Author: Futurity (National Geo)

More than 90% of vehicle-owning households in the United States would see a reduction in the percentage of income they spend on transportation energy if they switched to electric vehicles, research finds.

And more than 90% of households that replace gas-powered vehicles with EVs would also reduce the amount of climate-warming greenhouse gases they generate, the findings show.

However, more than half of the lowest-income US households (an estimated 8.3 million households) would continue to experience high transportation energy burdens, defined in this study as spending more than 4% of household income on filling the tank or charging up.

“Our results confirm the potential for widespread benefits from EV adoption,” says corresponding author of the study Joshua Newell, an urban geographer at the University of Michigan Center for Sustainable Systems, part of the School for Environment and Sustainability.

“However, EV ownership in the US has thus far been dominated by households with higher incomes and education levels, leaving the most vulnerable populations behind. Policy interventions are needed to increase EV accessibility so that all Americans can benefit from the EV transition.”

The new study appears in the journal Environmental Research Letters. It is the first study to consider the spatial variation of both EV energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions across the country.

It’s also the first study to examine EV energy costs through the lens of distributive justice by calculating the EV energy burden (percentage of income spent on EV charging) for the entire United States. Distributive justice concerns the fair distribution of benefits and burdens.

EVs currently account for about 1% of the cars, SUVs, and pickups on American roads. If all those vehicles were replaced with new EVs, the transportation energy burdens and associated greenhouse gas emissions would vary widely from place to place, according to the new study.

Reductions in both transportation energy burden and GHG emissions would be especially pronounced on the West Coast and in parts of the Northeast, due largely to cleaner energy grids and lower electricity prices.

Households in some locations could reduce their annual transportation-energy costs by $600 or more, and cut their annual carbon footprint by more than 4.1 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents, by buying a new EV.

But lower-income households in other parts of the country wouldn’t fare as well, Newell says.

Very high EV transportation energy burdens, ranging from 10% to 64%, would persist for the lowest-income households and would be concentrated in the Midwest and in the two states with the highest electricity prices: Hawaii and Alaska.

Of US households, 8% (an estimated 9.6 million) would see low savings in both transportation energy burden and greenhouse gas emissions by choosing an EV. “Both low” households are scattered across the country, with about half of them in Midwest states.

Factors that contribute to those low EV savings include cold winter temperatures that affect battery performance, electrical grids that rely largely on fossil fuels, or electricity prices that are higher relative to gasoline prices.

According to the study, the lowest-income households would continue to experience the highest transportation energy burdens. Essentially all households with incomes of less than 30% of the local median would experience moderate or high EV energy burdens.

“We identified disparities that will require targeted policies to promote energy justice in lower-income communities—including the subsidizing of charging infrastructure—as well as strategies to reduce electricity costs and increase the availability of low-carbon transportation modes such as public transit, bicycling, and car sharing,” says lead author Jesse Vega-Perkins, who did the work for a master’s thesis at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability.

“Our analysis indicates that future grid decarbonization, current and future fuel prices, and charging accessibility will impact the extent to which EV benefits will be realized, including lowering transportation energy burdens for low-income households,” says senior author Greg Keoleian, director of the university’s Center for Sustainable Systems.

The study used a geospatial model to evaluate three factors associated with the EV transition: transportation energy burden, fuel costs (meaning the cost of gasoline or the electricity needed to charge an EV), and greenhouse gas emissions.

The analysis does not include vehicle purchase cost. Total cost of ownership of EVs is the focus of a current study by the Center for Sustainable Systems.

The researchers calculated transportation energy burdens and lifetime greenhouse gas emissions of new battery-electric and internal-combustion vehicles at the census tract level. Then they compared the energy burdens of the new vehicles to the energy burdens of the current on-road vehicle stock. Finally, they compared the spatial variation and extent of energy burdens and greenhouse gas emissions for EVs and internal-combustion vehicles across the US.

Transportation accounts for the largest portion of the greenhouse gases emitted in the United States, with direct emissions from passenger vehicles and light-duty trucks comprising roughly 16% of US emissions. Electrification is seen as the primary pathway to reducing those emissions.

The study had support from the university’s School for Environment and Sustainability.

Source: University of Michigan

Researchers are using machine learning to map where sharks face the most risk from longline fishing.

The ocean can be a dangerous place, even for a shark. Despite sitting at the top of the food chain, these predators are now reeling from destructive human activities like overfishing, pollution, and climate change.

The new research used data from regional fisheries management organizations and machine learning algorithms. The findings in Frontiers in Marine Science highlight key regions where sharks can be protected with minimal impact on tuna fisheries.

Sharks take the bait

Offshore longline fisheries take an especially heavy toll on ocean life. The non-selective technique has the highest rate of shark bycatch.

“Longline fishing gear is exactly what it sounds like: a long line with lots of hooks attached to it that are baited. And they can be left in the water, waiting for fish to bite, for a very long time,” explains co-lead author Darcy Bradley, who heads the Ocean & Fisheries Program at the Environmental Markets Lab (emLab) at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

These baited hooks catch predators like tuna, but many nearby sharks will also converge on the bait.

Rather than simply report how many sharks were caught and where, the authors aimed to assess the relative risk sharks faced across different areas of the ocean.

“One of the main questions was ‘Where is the risk for catching sharks the highest, and does that overlap with fishing effort?’” says co-lead author Echelle Burns, a project scientist at emLab.

To answer this, Burns, Bradley, and coauthor Lennon Thomas (also at emLab) went hunting for data on longline fisheries. They sourced publicly available data from tuna regional fisheries management organizations. These intergovernmental institutions manage, collect data, and perform scientific assessments for tuna and tuna-like species.

The authors compiled data on shark catch from industrial longline fishing across all the world’s tuna fisheries into one comprehensive resource. This was quite a task. Each fisheries management organization operates differently, meaning their data isn’t always in the same format.

“Now anyone who’s interested in shark catches and other happenings in these global longline fisheries has access to that information,” Bradley says.

Even top predators face risks

The authors paired spatial shark catch data with environmental data like sea-surface temperature and factors correlated with food abundance. They also included economic data like ex vessel price—the price that fishers receive directly for their catch—for different shark species each year.

“Because you can’t catch a shark where it doesn’t live,” Bradley adds, “we used species distribution models to delineate where different sharks actually live in the ocean to inform our risk assessment.”

Still, there were a lot of unknowns. Not every fishing vessel has an impartial observer recording catch for the fisheries management organizations. And not every report is completely accurate.

So Burns, Bradley, and Thomas used a model to fill in the gaps, recognize trends and draw conclusions from this incomplete data. “The whole reason to use a model is because we have imperfect data,” Bradley says. “If we knew everything we wouldn’t need a model.”

This was a new approach to estimating the interactions between fisheries and marine species. Using machine learning enabled the team to extrapolate trends from their messy datasets. First, the model assessed whether a shark species was present in an area, and if so, how likely it was to be caught there. Then it looked at how many sharks of each species were caught in an area.

The authors prioritized predictive power in this study. “Our goal was to identify where sharks are at the highest risk of being caught by tuna longline fisheries,” Bradley explains. “For this study, we were not trying to understand the extent to which various factors influence this risk.”

The authors used a random forest model, which combines the outputs of many decision trees. Each decision tree considers a different variable, and its outcome is a vote for the final prediction.

“The basic idea is that a bunch of poor decision-makers, the trees, can share information to ultimately make a better decision: the forest,” Bradley says. While this method doesn’t provide a clear picture of how each factor influences the system, it is very good at making sense of messy and incomplete datasets. What emerged was a map of catch risk for shark populations across the globe.

Good for sharks, good for fishers

Tunas and sharks are both predators and target similar prey, so they’re often found together. But while they may share some traits, sharks and tunas are fundamentally different types of animals. Tunas grow quickly and produce many offspring, while sharks mature relatively late and reproduce slowly.

As a result, tuna can withstand much higher fishing pressures than sharks, and even a small impact on shark numbers can affect the population of a threatened species.

Fortunately, the scientists found that hotspots for longline-shark interactions didn’t correspond with preferred fishing grounds. “This suggests that we can design management strategies that can protect vulnerable and threatened shark species without having to close the most productive tuna fishing grounds,” Bradley says. The team found this particularly heartening, since it could encourage actions that help sharks while appealing to fishers as well.

Shark catch hotspots

The difference between hotspots and good fishing grounds could stem from those differences between tuna and sharks.

“For example, we noticed that some of the shark catch hotspots overlap with areas that play a critical role in a shark’s life cycle,” Thomas says. Take the ocean off the coast of Namibia, a well-known nursery habitat and juvenile feeding ground for blue sharks.

In fact, blue sharks dominated interactions with longline fishing fleets. This common and widespread species contributed over 78% of the total shark catch reported by tuna regional fisheries management organizations between 2012 and 2020.

As a result, the majority of the paper’s findings for sharks as a whole are driven by blue shark catch in particular. This was one reason the authors investigated hotspots for 12 species individually in their supplementary materials.

The team is working on a follow-up study estimating global shark mortality due to fishing as a whole—not just longline. They also plan to assess whether regulations have helped prevent shark catch. What’s more, this paper’s random forest model can provide insights on other species threatened by overfishing.

Better data will allow the team to improve their model, but it’s already providing useful lessons. For instance, we can design management strategies to protect vulnerable and threatened shark species without disrupting prime tuna fishing grounds.

“Making small adjustments to tuna fishing regulations to avoid shark catch hotspots could make a huge difference for shark populations in the future,” Burns says, “while also ensuring that the tuna fisheries remain successful.”

Source: UC Santa Barbara

Pinpointing the routes that the COVID-19 virus takes in and out of the nasal cavity could make possible a “morning after” spray to prevent infection, say researchers.

Imagine someone just coughed on you on a flight, in line at the store, anywhere. If only there were a “morning after” nasal spray that could knock out respiratory viruses’ ability to colonize your nose and throat.

“Our upper airways are the launchpad not only for infection of our lungs but for transmission to others,” says Peter Jackson, a Stanford School of Medicine professor of pathology and of microbiology and immunology. Jackson is senior author of the study in Cell with Raul Andino, professor of microbiology and immunology at UC San Francisco.

Inside the nose

The nose and airway are lined with epithelial tissue consisting mainly of three cell types: basal cells, goblet cells, and multiciliated cells, which make up about 80% of all cells in the nasal epithelium. Multiciliated cells form a protective barrier to keep viruses from entering the airway.

Jackson and his colleagues zoomed in on two structures found on multiciliated epithelial cells: cilia and microvilli. Although both are well known, neither structure has previously been implicated in how the virus enters or exits the cells lining the airway.

Cilia are spaghetti-like appendages sprouting from the outward-facing surfaces of various cells. A single nasal epithelial cell may host as many as 400 of these whiplike strands on its nasal-cavity-facing surface, all continuously beating in harmony. They’re topped by a thin layer of a protein called mucin—closely related to the key protein in mucus—and, atop that, a coat of mucus.

Mucin molecules can hook up with one another to form a mesh akin to an elastic, three-dimensional chain-link fence, preventing larger viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 from getting into upper-airway cells, Jackson says. The mucus coat entraps viral particles, bacteria, environmental debris, and cell-breakdown junk and keeps underlying cells moist.

Upper-airway epithelial cilia poke through this mucus layer, their synchronized beat generating a wave that pushes the mucus and its entrapped particles along, like a slow-moving river, to where it can be expectorated or, alternatively, swallowed and digested.

Another feature common to virtually all animal cells is microvilli, smaller spikes extending from the cell surface like little fingers. Microvilli can grab and transport subcellular particles and vesicles.

Organoids with cilia

To see, close up, what happens during a nascent viral infection, Jackson and his associates used a sophisticated tissue culture method to generate what they call airway epithelial organoids, which mimic normal airways. While lacking blood vessels and immune cells, these organoids otherwise fully recapitulate the architecture of the nasal epithelium, including an intact mucus-mucin layer and well-developed multiciliated cells.

The scientists inoculated the cultures by incubating them in the same dish with SARS-CoV-2. With light and electron microscopy and immunochemical staining, they monitored the epithelial cells for viral entry, replication and exit.

Only ciliated cells became infected. Electron microscopy showed that the virus initially attaches only to cilia. Six hours after organoids were incubated with SARS-CoV-2, many virus particles were dotting the cilia’s sides from the tips down. Even 24 hours after inoculation, the virus was replicating only in a few cells. It took 48 hours for massive replication to occur.

SARS-CoV-2 needs a full day or two to start replicating full-tilt in real life, too.

Depleting the cilia, by knocking down levels of a protein critical to cilia formation in nasal epithelial cells, severely slowed down SARS-CoV-2 infection.

“It’s clear that human ciliated nasal epithelial cells are the primary entry site for SARS-CoV-2 in nasal epithelial tissue,” Jackson says.

Suspecting that the delay in infection is due to the airway mucus-mucin barrier the virus has to cross, the researchers treated the airway organoids with a mucin-selective enzyme that breaks down the mucin-network mesh. It sped up virus entry at 24 hours from “barely detectable to easily detectable,” says Jackson, who concludes that eliminating mucin from this mesh prevented the mesh from blocking SARS-CoV-2 infection of the organoids.

In patients with a very rare disease called primary ciliary dyskinesia, whose ciliary beating capability is compromised or is no longer in sync, mucus flow loses its directionality.

In airway organoids generated from these patients, viral attachment to cilia resembled that seen in normal cells. At 24 hours post-inoculation, cell-infection rates were also similar to those of normal infected cells. Normal-looking microvilli bristled on cell surfaces.

But at 48 hours, SARS-CoV-2 was infecting far fewer cells overall—it could infect only the immediately surrounding cells—suggesting that once SARS-CoV-2 has started replicating within infected cells, the virus relies on adequate mucus flow to help it spread throughout the upper airways.

A May 2020 Nature Communications study, of which Jackson is a coauthor, showed that ACE2—the classic SARS-CoV-2-binding cell-surface molecule, or receptor—concentrates on the cilia of nasal epithelial cells. The new Cell study shows that SARS-CoV-2 bound to epithelial cilia via this receptor.

From there, Jackson says, the virus might slip past the mucus-mucin barrier in one of two ways: either by skipping down the side of cilia, hopscotch-style, from one ACE2 molecule to the next until it reaches the cell’s main body, fusing with the cell membrane there and climbing in; or by wedging its way into the cilium and riding an internal freight elevator down to the cell body.

“Once the virus gets through that barrier,” he says, “it can replicate freely in underlying cells.”

The researchers also find that SARS-CoV-2, once inside the cell, induces activity on the part of intracellular enzymes that causes microvilli to enlarge and branch, like crazy cactus plants, until their tips poke out above the mucus barrier. Their numbers increase. As soon as 24 hours post-inoculation, many altered microvilli, ordinarily less than half the length of cilia, have turned into huge, branching, tree-like structures the size of cilia or larger, and they’re decorated with attached viral particles that can shove off into the mucus-mucin layer, where they can float down the mucus river and infect other, more-distant cells.

The researchers pinpointed enzymes in the cell, massively switched on by SARS-CoV-2 infection, that were causing the microvilli’s transformation. Inhibiting these enzymes ground that aberration to a halt and greatly diminished the virus’s spread to other cells.

A ‘morning after’ spray?

Jackson and his colleagues had similar results when they incubated airway organoids with either of two other respiratory viruses—the now-surging respiratory syncytial virus and the less-common parainfluenza virus—as well as with BA.1, a variant of the omicron strain.

Omicron is more contagious, and, as expected, it infected airway-organoid multiciliated cells more quickly than the older strain used for the other SARS-CoV-2 experiments. But inhibiting viral entry or exit in airway cells still proved effective, even for this highly infectious variant.

These viral entry mechanisms may be a general property of many respiratory viruses, Jackson says.

The findings identify new targets for a nasally applied drug that, by impeding ciliary motion or microvilli gigantism, could prevent even unknown respiratory viruses—the kind you meet, say, at a pandemic—from making themselves at home in your nose or throat.

Jackson says substances used in these experiments could perhaps be optimized for use in, say, nasal sprays soon after a respiratory viral exposure, or as prophylactics.

“Delaying viral entry, exit or spread with a locally applied, short-duration drug would help our immune systems catch up and arrive in time to stop full-blown infection and hopefully limit future pandemics,” he says.

Other researchers from UCSF, the Jikei University School of Medicine in Tokyo, and the Texas Biomedical Research Institute contributed to the work.

The study had funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Stanford Diabetes Research Center, Fast Grant, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Stanford Respond Innovate Scale Empower, and the Stanford Maternal and Child Health Research Institute.

Source: Stanford University

Research shows that pharmacies can be a safe and accessible treatment starting point for people with opioid use disorder—and keep them better engaged than usual care with a physician.

The study in the New England Journal Medicine finds that pharmacists—not just physicians at clinics and doctor’s offices—can safely and effectively start patients with opioid use disorder on the lifesaving medication buprenorphine.

“With over 100,000 overdose deaths in 2022 and an opioid crisis impacting states across the country, improving access to buprenorphine is a critical and necessary next step,” says Traci Green, lead study author and co-director of Rhode Island Hospital’s Center of Biomedical Research Excellence on Opioids and Overdose.

“Dramatically increasing capacity to provide good, lifesaving treatment for people with opioid use disorder through pharmacies is an approach that could be ramped up today,” says Green, who is also an adjunct professor at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School. “It’s a game-changer.”

The first-of-its-kind pilot study documents the experiences of 100 patients who started taking buprenorphine after visiting a specially trained pharmacist for their care. Once stabilized on the medication, 58 patients were randomly assigned to receive either continued care in the pharmacy or usual care in a clinic or physician’s office.

After one month, the patients in the pharmacy care group showed dramatically higher rates of retention: 25 patients (89%) continued to receive treatment in the pharmacy compared to five (17%) in the usual care group.

“To have so many people in the pharmacy group continue on with their care was completely unexpected,” Green says. “The results from this pilot study show how pharmacies can be an effective and viable pathway to treatment for opioid use disorder.”

Access to addiction care

A third of patients in the study identified as Black, Indigenous, or persons of color, and almost half were without a permanent residence.

“Considering overdose deaths are increasing the fastest among Black and Hispanic communities and over 1,500 Rhode Islanders are currently unhoused, pharmacy-based addiction care models could be a pathway to promote racial and economic equity in accessing addiction treatment,” says study author Josiah D. Rich, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Brown.

“Treatment with medications can only work if it is available and accessible in the community,” says Rich, who is also an attending physician at the Miriam and Rhode Island Hospitals. “Opioid use disorder is too often a lethal disease, and it kills by stigma and isolation. Widespread, equitable access to effective treatment is the answer. Our study showed that the pharmacy treatment model increases access, which benefits a diverse patient population and increases equity.”

Buprenorphine at the pharmacy

Buprenorphine is an opioid agonist/antagonist medication that has proven safe and effective in treating opioid withdrawal, Rich notes, and has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to treat opioid use disorder.

Currently, patients with an opioid use disorder who are prescribed buprenorphine or naltrexone must see an approved physician or go to a US Drug Enforcement Agency-approved opioid treatment facility for their care. Patients typically then have the medications dispensed at the clinic or go to the pharmacy to pick them up.

Regulatory hurdles have prevented widespread use of buprenorphine, the researchers note; a 2019 national survey found that 80% of people with substance use disorder never receive any evidence-based medication treatment. Those who are prescribed treatment often face barriers such as long-distance travel to clinics, inconvenient clinic hours, time-consuming paperwork and bureaucracy, stigma, and more.

“We have a serious treatment gap—we are missing 90% of the people with opioid use disorder who need and want treatment,” says Jeffrey Bratberg, a study author and clinical professor of pharmacy practice at the University of Rhode Island College of Pharmacy. “Pharmacists are an underutilized partner in the health care workforce, especially the behavioral health care workforce. There is a pharmacy within 5 miles of where 95% of Americans live.”

Pharmacist reflections

The study enabled pharmacists trained in the foundations of addiction treatment to instead be a convenient and community-located place for patients to go for care and access medication. At the “one-stop” community pharmacy visit, patients filled their prescriptions, obtained medication management, and received follow-up care.

Genoa Healthcare, a provider of specialized pharmacy care for behavioral health and substance use disorder communities, supported a team of 21 pharmacists in training to provide buprenorphine care at six of its community pharmacies in Rhode Island.

Linda Rowe-Varone, one of the clinical pharmacists who provided buprenorphine to patients enrolled in the study, says one of her patients is a mother who lives near the Genoa Healthcare pharmacy in Providence. This patient told Rowe-Varone that she found the pharmacy hours to be much more convenient than the clinic she previously visited and that she felt safe and comfortable enough at the pharmacy to bring her children with her to treatment appointments.

Rowe-Varone says she appreciated the opportunity to work with the individuals enrolled in the study.

“I met people who could be my family members, my neighbors, people I work with, people I pass walking on the street, and they would come into our pharmacy for help,” she says. “They wanted to become healthy again… I feel as if we’re right there for them.”

Urgent action

The opportunity to open pharmacies for addiction treatment is expanding in 2023, the researchers note: Changes that President Joe Biden signed into law will make it easier and less cumbersome for trained health professionals to prescribe buprenorphine. Currently, 10 states allow pharmacists to obtain DEA authorization to prescribe controlled substances such as buprenorphine, which means the pharmacy treatment approach would be locally feasible.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of being able to quickly devise and implement new ways of delivering health care, Green says.

“During the COVID-19 crisis, we were able to quickly figure out how to deliver immunizations on a mass scale, and pharmacies were an important part of that model,” Green says. “The opioid crisis has been going on for some time, with over 100,000 people dying each year. There is an urgent need for new ways to get people the treatment they need.”

To spread the word about their findings, the team created a shareable video that illustrates the process of the study and includes patient feedback.

The study was a collaboration among Genoa Healthcare, the researchers, and leaders at the Rhode Island Health Department and the Rhode Island Department of Behavioral Health, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals, which created the legal and policy infrastructure to support the research and test the pharmacy care model. Green, Bratberg, and Rich serve as expert advisors to the Rhode Island Governor’s Overdose Prevention and Intervention Task Force.

Funding for the study came from the National Institute on General Medical Sciences and the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Source: Brown University

Researchers have discovered an Earth-sized exoplanet—a planet outside of our solar system.

The planet, named TOI-700 e, falls within its star’s habitable zone, meaning it could be capable of supporting life as we know it.

Astronomers believe that many such planets exist in our galaxy and across the universe. The discovery of TOI-700 e, along with the earlier confirmation of its host system, could provide unique opportunities to better explore exoplanets going forward.

“Even with more than 5,000 exoplanets discovered to date, TOI-700 e is a key example that we have a lot more to learn,” says Joey Rodriguez, an assistant professor in the physics and astronomy department at Michigan State University, who helped make the discovery.

Rodriguez was one of the senior researchers on the project, led by Emily Gilbert, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. The duo is also part of the original team that confirmed the TOI-700 system in 2020, finding it had at least three planets (named TOI-700 b, TOI-700 c, and TOI-700 d).

With the new discovery, the team showed that the TOI-700 system has two Earth-sized planets within its habitable zone.

“This is one of only a few systems with multiple, small, habitable-zone planets that we know of,” says Gilbert. “That makes the TOI-700 system an exciting prospect for additional follow-up.”

Gilbert, Rodriguez, and Andrew Vanderburg, an assistant professor of physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spearheaded the current project, which includes researchers from dozens of institutions. The research team announced the finding at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.

Here, Rodriguez, an exoplanet expert, explains the discovery and the research behind it:

There are still kinks to iron out in neuroimaging technology before doctors can translate images of the brain to psychiatric disorders such as PTSD, researchers report.

Several years ago, the National Institutes of Mental Health launched a multi-billion-dollar research effort to locate biomarkers of brain activity that point to the biological roots of a host of mental health diseases, which today are typically identified by clinical evaluation of a constellation of often overlapping symptoms reported by patients.

“The idea is to forget classification of disease by symptoms and find underlying biological causes,” says Ilan Harpaz-Rotem, professor of psychiatry and psychology at Yale University and senior author of the study in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

For the new study, the research team attempted to replicate the findings of an earlier nationwide neuroimaging study, in which Emory and Harvard scientists linked clusters of brain activity to a variety of outcomes among patients who had arrived at United States emergency departments following traumatic events.

Specifically, when researchers measured patients’ brain activity during the performance of simple tasks—including ones that probe responses to threats and rewards—they detected a cluster of brain activity that showed high reactivity to both threat and reward signals and seemed to predict more severe symptoms of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) later on.

However, when Yale researchers analyzed similar neuroimaging data collected from recent trauma survivors in Israel, they were not able to replicate these findings. While they did identify the different clusters of brain activity observed in the earlier study, they found no association with prospective PTSD symptoms.

“That is not to say one set of data is right and the other is wrong, just that there is a lot of fundamental work that needs to be done to develop reliable models that could generalize across different studies,” says Ziv Ben-Zion, a postdoctoral associate at Yale School of Medicine and the corresponding author of the study.

In fact, Yale researchers are currently working with the investigators of the original Emory-Harvard study to merge datasets “to search for common underlying patterns of brain activity associated with different responses to trauma,” Ben-Zion says.

“It took about 100 years to come up with current classifications of mental illness, but we’ve only been exploring refining psychiatric diagnoses using biomarkers for the last 10 years,” says Harpaz-Rotem. “We still have a long way to go.”

Source: Yale University

Satellite data can reveal large individual fossils from the air, allowing field researchers to embark on more targeted searches on the ground, research finds.

“Organizing field work is very expensive, and there are lots of safety and security risks,” says Elena Ghezzo, who led the work as a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of University of Oregon paleontologist Edward Davis. “So any additional information you can have from the field before you go is useful. My method seems be really good at ruling out regions that don’t have fossils.”

The team analyzed multispectrum satellite imagery, which includes not just visible light, but also other wavelengths like ultraviolet and infrared. By looking at how the landscape absorbs or reflects all these different types of light, researchers can pick out specific features, like fossils, from the background.

This kind of satellite data is often used to do aerial surveys of cities and track patterns of land use. But it hasn’t been used before to search for single fossils, Ghezzo says.

The researchers tested their idea with data from Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. More than 200 million years ago, this landscape was a lush coniferous forest. Today, it’s a colorful desert, dotted with fossilized logs. Based on a reference map they created by hand, the researchers could identify the signatures in the satellite data that distinguished a fossil from the background or from other landscape features.

To be picked out via satellite, a fossil must be bigger than a single pixel in the image. And its mineral composition must respond differently to light than the surrounding material. It’s easier when the landscape is flat and open, with relatively few obstructions, as the Petrified Forest is. But other data about the geology and topography of the region can also be factored in, to help researchers distinguish a fossil from, say, a tree or a big rock.

Ghezzo is now testing the technique on a variety of fossil sites around the world, from Peru to Egypt to Mongolia. And closer to home, Davis is particularly interested in applying the approach to some of his team’s field sites in Eastern Oregon.

“There’s a lot of places in the interior of Oregon that are very difficult to access even today,” Davis says. “Having the ability to use aerial photography to find fossils could help us allocate our resources.”

More broadly, a technique of this kind could be part of a shift within the field of paleontology. The practices of the past, which included blowing up hillsides with dynamite, have, in some cases, irreparably damaged the landscape. A new generation of paleontologists is working to make the field more sustainable and preserve the context in which fossils are found.

“We don’t do a lot of digging anymore,” Davis says. Instead, researchers often wait for fossils to be exposed by erosion, and then excavate in a more targeted manner. And satellite data can help them out.

Their findings appear in the journal Geological Magazine. Ghezzo had a Marie Skłodowska-Curie global fellowship to pursue the project.

Source: Laurel Hamers for University of Oregon

A recent study found that students who study abroad are more civically engaged than those who don’t.

Though formal classroom learning is an essential part of higher education, researchers at University of Chicago recognized that college is about more than what goes on in the lecture hall.

“It’s interesting to think about ways in which students’ college experiences outside the classroom prepare them for the world out there,” says Anne Henly, director of undergraduate studies in psychology and principal investigator of the study.

What impact do “cocurricular activities,” like joining a club or playing a sport, have on a student’s psychological development? As part of a grant awarded by the Self, Virtue, and Public Life Initiative, the Center for Practical Wisdom’s Jeannie Ngoc Boulware, Yena Kim, Howard Nusbaum, and Henly conducted a study focused on one specific co-curricular activity—studying abroad.

Though programs differ in location and level of immersion, students traveling overseas usually find themselves navigating different socio-cultural norms. Being in a new place allows students to acquire language skills, meet new people from other cultures and encounter different ideas.

“Our hypothesis was that because study abroad removes you from what you’re familiar with and introduces you to ways in which other people live, that might encourage you to see things from their perspective,” Henly says. “This might change basic perspective-taking abilities and empathic processes that affect social attitudes and engagement.”

To test this theory, researchers surveyed nearly 200 college students: those who had studied abroad, those hadn’t studied abroad but planned to, and students who weren’t interested in studying abroad.

Participants in each group completed several scales that measured not only civic attitudes and behaviors, but also psychological qualities that support those behaviors, such as empathy, epistemic humility, and cultural competency.

All groups scored similarly on the “Need for Cognition” scale, which measures enjoyment of thinking. In fact, apart from a difference in overall cultural competency, students who planned to study abroad and students who weren’t planning to were not fundamentally different.

Likewise, civic attitudes were high for all groups—most people believe they should participate in their community. However, students who had studied abroad were more likely to act on those beliefs—for example actually taking a volunteer position instead of simply believing volunteering is important.

“Those students who go abroad report more often actually taking the actions to participate as opposed to just believing that they should participate,” says Ngoc Boulware, first author and assistant director of communications and research for the Center for Practical Wisdom.

In addition, students who had studied abroad showed higher levels of empathy for others and greater epistemic humility, meaning they were more aware of the limits of their own knowledge. The researchers hypothesize that living abroad may alter one’s sense of self in relation to others in a way that spurs civic engagement. They plan to investigate further by tracking students’ civic engagement before and after they go abroad. The Center also plans to dig into other cocurricular activities and how they affect student development.

“If you get out of your typical experiences, force yourself to be a little bit uncomfortable and just have a little bit of perspective change, that can greatly benefit who you are as a member of society,” Boulware says. “We have this tendency to be in this echo chamber in our lives; to be able to step outside of that can really benefit us.”

The research appears in the Journal of Moral Education.

Source: Tori Lee for University of Chicago

Whiskey brands that outsource their distillation lose the perception of authenticity among consumers, research finds.

“We would have been stunned if that hadn’t been the case,” says Glenn Carroll, professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. “When consumers are looking for something authentic, they want the core of production under a company’s control, even if the quality suffers.”

Maker’s Mark rotates its oak barrels by hand. Bulleit follows a nearly 200-year-old family recipe. Jack Daniel’s touts its use of handcrafted charcoal and spring water drawn from limestone caverns.

In the journal Poetics, Carroll looks at whiskey distilleries to gain a broader sense of how consumers perceive authenticity. With Tulane’s J. Cameron Verhaal, he finds that intangible features—like the intuition of master distillers, hand-raked grains, or family ties to Prohibition-era moonshiners—matter to consumers, but less so than observable and costly marks of craftsmanship like on-site stills or integrated farming operations.

That larger takeaway isn’t meant just for whiskey drinkers. Carroll and Verhaal seek to fill a gap in the research into authenticity, which has yet to generate an overall theory of where it originates. “Most of the research on authenticity tends to be specific to a given context,” Carroll says. Researchers tend to burrow into a single subculture or product, like country music, baseball, or handicrafts, and ferret out the defining characteristics of authenticity within that setting. “What would be useful is a more general, abstract understanding of how authenticity works.”

The whiskey study brings two prominent social science theories to bear on authenticity. Signaling theory suggests that companies or people that make significant and visible investments appear more authentic, as those investments signal a strong commitment to their craft. In whiskey culture, on-site stills are an obvious signal. The theory of essentialism argues that unobservable features, like tradition, family name, or climate, are linked with authenticity. (These two theories are not mutually exclusive.)

Carroll and Verhaal ran four studies to characterize how these different ideas contribute to consumers’ perceptions of authenticity among whiskey distilleries. In the first study, participants—not all whiskey fans—selected which descriptions of a distillery sounded more authentic. The second study analyzed online reviews to determine which features of a particular whiskey corresponded with impressions of authenticity. The final two studies were experiments that used hypothetical descriptions of distilleries to tease out the type of characteristics whiskey drinkers associate with authenticity.

The researchers found evidence to support both signaling theory and the theory of essentialism, though signaling appeared to be more closely linked with perceptions of authenticity. Visible investments that reinforced on-site production were more important to notions of authenticity than more intangible traits like tradition or terroir.

This in itself wasn’t surprising, Carroll says. What was surprising is that signaling appeared to be universally more important than essence in broadcasting a brand’s authenticity. Consumers tended to respond more favorably to features they could see, like the source of the grain or the quality of barrels. “Across the board, there was a very strong emphasis placed on visible features,” he says.

These effects were strongest when a collection of visible features was described together. In terms of appearing authentic, there is some value in a distillery talking about growing its own grain. There is far more value, however, in advertising its holistic ownership of the operation, from growing through processing and production.

“That’s one of the key marketing takeaways,” Carroll says. “If you can cluster together a set of features that demonstrate investment in a craft, then that has a pretty powerful effect conveying authenticity.”

Another key takeaway is that companies interested in reaping the rewards of an authentic reputation should not outsource production, even if that means forgoing economic efficiencies.

Carroll and Verhaal point to the craft beer market as an instructional example. The distilled spirits market appears to be where craft brewing was several decades ago. At first, consumers didn’t know how much of a microbrewery’s beer was made internally. The Boston Beer Company, the early independent brewery behind the Sam Adams brand, was very successful despite outsourcing its production. This changed, though, as the craft movement expanded and matured.

“The communities around these products develop, they gain enthusiasts, review sites appear, and consumers come to know more about your identity as a company,” Verhaal says. “Eventually, you can no longer hide. Consumers will discover that you don’t have a distillery and, more likely than not, that will become a huge problem.”

There are important exceptions to this, however. He notes that Pappy Van Winkle, one of the most sought-after US bourbons, openly outsources its production to the Buffalo Trace Distillery. And yet a bottle of Pappy can go for thousands of dollars. Beyond whiskey, Carroll cites Patagonia, which has a reputation as one of the most authentic clothing brands despite not owning any mills or factories. “This is something to dig into in the future,” Verhaal says.

Source: Dylan Walsh for Stanford University

In a new trial, more than half of patients with persistent smell loss due to COVID-19 saw improvement with injections of platelet-rich plasma.

Early in the pandemic, when people with COVID-19 began reporting that they lost their sense of smell, Zara Patel figured as much. A professor of otolaryngology at Stanford Medicine, Patel has, for years, studied loss of smell as a symptom of viral infections.

“Many viruses can cause smell loss, so it wasn’t surprising to us as rhinologists when we found out that COVID-19 causes loss of smell and taste. It was almost expected,” she says. Patel also knew that the condition could last a while and that few effective treatments were available.

According to a 2022 survey by Patel and colleagues, about 15% of people who experienced smell loss from COVID-19 continued to have problems six months later. That’s roughly 9 million people in the US, and the number is growing. Many who report loss of smell also report loss of taste because smell is such a major component of how we experience food.

Now Patel’s team has tested a new treatment for long-term, COVID-19-related smell loss using injections of platelet-rich plasma derived from a patient’s own blood. In a trial of 26 participants, those who received the treatment were 12.5 times more likely to improve than patients who received placebo injections.

What is platelet-rich plasma?

Platelet-rich plasma is a concentrated form of plasma, the liquid portion of blood, with blood cells and other blood components removed. It’s rich in platelets and, most importantly, growth factors—compounds known to help regenerate tissue. Platelet-rich plasma has been purported to treat mild arthritis when injected into joints, reduce wrinkles when used on the face, and even regrow hair when injected into the scalp.

Patel was skeptical of such a cure-all but was intrigued by a study showing that platelet-rich plasma injections were as effective as surgery in treating carpal tunnel syndrome, which is caused by compressing and injuring a nerve in the wrist. She knew that COVID-19-related smell loss also was a neurological problem, in which long-term effects of the virus prevent nerves deep in the nasal cavity from regenerating correctly. These nerves connect to the brain and normally regenerate every three to four months.

“It’s a nerve damage and nerve regeneration issue that we’re dealing with,” she says.

How SARS-CoV-2 damages nerves

The SARS-CoV-2 virus doesn’t target nerve cells directly; it attacks supporting cells known as sustentacular cells, which have the ACE-2 receptor the virus uses to infect cells. These cells play a role in correct nerve regeneration, so persistent inflammation and damage to these cells may lead to long-term loss of function.

Patel had already completed a small pilot study demonstrating the safety of platelet-rich plasma injections in the nasal cavity when the pandemic hit, so she pivoted her plans for a larger trial to focus specifically on COVID-19-associated smell loss.

All participants had confirmed past COVID-19 infections and persistent smell loss lasting between 6 and 12 months. They also had to have already tried other treatments such as olfactory training and steroid rinses.

“I wanted to make sure that whatever intervention I was going to study was not just in place of or equivalent to the treatments we’re already doing, but a benefit above and beyond,” Patel says.

Half the participants received platelet-rich plasma injections into the tissue deep inside their nasal cavity every two weeks for six weeks, while the other half received placebo injections (of saline) on the same schedule. Neither the participants nor the researchers knew who received what.

Sniff, sniff

The researchers assessed smell ability using a standard olfactory test known as Sniffin’ Sticks. The test includes a range of odors, both pleasant (flowers) and terrible (rotten eggs), and participants are scored on their ability to identify the odors, tell odors apart, and determine their strength, for a possible score of 48.

When the researchers checked in with the participants three months after their first injection, those in the platelet-rich plasma group scored on average 6.25 points higher than they did before treatment, which was 3.67 points greater than the placebo group. They gained most in their ability to tell different odors apart, known as smell discrimination. At three months, 57.1% of the platelet-rich plasma group had shown a clinically significant improvement, compared with just 8.3% in the placebo group.

Interestingly, when the participants rated their own smell ability, both groups reported similar improvement. Patel says that prior studies have found that subjective improvement doesn’t always match up with objective improvement.

The improvements in the placebo group could in part be due to a placebo effect, Patel says, but they could also suggest that some spontaneous recovery can happen even after six months.

COVID-19 has brought attention to post-viral smell loss, and perhaps more appreciation of the role smell plays in our daily lives, Patel says. Though this study did not evaluate taste loss, the recovery of smell likely also would help with recovery of taste.

“People tell me all the time that they never realized how important their sense of smell and taste was to them and their quality of life until they lost it,” she says. “People say, ‘My life has gone gray.’”

Patel is now offering platelet-rich plasma injections to patients outside the trial.

“Our olfactory systems can be resilient,” Patel says. “But the sooner you perform some sort of definitive intervention, probably the better chance you have of improvement.”

The study appears in the International Forum of Allergy and Rhinology. Researchers from UC San Diego contributed to the study.

Source: Stanford University