the human and climatic pressures they face and their longevity.

Several species set new age records in 2019, including a fulmar humanely caught on Scotlands Sanda Island found to have a ring that was placed around its leg 41 years, 11 months and 17 days earlier. A siskin captured and ring-checked near the village of Tarbet in Argyll and Bute was found to have been ringed at the same site in 2010, making it the oldest known individual of its species.

A 50-year-old Manx shearwater caught by a ringer on Bardsey Island in Wales in 2008 holds the record as the longest-living wild bird in Britain after being ringed on the same small island in 1957.

Without fitting birds with uniquely numbered rings and monitoring their nests we wouldnt be able to follow their lives and our knowledge of them would be much poorer, said Rob Robinson of the BTO.

The data gathered by our fantastic volunteers help us to determine whether species are in trouble and, if they are, at what point of the lifecycle the problems are occurring.

Of 1,047,521 ringed birds, the most-ringed species was the blue tit, not known for its epic migrations. Second was the blackcap, traditionally a summer migrant which is now increasingly seen during winter because of global heating and the lure of garden bird feeders.

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British birds' long-distance feats and longevity are revealed - The Guardian

Throughout history, longevity and eternal life have been the ultimate goal of humanity. From the king of the ancient Chinese Qin dynasty to the European alchemists during the medieval age, countless people have devoted their lives to unveil the secrets of immortality.

Although none of such efforts have been proven to grant eternal life, nowadays, modern scientists succeeded to elongate the lifespan of simple organisms, such as worms and flies, by a considerable amount with meticulous manipulation of our genes. Among many of those studies, there have been three main methods that held their significance even in the human body.

Enzyme regulation

Most notably, the Scripps Research team discovered that the disruption of enzymatic pathways by small molecules can affect the lifespan of an organism. The team used Caenorhabditis elegans, a type of a roundworm, to test their hypothesis.

According to Benjamin Cravatt, Gilula Chair of Chemical Biology at Scripps Research, C.elegans worms were used for their experiment due to their relatively short lifespans (typically lives only a few weeks). Cravatts research involved about 100 compounds that were known to inhibit serine hydrolases in mammals.

In his experiment, Cravatt used each of the 100 molecules to block the enzymatic pathway and observed their effects on the lifespan of the C.elegans. When the team treated the worms that were 1 day into adulthood with the inhibiting compounds, they found that some of the compounds extended the average lifespan of the worm by at least 15%, according to Alice Chen, a graduate student in the Cravatt lab.

Chen elaborated that among the compounds, a carbamate compound called JZL 184, even extended the lifespan by 45% when treated at the optimal dose. Through further analysis, the team concluded that JZL 184 extended the worms lifespan by inhibiting fatty acid amide hydrolase 4(FAAH-4), which is known to break down a molecule called 2-AG, a molecule linked to aging in mammals.

Whats fascinating about this finding is that monoacylglycerol lipase was not present in C.elegans worms. MAGL usually breaks down the 2-AG molecules in mammals, but in the case of Chens experiment, FAAH-4 substituted the role of MAGL.

While the findings only apply to C.elegans worms as of now, the team stated that the FAAH-4 and 2-AG pathways will suggest a new path in extending human life.

Calorie Regulation

In addition, a research team led by David Sinclair, assistant professor of pathology at HMS, found that calorie regulation extends the lifespan of yeast cells. According to Sinclair, the PNC1 protein regulates a vitamin called nicotinamide, which is an inhibitor of the Sir2 molecule. Sinclair further hypothesized that since Sir2 typically extends the lifespan of yeast cells by stabilizing the ribosomal DNA, the regulation of nicotinamide, which is its inhibitor, will consequently prolong the organisms lifespan.

While the team believed that such a regulation process was initiated by the severe calorie restriction in yeast cells, they later discovered that calorie restriction had no impact on the Sir2 level. Thus, Sinclairs team tested the effect of the molecule NAD on PNC1 levels to confirm that NAD was responsible for altering the Sir2 level. It turned out: NAD had no effect on the PNC1 level.

Undeterred, with more in-depth analysis, the team finally reached the conclusion that nicotinamide, which is one of the products of the reaction between Sir2 and NAD, was responsible for the change in Sir2 level. Based on the correlation they found between Sir2 level and nicotinamide facilitated by calorie restriction, Sinclairs team is now investigating human genes that play the same role as PNC1, according to Harvard Medical School.

Mifepristone

Finally, the research team led by John Tower, professor of biological sciences at the University of Southern California, found that the drug mifepristone extends the lives of female flies that have mated.

Before the experiment, Tower had set a premise that the sex peptide in female flies from male flies reduces the lifespan of the female flies as it causes inflammation. In his study, he and his colleagues discovered that the drug mifepristone, also called RU-486, blocked the effects of the sex peptide during reproduction, which retained the female flies health and thus extended their lifespan.

What played the most significant role in the reaction was, according to Tower, a molecule called the Juvenile hormone.

According to Towers research team, the juvenile hormone is responsible for the growth and development of fruit flies throughout their life. The sex peptide, they elaborated, boosts the effect of the juvenile hormone, which causes harmful inflammation in the flies body and enervates the male flies by shifting the metabolic pathways.

Therefore, the inhibition of the sex peptide by mifepristone also regulates the level of juvenile hormone, consequently extending the lifespan of the flies. With their further testing of the drug on C.elegans, which has similar genes as those of humans, Tower suggested that their findings may be applicable to extending the lives of humans.

The life-extending technology is still in its burgeoning stage, as it only applies to simple organisms, such as worms and flies. However, while eternal life still seems improbable, humanity will proceed one step further to unveiling the secrets of longevity with scientists perpetual efforts.

View original post here:
Opinion: The secrets behind longevity HS Insider - Los Angeles Times

Agriculture

Published on July 24th, 2020 | by Andrea Bertoli

July 24th, 2020 by Andrea Bertoli

If you spend any time grocery shopping, you have probably noticed a proliferation of product labels organic, keto, vegan, made with whole grains, and more. Some of these labels have strict standards, some do not. And there is soon going to be a new label on products that means so much more: in 2020 were likely to see the label ROC added to products, and its a really good move.

ROC stands for Regenerative Organic Certification, and as a climate-smart consumer, its important for you to learn more about the nuances between this new label and regular organic.

Regenerative, as in healing, nourishing, and building; supportive of life cycles and biodiversity, and fair for humans and better for animals. The term was created in 2018 by the Rodale Institute, and is the certification now overseen by the Regenerative Organic Alliance.

So-called conventional agriculture, which is fossil-fuel dependent and relies heavily on chemical inputs to fertilize and protect the crops, can damage soil by depleting it of nutrients and damaging the very important soil microbiome. Heavy use of chemicals can also create superbugs, and these chemicals contribute to groundwater and waterway contamination (see, for example, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico).

Organic agriculture is great: its better for the planet and people because farmers do not rely on chemical-intensive inputs to manage their crops. It reduces the pesticide/herbicide exposure risk to farmworkers, reduces consumers exposure to pesticides/herbicides, and is often less damaging to soils and the localized ecosystem. Organic certification ensures that producers follow strict guidelines about the seeds, the soil amendments and inputs, the crops themselves, as well as the processing facilities.

And yet, when I first started farming, I was shocked to learn that many organic amendments include things like blood, feather, and bone meal waste products made with dead animals and their by-products. Not only is this super gross, it also supports the meat industries by making the waste products into a valuable commodity.

Most importantly, however, is that many organic-certified inputs do not actually improve the soil. While organic is better, it is not always proactively building, nourishing, and supporting the ecosystem in a holistic way. This is the gap that regenerative agriculture seeks to ameliorate. As weve learned more in recent years about the massive worlds of the microbiomesof land and sea, its become clear that the soil microbiome is more important than we thought.

Wheat fields in Nepal. Photo by Kakapoudel7 / CC BY-SA 4.0 license, via from Wikimedia Commons.

Soil is so much more than the dirt under our feet: its a living medium that is full of microorganisms and organic matter, and it helps support the plants. These microorganisms are the basis of life in healthy soils, and building a healthier planet begins by improving the health of the soils. In an undisturbed ecosystem, this natural cycling of nutrients ensures longevity of the ecosystem when we till and plant and dig and fertilize, we lose the connection to this natural cycle, and thus damage the health of the soil.

As I wrote in an article on our former site, Planetsave, soils are so often thought to be just a blank medium. However, soils are actually teeming with life of bacterial and fungal origin. Healthy soilssupport life on this planet in many ways, including filtering and regulating water flow into surface water; sustaining plants and animals; filtering pollutants, cycling nutrients like carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus; and giving structure to the land, ensuring that the trees, topsoil and even human structures maintain their place on the land. But perhaps most importantly, when soils are healthy, they store huge amounts of carbon, keeping it out of the atmosphere. But our current methods of agriculture have left us with degraded soils.

Healthy soils are extremely important, both for the sustainability of crop growth and nutrition, but also because truly healthy soils act as large carbon sinks for our increasingly carbon-rich atmosphere (and ICYMI, this is a big problem). The healthier our soils are, the more carbon they can absorb from the atmosphere.

The science is clear: soil health is intrinsic to climate health. According the the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO):

Agricultural soils are among the planets largest reservoirs of carbon and hold potential for expanded carbon sequestration (CS), and thus provide a prospective way of mitigating the increasing atmospheric concentration of CO2. It isestimated that soils can sequester around 20 Pg C in 25 years, more than 10 % of the anthropogenic emissions.

Building a better agricultural system thats focused on rebuilding our soils, providing better food, and improving livelihoods is long overdue.

Another issue thats important to consider is that farmers and ranchers are not incentivized to improve the soil often they are working to produce as much food as possible, and they might not have the time nor have the inclination to do the intense work of cover cropping, composting, and creating/adding the plans and soil amendments that will improve their crops in the long term.

If youve never thought about the importance of soil before, this is your warning light! According to some reports, we have only 60 years of functional topsoil left. Topsoil is very limited, and we need to undertake rapid and massive transformation to protect whats left and make the effort to build more.

ROC was established in 2017 by a group of farmers, business leaders, and experts in soil health, animal welfare, and social fairness now known as the Regenerative Organic Collective. As written on their site: We exist to heal a broken system, repair a damaged planet, and empower farmers and eaters to create a better future through better farming. Elsewhere on the site, they explain their goal as birthing a new standard to elevate farming around the world.

They have developed a very specific process by which producers can become certified, and it dovetails with existing certifications, like Organic certification or Demeter certification (the program that certifies biodynamic production). There are already lots of great brands on board, like Justins, Patagonia Provisions, Navitas Naturals, Dr. Bronners soaps, Natures Path organics, and of course, Rodale Institute, which has been talking about regenerative agricultural practices for years as the soil solution we need.

Its hard to argue with their vision for the world free of:

When organic first became a mainstream movement, it was derided as elitist, or superficial with the assumption that it was a silly project for wealthy elites, and that it wasnt actually going to help that much. But hopefully the above information can convince you this is not a political issue. Making a big shift away from chemical-intensive and fossil-fuel driven farming into a system that is holistic and regenerative is literally about saving the remaining soil we have and protecting the planet for generations of eaters to come.

Thankfully, bigger brands are paying attention to this important movement. General Mills announced in 2019 a huge commitment to regenerative agriculture, and if the movement continues and is supported by consumer, many other large companies will soon follow suit.

There is no official timeline yet, but hopefully well start to see this important label in the final months of 2020.

Tags: Agriculture, farming, farms, general mills, Patagonia, regenerative Organic Certification, Regenerative Organic Collective, Rodale Institute, soil microbiome, soils

Andrea Bertoli I'm a marketing and sales professional focused on mission-driven businesses, and currently I manage Sales and Partnerships for CleanTechnica. I'm also a journalist, green investor, wellness educator, surfer, and yogi. Find delicious food and wellness stuff on my Instagram @VibrantWellness.

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Regenerative Organic Certification (ROC): Farm Like The World Depends On It - CleanTechnica

Mars is the most explored planet in the solar system other than Earth. With all of our robotic visitors there, weve discovered that it is a world far too dry, cold and irradiated to support the scheming humanoids or tentacled invaders once imagined by science fiction.

But our trips to Mars have opened a window into the deep past of the red planet, when conditions were far more conducive to life.

This summer, NASA will launch its latest rover, Perseverance, on a seventh-month journey to Mars. Like its predecessor, Curiosity, Perseverance will touch down in the remains of an ancient Martian lake bed. What it finds there along with missions launched by China and the United Arab Emirates could help us Earthlings understand what Mars was like as a young planet some four billion years ago, and whether life ever blossomed on its surface.

Its a serene image: A river flowing into an expansive lake that fills a crater basin. Waves lapping at the shoreline; sediment piling into a delta. A lake bed caked with clay.

This is the type of aquatic environment that might support life, and it was once a familiar sight on Mars.

The evidence for the lakes and rivers is incontrovertible, said Ken Farley, project scientist on Perseverance and a geochemist at the California Institute of Technology.

Although Mars was once a wet planet, there is substantial debate about the origins, extent and life span of its long-lost bodies of water.

For instance, early Mars might have been warmed by the gassy belches of active volcanoes, which thickened its atmosphere and caused Martian permafrost to melt. Cataclysmic asteroid impacts might have also unleashed 900-foot mega-tsunamis that flooded the planets terrain. Theres even disputed evidence that an ocean once covered its northern lowlands.

Was it weird, short, transient events, or was there an ocean? Dr. Farley said. I would say theres no consensus. Theres a lot of ideas out there, and we really need a lot more data to sort it out.

One major question concerns the longevity of Mars liquid water. Nobody knows how much time is required for life to emerge on a planet, including on Earth. But the odds of life forming get better the longer that stable bodies of water persist.

During Curiositys eight-year journey across Gale Crater, an ancient lake bed, the rover discovered sediments that suggest water was present for at least a few million years. Curiosity also detected organic compounds, key ingredients for life as we know it.

What weve learned from Curiosity suggests that Mars was habitable, said Dawn Sumner, a planetary geologist at the University of California, Davis, and a member of the Curiosity science team.

Of course, habitable does not necessarily mean inhabited. The surface of Mars is exposed to damaging solar and cosmic radiation, which could have reduced the odds of complex, multicellular life ever forming.

If life did exist on Mars, there would be a strong evolutionary force toward being resistant to radiation, Dr. Sumner said.

There are microbial extremophiles on Earth that can endure intense radiation, often healing their own DNA on the fly. So its not far-fetched to imagine that there might be Martian microbes that could tolerate an onslaught of radiation. Plus, they may have been able to retreat underground if conditions became particularly hostile at the surface.

The big lesson about life, from the revolution of being able to use DNA, is life is able to go everywhere, Dr. Farley said. It is amazing. It will fill every niche it can get itself into, and it will do it in a relatively short period of time.

The bygone oases of Mars are now mirages of a distant past, and modern Mars is a dried-up husk. Earth, in contrast, has been habitable to microbes for most of its life span and has positively burst at the seams with biodiversity for eons. Why did these sibling worlds experience such different outcomes?

As baby planets, Mars and Earth were each swaddled in two protective blankets: a relatively thick atmosphere and a strong magnetic field. Earth has held on to both comforts. Mars has neither.

Mars mysteriously lost its magnetic mojo billions of years ago. With no magnetic sheath to protect it from solar wind, the Martian atmosphere was stripped away over time, though it still maintains a thin shell of its past skies.

These changes have left Mars relatively inert for billions of years, while Earth reinvents itself through tectonic activity, atmospheric shifts and the ingenuity of life.

This is great news for Earthlings, as we need those processes to survive. Yet the sheer deadness of Mars over the past few billion years could make it easier to reconstruct its early history.

Life has been so successful on Earth that its hard to trace back its origin, Dr. Sumner said. On Earth, everything is covered with organic matter from modern life.

One of the really cool and exciting things about Mars is that, because it doesnt have plate tectonics, large parts of its surface have these super-old rocks, she continued. Its a good place to go to try to understand what an early planet would be like.

Robot explorers on Mars have turned up countless insights about the red planet, but they have never found clear-cut signs of creatures currently residing there. Life, at least as we know it on Earth, simply does not seem probable on the Martian surface.

If theres any life on Mars now, it needs at least some liquid water, Dr. Sumner said. The surface of Mars now is very dry. Just incredibly dry. If theres life on Mars now, it would be in the deep subsurface.

Theres some evidence that liquid water is locked away in subterranean reservoirs, so perhaps there are sunless ecosystems lurking there. If these habitats exist, they are beyond the direct reach of our rovers and landers.

Recent detections of methane and other gases in whats left of Mars atmosphere are a tantalizing potential signature, Dr. Farley said, bolstering speculation about subterranean Martians. Many microbes on Earth produce methane, so it is possible that whiffs of the gas on Mars could be traced to alien life-forms deep underground.

Curiosity, which is equipped with a methane-sensitive spectrometer, has compounded the mystery by recording weird spikes of the gas at the Martian surface that remain unexplained.

Unfortunately, the satellites orbiting the red planet have not been able to provide backup for these readings, and the new NASA and Chinese rovers on the red planet may not be able to solve the puzzle.

Methane can also be created by a wide range of natural processes that have nothing to do with life. Some experts, like Dr. Sumner, say that the presence of the gas on Mars is not a surprise because it has all the geological processes it needs to produce the gas without life.

The discovery of life on Mars, either in the form of ancient fossils or subterranean reservoirs, would be one of the most momentous breakthroughs in human history. At last, we would have another example of a living planet, even if it only flourished in the past, implying that, at the very least, life can strike twice in the universe.

But even if we never find Martians, Mars is a place we can go to answer some of the questions about life on Earth, Dr. Sumner said. The red planet remains an eerie time capsule of the era when life first sprouted on our own world, and the direction it could have gone had all the factors that made our world possible not turned out just the right way.

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3 Great Mysteries About Life on Mars - The New York Times

July 23, 2020 For the first time, the raw genetic material that codes for bats unique adaptations and superpowers such as the ability to fly, to use sound to move effortlessly in complete darkness, to survive and tolerate deadly diseases, to resist ageing and cancer has been fully revealed.

Bat1K (Bat1K.com), a global consortium of scientists dedicated to sequencing the genomes of every one of the 1421 living bat species, has generated and analyzed six highly accurate bat genomes that are ten times more complete than any bat genome published to date, in order to uncover bats unique traits.

Given these exquisite bat genomes, we can now better understand how bats tolerate viruses, slow down ageing, and have evolved flight and echolocation. These genomes are the tools needed to identify the genetic solutions evolved in bats that ultimately could be harnessed to alleviate human ageing and disease, Emma Teeling, University College Dublin, Co-Founding Director of Bat1K and Senior Author.

To generate these exquisite bat genomes, the team used the newest technologies of the DRESDEN-concept Genome Center, a shared technology resource in Dresden, to sequence the bats DNA, and generated new methods to assemble these pieces into the correct order and to identify the genes present.

Using the latest DNA sequencing technologies and new computing methods for such data, we have 96 to 99 percent of each bat genome in chromosome level reconstructions an unprecedented quality akin to for example the current human genome reference which is the result of over a decade of intensive finishing efforts. As such, these bat genomes provide a superb foundation for experimentation and evolutionary studies of bats fascinating abilities and physiological properties Eugene Myers, Director of Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, and the Center for Systems Biology, Dresden, Germany, Senior Author.

Relationship to other mammals

The team compared these bat genomes against 42 other mammals to address the unresolved question of where bats are located within the mammalian tree of life. Using novel phylogenetic methods and comprehensive molecular data sets, the team found the strongest support for bats being most closely related to a group called Ferreuungulata that consists of carnivores (which includes dogs, cats and seals, among other species), pangolins, whales and ungulates (hooved mammals).

To uncover genomic changes that contribute to the unique adaptations found in bats, the team systematically searched for gene differences between bats and other mammals, identifying regions of the genome that have evolved differently in bats and the loss and gain of genes that may drive bats unique traits.

Our genome scans revealed changes in hearing genes that may contribute to echolocation, which bats use to hunt and navigate in complete darkness. Furthermore, we found expansions of anti-viral genes, unique selection on immune genes, and loss of genes involved in inflammation in bats. These changes may contribute to bats exceptional immunity and points to their tolerance of coronaviruses. Michael Hiller, Max Planck Research Group Leader, Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, and the Center for Systems Biology, Dresden, Senior Author.

Tolerance against viruses

The team also found evidence that bats ability to tolerate viruses is reflected in their genomes. The exquisite genomes revealed fossilised viruses, evidence of surviving past viral infections, and showed that bat genomes contained a higher diversity than other species providing a genomic record of historical tolerance to viral infection.

Given the quality of the bat genomes the team uniquely identified and experimentally validated several non-coding regulatory regions that may govern bats key evolutionary innovations.

Having such complete genomes allowed us to identify regulatory regions that control gene expression that are unique to bats. Importantly we were able to validate unique bat microRNAs in the lab to show their consequences for gene regulation. In the future we can use these genomes to understand how regulatory regions and epigenomics contributed to the extraordinary adaptations we see in bats, says Sonja Vernes, Co-Founding Director Bat 1K, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Senior Author.

This is just a beginning. The remaining ~1400 living bat species exhibit an incredible diversity in ecology, longevity, sensory perception and immunology, and numerous questions still remain regarding the genomic basis of these spectacular features. Bat1K will answer these questions as more and more exquisite bat genomes are sequenced, further uncovering the genetic basis of bats rare and wonderful superpowers.

SEE ORIGINAL STUDY: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2486-3

The rest is here:
The genetic basis of bats superpowers revealed - YubaNet

Every week there are numerous scientific studies published. Heres a look at some of the more interesting ones.

A Big Week for COVID-19 Vaccine Trials

Three of the most advanced COVID-19 vaccines published data from early and mid-range clinical trials this week. CanSino Biologics, along with Chinas military research unit, reported early data on its Phase II trial for its COVID-19 vaccine, Ad5-nCOV. The results in 508 patients showed antibody and T-cell immune responses. There were no reported serious side effects. The data was published in the journal The Lancet.

With one dose, CanSinos human adenovirus vector-based vaccine elicited receptor-binding and neutralizing antibodies in 508 patients peaking after 28 days, wrote Philipp Rosenbaum, senior infectious diseases analyst at GlobalData. However, in the 52% of study participants that had a high pre-existing immunity to the viral vector, both types of antibodies were only at half the level than in the group with low-pre-existing immunity. A second dose of the vaccine might solve this issue, but on the other hand reduce the number of people who can be vaccinated.

The CanSino vaccine uses a modified common cold virus as a vector to deliver the genetic material. This is a method also being utilized by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, which also published their results in The Lancet.

The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine stimulated a T-cell response within 14 days and an antibody response within 28 days.

Lead author Andrew Pollard, University of Oxford, UK, said, The new vaccine is a chimpanzee adenovirus viral vector (ChAdOx1) vaccine that expresses the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. It uses a common cold virus (adenovirus) that infects chimpanzees, which has been weakened so that it cant cause any disease in humans, and is genetically modified to code for the spike protein of the human SARS-CoV-2 virus. This means that when the adenovirus enters vaccinated peoples cells it also delivers the spike protein genetic code. This causes these peoples cells to produce the spike protein, and helps teach the immune system to recognize the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Last week, Moderna and researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and clinical trial centers published the data in The New England Journal of Medicine from its Phase I trial of mRNA-1273, its mRNA vaccine.

The interim analysis was of a two-dose vaccination schedule given 28 days apart at three different dose levels, 25, 100 and 250 micrograms in 45 healthy adults ranging in age from 18 to 55 years. The data published was on results through Day 57.

These Phase I data demonstrate that vaccination with mRNA-1273 elicits a robust immune response across all dose levels and clearly support the choice of 100 microgram in a prime and boost regimen as the optimal dose for the Phase III study, said Tal Zaks, Modernas chief medical officer. We look forward to beginning our Phase III study of mRNA-1273 this month to demonstrate our vaccines ability to significantly reduce the risk of COVID-19 disease.

The companys Phase II trial of the study, with two cohorts, healthy adults ages 18-55 years and older adults ages 55 years and above, are fully enrolled. That study is a placebo-controlled, dose-confirmation study focusing on patients receiving either a placebo, a 50-microgram or 100-microgram dose.

Pfizer and BioNTech announced preliminary data on July 1 from trials of their vaccines, with similar results.

Naor Bar-Zeev and William Moss, with the International Vaccine Access Center at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, wrote an accompanying editorial in The Lancet discussing both the University of Oxford/AstraZeneca results, also published in the journal, and the CanSino study.

These trial reports are hugely anticipated. The results of both studies augur well for Phase III trials, where the vaccines must be tested on much larger populations of participants to assess their efficacy and safety. Overall, they wrote, the results of both trials are broadly similar and promising, notwithstanding differences in the vector, in the geographical locations of the populations studies, and the neutralization assays used.

They noted that the importance of the studies looking at associations of age and sex with adverse events and immunogenicity by the Chinese group and longevity of response by the British groups, particularly given the differential burden of severe outcomes in older adults, and the emerging science around differential sex-specific vaccine effects. These COVID-19 vaccine trials are small so inferential caution is warranted, but the explorations are laudable. Ethnic diversity in both these trials was very limited.

They also point out that the safety results seen in the two trials are reassuring. But when things are urgent, we must proceed cautiously. The success of COVID-19 vaccines hinges on community trust in vaccine sciences, which requires comprehensive and transparent evaluation of risk and honest communication of potential harms.

Where are the Antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in the U.S.?

Researchers with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other investigators evaluated 10 locations across the U.S. for antibodies to COVID-19 from March 23 to May 12, 2020. By testing a cross section of 16,025 residual specimens, they estimated the proportion of people with detectible antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in 1.0% in the San Francisco Bay area to 6.9% in New York City. They found that there were six to 24 times more infections per site than reported COVID-19 cases. However, most people at those locations likely did not have detectable antibodies to the virus. The collection sites were San Francisco Bay area; Connecticut; south Florida; Louisiana; Minneapolis-St. Paul-St. Cloud metro area in Minnesota; Missouri; New York City metro area; Philadelphia metro area; Utah; and western Washington State. The authors concluded, The estimated number of infections was much greater than the number of reported cases in all sites. The findings may reflect the number of persons who had mild or no illness or who did not seek medical care or undergo testing but who still may have contributed to ongoing virus transmission in the population.

Proteins that Protect Synapses Discovered, Could Help Alzheimers and Schizophrenia

Researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio discovered a new class of proteins that protect synapses from being destroyed. This has implications for Alzheimers disease and schizophrenia. In mouse models of Alzheimers, they found that by removing complement proteins from the brain protected it from neurodegeneration. Complement is an immune system pathway that calls for macrophages to eat excess synapses during development. They identified proteins that inhibit this function.

University of Utah Researchers ID HIVs Dynamic Structure

Investigators with the University of Utah found that the lattice, a major structural part of the HIV virus, is dynamic. It is made of Gag and GagPol proteins and was thought to be completely static. But their new electron microscopy approach, that didnt involve freezing the viral samples, showed that the lattice was dynamic, moving, which may have implications for new approaches to therapeutics.

Oxytocin May Be Used to Treat Cognitive Diseases like Alzheimers

Researchers at Tokyo University of Science found evidence that oxytocin, a hormone dubbed the love hormone because of its ability to induce feelings of love and well-being, can reverse some of the damage caused by amyloid plaques in an animal model of Alzheimers disease. Alzheimers is associated with two abnormal proteins, amyloid plaques and tau tangles. The research was published in the journal Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications.

This is the first study in the world that has shown that oxytocin can reverse ABeta-induced impairments in the mouse hippocampus, said Akiyoshi Saitoh from the Tokyo University of Science, who led the research. At present, there are no sufficiently satisfactory drugs to treat dementia, and new therapies with novel mechanisms of action are desired. Our study puts forth the interesting possibility that oxytocin could be a novel therapeutic modality for the treatment of memory loss associated with cognitive disorders such as Alzheimers disease. We expect that our findings will open up a new pathway to the creation of new drugs for the treatment of dementia caused by Alzheimers disease.

Saitoh and his team perfused slices of the mouse hippocampus with Abeta to confirm that Abeta caused the signaling abilities of neurons in the slices to decline. Then, they perfused with oxytocin, noting that the signaling abilities increased. Further experiments concluded that oxytocin bound with oxytocin receptors in the membranes of brain cells.

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Research Roundup: Progress on COVID-19 Vaccines and More - BioSpace

JULY 24, 2020

IN GEODE, SUSAN BARBAS conceit is geological time, and it proves a timely guide. With a pandemic challenging our ability to predict the future, to act with care for strangers bodies, and to prioritize nature, her poems offer immensity / with speed bumps and a macro-view through a micro-lens. Her beguilingly exact poems chisel open interior spaces often unseen in everyday life. As in geodes, much of the richness of our perceptions and yearnings remains hidden, mute until it finds an Emersonian sayer. It takes a highly skilled poet to reveal us to ourselves; geode signals the arrival of one whose angle and anvil of vision is acute and necessary.

Barbas earlier book, Fair Sun (2017), includes her grandfathers testimony from his survival of the Armenian Genocide. While that collection explored historys felt presence, geode provides readers with a compass for the psychological terrain of the current moment and for the ecological and social forces that have catalyzed a health crisis. She situates lifecycles generational and geological, personal and planetary within Earths [b]lue-green grid of constant revolution, prompting us to reconsider the terms of our habitation. Like Elizabeth Bishop, she presents demands for a different world in a book that driv[es] to the interior, albeit of our own country and private lives.

Here we are ticking away, / all of us clocks, Barba acknowledges in The Minutes, but she posits the geode as a rival timepiece, independent of human reference. Shorn from limestone or shale, geodes often fit inside the palm, their plain exteriors disguising crystalline cores. A geode also records the context of its making in the way that a poem scores somatic experience in the sedimentary layers of language. [I]n words and rocks / the order is the meaning, she notes, cuing us to the specificity of her syntax and her poems layering.

Precision and subtle intelligence reward her reader. The poem Practice, for instance, offers a slender homily on how to root, in the earth, rage that comes from witnessing human folly.

Your anger is a scrim,clouding your vision.

You see, you hear,and then you testify, you judge.

Write the necessary elegies,the songs of temporary

fury. Human seasons areas leaves, not oaks.

See what foresthas arisen from the rot.

Allow yourselfto be as generous.

*

Oak, whose girthexceeds my reach

forever I amat your feet,looking up.

The poem switches from second to first person as stern self-advice becomes an ode to the oak. Dwarfing us in size and longevity, species of oak tree can live more than 500 years. This largeness (and largesse) in the natural world provides an example to the narrator. Bidding herself to write the necessary elegies, she tempers anger with metaphor human lives as leaves on long-lived trees, making seasonal departures. We, ourselves, wont be here long.

Depicting how sense perceptions rapidly inform ways we testify and judge, the poem counsels two responses: artistic resistance and the consolation of our relative inconsequence. As the poem shifts, it changes posture. It begins with the speaker looking out at the world of human squabble and concludes by looking up, praising a tree whose width surpasses her grasp.

Barbas poems reliably render the problematics of time, systems of care, and human responsibility on a comprehensive scale, venturing in unexpected directions. The early poem Exhibit 2 considers the psychology of habitation. What does it mean to dwell? What kind of living happens in the living room? What does our typical mode of shelter its prevalence of walls and doors invite or inhibit? She poses an answer in 10 compressed lines.

The centrifugal force of a room:four walls, a ceiling.Nothing can get inbut what you admit.Part dark harbor,part isolation chamber.A man whod lived out of doorssaid what hed missed mostwas not a roof, not a lock,but a doorknob.

In a single stanza, which means room in Italian, the walls and ceiling appear to flee from the center. The dweller, meanwhile, exerts agency in choosing what to admit, perhaps in both senses allowing entry or confessing. Privacy, fetishized in American culture and most often celebrated in its violation, seemingly protects us from vulnerability: what we do not wish to admit, whether guest or secret. In its spare exactness, the poem underscores the tension between isolation chamber and dark harbor, or loneliness versus chosen solitude. Thus the concluding meditation from a man who has lived not outdoors but, more concretely, out of doors suggests that the doorknob signifies having a choice in how we negotiate self and other, how we demarcate interiority in physical space.

Poems in geode also explore the crystalline webs between parent and child, lover and beloved, self and commodity: dyads with socially reinforced centripetal pull. Barba tracks individuation within these relationships and a primal desire for self-possession. As a daughter ventures into ocean surf, her dark head of hair bobs, visibly, as if she were performing a captioned ballet: ballon after ballon / this is my life! The childs postural repudiation of parental care is recast as a secular blessing in the poem Retrospective, Agnes Martin, which addresses the expressionist painter known for her years of disciplined solitude in the New Mexican desert. That poem concludes: if I could give you one thing / it would be untitled space. Autonomy is the essential assertion of children and artists, alike.

Similarly, the speaker in Wide Margin Love Poem bids for a Rilke-esque notion of love as the protection (rather than the collapse) of identity in a narrow column that threads the middle of the page.

Let melet yoube asbeforeor asafterme.

Wise about the claims individuals make on each other, even in love, the poet also contests the demands of commerce. In Blank Placard Dance, a poem about a protest dance performed in 1967 by Anna Halprin, the speaker urges her addressee to retain your stony / surface, stony structure. / Defend the palimpsest / that is your face. Expressivity, or the ability of the face to compose an array of changing affects, is what anonymizing data collection, targeted marketing, Botox, and stealth technology seeks to minimize or eliminate.

While geode features keenly cut lyrics, economic to the syllable, that elucidate murky interiors of what remains of private life, Barba also showcases her sophistication in other modes. In the epic poem River, she extends her concern for the tenets of personhood to the Colorado River, reinforcing her primary argument that we privilege human life and extractive capitalism over the earths health at our peril. The 12-page poem recounts the legal case The Colorado River Ecosystem v. The State of Colorado, which would have granted the river legal standing of personhood and rights akin to other ecosystems such as the Ganges River in India. The poem maps the rivers magnitude, extending 14 million acre-feet from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, supplying arterial lifeblood to nearly 40 million human beings, four million acres of cropland, and countless creatures. An epic catalog of the watersheds species includes the humpback chub and peregrine falcon, the bonytail and black bear, a list she punctuates with the poignant refrain, stay with me now.

Naming these dependent species underscores that the river is a person on whom an ecosystem, a nation of life, depends. Yet the case was dismissed in 2017 by the United States District Court for the District of Colorado, leading Barba to ask one of the books searing questions:

Is it by virtue of this immense life-giving laborthat the river is not a rights-holderbut a natural object,meant for profit,like slaves like womenan order apartlike the roe and the deer?

Misuse of the Colorado River is situated as part of a broader pathology of patriarchal capitalism, which refuses to acknowledge its instrumentalized objects as subjects. This section of the poem concludes with a riveting quotation from a 1968 casebook in property law: [A]fter all, land, like woman, was meant to be possessed.

The legal suit for the Colorado River epitomizes claims we might wish to make within our own lives against the exploitation of our labor, privacy, or attention. In the poem Dispersal, the narrator recounts making a long commute where she feels the light slip / the more she strove. Grappling with global news, her neighbors razed forest, and needy children in the backseat, she composes a petition:

re. space she wantednothing morethan a marginundisturbed

re. time she wantednever to accept it

the trees succumbingto storms with proper names

the grass succumbingto polypropylene

[]

she and I and youand they and he

seeds

seekingmore than a lifein the wind.

Susan Barba dramatizes ordinary life, riven with obligation, and a yearning for time, space, and an identity untethered to others claims. Her aesthetic marries the elliptical startle of Lorine Niedecker and Robert Creeley to the documentary impulse of Muriel Rukeyser and Charles Reznikoff, advocating for a comity with the earth and with our fragmented selves that is both visionary and diagnostic. We cannot have permanence or limitless abundance. But geode asserts that we might still claim purpose in our time on this spherical spinning rock.

Heather TreselersParturition(2020) won Irelands Munster Literature Centresinternational chapbook prize. Her poems appear inThe Cincinnati Review,Harvard Review,Alaska Quarterly Review,Southern Humanities Review, andThe Iowa Review,among other journals.

See the article here:
Driving to the Interior: On Susan Barba's geode - Los Angeles Review of Books - lareviewofbooks