From Yale University (US) : “Study examines severe breakthrough cases of COVID-19”

From Yale University (US)

September 7, 2021
Mallory Locklear

(Illustration by Michael S. Helfenbein)

A new Yale study provides important insights into breakthrough COVID-19 cases — instances where fully vaccinated individuals are infected by SARS-CoV-2 — and who is particularly vulnerable to serious illness.

In a study of hospitalized patients in the Yale New Haven Health System, researchers identified 969 individuals who tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 infection during a 14-week period between March and July 2021. Of that group, 54 were fully vaccinated.

“These cases are extremely rare, but they are becoming more frequent as variants emerge and more time passes since patients are vaccinated,” said Hyung Chun, associate professor of medicine (cardiology) at Yale and senior author of the study published Sept. 7 in Lancet Infectious Diseases.

As of Aug. 30, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (US) had received reports of 12,908 patients with breakthrough infections who were hospitalized or died — less than 0.008% of fully vaccinated individuals in the United States. “Identifying who is more likely to develop severe COVID-19 illness after vaccination will be critical to ongoing efforts to mitigate the impact of these breakthrough infections.”

While researchers in the new study observed a wide range of illness severity among the fully vaccinated patients who were hospitalized and tested positive for COVID-19, more than a quarter of this group were found to have severe or critical disease. All patients with severe or critical cases — 14 in total — required supplementary oxygen support, four were admitted to the intensive care unit, and three died.

These patients tended to be older — between 65 and 95 years old with a median age of 80.5 — and had preexisting comorbidities, such as cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes. A subset of patients was also on immunosuppressive drugs that may affect vaccine efficacy.

“The majority of fully vaccinated patients experience mild or no symptoms if infected with SARS-CoV-2,” Chun said. “This research identifies those who suffered more severe disease, and we need a better understanding of how to best manage these patients.”

Chun noted that many of the patients with severe breakthrough infections in the study were hospitalized before the Delta variant became the predominant variant of SARS-CoV-2 in the United States. Additional research will be needed to determine the impact of the Delta variant on the rate of breakthrough COVID-19, he said.

Chun and his colleagues are now investigating severe breakthrough cases to examine what is taking place at the molecular level. His team plans to study these patients to identify any unique mechanisms that may be driving disease severity in the breakthrough cases compared with COVID-19 infections in those yet to be vaccinated.

“It’s clear that the vaccines are highly effective, and without them we would be facing a much deadlier pandemic,” he said. “As effective as the vaccines are, with emerging variants and increasing cases of breakthrough infections, we need to continue to be vigilant in taking measures such as indoor masking and social distancing.”

Prerak Juthani, Akash Gupta, and Kelly Borges were co-lead authors of the study. Other Yale authors include Christina Price, Alfred Lee, and Christine Won.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Yale University (US) is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The Collegiate School was renamed Yale College in 1718 to honor the school’s largest private benefactor for the first century of its existence, Elihu Yale. Yale University is consistently ranked as one of the top universities and is considered one of the most prestigious in the nation.

Chartered by Connecticut Colony, the Collegiate School was established in 1701 by clergy to educate Congregational ministers before moving to New Haven in 1716. Originally restricted to theology and sacred languages, the curriculum began to incorporate humanities and sciences by the time of the American Revolution. In the 19th century, the college expanded into graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first PhD in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887. Yale’s faculty and student populations grew after 1890 with rapid expansion of the physical campus and scientific research.

Yale is organized into fourteen constituent schools: the original undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and twelve professional schools. While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each school’s faculty oversees its curriculum and degree programs. In addition to a central campus in downtown New Haven, the university owns athletic facilities in western New Haven, a campus in West Haven, Connecticut, and forests and nature preserves throughout New England. As of June 2020, the university’s endowment was valued at $31.1 billion, the second largest of any educational institution. The Yale University Library, serving all constituent schools, holds more than 15 million volumes and is the third-largest academic library in the United States. Students compete in intercollegiate sports as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA Division I – Ivy League.

As of October 2020, 65 Nobel laureates, five Fields Medalists, four Abel Prize laureates, and three Turing award winners have been affiliated with Yale University. In addition, Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including five U.S. Presidents, 19 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 31 living billionaires, and many heads of state. Hundreds of members of Congress and many U.S. diplomats, 78 MacArthur Fellows, 252 Rhodes Scholars, 123 Marshall Scholars, and nine Mitchell Scholars have been affiliated with the university.

Research

Yale is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU) (US) and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation (US), Yale spent $990 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 15th in the nation.

Yale’s faculty include 61 members of the National Academy of Sciences (US), 7 members of the National Academy of Engineering (US) and 49 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (US). The college is, after normalization for institution size, the tenth-largest baccalaureate source of doctoral degree recipients in the United States, and the largest such source within the Ivy League.

Yale’s English and Comparative Literature departments were part of the New Criticism movement. Of the New Critics, Robert Penn Warren, W.K. Wimsatt, and Cleanth Brooks were all Yale faculty. Later, the Yale Comparative literature department became a center of American deconstruction. Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, taught at the Department of Comparative Literature from the late seventies to mid-1980s. Several other Yale faculty members were also associated with deconstruction, forming the so-called “Yale School”. These included Paul de Man who taught in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman (both taught in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature), and Harold Bloom (English), whose theoretical position was always somewhat specific, and who ultimately took a very different path from the rest of this group. Yale’s history department has also originated important intellectual trends. Historians C. Vann Woodward and David Brion Davis are credited with beginning in the 1960s and 1970s an important stream of southern historians; likewise, David Montgomery, a labor historian, advised many of the current generation of labor historians in the country. Yale’s Music School and Department fostered the growth of Music Theory in the latter half of the 20th century. The Journal of Music Theory was founded there in 1957; Allen Forte and David Lewin were influential teachers and scholars.

In addition to eminent faculty members, Yale research relies heavily on the presence of roughly 1200 Postdocs from various national and international origin working in the multiple laboratories in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and professional schools of the university. The university progressively recognized this working force with the recent creation of the Office for Postdoctoral Affairs and the Yale Postdoctoral Association.

Notable alumni

Over its history, Yale has produced many distinguished alumni in a variety of fields, ranging from the public to private sector. According to 2020 data, around 71% of undergraduates join the workforce, while the next largest majority of 16.6% go on to attend graduate or professional schools. Yale graduates have been recipients of 252 Rhodes Scholarships, 123 Marshall Scholarships, 67 Truman Scholarships, 21 Churchill Scholarships, and 9 Mitchell Scholarships. The university is also the second largest producer of Fulbright Scholars, with a total of 1,199 in its history and has produced 89 MacArthur Fellows. The U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs ranked Yale fifth among research institutions producing the most 2020–2021 Fulbright Scholars. Additionally, 31 living billionaires are Yale alumni.

At Yale, one of the most popular undergraduate majors among Juniors and Seniors is political science, with many students going on to serve careers in government and politics. Former presidents who attended Yale for undergrad include William Howard Taft, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush while former presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton attended Yale Law School. Former vice-president and influential antebellum era politician John C. Calhoun also graduated from Yale. Former world leaders include Italian prime minister Mario Monti, Turkish prime minister Tansu Çiller, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, German president Karl Carstens, Philippine president José Paciano Laurel, Latvian president Valdis Zatlers, Taiwanese premier Jiang Yi-huah, and Malawian president Peter Mutharika, among others. Prominent royals who graduated are Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, and Olympia Bonaparte, Princess Napoléon.

Yale alumni have had considerable presence in U.S. government in all three branches. On the U.S. Supreme Court, 19 justices have been Yale alumni, including current Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. Numerous Yale alumni have been U.S. Senators, including current Senators Michael Bennet, Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Chris Coons, Amy Klobuchar, Ben Sasse, and Sheldon Whitehouse. Current and former cabinet members include Secretaries of State John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Cyrus Vance, and Dean Acheson; U.S. Secretaries of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Robert Rubin, Nicholas F. Brady, Steven Mnuchin, and Janet Yellen; U.S. Attorneys General Nicholas Katzenbach, John Ashcroft, and Edward H. Levi; and many others. Peace Corps founder and American diplomat Sargent Shriver and public official and urban planner Robert Moses are Yale alumni.

Yale has produced numerous award-winning authors and influential writers, like Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Sinclair Lewis and Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Vincent Benét, Thornton Wilder, Doug Wright, and David McCullough. Academy Award winning actors, actresses, and directors include Jodie Foster, Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Elia Kazan, George Roy Hill, Lupita Nyong’o, Oliver Stone, and Frances McDormand. Alumni from Yale have also made notable contributions to both music and the arts. Leading American composer from the 20th century Charles Ives, Broadway composer Cole Porter, Grammy award winner David Lang, and award-winning jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyer all hail from Yale. Hugo Boss Prize winner Matthew Barney, famed American sculptor Richard Serra, President Barack Obama presidential portrait painter Kehinde Wiley, MacArthur Fellow and contemporary artist Sarah Sze, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Garry Trudeau, and National Medal of Arts photorealist painter Chuck Close all graduated from Yale. Additional alumni include architect and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Maya Lin, Pritzker Prize winner Norman Foster, and Gateway Arch designer Eero Saarinen. Journalists and pundits include Dick Cavett, Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Fareed Zakaria.

In business, Yale has had numerous alumni and former students go on to become founders of influential business, like William Boeing (Boeing, United Airlines), Briton Hadden and Henry Luce (Time Magazine), Stephen A. Schwarzman (Blackstone Group), Frederick W. Smith (FedEx), Juan Trippe (Pan Am), Harold Stanley (Morgan Stanley), Bing Gordon (Electronic Arts), and Ben Silbermann (Pinterest). Other business people from Yale include former chairman and CEO of Sears Holdings Edward Lampert, former Time Warner president Jeffrey Bewkes, former PepsiCo chairperson and CEO Indra Nooyi, sports agent Donald Dell, and investor/philanthropist Sir John Templeton,

Yale alumni distinguished in academia include literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates, economists Irving Fischer, Mahbub ul Haq, and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman; Nobel Prize in Physics laureates Ernest Lawrence and Murray Gell-Mann; Fields Medalist John G. Thompson; Human Genome Project leader and National Institutes of Health (US) director Francis S. Collins; brain surgery pioneer Harvey Cushing; pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper; influential mathematician and chemist Josiah Willard Gibbs; National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee and biochemist Florence B. Seibert; Turing Award recipient Ron Rivest; inventors Samuel F.B. Morse and Eli Whitney; Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate John B. Goodenough; lexicographer Noah Webster; and theologians Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr.

In the sporting arena, Yale alumni include baseball players Ron Darling and Craig Breslow and baseball executives Theo Epstein and George Weiss; football players Calvin Hill, Gary Fenick, Amos Alonzo Stagg, and “the Father of American Football” Walter Camp; ice hockey players Chris Higgins and Olympian Helen Resor; Olympic figure skaters Sarah Hughes and Nathan Chen; nine-time U.S. Squash men’s champion Julian Illingworth; Olympic swimmer Don Schollander; Olympic rowers Josh West and Rusty Wailes; Olympic sailor Stuart McNay; Olympic runner Frank Shorter; and others.

From Yale University (US) : “New model helps map the individual variations of mental illness”

From Yale University (US)

July 27, 2021
Bill Hathaway

Illustration: Michael S. Helfenbein.

The diagnosis of mental illnesses such as major depression, schizophrenia, or anxiety disorder is typically based on coarse groupings of symptoms. These symptoms, however, vary widely among individuals as do the brain circuits that cause them. This complexity explains why drug treatments work for some patients, but not others.

Now Yale researchers have developed a novel framework for “computational psychiatry” that blends neuroimaging, pharmacology, biophysical modeling, and neural gene expression that maps these variations in individual symptoms to specific neural circuits.

The findings, reported in tandem papers published in the journal eLife, promise to help create more targeted therapies for individual patients. The two studies were led, respectively, by Alan Anticevic and John Murray, associate professors of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine.

In one study [eLife], a team led by Anticevic and Jie Lisa Ji, a Ph.D. student at Yale, used advanced statistical approaches to identify precise sets of symptoms that describe specific patients more accurately than traditional coarse diagnoses of mental illness, which do not account for individual variation of symptoms or the neural biology which causes them. The researchers found that these refined symptom signatures revealed precise neural circuits that more precisely captured variation across hundreds of patients diagnosed with psychotic disorders.

For instance, they found patients diagnosed with schizophrenia exhibited a diverse array of neural circuitry, the network of neurons which carry out brain function, that could be linked to specific symptoms of individual patients.

“This study shows the promise of computational psychiatry for personalized patient selection and treatment design using human brain imaging technology,” Anticevic said.

In the related study [eLife], led by Murray and Ph.D. student Joshua Burt, researchers simulated the effects of drugs on brain circuits. They used a new neuroimaging technology which incorporates a computational model that includes data on patterns of neural gene expression.

Specifically, the team studied the effects of LSD, a well-known hallucinogen known to alter consciousness and perception. Murray and colleagues were able to map personalized brain and psychological effects induced by LSD.

Understanding the neural effects of such substances can advance the treatment of mental illness, the researchers said. LSD is of particular interest to researchers because it can mimic symptoms of psychosis found in diseases like schizophrenia. It also activates a serotonin receptor which is a major target of antidepressants.

“We can develop a mechanistic view of how drugs alter brain function in specific regions and use that information to understand the brains of individual patients,” said Murray.

By linking personalized brain patterns to symptoms and simulating the effect of drugs on the human brain, these technologies can not only help clinicians to predict which drugs might best help patients but spur development of new drugs tailored to individuals, the authors say.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Yale University (US) is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The Collegiate School was renamed Yale College in 1718 to honor the school’s largest private benefactor for the first century of its existence, Elihu Yale. Yale University is consistently ranked as one of the top universities and is considered one of the most prestigious in the nation.

Chartered by Connecticut Colony, the Collegiate School was established in 1701 by clergy to educate Congregational ministers before moving to New Haven in 1716. Originally restricted to theology and sacred languages, the curriculum began to incorporate humanities and sciences by the time of the American Revolution. In the 19th century, the college expanded into graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first PhD in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887. Yale’s faculty and student populations grew after 1890 with rapid expansion of the physical campus and scientific research.

Yale is organized into fourteen constituent schools: the original undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and twelve professional schools. While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each school’s faculty oversees its curriculum and degree programs. In addition to a central campus in downtown New Haven, the university owns athletic facilities in western New Haven, a campus in West Haven, Connecticut, and forests and nature preserves throughout New England. As of June 2020, the university’s endowment was valued at $31.1 billion, the second largest of any educational institution. The Yale University Library, serving all constituent schools, holds more than 15 million volumes and is the third-largest academic library in the United States. Students compete in intercollegiate sports as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA Division I – Ivy League.

As of October 2020, 65 Nobel laureates, five Fields Medalists, four Abel Prize laureates, and three Turing award winners have been affiliated with Yale University. In addition, Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including five U.S. Presidents, 19 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 31 living billionaires, and many heads of state. Hundreds of members of Congress and many U.S. diplomats, 78 MacArthur Fellows, 252 Rhodes Scholars, 123 Marshall Scholars, and nine Mitchell Scholars have been affiliated with the university.

Research

Yale is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU) (US) and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation (US), Yale spent $990 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 15th in the nation.

Yale’s faculty include 61 members of the National Academy of Sciences (US), 7 members of the National Academy of Engineering (US) and 49 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (US). The college is, after normalization for institution size, the tenth-largest baccalaureate source of doctoral degree recipients in the United States, and the largest such source within the Ivy League.

Yale’s English and Comparative Literature departments were part of the New Criticism movement. Of the New Critics, Robert Penn Warren, W.K. Wimsatt, and Cleanth Brooks were all Yale faculty. Later, the Yale Comparative literature department became a center of American deconstruction. Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, taught at the Department of Comparative Literature from the late seventies to mid-1980s. Several other Yale faculty members were also associated with deconstruction, forming the so-called “Yale School”. These included Paul de Man who taught in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman (both taught in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature), and Harold Bloom (English), whose theoretical position was always somewhat specific, and who ultimately took a very different path from the rest of this group. Yale’s history department has also originated important intellectual trends. Historians C. Vann Woodward and David Brion Davis are credited with beginning in the 1960s and 1970s an important stream of southern historians; likewise, David Montgomery, a labor historian, advised many of the current generation of labor historians in the country. Yale’s Music School and Department fostered the growth of Music Theory in the latter half of the 20th century. The Journal of Music Theory was founded there in 1957; Allen Forte and David Lewin were influential teachers and scholars.

In addition to eminent faculty members, Yale research relies heavily on the presence of roughly 1200 Postdocs from various national and international origin working in the multiple laboratories in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and professional schools of the university. The university progressively recognized this working force with the recent creation of the Office for Postdoctoral Affairs and the Yale Postdoctoral Association.

Notable alumni

Over its history, Yale has produced many distinguished alumni in a variety of fields, ranging from the public to private sector. According to 2020 data, around 71% of undergraduates join the workforce, while the next largest majority of 16.6% go on to attend graduate or professional schools. Yale graduates have been recipients of 252 Rhodes Scholarships, 123 Marshall Scholarships, 67 Truman Scholarships, 21 Churchill Scholarships, and 9 Mitchell Scholarships. The university is also the second largest producer of Fulbright Scholars, with a total of 1,199 in its history and has produced 89 MacArthur Fellows. The U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs ranked Yale fifth among research institutions producing the most 2020–2021 Fulbright Scholars. Additionally, 31 living billionaires are Yale alumni.

At Yale, one of the most popular undergraduate majors among Juniors and Seniors is political science, with many students going on to serve careers in government and politics. Former presidents who attended Yale for undergrad include William Howard Taft, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush while former presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton attended Yale Law School. Former vice-president and influential antebellum era politician John C. Calhoun also graduated from Yale. Former world leaders include Italian prime minister Mario Monti, Turkish prime minister Tansu Çiller, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, German president Karl Carstens, Philippine president José Paciano Laurel, Latvian president Valdis Zatlers, Taiwanese premier Jiang Yi-huah, and Malawian president Peter Mutharika, among others. Prominent royals who graduated are Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, and Olympia Bonaparte, Princess Napoléon.

Yale alumni have had considerable presence in U.S. government in all three branches. On the U.S. Supreme Court, 19 justices have been Yale alumni, including current Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. Numerous Yale alumni have been U.S. Senators, including current Senators Michael Bennet, Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Chris Coons, Amy Klobuchar, Ben Sasse, and Sheldon Whitehouse. Current and former cabinet members include Secretaries of State John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Cyrus Vance, and Dean Acheson; U.S. Secretaries of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Robert Rubin, Nicholas F. Brady, Steven Mnuchin, and Janet Yellen; U.S. Attorneys General Nicholas Katzenbach, John Ashcroft, and Edward H. Levi; and many others. Peace Corps founder and American diplomat Sargent Shriver and public official and urban planner Robert Moses are Yale alumni.

Yale has produced numerous award-winning authors and influential writers, like Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Sinclair Lewis and Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Vincent Benét, Thornton Wilder, Doug Wright, and David McCullough. Academy Award winning actors, actresses, and directors include Jodie Foster, Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Elia Kazan, George Roy Hill, Lupita Nyong’o, Oliver Stone, and Frances McDormand. Alumni from Yale have also made notable contributions to both music and the arts. Leading American composer from the 20th century Charles Ives, Broadway composer Cole Porter, Grammy award winner David Lang, and award-winning jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyer all hail from Yale. Hugo Boss Prize winner Matthew Barney, famed American sculptor Richard Serra, President Barack Obama presidential portrait painter Kehinde Wiley, MacArthur Fellow and contemporary artist Sarah Sze, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Garry Trudeau, and National Medal of Arts photorealist painter Chuck Close all graduated from Yale. Additional alumni include architect and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Maya Lin, Pritzker Prize winner Norman Foster, and Gateway Arch designer Eero Saarinen. Journalists and pundits include Dick Cavett, Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Fareed Zakaria.

In business, Yale has had numerous alumni and former students go on to become founders of influential business, like William Boeing (Boeing, United Airlines), Briton Hadden and Henry Luce (Time Magazine), Stephen A. Schwarzman (Blackstone Group), Frederick W. Smith (FedEx), Juan Trippe (Pan Am), Harold Stanley (Morgan Stanley), Bing Gordon (Electronic Arts), and Ben Silbermann (Pinterest). Other business people from Yale include former chairman and CEO of Sears Holdings Edward Lampert, former Time Warner president Jeffrey Bewkes, former PepsiCo chairperson and CEO Indra Nooyi, sports agent Donald Dell, and investor/philanthropist Sir John Templeton,

Yale alumni distinguished in academia include literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates, economists Irving Fischer, Mahbub ul Haq, and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman; Nobel Prize in Physics laureates Ernest Lawrence and Murray Gell-Mann; Fields Medalist John G. Thompson; Human Genome Project leader and National Institutes of Health (US) director Francis S. Collins; brain surgery pioneer Harvey Cushing; pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper; influential mathematician and chemist Josiah Willard Gibbs; National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee and biochemist Florence B. Seibert; Turing Award recipient Ron Rivest; inventors Samuel F.B. Morse and Eli Whitney; Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate John B. Goodenough; lexicographer Noah Webster; and theologians Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr.

In the sporting arena, Yale alumni include baseball players Ron Darling and Craig Breslow and baseball executives Theo Epstein and George Weiss; football players Calvin Hill, Gary Fenick, Amos Alonzo Stagg, and “the Father of American Football” Walter Camp; ice hockey players Chris Higgins and Olympian Helen Resor; Olympic figure skaters Sarah Hughes and Nathan Chen; nine-time U.S. Squash men’s champion Julian Illingworth; Olympic swimmer Don Schollander; Olympic rowers Josh West and Rusty Wailes; Olympic sailor Stuart McNay; Olympic runner Frank Shorter; and others.

From University of California-Santa Cruz (US) : “NIH grant funds collaborative research on protein-RNA interactions in cancer”

From University of California-Santa Cruz (US)

August 03, 2021
Tim Stephens
stephens@ucsc.edu

Jeremy Sanford

Jeremy Sanford, professor of molecular, cell, and developmental biology at UC Santa Cruz, has received major funding from the National Cancer Institute for research on the role of protein-RNA interactions in cancer. Sanford and Dr. Dinesh Rao at University of California-Los Angeles (US) are co-principal investigators on the grant, which will provide more than $3 million over five years for their research.

Sanford and Rao, who have been friends since they met in college, have been collaborating for several years to investigate aggressive forms of leukemia that remain highly resistant to treatment. Their recent studies have shown that one determinant of the aggressive behavior of leukemia is an RNA-binding protein that regulates gene expression. The new grant supports their ongoing research to investigate the function of this RNA-binding protein, called IGF2BP3, in the initiation and maintenance of leukemia.

“Protein-RNA interactions are fundamental to the inner working of our cells,” Sanford said. “The expression of all genetic information is controlled through a network of protein-RNA interactions. When this network is disrupted, myriad human diseases, including cancer, can occur.”

In a study published July 29 in Leukemia, Sanford and Rao’s team presented new evidence for IGF2BP3 as an attractive target for novel therapies to treat leukemia. The researchers showed that deletion of the gene for IGF2BP3 significantly increases the survival of mice with a type of leukemia in which the RNA-binding protein is over-expressed. In addition, they found that mice lacking the protein developed normally, suggesting that blocking the protein would not have serious side effects.

“Importantly, IGF2BP3 goes rogue in a variety of other cancers,” Sanford said. “We anticipate that our work on IGF2BP3 will have broad impacts on cancer biology, diagnostics, and future therapies.”

Sanford noted that the preliminary research supporting their proposal for the new grant was funded by smaller grants from the Santa Cruz Cancer Benefit Group and the UC Cancer Research Coordinating Committee.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition
The University of California-Santa Cruz (US), opened in 1965 and grew, one college at a time, to its current (2008-09) enrollment of more than 16,000 students. Undergraduates pursue more than 60 majors supervised by divisional deans of humanities, physical & biological sciences, social sciences, and arts. Graduate students work toward graduate certificates, master’s degrees, or doctoral degrees in more than 30 academic fields under the supervision of the divisional and graduate deans. The dean of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering oversees the campus’s undergraduate and graduate engineering programs.

Lick Observatory Since 1888 Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft)

UC Observatories Lick Automated Planet Finder fully robotic 2.4-meter optical telescope at Lick Observatory, situated on the summit of Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose, California, USA.

The UCO Lick C. Donald Shane telescope is a 120-inch (3.0-meter) reflecting telescope located at the Lick Observatory, Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft).

UC Santa Cruz (US)campus.

UCSC is the home base for the Lick Observatory.

UCO Lick Observatory’s 36-inch Great Refractor telescope in the South (large) Dome of main building.

From University of Washington (US) School of Medicine : “Study links autism to new set of rare gene variants”

From University of Washington (US) School of Medicine

July 26, 2021

Brian Donohue
206.543.7856
bdonohue@uw.edu

The effects of these newly identified genes are unknown but some are associated with protein networks known to play a role in autism.

A child with autism plays with blocks. Credit: University of Washington (US) School of Medicine./Getty Images.

“These ultra-rare variants involve a set of genes that have not been associated with autism before,” said Amy B. Wilfert, a senior research fellow in the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine. She was the lead author of the report published July 26 in the journal Nature Genetics. Evan Eichler, UW professor of genome sciences, led the team that conducted the study.

The findings should help researchers better understand how the genetic risk of developing autism is inherited and how mutations in these variants might contribute to the disorder.

Autism, or autism spectrum disorder (ASD), affects about 1 in 59 children in the United States. The exact cause is unknown, but certain genes with deleterious mutation are known to increase the risk of developing the disorder.

To date, most research has focused on genes with mutations not found in the parents’ genomes but which originate in the sperm, the egg, or very early in the development of the fertilized egg. Such “de novo” variants have been shown to greatly increase a child’s risk of developing ASD, but account for a relatively small percentage of cases.

To better understand how children might inherit mutations in genes from a parent that put them at risk of developing ASD, the Seattle researchers and their collaborators looked for variants in genes so rare that they appeared in only one parent in a study group involving thousands of families. Such variants are called ultra-rare or private variants.

To find these ultra-rare variants, the researchers examined the genome sequences of nearly 3,500 families that had at least one child with ASD. They limited their search to changes in the genes that would likely disable the gene, called likely-gene disruptive (LGD) variants. They then repeated the analysis in a larger dataset of nearly 6,000 families. Overall, they analyzed nearly 35,000 genomes.

In the end, they identified 163 candidate genes with private LGD variants that collectively increase the risk of ASD. These genes had not been previously identified as ASD-risk genes by studies of de novo variants. The researchers estimate these mutations in these genes may account for as much as 4.5% of autism cases. That’s on par with the percentage ascribed to the more intensely studied de novo variants.

Inheriting one or more of these variants is not enough to cause ASD as none of the parents who carried the variants had ASD, the researchers found. Some additional factors, either genetic or environmental, must therefore have to be present for the child to go on to develop ASD. This finding supports the theory that changes in multiple genes must be present for a child to develop ASD, known as the “multi-hit” model. “Our study suggests that one inherited mutation is not enough,” said Wilfert. “You need at least one other mutation to push a child over the threshold required to be diagnosed with autism.”

One reason why these variants are so rare is that they appear to be relatively short-lived, persisting in a family for only a few generations, perhaps because those children that inherit them are less likely to go on to have children of their own, the researchers said.

Just how these ultra-rare variants increase a child’s risk of ASD is unknown, Wilfert said, but many of the genes are involved in protein networks that play a role in biochemical pathways that have been previously linked to the development of ASD.

“The availability of large whole genome and exome datasets made it possible to identify such rare variants. Without the sequencing efforts by our collaborators at the Centers for Common Disease Genomics, and the study coordination efforts from Simons Foundation this study would have been impossible,” she said. “Our findings won’t be brought into the clinic tomorrow,” Wilfert said, “but they do give researchers new areas to focus on and may lead to clinically relevant knowledge in the future.”

Study collaborators included researchers from the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, the New York Genome Center in New York, and the Center for Medical Genetic & Hunan Key Laboratory of Medical Genetics, Central South University, in Changsha, China.

This work was supported in part by grants from the National Institutes of Health (US) (R01 MH101221, R01 MH100047, K99 MH117165, K99 HG011041, UM1 HG008901); The National Human Genome Research Institute (US); The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (US); The Genome Sequencing Program Coordinating Center (U24 HG008956); The National Institute of Mental Health (US) via Autism Speaks (1U24MH081810); The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (US); and The Simons Foundation (US).

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The University of Washington School of Medicine (UWSOM) is a large public medical school in the northwest United States, located in Seattle and affiliated with the University of Washington. According to U.S. News & World Report’s 2022 Best Graduate School rankings, University of Washington School of Medicine ranked #1 in the nation for primary care education, and #7 for research.

UWSOM is the first public medical school in the states of Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho. The school maintains a network of teaching facilities in more than 100 towns and cities across the five-state region. As part of this “WWAMI” partnership, medical students from Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho spend their first year and a half at The University of Wyoming (US), The University of Alaska-Anchorage (US), Montana State University (US), or The University of Idaho (US), respectively. In addition, sixty first-year students and forty second-year students from Washington are based at Gonzaga University (US) in Spokane. Preference is given to residents of the WWAMI states.

The University of Washington (US) is one of the world’s preeminent public universities. Our impact on individuals, on our region, and on the world is profound — whether we are launching young people into a boundless future or confronting the grand challenges of our time through undaunted research and scholarship. Ranked number 10 in the world in Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings and educating more than 54,000 students annually, our students and faculty work together to turn ideas into impact and in the process transform lives and our world. For more about our impact on the world, every day.

So what defines us —the students, faculty and community members at the University of Washington? Above all, it’s our belief in possibility and our unshakable optimism. It’s a connection to others, both near and far. It’s a hunger that pushes us to tackle challenges and pursue progress. It’s the conviction that together we can create a world of good. Join us on the journey.

The University of Washington (US) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, United States. Founded in 1861, University of Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in downtown Seattle approximately a decade after the city’s founding to aid its economic development. Today, the university’s 703-acre main Seattle campus is in the University District above the Montlake Cut, within the urban Puget Sound region of the Pacific Northwest. The university has additional campuses in Tacoma and Bothell. Overall, University of Washington encompasses over 500 buildings and over 20 million gross square footage of space, including one of the largest library systems in the world with more than 26 university libraries, as well as the UW Tower, lecture halls, art centers, museums, laboratories, stadiums, and conference centers. The university offers bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees through 140 departments in various colleges and schools, sees a total student enrollment of roughly 46,000 annually, and functions on a quarter system.

University of Washington is a member of the Association of American Universities(US) and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation(US), UW spent $1.41 billion on research and development in 2018, ranking it 5th in the nation. As the flagship institution of the six public universities in Washington state, it is known for its medical, engineering and scientific research as well as its highly competitive computer science and engineering programs. Additionally, University of Washington continues to benefit from its deep historic ties and major collaborations with numerous technology giants in the region, such as Amazon, Boeing, Nintendo, and particularly Microsoft. Paul G. Allen, Bill Gates and others spent significant time at Washington computer labs for a startup venture before founding Microsoft and other ventures. The University of Washington’s 22 varsity sports teams are also highly competitive, competing as the Huskies in the Pac-12 Conference of the NCAA Division I, representing the United States at the Olympic Games, and other major competitions.

The university has been affiliated with many notable alumni and faculty, including 21 Nobel Prize laureates and numerous Pulitzer Prize winners, Fulbright Scholars, Rhodes Scholars and Marshall Scholars.

In 1854, territorial governor Isaac Stevens recommended the establishment of a university in the Washington Territory. Prominent Seattle-area residents, including Methodist preacher Daniel Bagley, saw this as a chance to add to the city’s potential and prestige. Bagley learned of a law that allowed United States territories to sell land to raise money in support of public schools. At the time, Arthur A. Denny, one of the founders of Seattle and a member of the territorial legislature, aimed to increase the city’s importance by moving the territory’s capital from Olympia to Seattle. However, Bagley eventually convinced Denny that the establishment of a university would assist more in the development of Seattle’s economy. Two universities were initially chartered, but later the decision was repealed in favor of a single university in Lewis County provided that locally donated land was available. When no site emerged, Denny successfully petitioned the legislature to reconsider Seattle as a location in 1858.

In 1861, scouting began for an appropriate 10 acres (4 ha) site in Seattle to serve as a new university campus. Arthur and Mary Denny donated eight acres, while fellow pioneers Edward Lander, and Charlie and Mary Terry, donated two acres on Denny’s Knoll in downtown Seattle. More specifically, this tract was bounded by 4th Avenue to the west, 6th Avenue to the east, Union Street to the north, and Seneca Streets to the south.

John Pike, for whom Pike Street is named, was the university’s architect and builder. It was opened on November 4, 1861, as the Territorial University of Washington. The legislature passed articles incorporating the University, and establishing its Board of Regents in 1862. The school initially struggled, closing three times: in 1863 for low enrollment, and again in 1867 and 1876 due to funds shortage. University of Washington awarded its first graduate Clara Antoinette McCarty Wilt in 1876, with a bachelor’s degree in science.

19th century relocation

By the time Washington state entered the Union in 1889, both Seattle and the University had grown substantially. University of Washington’s total undergraduate enrollment increased from 30 to nearly 300 students, and the campus’s relative isolation in downtown Seattle faced encroaching development. A special legislative committee, headed by University of Washington graduate Edmond Meany, was created to find a new campus to better serve the growing student population and faculty. The committee eventually selected a site on the northeast of downtown Seattle called Union Bay, which was the land of the Duwamish, and the legislature appropriated funds for its purchase and construction. In 1895, the University relocated to the new campus by moving into the newly built Denny Hall. The University Regents tried and failed to sell the old campus, eventually settling with leasing the area. This would later become one of the University’s most valuable pieces of real estate in modern-day Seattle, generating millions in annual revenue with what is now called the Metropolitan Tract. The original Territorial University building was torn down in 1908, and its former site now houses the Fairmont Olympic Hotel.

The sole-surviving remnants of Washington’s first building are four 24-foot (7.3 m), white, hand-fluted cedar, Ionic columns. They were salvaged by Edmond S. Meany, one of the University’s first graduates and former head of its history department. Meany and his colleague, Dean Herbert T. Condon, dubbed the columns as “Loyalty,” “Industry,” “Faith”, and “Efficiency”, or “LIFE.” The columns now stand in the Sylvan Grove Theater.

20th century expansion

Organizers of the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition eyed the still largely undeveloped campus as a prime setting for their world’s fair. They came to an agreement with Washington’s Board of Regents that allowed them to use the campus grounds for the exposition, surrounding today’s Drumheller Fountain facing towards Mount Rainier. In exchange, organizers agreed Washington would take over the campus and its development after the fair’s conclusion. This arrangement led to a detailed site plan and several new buildings, prepared in part by John Charles Olmsted. The plan was later incorporated into the overall University of Washington campus master plan, permanently affecting the campus layout.

Both World Wars brought the military to campus, with certain facilities temporarily lent to the federal government. In spite of this, subsequent post-war periods were times of dramatic growth for the University. The period between the wars saw a significant expansion of the upper campus. Construction of the Liberal Arts Quadrangle, known to students as “The Quad,” began in 1916 and continued to 1939. The University’s architectural centerpiece, Suzzallo Library, was built in 1926 and expanded in 1935.

After World War II, further growth came with the G.I. Bill. Among the most important developments of this period was the opening of the School of Medicine in 1946, which is now consistently ranked as the top medical school in the United States. It would eventually lead to the University of Washington Medical Center, ranked by U.S. News and World Report as one of the top ten hospitals in the nation.

In 1942, all persons of Japanese ancestry in the Seattle area were forced into inland internment camps as part of Executive Order 9066 following the attack on Pearl Harbor. During this difficult time, university president Lee Paul Sieg took an active and sympathetic leadership role in advocating for and facilitating the transfer of Japanese American students to universities and colleges away from the Pacific Coast to help them avoid the mass incarceration. Nevertheless many Japanese American students and “soon-to-be” graduates were unable to transfer successfully in the short time window or receive diplomas before being incarcerated. It was only many years later that they would be recognized for their accomplishments during the University of Washington’s Long Journey Home ceremonial event that was held in May 2008.

From 1958 to 1973, the University of Washington saw a tremendous growth in student enrollment, its faculties and operating budget, and also its prestige under the leadership of Charles Odegaard. University of Washington student enrollment had more than doubled to 34,000 as the baby boom generation came of age. However, this era was also marked by high levels of student activism, as was the case at many American universities. Much of the unrest focused around civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War. In response to anti-Vietnam War protests by the late 1960s, the University Safety and Security Division became the University of Washington Police Department.

Odegaard instituted a vision of building a “community of scholars”, convincing the Washington State legislatures to increase investment in the University. Washington senators, such as Henry M. Jackson and Warren G. Magnuson, also used their political clout to gather research funds for the University of Washington. The results included an increase in the operating budget from $37 million in 1958 to over $400 million in 1973, solidifying University of Washington as a top recipient of federal research funds in the United States. The establishment of technology giants such as Microsoft, Boeing and Amazon in the local area also proved to be highly influential in the University of Washington’s fortunes, not only improving graduate prospects but also helping to attract millions of dollars in university and research funding through its distinguished faculty and extensive alumni network.

21st century

In 1990, the University of Washington opened its additional campuses in Bothell and Tacoma. Although originally intended for students who have already completed two years of higher education, both schools have since become four-year universities with the authority to grant degrees. The first freshman classes at these campuses started in fall 2006. Today both Bothell and Tacoma also offer a selection of master’s degree programs.

In 2012, the University began exploring plans and governmental approval to expand the main Seattle campus, including significant increases in student housing, teaching facilities for the growing student body and faculty, as well as expanded public transit options. The University of Washington light rail station was completed in March 2015, connecting Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood to the University of Washington Husky Stadium within five minutes of rail travel time. It offers a previously unavailable option of transportation into and out of the campus, designed specifically to reduce dependence on private vehicles, bicycles and local King County buses.

University of Washington has been listed as a “Public Ivy” in Greene’s Guides since 2001, and is an elected member of the American Association of Universities. Among the faculty by 2012, there have been 151 members of American Association for the Advancement of Science, 68 members of the National Academy of Sciences(US), 67 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 53 members of the National Academy of Medicine(US), 29 winners of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, 21 members of the National Academy of Engineering(US), 15 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators, 15 MacArthur Fellows, 9 winners of the Gairdner Foundation International Award, 5 winners of the National Medal of Science, 7 Nobel Prize laureates, 5 winners of Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research, 4 members of the American Philosophical Society, 2 winners of the National Book Award, 2 winners of the National Medal of Arts, 2 Pulitzer Prize winners, 1 winner of the Fields Medal, and 1 member of the National Academy of Public Administration. Among UW students by 2012, there were 136 Fulbright Scholars, 35 Rhodes Scholars, 7 Marshall Scholars and 4 Gates Cambridge Scholars. UW is recognized as a top producer of Fulbright Scholars, ranking 2nd in the US in 2017.

The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) has consistently ranked University of Washington as one of the top 20 universities worldwide every year since its first release. In 2019, University of Washington ranked 14th worldwide out of 500 by the ARWU, 26th worldwide out of 981 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, and 28th worldwide out of 101 in the Times World Reputation Rankings. Meanwhile, QS World University Rankings ranked it 68th worldwide, out of over 900.

U.S. News & World Report ranked University of Washington 8th out of nearly 1,500 universities worldwide for 2021, with University of Washington’s undergraduate program tied for 58th among 389 national universities in the U.S. and tied for 19th among 209 public universities.

In 2019, it ranked 10th among the universities around the world by SCImago Institutions Rankings. In 2017, the Leiden Ranking, which focuses on science and the impact of scientific publications among the world’s 500 major universities, ranked University of Washington 12th globally and 5th in the U.S.

In 2019, Kiplinger Magazine’s review of “top college values” named University of Washington 5th for in-state students and 10th for out-of-state students among U.S. public colleges, and 84th overall out of 500 schools. In the Washington Monthly National University Rankings University of Washington was ranked 15th domestically in 2018, based on its contribution to the public good as measured by social mobility, research, and promoting public service.

From University of Strathclyde [Oilthigh Shrath Chluaidh] (SCT): “The paradox of a free-electron laser without the laser: a new source of coherent radiation”

From University of Strathclyde [Oilthigh Shrath Chluaidh] (SCT)

16 July 2021

A new way of producing coherent light in the ultra-violet spectral region, which points the way to developing brilliant table-top x-ray sources, has been produced in research led at the University of Strathclyde.

The scientists have developed a type of ultra-short wavelength coherent light source that does not require laser action to produce coherence. Common electron-beam based light sources-known as fourth-generation light sources-are based on the free-electron laser (FEL) which uses an undulator to convert electron beam energy into X-rays.

Coherent light sources are powerful tools that enable research in many areas of medicine, biology, material sciences, chemistry and physics.

Making ultraviolet and X-ray coherent light sources more widely available would transform the way science is done; a university could have one of the devices in a single room, on a table top, for a reasonable price.

The group is now planning a proof-of-principle experiment in the ultraviolet spectral range to demonstrate this new way of producing coherent light. If successful, it should dramatically accelerate the development of even shorter wavelength coherent sources based on the same principle. The Strathclyde group has set up a facility to investigate these types of sources: the Scottish Centre for the Application of Plasma-based Accelerators (SCAPA), which hosts one of the highest power lasers in the UK.

The new research has been published in Scientific Reports.

Professor Dino Jaroszynski, of Strathclyde’s Department of Physics, led the research. He said: “This work significantly advances the state-of-the-art of synchrotron sources by proposing a new method of producing short-wavelength coherent radiation, using a short undulator and attosecond duration electron bunches.

“This is more compact and less demanding on the electron beam quality than free-electron lasers and could provide a paradigm shift in light sources, which would stimulate a new direction of research. It proposes to use bunch compression – as in chirped pulse amplification lasers – within the undulator to significantly enhance the radiation brightness.

“The new method presented would be of wide interest to a diverse community developing and using light sources.”

In FELs, as in all lasers, the intensity of light is amplified by a feedback mechanism that locks the phases of individual radiators, which in this case are “free” electrons. In the FEL, this is achieved by passing a high energy electron beam through the undulator, which is an array of alternating polarity magnets.

Light emitted from the electrons as they wiggle through the undulator creates a force called the ponderomotive force that bunches the electrons – some are slowed down, some are sped up, which causes bunching, similar to traffic on a motorway periodically slowing and speeding up.

Electrons passing through the undulator radiate incoherent light if they are uniformly distributed – for every electron that emits light, there is another electron that partially cancels out the light because they radiate out of phase. An analogy of this partial cancelling out is rain on the sea: it produces many small ripples that partially cancel each other out, effectively quelling the waves – reducing their amplitude. In contrast, steady or pulsating wind will cause the waves to amplify through the mutual interaction of the wind with the sea.

In the FEL, electron bunching causes amplification of the light and the increase in its coherence, which usually takes a long time – thus very long undulators are required. In an X-ray FEL, the undulators can be more than a hundred metres long. The accelerators driving these X-ray FELs are kilometres long, which makes these devices very expensive and some of the largest instruments in the world.

However, using a free-electron laser to produce coherent radiation is not the only way; a “pre-bunched” beam or ultra-short electron bunch can also be used to achieve exactly the same coherence in a very short undulator that is less than a metre in length. As long as the electron bunch is shorter than the wavelength of the light produced by the undulator, it will automatically produce coherent light – all the light waves will add up or interfere constructively, which leads to very brilliant light with exactly the same properties of light from a laser.

The researchers have demonstrated theoretically that this can be achieved using a laser-plasma wakefield accelerator, which produces electron bunches that can have a length of a few tens of nanometres. They show that if these ultra-short bunches of high energy electrons pass through a short undulator, they can produce as may photons as a very expensive FEL can produce. Moreover, they have also shown that by producing an electron bunch that has an energy “chirp”, they can ballistically compress the bunch to a very short duration inside the undulator, which provides a unique way of going to even shorter electron bunches and therefore produce even shorter wavelength light.

The research collaboration also involved the University of Manchester (UK), Pulsar Physics (NL) and the STFC ASTeC group at Daresbury Laboratories. The study has received funding from the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council), to support a project named “Lab in a Bubble”.

See the full article here.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The University of Strathclyde [Oilthigh Shrath Chluaidh] (SCT)) is a public research university located in Glasgow, Scotland. Founded in 1796 as the Andersonian Institute, it is Glasgow’s second-oldest university, having received its royal charter in 1964 as the first technological university in the United Kingdom. Taking its name from the historic Kingdom of Strathclyde, it is Scotland’s third-largest university by number of students, with students and staff from over 100 countries.

The institution was named University of the Year 2012 by Times Higher Education and again in 2019, becoming the first university to receive this award twice. The annual income of the institution for 2019–20 was £334.8 million of which £81.2 million was from research grants and contracts, with an expenditure of £298.8 million. It is one of the 39 old universities in the UK comprising the distinctive second cluster of elite universities after Oxbridge.

Research

In 2011 the University’s Advanced Forming Research Centre was announced as a leading partner in the first UK-wide Technology Strategy Board Catapult Centre. The Government also announced that the University is to lead the UK-wide EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Continuous Manufacturing and Crystallisation.

The University has become the base for the first Fraunhofer Centre to be established in the UK. Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Europe’s largest organisation for contract research, is creating the new Fraunhofer Centre for Applied Photonics in collaboration with Strathclyde, for research in sectors including healthcare, security, energy and transport.

Strathclyde was chosen in 2012 as the exclusive European partner university for South Korea’s global research and commercialisation programme – the Global Industry-Academia Cooperation Programme, funded by South Korea’s Ministry of Knowledge and Economics.

In 2012 the University became a key partner in its second UK Catapult Centre. Plans for the Catapult Centre for Offshore Renewable Energy were announced at Strathclyde by Business Secretary Vince Cable. The University has also become a partner in the Industrial Doctorate Centre for Offshore Renewable Energy, which is one of 11 doctoral centres at Strathclyde.

Engineers at the University are leading the €4 million, Europe-wide Stardust project, a research-based training network investigating the removal of space debris and the deflection of asteroids.

Strathclyde has become part of the new ESRC Enterprise Research Centre, a £2.9 million venture generating world-class research to help stimulate growth for small and medium-sized enterprises.

The University has centres in pharmacy, drug delivery and development, micro and ultrasonic engineering, biophotonics and photonics, biomedical engineering, medical devices, new therapies,prosthetics and orthotics, public health history, law, crime and justice and social work. The University is involved in 11 partnerships with other universities through the Scottish Funding Councils’ Research Pooling Programme, covering areas such as engineering, life sciences, energy, marine science and technology, physics, chemistry, computer sciences and economics.

Several Strathclyde staff have been elected to Fellowships in the Royal Societies of Edinburgh and London.

From Carnegie Mellon University (US) : “DARPA Selects CMU to Develop AI for Portable Ultrasound”

From Carnegie Mellon University (US)

June 21, 2021
Aaron Aupperlee
aaupperlee@cmu.edu

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected Carnegie Mellon University as one of five teams to develop artificial intelligence that will help field medics better use portable ultrasound devices to diagnose and treat injuries on the battlefield.

Point-of-Care Ultrasound Automated Interpretation (POCUS AI). DARPA.

DARPA’s Point-of-Care Ultrasound Automated Interpretation (POCUS AI) program will challenge the teams to create an extensible AI model that can be trained to identify injuries and assist with interventions using limited data — 15 to 30 images or video clips instead of thousands.

“Because we cannot train the AI on large datasets, we are going to incorporate knowledge straight from doctors,” said John Galeotti, director of the Biomedical Image Guidance Laboratory in the Robotics Institute and head of the CMU team. “We are going to collect information from clinical experts and put it on top of the AI system so the model does not have to learn as many new concepts on its own for each new application.”

Portable point-of-care ultrasound devices could help frontline medics quickly capture images of injuries and confirm whether interventions to temporarily treat them or alleviate pain were administered properly or should be tried again. These devices could increase the speed and accuracy of the care provided on the battlefield or in other scenarios where evacuations could take time. But frontline medical personnel often lack significant training with these instruments, hindering their deployment. AI promises to bridge that gap.

DARPA selected five research teams to create an AI model for the 18-month challenge: CMU, Drexel University (US), Netrias, Novateur Research Solutions and Kitware Inc.

The CMU team, which includes Artur Dubrawski, Alumni Research Professor of Computer Science and head of the Auton Laboratory, will work to train an AI model that combines computer vision and machine learning to help medics identify what they see through the ultrasound. They’ll also incorporate clinical rules and best practices from medical experts to guide and evaluate the interventions when assessing for traumatic brain injury. DARPA requires the system to diagnose a life-threatening pneumothorax condition, which prevents the lungs from inflating, and measure the diameter of the optic nerve sheath to detect high intracranial pressure. The system must also tell a medic whether a nerve block injection needle was administered in the correct place and if a breathing tube was inserted correctly.

The value of the technology extends far beyond the military and battlefield, Galeotti said. It could be used with devices in ambulances to provide better treatment to roadside accident victims and be carried by paramedics, EMTs and other first responders to offer more effective aid outside hospital settings.

“This could help first responders provide better aid earlier, which would lead directly to not only saving more lives but also to alleviating pain and preventing long-lasting injuries,” Galeotti said.

See the full article here .

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Carnegie Mellon University (US) is a global research university with more than 12,000 students, 95,000 alumni, and 5,000 faculty and staff.
CMU has been a birthplace of innovation since its founding in 1900.
Today, we are a global leader bringing groundbreaking ideas to market and creating successful startup businesses.
Our award-winning faculty members are renowned for working closely with students to solve major scientific, technological and societal challenges. We put a strong emphasis on creating things—from art to robots. Our students are recruited by some of the world’s most innovative companies.
We have campuses in Pittsburgh, Qatar and Silicon Valley, and degree-granting programs around the world, including Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and Latin America.

The university was established by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools, the university became the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 and began granting four-year degrees. In 1967, the Carnegie Institute of Technology merged with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, formerly a part of the University of Pittsburgh. Since then, the university has operated as a single institution.

The university has seven colleges and independent schools, including the College of Engineering, College of Fine Arts, Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Mellon College of Science, Tepper School of Business, Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, and the School of Computer Science. The university has its main campus located 3 miles (5 km) from Downtown Pittsburgh, and the university also has over a dozen degree-granting locations in six continents, including degree-granting campuses in Qatar and Silicon Valley.

Past and present faculty and alumni include 20 Nobel Prize laureates, 13 Turing Award winners, 23 Members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (US), 22 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (US), 79 Members of the National Academies, 124 Emmy Award winners, 47 Tony Award laureates, and 10 Academy Award winners. Carnegie Mellon enrolls 14,799 students from 117 countries and employs 1,400 faculty members.
Research

Carnegie Mellon University is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity”. For the 2006 fiscal year, the university spent $315 million on research. The primary recipients of this funding were the School of Computer Science ($100.3 million), the Software Engineering Institute ($71.7 million), the College of Engineering ($48.5 million), and the Mellon College of Science ($47.7 million). The research money comes largely from federal sources, with a federal investment of $277.6 million. The federal agencies that invest the most money are the National Science Foundation (US) and the Department of Defense (US), which contribute 26% and 23.4% of the total university research budget respectively.

The recognition of Carnegie Mellon as one of the best research facilities in the nation has a long history—as early as the 1987 Federal budget Carnegie Mellon University was ranked as third in the amount of research dollars with $41.5 million, with only Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) and Johns Hopkins University (US) receiving more research funds from the Department of Defense.

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) (US) is a joint effort between Carnegie Mellon, University of Pittsburgh (US), and Westinghouse Electric Company. Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center was founded in 1986 by its two scientific directors, Dr. Ralph Roskies of the University of Pittsburgh and Dr. Michael Levine of Carnegie Mellon. Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is a leading partner in the TeraGrid, the National Science Foundation’s cyberinfrastructure program.
Scarab lunar rover is being developed by the RI.

The Robotics Institute (RI) is a division of the School of Computer Science and considered to be one of the leading centers of robotics research in the world. The Field Robotics Center (FRC) has developed a number of significant robots, including Sandstorm and H1ghlander, which finished second and third in the DARPA Grand Challenge, and Boss, which won the DARPA Urban Challenge. The Robotics Institute has partnered with a spinoff company, Astrobotic Technology Inc., to land a CMU robot on the moon by 2016 in pursuit of the Google Lunar XPrize. The robot, known as Andy, is designed to explore lunar pits, which might include entrances to caves. The RI is primarily sited at Carnegie Mellon’s main campus in Newell-Simon hall.

The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) is a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense and operated by Carnegie Mellon, with offices in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA; Arlington, Virginia, and Frankfurt, Germany. The SEI publishes books on software engineering for industry, government and military applications and practices. The organization is known for its Capability Maturity Model (CMM) and Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), which identify essential elements of effective system and software engineering processes and can be used to rate the level of an organization’s capability for producing quality systems. The SEI is also the home of CERT/CC, the federally funded computer security organization. The CERT Program’s primary goals are to ensure that appropriate technology and systems management practices are used to resist attacks on networked systems and to limit damage and ensure continuity of critical services subsequent to attacks, accidents, or failures.

The Human–Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) is a division of the School of Computer Science and is considered one of the leading centers of human–computer interaction research, integrating computer science, design, social science, and learning science. Such interdisciplinary collaboration is the hallmark of research done throughout the university.

The Language Technologies Institute (LTI) is another unit of the School of Computer Science and is famous for being one of the leading research centers in the area of language technologies. The primary research focus of the institute is on machine translation, speech recognition, speech synthesis, information retrieval, parsing and information extraction. Until 1996, the institute existed as the Center for Machine Translation that was established in 1986. From 1996 onwards, it started awarding graduate degrees and the name was changed to Language Technologies Institute.

Carnegie Mellon is also home to the Carnegie School of management and economics. This intellectual school grew out of the Tepper School of Business in the 1950s and 1960s and focused on the intersection of behavioralism and management. Several management theories, most notably bounded rationality and the behavioral theory of the firm, were established by Carnegie School management scientists and economists.

Carnegie Mellon also develops cross-disciplinary and university-wide institutes and initiatives to take advantage of strengths in various colleges and departments and develop solutions in critical social and technical problems. To date, these have included the Cylab Security and Privacy Institute, the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, the Neuroscience Institute (formerly known as BrainHub), the Simon Initiative, and the Disruptive Healthcare Technology Institute.

Carnegie Mellon has made a concerted effort to attract corporate research labs, offices, and partnerships to the Pittsburgh campus. Apple Inc., Intel, Google, Microsoft, Disney, Facebook, IBM, General Motors, Bombardier Inc., Yahoo!, Uber, Tata Consultancy Services, Ansys, Boeing, Robert Bosch GmbH, and the Rand Corporation have established a presence on or near campus. In collaboration with Intel, Carnegie Mellon has pioneered research into claytronics.

From University of Toronto (CA) : “U of T researchers develop antibody drug that could treat diabetic retinopathy”

From University of Toronto (CA)

June 09, 2021
Eileen Hoftyzer

A team led by U of T researcher Stéphane Angers has developed a synthetic antibody as a promising treatment for diabetic retinopathy, which causes blindness and affects about one third of diabetes patients (photo by Tetra Images via Getty Images)

The life-saving diabetic medication insulin, developed at the University of Toronto 100 years ago, was the first biologic therapy – a protein to treat disease. Now, a new biologic therapy developed by U of T researchers has potential to reverse a common diabetes complication.

A team led by Stéphane Angers, professor and associate dean of research at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, has developed a synthetic antibody as a promising treatment for diabetic retinopathy, which causes blindness and affects about 30 per cent of diabetes patients.

The researchers tested the antibody in both cell cultures and mice. The results were published this week in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine.

“This study has shown that these antibodies are very attractive therapeutics to restore blood-retina barrier defects,” said Rony Chidiac, a post-doctoral researcher in the Angers lab and lead author of the study.

“It gives new hope for the treatment of eye diseases like diabetic retinopathy and macular degeneration.”

Angers and his team are experts in the Wnt cell signalling pathway, which is crucial for the formation and maintenance of the blood-retina barrier, a physiological barrier that prevents molecules from entering the retina.

When the signalling pathway is disrupted – which can occur because of genetic mutations in rare eye conditions such as Norrie disease, or when tissue oxygen is low, as in diabetic retinopathy – the blood vessels can become leaky, causing damage in the eye.

Professor Stéphane Angers (right) works alongside post-doctoral researcher Rony Chidiac in this 2018 photo (Photo by Steve Southon.)

In previous research, Angers had collaborated with Sachdev Sidhu at the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research to develop a catalogue of synthetic antibodies that could activate Wnt signalling.

Their new publication describes how one of the antibodies, specifically activating the Frizzled4-LRP5 receptor complex, successfully stimulated Wnt signalling in the blood-retina barrier and effectively restored barrier function.

The antibody attaches to two key cell surface receptors (Frizzled4 and LRP5) bringing them close together, and this induced proximity activates the Wnt pathway that maintains the blood vessels.

The team first tested the antibody in cell cultures and found that it was a highly precise way to trigger the signalling pathway and restore barrier function. They then tested the antibody in different mouse models in collaboration with Harald Junge at the University of Minnesota and AntlerA Therapeutics, a start-up company founded by Angers and Sidhu. One model represented a genetic eye condition and one represented diabetic retinopathy.

Remarkably, the antibody restored the barrier function and corrected retinal blood vessel formation in mice. In addition, it normalized the pathological formation of new blood vessels, one of the consequences of a leaky blood-retina barrier that causes further eye damage.

With the antibody’s promising preclinical results, AntlerA Therapeutics will now lead the commercialization and translation to clinical studies.

While the current study’s results are focused on eye conditions, the similarities between the blood-retina barrier and blood-brain barrier mean that its applications could be much broader than eye conditions.

“The retinal vasculature was the first indication, and we have new funding to explore the role of this pathway in other contexts,” said Angers. “For example, we are testing whether this antibody could have implications in the blood-brain barrier and whether it could repair the barrier in the context of stroke.”

“We’ve found a way to activate Wnt signalling very precisely in order to have a viable therapeutic opportunity and actually treat these diseases,” added Chidiac. “We anticipate that this could have enormous impact in diverse applications in regenerative medicine.”

The research was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research [Instituts de recherche en santé du Canada] (CA) and the government of Ontario, among others.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The University of Toronto (CA) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen’s Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King’s College, the oldest university in the province of Ontario.

Originally controlled by the Church of England, the university assumed its present name in 1850 upon becoming a secular institution.

As a collegiate university, it comprises eleven colleges each with substantial autonomy on financial and institutional affairs and significant differences in character and history. The university also operates two satellite campuses located in Scarborough and Mississauga.

University of Toronto has evolved into Canada’s leading institution of learning, discovery and knowledge creation. We are proud to be one of the world’s top research-intensive universities, driven to invent and innovate.

Our students have the opportunity to learn from and work with preeminent thought leaders through our multidisciplinary network of teaching and research faculty, alumni and partners.

The ideas, innovations and actions of more than 560,000 graduates continue to have a positive impact on the world.

Academically, the University of Toronto is noted for movements and curricula in literary criticism and communication theory, known collectively as the Toronto School.

The university was the birthplace of insulin and stem cell research, and was the site of the first electron microscope in North America; the identification of the first black hole Cygnus X-1; multi-touch technology, and the development of the theory of NP-completeness.

The university was one of several universities involved in early research of deep learning. It receives the most annual scientific research funding of any Canadian university and is one of two members of the Association of American Universities (US) outside the United States, the other being McGill(CA).

The Varsity Blues are the athletic teams that represent the university in intercollegiate league matches, with ties to gridiron football, rowing and ice hockey. The earliest recorded instance of gridiron football occurred at University of Toronto’s University College in November 1861.

The university’s Hart House is an early example of the North American student centre, simultaneously serving cultural, intellectual, and recreational interests within its large Gothic-revival complex.

The University of Toronto has educated three Governors General of Canada, four Prime Ministers of Canada, three foreign leaders, and fourteen Justices of the Supreme Court. As of March 2019, ten Nobel laureates, five Turing Award winners, 94 Rhodes Scholars, and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with the university.

Early history

The founding of a colonial college had long been the desire of John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada and founder of York, the colonial capital. As an University of Oxford (UK)-educated military commander who had fought in the American Revolutionary War, Simcoe believed a college was needed to counter the spread of republicanism from the United States. The Upper Canada Executive Committee recommended in 1798 that a college be established in York.

On March 15, 1827, a royal charter was formally issued by King George IV, proclaiming “from this time one College, with the style and privileges of a University … for the education of youth in the principles of the Christian Religion, and for their instruction in the various branches of Science and Literature … to continue for ever, to be called King’s College.” The granting of the charter was largely the result of intense lobbying by John Strachan, the influential Anglican Bishop of Toronto who took office as the college’s first president. The original three-storey Greek Revival school building was built on the present site of Queen’s Park.

Under Strachan’s stewardship, King’s College was a religious institution closely aligned with the Church of England and the British colonial elite, known as the Family Compact. Reformist politicians opposed the clergy’s control over colonial institutions and fought to have the college secularized. In 1849, after a lengthy and heated debate, the newly elected responsible government of the Province of Canada voted to rename King’s College as the University of Toronto and severed the school’s ties with the church. Having anticipated this decision, the enraged Strachan had resigned a year earlier to open Trinity College as a private Anglican seminary. University College was created as the nondenominational teaching branch of the University of Toronto. During the American Civil War the threat of Union blockade on British North America prompted the creation of the University Rifle Corps which saw battle in resisting the Fenian raids on the Niagara border in 1866. The Corps was part of the Reserve Militia lead by Professor Henry Croft.

Established in 1878, the School of Practical Science was the precursor to the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering which has been nicknamed Skule since its earliest days. While the Faculty of Medicine opened in 1843 medical teaching was conducted by proprietary schools from 1853 until 1887 when the faculty absorbed the Toronto School of Medicine. Meanwhile the university continued to set examinations and confer medical degrees. The university opened the Faculty of Law in 1887, followed by the Faculty of Dentistry in 1888 when the Royal College of Dental Surgeons became an affiliate. Women were first admitted to the university in 1884.

A devastating fire in 1890 gutted the interior of University College and destroyed 33,000 volumes from the library but the university restored the building and replenished its library within two years. Over the next two decades a collegiate system took shape as the university arranged federation with several ecclesiastical colleges including Strachan’s Trinity College in 1904. The university operated the Royal Conservatory of Music from 1896 to 1991 and the Royal Ontario Museum from 1912 to 1968; both still retain close ties with the university as independent institutions. The University of Toronto Press was founded in 1901 as Canada’s first academic publishing house. The Faculty of Forestry founded in 1907 with Bernhard Fernow as dean was Canada’s first university faculty devoted to forest science. In 1910, the Faculty of Education opened its laboratory school, the University of Toronto Schools.

World wars and post-war years

The First and Second World Wars curtailed some university activities as undergraduate and graduate men eagerly enlisted. Intercollegiate athletic competitions and the Hart House Debates were suspended although exhibition and interfaculty games were still held. The David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill opened in 1935 followed by the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies in 1949. The university opened satellite campuses in Scarborough in 1964 and in Mississauga in 1967. The university’s former affiliated schools at the Ontario Agricultural College and Glendon Hall became fully independent of the University of Toronto and became part of University of Guelph (CA) in 1964 and York University (CA) in 1965 respectively. Beginning in the 1980s reductions in government funding prompted more rigorous fundraising efforts.

Since 2000

In 2000 Kin-Yip Chun was reinstated as a professor of the university after he launched an unsuccessful lawsuit against the university alleging racial discrimination. In 2017 a human rights application was filed against the University by one of its students for allegedly delaying the investigation of sexual assault and being dismissive of their concerns. In 2018 the university cleared one of its professors of allegations of discrimination and antisemitism in an internal investigation after a complaint was filed by one of its students.

The University of Toronto was the first Canadian university to amass a financial endowment greater than c. $1 billion in 2007. On September 24, 2020 the university announced a $250 million gift to the Faculty of Medicine from businessman and philanthropist James C. Temerty- the largest single philanthropic donation in Canadian history. This broke the previous record for the school set in 2019 when Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman jointly donated $100 million for the creation of a 750,000-square foot innovation and artificial intelligence centre.

Research

Since 1926 the University of Toronto has been a member of the Association of American Universities (US) a consortium of the leading North American research universities. The university manages by far the largest annual research budget of any university in Canada with sponsored direct-cost expenditures of $878 million in 2010. In 2018 the University of Toronto was named the top research university in Canada by Research Infosource with a sponsored research income (external sources of funding) of $1,147.584 million in 2017. In the same year the university’s faculty averaged a sponsored research income of $428,200 while graduate students averaged a sponsored research income of $63,700. The federal government was the largest source of funding with grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council amounting to about one-third of the research budget. About eight percent of research funding came from corporations- mostly in the healthcare industry.

The first practical electron microscope was built by the physics department in 1938. During World War II the university developed the G-suit- a life-saving garment worn by Allied fighter plane pilots later adopted for use by astronauts.Development of the infrared chemiluminescence technique improved analyses of energy behaviours in chemical reactions. In 1963 the asteroid 2104 Toronto was discovered in the David Dunlap Observatory (CA) in Richmond Hill and is named after the university. In 1972 studies on Cygnus X-1 led to the publication of the first observational evidence proving the existence of black holes. Toronto astronomers have also discovered the Uranian moons of Caliban and Sycorax; the dwarf galaxies of Andromeda I, II and III; and the supernova SN 1987A. A pioneer in computing technology the university designed and built UTEC- one of the world’s first operational computers- and later purchased Ferut- the second commercial computer after UNIVAC I. Multi-touch technology was developed at Toronto with applications ranging from handheld devices to collaboration walls. The AeroVelo Atlas which won the Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition in 2013 was developed by the university’s team of students and graduates and was tested in Vaughan.

The discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921 is considered among the most significant events in the history of medicine. The stem cell was discovered at the university in 1963 forming the basis for bone marrow transplantation and all subsequent research on adult and embryonic stem cells. This was the first of many findings at Toronto relating to stem cells including the identification of pancreatic and retinal stem cells. The cancer stem cell was first identified in 1997 by Toronto researchers who have since found stem cell associations in leukemia; brain tumors; and colorectal cancer. Medical inventions developed at Toronto include the glycaemic index; the infant cereal Pablum; the use of protective hypothermia in open heart surgery; and the first artificial cardiac pacemaker. The first successful single-lung transplant was performed at Toronto in 1981 followed by the first nerve transplant in 1988; and the first double-lung transplant in 1989. Researchers identified the maturation promoting factor that regulates cell division and discovered the T-cell receptor which triggers responses of the immune system. The university is credited with isolating the genes that cause Fanconi anemia; cystic fibrosis; and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease among numerous other diseases. Between 1914 and 1972 the university operated the Connaught Medical Research Laboratories- now part of the pharmaceutical corporation Sanofi-Aventis. Among the research conducted at the laboratory was the development of gel electrophoresis.

The University of Toronto is the primary research presence that supports one of the world’s largest concentrations of biotechnology firms. More than 5,000 principal investigators reside within 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) from the university grounds in Toronto’s Discovery District conducting $1 billion of medical research annually. MaRS Discovery District is a research park that serves commercial enterprises and the university’s technology transfer ventures. In 2008, the university disclosed 159 inventions and had 114 active start-up companies. Its SciNet Consortium operates the most powerful supercomputer in Canada.

From University of Toronto (CA) : Women in STEM-Alex De Serrano “Studying guppies researchers find ADHD drugs can affect later generations”

From University of Toronto (CA)

June 03, 2021
Sean Bettam

U of T PhD candidate Alex De Serrano is the lead author of a study that found the effects of drugs such as Ritalin and Concerta could be detected in multiple generations of guppies, including those with no direct exposure Credit: Helen Rodd.

By studying guppies, scientists at the University of Toronto and Florida State University (US) found that behaviours affected by methylphenidate hydrochloride (MPH) – the active ingredient in stimulants such as Ritalin and Concerta used to treat ADHD – can be passed along to several generations of descendants.

“We exposed male and female Trinidadian guppies to a low, steady dose of MPH and saw that it affected the anxiety and stress-related behaviour of males, but not females,” said Alex De Serrano, a PhD candidate in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB) in the Faculty of Arts & Science and lead author of a study published recently in Scientific Reports.

“Because of this male-specific effect, we investigated the effects of MPH through the paternal line and observed the same behaviours in several generations of their descendants not directly administered the drug.”

The findings add to growing knowledge about paternal effects on offspring, as well as the capacity for those effects to span multiple generations – of which even less is known.

From one month of age and through adolescence and into adulthood, first-generation guppies were exposed to MPH via the water in which they lived. The researchers then compared their behaviour against a control population exposed to non-treated water and observed that the males exposed to Ritalin were less cautious when placed in a new environment, compared to those not treated with the drug.

“The Ritalin-treated males showed less inhibition than expected when moved to a new environment,” said De Serrano. “Under natural conditions, guppies would be expected to freeze if they found themselves in such a situation, as this allows them to assess their new surroundings for predators and other threats.”

De Serrano then produced three generations of offspring from these individuals to see if the behaviour of their descendants differed from descendants of those not exposed to the drug and observed behaviours similar to those of first-generation males exposed to the drug.

“It suggests that Ritalin has the potential to cause changes that persist across several generations,” De Serrano said.

The study’s findings contribute to a growing understanding of paternal effects on offspring as well as the capacity for those effects to span multiple generations. Credit: Alex De Serrano.

The researchers say the paternal effect of behavioural change may be transmitted to descendants via non-genetic modifications to the sperm of male ancestors exposed to Ritalin. Such molecular changes that don’t affect DNA are a potential mechanism for males to transmit information about their environment – including exposure to drugs or pollutants – to future offspring.

“In many species, including guppies, males do not interact with offspring beyond contributing sperm, so it was traditionally thought that paternal effects would be limited to species where fathers provide some type of care to offspring or other resources to mothers,” said Helen Rodd, a professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology who is De Serrano’s supervisor.

“As of now, most known examples in animals of paternal effects and transgenerational effects – effects that span several generations – come from rodents, so our findings add to the handful of studies that have found paternal, transgenerational effects in other species, though the actual mechanism remains unclear.”

It has been suggested that Ritalin could cause transgenerational effects because MPH has been shown to affect the sperm cells of male rodents. Further, paternal effects have been observed in descendants of rats exposed to drugs with a similar mode of action. Despite these concerns, the transgenerational effects of paternal exposure to MPH in humans are unknown.

“I was surprised to learn that no studies had investigated whether a drug so commonly prescribed to adolescent boys to treat ADHD affects the behaviour of their offspring,” said De Serrano. “Because reduced caution in new situations has been associated with increased drug-seeking behaviour in rodents and humans, our results suggest that long-term exposure to Ritalin could increase the propensity for drug abuse and other affective disorders in males and their descendants.”

However, the researchers note that, as with all comparative studies, their results only hint at general processes that might be occurring in humans and are not directly translatable to human populations.

“More research is required to determine the mechanism that caused this altered behaviour to persist across generations,” said De Serrano. “And in order to extend these results to humans, longitudinal studies following individuals taking Ritalin and their offspring are needed.”

Support for the research was provided by the NSERC – Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (CA).

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The University of Toronto (CA) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen’s Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King’s College, the oldest university in the province of Ontario.

Originally controlled by the Church of England, the university assumed its present name in 1850 upon becoming a secular institution.

As a collegiate university, it comprises eleven colleges each with substantial autonomy on financial and institutional affairs and significant differences in character and history. The university also operates two satellite campuses located in Scarborough and Mississauga.

University of Toronto has evolved into Canada’s leading institution of learning, discovery and knowledge creation. We are proud to be one of the world’s top research-intensive universities, driven to invent and innovate.

Our students have the opportunity to learn from and work with preeminent thought leaders through our multidisciplinary network of teaching and research faculty, alumni and partners.

The ideas, innovations and actions of more than 560,000 graduates continue to have a positive impact on the world.

Academically, the University of Toronto is noted for movements and curricula in literary criticism and communication theory, known collectively as the Toronto School.

The university was the birthplace of insulin and stem cell research, and was the site of the first electron microscope in North America; the identification of the first black hole Cygnus X-1; multi-touch technology, and the development of the theory of NP-completeness.

The university was one of several universities involved in early research of deep learning. It receives the most annual scientific research funding of any Canadian university and is one of two members of the Association of American Universities (US) outside the United States, the other being McGill(CA).

The Varsity Blues are the athletic teams that represent the university in intercollegiate league matches, with ties to gridiron football, rowing and ice hockey. The earliest recorded instance of gridiron football occurred at University of Toronto’s University College in November 1861.

The university’s Hart House is an early example of the North American student centre, simultaneously serving cultural, intellectual, and recreational interests within its large Gothic-revival complex.

The University of Toronto has educated three Governors General of Canada, four Prime Ministers of Canada, three foreign leaders, and fourteen Justices of the Supreme Court. As of March 2019, ten Nobel laureates, five Turing Award winners, 94 Rhodes Scholars, and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with the university.

Early history

The founding of a colonial college had long been the desire of John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada and founder of York, the colonial capital. As an University of Oxford (UK)-educated military commander who had fought in the American Revolutionary War, Simcoe believed a college was needed to counter the spread of republicanism from the United States. The Upper Canada Executive Committee recommended in 1798 that a college be established in York.

On March 15, 1827, a royal charter was formally issued by King George IV, proclaiming “from this time one College, with the style and privileges of a University … for the education of youth in the principles of the Christian Religion, and for their instruction in the various branches of Science and Literature … to continue for ever, to be called King’s College.” The granting of the charter was largely the result of intense lobbying by John Strachan, the influential Anglican Bishop of Toronto who took office as the college’s first president. The original three-storey Greek Revival school building was built on the present site of Queen’s Park.

Under Strachan’s stewardship, King’s College was a religious institution closely aligned with the Church of England and the British colonial elite, known as the Family Compact. Reformist politicians opposed the clergy’s control over colonial institutions and fought to have the college secularized. In 1849, after a lengthy and heated debate, the newly elected responsible government of the Province of Canada voted to rename King’s College as the University of Toronto and severed the school’s ties with the church. Having anticipated this decision, the enraged Strachan had resigned a year earlier to open Trinity College as a private Anglican seminary. University College was created as the nondenominational teaching branch of the University of Toronto. During the American Civil War the threat of Union blockade on British North America prompted the creation of the University Rifle Corps which saw battle in resisting the Fenian raids on the Niagara border in 1866. The Corps was part of the Reserve Militia lead by Professor Henry Croft.

Established in 1878, the School of Practical Science was the precursor to the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering which has been nicknamed Skule since its earliest days. While the Faculty of Medicine opened in 1843 medical teaching was conducted by proprietary schools from 1853 until 1887 when the faculty absorbed the Toronto School of Medicine. Meanwhile the university continued to set examinations and confer medical degrees. The university opened the Faculty of Law in 1887, followed by the Faculty of Dentistry in 1888 when the Royal College of Dental Surgeons became an affiliate. Women were first admitted to the university in 1884.

A devastating fire in 1890 gutted the interior of University College and destroyed 33,000 volumes from the library but the university restored the building and replenished its library within two years. Over the next two decades a collegiate system took shape as the university arranged federation with several ecclesiastical colleges including Strachan’s Trinity College in 1904. The university operated the Royal Conservatory of Music from 1896 to 1991 and the Royal Ontario Museum from 1912 to 1968; both still retain close ties with the university as independent institutions. The University of Toronto Press was founded in 1901 as Canada’s first academic publishing house. The Faculty of Forestry founded in 1907 with Bernhard Fernow as dean was Canada’s first university faculty devoted to forest science. In 1910, the Faculty of Education opened its laboratory school, the University of Toronto Schools.

World wars and post-war years

The First and Second World Wars curtailed some university activities as undergraduate and graduate men eagerly enlisted. Intercollegiate athletic competitions and the Hart House Debates were suspended although exhibition and interfaculty games were still held. The David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill opened in 1935 followed by the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies in 1949. The university opened satellite campuses in Scarborough in 1964 and in Mississauga in 1967. The university’s former affiliated schools at the Ontario Agricultural College and Glendon Hall became fully independent of the University of Toronto and became part of University of Guelph (CA) in 1964 and York University (CA) in 1965 respectively. Beginning in the 1980s reductions in government funding prompted more rigorous fundraising efforts.

Since 2000

In 2000 Kin-Yip Chun was reinstated as a professor of the university after he launched an unsuccessful lawsuit against the university alleging racial discrimination. In 2017 a human rights application was filed against the University by one of its students for allegedly delaying the investigation of sexual assault and being dismissive of their concerns. In 2018 the university cleared one of its professors of allegations of discrimination and antisemitism in an internal investigation after a complaint was filed by one of its students.

The University of Toronto was the first Canadian university to amass a financial endowment greater than c. $1 billion in 2007. On September 24, 2020 the university announced a $250 million gift to the Faculty of Medicine from businessman and philanthropist James C. Temerty- the largest single philanthropic donation in Canadian history. This broke the previous record for the school set in 2019 when Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman jointly donated $100 million for the creation of a 750,000-square foot innovation and artificial intelligence centre.

Research

Since 1926 the University of Toronto has been a member of the Association of American Universities (US) a consortium of the leading North American research universities. The university manages by far the largest annual research budget of any university in Canada with sponsored direct-cost expenditures of $878 million in 2010. In 2018 the University of Toronto was named the top research university in Canada by Research Infosource with a sponsored research income (external sources of funding) of $1,147.584 million in 2017. In the same year the university’s faculty averaged a sponsored research income of $428,200 while graduate students averaged a sponsored research income of $63,700. The federal government was the largest source of funding with grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council amounting to about one-third of the research budget. About eight percent of research funding came from corporations- mostly in the healthcare industry.

The first practical electron microscope was built by the physics department in 1938. During World War II the university developed the G-suit- a life-saving garment worn by Allied fighter plane pilots later adopted for use by astronauts.Development of the infrared chemiluminescence technique improved analyses of energy behaviours in chemical reactions. In 1963 the asteroid 2104 Toronto was discovered in the David Dunlap Observatory (CA) in Richmond Hill and is named after the university. In 1972 studies on Cygnus X-1 led to the publication of the first observational evidence proving the existence of black holes. Toronto astronomers have also discovered the Uranian moons of Caliban and Sycorax; the dwarf galaxies of Andromeda I, II and III; and the supernova SN 1987A. A pioneer in computing technology the university designed and built UTEC- one of the world’s first operational computers- and later purchased Ferut- the second commercial computer after UNIVAC I. Multi-touch technology was developed at Toronto with applications ranging from handheld devices to collaboration walls. The AeroVelo Atlas which won the Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition in 2013 was developed by the university’s team of students and graduates and was tested in Vaughan.

The discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921 is considered among the most significant events in the history of medicine. The stem cell was discovered at the university in 1963 forming the basis for bone marrow transplantation and all subsequent research on adult and embryonic stem cells. This was the first of many findings at Toronto relating to stem cells including the identification of pancreatic and retinal stem cells. The cancer stem cell was first identified in 1997 by Toronto researchers who have since found stem cell associations in leukemia; brain tumors; and colorectal cancer. Medical inventions developed at Toronto include the glycaemic index; the infant cereal Pablum; the use of protective hypothermia in open heart surgery; and the first artificial cardiac pacemaker. The first successful single-lung transplant was performed at Toronto in 1981 followed by the first nerve transplant in 1988; and the first double-lung transplant in 1989. Researchers identified the maturation promoting factor that regulates cell division and discovered the T-cell receptor which triggers responses of the immune system. The university is credited with isolating the genes that cause Fanconi anemia; cystic fibrosis; and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease among numerous other diseases. Between 1914 and 1972 the university operated the Connaught Medical Research Laboratories- now part of the pharmaceutical corporation Sanofi-Aventis. Among the research conducted at the laboratory was the development of gel electrophoresis.

The University of Toronto is the primary research presence that supports one of the world’s largest concentrations of biotechnology firms. More than 5,000 principal investigators reside within 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) from the university grounds in Toronto’s Discovery District conducting $1 billion of medical research annually. MaRS Discovery District is a research park that serves commercial enterprises and the university’s technology transfer ventures. In 2008, the university disclosed 159 inventions and had 114 active start-up companies. Its SciNet Consortium operates the most powerful supercomputer in Canada.

From University of California-Berkeley (US): “Diamonds engage both optical microscopy and MRI for better imaging”

From University of California-Berkeley (US)

May 17, 2021
Robert Sanders
rlsanders@berkeley.edu
Media relations

The microdiamonds used as biological tracers are about 200 microns across, less than one-hundredth of an inch. They fluoresce red but can also be hyperpolarized, allowing them to be detected both optically — by fluorescence microscopy — and by radio-frequency NMR imaging, boosting the power of both techniques. Photo courtesy of Ashok Ajoy.

When doctors or scientists want to peer into living tissue there’s always a trade-off between how deep they can probe and how clear a picture they can get.

With light microscopes, researchers can see submicron-resolution structures inside cells or tissue, but only as deep as the millimeter or so that light can penetrate without scattering. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) uses radio frequencies that can reach everywhere in the body, but the technique provides low resolution — about a millimeter, or 1,000 times worse than light.

A University of California, Berkeley, researcher has now shown that microscopic diamond tracers can provide information via MRI and optical fluorescence simultaneously potentially allowing scientists to get high-quality images up to a centimeter below the surface of tissue 10 times deeper than light alone.

By using two modes of observation, the technique also could allow faster imaging.

The technique would be useful primarily for studying cells and tissue outside the body, probing blood or other fluids for chemical markers of disease, or for physiological studies in animals.

“This is perhaps the first demonstration that the same object can be imaged in optics and hyperpolarized MRI simultaneously,” said Ashok Ajoy, UC Berkeley assistant professor of chemistry. “There is a lot of information you can get in combination, because the two modes are better than the sum of their parts. This opens up many possibilities, where you can accelerate the imaging of these diamond tracers in a medium by several orders of magnitude.”

The technique, which Ajoy and his colleagues report this week in the journal PNAS, utilizes a relatively new type of biological tracer: microdiamonds that have had some of their carbon atoms kicked out and replaced by nitrogen, leaving behind empty spots in the crystal — nitrogen vacancies — that fluoresce when hit by laser light.

Ajoy exploits an isotope of carbon — carbon-13 (C-13) – that occurs naturally in the diamond particles at about 1% concentration, but also could be enriched further by replacing many of the dominant carbon atoms, carbon-12. Carbon-13 nuclei are more readily aligned, or polarized, by nearby spin-polarized vacancy centers, which become polarized at the same time they fluoresce after being illuminated with a laser. The polarized C-13 nuclei yield a stronger signal for nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) — the technique at the heart of MRI.

The crystal lattice of a microdiamond contains gaps — nitrogen vacancies — that can be polarized (red spinning balls) and made to emit red light when illuminated by a laser. The polarized centers then hyperpolarize nearby carbon-13 atoms (blue balls), allowing them to be detected by NMR imaging. This allows the tracers to be imaged both by optical fluorescence microscopy and NMR, providing higher resolution pictures deeper inside tissue. UC Berkeley graphic by Xudong Lv and Mustafa Kamran.

As a result, these hyperpolarized diamonds can be detected both optically — because of the fluorescent nitrogen vacancy centers — and at radio frequencies, because of the spin-polarized carbon-13. This allows simultaneous imaging by two of the best techniques available, with particular benefit when looking deep inside tissues that scatter visible light.

“Optical imaging suffers greatly when you go in deep tissue. Even beyond 1 millimeter, you get a lot of optical scattering. This is a major problem,” Ajoy said. “The advantage here is that the imaging can be done in radio frequencies and optical light using the same diamond tracer. The same version of MRI that you use for imaging inside people can be used for imaging these diamond particles, even when the optical fluorescence signature is completely scattered out.”

Detecting nuclear spin

Ajoy focuses on improving NMR — a very precise way of identifying molecules — and its medical imaging counterpart, MRI, in hopes of lowering the cost and reducing the size of the machines. One limitation of NMR and MRI is that large, powerful and costly magnets are needed to align or polarize the nuclear spins of molecules inside samples or the body so that they can be detected by pulses of radio waves. But humans can’t withstand the very high magnetic fields needed to get lots of spins polarized at once, which would provide better images.

Emanuel Druga and Xudong Lv with a prototype “hyperpolarizer” for diamond particles (on table). They are standing next to a 9-tesla NMR machine. Credit: Ashok Ajoy.

One way to overcome this is to tweak the nuclear spins of the atoms you want to detect so that more of them are aligned in the same direction, instead of randomly. With more spins aligned, called hyperpolarization, the signal detected by radio is stronger, and less powerful magnets can be used.

In his latest experiments, Ajoy employed a magnetic field equivalent to that of a cheap refrigerator magnet and an inexpensive green laser to hyperpolarize the carbon-13 atoms in the crystal lattice of the microdiamonds.

“It turns out that if you shine light on these particles, you can align their spins to a very, very high degree — about three to four orders of magnitude higher than the alignment of spins in an MRI machine,” Ajoy said. “Compared to conventional hospital MRIs, which use a magnetic field of 1.5 teslas, the carbons are polarized effectively like they were in a 1,000-tesla magnetic field.”

When the diamonds are targeted to specific sites in cells or tissue — by antibodies, for example, which are often used with fluorescent tracers — they can be detected both by NMR imaging of the hyperpolarized C-13 and the fluorescence of the nitrogen vacancy centers in the diamond. The nitrogen vacancy-center diamonds are already becoming more widely used as tracers for their fluorescence alone.

In the researchers’ experiment, diamond particles arranged in a ring were imaged both optically and with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Credit: Ashok Ajoy.

“We show one important cool feature of these diamond particles, the fact that they spin polarize — therefore they can glow very bright in an MRI machine — but they also fluoresce optically,” he said. “The same thing that endows them with the spin polarization also allows them to fluoresce optically.”

The diamond tracers also are inexpensive and relatively easy to work with, Ajoy said. Together, these new developments could, in the future, allow for an inexpensive NMR imaging machine on every chemist’s benchtop. Today, only large hospitals can afford the million-dollar price tag for MRIs. He currently is working on other techniques to improve NMR and MRI, including using hyperpolarized diamond particles to hyperpolarize other molecules.

The experiments were led by former graduate student Xudong Lv using a home-built hyperpolarizer device constructed by staff scientist Emanuel Druga. Ajoy’s work was supported by the Office of Naval Research (N00014-20-1-2806). Other co-authors are F. Wang, A. Aguilar, T. McKnelly, R. Nazaryan and L. Wu of UC Berkeley; J. H. Walton of University of California-Davis (US); O. Shenderova of Adamas Nanotechnologies Inc., in North Carolina; D. B. Vigneron of Univerity of California-San Fransisco (US); Carlos Meriles of City University of New York (US); and professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering Jeffrey Reimer and chemistry professor Alexander Pines, both of UC Berkeley.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The University of California-Berkeley is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the state’s first land-grant university, it was the first campus of the University of California (US) system and a founding member of the Association of American Universities (US). Its 14 colleges and schools offer over 350 degree programs and enroll some 31,000 undergraduate and 12,000 graduate students. Berkeley is ranked among the world’s top universities by major educational publications.

Berkeley hosts many leading research institutes, including the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and the Space Sciences Laboratory. It founded and maintains close relationships with three national laboratories at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory(US), DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory(US) and DOE’s Los Alamos National Lab(US), and has played a prominent role in many scientific advances, from the Manhattan Project and the discovery of 16 chemical elements to breakthroughs in computer science and genomics. Berkeley is also known for student activism and the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s.

Berkeley alumni and faculty count among their ranks 110 Nobel laureates (34 alumni), 25 Turing Award winners (11 alumni), 14 Fields Medalists, 28 Wolf Prize winners, 103 MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipients, 30 Pulitzer Prize winners, and 19 Academy Award winners. The university has produced seven heads of state or government; five chief justices, including Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren; 21 cabinet-level officials; 11 governors; and 25 living billionaires. It is also a leading producer of Fulbright Scholars, MacArthur Fellows, and Marshall Scholars. Berkeley alumni, widely recognized for their entrepreneurship, have founded many notable companies.

Berkeley’s athletic teams compete in Division I of the NCAA, primarily in the Pac-12 Conference, and are collectively known as the California Golden Bears. The university’s teams have won 107 national championships, and its students and alumni have won 207 Olympic medals.

Made possible by President Lincoln’s signing of the Morrill Act in 1862, the University of California was founded in 1868 as the state’s first land-grant university by inheriting certain assets and objectives of the private College of California and the public Agricultural, Mining, and Mechanical Arts College. Although this process is often incorrectly mistaken for a merger, the Organic Act created a “completely new institution” and did not actually merge the two precursor entities into the new university. The Organic Act states that the “University shall have for its design, to provide instruction and thorough and complete education in all departments of science, literature and art, industrial and professional pursuits, and general education, and also special courses of instruction in preparation for the professions”.

Ten faculty members and 40 students made up the fledgling university when it opened in Oakland in 1869. Frederick H. Billings, a trustee of the College of California, suggested that a new campus site north of Oakland be named in honor of Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley. The university began admitting women the following year. In 1870, Henry Durant, founder of the College of California, became its first president. With the completion of North and South Halls in 1873, the university relocated to its Berkeley location with 167 male and 22 female students.

Beginning in 1891, Phoebe Apperson Hearst made several large gifts to Berkeley, funding a number of programs and new buildings and sponsoring, in 1898, an international competition in Antwerp, Belgium, where French architect Émile Bénard submitted the winning design for a campus master plan.

20th century

In 1905, the University Farm was established near Sacramento, ultimately becoming the University of California, Davis. In 1919, Los Angeles State Normal School became the southern branch of the University, which ultimately became the University of California, Los Angeles. By 1920s, the number of campus buildings had grown substantially and included twenty structures designed by architect John Galen Howard.

In 1917, one of the nation’s first ROTC programs was established at Berkeley and its School of Military Aeronautics began training pilots, including Gen. Jimmy Doolittle. Berkeley ROTC alumni include former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Army Chief of Staff Frederick C. Weyand as well as 16 other generals. In 1926, future fleet admiral Chester W. Nimitz established the first Naval ROTC unit at Berkeley.

In the 1930s, Ernest Lawrence helped establish the Radiation Laboratory (now DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (US)) and invented the cyclotron, which won him the Nobel physics prize in 1939. Using the cyclotron, Berkeley professors and Berkeley Lab researchers went on to discover 16 chemical elements—more than any other university in the world. In particular, during World War II and following Glenn Seaborg’s then-secret discovery of plutonium, Ernest Orlando Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory began to contract with the U.S. Army to develop the atomic bomb. Physics professor J. Robert Oppenheimer was named scientific head of the Manhattan Project in 1942. Along with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley founded and was then a partner in managing two other labs, Los Alamos National Laboratory (1943) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (1952).

By 1942, the American Council on Education ranked Berkeley second only to Harvard University (US) in the number of distinguished departments.

In 1952, the University of California reorganized itself into a system of semi-autonomous campuses, with each campus given its own chancellor, and Clark Kerr became Berkeley’s first Chancellor, while Sproul remained in place as the President of the University of California.

Berkeley gained a worldwide reputation for political activism in the 1960s. In 1964, the Free Speech Movement organized student resistance to the university’s restrictions on political activities on campus—most conspicuously, student activities related to the Civil Rights Movement. The arrest in Sproul Plaza of Jack Weinberg, a recent Berkeley alumnus and chair of Campus CORE, in October 1964, prompted a series of student-led acts of formal remonstrance and civil disobedience that ultimately gave rise to the Free Speech Movement, which movement would prevail and serve as precedent for student opposition to America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

In 1982, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) was established on campus with support from the National Science Foundation and at the request of three Berkeley mathematicians — Shiing-Shen Chern, Calvin Moore and Isadore M. Singer. The institute is now widely regarded as a leading center for collaborative mathematical research, drawing thousands of visiting researchers from around the world each year.

21st century

In the current century, Berkeley has become less politically active and more focused on entrepreneurship and fundraising, especially for STEM disciplines.

Modern Berkeley students are less politically radical, with a greater percentage of moderates and conservatives than in the 1960s and 70s. Democrats outnumber Republicans on the faculty by a ratio of 9:1. On the whole, Democrats outnumber Republicans on American university campuses by a ratio of 10:1.

In 2007, the Energy Biosciences Institute was established with funding from BP and Stanley Hall, a research facility and headquarters for the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, opened. The next few years saw the dedication of the Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences, funded by a lead gift from billionaire Li Ka-shing; the opening of Sutardja Dai Hall, home of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society; and the unveiling of Blum Hall, housing the Blum Center for Developing Economies. Supported by a grant from alumnus James Simons, the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing was established in 2012. In 2014, Berkeley and its sister campus, Univerity of California-San Fransisco (US), established the Innovative Genomics Institute, and, in 2020, an anonymous donor pledged $252 million to help fund a new center for computing and data science.

Since 2000, Berkeley alumni and faculty have received 40 Nobel Prizes, behind only Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) among US universities; five Turing Awards, behind only MIT and Stanford; and five Fields Medals, second only to Princeton University (US). According to PitchBook, Berkeley ranks second, just behind Stanford University, in producing VC-backed entrepreneurs.

From University of South Florida : “$44 Million NIH Grant to See if Dementia Can Be Prevented”

From University of South Florida

April 06, 2021

National Institutes of Health (US)

Researchers at the University South Florida in Tampa have received a $44.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)(US) for the Preventing Alzheimer’s with Cognitive Training (PACT) Study.This new grant furthers prior research [PubMed], published as findings of the ACTIVE Study in 2017, that showed a small amount of cognitive training significantly reduced the risk and incidence of dementia among older adults. The computerized brain training used in the prior study and the new study is found exclusively in the BrainHQ app, made by Posit Science, and is based on the science of brain plasticity – how the brain rewires itself through learning.

The PACT Study is a very large randomized controlled trial, which plans to enroll 7,600 adults, aged 65 and older, to test the effectiveness of BrainHQ computerized brain exercises in reducing the incidence of medical diagnoses of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and dementia.

A feasibility stage of the study with over 1,000 participants has been completed and the new grant-to be overseen by the National Institute on Aging-will be deployed to bring the study to scale with a completion target date in 2027.

PACT participants will be randomized into two training groups. Each group will be asked to complete a total of 25 hours over the course of up to five months, and then an additional 10 hours after one year and two years.

“This study addresses the central question that most people have about brain training – does training your brain reduce your chances of dementia?” said Dr. Henry Mahncke, CEO of Posit Science, the maker of BrainHQ.

The ACTIVE study provided the possible beginnings of an answer in 2017. Those results grabbed headlines worldwide, since it was the first large randomized controlled trial to show an intervention (of any kind) could be effective in reducing dementia risk and incidence. Researchers reported an up to 48 percent reduction in dementia incidence among people who asked to complete up to 18 hours of training and an overall 29 percent reduction in dementia risk.

A 2020 study in Australia also found a statistically and clinically significant reduction in Alzheimer’s risk from an intervention that combined advice on Alzheimer’s risk reduction with using BrainHQ over an eight-week period, a meeting with a dietician to set up a diet plan, and a meeting with a physiologist to set up a physical exercise plan, when compared to a control group just getting advice on lifestyle risk redaction, brain exercise, diet, and physical exercise.

Some eighteen studies have been published on the impact of using BrainHQ among people with MCI or similar pre-dementia conditions, who are typically considered at elevated risk for Alzheimer’s or other dementias. Results from those studies have included improved performance on standard measures of cognitive abilities, better performance on standard measures of mood, better performance at tasks necessary to maintain independent living, better connectivity in key cortical networks, and improvement in the autonomic nervous system (as measured by heart rate variability).

“It’s gratifying to see the NIH going the distance – building on the established science of brain training to answer the crucial question of dementia prevention,” Dr. Mahncke observed. “Billions have been spent in the thus far unsuccessful search for drugs to prevent MCI and dementia, and so it’s great to see a serious commitment to evaluating the plasticity-based training that has delivered so many promising results in recent studies. It’s impressive that USF is leading this study – they have a strong history of performing large-scale clinical trials required to advance basic science into clinical practice.”

More than 100 published studies of the exercises in BrainHQ have shown benefits, including gains in standard measures of cognition (attention, speed, memory, executive function), in standard measures of quality of life (mood, confidence and control, managing stress, health-related quality of life) and in real world activities (gait, balance, driving, everyday cognition, maintaining independence, healthcare costs). BrainHQ is now offered, without charge, as a benefit by leading national and 5-star Medicare Advantage plans and by hundreds of clinics, libraries, and communities. Consumers can also try BrainHQ for free at http://www.brainhq.com.

See the full article here.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Welcome to the University of South Florida, a Preeminent State Research University! Located in the heart of Tampa Bay, the University of South Florida is dedicated to empowering students to maximize their potential for lifelong success.

USF is situated in the vibrant and diverse Tampa Bay region, with campuses in Tampa, St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee. Together these campuses serve more than 50,000 students and offer undergraduate, graduate, specialist and doctoral degrees.

Across our 14 colleges, undergraduates choose from over 180 majors and concentrations, from business and engineering to the arts and USF Health. We are dedicated to empowering our students to prosper and have been recognized nationally for closing the achievement gap regardless of race, background or socioeconomic status.

Over the past five years, USF has been the fastest-rising university in the nation, public or private, on the U.S. News and World Report’s list of best universities. USF ranks as the 46th best public university in America.