Category: Science

A common stomach bacteria found in two thirds of the world population may be linked to a higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease, new research suggests.

The study investigated whether a clinically apparent Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) infection increased the risk of Alzheimer’s disease in people aged 50 and older. The prevalent infection can trigger indigestion, gastritis, ulcers, and even stomach cancer.

The researchers analyzed health data of over 4 million people in the United Kingdom aged 50 and above between 1988 and 2019. They found that people with symptomatic H. pylori infection had an 11% higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, the most common type of dementia.

While the cause of Alzheimer’s disease is multifaceted, the findings build upon a growing body of evidence on the potential role of infections, particularly H. Pylori, in its development.

The study opens avenues for future research, particularly exploring whether eradicating this bacterium could effectively prevent Alzheimer’s disease in some people.

Alzheimer’s disease affects millions of people globally, with numbers expected to rise sharply as demographics shift, say researchers.

“Given the global aging population, dementia numbers are expected to triple in the next 40 years. However, there remains a lack of effective treatment options for this disease,” says Paul Brassard, the study’s senior author and a professor in McGill University’s medicine department.

“We hope the findings from this investigation will provide insight on the potential role of H. pylori in dementia in order to inform the development of prevention strategies, such as individualized eradication programs, to reduce infections at the population level,” says Brassard, a public health and preventive medicine physician at the McGill University Health Centre.

The study appears in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association.

Funding for the study came from a project grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).

Source: McGill University

The Caribbean islands are uniquely susceptible to “flash droughts,” research finds.

The word “drought” typically conjures images of parched soil, dust-swept prairies, depleted reservoirs, and dry creek beds, all the result of weeks or seasons of persistently dry atmospheric conditions.

In the sun-soaked islands in the Caribbean, however, drought conditions can occur much more rapidly, with warning signs appearing too late for mediation strategies to limit agriculture losses or prevent stresses on infrastructure systems that provide clean water to communities.

In the new paper, published in Journal of Hydrometeorology, Craig Ramseyer, assistant professor in the geography department at Virginia Tech, advocates for alternative methodologies to more accurately measure dry conditions in the region.

“The tropics have extremely intense solar radiation, so atmospheric processes tend to be expedited,” Ramseyer says. “Despite often receiving daily rainfall, island ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to drought conditions.”

Ramseyer, whose research focuses on tropical rainfall and severe weather impacts in the Caribbean, utilized a new drought index that considers the atmospheric demand for moisture to identify drought risk conditions instead of more traditional soil moisture measurements.

“This new drought index is really developed to try to identify the first trigger of drought by focusing on evaporative demand,” says Ramseyer, who collaborated on the paper with Paul Miller an assistant professor at Louisiana State University. “Evaporative demand is a measure of how thirsty the atmosphere is and how much moisture it can collect from soil or plant matter.”

Ramseyer stresses that identifying drying conditions earlier is a key step to limiting the impacts of droughts.

“A lot of drought observation is based on soil moisture, but in tropical environments, a decline in soil moisture is a response to other things that have already happened so you’re further down in the chain of events,” he says. “We can mitigate a lot of losses in, say, agriculture, by being able to forecast sudden, anomalous increases in evaporative demand.”

The impacts of drought conditions extend beyond agriculture: Tropical ecosystems are also strongly affected by dry atmospheric weather conditions, and access to fresh water is a necessity for both communities in the region and a tourism industry that is a central driver for economies in the Caribbean.

To better understand how that interplay of meteorological patterns impacts drought conditions, Ramseyer utilized 40 years of data from a long-term ecological research project in the El Yunque National Forest. He found that flash droughts have routinely occurred in the Caribbean and that occurrences of drought are not limited to traditional dry seasons on the island.

“In terms of climate, Puerto Rico is situated at a crossroads, buffered on the west by the El Niño southern oscillation and by the cooler North Atlantic oscillation on the east,” says Ramseyer. “Because of that, Puerto Rico has a unique geography for researching atmospheric changes.”

The looming concerns over global warming have only accelerated the need for meteorologists to better understand drought occurrences in the Caribbean and enhance monitoring of moisture conditions in the region.

“A warming planet results in more moisture available in the atmosphere overall, which means that the kinds of short-term precipitation events common to the Caribbean will increase in intensity,” says Ramseyer. “Meanwhile, droughts are becoming higher in magnitude, so climate change is altering both extremes.”

Ramseyer says developing clearer criteria for flash drought conditions is an important first step toward addressing the infrastructure challenges that Caribbean communities are likely to face.

“The key current and future issue for the Caribbean is all about finding a way to capture rainfall successfully and draw it out slowly to mitigate evaporation losses,” says Ramseyer. “Puerto Rico and all of the Caribbean have water infrastructure challenges that must be addressed to accommodate these trends.”

Ramseyer advocates for additional research into understanding the relationship between flash drought events and economic losses and how future drought events can be better communicated to stakeholders and communities.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Program Office funded the work.

Source: Virginia Tech

One application that comes to mind is a toy robot called Moxie that incorporates multimodal AI emotion recognition in its engagement with children. Based on a paper released by its creators, the behavioral metrics that the toy tracks primarily relate to facial expressions and word choices.

Here, even though the word choices are technically recorded via speech through a microphone, it’s different from SER because the analysis of words is presumably powered first by a speech-to-text model that converts the speech into text, and then analyzes that text to examine if certain words, such as “family” or “friend,” relate to concepts that they deem to be “positive” or “negative.”

This is generally called “sentiment analysis” in the field, and it’s also a somewhat contentious area for similar reasons: words alone are not consistently indicative of “sentiment.” The paper states that the toy was first developed as a tool for supporting children diagnosed with mental behavioral development disorders or MBDDs, but my understanding is that it’s now being sold as a more general learning companion for all children that supports “holistic skill development,” which of course expands the addressable market of Moxie.

My colleague Mara Mills has called this phenomenon of resourcing disability as a step towards more profitable realms as “assistive pretext.” As I briefly recount in my paper, children, and especially those who have been diagnosed with MBDDs, have historically been designated as the target demographic and justification for the initial development of emotion recognition technologies.

A chapter in Rosalind Picard’s pioneering 1995 book Affective Computing, for instance, has a section dedicated to “helping autistic individuals.” About a decade later, researchers from the University of Cambridge also proposed an “emotional hearing aid” that was described as a facial prosthetic to help children with Asperger’s syndrome socialize.

To my knowledge, most of this work as it has been taken up by the broader tech industry has now developed beyond these “assistive pretexts,” and the benefit for the individuals that served as the justification for their initial development is contestable. My hope is for researchers and builders to remain critical and compassionate in their development, or not, of these technologies.

WASHINGTON — SpaceX ended an 11-day hiatus in launches late Dec. 18 with a successful Starlink mission, but the gap likely means the company will fall just short of its goal of 100 Falcon launches this year.

A Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 49 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 11:01 p.m. Eastern. The rocket deployed its payload of 23 Starlink “v2 mini” satellites into orbit a little more than an hour later.

The launch was the first for SpaceX since a Falcon 9 launch of another set of Starlink satellites early Dec. 8 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The gap of almost 11 days between launches is the longest for the company this year. SpaceX has averaged about four days between launches in 2023.

Several factors contributed to the gap in launches. Poor weather conditions in Florida delayed the latest Starlink launch from last week. A Falcon Heavy launch of the Space Force’s X-37B spaceplane from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center was scrubbed Dec. 11 because of a ground equipment issue, but has since been delayed to no earlier than Dec. 28, reportedly because of issues with the rocket.

SpaceX had scheduled a Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg carrying Starlink satellites for Dec. 14, then delayed it a day before pushing it back again to Dec. 28. SpaceX did not disclose the reason for the extended delay, but is believed to free up a launch opportunity for the German SARah 2 and 3 radar imaging satellites as soon as Dec. 21.

The combination of factors means SpaceX will likely fall just short of a goal set earlier this year of 100 Falcon launches. The company has now conducted 92 launches — 88 of the Falcon 9 and 4 of the Falcon Heavy — so far this year. In addition to the X-37B, Starlink and SARah launches, SpaceX is expected to attempt one more Starlink launch from Florida as well as the launch of the Ovzon-3 communications satellite. All those launches would bring SpaceX’s total for the year to 97.

Even before the recent gap, a SpaceX executive said getting to 100 would have been a stretch. “100 is very much on the table, but it will take excellent execution, relentless focus on safety and reliability, and a little luck with the weather!” said Kiko Dontchev, vice president of launch, in a Dec. 4 social media post.

Despite missing the goal, the company’s launch cadence has been a significant achievement compared both to its past activity as well as global competitors. SpaceX launches increased by more than 50% from 2022 and are triple what it performed in 2021.

SpaceX accounts for nearly half of the 209 orbital launch attempts so far in 2023, 200 of which were successful. (Those figures do not include two Starship launches in April and November that, even if completely successful, would not have achieved orbit.) Among American companies, SpaceX has performed more the nine times as many launches this year as the second most active company, Rocket Lab, which recently flew its tenth Electron rocket of 2023.

SpaceX expects to continue increasing its launch cadence into 2024. In testimony to a Senate space subcommittee Oct. 18, Bill Gerstenmaier, vice president of build and flight reliability at SpaceX, said the company was planning to conduct 144 launches — 12 per month — in 2024.

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Feeling lonely at multiple times throughout life leads to more serious illness and higher mortality risk in mid to later life, a new study shows.

“Cumulative loneliness in mid- to later-life may be a mortality risk factor with a notable impact on excess mortality,” according to the research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The focus on cumulative loneliness brings a new contribution to the field of loneliness research,” says senior author Lindsay Kobayashi, professor of epidemiology and global health and director of the Social Epidemiology of Global Aging Lab at the University of Michigan.

The researchers found that participants who reported more periods of feeling lonely had significantly greater mortality risk, compared to participants who reported no or fewer periods of loneliness. The researchers used data from more than 9,000 participants aged 50 and older in the US Health and Retirement Study, considered the most authoritative data source on aging in the United States.

The data on loneliness covered an eight-year period from 1996-2004 and was categorized into four groups: never experienced loneliness and experienced loneliness at one, two, or three points. Responses were cross-referenced with participants’ health and lifestyle, and objectively measured social isolation at baseline in 1996 and subsequent mortality risk through 2019.

The results surprised even the researchers: They observed 106 excess deaths when loneliness was reported one time, 202 excess deaths when loneliness was reported two times, and 288 excess deaths when loneliness was reported three or more times over the eight-year exposure period.

“Loneliness is not a static experience, it is dynamic. So, the eight-year duration of our data on loneliness was a unique part of this study that allowed us to look into cumulative loneliness over time,” Kobayashi says.

‘”The numbers surprised me. They strike me as very high because loneliness is preventable. Anytime there are excess deaths due to a modifiable risk factor it’s too many.”

With life expectancy in the US still at historic lows and loneliness being treated as a global health crisis by the US Surgeon General and the World Health Organization, the study urges prevention: “Loneliness may be an important target for interventions to improve life expectancy in the United States.”

“Life expectancy in the US has dropped. That is a particularly big red flag,” Kobayashi says. “Reducing loneliness at a societal level is critical for older adults but also for younger individuals. There’s increasing concern that as the population ages, loneliness will increase as the loss of meaningful roles in life come to pass, such as leaving the workforce.”

She says it’s important to note that living alone or preferring solitude is not necessarily the same as feeling lonely.

“Even those who are socially isolated may not feel lonely. It’s the feeling of loneliness, of needing people and purpose and not getting it which appears to be bad for health,” she says.

“As people age, they transition out of meaningful social roles. They need meaningful replacements. Maintaining integration with families is important, and can be a big source of meaning in life. We do live in an individualist society, and should evaluate our culture’s value of older people to society.”

Additional interventions to address the crisis of loneliness might be age-friendly communities and cities incorporating older people into urban planning, Kobayashi says.

“There are ways we can make environments accessible, offer places to go and socialize. It’s about the physical design of communities and resources and priorities. It’s about a cultural shift in how we see and portray older people.” Kobayashi says. “Extending work life, especially as Baby Boomers age, could be of benefit. Policy changes are needed to support changes.”

“These adaptations can promote community in general, something we’ve seen a loss of with the COVID-19 pandemic,” she says. “This issue cuts across so many parts of society. It really does affect us all.”

Source: University of Michigan

Progress toward the elimination of tuberculosis in the United States has been stalled by significant racial and ethnic disparities often masked by state- and national-level data, researchers say.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 88% of reported tuberculosis (TB) cases in the US are among racial and ethnic minority groups.

“There has been a lot of advancement in controlling tuberculosis, especially in resourceful countries such as the US,” says Maheen Humayun, a doctoral student in the epidemiology department at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health and first author of the study in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

“But when you separate the data by race and ethnicity, you see that the burden of TB among racial/ethnic minorities is remarkably high, often as high as in high-burden countries.”

The researchers conducted a disaggregated analysis of TB surveillance data using detailed racial/ethnic categorizations in the state of Arkansas.

The study found that Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders had the highest risk of TB in Arkansas, followed by Asian, Hispanic, and non-Hispanic Black populations, when compared to non-Hispanic whites.

Furthermore, the research findings suggest that these racial and ethnic minorities in Arkansas were also more likely to have advanced and severe disease, suggesting inequitable access to timely and adequate TB treatment and care.

“If we really want to make the final push toward TB elimination, we will have to understand the TB epidemic as a health equity issue,” Humayun says. “The low statewide aggregated estimates are misleading as they mask the underlying disparities that potentially fuel the remaining TB epidemic in Arkansas.”

Nationally, rates of TB in the US have decreased over the last three decades. While the US is considered a country of low TB incidence overall, populations that have been socially and historically marginalized continue to bear a disproportionate burden of the disease.

The disparities in the risk of advanced and severe disease are important public health metrics, particularly at the state level, for the development and implementation of appropriate intervention strategies to eliminate the disease, Humayun says.

“Race and ethnicity is an important social determinant of health,” says senior author Zhenhua Yang, associate professor of epidemiology.

“Through the assessment of disease distribution and drivers of TB incidence across subpopulations we can determine the more targeted specific measures needed to eliminate tuberculosis and improve health outcomes.”

Additional coauthors are from the University of Michigan and the Arkansas Department of Health.

Source: University of Michigan

TAMPA, Fla. — International regulators have left the door open to relaxing a cap on satellite transmission power in non-geostationary orbit as soon as 2027, NGSO operators say, even as their geostationary peers assert any change has been blocked until at least four years later.

A proposal to review Equivalent Power Flux Density (EPFD) limits affecting how strong NGSO signals should be to avoid disrupting satellites in geosynchronous orbit (GSO) was one of the most divisive issues at WRC-23, a quadrennial event for updating global spectrum rules that wrapped up Dec. 15 in Dubai. 

After weeks of intense treaty-level talks that pitted NGSO newcomers seeking greater power and capacity against more established GSO players concerned about increased interference, a compromise was reached: Technical EPFD studies can advance without regulatory consequences.

For some, this means regulatory proposals for updating EPFD limits cannot be put up for debate until the next time the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union holds a WRC (World Radiocommunication Conference), in 2031.

However, SpaceX and the Alliance for Satellite Broadband, a group Amazon created to lobby for updating EPFD rules set up more than a decade ago, see things differently.

“The plenary text uses the term ‘regulatory consequences’ and the results of the studies will be presented to WRC-27,” a spokesperson for the Alliance for Satellite Broadband said via email.

“In other words, there are paths to study and potentially revise epfd limits at WRC-27.”

The spokesperson did not detail what these paths could be.

Amazon operates two prototypes for a proposed NGSO broadband constellation of more than 3,200 satellites that the company plans to start deploying next year.

There are currently more than 5,000 broadband satellites in SpaceX’s NGSO Starlink constellation — easily the world’s largest by number.

In a letter seen by SpaceNews that SpaceX said it sent the Federal Communications Commission Dec. 14, the company said the approved studies “should result in updated regulations as soon as 2027 that allow next-generation satellite system to increase their power and capacity, which will allow them to connect more people around the world with no consequences for GSO satellite operators.”

David Goldman, SpaceX vice president of satellite policy, also called on the FCC “to make clear the intention of WRC-23 that the radio regulations can be updated in 2027” in the letter, “and to correct those who are misrepresenting the record to try to delay updates that will be critical to connecting more people as expeditiously as possible.”

Viasat, a GSO operator that earlier warned reviewing satellite transmission power limits risked impeding investments and innovation in the orbit, strongly dismissed the idea that regulators have created a path for EPFD regulatory changes to be proposed at WRC-27.

“WRC-23 saw many dozens of nations come together to firmly reject an attempt to change the rules that protect GSO services from interference,” a Viasat spokesperson said via email.

“There is no future WRC agenda item on the possibility of increasing NGSO interference into GSOs for WRC-27 or WRC-31. International consensus also directed that this rejection not be bypassed through procedural means.”

Hazem Moakkit, vice president of spectrum strategy at GSO operator Intelsat, which has plans for an NGSO constellation, said there may be ways to present EPFD changes at WRC-27, “albeit difficult.”

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New findings clarify when and why teenagers lie or tell the truth to their parents.

In a recent study in the Journal of Adolescence, Judith Smetana, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester and collaborators explore the narratives of 131 teenagers and college students who had been interviewed about a time when they did something that their parents disagreed with or had expressly forbidden. Study participants were asked about each of these three scenarios: a time when they subsequently disclosed (part or all of it), concealed, or lied about an activity that their parents disapproved of.

Narratives hold special value, according to Smetana. While disclosure and concealing has spawned a large body of research over the last two decades, most of it relies on questionnaires and surveys.

“Narratives provide rich information about how individuals make sense of their experiences—including how elaborate their narratives are, both factually and psychologically,” she says. “They’re really good for looking at how you reconstruct stories and what you remember about them.”

“Even in families where they have good relationships, parents don’t know as much as they think they do.”

The present study is the third in a series, based on narratives that Smetana originally collected in 2014 and 2015. The first study (2019) looked at lessons teens learned about themselves and their parents, while the second (2021) examined teenagers’ emotions when reflecting on the three situations they had narrated.

For the most recent study, the team coded the narrated interviews for voluntariness, timing, consistency, and lessons learned. Part of the research addressed the frequent assumption that disclosure is voluntary, i.e. that teens who tell part or the whole truth do so on their own volition. “But that’s not always the case, which is what we suspected and, indeed, found,” says Smetana.

As most parents know—and which has been shown in prior research—as children become teenagers, their willingness to share information and keep parents in the loop declines, while secrecy increases.

“Partly, that’s about autonomy development, and teens doing what they want to do, even if it involves risky behavior,” says Smetana.

Teenagers disclose information to their parents primarily voluntarily (40%)  or strategically (47%)—either as a means to an end, such as telling the truth about a party to which they may need a ride, or preemptively because they suspect their parents will find out anyway.

“It’s significant,” that only 40% of study participants disclosed the salient information of their own volition—”far less” than what had been commonly assumed, says Smetana.

Involuntary truth telling or disclosing, the team found, is much less frequent (13%), and could involve a friend’s spilling the beans accidentally, a teen’s getting a tattoo that is eventually seen by parents, or by getting pressured by parents to tell.

Timing plays a crucial role: adolescents were more likely to lie (53%) before the event or action that their parents would not condone. However, telling the truth or disclosing the information occurred more often after they had already engaged in the parentally disapproved activity (35% disclosed the dodgy activity shortly afterwards, 8% lied for an extended time before coming clean, and 23% told the truth at some unspecified time).

Unsurprisingly (to any parent of teenagers), the teens in the study proved nimble in their approaches: they typically reported additional strategies besides the ones the researchers were specifically asking about, using multiple strategies around the same event.

“Disclosure may not be the first thing they do. Maybe they tried to get away with it without telling their parents. Or maybe they concealed first, and then they disclosed. It’s really shades of gray—usually not black and white,” says Smetana.

Disclosing (or telling the truth) after the event was associated with lessons learned, and voluntary disclosure with psychological growth. Meanwhile, psychological control—which is intrusive, manipulative, or disrespectful parenting that undermines the child—was associated with negative self-lessons.

While a whole host of studies have looked at teenage disclosure and secrecy—the timing of it has not been previously studied. Yet, timing, Smetana say, is crucial and has implications for how teens interpret these experiences, including life lessons learned.

Study participants were asked what, if anything, they had learned from their recounted experiences of disclosure and lying. Not all proved good ones, says Smetana. “The lesson learned about lying could be, ‘I’m a good liar!’ And we did get some of that.”

Overall, the researchers found that, regardless of age, telling the truth (or part of it) voluntarily was associated with teens’ reporting positive change, such as greater psychological growth in understanding themselves, their purpose, self-efficacy, or connections to others and parents. When it came to experiences of truth telling, the team noticed that the disclosure narratives contained more motives, intentions, and desires—compared to the teens’ narratives about concealment or lying.

“They had a better psychological understanding of themselves and made more psychological meaning out of disclosure, than out of concealment or lying,” says Smetana.

Conversely, teenagers drew more negative conclusions when retelling experiences of lying, such as more negative views and less clarity about themselves, more negative emotions, or poorer self‐image. Additionally, disclosing after—rather than before—the narrated event was associated with greater likelihood of lessons learned about the self.

Lying often goes hand in hand with a host of other problems. Over time, lying regularly to parents is associated with poorer adolescent-parent relationships, and teenage problem behavior down the road, Smetana discovered in a separate study in 2015. Especially in the case of lying, the likelihood of a teen’s having depression increases over time.

Previous research, the team notes, has shown that boys tend to lie to parents more than girls, perhaps because they are more likely to engage in deviant activities. Yet, pressured by parents to tell the truth lead over time to increases in stress for boys, and anxiety and depression for girls.

Disclosure and lying are “complex and nuanced” actions, the team writes, varying in timing, consistency, and voluntariness. These features contribute to how adolescents construe, understand, or make sense of life events, relationships, others, and themselves—which psychologists refer to as meaning-making.

According to Smetana, researchers used to think that parents who monitor their children—who have firm rules and ask their kids what they are up to—would be able to keep their offspring out of trouble. More recent research , however, indicates that parental monitoring doesn’t improve parents’ knowledge of their children’s lives. Instead, it all comes down to the teens’ willingness to share information.

“Do whatever you can to be responsive and keep the lines of communication open so that your kids will tell you voluntarily, not under pressure,” says Smetana.

The key to sharing pertinent information are warm, trusting parent-child relationships that develop prior to adolescence and continue throughout life. There are some things teens choose not to disclose because they see the issues as personal and private—not the parent’s business, notes Smetana. To some extent that’s ok, she says, because it helps foster teen autonomy. But parents and teenagers often differ on what is private and should be up to the teen to decide—versus what parents need to know to keep their teens safe. Adolescents may not tell parents about risky behavior, for example, because they are afraid they’ll get in trouble, or that their parents will think less of them.

“This is where trust and good communication are especially important, because it might mitigate parents’ negative responses,” says Smetana.

In earlier research, Smetana had asked parents how much they thought they knew about their teenagers’ activities and found that parents vastly overestimated their knowledge.

“Even in families where they have good relationships, parents don’t know as much as they think they do.”

This overestimation, Smetana acknowledges, extends to the parenting of her own, now grown, sons.

Only after they had left home, she says, did she learn about some of the things they did as teens. “Nothing too drastic—but what? Really?! I study this stuff and I didn’t know everything.”

Source: University of Rochester