Women in their mid-20s who reported frequent binge drinking during the pandemic were more likely to become infected with COVID-19, according to a new study.

The researchers say physicians need to develop pandemic-related prevention methods to tackle substance use issues.

The study in Drug and Alcohol Dependence shows that young Black and white women ranging from ages 25 to 28 who reported binge drinking—four or more drinks in one sitting—had the highest self-reported prevalence of COVID-19 infection among the subgroups studied.

“Our research shows that when young women binge drink, they’re also heightening their risk of contracting COVID-19,” says Tammy Chung, a professor of psychiatry and director of the Center for Population Behavioral Health at the Rutgers Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research and a corresponding author of the study.

“This can be due to several factors associated with binge drinking, such as being less vigilant in using preventive behaviors such as social distancing when intoxicated.”

Researchers analyzed whether people’s use of alcohol and substances changed from before the COVID-19 pandemic to during the pandemic in a sample of young Black and white women. They examined how characteristics such as socioeconomic status and COVID-19 infection status were associated with certain patterns of substance and alcohol use during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study focused on young women, an understudied group whose rates of substance use are catching up to or matching that of men for most substances because young women experience disproportionate financial strain due to job loss and increased caregiving responsibilities.

“Identifying these characteristic profiles can inform tailored intervention to address disparities associated with risk for COVID-19 infection and its intersection with specific patterns of substance use among young women to guide more personalized public health response,” Chung says.

The study looked at seven subgroups of young women who showed similar patterns of substance use before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Groups included those with low use of substances, cannabis use, binge drinking, cigarette or e-cigarette use combined with binge drinking, and other patterns.

Researchers also examined the characteristics that were associated with these patterns of substance use, such as socioeconomic status, COVID-19 infection status, and COVID-19 impacts on mental health and financial situations.

Each subgroup correlated with a different response to COVID-19 impacts. Using the profiles of the subgroups, researchers could better understand how personal characteristics are associated with patterns of substance abuse. Researchers also found that individuals who reported using more than one drug were more likely to report pandemic-related psychological health and job or income loss.

“Women who report use of multiple substances warrant intervention not only for substance use, but also would benefit from mental health services and job or income-loss support,” says Chung.

Future research could analyze subgroups of males, women who don’t identify as Black or white, and other age groups.

Additional coauthors are from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Rutgers Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research.

Source: Rutgers University

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New research identifies the top factors that predict longevity in older people.

The new model relies less on specific disease diagnoses and more on factors such as the ability to grocery shop, the amount of certain small cholesterol particles circulating in the blood, and whether someone never or only occasionally smoked.

The findings provide a way to predict whether a person over the age of 70 is likely to live two, five, or 10 years. The markers may be obtained during a doctor visit, so they could be a useful guide for clinical care.

“This study was designed to determine the proximal causes of longevity—the factors that portend whether someone is likely to live two more years or 10 more years,” says Virginia Byers Kraus, professor in the departments of medicine, pathology, and orthopedic surgery at Duke University School of Medicine and lead author of the study in the journal eBioMedicine.

“Properly applied, these measures could help determine the benefits and burdens of screening tests and treatment for older people,” Kraus says.

Kraus and colleagues launched their inquiry at an opportune time, having been directed to a cache of 1,500 blood samples from a 1980s longitudinal study that enrolled older people.

The banked samples had been drawn in 1992 when participants were at least 71 years old and then stored at the NIH. They were scheduled for destruction, but the researchers arrived in time to transfer them to Duke for analysis.

The blood samples had the additional fortuitous feature of being drawn at a time that preceded the widespread use of medications such as statins, which could have skewed the results. More good luck: study participants had been followed for several years and had filled out questionnaires about their health histories and habits.

Capitalizing on all the features of the older study, the researchers were able to apply current sophisticated analytical tools. Led by Constantin Aliferis and Sisi Ma at the University of Minnesota, the researchers were able to delve into health factors to identify a core set of 17 predictive variables that have a causal impact on longevity.

The analysis found that a leading factor associated with longevity across each of the study’s benchmarks—two-, five-, and 10-years after participants had their blood drawn—was physical function, which was defined as an ability to go grocery shopping or perform housecleaning chores. Surprisingly, having cancer or heart disease was not among the main predictors.

For older people living two years beyond the time their blood had been drawn, the leading factor associated with longevity was having an abundance of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol—and not just any HDL lipids, but high volumes of very small HDL particles.

“This was especially surprising,” Kraus says. “We hypothesize that these very small HDL particles are the size that is best at scavenging and clearing endotoxin, a potent inflammation-causing molecule from gut microbes, from the circulation. The small particle may also be best able to get into the nooks and crannies of cells to remove the bad cholesterol, so having more of them could provide this protective benefit.”

At five years beyond the original blood draw, just being of a younger age was predictive of longevity, along with cognitive function. And among the longest survivors—those living 10 years—the best predictor was a person’s smoking history, with non-smokers faring best.

“These measures clarify and enrich our understanding of mechanisms underlying longevity and could point to appropriate tests and potential interventions,” Kraus says.

She says the next stage of research is to use additional analytical tools to improve the predictivity and identify potential targets for therapies.

The study had funding from the National Institute of Aging, a unit of the National Institutes of Health, and the NIH/National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.

Source: Duke University

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Police officers in the United States receive less training—an average of five months in the classroom—than those in 18 countries, research finds.

According to the data, the rate of fatal police shootings in the US in 2019 (3.1 per million) was 5 times higher than in similarly developed nations like France (.14 per million) and 22 times higher than in Australia (.64 per million).

Published in the Annual Review of Criminology, the study examines the rates of fatal police violence, including shootings and other violence, in 18 countries while looking at factors like the treatment of minorities, gun homicides, and police training duration. Rates of gun homicides and fatal police violence were extremely closely related (.97 correlation).

That said, gun homicides may be a proxy for another explanation like armed and hostile suspects. For example, the study found the US had a high fatal police violence rate (3.4 per million) and a high rate of gun homicide (3.7 per 100,000), while Australia had a relatively high fatal police violence rate in 2019 (.7 per million) despite low rates of gun homicide (.14 per 100,000).

Countries that exhibit high fatal police violence rates—the US, Venezuela, Canada, Australia, Brazil, France, and Belgium—are distinguished by their mistreatment of minorities or long-standing grievances and turmoil, says Paul Hirschfield, lead author of the study and an associate professor of sociology and director of the Criminal Justice Program at Rutgers University.

“The institution of slavery was so massive in Brazil and the United States that the wounds that it inflicted, the benefits it conferred, and the racial hierarchy and ideology that sustained it remained long after abolition and have indelibly shaped the contemporary social and institutional order,” says Hirschfield.

According to the study, the seven highest countries with fatal police violence—Venezuela, Brazil, the US, Argentina, Chile, Canada, and Australia (four of which, Venezuela, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina, have recent histories of authoritarian rule)—have roots in recent colonial domination that produced some form of ethnic cleansing. The top four fatal police violence countries practiced slavery until the second half of the 19th century.

The study suggests that the amount of time police receive training and fatal police violence outcomes are closely related.

Belgian police, with a fatal police violence rate of .35 per million, receive eight months of training, while the National Police in France, with a lower .29 per million rate of fatal police violence attend school for ten months.

Canada, meanwhile, with a fatal police violence rate of .9 per million, provides 26 weeks of training for its national police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and 24 weeks for Toronto police, its largest municipal force.

What police learn during the training, not just the duration of the training, makes a difference. In Brazil and Venezuela, militarized police forces receive extended training, but fatal police violence rates are extraordinarily high, in part, because training models brutal methods and generally fails to teach restraint.

Hirschfield says countries that have low fatal police violence rates despite ethnic tensions and relatively short classroom training duration (the UK’s England and Wales as well as Spain), high rates of distrust in the police (Spain), secretive national police organizations with roots in dictatorships (Spain and Chile), relatively decentralized policing system with strong local policing (Spain and Switzerland), do exist.

The study suggests that researchers delve into these deviant cases to examine how countries such as Chile and Spain—which are beset with rising crime or insecurity, inadequate public resources, and secretive national police forces with roots in dictatorships—still manage to avoid high fatal police violence rates.

Hirschfield says these are “rather fertile grounds for refining both explanations of exceptionally lethal policing in the US and theories of international variation in lethal policing more broadly.”

Source: Rutgers University

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Every modern mammal, from a platypus to a blue whale, is descended from a common ancestor that lived about 180 million years ago.

We don’t know a great deal about this animal, but researchers have now computationally reconstructed the organization of its genome.

“Our results have important implications for understanding the evolution of mammals and for conservation efforts,” says Harris Lewin, professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis, and senior author of the paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers drew on high-quality genome sequences from 32 living species representing 23 of the 26 known orders of mammals. They included humans and chimps, wombats and rabbits, manatees, domestic cattle, rhinos, bats, and pangolins.

The analysis also included the Chinese alligator and chicken genomes as comparison groups. Some of these genomes are being produced as part of the Earth BioGenome Project and other large-scale biodiversity genome sequencing efforts. Lewin chairs the Working Group for the Earth BioGenome Project.

The reconstruction shows that the mammal ancestor had 19 autosomal chromosomes, which control the inheritance of an organism’s characteristics outside of those controlled by sex-linked chromosomes, (these are paired in most cells, making 38 in total) plus two sex chromosomes, says first author Joana Damas, a postdoctoral researcher at the UC Davis Genome Center.

The team identified 1,215 blocks of genes that consistently occur on the same chromosome in the same order across all 32 genomes. These building blocks of all mammal genomes contain genes that are critical to developing a normal embryo, Damas says.

The researchers found nine whole chromosomes, or chromosome fragments in the mammal ancestor whose order of genes is the same in modern birds’ chromosomes.

“This remarkable finding shows the evolutionary stability of the order and orientation of genes on chromosomes over an extended evolutionary timeframe of more than 320 million years,” Lewin says.
In contrast, regions between these conserved blocks contained more repetitive sequences and were more prone to breakages, rearrangements, and sequence duplications, which are major drivers of genome evolution.

“Ancestral genome reconstructions are critical to interpreting where and why selective pressures vary across genomes. This study establishes a clear relationship between chromatin architecture, gene regulation and linkage conservation,” says William Murphy, a professor at Texas A&M University, who was not involved with the paper. “This provides the foundation for assessing the role of natural selection in chromosome evolution across the mammalian tree of life.”

The researchers were able to follow the ancestral chromosomes forward in time from the common ancestor. They found that the rate of chromosome rearrangement differed between mammal lineages.

For example, in the ruminant lineage (leading to modern cattle, sheep, and deer) there was an acceleration in rearrangement 66 million years ago, when an asteroid impact killed off the dinosaurs and led to the rise of mammals.

The results will help understand the genetics behind adaptations that have allowed mammals to flourish on a changing planet over the last 180 million years, the authors say.

Additional coauthors are from Konkuk University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, the University of Kent, the University of London, the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, Pacific Biosciences, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, the Mazzoni Berlin Center for Genomics in Biodiversity, and the Zoonomia Consortium.

The US Department of Agriculture supported the work.

Source: UC Davis

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The effect of air pollution on human health, economies, and agriculture differs drastically depending on where the pollutants are emitted, according to a new study.

The findings could potentially incentivize certain countries to cut climate-changing emissions.

The study is the first to simulate how pollutants affect both climate and air quality for locations around the globe.

For the study, published in Science Advances, researchers analyzed the climate and air quality impacts of aerosols—tiny solid particles and liquid droplets that contribute to smog and are emitted from industrial factories, power plants, and vehicle tailpipes.

Aerosols create unique global patterns of impact on human health, agricultural, and economic productivity when compared with carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, which are the focus of efforts to mitigate climate change.

Although CO2 and aerosols are often emitted at the same time during the combustion of fuel, the two substances behave differently in Earth’s atmosphere, says co-lead author Geeta Persad, an assistant professor in University of Texas at Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences.

Aerosol emissions are always bad for both the emitter and the planet overall.

“Carbon dioxide has the same impact on climate no matter who emits it,” Persad says. “But for these aerosol pollutants, they tend to stay concentrated near where they’re emitted, so the effect that they have on the climate system is very patchy and very dependent on where they’re coming from.”

The researchers found that, depending on where they are emitted, aerosols can worsen the social costs of carbon—an estimate of the economic costs greenhouse gases have on society—by as much as 66%.

The scientists looked at eight key regions: Brazil, China, East Africa, western Europe, India, Indonesia, United States, and South Africa.

“This research highlights how the harmful effects of our emissions are generally underestimated,” says Jennifer Burney, co-lead author and the chair in global climate policy and research at the University of California, San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy.

“CO2 is making the planet warmer, but it also gets emitted with a bunch of other compounds that impact people and plants directly and cause climate changes in their own right.”

Aerosols can directly affect human health and the climate on their own. They are associated with negative health impacts when inhaled and can affect the climate by influencing temperature, precipitation patterns, and how much sunlight reaches the Earth’s surface.

To study aerosols’ influence in comparison to CO2, the team created a set of climate simulations using the Community Earth System Model version 1 developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

They ran simulations in which each of the eight regions produced identical aerosol emissions and mapped how temperature, precipitation, and surface air quality were affected across the globe, then connected this data with known relationships between climate and air quality and infant mortality, crop productivity, and gross domestic product across the eight regions. Finally, they compared the total societal costs of these aerosol-driven impacts against the societal costs of CO2 emitted in each of the eight regions.

The outcome paints a varied and complicated picture. Emissions from some regions produce climate and air quality effects that range from two to more than 10 times as strong as others and social costs that sometimes affect neighboring regions more than the region that produced the aerosol emissions. For example, in Europe local emissions result in four times as many infant deaths outside Europe as within.

But the researchers note that aerosol emissions are always bad for both the emitter and the planet overall.

“While we might think about aerosols, which cool the climate, as having the silver lining of counteracting CO2-driven warming, when we look at all these effects in combination, we find that no region experiences overall local benefits or generates overall global benefits by emitting aerosols,” Persad says.

Additional coauthors are from Stanford University, Harvard University, and UT Austin. The National Science Foundation supported the work.

Source: UT Austin

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The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization raises the question: will in vitro fertilization and other assisted reproductive technologies remain legal?

The United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 83,946 babies born in 2019 were conceived via assisted reproductive technology, or ART. That number has doubled over the past decade, as couples struggling with infertility as well as same-sex couples have explored greater options and opportunities for childbirth.

While the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling states that “nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion,” many legal experts have noted that the concurrence that conservative Justice Clarence Thomas drafted contradicts this notion. Thomas recommended the Court revisit landmark decisions instating the right to contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut), same-sex intimacy (Lawrence v. Texas), and same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges). The common denominator in these three cases is substantive due process, the principle that protects fundamental rights—including those not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution—from government interference.

The right to access assisted reproductive technology, which requires the creation and elimination of embryos, is also bolstered by substantive due process—and therefore, Justice Thomas’ concurrence forecasts a highly uncertain legal future for IVF, says Melissa Murray, professor of law at New York University.

Murray, a leading expert in family law, constitutional law, and reproductive rights and justice, describes Dobbs’ potential implications for access to assisted reproductive technology and other reproductive rights:

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Things like office layout and mentorship for new employees can reduce “quiet quitting,” say researchers.

“We’re not fans of the term ‘quiet quitting,’ since it seems dismissive of employees who are fulfilling their roles in a company,” says Erin Powell, coauthor of a paper on the work and an associate professor of entrepreneurship in North Carolina State University’s Poole College of Management.

“That said, it is clear that companies can benefit significantly when employees go above and beyond what’s required of them. And our study offers insights into what gives employees that sense of purpose and drive that can benefit their employers.”

“Fundamentally, we wanted to know how one’s relationships with coworkers affect the extent to which one identifies with an employer and, by extension, the extent to which one is helpful at work,” says Tom Zagenczyk, coauthor of the paper and a professor of management.

“Historically, attempts to explore ‘organizational identification’—or the extent to which your organization is part of your identity—have focused on how employees perceive the organization’s reputation and how they view the way they’re treated at work. We really wanted to explore possible social influences.”

To that end, the researchers conducted an in-depth social network study of 91 employees at a company that employs a total of 97 people. Study participants received a survey designed to capture the role of each employee, how they related to the company, and how they interacted with other employees. For example, questions assessed the extent to which each employee identified with the company; how they viewed their treatment by the employer; how helpful coworkers were; and how they fit into the structure of the organization.

The researchers then used statistical tools to account for potentially confounding variables and to identify factors that affected organizational identification and helpfulness at work.

“One key finding was that a given employee’s organizational identification was similar to the organizational identification of the people who give that employee advice in the workplace,” Zagenczyk says. “In other words, it appears that the people an employee turns to for help at work have a significant influence on how the employee feels about the company.”

“That’s important because it is well-established that the more a person identifies with their company, the more likely they are to go beyond the call of duty at work,” Powell says. “And that helps the employer’s bottom line.

“This finding has practical applications, since employers have myriad ways of influencing how employees interact with each other. For example, employers decide where people’s desks or offices are located, they can determine who is assigned to mentor new hires, and so on.”

The researchers also found that, when people occupy similar places in their employer’s social network, they exhibit similar levels of helpful behavior. That was true regardless of how closely the individuals identified with the employer.

“We think this demonstrates that workplace behavior can also be influenced by observing the behavior of peers, regardless of whether they interact directly with those peers,” Zagenczyk says. “This highlights the importance of establishing those positive social interactions we mentioned earlier—the effects can extend beyond the people directly involved in the interaction.

“One reason companies are freaking out about quiet quitting is that many workplaces have moved away from clearly defined job descriptions to adopt team-based, decentralized organizational structures,” Zagenczyk says. “In that sort of environment—in which many tasks don’t fall within any employee’s defined job description—a lack of ‘organizational citizenship’ in employees can really hurt the company. Employers can address this challenge by better understanding the informal social networks that influence the way people feel about their employers. Studies like this one will help managers do that.”

The paper appears in the journal Human Resource Management.

Source: NC State

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Long-term memories rely on both the repetition of events and an intricate neurological learning process in making these memories last, shows a new study in sea slugs.

The findings provide a more detailed understanding of how these types of memories are formed as well as insights into what may disrupt their creation.

“Repetition is a well-documented trigger for memory formation—the more times something is repeated, the better it is remembered,” explains New York University’s Nikolay V. Kukushkin, the lead author of the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“However, the brain’s machinery is more complicated than that. Our research shows that the effects of individual repeated events interact in more nuanced ways and have distinct roles in working to form long-term memories—neurons can sense not just repetition, but also the order of repeated experiences and can use that information to discriminate between different patterns of these events in building memories.

“For example, neurons can tell the difference between two events in escalating order of intensity and those same two events in the opposite order, forming a memory only if the intensity increases over time,” he adds.

The researchers sought to better understand what lies behind a well-documented neurological process—specifically, that repeated events induce long-term memory where individual events fail to do so.

What has been unclear is how repeated events interact with one another to form a memory.

To explore this question, the scientists studied Aplysia californica, the California sea slug. Aplysia is a model organism for this type of research because its simple memories are well understood at the molecular and cellular level. Neurons that control them can be isolated and studied in a Petri dish, as the study’s authors did here, reproducing all the essential components of memory formation. The researchers “trained” these neurons by applying repeated chemical pulses that replicated Aplysia’s responses to stimuli, such as mild electric shocks, typically used in experiments. They then monitored the long-term strengthening of connections between the neurons, thereby mimicking and then observing the formation of a long-term memory.

“Two-trial learning is a technique in which Aplysia, or even isolated Aplysia neurons, can be made to form a long-term memory after two experiences,” explains Kukushkin, a researcher at NYU’s Center for neural science.

“Single trials have no effect, but two trials, if they are appropriately spaced in time, do.”

As part of these experiments, the researchers specifically examined the resulting activity of the protein ERK, which is required for memory.

Previously, scientists had thought that ERK activation should build up during the learning process. But in the new study, the researchers found a more complicated dynamic: a “tug of war” between molecules that activate ERK (and therefore favor memory) and those that deactivate it (and therefore oppose memory).

After only a single trial, they note, the deactivating side of the “tug of war” prevailed and ERK activity was arrested, preventing memory formation. By contrast, a second trial was required to prevent the decrease in ERK activity, thereby allowing memories to take hold.

The scientists used different variations of the training procedure—alterations that differentially affected memory depending on the pattern of stimulation. They modified the “intensity” of individual training events by varying the concentration of chemicals used to mimic electric shocks. When the two-trial training included events of different intensity, only the “weak-strong” pattern of training produced long-term memory, whereas the inverse, “strong-weak” sequence, failed to do so.

In other words, the same combination of trials only had an effect if it increased in intensity, but not if it decreased in intensity, over time. This might represent an evolutionary adaptation to prioritize memory of escalating stimuli, the scientists suggest—as they point out, events that escalate in intensity have more predictive power than those that decrease in intensity.

“Long-term memory formation, then, depends on which of the two competing sides of the ERK tug of war wins over time,” explains Kukushkin. “But perhaps more significantly, the work demonstrates that effects of repeated events do not simply accumulate. In fact, they have distinct roles, such as to initiate and confirm the commitment of information to long-term memory. Neurons can sense not just repetition, but the order of stimuli, and they use that information to discriminate between different patterns of experience.”

Funding for the research came from the National Institutes of Health.

Source: NYU

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Among ancient Mayas, cacao was accessible to the general populace and not just enjoyed by the society’s very upper echelons, royalty, a new study shows.

Said to be a gift from the gods, cacao for the ancient Maya was considered sacred, used not only as currency, but in special ceremonies and religious rituals. It’s the progenitor plant of chocolate, and notions of luxury are embedded in its lore.

The prevailing belief: Cacao was more available to, even controlled by, society’s upper crust. Past efforts to identify cacao in ceramics focused on highly decorative vessels associated with elite ceremonial contexts—think ornate drinking vases—leading to assumptions about how cacao was distributed and who could access it.

What about the farmers who grew cacao and the communities of people who lived amongst these orchards? What of the general populace?

The new study asks these questions—and answers them—by examining cacao residues from ancient ceramics. Their results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrate that cacao was, in fact, used in celebrations at all levels of society.

“It had long been assumed that cacao for the Maya was an elite exclusive,” says Anabel Ford, an anthropologist and director of the MesoAmerican Research Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who for 40 years has conducted research on the ancient Maya city of El Pilar.

“We now know this is not the case. The imbibing of cacao was a luxury accessible to all. The importance is that it was a requirement of the rituals associated with it.”

To test the exclusivity of cacao use, the work examines 54 archaeological ceramic sherds. Originating from El Pilar, located between Belize and Guatemala, researchers traced the sherds to Late Classic period civic and residential contexts, representing a cross section of ancient Maya inhabitants.

The study includes a chemical analysis of these sherds—specifically of the biomarkers for cacao: caffeine, theobromine, and theophylline.

“The discovery of chemical signatures of cacao made the investigation possible, but the main active ingredient, theobromine, it turns out is not sufficiently discrete to be certain of the cacao attribution,” Ford says.

“Mattanjah (de Vries) and his students, in their chemical research, encountered the possibility of detecting theophylline, a specific component of cacao that could not be confused with anything else. His work was not archaeological, but he saw the potential for an interdisciplinary project.”

De Vries, a professor and department chair of chemistry and biochemistry at UC Santa Barbara, has long studied how DNA bases, the building blocks of life, and similar molecules respond to UV light and, he says, whether UV light “could have played a role on an early Earth, in the way nature selected those building blocks from a primordial soup of many such compounds.

“At some point I realized that some of the compounds we had been studying in this origin of life chemistry project occur in cacao, and thus can serve as biomarkers for cacao,” de Vries says.

“Since we had already investigated the spectroscopy of these compounds in great detail, this presented an opportunity to apply that expertise to detection of these biomarkers for archaeology. We can find a needle in a haystack, provided we know what the needle looks like; in this case the target molecule was a certain biomarker for cacao,” he adds. “That ability is what made this analysis possible.”

In their selection of ceramics to test, Ford and de Vries prioritized the vases from which cacao was likely drunk. They also tested bowls, jars, and plates. All vessel types had evidence of cacao.

“This was a surprise at first,” Ford says, “but giving thought to the presence and understanding of their uses, bowls would be good for mixing, jars would be right for warming the drink (a traditional cacao preparation), and plates appropriate for serving food with sauces that can contain cacao (such as mole poblano).

“Now that we know that the presence of cacao is in all vessel types, we need to understand the greater distribution and use of these important household forms,” Ford adds.

“What is critical in our work is that the data I collected in the El Pilar-Belize River area emphasizes the ordinary households and not just the elite center. Our research thus breaks ground on the identification and the distribution.”

Source: UC Santa Barbara

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Using drones for the last mile of package deliveries uses less energy and creates fewer emissions than conventional means, a new study shows.

As consumers, we’ve gotten used to the immediacy of deliveries. Order a product one day and have it at your house the next. But the logistics behind this massive movement of goods—and its environmental impact—mean that better solutions are needed to balance consumer demand and the energy consumption of “last-mile” deliveries.

To address this issue, researchers looked at what they refer to as “an increase in the demand for last-mile delivery while trying to reduce the environmental impacts of the transportation sector.”

Many companies are exploring using autonomous vehicles to perform last-mile delivery, says Thiago Rodrigues, a PhD candidate in civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

“We focused on understanding the impacts on the energy consumption and GHG emissions of this transformation in how we deliver packages,” Rodrigues says.

The experiments began by defining the principles that influenced an aircraft’s overall energy consumption. “Most of the literature in this field is focused on helicopters,” Rodrigues says. “So we adapted the physical model and created an experimental protocol to replicate the flight conditions expected during last-mile delivery.”

The team learned that both payload mass and total flight duration were the main contributors to the drone’s overall energy consumption. “For small packages with high aggregated value, such as medical supplies and electronics, the quadcopter drones showed a considerably low energy consumption per mile traveled compared to other transportation modes.”

Surprisingly, drone speed and wind speeds had little impact on the drone’s overall energy consumption, Rodrigues says. Testing took place with the drone flying at speeds between four and 12 meters (about 13 to 39.3 feet) per second. During that time, the wind conditions varied from two to 16 knots.

“Drones can have up to 94% lower energy consumption per package than other vehicles,” Rodrigues says, adding that the overall amount of emissions reduction depends on the intensity of the electricity grid in an area. “Regions with cleaner electricity would benefit more from adopting drones to transport small packages.”

While the researchers determined multiple benefits in utilizing small drones, Rodrigues admits that there are still operational and regulatory challenges that need to be addressed before drone deliveries become a reality.

“However, a few drone delivery operations are already being implemented, with medical supplies and even groceries being safely delivered by drones. These operations are leading the way in expanding the use of drones in all last-mile delivery sectors.”

These successful operations may make the prospect of a drone delivery more enticing to consumers. Rodrigues believes that people are already receptive to the idea, stating that in a recent study, more than 60% of online customers says they’d be willing to pay extra to receive their packages using autonomous delivery robots.

There’s also the issue of larger packages, which cannot be delivered by small drones. Rodrigues suggests that electric cargo bicycles and other ground autonomous delivery robots could be an energy-efficient way to get these items to customers.

The new study appears in the journal Patterns.

The Department of Energy funded the work.

Source: Carnegie Mellon University

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Charging your electric vehicle at work instead of at home, and during the day instead of at night, could cut costs and help the grid, a new study shows.

In March, the researchers published a paper on a model they created for charging demand that can be applied to an array of populations and other factors.

For their new study in Nature Energy, the team applied their model to the whole of the western United States and examined the stress the region’s electric grid will come under by 2035 from growing EV ownership. In a little over a decade, rapid EV growth alone could increase peak electricity demand by up to 25%, assuming a continued dominance of residential, nighttime charging, the new study finds.

To limit the high costs of all that new capacity for generating and storing electricity, drivers should move to daytime charging at work or public charging stations, which would also reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the researchers say.

This finding has policy and investment implications for the region and its utilities, especially since California moved in late August to ban sales of gasoline-powered cars and light trucks starting in 2035.

“We encourage policymakers to consider utility rates that encourage day charging and incentivize investment in charging infrastructure to shift drivers from home to work for charging,” says the study’s co-senior author, Ram Rajagopal, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University.

Charge your EV and help the grid

In February, cumulative sales of EVs in California reached one million, accounting for about 6% of cars and light trucks. The state has targeted five million EVs on the road by 2030. When the penetration hits 30% to 40% of cars on the road, the grid will experience significant stress without major investments and changes in charging habits, says Rajagopal. Building that infrastructure requires significant lead time and cannot be done overnight.

“We considered the entire Western US region, because California depends heavily on electricity imports from the other Western states. EV charging plus all other electricity uses have consequences for the whole Western region given the interconnected nature of our electric grid,” says Siobhan Powell, a PhD in mechanical engineering and lead author of both the March study and the new one.

“We were able to show that with less home charging and more daytime charging, the Western US would need less generating capacity and storage, and it would not waste as much solar and wind power,” she says.

“And it’s not just California and Western states. All states may need to rethink electricity pricing structures as their EV charging needs increase and their grid changes,” adds Powell, who recently took a postdoctoral research position at ETH Zurich.

Once 50% of cars on the road are powered by electricity in the Western US—of which about half the population lives in California—more than 5.4 gigawatts of energy storage would be needed if charging habits follow their current course. That’s the capacity equivalent of five large nuclear power reactors. A big shift to charging at work instead of home would reduce the storage needed for EVs to 4.2 gigawatts.

Current time-of-use rates encourage consumers to switch electricity use to nighttime whenever possible, like running the dishwasher and charging EVs. This rate structure reflects the time before significant solar and wind power supplies when demand threatened to exceed supply during the day, especially late afternoons in the summer.

Today, California has excess electricity during late mornings and early afternoons, thanks mainly to its solar capacity. If most EVs were to charge during these times, then the cheap power would be used instead of wasted.

Alternatively, if most EVs continue to charge at night, then the state will need to build more generators—likely powered by natural gas—or expensive energy storage on a large scale. Electricity going first to a huge battery and then to an EV battery loses power from the extra stop.

Decarbonizing the transportation sector

At the local level, if a third of homes in a neighborhood have EVs and most of the owners continue to set charging to start at 11PM or whenever electricity rates drop, the local grid could become unstable.

“The findings from this paper have two profound implications: the first is that the price signals are not aligned with what would be best for the grid—and for ratepayers. The second is that it calls for considering investments in a charging infrastructure for where people work,” says Ines Azevedo, associate professor of energy science and engineering in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and a co-senior author of the new paper.

“We need to move quickly toward decarbonizing the transportation sector, which accounts for the bulk of emissions in California,” Azevedo says. “This work provides insight on how to get there. Let’s ensure that we pursue policies and investment strategies that allow us to do so in a way that is sustainable.”

Another issue with electricity pricing design is charging commercial and industrial customers big fees based on their peak electricity use. This can disincentivize employers from installing chargers, especially once half or more of their employees have EVs.

The research team compared several scenarios of charging infrastructure availability, along with several different residential time-of-use rates and commercial demand charges. Some rate changes made the situation at the grid level worse, while others improved it. Nevertheless, a scenario of having charging infrastructure that encourages more daytime charging and less home charging provided the biggest benefits, the researchers found.

Rajagopal and Azevedo are also co-directors of the Bits & Watts Initiative at Stanford’s Precourt Institute for Energy. Gustavo Cezar, PhD student and a staff engineer at Stanford’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory; and Liang Min, managing director of the Bits & Watts Initiative are coauthors of the new study.

The California Energy Commission, the National Science Foundation, and the Bits & Watts Initiative, with support from Volkswagen, funded the work.

Source: Stanford University

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Researchers have created a tool for measuring how much discomfort apps cause users by collecting personal data.

You would think that feeling chronically uneasy about products would spur a movement away from them. However, this is not the case for apps use. Even though surveys show that users to feel emotional stress by the fact that apps collect personal data, we continue using them.

“It seems that people accept this uneasy feeling almost as a part of the user experience. Somehow, we have been trained to live with being uncomfortable. But you may ask how it can be defensible to treat people and their emotional states so terribly,” says Irina Shklovski, professor in the computer science department at the University of Copenhagen.

Shklovski presented a paper on the findings at the Human Factors in Computing Science conference.

“I think most of us have tried feeling uneasy when downloading apps, but most often you can’t really put your finger on what the problem might be. So, we decided to create a way of measuring the degree of discomfort,” Shklovski says.

The researchers broke down the problem into three parts. To be creepy, an app needs to:

• violate the boundaries of the user;
• do so unexpectedly; and
• possess ambiguity of threat.

High scores in all three categories would amount to one very creepy app.

“Notably, we are talking about emotional response here. Even in a situation where objectively everything is fine, for instance if a technical solution guarding against misuse of personal data is in place, the user may still feel discomfort,” Shklovski emphasizes.

Having a score for creepiness means the researchers can now examine how various modifications can change user experience.

In the study, they divided 751 participants into cohorts that rated their experience under different “regimes.” All regimes would feature a fictitious app called “Remember Music.” Just like several real-world apps, Remember Music can recognize a tune or song that you might hear randomly, for example as you walk down the street.

“Just like in the real world, the participants would have to agree to a license agreement, and again just like in the real world they would click accept without thinking twice,” says Shklovski.

In one regime, the app would collect your location. In another regime, it would soon start to make suggestions on more music from the identified artists. In yet another regime, the app would post on Facebook what you are listening to. Further, some participants were granted control of what the app was doing: they could approve or deny having their music habits displayed on Facebook.

“We had expected the group with control to feel more comfortable, but surprisingly they didn’t,” Shklovski says.

“Lawyers and organizations working to improve data privacy are often focused on improving user control. While this may be desirable for other reasons, sadly our research show that the emotional stress to users will not be relieved.”

As part of the experiment, participants rated themselves on digital literacy.

“We normally assume people who have a high degree of digital literacy to be more critical towards the apps, but again surprisingly, the opposite is true. The more you see yourself as digitally literate, the higher the likeliness of you continuing using an app which is invasive,” says Shklovski.

And again, this discovery delivers challenges industry dogma:

“Industry and public bodies will argue that this is a question of personal data hygiene. In other words, that as users become more digitally aware they will favor less intrusive apps over the more intrusive. Based on the data from our study, we can say that trying to shift responsibility to the user in this way will not work. That horse has bolted. If we want things to get better, we need developers and policy makers to change the scene,” Shklovski concludes.

Additional coauthors of the study are from Michigan State University, Indiana University Bloomington, and the University of Utah.

Source: University of Copenhagen

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Researchers have developed a method to make silk-based materials that don’t stick to water, or almost anything else that contains water.

The modified silk, which can be molded into forms like plastic or coated onto surfaces as a film, has nonstick properties that surpass those of nonstick surfaces typically used on cookware. It could have applications that extend into a wide range of consumer and medical products.

Silk is a natural fiber spun by moths and has been used for thousands of years to make durable and fine fabrics—and surgical sutures to close wounds.

More recently, scientists have learned to break down the fibers to their basic protein element—silk fibroin—and reconstitute it into gels, films, sponges, and other forms to create all kinds of things like implantable orthopedic screws and textile inks that change color in response to body chemistry.

“What makes silk such a unique material is that not only can it take on a wide range of forms and shapes, but one can easily change its properties by chemically modifying the silk fibroin,” says Krishna Kumar, a professor of chemistry at Tufts University.

“If we want to make orthopedic screws that are absorbed by the body at different rates using silk fibroin, we modify the chemistry,” he says. “If we want to create a blood sensor that detects oxygen, or glucose, or other blood components, we modify the chemistry. In this study, we modified silk fibroin to repel water, and we can do it in a way that can ‘tune’ the material to be more or less water repellant.”

The study is published in the journal ChemBioChem.

Water beads

To turn silk into a water repellant material the researchers covered the surface of the silk fibroin with short chemical chains containing carbon and fluorine, called perfluorocarbons. These chains are very stable and don’t react with other chemicals, nor do they interact with proteins and other biological chemicals in the body.

While the natural surface of the silk protein acts like a magnet to water, with negatively and positively charged branches on the silk attracting water, a silk protein covered with perfluorocarbons leaves little for the water to grab onto.

Perfluorocarbons even resist attraction caused by other forces that typically bring molecules together. Changing the number and length of perfluorocarbon chains on the silk protein can adjust how “unsticky” it behaves. Luke Davis, an assistant professor of chemistry, established the level of fluorine required on the surface of silk to exhibit nonstick behavior.

The chemical synthesis is done under mild conditions, so unlike the production of other nonstick substances, the manufacturing process could be safer, both for workers and the environment. Safer manufacturing and a renewable biological source of material checks two boxes for sustainability.

The researchers measured the nonstick property by observing how water beads up on the surface of the material—like how water rolls off a waxed car. In fact, on nonstick silk molded into bars using the highest level of perfluorocarbons, the water rolled up into drops that are rounded even tighter than on Teflon.

It’s not just water that rolls off the nonstick silk, but any substance that has water as a major component, which could include various foods, blood, cells, and tissues. Although not tested in this study, perfluorinated materials are known to repel oils as well.

“Modifying medical devices to prevent detrimental interactions with water and other biologics has the potential to preserve strength and integrity for as long as they are needed,” explains coauthor Julia Fountain, a graduate student in Kumar’s lab. “Silk is already relatively inert to the immune system, so tuning its ability to repel cells or other substances could make it even more useful.”

More than medical uses

The advantages of highly nonstick surfaces go well beyond medical applications. While there is concern regarding chemicals absorbed in the body from commercially available nonstick coatings, silk-based nonstick surfaces may offer an alternative option, which can be explored for its relative safety.

One could also imagine automotive windshields where rainwater just rolls off without using wipers, coatings on metals that help prevent rust, or on fabrics to make them easier to clean.

“The success we had with modifying silk to repel water extends our successes with chemically modifying silk for other functionalities—such as the ability to change color, conduct electrical charge, or persist or degrade in a biological environment,” says David Kaplan, professor of engineering.

“As a protein, silk lends itself well to modular chemistry—the ability to ‘plug in’ different functional components on a natural scaffold.”

Source: Tufts University

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Climate change and the lead exposure crisis in Flint, Michigan have prompted investment in water resources, an expert says.

“We’re talking about an entire city being poisoned by the water due to the negligence of its government.”

Jeremy Orr, adjunct professor of law in the Michigan State University College of Law with expertise in water sustainability and issues of access and affordability, explains how these events have spurred government and communities to invest in efforts to sustain water resources and make them accessible to everyone:

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Asexual relationships need the same ingredients as any other relationship, a study finds.

Many asexual individuals—those with little to no sexual attraction—are in long-term satisfying romantic relationships, but there has been little study on how and why they last and thrive.

“Although asexuals don’t have the desire for sexual relationships, they nevertheless form romantic relationships and those connections look at least somewhat similar to non-asexuals’ romantic relationships,” says study coauthor William Chopik, associate professor in Michigan State University’s psychology department.

The study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, is among the largest studies of asexual individuals’ relationships ever conducted and the only one to examine what predicts commitment and longevity in their relationships. The study looked at a sample of 485 people who self-identified as on the asexual spectrum and are currently in a romantic relationship. This is one of the only published studies that allowed people to self-identify with any asexual spectrum label, in addition to allowing them to use any other sexual or romantic labels that fit.

“I sincerely hope that this study will more widely show the diversity of the asexual community, shed light on their experiences, and show that being on the asexual spectrum does not preclude one from successful romantic relationships or love,” says coauthor and research associate Alexandra Brozowski.

The long-standing theory about what predicts who breaks up and who stays in relationships, called the Investment Model, says that people stay in relationships if they are happy and satisfied, if they have invested time and energy into the relationship, and if they don’t have any other options. Many theories say that sex is a central part of romantic relationships, which doesn’t leave room for asexual relationships.

“We found that the same ingredients predict success in these relationships, so they’re not weird, bizarre, worse than, or much different at all from non-asexual people’s relationships.” Chopik says. “The hope is that this destigmatizes asexual people’s relationships as just as satisfied and common as non-asexual people’s relationships.”

Source: Michigan State University

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The impactor that formed the Vredefort crater, Earth’s largest, about two billion years ago, was probably much bigger than previously believed—and would have had devastating consequences, a new study shows.

Scientists have widely accepted, based on previous research, that an object about 15 kilometers (approximately 9.3 miles) in diameter that was traveling at a velocity of 15 kilometers per second formed the impact structure, in an area near present-day Johannesburg, South Africa.

This research, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, provides a more accurate understanding of the large impact and will allow researchers to better simulate impact events on Earth and other planets, both in the past and the future.

“Understanding the largest impact structure that we have on Earth is critical,” says Natalie Allen, first author of the paper, based on research she conducted as an undergraduate student with Miki Nakajima, an assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester, who is now a PhD student at Johns Hopkins University.

“Having access to the information provided by a structure like the Vredefort crater is a great opportunity to test our model and our understanding of the geologic evidence so we can better understand impacts on Earth and beyond.”

Bigger than believed

Over the course of two billion years, the Vredefort crater has eroded. This makes it difficult for scientists to directly estimate the size of the crater at the time of the original impact, and therefore the size and velocity of the impactor that formed the crater.

An object that is 15 kilometers in size and traveling at a velocity of 15 kilometers per second would produce a crater about 172 kilometers (about 106 miles) in diameter.

However, this is much smaller than current estimates for the Vredefort crater. These current estimates are based on new geological evidence and measurements estimating that the structure’s original diameter would have been between 250 and 280 kilometers (approximately 155 and 174 miles) during the time of the impact.

Allen, Nakajima, and their colleagues conducted simulations to match the updated size of the crater. Their results showed that an impactor would have to be much larger—about 20 to 25 kilometers—and traveling at a velocity of 15 to 20 kilometers per second to explain a crater 250 kilometers in size.

This means the impactor that formed the Vredefort crater would have been larger than the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, forming the Chicxulub crater. That impact had damaging effects globally, including greenhouse heating, widespread forest fires, acid rain, and destruction of the ozone layer, in addition to causing the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event that killed the dinosaurs.

If the Vredefort crater was even larger and the impact more energetic than that which formed the Chicxulub crater, the Vredefort impact may have caused even more catastrophic global consequences.

“Unlike the Chicxulub impact, the Vredefort impact did not leave a record of mass extinction or forest fires given that there were only single-cell lifeforms and no trees existed two billion years ago,” Nakajima says. “However, the impact would have affected the global climate potentially more extensively than the Chicxulub impact did.”

Dust and aerosols from the Vredefort impact would have spread across the planet and blocked sunlight, cooling the Earth’s surface, she says.

“This could have had a devastating effect on photosynthetic organisms. After the dust and aerosols settled—which could have taken anywhere from hours to a decade—greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide that were emitted from the impact would have raised the global temperature potentially by several degrees for a long period of time.”

Vredefort crater spew

The simulations also allowed the researchers to study the material ejected by the impact and the distance the material traveled from the crater. They can use this information to determine the geographic locations of land masses billions of years ago.

For instance, previous research determined material from the impactor was ejected to present-day Karelia, Russia. Using their model, Allen, Nakajima, and their colleagues found that, two billion years ago, the distance of the land mass containing Karelia would have been only 2,000 to 2,500 kilometers from the crater in South Africa—much closer than the two areas are today.

“It is incredibly difficult to constrain the location of landmasses long ago,” Allen says. “The current best simulations have mapped back about a billion years, and uncertainties grow larger the further back you go. Clarifying evidence such as this ejecta layer mapping may allow researchers to test their models and help complete the view into the past.”

Source: University of Rochester

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You’re unlikely to get the flu from touching a surface, explains microbiologist Emanuel Goldman.

In the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, we thought the coronavirus was everywhere—stuck to our cellphone screens, smeared on our mail, dangling from doorknobs, even clinging to our cereal boxes. But it wasn’t.

Despite public health guidance suggesting surfaces be disinfected to stop the spread of COVID-19, the virus wasn’t significantly transmitted through inanimate surfaces and objects, what microbiologists call “fomites.” As with all respiratory viruses—from the flu to the common cold—transmission was and remains almost exclusively airborne.

Goldman, a professor of microbiology at the Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, was among the first scientists to challenge conventional wisdom by warning that hygiene theater—overzealous disinfection of surfaces—had “become counterproductive” for public health. In April 2021, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) agreed.

Goldman is once again sounding the virus alarm. His recent work delves deeper into laboratory testing failures and advocates for a science-based path out of the pandemic. He will present his findings at a respiratory disease conference in December in New York.

Here, he answers questions about fomites and why we still need to wash our hands:

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Changing weather could increase suitable habitats for the brown marmorated stink bug in the United States by 70%, a new study shows.

The study, published in Pest Management Science, draws on data from a three-year stink bug monitoring effort in 17 states as well as several potential climate scenarios. However, whether the insects will thrive in new places depends on the conditions of each area and potential mitigation measures.

“Every system will change with climate change, so the fact that you can grow garbanzo beans, lentils, or wheat without these pests now, doesn’t mean that you will not have them in a few years,” says lead author Javier Gutierrez Illan, a research assistant professor in the entomology department at Washington State University. “There are mitigating things that we can do, but it is wise to prepare for change.”

The brown marmorated stink bug is known to feast on nearly 170 different plants including crops and ornamental plants.

The study found that overall, there is likely to be a northward shift in stink bug-friendly conditions. Regions that may be particularly affected include the Mid-Atlantic, areas surrounding the Great Lakes, and the valleys of the West Coast, such as the Sacramento Valley in California and the Treasure Valley in Idaho.

The insect is a generalist herbivore—it is known to feast on nearly 170 different plants including crops and ornamental plants. Originating in Asia, this type of stink bug first appeared in the US about 20 years ago and has since spread coast to coast. It’s been detected in 46 states and considered a pest in 15 of them.

Homeowners may recognize brown marmorated stink bugs because they like to overwinter indoors. In fact, the study found that proximity to populated areas appeared to help the insects get established in new places, but once there, they don’t need to be near people to proliferate. Other factors like availability of water mattered more for their abundance.

People are likely inadvertently transporting the bugs in vehicles or farm equipment to areas that would otherwise be hard for them to reach by flying alone, says Gutierrez Illan.

Stink bugs dislike cold winters, but the rising temperatures brought by climate change are not necessarily a good thing if the land becomes too dry. They need water, so the researchers say that changing patterns of precipitation will likely influence where the stink bugs will thrive.

In some states, officials and researchers are using a parasitoid insect, called the samurai wasp, to control stink bugs. The wasps lay their own eggs inside stink bug eggs. This not only destroys the affected eggs, but when the wasp larvae hatch, they eat other developing stink bugs. Measures like these might help prevent or minimize stink bug spread into new areas, Gutierrez Illan says.

Gutierrez Illan advises growers to familiarize themselves with the brown marmorated stink bug through sites like stopbsmb.org, even if they have never had the pest in their fields.

“Most growers learn from their parents or from the previous generation, but the information that they had is probably no longer as useful because the climate is changing, so they need these types of tools,” Gutierrez Illan says.

Source: Washington State University

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School closings during the pandemic’s first year brought an immediate and potentially devastating problem: How would millions of children get the school meals many of them depended on?

The US Congress responded by authorizing the Department of Agriculture to roll out two major programs. It launched the “grab and go school meals,” which helped schools provide prepared meals for off-site consumption and distributed funding for the state-operated Pandemic EBT (P-EBT) program, which gave parents debit cards so they could purchase groceries from food retailers.

Those programs reached more than 30 million children and either directly provided meals or, through the P-EBT program, cash for nearly 1.5 billion meals a month in 2020, according to a new study.

As reported in JAMA Network Open, the researchers found:

• The P-EBT program reached 26.9 million of the 30 million children whose families qualified because of low income at a cost of $6.46 per meal, providing access to 1.1 billion meals a month.
• The grab-and-go program reached 8 million children not eligible for P-EBT at a cost of $8.07 per meal, providing 429 million meals a month.

“When schools had to close across the country during the spring of 2020 due to COVID-19, kids all of a sudden lost access to school lunches and breakfasts. From a public health and nutrition security perspective, this was an urgent concern, given that these meals are critical for students at risk of food insecurity and are also an essential source of nutrition for millions of children,” says lead author Erica Kenney, assistant professor of public health nutrition at Harvard University.

When these programs began, no one really knew how effectively they would reach kids who needed them and at what cost per meal. So the researchers set out to try to answer how these two major policy responses to the loss of regular school meal access worked.

“This study suggests that, in many states, P-EBT can reach the most eligible children at relatively low cost to the government, while a meal distribution model such as grab-and-go school meals can also ensure families directly receive meals and reach children beyond those who are P-EBT-eligible,” says senior author James Krieger, a clinical professor of health systems and population health in the University of Washington School of Public Health.

Now, Krieger says, extensions of these two key projects are being debated in Congress. On July 27, the House Education and Labor Committee sent its 2022 Child Nutrition Reauthorization bill (H.R. 8450), the “Healthy Meals, Healthy Kids Act“ to the House floor.

Here, Krieger answers some questions about the new act and how to best keep kids fed:

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A pediatrician has answers for parents about enterovirus D68 as a possible precursor to a neurologic condition that involves limb weakness.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a health advisory about a rise in children hospitalized with a severe respiratory illness who also test positive for the rhinovirus or enterovirus EV-D68.

That particular enterovirus has been associated with acute flaccid myelitis (AFM)—a rare polio-like illness that affects the nerve cells in the gray matter of the spinal cord and could lead to permanent paralysis.

Here, Simon Li, an associate professor of pediatrics at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, discusses what parents should know about children who test positive for different viruses that cause severe respiratory illnesses:

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