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Putting the diverse into neurodiversity
The global Institute Of Neurodiversity ION has launched its UK chapter.
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The Institute aims to give a global voice to all neurodiverse groups, and ensure neurodivergent individuals are understood, represented, and valued equally in society. Currently, 1 in 7 people in the UK are neurodiverse, living with conditions such as autism, ADHD, dyspraxia, dyslexia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia and Tourette syndrome. Neurodiversity has long been regarded as something to ‘overcome’ or assimilate, a view ION seeks to challenge. The Institute intends to lobby government, industry, education and charity sectors, to promote a greater understanding of the reality of being neurodiverse and to work toward eliminating institutional discrimination. Founded by former Chair of the Institute of Directors and governance expert Charlotte Valeur, with a global steering group of neurodivergent individuals and allies, the Institute Of Neurodiversity ION is based in Geneva, Switzerland. It is the world’s only umbrella organisation representing all neurodiverse groups, and aims to have one million members by 2025. Some immediate tasks include challenging research programmes on neurodiverse groups by highlighting the unintended, future consequences that research may have. Another is to call for reform to common conversion therapies that aim to ‘cure’ neurodiversity, but have misguided aims of changing an individual to be different to what they naturally are. Ms Valeur said: “We’re a vertical slice of society – in all colours, cultures, industries, countries, we are doctors, we are cleaners, we are everywhere.” Ms Valeur has had a 35-year career in financial services and the broader corporate world as a non-executive director. While at the Institute of Directors, she revealed in an interview with The Independent that she was autistic, a move that sparked a national conversation about workplace neurodiversity at the time. She added: “Neurodiverse individuals all have different ways of thinking that have value. The route to equality for us all is not through making society comfortable with our existence, it is to educate society into breaking down those barriers and being inclusive of all types of viewpoints in the world.”
WHAT IS NEURODIVERSITY?
Humans are hugely diverse in many ways, and neurodiversity (ND) is a form of diversity. Neurodiverse groups include ADHD, autism, dyspraxia, dyslexia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, and Tourette syndrome. People who are ‘neurotypical’ are those whose brain works in the way that society expects. Neurodiversity describes these natural variations in the human brain, which affect sociability, learning, attention, and mood. Judy Singer, the sociologist, coined the term in 1998 and journalist Harvey Blume helped to popularise the word.
The medical profession groups neurodiverse people into diagnostic conditions to help understand the challenges that people may experience. However, everyone’s different, even within neurodiverse types.
A reconstruction of the penis worm Eximipriapulus inhabiting a hyolith shell.
penis worms were the first ‘hermits’
Ancient penis worms (Priapulida) invented the ‘hermit’ lifestyle some 500 million years ago, at the rise of the earliest animal ecosystems in the Cambrian period.
Hermit crabs are well known for employing snail shells as shelters against predators, but researchers have now found that penis worms invented the ‘hermit’ lifestyle hundreds of million years before hermit crabs first evolved.
Researchers studied collections of the Guanshan fossil deposits – famous because they preserve soft tissue (such as the bodies of worms) alongside the shelly material that makes up the conventional fossil record. Four specimens of the penis worm Eximipriapulus were found inside conical shells of hyoliths, a long-extinct fossil group. “The worms are always sitting snugly within these same types of shells, in the same position and orientation”, explained Dr Martin Smith, co-author of the study. The researchers established that Cambrian predators were plentiful and aggressive, forcing the penis worms to take permanent shelter in empty shells. Dr Smith added: “The only explanation that made sense was that these shells were their homes – something that came as a real surprise. Not long before these organisms existed, there was nothing alive more complex than seaweeds or jellyfish: so it’s mind-boggling that we start to see the complex and dangerous ecologies usually associated with much younger geological periods so soon after the first complex animals arrive on the scene.” The research indicates the key role of predators in shaping ecology and behaviour in the very early stages of animal evolution. Study findings will be published in the journal Current Biology. A “hermiting” lifestyle has never been documented or observed in living or fossil penis worms; nor has it been directly observed in any organism living earlier than the ‘Mesozoic Marine Revolution’ in the age of dinosaurs. The fact that it evolved independently in the immediate aftermath of the “Cambrian explosion”, which marked the rapid rise of modern animal body plans, highlights the remarkable speed and flexibility of the evolutionary process. The study was carried out by researchers from Durham University and Yunnan University.
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Sizzling breakthrough for 3D meat
A 4oz steak has been ‘lab-grown’ using a digital design file.
Israeli firm MeaTech 3D Ltd. cultivated the bio-printed steak using real fat and muscle cells. The cells were produced using an advanced process that starts by isolating ethically harvested bovine stem cells from living tissue samples and multiplying them. Once cellular mass was reached, the structures of the stem cells were formulated into bio-inks compatible with MeaTech’s 3D bio-printer. The printed product was placed in an incubator to mature, where the stem cells were differentiated into fat and muscle cells to develop into fat and muscle tissue, thus forming the steak. The meat is said to look, taste, smell and feel like the farmed variety. MeaTech believes this breakthrough will revolutionise farming, as a replacement for conventional steak that maximises cell-based content rather than non-meat ingredients. The steak comprises real, living muscle and fat cells, and doesn’t contain any soy or pea protein typically used in plant-based alternatives. The firm is now looking to improve its bioprinting and cultivation technologies to produce a sustainable source of cultivated meat that mirrors the key characteristics of farm-raised, premium steak. The hope is also that it will simplify meat production and the supply chain. Current farming methods account for nearly 15 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, making livestock-rearing a huge contribution to climate change. The process for cultivated steak is also a fraction of the time for a conventional steak, which takes 18 months to reach the market. It is designed as ‘clean meat’ without the same bacterial contamination risk which typically causes spoilage, so is anticipated to have a longer shelf life. The process is also fully automated. MeaTech is also developing advanced technologies to produce cell-based alternative protein products, including cell lines for beef, pork and chicken.
‘Super jelly’ can survive being run over by a car
Researchers have developed a jelly-like material that can withstand the equivalent of an elephant standing on it, and completely recover to its original shape, even though it’s 80 per cent water.
The soft-yet-strong material, developed by a team at the University of Cambridge, looks and feels like a squishy jelly, but acts like an ultra-hard, shatterproof glass when compressed, despite its high water content. The non-water portion of the material is a network of polymers held together by reversible on/off interactions that control the material’s mechanical properties. This is the first time that such significant resistance to compression has been incorporated into a soft material.
The ‘super jelly’ could be used for a wide range of potential applications, including soft robotics, bioelectronics or even as a cartilage replacement for biomedical use. The results are reported in the journal Nature Materials. The way materials behave – whether they’re soft or firm, brittle or strong – is dependent upon their molecular structure. Stretchy, rubber-like hydrogels have lots of interesting properties that make them a popular subject of research – such as their toughness and self-healing capabilities – but making hydrogels that can withstand being compressed without getting crushed is a challenge. “In order to make materials with the mechanical properties we want, we use crosslinkers, where two molecules are joined through a chemical bond,” said Dr Zehuan Huang from the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, the study’s first author. “We use reversible crosslinkers to make soft and stretchy hydrogels, but making a hard and compressible hydrogel is difficult and designing a material with these properties is completely counterintuitive.” Working in the lab of Professor Oren A Scherman, who led the research, the team used barrel-shaped molecules called cucurbiturils to make a hydrogel that can withstand compression. The cucurbituril is the crosslinking molecule that holds two guest molecules in its cavity – like a molecular handcuff. The researchers designed guest molecules that prefer to stay inside the cavity for longer than normal, which keeps the polymer network tightly linked, allowing for it to withstand compression. “At 80% water content, you’d think it would burst apart like a water balloon, but it doesn’t: it stays intact and withstands huge compressive forces,” said Scherman, Director of the University’s Melville Laboratory for Polymer Synthesis. “The properties of the hydrogel are seemingly at odds with each other.” “The way the hydrogel can withstand compression was surprising, it wasn’t like anything we’ve seen in hydrogels,” said co-author Dr Jade McCune, also from the Department of Chemistry. “We also found that the compressive strength could be easily controlled through simply changing the chemical structure of the guest molecule inside the handcuff.” To make their glass-like hydrogels, the team chose specific guest molecules for the handcuff. Altering the molecular structure of guest molecules within the handcuff allowed the dynamics of the material to ‘slow down’ considerably, with the mechanical performance of the final hydrogel ranging from rubber-like to glasslike states.
“People have spent years making rubber-like hydrogels, but that’s just half of the picture,” said Scherman. “We’ve revisited traditional polymer physics and created a new class of materials that span the whole range of material properties from rubber-like to glass-like, completing the full picture.” The researchers used the material to make a hydrogel pressure sensor for real-time monitoring of human motions, including standing, walking and jumping. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that glass-like hydrogels have been made. We’re not just writing something new into the textbooks, which is really exciting, but we’re opening a new chapter in the area of high-performance soft materials,” said Huang. Researchers from the Scherman lab are currently working to further develop these glass-like materials towards biomedical and bioelectronic applications in collaboration with experts from engineering and materials science. The research was funded in part by the Leverhulme Trust and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship. Oren Scherman is a Fellow of Jesus College.
REFERENCE:
Zehuan Huang et al. ‘Highly compressible glass-like supramolecular polymer networks.’ Nature Materials (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41563-021-01124-x
New microscope uses photonics for insights into ‘superbugs’
Scientists are building a new super-resolution microscope that uses laser light to study the inner workings and behaviours of superbugs to gain new insights into how they cause disease.
The microscope will allow scientists to peer into bacteria like at a molecular-scale resolution – showing up objects smaller than 10,000th the thickness of a sheet of paper. A leading cause of bacterial pneumonia, meningitis, and sepsis, Streptococcus Pneumoniae bacteria are estimated to have killed around 335,000 children aged five years and under in 2015 worldwide.
Current technologies do not allow a resolution that enables thorough studies of bacterial properties that affect disease development. The super-resolution microscope uses laser light to illuminate proteins at very high resolutions, allowing scientists to gain new insights into what makes these potentially deadly bacteria so pathogenic. Although electron microscopes can show minute detail at the atomic level, they cannot analyse live specimens: electrons can easily be deflected by molecules in the air, meaning any bacteria under inspection must be held in a vacuum. Super-resolution microscopes are far more superior for biological analysis. Called the ‘NANO-scale Visualisation to understand Bacterial virulence and invasiveness - based on fluorescence NANOscopy and VIBrational microscopy’ (or ‘NanoVIB’ for short), the project will shed new light on how superbugs can cause disease, thereby providing the basis for the development of new antimicrobials to treat bacterial infections.
The European Commission has granted €5,635,529 via the Photonics Public Private Partnership to build the microscope.
TEN-FOLD RESOLUTION
While super-resolution microscopes already exist, the NanoVIB team proposes to make a new device with unrivalled resolution capable of revealing the intricate, detailed molecular mechanisms underlying inter-and intracellular processes and disease. Project coordinator, Professor Jerker Widengren, said: "We expect our new microscope prototype to be a nextgeneration super-resolution system, making it possible to image cellular proteins marked with fluorescence emitters (fluorophores) with a ten-fold higher resolution than with any other fluorescence microscopy technique. “With the help of advanced laser, detector and microscopy technologies that will be developed in the project, super-
resolution localisation patterns of specific proteins will be overlaid with light-scattering images, correlating these patterns with local structures and chemical conditions in the bacteria.
“Using laser light, this new microscope will show how bacterial proteins localise on the surface of bacteria, allowing scientists to study the interaction of the pathogen with immune and host cells.
It works based on the so-called MINFLUX concept, where infrared laser light excites fluorophore-labelled molecules in a triangulated manner – leading to an increased resolution. The user can then fine-tune the microscopic imaging to previously unimaginable resolutions. “MINFLUX microscopy will make it possible to resolve how certain pneumococcal surface proteins are distributed on the bacteria under different cell division stages, and whether these proteins are localised in such a way that specific, extra sensitive surface regions of the bacteria, a critical step of the cell division, are protected from immune activation,” said Widengren.
Teaching old oaks new tricks
Mature oak trees will increase their rate of photosynthesis by up to a third in response to the raised CO2 levels expected to be the world average by about 2050, new research shows.
The results, published in Tree Physiology, are the first to emerge from a giant outdoor experiment, led by the University of Birmingham in which an old oak forest is bathed in elevated levels of CO2. Over the first three years of a ten-year project, the 175-year-old oaks clearly responded to the CO2 by consistently increasing their rate of photosynthesis. Researchers are now measuring leaves, wood, roots, and soil to find out where the extra carbon captured ends up and for how long it stays locked up in the forest. The increase in photosynthesis was greatest in strong sunlight. The overall balance of key nutrient elements carbon and nitrogen did not change in the leaves. Keeping the carbon to nitrogen ratio constant suggests that the old trees have found ways of redirecting their elements, or found ways of bringing more nitrogen in from the soil to balance the carbon they are gaining from the air. The research was carried out at the Free-Air CO2 (FACE) facility of the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR) in close collaboration with colleagues from Western Sydney University who run a very similar experiment in old eucalyptus forest (EucFACE). BIFoR FACE and EucFACE are the world’s two largest experiments investigating the effect of global change on nature. Birmingham researcher Anna Gardner, who carried out the measurements, said: “I’m really excited to contribute the first published science results to BIFoR FACE, an experiment of global importance. It was hard work conducting measurements at the top of a 25m oak day after day, but it was the only way to be sure how much extra the trees were photosynthesising.” Professor David Ellsworth, EucFACE lead scientist, said “Previous work at EucFACE measured photosynthesis increased by up to a fifth in increased carbon dioxide. So, we now know how old forest responds in the warm-temperate climate that we have here in Sydney, and the mild temperate climate of the northern middle latitudes where Birmingham sits. At EucFACE we found no additional growth in higher CO2, and it remains to be seen if that will be the case for BIFOR as well.”
Professor Rob MacKenzie, founding Director of BIFoR,added: “It’s a delight to see the first piece of the carbon jigsaw for BIFoR FACE fall into place. We are sure now that the old trees are responding to future carbon dioxide levels. How the entire forest ecosystem responds is a much bigger question requiring many more detailed investigations. We are now pushing ahead with those investigations.”
Anna Gardner, from the University of Birmingham, hard at work in the treetops.
Spider web secrets unravelled
American scientists are the first to document every step of web-building.
Johns Hopkins University researchers discovered precisely how spiders build webs by using night vision and artificial intelligence to track and record every movement of all eight legs as spiders worked in the dark. Their creation of a web-building playbook or algorithm brings new understanding of how creatures with brains a fraction of the size of a human’s are able to create structures of such elegance, complexity and geometric precision. The findings are now available online. Behavioural biologist and senior author Andrew Gordus said: “I first got interested in this topic while I was out birding with my son. After seeing a spectacular web I thought, ‘if you went to a zoo and saw a chimpanzee building this you’d think that’s one amazing and impressive chimpanzee.’ Well this is even more amazing because a spider’s brain is so tiny and I was frustrated that we didn’t know more about how this remarkable behavior occurs.”
“Now we’ve defined the entire choreography for web building, which has never been done for any animal architecture at this fine of a resolution.”
Web-weaving spiders that build blindly using only the sense of touch, have fascinated humans for centuries. Not all spiders build webs but those that do are among a subset of animal species known for their architectural creations, like nest-building birds and puffer fish that create elaborate sand circles when mating. The first step to understanding how the relatively small brains of these animal architects support their high-level construction projects, is to systematically document and analyse the behaviours and motor skills involved, which until now has never been done, mainly because of the challenges of capturing and recording the actions, Gordus said.
His team studied a hackled orb weaver, a spider native to the western United States that’s small enough to sit comfortably on a fingertip. To observe the spiders during their night-time web-building work, the lab designed an arena with infrared cameras and infrared lights. With that set-up they monitored and recorded six spiders every night as they constructed webs, tracking the millions of individual leg actions with machine vision software designed specifically to detect limb movement. “Even if you video record it, that’s a lot of legs to track, over a long time, across many individuals,” said lead author Abel Corver, a graduate student studying web-making and neurophysiology. “It’s just too much to go through every frame and annotate the leg points by hand so we trained machine vision software to detect the posture of the spider, frame by frame, so we could document everything the legs do to build an entire web.”
They found that web-making behaviors are quite similar across spiders, so much so that the researchers were able to predict the part of a web a spider was working on just from seeing the position of a leg. “Even if the final structure is a little different, the rules they use to build the web are the same,” Gordus said. “They’re all using the same rules, which confirms the rules are encoded in their brains. Now we want to know how those rules are encoded at the level of neurons.”
Future work for the lab includes experiments with mindaltering drugs to determine which circuits in the spider’s brain are responsible for the various stages of web-building. “The spider is fascinating,” Corver said, “because here you have an animal with a brain built on the same fundamental building blocks as our own, and this work could give us hints on how we can understand larger brain systems, including humans, and I think that’s very exciting. Authors also include Nicholas Wilkerson, a former Hopkins undergraduate and current graduate student at Atlantic Veterinary College, and Jeremy Miller, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program and National Institutes of Health grant R35GM124883.
