As the climate warms, forest cover will become increasingly important for wildlife conservation, researchers report.

The findings show that North American mammals, including pumas, wolves, bears, rabbits, deer, and opossums consistently depend on forests and avoid cities, farms, and other human-dominated areas in hotter climes.

In fact, mammals are, on average, 50% more likely to occupy forests than open habitats in hot regions. The opposite is true in the coldest regions.

“Different populations of the same species respond differently to habitat based on where they are,” says lead author Mahdieh Tourani, who conducted the study while a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Davis who is now an assistant professor of quantitative ecology at the University of Montana, Missoula. “Climate is mediating that difference.”

Tourani points to the eastern cottontail as an example. The study showed the common rabbit preferred forests in hotter areas while preferring human-dominated habitat, such as agricultural areas, in colder regions.

Her example illustrates “intraspecific variation,” which the study found to be pervasive across all North America’s mammals. This runs contrary to a longstanding practice in conservation biology of categorizing species as those that live well alongside people and those that don’t. The authors say there is growing recognition of ecological flexibility, and that species are more complicated than those two categories suggest.

“We can’t take a one-size-fits all approach to habitat conservation,” says senior author Daniel Karp, associate professor in the wildlife, fish, and conservation biology department at UC Davis. “It turns out climate has a large role in how species respond to habitat loss.”

For example, if elk are managed under the assumption that they can only live in protected areas, then conservation managers may miss opportunities to conserve them in human-dominated landscapes.

“On the other hand, if we assume a species will always be able to live alongside us, then we might be wasting our effort trying to improve the conservation value of human-dominated landscapes in areas where it is simply too hot for the species,” Karp says.

For the study, the authors leveraged Snapshot USA, a collaborative monitoring program with thousands of camera trap locations across the country.

“We analyzed 150,000 records of 29 mammal species using community occupancy models,” Tourani says. “These models allowed us to study how mammals respond to habitat types across their ranges while accounting for the fact that species may be in an area, but we did not record their presence because the species is rare or elusive.”

The study provides a pathway for conservation managers to tailor efforts to conserve and establish protected areas, as well as enhance working landscapes, like farms, pastures, and developed areas.

“If we’re trying to conserve species in working landscapes, it might behoove us to provide more shade for species,” says Karp, whose recent study about birds and climate change drew a similar conclusion, with forests providing a protective buffer against high temperatures.

“We can maintain patches of native vegetation, scattered trees, and hedgerows that provide local refugia for wildlife, especially in places that are going to get warmer with climate change.”

The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Additional coauthors are from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, North Carolina State University, Arizona State University, and Conservation International.

Conservation International funded the work.

Source: UC Davis

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New findings indicate that white hiring managers should demonstrate an ethical leadership style during interviews with Black job candidates.

As many companies aim to build diverse workforces, candidates from historically marginalized communities continue to report unfair recruitment practices and limited opportunities. Building an equitable organization starts during the hiring process, with potential supervisors playing a major role in making applicants feel comfortable.

New research examines the impact of leadership style on prospective Black employees who apply for jobs in less-diverse companies. During selection, these applicants often experience stereotype threat, or a fear of being mistreated due to negative stereotypes about their racial group. This can cause candidates to withdraw from the hiring process.

The researchers studied the effects of two moral leadership styles—ethical and authentic—on candidates. Authentic leadership follows an internal compass, drawing on personal experiences and values. Ethical leadership complies with community norms: Ethical leaders provide candidates with an outline of group values and accepted behaviors, emphasize universal ethical principles, and establish a clear reward and punishment system. When supervisors demonstrate their leadership styles during the hiring process, they offer candidates an idea of how a future employee will be treated in daily interactions.

The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Applied Psychology, shows that when a white manager is interviewing a Black candidate, ethical leadership is more helpful in reducing threat and increasing willingness to apply for a job.

“Our data aligned with the idea that, if I’m a Black person and my would-be manager is white and showing authentic leadership, it’s going to be hard for me to predict what that’s going to mean,” says Andrew Hafenbrack, coauthor and associate professor of management and organization in the University of Washington Foster School of Business. “And if I do predict it, racism is so common that I might predict something that wouldn’t help me.

“It’s better in this case if my would-be manager is using an ethical style, therefore following community norms, so I can learn those norms. In other words: If there are rules to the game, and they’re going to follow them, then I can figure out the rules and we can work together well.”

Authentic leadership, which emphasizes individual experiences and beliefs, makes applicants feel more comfortable when the supervisor is from the same racial group. In this case, applicants are likely to identify with someone from a similar background. Since candidates in this situation are typically no longer concerned about unfair treatment, they are more likely to view authentic leadership as an opportunity to develop their own individuality in the workplace.

To reach these conclusions, the researchers conducted five experiments with nearly 500 Black residents of Brazilian favelas, or impoverished neighborhoods. Two of the studies included real-world job recruitment processes and physiological measures of stress: salivary cortisol and blood pressure. The results suggest that interactions with potential direct supervisors can reduce stereotype threat, which boosts Black applicants’ desire to join an organization. However, the leader’s identity determines whether these interactions feel positive or not.

“During recruitment, people from marginalized groups can experience this unpleasant feeling that they will be negatively stereotyped and face discrimination in their future job,” says Urszula Lagowska, corresponding author and assistant professor at Neoma Business School in France. “Because of that, they decide to either avoid these threatening companies or withdraw their application from the hiring process.”

Past research shows that job interviews and site visits are likely to trigger stereotype threat due to high pressure and the fact that most managers at many organizations are white. While organizational strategies—such as diversity-oriented policies—have benefits, they can also create the perception that marginalized groups are being singled out.

“Our research provides an answer for what a recruiting manager can do in their own capacity regardless of company policies,” Lagowska says.

Since a behavioral adjustment from leadership can make candidates from marginalized groups feel more comfortable, there is reason to reevaluate the increasing use of automated recruitment tools. Companies often use such tools to optimize searches and avoid bias, but these results suggest that increasing interactions with managers could help attract more diverse talent.

“If you’re really trying to get leadership styles right, it has to go beyond the policies themselves,” Hafenbrack says. “You can’t mandate something like this. This is about intuition and the understanding of the situation. Assuming a manager cares about inclusion and wants to reduce stereotype threat, it’s a nuanced process for them to make this shift. If you’re using an ethical leadership style, it must feel real.”

Additional coauthors are from the Brazilian School of Public and Business Administration in Rio de Janeiro and the IESEG School of Management in Paris. Funding for this came from Coordination of Superior Level Staff Improvement, the Brazilian Research Council and the Rio de Janeiro Research Foundation.

Source: Lauren Kirschman University of Washington

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Researchers have come up with a surface that makes water bubbles jump to more efficiently carry heat.

Water is often the go-to resource for heat transfer, being used in large-scale cooling operations like data centers that power the internet and nuclear power plants that power cities.

Discovering dynamic phenomena to make water-based heat transfer more energy and cost efficient is the ongoing work of Jonathan Boreyko, associate professor in mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech.

Boreyko and his team have published extensively on the topic of water and the way it can move, with members of his Nature-Inspired Fluids and Interfaces Lab producing water droplets that leap propelled by surface tension and frost that jumps by way of electrostatics.

Having incorporated the two phases of liquid and solid in the first two volumes, their third volume investigates a third phase with boiling water.

“During my PhD research at Duke University, I discovered jumping water droplets,” Boreyko says. “A decade later, my own graduate student discovered jumping ice during his research on frost growth. This made me determined to complete a three-phase “trilogy” for jumping water, which we achieved here with this paper on jumping bubbles during the boiling of water.

Graduate student Hyunggon Park created a micro-structured boiler capable of releasing bubbles at one-tenth the usual size, deploying a steady barrage of bubbles to carry energy. The result is a more efficient method of removing heat from a surface.

“When Hyunggon showed me the first videos of these jumping bubbles that complete the trilogy, needless to say, I was jumping with excitement.”

Boiling is the most efficient way to continuously transfer heat through water. If boiling remains constant, so does the departure of energy. Energy is carried away in bubbles, like spherical cars carrying heat passengers. Those bubbles normally depart when their own buoyancy becomes stronger than surface adhesion, causing them to rise to the surface and release the energy.

Park and Boreyko’s new method improves on that principle by making the fleet of bubble cars smaller and more numerous. Because there is a more constant departure of bubbles, more energy passengers are also leaving. The bubbles aren’t waiting for their own buoyancy to do the work, but they are leaping away from the heated surface at a faster rate. Because the bubbles are also microscopically small, the team has solved a breakdown that occurs with larger bubbles and stalls heat removal.

“Normally, buoyancy detaches these surface bubbles when they are millimeters in diameter, allowing them to escape and take the heat away as steam,” says Boreyko. “When boiling at higher temperatures, these large surface bubbles merge together to form a continuous vapor film. This film insulates the liquid from the hot surface, causing a breakdown in heat transfer.”

The secret to the team’s method is found in the engineered surfaces they have created. By fabricating an array of micro-cavities onto the boiling surface, bubbles preferentially form and grow within the cavities. Pairs of cavities are intentionally placed very close together, causing neighboring bubbles to coalesce together at unusually small sizes.

At such small sizes, the force of surface tension is very strong, causing the bubbles to jump away from the surface as they merge together. In the case of a data center, more rapid removal of heat from a surface could mean the difference between business as usual and costly downtime.

In many ways, this jumping-bubble effect is very similar to the jumping dew droplets Boreyko previously discovered. The use of surface tension proved valuable in both cases, but the added factor of heat brings new dynamics into the picture.

Putting those pieces together, Boreyko expects that the jumping phenomenon will be more practical when finding widespread applications for cooling and heat transfer.

“To cause droplets to jump, the surface needs a hydrophobic coating and ultra-small nanostructures, both of which are fragile and expensive,” Boreyko explains. “In contrast, bubbles prefer jumping on a hydrophilic surface, which allows for uncoated metals to be used. Also, the micro-cavities required for jumping bubbles are much larger and more durable than the nanostructures needed for jumping droplets.”

This project lays deeper groundwork for understanding the fluid mechanics of the jumping bubble effect. The next step is measuring the improved heat transfer through boiling, mapped over a wide range of temperatures and surface geometries, to gain a better understanding of the full potential of jumping-enhanced boiling.

The study appears in Advanced Functional Materials.

Source: Virginia Tech

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A new wearable device can send health data up to 15 miles, 2,400 times the distance of WiFi, and without need for significant network infrastructure.

Wearable devices that use sensors to monitor biological signals can play an important role in health care. These devices provide valuable information that allows providers to predict, diagnose, and treat a variety of conditions while improving access to care and reducing costs.

However, wearables currently require significant infrastructure—such as satellites or arrays of antennas that use cell signals—to transmit data, making many of those devices inaccessible to rural and under-resourced communities.

Researchers hope the new device will help make digital health access more equitable.

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the strain it placed on the global health care system, brought attention to the need for accurate, fast, and robust remote patient monitoring, says Philipp Gutruf, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering in the College of Engineering at the University of Arizona and lead author of the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Non-invasive wearable devices currently use the internet to connect clinicians to patient data for aggregation and investigation.

“These internet-based communication protocols are effective and well-developed, but they require cell coverage or internet connectivity and main-line power sources,” says Gutruf, who is also a member of the BIO5 Institute. “These requirements often leave individuals in remote or resource-constrained environments underserved.”

In contrast, the system the Gutruf Lab developed uses a low power wide area network, or LPWAN, that offers 2,400 times the distance of WiFi and 533 times that of Bluetooth. The new system uses LoRa, a patented type of LPWAN technology.

“The choice of LoRa helped address previous limitations associated with power and electromagnetic constraints,” says Tucker Stuart, a biomedical engineering doctoral alumnus.

Alongside the implementation of this protocol, the lab developed circuitry and an antenna, which, in usual LoRa-enabled devices, is a large box that seamlessly integrates into the soft wearable. These electromagnetic, electronic, and mechanical features enable it to send data to the receiver over a long distance.

To make the device almost imperceptible to the wearer, the lab also enables recharge of its batteries over 2 meters (about 6.5 feet) of distance. The soft electronics, and the device’s ability to harvest power, are the keys to the performance of this first-of-its-kind monitoring system, Gutruf says.

The Gutruf Lab calls the soft mesh wearable biosymbiotic, meaning it is custom 3D-printed to fit the user and is so unobtrusive it almost begins to feel like part of their body. The device, worn on the low forearm, stays in place even during exercise, ensuring high-quality data collection, Gutruf says. The user wears the device at all times, and it charges without removal or effort.

“Our device allows for continuous operation over weeks due to its wireless power transfer feature for interaction-free recharging—all realized within a small package that even includes onboard computation of health metrics,” says coauthor Max Farley, an undergraduate student studying biomedical engineering.

The researchers plan to further improve and extend communication distances with the implementation of LoRa wireless area network gateways that could serve hundreds of square miles and hundreds of device users, using only a small number of connection points.

The wearable device and its communication system have the potential to aid remote monitoring in underserved rural communities, ensure high-fidelity recording in war zones, and monitor health in bustling cities, says Gutruf, whose long-term goal is to make the technology available to the communities with the most need.

“This effort is not just a scientific endeavor,” he says. “It’s a step toward making digital medicine more accessible, irrespective of geographical and resource constraints.”

Source: University of Arizona

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A malaria-carrying mosquito that thrives in urban environments is moving into Africa, where a construction boom may be one factor welcoming them.

Lancet Planetary Health published the findings on the ecology of the invasive Anopheles stephensi mosquito led by Gonzalo Vazquez-Prokopec, a professor in Emory University’s environmental sciences department.

The invasion of stephensi poses a major threat to urban populations in Africa, where malaria has primarily been a rural disease. While most of the limited data available on stephensi in Africa has been gathered during the rainy season, this study focused on the city of Jigjiga in eastern Ethiopia during the peak of the dry season.

Stephensi was first detected in Jigjiga in 2018 and has persisted there despite harsh dry seasons of around three rainless months.

“We found that during this period of low-water availability, Anopheles stephensi is primarily exploiting habitats associated with construction,” says Vazquez-Prokopec, a leading expert in the disease ecology of urban mosquitos.

The researchers, including Jigjiga University entomologists, searched for standing water at locations across the city to sample for mosquito larvae.

The results showed that the major habitats consistently infested with stephensi larvae, serving as mosquito nurseries during the dry season, were the humanmade pits used to store water at construction sites and small-scale, brick-making facilities.

Targeting these sites for control of stephensi larvae during the dry season may represent a unique opportunity for resource-strapped public health officials to mitigate malarial outbreaks in the city, Vazquez-Prokopec says.

He cites stocking the construction pits with larvae-eating fish as one potential intervention, since the large pits are kept filled with water during the lengthy process of constructing buildings.

Jigjiga, which grew from around 126,000 inhabitants in 2007 to 800,000 today, is pocked with construction sites and brick-making facilities. The building boom accelerated even further in 2018, following major political reform in Ethiopia.

Building booms are occurring throughout much of Africa, as the continent is the most rapidly urbanizing on Earth.

“Anopheles stephensi arrived in Africa at the best time for the mosquito, but the worst time for the people,” Vazquez-Prokopec says.

One of the construction pits sampled by the researchers that was found to be infested with stephensi larvae. People in Jigjiga commonly keep goats and sheep within their premises.

Malaria annually kills around 620,000 people globally, mostly in Africa, according to the World Health Organization.

Anopheles stephensi is tricky

Stephensi, long a major vector of malaria in Asia, was first identified in Africa in the port city of Djibouti in 2012. It has since been detected in Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana. The insect has already sparked several urban outbreaks of malaria in Africa, including in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia’s second-largest city.

The invader brings a challenging new twist to malaria-eradication efforts on the continent, where malaria is overwhelmingly a rural disease, spread by other species of mosquitos that are adapted to live in rural areas. African public health officials have made great strides controlling the disease, using methods targeting the unique behaviors of these rural mosquitos and the lifestyles of people in the countryside.

Stephensi, however, is a game changer. This species of mosquito can live in rural environments but also thrives in urban areas. It’s resistant to insecticides and adept at surviving dry seasons. Its arrival in Africa poses a serious potential threat to millions of city dwellers who have little or no immunity from repeated prior exposure to malaria.

“Different methods of surveillance and control than those used in the countryside will be needed to combat malaria spread by Anopheles stephensi,” Vazquez-Prokopec says.

Indoor spraying and the use of bed nets impregnated with insecticide, for instance, are malaria interventions in rural areas. That’s because night is the peak biting time for the two mosquito species that are currently the primary malaria vectors in Africa.

Stephenesi, however, tends to bite outside and at dusk before people have gone to bed.

For more than 15 years, Vazquez-Prokopec has traced outbreaks of viral diseases spread by another urban mosquito, Aedes aegypti, including dengue fever, Zika, and chikungunya. His research in South America and Mexico considers the interactions of mosquitos, pathogens, and people.

The goal is to zero in on the most effective ways for cash-strapped public health officials to control outbreaks of these mosquito-borne diseases in sprawling, densely packed cities where many people live in substandard housing.

Dengue fever alone sickens nearly 100 million people a year globally, although its annual death toll of around 40,000 people is far less than that of malaria.

Construction pits around the city

After identifying the manmade construction pits as the primary habitats for the stephensi larvae, the researchers entered their GPS coordinates into Google Earth to visualize their locations. It became apparent that the sites provided a unique spectral signature—demarcated by size, color contrast, and the presence of water—that allowed the researchers to easily identify other construction pits throughout Jigjiga.

Historical data archived by Google Earth gave the researchers a view into how the pattern of the construction sites evolved in relation to the rapid development of the city since 2016. Google Earth maps also reveal the gradient of population density as the semirural outskirts gradually become absorbed by urban development.

“It may be possible to use Google Earth like a time machine as one tool to understand the dynamics of how stephensi exploits human habitats to survive and to expand its range,” Vazquez-Prokopec says.

With funding from the CDC, Vazquez-Prokopec and his colleagues are now expanding their research into stephensi in Jigjiga along with several other Ethiopian cities.

They will use satellite data to explore urban-rural gradients across these cities, from the fully developed centers to the outskirts where there is less development but a greater presence of domesticated animals such as cattle and sheep.

“We want to understand how different habitats across this developmental gradient influence the presence of stephensi,” Vazquez-Prokopec says. “We want to answer questions such as whether the mosquitos are reproducing faster in one area or another and the factors that may be influencing these differences.”

Better understanding the behaviors of the mosquitos within different ecologies will allow the researchers to develop a suite of tools to control stephensi.

“The goal is to provide tools and guidance that enables public health officials to control these mosquitos as effectively as possible, so that their limited resources are not wasted,” Vazquez-Prokopec says. “Detecting patterns can enable public health workers to predict where hotspots may occur. That gives them an opportunity to prevent, or at least mitigate, an outbreak.”

Mosquito-borne diseases

The dengue-virus-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquito is also present in African cities, Vazquez-Prokopec notes, along with other species of the insect that have adapted to urban environments.

Working to control urban malaria outbreaks spread by stephensi may simultaneously help to control some other urban mosquito-borne diseases, although each disease and mosquito species presents unique challenges.

Aedes aegypti, for instance, only bites humans and lives almost exclusively in urban areas. Stephensi, however, also bites cattle and other animals and can get established in rural environments.

“Whenever possible, we will look for opportunities to synergize control methods across species of mosquitos,” Vazquez-Prokopec says.

Djibouti, the first place in Africa that stephensi was identified, had made such gains in controlling malaria that it appeared the disease might be eliminated in the country. Since the arrival of stephensi, however, malaria exploded in Djibouti, rising from just 27 cases in 2012 to 70,000 cases in 2020, mostly in Djibouti City.

It is not clear whether urban malaria will follow a similar pattern as stephensi spreads across Africa. But it is important to realize the growing potential for malaria outbreaks in African cities, Vazquez-Prokopec says.

“Even if urban malaria only contributes to a small percentage of the disease burden in Africa, it could still take a tremendous toll,” he says. “It’s important to learn everything we can about the disease ecology of stephensi as it enters new habitats so we can give public health officials effective tools to reduce its impact on people.”

The research had funding from the Emory Global Health Institute.

Coauthors of the current paper are from Jigjiga University; Addis Ababa University; Emory University; the Autonomous University of Yucatán, Mexico; Baylor University; the London School of Public Health; the Israel Ministry of Health; and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Source: Emory University

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New research clarifies when hyenas gang up on lions.

Publishing in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the team reveals that relationships and social interactions between hyenas can influence when two or more animals decide to work together to attack lions. This type of cooperative behavior is called mobbing.

“Social relationships can overcome barriers to mobbing and let hyenas achieve cooperation,” says Tracy Montgomery, a lead author of the new report.

Montgomery started the project while earning her doctorate in the lab of Kay Holekamp at Michigan State University.

“If hyenas greet each other, they’re more likely to mob,” says Montgomery, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the University of Konstanz in Germany. “If they have strong social bonds, they’re more likely to mob.”

Spotted hyenas are social creatures with complex social structures that are similar to those of baboons and other primates. Researchers study animals like these to explore how cooperative behaviors—like teaming up against a common foe—have evolved not just in wildlife, but in humans as well.

“It’s fascinating because this seems like something humans would do,” says Kenna Lehmann, another lead author who also worked on the project while earning her doctorate as part of Holekamp’s team. She’s now an assistant professor at Michigan State.

“The relationships they build over time make a difference,” Lehmann says. “It’s not just, ‘I’ll give you a zebra leg if you help.'”

“One of the coolest things about this paper is the finding that hyenas are sensitive to social relationships across a range of temporal scales,” adds Holekamp, a professor of integrative biology in MSU’s College of Natural Science.

“They base their decisions about whether or not to cooperate in mobbing lions on both immediate-term friendly behaviors and long-term, friendship-like relationships.”

Holekamp has been studying hyenas in Kenya for 35 years, but that wasn’t her original plan.

“I went to Kenya in 1988 thinking I’d do a dissertation-length project—three or four years—with hyenas, then I’d move on to study dolphins or monkeys or some other animals,” says Holekamp.

“But the hyenas proved to be so weird and fascinating that they have kept my rapt attention.”

Take, as a weird and fascinating example, the fact that female spotted hyenas have what are known as pseudo-penises. Understanding why female genitalia is so like male genitalia is one of the big, looming biological questions about hyenas, Holekamp says.

Although that question doesn’t factor directly into this study, it does underscore why Holekamp finds hyenas so interesting.

“Spotted hyenas appear to violate many of the basic rules of mammalian biology,” Holekamp says. “By studying them, we can potentially determine what the rules really are.”

Why would the hyenas risk it?

As doctoral students working with Holekamp, both Montgomery and Lehmann became interested in what hyenas’ rules of engagement were when it comes to mobbing lions.

“We wanted to understand why they would risk themselves in this way—because it is risky—and what they got out of it,” Montgomery says.

When researchers are able to determine what caused the death of a hyena, it’s a lion more than 25% of the time.

Lions and hyenas have overlapping territories, though. So, Lehmann and Montgomery first examined mobbing through the lens of its obvious benefits, such as fighting off lions for food.

In a 2017 report published in Current Zoology, the team show that, although mobbing occurred most frequently near freshly killed food, hyenas also formed mobs when there was no obvious benefit.

“There were times we’d be watching them thinking, ‘Why are you doing that? That is such a bad idea,'” Lehmann says.

Mobbing and social interactions

In their new study, the researchers dug deeper into mobbing behavior to look at other motivations. In doing so, they also discovered that mobbing was more frequent when the risk of injury or death to hyenas was lower, even in the absence of a benefit.

For example, male lions are larger than females and more dangerous to hyenas. Hyenas were more likely to mob when there weren’t any male lions around. Conversely, in spotted hyenas, females are larger than males and females were more likely to join mobs.

But it was the social components of mobbing that stood out most to researchers, and it’s a discovery made possible by observing several generations of hyenas in the same habitat over 35 years. During that time, the team always had several collaborators present at its research camp in the Maasai Mara National Reserve.

“There’s no way we would have been able to do this study without it being part of a 35-year project,” Lehmann says.

One of the big reasons is that researchers don’t see mobs every day—far from it. The team observed about 1,000 mobbing interactions between hyenas and lions over the past three decades.

Rarer still are the interactions where researchers could record all the information they needed.

“These interactions are extremely fast paced, there are often many hyenas and lions present and most are moving around fairly quickly,” Holekamp says. “This makes accurately recording what happens in adequate detail to include in our analyses very challenging.”

Of those roughly 1,000 interactions, 325 had robust enough data for Montgomery and Lehmann to analyze and make their discoveries. The two credited the hard work of students, research assistants, and other collaborators over the past 30 years, who helped standardize and organize observations from the field into usable data sets.

And Holekamp’s team is still working to find what other secrets those data sets hold.

“Finding these results was really exciting, but I feel like the fun part of science is you answer a question and you immediately have 50 more,” Montgomery says. “There are so many more things that we need to do with this data.”

This project was supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and by the Human Frontier Science Program. Montgomery also had support from the Dr. Marvin Hensley Endowed Scholarship Fund in Zoology.

Source: Michigan State University

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Bird feeding’s benefits to people should play a role in public guidance and policy, according the author of a new paper on the practice.

“Wildlife agencies and others making decisions on managing bird feeding need to be considering not only what the science is behind what’s going on with birds, but also the science behind what’s going on with people,” says Ashley Dayer, associate professor in the department of fish and wildlife conservation at Virginia Tech and lead author of the paper in People and Nature.

The article also encourages additional research to better understand how human well-being is affected by regularly feeding birds, and Dayer and a team of researchers are leading the way. The group is conducting what is perhaps the first large-scale bird feeding research that also incorporates observing humans.

“People are not only reporting what they see at their bird feeders, but also their emotional responses to it,” Dayer says. “It’s pretty fun because most citizen science projects focus just on the natural or physical science, but we’re now able to look at the human piece of it.”

Led by Dayer and Dana Hawley, professor of biological sciences, the four-year project aims to engage more than 10,000 bird feeders across the United States.

Dayer says interest in the topic began in 2021, when the researchers noticed state agencies advising people to stop feeding birds in response to various avian disease outbreaks. After looking into it, they found that 23 states had made such recommendations without evidence it would decrease disease spread, with varying levels of pushback, and with no real method of gauging compliance, much less its effect on people.

Hawley says the lack of information about humans related to bird feeing was something she’d not previously considered, and she found it a strong motivator for this project.

“In all my years of studying how bird feeding impacts wild birds, I didn’t give much thought to how it can also impact the people that spend their time and money feeding and watching birds,” Hawley says. “I get calls every year from people who see a sick bird at their feeder and want to know how they can help prevent disease spread. All in all, this made me wonder about how policy decisions that aim to minimize disease spread can inadvertently impact the people who feed the birds.”

To help find those answers, the research team will utilize Project FeederWatch’s existing network of bird enthusiasts. Operated by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Birds Canada, FeederWatch has tasked people with asks participants to observe and report what they see at their feeders from November to April for the past 37 years.

“FeederWatch is such a versatile data set even though, at its core, it is based on simple bird counts,” says Emma Greig, coauthor and project leader for FeederWatch. “When you overlay information about behavior, disease, habitat, and climate change with those bird counts, we can get amazing insights into ecology and evolution.”

During this project, FeederWatch participants also will be asked to observe their own well-being. Dayer says about 8,000 submissions came in in from the first week of this season alone.

Such passion for birds is something Dayer understands very well. She says her mother always made sure they had bird feeders outside their family’s home, and when she became an “empty nester,” the birds became almost like children.

“She’ll go on vacation and cut the vacation short because she needs to go home and feed her birds,” Dayer says. “So I’ve lived with someone who was really into bird feeding and have seen how important it can be to them.”

But Dayer believes the positive impact of bird feeding isn’t limited to enthusiasts and is important in proving one of the most widely accessible connection to wildlife.

“People in urban areas can feed birds. People with just a deck can feed birds. People with a wide range of physical abilities can feed birds. So it’s just a great way to keep that human connection to wildlife,” Dayer says.

Hawley agrees, and says she hopes their work helps advance policies that will foster both health and healthy relationships.

“In a world where so many of us live in cities or suburbs, having birds visit feeders in our yards or on our balconies is one of the only ways we get to connect daily with wildlife. But people want to be able to feed birds in ways that keep wild bird populations healthy and thriving,” Hawley says. “Our work will ideally help us develop guidelines for bird feeding that minimize risk to wild birds and maximize the benefits to the people that feed them.”

Source: Travis Williams for Virginia Tech

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Unfiltered air from rush-hour traffic significantly increases passengers’ blood pressure, both while in the car and up to 24 hours later, researchers report.

For more than a century, high-traffic roadways have sliced and diced American cities. Interstate highways and wide arterials are now a defining feature of most metropolitan areas, their constant flow of cars spewing pollution into nearby neighborhoods.

Researchers have only just begun to understand the health risks posed by all that pollution. Long-term exposure to traffic-related air pollution—a complex mixture of exhaust from tailpipes, brake and tire wear, and road dust—has been linked to increased rates of cardiovascular disease, asthma, lung cancer, and death.

“The body has a complex set of systems to try to keep blood pressure to your brain the same all the time. It’s a very complex, tightly regulated system, and it appears that somewhere, in one of those mechanisms, traffic-related air pollution interferes with blood pressure,” says Joel Kaufman, a physician and professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington and lead author of the study in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

An earlier experiment by Kaufman’s lab found that exposure to diesel exhaust fumes increased blood pressure in a controlled environment. The roadway traffic study was designed to test that finding in a real-world setting by isolating the effects of traffic-related air pollution.

For the study, researchers drove healthy participants between the ages of 22 and 45 through rush-hour Seattle traffic while monitoring their blood pressure. On two of the drives, unfiltered road air was allowed to enter the car, mirroring how many of us drive. On the third, the car was equipped with high-quality HEPA filters that blocked out 86% of particulate pollution. Participants did not know whether they were on a clean air drive or a roadway air drive.

Breathing unfiltered air resulted in net blood pressure increases of more than 4.50 mm Hg (millimeters of mercury) when compared to drives with filtered air. The increase occurred rapidly, peaking about an hour into the drive and holding steady for at least 24 hours. Researchers did not test past the 24-hour mark.

The size of the increase is comparable to the effect of a high-sodium diet.

“We know that modest increases in blood pressure like this, on a population level, are associated with a significant increase in cardiovascular disease,” Kaufman says. “There is a growing understanding that air pollution contributes to heart problems. The idea that roadway air pollution at relatively low levels can affect blood pressure this much is an important piece of the puzzle we’re trying to solve.”

The findings also raise questions about ultrafine particles, an unregulated and little-understood pollutant that has become a source of growing concern among public health experts. Ultrafine particles are less than 100 nanometers in diameter, much too small to be seen.

Traffic-related air pollution contains high concentrations of ultrafine particles. In the study, unfiltered air contained high levels of ultrafine particles, though the overall level of pollution as measured by fine particle concentration (PM_2.5) was relatively low, equivalent to an AQI of 36.

“Ultrafine particles are the pollutant that were most effectively filtered in our experiment—in other words, where the levels are most dramatically high on the road and low in the filtered environment,” Kaufman says. “So, the hint is that ultrafines may be especially important [for blood pressure]. To actually prove that requires further research, but this study provides a very strong clue as to what’s going on.”

Traffic-related air pollution is the main cause of air quality variation from community to community in most US metropolitan areas.

“This study is exciting because it takes the gold-standard design for laboratory studies and applies it in an on-roadway setting, answering an important question about the health effects of real-world exposures,” says lead author Michael Young, a former postdoctoral fellow in the environmental and occupational health sciences department.

“Studies on this topic often have a challenging time separating the effects of pollution from other roadway exposures like stress and noise, but with our approach the only difference between drive days was air pollution concentration. The findings are valuable because they can reproduce situations that millions of people actually experience every day.”

The US Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health funded the work.

Source: University of Washington

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Women who experience more than one episode of gestational diabetes or gestational hypertension have double or even triple the risk of heart attack or stroke, a study finds.

“Women who have had even one occurrence of gestational diabetes or gestational hypertension need support to take action. In women with more than one occurrence, the need for action is even more urgent. We hope our findings activate these individuals, their health care providers, their communities, and the government to find the tools to prevent heart disease and stroke,” says Kaberi Dasgupta, senior scientist in the Metabolic Disorders and Complications Program at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) and senior author of the study in Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice.

The researchers included in their sample nearly half a million women who had had at least two deliveries. They excluded women who had diabetes or hypertension before becoming pregnant or between pregnancies. They then examined what had happened to these women after their second pregnancy, over an average period of more than 15 years, and calculated the risks using statistical programs.

The lowest risk women were the ones who didn’t have gestational diabetes or gestational hypertension in either pregnancy. Compared to them, the ones with one occurrence of either gestational diabetes or gestational hypertension in either pregnancy had a 50% higher chance of a heart attack or stroke in the future. Women with two occurrences had double the risk. Those with three or more occurrences had triple the risk.

“Pregnancy is usually a time when younger adults are interested in addressing health issues to improve the short- and long-term health of their families. We are hoping our work incentivizes mothers to consume heart-healthy foods, exercise routinely, and regularly attend follow-up hospital visits after the birth of their baby,” says Joseph Mussa, PhD candidate in epidemiology at McGill University, RI-MUHC trainee at the Centre for Outcomes Research and Evaluation, and first author of the study.

Heart disease and stroke are challenging conditions that can affect productivity and day-to-day functioning. Yet there are ways of reducing the risks. Being more physically active, eating more fruits and vegetables and less processed foods, and having opportunities and resources to be more active and eat in a healthy way can all lower heart attack and stroke risk.

“If women are supported in their prevention efforts, especially by their families and health care teams, the impact will be positive for their health and for all of those people with whom they are connected and who rely on them—their families, colleagues, friends, and communities,” adds Dasgupta, who is also a full professor in the department of medicine.

This complex work had funding from the Heart & Stroke Foundation of Canada (Heart & Stroke), and the analyses took place in the secure data centers of the Quebec Statistical Institute.

Source: McGill University

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Being a caregiver is associated with a 9% lower risk of death from any cause over an average follow-up of 17.5 years, a new study finds.

That suggests that being a caregiver not only helps those receiving care, but also those providing it, according to the study of nearly 160,000 postmenopausal women.

“The ‘why’ is not known,” says Michael LaMonte, a research professor in the epidemiology and environmental health department in the University at Buffalo’s School of Public Health and Health Professions.

“Some believe that one need be of a certain level of health to be able to provide care to another. It’s the so-called healthy worker effect, which, if true, would give caregivers an advantage over non-caregivers, on average, in terms of disease risks,” says LaMonte, corresponding author of the study published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

But researchers tried to look at that using the data available and came up empty.

“There was not a clear indication that a ‘healthy caregiver’ phenomenon was the explanation for the lower mortality risk observed in caregivers compared to non-caregivers,” he says. “We need more investigation to clarify what might be the answer underlying better health outcomes in these folks.”

Another line of reasoning suggests that being a caregiver provides a sense of purpose and enhances the individual’s physical and emotional health characteristics, which might benefit the person providing care, LaMonte says.

Still, the findings are significant given that women aged 65 and older are the fastest-growing subgroup in the US, meaning the burden of caregiving—and its impact on health—will be substantial in the years to come.

Data from the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and the National Alliance for Caregiving found that in 2020, more than 53 million Americans over the age of 18 provided unpaid care to an adult. In addition, women represent more than 60% of caregivers in the US and more than 35% of current US caregivers are over age 65.

Prachi Chavan, who conducted the research as a postdoctoral fellow in epidemiology and environmental health, is the study’s lead author. Chavan is now an assistant professor at Eastern Virginia Medical School.

Chavan and her colleagues used data compiled from 158,987 participants aged 50 to 79 in the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), a long-term national health study funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute that initially focused on cardiovascular disease, cancers, and fractures but has since been expanded to address a broad array of questions on women’s health and aging.

In the study, 31.8% of women died during follow-up, and women who reported being a caregiver over two assessments 10 years apart had a 9% lower risk of dying from any cause compared with non-caregivers. Caregiving was also associated with lower risks of death from cardiovascular disease or cancer.

The associations did not differ according to caregiving frequency or when participants were stratified by age, race-ethnicity, depressive symptoms, optimism, or living status.

Source: University at Buffalo

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A combination of antibiotics is more effective in treating Lyme disease than the commonly prescribed course of one single antibiotic, a new study finds.

The finding could pave the way for improved Lyme disease treatments, particularly in persistent cases that have not responded to standard antibiotic treatment.

Lyme disease, caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi and transmitted through tick bites, is a growing health concern with over 476,000 estimated cases annually in North America alone. While most cases resolve with a short course of oral antibiotics, a notable percentage of patients develop chronic symptoms known as post-treatment Lyme disease due to delayed or insufficient treatment.

The study involved a series of experiments using various antibiotics both alone and in combination in a mouse model of Lyme disease. The research team used multiple detection methods to assess the efficacy of treatments.

While none of the single antibiotics completely eradicated the persistent infection after a 28-day treatment course, several combination therapies of already FDA-approved drugs, successfully cleared the infection.

Specifically, four different dual combinations of antibiotics (doxycycline and ceftriaxone; dapsone and rifampicin; dapsone and clofazimine; doxycycline and cefotaxime) and three triple combinations of antibiotics and antimicrobials (doxycycline, ceftriaxone, and carbomycin; doxycycline, cefotaxime, and loratadine; dapsone, rifampicin, and clofazimine) eradicated persistent infections of the bacteria.

These results suggest a need for further studies of combination antibiotic therapies in successfully eradicating Lyme disease.

“Lyme disease is a complicated disease due to the evasive nature of Borrelia burgdorferi, which hides in organs soon after infection,” says Monica Embers, associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Tulane University and lead author of the study in Frontiers in Microbiology. “This finding could be a game-changer in how we approach this complex and often debilitating disease.”

This study represents a significant step in persistent Lyme disease treatment and could lead to more effective strategies in combating this disease.

The Bay Area Lyme Foundation and the National Institutes of Health funded the work.

Source: Tulane University

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More older Americans use cannabis now than before the pandemic, with 12% saying they’ve consumed a THC-containing substance in the past year and 4% saying they do so multiple times a week, a new study finds.

The new poll of people aged 50 to 80 also found that older adults who drink alcohol at risky levels have a much higher rate of cannabis use.

The findings, published in the journal Cannabis and Cannabinoids Research, suggest a need for more education and screening of older adults for cannabis-related risks.

“As the stress of the pandemic and the increased legalization of cannabis by states converged, our findings suggest cannabis use increased among older adults nationally,” says lead author Anne Fernandez, an addiction psychologist in the University of Michigan Addiction Center and psychiatry department.

“Older adults represent a vulnerable age group for cannabis use due to interactions with medications, risky driving, cannabis-related mental health impacts, and increased possibility of falls and memory issues.”

The data in the study come from the National Poll on Healthy Aging. Researchers conducted the national poll of 2,023 older adults in January 2021, nine months into the official pandemic declaration and just as the first COVID-19 vaccines were being made available to the groups at the highest risk.

The 12% overall past-year use of cannabis seen in the new study is higher than the 9.5% seen in 2019 by other researchers pre-pandemic, and far higher than the 3% seen in another study in 2006, when only 12 states had passed medical cannabis laws. The NPHA in 2017 found that 6% of older adults had used cannabis for medical purposes.

In the new study, in addition to the 4% who said they use cannabis products four or more times a week, another 5% said they use cannabis once a month or less. The poll question asked about use of any product containing THC, the main psychoactive component of cannabis—including edibles—and used multiple common names for cannabis. It did not differentiate between medical and recreational use of cannabis.

Older adults who said they were unemployed, those who said they were unmarried and had no partner, and those who said they drank alcohol were more likely to say they used cannabis.

Fernandez notes an especially concerning finding: those whose alcohol use was high enough to cause physical and psychological harms were nearly eight times as likely to say they had used cannabis in the past year. But even those with low-risk alcohol drinking patterns were more than twice as likely to say they had used cannabis in the past year.

This group of dual-substance users is one that doctors and public health officials should pay special attention to, Fernandez says.

“Other research has shown that using both alcohol and cannabis increases the chance that a person will drive while impaired,” she explains. “They are also more likely to have physical and mental health issues, including substance use disorders. Screening for alcohol use, cannabis use, and other drug use could help more people get counseling and reduce their risk and risk to others.”

While there were no statistical differences among older adults by age, health or mental health status, income, or education, those who said they had Hispanic backgrounds were less likely than non-Hispanic older adults to say they used cannabis. Fernandez says this is consistent with other research showing lower cannabis use in the Latino community.

She advises any older adult who chooses to use cannabis products for any reason to be open with their health care provider about it, especially if they also drink alcohol or take certain medications.

Physicians, nurse practitioners, and pharmacists can advise if any medications a person is taking might interact with cannabis, including ones for insomnia, depression, and anxiety, opioid-containing pain medications, seizure medications, and blood thinners.

Source: University of Michigan

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A new prescription wristwatch continuously monitors the wearer’s heart rhythm and uses an algorithm to detect atrial fibrillation.

As the use of wearable technology grows, smartwatches are marketed across the globe to consumers as a way to monitor health.

For some, these devices let them know they have atrial fibrillation, an irregular heartbeat, which is known to increase the risk of heart attack and stroke.

“Unfortunately, this has led to a tsunami of healthy patients coming to clinics complaining about having atrial fibrillation, and we see many false positives without really having a way to use these devices clinically,” says Hamid Ghanbari, an assistant professor of internal medicine-cardiology at the University of Michigan Medical School and lead author of the study in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

The clinical-grade device, called the Verily Study Watch, addresses that clinical gap and has proved very accurate at identifying atrial fibrillation in study participants.

“Right now, we typically manage patients with atrial fibrillation using electrocardiogram, or ECG, patches that we put on the chest, but the future of Afib management will be on the wrist,” Ghanbari says.

Much like consumer wearable devices, the Verily Study Watch detects subtle changes in heart rhythm by sending light pulses through the skin into the blood vessels, a process known as photoplethysmography.

If it suspects atrial fibrillation, the device would prompt a user to take a single-lead ECG to determine if the algorithm correctly identified to Afib.

The results would then be reviewed by a cardiographic technician before it was reported to the participant’s physician.

For the study, the device analyzed data every 15 minutes, and its deep neural network algorithm determined whether over 100 participants had atrial fibrillation between September 2020 and May 2021.

The study watch correctly identified atrial fibrillation in the vast majority of participants, with levels of false negatives and positives that was similar to other devices for detection of Afib using similar photoplethysmography technology.

Although there was a decrease in performance of the device for some episodes of atrial fibrillation for participants with darker skin tones, it was still able to detect Afib in those patients.

The researchers say this is the first study to report the performance of the photoplenthysmography-based algorithm for participants at all levels of physical activity. The device’s accuracy of detecting atrial fibrillation was comparable during low and moderate levels of activity.

Consumer-facing devices, like Apple Watch and Fitbit, are cleared by the United States Food and Drug Administration for pre-diagnostic purposes but are not intended for clinical decision making.

This device, Ghanbari says, could provide the link that allows providers to effectively use data from wearables to manage patients with Afib.

“The prescription Study Watch bridges the gap between long term, continuous monitoring that is currently more invasive and the consumer space with a practical solution for Afib detection and burden assessment,” he says.

“It is not intended to replace interval ECG monitoring for patients who need it. However, the multistage system may also limit the burden on clinicians and avoid the deluge of notifications generated by other wrist-worn devices that rarely result in clinically actionable findings.”

The creator of the watch, Verily Life Sciences, received 510(k) clearance from the FDA, a premarket submission to demonstrate the product’s efficacy and similarity to a legally marketed device.

“There is a need for clinical grade wrist-worn wearable that is affordable and can be prescribed by clinicians for the long term, personalized and continuous management of patients with Afib,” Ghanbari says.

Additional coauthors are from the University of Michigan, the University of Pittsburgh, Verily Life Sciences, Google, iRhythm Technologies, the Colorado Heart and Vascular, the San Diego Cardiac Center, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and Ascension Providence Hospital.

Ghanbari is a paid consultant for Verily Life Sciences, Boston Scientific, Johnson and Johnson, and Huxley Medical Inc.

Source: University of Michigan

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All modern maize descends from a hybrid created just over 5,000 years ago in central Mexico, thousands of years after the plant was first domesticated, researchers report.

Maize is one of the world’s most widely grown crops. It is used for both human and animal foods and holds great cultural significance, especially for Indigenous peoples in the Americas. Yet despite its importance, the origins of the grain have been hotly debated for more than a century.

The findings, published in the journal Science, have implications both for improving one of the world’s most important crops and for understanding how the histories of people and their crops influence each other.

“It’s a new model for the origins and spread of maize, and how it became a staple across the Americas,” says senior author Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra, professor in the evolution and ecology department at the University of California, Davis.

For the last few decades, the consensus has been that maize (Zea mays) was domesticated once from a single wild grass—called teosinte—in the lowlands of southwest Mexico about 9,000 to 10,000 years ago.

Known as corn in the United States, maize is not only a staple of diets around the globe, but also can be processed into sweeteners, ethanol fuel, and other uses.

More recently, though, it’s become clear that the genome of modern maize also contains a hefty dose of DNA from a second teosinte that grows in the highlands of central Mexico.

Ross-Ibarra and collaborators analyzed the genomes of over a thousand samples of maize and wild relatives. They found that about 20% of the genome of all maize worldwide comes from this second highland teosinte.

The new findings suggest that, though maize was domesticated around 10,000 years ago, it was not until 4,000 years later, when it hybridized with highland teosinte, that maize really took off as a popular crop and food staple. This is also supported by archaeological evidence of the increasing importance of maize around the same time.

The new crop spread rapidly through the Americas and later worldwide. Today, about 1.2 billion metric tons are harvested each year globally.

The hunt for why highland teosinte enabled maize to become a staple is still underway, Ross-Ibarra says. The researchers did find genes related to cob size—perhaps representing an increased yield potential—and flowering time, which likely helped maize, a tropical crop, to grow at higher latitudes with longer days.

Hybridization may also have brought “hybrid vigor,” where a hybrid organism is more vigorous than either of its parents. The researchers observed that genomic segments from highland teosinte contained fewer harmful mutations than did other parts of the genome.

While the initial hybridization may have been accidental, it’s likely that Indigenous farmers recognized and took advantage of the novel variation introduced from highland maize, Ross-Ibarra says. Even today, he says, “If you talk to Mexican farmers, some will tell you that letting wild maize grow near the fields makes their crops stronger.”

A team led by Ross-Ibarra with Graham Coop, a professor at UC Davis, archaeologists at UC Santa Barbara, and geneticists at Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences will now study the coevolution of humans and maize in the Americas. They will use genetics to look at how humans and maize spread across the continent and how populations of both maize and humans grew and shrank as they interacted with each other.

“We will incorporate human genetic data, maize genetics, and archaeological data in an effort to answer many of the questions raised by our new model of maize origins,” Ross-Ibarra says.

Additional coauthors of the Science paper are from UC Davis, Purdue University, Iowa State University, UC Santa Barbara, Penn State, Cornell University, Huazhong Agricultural University, Jilin Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Laboratorio Nacional de Genómica para la Biodiversidad, Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Sichuan Agricultural University, and China Agricultural University.

The National Natural Science Foundation of China, the US National Science Foundation, and the US Department of Agriculture supported the work.

Source: UC Davis

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Transitioning away from firefighter turnout gear with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances could bring potential performance tradeoffs, according to new research.

The chemicals offer water- and oil-repelling properties on the outer shells of firefighter turnout gear.

The study showed that turnout gear without PFAS outer shell coatings were not oil-repellent, posing a potential flammability hazard to firefighters if exposed to oil and flame, says Bryan Ormond, assistant professor of textile engineering, chemistry, and science at North Carolina State University. Ormond is corresponding author of the study in the Journal of Industrial Textiles.

“All oil repellents can also repel water, but all water repellents don’t necessarily repel oil. Diesel fuel is really difficult to repel, as is hydraulic fluid; in our testing, PFAS-treated materials repel both,” he says. “In our tests, turnout gear without PFAS repelled water but not oil or hydraulic fluid. Further, oils seem to spread out even more on the PFAS-free gear, potentially increasing the hazard.”

PFAS chemicals—known as forever chemicals because of their environmental persistence—are used in food packaging, cookware, and cosmetics, among other uses, but have recently been implicated in higher risks of cancer, higher cholesterol levels, and compromised immune systems in humans.

In response, firefighters have sought alternative chemical compounds—like the hydrocarbon wax coating used in the study—on turnout gear to repel water and oils.

Besides testing the oil- and water-repelling properties of PFAS-treated and PFAS-free outer garments, the researchers also compared how the outer shells aged in job-related exposures like weathering, high heat, and repeated laundering, and whether the garments remained durable and withstood tears and rips.

The study showed that PFAS-treated and PFAS-free outer shells performed similarly after exposure to UV rays and various levels of heat and moisture, as well as passes through heating equipment—similar to a pizza oven—and through washing machines.

“Laundering the gear is actually very damaging to turnout gear because of the washing machine’s agitation and cleaning agents used,” Ormond says.

“We also performed chemical analyses to see what’s happening during the weathering process,” says lead author Nur Mazumder, a doctoral student in fiber and polymer science.

“Are we losing the PFAS chemistries, the PFAS-free chemistries, or both when we age the garments? It turns out that we lost significant amounts of both of these finishes after the aging tests.”

Both types of garments performed similarly when tested for strength against tearing the outer shell fabric. The researchers say the PFAS and PFAS-free coatings didn’t seem to affect this attribute.

Future work will explore how much oil repellency is needed by firefighters out in the field, Ormond says.

“Even with PFAS treatment, you see a difference between a splash of fluid and soaked-in fluid,” he says. “For all of its benefits, PFAS-treated gear, when soaked, is dangerous to firefighters.

“So we need to really ask ‘What do firefighters need?’ If you’re not experiencing this need for oil repellency, there’s no worry about switching to non-PFAS gear. But firefighters need to know the non-PFAS gear will absorb oil, regardless of what those oils are.”

Coauthor Andrew Hall, another doctoral student in fiber and polymer science, is also testing dermal absorption, or taking the aged outer shell materials and placing them on a skin surrogate for a day or two. Are outer shell chemicals absorbed in the skin surrogate after these admittedly extreme exposure durations?

“Firefighting as a job is classified as a carcinogen and it shouldn’t be,” Ormond says. “How do we make better gear for them? How do we come up with better finishes and strategies for them? These aren’t just fabrics. They are highly engineered pieces of material that aren’t easily replaced.”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Assistance to Firefighters Grants Program funded the work.

Source: NC State

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A new material replicates the structure responsible for the blue feathers of eastern bluebirds and other songbirds. The new material could be used in batteries or filtration.

The blue color of the eastern bluebird doesn’t come from pigments but from the special structure of the feather. Viewed under the microscope, the feathers are traversed by a network of channels with a diameter of just a few hundred nanometers. By way of classification, a nanometer is a billionth of a meter.

The blue of the bluebird came to the attention of ETH Zurich researchers from the Laboratory of Soft and Living Materials led by former ETH professor Eric Dufresne. So much so that they decided to replicate this material in the laboratory. They have now succeeded with a new method: they have developed a material that exhibits the same structural design of the bluebird feathers, while offering potential for practical applications thanks to its nanonetworks.

The researchers used as a starting material a transparent silicone rubber that can be stretched and deformed. The scientists placed this rubber in an oily solution and left it to swell for several days in an oven at temperatures of 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees Fahrenheit). They then cooled it and extracted the rubber from the oily solution.

The researchers were able to observe under the microscope how the nanostructure of the rubber had changed during the procedure, and they identified similar network structures to those that give the bluebird feather its blue color. The main difference is the thickness of the channels formed—the bird’s feather measured approximately 200 nanometers and the synthetic material 800 nanometers.

The principle behind the network formation is phase separation. This phenomenon can be observed in the kitchen with a salad dressing made of oil and vinegar. Mixing the two liquids is not easy and is best achieved by shaking vigorously. The liquids separate again as soon as the shaking stops. However, it is also possible to mix them by means of heating and then cooling them again to separate them. This is precisely the principle the researchers applied to mix the silicone rubber and oily solution. This resulted in the formation of an entire microscopic network of channels inside the rubber.

“We are able to control and select the conditions in such a way that channels are formed during phase separation,” says lead author Carla Fernández Rico. “We have succeeded in halting the procedure before the two phases merge with each other completely again.” This channel-like structure is very similar to the structure of the bird’s feathers.

The advantage of this new method is that the new material is several centimeters in size and remains scalable. “In principle you could use a piece of rubbery plastic of any size. However, you’d then also need correspondingly large containers and ovens,” says Fernández Rico.

The novelty of this material processing method is generating a lot of interest in the physics community. “We have a simple system made of only two ingredients, but the final structure obtained is very complex and controlled by the properties of the ingredients,” says Fernández Rico. “We have been approached by several theoretical groups that are proposing the use of physical models in order to understand the key physical principles of this new process and to predict its outcome.”

The new material offers potential for technical and sustainable applications. Batteries are one possible field of application. Ions in batteries typically move between electrodes through a liquid called the electrolyte. One of the main reasons batteries lose their charging capacity over time, or even end up failing, is because the ions react with the liquid electrolyte, which causes the two electrodes to establish physical contact and damage the battery. Liquid electrolytes could be replaced by solid electrolytes with a network structure of interconnected channels—such as the one shown by the researchers, which would avoid physical contact between electrodes, while maintaining good ion transport through the battery.

Water filters could be another application. Good transport properties across the interconnected channels and large surface areas are advantageous here. The ratio of surface to volume is enormous in the case of channel-like structures. This enables the efficient removal of contaminants such as bacteria or other particles from water.

“However, the product is still a long way from being ready for market,” says Fernández Rico. “While the rubbery material is cheap and easy to obtain, the oily phase is quite expensive. A less expensive pair of materials would be required here.”

Fernández Rico wishes to develop her future research with a view to sustainability: “Many natural polymers, such as cellulose or chitin, have a structure similar to the rubber used in our work.” However, working with a natural material such as cellulose is (more) environmentally friendly than with silicone rubbers derived from petroleum. The postdoctoral researcher therefore wishes to find out in future how such materials can be made more functional to exploit their potential.

The findings appear in Nature Materials.

Source: Deborah Kyburz for ETH Zurich

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New natural disaster risk modeling offers a reliable and affordable way for governments to estimate expected damage from river floods that overflow their banks.

In recent months, rivers overflowing their banks have caused property damage and loss of life in France, Italy, Mexico, and South Africa, underscoring the increasing perils of climate change.

To prepare for such river floods, governments deploy mathematical models. However, due to time constraints and lack of data, these models sometimes incorporate “off-the-shelf” damage calculations based on previous unrelated floods.

Unfortunately, these predictions are often inaccurate, leading to inadequate interventions and failing to sufficiently protect property and human life.

The new method not only provides users with step-by-step instructions but also measures and assigns numerical values to the level of uncertainty in individual river flood damage forecasts, giving governments a clearer picture of how reliable their predictions are.

“The bottom line is that accurate predictions are crucial to the safety and well-being of people and property. If a government acts based on inaccurate information, its preparation can be off by orders of magnitude, with very serious results,” says Gonzalo Pita, an associate research scientist in the Whiting School of Engineering’s civil and systems engineering department at Johns Hopkins University.

The study, published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, builds upon work that previously appeared in the Journal of Hydrology.

In the new study, Pita first investigated the accuracy of using expert opinion alone to estimate and predict flood damage. He surveyed multiple authorities and simulated thousands of expert surveys in numerous combinations to analyze how the composition of the expert team influences prediction accuracy.

“What I found was a variability in accuracy of between 10% and 46% among experts, which is a wide range,” Pita says. “I also learned that accuracy was enhanced by adding additional expert voices, rather than simply adding more questions to the survey.”

Pita then tackled the issue of “damage functions,” a fundamental component of natural disaster risk simulations. A function refers to the mathematical relationship between two variables—in this case, a depth-damage function describes the correlation between the depth of flood waters and the level of damage it causes, as in “1 foot of flood water in a home causes $10,000 in damage.” Creating these functions accurately is out of the reach of many governments, Pita says.

“It is a very expensive process in terms of money and time, and countries sometimes may not have the expertise, time, or data to develop them within an acceptable timeframe. So with this method, these functions can be built inexpensively but with a useful level of accuracy that governments can use provisionally until they get better data that will enable them to generate more accurate functions.”

The new approach works by helping quantify the uncertainty in experts’ predictions by assigning weights to each expert, resulting in a more detailed analysis of the uncertainties involved. The result is a method that Pita expects to be “very useful” for flood modelers and influencing preparedness policy.

“These types of insights could inform policy directly and indirectly, from enabling smarter zoning laws and budgeting for asset maintenance to designing disaster insurance programs. All of this is to say that better flood damage data and predictions have the potential to have far-reaching benefits,” he says.

Source: Johns Hopkins University

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Norovirus, a common viral stomach illness, tends to occur between November and April, and can spread almost anywhere.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been at least 13 cruise ship outbreaks so far in 2023. But norovirus causes about 20 million cases each year in the US with more than 100,000 hospitalizations, so it’s important to know how to spot it and deal with an infection.

Joshua St. Louis, an assistant professor of family medicine at the Tufts University School of Medicine, spends much of his time caring for people with chronic infections. Here, he shares some tips on how to prevent a norovirus infection, what to do if you get sick, and how to recover:

1. Isolate and clean to stop the spread

Norovirus spreads when droplets from an infected person’s vomit and feces are ingested by someone else. It can’t spread through inhalation of particles, or through coughing or sneezing, St. Louis says. The best way to prevent the spread of norovirus once you’re sick is to isolate yourself from others, and, especially, to use a different bathroom.

“Norovirus is extremely contagious,” he says. “It’s very easily transmitted to others. And unfortunately, when someone’s having profuse vomiting and diarrhea, it’s pretty hard to not be exposed to norovirus particles.”

Washing your hands frequently with soap and water is another important way to prevent the virus from spreading, St. Louis says. That’s partly because norovirus can’t be killed by alcohol—the typical disinfectant used in hand sanitizers and disinfectant wipes.

So, if you have to share space with an infected person, make sure to disinfect commonly touched surfaces with a solution of bleach and water to kill the virus. If you have a child, especially under the age of 12 months, ensure that anyone coming into contact with the child washes their hands first, too.

2. Expect a sudden onset of norovirus symptoms

Norovirus symptoms appear very soon after infection, St. Louis says. “People feel well one moment, and then the next moment, they feel extremely unwell.” You’ll know you probably have norovirus if your main symptoms are almost uncontrollable diarrhea and vomiting—virtually all infected people experience diarrhea, and about half have vomiting as well.

Rarer norovirus symptoms may include a fever, chills, or muscle aches. In most healthy people, these symptoms leave almost as quickly as they arrived, and usually last for only about 12-36 hours. Since symptoms arrive quickly, norovirus rarely spreads from asymptomatic people, so it’s unlikely you’ll get it from a seemingly healthy roommate or family member.

3. Watch for dehydration

Dehydration is the most dangerous effect of norovirus, so replacing lost fluids is key. If you’re at home, make sure to stay hydrated by trying to sip water every 15 minutes. Have electrolyte powders or electrolyte drinks, such as Pedialyte or Gatorade, on hand. Symptoms of dehydration among people of all ages include dry mouth and lips, a decreased frequency of urination, fatigue, or dizziness. Cracked lips or skin that looks tight or pale are signs that dehydration may be severe.

While hospitalization is unlikely, it may be necessary if an infected person gets too dehydrated. Severe dehydration can lead to kidney failure or life-threatening low blood pressure. If you go to the hospital, doctors will likely replenish your fluids and electrolytes intravenously and administer Tylenol to control fevers. Antibiotics don’t affect norovirus, and there aren’t currently any effective antiviral medications, says St. Louis.

4. Help your body recover after norovirus

Even after the worst of the infection passes, you may still feel dehydrated or have persistent stomach issues from a lack of beneficial bacteria in your gut.

“Norovirus sort of decimates your microbiome,” St. Louis says. “It will take weeks to months to rebuild a healthy gut, so people may continue to have lingering symptoms like occasional diarrhea, cramping, nausea, and constipation until they’re able to get their microbiome back in order.” St. Louis recommends helping your digestive tract recover by eating a balanced diet, as well as fermented foods such as yogurt, kombucha, or pickled vegetables.

5. Pay special attention to those with weaker immune systems

Children under 12 months old or people with weakened immune systems are at a higher risk of more severe norovirus symptoms and may be more likely to develop chronic norovirus, when symptoms of norovirus last for weeks or even months.

St. Louis recommends that any child under 12 months or any immunocompromised person should receive professional medical care if they’re experiencing norovirus symptoms, especially profuse vomiting, diarrhea, excessive sleepiness, or refusal to eat and drink.

“I would encourage parents of kids under one year old to seek out medical attention urgently if their child is behaving in a way that seems out of the norm for them,” says St. Louis.

Source: Grace van Deelen for Tufts University

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A new mathematical model provides fast and reliable predictions of how far wind can carry a plant’s seeds.

As Earth’s climate continues to change, a plant’s ability to adapt to its shifting environment is critical to its survival.

Often, to stay alive a plant must move locations by releasing its seeds, but plants are rooted in the ground and cannot move themselves. Instead, they are dependent on animals or the wind to carry their seeds to a new location.

Playing an essential foundational role in an ecosystem, plants contribute to the well-being of human health by helping create resources like food and medicine.

A team of researchers developed the model to better understand how plants can maintain resiliency in the face of challenges like climate change.

“Once seeds are released from a plant, we wanted to know how far they can go because as wind conditions fluctuate the seeds will be moved around differently as a result of various weights, sizes, and shapes,” says Binbin Wang, an assistant professor in the civil and environmental engineering department at the University of Missouri.

“This model gives us a better idea of the probability of where a seed will land on the ground in different conditions depending on the seed type, the plant type, and the wind speed.”

One advantage of the model is its ability to predict the probability of where seeds might eventually land on the ground when winds are turbulent, says Jeffrey Wood, an assistant professor in the School of Natural Resources.

“Like eddies created by currents in a river, there are also eddies swirling around in the atmosphere, particularly in the lowest part closest to the Earth’s surface,” Wood says. “These atmospheric eddies, called turbulence, are chaotic, swirling movements that can transport gases and heat around in the atmosphere. They also move seeds through the air.”

Changes in one part of the ecosystem can create a “snowball effect” on other parts. For instance, a loss in plant diversity can disrupt the fragile stability of the entire ecosystem, and affect both human and animal populations.

That’s why understanding seed dispersal is important. Plants can only make this move once during their life—as a seed, says Lauren Sullivan, an assistant professor in the College of Natural Science at Michigan State University.

For example, if the winds are low, calm, and not turbulent when a plant is producing its seeds, the seeds might fall straight down and not spread anywhere, she says.

“Understanding how plants move as seeds year-round is critical for us to analyze how they’ll be able to handle climate change,” Sullivan says. “This movement is also important for how we can increase diversity in the ecosystem.

“As a biologist, instead of making assumptions about how plants move, we’re now able to partner with researchers who can factor in aspects like aerodynamics and micro-meteorology. This innovative approach can help us develop accurate models that are simple enough to make good predictions in just a short amount of time.”

The model, which makes predictions based on seed and plant type, plant height, and wind speed, can develop an entire year’s worth of predictive data in just one or two days. It’s similar to other models that Wang has created for predicting the spread of fish eggs in rivers, or the spread of virus-laden respiratory droplets in air.

As part of their future work, the team will develop educational programming for K-12 and college students. For example, they will provide opportunities for college students to explore how different disciplines, such as agriculture, biological sciences, and engineering, can work together to solve different real-world problems.

The study appears in the journal Ecological Modelling. The United States Department of Agriculture funded the work.

Source: University of Missouri

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Businesses that believe the best vaccine for the pandemic is simply returning to in-person work will be disappointed, according to organizational psychologist Constance Hadley.

The surgeon general of the United States has declared loneliness a lethal pandemic, equating it to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Hadley studies one environment where a loneliness outbreak seems to be spreading: the workplace.

That COVID-19 worsened loneliness—with working from home and Zoom—is perhaps no surprise. But workplaces could be hothouses of loneliness before the virus forced employees home, according to research by Hadley, a lecturer in management and organization at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.

“Remember the definition of loneliness: it’s the feedback from the environment that creates loneliness.”

“Going back to my dissertation at Harvard, I was studying people with emotionally, psychologically hard jobs, like emergency room physicians, social workers, and special education teachers,” she says. “How the heck do you survive without burning out? It was the social support they got from their colleagues at work. That is the unacknowledged grease that keeps a lot of these organizations going.”

When she found many people lacking such collegial support, she turned her attention to loneliness. Others have quantified its economic damage: $154 billion annually “in stress-related absenteeism alone,” according to Cigna.

In his report, Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy agreed that pre-COVID trends fostered loneliness, including plunging rates of marriage, childbearing, and churchgoing, with racially, ethnically, economically, and sexually marginalized Americans especially at risk. “Recent surveys,” Murthy wrote, “have found that approximately half of US adults report experiencing loneliness, with some of the highest rates among young adults.”

Hadley discussed her research and what it suggests for combating loneliness—and the best ways of bringing workers back to the office:

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