The findings of a recent analysis conducted by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope, suggest that ecosystems suitable for harboring ticks that carry debilitating Lyme disease could be more widespread than previously thought in California, Oregon and Washington.
Bolstering the research were the efforts of an army of “citizen scientists” who collected and submitted 18,881 ticks over nearly three years through the Free Tick Testing Program created by the Bay Area Lyme Foundation, which funded the research, producing a wealth of data for scientists to analyze.
This new study builds on initial research led by the late Nate Nieto, Ph.D., at Northern Arizona University, and Daniel Salkeld, Ph.D., of Colorado State University.
This immense sample collection represented a multi-fold increase in the number of ticks that could be gathered by professional biologists conducting field surveys in far less time and at a fraction of the cost. This kind of citizen participation — which in the future could include smart-phone apps and photography — could become “a powerful tool” for tracking other animal- and insect-borne infectious diseases important for monitoring human and environmental health, according to study results published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.
This study expands on previous work in California and is the first study to produce high resolution distributions of both actual and potential tick habitat in Oregon and Washington.
“This study is a great example of how citizen scientists can help — whether tracking climate change, fires, habitat changes or species distribution shifts — at a much finer scale than ever before,” said Tanner Porter, Ph.D., a TGen Research Associate and lead author of the study.

The vast majority of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 clear the virus, but those with compromised immunity — such as individuals receiving immune-suppressive drugs for autoimmune diseases — can become chronically infected. As a result, their weakened immune defenses continue to attack the virus without being able to eradicate it fully.
This physiological tug-of-war between human host and pathogen offers a valuable opportunity to understand how SARS-CoV-2 can survive under immune pressure and adapt to it.
Now, a new study led by Harvard Medical School scientists offers a look into this interplay, shedding light on the ways in which compromised immunity may render SARS-CoV-2 fitter and capable of evading the immune system.
The research, published March 16 in Cell, shows that a mutated SARS-CoV-2 from a chronically infected immunocompromised patient is capable of evading both naturally occurring antibodies from COVID-19 survivors as well as lab-made antibodies now in clinical use for treatment of COVID-19.
The patient case was originally described Dec. 3, 2020, as a New England Journal of Medicine report by scientists at Brigham and Women’s Hospital a few weeks before the U.K. and South African variants were first reported to the World Health Organization. Interestingly, the patient-derived virus contained a cluster of changes on its spike protein — the current target for vaccines and antibody-based treatments — and some of these changes were later detected in viral samples in the U.K. and South Africa, where they appear to have arisen independently, the researchers said.
The newly published study, which builds on the initial case report, shows something more alarming still. Some of the changes found in the patient-derived virus have not been identified yet in dominant viral variants circulating in the population at large. However, these changes have been already detected in databases of publicly available viral sequences. These mutations remain isolated, the authors of the report said, but they could be harbingers of viral mutants that may spread across the population.

Females who are fit and healthy tend to burn more fat when they exercise than men, according to new research from a team of sports nutritionists.
The research, comprising two new studies from academics led by the University of Bath’s Centre for Nutrition, Exercise & Metabolism, analysed the factors that most influenced individuals’ capacity to burn body fat when undertaking endurance sports.
How the body burns fat is important to all of us for good metabolic health, insulin sensitivity and in reducing the risk of developing Type II diabetes. But, for endurance sport competitions, such as running or cycling, how the body burns fat can make the difference between success and failure.
Previous research from the same team has shown how, for endurance athletes competing in distance events, the body’s carbohydrate stores deplenish quickly when exercising. This means that that an athletes’ ability to tap into their fat reserves to fuel them on becomes essential to their performance.
The first study, published in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition & Exercise Medicine, involved 73 healthy adults aged 19-63 (41 men; 32 women). It tested the lifestyle and biological factors for optimal fat burning by asking participants to take part in a cycling fitness test and measuring key indicators.
Their results found that females and those who were physically fitter, right across the age ranges, burnt fat more efficiently when exercising.
The second related paper, published in the journal Experimental Physiology, took this a stage further to explore what molecular factors in our muscles and fat tissue determine how fat is burnt. This experiment involved the researchers taking fat and muscle biopsies from participants to analyse how differences in the proteins in fat and muscle tissue might affect their ability to burn fat.
It found that the proteins in muscle that are involved in breaking down stored fat into the smaller fatty acids, and proteins involved in transporting those fatty acids into the mitochondria in muscle (the powerhouse of the cells) consistently correlated with a greater ability to burn fat. The molecular factors explored did not explain why females burned more fat than males, however.
Lead author on both papers, Ollie Chrzanowski-Smith from the University of Bath explains: “Our study found that females typically have a greater reliance upon fat as a fuel source during exercise than males. Understanding the mechanisms behind these sex differences in fuel use may help explain why being female seems to confer a metabolic advantage for insulin sensitivity, an important marker of metabolic health.”
The researchers note that the ability to burn fat as a fuel appears to protect against future weight gain, ensuring good weight management. However, they caution that the body’s ability to burn fat should not be equated with an ability to lose weight. Losing weight is primarily produced by an energy deficit (ie. consuming fewer calories than we expend). For weight loss, in particular where individuals might be overweight, they stress the importance of diet and exercise.
Dr Javier Gonzalez, also from the University of Bath’s Department for Health, added: “Weight management is mainly about energy balance, so to lose weight we need to eat fewer calories than we expend through our resting metabolism and physical activity. However, people with a higher ability to burn fat as a fuel seem to be somewhat protected against future weight gain, which might be related to how fat burning affects food intake and energy expenditure.
“Ultimately, a greater capacity to burn fat as a fuel has potential benefits for endurance athletes, by delaying the timepoint when they run out of precious carbohydrate stores.”
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Imposter syndrome is a considerable mental health challenge to many throughout higher education. It is often associated with depression, anxiety, low self-esteem and self-sabotage and other traits. Researchers at the Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University wanted to learn to what extent incoming medical students displayed characteristics of imposter syndrome, and found that up to 87% of an incoming class reported a high or very high degree of imposter syndrome.
“Distress and mental health needs are critical issues among medical students,” says Susan Rosenthal, MD, lead author of the study published in the journal Family Medicine. “This paper identifies how common imposter syndrome is, and the personality traits most associated with it, which gives us an avenue to address it.”
Medical students nationwide report alarming rates of depression, anxiety and burnout. Identifying and intervening to support psychological well-being in these learners is a continuing challenge, especially among first year medical students.
Dr. Rosenthal and her colleagues examined imposter syndrome, which is defined as inappropriate feelings of inadequacy among high achievers, using a validated survey tool called the Clance Imposter Phenomenon (IP) Scale. Of the 257 students who completed the survey, 87% of students who reported high levels of imposter syndrome, were more likely to show an even higher degree of imposter syndrome at the end of their first year. They also found that students’ higher IP scores were associated with lower scores for self-compassion, sociability, self-esteem and higher scores on neuroticism/anxiety. Therefore, a high CIP score among entering students may be an indicator of future risk for experiencing psychological distress during medical school.
“Imposter syndrome is a malleable personality construct, and is therefore responsive to intervention,” says Dr. Rosenthal, who is also the medical college’s associate dean for Student Affairs. “Supportive feedback and collaborative learning, mentoring by faculty, academic support, individual counseling and group discussions with peers are all helpful. For many students, the most powerful first step in addressing and ameliorating imposter syndrome is normalizing this distorted and maladaptive self-perception through individual sessions with faculty and mentored small-group discussions with peers.”
It is of interest to note that the students in this study the medical college’s Class of 2020 were exposed to the traditional medical school curriculum. The following year, Jefferson introduced an innovative new curriculum, called JeffMD. Dr. Rosenthal and colleagues plan to compare the rates of imposter syndrome in students exposed to the novel curriculum. The new JeffMD curriculum emphasizes collaborative learning with a faculty mentor and a small group of students. The researchers hope, and will test whether this change in the learning environment can ameliorate feelings of imposterism.
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The link between psychological stress and physical health problems generally relates to a stress-induced immune response gone wild, with inflammation then causing damage to other systems in the body. It’s a predictable cascade — except in pregnancy, research suggests.
Scientists exploring the negative effects of prenatal stress on offspring mental health set out to find the immune cells and microbes in stressed pregnant mice most likely to trigger inflammation in the fetal brain — the source for anxiety and other psychological problems identified in previous research.
Instead, the researchers found two simultaneous conditions in response to stress that made them realize just how complex the cross-talk between mom and baby is during gestation: Immune cells in the placenta and uterus were not activated, but significant inflammation was detected in the fetal brain.
They also found that prenatal stress in the mice led to reductions in gut microbial strains and functions, especially those linked to inflammation.
“I thought it was going to be a fairly straightforward tale of maternal inflammation, changes in microbes and fetal inflammation. And while the changes in microbes are there, the inflammation part is more complex than I had anticipated,” said Tamar Gur, senior author of the study and assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral health, neuroscience, and obstetrics and gynecology at The Ohio State University.
“The complex interplay between the stress response and the immune system is dysregulated by stress, which is problematic for the developing fetus. There are key changes during this critical window that can help shape the developing brain, so we want to figure out how we could potentially intervene to help regulate these systems.”
The study was published recently in Scientific Reports.

Wealthier northeastern US states and Western European countries tended to have significantly lower mortality rates during second-wave COVID-19 infections, new research from the University of Sydney and Tsinghua University has shown. However, the pattern was not as general as expected, with notable exceptions to this trend in Sweden and Germany.
Researchers say mortality change could have several explanations: European first-wave case counts were underestimated; First-wave deaths disproportionately affected the elderly; Second-wave infections tended to affect younger people; With some exceptions, lower mortality rates occurred in countries with more socialised and equitable health systems.The researchers, Nick James, Max Menzies and Peter Radchenko, believe their new methodology could assist epidemiologists to analyse data consistently to assess the impact of COVID-19 mortality across populations.
“We have been able to look at the mortality rates in a more dynamic way,” said Mr James from the University of Sydney.
They have published their results today in the mathematical journal Chaos.
“We take a time series of infection rates by country, apply an algorithmic approach to chop it up into first and later waves and then do some relatively simple optimisation and calculations to determine two different mortality numbers,” said Nick James, a PhD student in the School of Mathematics & Statistics at the University of Sydney.

Men and women are impacted differently by brain diseases, like Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. Researchers are urging their colleagues to remember those differences when researching treatments and cures.
In APL Bioengineering, by AIP Publishing, University of Maryland scientists highlight a growing body of research suggesting sex differences play roles in how patients respond to brain diseases, as well as multiple sclerosis, motor neuron disease, and other brain ailments.
That is progress from just a few years ago, said Alisa Morss Clyne, director of the university’s Vascular Kinetics Laboratory.
“I have worked with vascular cells for 20 years and, up until maybe about five years ago, if you asked if the sex of my cells mattered at all, I would have said no,” Clyne said. Then, she worked on a difficult study in which data appeared “all over the place.”
“We separated the cell data by sex, and it all made sense,” Clyne said. “It was an awakening for me that we should be studying this.”
As of 2020, an estimated 5.8 million Americans were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, another 1 million with Parkinson’s disease, 914,000 with multiple sclerosis, and 63,000 with motor neuron disease. These diseases happen when nerve cells in the brain and nervous system quit working and, ultimately, die.
The changes are associated with the breakdown of what is called the blood-brain barrier — a border of cells that keeps the wrong kind of molecules in the bloodstream from entering the brain and damaging it.
Published research has shown differences in the blood-brain barriers of men and women. Some of the research suggests the barrier can be stronger in women than men, and the barriers in men and women are built and behave differently.
That could factor into known differences in the sexes, such as Alzheimer’s disease being more prevalent in older women than men, while Parkinson’s impacts men more frequently and tends to do so more severely.
The authors said they hope their article will serve as a reminder to researchers not just in their own field, but across the sciences, that accounting for sex differences leads to better results.
“I think there is an awakening in the past 10 years or so that you cannot ignore sex differences,” Clyne said. “My goal is to inspire people to include sex differences in their research, no matter what research they are doing.”
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Scrolling may work for social media, but experts say that for school assignments, kids learn better if they slow down their reading.In this pandemic year, parents have been watching — often anxiously — their children’s increasing reliance on screens for every aspect of their education. It can feel as if there’s no turning back to the time when learning involved hitting the actual books.But the format children read in can make a difference in terms of how they absorb information.Naomi Baron, who is professor emerita of linguistics at American University and author of a new book, “How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen and Audio,” said, “there are two components, the physical medium and the mind-set we bring to reading on that medium — and everything else sort of follows from that.”Because we use screens for social purposes and for amusement, we all — adults and children — get used to absorbing online material, much of which was designed to be read quickly and casually, without much effort. And then we tend to use that same approach to on-screen reading with harder material that we need to learn from, to slow down with, to absorb more carefully. A result can be that we don’t give that material the right kind of attention.For early readersWith younger children, Professor Baron said, it makes sense to stick with print to the extent that it is possible. (Full disclosure: As the national medical director of the program Reach Out and Read, I believe fervently in the value of reading print books to young children.) Print, she said, makes it easier for parents and children to interact with language, questions and answers, what is called “dialogic reading.” Further, many apps and e-books have too many distractions.Dr. Jenny Radesky, a developmental behavioral pediatrician who is an assistant professor of pediatrics at Michigan Medicine C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor, said that apps designed to teach reading in the early years of school rely on “gamification meant to keep children engaged.” And though they do successfully teach core skills, she said, “what has been missing in remote schooling is the classroom context, the teacher as meaning maker, to tie it all together, helping it be more meaningful to you, not just a bunch of curricular components you’ve mastered.”Any time that parents are able to engage with family reading time is good, using whatever medium works best for them, said Dr. Tiffany Munzer, also a developmental behavioral pediatrician at Mott Children’s Hospital, who has studied how young children use e-books. However, Dr. Munzer was the lead author on a 2019 study that found that parents and toddlers spoke less overall, and also spoke less about the story when they were looking at electronic books compared with print books, and another study that showed less social back-and-forth — the toddlers were more likely to be using the screens by themselves.“There are some electronic books that are designed really well,” Dr. Munzer said, pointing to a study of one book (designed by PBS) that included a character who guided parents in engaging their children around the story. “On the other hand, there’s research that suggests that a lot of what you find in the most popular apps have all these visually salient features which distracts from the core content and makes it harder for kids to glean the content, harder for parents to have really rich dialogue.”Still, she said, it’s not fair to expect parents to navigate this technology — it should be the job of the software developers to design electronic books that encourage language and interactions, tailored to a child’s developmental level.With preschoolers as opposed to toddlers, Professor Baron said, “there are now beginning to be some smarter designs where the components of the book or the app help further the story line or encourage dialogic reading — that’s now part of the discussion.”Dr. Radesky, who was involved in the research projects with Dr. Munzer, talked about the importance of helping children master reading that goes beyond specific remembered details — words or characters or events — so a child is “able to integrate knowledge gained from the story with life experience.” And again, she said, that isn’t what is stressed in digital design. “Stuff that makes you think, makes you slow down and process things deeply, doesn’t sell, doesn’t get the most clicks,” she said.Parents can help with this when their children are young, Dr. Radesky said, by discussing the story and asking the questions that help children draw those connections.For school-age kids“When kids enter digital spaces, they have access to an infinite number of platforms and websites in addition to those e-books you’re supposed to be reading,” Dr. Radesky said. “We’ve all been on the ground helping our kids through remote learning and watching them not be able to resist opening up that tab that’s less demanding.”“All through the fall I was constantly helping families manage getting their child off YouTube,” Dr. Radesky said. “They’re bored, it’s easy to open up a browser window,” as adults know all too well. “I’m concerned that during remote learning, kids have learned to orient toward devices with this very skimmy partial attention.”Professor Baron said that in an ideal world, children would learn “how to read contiguous text for enjoyment, how to stop, how to reflect.”In elementary school, she said, there’s an opportunity to start a conversation about the advantages of the different media: “It goes for print, goes for a digital screen, goes for audio, goes for video, they all have their uses — we need to make kids aware that not all media are best suited to all purposes.” Children can experiment with reading digitally and in print, and can be encouraged to talk about what they perceived and what they enjoyed.Dr. Radesky talked about helping children develop what she called “metacognition,” in which they ask themselves questions like, “how does my brain feel, what does this do to my attention span?” Starting around the age of 8 to 10, she said, children are developing the skills to understand how they stay on task and how they get distracted. “Kids recognize when the classroom gets too busy; we want them to recognize when you go into a really busy digital space,” she said.For older readersIn experiments with middle school and university students asked to read a passage and then be tested on it, Professor Baron said, there is a mismatch between how they feel they learn and how they actually perform.Students who think they read better — or more efficiently — on the screen will still do better on the test if they have read the passage on the page. And college students who print out articles, she said, tend to have higher grades and better test scores. There is also research to suggest that university students who used authentic books, magazines or newspapers to write an essay wrote more sophisticated essays than those just given printouts.With complex text in any format, slowing down helps. Professor Baron said that parents can model this at home, sitting and relaxing over a book, reading without rushing and perhaps generally de-emphasizing speed when it comes to learning. Teachers can be trained to help students develop “deep reading, mindful, focusing on the text,” she said.For example, students can be trained in digital annotation, highlighting but also making marginal notes, so that they have to slow down and add their own words. “We’ve known that for years, we’ve done it with print, we have to realize that if you want to learn something from a digital document, annotate,” she said.There are also studies that suggest that reading comprehension is better onscreen when readers page down — that is, when they see a page (or a screen) of text at a time, and then move to the next, rather than continuously scrolling through text.Seeing information on the page may help a student see a book as something with a structure, rather than just text from which you grab some quick information.No one is going to take screens out of children’s lives, or out of their learning. But the more we exploit the rich possibilities of digital reading, the more important it may be to encourage children to try out reading things in different ways, and to discuss what it feels like, and perhaps to have adults reflect on their own reading habits. Reading on digital devices can motivate recalcitrant readers, Professor Baron said, and there are many good reasons to do some of your reading on a screen.But, of course, it’s a different experience.“There’s a physicality,” Professor Baron said. “So many young people talk about the smell of books, talk about reading print as being ‘real’ reading.”

ETC-159, a made-in-Singapore anti-cancer drug that is currently in early phase clinical trials for use in a subset of colorectal and gynaecological cancers, could also prevent some tumours from resisting therapies by blocking a key DNA repair mechanism, researchers from Duke-NUS Medical School and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) in Singapore reported in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine.
Among the many therapies used to treat cancers, inhibitors of the enzyme poly (ADP ribose) polymerase (PARP) prevent cancer cells from repairing naturally occurring DNA damage, including unwanted/harmful breaks in the DNA. When too many breaks accumulate, the cell dies.
“Some cancers have an overactive Wnt signalling pathway that may make them resistant to this sort of DNA damage,” said Assistant Professor Babita Madan, from Duke-NUS’ Cancer and Stem Cell Biology (CSCB) Programme and a senior author of the study. “Understanding how this pathway drives resistance to existing therapies could lead to the development of novel anti-cancer treatments.”
Normally, Wnt signalling proteins interact with cell receptors to activate the translocation of another protein, called beta-catenin, into the nucleus, where it regulates the activation of several genes.
“We found that, when Wnt signalling sends beta-catenin into the nucleus, it activates a family of DNA break repair genes,” said Professor David Virshup, director of the CSCB Programme and co-senior author of the study. “Cancers with excessive Wnt signalling, like colorectal cancer, therefore, have an enhanced ability to repair DNA breaks and thus escape the effects of PARP inhibitors.”
The team found that blocking Wnt signalling with a drug called ETC-159 reversed PARP inhibitor resistance in several cancer cell lines.
ETC-159 inhibits an enzyme called porcupine, which in turn, prevent the secretion of Wnt proteins. ETC-159 is being tested in a clinical trial for use in cancers with overactive Wnt signalling, amongst other therapeutic indications
Analysis of this pre-clinical study shows that therapeutic doses of ETC-159 appear to be well tolerated by the gut, without causing toxicity. This means that a low dose of ETC-159, when given alongside PARP inhibitors, could prevent cancer resistance to treatment with PARP inhibitors while sparing intestinal stem cells, providing further options for treating cancers with hyperactive Wnt signalling.
Through this study, the researchers also learned that the same signal for DNA repair helps to prevent mutations from developing in stem cells residing inside the intestinal epithelium, further confirming the importance of normal Wnt signalling in stem cell maintenance.
ETC-159 was jointly developed by Duke-NUS and the Experimental Drug Development Centre (EDDC), a national platform for drug discovery and development hosted by A*STAR. The Wnt-pathway inhibitor is a novel small-molecule drug candidate that targets a range of cancers. It is currently progressing through clinical trials as a treatment for a subset of colorectal and gynaecological cancers.
“These findings improve our understanding of how Wnt signalling enhances DNA repair in stem cells and cancers, maintaining their genomic integrity,” said Dr May Ann Lee, a group head at EDDC and also a senior author of the study. “Conversely, interventions that block Wnt signalling could cause some cancers to be more sensitive to radiation and other DNA damaging agents.”
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