Category: Science

Baby kangaroo feces might help provide an unlikely solution to the environmental problem of cow-produced methane, according to a new study.

A microbial culture developed from the kangaroo feces inhibited methane production in a cow stomach simulator.

After researchers added the baby kangaroo culture and a known methane inhibitor to the simulated stomach, it produced acetic acid instead of methane. Unlike methane, which cattle discard as flatulence, acetic acid has benefits for cows as it aids muscle growth.

“Methane emissions from cows are a major contributor to greenhouse gases, and at the same time, people like to eat red meat,” says Birgitte Ahring, professor in with the bioproducts, sciences, and engineering laboratory at Washington State University and corresponding author of the study in the journal Biocatalysis and Agricultural Biotechnology. “We have to find a way to mitigate this problem.”

Reducing the burps and farts of methane emissions from cattle is no laughing matter. Methane is the second largest greenhouse gas contributor and is about 30 times more potent at heating up the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. More than half of the methane released to the atmosphere is thought to come from the agricultural sector, and ruminant animals, such as cattle and goats, are the most significant contributors. Furthermore, the process of producing methane requires as much as 10% of the animal’s energy.

Researchers have tried changing cows’ diets as well as giving them chemical inhibitors to stop methane production, but the methane-producing bacteria soon become resistant to the chemicals. They also have tried to develop vaccines, but a cow’s microbiome depends on where it’s eating, and there are far too many varieties of the methane-producing bacteria worldwide. The interventions can also negatively affect the animals’ biological processes.

Ahring and colleagues study fermentation and anaerobic processes and had previously designed an artificial rumen, the largest stomach compartment found in ruminant animals, to simulate cow digestion.

With many enzymes that are able to break down natural materials, rumens have “amazing abilities,” says Ahring, who is also a professor in the School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering and in Biological System Engineering.

Looking to investigate how to outcompete the methane-producing bacteria in their reactor, Ahring learned that kangaroos have acetic acid-producing, instead of methane-producing, bacteria in their foregut. Her students tracked down some kangaroos, took samples, and learned that the specialized acetic acid-producing process only occurred in baby kangaroos—not in adults. Unable to separate out specific bacteria that might be producing the acetic acid, the researchers used a stable mixed culture developed from the feces of the baby kangaroo.

After initially reducing the methane-producing bacteria in their reactor with a specialized chemical, the acetic acid bacteria were able to replace the methane-producing microbes for several months with a similar growth rate as the methane-producing microbes.

While the researchers have tested their system in the simulated rumen, they hope to try it on real cows sometime in the future.

“It is a very good culture. I have no doubt it is promising,” Ahring says. “It could be really interesting to see if that culture could run for an extended period of time, so we would only have to inhibit the methane production from time to time. Then, it could actually be a practice.”

Washington State’s College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences’ Appendix A program supported the work.

Source: Washington State University

A quick clinical test can predict which people with neck pain are more likely to benefit from epidural steroid injections, researchers report.

These injections deliver drugs directly around the spinal nerves to stop nerve inflammation and reduce pain.

The uncomfortable injections are a common treatment for neck pain, but can cost hundreds of dollars each, carry risks, and help only a minority of patients, studies show.

A new variation on physical exam, as described in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings among 78 people with neck pain, could help guide best use of the treatment.

“Until now, it was really a 50/50 coin flip whether an epidural steroid injection would help any given neck pain patient,” says Steven P. Cohen, professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

“We looked at many different variables and believe we’ve figured out a quick and reliable way to provide patients with much more accurate, personalized information on their chances of getting better, and actually improve their odds of treatment success.”

According to the American Medical Association, neck and back pain are among the ailments that incur the highest amounts of total health care spending in the United States. Each year, doctors administer more than 10 million epidural steroid injections for back and neck pain.

Injected steroids can reduce the swelling and pressure on nerves that contribute to pain. However, the underlying causes of back and neck pain are diverse, and not all patients experience pain relief from the injections. As a result, the procedure is facing increased scrutiny by hospital systems and insurers, fueling a search for ways to better identify patients most likely to benefit.

In the new study, Cohen and collaborators adapted Waddell signs—a group of eight physical signs, named for the physician who developed them, more than 50 years ago, as a tool to identify patients whose back pain may not be due to physical abnormalities that can be treated surgically—for neck pain patients.

The signs, which can be assessed in a few minutes by a clinician, include checking for tenderness, overreaction to light stimulation, weakness not clearly explained by any physical injury or abnormality, pain that disappears when the patient is distracted, and pain that extends beyond expected areas of the body. “These physical exam maneuvers are incredibly simple to perform and easy to identify,” says Cohen.

For back pain, Waddell signs are used primarily to determine whether back pain is non-organic (not associated with a direct anatomic cause). Previously, many clinicians interpreted these signs as indicative of malingering or psychological factors. More recently, however, researchers have shown that such non-organic signs may also point to complex underlying causes of pain. In general, studies have shown that back pain patients with more Waddell signs are less likely to benefit from treatment.

To conduct the new study, clinicians examined 78 neck pain patients for the eight non-organic physical signs before treating them with epidural steroid injections. Overall, 29% (23) of the patients showed no non-organic signs; 21% (16) had one non-organic sign; and 50% (39) of patients had two or more signs before injections.

One month later, patients whose pain was still decreased by the epidural steroid injection had, on average, just 1.3 non-organic signs, while those whose pain was not decreased at the one-month mark had, on average, 3.4 non-organic signs.

Some of the individual Waddell signs were highly correlated with a lack of response to the injections. For example, 55% of injection non-responders showed apparent overreactions to light touch, while only 11% of those helped by the injections showed this sign. The researchers also found that people with more non-organic signs associated with their neck pain were more likely to report chronic pain in other areas of the body, as well as fibromyalgia and psychiatric conditions.

Cohen says it appears that the presence of multiple non-organic signs are identifying patients who might benefit from other treatment approaches, before trying epidural steroid injections. “But further research must be done to determine the best options.”

For now, Cohen says the findings can immediately help guide conversations between patients with neck pain and their doctors, when weighing the potential risks and benefits of an epidural steroid injection.

Additional coauthors are from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, the District of Columbia Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Seoul National University in Korea, and Johns Hopkins.

The research was supported in part by the US Department of Defense.

Source: Johns Hopkins University

Contrary to popular belief, snakes can hear and react to airborne sound, according to a new study.

The researchers played three different sound frequencies to captive-bred snakes one at a time in a soundproof room and observed their reactions.

“Because snakes don’t have external ears, people typically think they’re deaf and can only feel vibrations through the ground and into their bodies,” says Christina Zdenek from University of Queensland’s School of Biological Sciences.

“But our research—the first of its kind using non-anesthetized, freely moving snakes—found they do react to soundwaves traveling through the air, and possibly human voices.”

The study involved 19 snakes, representing five genetic families of reptile.

“We played one sound which produced ground vibrations, while the other two were airborne only,” Zdenek says. “It meant we were able to test both types of ‘hearing’—tactile hearing through the snakes’ belly scales and airborne through their internal ear.”

The reactions strongly depended on the genus of the snakes.

“Only the woma python tended to move toward sound, while taipans, brown snakes, and especially death adders were all more likely to move away from it,” Zdenek says.

“The types of behavioral reactions also differed, with taipans in particular more likely to exhibit defensive and cautious responses to sound.

“For example, woma pythons are large nocturnal snakes with fewer predators than smaller species and probably don’t need to be as cautious, so they tended to approach sound,” Zdenek says.

“But taipans may have to worry about raptor predators and they also actively pursue their prey, so their senses seem to be much more sensitive.”

The findings challenge the assumption that snakes can’t hear sound, such as humans talking or yelling, and could reshape the view on how they react to sound.

“We know very little about how most snake species navigate situations and landscapes around the world. But our study shows that sound may be an important part of their sensory repertoire.

“Snakes are very vulnerable, timid creatures that hide most of the time, and we still have so much to learn about them.”

The research appears in PLOS ONE. Damian Candusso, a professor at Queensland University of Technology is a coauthor.

Source: University of Queensland

The ability of fish in temperate and polar ecosystems to transition back and forth from shallow to deep water triggers species diversification, a new study finds.

Fish, the most biodiverse vertebrates in the animal kingdom, present evolutionary biologists a conundrum: The greatest species richness is found in the world’s tropical waters, yet the fish groups that generate new species most rapidly inhabit colder climates at higher latitudes.

The findings of the new study, published in Nature Communications, help to explain the paradox and suggest that as climate change warms the oceans at higher latitudes, it will impede the evolution of fish species.

“The fish clades contributing the most fish diversity in today’s oceans are leveraging the water column and the ocean depths, in particular, to diversify,” says lead author Sarah T. Friedman, who conducted the research while a postdoctoral associate at Yale University.

“Fishes that make these forays into the deep ocean are almost exclusively located in high latitudes, where it’s easier to move along the water column. These regions are experiencing the most drastic warming due to climate change, which threatens to disrupt speciation by making it more difficult for fish to change depths.”

Friedman, now a research fish biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, coauthored the study with Martha Muñoz, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale and an assistant curator of vertebrate zoology at the Yale Peabody Museum.

For the study, the researchers analyzed existing data on the global species occurrence of 4,067 fish species that included information on species geographic range and speciation rate. In part, their analysis modeled how often fish lineages might be expected to transition across ocean depths.

By laying out a distribution of anticipated shifts in depth, the researchers could compare the number of observed transitions in specific lineages. They found that species-rich, high-latitude lineages—eelpouts, rockfishes, flatfishes, icefishes, and snailfishes—transitioned up and down the water column more often than expected. Meanwhile, hyper-diverse tropical lineages, such as gobies and wrasses, changed depth less frequently than predicted.

Fish clades, evolutionary lineages that share a common ancestor, that can freely disperse along the depth gradient may be more likely to capitalize on novel resources or niches at specific depths and become isolated from other members of their group, the researchers say. This can lead to repeated local adaptation and the evolution of new species.

Many variables can affect a fish’s ability to move between depths, including water temperature, pressure, and light penetration. Friedman and Muñoz suggest that temperature plays an important role in the ability of high-latitude fish clades to transition along the water column.

Fish clades that inhabit colder water have an easier time traveling into ocean depths, where water temperature plummets dramatically. By contrast, tropical fish, which spend their lives in warm, shallow waters, face steep thermal barrier to transitioning to the deep ocean, the researchers say.

The existing high biodiversity in tropical waters could be a remnant of the deep past when warmer regions were hotbeds of species generation, but over time, most diversification began occurring closer to the Earth’s poles, the researchers explain.

But this biodiversity engine at higher latitudes is vulnerable to climate change. Since the water profile is so much more uniform at higher latitudes than in the tropics, the fish that inhabit them are physiologically fine-tuned to those environments, Muñoz explains.

For them, a one-degree shift in temperature will be physiologically more challenging than for an organism that is more of a thermal generalist.

“As the oceans warm, organisms might face steeper barriers to dispersal across the depth column,” Muñoz says. “Over time, I think we’ll see a slowdown of this engine of biodiversification.”

Funding came from the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Environmental Postdoctoral Fellowship, which aims to enable creative research collaborations in the environmental sciences at Yale by developing diverse academic excellence at the postdoctoral level.

Source: Yale University

The brown basilisk, a nonnative lizard, is gaining ground across South Florida, and University of Florida scientists need more data to determine its status and potential impacts.

Wildlife specialists with the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) depend on geographic information to determine this lizard’s potential impacts on the environment, wildlife, and human health. They need more information to stay ahead.

“We receive anecdotal reports of brown basilisks in areas where the reported sightings are thin and sporadic, but we know they are thriving in South and Central Florida. There are reports of brown basilisks from the Florida Keys to Gainesville,” says Ken Gioeli, a natural resources and environment agent at University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) Extension St. Lucie County. “Residents and visitors can enhance the data by taking photos of brown basilisks and uploading them to EddMapS or the IveGot1 app.”

This call to action goes out as National Invasive Species Awareness Week begins on February 20.

The lizard has prominent markings and characteristics that distinguish it from other reptilian species. Most notable is the head crest. They also appear to run across water. There remains a mystery to scientists about how far and wide they have spread and what they are eating and disturbing.

To help residents and visitors identify the brown basilisk, a peer-reviewed Extension document is available in English and Spanish. UF/IFAS faculty hope the information will galvanize more people to report the species.

“Providing information in multiple languages is vital to extending the reach in search of scientific data,” says Lourdes Perez Cordero, an agriculture and natural resources agent at UF/IFAS Extension Highlands County. “Hispanics living throughout Florida can provide valuable insight to the presence of brown basilisks in places where they haven’t been reported previously. Their feedback also enriches our general knowledge of these lizards and helps us develop more educational materials for Spanish speakers in the future that can reach local communities in both languages.”

Currently, numbers indicate that the reptiles are in South and Central Florida.

“It is important for us to determine where the invasion front currently is, where it might be heading, and the numbers likely to be found,” says Gioeli, a coauthor of the document. “Right now, we can work with the limited reported sightings on EddMaps, but scientists need more accurate numbers.”

Of particular interest is the space between Orlando and Palm Beach County, says Gioeli. “We know the brown basilisks are on the Treasure Coast, and we can see there is a likely move northward and west.”

Florida’s west coast has also seen sporadic reports. More residents reporting their locations provides credible research-based information to scientists and keeps residents informed among local communities.

The additional geographic points can give researchers a jump ahead of the invasion front and start letting people know what to watch out for. This will help scientists record how far and wide the brown basilisk continues to spread while studying their behaviors, impacts, and potential as an invasive species.

“There is still a lot we don’t know about the impacts of brown basilisks in south and central Florida,” Gioeli says.

While not all nonnative species evolve to become invasive, those that become established can affect waterways, wildlife, agriculture and urban areas—a concern for scientists, wildlife organizations, and communities.

Key things to know about the brown basilisk:

• The brown basilisk is in the family Corytophanidae, also known as iguanian lizards. They go by several names, such as helmeted or casque-headed lizards due to their head crests and as “Jesus lizards” because they can sprint across the surface of waters when fleeing predators.
• Brown basilisks are brown or dark olive. They have a distinct yellow or cream-colored stripe on each side of their body that runs from the eye down their back. A second stripe is often visible on the face extending to the shoulder. They have long, thin tails and long rear toes. Adults can range in size from 11 to 27 inches.
• A study published in the journal Frontiers in 2022 finds that Culex mosquitoes prefer to feed on nonnative lizards. The brown basilisks are among five identified nonnative lizards that could potentially serve as significant hosts for West Nile virus and St. Louis encephalitis virus vectors in Florida.
• As of February 2023, more than 160 specimens have been collected and recorded at the Florida Museum of Natural History Herpetology Collection database. The range of specimens in the database are from primarily coastal counties stretching from Brevard to Monroe, with additional samples from Manatee, Lee, Pinellas, and Collier counties. The southern shore of Lake Okeechobee also has established populations.
• While they are typically found near fresh water, including canals, shorelines of lakes, retention ponds, and ditches, they prefer areas with thick vegetation and are often seen basking and searching for insects on sidewalks, roads, and parking lots.

Source: University of Florida

We need to think about the human aspect of using AI in our everyday lives and how it will influence the ways in which we perceive and interact with one another, says communication scholar Jeff Hancock.

Since its public launch in November 2022, ChatGPT has captured the world’s attention, showing millions of users around the globe the extraordinary potential of artificial intelligence as it churns out human-sounding answers to requests ranging from the practical to the surreal.

It has drafted cover letters, composed lines of poetry, pretended to be William Shakespeare, crafted messages for dating app users to woo matches, and even written news articles, all with varying results.

Emerging out of these promising applications are ethical dilemmas as well. In a world increasingly dominated by AI-powered tools that can mimic human natural language abilities, what does it mean to be truthful and authentic?

Hancock has been tackling this issue and the impact of AI on interpersonal relationships in his research.

Hancock argues that the Turing test era is over: Bots now sound so real that it has become impossible for people to distinguish between humans and machines in conversations, which poses huge risks for manipulation and deception at mass scale. How then can these tools be used for good and not harm is a question that has Hancock and others worried.

While he sees the potential of AI to help how people do their work more effectively, Hancock sees pitfalls as well. Ultimately, he says, our challenge will be to develop AI that supports human goals and to educate people how best to use these new technologies in effective and ethical ways.

For several years now, Hancock has been examining how AI-mediated communication is transforming—and potentially, undermining—interpersonal relationships.

Here, he explains some of the challenges tools like ChatGPT pose and how they will shape our lives going forward:

Due to their feed, chicken and farmed salmon have remarkably similar environmental footprints, research finds.

The key is in the feed, says marine ecologist Ben Halpern, director of the University of California, Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis, and an author of a paper in the journal Current Biology.

In an effort to tease out opportunities for reducing the substantial environmental pressures of global food production, he and colleagues took a deep look at how we raise these two highly popular animals for consumption, focusing in particular on dynamics between land and sea.

“Chicken are fed fish from the ocean, just as are salmon, and salmon are fed crop products like soy, just as are chicken,” Halpern says regarding industrially farmed broiler chickens, and farmed salmonids (salmon, marine trout, and char). In addition to land-based crops, chickens are fed fishmeal and fish oil; while salmon, which typically eat other fish, are farmed with land-based feed, such as oil crops, soybeans, and wheat. “In a sense,” he notes, “we really do have ‘chicken of the sea.’”

The researchers found that 95% of the cumulative environmental footprint of these two items (greenhouse gas emissions, nutrient pollution, freshwater use, and spatial disturbance) is concentrated on less than 5% of the planet, with 85.5% spatial overlap between the two products, due mostly to shared feed ingredients. According to the study, the total cumulative pressures from chicken production is highest in the United States, China, and Brazil.

For fish, the highest cumulative pressures are found off the coasts of Chile, Mexico, and China, with some pressure on land due to salmon aquaculture. Additionally, the researchers found that while chicken has nine times the environmental footprint of farmed salmon, it has 55 times more production than salmon, an efficiency due largely to the very fast reproductive cycle of chickens—six to eight weeks to reach slaughter weight versus one to two years for salmon.

Within that 5% of the planet that bears the environmental pressures of chicken and salmon production, there are variations in the farming methods’ environmental efficiencies. In the case of chicken, for instance, the US (the world’s top producer of chicken) and Brazil (second largest) are more efficient than China (third largest). There are also variations between environmental pressures relative to the amount of salmon produced that differ by geography, indicating opportunities to improve efficiencies while minimizing environmental impacts.

Chicken and salmon are among the most popular sources of protein and, according to the researchers, are relatively environmentally efficient in comparison to other animal protein production such as beef and pork. However, the magnitude of their production, and their overlap in terms of environmental footprint raises interesting questions about the subtle connections between marine and land protein production, which, in turn, could provide opportunities for promoting sustainability. At the same time, the study underscores the importance of integrating food policies across realms and sectors to advance food system sustainability, according to the researchers.

“We got really interested in understanding how these two critically important and dominant foods affect our planet and how they compare,” Halpern says. “I knew from past research I’ve been part of that what we feed animals is a key part of what determines their environmental footprint, but I really didn’t expect chicken and farmed salmon to be so similar. The old adage that ‘we are what we eat’ applies to farm animals too!”

Source: UC Santa Barbara

A psychologist has advice for how to find and foster love, including how to get the most out of online dating.

Social psychologist Harry Reis was instrumental in launching the field of relationship science. For nearly five decades, the University of Rochester professor has been studying close relationships, theories of intimacy, and personal attachment styles.

Here, Reis shares his science-backed advice on how to find—and keep—love:

Which is better: Online dating or traditional dating?

Dating apps or sites are not necessarily better equipped at introducing you to higher-quality candidates than meeting someone in public or through your social circles, says Reis. But they do give you a lot more options. Where else would you be able to meet two or three dozen people a week?

By now, the apps have largely given up on formulating algorithms that claim to match perfect couples. Instead, they offer dating options based on factors such as location, interests, life goals, and more, expanding the “field of eligibles,” as Reis calls it.

“If I were single, I would definitely be using those sites,” he says.

According to a recent report by the Pew Research Center, online dating is much more common among younger generations, with 53% of adults under 30 saying they have used dating sites or apps. One in five adults under 30 say they met their current spouse or partner on a dating site or app, as do about a quarter of partnered lesbian, gay, or bisexual adults.

Are marriages that result from online dating any better than other marriages? Reis doubts it, since studies point in both directions. The bigger issue, according to him, is that the research isn’t properly designed to answer this question in the first place. In addition, emerging and changing technologies for dating—virtual reality dating, for example—are outpacing research on the subject.

Reis’s main takeaway in the current age of digital dating? “You have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince,” he says. “And that’s fine.”

How you can get the most out of online dating?

First, take some of the information in online profiles with a grain of salt, says Reis, who has studied the effectiveness of online dating. “Women, on average, claim to be a few years younger, and men say they’re a few inches taller,” he says, but these are just averages—they don’t mean that everyone is dissembling.

That aside—don’t reject candidates out of hand just because they don’t seem to share your interests, Reis and coauthors write in their critical analysis of online dating. Instead, weed out only those who are clear no’s from the get-go—those who live thousands of miles away, or simply live on the wrong side of your core values. Then, connect with as many possible partners and go on as many dates as you can, advises Reis. Make some semi-random choices and see where that takes you. Don’t make assumptions about the person simply based on what they claim in their online profile; rather, pick up the phone and find out what they’re like firsthand.

Keep in mind, too, that similarities matter to an extent but are far from a guarantee for happy relationships. In fact, connecting with someone who has different interests from your own can be a way of growing—something that psychologists explain via the self-expansion model. Instead of looking for a person who likes baseball as much as you do, try being open to something new. “If somebody loves ballet, and you don’t know much about ballet and have never tried going to a performance, that could turn out to be really interesting,” offers Reis.

But the biggest mistake in online dating? Putting too much emphasis on appearances.

Of course, attractiveness matters—that’s true whether meeting online or in person. But most people use looks as the main criterion when making choices online about whom they want to get to know better, thereby weeding out possible good matches by mistake.

The other thing people get wrong, according to Reis, is processing the information about another person in a superficial way, without really giving much thought to what the other might be like and might be interested in.

In short: slow down when swiping. Take time to read, think, feel.

“Romantic chemistry is certainly elusive,” says Reis, who recently published a paper on interpersonal chemistry. “But it’s an exaggeration to claim it’s either there or not, based on a few minutes of interaction.”

Instead, chemistry is about forging a connection, a feeling of being on the same wavelength with another person. If someone opens up about what they find interesting and what’s important to them—and if the potential partner responds in a way that shows true listening—then a back-and-forth ensues.

“The feeling that the other person just ‘gets us’ is really emerging chemistry,” says Reis. That feeling, by the way, can be similar to what happens at the start of new (non-romantic) friendships.

More often than not, romantic chemistry emerges relatively quickly—although not necessarily instantly. Yet plenty of people go on first dates after connecting on a dating app, only to decide hastily that “we have no chemistry.” While there’s no magic number of minimum hours or dates to aim for, Reis recommends avoiding snap judgments.

Occasionally, chemistry between two people emerges much later. Some relationships can and do change, with a sense of connection turning a friendship into a romance. “Be on the lookout, but don’t expect magic to arrive out of thin air,” says Reis.

Avoid the ‘suffocation model’

Keep your expectations grounded. Perfection is the enemy of good. If you want a partner for life, pay less attention to looks and don’t expect the impossible, advises Reis.

In the 1950s, he says, people frequently found their partner in their own neighborhood, or in their religious or social groups. But in today’s digitally connected world, people tend to have higher expectations for potential partners. “It’s been called the ‘suffocation model of relationships’ by researchers, in that we want the other person to be our sexual partners, our best friends, our confidants, our co-parents, and our financial partners. We want them to be everything to us. And that’s an awfully high expectation for us humans to live up to.”

During one of Reis’s studies, a participant told him that they knew exactly what they wanted their future partner to be. And if the participant couldn’t find someone who was 100% like that, they’d rather be single.

In some ways, online dating has contributed to the false idea of finding a perfect match by serving up a seemingly endless supply of options. “I don’t think that 100% person exists for anybody,” Reis says. “If you are holding out for perfection, you may very well find yourself priced out of the market.”

Meanwhile, dating during the pandemic has created additional challenges. Seven in ten Americans, who were single and looking for a partner, said their dating lives weren’t going well, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey.

Make small tweaks for big improvements

You’ve found your partner for life (or, at least, for now). How do you make sure mutual love endures? What makes couples stay together—for months, years, decades, or forever—and remain happy and fulfilled? Plenty has been written on the topic in books, magazines, blogs, and other outlets. But what does the research say?

One of the critical factors, according to Reis, is the ability to resolve disagreements in a cooperative and supportive way without creating further hurts. It’s “a huge one” that’s been shown in just about every study that’s been done on the topic.

Another important strategy is to share positive events with your partner. Reis has studied both the intrapersonal and interpersonal benefits—that is, the advantages for both the “sharer” and the partner—of communicating positive experiences and letting your partner know that you are excited for them. So, why does this strategy work? Because we all like when good things happen to us—such as getting a promotion at work, passing a big test, setting a personal best in bowling or at a 5K race—and we want to share that experience with our partners.

In a set of experiments, Reis found that when people talked about personal positive events with others, they felt even happier, beyond simply the uplifting effect of the event itself. And when a partner responded enthusiastically to the sharing of the other’s good news, the relationship fared better with increased well-being for both partners, greater intimacy, and higher daily marital satisfaction.

Research shows that another seemingly trivial, yet nonetheless effective, way of building connections with a partner is having the “how was your day” conversation, where partners listen to one another, ask questions, allow for elaboration, and show empathy or enthusiasm.

“The point is that you’re really listening to your partner, that you’re really engaging,” says Reis. “It’s not so much about the issue of the conversation as it is about the engagement, the sense of making time for each other, and connecting in those moments.”

When people first start dating, connecting happens naturally and frequently. As time goes on—and especially once couples are married or have been living together for a while—it’s easy to lose that attentiveness in the daily humdrum of work, household responsibilities—and for some—the raising of children. But it’s these little things that make a big difference, says Reis, and that contribute to feeling understood by your partner.

Shared hobbies matter

While spouses (or partners) don’t have to be clones of each other or do everything together, they need to be on the same page about where they want their lives to go. Part of that means enjoying some degree of shared recreation. “If you’re always doing things separately, you’re not building connections,” Reis points out.

There’s important research on so-called “novel” and “arousing activities,” which has shown that couples do well when they are taking up a new hobby together. It typically should be something that’s a bit more active, says Reis, like learning to ski, taking cooking lessons, or trying dance classes together—something that introduces an element of novelty for both participants.

Particularly in this COVID era, many couples feel their lives have become stagnant. “The same thing every night: they have dinner and then they watch Netflix. That can get awfully tiresome,” says Reis.

Doing new things together that are fun and interesting can help keep a marriage or a partnership vital. “Even something as mundane as going to the movies together and then talking about it,” says Reis, pointing to research by colleague Ronald Rogge, which shows that couples who watched romantic comedies together and talked about them afterward reduced their risk of divorce.

The evolving nature—and science—of love

Even as social psychologists and others continue to learn more about the intricacies of human love and intimacy, it’s important to remember that research in this area is ongoing—and increasingly reflective of changing norms and practices, from virtual reality dating to ethical non-monogamy.

Reis notes that much of the literature on relationship research to date is predominantly based on “WEIRD samples,” participants who belong to groups that are western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. But, he says, more work is being done with married same-sex couples—and so far, the findings among same-sex couples seem, with a few exceptions, very much similar to those of mixed-sex couples.

The one thing couples can do right now to improve their relationship

It depends, of course, on the strengths and weaknesses of each particular relationship. But if he had to pick one thing, Reis says, it would be this one: “Make it clear that your relationship is one of your highest priorities. And really act on that. Make connecting in the relationship not the thing you do after everything else is done.”

How do you signal that importance? Set aside time for a regular date night, for example. Really talk and listen to each other, perhaps while doing a chore together—such as washing the nightly dishes or walking the dog. Send your partner an affectionate text during the day to let them know they are on your mind. And don’t forget the importance of physical affection.

Beware that problems have a tendency to swamp us, he cautions. “The difficulties, the stresses, the disagreements, all tend to dominate our attention. That’s what we humans do—we pay attention to what’s going wrong,” says Reis. That negative bias can lead people to forget what was fun about their relationship in the first place.

“Building in those little positive moments is an easy way of reminding oneself and one’s partner that there’s something good here,” says Reis.

Source: University of Rochester

We sometimes treat the Black experience as though it is peripheral to the American experience, when in fact it is central. I wrote a newspaper article long ago now, the headline of which was “Black History is American History.” And the point of it was that while Black History Month, (which started as Black History Week), is a good thing, the ultimate endpoint should be that we have issues of Black history fully integrated into American history. That should be the endpoint, to understand the extent to which the central issues involving the nature of our democracy have played out in a racial context, because the struggle with racism has defined our nation. We’ve been struggling with racism since the very beginning. African American Studies is a step in the direction of the full integration of the Black experience into the American experience.

There has been some controversy about Florida Governor DeSantis and his railing against this new AP course. The College Board released an official curriculum that, by news accounts, has been revised, stripped of much of the subject matter that angered DeSantis and conservatives, including critical race theory, LGBTQ issues, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

What people seem to be doing is taking positions based on their identity, rather than their knowledge of the facts, whether they’re DeSantis or one of his supporters or one of his critics. That said, the appearance here is that the College Board made a decision for political reasons, rather than substantive, pedagogical, or curriculum-oriented reasons. And that’s a bad thing.

But I should also say that the fact that the outcome here, if it’s politically motivated, may be a bad outcome, doesn’t mean that the concerns that prompted the criticism by DeSantis are wholly illegitimate. And this is what I think people miss. There may still be some legitimate reasons that are giving rise to proposed amendments, some legitimate things that people are reacting to. This is not a debate about what’s true versus what’s false. It’s a debate about the ways in which teachings of history can create narratives about society. Evidently the narrative of the nation embedded in the prior version is something that DeSantis and others were opposed to because it created a sort of orthodoxy about the nation that they could not support.