- Precision functional MRI mapping reveals distinct connectivity patterns for depression associated with traumatic brain injury Science
- Redefining Depression: TBI Affective Syndrome Discovered Neuroscience News
- Depression after a brain injury is a distinct condition, study finds. That could change how it’s treated. AOL
- Why depression after traumatic brain injury is distinct — and less likely to respond to standard treatment STAT
- Abnormal Brain Folding a Biomarker for Major Depressive Disorder Neuroscience News
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: patterns
Want to live longer? Follow these 4 healthy eating patterns, new study finds
Your dietary pattern may help predict how long you live. This is the conclusion from a new study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association assessing diet quality and mortality. The study found that individuals that consumed a more nutrient-dense diet were less likely to die early.
The eating habits of 119,315 individuals (75,230 women and 44,085 men) from the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study were assessed over 36 years. During that time frame, they evaluated adherence and outcomes related to four different dietary patterns, all of which adhere in some capacity to the United States Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
The four eating patterns analyzed were:
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The Healthy Eating Index 2015 (HEI), which measures diet quality and adherence and utilizes guidelines from the Dietary Guidelines for Americans in its scoring assessment.
-
The Alternate Healthy Eating Index (AHEI), which was created by researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health as an alternative to the original HEI. Like the HEI, it provides scoring but focuses more on reducing chronic disease risk.
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The Alternate Mediterranean Diet (AMED), which measures adaptation to the Mediterranean diet principles.
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The Healthful Plant-based Diet Index (HPDI), which measures adherence to a healthy plant-based diet.
The study found there are multiple ways to adhere to a healthy diet
Individuals with the greatest adherence to at least one of the healthier eating indexes had the lowest risk of death compared with individuals with the lowest adherence. This outcome was seen amongst all four healthy eating indexes. Additionally, this outcome was consistent amongst multiple racial and ethnic groups. It was also seen in a dose-dependent fashion (the greater the score, the lower the risk for early death from cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, and cancer). Higher adherence scores for AMED and AHEI were further associated with a lower risk of neurodegenerative disease mortality.
There were several key takeaways from the study. First, it emphasized that there are multiple ways to adhere to a healthier way of eating. Since there is no “one size fits all” diet, it demonstrated that different dietary patterns could be adapted to any ethnic or personal preference. Second, there were many similarities between the four eating patterns. For example, all eating habits were nutrient-dense, providing abundant vitamins and minerals. They were also more slanted towards more plant-based approaches. Dr. Frank Hu, chair of department of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, was the study’s lead author. He tells TODAY.com, “Although these diets differ in some aspects, they all include high amounts of healthy plant foods such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, and legumes, and lower amounts of refined grains, added sugars, sodium, and red and processed meats.”
For a longer life, focus on these 5 dietary habits:
1. Focus on fiber
One of the best ways to consume more plants is to focus on getting more fiber. A 2019 systematic review and meta-analysis in the journal Lancet found that adequate fiber intake (between 25g to 29g per day) was also associated with a reduction in risk of all causes and decreases in heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, and colorectal cancer.
2. Nosh on nuts
Nut consumption was emphasized in all four eating patterns in the study. Nuts are high in healthy fats, which may help increase satiety and fullness, a key component of weight management. They have also been associated with better brain health and may lower the risk of heart disease.
3. Get colorful
Color is vital in the plant world and comes from compounds called phytonutrients that provide both hue and benefit to the plant. Studies show that consuming colorful fruits and vegetables can also lead to a longer life.
4. Opt for plant and marine sources of protein
Beans, legumes and fish were highlighted in several of the eating patterns. The AMED pattern, for example, encouraged the consumption of fatty fish, like salmon, that can provide abundant amounts of omega-3 fatty acids. In contrast, beans and legumes provide fiber in addition to protein.
5. Find flexibility
The study demonstrated that healthy eating can be tailored to the individual — and that following multiple approaches within the common themes could lead to significant health benefits. “In order for someone to stick to a healthy diet long-term, one needs to enjoy it. So it is important for individuals to adapt these healthy eating patterns to their own food and cultural preferences. Also, one does not need to stick to only one dietary approach for their whole life. To enhance variety and adherence, one can switch between these various healthy diets or create their own flexitarian diet. However, the core healthy eating principles should remain the same: Eat more minimally-processed plant foods such as fruits, vegetables, nuts, whole grains, and legumes; eat less red meat and ultra-processed foods high in sugar, sodium, and refined starch,” Hu explains.
If overhauling your dietary pattern seems overwhelming, consider this — baby steps will go further than no movement at all. Hu says that many healthy dietary patterns have been associated with, not only a longer life, but a reduction in chronic disease risk complications as well. Hu explains that, for example, “a greater adherence to the Mediterranean diet reduces the risk of cardiovascular complications among people with diabetes.” Also, healthy eating patterns have been associated with better survival among people with breast or colorectal cancer.”
As Hu says, “it’s never too late to adopt a healthy diet.”
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
New research indicates signs of depression can be detected in speech patterns
New research published in BMC Psychiatry finds that changes in speech like speed, pitch, number of pauses, and intensity can predict who may report more depressive symptoms. The research team found they could predict with 93% accuracy who would have scores on a measure of depression high enough to be clinically significant. This research may lead to new early screening methods for depression.
Major depressive disorder is one of the most common mental illnesses of our time; it is found everywhere in the world and, according to the WHO, affects more than 264 million people. An illness that affects so many can benefit from early detection methods. Research has found that if early signs of depression are caught, therapeutic interventions may reduce the intensity of the depressive episode. Alexandra König and colleagues recognize that objective and easy-to-use tools for early identification are needed.
It has been known for some time that those who are depressed speak differently; speed, fluency, and pitch are known to change during depressive episodes. Clinicians report that they look for these speech characteristics during the diagnosis process. If this is so, König and the research team were curious if a speech analysis test could be developed to look for speech differences in those at risk for depression.
In order to determine if this was possible, subjects with no clinical diagnosis were used in the hopes that some would have more depressive symptoms and would be identified through speech analysis. One hundred and eighteen university students were recruited for the study. First, participants took an assessment called “Trail Making.” This assessment was intended to measure their cognitive speed at problem-solving. Next, they took an assessment of depressive symptoms; then, they were recorded speaking.
The speech task asked them to speak for one minute about something positive in their life and one minute about something negative. The speech task was analyzed, looking for specific acoustic features, how many words were said, and how many words were said in a speech segment (before a pause).
Their results found that 25 of their subjects scored high enough on the measure of depression to be considered for a clinical diagnosis of depression. These 25 subjects spoke more words than those who did not score high for depression, and this was true in both the positive and negative stories. In addition, speed of speech, pitch, and prosodic features of speech were excellent predictors of who would have depression scores. Finally, those with high depression scores took more time to complete the Trail Making Test.
The research team acknowledges some limitations to their work. Their speech recording was short, just two minutes per subject, which may have needed longer to make reliable predictions. Second, the subjects of their study were all university students, making the sample, not representative. Finally, the subjects were not clinically observed, so it is impossible to know if they would have been diagnosed with clinical depression.
These limitations notwithstanding, the research team finds their work valuable in the pursuit of early detection of depressive symptoms. They conclude, “Taken together, our study adds to the current literature that speech features are sensitive for the detection of depressive symptoms even in a non-clinical sample.”
The study, “Detecting subtle signs of depression with automated speech analysis in a non-clinical sample”, was authored by Alexandra König, Johannes Tröger, Elisa Mallick, Mario Mina, Nicklas Linz, Carole Wagnon, Julia Karbach, Caroline Kuhn, and Jessica Peter.
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High Frequency Brain Wave Patterns in the Motor Cortex Can Predict an Upcoming Movement
Summary: Spatially organized recruitment of neural activity across the motor cortex informs details of planned movements.
Source: University of Chicago
Nicholas G. Hatsopoulos, PhD, Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago, has long been interested in space. Specifically, the physical space occupied by the brain.
“Inside our heads, the brain is all crumpled up. If you flattened out the human cortex into a single 2D sheet, it would cover two and a half square feet of space — roughly the size of four pieces of paper. You would think that the brain would take advantage of all that space when organizing activity patterns, but aside from knowing that one patch of the brain controls the arm and another controls the leg, we’ve mostly ignored how the brain might use that spatial organization.”
Now in a new study published on January 16 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Hatsopoulos and his team have found evidence that the brain does indeed use the spatial organization of high frequency propagating waves of neuronal activity during movement.
The presences of propagating waves of neuronal activity has been well-established, but they are traditionally associated with the general behavioral state of an animal (such as awake or asleep). This study is the first evidence that spatially organized recruitment of neuronal activity across the motor cortex can inform details of a planned movement.
The team hopes the work will help inform how researchers and engineers decode motor information to build better brain-machine interfaces.
To conduct the study, the researchers recorded the activity from multielectrode arrays implanted in the primary motor cortex of macaque monkeys while the monkeys did a task that required them to move a joystick. Then, they looked for wave-like patterns of activity, specifically those of high-amplitude.
“We focused on the high frequency band signals given its rich information, ideal spatial reach and easiness of obtaining signal in every electrode,” said Wei Liang, first author on the study and a graduate student in the Hatsopoulos lab.
They found that these propagating waves, comprised of the activity of hundreds of neurons, traveled in different directions across the cortical surface based on which direction the monkey pushed the joystick.
“It’s like a series of dominoes falling,” said Hatsopoulos. “All of the wave patterning we’ve seen in the past didn’t tell us what the animal was doing, it would just happen. This is very exciting because now we’re looking at this propagating wave pattern and shown that the direction the wave goes tells you something about what the animal is about to do.”
The results provide a new way of looking at cortical function. “This shows that space does matter,” Hatsopoulos said. “Instead of just looking at what populations of neurons do and care about, we’re seeing that there is spatially organized patterning that carries information. This is a very different way of thinking about things.”
The research was challenging due to the fact that they were studying the activity patterns from individual movements, rather than averaging the recordings over repeated trials, which can be quite noisy. The team was able to develop a computational method for cleaning up the data to provide clarity on the signals being recorded without losing important information.
“If you average across trials, you miss information,” said Hatsopoulos. “If we want to implement this system as part of a brain-machine interface, we can’t be averaging trials — your decoder has to do it on the fly, as the movement is happening, for the system to work effectively.”
Knowing that these waves contain information about movement opens the door to a new dimension of understanding how the brain moves the body, which can in turn provide additional information for the computational systems that will drive the brain-machine interfaces of the future.
“The spatial dimension has been mostly ignored thus far, but it’s a new angle we can use for understanding cortical function,” said Hatsopoulos. “When we try to understand the computations the cortex is doing, we should consider how the neurons are spatially laid out.”
Future studies will examine whether similar wave patterns are seen in more complicated movements, such as sequential movements as opposed to simple point-to-point reaching, and whether or not wave-like electrical stimulation of the brain can bias the monkey’s movement.
Funding: The study, “Propagating spatiotemporal activity patterns across macaque motor cortex carry kinematic information,” was supported by the National Institutes of Health (R01 NS111982). Additional authors include Karthikeyan Balasubramanianb and Vasileios Papadourakis of the University of Chicago.
See also
About this movement and neuroscience research news
Author: Alison Caldwell
Source: University of Chicago
Contact: Alison Caldwell – University of Chicago
Image: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Open access.
“Propagating spatiotemporal activity patterns across macaque motor cortex carry kinematic information” by Wei Liang et al. PNAS
Abstract
Propagating spatiotemporal activity patterns across macaque motor cortex carry kinematic information
Propagating spatiotemporal neural patterns are widely evident across sensory, motor, and association cortical areas. However, it remains unclear whether any characteristics of neural propagation carry information about specific behavioral details.
Here, we provide the first evidence for a link between the direction of cortical propagation and specific behavioral features of an upcoming movement on a trial-by-trial basis.
We recorded local field potentials (LFPs) from multielectrode arrays implanted in the primary motor cortex of two rhesus macaque monkeys while they performed a 2D reach task. Propagating patterns were extracted from the information-rich high-gamma band (200 to 400 Hz) envelopes in the LFP amplitude.
We found that the exact direction of propagating patterns varied systematically according to initial movement direction, enabling kinematic predictions.
Furthermore, characteristics of these propagation patterns provided additional predictive capability beyond the LFP amplitude themselves, which suggests the value of including mesoscopic spatiotemporal characteristics in refining brain–machine interfaces.
Huge Study Reveals 4 Eating Patterns Linked to Lower Risk of Early Death : ScienceAlert
There’s a lot of dietary advice out there, but the science that links food and health isn’t always clear-cut. A new study on the topic is one of the most comprehensive to date and has identified four eating patterns associated with lower mortality risk.
Analyzing the eating patterns of 119,315 people over 36 years, researchers compared those patterns with four sets of recognized healthy dietary regimes: the Healthy Eating Index, the Alternate Mediterranean Diet, the Healthful Plant-based Diet Index, and the Alternate Healthy Eating Index.
Sticking closely to at least one of these patterns reduced the risk of premature death by any cause and cardiovascular disease, cancer, and respiratory disease, the study showed. While the diets differ, they all include whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes.
That matches the official Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs), the researchers note – guidelines that recommend multiple healthy eating patterns to suit individual preferences, cultures, and health needs and offer a host of tips on eating in a way that doesn’t harm our bodies.
“The Dietary Guidelines for Americans are intended to provide science-based dietary advice that promotes good health and reduces major chronic diseases,” says Frank Hu, a nutritional epidemiologist from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health in Massachusetts.
“Thus, it is critical to examine the associations between DGAs-recommended dietary patterns and long-term health outcomes, especially mortality.”
The Healthy Eating Index, for example, provides recommended amounts across all the main food groups, including fruits, vegetables, and dairy. The Alternate Mediterranean Diet score is comprehensive, taking in data on fruits, fish, nuts, alcohol, and more.
Then there’s the Healthful Plant-based Diet Index, which ranks healthy plant-based foods (like vegetables and whole grains) against unhealthy plant-based foods (such as refined grains and high-sugar foods) and animal-based foods.
Finally, the Alternate Healthy Eating Index takes in everything from vegetables to sugary drinks, mainly how this links with chronic disease.
As per the results from this latest study, it’s an excellent idea to start following at least one of these approaches.
“It is important to evaluate adherence to DGAs-recommended eating patterns and health outcomes, including mortality, so that timely updates can be made,” says Hu.
While the research can’t definitively say that these specific dietary habits are causing longer life – and it relies on self-reported data rather than anything scientifically logged – the association is clear enough to demonstrate the health benefits of eating well.
As noted by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 6 in 10 adults in the US are living with at least one chronic disease related to their diet. Meanwhile, adherence to these guidelines hasn’t improved much over recent years.
There is no shortage of studies looking at diet and health, though recommendations can vary depending on age and how we’re built. Legumes, whole grains, and vegetables are often recommended, while fish, eggs, and dairy are typically best eaten in moderation, according to experts.
What’s clear is how important it is to commit to a healthy diet throughout our lives if we want those lives to last as long as possible. That’s part of the job of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which are due to be updated in the near future.
“Our findings will be valuable for the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, which is being formed to evaluate current evidence surrounding different eating patterns and health outcomes,” says Hu.
The research has been published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
The Surprising Connection Between Earth’s Orbital Patterns and an Ancient Warming Event
An international team of scientists has found that changes in Earth’s orbit that favored hotter conditions may have helped trigger a rapid global warming event 56 million years ago known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM).
An international team of scientists has suggested that changes in Earth’s orbit that resulted in hotter conditions may have played a role in triggering a rapid global warming event that occurred 56 million years ago. This event, known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), is considered to be an analog to modern-day climate change.
“The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum is the closest thing we have in the geologic record to anything like what we’re experiencing now and may experience in the future with climate change,” said Lee Kump, professor of geosciences at Penn State University. “There has been a lot of interest in better resolving that history, and our work addresses important questions about what triggered the event and the rate of carbon emissions.”
The team of scientists studied core samples from a well-preserved record of the PETM near the Maryland coast using astrochronology, a method of dating sedimentary layers based on orbital patterns that occur over long periods of time, known as Milankovitch cycles.
Victoria Fortiz (right), then a graduate student at Penn State, and Jean Self-Trail, a research geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, work on a core sample from the Howards Tract site in Maryland. Credit: Penn State
They found the shape of Earth’s orbit, or eccentricity, and the wobble in its rotation, or precession, favored hotter conditions at the onset of the PETM and that these orbital configurations together may have played a role in triggering the event.
“An orbital trigger may have led to the carbon release that caused several degrees of global warming during the PETM as opposed to what’s a more popular interpretation at the moment that massive volcanism released the carbon and triggered the event,” said Kump, the John Leone Dean in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences.
The findings, published in the journal
“Those rates are close to an order of magnitude slower than the rate of carbon emissions today, so that is cause for some concern,” Kump said. “We are now emitting carbon at a rate that’s 5 to 10 times higher than our estimates of emissions during this geological event that left an indelible imprint on the planet 56 million years ago.”
The scientists conducted a time series analysis of calcium content and magnetic susceptibility found in the cores, which are proxies for changes in orbital cycles, and used that information to estimate the pacing of the PETM.
Earth’s orbit varies in predictable, calculable ways due to gravitational interactions with the sun and other planets in the solar system. These changes impact how much sunlight reaches Earth and its geographic distribution and therefore influence the climate.
“The reason there’s an expression in the geologic record of these orbital changes is because they affect climate,” Kump said. “And that affects how productive marine and terrestrial organisms are, how much rainfall there is, how much erosion there is on the continents, and therefore how much sediment is carried into the ocean environment.”
Erosion from the paleo Potomac and Susquehanna rivers, which at the onset of the PETM may have rivaled the discharge of the Amazon River, carried sediments to the ocean where they were deposited on the continental shelf. This formation, called the Marlboro Clay, is now inland and offers one of the best-preserved examples of the PETM.
“We can develop histories by coring down through the layers of sediment and extracting specific cycles that are creating this story, just like you could extract each note from a song,” Kump said. “Of course, some of the records are distorted and there are gaps — but we can use the same types of statistical methods that are used in apps that can determine what song you are trying to sing. You can sing a song and if you forget half the words and skip a chorus, it will still be able to determine the song, and we can use that same approach to reconstruct these records.”
Reference: “Astrochronology of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum on the Atlantic Coastal Plain” by Mingsong Li, Timothy J. Bralower, Lee R. Kump, Jean M. Self-Trail, James C. Zachos, William D. Rush and Marci M. Robinson, 24 September 2022, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-33390-x
The study was funded by the National Key R&D Program of China and the Heising-Simons Foundation.
Mysterious Patterns in Temperatures Detected on Jupiter
This view compares a lucky imaging view of Jupiter from VISIR (left) at infrared wavelengths with a very sharp amateur image in visible light from about the same time (right). Credit: ESO/L.N. Fletcher/Damian Peach
Based partly on data from generations of
Jupiter’s troposphere has a lot in common with Earth’s: It’s where clouds form and storms churn. To understand this weather activity, scientists need to study certain properties, including wind, pressure, humidity, and temperature. They have known since NASA’s Pioneer 10 and 11 missions in the 1970s that, in general, colder temperatures are associated with Jupiter’s lighter and whiter bands (known as zones), while the darker brown-red bands (known as belts) are locations of warmer temperatures.
These infrared images of Jupiter with color added were obtained by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in 2016 and contributed to the new study. The colors represent temperatures and cloudiness: The bluer areas are cold and cloudy, and the orange areas are warmer and cloud-free. Credit: ESO / L.N. Fletcher
However, not enough data sets were available to understand how temperatures vary over the long term. The new research, published on December 19 in the journal Nature Astronomy, breaks ground by studying images of the bright infrared glow (invisible to the human eye) that rises from warmer regions of the atmosphere, directly measuring Jupiter’s temperatures above the colorful clouds. The scientists collected these images at regular intervals over three of Jupiter’s orbits around the Sun, each of which lasts 12 Earth years.
In the process, they discovered that Jupiter’s temperatures rise and fall following definite periods that aren’t tied to the seasons or any other cycles scientists know about. Because Jupiter has weak seasons – the planet is tilted on its axis only 3 degrees, compared to Earth’s jaunty 23.5 degrees – scientists didn’t expect to find temperatures on Jupiter varying in such regular cycles.
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the sun and the largest planet in the solar system. It is a gas giant with a mass about two and a half times that of all the other planets in the solar system combined. Jupiter has a thick atmosphere made up mostly of hydrogen and helium, and it has a number of distinctive features, including dark bands called “belts” and light bands called “zones.” The most famous feature of Jupiter is the Great Red Spot, a giant storm that has been raging for hundreds of years. Jupiter has 80 known moons, the four largest of which are called the Galilean moons in honor of their discoverer, Galileo Galilei. These moons are Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Jupiter also has a number of rings, though they are much less prominent than the rings of
“We’ve solved one part of the puzzle now, which is that the atmosphere shows these natural cycles,” said co-author Leigh Fletcher of the University of Leicester in England. “To understand what’s driving these patterns and why they occur on these particular timescales, we need to explore both above and below the cloudy layers.”
One possible explanation became apparent at the equator: The study authors found that temperature variations higher up, in the stratosphere, seemed to rise and fall in a pattern that is the opposite of how temperatures behave in the troposphere, suggesting changes in the stratosphere influence changes in the troposphere and vice versa.
Decades of Observations
Orton and his colleagues began the study in 1978. For the duration of their research, they would write proposals several times a year to win observation time on three large telescopes around the world: the
Then came the hard part – combining multiple years’ worth of observations from several telescopes and science instruments to search for patterns. Joining these veteran scientists on their long-duration study were several undergraduate interns, none of whom had been born when the study began. They are students at Caltech in Pasadena, California; Cal Poly Pomona in Pomona, California; Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio; and Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts.
Scientists hope the study will help them eventually be able to predict weather on Jupiter, now that they have a more detailed understanding of it. The research could contribute to climate modeling, with computer simulations of the temperature cycles and how they affect weather – not just for Jupiter, but for all giant planets across our solar system and beyond.
“Measuring these temperature changes and periods over time is a step toward ultimately having a full-on Jupiter weather forecast, if we can connect cause and effect in Jupiter’s atmosphere,” Fletcher said. “And the even bigger-picture question is if we can someday extend this to other giant planets to see if similar patterns show up.”
Reference: “Unexpected long-term variability in Jupiter’s tropospheric temperatures” by Glenn S. Orton, Arrate Antuñano, Leigh N. Fletcher, James A. Sinclair, Thomas W. Momary, Takuya Fujiyoshi, Padma Yanamandra-Fisher, Padraig T. Donnelly, Jennifer J. Greco, Anna V. Payne, Kimberly A. Boydstun and Laura E. Wakefield, 19 December 2022, Nature Astronomy.
DOI: 10.1038/s41550-022-01839-0
Mysterious Patterns in Temperatures Detected on Jupiter
This view compares a lucky imaging view of Jupiter from VISIR (left) at infrared wavelengths with a very sharp amateur image in visible light from about the same time (right). Credit: ESO/L.N. Fletcher/Damian Peach
Based partly on data from generations of
Jupiter’s troposphere has a lot in common with Earth’s: It’s where clouds form and storms churn. To understand this weather activity, scientists need to study certain properties, including wind, pressure, humidity, and temperature. They have known since NASA’s Pioneer 10 and 11 missions in the 1970s that, in general, colder temperatures are associated with Jupiter’s lighter and whiter bands (known as zones), while the darker brown-red bands (known as belts) are locations of warmer temperatures.
These infrared images of Jupiter with color added were obtained by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in 2016 and contributed to the new study. The colors represent temperatures and cloudiness: The bluer areas are cold and cloudy, and the orange areas are warmer and cloud-free. Credit: ESO / L.N. Fletcher
However, not enough data sets were available to understand how temperatures vary over the long term. The new research, published on December 19 in the journal Nature Astronomy, breaks ground by studying images of the bright infrared glow (invisible to the human eye) that rises from warmer regions of the atmosphere, directly measuring Jupiter’s temperatures above the colorful clouds. The scientists collected these images at regular intervals over three of Jupiter’s orbits around the Sun, each of which lasts 12 Earth years.
In the process, they discovered that Jupiter’s temperatures rise and fall following definite periods that aren’t tied to the seasons or any other cycles scientists know about. Because Jupiter has weak seasons – the planet is tilted on its axis only 3 degrees, compared to Earth’s jaunty 23.5 degrees – scientists didn’t expect to find temperatures on Jupiter varying in such regular cycles.
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the sun and the largest planet in the solar system. It is a gas giant with a mass about two and a half times that of all the other planets in the solar system combined. Jupiter has a thick atmosphere made up mostly of hydrogen and helium, and it has a number of distinctive features, including dark bands called “belts” and light bands called “zones.” The most famous feature of Jupiter is the Great Red Spot, a giant storm that has been raging for hundreds of years. Jupiter has 80 known moons, the four largest of which are called the Galilean moons in honor of their discoverer, Galileo Galilei. These moons are Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Jupiter also has a number of rings, though they are much less prominent than the rings of
“We’ve solved one part of the puzzle now, which is that the atmosphere shows these natural cycles,” said co-author Leigh Fletcher of the University of Leicester in England. “To understand what’s driving these patterns and why they occur on these particular timescales, we need to explore both above and below the cloudy layers.”
One possible explanation became apparent at the equator: The study authors found that temperature variations higher up, in the stratosphere, seemed to rise and fall in a pattern that is the opposite of how temperatures behave in the troposphere, suggesting changes in the stratosphere influence changes in the troposphere and vice versa.
Decades of Observations
Orton and his colleagues began the study in 1978. For the duration of their research, they would write proposals several times a year to win observation time on three large telescopes around the world: the
Then came the hard part – combining multiple years’ worth of observations from several telescopes and science instruments to search for patterns. Joining these veteran scientists on their long-duration study were several undergraduate interns, none of whom had been born when the study began. They are students at Caltech in Pasadena, California; Cal Poly Pomona in Pomona, California; Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio; and Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts.
Scientists hope the study will help them eventually be able to predict weather on Jupiter, now that they have a more detailed understanding of it. The research could contribute to climate modeling, with computer simulations of the temperature cycles and how they affect weather – not just for Jupiter, but for all giant planets across our solar system and beyond.
“Measuring these temperature changes and periods over time is a step toward ultimately having a full-on Jupiter weather forecast, if we can connect cause and effect in Jupiter’s atmosphere,” Fletcher said. “And the even bigger-picture question is if we can someday extend this to other giant planets to see if similar patterns show up.”
Reference: “Unexpected long-term variability in Jupiter’s tropospheric temperatures” by Glenn S. Orton, Arrate Antuñano, Leigh N. Fletcher, James A. Sinclair, Thomas W. Momary, Takuya Fujiyoshi, Padma Yanamandra-Fisher, Padraig T. Donnelly, Jennifer J. Greco, Anna V. Payne, Kimberly A. Boydstun and Laura E. Wakefield, 19 December 2022, Nature Astronomy.
DOI: 10.1038/s41550-022-01839-0
Patterns of Lifespan Weight Gain and Loss May Predict Dementia Risk
Summary: Changes in body weight over a person’s lifetime may predict dementia later in life, a new study reveals.
Source: Boston University School of Medicine
Dementia is a growing global public health concern currently affecting 50 million people and is expected to rise dramatically to more than 150 million cases worldwide by 2050.
Obesity, commonly measured by body mass index (BMI), continues to be a global epidemic and earlier studies suggested that obesity at midlife may lead to increased risk for dementia. But the association between BMI and the risk of dementia remains unclear.
Now, researchers from Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences & Peking Union Medical College, have found that different patterns of BMI changes over one’s life course may be an indicator of a person’s risk for dementia.
“These findings are important because previous studies that looked at weight trajectories didn’t consider how patterns of weight gain/stability/loss might help signal that dementia is potentially imminent,” explained corresponding author Rhoda Au, Ph.D., professor of anatomy and neurobiology.
Through the Framingham Heart Study, a group of participants was followed for 39 years and their weight was measured approximately every 2-4 years. The researchers compared different weight patterns (stable, gain, loss) among those who did and did not become demented.
They found the overall trend of declining BMI was associated with a higher risk of developing dementia. However, after further exploration, they found a subgroup with a pattern of initial increasing BMI followed by declining BMI, both occurring within midlife, which appeared to be central to the declining BMI-dementia association.
Au points out that for individuals, family members, and primary care physicians, it is relatively easy to monitor weight.
“If after a steady increase in weight that is common as one gets older, there is an unexpected shift to losing weight post midlife, it might be good to consult with one’s healthcare provider and pinpoint why. There are some potential treatments emerging where early detection might be critical in the effectiveness of any of these treatments as they are approved and become available,” she adds.
The researchers hope this study will illustrate that the seeds for dementia risk are being sowed across many years, likely even across the entire lifespan.
“Dementia is not necessarily inevitable and monitoring risk indicators such as something as easy to notice as weight patterns, might offer opportunities for early intervention that can change the trajectory of disease onset and progression.”
About this dementia research news
Author: Press Office
Source: Boston University School of Medicine
Contact: Press Office – Boston University School of Medicine
Image: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Open access.
“BMI decline patterns and relation to dementia risk across four decades of follow‐up in the Framingham Study” by Jinlei Li et al. Alzheimer’s & Dementia
See also
Abstract
BMI decline patterns and relation to dementia risk across four decades of follow‐up in the Framingham Study
Background
Obesity has been associated with increased risk of dementia with several studies reporting a reverse causality, with weight loss preceding the onset of dementia.
Methods
Two thousand forty-five non-demented Framingham Offspring participants, aged 30 to 50 years, were included to determine effect of body mass index (BMI) decline patterns from mid- to late life over a 39-year follow-up. Group-based trajectory models were used to create BMI trajectories.
Results
Decreasing BMI trends were associated with higher risk of developing dementia in late life. Decliners with first early mid-life increasing and then later mid-life declining patterns of BMI were at greater increased risk of dementia compared to non-decliners (hazard ratio 3.84, 95% confidence interval 1.39–10.60).
Conclusion
While patterns of decline in BMI were associated with dementia, a subgroup with a pattern of initial increasing BMI followed by declining BMI, both occurring within mid-life, appeared to be central to declining BMI–dementia association. Further validations are needed to provide robust conclusions.
Butterfly wing patterns emerge from ancient “junk” DNA
Butterfly wing patterns have a basic plan to them, which is manipulated by non-coding regulatory DNA to create the diversity of wings seen in different species, according to new research.
The study, “Deep cis-regulatory homology of the butterfly wing pattern ground plan,” published as the cover story in the Oct. 21 issue of Science, explains how DNA that sits between genes – called ‘junk’ DNA or non-coding regulatory DNA – accommodates a basic plan conserved over tens to hundreds of millions of years while at the same time allowing wing patterns to evolve extremely quickly.
The research supports the idea that an ancient color pattern ground plan is already encoded in the genome and that non-coding regulatory DNA works like switches to turn up some patterns and turn down others.
“We are interested to know how the same gene can build these very different looking butterflies,” said Anyi Mazo-Vargas, Ph.D. ’20, the study’s first author and a former graduate student in the lab of senior author, Robert Reed, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Mazo-Vargas is currently a postdoctoral researcher at George Washington University.
“We see that there’s a very conserved group of switches [non-coding DNA] that are working in different positions and are activated and driving the gene,” Mazo-Vargas said.
Previous work in Reed’s lab has uncovered key color pattern genes: one (WntA) that controls stripes and another (Optix) that controls color and iridescence in butterfly wings. When the researchers disabled the Optix gene, the wings appeared black, and when the WntA gene was deleted, stripe patterns disappeared.
This study focused on the effect of non-coding DNA on the WntA gene. Specifically, the researchers ran experiments on 46 of these non-coding elements in five species of nymphalid butterflies, which is the largest family of butterflies.
In order for these non-coding regulatory elements to control genes, tightly wound coils of DNA become unspooled, a sign that a regulatory element is interacting with a gene to activate it, or in some cases, turn it off.
In the study, the researchers used a technology called ATAC-seq to identify regions in the genome where this unraveling is occurring. Mazo-Vargas compared ATAC-seq profiles from the wings of five butterfly species, in order to identify genetic regions involved in wing pattern development. They were surprised to find that a large number of regulatory regions were shared across very different butterfly species.
Mazo-Vargas and colleagues then employed CRISPR-Cas gene editing technology to disable 46 regulatory elements one at a time, in order to see the effects on wing patterns when each of these non-coding DNA sequences were broken. When deleted, each non-coding element changed an aspect of the wing patterns of the butterflies.
The researchers found that across four of the species – Junonia coenia (buckeye), Vanessa cardui (painted lady), Heliconius himera and Agraulis vanillae (gulf fritillary) – each of these non-coding elements had similar functions with respect to the WntA gene, proving they were ancient and conserved, likely originating in a distant common ancestor.
They also found that D. plexippus (monarch) used different regulatory elements from the other four species to control its WntA gene, perhaps because it lost some of its genetic information over its history and had to reinvent its own regulatory system to develop its unique color patterns.
“We have progressively come to understand that most evolution occurs because of mutations in these non-coding regions,” Reed said. “What I hope is that this paper will be a case study that shows how people can use this combination of ATAC-seq and CRISPR to begin to interrogate these interesting regions in their own study systems, whether they work on birds or flies or worms.”
The study was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
“This research is a breakthrough for our understanding of the genetic control of complex traits, and not only in butterflies,” said Theodore Morgan, a program director at the NSF. “Not only did the study show how the instructions for butterfly color patterns are deeply conserved across evolutionary history, but it also revealed new evidence for how regulatory DNA segments positively and negatively influence traits such as color and shape.”