Publisher Health

The effects of a phenomenon called tree masting on ecosystems and food webs can be better understood thanks to new theoretical models validated by real world observations.
Some species of trees go through a process called masting, involving periodical cycles of synchronized mass production of fruits and seeds, followed by much lower production in the next year or over several subsequent years. Researchers at Hokkaido University have developed new computer-based models of masting that, amongst other uses, could help predict the effects of climate change on woodland and forests. Their work is published in the journal Ecological Modelling.
The effects of masting are not included in most commonly used dynamic vegetation models, a weakness that stimulated Tomomichi Kato, of Hokkaido University’s Research Faculty of Agriculture, and Lea Végh, of the National Institute for Environmental Studies, to address this gap.
The over-production of seeds during masting imposes considerable nutritional and energy costs on the trees, but it is believed to have evolved to ensure the survival of sufficient seeds. If the animals that feed on the seeds have a sudden excess supply, they cannot eat all of them and enough seeds will remain to develop into seedlings.
“In addition to understanding the effects of masting on trees, our model could be useful for projecting the long-term trend of food availability, such as acorn production, for wild animals,” says Végh.
Masting can cause an increase in the population of rodents, and lead to moth, tick and Lyme disease outbreaks, so it can have significant effects on the complex interactions between humans and the natural world.
Végh and Kato developed four models of masting using combinations of three major masting theories, which cover the trees’ resource budget, pollen limitation and exposure to weather patterns. The initial versions of their models are focused on the Japanese Oak (Quercus crispula), which allowed the predictions to be validated by observations in a local temperate forest research facility rich in oak trees.

The results indicated that masting could affect tree mortality. When trees allocate too many resources to the flowering and acorn production, they might not be able to secure resources for other processes, increasing the rate of tree death.
Of the four models, the one that focused on the resource budget and pollen limitation gave the best agreement with real observations.
“Our models can be readily adapted to other species, making them suitable for worldwide application, such as simulating the effects of climate change on masting and mitigating negative impacts on forest ecosystems and human-wildlife interactions,” says Kato.
Further developments of the model will initially cover all of Japan and parts of East Asia. To apply it even more widely, the researchers will then seek opportunities for obtaining validation data from collaborators in the USA and Europe.

The Wistar Institute’s associate professor Mohamed Abdel-Mohsen, Ph.D., has demonstrated, with his lab and collaborators, a connection between viral damage to the gut and premature biological aging. The group found that this pro-aging connection can contribute to both gut permeability and premature systemic & intestinal tissue aging in people living with chronic HIV infection, and their discovery is detailed in the newly published paper titled, “Distinct Intestinal Microbial Signatures Linked to Accelerated Systemic and Intestinal Biological Aging,” published in the journal Microbiome.
When people’s bodies age faster than their chronological years — a condition known as accelerated biological aging — they become more vulnerable to serious health issues usually seen in older adults, including cancers, heart diseases, brain disorders, severe infections, and reduced vaccine effectiveness. Dr. Abdel-Mohsen investigates what drives this rapid aging and how to create ways to slow down biological aging and improve health.
A prime suspect in this aging puzzle is the gut microbiome and its potential leakage into the bloodstream. The Abdel-Mohsen lab investigates how gut leakage can impact the immune system and lead to chronic inflammation, which may accelerate aging.
To delve into this question, Dr. Abdel-Mohsen and colleagues analyzed samples from people living with chronic HIV infection. Living with chronic HIV infection is known to potentially accelerate or accentuate biological age, which makes it an excellent model to investigate mechanisms of accelerated biological age in people living with chronic conditions.
In particular, the investigative team analyzed colon, ileum, stool, and blood samples from people living with chronic HIV infection and well-matched controls. Their analysis revealed a significant connection between disrupted gut microbiomes, increased intestinal permeability (leaky gut), and faster biological aging.
Notably, they observed a connection between accelerated biological aging and the microbiomes of both the colon and ileum, but not the fecal microbiome. This suggests that the location of the microbiome significantly impacts its effects and highlights the importance of sampling intestinal tissues to accurately understand the connection between the microbiome and age.
Biological age can be measured through several advanced methods like telomere length analysis and “epigenetic clocks,” such as the Hannum and Horvath clocks, which evaluate age based on DNA methylation patterns. DNA methylation, which involves methyl groups attaching to nucleotides in DNA, varies with age, and these epigenetic clocks use certain variations in methylation to estimate biological age.
The team’s application of several advanced methods to measure biological age to blood and intestinal tissue samples is the first analysis of its kind in people living with HIV, and their examination of the link between the microbiome and intestinal biological age in this population is a novel exploration of chronic HIV’s aging effects in the microbiome.
The work of Dr. Abdel-Mohsen and his team highlights specific bacteria and their by-products as potential accelerators of aging. These findings open new avenues for developing strategies to mitigate these bacteria and their byproducts, which could potentially enhance the duration of good health in the lives of people living with chronic conditions like chronic infections.
“More investigation is needed to fully understand the underlying causes and potential impacts of our findings,” said Dr. Abdel-Mohsen. “Moreover, there’s a crucial need to create strategies to prevent intestinal dysbiosis and gut leakiness and to determine how these strategies could affect an individual’s biological age. Our work is just the beginning of an exciting journey into enhancing health and longevity.”

About a decade ago, researchers in UC Santa Barbara chemistry professor Guillermo Bazan’s lab began to observe a recurring challenge in their research: Some of the compounds they were developing to harness energy from bacteria were instead killing the microbes. Not good if the objective of the project was to harness the metabolism of living bacteria to produce electricity.
“We needed the bacteria to be alive,” said Alex Moreland, a Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow who joined the Bazan research group as a graduate student in 2014, and currently works at UCSB’s Center for Polymers and Organic Solids. “While we were developing new molecules for that application, we found that some of them didn’t work because they were killing the bacteria.”
However, instead of brushing it off as a rather annoying laboratory curiosity, in subsequent research the team leaned into the apparent antimicrobial properties of these compounds, called conjugated oligoelectrolytes (COE). Fast-forward to today, and they now have the basis for a new class of antibiotics, one that not only shows promise against a broad array of bacterial infections but can also evade the dreaded resistance that has been rendering our current generation of first-line antibiotics ineffective.
“We realized that the molecular frameworks that we had been working on for some time could, if properly designed, yield a new class of antibiotics; something that is seldom found and that has profound implications for modern medicine,” Bazan said.
The Bazan Group’s proof-of-concept studies for a wide range of bacterial infections appear across multiple papers published in Science Translational Medicine, the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, and Chemical Communications.
A global problem In what has been called an overlooked pandemic, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global problem that affects all walks of life. In 2019, an estimated 1.3 million deaths around the globe could be attributed to AMR.
“This figure assumes that if the resistant bacteria was replaced with a non-resistant bacteria of the same type, the patients would have survived,” Moreland said. “These are excess deaths specifically related to resistance to antibiotics that were effective in years past.” In many cases, he added, the mortality rate for infections with certain resistant bacteria is more than three times higher than that for non-resistant strains.

Antibiotic resistance develops when bacteria are exposed to an antibiotic and evolve ways to defeat or bypass the antibiotic. Strategies include using the cell membrane as a barrier, destroying the offending molecule or eliminating it from the cell, or altering the drug’s target to render the antibiotic ineffective. These resistance mechanisms can be passed on to progeny bacteria or shared with other bacteria in the environment.
“There were 4.95 million deaths associated with antibiotic resistance in 2019, including the 1.3 million deaths that could be directly attributed to AMR, while around 10 million people die every year from cancer,” Bazan commented. “However, last time we checked, there were 27 clinical trials for new antibiotics and 1,300 for anticancer treatments. It is worth taking a moment to reflect on these numbers.”
Broadly effective, yet highly selective COEs appear to hit multiple targets by “remodeling” bacterial membranes, the international team of researchers demonstrate in Science Translational Medicine. Led by Kaixi Zhang, at the time a National University of Singapore (NUS) postdoctoral researcher in the Bazan Lab, the team deployed their compounds against a particularly difficult-to-treat microbe, Mycobacterium abscessus (Mab), infections of which are prevalent in patients with underlying lung diseases, such as cystic fibrosis. Not only does Mab have “an unusually thick and impermeable cell envelope” that repels antibiotics, it also has the ability to hide inside phagocytes, immune cells whose job it is to engulf and kill microorganisms.
In the case of Mab, these immune cells do not efficiently kill the bacteria and may unintentionally harbor them against antibiotics. Current treatments often fail despite long bouts with three to four antibiotic combinations for 12 to 18 months — more than half of the patients are not cured, yet more than 70% of the patients suffer from notable adverse side effects. The COE in this study proved more effective than antibiotic controls amikacin and imipenem at eradicating Mab in both in-vitro and in-vivo experiments.
The researchers attribute this effectiveness to the compound’s targeting of the physical and functional integrity of the bacteria’s cell wall.
“If you destroy the membrane, the cell will rupture and of course that’s going to kill the bacteria, but that tends not to be a selective mechanism,” Zhang said. “However, there are a lot of essential functions that happen in the membrane that can be interrupted by more subtle membrane targeting. Our hypothesis is that our compounds, by inducing membrane remodeling, inhibit multiple essential functions simultaneously.” This onslaught of disruption has a multiplicative effect on the bacteria, she added, making it 10 to 1000 times more difficult for them to develop resistance compared to conventional antibiotics.

The unique mechanism of COEs also figures heavily in another facet of antibiotic resistance or tolerance: the production of a biofilm, a state in which a community of microbes band together and produce a polymeric substance, creating a shield of sorts.
In the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, led by UCSB/NUS postdoctoral researcher Jakkarin Limwongyut, the team demonstrated another COE compound’s efficacy against Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a biofilm-forming drug-resistant bacteria that is considered an urgent threat by World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and is among the pathogens more traditionally associated with AMR. It causes a variety of diseases from ear infections to life-threatening pneumonia, and is especially prevalent in hospital settings.
“Some antibiotics can’t penetrate into a biofilm, but also when bacteria form biofilms, their metabolism changes because they have less access to nutrients,” said Limwongyut, explaining that the slower metabolism can render the effects of an antibiotic more tolerable to the pathogens and therefore less effective. “Recalcitrant and recurring infections, be that UTIs, pneumonia, endocarditis, or diabetic foot ulcer infections, are often associated with biofilms,” he said.
The team proved that their COE compound was capable of killing bacteria in established biofilms while also inhibiting the formation of biofilms. It’s a rare one-two punch in the world of antibiotics.
“There are a couple of antibiotics that do have anti-biofilm activity, but they either aren’t used systemically or they are used systemically but really shouldn’t be,” Moreland said, alluding to the high toxicity of some of these antibiotics. For example, polymyxins in a topical form are effective against biofilms, but are toxic to kidneys at the doses used systemically (intravenous injection). Polymyxins accumulate in patients’ kidneys, causing damage to the cells and tissue, and in severe cases, leading to kidney transplants.
In contrast, the Bazan Lab has developed COEs to be highly selective for bacteria. In Chemical Communications, Moreland and team investigated how structural features of these molecules could drive their affinity for bacterial membranes and their antibiotic activity without “detergent-like” effects. In detergents, the antibacterial action relies on the indiscriminate destruction of cell membranes.
“Your skin cells are pretty good at tolerating soaps and detergents but other cells in your body, and especially red blood cells, are very sensitive,” he said, which is why these compounds are used only externally or to decontaminate surfaces and not as therapeutic agents. For COEs, they found, membrane permeability and antibiotic action are not inherently linked, suggesting a novel mechanism behind the COEs’ activity, and critically, a mechanism that can be highly selective for bacterial membranes over mammalian ones. In fact, the molecules in the Mab experiment were able to reach inside of the phagocytes to kill the bacteria without damaging the mammalian cells.
“We don’t yet know the exact mechanisms, but we can definitively show that COEs kill bacteria and don’t kill mammalian cells,” Moreland said. He added, “this was not necessarily the case with the original molecules that we discovered early on, but with a lot of chemistry, and the help of tools such as machine learning, we were able to determine which molecular structures appear to strike the balance between efficacy against bacteria and safety for mammals.” In various infection models, mice also appeared to tolerate COE treatments fairly easily.
Looking ahead
It’s still early days for the Bazan research group, now mostly based in Singapore, as they continue to investigate mechanisms of action, search for additional novel properties and design and refine their molecules. Ideally, COE antibiotics would someday serve as safe and effective treatments, effective in cases of even the most resistant bacterial infections. Still, the road to clinical trials is a long one, albeit with interest and support from a variety of institutes and research collaborations around the globe, from the Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in the U.S.
“So far, so good. COEs have worked well in the experiments that we’ve done to-date,” said Moreland, adding that the molecules in the studies need further refinement before advancing into clinical trials. “There’s obviously more development required but we’re up to it.”

Body composition — often expressed as the amount of fat in relation to muscle — is one of the standard predictors of cardiac health. Now, new research from the University of California San Diego indicates more muscle doesn’t automatically mean lower risk of heart trouble.
The study, published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, found all muscle isn’t the same. Britta Larsen, PhD, says men with a higher area of abdominal muscle have a greater risk of cardiac trouble. It’s a completely different story for men with greater muscle density. The denser the muscle, the better: Men with the densest muscle in their abdominal cavity had about one quarter the risk of coronary heart disease later on.
“And the other really important thing to note is that we didn’t find this with women. It was just in men,” said Larsen, lead author and associate professor in the UC San Diego Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science.
The data were taken from computed tomography of subjects in the National Institutes of Health Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis, or MESA. Larsen explained that the subjects were in their mid-60s when the study — aimed at the understanding of the thickening of the arteries — began in the year 2000. Participants were recruited from numerous places around the U.S. and had follow-up visits for 20 years. Larsen noted that her group followed the subjects’ medical records for 12 years.
The researchers found that the large-muscle group’s heart-disease risk was as much as six times higher than the group of men with the smallest abdominal muscle area. Larsen said the team was surprised by the correlation of higher muscle area with higher coronary heart disease.
“Muscle has been overlooked in health for a long time,” Larsen said. “Researchers have really just focused on fat. But muscle is a large, active metabolic tissue, and it’s finally getting a little bit more attention.”
Larsen explains the distinction between muscle area and muscle density boils down to quantity vs quality. The computed tomography scans render a two-dimensional image. Muscle area, she said, was determined simply by pixel count in the image.

“Density is a little bit trickier. It’s sort of our proxy measure of muscle quality,” Larsen said. “It’s really a measure of how much fat has infiltrated the muscle cavity. Within the muscle itself, how much is pure muscle? And how much is fat content?”
The study also found no correlation between muscle and stroke, among men as well as women. The researchers drew a distinction between coronary heart disease and cardiovascular disease, which includes stroke — a block in the artery outside the heart.
“What that tells me is that muscle density isn’t just sort of a proxy measure of overall health or frailty or aging,” she said. “Otherwise, we would see it with stroke and other outcomes, too.”
Larsen said the work raises many more questions and possible avenues for future research. For instance: Why are women seemingly exempt from the muscle/coronary connection?
Larsen said a larger question concerns the biological mechanisms driving the muscle/coronary connection in men. Genetics could be involved, but she said her suspicions turn to diet and physical activity.
Co-authors on the paper from UC San Diego’s Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science include John Bellettiere, Rowena M. Tam and Rita Ryu. Other UC San Diego co-authors include Matthew Allison, Michael Criqui and Jonathan Unkart, all of the Department of Family Medicine & Public Health at UC San Diego; Robyn L. McClelland, Department of Biostatistics, University of Washington; Iva Miljkovic, Department of Epidemiology, University of Pittsburgh; Chantal Vella, Department of Movement Sciences, University of Idaho; and Pamela Ouyang, Department of Medicine, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

A UC Davis Health study found that a single dose of Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG), the vaccine for tuberculosis (TB), reduced liver tumor burden and extended the survival of mice with liver cancer. The study, published in Advanced Science, is the first to show the promising effects of the vaccine in treating liver cancer.
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most common type of liver cancer. It is also the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Current therapies include surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, immunotherapy and liver transplant. Yet, the therapy outcomes for liver cancer remain bleak.
BCG, the century-old TB vaccine, is derived from the live bacteria Mycobacterium bovis. It is considered safe and widely used around the world.
BCG is also known to boost the body’s immunity. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved it for the treatment of bladder cancer. Yet, the potential effect of BCG in treating solid tumors, such as those of liver cancer, remained unknown.
The new study, led by Distinguished Professor Yu-Jui Yvonne Wan, showed that one dose of BCG delivered under the skin reduced tissue scarring (fibrosis), improved liver function, lowered liver lipid, and led to tumor shrinkage.
“HCC is very difficult to treat. This cancer is considered a cold tumor, which does not respond well to immunotherapy,” said Wan, the study’s senior author and vice chair for research in the UC Davis Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. “We had a good reason to believe that the BCG vaccine could stimulate an immune response. So, we gave a dose of BCG to mice with liver cancer, and to our surprise, it was enough to activate the body’s immune system and reduce tumor load.”
How does the TB vaccine fight liver cancer?
The researchers gave a BCG dose under the skin to mice with liver cancer. This is the same way the BCG vaccine is given to humans. They found that BCG reduced inflammation and promoted the work of immune T cells. It specifically allowed the infiltration of CD4+ and CD8+ T cells and M1 macrophages into the tumor.

“We discovered that the BCG treatment resulted in the movement of T cells and macrophages to the tumor. It also activated the body’s immunity and enhanced IFN-γ signaling, which contributes to an anti-HCC effect,” Wan said.
Macrophages are white blood cells that can fight cancer. BCG induced IFN-γ signaling, resulting in cancer cell death.
The study also tested if the effects of BCG on liver cancer are sex dependent.
“While previous studies have shown sex differences in BCG effects on immunity, our data showed that both male and female HCC mice responded to the BCG treatment,” Wan added.
A better immunotherapy for liver cancer
Bacterial immunotherapy, such as BCG, offers an alternative to current immunotherapy based on immune checkpoint inhibitors. It has the potential to revolutionize the treatment approach for HCC.

“Our study showed that BCG immunotherapy for HCC is different from and superior to other immunotherapies. It requires only a single injection. In animal models, BCG generated better anti-liver cancer treatment outcomes than other standard immunotherapies, such as anti-PD-1. This means a potentially more simplified treatment plan,” Wan explained.
Future directions
The study findings suggest that the BCG vaccine could be repurposed as an HCC treatment. The discovery is significant, since BCG is already used safely around the world.
The researchers point to the need to explore the potential preventive ability of BCG and whether multiple doses would be even more effective at combating liver cancer. The efficacy could also be boosted through dosage adjustments, different timing and number of doses.
“If BCG treated a tough tumor like liver cancer, I’m optimistic it can work well on other hard-to-treat cancers. We would need more research in order to move to the next step. For example, we don’t know how long this immune memory lasts, so efficacy of this vaccine over time is still a mystery. The mechanism can be complicated, and further research is needed,” Wan explained.
The team also recommended examining the impact of BCG on the gut microbiome via the gut-liver axis.
The co-first authors on this study are Farzam Vaziri and Tahereh Setayesh. The other co-authors are Ying Hu, Resmi Ravindran and Dongguang Wei. This study was supported by the National Institutes of Health grants R01CA222490, R50CA243787 and T32 CA108459-15.

People with higher exposure to traffic-related air pollution were more likely to have high amounts of amyloid plaques in their brains associated with Alzheimer’s disease after death, according to a study published in the February 21, 2024, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Researchers looked at fine particulate matter, PM2.5, which consists of pollutant particles of less than 2.5 microns in diameter suspended in air.
The study does not prove that air pollution causes more amyloid plaques in the brain. It only shows an association.
“These results add to the evidence that fine particulate matter from traffic-related air pollution affects the amount of amyloid plaque in the brain,” said study author Anke Huels, PhD, of Emory University in Atlanta. “More research is needed to investigate the mechanisms behind this link.”
For the study, researchers examined the brain tissue of 224 people who agreed to donate their brains at death to advance research on dementia. The people had died at an average age of 76.
Researchers looked at the traffic-related air pollution exposure based on the people’s home address in the Atlanta area at the time of death. Traffic-related PM2.5 concentrations are a major source of ambient pollution in urban areas like the metro-Atlanta area where most donors lived. The average level of exposure in the year before death was 1.32 micrograms per cubic meter (µg/m3) and 1.35 µg/m3 in the three years before death.
Researchers then compared pollution exposures to measures of the signs of Alzheimer’s disease in the brain: amyloid plaques and tau tangles. They found that people with higher exposures to air pollution one and three years before death were more likely to have higher levels of amyloid plaques in their brains. People with 1 µg/m3 higher PM2.5 exposure in the year before death were nearly twice as likely to have higher levels of plaques, while those with higher exposure in the three years before death were 87% more likely to have higher levels of plaques.
Researchers also looked at whether having the main gene variant associated with Alzheimer’s disease, APOE e4, had any effect on the relationship between air pollution and signs of Alzheimer’s in the brain. They found that the strongest relationship between air pollution and signs of Alzheimer’s was among those without the gene variant.
“This suggests that environmental factors such as air pollution could be a contributing factor to Alzheimer’s in patients in which the disease cannot be explained by genetics,” Huels said.
A limitation of the study is that researchers only had the home address of people at the time of their death for measuring air pollution, so it’s possible that pollution exposure may have been misclassified. The study also involved mainly white people who were highly educated, so the results may not be representative of other populations.
The study was supported by the HERCULES Pilot Project, Goizueta Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and the Rollins School of Public Health Dean’s Pilot and Innovation Grant.

University of Alaska Fairbanks researchers have devised a way to remotely detect large landslides within minutes of occurrence and to quickly determine whether they are close to open water and present a tsunami hazard.
They write in a new paper that their method of determining a landslide’s location, volume and potential impact is rapid enough to support the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s goal of issuing a tsunami warning within 5 minutes of a landslide.
“The warming climate is causing glaciers to retreat, leaving behind valleys whose mountainsides and hillsides have lost their support,” said research seismologist Ezgi Karasözen of the UAF Geophysical Institute. “This is important, especially in regions like southern coastal Alaska, because huge masses of land can and do spill into water and cause tsunamis.”
Karasözen and Michael West, director of the Alaska Earthquake Center at the Geophysical Institute, detailed their method in a paper published Feb. 9 in the journal The Seismic Record. West also serves as Alaska state seismologist.
Their paper calls attention to the danger by pointing to a 2015 landslide that sent 100 million cubic yards of rock into Alaska’s Taan Fjord, located off Icy Bay, 65 miles northwest of Yakutat. The slide created a tsunami that stripped vegetation as high as 620 feet above waterline.
A prototype system by Karasözen and West capable of real-time detection has been in place since August in the area of the Barry Arm of Prince William Sound. It uses data from seismic stations already in the Alaska network.
State and federal agencies fear a landslide and tsunami could occur at Barry Arm, where Barry Glacier has retreated and left behind an unsupported fjord wall that has slumped about 650 feet in recent decades. Retrospective analysis of seismic station data at Barry Arm revealed three landslides that occurred in 2020 and 2021.

Karasözen and West write that the instability “has prompted concerns that a catastrophic failure could generate a tsunami with several meters of peak wave height reaching nearby communities in just 20 minutes.”
The U.S. Geological Survey is leading the multifaceted interagency monitoring of the area.
“With an earthquake, there are instruments that measure ocean wave heights, and tsunami warning centers are on alert after an earthquake,” Karasözen said. “But landslides aren’t systematically monitored in Alaska or elsewhere in the world. If a landslide-triggered tsunami were to happen, we wouldn’t know. That’s a major concern.”
The method by Karasözen and West involves quickly identifying a landslide’s long-period waves amid a seismic record busy with short-period waves created not only by a landslide but also by nearby earthquakes and glaciers and by human-caused activity.
A landslide’s initial onset generally registers as short-period waves; it isn’t until the slide accelerates that the identifiable long-period waves materialize. Landslides produce disproportionately more long-period energy compared with other sources. Most earthquake ruptures last only seconds, while landslides routinely last a minute or more.
Coastal fjords present a significant challenge for landslide detection because glaciers can create hundreds of prominent seismic events daily, the researchers write.

Karasözen and West created an algorithm to continually scan seismic data from multiple seismic stations to look for a landslide wave signature. Finding a match, their system will estimate the slide’s location and volume. In areas with good seismic station coverage, location can be estimated to within a few miles.
The goal is to have the system alert tsunami and seismology agency personnel, but more work remains before that can occur.
To create the algorithm, the two researchers analyzed data of the three recent Barry Glacier landslides and six additional landslides — five of them in Southeast Alaska and one on the west side of lower Cook Inlet, across from the Kenai Peninsula.
Other efforts have been tried over recent decades. Several researchers have shown that landslide seismograms can be used to estimate location and volume, but those efforts usually were unique to a region, required considerable fine-tuning and were not designed for real-time purposes.
Determining landslide location from distant seismic stations doesn’t allow for real-time assessment, due to the time it would take for the seismic waves to reach those stations.
West said the research augments ongoing monitoring and alert efforts.
“The potential for real-time monitoring of large landslides is one important component of the interagency effort underway to address Alaska’s landslide challenge,” he said.

Published42 minutes agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesBy Annabel Rackham and Philippa RoxbyHealth reportersBereaved parents who lose a baby before 24 weeks of pregnancy in England can now receive a certificate in recognition of their loss.Ministers say they have listened to bereaved parents who have gone through the painful experience of miscarriage.Campaigners said they were “thrilled” that millions of families would finally get the formal acknowledgement that their baby existed.All parents who have experienced baby loss since September 2018 can apply.They should visit the gov.uk website – applicants must be 16 years old, have been living in England at the time of the loss and be one of the baby’s parents or surrogate.In Wales, there are plans to deliver a similar scheme. A memorial book where people can record their pre-24 week losses is already up and running in Scotland.’Time to recognise invisible loss of our babies”I’m not sick, I just gave birth and my baby died’Campaigners want pre-24 weeks baby loss recognisedBabies who are born dead after 24 completed weeks of pregnancy are called stillbirths, and their deaths are officially registered. But this does not happen for babies who die before that stage.Pregnancy loss or miscarriage before 24 weeks is the most common complication of pregnancy, experienced by an estimated one in five women in the UK.’This piece of paper proves our babies existed’ Image source, Cate PooltonCate Poolton, 41, from Warwickshire, lost two babies in early pregnancy. She now has two children but she says the official certificates, which are not legal documents, will be “an incredible thing”.”It takes a long time to process and recover from losing a baby,” she said.”Regardless of how long you’re pregnant for, it’s still a baby you’ve lost and this piece of paper proves it existed.”She said the certificates would “get people talking about what they went through” and show employers the reason they are off work.”The only thing we have are the memories,” she adds. “There’s nothing to say our babies were ever anything.” A recent independent review looked at ways to improve NHS care and support for parents experiencing losses before 24 weeks of pregnancy – and it came up with 73 recommendations on how to make positive changes.Every year there are thought to be a quarter of a million miscarriages and more than 11,000 hospital admissions for losses because of ectopic pregnancies.Statistics also show that in 2021, 3,300 women had to terminate a wanted pregnancy for medical reasons.In response, the government decided that issuing certificates of baby loss on a voluntary basis should be a priority in England. ‘Deeply distressing’Myleene Klass, musician and TV presenter, who lost four babies during pregnancies and campaigned for the reforms, said: “I wanted to use my voice for something really powerful, but it turns out we’ve just gone on to move a mountain.”Describing the changes as one of her proudest achievements, she said women would no longer have to endure the “hell” she suffered.Kate Brintworth, chief midwifery officer for England, said she was pleased that women “will now be able to access a baby loss certificate which recognises the impact and importance of early pregnancy loss to them and their families”. By next month, bereavement services will be available in almost every NHS trust in England, seven days a week, she added.The Miscarriage Association said it looked forward to the baby loss certificate scheme being extended to losses prior to September 2018 as soon as possible.”For many, if not most people, even the earliest of losses can be deeply distressing, both emotionally and physically,” said Ruth Bender Atik, national director of the association. “The new certification scheme will make a genuinely positive difference to many who have experienced pregnancy or baby loss, offering formal recognition of the tiniest of lives.” The announcement has also been praised by Zoe Clark-Coates, who runs the pregnancy loss support charity The Mariposa Trust.She thanked “the tens of thousands of bereaved parents who have asked for this, and supported our work to see these introduced”.More on this story’Time to recognise invisible loss of our babies’Published3 April 2023’I’m not sick, I just gave birth and my baby died’Published19 October 2023Campaigners want pre-24 weeks baby loss recognisedPublished12 December 2022Related Internet LinksMiscarriage – NHSThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

Published7 hours agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Carlos DuarteBy Kayla EpsteinBBC NewsA ruling from the Alabama Supreme Court that frozen embryos are considered children, and that a person could be held liable for accidentally destroying them, has opened up a new front in the US battle over reproductive medicine.The southern US state’s largest hospital has paused its in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) services in the wake of the decision, over fears it could expose them to criminal prosecution.The University of Alabama at Birmingham health system said it would continue retrieving eggs from women’s ovaries. But it said it would halt the next step in the IVF process, in which the eggs are fertilised with sperm before being implanted into the uterus.”We are saddened that this will impact our patients’ attempt to have a baby through IVF,” the leading state medical provider said in a statement.”But we must evaluate the potential that our patients and our physicians could be prosecuted criminally or face punitive damages for following the standard of care for IVF treatments.”Medical experts and reproductive advocacy groups warned the ruling could have negative consequences for fertility treatments in Alabama and beyond. Conservative groups welcomed the ruling, arguing that even the tiniest embryo deserved legal protection.Why did this lawsuit occur and what did the court rule?The case stems from a wrongful death lawsuit brought by three couples whose embryos were lost at a fertility clinic in 2020.A patient had wandered into the place where the embryos were stored, handled them, and accidentally dropped them. As a result, the embryos were destroyed.The couples sought to sue the Center for Reproductive Medicine and the Mobile Infirmary Association under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. That law covers foetuses, but did not specifically cover embryos resulting from IVF.A lower court had ruled that the embryos did not qualify as a person or child, and that a wrongful death lawsuit could not move forward. But in its ruling, the Alabama Supreme Court sided with the couples, and ruled that frozen embryos were considered “children”. The wrongful death law applied to “all unborn children, regardless of their location”, the decision said.Concurring with the majority opinion, Chief Justice Tom Parker wrote: “Even before birth, all human beings have the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”What are the implications for Alabama fertility patients?The ruling does not ban or restrict IVF and in fact, the couples who brought the case actively sought out the procedure.But the decision may cause confusion about whether some aspects of IVF are legal under Alabama law, experts say. If an embryo is considered a person, it could raise questions about how clinics are allowed to use and store them.Elisabeth Smith, director of state policy at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told the BBC in a statement: “Not all [IVF] embryos are used, nor can they be. “To enact legislation granting legal personhood to embryos could have disastrous consequences for the use of IVF – a science many people rely on to build their families.” Ambiguity over the law could also extend to patients themselves, who may worry about whether the procedure remains available or legal.The Medical Association of the State of Alabama said in a statement: “The significance of this decision impacts all Alabamians and will likely lead to fewer babies – children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and cousins – as fertility options become limited for those who want to have a family.”How does this tie in with the US abortion debate?When the US Supreme Court struck down a nationwide right to abortion in 2022, it opened the door for states to make their own laws on the issue.Since the decision, Democratic-controlled states have expanded access while Republican-controlled states have restricted it.Alabama already has a total ban on abortion, at all stages of pregnancy.The White House called the Alabama ruling “exactly the type of chaos that we expected when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and paved the way for politicians to dictate some of the most personal decisions families can make”.Abortion opponents are also watching this ruling closely. The question of when an embryo or a foetus is legally considered a person is a factor in many state abortion restrictions.The Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group, described the Alabama ruling as a “tremendous victory for life”.”No matter the circumstances, all human life is valuable from the moment of conception,” spokeswoman Denise Burke said in a statement to the BBC. “We are grateful the Court correctly found that Alabama law recognises this fundamental truth.”Other anti-abortion activists said IVF was not as clear-cut an ethical issue in their eyes, compared to terminating a pregnancy.Eric Johnston, a lawyer who helped draft Alabama’s constitutional language on abortion in 2018, told the BBC: “By and large the pro-life community would say that fertilised eggs are in need of protection.”But he acknowledged there were couples with anti-abortion views who had used IVF to have children, and said he would never condemn them.”It’s a dilemma, and a dilemma is something where you don’t have a satisfactory answer,” he added.What could happen in other states?US states often tend to replicate each other’s legislation, and the US has seen this pattern play out with abortion. Often, states will take cues from each other about what laws or policies have successfully passed legislatures or withstood legal challenges.Though the Alabama ruling only applies within the state, experts said other states could see legislative attempts or lawsuits aimed at advancing the concept that frozen embryos should legally be considered children or people.But they said it appeared unlikely this particular case would end up at the US Supreme Court, as the issue of abortion did, because the Alabama ruling originated in state court and concerns an interpretation of state, not federal, law.According to the Centers for Disease Control, 97,128 babies were born in the US as a result of IVF treatments in 2021.How could this ruling affect US politics?The right to abortion has been a winning issue for Democrats since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, which guaranteed the constitutional right to abortion up to the point of foetal viability, about 23-25 weeks. In the wake of the Alabama ruling, Democratic candidates could run on a platform of protecting access to fertility treatment across the United States.Republican politicians, meanwhile, often side with religious conservatives who want abortion banned or limited in the US.Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley, the only significant contender remaining in the race against Donald Trump for the party’s nomination, endorsed the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision on Thursday.”Embryos to me, are babies,” she said. “When you talk about an embryo, you are talking about, to me, that’s life and so I do see where that’s coming from when they talk about that.”You may also be interested in:This video can not be playedTo play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.More on this storyAlabama passes bill banning abortionPublished15 May 2019Four ways the end of Roe v Wade has changed AmericaPublished24 June 2023

A ruling by the state’s Supreme Court could change common practices at fertility clinics in the state and possibly nationwide.The Alabama Supreme Court has opened a new front in the legal debate over when human life begins. Embryos created and stored in a medical facility must be considered children under the state’s law governing harmful death, the court ruled.Friday’s ruling was cheered by anti-abortion activists nationwide, who have long argued that life begins at conception. They were thrilled that, for the first time, a court included conception outside the uterus in that definition. But the strongest and most immediate effect of the decision will be on fertility patients trying to get pregnant, not women seeking to end their pregnancies.The Alabama ruling invites states to enact strict new regulations over the fertility industry that could sharply limit the number of embryos created during a cycle of medical treatment and affect the future of millions of stored frozen embryos. A concurring opinion even offered road maps for such statutes. That could have a chilling effect on a person seeking to have children through in vitro fertilization, whether single or part of a same-sex or heterosexual couple.What did the ruling say?The ruling is actually somewhat narrow. It applies to three couples who had sued the Center for Reproductive Medicine, a fertility clinic in Mobile, for inadvertently destroying their embryos. The plaintiffs argued that they were entitled to punitive damages under Alabama’s 1872 Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. Two lower state courts disagreed, saying the embryos were neither people nor children. The State Supreme Court reversed those rulings, saying that the embryos fell squarely under Alabama’s definition of minors and that the negligence lawsuits could proceed. The case will now go back to the State District Court for further litigation.What did the ruling not say?The decision is silent on the fate of other frozen embryos in Alabama because that issue was not before the court. The ruling is only about the terms under which plaintiffs may bring a negligence case against a fertility clinic for embryo destruction. However, it could eventually have major consequences for Alabama patients and providers.On Wednesday, the I.V.F. clinic at the University of Alabama at Birmingham announced it was temporarily closing to explore the implications of the court’s ruling on its patients and providers. One fear is that the clinic, doctors and even patients may face daunting new liability issues surrounding the handling of embryos.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.