Climate change accelerates maturing of grape in wine production

                             Johann Martínez-Lüscher , Nafarroako Unibertsitatea

The increase in temperatures and of CO2 levels – the consequences of climate change – accelerates the maturing of grapes in wine production, affecting colour and possibly aromas”. This was the conclusion of the PhD thesis defended by Johann Martínez-Lüscher, undertaken jointly by the University of Navarra and the University of Bordeaux.

The biologist explained that if the forecasts by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of a level of 700ppm of carbon dioxide and a temperature increase of 4ºC are proved correct, “the accumulation of sugars could be so rapid that the rest of these processes that depend on this will not be capable of keeping up. This will mean that, on comparing grapes with the same concentration of sugars or degree of alcohol, the crops under climate change conditions will have poorer colouration and this will be noticed in the wine”.

In fact, “it is increasingly more frequent to find wines with a higher alcoholic degree due to the over maturing of the grape”. Nonetheless, in the framework of climate change, the consequences can vary. “For example, the changes in levels of ultraviolet radiation or the decrease in rainfall may have antagonistic effects to those caused by an increase in temperature or CO2 levels. Thus, there are many unknowns about what the future holds”, he added.

Wine in a new scenario

In this way wine production will have to find solutions in order to confront environmental challenges. “The use of slower maturing ‘clones’ (sub-varieties) could be one of the possible strategies. It would also be very tempting to substitute the varieties planted in each location by others better adapted to warmer climates, but this would to a great extent mean giving up the typical characteristics of each variety of our wines – something unthinkable to date”.

Nevertheless, as this expert pointed out, climate change can provide new opportunities: for example, the production of a type of wine in cooler climes where it was not possible before. “This is the case of the incipient wine industry in the United Kingdom where I intend to continue working”, stated the researcher.

Mr. Martínez-Lüscher’s research has been financed by the University of Navarra, the Navarre-Aquitane Cross-Border Cooperation Programme, the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, and the 7th European Union Framework Programme.

Source: Elhuyar Fundazioa

Use Social Media in Study of E-Cigarettes

Five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health will support project that is as much about data-gathering methods as it is about public health. Credit: UA

When Facebook announced in September that it would use all that personal data it collects to roll out a new ad platform to rival Google, privacy advocates groaned and marketers grinned.

But what if all that intelligence could be used to crack open one of today’s most pressing — yet least understood — public health issues?

That’s precisely the vision of the University of Arizona’s Daniel Zeng, MIS professor at the Eller College of Management, and Scott Leischow, adjunct faculty in the UA College of Medicine and professor of health services research at Arizona’s Mayo Clinic.

Fusing cutting-edge informatics and public health, their plan to scrape social media to create the world’s best data on e-cigarette usage and marketing recently won a five-year, $2.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

The project will tackle four distinct goals. It will:

Create a massive, real-time and continuously growing data set of what consumers and marketers say about e-cigarettes on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as social media forums focused on e-cigarettes and "vaping."

Mine that content for insights into why people use e-cigarettes, how they believe they affect their health and whether they help them quit smoking.

Document the marketing landscape — all the ways brands and vendors use these channels to promote their products and how consumers respond.

Integrate all of that information in the world’s first one-stop resource for wide-ranging data on e-cigarettes as revealed through social media as a tool for other researchers, health care professionals and more.

While e-cigarettes are relatively new in the U.S. — they were introduced in 2007 — sales are doubling annually and were expected to reach $1 billion last year. Even so, any time public dollars fund research, two questions naturally arise: Why study this? And why study it this way?

"There’s so much we don’t know about e-cigarettes," Leischow says. "The scientific community has found mixed data on whether they’re helpful for smoking cessation. We have questions about how different flavorings impact use, particularly among minors. And many health professionals worry that e-cigarettes may ultimately lead to more young people taking up smoking. All of these blind spots around a product that is still totally unregulated make this a top-priority area for the FDA."

As for why it makes sense to study e-cigarettes in this way, Zeng’s MIS expertise holds the key.  By mining social media in real time, as Zeng and Leischow have proposed, there are a number of strategic advantages:

Data comes from people interacting naturally in their day-to-day lives, thus removing “presentation bias” problems intrinsic in surveys.

The data collection is automated, which means sample size is not constrained by how much money or how many eyeball hours researchers can muster.

The lack of constraint also makes anecdotal information scientifically relevant: One personal story is just that, but 10,000 or 100,000 personal stories over time equal robust statistical data.

Because content is processed by algorithms, not people, data is available in near real time, not months or even years after countless hours of labor-intensive review.

The world of e-cigarettes, like that of any niche product or interest, has its own specialized vocabulary of acronyms and slang, so the research team will first need to construct a base lexical dataset for “training” the computers that will collect and process content.

It’s also one thing to scrape words but a much more complex challenge to automate the process of extracting meaning, so that a computer can spot when someone cites a reason for using e-cigarettes or mentions how the products affect his or her health (both of which first require a computer to detect who is or isn’t a user) or correctly catalog the marketing strategy used in an advertisement.

"We basically will be creating a suite of novel technologies for this study using both established building blocks of informatics and methods that have yet to be developed," Zeng says, "including analysis and visualization tools that were developed here at the U of A. 
Beyond that, we’re relying on proven tools for pattern mining, group behavior prediction, social network analysis and a lot more, but in ways that have never been combined for this level of research and in this topic area."

For Leischow, the knowledge those tools will produce is invaluable.

"There are all kinds of messages out there, from how effective e-cigarettes can be to help smokers quit tobacco to how they’re totally harmless or taste like candy," he says. "It may be that e-cigarettes prove beneficial to public health, or they may be shown to do more harm than good. In either case, it often takes many years for experts to fully recognize how products are being used and how they impact well-being, and even longer for regulation to catch up.

"This time, it’s going to be different. This time, we’re getting out ahead."

Source: UA

Alcohol interferes with body's ability to regulate sleep

At right: Mahesh Thakkar, PhD, associate professor and director of research in the MU School of Medicine’s Department of Neurology, and Pradeep Sahota, MD, chair of the MU School of Medicine’s Department of Neurology, have studied alcohol’s effects on sleep for more than five years. Their study found that drinking interferes with the brain’s built-in system for regulating a person’s need for sleep. Credit: Image courtesy of University of Missouri-Columbia

Researchers from the University of Missouri School of Medicine have found that drinking alcohol to fall asleep interferes with sleep homeostasis, the body's sleep-regulating mechanism.

Alcohol is known to be a powerful somnogen, or sleep inducer, and approximately 20 percent of the U.S. adult population drinks alcohol to help fall asleep. The researchers, led by Mahesh Thakkar, PhD, associate professor and director of research in the MU School of Medicine's Department of Neurology, have studied alcohol's effects on sleep for more than five years. They found that alcohol interferes with the brain's built-in system for regulating a person's need for sleep.

"The prevailing thought was that alcohol promotes sleep by changing a person's circadian rhythm -- the body's built-in 24-hour clock," Thakkar said. "However, we discovered that alcohol actually promotes sleep by affecting a person's sleep homeostasis -- the brain's built-in mechanism that regulates your sleepiness and wakefulness."

Sleep homeostasis balances the body's need for sleep in relation to how long a person has been awake. If an individual loses sleep, the body produces adenosine, a naturally occurring sleep-regulating substance that increases a person's need for sleep. When a person goes to sleep early, sleep homeostasis is shifted and he or she may wake up in the middle of the night or early morning. The researchers found that alcohol alters the sleep homeostatic mechanism and puts pressure on an individual to sleep. When this happens, the sleep period is shifted, and a person may experience disrupted sleep.

"Based on our results, it's clear that alcohol should not be used as a sleep aid," said Pradeep Sahota, MD, chair of the MU School of Medicine's Department of Neurology and an author of the study. "Alcohol disrupts sleep and the quality of sleep is diminished. Additionally, alcohol is a diuretic, which increases your need to go the bathroom and causes you to wake up earlier in the morning."

In addition to studying alcohol's impact on sleep homeostasis, the researchers explored how alcohol withdrawal affects sleep. The investigators found that after extended periods of frequent drinking, subjects would fall asleep as expected, but would wake within a few hours and would be unable to fall back asleep. When the subjects were not given alcohol, the researchers found that subjects showed symptomatic insomnia.

"During acute alcohol withdrawal, subjects displayed a significant increase in wakefulness with a reduction in rapid eye movement and non-rapid eye movement sleep," Thakkar said. "This caused insomnia-like symptoms and suggests an impaired sleep homeostasis."

The researchers hope to use these findings to explore other effects of alcohol consumption.

"Sleep is an immense area of study," Thakkar said. "Approximately one-third of our life is spent sleeping. Coupled with statistics that show 20 percent of people drink alcohol to sleep, it's vital that we understand how the two interact. If you are experiencing difficulty sleeping, don't use alcohol. Talk to your doctor or a sleep medicine physician to determine what factors are keeping you from sleeping. These factors can then be addressed with individualized treatments."

The study, "Alcohol Disrupts Sleep Homeostasis," is an invited article published in the international biomedical journal Alcohol.

Source:  University of Missouri-Columbia

The simplest element: Turning hydrogen into 'graphene'

This image is a comparison of the carbon compound graphene with a similar hydrogen-based structure synthesized by Carnegie scientists. Credit: Carneige's Ivan Naumov and Russell Hemley

New work from Carnegie's Ivan Naumov and Russell Hemley delves into the chemistry underlying some surprising recent observations about hydrogen, and reveals remarkable parallels between hydrogen and graphene under extreme pressures. Their work is the cover story in the December issue of Accounts of Chemical Research.

Hydrogen is the most-abundant element in the cosmos. With only a single electron per atom, it is deceptively simple. As a result, hydrogen has been a testing ground for theories of the chemical bond since the birth of quantum mechanics a century ago. Understanding the nature of chemical bonding in extreme environments is crucial for expanding our understanding of matter over the broad range of conditions found in the universe.

Observing hydrogen's behavior under very high pressures has been a great challenge for researchers. But recently teams have been able to observe that at pressures of 2-to-3.5 million times normal atmospheric pressure it transforms into an unexpected structure consisting of layered sheets, rather than a close-packed metal as had been predicted many years ago.

These hydrogen sheets resemble the carbon compound graphene. Graphene's layers are each constructed of a honeycomb structure made of six-atom carbon rings. This conventional carbon graphene, first synthesized about a decade ago, is very light, but incredibly strong, and conducts heat and electricity very efficiently. These properties promise revolutionary technology, including advanced optical electronics for screens, high-functioning photovoltaic cells, and enhanced batteries and other energy storage devices.

The new work from Naumov and Hemley shows that the stability of the unusual hydrogen structure arises from the intrinsic stability of its hydrogen rings. These rings form because of so-called aromaticity, which is well understood in carbon-containing molecules such as benzene, as well as in graphene. Aromatic structures take on a ring-like shape that can be thought of as alternating single and double bonded carbons. But what actually happens is that the electrons that make up these theoretically alternating bonds become delocalized and float in a shared circle around the inside of the ring, increasing stability.

Naumov and Hemley's study also indicates that hydrogen initially becomes a dark poorly conducting metal like graphite instead of a conventional shiny metal and a good conductor, as was originally suggested in theoretical calculations going back to the 1930's using early quantum mechanical models for solids.

Though the discovery of this layered sheet character of dense hydrogen has come as a surprise to many, chemists 30 years ago--before the discovery of graphene--predicted the structure based on simple chemical considerations. Their work is validated and extended by the new findings.

"Overall, our results indicate that chemical bonding occurs over a much broader range of conditions than people had previously considered. However, the structural effects of that chemical bonding under extreme conditions can be very different than that observed under the ordinary conditions that are familiar to us," Hemley said.

Source: Carnegie Institution