Futurity

Experts: Better COVID-19 testing is still vital to ‘reopening’

Fri, 07 Aug 2020 16:15:24 GMT

Whether America is ready to “reopen” depends on the nation’s COVID-19 testing capabilities, regional spread of the virus, and political leadership, two experts argue.

“We keep looking for a silver bullet. But when you have four tools and put them all together, the combination is the silver bullet.”

Speaking at a virtual event, Emily Oster, a professor of economics, and incoming dean of the Brown School of Public Health Ashish K. Jha say the ability to return to offices, schools, and restaurants rests largely on the availability and efficiency of COVID-19 tests, the federal government’s cooperation with public health experts’ advice, and the collective ability of Americans to embrace imperfect but effective prevention and treatment methods, rather than continuing to search for a single ideal solution.

“We keep looking for a silver bullet,” says Jha, a physician and global health scholar who officially begins his tenure at Brown next month. “But when you have four tools and put them all together, the combination is the silver bullet.”

Some of those flawed yet valuable tools, Jha and Oster say, include regular, widespread, and rapid testing; thorough contact tracing; proper mask wearing; and continuous work toward developing a COVID-19 vaccine.

“If most people wear masks, that’s better than nobody wearing them,” says Oster, creator of the facts-based COVID-Explained website. “If there’s a 15% or 20% false negative rate in testing, that’s okay if you’re testing millions of people every day. I think we haven’t made that mental shift, but we’re going to have to if we want to have a better surveillance testing infrastructure.”

Oster argues that reopening in the US does not have to be an all-or-nothing proposition: Some communities may be able to return to work and school sooner if the number of cases is low and their schools have the resources necessary to implement frequent testing. Others may need to stay closed for many more months to reduce the number of positive cases.

But both Oster and Jha agreed that reopening on a grand scale can’t happen until the US has the resources to test millions of Americans every day and return those test results in 48 hours or less, a move that needs support from federal leadership to happen.

“We’re not going to be able to figure out how to get more testing out of the infrastructure we have,” Jha says.

“We need totally new modalities. The good news is, they exist. I believe we can get to a point where we can have ubiquitous testing. Whether [it] shows up in three months or 12 months is largely going to be driven by policy.”

Source: Brown University

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4 ways schools can keep teachers from quitting

Fri, 07 Aug 2020 14:09:36 GMT

New research into why teachers leave the profession could help schools avoid an exodus of instructors during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Teacher turnover causes learning setbacks, with a bigger impact on high-poverty schools, researchers say. Replacing teachers is expensive, and vacancies are hard to fill.

The study in the Journal of Vocational Behavior looked at data from 3,201 teachers in grades K-12, revealing the factors most likely to influence a teachers’ decision to leave. While the study was completed before COVID-19, the motivations may intensify as teachers go back to school amid the pandemic, says author Brian Swider, a professor at the University of Florida.

Here, he explains four factors that may nudge a teacher to quit and what school systems can do about each of them:

1. Duties other than teaching

“One of the strongest, most consistent predictors of teachers leaving the occupation is how many non-core job duties they had,” says Swider, a management researcher in the Warrington School of Business.

Teachers are saddled with tasks from serving on committees to fulfilling administrative duties, taking time and energy away from helping kids learn.

“These non-core roles will almost assuredly increase during COVID. K-12 teachers will be expected to monitor children’s health, be vigilant on keeping classrooms clean, adhering to safety guidelines, and developing or maintaining online platforms and lessons,” Swider says.

What school boards can do: Especially now, try to minimize non-core duties, recognizing that some new COVID tasks will be inevitable. “The more that gets added onto their plate, the more likely they will be to leave,” Swider says.

2. Investment in teaching

While older teachers may consider leaving because of their higher COVID risk, teachers with less training and expertise are more likely to leave during normal circumstances. Add a pandemic, and the outlook gets worse.

“You may have a whole generation of teachers who recently joined the profession leaving for good. That effect will be felt for generations,” Swider says.

What school boards can do: Offer opportunities for teachers to boost their skills through certifications, professional development, or other resources can help keep instructors in place.

“We found teachers were much more hesitant to leave the profession if, by doing so, they would sacrifice all that industry-specific knowledge. With re-opening during COVID, schools should be providing as many resources as possible to develop and support their teachers and meet their increasing job demands,” Swider says.

3. Salary

Swider and colleagues showed that a reliable way to retain teachers is better pay. “Paying teachers more would likely work, but that does not seem likely, unfortunately.”

What school boards can do: Understand that using funding as a threat could backfire badly. “Threatening to take away resources from schools and K-12 teachers is the exact opposite of what I would recommend for the long-term health of the profession,” he says.

4. Moonlighting

A side hustle is a strong predictor of whether teachers will leave the field, according to the study.

Moonlighting expanded teachers’ professional networks and skill sets, possibly revealing other career options. Since many teachers haven’t had face-to-face classes since March, “my guess is that more teachers have been moonlighting during COVID than normal,” Swider says.

What school boards can do: Don’t assume teachers have no other options—and see numbers 1, 2, and 3.

“We controlled for job satisfaction and burnout in all analyses, so these findings go beyond how much they like the job and how exhausted they feel,” Swider says.

“My No. 1 recommendation to school boards is to genuinely listen to what the teachers say they need and do whatever you can to provide them the resources necessary to meet the unpredicted demands they will face in the fall.

“Schools cannot assume that if they act in a ‘business as usual’ fashion, then everything will be fine. Taking that approach will almost assuredly result in teachers leaving the profession en masse.”

Additional coauthors are from Virginia Tech.

Source: University of Florida

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EPA ‘double standard’ puts kids at risk of lead poisoning

Fri, 07 Aug 2020 13:45:44 GMT

New rules from the Environmental Protection Agency stand to put more than 35,000 kids in the United States at increased risk of lead poisoning, say researchers.

The EPA is moving to revise protective standards for dust lead levels on floors and windowsills in buildings constructed before 1978.

“Lead exposure presents a major risk to hundreds of thousands of children across the nation, and it’s imperative that federal EPA regulations offer a clear and consistent standard to reduce that risk,” says Joseph Braun, an associate professor of epidemiology at Brown University. “Currently, these standards are counterproductive to public health.”

EPA standards and the discrepancy

In 2019, the EPA tightened the standard for the amount of residential dust lead considered hazardous to children from 40 micrograms per square foot (µg/ft2) to 10 on floors, and from 250 µg/ft2 to 100 on windowsills. The change came after a federal appeals court ordered the agency to reduce dust lead hazard standards after a 2016 lawsuit filed by environmental groups.

Traditionally, the residential standard had been the same as the clearance standard for dust lead levels after completing lead abatement work—yet despite the more aggressive standard imposed after the court’s order, the EPA left the post-abatement clearance standard where it has stood since 2001. Both standards fall under the Toxic Substances Control Act, which authorizes EPA to impose restrictions related to chemical substances.

Conceivably, a risk assessment could identify a dust lead hazard above 10 µg/ft2 but below 40 µg/ft2 on the floor of a home where there is a child with lead poisoning. Braun, an expert on children’s environmental health, says an abatement contractor could theoretically do nothing, but given the discrepancy in standards, the unit would pass the clearance.

“When I read this, initially, I thought this is absolutely crazy,” Braun says.

So Braun and his coauthors wanted to find out how many extra cases of lead poisoning would result from the post-abatement clearance standard being higher than the dust lead hazard standard.

Their study, published in Pediatric Research, finds that children in homes with floor dust lead loadings between 10 and 40 µg/ft2 had nearly four times the risk of lead poisoning compared to children from homes with floor dust lead loadings at or under 10 µg/ft2.

They estimate that 36,700 cases of childhood lead poisoning—nearly 7% of US children between the ages of one and five with lead poisoning—were attributable to this regulatory discrepancy.

Hand to mouth

Dust from lead-based paint is a common cause of lead poisoning in young children, Braun says, and so the implications of the double standard are significant. Their greater hand-to-mouth behavior makes them vulnerable to lead exposure.

“I have a two-and-a half year old who puts everything in his mouth,” Braun says. “That’s how they explore their environment at this age.”

Lead poisoning can cause learning disabilities and behavioral problems that last a lifetime and affect kids from all social and economic levels, though those living at or below the poverty line in older housing are at greatest risk. Earlier work by Braun and his colleagues found higher blood lead levels and risk of lead poisoning among Black children compared to white.

For the new study, the researchers looked at 250 children from Cincinnati living in homes built before 1978—the year lead-based paints were banned for residential use—whose mothers participated in a longitudinal pregnancy and birth cohort study between 2003 and 2006.

Researchers took samples of floor and interior windowsill dust lead loadings with wipes over a one-square-foot area when participants joined the study, when their children turned one year old and again when they turned two. Blood samples were also collected from the children at these same times.

The study adds to a vast body of scientific research guiding housing and environmental policymakers. But Braun points out that the bulk of these studies were completed 20 and 30 years ago when lead exposure was much higher.

“The fact that we’re still seeing these relationships at contemporary levels of lead exposure indicates that this is still a significant problem, so that’s the real contribution here,” Braun says.

Reduce lead exposure

The EPA has issued a proposed rule to align the post-abatement clearance standard with the tighter standard revised in 2019. Its two-month public comment period ends on August 24. An EPA spokesperson says Braun’s study will be considered when developing a final rule along with all other feedback received.

Braun says the proposed change still won’t go far enough to protect children. In 2012, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledged there is no known safe blood lead level.

The study found children were at 45% higher risk of having blood poisoning at the newly revised floor dust lead hazards of 10 µg/ft2 compared to a more stringent standard of 5 µg/ft2.

“Reducing sources of lead exposure in children is imperative to optimize children’s health,” Braun says.

Braun’s coauthors included researchers from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, the National Center for Healthy Housing, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Macquarie University, and Simon Fraser University.

The Cincinnati-based longitudinal study had support from the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences and the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Source: Janine Weisman for Brown University

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New Guinea is #1 for island plant diversity

Fri, 07 Aug 2020 13:44:17 GMT

In terms of plants, New Guinea is the most diverse island in the world, according to a new study.

The study presents a list of almost 14,000 plant species, compiled from online catalogues and verified by plant experts. The results are invaluable for research and conservation, and also underline the importance of expert knowledge in the digital era.

Almost 20 times the size of Switzerland, New Guinea is the world’s largest tropical island. It features a complex mosaic of ecosystems—from lowland jungles to high-elevation grasslands with peaks higher than Mont Blanc.

View of mature forest and mountains taken from the Lae-Madang Highway at Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. (Credit: Zacky Ezedin)

Botanists have long known that this mega-diverse wilderness area is home to a large number of plant species. Efforts to identify and name thousands of plants collected in New Guinea and archived in herbaria all over the world have been ongoing since the 17th century.

However, since researchers have worked mostly independently from each other, a great uncertainty remains as to the exact number of plant species, with conflicting estimates ranging from 9,000 to 25,000.

“Compared to other areas like Amazonia, for which plant checklists were recently published, New Guinea remained the ‘Last Unknown’,” says Rodrigo Cámara-Leret, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Jordi Bascompte in the University of Zurich’s evolutionary biology and environmental studies department.

Under his lead, 99 scientists from 56 institutions and 19 countries have now built the first expert-verified checklist for the 13,634 vascular plant species of New Guinea and its surrounding islands.

The researchers began their large-scale collaborative effort by compiling a list of plant names from online catalogues, institutional repositories and datasets curated by taxonomists.

“Such high endemic species richness is unmatched in tropical Asia…”

After standardizing the scientific names, 99 experts on New Guinea flora checked almost 25,000 species names derived from over 700,000 individual specimens. For this, they reviewed the list of original names in their plant family of expertise and assessed whether these names were correctly assigned in the online platforms. Finally, an independent comparison was performed between the list accepted by experts and a list contained in “Plants of the World Online” for New Guinea.

The resulting checklist contains 13,634 plants, demonstrating that New Guinea has the world’s richest island flora—with about 20% more species than Madagascar or Borneo. By far the most species-rich family are the orchids and almost a third of the species are trees. One particularly remarkable finding is that 68% of the plants are endemic—they are only found in the region.

“Such high endemic species richness is unmatched in tropical Asia,” says Cámara-Leret.

“It means that Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, the two states into which the island is divided, have a unique responsibility for the survival of this irreplaceable biodiversity.”

“We estimate that in the next 50 years, 3,000 to 4,000 species will be added.”

The new authoritative checklist will improve the accuracy of biogeographic and ecological studies, help focus DNA sequencing on species-rich groups with high endemism, and facilitate the discovery of more species by taxonomists. Thousands of specimens remain unidentified in the collections and many unknown species have yet to be discovered in the wild.

“We estimate that in the next 50 years, 3,000 to 4,000 species will be added,” says coauthor Michael Kessler, scientific curator of the botanical garden of the University of Zurich. These efforts will be important for conservation planning and modeling the impact of changes in climate and land use.

The collaboration also underscores that expert knowledge is still essential in the digital era—reliance on online platforms alone would have erroneously inflated species counts by one fifth. However, many of the New Guinea plants experts are already or soon to be retired, and almost half of them are non-residents. The researchers therefore advocate building a critical mass of resident plant taxonomists.

Policy-wise, the study shows that long-term institutional and financial support is critical if significant advances are to be made over the next decades.

“Our work demonstrates that international collaborative efforts using verified digital data can rapidly synthesize biodiversity information. This can serve as a model for accelerating research in other hyper-diverse areas such as Borneo,” says Cámara-Leret. “Such initiatives pave the way for the grand challenge of conserving the richest island flora of the world.”

The research appears in Nature.

Source: University of Zurich

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Bugs, mice, and people may share one ‘brain ancestor’

Fri, 07 Aug 2020 11:53:56 GMT

Humans, mice, and flies share the same genetic mechanisms that regulate the formation and function of brain areas involved in attention and movement control, according to a new study.

The findings shed light on the deep evolutionary past connecting organisms with seemingly unrelated body plans.

They also may help scientists understand the subtle changes that can occur in genes and brain circuits that can lead to mental health disorders such as anxiety and autism spectrum disorders.

“The crucial question scientists are trying to answer is: Did the brains in the animal kingdom evolve from a common ancestor?”

Resemblances between the nervous systems of vertebrates and invertebrates have been known since the early 18th century, but only recently have scientists asked whether such similarities are due to corresponding genetic programs that already existed in a common ancestor of vertebrates and invertebrates that lived more than half a billion years ago.

“The crucial question scientists are trying to answer is: Did the brains in the animal kingdom evolve from a common ancestor?” says coauthor Nicholas Strausfeld, professor of neuroscience at the University of Arizona. “Or, did brains evolve independently in different lineages of animals?”

Microscopic image of a fruit fly brain showing several neurons specified during development of the deutocerebral-tritocerebral boundary, or DTB, revealed by Green Fluorescent Protein. The circuits arising from the DTB play crucial roles in the regulation of behavior. (Credit:Jessika Bridi/Hirth Lab/ King’s College London)

The study provides evidence of underlying gene regulatory networks governing the formation of two corresponding structures in the developing brains of fruit flies and vertebrates including mice and humans.

Uncovering previously unknown similarities in how their brains develop during embryogenesis, the study further supports the hypothesis of a basic brain architecture shared across the animal kingdom.

The evolution of the brain

The study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides strong evidence that the mechanisms that regulate genetic activity required for the formation of important behavior-related brain areas are the same for insects and mammals.

“The findings indicate that the evolution of their very different brains can be traced back to a single ancestral brain more than a half billion years ago.”

Most strikingly, the authors demonstrate that when these regulatory mechanisms are inhibited or impaired in insects and mammals, they experience very similar behavioral problems. This indicates that the same building blocks that control the activity of genes are essential to both the formation of brain circuits but also the behavior-related functions they perform. According to the researchers, this provides evidence that these mechanisms likely arose in a common ancestor.

“Our research indicates that the way the brain’s circuits are put in place is the same in humans, flies, and mice,” says senior study author Frank Hirth from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Neuroscience at King’s College London. “The findings indicate that the evolution of their very different brains can be traced back to a single ancestral brain more than a half billion years ago.

Using neuroanatomical observations and developmental genetic experiments, the researchers traced nerve cell lineages in the developing embryos of fruit flies and mice to identify how adult brain structures, along with their functionalities, unfold.

The team focused on those areas of the brain known as the deutocerebral-tritocerebral boundary, or DTB, in flies and the midbrain-hindbrain boundary, or MHB, in vertebrates including humans.

“In both vertebrates and arthropods, this boundary belongs to the anterior part of the brain and separates it from the rest,” Strausfeld says. “The anterior part integrates sensory inputs, forms memories, and plans and controls complex actions. The part behind it is essential for controlling balance and autonomic functions like breathing.”

Ancient but stable over time

Using genomic data, the researchers identified the genes that play a key role in the formation of brain circuits of the DTB in flies and the MHB in mice and men, and ascertained that these circuits play crucial roles in the regulation of behavior. They then ascertained which regions of the genome control when and where these genes are expressed.

They found that those genomic regions are very similar in flies, mice, and humans, indicating that they share the same fundamental genetic mechanism by which these brain areas develop.

“For many years researchers have been trying to find the mechanistic basis underlying behavior. We have discovered a crucial part of the jigsaw puzzle…”

Manipulating the relevant genomic regions in flies resulted in impaired behavior. This corresponds to findings from research on people where mutations in these gene regulatory sequences or the regulated genes themselves have been associated with behavioral disorders, including anxiety and autism spectrum disorders.

The research builds on previous work led by Hirth showing that the early divisions of the fly’s brain into distinctive parts followed by an extended nerve cord correspond to the three front-to-back divisions of the developing mouse brain and its spinal cord. Both in flies and mice, the development of each morphologically corresponding part requires the same set of genes, called homeobox genes, suggesting homologous genetic programs for brain development in invertebrate and vertebrates.

Evidence from soft tissue preservation in fossils of ancient arthropods studied by Strausfeld suggests that overall brain morphologies present in arthropod lineages living today must indeed have originated before the early Cambrian era, more than 520 million years ago.

“This implies that basic neural arrangements can be ancient and yet highly stable over geological time,” he says. “You could say the jigsaw puzzle of how the brain evolved still lacks an image on the box, but the pieces currently being added suggest a very early origin of essential circuits that, over an immense span of time, have been maintained, albeit with modification, across the great diversity of brains we see today.”

“For many years researchers have been trying to find the mechanistic basis underlying behavior,” Hirth says. “We have discovered a crucial part of the jigsaw puzzle by identifying these basic gene regulatory mechanisms required for midbrain circuit formation and function. If we can understand these very small, very basic building blocks, how they form and function, this will help find answers to what happens when things go wrong at a genetic level to cause these disorders.”

Additional researchers from King’s College London, the University of Arizona, the University of Leuven, and Leibniz Institute DSMZ contributed to the research.

Funding for this study came from the Ministry of Education of Brazil, King’s College London, the Research Foundation Flanders, the US National Science Foundation, the UK Medical Research Council, the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, and the UK Motor Neuron Disease Association.

Source: University of Arizona

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Avalanches inspire tool to predict ‘black swan’ events

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 23:28:11 GMT

A new computational method could help predict unprecedented, extreme “black swan” events, researchers report.

A black swan event is a highly unlikely but massively consequential incident, such as the 2008 global recession and the loss of one-third of the world’s saiga antelope in a matter of days in 2015.

“Existing methods rely on what we have seen to predict what might happen in the future, and that’s why they tend to miss black swan events.”

“By analyzing long-term data from three ecosystems, we were able to show that fluctuations that happen in different biological species are statistically the same across different ecosystems,” says lead author Samuel Bray, a research assistant in the lab of senior author Bo Wang, assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford University.

“That suggests there are certain underlying universal processes that we can take advantage of in order to forecast this kind of extreme behavior,” Bray says.

The forecasting method the researchers have developed is based on natural systems and could find use in health care and environmental research. It also has potential applications in disciplines outside ecology that have their own black swan events, such as economics and politics.

“This work is exciting because it’s a chance to take the knowledge and the computational tools that we’re building in the lab and use those to better understand—even predict or forecast—what happens in the world surrounding us,” says Wang. “It connects us to the bigger world.”

Predicting unpredictable black swan events

Over years of studying microbial communities, Bray noticed several instances where one species would undergo an unanticipated population boom, overtaking its neighbors. Discussing these events with Wang, they wondered whether this phenomenon occurred outside the lab as well and, if so, whether it could be predicted.

In order to address this question, the researchers had to find other biological systems that experience black swan events. The researchers needed details, not only about the black swan events themselves but also the context in which they occurred. So, they specifically sought ecosystems that scientists have been closely monitoring for many years.

“These data have to capture long periods of time and that’s hard to collect,” says Bray. “It’s much more than a PhD-worth of information. But that’s the only way you can see the spectra of these fluctuations at large scales.”

Bray settled on three eclectic datasets: an eight-year study of plankton from the Baltic Sea with species levels measured twice weekly; net carbon measurements from a deciduous broadleaf forest at Harvard University, gathered every 30 minutes since 1991; and measurements of barnacles, algae, and mussels on the coast of New Zealand, taken monthly for over 20 years.

The researchers then analyzed these three datasets using theory about avalanches—physical fluctuations that, like black swan events, exhibit short-term, sudden, extreme behavior.

At its core, this theory attempts to explain the physics of systems like avalanches, earthquakes, fire embers, or even crumpling candy wrappers, which all respond to external forces with discrete events of various magnitudes or sizes—a phenomenon scientists call “crackling noise.”

Better forecasting

Built on the analysis, the researchers developed a method for predicting black swan events, one that is designed to be flexible across species and timespans, and able to work with data that are far less detailed and more complex than those used to develop it.

“Existing methods rely on what we have seen to predict what might happen in the future, and that’s why they tend to miss black swan events,” says Wang. “But Sam’s method is different in that it assumes we are only seeing part of the world. It extrapolates a little about what we’re missing, and it turns out that helps tremendously in terms of prediction.”

The researchers tested their method using the three ecosystem datasets on which it was built. Using only fragments of each dataset—specifically fragments which contained the smallest fluctuations in the variable of interest—they were able to accurately predict extreme events that occurred in those systems.

They would like to expand the application of their method to other systems in which black swan events are also present, such as in economics, epidemiology, politics, and physics.

At present, the researchers are hoping to collaborate with field scientists and ecologists to apply their method to real-world situations where they could make a positive difference in the lives of other people and the planet.

The research appears in PLOS Computational Biology.

Source: Stanford University

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Collision avoidance systems affect a driver’s gaze in 4 ways

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 23:19:16 GMT

Open road testing of three collision avoidance systems shows that drivers’ responses to an alert generated from these system fall into four categories, researchers report.

A collision avoidance system, or pre-crash alert generated by a vehicle, can often be found as an optional safety feature in today’s vehicles to help reduce possible accidents and save lives. However, these systems are not always tested in a real-world environment prior to the vehicle being owned and operated.

Researchers found that the systems elicited four different categories of behavior: active gaze, self-conscious gaze, attentive gaze, and ignored gaze.

Active gaze: Driver takes immediate action in response to an alert.
Self-conscious gaze: Driver is already aware of the situation that triggers the alert and doesn’t react.
Attentive gaze: Driver is aware of the alert but deems it’s not serious, so they ignore the alert.
Ignored gaze: Driver doesn’t respond because the alert is bothersome to them.

Similar studies used driving simulators and closed-course tracks for testing, but this is one of the first studies to use open road, or real world, conditions, says study author Jung Hyup Kim, an assistant professor in the College of Engineering of the University of Missouri.

Researchers filmed each study participant responding to alerts by the collision avoidance system, including using a pair of specialized eye glasses worn by the driver to capture eye movement while driving. (Credit: U. Missouri)

The new study tracked a group of college-age male drivers as they tested each system on 9.3 miles of open roads that reflect the typical driving experience for their age group—streets near the University of Missouri campus, other surrounding city streets, and highways.

“If you truly want to evaluate the effectiveness of this technology, you also have to understand how drivers will respond to alerts, because every auto company develops their own guidelines for generating an alert,” says Kim.

“Therefore, by better understanding a driver’s visual behavior in response to an alert, this information could help auto companies develop more user-friendly systems and lead to less of a chance that a driver ignores or turns off a collision avoidance system.”

Researchers filmed each participant responding to alerts by the collision avoidance system while driving. They used a combination of cameras—a pair of specialized eye glasses worn by the driver to capture eye movement, a 360-degree camera mounted on the vehicle’s roof, and a camera pointed at the driver from the passenger side door to capture arm and leg movements. A GPS camera mounted on the windshield also logged the vehicle’s speed and location.

Kim analyzed each video seven seconds before and after an alert occurred. He says a limitation of the study was the age group and demographics of the drivers, and future plans include incorporating more drivers of different ages and demographics.

“As time goes by, drivers get older, and their response times are likely to be slower and more delayed,” Kim says.

“Therefore, if we can collect data from maybe a thousand drivers and use a range of different ages and demographics, then that information might be beneficial for auto companies.”

The researchers presented their paper at the 2020 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, held virtually this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Missouri Employers Mutual funded the study. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the funding agencies.

Source: University of Missouri

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Cats prefer free meals over working for food

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 23:07:25 GMT

Unlike most animals, domestic cats prefer eating for free to working out a simple puzzle to get their food, researchers report.

Given a choice between free food and performing a task for food, most animals will perform a task. This is called contrafreeloading and has been known since the 1970s.

But domestic cats are different, according to the new study presented this week at a virtual meeting of the Animal Behavior Society.

“It wasn’t that the cats never used the food puzzle, they just used it less, ate less food from it, and typically would eat from the freely available food first.”

Researchers offered 18 house cats a choice between a food puzzle and a tray of free food. Cats ate more from the free tray and spent more time on the free food, they found.

“It wasn’t that the cats never used the food puzzle, they just used it less, ate less food from it, and typically would eat from the freely available food first,” says coauthor Mikel Delgado, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.

That makes cats an exception compared to rats, mice, gerbils, birds, dogs, and chimpanzees, and other animals both wild and domestic that have been tested over the years.

Although contrafreeloading has been known for almost 50 years, there is still no single theory to explain it.

“There are different theories about why animals might contrafreeload, including boredom in captive environments, stimulating natural foraging behaviors, and creating a sense of control over the environment and outcomes,” Delgado says.

It’s also not clear why cats don’t do it—perhaps because it does not simulate natural hunting behavior, she says.

Cats can and do use food puzzles when other food is not provided, though. Food puzzles can provide an important enrichment activity for domestic cats, according to previous research by Delgado and colleagues.

Source: UC Davis

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Placebos cut distress even when you know they shouldn’t

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 21:02:06 GMT

Placebos can reduce brain markers of emotional distress even when people know they are taking them, researchers report.

Scientists have long documented that people often feel better after taking a treatment without active ingredients simply because they believe it’s real—known as the placebo effect.

Now, evidence shows that even if people are aware that their treatment is not “real”— known as nondeceptive placebos—believing that it can heal can lead to changes in how the brain reacts to emotional information.

“Just think: What if someone took a side-effect free sugar pill twice a day after going through a short convincing video on the power of placebos and experienced reduced stress as a result?” says Darwin Guevarra, a postdoctoral fellow at Michigan State University and lead author of a new study in Nature Communications. “These results raise that possibility.”

Researchers tested how effective nondeceptive placebos are for reducing emotional brain activity.

“Placebos are all about ‘mind over matter,'” says coauthor Jason Moser, professor of psychology. “Nondeceptive placebos were born so that you could possibly use them in routine practice. So rather than prescribing a host of medications to help a patient, you could give them a placebo, tell them it can help them and chances are—if they believe it can, then it will.”

To test nondeceptive placebos, the researchers showed two separate groups of people a series of emotional images across two experiments. The nondeceptive placebo group members read about placebo effects and then researchers asked them to inhale a saline solution nasal spray.

The researchers told the participants the nasal spray contained no active ingredients but would help reduce their negative feelings if they believed it would. The comparison control group members also inhaled the same saline solution spray, but were told that the spray improved the clarity of the physiological readings the researchers were recording.

The first experiment found that the nondeceptive placebos reduced participants’ self-reported emotional distress. Importantly, the second study showed that nondeceptive placebos reduced electrical brain activity reflecting how much distress someone feels to emotional events, and the reduction in emotional brain activity occurred within just a couple of seconds.

“These findings provide initial support that nondeceptive placebos are not merely a product of response bias—telling the experimenter what they want to hear—but represent genuine psychobiological effects,” says coauthor Ethan Kross, a professor of psychology and management at the University of Michigan.

The researchers are already following up on their data with a real-life nondeceptive placebo trial for COVID-19 stress.

Additional coauthors are from Dartmouth College.

Source: Michigan State University

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AI plays ‘Mad Libs’ to learn grammar the way kids do

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 19:14:35 GMT

Advanced AI systems can figure out linguistic principles on their own, without first practicing on sentences that humans have labeled for them, according to new research.

“In a sense, it’s nothing short of miraculous…”

It’s much closer to how human children learn languages long before adults teach them grammar or syntax, the researchers report.

Even more surprising, however, they found that the AI model appears to infer “universal” grammatical relationships that apply to many different languages.

AI, Mad Libs, and learning language

Imagine you’re training a computer with a solid vocabulary and a basic knowledge about parts of speech. How would it understand this sentence: “The chef who ran to the store was out of food”?

Did the chef run out of food? Did the store? Did the chef run the store that ran out of food?

Most human English speakers will instantly come up with the right answer, but even advanced artificial intelligence systems can get confused. After all, part of the sentence literally says that “the store was out of food.”

Advanced new machine learning models have made enormous progress on these problems, mainly by training on huge datasets or “treebanks” of sentences that humans have hand-labeled to teach grammar, syntax, and other linguistic principles.

The problem is that treebanks are expensive and labor intensive, and computers still struggle with many ambiguities. The same collection of words can have widely different meanings, depending on the sentence structure and context.

“All we’re doing is having these very large neural networks run these Mad Libs tasks, but that’s sufficient to cause them to start learning grammatical structures.”

The new research has big implications for natural language processing, which is increasingly central to AI systems that answer questions, translate languages, help customers, and even review resumes. It could also facilitate systems that learn languages spoken by very small numbers of people.

The key to success? It appears that machines learn a lot about language just by playing billions of fill-in-the-blank games that are reminiscent of “Mad Libs.” In order to get better at predicting the missing words, the systems gradually create their own models about how words relate to each other.

“As these models get bigger and more flexible, it turns out that they actually self-organize to discover and learn the structure of human language,” says Christopher Manning, a professor of machine learning, of linguistics, and of computer science at Stanford University, as well as associate director of the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

“It’s similar to what a human child does,” he says.

BERT learns words

In the first study, the researchers began by using a state-of-the-art language processing model developed by Google that’s nicknamed BERT (short for “Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers”). BERT uses a Mad Libs approach to train itself, but researchers had assumed that the model was simply making associations between nearby words. A sentence that mentions “hoops” and “jump shot,” for example, would prompt the model to search for words tied to basketball.

However, the researchers found that the system was doing something more profound: It was learning sentence structure in order to identify nouns and verbs as well as subjects, objects and predicates. That in turn improved its ability to untangle the true meaning of sentences that might otherwise be confusing.

“If it knows that ‘she’ refers to Lady Gaga, for example, it will have more of an idea of what ‘she’ is likely doing.”

“If it can work out the subject or object of a blanked-out verb, that will help it to predict the verb better than simply knowing the words that appear nearby,” Manning says. “If it knows that ‘she’ refers to Lady Gaga, for example, it will have more of an idea of what ‘she’ is likely doing.”

That’s very useful. Take this sentence about promotional literature for mutual funds: “It goes on to plug a few diversified Fidelity funds by name.”

The system recognized that “plug” was a verb, even though that word is usually a noun, and that “funds” was a noun and the object of the verb—even though “funds” might look like a verb. Not only that, the system didn’t get distracted by the string of descriptive words—”a few diversified Fidelity”— between “plug” and “funds.”

The system also became good at identifying words that referred to each other. In a passage about meetings between Israelis and Palestinians, the system recognized that the “talks” mentioned in one sentence were the same as “negotiations” in the next sentence. Here, too, the system didn’t mistakenly decide that “talks” was a verb.

“In a sense, it’s nothing short of miraculous,” Manning says. “All we’re doing is having these very large neural networks run these Mad Libs tasks, but that’s sufficient to cause them to start learning grammatical structures.”

Discovering Universal Language Principles

In a separate paper, researchers found evidence that BERT teaches itself universal principles that apply in languages as different as English, French, and Chinese. At the same time, the system learned differences: In English, an adjective usually goes in front of the noun it’s modifying, but in French and many other languages it goes after the noun.

The bottom line is that identifying cross-language patterns should make it easier for a system that learns one language to learn more of them—even if they seem to have little in common.

“This common grammatical representation across languages suggests that multilingual models trained on 10 languages should be able to learn an eleventh or a twelfth language much more easily,” Manning says. “Indeed, this is exactly what we are starting to find.”

Additional researchers from Stanford and Facebook contributed to the first study.

Source: Stanford University

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Survey: 66% of US adults say they’ll get a COVID-19 vaccine

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 17:18:42 GMT

When a COVID-19 vaccine becomes available, 66% of adults say they will likely get it, and have their children vaccinated too, according to a new nationwide survey.

The survey indicates that women, African Americans, and Republicans are more hesitant about getting a COVID-19 vaccine.

The likelihood of receiving the vaccination is below 60% in 11 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, South Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Wyoming. It is greater than 70% in 11 other states: Arizona, California, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Dakota, New York, Rhode Island, Utah, and Washington, as well as in the District of Columbia.

More outreach efforts will be necessary for these groups once a vaccine is available, the researchers say.

“Health experts expect that a COVID-19 vaccine will be ready for the public in the first half of next year,” says coauthor Katherine Ognyanova, an assistant professor of communication at Rutgers University–New Brunswick’s School of Communication and Information.

“But will the public be ready for a vaccine? We may need to reach 70-90% immunity among the population to get the disease fully under control and have herd protection for those vulnerable.”

The survey also shows that only 58% of those without a high school diploma say they plan to get a COVID-19 vaccine, compared to 78% of those with at least a bachelor’s degree. Of people who earn less than $25,000, 59% anticipate vaccinating, compared to 78% of those who earn more than $100,000.

Young adults (18-24) and older adults (65+) are more likely to say they will likely get the vaccine (71 and 73% respectively) than those aged 25-44 and 45-64 (63 and 64%).

Party affiliation also plays a role in how likely someone will get the vaccine: 62% of Republicans say they would likely seek vaccination compared to 75% of Democrats.

For those who said they are likely to get vaccinated, 62% identify the need to protect themselves and their families as a motivation, 45% cite protecting people in their community, and 59% identify medical professionals’ recommendations as a factor.

For those less likely to get the vaccine, 33% prioritize protecting themselves and their families, 18% protecting the community, and 26% identify a medical professional’s recommendation as an important consideration.

“In designing public health strategies to increase vaccine acceptance, the desire to protect others or follow medical advice may not be effective motivations for a majority of those not planning to seek vaccination,” Ognyanova says.

The COVID-19 Consortium for Understanding the Public’s Policy Preferences Across States, a joint project of Rutgers University, Northeastern University, Harvard University, and Northwestern University, conducted the study, polling 19,058 people in all 50 states and the District of Columbia from July 10 to July 26.

Source: Rutgers University

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Team measures Mars from crust to core

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 17:10:15 GMT

Using data from NASA’s InSight Lander on Mars, seismologists have made the first direct measurements of three subsurface boundaries from the crust to the core of the red planet.

“Ultimately it may help us understand planetary formation,” says Alan Levander, coauthor of a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters.

While researchers have previously calculated the thickness of Mars’ crust and the depth of its core with a number of models, the InSight data allowed for the first direct measurements, which researchers can use to check models and ultimately to improve them, Levander says.

“In the absence of plate tectonics on Mars, its early history is mostly preserved compared with Earth,” says graduate student Sizhuang Deng, the paper’s coauthor.

“The depth estimates of Martian seismic boundaries can provide indications to better understand its past as well as the formation and evolution of terrestrial planets in general.”

Finding clues about Mars’ interior and the processes that formed it are key goals for InSight, a robotic lander that touched down in November 2018.

The probe’s dome-shaped seismometer allows scientists to listen to faint rumblings inside the planet, in much the way that a doctor might listen to a patient’s heartbeat with a stethoscope.

Seismometers measure vibrations from seismic waves. Like circular ripples that mark the spot where a pebble disturbed the surface of a pond, seismic waves flow through planets, marking the location and size of disturbances like meteor strikes or earthquakes, which are aptly called marsquakes on the red planet. InSight’s seismometer recorded more than 170 of these from February to September 2019.

Seismic waves also subtly change as they pass through different kinds of rock. Seismologists have studied the patterns in seismographic recordings on Earth for more than a century and can use them to map the location of oil and gas deposits and much deeper strata.

“The traditional way to investigate structures beneath Earth is to analyze earthquake signals using dense networks of seismic stations,” says Deng. “Mars is much less tectonically active, which means it will have far fewer marsquake events compared with Earth. Moreover, with only one seismic station on Mars, we cannot employ methods that rely on seismic networks.”

For the study, Levander, Deng, and Carey Croneis professor of earth, environmental and planetary sciences, analyzed InSight’s 2019 seismology data using a technique called ambient noise autocorrelation.

“It uses continuous noise data recorded by the single seismic station on Mars to extract pronounced reflection signals from seismic boundaries,” Deng says.

The first boundary Deng and Levander measured is the divide between Mars’ crust and mantle almost 22 miles (35 kilometers) beneath the lander.

The second is a transition zone within the mantle where magnesium iron silicates undergo a geochemical change. Above the zone, the elements form a mineral called olivine, and beneath it, heat and pressure compress them into a new mineral called wadsleyite.

Known as the olivine-wadsleyite transition, researchers found this zone 690-727 miles (1,110-1,170 kilometers) beneath InSight.

“The temperature at the olivine-wadsleyite transition is an important key to building thermal models of Mars,” Deng says. “From the depth of the transition, we can easily calculate the pressure, and with that, we can derive the temperature.”

The third boundary he and Levander measured is the border between Mars’ mantle and its iron-rich core, which they found about 945-994 miles (1,520-1,600 kilometers) beneath the lander.

Better understanding this boundary “can provide information about the planet’s development from both a chemical and thermal point of view,” Deng says.

Rice’s earth, environmental and planetary sciences department funded the work.

Source: Rice University

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Could better ‘oral posture’ spare kids braces?

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 15:01:15 GMT

The shrinking human jaw isn’t the result of genetics but lifestyle, and can be addressed, say researchers.

For many of us, orthodontic work—getting fitted with braces, wearing retainers—was just a late-childhood rite of passage. The same went for the pulling of wisdom teeth in early adulthood. Other common conditions, including jaw pain and obstructed sleep apnea—when slack throat muscles interrupt breathing during rest—also just seem like par for the course.

The broader scientific community has largely deemed the underlying abnormality behind these problems as hereditary and untreatable, and opted to deal with symptoms through medical devices and after-the-fact interventions.

But in a new study, researchers argue that all these issues and more are actually relatively new problems afflicting modern humans and can be traced to a shrinking of our jaws. Moreover, they maintain that this “jaws epidemic” is not primarily genetic in origin, as previously thought, but rather a lifestyle disease. That means the epidemic is largely the result of human practices and akin to obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and some cancers.

The study in BioScience marshals the growing evidence from studies conducted around the world surrounding the jaws epidemic, as well as how to address it proactively. Parents and caregivers can take steps to promote proper mouth, jawbone, and facial musculature development in children, the study advises, to help stave off future health burdens and chronic conditions.

“The jaws epidemic is very serious, but the good news is, we can actually do something about it,” says Paul Ehrlich, professor emeritus of population studies at Stanford University and one of the study’s authors.

The new study builds upon a book Ehrlich co-wrote with orthodontist and lead study author Sandra Kahn called Jaws: The Story of a Hidden Epidemic (Stanford University Press, 2018). Two other Stanford researchers, Robert Sapolsky and Marcus Feldman, have contributed their expertise to the new study. Seng-Mun “Simon” Wong, a general dentist in private practice in Australia, is also a coauthor.

Shrinking jaws

Anthropologists have long noted the significant differences between the jaws and teeth in modern skulls compared to pre-agricultural, hunter-gatherer humans from thousands of years ago. The differences are stark even compared to humans who lived as recently as a century-and-a-half ago during pre-industrial times. These bygone humans showed little teeth crowding, impaction of their wisdom teeth (a leading reason for their surgical removal nowadays), or malocclusion—the abnormal positioning of the upper and lower teeth when the mouth is closed.

Assuming that genetics are chiefly responsible for the sudden modern rise of these dental maladies does not make sense, says Ehrlich. “There’s not been enough time for evolution over the span of only several generations to have made our jaws shrink,” says Ehrlich. Nor is there any evidence of selection pressures that would have favored smaller jawed-people producing more offspring—and thus perpetuating the trait—than regular-jawed people.

“The evidence of a genetic contribution to the jaws epidemic is not strong,” says Feldman, who a population geneticist and professor of biology.

Instead, profound physiological changes can occur in human populations over short intervals, Feldman points out, purely as a result of environmental factors, such as dietary choices and cultural norms. For instance, since World War II, a switchover from heavy rice consumption to more dairy and protein in childhood has been linked to Japanese men gaining around five inches in average adult height.

This goes to show that in many cases, lifestyle choices can have just as powerful if not more of an influence on human traits than underlying genetics. “A genetic contribution to a trait, if there is one, does not necessarily sentence you to a life with that trait,” says Feldman. “In almost all cases, you cannot intervene medically to alter a genetic contribution; it’s not actionable. But what is actionable are the things talked about in this study, as well as Paul and Sandra’s book.”

Soft food, soft beds, and ‘bad oral posture’

Available evidence points to the jaws epidemic arising as humanity underwent sweeping behavioral changes with the advent of agriculture, sedentism (settling in one place for extended periods), and industrialization. One obvious factor is the softening of diets, especially with the relatively recent invention of processed foods. Also, we need to chew our food less to extract adequate nutrition—our ancestors didn’t have the luxury of slurping down protein shakes.

A less obvious, though more significant reason behind the jaws epidemic, Ehrlich and colleagues contend, has been the rise of what they describe as bad oral posture. Our bones grow, develop, and change shape under the influences of gentle but persistent pressures, multiple studies have shown.

The proper development of the jaw and its associated soft tissues is guided by oral posture—the positioning of the jaws and the tongue during times when children are not eating or speaking. This positioning is especially important overnight during long sleep stretches, when swallowing maintains the correct, gentle pressures. With both children and adults now sleeping on forgiving mattresses and pillows, instead of the firm ground as their ancestors did, mouths are likelier to fall open, disrupting positioning and swallowing.

So what should parents do?

To promote the proper development of the jaw, the answer is not to start sleeping on rocks. Rather, basic practices such as having children chew sugar-free gum, as well as giving babies less mushy foods as they transition to solid foods, can help, the researchers say.

Kahn and Wong also practice what they call forwardontics, which includes exercises such as proper breathing and swallowing patterns to guide jaw growth in children as young as two versus waiting until children are older and require more severe interventions. To raise awareness of the jaws epidemic and how to better address it, Ehrlich and his coauthors have been giving lectures to conventions of orthodontists and seen some positive momentum. “There’s no question that some clinical practices are moving in this direction,” says Ehrlich, “but we have a lot more work to do.”

Benefits are not just limited to straighter teeth, roomier jaws, and stronger oral muscles. Cutting down on sleep deprivation from sleep apnea is another gain, which has myriad knock-on benefits. Sleep deprivation increases stress, which is associated with greater risks of heart disease, high blood pressure, depression, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease in adult populations, and with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children.

“The maladaptive ‘jaws’ profile can disrupt our stress response and ultimately bring about greater stress and chronic activation of the body’s stress response,” says Sapolsky, professor of biology, of neurology and neurological sciences, and of neurosurgery, whose research focuses on stress.

Ehrlich hopes that increased attention and research geared toward the jaws epidemic can turn the tide.

“We’re going to continue learning the causes of the jaws epidemic and continue getting the word out on how this is a highly treatable condition early on in life,” says Ehrlich. “Parents and caregivers, in collaboration with dentists and orthodontists, can all help children to avoid some serious health problems later on in their lives.”

Source: Adam Hadhazy for Stanford University

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Climate change may exacerbate allergies, autism

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 14:54:22 GMT

Climate change and disruption of the ecosystem have the potential to profoundly affect the human body, affecting allergies, autism, and autoimmune systems, researchers report.

A new paper in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health details the effects of climate change on allergies, autoimmunity, and the microbiome, the beneficial microorganisms that live on and inside the human body.

Here, the paper’s author, Xue Ming, a professor of neurology at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, discusses how the delicate balance of the environment affects these conditions:

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Will COVID-19 spur new robot ‘friends’ and helpers?

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 14:16:36 GMT

Socially assistive robots seem especially promising during the pandemic, says a cognitive scientist.

“In general, I don’t think the public is very aware of what these robots can do to improve our lives,” says Jeffrey Krichmar, professor at the University of California, Irvine. “There’s more education that needs to be done. I hope COVID-19 will be a wakeup call to our robotics community to spur new ideas.”

Socially assistive robots interact with people and can perform household chores, accomplish health care tasks, and offer emotional support. Mobile devices with multiple sensors and manipulators, they communicate through wireless internet connectivity and can function either autonomously or via remote control. The robots work in education, health care, and business, as well as in disaster relief operations.

Telepresence robots, for instance, allow children or adults homebound with a chronic illness or other medical condition to engage in school or workplace activities. The units are physically located in the classroom or office, which gives their users mobility and a sense of being on-site.

“As we begin to reopen [society], I anticipate a hybrid situation where some people can attend school or go to work, but others must stay home,” Krichmar says. “Being able to participate remotely through a moving robot could make that transition smoother. I can also see this technology expanding to a wider population. For example, people could visit their relatives in nursing homes or hospitals this way.”

Robotic dogs, cats, and baby seals can provide emotional support to those who are lonely or anxious due to shelter-in-place restrictions, along with the elderly and children with neurodevelopmental disorders—similar to the comfort that a pet offers but without the upkeep. These are not yet in widespread use, however, because they’re costly and limited in their capacity.

Krichmarl leads the university’s Cognitive Anteater Robotics Laboratory, where researchers are designing robotic systems that mimic the mammalian brain. A number of the lab’s projects involve the Toyota Human Support Robot. Called CARL SR, it’s been programmed to perform such basic tasks as serving meals, putting away groceries, and taking out the trash, as well as functions requiring higher-level cognition skills. These include anticipating a person’s needs and retrieving any associated objects, as well as learning where they’re located.

Krichmar is confident that assistive robots will, in the future, play a larger role during crises like the current one. He sees parallels to Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011. “That accident highlighted the fact that robots were not ready to help, which led to a number of advances in rescue robotics,” Krichmar says.

“I’m hopeful that this pandemic will prompt the socially assistive robotics community to make progress so that we can be prepared to help in future health crises.”

Source: UC Irvine

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Cold War spy satellite captures threat to marmots

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 13:50:12 GMT

Data from a Cold War spy satellite reveal how agriculture has destroyed the living conditions of marmots in Eurasia.

Researchers used the satellite data to map the impact of agriculture on biodiversity across Eurasia.

The Eurasian Steppes stretch from Europe, through Russia and to Mongolia, and includes countries such as Austria, Hungary, Moldova, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan.

“Since the 1960s, there has been a significant decrease in the number of marmots in northern Kazakhstan, at 14%. This is connected to the expansion of agriculture in large grasslands due to the high demand of food in [the Soviet Union] after the Second World War.

“Their flight could lead to an eventual decrease of the overall population of these rodents,” says Alexander V. Prishchepov, an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen’s department of geosciences and natural resources management.

Until now, it was impossible to gauge how animal and plant species reacted to increasingly large agricultural tracts prior to the late 1980s, as no systematic observations had been made before then.

But using satellite data, the researchers could map the impact of agriculture on the bobak marmot, for one, as far back as the 1960s, and up to the present day.

“It is absolutely fantastic that we can use data from a spy satellite—launched into space as a response to an American pilot being downed over the Soviet Union by the Russian military in the 1960s—to count marmots and gain an overview of biodiversity,” says Prishchepov.

Along with his Romanian, Kazakh, and German research colleagues, Prishchepov compared images from the satellite with imagery from other services such as Google Earth, Bing, and Esri. All in all, the material encompasses an area of 60,000 square kilometers (23,166 square miles).

Marmots dig holes that foxes, spiders, and other animals use as shelter from weather and hungry predators. The small rodents also make the soil more nutrient-rich with their nitrogen-rich feces. These contributions to the habitats and survival of other species make them important for biodiversity.

“But when we humans cultivate the soil and release toxic pesticides, the living conditions of the marmot—which would otherwise live in the same place for generations—can be lost due to continuous pressure from intensive farming,” explains Prishchepov.

“Agriculture is vital for humans, but we need to find better ways to cultivate land in order to avoid destroying animal and plant life,” he says. “We must learn from the past, as we did with our study, and avoid short-term politically-driven decisions but with long term adverse environmental implications.”

Source: University of Copenhagen

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Non-COVID-19 doctor visits drop during pandemic

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 13:30:40 GMT

Use of non-COVID-19-related health care has declined since the beginning of the pandemic, according to a new study.

That could have important implications for patient health, researchers say.

The US health care system has focused on providing life-saving care for COVID-19 patients. States closed non-essential activities and people curtailed interactions outside their homes to slow the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

“A combination of private responses and public policies related to the epidemic likely affected the way people use the health care system for conditions unrelated to COVID-19,” says Kosali Simon, professor in the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University-Bloomington and coauthor of a new study published online as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“This is the first look at how different state policies affected non-COVID-19 outpatient health care, as a way to understand what actions might be needed to protect all of health care as we continue living through the pandemic.”

For the study, researchers examined data from a nationwide electronic health care records system covering more than 35 million patients and providing information on health care use from January 2019 through June 30, 2020. They focused on outpatient visits, outpatient procedures, and laboratory tests for non-COVID-19 care.

The findings show that overall, non-COVID-19 doctor visits declined about 40% during the first six weeks or so of the pandemic, from early March to mid-April.

State policies ordering people to stay at home and closing non-essential businesses played a substantial role, reducing outpatient visits about 15% in the first two weeks of the shutdown.

The negative impact varied by type of care, according to the study. Visits associated with heart disease declined dramatically, as did outpatient visits for diabetes and various cancers.

But mental health outpatient visits declined far less than the other care categories studied. The researchers conclude that telemedicine delivering mental health services may have mitigated the decline in mental health care visits.

While outpatient visits rebounded substantially in recent months following re-openings, the care visits still remain below the pre-epidemic levels in most cases, the researchers note.

“Our work sheds light not only on the overall decline and recovery of health care utilization, but also on the ways that the epidemic has disrupted some types of services and therapies more than others,” the researchers write.

“Understanding these patterns is important to prepare the health care system to address health consequences in the future that will be caused by the shortfalls in health care use during this era.”

Additional coauthors are from Tulane University and Indiana University.

Source: Indiana University

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Particles from Fukushima meltdown contained plutonium

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 12:03:34 GMT

Microscopic particles emitted during the Fukushima nuclear disaster contained plutonium, according to a new study.

The microscopic radioactive particles formed inside the Fukushima reactors when the melting nuclear fuel interacted with the reactor’s structural concrete.

Nearly ten years after meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant caused a nuclear disaster, the new information about the extent and severity of the meltdown and the distribution patterns of the plutonium have broad implications for understanding the mobility of plutonium during a nuclear accident.

“The study used an extraordinary array of analytical techniques in order to complete the description of the particles at the atomic-scale,” says coauthor Rod Ewing, co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University.

The researchers found that, due to loss of containment in the reactors, the particles were released into the atmosphere and many were then deposited many miles from the reactor sites.

Studies have shown that the cesium-rich microparticles, or CsMPs, are highly radioactive and primarily composed of glass (with silica from concrete) and radio-cesium (a volatile fission product formed in the reactors). But the environmental impact and their distribution is still an active subject of research and debate. The new work offers a much-needed insight into the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (FDNPP) meltdowns.

The study used an extraordinary array of analytical techniques in order to complete the description of the particles at the atomic-scale.

The researchers used a combination of advanced analytical techniques, including synchrotron-based micro-X-ray analysis, secondary ion mass spectrometry, and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy, to find and characterize the plutonium that was present in the CsMP samples. They initially discovered incredibly small uranium-dioxide inclusions, of less than 10 nanometers in diameter, inside the CsMPs; this indicated possible inclusion of nuclear fuel inside the particles.

Detailed analysis revealed, for the first-time, that plutonium-oxide concentrates were associated with the uranium, and that the isotopic composition of the uranium and plutonium matched that calculated for the FDNPP irradiated fuel inventory.

“These results strongly suggest that the nano-scale heterogeneity that is common in normal nuclear fuels is still present in the fuel debris that remains inside the site’s damaged reactors,” says geochemist Satoshi Utsunomiya of Kyushu University, who led the team.

“This is important information as it tells us about the extent [and] severity of the meltdown. Further, this is important information for the eventual decommissioning of the damaged reactors and the long-term management of their wastes.”

With regards to environmental impact, Utsunomiya says, “as we already know that the CsMPs were distributed over a wide region in Japan, small amounts of plutonium were likely dispersed in the same way.”

This is important information for the eventual decommissioning of the damaged reactors and the long-term management of their wastes.

The team “will continue to experiment with the CsMPs, in an effort to better understand their long-term behavior and environmental impact,” says Gareth T. W. Law, a coauthor on the paper from the University of Helsinki. It is now clear that CsMPs are an important vector of radioactive contamination from nuclear accidents.”

“While the plutonium released from the damaged reactors is low compared to that of cesium; the investigation provides crucial information for studying the associated health impact,” says coauthor Bernd Grambow of Nantes/France.

Utsunomiya emphasizes that this is a great achievement of international collaboration. “It’s been almost ten years since the nuclear disaster at Fukushima,” he says, “but research on Fukushima’s environmental impact and its decommissioning are a long way from being over.”

The paper appears in Science of the Total Environment.

Additional researchers from Kyushu University, University of Tsukuba, Tokyo Institute of Technology, National Institute of Polar Research, University of Helsinki, Paul Scherrer Institute, Diamond Light Source, and SUBATECH (IMT Atlantique, CNRS, University of Nantes) contributed to the work.

Source: Stanford University via Kyushu University

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AI methods make COVID-19 forecasting more local

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 11:50:06 GMT

Artificial intelligence techniques have inspired a new COVID-19 forecasting model provide timely information at a more localized level.

The researchers say that officials and anyone in the public can use in their decision-making processes.

“We are all overwhelmed by the data, most of which is provided at national and state levels,” says Xifeng Yan, an associate professor of and chair in computer science at the College of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“Humans, even trained professionals, are not able to process the massive data as effectively as computer algorithms.”

“Parents are more interested in what is happening in their school district and if it’s safe for their kids to go to school in the fall,” Yan says. “However, there are very few websites providing that information. We aim to provide forecasting and explanations at a localized level with data that is more useful for residents and decision makers.”

“The challenges of making sense of messy data are precisely the type of problems that we deal with every day as computer scientists working in AI and machine learning,” says Yu-Xiang Wang, an assistant professor of and chair in computer science. “We are compelled to lend our expertise to help communities make informed decisions.”

‘Transforming’ COVID-19 forecasting

Yan and Wang developed an innovative forecasting algorithm based on a deep learning model called Transformer. The model is driven by an attention mechanism that intuitively learns how to forecast by learning what time period in the past to look at and what data is the most important and relevant.

“If we are trying to forecast for a specific region, like Santa Barbara County, our algorithm compares the growth curves of COVID-19 cases across different regions over a period of time to determine the most-similar regions. It then weighs these regions to forecast cases in the target region,” explains Yan.

In addition to COVID-19 data, the algorithm also draws information from the US Census to factor in hyper-local details when calibrating the forecast for a local community.

“The census data is very informative because it implicitly captures the culture, lifestyle, demographics, and types of businesses in each local community,” says Wang.

“Hopefully, the next time we are in such a situation, we will be better equipped to make the right decisions at the right time.”

“When you combine that with COVID-19 data available by region, it helps us transfer the knowledge learned from one region to another, which will be useful for communities that want data on the effectiveness of interventions in order to make informed decisions.”

The researchers’ models showed that, during the recent spike, Santa Barbara County experienced spread similar to what Mecklenburg, Wake, and Durham counties in North Carolina saw in late March and early April. Using those counties to forecast future cases in Santa Barbara County, the researchers’ attention-based model outperformed the most commonly used epidemiological models: the SIR (susceptible, infected, recovered) model, which describes the flow of individuals through three mutually exclusive stages; and the autoregressive model, which makes predictions based solely on a series of data points displayed over time.

The AI-based model had a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 0.030, compared with 0.11 for the SIR model and 0.072 with autoregression. The MAPE is a common measure of prediction accuracy in statistics.

Fixing models for better data

Yan and Wang say their model forecasts more accurately because it eliminates key weaknesses associated with current models. Census data provides fine-grained details missing in existing simulation models, while the attention mechanism leverages the substantial amounts of data now available publicly.

“Humans, even trained professionals, are not able to process the massive data as effectively as computer algorithms,” says Wang. “Our research provides tools for automatically extracting useful information from the data to simplify the picture, rather than making it more complicated.”

The researchers plan to make their model and forecasts available to the public via a website and to collect enough data to forecast for communities across the country.

“We hope to forecast for every community in the country because we believe that when people are well informed with local data, they will make well-informed decisions,” says Yan.

They also hope their algorithm can be used to forecast what could happen if a particular intervention is implemented at a specific time.

“Because our research focuses on more fundamental aspects, the developed tools can be applied to a variety of factors,” adds Yan. “Hopefully, the next time we are in such a situation, we will be better equipped to make the right decisions at the right time.”

The researchers will present their work later this month during the Computing Research Association (CRA) Virtual Conference. Additional researchers from Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara contributed to the work.

Source: UC Santa Barbara

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We can save parasites. Here’s why we should

Wed, 05 Aug 2020 20:39:53 GMT

An ambitious global plan to save parasites seeks to correct the mistake of leaving them out of most conservation efforts.

Parasites have a public relations problem. Unlike the many charismatic mammals, fishes, and birds that receive our attention (and our conservation dollars), many people think of parasites as something to eradicate—and certainly not something to protect.

But only 4% of known parasites can infect humans, and the majority actually serve critical ecological roles, like regulating wildlife that might otherwise balloon in population size and become pests. Still, researchers have only identified about 10% of parasites and, as a result, conservation activities and research mostly leave them out.

“Parasites are an incredibly diverse group of species, but as a society, we do not recognize this biological diversity as valuable,” says Chelsea Wood, an assistant professor at the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “The point of this paper is to emphasize that we are losing parasites and the functions they serve without even recognizing it.”

12 goals for saving parasites

In the paper in Biological Conservation, Wood and colleagues propose 12 goals for the next decade that could advance parasite biodiversity conservation through a mix of research, advocacy, and management.

“Even though we know little to nothing about most parasite species, we can still take action now to conserve parasite biodiversity,” says Skylar Hopkins, paper and project co-lead and an assistant professor at North Carolina State University.

Perhaps the most ambitious goal is to describe half of the world’s parasites within the next 10 years. Providing taxonomic descriptions allow species to be named, an important part of the conservation process, the researchers say.

“If species don’t have a name, we can’t save them,” says Colin Carlson, the other project co-lead and an assistant professor at Georgetown University.

“We’ve accepted that for decades about most animals and plants, but scientists have only discovered a fraction of a percentage of all the parasites on the planet. Those are the last frontiers: the deep sea, deep space, and the world that’s living inside every species on Earth.”

Outbreak and loss

Importantly, the researchers stress they did not include any of the parasites that infect humans or domesticated animals in their conservation plan. They say these parasites need controlling to safeguard human and animal health.

The paper is part of an entire special edition devoted to parasite conservation. Wood is the lead author on one study in the collection that finds the responses of parasites to environmental change will likely be complex, and that a changing world probably will see both outbreaks of some parasites and a total loss of other parasite species.

“We need to recognize that there will be a diversity of responses among parasite taxa and not take for granted that every parasite is dwindling toward extinction or about to cause a major outbreak,” Wood says.

Parasites often need two or more host species to complete their life cycle. For example, some parasites first infect fish or amphibians, but ultimately must get transmitted to birds to reproduce and multiply.

They ensure that this happens through ingenious ways, Wood says, often manipulating the behavior or even the anatomy of their first host to make these fish or amphibians more susceptible to birds eating them. In this way, the parasite then gets transmitted to a bird—its ultimate destination.

Given this dynamic, Wood and colleagues wanted to see what would happen to the abundance of parasites if the ecosystems in which they live changed. They designed an experiment across 16 ponds in central California’s East Bay region. In half of the ponds, they installed structures such as bird houses, floating perches, and mallard decoys intended to attract more birds, thus temporarily altering the natural ecosystem and boosting biodiversity in these ponds.

After a couple of years, the researchers analyzed parasite biodiversity in each of the 16 ponds. What they found was a mixed bag: Some parasite species declined in abundance in response to elevated bird biodiversity. But other parasites actually increased in number when bird biodiversity increased. The authors conclude that as biodiversity changes—due to climate change, development pressure, or other reasons—we can expect to see divergent responses by parasites, even those living within the same ecosystem.

Pickled time capsules

Traditionally, the field of disease ecology assumes one of two paths: That we are either heading toward a future of more disease and massive outbreaks or toward a future of parasite extinction. This paper shows that both trajectories are happening simultaneously, Wood says.

“This particular experiment suggests that we need to anticipate both trajectories going forward. It starts to resolve the conflict in the literature by showing that everyone is right—it’s all happening,” Wood says. “The trick now is to figure out what traits will predict which parasites will decline and which will increase in response to biodiversity loss.”

Wood’s lab is working on that question now. She and colleagues are reconstructing the history of parasites over time, documenting which parasites increased in abundance, and which declined.

However, there’s almost no historical record of parasites and without this information, it’s difficult to know how to conserve them. Dissecting museum specimens of fish allows the researchers to identify and count various parasites found in the specimens at different places and times.

“These pickled animals are like parasite time capsules,” Wood says. “We can open them up and identify the parasites that infected a fish at its death. In this way, we can reconstruct and resurrect information that previously we didn’t think was possible to get.”

Additional coauthors are from the University of Colorado. The Michigan Society of Fellows, the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the University of Washington, the University of Colorado, the National Institutes of Health, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation funded the work.

Source: University of Washington

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