Human Behavior

Trends That Are Shaping The Future Of The Workplace – Allwork.Space

LinkedIns Global Talent Trends report for 2020 provided major insights into the trends that are expected to shape the future of the workplace. Of the four major trends to emerge from the report, they all found that keeping the human experience at the center of HR is vital in attracting and retaining top talent.

The report combined survey results from over 7,000 professionals across 35 countries, behavioral data and 40 interviews with experts.

The report found that 96% of professionals said the employee experience has become more important. This is leading HR to focus on how to make the best experience for workers, including collecting feedback on a regular basis and collaborating with employees to build an experience that works for everyone.

People analytics will also emerge as the key to understanding and capitalizing on human behavior. Having a better understanding of employees allows companies to better plan their workplace, predict attrition and evaluate worker performance.

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The data also found that role changes within companies have increased by 10% over the last five years as organizations are learning how to reskill internally instead of hiring new talent.

Additionally, the report found that 89% of professionals said a multigenerational workforce makes a company more successful. In order to attract a broader range of generations, companies have started offering more flexible work options, career paths and ways to share intelligence. The key to having a healthy, diverse workforce is to create an environment that encourages collaboration and knowledge exchange.

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Trends That Are Shaping The Future Of The Workplace - Allwork.Space

Human Behavior

Nearly a decade later, animal life has returned to Fukushima – CMU The Tartan Online

The devastating nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima, Japan occurred in 2011. Nine years later, wildlife populations have returned to the areas affected by the catastrophe. Researchers at the University of Georgia recently performed a camera study published in the Journal of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. They took more than 267,000 wildlife pictures of the landscape, showing that more than 20 species have returned to the area, including raccoon dogs, pheasants, foxes, Japanese hares, wild boars, red foxes, weasels, sika deer, black bears, masked palm civets, and macaques.

According to James Beasley, a wildlife biologist and associate professor at the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources and the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory at the University of Georgia, both the public and the scientific community have inquired as to the whereabouts and livelihoods of wildlife in the years following nuclear accidents such as those in Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Our results represent the first evidence that numerous species of wildlife are now abundant throughout the Fukushima Evacuation Zone, despite the presence of radiological contamination, Beasley remarked in a press release. He stated that the species most commonly seen in the photos from the study, like wild boars, typically come into conflict with humans. This suggests these species have increased in abundance following the evacuation of people, he explained.

To effectively study Fukushima, Beasleys team worked with Professor Thomas Hinton at the Institute of Environmental Radioactivity at Fukushima University to split the landscape into three zones by contamination level: the highest where humans were completely excluded, intermediate where humans were restricted, and low radiation where humans were permitted to inhabit. These designations were largely based on those established by the Japanese government following the Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe.

Cameras captured pictures of the landscape over 120 days. Over 26,000 of these images were from the uninhabited area, about 13,000 were from the restricted area, and roughly 7,000 were from the inhabited area. An overwhelming 46,000 of the photos contained wild boars. A few other species that were more common in the uninhabited and restricted zones were raccoons, Japanese marten, and Japanese macaque.

The control zone for the research was the uninhabited zone since no data was recorded on wildlife populations in the evacuated areas. This was ideal as it was close to the human-inhabited zone and had a similar landscape. The researchers also investigated how variables such as vegetation type and elevation affect wildlife populations.

The terrain varies from mountainous to coastal habitats, and we know these habitats support different types of species. To account for these factors, we incorporated habitat and landscape attributes such as elevation into our analysis, Beasley noted. Based on these analyses, our results show that level of human activity, elevation, and habitat type were the primary factors influencing the abundance of the species evaluated, rather than radiation levels.

Although the activity pattern of most species was similar to that of their activity pattern in other regions, wild boars were more active in the day than other wild boars in human-inhabited areas were. Researchers speculate that they are changing their behavior due to the lack of humans. Japanese serow also appear to be changing their behavior; they usually avoid humans, but the photos showed that they were often present in rural regions inhabited by humans. This behavior is likely a reaction to the increasing population of boar in the uninhabited zone.

While this study does not attempt to accurately assess an individual animals health, Hinton said, [it] makes an important contribution because it examines radiological impacts to populations of wildlife, whereas most previous studies have looked for effects to individual animals.

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Nearly a decade later, animal life has returned to Fukushima - CMU The Tartan Online

Human Behavior

3 Steps for Building an Effective Compliance Program in Sleep Therapy – HomeCare

Being diagnosed with a medical condition is the first step towards a healthier life. The second step, however, too often gets in the way of the best health possible: effective and consistent treatment of the diagnosed condition. What use is a diagnosis if its not paired with effective treatment? Adherence to a treatment plan is a universal issue in health care; according to the World Health Organization, nonadherence accounts for 125,000 deaths and 25% of hospitalizations annually.

Our goal as care providers is to partner with patients to effectively treat their conditions and improve their lives. But patients have free will. How do you ensure they take their medication and follow their treatment protocols? What role does patient engagement play in long-term adherence, and how do providers work to ensure their programs create engagement with their patient base?

Lets take a closer look at patient compliance in sleep therapy, a prime example of how patient engagement can help with therapy compliance.

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a serious medical condition with well-understood treatment options that can be administered at low cost in the home. These treatment options are supported by strong science and are easily understood. Yet OSA therapy compliance is estimated to be below 60% nationally.

While compliance is ultimately up to the patient, Id argue that a providers compliance rateas measured by patients who continue with insurance-covered therapy after the initial 90 daysis a key performance indicator to determine how they are doing. Our team at Cape Medical Supply has spent years studying the issue and working on a variety of improvement efforts to help build and maintain an industry-leading compliance rate that we can be proud of and share with our referral and payer partners.

I believe there are three high-level areas to focus on to ensure you are supporting strong results.

As early in the the referral process as possible, you must work to engage patients. They need to understand that OSA is a serious medical condition and that positive airway pressure (PAP) therapy is the gold standard for treating and managing it. If they commit to the therapy, they will enjoy a higher quality of life and create a better chance at improved overall health. PAP therapy, especially in the early days of treatment, isnt easy, so getting a patient to commit to sticking with iteven if its uncomfortable at firstis the key goal. Sleeping with a mask on your face is a major lifestyle adjustment, but pointing out the numerous health benefits of therapy will help patients commit to their treatment and set the table for a successful life with PAP therapy.

Telehealth is a buzzword in health care right now and a space seeing significant investments from payers, private equity firms and health systems. It has the potential to transform community-based care and is a valuable tool for patients requiring connectivity to adhere to therapies or care plans. Remote patient monitoring is supported by the manufacturers of PAP therapy devices, who have their own cloud-based environments to access machine utilization and monitor several points of clinical performance for patients. Having a dedicated function to analyze this data and intervene where needed is essential to being a good health care partner.

Sleep coaches can encourage patient success and can frequently rescue patients who are struggling with therapy. The key here is stratifying patients into buckets and focusing your interventions where they will deliver the best possible outcomes. Some patients are self-driven and require no support, while others have no commitment to therapy and no amount of intervention will improve their compliance. Find the middle sweet spot, where intervention will deliver results.

Having a strong plan around how to use data strategically is the final point of emphasis as you build out a compliance program for your sleep therapy practice. What information do you have to present to referral partners on the success of your program? If a payer asked about your sleep therapy program, what would you give them as a point of differentiation? Data is everywhere; turning the data you have into actionable information for your team, your patients and your partners needs to be a focal point for progressive companies in the sleep therapy space. Durable medical equipment providers and the industry as a whole need to be able to demonstrate value. What better way to do that than to have a deep data repository that provides information to decision-makers who would benefit from it? A scientific, data-driven approach to health care delivery is required in a value-based environment; providers of all stripes would be well-served by ensuring their data capture and sharing practices are aligned with current macro initiatives within health care.

The modern health care system in the United States is riddled with inefficiency, waste and suboptimal outcomes. Much of that is due to system design and perverse incentives among current players. However, some comes down to patient nonadherence to prescribed medications or therapy regimes. Effective and involved compliance programs can ensure that sleep therapy providers, as a whole, provide system-level solutions for nonadherence.

Plato is credited with saying that human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion and knowledge. If you apply that idea to our operating environment, you can focus on:

If you can do that, you will have set the stage for effective therapy and will have patients much more attuned to therapy and ready to work with your team to achieve their best possible outcomes. You will also be providing health care services with a higher level of effectiveness and more sustainability over a longer time horizon.

Patient engagement is the center of any effective compliance program. Taking the time to learn about your customers journey through the continuum of care becomes essential to understanding how to build a program that is patient-centric. Start by discussing and documenting that journey, and your compliance program will create itself from there.

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3 Steps for Building an Effective Compliance Program in Sleep Therapy - HomeCare

Human Behavior

The Objects of a Time Passed: Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw | The Truffle Hunters – Filmmaker Magazine

Whether capturing or creating a world, the objects onscreen tell as much of a story as the people within it. Whether sourced or accidental, insert shot or background detail, what prop or piece of set decoration do you find particularly integral to your film? What story does it tell?

Our film is about a group of mirthful old truffle hunters who live in the forests of Northern Italy. The time spent in their world felt like moving through a fairytale storybook where every object had a past and every cobblestone street and wooded path holds a secret waiting to be discovered. Their homes are constructed from age-old techniques that have kept them standing for hundreds of years. Their lives are filled with handmade objects that seem to be from another era. The forests that they grew up in are still a part of their daily lives. The layers of history that their world was built on created a feeling of mystery and magic, and it was this feeling that inspired our approach to filming.

For us, this meant creating a film that showed the world as it could be, a real-life fairytale. Each day was the opportunity to film a new page of the storybook. To capture this feeling, we chose to build the film as a series of single-shot uncut scenes with mostly static frames. We spent very little time with the camera rolling; on most days, we would shoot only one scene in a single uninterrupted take. Instead, our days were spent engaged in the truffle hunters lives, observing their routines, their relationships, the way they lived, and the objects they surrounded themselves with and, most importantly, building relationships with them.

That knowledge guided where we put the camera, who and what we included in the frame, and how we shaped the light. We built deep focus into our scenes to allow the opportunity to study the objects, materials, and textures that define our characters existence. Each of the 106 compositions in the film is a study in stillness, created to reveal the poetry in the small details of human behavior and a way of life that remains comfortably hidden from the trappings of modernity. These deliberate choices in how we constructed the film were made to capture the intangible feeling of a life lived with nature and the objects of a time passed.

By presenting each moment in uncut continuity, we ask our viewers to participate in the discovery of the story, and perhaps experience something beyond information, language, and the mechanics of narrative, to feel the humanity in our characters and revel in the fleeting moments of beauty that fill everyday life. By combining the monumental stillness of each frame with the movement of life and rhythm of editing, we sought to construct a film that flowed like a stream of paintings to tell a story that is felt more than understood. With this in mind, we set out to make a film that would express something deeper than facts, and translate the feeling of this place, its mystery and magic into a cinematic experience.

Sundance Responses 2020

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The Objects of a Time Passed: Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw | The Truffle Hunters - Filmmaker Magazine

Human Behavior

Sundance Review: The Nest Meticulously Unpacks the Futility of Wealth with Impeccable Craft – The Film Stage

One of Sundances most stunning break-outs in the past decade was Martha Marcy May Marlene, Sean Durkins remarkably crafted, psychologically deft exploration of an upstate New York cult starring Elizabeth Olsen. After nearly a decade, the director finally returns to the festival with his feature follow-up The Nest, another exquisitely mounted drama that revels in letting minute character details slowly become elucidated as Durkin puts trust into his audience to pick up the pieces along the way. In peeling back the layers of a fractured family and the soulless drive for wealth, the emptiness underneath is patently revealed, so much so that it backs itself into a heavy-handed corner.

Set in 1986, the OHara family seemingly enjoy their nice life in a New York suburb. Rory (Jude Law) and Allison (Carrie Coon) raise their children Benjamin (Charlie Shotwell) and Samantha (Oona Roche)Allisons daughter from a previous relationshipwith just the right amount of attention, complete with soccer matches outside and entertaining dinner chatter. When Rory gets the opportunity to move back to his native home country of England to return to former colleagues, the rest of the family agrees with some hesitation. Their new home is a massive, weathered manor, full of secret doors and hiding places, set on a sprawling estate. Right from the bat with the opening credits font, there are indeed Kubrickian touches, from Durkins formal control (including a few well-timed crossfades) to the way his script picks at the subtleties of human behavior. Yet, while this set-up has the right ingredients for quality gothic horror, the only dread on display is tied to the way Rorys blind, hopeless yearning for status and money causes his family to crumble.

Cinematographer Mtys Erdly, best known for his frenetic, claustrophobic portraits of chaos such as Son of Saul and the Durkin-produced James White, shows a different side here. Until some use of handheld in the third act to match the familial ruination we witness, virtually every shot prior is a wide master that steadily opens up the spaces on display and lets the story carefully unfold amongst them. Its a similar approach to Durkins last feature, which also had a sole central location, but hes clearly been given more budget here and the production design shows, juxtaposing the sleek, empty surfaces of Roys office life with the isolation felt throughout their vast, creaky home. Richard Reed Parrys haunting score also plays into the unsettling atmosphere, which is rendered with splendid detail.

Law is well-cast as the smarmy, charming commodities trader with an empty, wayward soul. As he chats his way through utterly hollow business-minded conversations, Durkin excels at painting him as a man who literally doesnt know any other way as he tries to fill a meaningless hole in his life. Where Durkins script trips up is the thuddingly obvious metaphor of Allisons horse, shipped over from the U.S. and is now living a life as isolated as the rest of their family in their newly built stableone that Rory didnt have the money to pay for. Disregarded by the family, the horse becomes a symbol of the festering sickness pervading Roys life as he ignores what is most important right in front of him. For as understated as the rest of the script is, its a strange decision to key into such a clear-cut allegory, and particularly in how snowballs even larger in the third act.

As Allison, Carrie Coon steals the show. Introduced as a timid, obedient wife who trusts her husband to provide for her and her family, things begin to shift as new details begin to add up. As her world comes crashing down, she delightfully blossoms and decides to take on independence on her own terms in richly satisfying, emasculating ways. From the initial realization that Rory lied to herhe went after this position in London, it wasnt offered to himto the ways in which her sycophantic husband is trying to posture as a prosperous success in his field, Coons priceless reactions and maneuvers to establish a semblance of power in their marriage will certainly be memed as the film finds a wider audience.

The Nest may not reach the sustained highs of Martha Marcy May Marlene, but theres still a great deal to admire in the way Durkins total mastery of composition and perspective carry through to the final shot. A measured exploration of marriage and the ways in which it can all crumble through dishonestyas well as a look at the mindless, soul-sucking rat race of capitalismThe Nest is another clear-eyed drama from Durkin that shows genuine vision. The finishing of the narrative puzzle isnt as graceful as the mindful setting of its pieces, but this is a rare director who has something compelling to convey with each choice he makes behind the camera. Its invigorating to see his return, and heres hoping the wait for his next film wont be as prolonged.

The Nest premiered at Sundance Film Festival.

See more Sundance coverage here.

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Sundance Review: The Nest Meticulously Unpacks the Futility of Wealth with Impeccable Craft - The Film Stage

Human Behavior

Former Grammy CEO alleges bias within organization – RU Daily Targum

Photo by Twitter | The Daily Targum

The always illustrious Grammy Awards aired last night on ABC following days of public criticism after its CEO was abruptly suspended without warning.

Chief Executive Officer of The Recording Academy Deborah Dugan has accused the award shows Recording Academy of gender and race discrimination, as well as sexual misconduct, both before and after her suspension. This case is the latest addition to the #MeToo movement.

Nearing the end of her five-month employment, Dugan claims that she sent an email to human resources on Dec. 22 expressing concerns of board members behaviors and voting irregularities, according to NBC News. Dugan went on to also state that she was sexually harassed by the Academys lawyer, Joel Katz.

Almost a month later, Dugan was placed on administrative leave just 10 days before the music awards allegedly due to claims that she created a toxic work environment with an abusive and bullying management style, according to the article.

A previous co-worker at the nonprofit AIDS advocacy group, Charles Gibbs, publicly expressed his shock about these claims and went on to tell the media that Dugan is one of the most compassionate and selfless people that he had ever met, according to The Los Angeles Times.

Since Dugans absence, she has denied the inauspicious allegations against her and has filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Reportedly, the complaint explains the malpractice and intolerance she uncovered at the Academy, according to The Atlantic.

Dugan cited several statistical facts within the complaint. More specifically, she reminded the public that within the past five years, 9.3 percent of nominations in the telecasts top five categories have been women.

This is not the first time the Grammy has faced criticism in the public eye.

In 2018, pop singer Alessia Cara was the only woman who had won a solo award. During a press conference, the Academys previous CEO, Neil Portnow, was asked about the circumstances of the fact.

Portnow responded saying women who have the creativity in their hearts and souls, who want to be musicians, who want to be engineers, producers and want to be part of the industry on the executive level simply needed to step up, according to The New Yorker.

During his 16-year high-ranking residency, Portnow has allegedly been accused of rape by an anonymous Carnegie Hall performer. Dugan has asserted that the Recording Academys board of trustees knew of the claim.

Though these allegations support Dugans argument about sexism in the workplace, the Grammy has denied these assertions after an internal investigation took place, according to The Atlantic.

In the wake of the misogyny surrounding the esteemed award show, the #MeToo movement becomes more prominent than ever as opening statements of the ever so infamous Harvey Weinstein trial goes underway.

Over the past three years, countless women have come forward indicating blatant corruption and sexual misconduct in the workforce, sending the media into a frenzy. Distinguished conglomerates like NBC, Fox, Hollywood and now the Recording Academy have been blamed for protecting the predatory behavior.

The #MeToo movement took off when actresses Ashley Judd and Rose McGowan broke their silence and accused Weinstein of sexual assault, prompting victimized women everywhere to come forward with their own stories about the lewd abuse of men in power, according to BBC. The term "Me Too" was first coined in 2006 by social activist Tarana Burke.

Amid the accusations, Today show co-anchor Matt Lauer was immediately fired after being suspected of several counts of sexual harassment by fellow employees dating back to 2014, according to Variety.

Now, at the height of the empowering cultural phenomenon, Hollywood has gone on to make money by exploiting assault stories inspired by events in recent releases such as Bombshell, The Morning Show and Unbelievable.

While no acts of sexual misconduct by employers at the Recording Academy have been confirmed, the fight for gender equality in a patriarchal work environment and society continues to grow more aggressive every day.

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Former Grammy CEO alleges bias within organization - RU Daily Targum

Human Behavior

Simple and effective- Best ways to dispose of plastic! – Times of India

India consumes an estimated 16.5 million tonnes, about 1.6 million truck full of plastic annually, of which 25-30% percent remains uncollected as per this June 2018 report. The plastic processing industry is estimated to grow to 22 million tonnes per year by 2020, as per another study. The sad part is that the current situation of disposing plastic is not easy to explain. One cannot dispose of plastic like other forms of garbage. Plastic is strong, flexible and durable, making it extremely useful and hard-to-break. As useful as it might be, it does create harm to the environment by entering the oceans every day and staying there forever, becoming toxic 'food' for marine life. Plastic Waste Crisis'; var randomNumber = Math.random(); var isIndia = (window.geoinfo && window.geoinfo.CountryCode === 'IN') && (window.location.href.indexOf('outsideindia') === -1 ); console.log(isIndia && randomNumber The consumption of plastic has been increasing by 10 percent year-on-year but the disposal methods of plastic have not evolved and that makes the situation murky for us. Multiple factors add to the problem - for instance, theres no segregation at the waste source, many amongst us still use one bin for all kinds of waste. Lack of awareness about segregation leads to a bigger problem. Plastic makes up about eight percent of total solid waste in India, according to the government and this plastic comes from the use of single-use plastic such as bags, cutlery and straws alone. It is estimated that 80% of marine litter comes from land and this hotchpotch ends up in landfills. However, it should be considered that plastic itself is not that bad, but the way people dispense it, that creates a negative environmental impact. We all need to work towards changing this.

Simple Habits Need To Change

The problem is irresponsible human behavior in disposing of plastic. If recycled, plastic can be made to form recycled polyester which in turn is made to produce a number of things like shoes, T-shirts, bags, etc. thereby causing less strain on natural resources, then plastic has value. Every individual can contribute by making small changes in their consumption and dumping patterns. To begin with, lets follow these simple, basic rules:

Be The Change You Want To See

We all know how we have polluted our surroundings by neglecting the way we use and dispose of plastic. To improve the quality of living, we will have to go back to the basics we had all learned in school:

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Simple and effective- Best ways to dispose of plastic! - Times of India

Human Behavior

Nature up close: Are humans really the smartest species? – Wink News

CBS NEWS

This story is by Sunday Morning contributing videographer Judy Lehmberg, who is a former college biology teacher who now shoots nature videos.

Ive been thinking and reading a lot about non-human animal intelligence recently. One thought that continues to run through my head is the meaning of the word anthropomorphic. The more I think and read, the more Ive come to feel it is a word that shouldnt exist.

Anthropomorphic, from anthropos (human) and morphe (form), means attributing human actions and thoughts to non-human animals. Fine. Except, who evolved from whom? Other animals didnt evolve from us. We, Homo sapiens, at a mere 200,000 or so years old, are one of the new kids on this Earth. We didnt directly evolve from wolves or moose or elephants, but they were here first. Therefore, it is logical that our thoughts and emotions evolved later than those of any other animal.

And since we share many similar structures and DNA with other organisms who were here first, it is logical to assume our brains evolved in a similar manner and have some of the same intelligence and emotions. We should be talking about gorillaopomorphic or chimpomorphic or even animalmorphic, not anthropomorphic. They arent emulating us; were emulating them, because they were doing it first.

The more time I spend watching animals, the more I see humans in them. Weve all heard stories about elephants mourning their dead, including seeming distraught due to the absence of a family member. Crows and ravens can pull up long strings tied to a horizontal bar with a piece of meat on the other end. They pull the string up as far as they can, trap it with a foot, and repeat until the morsel is within reach. A chimpanzee in a Swedish zoo was discovered to spend his early mornings hiding rocks behind logs and hay piles he created and later using them to throw at zoo visitors. Guess he didnt want company! Ive watched a female fox bury the remains of one of her babies after a badger killed and ate most of it. Ive seen bison and elk mourn the death of their babies for hours, sometimes all day long, after a wolf or bear got it. We once watched a bison mom who had given birth to a stillborn calf fend off wolves for hours, until she was exhausted. She then suddenly left only to return with some of her friends as reinforcements. There are many, many other examples.

One of the reasons I started thinking about animal intelligence was because of a story I heard years ago about an orangutan at a zoo that kept getting out of its locked enclosure and letting the rest of the orangutans out with him. I had believed that story because I knew orangutans were smart, but I didnt have any proof it was true, until the head zookeeper involved told it on NPRs Radiolab.

Jerry Stones was the head zookeeper in the 1960s at the zoo in Omaha, Nebraska. One day some of his keepers came to him and said all the orangutans were loose and up in the trees near the elephants. They all ran to the orangs, lured them back to their enclosure, and then tried to figure how they had gotten out. Jerry was sure one of the keepers had forgotten to lock the enclosure door. Over the next few weeks it happened several more times with the same results. The keepers swore they were making sure the door was carefully locked. Jerry threatened to fire someone. Several days after the last escape, one of the keepers came running to Jerry and said, You have to come see this. They snuck up to the orangutan enclosure and watched Fu Manchu, the dominant male, fiddling with the door lock. He had something in his hand, but they couldnt figure out what it was. As they watched they realized he had a piece of wire he slipped into the slit between the door and the door stop and skillfully get it around the door latch. Then he pulled on both ends of the wire and the latch pulled out of its hole. They were free!

Jerry and the other keepers were amazed but they still had the wherewithal to stop the orangutans, and confiscate the wire. They later realized Fu Manchu was hiding the wire in the area between his lower lip and teeth.

He was not only using a tool; he was using a tool in a way he had never been taught and he was storing it for future use. I guess his one mistake was that he was too nave to watch for people spying on him.

We know a growing number of animals, from Darwins finches to chimpanzees, are capable of using tools. But here was an animal hiding a tool he knew he would lose if discovered, and planning to use it in the future.

Many biologists who study animal behavior dismiss the idea of nonhuman higher intelligence or emotion. I had a very highly-respected animal behavior professor in college who was absolutely scornful of a young, uneducated woman who had the audacity to go to Africa and study chimpanzees and horror of all horrors! she also had the nerve to name them human names, such as David Greybeard and Frodo rather than Chimp 1, Chimp 2, Chimp 3, etc. Of course, that young woman was Jane Goodall, who has contributed so much to our knowledge of chimps and is now considered the worlds foremost chimp expert.

I wonder what we would discover if we were smart enough to understand their language? And if we really are the smartest species, why are we in the process of destroying the Earth with our overpopulation, global warming, destruction of habitat, etc.? Maybe we should be learning from them.

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Nature up close: Are humans really the smartest species? - Wink News

Cell Biology

Six is better than two: assay assesses multiple cellular pathways at once – Baylor College of Medicine News

Scientists strive to have a better understanding of the complex biological processes involved in health and disease, and what they can learn usually goes hand-in-hand with the number, quality and type of measurements techniques provide.

Cancer, for instance, usually originates through changes on many different genes and pathways, not just one, but currently most cell-based screening assays conduct single measurements, said Dr. Koen Venken, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, and pharmacology and chemical biology at Baylor. We thought that if we could see what happens to more than one cellular pathway at once, we could have a more complete picture of what goes on inside a cancer cell.

To get a more detailed picture of the cellular processes that differentiate normal versus cancer cells, researchers resort to conduct several independent screening assays at the expense of time and additional cost.

In his lab at Baylor College of Medicine, Venken and his colleagues apply state-of-the-art synthetic biology, cell biology, genetics, genome engineering and transgenic technologies to have a better understanding of the processes involved in cancer.

Our goal in this study was to measure multiple cellular pathways at once in a single biological sample, which would also minimize experimental errors resulting from conducting multiple separate assays using different samples, said Venken, a McNair Scholar and member of the Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center at Baylor.

Dr. Alejandro Sarrion-Perdigones, first author of the paper, wanted to develop an experimental assay that would expand the number of molecular pathways that can be studied simultaneously in a cell sample.

He focused on developing a multiplexed method a method for simultaneously detecting many signals from complex systems, such as living cells. He developed a sensitive assay using luciferases, enzymes that produce bioluminescence. The assay includes six luciferases, each one emitting bioluminescence that can be distinguished from the others. Each luciferase was engineered to reveal the activity of a particular pathway by emitting bioluminescence.

To engineer and deliver the luciferase system to cells, we used a molecular Lego approach, said co-author Dr. Lyra Chang, post-doctoral researchers at the Center for Drug Discovery at Baylor. This consists of connecting the DNA fragments encoding all the biological and technological information necessary to express each luciferase gene together sequentially forming a single DNA chain called vector. This single vector enters the cells where each luciferase enzyme is produced separately.

Treating the cells with a single multi-luciferase gene vector instead of using six individual vectors, decreased variability between biological replicates and provided an additional level of experimental control, Chang explained. This approach allowed for simultaneous readout of the activity of five different pathways (a control makes number six), compared to just one using traditional approaches, providing a much deeper understanding of cellular pathways of interest.

The new assay is sensitive, saves time and expense when compared to traditional approaches, reduces experimental error and can be adapted to any research field where the dual luciferase assay is already implemented, and beyond.

In addition to applications in cancer research, as we have shown in this work, our multiplex luciferase assay can be used to study other cellular pathways or complex diseases across different research fields, Venken said. For instance, the assay can be adapted to study the effect of drugs on insulin sensitivity in different cell types, the immune response to viral infections or any other combinations of pathways.

Interested in this new technology? Find all the details in the journal Nature Communications.

Other contributors to this work include Yezabel Gonzalez, Tatiana Gallego-Flores and Damian W. Young, all at Baylor.

This work was supported by start-up funds provided by Baylor College of Medicine, the Albert and Margaret Alkek Foundation and the McNair Medical Institute at The Robert and Janice McNair Foundation. Additional support was provided by March of Dimes Foundation grant #1-FY14-315, the Foundation For Angelman Syndrome Therapeutics grant FT2016-002, the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas grants R1313 and R1314 and the National Institutes of Health grants 1R21GM110190, 1R21OD022981 and R01GM109938.

The authors dedicate this work to the memory of Dr. Alejandro Sarrion-Perdigones, who passed away before the paper was published.

By Ana Mara Rodrguez, Ph.D.

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Six is better than two: assay assesses multiple cellular pathways at once - Baylor College of Medicine News

Cell Biology

Scientists Have Grown Snake Venom Glands in The Lab. Here’s Why That’s Awesome – ScienceAlert

For the first time, scientists have produced snake venom toxins in the lab, opening up a much-needed path for developing drugs and venom antidotes that doesn't involve having to breed and milk real-life snakes.

The toxins have been produced through mini glands called organoids, following a process adapted from growing simplified human organs something that is already helping in a wide range of scientific and medical research projects.

In the case of the snakes, researchers were able to blow organoids matching the Cape coral snake (Aspidelaps lubricus cowlesi) and seven other snake species, and they say this new approach is a welcome upgrade on current methods of farming snakes to extract their venom.

"More than 100,000 people die from snake bites every year, mostly in developing countries," says molecular biologist Hans Clevers, from Utrecht University in the Netherlands. "Yet the methods for manufacturing antivenom haven't changed since the 19th century."

By tweaking the recently developed process for growing human organoids including reducing the temperature to match reptiles rather than mammals the researchers were able to find a recipe that supports the indefinite growth of tiny snake venom glands.

Tissue was removed from snake embryos and put into a gel mixed with growth factors, but access to stem cells which is how human and mouse organoids are usually developed wasn't required.

The cells quickly began dividing and forming structures, giving the team hundreds of growing samples in the space of a couple of months, and producing small white blobs from which venom toxins could be harvested.

Al least four distinct types of cell were identified by the researchers within the artificially grown venom glands, and they were also able to confirm that the venom peptides produced were biologically active, closely resembling those in live snake venom.

Snake venom gland organoids. (Ravian van Ineveld/Princess Mxima Center)

"We know from other secretory systems such as the pancreas and intestine that specialised cell types make subsets of hormones," says developmental biologist Joep Beumerfrom Utrecht University.

"Now we saw for the first time that this is also the case for the toxins produced by snake venom gland cells."

The use of snake venom toxins to develop medicines and treatments has been going on since the time of ancient Greece. In the modern age, drugs fighting everything from cancer to haemorrhages have been developed with the help of toxins we find in snake venom.

Having faster and more controlled access to these toxins could mean these treatments can be developed more easily and on a shorter time scale, say the researchers.

Besides drug development, these organoid venom glands should make it easier and faster to develop antivenoms and with so many people suffering deaths, injuries or disabilities because of snake bites, that will make a considerable difference.

"It's a breakthrough," snake venom toxicologist Jos Mara Gutirrez from the University of Costa Rica, told Science.

"This work opens the possibilities for studying the cellular biology of venom-secreting cells at a very fine level, which has not been possible in the past."

The research has been published in Cell.

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Scientists Have Grown Snake Venom Glands in The Lab. Here's Why That's Awesome - ScienceAlert