Background: Single-session interventions have the potential to address young people's mental health needs at scale, but their effects are heterogeneous. We tested whether the hypothesis could help explain when intervention effects persist or fade over time. The hypothesis posits that interventions are more effective in environments that support the intervention message.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe present study seeks to contribute to developmental science in emergencies by investigating associations between COVID-19 pandemic-related stressors, parents' stress, family relationships, and child wellbeing. In doing so, we build on recent research that generalizes the assumptions of the Family Stress Model beyond direct economic stressors of households to macro-contextual stressors that operate at the societal level. In the case of our study, these stressors relate to the COVID-19 pandemic, such as health risks and confinement-related stresses.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMeta-analysts often ask a yes-or-no question: Is there an intervention effect or not? This traditional, all-or-nothing thinking stands in contrast with current best practice in meta-analysis, which calls for a heterogeneity-attuned approach (i.e., focused on the extent to which effects vary across procedures, participant groups, or contexts).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEducational outcomes remain highly unequal within and across nations. Students' mindsets-their beliefs about whether intellectual abilities can be developed-have been identified as a potential lever for making adolescents' academic outcomes more equitable. Recent research, however, suggests that intervention programs aimed at changing students' mindsets should be supplemented by programs aimed at the changing the mindset culture, which is defined as the shared set of beliefs about learning in a school or classroom.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGroup-based educational disparities are smaller in classrooms where teachers express a belief that students can improve their abilities. However, a scalable method for motivating teachers to adopt such growth mindset-supportive teaching practices has remained elusive. In part, this is because teachers often already face overwhelming demands on their time and attention and have reason to be skeptical of the professional development advice they receive from researchers and other experts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe ribonucleoprotein telomerase contains two essential components: telomerase RNA (TER) and telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT, Est2 in yeast). A small portion of TER, termed the template, is copied by TERT onto the chromosome ends, thus compensating for sequence loss due to incomplete DNA replication and nuclease action. Although telomerase RNA is highly divergent in sequence and length across fungi and mammals, structural motifs essential for telomerase function are conserved.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSocial-evaluative stressors-experiences in which people feel they could be judged negatively-pose a major threat to adolescent mental health and can cause young people to disengage from stressful pursuits, resulting in missed opportunities to acquire valuable skills. Here we show that replicable benefits for the stress responses of adolescents can be achieved with a short (around 30-min), scalable 'synergistic mindsets' intervention. This intervention, which is a self-administered online training module, synergistically targets both growth mindsets (the idea that intelligence can be developed) and stress-can-be-enhancing mindsets (the idea that one's physiological stress response can fuel optimal performance).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the past decade, behavioural science has gained influence in policymaking but suffered a crisis of confidence in the replicability of its findings. Here, we describe a nascent heterogeneity revolution that we believe these twin historical trends have triggered. This revolution will be defined by the recognition that most treatment effects are heterogeneous, so the variation in effect estimates across studies that defines the replication crisis is to be expected as long as heterogeneous effects are studied without a systematic approach to sampling and moderation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSocial stress poses a major threat to adolescent health via its effects on internalizing symptoms, such as anxiety and depression. Available interventions to help adolescents improve their stress responses, however, have not been effective in rigorous evaluation studies, or they have been difficult to administer widely. Here we show that replicable improvements in adolescent stress responses can be achieved with a short (~30-minute), scalable synergistic mindsets intervention.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPyrite-bearing coal wastes are responsible of the formation of acid mine drainage (AMD), and their management to mitigate environmental impacts is a challenge to the coal mine industry in Europe and worldwide. The European CEReS project sought to develop a generic co-processing strategy to reuse and recycle coal wastes, based on removal of AMD generating potential through bioleaching. Chemolitoautotrophic iron- and sulfur-oxidizing microbial consortia were enriched from a Polish coal waste at 30 °C and 48 °C, but not 42 °C.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
December 2019
In recent years, the field of psychology has begun to conduct replication tests on a large scale. Here, we show that "replicator degrees of freedom" make it far too easy to obtain and publish false-negative replication results, even while appearing to adhere to strict methodological standards. Specifically, using data from an ongoing debate, we show that commonly exercised flexibility at the experimental design and data analysis stages of replication testing can make it appear that a finding was not replicated when, in fact, it was.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCompounds - and representing key members of the marinoquinoline family of natural products, together with the related marine alkaloid aplidiopsamine A (), have been synthesized using various combinations of palladium-catalyzed Ullmann cross-coupling and reductive cyclization processes involving a C3-arylated pyrrole as the common intermediate. These natural products have been characterized by single-crystal X-ray analyses and evaluated as inhibitors of acetylcholinesterase (AChE) with congener proving to be the most active.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn an era of unprecedented environmental change, there have been increasing ecological and global public health concerns associated with exposure to anthropogenic pollutants. While there is a pressing need to remediate polluted ecosystems, human intervention might unwittingly oppose selection for natural detoxification, which is primarily carried out by microbes. We test this possibility in the context of a ubiquitous chemical remediation strategy aimed at targeting metal pollution: the addition of lime-containing materials.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdolescents are exposed to extensive marketing for junk food, which drives overconsumption by creating positive emotional associations with junk food. Here we counter this influence with an intervention that frames manipulative food marketing as incompatible with important adolescent values, including social justice and autonomy from adult control. In a preregistered, longitudinal, randomized, controlled field experiment, we show that this framing intervention reduces boys' and girls' implicit positive associations with junk food marketing and substantially improves boys' daily dietary choices in the school cafeteria.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEbola virus (EBOV) in humans causes a severe illness with high mortality rates. Several strategies have been developed in the past to treat EBOV infection, including the antibody cocktail ZMapp, which has been shown to be effective in nonhuman primate models of infection and has been used under compassionate-treatment protocols in humans . ZMapp is a mixture of three chimerized murine monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) that target EBOV-specific epitopes on the surface glycoprotein.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDrug combinations are synergistic when their combined efficacy exceeds the sum of the individual actions, but they rarely include ineffective drugs that become effective only in combination. We identified several "enabling pairs" of neutralizing and non-neutralizing anti-ebolavirus monoclonal antibodies, whose combination exhibited new functional profiles, including transforming a non-neutralizing antibody to a neutralizer. Sub-neutralizing concentrations of antibodies 2G4 or m8C4 enabled non-neutralizing antibody FVM09 (IC >1 μM) to exhibit potent neutralization (IC 1-10 nM).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExtremely acidophilic microorganisms (pH optima for growth of ≤3) are utilized for the extraction of metals from sulfide minerals in the industrial biotechnology of "biomining." A long term goal for biomining has been development of microbial consortia able to withstand increased chloride concentrations for use in regions where freshwater is scarce. However, when challenged by elevated salt, acidophiles experience both osmotic stress and an acidification of the cytoplasm due to a collapse of the inside positive membrane potential, leading to an influx of protons.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
October 2016
It is now appreciated that more HLA-DR mismatching at the time of the first renal transplant is associated with higher degrees of sensitization, lower rates and longer times to retransplantation, and worse graft outcomes in children who are subsequently retransplanted. As such, our pediatric renal transplant program preferentially uses 0 or 1 HLA-DR-mismatched kidneys and reserves 2 DR-mismatched kidneys for recipients with an eminent need for a kidney. Based on a new HLA class II epitope matching strategy that is designed to minimize dnDSA production to DR and DQ antigens, we evaluated the prevalence of DR and DQ eplet mismatching for dd offers made to our pediatric wait-listed candidates.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhat can be done to reduce unhealthy eating among adolescents? It was hypothesized that aligning healthy eating with important and widely shared adolescent values would produce the needed motivation. A double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled experiment with eighth graders (total n = 536) evaluated the impact of a treatment that framed healthy eating as consistent with the adolescent values of autonomy from adult control and the pursuit of social justice. Healthy eating was suggested as a way to take a stand against manipulative and unfair practices of the food industry, such as engineering junk food to make it addictive and marketing it to young children.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious efforts to identify cross-neutralizing antibodies to the receptor-binding site (RBS) of ebolavirus glycoproteins have been unsuccessful, largely because the RBS is occluded on the viral surface. We report a monoclonal antibody (FVM04) that targets a uniquely exposed epitope within the RBS; cross-neutralizes Ebola (EBOV), Sudan (SUDV), and, to a lesser extent, Bundibugyo viruses; and shows protection against EBOV and SUDV in mice and guinea pigs. The antibody cocktail ZMapp™ is remarkably effective against EBOV (Zaire) but does not cross-neutralize other ebolaviruses.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Human leukocyte antigens (HLA) class II donor-specific antibodies (DSAs) are associated with microcirculation inflammation, transplant glomerulopathy and ultimately graft loss. There is however no data on allograft outcomes in deceased donor kidney transplant recipients who have not received any desensitization prior to transplantation.
Methods: We prospectively evaluated the association of HLA DR and DQ DSAs on rejection and short-term graft survival in patients who did not receive desensitization prior to transplantation.
Recent studies have suggested that antibody-mediated protection against the Ebolaviruses may be achievable, but little is known about whether or not antibodies can confer cross-reactive protection against viruses belonging to diverse Ebolavirus species, such as Ebola virus (EBOV), Sudan virus (SUDV), and Bundibugyo virus (BDBV). We isolated a large panel of human monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) against BDBV glycoprotein (GP) using peripheral blood B cells from survivors of the 2007 BDBV outbreak in Uganda. We determined that a large proportion of mAbs with potent neutralizing activity against BDBV bind to the glycan cap and recognize diverse epitopes within this major antigenic site.
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