Futurity

Chimps focus on positive relationships in old age

Wed, 28 Oct 2020 19:46:11 GMT

As they get older, wild chimpanzees seek interactions with other group members in increasingly positive ways, a new study shows.

Humans prioritize close, positive relationships during aging, which can support physical and mental health. The researchers have now found these social aging behaviors in wild chimpanzees.

The study, published in Science, uses data from the Kanyawara chimpanzee community living in Kibale National Park in Uganda. Scientists with the Kibale Chimpanzee Project have studied the animals for decades, and researchers of the current study used this long-term dataset to test socio-emotional selectivity theory.

Big Brown is an older male in the chimpanzee group. (Credit: John Lower)

The theory proposes that people shift their social behavior from a focus on forming new friends in young adulthood, to maintaining a smaller network of close, fulfilling relationships for companionship in old age.

“The proposal is that this shift happens because of our human ability to monitor our own personal time horizons—how much time we have left in our life—which causes us to prioritize emotionally fulfilling relationships when time is perceived to be running out,” says lead author Alexandra Rosati, professor of psychology and anthropology at the University of Michigan.

Rosati and her colleagues discovered that aging male chimpanzees have more mutual and equitable friendships characterized by high, equitable investment. Younger adult chimpanzees, in contrast, are more likely to form lopsided relationships where their partner does not reciprocate.

Older males are more likely to be alone, but also interact more with important social partners when they join the group. Males also showed a relative shift from more agonistic interactions to more positive, affiliative interactions over the lifespan, the researchers say.

“These results show that chimpanzees share these special social aging patterns with humans, even though they do not have the same rich future time perspective and knowledge of their own mortality that we have,” says co-lead author Zarin Machanda, professor of anthropology and biology at Tufts University.

The shared pattern between chimpanzees and humans could represent an adaptive response where older adults focus on important social relationships that provide benefits, and avoid interactions that have negative consequences as they lose competitive fighting ability, she says.

The research highlights how long-term behavioral datasets from wild animals like chimpanzees can help us understand and promote healthy aging in humans, Rosati says.

Additional coauthors are from Harvard University, the University of New Mexico, and the Kibale Chimpanzee Project.

Source: University of Michigan

The post Chimps focus on positive relationships in old age appeared first on Futurity.

Quarantines and other non-medical tactics cut COVID deaths

Wed, 28 Oct 2020 18:34:55 GMT

Voluntary shelter-in-place, quarantines, and other non-pharmaceutical interventions can reduce the peak number of COVID infections, daily infection rates, cumulative infections, and overall deaths, researchers report.

“High compliance with voluntary quarantine—where the entire household stays home if there is a person with symptoms or risk of exposure in the household—has a significant impact on reducing the spread,” says Pinar Keskinocak, professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) and director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems at Georgia Institute of Technology.

“Shelter-in-place (SIP) puts the brakes on the spread for some time, but if people go back to ‘business as usual‘ after SIP, the significant impact is lost, so it needs to be followed up by voluntary quarantine and other physical distancing measures.”

Using data from the state of Georgia, researchers determined that a combination of non-pharmaceutical interventions, with various levels of compliance that change over time, could in some instances cut cumulative infections in half and reduce the peak number of infections to about a third of what could have been seen, “flattening the peak” to avoid overwhelming a state’s health care system.

For the study, published in PLOS ONE, researchers compared actual statistics to revised models of what could have happened in the state during the past seven and a half months without the physical distancing.

As COVID-19 cases increase toward what may be a new peak this fall, the study could help public health officials evaluate the benefits of potential intervention strategies, for example, in the debate around K-12 school closure.

The study modeled the number of COVID-19 infections and resulting severe outcomes, and the need for hospital capacity under social distancing, particularly, school closures, shelter-in-place, and voluntary quarantine.

“As one would expect, there is variation across the state in the observed data, which depends in large part on people’s behaviors,” says Nicoleta Serban, a professor in ISyE. “For example, mobility increased faster in some counties compared to others, which is likely to be correlated with increased physical and social interactions, and therefore faster spread of the coronavirus.”

The team, including PhD students Buse Eylul Oruc and Arden Baxter, developed and used an agent-based simulation model to project the COVID infection spread.

“This is a sophisticated mathematical model which mimics what might happen in practice—under different scenarios—by capturing the progression of the disease in an individual, as well as the interactions between people in the household, in peer groups such as schools or workplaces, or in community groups such as grocery stores,” Oruc says.

The model uses parameters specific to COVID-19 and data from Georgia on population interactions and demographics. The study covered a period starting February 18 and evaluated different social distancing scenarios, including baselines in which no intervention would have taken place or the only intervention would have been K-12 school closure, comparing them to combinations of shelter-in-place and voluntary quarantine with different timelines and compliance levels.

Researchers compared outcomes at the state and community level for the number and percentage of cumulative and daily new symptomatic and asymptomatic infections, hospitalizations, and deaths, as well as COVID-19-related demand for hospital beds, ICU beds, and ventilators.

The number of hospitalizations in Georgia turned out to be fewer than models last spring had forecast, but “models accurately predicted which hospital regions of the state that would have the largest gaps between number of people with severe outcomes and available care capacity—and therefore face potential shortages of ICU beds, hospital beds, and ventilators,” Baxter says.

The results suggest that shelter-in place followed by voluntary quarantine reduced peak infections to less than a third of what we would have seen if no intervention had taken place and to less than a half if only schools had been closed. The models predicted correctly that the interventions would delay the peak from April to sometime between late July to mid-September, reducing the daily strain on health care systems.

According to the study, increasing shelter-in-place duration from four to five weeks yielded between 2% to 9% and 3% to 11% decrease in cumulative infection and deaths, respectively. Regardless of the shelter-in-place duration, increasing voluntary quarantine compliance decreased daily new infections and cumulative infections by about 50%. The cumulative number of deaths ranged from 6,660 to 19,430 under different scenarios.

As COVID infection rates rise in the United States during late October, the study could help public health officials select the best techniques for addressing the viral threat. Georgia’s total population is approximately 10.5 million, and COVID-19 related deaths have exceeded 7,600.

“The study further highlighted and quantified the impact of how compliance with public health measures impact infectious disease spread,” Keskinocak says. “The takeaway message is that each of us have the power to control our health by making the right choices.”

“As individuals and as a nation, we often expect technological or medical fixes or cures to health problems, whereas many of these problems, whether they are at the individual level or the public health level, are caused by or exacerbated by our choices and behaviors,” Keskinocak says.

“For many of them, we don’t need a new fancy device, drug, or technology to make things better. As individuals, or households, or communities, we have the power and the responsibility to impact and improve our own health, and the public health, by making healthy choices.”

The National Science Foundation, a William W. George endowment, a Virginia C. and Joseph C. Mello endowment, Georgia Tech benefactors, and Georgia Tech supported the work. The funders played no role in the study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation, or in writing the manuscript.

Source: Georgia Tech

The post Quarantines and other non-medical tactics cut COVID deaths appeared first on Futurity.

Can gargling saltwater replace nasal swab COVID tests?

Wed, 28 Oct 2020 17:42:26 GMT

A new COVID test that relies on gargling with saltwater instead of using a nasal swab shows encouraging initial results, researchers say.

Michael Worobey, head of the ecology and evolutionary biology department at the University of Arizona, specializes in the evolution of viruses. He began using the mouth rinse test in limited campus populations after reading a paper from researchers in British Columbia published on medRxiv, a preprint server for health sciences research.

While papers published on preprint servers have not yet received peer review and therefore should be treated as preliminary, Worobey deemed the report convincing enough to give the mouth rinse approach a shot.

He has since used the test to collect samples from University of Arizona students in isolation dormitories who have already had a positive COVID test, as well as from students, staff, and faculty willing to enroll in his study immediately after providing samples for clinical testing through Campus Health.

The sampling effort aims to collect as many virus genomes as possible as part of an ongoing study that seeks to discover how SARS-CoV-2 evolves over time and how it spreads through the human population. Initial results have been encouraging, says Worobey, who also is associate director of the University of Arizona BIO5 Institute.

“It’s vastly more tolerable than the nasopharyngeal swab, and people can do it all by themselves and even keep their mask on almost the whole time,” says Worobey, who doesn’t know of any other US universities using the mouth rinse test.

Demonstrating the COVID test himself, Worobey cracks open a crayon-sized, pink plastic vial containing a liquid. “Off comes the top, you pull your mask down, and you just squirt a bit of sterile saltwater into your mouth.”

(Credit: Chris Richards/U. Arizona)

Worobey swishes the liquid around in his mouth for five seconds, then tilts his head back for 10 seconds of gargling. After a total of three cycles of swishing and gargling, Worobey spits the liquid into the specimen cup and screws the lid back on.

“And that’s it,” he says, “you’re done.”

A more sensitive COVID test

Based on his results, the mouth rinse test is more sensitive than a nasopharyngeal swab test, Worobey says. It also appears to be considerably more sensitive than a test based solely on saliva samples, where test subjects simply spit into a cup.

The reason for the increased sensitivity, Worobey says, could have to do with the fact that the test pulls virus particles from the throat during the saltwater gargle phase in addition to the saliva collected during the mouth rinse procedure.

The saltwater gargle approach is also ideal for the extremely dry climate typical of fall in southern Arizona, which makes it difficult for some people to stay properly hydrated and produce the necessary amount of saliva needed for a spit test.

“Our system allows the participants to painlessly collect virus from the back of their throat in a way that, so far, seems superior in terms of its ability to detect the virus,” Worobey says.

When Worobey tested the first person in the study, using both the nasal swab and the saline gargle samples, the virus was detectable only in the gargle sample. Out of more than 100 people screened, he now has paired nasopharyngeal and saline gargle samples from 30 coronavirus-positive patients. In this head-to-head comparison, the oral rinse samples detected the virus in about 20% more patients than the nasopharyngeal ones.

“This shows that the salt rinse and gargle test can be more sensitive and catch an infection you’d miss with the nasopharyngeal test,” he says. “It also suggests that it’s doing a good job of detecting virus in people who have or recently had the virus.”

Cracking the coronavirus genome

Soon after the pandemic began, Worobey embarked on research that aimed to collect as many complete genome sequences of the coronavirus as possible, in a collaboration with David Harris, director of the University of Arizona Health Sciences Biorepository.

Worobey also is one of three principal investigators for the Arizona COVID-19 Genomics Union, a joint effort between University of Arizona, Northern Arizona University, and the Translational Research Genomics Institute that was set up to perform high-throughput sequencing of samples from COVID-19 patients to analyze the virus’s genomic sequences.

Accurately deciphering the viral genome, which consists of about 30,000 nucleotides—essentially the letters spelling out the genetic blueprint of all organisms—allows researchers and health officials to track different strains, track where each sample originated and where it may have been transmitted, and possibly reveal details that could provide critical information for diagnostics, antiviral drug targets, vaccine development, and prevention of future pandemics.

“I think the saltwater gargle will work better than nasopharyngeal swabs,” Worobey says, “because for a research study, and eventually clinical testing, you need to get people to be OK with participating, and any kind of unpleasantness you throw at them means a lower percentage of people will participate.”

The mouth rinse is safer for health care workers, too, because test subjects can collect their own samples without the need for a health care worker to administer the test.

“For the medical technicians collecting nasopharyngeal swabs for diagnostic PCR tests, it just seems better to take the coughing, sneezing, and close proximity out of the equation to reduce the risks to the brave people doing that vital work, yet still provide a highly sensitive test,” Worobey says.

User-friendly for kids

To reconstruct complete genomes from samples containing coronavirus, researchers have to amplify the genetic material—in other words, make copies in the millions—and then stitch them together like pages randomly torn from a book.

Worldwide, researchers have sequenced more than 100,000 genomes so far, with most being deciphered with a technique Worobey pioneered.

“It turns out sequencing many virus genomes works best if you amplify about 100 to 300 small sections of nucleotides, sequence them, then stitch them back together into a cohesive genomic sequence,” Worobey says. “We call it RNA jackhammering, because you tackle a big problem by applying a whole bunch of little blows to it.”

Worobey hopes that the saltwater gargle test lives up to expectations and might eventually be used not just for research purposes but also for public health and individualized clinical diagnostic testing on the University of Arizona campus and beyond.

He thinks the test could fairly easily scale up to collect and process hundreds or thousands of samples per day—something that is more difficult to accomplish with standard saliva test samples, which are more viscous and therefore can be difficult to process.

Even if it doesn’t end up replacing currently used methods, Worobey says it could be another valuable tool. And, he adds, this method of COVID test is particularly user-friendly for school-aged children.

“That is an application where I could really see huge benefit to a safe, inexpensive—but most importantly less invasive—sampling modality like this,” he says.

Source: University of Arizona

The post Can gargling saltwater replace nasal swab COVID tests? appeared first on Futurity.

This Halloween, trick-or-treating could be down 41%

Wed, 28 Oct 2020 17:27:11 GMT

New data predicts that trick-or-treating could be down approximately 41% for households with children under 14 due to COVID-19.

The report, published by the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, also found:

Households handing out candy may decrease by half in 2020.
Candy sales will likely decrease as 42% of households plan to consume less candy this year.
47% of households are not likely to participate in any Halloween activity.
Year-over-year candy sales will be dramatically down in 2020.

“…our survey suggests that COVID-19 will generate a chilling effect on the fun social activities we all traditionally enjoy during this time.”

According to Trey Malone, report author and assistant professor of agriculture, food, and resource economics at Michigan State University’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, COVID-19 continues to disrupt food systems.

“As we move into the holiday season, our survey suggests that COVID-19 will generate a chilling effect on the fun social activities we all traditionally enjoy during this time,” Malone says.

“I would expect candy to be widely available, but fewer social events to go on as planned. One of our more surprising findings is how so many households have yet to decide exactly what they will do this year,” he says.

“I’m not sure we’ve ever seen so much uncertainty in our holiday planning this close to the season.”

The data used are from the Pandemic Food Consumer and Stigma Survey fielded by Qualtrics.

Brandon R. McFadden of the applied economics and statistics department at the University of Delaware, cowrote the report along with Delaware high school students Eleanor R. Messer and Kabir Advani.

The Center for Behavioral and Experimental Agri-Environmental and Risk Management Research through the US Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture funded the work.

Source: Michigan State University

The post This Halloween, trick-or-treating could be down 41% appeared first on Futurity.

Why some ancient Egyptian ink contained lead

Wed, 28 Oct 2020 17:20:40 GMT

X-ray microscopy reveals lead compounds in red and black inks on 12 ancient Egyptian papyrus fragments.

The researchers suggest they were used for their drying properties rather than as a pigment. A similar lead-based “drying technique” has also been documented in 15th century European painting, and the discovery of it in Egyptian papyri calls for a reassessment of ancient lead-based pigments.

The ancient Egyptians have been using inks for writing since at least 3200 BCE, using black inks for the primary body of text and using red inks to highlight headings and keywords. As reported in PNAS, researchers used advanced synchrotron radiation based X-ray microscopy equipment to investigate red and black inks preserved on the papyrus fragments from Roman period Egypt (around 100 to 200 CE).

“Our analyses of the inks on the papyri fragments from the unique Tebtunis temple library revealed previously unknown compositions of red and black inks, particularly iron-based and lead-based compounds,” says Egyptologist and first author of the study Thomas Christiansen from the University of Copenhagen.

“The iron-based compounds in the red inks are most likely ocher—a natural earth pigment—because the iron was found together with aluminum and the mineral hematite, which occur in ocher,” adds chemistry professor and coauthor Sine Larsen. “The lead compounds appear in both the red and black inks, but since we did not identify any of the typical lead-based pigments used to color the ink, we suggest that this particular lead compound was used by the scribes to dry the ink rather than as a pigment.”

A similar lead-based drying technique was used in 15th century Europe during the development of oil painting, and the researchers believe that the Egyptians must have discovered 1,400 years earlier that they could ensure their papyri did not smear by applying this particular ink. According to the researchers, their discovery calls for a reassessment of lead-based compounds found in ancient Mediterranean inks in that drying techniques may have been widespread much earlier than previously believed.

The studied papyri fragments all form part of larger manuscripts belonging to the Papyrus Carlsberg Collection at the University of Copenhagen, more specifically from the Tebtunis temple library, which is the only surviving large-scale institutional library from ancient Egypt. The temple priests, who wrote the analyzed papyri manuscripts, did probably not manufacture the inks themselves as the complexity of particularly the red inks must have required specialist knowledge:

“Judging from the amount of raw materials needed to supply a temple library as the one in Tebtunis, we propose that the priests must have acquired them or overseen their production at specialized workshops much like the Master Painters from the Renaissance,” Christiansen explains.

“The advanced synchrotron-based microanalyses have provided us with invaluable knowledge of the preparation and composition of red and black inks in ancient Egypt and Rome 2,000 years ago. And our results are supported by contemporary evidence of ink production facilities in ancient Egypt from a magical spell inscribed on a Greek alchemical papyrus, which dates to the third century [CE]. It refers to a red ink that was prepared inside a workshop.

“This papyrus was found in Thebes, and it may well have belonged to a priestly library like the papyri studied here, thus providing insights into some of the chemical arts applied by Egyptian priests of the late Roman period.”

The investigation took place at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble as part of the CoNext project on equipment that has made it possible to probe the chemical composition from the millimeter to the submicrometer scale. The work provides information not only on the elemental, but also the molecular and structural composition of the inks.

According to the researchers, their results will also be useful for conservation purposes as detailed knowledge of the material’s composition could help museums and collections preserve cultural heritage objects.

Source: University of Copenhagen

The post Why some ancient Egyptian ink contained lead appeared first on Futurity.

How affordable health care can fight climate change

Wed, 28 Oct 2020 15:46:07 GMT

Improving health care in rural Indonesia reduced incentives for illegal logging in a nearby national park, averting millions of dollars’ worth of atmospheric carbon emissions, a study finds.

The finding indicates that accessible and affordable health care could be a key tool for addressing the climate crisis.

Although the link may not be obvious, health care and climate change—two issues that pose major challenges around the world—are more connected than people may realize.

The analysis, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that deforestation in the national park declined 70% in the 10 years after an affordable health clinic opened in the area. This equates to more than $65 million worth of avoided carbon emissions when translated to the European carbon market, the study reports.

“…we were continually amazed that the data suggested such a strong link between improvements in health care access and tropical forest conservation.”

“The results illustrate a strong link between human health and conservation in tropical forests in the developing world,” says Andy MacDonald, assistant researcher at the Earth Research Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The Indonesian clinic accepts barter as payment and gives discounts to villages based on community-wide reductions in logging. Given its success, it could provide a blueprint for preserving the world’s biodiverse carbon sinks while reducing poverty and illness.

“This innovative model has clear global health implications,” says coauthor Michele Barry, senior associate dean of global health at Stanford University and director of the Center for Innovation in Global Health. “Health and climate can and should be addressed in unison, and done in coordination with and respect for local communities.”

Every second, more than 100 trees disappear from tropical forests around the world. These forests, some of the world’s most important carbon reservoirs, are crucial to slowing climate change and mass extinction.

The current paradigm for conserving tropical forests—establishing protected areas—often excludes and disenfranchises local communities. This failure to address people’s needs can lead communities with few economic alternatives to illegally log and convert the land. Lack of access to high-quality, affordable health care can compound the problem by perpetuating cycles of poor health and expanding out-of-pocket costs.

Health care access and climate change

With this in mind, the nonprofit organizations Alam Sehat Lestari and Health In Harmony in 2007 established a health care clinic adjacent to Gunung Palung National Park in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, with the support of the local government. The clinic was able to serve thousands of patients by accepting a range of alternative payments, such as tree seedlings, handicrafts, and labor—an approach they created in collaboration with the communities themselves.

Through agreements with most of the region’s district leaders, the clinic also provided discounts to villages that could show evidence of reductions in illegal logging. Between 1985 and 2001, this region had lost 60% of its forest to this activity. In addition to affordable health care, the intervention provided training in sustainable, organic agriculture and a chainsaw buyback program.

Researchers worked with the two non-profits to analyze more than 10 years of the clinic’s patient health records, coupled with satellite observations of forest cover over that time.

The medical care led to a significant decline in a range of diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, and diabetes. At the same time, satellite images of the national park showed a 70% reduction in deforestation, compared to forest loss at control sites, an amount equivalent to more than 6,770 acres of rainforest.

“We didn’t know what to expect when we started evaluating the program’s health and conservation impacts, but we were continually amazed that the data suggested such a strong link between improvements in health care access and tropical forest conservation,” says lead author Isabel Jones, who recently earned her doctorate in biology at Stanford. Looking more closely at community-level logging rates, the researchers found that the greatest drop-offs in logging occurred adjacent to villages with the highest rates of clinic usage.

Indigenous and local input

“This is a case study of how to design, implement, and evaluate a planetary health intervention that addresses human health and the health of rainforests on which our health depends,” says coauthor Susanne Sokolow, a senior research scientist at Stanford.

Globally, about 35% of protected areas are traditionally owned, managed, used, or occupied by Indigenous and local communities. Yet the perspective and guidance of Indigenous peoples and local communities are rarely involved in the design of conservation and climate mitigation programs. By contrast, the Indonesian clinic’s success grew out of the early and continued input of local communities who identified the mechanisms driving health and environmental problems as well as possible solutions.

Such holistic approaches can have greater long-term effects by preserving and restoring the ecosystem services that protect human health. These include natural filtering processes that reduce the risk of waterborne diseases and shade-providing forest canopies that reduce ground temperature and heat-related illnesses.

“The data support two important conclusions: human health is integral to the conservation of nature and vice versa, and we need to listen to the guidance of rainforest communities who know best how to live in balance with their forests,” says Monica Nirmala, the executive director of the clinic from 2014 to 2018 and current board member of Health In Harmony.

The clinic in West Kalimantan is still active, and the researchers are currently working on a follow-up project to see whether it and similar interventions in Indonesia have alleviated some of the shock from COVID-19 both on human health and deforestation.

“We would expect illegal logging activity to respond to changes in timber market prices or loss of income associated with COVID-19,” MacDonald says. “We want to know whether the interventions buffered communities against these effects, as well as whether they increased the communities’ resilience in terms of health and wellbeing.

“Health in Harmony is also expanding to Madagascar and Brazil,” he adds, “and we want to be able to robustly evaluate the impacts of their interventions there.”

Additional coauthors are from North Carolina State University Raleigh, Oregon Health and Science University, Natural Capital Advisors, and the two NGOs involved in the intervention.

Source: UC Santa Barbara

The post How affordable health care can fight climate change appeared first on Futurity.

New wasp may be a parasite of a parasite

Wed, 28 Oct 2020 13:12:46 GMT

Researchers have discovered a new wasp species that may be a parasite of a parasite.

A horrifying insect soap opera with vampires, mummies, and infant-eating parasites is playing out on the stems and leaves of live oak trees every day, and evolutionary biologist Scott Egan found the latest character within walking distance of his lab.

Egan, an associate professor of biosciences at Rice University, studies gall wasps, tiny insects that cast a biochemical spell on live oaks.

When gall wasps lay their eggs on oak leaves or stems, they chemically program the tree to unwittingly produce a tumor-like growth, or gall, which first shelters the egg and then feeds the larval wasp that hatches from it.

Dozens of smooth, round Belonocnema treatae galls dot the underside of leaves on a live oak tree. The wasps lay a mixture of venom and proteins alongside their eggs to coax the trees to form the tumor-like nurseries where the wasp larvae mature. (Credit: Scott Egan/Rice)

Egan describes the wasps as “ecosystem engineers,” because their galls are attractive morsels that harbor a supporting cast of opportunistic ne’er-do-wells, thieves, and killers. It’s a great setting to study how competition for resources drives evolution, and Egan and his students have spent more than a decade documenting the eerie, interspecies who’s-eating-who drama.

The latest species they discovered, Allorhogas gallifolia (al-UHROH’-guhs GAHL’-ihf-ohl-eeuh), is one of four new wasp species from the genus Allorhogas that Egan and collaborators Ernesto Samacá-Sáenz and Alejandro Zaldívar-Riverón at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City describe in a study in Insect Systematics and Diversity.

“They lay their egg in another wasp’s gall,” Egan says of A. gallifolia, which his group first hatched in 2014.

“They’re using the gall as a resource, and we’re still not certain how, but I think they’re attacking herbivorous caterpillars that are feeding on the gall tissue, and the wasp larva are eating those caterpillars after they hatch.”

He says more than 50 species of Allorhogas have been found in Central America and Mexico, but only two species were previously documented in the United States, one at the University of Maryland campus in 1912 and another some years later in Arizona.

The A. gallifolia found at Rice was collected as part of an effort to describe the community of natural enemies for one species of gall wasp, Belonocnema treatae (behl-uh-NAHK’-nee-muh TREE’-tee). In that study and others like it that Egan’s lab has published for other gall species, thousands of galls are collected across the southeastern United States, and everything that emerges from the galls is studied and cataloged. Egan describes the operation, which runs almost 365 days per year, as a “factory of discovery,” and A. gallifolia was one of many mysterious specimens it has produced.

“It did not match any of the previously described species, so we documented that in our 2016 paper and raised the hypothesis that this might be a new species,” Egan says. “A year or two went by and lead author Ernesto Samacá-Sáenz contacted us and offered to collaborate on determining if this lineage was, in fact, a new species.”

Samacá-Sáenz is a graduate student in the UNAM lab of Zaldívar-Riverón, an expert in Allorhogas and similar predatory wasps, which can be used by farmers as biological controls for crop pests. By the time Samacá-Sáenz reached out about the 2016 paper, Egan’s lab had collected a number of other undescribed specimens that they also suspected were new species of Allorhogas. The email kicked off a close collaboration that has taken Rice researchers on a number of trips to Mexico to conduct field work and science outreach in remote village schools.

While the jury is still out on exactly how A. gallifolia interacts with other species on the galls of B. treatae, Egan says he, Samacá-Sáenz, and Zaldívar-Riverón have discussed a number of hypotheses.

“They think it could be phytophagous, meaning it’s actually just eating plant material, or that it could be a gallmaker itself,” Egan says. “But I’m convinced that these guys are predators of caterpillars that live inside the Belonocnema galls and eat the gall plant material. I think the larval wasp eats the caterpillar and then emerges out of the side of the gall.”

Egan says it will take more research to determine whether that hypothesis is true. If it is, it would be “a whole new way of life that would be unknown to this entire genus.” But it would not be the first—or the creepiest—interaction between species that Egan and his colleagues have found.

Take 2018’s discovery, for example, that the parasitic vine Cassytha filiformis (kuh-SIHTH’-uh FIHL’-ih-form-ihs), commonly known as the love vine, targets B. treatae galls and sucks so many nutrients out of them that it mummifies the larval wasps inside.

That marked the first observation of a parasitic plant attacking a gall-forming wasp, but it could not match the ghoulish weirdness of the crypt-keeper wasp they discovered in 2017.

Euderus set (yoo-DEHR’-uhs SEHT’) is so diabolical that it was named for Set, the Egyptian god who trapped, murdered, and dismembered his brother in a crypt. E. set—which Egan discovered on a family vacation in Florida and later found on a tree in his front yard—lays its egg inside the gall of the Bassettia pallida (buh-SEHT’-eeuh PAL’-ih-duh) wasp.

Both eggs hatch and the larvae live side by side, maturing inside the gall. When the pair are large enough to emerge as adults, E. set manipulates its step-sibling into trying to escape before its emergence hole is finished. When B. pallida‘s head gets stuck in the undersized hole, E. set begins eating. Starting from the tail, it devours a tunnel through its roommate, emerging through the head to take its place in the world outside.

There are more than 1,400 known species of gall-forming wasps, and Egan says he believes there are many more species waiting to be discovered in their plant/bug-eat-bug-eat-plant corner of the world.

“We’ve focused on the gall former Belonocnema a lot, and that’s where we initially found this first Allorhogas,” he says. “When we reared out that entire community and tried to key out each of the members, A. gallifolia was one of those things where we could not narrow it down to a species. Nothing fit the description.

“Twenty-five percent of all the things we reared out of Belonocnema fit that same type of uncertainty,” Egan says.

“We can’t find anything that’s ever been described like them before. Some of those, including one I have on my desk right now, are also mostly likely new species. Considering there are 90 oak species in the United States, and I have studied only three of them, this is the tip of the biodiversity iceberg.”

Support for the research came from the UNAM Directorate General for Academic Personnel Affairs and the UNAM General Directorate of Computing and Information and Communication Technologies.

Source: Rice University

The post New wasp may be a parasite of a parasite appeared first on Futurity.

‘Nearly invisible’ leopards rebound in China

Wed, 28 Oct 2020 12:05:51 GMT

Leopard populations in northern China are on the mend, according to new research.

Most of the world’s leopards are endangered and generally, the number of these shy and stunning cats is decreasing.

Leopards are fascinating animals. In addition to being sublime hunters that will eat nearly anything and can survive in varied habitats from forests to deserts, they are able to withstand temperatures ranging from minus 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees F) during winter to plus 40 degrees in summer.

Despite their resilience, the majority of leopard species are endangered. Poaching and the clearing of forest habitat for human activities are among the reasons for their global decline.

But in northern China—and specifically on the Loess Plateau—something fantastic is occurring. Numbers of a leopard subspecies called the North Chinese leopard have increased, according to the new study.

“We were quite surprised that the number of leopards has increased, because their populations are declining in many other places. We knew that there were leopards in this area, but we had no idea how many,” says Bing Xie, a PhD student at the University of Copenhagen’s biology department and one of the researchers of the study.

Together with researchers at Beijing Normal University, she covered 800 square kilometers (308.8 square miles) of the Loess Plateau between 2016 and 2017. The just-completed count reports that the number of leopards increased from 88 in 2016 to 110 in 2017—a 25% increase. The researchers suspect that their numbers have continued to increase in the years since.

This is the first time that researchers have made an estimate for the status of local population in North Chinese leopards.

The reason for this spotted golden giant’s rebound likely reflects the 13th five-year plan that the Chinese government, in consultation with a range of scientific researchers, implemented in 2015 to restore biodiversity in the area.

“About 20 years ago, much of the Loess Plateau’s forest habitat was transformed into agricultural land. Human activity scared away wild boars, toads, frogs, and deer—making it impossible for leopards to find food. Now that much of the forest has been restored, prey have returned, along with the leopards,” explains Xie.

“Many locals had no idea there were leopards in the area, so they were wildly enthused and surprised,” she says. “And, it was a success for the government, which had hoped for greater biodiversity in the area. Suddenly, they could ‘house’ these big cats on a far greater scale than they had dreamed of.”

The research team deployed camera equipment to map how many leopards were in this area of northern China. But even though the footage captured more cats than expected on film, none of the researchers saw any of the big stealthy felines with their own eyes.

“Leopards are extremely shy of humans and sneak about silently. That’s why it’s not at all uncommon to study them for 10 years without physically observing one,” Xie explains.

Even though Xie has never seen leopards in the wild, she will continue to fight for their survival.

“That 98% of leopard habitat has been lost over the years makes me so sad. I have a great love for these gorgeous cats and I will continue to research on how best to protect them,” she says.

The research appears in Integrative Zoology.

Source: University of Copenhagen

The post ‘Nearly invisible’ leopards rebound in China appeared first on Futurity.

Volcanoes feed the atmosphere on Jupiter’s moon Io

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 17:33:56 GMT

The atmosphere on Jupiter’s moon Io is a witches’ brew, composed primarily of the sulfurous exhalations of more than 400 volcanoes that dot the surface. A new study clarifies how it got that way.

Until now, it was unclear whether volcanoes spewing hot sulfur dioxide (SO₂) are the main contributors to the atmosphere, or whether the main component is the accumulated cold SO₂, much of which is frozen on the surface but in sunlight evaporates or sublimates into the atmosphere.

“It was not known which process drives the dynamics in Io’s atmosphere,” says Imke de Pater, a professor of the graduate school in the departments of astronomy and of earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley. “Is it volcanic activity, or gas that sublimates from the icy surface when Io is in sunlight? What we show is that, actually, volcanoes do have a large impact on the atmosphere.”

As the most volcanically active moon in our solar system, Io (“EYE oh”) provides a laboratory for exotic environments unlike anything on Earth. And since we’re unable to probe inside Io, the atmosphere—about a billion times thinner than Earth’s atmosphere—provides a window into the moon’s roiling interior and the internal magma reservoirs feeding the volcanoes.

With no nearby satellite currently observing the moon—NASA’s Juno mission focuses primarily on Jupiter and will end next July—astronomers like de Pater must rely on Earth-based telescopes to probe the atmosphere. She has observed Io’s atmosphere for 30 years with radio telescopes like the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, and optical and infrared telescopes, primarily the Keck telescopes in Hawaii.

One surprise from the new observations is that the atmosphere becomes dramatically unstable when Io passes through Jupiter’s shadow every 42 hours as it orbits the planet.

Stealth volcanoes on Io

In a paper accepted for publication in the Planetary Science Journal, de Pater and colleagues report that the radio emissions from sulfur dioxide (SO₂) gas dropped exponentially as Io was eclipsed by Jupiter on March 20, 2018, indicating that the lower atmosphere—below 10 to 20 kilometers (6.2 to 12.4 miles) in altitude—essentially collapsed, quickly freezing out onto the surface.

Although Io’s surface is always cold—about 150 degrees Celsius below freezing, or -230 F—a further drop in temperature by a few tens of degrees, down to -270 F, brings the temperature below the freezing point of SO₂.

As the moon re-emerged from Jupiter’s shadow during observations on September 2 and 11 in 2018, the cold sulfur dioxide emissions returned within about 10 minutes.

“As soon as Io gets into sunlight, the temperature increases, and you get all this SO₂ ice subliming into gas, and you reform the atmosphere in about 10 minutes’ time, faster than what models had predicted,” de Pater says.

She notes that not all the cold SO₂ froze out as the temperature dropped in Jupiter’s shadow. During the eclipse, in addition to abundant SO₂ gas over some volcanoes, ALMA also detected low levels of SO₂ globally in Io’s atmosphere, suggesting that many unseen volcanoes—so-called stealth volcanoes, because they emit no smoke or other particulates that can be easily seen—are constantly spewing SO₂ into the atmosphere that remains too warm to condense.

There were also hints of stealth volcanism in observations de Pater and her colleagues reported in July, based on Keck observations. They saw widespread sulfur monoxide (SO) gas in the atmosphere—not, as expected, only over active volcanoes. As de Pater shows in her new paper, the SO as seen with ALMA is likely produced when sunlight breaks the sulfur-oxygen bond in SO₂ that has been ejected hundreds of kilometers above the surface.

“The SO₂ that we see with ALMA when Io is in eclipse is at a very low level, and we can’t say if that is stealth volcanism or caused by SO₂ not completely condensing out,” she says. “But then, when we looked at the SO with Keck, we can only explain the SO emissions, which are widespread on the surface, through this stealth volcanism, because excitation of the SO requires a very high temperature.”

Io’s true colors

With such a thin atmosphere, Io is exposed to the cold of space, as well as to the hot plasma around Jupiter. The tidal tug that Jupiter and two of its largest moons, Ganymede and Europa, exert on Io heats the moon’s interior, creating the volcanoes that bathe the surface in hot sulfur dioxide fumes. Io’s largest volcano, Loki Patera, spans more than 200 kilometers (124 miles).

The volcanic SO₂ eventually condenses on the surface to form a thick frozen layer of sulfur dioxide ice, recently mapped globally by de Pater and her colleagues. This frozen SO₂, often overlain by a layer of volcanic dust, is what gives Io its characteristic yellow, white, orange, and red colors.

Though the dominance of SO₂ in Io’s atmosphere was well known—de Pater was a member of the first team to observe global SO₂ in 1990—it was still unclear whether recently emitted hot SO₂ or sublimation from the accumulated SO₂ ice (referred to as cold SO₂) dominated the atmosphere.

To disentangle the contributions of hot and cold SO₂, de Pater and colleagues, including Statia Luszcz-Cook from Columbia University in New York and Katherine de Kleer of California Institute of Technology, chose to observe Io during its transition from sunlight into darkness during an eclipse and again when it re-emerged into the light from eclipse. Because of the alignment of Io and Earth relative to Jupiter, it’s impossible to observe both entry and exit of Jupiter’s moon from the same eclipse, so the two observations took place six months apart.

“When Io passes into Jupiter’s shadow, and is out of direct sunlight, it is too cold for sulfur dioxide gas, and it condenses onto Io’s surface. During that time, we can only see volcanically-sourced sulfur dioxide. We can, therefore, see exactly how much of the atmosphere is impacted by volcanic activity,” Luszcz-Cook says.

Table salt in magma

Thanks to ALMA’s exquisite resolution and sensitivity, the astronomers could, for the first time, clearly see the plumes of SO₂ and SO rise up from the volcanoes, two of which—Karei Patera and Daedalus Patera—were erupting in March, while a third volcano was active in September. Based on the snapshots, they calculated that active volcanoes directly produce 30% to 50% of Io’s atmosphere.

The ALMA images also showed a third gas coming out of volcanoes: potassium chloride (KCl). Both KCl and sodium chloride—NaCl, or common table salt—are common components of magma.

“We see KCl in volcanic regions where we do not see SO₂ or SO,” says Luszcz-Cook. “This is strong evidence that the magma reservoirs are different under different volcanoes.”

“By studying Io’s atmosphere and volcanic activity, we can understand more about the volcanoes, the tidal heating process, and Io’s interior,” de Kleer says.

De Pater and colleagues also hope to observe Io at other radio wavelengths that can probe several inches below the surface, potentially revealing the content and temperature of the magma underlying the volcanoes.

A big unknown remains the temperature in Io’s lower atmosphere. In future research, the astronomers hope to measure this with ALMA.

“To measure the temperature of Io’s atmosphere, we need to obtain a higher resolution in our observations, which requires that we observe the moon for a longer period of time. We can only do this when Io is in sunlight, since it does not spend much time in eclipse,” says de Pater.

“During such an observation, Io will rotate by tens of degrees. We will need to apply software that helps us make unsmeared images. We have done this previously with radio images of Jupiter made with ALMA and the Very Large Array.”

Additional coauthors are from the Universidad de Chile in Santiago; the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California; and UC Berkeley. The National Science Foundation funded the work. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities Inc.

Source: UC Berkeley

The post Volcanoes feed the atmosphere on Jupiter’s moon Io appeared first on Futurity.

Stress shows up in your spit after work interruptions

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 15:59:35 GMT

The body produces more of the stress hormone cortisol when people are repeatedly interrupted at work, researchers report.

And yet participants in the new study did not experience an equal rise in their perceived sense of psychological stress.

According to the Job Stress Index 2020 compiled by Stiftung Gesundheitsförderung Schweiz, a Swiss health foundation, almost one-third of the Swiss workforce experience work-related stress. Should this stress become chronic, it can lead to states of exhaustion that have a negative impact on public health and carry a significant economic cost.

Researchers are developing a digital early warning system that uses machine learning to detect stress in the workplace in real time. “Our first step was to find out how to measure the effects of social pressure and interruptions—two of the most common causes of stress in the workplace,” says Jasmine Kerr, who is working at the Mobiliar Lab for Analytics at ETH Zurich.

Kerr, and fellow doctoral students mathematician Mara Nägelin and computer scientist Raphael Weibel, are all lead authors of a recent study.

The researchers recruited 90 participants, who agreed to take part in an experiment lasting just under two hours.

To conduct their experiment, Kerr, Nägelin, and Weibel transformed the Decision Science Laboratory at ETH Zurich into three group office environments. Each workstation was equipped with a chair, a computer with monitor, and kits for collecting samples of saliva.

Playing the parts of employees at a fictional insurance company, the participants were asked to perform typical office tasks, such as typing up information from hand-written forms and arranging appointments with clients. While they did so, the researchers observed their psychobiological responses.

At a total of six points during the experiment, the participants rated their mood on questionnaires, while a portable ECG device continuously measured their heartbeat. The researchers used the saliva samples to measure the concentration of the stress hormone cortisol.

For their experiment, the researchers divided the participants into three groups and exposed each group to a different level of stress. All groups were given the same workload. In the middle of the experiment, all participants were visited by two actors masquerading as representatives of the insurance company’s HR department. For participants in the control group, the actors staged a sales pitch dialogue, while in the two stress groups they pretended to be looking for the most suitable candidates for a promotion.

The difference between the two stress groups was that participants in the first group stopped work only to have samples of their saliva taken. But the participants in the second stress group had to contend with additional interruptions in the form of chat messages from their superiors urgently requesting information.

Upon evaluation, the data indicated that asking participants to compete for a fictional promotion was enough to raise their heart rate and trigger the release of cortisol. “But participants in the second stress group released almost twice the level of cortisol as those in the first stress group,” Nägelin says.

Weibel adds: “Most research into workplace interruptions carried out to date focused only on their effect on performance and productivity. Our study shows for the first time that they also affect the level of cortisol a person releases, in other words they actually influence a person’s biological stress response.”

What surprised the researchers were participants’ subjective responses in terms of how they perceived psychological stress. They observed that participants in the second stress group, who were interrupted by chat messages, reported being less stressed and in a better mood than the participants in the first stress group, who didn’t have these interruptions. Interestingly, although the two groups rated the situation as equally challenging, the second group found it less threatening.

The researchers inferred that the release of cortisol triggered by the additional interruptions mobilized more physical resources, which in turn led to a better emotional and cognitive response to stress. It is also possible that the interruptions distracted the participants from the impending social stress situation, meaning that they felt less threatened and thus less stressed.

The research appears Psychoneuroendocrinology.

Source: ETH Zurich

The post Stress shows up in your spit after work interruptions appeared first on Futurity.

Nanofoam could make football helmets safe for longer

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 15:48:58 GMT

A liquid nanofoam liner undergoing testing could prolong the safe use of football helmets, researchers report.

When a helmet withstands an impact severe enough to cause a concussion to the player wearing it, the safety features of the helmet are compromised, rendering equipment unsafe for further use, says Weiyi Lu, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Michigan State University.

“The nanofoam was able to mitigate continuous multiple impacts without damage; the results were identical from test one through test 10.”

Lu has been testing a liquid nanofoam material that could change that. The research appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The material is full of tiny nanopores. “The pore diameters are between two and 200 nanometers and that creates a large amount of surface area,” Lu says. “The whole area of MSU’s Spartan Stadium could be folded up into one gram of nanofoam.”

Ordinarily, the material is rigid and adding liquid would fill the holes. To fix this, Lu and his team coated the nanopores with a hydrophobic or water repellant silicone layer made from an organic silyl chain that prevents liquid from being absorbed by the material. As a result, the saltwater liquid inside the nanofoam material becomes pressurized during an impact.

“When the pressure reaches the safety threshold, ions and water are forced into the nanopores making the material deformable for effective protection. In addition, the liquid-like material is pliable enough to form into any shape,” he says. “Helmets are pretty much one shape but the liquid nanofoam material can be made to fit a person’s specific head shape or profile.”

During an impact, pressurized water fills the nano pores.

In early laboratory tests, Lu and his team compared an eighth-inch liquid nanofoam liner against the three-quarter-inch piece of solid foam traditionally used in helmets. Both materials were struck with a five-kilogram mass (the approximate weight of a human head) at three meters (9.8 feet) per second. Even though both materials were deformed by the impact, the liquid nanofoam recovered between the continuous impacts of the test and the solid foam did not.

“The liquid nanofoam outperformed the solid foam,” Lu says. “The nanofoam was able to mitigate continuous multiple impacts without damage; the results were identical from test one through test 10.”

A liquid nanofoam liner would be thinner and less bulky inside a helmet. And since the liner can withstand multiple high-impact forces, the liner would not need to be replaced after a high-impact collision unless the helmet shell was damaged.”A helmet that can be safely reused is a huge advantage,” he says. “We would love to see a liquid nanofoam liner in MSU football helmets in the future.”

Lu envisions multiple future applications of the liquid nanofoam material beyond football and military helmets. The material could also be used in passive safety devices such as automobile air bags and bumpers. The liquid nanofoam could even be used to protect people and buildings from earthquake vibrations.

The next stage of research will focus on more dynamic studies that will test faster and more intensive impacts such as the effects of a bomb blast, Lu says. “We want this material to help not just extend people’s lives but to improve their quality of life.”

Source: Michigan State University

The post Nanofoam could make football helmets safe for longer appeared first on Futurity.

Old dog training methods teach robots new tricks

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 14:17:01 GMT

With a training technique commonly used to teach dogs to sit and stay, researchers showed a robot how to teach itself several new tricks, including stacking blocks.

With the method, the robot, named Spot, was able to learn in days what typically takes a month.

“I’ve had dogs so I know rewards work and that was the inspiration for how I designed the learning algorithm.”

By using positive reinforcement, an approach familiar to anyone who’s used treats to change a dog’s behavior, the team dramatically improved the robot’s skills and did it quickly enough to make training robots for real-world work a more feasible enterprise.

“The question here was how do we get the robot to learn a skill?” says lead author Andrew Hundt, a PhD student working in Johns Hopkins University’s Computational Interaction and Robotics Laboratory. “I’ve had dogs so I know rewards work and that was the inspiration for how I designed the learning algorithm.”

The research appears in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

Teaching a robot to learn

Unlike humans and animals that are born with highly intuitive brains, computers are blank slates and must learn everything from scratch. But true learning is often accomplished with trial and error, and roboticists are still figuring out how robots can learn efficiently from their mistakes.

The team accomplished that by devising a reward system that works for a robot the way treats work for a dog. Where a dog might get a cookie for a job well done, the robot earned numeric points.

Hundt recalled how he once taught his terrier mix puppy named Leah the command “leave it,” so she could ignore squirrels on walks. He used two types of treats, ordinary trainer treats and something even better, like cheese.

When Leah was excited and sniffing around the treats, she got nothing. But when she calmed down and looked away, she got the good stuff. “That’s when I gave her the cheese and said, ‘Leave it! Good Leah!'”

Similarly, to stack blocks, Spot the robot needed to learn how to focus on constructive actions. As the robot explored the blocks, it quickly learned that correct behaviors for stacking earned high points, but incorrect ones earned nothing. Reach out but don’t grasp a block? No points. Knock over a stack? Definitely no points. Spot earned the most by placing the last block on top of a four-block stack.

High score!

The training tactic not only worked, it took just days to teach the robot what used to take weeks. The team was able to reduce the practice time by first training a simulated robot, which is a lot like a video game, then running tests with Spot.

“The robot wants the higher score,” Hundt says. “It quickly learns the right behavior to get the best reward. In fact, it used to take a month of practice for the robot to achieve 100% accuracy. We were able to do it in two days.”

Positive reinforcement not only worked to help the robot teach itself to stack blocks, with the point system the robot just as quickly learned several other tasks—even how to play a simulated navigation game. The ability to learn from mistakes in all types of situations is critical for designing a robot that could adapt to new environments.

“At the start the robot has no idea what it’s doing but it will get better and better with each practice. It never gives up and keeps trying to stack and is able to finish the task 100% of the time,” Hundt says.

The team imagines these findings could help train household robots to do laundry and wash dishes—tasks that could be popular on the open market and help seniors live independently. It could also help design improved self-driving cars.

“Our goal is to eventually develop robots that can do complex tasks in the real world—like product assembly, caring for the elderly, and surgery,” says coauthor Gregory D. Hager, a professor of computer science.

“We don’t currently know how to program tasks like that—the world is too complex. But work like this shows us that there is promise to the idea that robots can learn how to accomplish such real-world tasks in a safe and efficient way,” Hager says.

Source: Johns Hopkins University

The post Old dog training methods teach robots new tricks appeared first on Futurity.

3 things drive our social media ‘non-click’ decisions

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 13:20:40 GMT

A new study explores why people make a “non-click” choice, a decision to not respond to some social media posts, even when they spend time as “lurkers” of the content.

For the study, published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, researchers observed 38 participants as they scrolled through their Facebook news feeds and found that the decision not to click on content was often intentional.

Study participants opted not to click to avoid sharing information with various audiences—sometimes the poster, their network of friends, or the platform itself. Motives included wanting to discourage certain kinds of posting behavior, to evade algorithms learning too much about them, or to follow up with posters in other channels.

“What’s new about this piece is that we are really turning our focus to instances where individuals are paying attention and are looking at content and then consciously and deliberately deciding not to click—this is a new approach for the field’s traditional ways of understanding social media use,” says lead author Nicole Ellison, professor of information at the University of Michigan.

Gratuitous clickers

Until now, Ellison says, researchers have put social media behaviors generally in one of two camps: passive users who refrain from participating online, often correlated with negative outcomes such as social comparison; or active users who comment and click as a form of social connectedness.

The researchers say this idea of seeing users on opposite ends of a spectrum does not get to the bottom of why some lurkers read but then withhold reaction.

In fact, the new study challenges this framing, saying clicking and viewing behaviors likely exist on a spectrum, and exploring the motivation that drives the click or non-click is just as important as the act itself.

“So that’s where this notion of the gratuitous clicker—someone who just clicks through without paying attention—or alternately, someone who is really engaging with the content but decides not to click, instead maybe mentioning it in the hallway the next day, picking up the phone, or sending a text message,” Ellison says.

“Those interactions are very important and meaningful but are not captured in server-level data, so they are invisible to anyone relying on those datasets and, of course, to the other audiences.”

Reasons for clicks and non-clicks

To determine click behavior, the researchers conducted eye tracking on Facebook pages during seven-minute sessions involving 38 participants who looked at their own feeds. A tracker mounted at the bottom of a monitor recorded eye gaze as users viewed 598 posts, during which they offered 268 reactions including likes (and the various emoji variations which, at the time of the research, did not include the newer “care” icon), shares, one event response, and composed written responses. Clicks were about six per session and the median viewing time was 7.65 seconds per post.

Counterintuitively, the researchers say, they found no difference in viewing duration for those items that received clicks versus non-clicks.

They then asked each participant to fill out a follow-up survey and participate in interviews to find out why they chose not to click on items that clearly caught their attention. They found three themes:

Clicking can be lightweight; channel-switching can be meaningful: Several people described Facebook as a “conversation starter,” seeing a post that they would mention in another channel instead of clicking. Taking the first example in this piece, this would mean calling the friend with the disclosure about work instead of trying to write something publicly or just using a “like” which could be misconstrued.
Feed content and motivations, not general use, predict clicking: When the team asked what made people click, they found interpersonal motivations and a desire to please others, or not, were the most important factors.
Different audience concerns determine non-clicking: Click motivation is often based on how interesting or “worthy” the information is, but even when content was seen as worthy, participants sometimes considered the audience before clicking. For instance, one user was not inclined to click on a friend’s post boasting about her child’s success in a sport, whereas she might have done so if the post had celebrated the team’s accomplishment. Some participants didn’t want to draw attention to themselves in the matter at hand. Others didn’t want to be drawn into a wider network by responding to a post about a conflict or political situation where there might be social ramifications. Finally, and somewhat surprising Ellison says, were participants that didn’t want to click because of the platform itself. Users did not want the program’s algorithm to key in on certain words in the post and flood their feeds with related content in the future.

Source: University of Michigan

The post 3 things drive our social media ‘non-click’ decisions appeared first on Futurity.

Breast cancer is rising among South Asians in US

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 12:16:53 GMT

Indian and Pakistani women in the United States are diagnosed with breast cancer, including more aggressive forms of the disease, at a younger age, according to new research.

South Asians are the fastest-growing major ethnic group in the US with breast cancer rates increasing within the population, but little is known about the disease in the population.

The study in the International Journal of Cancer examines the characteristics of breast cancer in Indian- and Pakistani-American and non-Hispanic white women in the United States using data from the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program. The researchers, who are part of the Rutgers School of Public Health and Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, reviewed incidence data among Indian and Pakistani women between 1990 and 2014. They also reviewed disease characteristics, treatment, and survival data between 2000 and 2016 for 4,900 Indian and Pakistani women and 482,250 non-Hispanic white women with breast cancer.

They found that the occurrence of breast cancer in Indian and Pakistani women was lower than in non-Hispanic white women; however, the number of Indian and Pakistani women diagnosed with breast cancer increased over the years.

Indian and Pakistani women with breast cancer were more likely to be diagnosed at a younger age and at more advanced stages of the disease. In addition, they received more subcutaneous or total mastectomies than non-Hispanic white women. Although the researchers found that Indian and Pakistani women were less likely to die of breast cancer than their non-Hispanic white counterparts, their health was tracked for a shorter time.

“Our results provide an insight into breast cancer in Indian and Pakistani women, suggesting several hypotheses to guide future scientific studies to better understand the risk factors influencing disease etiology and prognosis,” says Jaya M. Satagopan, lead author and director of the Center for South Asian Quantitative Health and Education at the Rutgers School of Public Health.

Prior cancer research has shown that fewer Indian and Pakistani women participate in scientific studies and that several sociocultural factors may delay their seeking health care. Research also has shown poor mammogram screening rates in Indian and Pakistani women, which is linked to a lack of family support, lack of transportation, modesty, fear, beliefs that cancer is divine punishment for past deeds, having lived in the United States for less than 10 years, low English proficiency, and a lack of faith in the health system.

“Our study indicated that there are important differences in this population that justify further studies to better understand biological, sociocultural, and system level factors such as interactions with the health system, affecting breast cancer screening patterns, diagnosis, risk, and survival among South Asian women, given the paucity of literature on this topic,” says Elisa V. Bandera, co-leader of the Cancer Prevention and Control Research Program at Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey and professor at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, who is the study’s senior author.

The study recommends identifying strategies to better engage Indian and Pakistani women in breast cancer studies and to improve interactions between health care providers and Indian and Pakistani women to identify sociocultural factors associated with screening decisions and health care use in this population.

“As the South Asian population in the United States—and especially in New Jersey—grows, it is imperative that we work to promote health equity in cancer prevention, screening, early diagnosis, and treatment through community engagement and a team science approach,” says Anita Kinney, director of the Center for Cancer Health Equity at Rutgers School of Public Health and Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey and professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health, who is also one of the study’s authors.

Source: Rutgers University

The post Breast cancer is rising among South Asians in US appeared first on Futurity.

Americans’ odds of getting pregnant may peak in late fall

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 11:56:02 GMT

The seasons in North America may play a role in how easy it is to get pregnant, research indicates.

A study in Human Reproduction finds that couples in North America are most likely to start trying to conceive in September, but that they are most likely to succeed in getting pregnant in late November and early December, especially if they live in southern US states.

“There are a lot of studies out there that look at seasonal patterns in births, but these studies don’t take into account when couples start trying, how long they take to conceive, or how long their pregnancies last,” says the study’s lead author Amelia Wesselink, a postdoctoral associate in epidemiology at the Boston University School of Public Health.

In their paper, Wesselink and collaborators suggest that “couples may time their pregnancy attempts for a variety of reasons including employment schedules (e.g. more flexible summer hours), comfort (e.g. to avoid being pregnant during hot months), or personal choice (e.g. desiring a fall baby).”

To find out when couples were most likely to conceive, the researchers analyzed data on 14,331 pregnancy-planning women who had been trying to conceive for no more than six months, including 5,827 American and Canadian participants enrolled in the Pregnancy Study Online (PRESTO), as well as 8,504 Danish participants enrolled in a similar set of studies at Aarhus University in Denmark.

These studies follow women with detailed surveys every two months until they either conceive or have tried to conceive for 12 menstrual cycles, gathering data about things like intercourse frequency, menstruation, smoking, diet, education, and income.

“After accounting for seasonal patterns when couples start trying to conceive, we found a decline in [the odds of conceiving within one menstrual cycle] in the late spring and a peak in the chances of conceiving in late fall,” Wesselink says. “Interestingly, the association was stronger among couples living [farther south in North America].”

North Americans were also more likely than Danes to begin trying to conceive in the fall (possibly in the hopes of giving birth when work is less busy in the summer, Wesselink says, which may be more important in the US than Scandinavia).

But, after taking those patterns into account, North Americans got a 16% boost in their odds of conceiving in the fall versus the spring, while Danes got only an 8% seasonal boost in the fall. In southern US states, the seasonal variation was much stronger, increasing by 45% with a peak in conceptions in late November. In contrast, seasonality had much less impact on conception in Denmark, Canada, and northern US states.

The findings did not significantly change after controlling for factors associated with the probability of conceiving that can vary throughout the year, including intercourse frequency, sugar intake, smoking, and medication use.

“Although this study cannot identify the reasons for seasonal variation in fertility, we are interested in exploring several hypotheses on seasonally varying factors and how they affect fertility, including meteorological variables such as temperature and humidity, vitamin D exposure, and environmental exposures such as air pollution,” Wesselink says.

Funding for the research came from the Eunice K. Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the Danish Medical Research Council.

Source: Boston University

The post Americans’ odds of getting pregnant may peak in late fall appeared first on Futurity.

Light pollution may skew mule deer and cougar dynamic

Mon, 26 Oct 2020 19:54:29 GMT

Exposure to light pollution may alter predator-prey dynamics between mule deer and cougars across the intermountain West, a region where night skyglow is an increasing environmental disturbance, researchers report.

The study is the first to assess the effects of light pollution on predator-prey interactions at a regional scale. It combines satellite-derived estimates of artificial night time lights with GPS location data from hundreds of radio-collared mule deer and cougars across the intermountain West.

The study found that:

Mule deer living in light-polluted areas are drawn to artificial night time lighting, which is associated with green vegetation around homes.
Cougars, also known as mountain lions and pumas, are able to successfully hunt within light-polluted areas by selecting the darkest spots on the landscape to make their kill.
While mule deer that live in dark wildland locations are most active around dawn and dusk, those living around artificial night light forage throughout the day and are more active at night than wildland deer—especially during the summer.

The animal data used in the study were collected by state and federal wildlife agencies across the region. Collation of those records yielded what is believed to be the largest dataset on interactions between cougars and mule deer, two of the most ecologically and economically important large-mammal species in the West.

“Our findings illuminate some of the ways that changes in land use are creating a brighter world that impacts the biology and ecology of highly mobile mammalian species, including an apex carnivore,” says lead author Mark Ditmer, formerly a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability and now at Colorado State University.

Mule deer and cougars

The intermountain West spans nearly 400,000 square miles and is an ideal place to assess how varying light-pollution exposures influence the behavior of mule deer and cougars and their predator-prey dynamics.

Both species are widely distributed throughout the region—the mule deer is the cougar’s primary prey species—and the region presents a wide range of night time lighting conditions.

The intermountain West is home to some of the darkest night skies in the continental United States, as well as some of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas, including Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. Between the dark wildlands and the brightly illuminated cities is the wildland-urban interface, the rapidly expanding zone where homes and associated structures are built within forests and other types of undeveloped wildland vegetation.

For the study, researchers obtained detailed estimates of night time lighting sources from the NASA-NOAA Suomi polar-orbiting satellite. They collected GPS location data for 117 cougars and 486 mule deer from four states: Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and California. In addition, wildlife agencies provided locations of 1,562 sites where cougars successfully killed mule deer.

“This paper represents a massive undertaking, and to our knowledge this dataset is the largest ever compiled for these two species,” says senior author Neil Carter, a conservation ecologist at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability.

Deer in the arid West are attracted to the greenery in the backyards and parks of the wildland-urban interface. Predators follow them there, despite increased night time light levels that they would normally shun. Going into the study, the researchers suspected that light pollution within the wildland-urban interface could alter cougar-mule deer interactions in one of two ways.

Perhaps artificial night time light would create a shield that protects deer from predators and allows them to forage freely. Alternatively, cougars might exploit elevated deer densities within the wildland-urban interface, feasting on easy prey inside what scientists call an ecological trap.

Predator shield and ecological trap

Data from the study provides support for both the predator shield and ecological trap hypotheses, the researchers say. At certain times and locations within the wildland-urban interface, there is simply too much artificial light and/or human activity for cougars, creating a protective shield for deer.

An ecological trap occurs when an animal is misled, or trapped, into settling for apparently attractive but in fact low-quality habitat. In this particular case, mule deer are drawn to the greenery of the wildland-urban interface and may mistakenly perceive that the enhanced night time lighting creates a predator-free zone.

But the cougars are able to successfully hunt within the wildland-urban interface by carefully selecting the darkest spots on the landscape to make their kill, the study shows. In contrast, cougars living in dark wildland locations hunt in places where night time light levels are slightly higher than the surroundings, the researchers found.

“The intermountain West is the fastest-growing region of the US, and we anticipate that night light levels will dramatically increase in magnitude and across space,” Carter says. “These elevated levels of night light are likely to fundamentally alter a predator-prey system of ecological and management significance—both species are hunted extensively in this region and are economically and culturally important.”

Additional coauthors of the paper, published in Ecography, are from Utah State University, California Polytechnic University, Boise State University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, the US Geological Survey, the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, Brigham Young University, the University of Nevada at Reno, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and Grand Canyon National Park.

Funding came from NASA; the National Park Service; the US Geological Survey; the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources; the Nevada Department of Wildlife; the Arizona Game and Fish Department; the US Department of Energy; Grand Canyon, Zion, and Capitol Reef national parks; the Bureau of Land Management; the US Forest Service; the US Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services; and the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Source: University of Michigan

The post Light pollution may skew mule deer and cougar dynamic appeared first on Futurity.

Lab-made mini-lungs mimic real COVID infections

Mon, 26 Oct 2020 19:27:13 GMT

A new lab-grown living lung model mimics the tiny air sacs of the lungs where coronavirus infection and serious lung damage take place.

The advance allows researchers to watch the battle between the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and lung cells at the finest molecular scale.

The virus damages the delicate, balloon-like air sacs, known as alveoli, leading to pneumonia and acute respiratory distress, the leading cause of death in COVID-19 patients. But the lack of experimental models that mimic human lung tissues has, until now, hampered scientists in COVID-19 studies.

Purushothama Rao Tata, a cell biologist at Duke University, led a team that developed the model that uses “lung organoids,” also dubbed mini-lungs in a dish. The organoids are grown from alveolar epithelial type-2 cells (AT2s), the stem cells that repair the deepest portions of the lungs where SARS-CoV-2 attacks.

Earlier research had shown that just one AT2 cell, isolated into tiny dishes, could multiply to produce millions of cells that assemble themselves into balloon-like organoids that look just like alveoli. However, the “soup” in which researchers grew the cells contained complex ingredients such as serum from cows that is not completely defined.

100% human mini-lungs

For the new study, published in Cell Stem Cell, Tata’s group took on the big challenge of predicting and testing many combinations of chemically pure factors that would do the job just as well.

The result is a purely human organoid without any helper cells. Mini-lungs grown in tiny wells will enable high throughput science, in which hundreds of experiments can be run simultaneously to screen for new drug candidates or to identify self-defense chemicals produced by lung cells in response to infection.

“This is a versatile model system that allows us to study not only SARS-CoV-2, but any respiratory virus that targets these cells, including influenza,” Tata says.

In using mini-lungs to study SARS-CoV-2 infection, the researchers had to take precautions to safely handle the deadly virus. The researchers utilized state-of-the art biosafety level 3 facilities to infect the lung organoids. The researchers watched the gene activity and chemical signals that are produced by the lung cells after infection.

“This is a major breakthrough for the field because we were using cells that didn’t have purified cultures,” says coauthor Ralph Baric, a professor of epidemiology, microbiology, and immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The mini-lungs are 100% human with no supporting cells that could confuse findings. “This is incredibly elegant work to figure out how to purify and grow AT2 cells in culture in pure form,” Baric says.

New weapon in COVID fight

Baric’s lab is capable of changing any nucleotide of the COVID-19 virus’s genetic code at will, so it produced a glowing version that would reveal where it went in the mini-lungs, confirming that it did indeed home in on the crucial ACE2 cell surface receptor, leading to infection.

When infected with the virus, the organoids launched an inflammatory response mediated by interferons. The researchers have also witnessed the cytokine storm of immune molecules the lungs launch in response to the virus.

“It was thought cytokine storm happened due to the large influx of immune cells, but we can see it also happens in the lung stem cells themselves,” Tata says.

Tata’s lab found the cells produced interferons and experienced self-destructive cell death, just as samples from COVID-19 patients have shown. The signal for cell suicide was sometimes triggered in uninfected neighboring lung cells as well, as the cells struggled to get ahead of the virus.

The researchers also compared the gene activity patterns between the mini-lungs and samples from six severe COVID-19 patients and found they agreed with “striking similarity.”

“We’ve only been able to see this from autopsies until now,” Tata says. “Now we have a way to figure out how to energize the cells to fight against this deadly virus.”

Cell-based therapies

In another series of experiments, mini-lungs treated with low doses of interferons before infection were able to slow viral copying. But suppressing interferon activity before infection led to increased viral replication.

Tata says his lab was working on growing the mini lungs in mid-2019 and had achieved a working model just as the coronavirus pandemic emerged.

He says his group will be working with both academic and industry partners to use these cells for cell-based therapies and eventually to try to grow a complete lung for transplantation.

Baric says his lab will probably use the mini-lungs to better understand a new strain of SARS-CoV-2 called D614G that has become the dominant version of the virus. This strain, which emerged in Italy, has a spike protein that is apparently more efficient at recognizing the ACE2 receptor on lung cells, making it even more infectious.

The Chan Zuckerberg Foundation, the US National Institutes of Health, Duke University, and United Therapeutics Corporation funded the work.

Source: Duke University

The post Lab-made mini-lungs mimic real COVID infections appeared first on Futurity.

Men with physical jobs have 55% higher dementia risk

Mon, 26 Oct 2020 18:26:06 GMT

Men in jobs with hard physical work have a higher risk of developing dementia compared to men doing sedentary work, new research reveals.

Based on the findings, researchers urge health authorities to make their recommendations concerning physical activity more specific.

The muscles and joints are not the only parts of the body to be worn down by physical work. The brain and heart suffer too. The new study from the University of Copenhagen shows that people doing hard physical work have a 55% higher risk of developing dementia than those doing sedentary work. The figures have been adjusted for lifestyle factors and lifetime, among other things.

The general view has been that physical activity normally reduces the risk of dementia, just as another study recently showed that a healthy lifestyle can reduce the risk of developing dementia conditions by half.

The form of physical activity is vital, though, says Kirsten Nabe-Nielsen, an associate professor from the public health department at the University of Copenhagen.

“Before the study we assumed that hard physical work was associated with a higher risk of dementia. It is something other studies have tried to prove, but ours is the first to connect the two things convincingly,” says Nabe-Nielsen, who headed the study with the National Research Centre for the Working Environment with help from Bispebjerg-Frederiksberg Hospital.

“For example, the WHO guide to preventing dementia and disease on the whole mentions physical activity as an important factor. But our study suggests that it must be a ‘good’ form of physical activity, which hard physical work is not. Guides from the health authorities should therefore differentiate between physical activity in your spare time and physical activity at work, as there is reason to believe that the two forms of physical activity have opposite effects,” Nabe-Nielsen says.

She explains that even when you take smoking, blood pressure, overweight, alcohol intake, and physical activity in one’s spare time into account, hard physical work is associated with an increased occurrence of dementia.

Coauthor Andreas Holtermann of the National Research Centre for the Working Environment hopes the dementia study will shine a spotlight on the importance of prevention, as changes in the brain begin long before the person leaves the labor market.

“A lot of workplaces have already taken steps to improve the health of their staff. The problem is that it is the most well-educated and resourceful part of the population that uses these initiatives,” Holtermann says.

“Those with a shorter education often struggle with overweight, pain, and poor physical fitness, even though they take more steps during the day and to a larger extent use their body as a tool. For workmen, it is not enough for example to avoid heavy lifts if they wish to remain in the profession until age 70. People with a shorter education doing manual labor also need to take preventive steps by strengthening the body’s capacity via, for example, exercise and strength training,” he says.

The study is based on data from the Copenhagen Male Study (CMS), which included 4,721 Danish men, who back in the 1970s reported data on the type of work they did on a daily basis. The study included 14 large Copenhagen-based companies, the largest being DSB, the Danish Defence, KTAS, the Postal Services, and the City of Copenhagen.

Through the years, the researchers have compiled health data on these men, including data on the development of dementia conditions.

According to Nabe-Nielsen, previous studies have suggested that hard physical work may have a negative effect on the heart blood circulation and thus also on the blood supply to the brain. This may for example lead to the development of cardiovascular diseases like high blood pressure, blood clots in the heart, heart cramps, and heart failure.

The National Research Centre for the Working Environment continues to work on the results with a view to identifying healthier ways of doing hard physical work. They have therefore begun to collect data from social and health care assistants, child care workers, and packing operatives, among others, in order to produce interventions meant to organize hard physical work in such a way that it has an “exercise effect.”

They hope to see companies successfully change work procedures, ensuring for example that heavy lifts will have a positive effect rather than wear down the workers.

The study appears in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports.

Source: University of Copenhagen

The post Men with physical jobs have 55% higher dementia risk appeared first on Futurity.

Smoothie time? Pig blood becomes protein powder

Mon, 26 Oct 2020 17:37:16 GMT

A new method turns pig blood into a neutral tasting protein powder for the food industry.

Using an enzyme from papayas, researchers from the University of Copenhagen’s food science department have developed a method to extract protein from pig blood. The result is a fine, white, neutral tasting powder with a 90% protein content. One that can be used as a supplement in a wide variety of foods. Pig blood protein has a higher nutritional value than any other plant or dairy-based protein on the market.

“We are increasing production sustainability by taking advantage of pig blood as a protein source for human consumption. It is likely that a growing number of people will satisfy their protein needs in the future through alternative food sources, for the sake of CO₂ emissions and due to food shortages,” explains associate professor and head researcher Rene Lametsch.

The 60,000 tons of pig blood that flow through Danish slaughterhouses annually primarily sell in the international market for animal feed. By using the researchers’ method to use the blood as a protein source for humans, 5,000 tonnes (about 5,500 tons) of pure protein powder can be extracted from 60,000 tonnes (just over 66,000 tons) of blood.

Protein extracted from this blood can be used for many things. People could blend the protein powder into juices, ice cream, chocolate bars, dairy drinks, and more. It could also be useful in hospitals and for elder care.

“We have tested the powder in a chocolate bar, as well as in meatballs served to people 65-years-old and up, with positive results. Older people can have a tough time getting enough protein in their diets as they begin to eat less at the exact same time that their bodies need additional protein,” explains Lametsch.

The researchers’ method also separates iron from blood, which can be used for dietary supplements or as a natural food colorant.

The ability to use pig blood as a protein source with the potential of reducing meat production and helping the environment now awaits an industrial investor willing to launch a product with pig blood protein in it.

“Our research is done. The next step is in the hands of the industry. We need a partner that can move this to market,” says Lametsch. “A bold industrial investor must be willing to test this with consumers. Protein from pig’s blood faces the same challenge as with insects. People try it, and think of it as exciting, but it takes time to get used to.”

Lametsch points to China as a potential export market.

The research project took place in collaboration with Danish Crown, Toft Care, and Essentia Protein solutions. Findings from the project appear most recently in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Source: University of Copenhagen

The post Smoothie time? Pig blood becomes protein powder appeared first on Futurity.

54% of countries mandate at least 1 vaccination

Mon, 26 Oct 2020 15:37:11 GMT

A new study comparing policies around the world finds broad implementation of vaccination mandates.

However, the penalties for failing to vaccinate differ significantly by country, ranging from fines to jail time.

“Achieving and maintaining high vaccination coverage globally is critical,” says Nicole Basta, an associate professor in the epidemiology, biostatistics and occupational health department at McGill University.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has shown just how challenging infectious disease control is when vaccination is not possible. There are many other vaccine-preventable diseases, yet vaccine uptake is not high enough to prevent outbreaks in many countries,” Basta says.

The study in Vaccine assesses national mandatory vaccination policies from all UN-recognized countries worldwide.

“The use of vaccination programs is one of the most cost-effective and successful tools for public health. Especially in a pandemic, high vaccination coverage on a global scale is important,” says lead author Katie Gravagna, a master’s student in epidemiology studying under Basta’s supervision.

Researchers found that 105 out of the 193 countries (54%) they studied had evidence of a national mandatory vaccination mandate policy that required at least one vaccine. Of those, 62 countries (59%) also have one or more penalties that can be imposed on individuals who do not comply. The frequency, types, and severity of penalties for failing to comply with mandatory vaccination varied widely across all regions from relatively minor penalties like small one-time fines to jail time.

The most common penalties included those of the educational and financial variety. Most educational penalties deny school enrollment until vaccination requirements have been met. Of the 32 countries with financial penalties, 53% have one-time fines of less than $1,000 USD.

More severe penalties include jail time—a possibility in 12 countries, seven of which include less than six months. Italy’s mandatory vaccination policy has among the most severe penalties, with violations potentially resulting in the temporary loss of parental rights.

“Our findings set the stage for the most important next step: determining whether these mandatory vaccination policies and the penalties that countries use to promote adherence are effective, beneficial, or harmful in deterring non-compliance,” says Basta.

“These comparative studies are important because we need to define best practices for sustaining high vaccination uptake worldwide.”

Source: McGill University

The post 54% of countries mandate at least 1 vaccination appeared first on Futurity.