Monthly Archives: October 2022

Cell Biology

The Brilliant 10: The top up-and-coming minds in science – Popular Science

Theres a phrase that rings loudly in the heads of Popular Science editors any time we bring together a new Brilliant 10 class: Theyve only just begun. Our annual list of early-career scientists and engineers is as much a celebration of what our honorees have already accomplished as it is a forecast for what theyll do next. To find the brightest innovators of today, we embarked on a nationwide search, vetting hundreds of researchers across a range of institutions and disciplines. The collective work of this years class sets the stage for a healthier, safer, more efficient, and more equitable futureone thats already taking shape today.

After earning a bachelors in chemistry in 2007, Kandis Leslie Abdul-Aziz took a position at an oil refinery along the Schuykill River in South Philadelphia. Part of her job was to analyze refined petroleum products, like acetone and phenol, that other industrial manufacturers might buy. She was also tasked with testing the refinerys wastewaterwhich, she couldnt help but notice, flowed out right next to a residential neighborhood. Literally, if you looked out past the plant, she says, you could see houses close by.

That was more than a decade before an explosive fire forced the refinery to close and spurred an unprecedented cleanup effort. But the experience got Abdul-Aziz thinking about the life cycle of chemical byproducts and their potential impacts on human health. She went back to school for a PhD in chemistry, and her lab at the University of California, Riverside, now focuses on giving problematic waste streamsfrom plastic trash to greenhouse gasesa second life.

To start, Abdul-Aziz decided to investigate whether she could convert corn stover into something with economic value. The stalks, leaves, tassels, and husks left over from harvest add up to Americas most copious agricultural waste product. Much of it is left to rot on the ground, releasing methane and other greenhouse gases. A small percentage does get salvaged and converted into biofuels, but the payoff usually isnt worth the effort.

Abdul-Aziz and her colleagues set out to test multiple processes for turning the refuse into activated carbon, the charcoal-like substance thats used as a filter everywhere from smokestacks to your home Brita pitcher. Her analysis, published in 2021, looks at the activated carbon produced by various methodsfrom charring stover in an industrial furnace to dousing it in caustic substancesand the molecular properties that affect which contaminants it can soak up. The ultimate aim: Tell her what kind of chemicals you want to clean up, and shell create a carbon filter that can do the trick.

Abdul-Aziz has since applied to patent her customizable process, and is looking into other sources of detritus and use cases. Wastewater treatment companies have expressed interest, she says, in using her tools on environmental toxins such as PFASthe stubborn, hormone-disrupting forever chemicals ubiquitous in household products and prone to contaminating drinking water. At the same time, she has also demonstrated that she can derive activated carbon from citrus peels, and is now investigating whether she can do the same with plastic trash.

Shes also exploring an even bigger swing. Earlier this year, the National Science Foundation awarded her half a million dollars to develop absorbent materials to capture carbon dioxide emissions and help convert them back into useful materials such as polymers and fuels. Abdul-Aziz wants to identify practical recycling processes that dont require overhauling existing infrastructure. For us its about trying to develop realistic solutions for these sustainability problems so they can actually be implemented, she explains. Its these small steps that she believes will move us toward a truly circular economyone where materials can be reused many times. And with any luck, her innovations will help buffer the worst impacts of the very petrochemicals that inspired her quest.Mara Grunbaum

In recent decades, immunotherapy has been a game-changer in cancer treatment. Drugs that augment the bodys natural immune response against malignant tumors have dramatically improved survival rates for patients with diseases like lymphoma, lung cancer, and metastatic melanoma. But the method has been far less successful in breast cancersparticularly the most aggressive ones. Sangeetha Reddy, a physician-scientist at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, is trying to change that. We could do better, she says.

Reddy works with patients with triple-negative breast cancers, so-called because the malignancies dont have any of the three markers scientists have historically targeted with anti-cancer drugs. Even with aggressive chemotherapy and surgery, the prognosis for these patientswho account for about 15 percent of breast cancer diagnoses worldwideis relatively poor. Immunotherapies, in particular, often fail because breast cancers tend to hobble the bodys dendritic cells, the roving molecular spies that sweep up pieces of suspicious material and carry them back to immune system headquarters to introduce as the new enemy. When the body doesnt know what its supposed to be attacking, boosting its power is of little use.

Reddy is therefore trying to figure out how to restore dendritic cell function. As a physician-scientist, she uses a relatively new approach that she describes as bedside to bench and back. She treats patients in her clinic, conducts in vitro and mouse experiments in her lab, and designs and manages her own clinical trials. This physician-scientist method enables a positive feedback loop: Reddy can analyze tumors excised from her own patients to assess whether treatments are working. Then she can test out new drugs on those same cancer cells. When she identifies a promising tactic, she can design clinical trials to test things like safety, dosage, and timing. At every step, she can find something in what she learns to incorporate back into her research or her patients care.

This cyclical strategy has led Reddy to the combination of three drugs that shes currently testing against triple-negative breast cancer: Flt3-ligand, a protein that stimulates the proliferation of dendritic cells; a chemical that helps activate these cells and others; and anthracycline, a standard chemotherapy agent. In mice, this triad kept breast cancer tumors at least 50% smaller than chemotherapy alone. A couple of our mice, we actually cured them, says Reddy. A Phase-1 clinical trial investigating the safety and efficacy of the regimen in people began enrolling patients earlier this year.

Though it can take years to work out all the kinks in a new cancer treatment and clear the hurdles on the way to FDA approval, Reddys multi-pronged strategy should streamline this process as much as possible. Doing so will allow her to enable a transformation shes been eyeing since she started to specialize in cancer treatment more than eight years ago. As a fellow at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, Reddy worked with melanoma patients in clinical trials of immunotherapy, which gave her a firsthand look at the treatments emerging potential. We were taking patients who would have passed away within months and giving them ten years, she says. Just that hope that we can get there with [triple-negative breast cancer] led me to this path.M.G.

The internet as we know it is inextricable from the cloudthe ethereal space through which all e-mails, Zooms, and Instagram posts pass. As many of us well-know, however, this nebulous concept is anchored to the Earth by sprawling warehouses that crunch and store data in remote places. Their energy demands are enormous and increasing exponentially: One model predicts they will use up to 13 percent of the worlds power by 2030 compared to just 3 percent in 2010. Gains in computing efficiency have helped matters, says University of Massachusetts Amherst assistant professor of informatics and computer science Mohammad Hajiesmaili, but those improvements do little to reduce the centers impact on the environment.

If the power supply is coming from fuel sources, its not carbon optimized, explains Hajiesmaili. But renewable power is sporadic, given its reliance on sun and wind, and geographically constrained, since its only harvested in certain places. This is the puzzle Hajiesmaili is working to solve: How can data centers run on carbon-free energy 24/7?

The answer involves designing systems that organize their energy use around a zero-carbon goal. Several approaches are in the works. The simplest uses schemes that schedule computing tasks to coincide with the availability of renewable energy. But that fix cant work on its own given the unpredictability of bright sunlight and gusts of windand the fact that the cloud doesnt sleep. Another strategy is geographical load balancing, which involves moving tasks from one data center to another based on local access to clean power. It, also, has drawbacks: Transferring data from one place to another still requires energy, Hajiesmaili notes, and, if youre not careful, this overhead might be substantial.

An ideal solution, and the focal point of much of his work these days, involves equipping data centers with batteries that store renewable energy as a reserve to tap, say, at night. Whenever the carbon intensity of the grid is high, he says, you can just discharge from the battery instead of consuming local high-carbon energy sources. Even though batteries that are big enough, or cheap enough, to fully power data centers dont exist yet, Hajiesmaili is already developing algorithms to control when future devices will charge and dischargeusing carbon optimization as their guiding principle. This carbon-aware battery use is just one of many ways in which Hajiesmaili thinks cloud design should be overhauled; ultimately, the entire system must shift to put carbon use front and center.

Most big technology companies have pledged to become carbon-neutralor negative, in Microsofts casein the coming decades. Historically, they have pursued those goals by buying controversial offset credits, but interest in carbon-intelligent computing is mounting. Google, for one, already uses geographical load balancing and is continuing to fine-tune it with Hajiesmailis input, and cloud-computer company VMWare has its own carbon-cutting projects in the works. In his view, though, the emerging field of computational decarbonization has applications far beyond the internet. All aspects of societyagriculture, transportation, housingcould someday optimize their usage through the same approach. Its just the beginning, he says. Its going to be huge.Yasmin Tayag

Evolutionary biologists typically think about changes that took place in the past, and on the scale of thousands and millions of years. Meanwhile, conservation biologists tend to focus on the needs of present wildlife populations. In a warming world, where more than 10,000 species already face increased risk of extinction, those disciplines leave a crucial gap. We dont know which animals will be able to adjust, how quickly they can do it, and how people can best support them.

Answers to these questions are often based on crude generalizations rather than solid data. Rachael Bay, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Davis, has developed an approach that could help make specific predictions about how at-risk species might evolve over the coming decades. Injecting evolution into conservation questions is really quite novel, she says.

The central premise of Bays work addresses a common blind spot. Conjectures about how climate change will affect a particular creature often assume that all of them will respond similarly to their changing habitat. In fact, she points out, its exactly the variation between individuals that determines if and how a species will be able to survive.

Take the reef-building corals she looked at for her PhD research: Thought to be one of the organisms most vulnerable to extinction as a result of warming oceans, some already live in hotter waters than others. Bay identified genes associated with heat tolerance in the coral Acropora hyacinthus and measured the prevalence of that DNA in populations in cooler waters; from there, she was able to model how natural selection would change the gene pool under various climate-change scenarios. Her findings, published in 2017 in Science Advances, made a splash. The data indicated that the cooler-water corals can, in fact, adapt to warming if global carbon emissions start declining by 2050; if they dont, or keep accelerating as they have been, the outlook becomes grim.

Bay has continued her work on corals and other marine organisms, but she has also applied her method to terrestrial animals. In 2017, work she conducted with UCLA colleague Kristen Ruegg bolstered the case for keeping a Southwestern subspecies of the willow flycatcher on the US endangered list. Though the species as a whole is abundant, with a breeding range that spans most of the US and southwestern Canada, the subgroup that occupies southern California, Arizona, and New Mexico has struggled with habitat loss. The scientists demonstrated not only that the desert-dwelling birds were genetically distinct enough to merit their own listing, but also that individuals in that population have unique genes that are likely associated with their ability to survive temperatures that regularly top 100F. Protecting this small subgroupless than one-tenth of a percent of the total populationcould help the entire species persist.

That kind of specific, forward-looking decision is exactly what Bay hopes to enable for other wildlife facing an uncertain future. Other recent work has focused on how yellow warblers, Annas hummingbirds, and a coastal Pacific snail called the owl limpet might shift their ranges in response to climate change. The pie-in-the-sky goal is to make evolutionary predictions that can be used in management, she says.M.G.

When a new pathogen invades, the immune system unleashes a suite of antibodies into the bloodstreamthe bodily equivalent of throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. While most of those proteins will do an okay job of neutralizing the trespasser, a valuable few will zero in with deadly accuracy. The faster scientists can identify and replicate those killers, the better well get at beating disease. Case in point: Antibody therapy helped many at-risk patients sick with COVID-19. The big challenge in studying the bodys natural response, however, is that in order to do so, people have to get sick.

John Blazeck, of Georgia Techs School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, is developing a workaround. Instead of using the human body as a bioreactor for antibodies, he wants to use microbes. That way, the repertoire that fires off in response to a pathogen can be studied in, say, a flask or a chip. The dream of a synthetic immune system has kicked around biotech circles for the last two decades, but Blazecks work is ushering it into reality. We can have a million different microbes, making a million different antibodies that would mimic what a person would be doing, he says.

His career began in synthetic biology, a field that involves sticking genes into microbes to make them do new things. Specifically, he tried to get them to pump out biofuels. His interest in advancing health, however, led him to use his expertise to fight disease in 2013, when he injected microbes with the human genes known to produce antibodies. Recreating the immune system in this way is a colossal undertaking. The catch is that the process has been optimized for millions of years, so its very hard to make it happen, he explains.

Nevertheless, his team has made foundational progress that could underpin the future of this research. Recently, they figured out how to efficiently mutate antibody DNA after its been inserted into microbes, which will help them select antibodies that bind more tightly to a given pathogen. The process is meant to mimic how the immune system uses its B cellsthe bodys antibody factoriesto self-select the proteins that generate the strongest defenses.

Building a synthetic immune system is only half of what Blazeck is doing to supercharge immunity. The rest builds on his postdoctoral research on engineering a means to thwart cancer cells defenses. Tumors secrete molecules that shut down immune cells trying to get in their way. Blazeckwith his former advisor George Georgiou, of the University of Texas, Austinfound an enzyme that can render those molecules harmless, allowing the immune system to do its thing. Ikena Oncology, a company specializing in precision cancer treatment licensed the enzyme, one of the first of its kind, in 2015. Both aspects of Blazecks work are at the forefront of burgeoning new fields, and hes been heartened by the early response. I hope that people continue to appreciate the value of trying to engineer immunity, and how it can contribute to understanding how to fight diseaseand also directly fight disease, he says.Y.T.

The whole world will be watching when a 1,000-foot-wide asteroid called Apophis swoops by Earth in mid-April 2029. But DaniellaMendozaDellaGiustina, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, will be looking more closely than anyone else. Her gaze will be trained on what the space rock reveals about our pastand what it means for our future. Its going to captivate the world, she says. In 2022, NASA named her principal investigator of the OSIRIS-APEX mission, which will send the OSIRIS-ReX spacecraft that sampled the asteroid Bennu in 2020 chasing after Apophis.

DellaGiustina wasnt always interested in space, but as a cerebral young person gazing into the famously clear skies of the desert Southwest, she had a lot of big questions: Why are we here? How did we get here? A community college class in astronomy piqued her interest. Then, a university course on meteorites led to an undergraduate research position with Dante Lauretta, who later became the principal investigator of OSIRIS-ReX. DellaGiustina knew very early on that the research environment was right for her: Youre actively pushing the boundary of human knowledge. A masters degree in computational physics led her to field work on the ice sheets of Alaska, which resemble those on other planets. Eventually, she returned to the University of Arizona, where completed a PhD in geosciences (seismology) while working on image processing for OSIRIS-ReX.

A belief that asteroids hold answers to the big questions of her youth drives her to understand them from the inside out. They really represent the leftovers of solar system formation, she says. Its kind of like finding an ancient relic. So-called carbonaceous asteroids like Ryugu and Europarich in volatile substances, including icemay explain how water and the amino acids that jumpstarted life once made their way to Earth. They may also offer a glimpse of the future: Near-Earth asteroids, especially, hold tremendous potential for resource utilization, DellaGiustina says, but one might also take us out someday.

Apophis is not considered dangerous, but it will swing by at roughly one-tenth the distance between Earth and the Moon. If we ever have an incoming threat to our own planet, we need to understand whats the structure of this thing? so that we can properly mitigate against it, she says. With DellaGiustina at the helm, the OSIRIS-APEX project will use this once-in-7,500-years chance to study how close encounters with planets can change an asteroid. Earths tidal pull, for example, is expected to squeeze Apophisa tug DellaGiustina hopes to measure via a seismometer dropped on the surface.

Lauretta, who has worked with DellaGiustina since she was an undergraduate, jumped at the chance to nominate her to lead the next phase of the OSIRIS mission. She had always been keen on designing experimentsLauretta seriously considered her proposal to equip OSIRIS-ReX with a dosimeter to measure the radiation risk for future asteroid-hopping astronauts. Her decisive leadership is rare and critical for a program of this size, he adds. On the off chance that an errant space rock ever threatens Earth, itll be a comfort to know shes at work behind the scenes.Y.T.

Picture this: Its Tuesday morning, and youre planning to ride the train to work. Walking to the station takes 25 minutes, so you hop on the local bus. Today, though, the bus is delayed, and doesnt reach the station in time to catch the train. You wait for the next one. Youre late for work.

If your boss is a stickler and you rely on public transit, a missed connection can be make or break. These are the kinds of problems that Samitha Samaranayake, a computer-scientist-turned-civil-engineer at Cornell University, has made it his mission to solve. He designs algorithms to help varied modes of mass transit work more seamlessly togetherand help city planners make changes that benefit those who need them most.

Before Cornell, Samaranayake spent several years studying app-based ridesharing, including the potential of on-demand autonomous car fleets. In 2017, he co-authored an influential paper showing that companies like Uber and Lyft could reduce their contribution to urban congestion if cars were dispatched and shared efficiently. But he quickly became disillusioned with entirely car-centric solutions. Its convenient for people who can afford it, he says, but when it comes to moving city-dwellers efficiently and accessibly, mass transit cant be beat.

So Samaranayake began investigating how new technology can best be incorporated into city transit systemsand possibly solve some of their most-common pitfalls. Take the last mile problem: the challenge of transporting people from transit hubs in dense urban areas to the less-centralized places that they need to golike their homes in far-out neighborhoods. If these connections arent quick and reliable, people may not use them. And if people arent using a neighborhood bus line or other last-mile service, says Samaranayake, a transit agency might cut it rather than run more buses, making the problem worse.

Thats where the technology developed by ride-sharing companies becomes useful, says Samaranayake. In recent years, hes designed algorithms to integrate real-time data from public transit with the software used to dispatch on-demand vehicles. This could let transit authorities send cars to pick up groups of people, then deliver them to a commuter hub in time to make their connections.

This approach is known as microtransit, and after pandemic-related delays, a test project with King County Metro in Seattle launched earlier this year. It uses app-based rideshare vans to shuttle shift workers and others who live in the outskirts of the city to and from the regional rail line. Although its too early to measure success, Samaranayake has seen enthusiastic uptake from some commuters without many good alternatives.

That points toward his other goal: finding better ways to quantify how equitably transit resources are apportioned, so that city planners can ultimately design new systems that reach more people more efficiently. This social-justice element helps motivate Samaranayake to keep working on mass transit, even though funding has typically been more abundant for flashier technology like self-driving cars.

That could be changing: In recent years, Samaranayake and his collaborators have received nearly $5 million from the US Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation to pursue their vision. Transit is not cool from a research perspective, Samaranayake admits. But its the only path forward to a transportation system that is environmentally sustainable and equitable, in my view.M.G.

Anyone whos taken high school biology knows that mitochondria are the powerhouses of cells. While its true that these organelles are responsible for converting sugars into energy, they also have many less-appreciated jobs, including generating heat, storing and transporting calcium, and regulating cell growth and death. In recent decades, researchers have linked the breakdown of these functions to the development of certain cancers and heart disease.

When it comes to diseases like dementia, Parkinsons, and ALS, however, Duke University cell biologist Chantell Evans thinks its time to look specifically at neurons. Mitochondria are implicated in almost every neurodegenerative disease, says Evans. By unraveling how neurons deal with malfunctioning mitochondria, her work could open up possibilities for treating many currently incurable conditions.

Evans work focuses on understanding a process called mitophagyhow cells deal with dead or malfunctioning mitochondriain neurons. There are plenty of reasons to believe brain cells might manage their organelles in unique ways: For one, they dont divide and replenish themselves, which means the 80 billion or so were issued at birth have to last a lifetime. Neurons are also extremely stretched out (the longest ones run from the bottom of the backbone to the tip of each big toe) which means each nucleus has to monitor and maintain its roughly two million mitochondria over a great distance.

Before Evans launched her investigation in 2016, research on epithelial cellsthose that line the surface of the body and its organshad identified two proteins, PINK1 and Parkin, that seem to be mutated in patients with Parkinsons disease. But, confusingly, disabling those proteins in mice in the lab didnt lead to the mouse equivalent of Parkinsons. To Evans, that suggested that the story of neural mitophagy must be more complicated.

To find out how, she went back to basics. Her lab watched rodent brain cells in a dish as they processed dysfunctional mitochondria. Evans gradually cranked up the stress they experienced by removing essential nutrients from their growth medium. This, she argues, is more akin to what happens in an aging human body than the typical process, which uses potent chemicals to damage mitochondria.

Results she published in 2020 in the journal eLife found that disposing of damaged mitochondria takes significantly longer in neurons than it does in epithelial cells. We think, because [this slowness] is specific to neurons, that it may put neurons in a more vulnerable state, she explains. Evans has also helped identify additional proteins that are involved in the best-known repair pathwayand determined that that action takes place in the soma, or main body, of a neuron but not in its threadlike extensions, known as axons. That, she says, could mean theres a separate pathway thats maintaining the mitochondria in the axon. Now, she wants to identify and understand that one too.

Thoroughly documenting these mechanics will take time, but Evans says charting the system could lead to precious medicine. If we understand what goes wrong, she says, We might be able to diagnose people earlier and be more targeted in trying to develop better treatment options.M.G.

It took the Human Genome Project a decade to lay out our complete genetic code. Since then, advances in sequencing technology have vastly sped up the pace by which geneticists can parse As, Gs, Ts, and Cs, which has allowed biologists to think even biggerby going smaller. Instead of spelling out all of a persons DNA, they want to create a Human Cell Atlas that characterizes the genetic material of every single cell in the body. Doing so will create a reference map of what a healthy human looks like, explains bioengineer Aaron Streets.

Understanding what makes individual cells unique requires insight into the epigenomethe suite of chemical instructions that tell the body how to make many kinds of cells out of the same string of DNA. This is where the notion of the epigenome comes into play, says Streets, who runs a lab at the University of California, Berkeley. All cells may be reading from the same book, but each ones epigenome highlights the most relevant passagesessentially how and which genes are expressed. Streets is inventing the tools scientists need to zero in on those specifics.

Reading the epigenome is important, says Streets, because, in addition to showing why healthy cells act the way they do, it can also reveal why an individual one goes haywire and causes illnesscancer, for example. Once the markers of a rogue actor are known, he explains, researchers can develop therapeutics that address the question: How can we engineer the epigenome of cells to fix the disease?

Characterizing cells is highly interdisciplinary work, which Streets is perfectly suited for. He majored in art and physics but just wasnt good at biology organismal studies. It wasnt until graduate school, where he worked with a physicist-turned-bioengineer, that he realized how much insights gleaned from math, physics, and engineering could benefit the study of living things.

As a start, this year Streets and his colleagues published a protocol in the journal Nature Methods for reading particularly mysterious parts of the genome. The tool identifies sections within hard-to-read DNA regions that bind proteinsand thus have epigenomic significanceby bookending the strings with chemical markers called methyl groups. To James Eberwine, a pharmacology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a pioneer of single-cell biology, it is going to be very useful for building a cell atlas.

Now, Streetss lab is building new software to piece together the millions of sequences that comprise a single cells genome. And, because mapping every single anatomical cell will require a fair bit of teamwork, the programs they create are shared freely with other scientists who can use the tools to make their own discoveries. If you look at really huge leaps in progress in our understanding of how the human body works, says Streets, they correlate really strongly with advances in technology.Y.T.

Like everyone in early 2020, Daniel Larremore wondered whether this virus making its way around the globe was going to be a big deal. Would he have to cancel the exciting academic workshop he had planned for March? What about his ongoing research on the immune-evading genes of malaria parasites?

As the answers became clear, so did his next big task: predicting the trajectory of the disease so that scientists and policymakers could get ahead of it. You have a background in infectious diseases and mathematical modeling, thought the University of Colorado Boulder computer scientist. If youre not going to make a contribution when theres a global pandemic, when are you going to step up? He put his work on the epidemiology of malaria on hold as he emailed colleagues studying the emerging outbreak to ask how his lab could help. I sent that mid-March, he says, and didnt stop working until early to mid-2021.

Before coming to Boulder, Larremore had been a postdoctoral candidate at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he was first immersed in the world of infectious diseasehow it was transmitted, how it evaded immunity, and how to model its spread. It prepared him well for the first wave of COVID-19 research questions, which were all about working around the shortcomings of antibody tests. At the time, they were the only tools available for counting infections, but their sensitivity and specificity varied widely. A paper he co-authored in those early months described how to estimate infection rate, a key metric in justifying public health measures like mask mandates and social distancing.

As the pandemic wore on, Larremore and his collaborators continued to think forward: Whats the question were going to be asking six months from now that well wish we had the answer to right away? The research they conducted now underpins much of American COVID policy: Their modeling found that speed, not accuracy, in testing was more important for curbing viral spread; that the success of immunity passports depended on the prevalence and infectiousness of the virus; and that elderly and medically vulnerable people should be prioritized for vaccination. Dan did a huge amount of work across a number of different disciplines, and I think the contributions hes made have really been remarkable, says Yonatan Grad, an associate professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who frequently collaborates with Larremore.

While his work on COVID-19 winds down, Larremore is already helping develop a general theory of disease mitigation involving at-home testing. Through modeling, hes hoping to find out how much testing might slow the spread of different infectious diseasesand how that changes with disease or the variant. Hes excited about leveraging the jump in public science literacy induced by COVID-19: If you tell people to self-collect a nasal swab, theyll do a great job at it, he says. He imagines a world where the public can reliably self-diagnose common illnesses like flu, and take the appropriate steps (wearing a mask, opening windows) to protect others. That just seems really empowering, says Larremore. And, potentially, a cool future. Y.T.

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The Brilliant 10: The top up-and-coming minds in science - Popular Science

Cell Biology

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(5) What are the emerging trends that may influence the Global Live-Cell Imaging market growth?

(6) Which product type segment will exhibit high CAGR in future?

(7) Which application segment will grab a handsome share in the Global Live-Cell Imaging industry?

(8) Which region is lucrative for the manufacturers?

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Cell Biology

New cellular agriculture consortium will help develop the foods of the future – EurekAlert

image:The goal of cellular agriculture is to create meat from cell culture, without having to sacrifice animals, or require the use of large swaths of land, or put the environment at risk with heavy water usage and waste production view more

Credit: Tufts University

Competition drives innovation, but for an industry in its earliest stages of development, one of the smartest moves competitors can take is to join forces to overcome fundamental technical challenges, develop standards, and share knowledge in a way that advances the industry as a whole.

Recently, the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture (TUCCA) launched a new Consortium, consisting of industry and nonprofit members, to support research in a field that many consider the future of food. Cellular agriculture is an emerging technical solution to creating meat products from the growth of cells in a bioreactor, avoiding the need for farm animals, large swaths of cleared land, and outsized demands for feedstock, water and waste management. Traditional farming puts increasing pressure on resources and the environment to feed a growing population, while cellular agriculture holds out the promise for a more sustainable and humane solution to growing and sacrificing animals for food.

Start-ups and academic labs have begun to produce cultivated meat grown from cells to replicate lamb, pork, fish and chicken, but the field of cellular agriculture is still very young. Getting to the point at which the new technology can feed millions of people, or even billions of people on the planet will require some important hurdles to be overcome. These include developing improved processes to rapidly grow and form cells into meat products that have the taste, nutrition and texture of the real thing and bringing production up to a scale that can meet the demands of a hungry worldwide market.

While the potential for sustainability in cellular agriculture is great, competitors can benefit from sharing knowledge and methods to minimize environmental impacts, finding replacements for all animal sourced materials (other than the self-propagating cells) in the growth media, and evaluating the entire economic and environmental cost of production. Those are just a few of the areas that the TUCCA Consortium may explore. In practice, the Consortium members will confer and decide among themselves what challenges take priority, and then focus their resources on research to find solutions to those challenges

The Consortiums nine founding members represent companies and non-profits in cellular agriculture worldwide. They include BioFeyn, Cargill, CellX, the Good Food Institute, MilliporeSigma, ThermoFisher Scientific, TurtleTree, UPSIDE Foods, and Vow. We welcome new applicants that wish to join, said David Kaplan, Stern Family Professor of Engineering at Tufts and director of the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture. Joining us at the table will enable a company or organization with an interest in cellular agriculture to provide input on the projects to be funded by the Consortium, and early access to the technology and knowledge that comes out of those projects. Projects are supported by an annual fee provided by Consortium members.

The pre-competitive research we do together will help build the foundation of technology for the industry, said Christel Andreassen, associate director of TUCCA. These efforts may be outside the main business focus of the individual members, or beyond the scope of capability for any one member to address. Pooling our expertise across disciplines and resources will be key.

Tufts University is in a unique position to act as a catalyst for this new industry, said Bernard Arulanandam, Vice Provost for Research at Tufts. In addition to our own research in developing cultured meat, we can provide resources to the Consortium across multiple fields, from biology and engineering, to nutrition and veterinary medicine. The Consortium will be aided by faculty and resources at the Tufts School of Engineering, the School of Arts and Sciences, Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, the Friedman School of Nutrition and Science Policy, and the School of Medicine, as well as the Food & Nutrition Innovation Institute at the Friedman School.

In 2021, Tufts was awarded a $10 million grant from the USDA to help establish a National Institute for Cellular Agriculture to train the next generation of professionals in the field, and to combine physical, biological and social sciences toward building a new cellular agriculture industry. The grant helped establish TUCCA along with educational programs at Tufts, Virginia Tech, Virginia State, University of California Davis, MIT, and University of Massachusetts Boston. Workforce training will be an important goal for the Consortium, which will set up an internship program providing undergraduate and graduate students, and post-doctoral researchers the opportunity to work with member companies while honing their knowledge and skills on real world applications

The TUCCA Consortium welcomes inquiries. Please contact either Prof. David Kaplan (david.kaplan@tufts.edu), program lead, or Christel Andreassen (christel.andreassen@tufts.edu), associate director of TUCCA.

Commentary/editorial

Lab-produced tissue samples

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.

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New cellular agriculture consortium will help develop the foods of the future - EurekAlert

Human Behavior

Female dogs judge their owners when they’re incompetent – Study Finds

KYOTO, Japan Have you ever caught a dog giving you a strange look after you make a mistake? It turns out theyre quietly judging you and your apparent incompetence, at least if theyre female, a new study reveals.

Researchers in Japan have found that female dogs judge people after watching them make an error or act in an incompetent manner. While the team examined how both male and female dogs reacted to watching people either act competently or incompetently, results show females stare longer and approach humans who appear competent while opening a container of food.

Dogs are highly sensitive to human behavior, and they evaluate us using both their direct experiences and from a third-party perspective, researchers write in the journal Behavioural Processes.Dogs pay attention to various aspects of our actions and make judgments about, for example, social vs. selfish acts.

To test how dogs react to people making mistakes, 30 canines sat in front of two actors. Each person had a container of food with a lid on it. The competent human easily opened the container. Meanwhile, the incompetent human struggled to get the lid off.

After recording this experiment, the team found that female dogs stared at the competent human significantly longer than their male counterparts. They were also more likely to approach the clever human who could get the lid off. Study authors believe this shows female dogs can recognize when a person is competent, and that this judgement influences their behavior.

Simply put, female dogs see a smart human and want to be around them, while avoiding their dimmer friends who cant even open a jar.

This result suggests that dogs can recognize different competence levels in humans, and that this ability influences their behavior according to the first situation. Our data also indicate that more attention should be given to potential sex differences in dogs social evaluation abilities, the researchers conclude.

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Female dogs judge their owners when they're incompetent - Study Finds

Human Behavior

Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test: How Behavior Evolves and Why it Matters – Next Big Idea Club Magazine

Marlene Zuk is an evolutionary biologist and a professor of biology at the University of Minnesota, where she researches animal behavior.

Below, Marlene shares 5 key insights from her new book, Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test: How Behavior Evolves and Why it Matters. Listen to the audio versionread by Marlene herselfin the Next Big Idea App.

When people think about behavior in either humans or animals, they often want to know if that behavior is genetic or whether its learned. Thats especially true when headlines are full of declarations like Our politics are in our DNA.

This is the old nature-nurture debate. Traits as complex as intelligence or aggression have to be affected by both genes and the environment. And yet, we keep resurrecting this notion of it being nature or nurture. The nature-nurture controversy has become a zombie idea that keeps springing back to life but deserves to die once and for all.

The problem is that if people genuinely believe that, for example, men will always grow up with dominating tendencies because its in their genes, then interventions to prevent aggression are worthless. In reality, its the interplay, the entanglement, between genes and environment thats important.

We can illustrate that with a human disorder thats often called a genetic disease, phenylketonuria (PKU). Its screened for in infants with a heel prick at birth. Babies with two copies of a defective gene cannot properly metabolize the amino acid phenylalanine, which then builds up in the bloodstream, leading to severe intellectual disability. Seems obviously genetic, right? Nopeit turns out that if these babies are given a special diet, then they develop normally, so one could argue that the disease is environmental. The interaction of genes and the environ-ment is what matters. The outcome of whether the child grows up intellectually disabled or not depends on which diet they receive only if they have the defective genes.

A greater cause cannot be ascribed to genes or environment. And thats true for all traits. Next time you read that theres a gene for a behavior, whether its dog ownership or intelligence, think zombie.

Many people have tried connecting brain size and intelligence, with the assumption that a big brain is a prerequisite for complex or flexible behavior. But few have drawn this comparison out to its logical conclusion: are there animals that are so tiny that they are almost too stupid to live or do complicated tasks?

To figure this out, a scientist named William Eberhard studied extremely small spiders (including one kind that weighs less than a milligram) or about as much as an inch of sewing thread. Yet the spiders still produce orb webs, the silky wheel that entraps their even tinier prey. Eberhard measured whether the difficult process of weaving and adjusting a web was more of a challenge to the minuscule spiders than to three other kinds of spiders that weighed anywhere from 10 to 10,000 times more. The small spiders are just as capable as larger ones.

How do they manage that? Some tiny species cram brain tissue into places where it is not usually found, like into their legs, giving, as Eberhard and his colleague Bill Wcislo say, new meaning to the phrase thinking on your feet. This begs the question of how little tissue is required to run an animal at all, since nerve cells are limited by the laws of physics in how small they can become. Recent work suggests that the tiny spiders reduce neuron size and increase their relative brain size, so they have essentially equal numbers of neurons compared with larger orb weavers.

All nervous systems, and all brains, are success stories; you cant draw conclusions simply based on size. This should make us wary of generalizing intelligence, and what is meant by intelligenceespecially in insects. Insects have surprisingly large behavioral repertoires given their small brains, with flexibility that rivals that of some vertebrates. Maybe the question should be not how insects do so much with tiny brains, but why vertebrates bother with big ones?

Dr. Stephen Lea is a brave man. An emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Exeter in England, he published a paper with Britta Osthaus titled, In what sense are dogs special? The conclusion was that they arent.

The reception to their work was not appreciative. Your Dog Is Probably Dumber Than You Think, a New Study Says, smirked a typical headline from Time magazine. Lea tried to pacify the dog people in an interview by saying, Dog cognition may not be exceptional, but dogs are certainly exceptional cognitive research subjects. No one seemed placated.

The study didnt show that dogs were stupid. It asked whether they were smarter than you would expect. To answer this, Lea and Osthaus picked three groups for comparison. First, they looked at other species that are related to dogs evolutionarilymembers of the group Carnivora, meaning meat-eaters, including African wild dogs and cats. Then, they considered dogs as social hunters, alongside dolphins and chimpanzees. Finally, they examined horses and domestic pigeons, both of which are domesticated like dogs and which share characteristics like being subject to training.

The result was that dogs do well at discriminating complex visual patterns, like telling human faces apart, but so do chimps and pigeons. Dogs are good at smells, but they are bested by pigs, which can even distinguish between the odors of familiar and unfamiliar people. Dogs are not especially skilled at what Lea and Osthaus term physical cognitionrecognizing the consequences of manipulating objects like strings attached to food. Despite the heartwarming nature of movies like Homeward Bound, dogs arent particularly good at navigating over long distances.

But it doesnt make sense to pick on an animal, no matter how beloved, and rank it according to a scale that only works in a single dimension or on human-centric traits. For the most part, nonhuman animals are not considered smart unless theyve passed a test designed by humans, like making a tool or recognizing themselves in a mirror. But dogs are good at things that make sense for dogs, not things that make sense for humans. Though an unsatisfying answer, it makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint.

Early humans used medicine and treated injuries such as fractures, but where did their knowledge come from? Do animals help themselves feel better when they are sick?

Yes. Chimpanzees in Africa eat a variety of plants, but some individuals have been seen to select the young shoots of one particular plant, stripping the stems of their bark, and chewing the bitter pith and juice. These individuals often seemed sick with diarrhea, weight loss, and a lack of energy. Researchers found that the use of the plant was associated with a drop in intestinal parasites. Chimps will also swallow entire leaves from a different plant whole (without chewing) and here the leaves had tiny hairs that seem to scrape worms from the gut and allow them to be expelled.

This kind of behavior doesnt necessarily require a sophisticated level of cognition. Animals have many ways of changing their behavior to deal with infection, and not all of the animals that do so are those we consider smart, as we do apes. For instance, goats supposedly eat anything, from tin cans to laundry off the line, but they are remarkably sensitive foragers. If infected with roundworms, they will eat more of a shrub containing a chemical that fights the worms.

Many birds nests are plagued by lice, fleas, and other parasites. These suck blood from the young birds and can lead to slower growth or even death. The parent birds cant physically remove the pests, but some species place aromatic leaves inside the nest. The plants act as a natural fumigant, reducing the number of fleas and other external parasites. House finches have even adapted to urban environments by weaving fibers from cigarette butts into their nests, also for its fumigant effect. The butts contain nicotine, which is often used as an insecticide, and it keeps fleas and lice away. The use of tobacco, however, carries a cost: in nests with nicotine, both the nestlings and their parents showed signs of DNA damage.

Darwin thought that insanity in animals demonstrated how all living things are related, so he thought they did get mentally ill. On the other hand, some scientists think that animals can serve as models for us to understand mental illness, but dont get the disorders themselves. Yet others think animals are only mentally ill when they are mistreated by humans.

I agree with Darwin, and one of the best places to see the continuity of mental disorders in humans and animals is in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, OCD. People have noticed for many years that some characteristics of OCD are also seen in animals, particularly dogs. The disorder means doing normal behaviorshand-washing, turning in circles before lying downtoo much. In dogs, we call it CCD, Canine Compulsive Disorder, because we cant know what dogs are or arent obsessing over.

A scientist named Elinor Karlsson and her team have identified genes that affect a dogs risk of showing the disorder. These genes govern the way nerve cells communicate. But knowing a dogs genetic makeup wont tell you definitively whether or not they will exhibit the disorder. Dogs, like humans, inherit one copy of any particular gene from their mother and one copy from their father, so both can be the same or they can have one normal and one abnormal gene. Of the dogs with two normal copies, 10% have CCD anyway; of the ones with one copy of each type, 25% have it; and of the dogs with two abnormal copies, 60% show CCD, but not all of them. Knowing the dogs genetic profile doesnt tell you for sure whether the dog has the disorder.

This shows us two things. First, entanglement of genes and the environment because the gene doesnt cause the disorder unless the environment favors it. Second, mental disorders can illustrate the common evolutionary roots in our brains and bodies that give rise to amazingly different behaviors.

To listen to the audio version read by author Marlene Zuk, download the Next Big Idea App today:

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Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test: How Behavior Evolves and Why it Matters - Next Big Idea Club Magazine

Human Behavior

The kids arent alright: We must ensure that our students are emotionally nourished – The Hill

Every day nearly 3 million teachers report to work to teach the future of America. For many, this work is a calling and a privilege, but the conditions of their workplace are worsening and becoming more challenging. Why? Politics are hampering teachers abilities to help children succeed.

The wake of the COVID-19 pandemic has had a tremendous psychological impact on our children. The National Center for Education Statistics reports more than half of all schools reported increased data on fighting and threats between students. More than half of schools reported increased disruptions because of student misconduct. Verbal abuse and disrespect in classrooms from students is up. Nearly 80 percent of public schools need more support for mental health.

Students are experiencing previously unseen levels of anxiety, depression and behavioral health challenges, as well as gaps in their grasp of important concepts, facts and knowledge critical for future success. Teachers and school districts can help with this, if we can stop playing politics.

Young children need social-emotional competencies such as getting along with one another, working collaboratively to solve problems, and how to effectively deal with interpersonal conflict and failure. As a former teacher in public schools and former superintendent in Connecticut, I know these skills dont come naturallythey are learned. And they form the basis of social-emotional learning (SEL), critical and powerful skills that are essential to young peoples ability to succeed not just in school, but also in the workplace, at home and in their communities.

Students who lack these competencies cannot learn to their potential. While the focus on academic remediation from lost learning rightfully has been front and center, we know that this loss cannot be recovered while students are under emotional duress or in a mental health crisis. Just as in the 1960s when public schools began feeding breakfast to hungry students so they could learn more effectively, today we must ensure that our students are emotionally nourished to promote success.

Unfortunately, social emotional learning has become a tool that is being unnecessarily wielded by politicians. A 2017 study found that SEL helped pre-kindergarten students improve executive function, better regulate their emotions and hone social skills. Other studies have shown that learning these skills can help historically underserved populations.

The reason social-emotional competencies are questioned is because some individuals do not understand, or do not want to understand, what SEL means and how it is taught. Parents have every right to be concerned about what their children are learning. Likewise, teachers seeking to build student competencies understand that they cannot reach kids who are an emotional mess.

We cannot assume that children know how to recognize what their emotions are, let alone how to work with them safely and skillfully. Without direct SEL instruction, children may move through adolescence and into adulthood avoiding their emotions. This can result in maladaptive behaviors such as addiction, overworking, overeating, anger and isolation.

Lacking these healthy tools, children grow up unable to solve problems or interact effectively with peers. They may struggle to succeed at school, in the workplace and in their personal and professional relationships. Exploring these critical lessons in humanity and personal growth is especially important in this era where standardized testing, pandemic-driven isolation and pervasive achievement gaps have allowed schools and communities to lose sight of the whole child, sacrificing emotional and social growth for manufactured metrics.

It is incredibly naive and disingenuous to blame SEL for the disintegration of societal norms and behaviors. Its quite the opposite, actuallySEL is democracy in practice. Its not dogmatic and gives our children space and resources for learning about themselves and the world around them. This includes setting and achieving positive goals, feeling and showing empathy for others and establishing and maintaining positive relationships.

SEL is our North Star, the foundation upon which relationships and the ability to survive and flourish in society is based. It helps teach us how to relate to one another and to prosper as individuals, a society and a nation. Strong leadership comes from equally strong and emotionally healthy individuals well versed in human behavior, compassion and open minds. We must reject the overt politicization of SEL and do whats best for our kids. Our country is counting on it.

David Title, Ed.D., is Associate Clinical Professor, chair of Department of Educational and Literacy Leadership, and director of the Ed.D. program focused on Social, Emotional and Academic Learning in the Isabelle Farrington College of Education & Human Development at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn.

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The kids arent alright: We must ensure that our students are emotionally nourished - The Hill

Human Behavior

Tracking Trust In Human-Robot Work Interactions – Texas A&M Today – Texas A&M University Today

Researchers in Ranjana Mehtas lab capture functional brain activity as operators work with robots on a manufacturing task to track the operators trust or distrust levels.

Texas A&M Engineering

The future of work is here.

As industries begin to see humans working closely with robots, theres a need to ensure that the relationship is effective, smooth and beneficial to humans. Robot trustworthiness and humans willingness to trust robot behavior are vital to this working relationship. However, capturing human trust levels can be difficult due to subjectivity, a challenge researchers in the Wm Michael Barnes 64 Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Texas A&M University aim to solve.

Ranjana Mehta, associate professor and director of the NeuroErgonomics Lab, said her labs human-autonomy trust research stemmed from a series of projects on human-robot interactions in safety-critical work domains funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

While our focus so far was to understand how operator states of fatigue and stress impact how humans interact with robots, trust became an important construct to study, Mehta said. We found that as humans get tired, they let their guards down and become more trusting of automation than they should. However, why that is the case becomes an important question to address.

Mehtaslatest NSF-funded work, recently published inHuman Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, focuses on understanding the brain-behavior relationships of why and how an operators trusting behaviors are influenced by both human and robot factors.

Mehta also has another publication in the journalApplied Ergonomicsthat investigates these human and robot factors.

Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy, Mehtas lab captured functional brain activity as operators collaborated with robots on a manufacturing task. They found faulty robot actions decreased the operators trust in the robots. That distrust was associated with increased activation of regions in the frontal, motor and visual cortices, indicating increasing workload and heightened situational awareness. Interestingly, the same distrusting behavior was associated with the decoupling of these brain regions working together, which otherwise were well connected when the robot behaved reliably. Mehta said this decoupling was greater at higher robot autonomy levels, indicating that neural signatures of trust are influenced by the dynamics of human-autonomy teaming.

What we found most interesting was that the neural signatures differed when we compared brain activation data across reliability conditions (manipulated using normal and faulty robot behavior) versus operators trust levels (collected via surveys) in the robot, Mehta said. This emphasized the importance of understanding and measuring brain-behavior relationships of trust in human-robot collaborations since perceptions of trust alone is not indicative of how operators trusting behaviors shape up.

Sarah Hopko 19, lead author on both papers and recent industrial engineering doctoral student, said neural responses and perceptions of trust are both symptoms of trusting and distrusting behaviors and relay distinct information on how trust builds, breaches and repairs with different robot behaviors. She emphasized the strengths of multimodal trust metrics neural activity, eye tracking, behavioral analysis, etc. can reveal new perspectives that subjective responses alone cannot offer.

The next step is to expand the research into a different work context, such as emergency response, and understand how trust in multi-human robot teams impact teamwork and taskwork in safety-critical environments. Mehta said the long-term goal is not to replace humans with autonomous robots but to support them by developing trust-aware autonomy agents.

This work is critical, and we are motivated to ensure that humans-in-the-loop robotics design, evaluation and integration into the workplace are supportive and empowering of human capabilities, Mehta said.

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Tracking Trust In Human-Robot Work Interactions - Texas A&M Today - Texas A&M University Today

Human Behavior

Mindreader: The New Science of Deciphering What People Really Think, What They Really Want, and Who They Really Are – Next Big Idea Club Magazine

David Lieberman is a specialist in the field of human behavior and interpersonal relationships. He is a renowned psychotherapist and author of eleven books. He has trained personnel in the U.S. military, the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA, and his instructional video is mandatory for psychological operations graduates. He teaches government negotiators, mental health professionals, and Fortune 100 executives.

Below, David shares 5 key insights from his new book, Mindreader: The New Science of Deciphering What People Really Think, What They Really Want, and Who They Really Are. Listen to the audio versionread by David himselfin the Next Big Idea App.

Paying close attention to both what people say and how they say itlanguage pattern and sentence structurereveals whats actually going on inside their heads. There are seven or eight different markers to consider.

One such marker is pronoun usage. From a psycholinguistic standpoint, pronouns can reveal whether someone is trying to separate themself from their words. In much the same way that an unsophisticated liar might look away because they are feeling guilt and eye contact increases intimacy, a person making an untrue statement often subconsciously distances from their own words. The personal pronouns (e.g., I, me, mine, and my) indicate that a person is committed to and confident about their statement. Omitting personal pronouns may signal someones reluctance to accept ownership of their words.

Lets take the example of giving a compliment. A woman who believes what shes saying is more likely to use a personal pronoun. For instance, I really liked your presentation. However, a person offering insincere flattery might say, Nice presentation, or Looks like you did a lot of research. In the second case, she has removed herself from the equation. Those in law enforcement are well acquainted with this principle and recognize when people are filing a false report about their car being stolen because they typically refer to it as the car or that car and not my car or our car. Of course, you cant gauge honesty by a single sentence, and pronoun usage is only one of a dozen of different markers available to us.

Those in law enforcement know that victims of violent crimes, such as abduction or assault, rarely use the word we. Instead, theyll relate the events in a way that separates them from the aggressor, referring to the attacker as he or she and themselves as I. Rather than saying, We got into the car, they are inclined to phrase it as, He put me in the car. Recounting a story that is peppered with we, us, and our may indicate psychological closeness and implies an association, a relationship, and perhaps even cooperation.

We can observe benign applications of this in everyday life. At the end of a date, Jack and Jill walk out of a restaurant, and Jill inquires, Where did we park the car? An innocent question, but using we, instead of you, indicates that she has begun to identify with Jack and sees them as a couple. Asking Where is your car parked? hardly implies disinterest, but turning your into our does expose a subtext of interest.

Whenever I speak to couples, Im always on the lookout when the word we is conspicuously absent from conversation. Research finds that married couples who use cooperative language (e.g., we, our, and us), more often than individualized language (e.g., I, me, and you) have lower divorce rates and report greater marital satisfaction. Studies also demonstrate a powerful correlation between such pronoun use and how couples respond to disagreements and crises, predicting whether they will team up and cooperate or become polarized and divided. The use of you-words (e.g., you, your, and yourself) may suggest unexpressed frustration or outright aggression. A person who says, You need to figure this out, conveys enmity and a me-versus-you mindset. However, We need to figure this out, indicates us-versus-the-problem, a presumption of shared responsibility and cooperation.

Again, a single, casual reference does not mean anything (and any of these statements might signal anger or frustration in the moment, not about the marriage itself), but a consistent pattern of syntax reveals everything.

The implications of syntax extend to the corporate arena. Research finds that firms where workers typically refer to their workplace as the company or that company, rather than my company or our company, and to coworkers mostly as they rather than my coworkers, are likely to have low morale and a high rate of turnover. Similarly, in sports a fair-weather fan can be spotted through language: When the fans team wins, they characteristically declare, We won. But when the team loses, it becomes, They lost. The pronoun we is typically reserved for positive associations.

Sun Tzu, in The Art of War, neatly distills the bluff: If able, appear unable; if active, appear inactive; if near, appear far; if far, appear near.

When a person is bluffing, they are managing others impressions to convey the right effect and serve a personal agenda. Conversely, the authentic person is not interested in how they come across because they are unconcerned with their image. A deceptive counterpart focuses solely on others impressions and puts a great deal of effort into presenting a certain image. The latter person almost always goes too far.

A bluff occurs when someone is really against something but pretends to be for itor vice versa. The person is trying to create a false impression to disguise their true intentions. Therein lies the key: People who bluff habitually overcompensate, so you can uncover a bluff instantly by noticing how someone tries to appear. Lets take an example from the world of poker.

A card player bets heavily and raises the pot. Does he have the cards or simply guts? When a person is bluffing in a poker hand, he wants to show he is not timid. He might put his money in quickly. But if he does have a good hand, he may deliberate a bit, showing that he is not really sure about his hand. Poker professionals know that a bluffing person will give the impression of having a strong hand, while a person with a strong hand will imply that their hand is weak.

When people feign confidence they manipulate how self-assured they appear because we equate confidence with calm. For instance, law enforcement professionals know that a suspect may yawn as if to show he is relaxed or even bored. If the person is sitting, they may slouch or stretch, covering more territory as if to demonstrate a feeling of ease. Or the suspect may busily pick lint off his slacks, trying to show he is preoccupied with something trivial and is clearly not worried about the charges. The only problem (for the guilty person) is that a wrongly accused person will be indignant and wont try promoting the right image. Remember, people who bluff habitually overcompensate.

Imagine that a man woke up one morning insisting he was a zombie. His wife tried shaking him into reality, to no avail. She reached out to his mother, who also tried to snap him out of this delusion. Not knowing what else to do, they finally took him to a psychiatrist but the guy insisted to the doctor, as he had to both his wife and mother, that he does not have a problem. The psychiatrist said, But I hear that you think that youre a zombie. The man said, Doc I know Im a zombie. The psychiatrist asked if zombies bleed and the man said they dont. So, the psychiatrist pricked the mans finger and it bled. The man stared in amazement at his finger, blood trickling down, and looked up to say, Well what do you know, zombies do bleed.

The moral of the story is that people see themselves, others, and their world the way that they need to, in order to reconcile with their personal narrativeto make sense of themselves, their choices, and their lives.

The greater our ego, the more vulnerable we feel, and the greater our drive to predict and control our world. We then interpret the world to fit our narrative, rather than adjusting our worldview to fit reality. Essentially, we color the world so that we are untainted.

Take notice of how people see themselves and their worldwhat attracts their attention and what they avoid; what they condemn and what they defendto know their story of I. Or put differently, the what (they focus on and see) tells you the why (they focus on it), and the why tells you the who (they really are).

Building a psychological assessment begins with asking, Why do they need to see that which they are looking for in the first place?

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character. This is a piercing insight into human nature. A person looks at the world as a reflection of themselves. If they see the world as corrupt, they feel on some level that they are corrupt. If they see honest working people, that is frequently how they see themselves. Thats why con artists are the first to accuse others of cheating.

The old saying, What Susie says about Sally says more of Susie than of Sally, has a strong psychological basis. Research finds that when you ask someone to rate the personality of another persona close colleague, an acquaintance, or a friendtheir response provides direct insight into their personality traits and emotional health. Indeed, findings show a huge suite of negative personality traits are associated with viewing others negatively. Specifically, the level of negativity the rater uses in describing the other person and the simple tendency to see people negatively indicates a greater likelihood of depression and various personality disorders, including narcissism and antisocial behavior. Similarly, seeing others in a positive light correlates with how happy, kindhearted, and emotionally stable a person is.

The less emotionally healthy a person is, the more they denigrate the world to accommodate their own insecurities. Hence, how someone treats you is a reflection of their own emotional health and says everything about them and nothing about you. We give love. We give respect. If someone doesnt love themselves, what do you expect them to give back? The emotionally healthy person is true to themselves, nonjudgmental, and accepting of others.

Knowledge is not power. Knowledge is a tool. How it is wielded makes all of the difference. Real power is the responsible application of knowledge. Knowing what people really think and feel saves time, money, energy, and heartache. But it also positions you to better understand, help, and heal those who are in pain. The techniques in my book are to be used responsibly, to enlighten, empower, and inspire. They are designed to educate so that you can become more effective in your life and interactions and more optimistic about your abilities and possibilities.

To listen to the audio version read by author David Lieberman, download the Next Big Idea App today:

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Mindreader: The New Science of Deciphering What People Really Think, What They Really Want, and Who They Really Are - Next Big Idea Club Magazine

Human Behavior

OutThinks cybersecurity training uses NLP and data to mitigate employee-related risks – VentureBeat

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Traditionally, cybersecurity has been all about technology but really, it is a people problem.

Research indicates that human behavior accounts for the majority of cybersecurity issues: 95% according to the World Economic Forum; 82% per Verizons 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report; nearly 91% according to the U.K.s Information Commissioners Office.

This is not for lack of training, said Flavius Plesu, CEO of new software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform OutThink.

Workers have not been ignored; training has always been a key part of the security landscape, he said.

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However, he pointed out, these have primarily been delivered through computer-based Security Awareness Training (SAT).

The focus of SAT has until now been to instruct, rather than to understand users, he said.

To address this, OutThink claims it has invented a new category of software: The cybersecurity human risk management platform. To aid in its development, the company today announced that it has raised $10 million in a seed-stage funding round, led by Albion VC, with participation from Triple Point Ventures, Forward Partners, Gapminder and Innovate U.K.

The entire platform is about making the human side of security practical, said Plesu.

Cyberattacks continue to increase in complexity, scope and cost. The average cost of a data breach globally is $4.35 million; in the U.S. its more than double that, at $9.44 million.

In fact, the World Economic Forums 2021 Global Risks Report ranks cyberattacks as one of the top three biggest threats of the decade, alongside weapons of mass destruction and climate change.

To the point of human behavior, the focus of this years Cybersecurity Awareness Month (October) is See Yourself in Cyber. Gartner identifies beyond awareness programs as one of the top trends in cybersecurity in 2022.

Progressive organizations are moving beyond outdated compliance-based awareness campaigns and investing in holistic behavior and culture change programs designed to provoke more secure ways of working, writes Peter Firstbrook, Gartner VP analyst.

Companies offering platforms to this end include KnowBe4, SoSafe, CybSafe, Cyber Risk Aware and CyberReady, among others.

OutThinks tool uses monitored machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP) and applied psychology to reveal what users truly believe and gauge their risk, explained Plesu.

Intelligence is combined with data from integrated security systems like Microsoft Defender or Microsoft Sentinel to present live dashboards showing the overall human risk picture at a department, group or organization level, as well as the root causes of that risk, he said.

Based on this information, the platform then recommends or automates the delivery of tailored improvement actions.

All three points of the people-processes-technology triangle are better aligned and joined up, said Plesu, and people are no longer the problem: They become the solution.

The platform is already used by a number of large global organizations including Whirlpool, Danske Bank, Rothschild and FTSE 100 brands, he said.

OutThink came from Plesus personal experience as a CISO. Early in his career, he explained, he led complex cybersecurity transformation programs within large global organizations.

It became clear to me that, despite considerable investment in technical security measures and awareness training, we were still exposed, he said.

He began to rethink cybersecurity and address the human risk challenge with CISO peers and members of the academic community.

Plesu noted that, whenever people use computer systems to process or handle information, there is an inherent risk that someone will make a mistake, or turn against the company and cause deliberate damage. Cybersecurity human risk management aims to answer three key questions for CISOs:

The idea for OutThink was born out of frustration with the first-generation solutions in the market, but it also came from a passionate belief: If we engage people beyond security awareness training, we can make them an organizations strongest defense mechanism, said Plesu.

One FTSE 100 organization benchmarked OutThink using independent phishing simulation platforms (Proofpoint and Cyber Risk Aware). After just one individualized security awareness OutThink session, its employees were 47.74% less likely to click on a phishing link and 46% more likely to correctly identify and report a phishing email, said Plesu.

By contrast, he said, first-generation tools on the market provide e-learning modules or videos and phishing simulations that are typically identical to all users.

While these have moderate levels of efficacy, they suffer from the same problem as any training solution: The vast majority of information (75%) is forgotten within a week, he pointed out.

Newer platforms use ML to understand behaviors and target training, namely through surveys. But NLP and data science are typically not applied to understand how people feel and think about security; they are dependent on honest responses.

A huge number of cognitive biases mean this is a risky approach, said Plesu. People tend to overestimate their own ability and knowledge, especially for those with the weakest competencies.

Also, people tend to think of themselves as exceptions, and they will provide the responses requiring the least effort.

There are also custom-designed e-learning assets for organizations or specific departments within them, he said.

We do not consider this to be a viable alternative because there are major differences in the security attitudes including personality, risk perception and intentions and behaviors of each employee within an organization; even within the same department, said Plesu.

Ultimately, the continual growth of cybercrime shows that conventional approaches arent working, he said. There is an urgent need for effective new approaches to cybersecurity human risk management.

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OutThinks cybersecurity training uses NLP and data to mitigate employee-related risks - VentureBeat

Human Behavior

News | About the College | College of Arts and Sciences – The Seattle U Newsroom – News, stories and more

Written by Karen L. Bystrom

Ken Allan, PhD, Associate Professor, Art History, and Charles M. Tung, PhD, Professor, English, co-organized a seminar, Survival is Insufficient: Infrastructures of Preservation and Transmission, at the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) Conference at UCLA, Sept 15-18, 2022. Allans paper, Radio/Aether: Wallace Bermans Verifax Collages and LIFE Magazine as a Medium for the Sixties, considered the artist's use of the magazine as an archive and the emergence of information theory during the postmodern turn in the arts. Tungs paper, Critical University Studies in Deep Time, focused on contemporary representations of educational institutions and scenes of learning against a backdrop of seed banks, survivalist libraries, and bunkers. Allan serves on the ASAP board as Secretary.

P. Sven Arvidson, PhD, Professor and Director of Interdisciplinary Liberal Studies, published "Reverent Awe and the Field of Consciousness" in the peer-reviewed philosophy journal Human Studies.

Dominic CodyKramers, MFA, Associate Teaching Professor, Performing Arts and Arts Leadership, is designing sound for Seattle Shakespeare Company's production of Shakespeare's Macbeth, featuring the acting and music talents of Dean Powers' son, Hersh. The play opens October 28 and runs thru November 20.

Serena Cosgrove, PhD, Associate Professor, International Studies, and her co-editors, Wendi Bellanger, PhD, and Irina Carlota Silber, PhD, are happy to share the news that their book,Higher Education, State Repression, and Neoliberal Reform in Nicaragua: Reflections from a University under Fire, has just been published by Routledge. This innovative volume makes a key contribution to debates around the role of the university as a space of resistance by highlighting the liberatory practices undertaken to oppose dual pressures of state repression and neoliberal reform at the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) in Nicaragua. With a range of contributors from Nicaragua and Central Americanist scholars in the U.S., including the editors, one of the chapters was authored by Andrew Gorvetzian, who graduated in 2015 from Seattle University with a double major in International Studies and Spanish.

Elizabeth Dale, PhD, Associate Professor, Nonprofit Leadership, co-authored an article with Nicole Plastino, MNPL 20. Dale, E. J., & Plastino, N. J. (2022). Giving With Pride: Considering Participatory Grantmaking in an Anti-Racist, LGBTQ+ Community Foundation. The Foundation Review, 14(1).

Amelia Seraphia Derr, MSW, PhD, Associate Professor, Social Work, will present a paper at The Council on Social Work Education Annual Conference in Anaheim on November 12, Educating for Self and Community Care: Sustaining Students in their Social (Justice) Work.

Fade Eadah, PhD, Assistant Professor, Psychology, had an article, Teaching Agents to Understand Teamwork: Evaluating and Predicting Collective Intelligence as a Latent Variable via Hidden Markov Models, accepted for Computers in Human Behavior, a top multidisciplinary journal in Psychology. The article shows a new method for predicting future behavior in teamwork based on past behavior, which will allow for AI to (eventually) appropriately time interventions.

Gabriella Gutirrez y Muhs, PhD, Professor, Modern Languages and Women Gender, and Sexuality Studies, delivered the Hispanic and Latinx Heritage Month Keynote Address for the EKU Chautauqua Lecture Series at Eastern Kentucky University.

Janet Hayatshahi, MFA, Assistant Professor, Performing Arts and Arts Leadership, was interviewed by American Theatre for Zharia ONeal Is Sound Theatres First William S. Yellow Robe Playwright.

Jacqueline Helfgott, PhD, Professor, Criminal Justice and Director, Crime & Justice Research Center, was interviewed for Las Vegas Murders on Mass Shootings Anniversary is Coincidence, Experts Say.

Audrey Hudgins, EdD, Clinical Associate Professor, Matteo Ricci Institute, with Seattle University student, Cullin Egge, and a colleague and student from Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla, Guillermo Yrizar and Metztli Chavez, presented Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL): A Tool for Global Citizenship at the 2022 American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) Conference on Global Learning. She has been invited to write a chapter called "Global experiential learning: (De)Constructing Housing Justice in Tijuana, Mexico" to be included in the book, Critical Innovations in Global Development Studies Pedagogy.

Kira Mauseth, PhD, Senior Instructor, Psychology, appeared in Hundreds of thousands of kids with mental health needs aren't receiving necessary help, an interview that appeared nationally and on KOMO 4. Also, asco-lead of the Behavioral Health Strike Team for the Washington State Department of Health, talks about her work in with the Northwest Mental Health Technology Transfer Center in Training and Supporting Healthcare Leadership during the COVID Pandemic, published in the latest issue of Elevate, a publication of the Public Health Learning Network.

James Miles, MFA, Assistant Professor, Performing Arts and Arts Leadership, presented Its Bigger Than Hip Hop with Dr Jason Rawls from Ohio University, emcee/teacher Vinson Wordsworth Johnson, and emcee/teaching artist John Lil Sci Robinson at the Teach Better Conference in Akron, OH, October 14 and 15.

Quinton Morris, DMA, Associate Professor, Violin, will be honored as a recipient of the distinguished Pathfinder Award by the Puget Sound Association of Phi Beta Kappa. This award reflects the imagery on the distinguished Phi Beta Kappa key, a hand pointing to the stars and is given to those individuals who "encourage others to seek new worlds to discover, pathways to explore, and untouched destinations to reach. The people, businesses, and institutions honored do something to broaden peoples' interests in active intellectual accomplishments; they reach beyond ordinary routine, beyond the regular requirement of their lives and jobs, in order to break new intellectual ground and/or inspire others to do so. Morris is being honored for his scholarship and community work as an educator and youth advocate through his work with his nonprofit organization, Key to Change. Morris will receive the distinguished award on November 17.

Patrick Schoettmer, PhD, Associate Teaching Professor, Political Science, was interviewed for Senate candidates spar over coffee, crime in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood, on KOMO 4.

Kirsten Moana Thompson, PhD, Professor and Director, Film Studies, and Theiline Pigott-McCone Endowed Chair (2022-24), delivered a keynote address The Doors of Perception: Scintillating Light and Stuttering, Starburst Animation at the Conference on Color, Bern Lichtspiel Kinemathek, Switzerland, September 25-28, 2022. She published" Introduction to Animation and Advertising", Malcolm Cook and Kirsten Moana Thompson, Handbook Animation Studies, (In German) eds. Franziska Bruckner, Julia Eckel, Maike Reinerth, and Erwin Feyersinger. Springer, (forthcoming) 2022. She also presented the conference paper, Indigeneity, Corporate and alt right Appropriations: Fantasies of the Pacific, from Moana to Aquaman, New Zealand Studies Association (NZSA), Marseille, France, July 5-8, 2022.

Charles M. Tung, PhD, Professor and Chair, English, published a chapter, Clocks: Modernist Heterochrony and the Contemporary Big Clock, in The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology, edited by Alex Goody and Ian Whittington. In this piece, Tung argues: When powered by modernist clockwork, the big clock of human civilization and the time of the planet the clock that seems to preside over scenes of an ultimate fate, an absolute break and temporal reset, and even over omega-point fantasies of the death of time itself ticks in a most peculiar way. The enlarged order of modernisms clocks reveals not only that time is elapsing differently in different reference frames, but also that the present and the experience afforded by it are shot through unevenly with a variety of temporal rates and scales.

Mariela Lpez Velarde, Assistant Professor, PhD, Spanish, Modern Languages and Cultures, was an invited speaker at the series of conferences entitled The future of internationalization in Jesuit Universities. It was a forum organized by AUSJAL (Asociacin de Universidades confiadas a la Compaa de Jess de Amrica Latina/ Association of Universities Entrusted to the Society of Jesus in Latin America) dedicated to the discussion and dialogue about the integration of the international dimension of the work done in Jesuit universities around the world.

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News | About the College | College of Arts and Sciences - The Seattle U Newsroom - News, stories and more