New engineered bacteria could destroy plastics in seawater

Over 14 million tons of plastic litter ends up in the ocean every year, killing thousands of animals and birds that ingest it. Much of it ends up amassing in giant garbage patches and over time breaking down into smaller microscopic pieces that are harmful to marine life.

A new study offers a glimmer of hope in addressing this marine plastic pollution problem. Researchers at North Carolina State University report in the AIChE Journal that they have genetically engineered a marine microorganism to break down a commonly used plastic in salt water.

Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is a type of plastic used to make bottles, food packaging and clothes. Much PET plastic waste does not get recycled, and ends up in landfills and aquatic environments. It eventually breaks down into microplastics—particles with a size of less than 5 mm—which are challenging to collect and have been shown to move quickly between aquatic, terrestrial, and atmospheric environments, the researchers point out in the paper.

Some microbes have been found to have the ability to break down plastic. Researchers have genetically engineered bacteria, or even just the enzymes they produce, to convert plastic waste into valuable chemicals. A key limitation with these previously modified organisms is that “their growth is inhibited by high concentrations of salt,” the NCSU team writes. That means microplastics would have to be collected and washed off using large quantities of water before they can be broken down.

So the researchers took a different approach, harnessing two different species of bacteria. The first, Vibrio natriegens, lives in saltwater and reproduces very quickly, doubling in number in under 10 minutes in ideal conditions. The second bacteria, Ideonella sakaiensis, produces enzymes that can deconstruct PET.

The team isolated the DNA sequence from I. sakaiensis that is responsible for producing the enzyme, and inserted it into V. natriegens. The modified V. natriegens could produce the PET-degrading enzymes on the surface of their cells. They found that V. natriegens was able to break down PET into its building blocks in a saltwater environment at room temperature.

“From a practical standpoint, this is the first genetically engineered organism that we know of that is capable of breaking down PET microplastics in saltwater,” said Tianyu Li, a PhD student and the paper’s first author, in a press release. “That’s important, because it is not economically feasible to remove plastics from the ocean and rinse high concentration salts off before beginning any processes related to breaking the plastic down.”

There is still significant work to be done, the researchers say. They now plan to modify V. natriegens so that it can feed on the byproducts it creates when it breaks apart PET, and so it can produce useful chemical molecules in the end.

Source: Tianyu Li, Stefano Menegatti, Nathan Crook. Breakdown of polyethylene therepthalate microplastics under saltwater conditions using engineered Vibrio natriegens. AIChE Journal, 2023.

Child drug poisonings and firearm deaths have skyrocketed in America: Study

Firearm deaths and drug poisoning deaths in children have spiked in the last decade, according to a new study in the United States. The study found an increase in firearm deaths by 87% and drug poisoning deaths by 133%.

Researchers looked at data from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention’s injury reporting system. They analyzed injuries leading to death from 2011-2021 and nonfatal injuries from 2011-2020.

Overall, they found that fatal injury rates increased from about 14 deaths per 100,000 children in 2011 to over 17 deaths per 100,000 children in 2021. Firearm injuries made up the biggest portion of those fatal injuries.

Both the increase in firearm and drug overdoses may be because children can get ahold of these dangerous items easily, says Dr. Rebecca Mannix, an author on the study and a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Boston Children’s Hospital.

"The access issues of firearms and prescription and illicit drugs have also been a huge problem in the pediatric population," she says. "There's a reservoir of both prescribed and illicit drugs that kids have access to that can become quite deadly."

The study found that pediatric injury fatalities sharply increased in the pandemic years of 2020 to 2021.

"The increase in pediatric injury-related deaths preceded the COVID-19 pandemic, though the pandemic exacerbated numerous factors underlying this disturbing trend, including access to lethal means, such as firearms and opioids, the mental health crisis and structural racism," said Mannix in an email to ABC News. "In this way, the increase in deaths in 2020 to 2021 is an amplified trend that has been creeping up on us for the last decade."

It remains unclear whether these trends will continue. The study also looked at the trends of injuries that did not lead to death in children.

Nonfatal injuries decreased by more than half between 2011 and 2020. Motor vehicle injuries saw a decrease by 47%.

While it is hard to determine why there was a decrease, Mannix and her team point to public health initiatives, such as booster seats for children, as a possible cause.

"This is largely due to public health interventions I think, in the last few decades, improving motor vehicle safety, improving helmet technology, [and] childproofing," says Mannix. Technological advancements and legislative requirements may also have contributed, experts say.

Public safety initiatives are key to keeping children safe, says Dr. Wee Chua, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University. That includes "car seats, bike helmets, and the safe storage of firearms," Chua says.

Despite overall decreases in nonfatal injuries, the rates of self-harm increased by 57%. Self-harm is the act of purposefully hurting oneself, and it’s associated with mental illnesses like depression and anxiety.

"I spend my clinical time in the ER," says Mannix, "And I can tell you, there's a behavioral health [and] mental health crisis in kids."

Parents can prevent firearm injuries and drug poisonings by removing guns from homes, locking prescription drugs, monitoring for illicit and prescription drug use and seeing a doctor if your child is exhibiting self-harm behavior.

AI translates 5,000-year-old cuneiform tablets into English | A new technology meets old languages.

Abstract

Cuneiform is one of the earliest writing systems in recorded human history (ca. 3,400 BCE–75 CE). Hundreds of thousands of such texts were found over the last two centuries, most of which are written in Sumerian and Akkadian. We show the high potential in assisting scholars and interested laypeople alike, by using natural language processing (NLP) methods such as convolutional neural networks (CNN), to automatically translate Akkadian from cuneiform Unicode glyphs directly to English (C2E) and from transliteration to English (T2E). We show that high-quality translations can be obtained when translating directly from cuneiform to English, as we get 36.52 and 37.47 Best Bilingual Evaluation Understudy 4 (BLEU4) scores for C2E and T2E, respectively. For C2E, our model is better than the translation memory baseline in 9.43, and for T2E, the difference is even higher and stands at 13.96. The model achieves best results in short- and medium-length sentences (c. 118 or less characters). As the number of digitized texts grows, the model can be improved by further training as part of a human-in-the-loop system which corrects the results.

Significance Statement

Hundreds of thousands of clay tablets inscribed in the cuneiform script document the political, social, economic, and scientific history of ancient Mesopotamia. Yet, most of these documents remain untranslated and inaccessible due to their sheer number and limited quantity of experts able to read them. This paper presents a state of the art neural machine translation model for the automatic translation of Akkadian texts into English, from Unicode cuneiform glyphs and from transliterations of the cuneiform signs, achieving 36.52 and 37.47 Best Bilingual Evaluation Understudy 4 (BLEU4) scores, respectively. It is particularly effective in maintaining the style of the text genre in the translation. This is another major step toward the preservation and dissemination of the cultural heritage of ancient Mesopotamia.

What are possible specialities in power system engineering?

As a newly graduate with Power Engineering degree, what speciality in power systems should you focus on?

I will give you some insights, these inputs will help you decide in the type of learning course and projects you will pursue in power system speciality.

You have a couple of paths to take:

1. System Protection (relays and settings)

2. System Control (generator control, remedial action schemes, etc.)

3. System Design (create prints, bill of materials, etc.)

4. System Testing (in service testing and commissioning or equipment testing)

5. System Studies (powerflow, voltage and transient stability studies, planning, etc)

6. Project Engineer (a smarter PM)

What you do depends on what type of career you want. Every power system company has system protection, plenty of positions, and is an extremely deep topic so it is always a good choice.

Controls is very specific to a particular company so the skills aren’t always marketable to other companies but if you want to stay long term in one place this is a great path because they always need you.

Design is pretty much only contract work these days. You can work for a firm but you will get overworked and underpaid.

System testing is some of the most fun but you will have to travel 90% of the time which is a hard lifestyle but some people love it. Very nomadic. 

System studies is a good choice if you are computer inclined. You essentially need a good understanding of the power system and some computer science to be really successful. This path gets you into a lot more theoretical stuff and lots of companies are doing hybrid or full remote positions if that attracts you. 

Project engineers are in meetings all day. You lose a lot of the technical side but you get your face in front of management if you do a good job so it can help you move into management if that is your goal.

Calls for verbal abuse of children by adults to be formally recognised as form of child maltreatment

A new systematic review by researchers at UCL and Wingate University has highlighted the importance of identifying childhood verbal abuse by adults as a standalone subtype of child maltreatment, to ensure targeted prevention and address the lasting harm it can inflict.

Child maltreatment is currently classified into four subtypes: physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect. These classifications guide the creation of interventions and the monitoring of affected populations.

The study, published in Child Abuse & Neglect: The International Journal and commissioned by charity, Words Matter, examines a total of 149 quantitative and 17 qualitative studies to assess how child verbal abuse is currently defined and measured.

Researchers found that there needs to be a more consistent way of defining childhood verbal abuse, as it currently varies between parents and other authorities, with it being normalised in some cultures as a form of discipline.

The nature of childhood verbal abuse involves behaviours that can be detrimental to a child’s wellbeing, such as belittling, shouting, and threatening language.

It was found that these actions could have a lasting impact throughout the child’s life, creating underlying emotional and psychological repercussions, including increased risks of anger, depression, substance abuse, self-harm and obesity.

However, the team noted that there was a noticeable void in acknowledging childhood verbal abuse by adults as a distinct maltreatment subtype and that doing so would be a starting point for its identification and prevention.

Co-author, Professor Peter Fonagy (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences), said: “This systematic review is timely and of significant clinical value. Preventing the maltreatment of children is the most effective way we can reduce the prevalence of child mental health problems. A sharp focus on childhood verbal abuse by adults around them by the new charity Words Matter, and this review will help make significant change, and support and direct our efforts to identify and respond to this risk in an effective and timely manner.” 

Data from the World Health Organization (WHO) has found that emotional abuse is now the most prevalent form of child maltreatment, ahead of physical or sexual abuse.*

However, researchers found that the term “emotional abuse” was ambiguous and focused on the victim.

Whereas the term “childhood verbal abuse” zeroes in on the adult’s actions and this onus could be a starting point for prevention, were it to be made a subtype in its own right.

There was also a range of varying terminology associated with “verbal abuse” across the studies, with terms such as “verbal aggression”, “verbal hostility” and “verbal abuse” being used - highlighting the need for standardised terminology in this area.

The review found that the main perpetrators of childhood verbal abuse by adults were parents (76.5%), other adult caregivers in the home (2.4%), and teachers (12.71%). Other adults noted were coaches (0.6%) and police (0.6%).

Shouting and screaming were the most documented characteristics of verbal abuse. However, the research emphasises that definitions of childhood verbal abuse should not only consider the words used but also the intent, delivery, and the immediate impact on children.

More research would need to be carried out on specific age groups to further understand the effects of this behaviour.

Lead author, Professor Shanta Dube (Wingate University, US), said: “Childhood verbal abuse desperately needs to be acknowledged as an abuse subtype, because of the lifelong negative consequences.

“We’ve seen tremendous strides in increased awareness and interventions targeting physical and sexual abuse perpetrators leading to the reduction in these forms of maltreatment. If we focus on ‘verbal abuse’ by perpetrators rather than just ‘emotional abuse’ among victims, we may develop similar actions to prevent childhood verbal abuse and its consequences.

“Breaking the intergenerational cycles starts with the adults.”

Jessica Bondy, Founder of Words Matter, a newly established charity with the mission of enhancing children’s overall health and wellbeing by curtailing verbal abuse by adults in their lives, said: “It’s paramount to grasp the true scale and impact of childhood verbal abuse. All adults get overloaded sometimes and say things unintentionally. We have to work collectively to devise ways to recognise these actions and end childhood verbal abuse by adults so children can flourish.

“Words have weight, they can uplift or destroy. Let’s build children up, not knock them down.”

Romantic relationships linked to disturbed sleep patterns in adolescents, study finds

A new study published in Behavioral Sleep Medicine has found that beginning a romantic relationship or going through a breakup can impact poorly upon the sleep of adolescents, particularly in younger adolescent females.

Adolescence is a turbulent, dynamic period characterized by new experiences, one of which may be commencing a romantic relationship. While engaging in a relationship is ideally a positive experience that can boost mental health, relationships are major life events that can potentially act as a source of stress. Adolescents can be impacted emotionally and behaviorally, with research suggesting issues such as lowered self-esteem, more mood swings, and more alcohol and substance abuse.  

This in turn could have detrimental impacts upon sleep, where adolescents can experience insomnia symptoms, such as struggling to fall asleep, sleeping for shorter time periods, or frequently waking up during the night.

However, previous research investigating the exact relationship between adolescent romantic experiences and sleep has provided mixed results, with some studies suggesting shorter sleep duration, other studies not finding any association between the two factors, and the remaining studies suggesting an improvement to subjective sleep quality. 

Additionally, little is known regarding how adolescent age and sex influences this association.

The study team, led by Xianchen Liu from the University of Pennsylvania, aimed to clarify this ambiguity with a focus on Chinese adolescents.

Over the course of one year, 7,072 middle school and high school students were followed. The students began the study in grade 7, 8 or 10, and completed baseline questionnaires about their romantic experiences within the last year, their insomnia symptoms, and their sleep duration at night. 

Information was also collected on various factors that could affect romantic relationships and/or sleep, including age, sex, smoking, alcohol use, family socioeconomic status, parents’ marital status, and depressive symptoms.

The same data points were again collected one year later in follow-up surveys.

After adjusting for the variables that impact romantic relationships and/or sleep, Liu and authors discovered that at baseline, there was an increased chance of insomnia symptoms that were associated with starting a relationship (41% increase), ending a relationship (35% increase), or a combination of both (45% increase). 

Experiencing both the start and end of a relationship at baseline was associated with a 30% increased chance of short sleep i.e. under seven hours a night.

When re-examining the adolescents one year later, those who had entered into a relationship were found to have a 61% higher chance of new insomnia symptoms, and those who experienced a break-up had a 43% increased chance of developing new insomnia symptoms.

The researchers concluded that “romantic relationships not only have short-term impacts on sleep quality and quantity but also are significant predictors of insomnia symptoms one year later” and that various factors could contribute to this, such as life stress, hormonal changes and psychosocial development.

Additionally, the relationships between romantic involvement and sleep difficulties were discovered to be greater in younger adolescents (under 15 years old), compared to older adolescents (at least 15 years old), and was particularly evident in females.

Psychological, social, and biological development may explain poorer sleep in early adolescence, with the authors suggesting “fast physical growth and sexual development, marked sleep changes, need for more independence and privacy, and immature decision-making and stress management skills” as potential mechanisms. However, more studies are required to unpack the influence of sex in the relationship between romantic experience and sleep, as the current analyses did not provide conclusive support towards the notion that females and males are impacted differently.

Notably, the results must be viewed through the lens of traditional Chinese culture. Involvement in relationships as an adolescent deviates from social norms and thus the stresses of entering or ending a relationship could be exacerbated, and consequently sleep problems could be amplified. The authors noted that further research is required to ascertain how this may differ in Western culture.

There are some caveats to be considered. As the data was reported by the adolescents themselves, results may have been biased. Additionally, the questions may have been interpreted with some liberty, with the authors suggesting that some adolescents may have interpreted experiences of having a crush or unrequited love as meeting the criteria of having ‘entered’ into a romantic relationship. Finally, data was not collected on other important factors that should be considered in romantic relationships, such as the number, duration and quality of relationships, or the rationale behind break-ups.

The study, “Starting a Romantic Relationship, Breakups, and Sleep: A Longitudinal Study of Chinese Adolescents”, was authored by Xianchen Liu, Zhen-Zhen Liu, Yanyun Yang and Cun-Xian Jia.

New study shines a light on men's unconscious attraction to fertility cues in women's faces

Heterosexual men tend to be more attracted to the faces of women when they are near ovulation compared to when they are at other phases of their menstrual cycles, according to new research published in the scientific journal Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology. However, men’s preference for fertility cues appears to be driven by unconscious mechanisms rather than conscious detection.

Attraction between the sexes has long fascinated scientists and researchers, prompting numerous studies exploring the dynamics at play. One critical aspect of this attraction centers around a woman’s fertility, which has been suggested to play a role in shaping men’s preferences in potential partners.

Previous research has indicated that men often exhibit a preference for women who display cues of high fertility. These cues, believed to be unconsciously detected by men, may include subtle changes in scent, facial features, voice, and even body movements. These cues have led scientists to ponder the evolutionary origins of such preferences.

The recent study aimed to delve deeper into the intricacies of human attraction, specifically focusing on men’s responses to cues associated with women’s fertility. The researchers were motivated to investigate why some men appear more sensitive to these cues than others.

“Considerable research over the last couple decades has investigated changes in mating-related behaviors and preferences in women across their menstrual cycles,” explained study author Lisa Welling, a professor of psychology at Oakland University and author of “The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology and Behavioral Endocrinology” and “Evolutionary Perspectives on Social Psychology.”

“Some of that research has found evidence that men consider women more attractive near ovulation when they are most fertile, which suggests that men are picking up on subtle cues to ovulatory status in women. However, no research has investigated variance in men’s ability to perceive these cues. We were interested in which men are particularly good, or particularly bad, at perceiving these subtle cues to women’s conception probability.”

The researchers devised a study involving 182 male participants who ranged in age from 18 to 52 years. These participants, a mix of single and partnered heterosexual men, were presented with photographs of female faces. The participants first rated the physical attractiveness of the women. Then, they were asked to assess each woman’s perceived fertility.

The researchers used pairs of facial photographs collected previously to assess participants’ preferences and their ability to detect cues to high fertility in female faces. Each pair contained a luteal phase (low fertility) and a late-follicular phase (high fertility) version of the same female face. Fertility status was confirmed using diary data and hormone samples. The images were taken under standard lighting conditions, and participants were instructed to adopt a neutral expression and remove jewelry and makeup.

The findings confirmed that men, on average, showed a preference for faces with cues associated with high fertility. Despite their preference for high-fertility faces, the researchers observed that men could not consciously identify which images depicted women more likely to get pregnant.

“We replicated previous research finding that men prefer the faces of women when they are near ovulation compared to when they are at other phases of their menstrual cycles, which again suggests that men are picking up on cues to fertility on some level and are showing a preference for women exhibiting those cues,” Welling told PsyPost.

“This is not a conscious perception, however, because when asked which woman had a greater chance of conceiving, the men were no better than chance at choosing the correct face. In other words, men seem to be rating women as more attractive when they are fertile, but do not consciously link that preference to increased conception probability.”

Interestingly, the study highlighted that single men with lower sociosexuality (indicating a preference for long-term relationships) displayed a stronger preference for high-fertility faces. This finding suggests that men seeking long-term partnerships may prioritize mate quality and fertility cues more than their short-term counterparts.

“We also found that single men who reported being less open to unrestricted, casual sex had a higher preference for cues to fertility than did other men,” Welling explained. “This suggests that men who are less open to casual sex and are using more of a long-term mating strategy may benefit from being more discerning about a potential partner than men who are more open to casual sex and short-term mating strategies.”

However, the study did not find any evidence to support the Paternal Investment Hypothesis — the idea that men who are more attracted to fertility cues in women are more likely to engage in mate retention tactics, especially those that involve costs to their partner. In other words, there was no link between a man’s preference for women displaying signs of high fertility and his willingness to use tactics like jealousy or possessiveness to keep his partner from being interested in other potential mates.

Men’s relationship status, whether single or partnered, also did not significantly influence their preference for high-fertility faces. Both groups exhibited a similar level of preference for these cues.

“We investigated the influence of a few other variables, including mate quality, partner quality, and cost-inflicting mate-retention tactics, which refers to jealous behaviors that inflict a cost of some kind on a mate, such as violence,” Welling told PsyPost. “None of these other variables related to preference for cues to fertility.”

While this study has unearthed intriguing findings about men’s preferences for women’s fertility cues, there are some limitations to note. For instance, the research focused exclusively on facial cues, overlooking other sensory cues like scent and voice, which have been shown to play a role in mate selection.

“This study is the first to look into these sources of variation in the strength of men’s preferences for cues to fertility in women,” Welling said. “It is, however, somewhat preliminary and a great deal remains to be investigated, including other aspects of male mating psychology.”

“Also, we used facial photographs of the same women at different points in their menstrual cycles, but future research could look at other cues, such as changes in scent, gait, or behavior. This work also doesn’t consider variation in the expression of ovulatory cues by women. Just like men appear to vary in how much they prefer cues to fertility, women may vary in how well they signal fertility, and the sources of that variation should also be investigated.”

“Demonstrating that some men can better detect cues to ovulation and show a greater preference for these cues relative to other men opens up a fruitful area for future study in understanding the evolution of human mate preferences,” Welling concluded. “There’s a lot we still don’t understand about our own mating psychology.”

The study, “A Preliminary Investigation Into Individual Differences that Predict Men’s Preferences for Cues to Fertility in Women’s Faces“, was authored by Lisa L. M. Welling and Alex Orille.