Culture

Until recently, data on criminal victimization did not include information on the status--immigrant or citizen--of respondents. In a recent study, researchers used new data that include respondents' status to explore the association between citizenship status and risk of victimization. They found that for many, a person's foreign-born status, but not their acquired U.S. citizenship, protects against criminal victimization.

The study, by researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) at College Park and the Pennsylvania State University (PSU), is forthcoming in Criminology, a publication of the American Society of Criminology.

"Understanding how patterns of victimization vary between U.S.-born citizens and different groups of immigrants is critical for informing policy and practice," says Min Xie, professor of criminology and criminal justice at UMD at College Park, who conducted the study with Eric Baumer, professor of sociology and criminology at PSU. "Our findings challenge claims that crime is more prevalent among immigrants, suggesting that using immigration control to reduce crime is likely to be impractical," says Xie.

Prior to 2017, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), the nation's largest survey on criminal victimization, did not record immigration information. In this study, researchers used new data from the 2017-2018 NCVS, looking at a nationally representative sample of households and people ages 12 and older. In 2017-2018, nearly 482,500 people and more than 296,500 households were interviewed by the NCVS, with response rates of 83% (people) and 74% (households).

These new data are unique because of the addition of a question on citizenship status: Respondents were asked to self-identify as U.S.-born citizens, naturalized citizens, or non-U.S. citizens. Researchers labeled those who did not answer the citizenship question or said "don't know" as having ambiguous citizenship status. By incorporating nonresponse to the citizenship question in a new way, the study explored patterns of victimization among a group of noncitizens who, in many respects, parallel the undocumented immigrant population.

Respondents were asked to recall incidents of violence (rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated and simple assault) and household property crimes (burglary, motor vehicle theft, and other types of theft) in the preceding six months. The study controlled for previously identified demographic and socioeconomic factors of criminal victimization, including respondents' race/ethnicity, age, sex, marital status, years of education, employment status, and years of residence, as well as other information about the household.

The study found that for both violent and property crime, the victimization rate of foreign-born citizens as a whole was significantly lower than that of U.S.-born citizens.

Within the foreign-born population, the victimization rate was statistically indistinguishable between naturalized citizens and noncitizens after accounting for differences between these groups in age, home ownership, and other socioeconomic factors. However, these two immigrant groups had significantly lower rates of victimization than that of the ambiguous citizenship group.

"Naturalized citizens and known noncitizens are on the one end of the continuum with a lower risk of victimization, and U.S.-born citizens and the ambiguous citizenship status respondents are on the other end with a higher risk of victimization," says Baumer. "Our findings provide important insights at a time when the U.S. immigration systems are facing major challenges amid tension surrounding immigration and growing concerns about social and racial-ethnic injustice."

One limitation of the study is that immigrants who are in marginalized and vulnerable positions may be reluctant to report certain types of crimes to NCVS interviewers, the authors note, but they suggest that the results are not unduly affected by underreporting. Another limitation, they note, is that the higher victimization risks for the ambiguous citizenship status group might reflect factors besides immigration or documentation status.

HOUSTON - (June 22, 2021) - We can't detect them yet, but radio signals from distant solar systems could provide valuable information about the characteristics of their planets.

A paper by Rice University scientists describes a way to better determine which exoplanets are most likely to produce detectable signals based on magnetosphere activity on exoplanets' previously discounted nightsides.

The study by Rice alumnus Anthony Sciola, who earned his Ph.D. this spring and was mentored by co-author and space plasma physicist Frank Toffoletto, shows that while radio emissions from the daysides of exoplanets appear to max out during high solar activity, those that emerge from the nightside are likely to add significantly to the signal.

This interests the exoplanet community because the strength of a given planet's magnetosphere indicates how well it would be protected from the solar wind that radiates from its star, the same way Earth's magnetic field protects us.

Planets that orbit within a star's Goldilocks zone, where conditions may otherwise give rise to life, could be deemed uninhabitable without evidence of a strong enough magnetosphere. Magnetic field strength data would also help to model planetary interiors and understand how planets form, Sciola said.

The study appears in The Astrophysical Journal.

Earth's magnetosphere isn't exactly a sphere; it's a comet-shaped set of field lines that compress against the planet's day side and tail off into space on the night side, leaving eddies in their wake, especially during solar events like coronal mass ejections. The magnetosphere around every planet emits what we interpret as radio waves, and the closer to the sun a planet orbits, the stronger the emissions.

Astrophysicists have a pretty good understanding of our own system's planetary magnetospheres based on the Radiometric Bode's Law, an analytical tool used to establish a linear relationship between the solar wind and radio emissions from the planets in its path. In recent years, researchers have attempted to apply the law to exoplanetary systems with limited success.

"The community has used these rule-of-thumb empirical models based on what we know about the solar system, but it's kind of averaged and smoothed out," Toffoletto said. "A dynamic model that includes all this spiky behavior could imply the signal is actually much larger than these old models suggest. Anthony is taking this and pushing it to its limits to understand how signals from exoplanets could be detected."

Sciola said the current analytic model relies primarily on emissions expected to emerge from an exoplanet's polar region, what we see on Earth as an aurora. The new study appends a numerical model to those that estimate polar region emissions to provide a more complete picture of emissions around an entire exoplanet.

"We're adding in features that only show up in lower regions during really high solar activity," he said.

It turns out, he said, that nightside emissions don't necessarily come from one large spot, like auroras around the north pole, but from various parts of the magnetosphere. In the presence of strong solar activity, the sum of these nightside spots could raise the planet's total emissions by at least an order of magnitude.

"They're very small-scale and occur sporadically, but when you sum them all up, they can have a great effect," said Sciola, who is continuing the work at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory. "You need a numerical model to resolve those events. For this study, Sciola used the Multiscale Atmosphere Geospace Environment (MAGE) developed by the Center for Geospace Storms (CGS) based at the Applied Physics Laboratory in collaboration which the Rice space plasma physics group.

"We're essentially confirming the analytic model for more extreme exoplanet simulations, but adding extra detail," he said. "The takeaway is that we're bringing further attention to the current model's limiting factors but saying that under certain situations, you can get more emissions than that limiting factor suggests."

He noted the new model works best on exoplanetary systems. "You need to be really far away to see the effect," he said. It's hard to tell what's going on at the global scale on Earth; it's like trying to watch a movie by sitting right next to the screen. You're only getting a little patch of it."

Also, radio signals from an Earth-like exoplanet may never be detectable from Earth's surface, Sciola said. "Earth's ionosphere blocks them," he said. "That means we can't even see Earth's own radio emission from the ground, even though it's so close."

Detection of signals from exoplanets will require either a complex of satellites or an installation on the far side of the moon. "That would be a nice, quiet place to make an array that won't be limited by Earth's ionosphere and atmosphere," Sciola said.

He said the observer's position in relation to the exoplanet is also important. "The emission is 'beamed,'" Sciola said. "It's like a lighthouse: You can see the light if you are in line with the beam, but not if you are directly above the lighthouse. So having a better understanding of the expected angle of the signal will help observers determine if they are in line to observe it for a particular exoplanet."

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - Sunday church service in Amish country is more than just belting out hymns, reading Bible passages and returning home an hour later to catch a football game or nap.

It's an all-day affair: A host family welcomes church members - between 20 to 40 families - into their home to worship and have fellowship with one another from morning to night. Church is a biweekly activity; each gathering takes place in a member's home and is a key ritual in the Amish community which values in-person communication.

New research from West Virginia University sociologists suggests this face-to-face interaction, coupled with a distrust in preventative medicine, led to "excess deaths" among the Amish population in 2020.

The death rate for that year soared above the baseline average from 2015 to 2019, with the largest spike - 125% - occurring in November.

Researchers, led by Rachel Stein, associate professor of sociology, analyzed obituary information published in an Amish/Mennonite newspaper to examine excess death among this segment of the population in 2020. Their results are published in the Journal of Religion and Health.

"By taking multiple years of historical data, we can create an average rate of death," explained co-author Katie Corcoran, associate professor of sociology. "For 2020, when the pandemic started, we identified how much extra deaths occurred on top of that average. We call that excess deaths."

The team emphasized that these deaths may or may not be directly related to COVID-19; however, the excess death rates among the Amish/Mennonites mirrored the general COVID-19 infection waves in the United States. Researchers did not access official death certificates (which do not indicate religion/faith) and obituaries usually lacked the cause of death.

Information was taken from The Budget, a weekly correspondence newspaper published in Ohio geared toward the Amish and Mennonite communities.

Stein, who grew up in Amish country, decided to explore COVID-19's impacts after noticing many community members not practicing social distancing at the onset of the pandemic. Also, the Amish do not use modern technology, such as electricity, and tend to distrust preventative medicine, lifestyle choices engrained in their culture and religion.

"There's been a lot of minimizing of the severity of COVID," Stein said. "There's a perception that COVID is like the flu. If people get sick, then people get sick and will eventually get over it.

"I don't want to convey that all Amish aren't taking COVID seriously. That's not true. There are certainly groups of Amish who perceive COVID as a real problem and they've had loved ones negatively affected by it."

God's law beats man's law

Co-author Corey Colyer, associate professor of sociology, views the team's findings through the intersection of religion and government guidelines.

Colyer believes that policies established by government entities can leave behind a bad taste for members of religious communities bearing a history of persecution.

"Mandates prohibiting church can backfire," Colyer said. "We've picked up on that in letters to The Budget. The Amish, conservative Mennonites and other Anabaptists have collective memories of persecution."

Colyer explained that when the Anabaptists formed in the Counter-Reformation, they were heavily persecuted and even rounded up and executed in Europe.

"When this pandemic hit and the state prohibited worship, they didn't take it lightly," Colyer said. "They don't look at it as a 'nanny state' or a government overstepping its bounds. They take it as persecution. Any attempt to curtail religious gathering and practice interferes with their sacred business.

"When states step in and say, 'You can't gather for Church,' they say, 'Well, there's man law and there's God's law. We're going to follow God's law.'"

The study suggests that, in general, many groups complied with government guidelines limiting religious gatherings in March and April. But many resumed church services by summer.

When government restrictions relaxed more so in the fall in Ohio, that's when researchers observed the greatest spike in excess deaths.

The coming days, weeks and months will remain problematic from a public health standpoint in these communities, as most members will not practice social distancing or get vaccinated, the research team said.

Researchers stressed that the Amish should not be singled out. Their methodology could be applied in studying other religious groups and the impacts of COVID-19. They noted that in some countries, such as Egypt and Jordan, Muslim and Christian obituaries are clearly distinguishable. There are also Jewish newspapers across the United States and the world that report obituaries. An unrelated study (Connelly, 2020) showed how COVID-19 decimated a Jewish community.

At the end of the day, all human beings, regardless of race, religion or creed, can succumb to the virus.

"COVID does not respect doctrinal boundaries," Colyer said. "Many of the Amish believe that God will protect them. The evidence suggests that COVID doesn't care if you are Amish or English, Christian or atheist. The consequences are the consequences."

Cities must become fully car-free in order to be liveable in the future, according to the UCL experts behind a new modelling report looking at urban car use.

The experts have called for a shift in collective behaviour to reduce the number of private cars in cities. Globally, the number of cars produced is increasing faster than the population; 80m cars were produced in 2019, while the population increased by 78m.

The researchers said future city planning must include a focus on reducing dependence on cars, promoting fewer and shorter trips and encouraging walking and cycling as primary modes of local transport. Public transport should be encouraged for longer journeys, the researchers argued, and cars should only be used for emergencies or special occasions.

For the paper, published in Open Science, researchers created a mathematical model of car use in a city, where residents either used a car on a daily basis or used public transport. Estimated costs were the length of time journeys take because this is the biggest factor when deciding how to travel, with the baseline for the model being driving with no traffic.

Lead author Dr Rafael Prieto Curiel commented: "The city of the future, with millions of people, cannot be constructed around cars and their expensive infrastructure. In a few decades, we will have cities with 40 or 50 million inhabitants, and these could resemble car parks with 40 or 50 million cars. The idea that we need cars comes from a very pollutant industry and very expensive marketing."

Using the model, the researchers found one extreme scenario for a city with 50 million inhabitants and 50 million cars, where all residents use a car on a daily basis to try to minimise their commute time. As a result, the city experiences the highest levels of congestion and requires more infrastructure such as avenues, bridges and car parks to accommodate so many cars.

In this scenario, where everyone tries to reduce their commute times by driving, they instead reach the worst-case scenario. This is where the cost (commuting time) that everyone puts on the streets by driving creates a paradox where commuting times are at the maximum.

It is generally assumed that improving public transport infrastructure would improve baseline costs (time) as more residents opt for this over driving. The model showed that even without improving infrastructure, baseline costs could be lowered by reducing the number of people allowed to drive at a time.

For example, if one group of people is allowed to drive one week and must use other modes of transport the next, the average commuting time could be reduced by up to 25% with a non-selfish modal share where the number of cars on the road is reduced. This would lead to less congestion and a faster city on average.

Decreasing car use in cities depends mainly on providing citizens with more travel options, plus local shops and services. Ensuring residents understand the local costs of car use can help individuals make informed choices, while interventions such as congestion charges, tolls and driving and parking controls can further help to discourage car use.

Global car production - including electric cars - contributes 4% of total carbon dioxide emissions. Other associated costs include petrol and electricity use, the materials and infrastructure required, and congestion generated by high volumes of cars.

Some cities have implemented some of the above-mentioned interventions. London, whilst being an example of a city where public transport is highly used, has implemented congestion charging and low emission zones.

Mexico City, for example, has banned some vehicles based on their licence plate, but the policy has led to an overall increase in cars as drivers buy older, cheaper and therefore more polluting cars to get around the restrictions.

The experts conclude from the model that encouraging people to take alternative modes of transport is key is to making driving less appealing. Making public transport faster, reliable, secure and comfortable is also essential.

Report author Dr Humberto González Ramírez (Université Gustave Eiffel) said: "Currently, much of the land in cities is dedicated to cars. If our goal is to have more liveable and sustainable cities, then we must take part of this land and allocate it to alternative modes of transportation: walking, cycling and public transport."

The mathematical model can be applied to any city. It is particularly useful when applied to cities where more than 90% of journeys are by car, such as in the US cities of Dallas, Houston and Detroit.

Promoting sustainable transport is the objective of many cities and a core part of one of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.

A new study by Penn State researchers, who looked at emergency room admissions across the U.S. over a recent five-year period in a novel way, suggests that the agriculture industry is even more dangerous than previously believed.

The research revealed that from Jan. 1, 2015, to Dec. 31, 2019, more than 60,000 people were treated in emergency departments for nonfatal, agricultural-related injuries. Significantly, nearly a third of those injured were youths, according to study author Judd Michael, Nationwide Insurance Professor of Agricultural Safety and Health and professor of agricultural and biological engineering, College of Agricultural Sciences.

"This study revealed the true magnitude of the agricultural-related injury problem," he said. "We were slightly surprised at the sheer number of farm-related injuries and concerned by the high number of youths who were injured."

Before this research, knowledge of nonfatal agricultural injuries was somewhat limited by the available sources of information, Michael noted. Existing data are based mostly on regional or national periodic surveys, he added. The Bureau of Labor Statistics captures only nonfatal occupational injuries through its Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses, often called the SOII.

That survey collects data on work-related nonfatal injuries and illnesses among employees in all industries in the U.S. But its data exclude self-employed farmers and family members as well as workers on farms with fewer than 11 employees.

"It has been estimated that the SOII was undercounting occupational injuries and illnesses in agriculture by about 78%," Michael said.

To reach their conclusion, researchers conducted a cross-sectional study using data from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission's National Electronic Injury Surveillance System -- or NEISS -- for patients treated in emergency departments over the five-year period. By querying all cases in the NEISS database using the location code "farm," and with a narrative search using relevant key words, they created a unique view of one of the country's most dangerous occupations.

Over the period, an estimated 62,079 people were treated in an emergency department for agricultural-related injuries. The mean age estimate in this population was 39 years old, with ages ranging from 1 to 95. Almost two-thirds of patients were male, and almost 80% were white. Approximately 30% and 22% of those injured were youth and elderly patients, respectively. These age groups are usually not present in the typical workforce but are involved in agriculture.

According to findings recently published in the Journal of Agromedicine, most injuries occurred from April through September. The most common injury was fracture, followed by open wound or amputation. The primary source of injury was in the "vehicles" category, with tractors being the dominant vehicle type.

Historically, researchers have known that youth are at greater risk than adults for injury around a farm or ag environment, but it is not necessarily because they are working, Michael noted. Rather, in family farm environments where the kids are present, they are exposed to dangers.

"Small farms are family-oriented businesses, and often they have all their family members helping out," he said. "And the kids who are helping out or visiting the farm are exposed to hazards that they may not understand or know how to react to. They're not mature enough to foresee hazardous situations. And that leads to injuries or worse, in some cases, fatalities."

Getting a better handle on the number of agriculture-related injuries and how they occur is important, Michael pointed out, because that knowledge may lead to a reduction in accidents.

"Agriculture and forestry are among the most hazardous industries in the U.S., and part of our overall goal here at Penn State in the ag safety and health program, and certainly within my role as the Nationwide Insurance Professor, is to conduct research that will help us understand the causes of injuries and fatalities," he said. "Because we know that if we understand why they happen, it's much easier to prevent them."

Interstate highway systems and networks of dense urban roads typically receive top billing on maps, in infrastructure legislation and in travelers' daily commuting routes. However, more than 80% of all US roads are considered low-volume roads - defined as those that carry fewer than 1000 vehicles per day. According to a new report published by the Ecological Society of America, "The Ecology of Rural Roads: Effects, Management and Research," this less-traveled road network can have an outsized impact on surrounding ecosystems, altering the local hydrology, affecting wildlife populations and shuttling invasive species into new areas.

"Rural roads provide important transportation connections for rural populations but,while apparently innocuous, can lead to drastic changes in whole landscapes, including the plants and animals that live in them," said Alisa W. Coffin, a research ecologist at the United States Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service Southeast Watershed Research Laboratory in Tifton, GA.

Proper planning and maintenance of rural roads improves farmers' ability to get products to market, creating more reliable conditions for agricultural trade and for other social and economic opportunities. Maintaining and improving rural infrastructure is important not only for surrounding rural communities, but also for the broader public that depends on the goods and services that these communities produce. However, roads may also introduce heavy metals and road salt into waterways, alter flooding regimes and even change the rate at which nearby trees release water into the atmosphere. Animal deaths from vehicle collisions on rural roads can dramatically alter wildlife populations. When transportation planners fail to account for these cumulative impacts, it compromises the clean water and healthy ecosystems that support the wildlife and people that live nearby.

Road ecology is a relatively new discipline, and Coffin and her colleagues hope their paper can increase awareness of the importance of low-volume rural road networks. The report also describes best management practices and policy applications.

"Transportation authorities are increasingly looking to the science of road ecology for solutions on how to improve our transportation systems while also mitigating for their negative ecological effects," said Coffin. "The science shows that new roads bring additional negative effects and that mitigation improves ecological outcomes."

The report is No. 23 in Issues in Ecology, a series of reports published by the Ecological Society of America that use commonly understood language to present the consensus of a panel of scientific experts on issues related to the environment. Previous reports in the series are available at https://www.esa.org/publications/issues/.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and migraine often co-occur, but researchers knew relatively little about how or why this happens. A new study in Frontiers in Neuroscience is the first to investigate if the conditions have a common genetic basis. By studying identical twins, where one twin in each pair lives with PTSD or migraines and the other twin does not, the researchers found common genes that may play a role in both conditions. These genes may help to explain why the conditions co-occur, and could reveal new treatment targets for both.

PTSD is a psychiatric disorder that typically occurs after a traumatic experience, such as a life-threatening event. Most people will experience a traumatic event at some point in their lives, but the vast majority will not develop PTSD, so there is something special about those who do.

Identical twins can reveal epigenetic risk factors

Those who live with PTSD are also more likely to experience migraine headaches, suggesting common risk factors for these conditions. The synergy between PTSD and migraines is not understood as no studies have examined this link before. This latest study suggests that our genes may hold the answer, and specifically, epigenetic changes.

Epigenetics refers to the influence of our environment on how our genes are expressed, and typically involves biochemical modifications to DNA. Identical twins have exactly the same genes, but different experiences as they grow up may result in different epigenetic changes. This can mean that some genes are more or less likely to be expressed in each twin.

The researchers used this phenomenon in twins to see which genes show altered activity in PTSD and migraine and whether the conditions shared common changes. Six pairs of twins volunteered for the study, where both twins had experienced traumatic events, but only one of each pair lives with PTSD.

Given the low probability that all these conditions are met, the sample size could never be large. But because identical twins share all of their DNA - but not all of their epigenetic marks - the study is still powerful. The researchers also enrolled 15 pairs of twins where one of each pair experiences migraine headaches. The researchers took blood samples from the twins and analyzed them to detect epigenetic changes associated with PTSD or migraine.

Exciting findings

Excitingly, the study revealed that certain genes are similarly affected in PTSD and migraine, suggesting that they may share some risk factors.

"Our results suggest that common genes and signaling pathways are involved in PTSD and migraine and this might explain why PTSD and migraine can co-occur frequently," explained Prof Divya Mehta of the Queensland University of Technology, senior author on the study. "This might further imply that common environmental risk factors for both PTSD and migraine might be acting on these genes."

So, what do these findings mean for those living with PTSD and/or migraines? Well, the genes and epigenetic modifications the researchers identified could form the basis for new treatments. Epigenetic changes offer an excellent drug target, as they can often be reversed.

"These results may have implications for treatments, as one medicine or therapy might only be effective for a single disorder," said Mehta. "For co-occurring disorders such as PTSD and migraine, once we know which common genes are implicated in both disorders, we can develop new therapeutics to target these, thereby reducing symptoms and curing both."

Plastic is practical, cheap and incredibly popular. Every year, more than 350 million tonnes are produced worldwide. These plastics contain a huge variety of chemicals that may be released during their lifecycles - including substances that pose a significant risk to people and the environment. However, only a small proportion of the chemicals contained in plastic are publicly known or have been extensively studied.

A team of researchers led by Stefanie Hellweg, ETH Professor of Ecological Systems Design, has for a first time compiled a comprehensive database of plastic monomers, additives and processing aids for use in the production and processing of plastics on the world market, and systematically categorized them on the basis of usage patterns and hazard potential. The study, just published in the scientific journal Environmental Science & Technology, provides an enlightening but worrying insight into the world of chemicals that are intentionally added to plastics.

A high level of chemical diversity

The team identified around 10,500 chemicals in plastic. Many are used in packaging (2,489), textiles (2,429) and food-contact applications (2,109); some are for toys (522) and medical devices, including masks (247). Of the 10,500 substances identified, the researchers categorized 2,480 substances (24 percent) as substances of potential concern.

"This means that almost a quarter of all the chemicals used in plastic are either highly stable, accumulate in organisms or are toxic. These substances are often toxic to aquatic life, cause cancer or damage specific organs," explains Helene Wiesinger, doctoral student at the Chair of Ecological Systems Design and lead author of the study. About half are chemicals with high production volumes in the EU or the US.

"It is particularly striking that many of the questionable substances are barely regulated or are ambiguously described," continues Wiesinger.

In fact, 53 percent of all the substances of potential concern are not regulated in the US, the EU or Japan. More surprisingly, 901 hazardous substances are approved for use in food contact plastics in these regions. Finally, scientific studies are lacking for about 10 percent of the identified substances of potential concern.

Plastic monomers, additives and processing aids

Plastics are made of organic polymers built up from repeating monomer units. A wide variety of additives, such as antioxidants, plasticisers and flame retardants, give the polymer matrix the desired properties. Catalysts, solvents and other chemicals are also used as processing aids in production.

"Until now, research, industry and regulators have mainly concentrated on a limited number of dangerous chemicals known to be present in plastics," says Wiesinger. Today, plastic packaging is seen as a main source of organic contamination in food, while phthalate plasticisers and brominated flame retardants are detectable in house dust and indoor air. Earlier studies have already indicated that significantly more plastic chemicals used worldwide are potentially hazardous.

Nevertheless, the results of the inventory came as an unpleasant surprise to the researchers. "The unexpectedly high number of substances of potential concern is worrying," says Zhanyun Wang, senior scientist in Hellweg's group. Exposure to such substances can have a negative impact on the health of consumers and workers and on polluted ecosystems. Problematic chemicals can also affect recycling processes and the safety and quality of recycled plastics.

Wang stresses that even more chemicals in plastics could be problematic. "Recorded hazard data are often limited and scattered. For 4,100 or 39 percent of all the substances we identified, we were not able to categorize them due to a lack of hazard classifications" he says.

A lack of data and transparency

The two researchers identified the lack of transparency in chemicals in plastics and dispersed data silos as a main problem. In over two and a half years of detective work, they combed through more than 190 publicly accessible data sources from research, industry and authorities and identified 60 sources with sufficient information about intentionally added substances in plastics. "We found multiple critical knowledge and data gaps, in particular for the substances and their actual uses. This ultimately hinders consumers' choice of safe plastic products", they say.

Wiesinger and Wang are pursuing the goal of a sustainable circular plastic economy. They see an acute need for effective global chemicals management; such a system would have to be transparent and independent, and oversee all hazardous substances in full. The two researchers say that open and easy access to reliable information is crucial.

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. -- Mental distress tends to be lower in the summer when compared to the fall, according to new research from Binghamton University, State University of New York.

"Our results suggest that summertime is associated with better diet quality, higher exercise frequency and improved mood. This is important for the post-COVID era as we are getting into the summer season," said Lina Begdache, assistant professor of health and wellness studies at Binghamton University.

Begdache had previously published research suggesting that mental distress and exercise frequency are associated with different dietary and lifestyle patterns. In a new study, Begdache and colleagues wanted to investigate the nature of the associations between diet quality, sleep quality, exercise, seasonal changes and mental distress among men and women based on age-groups -- reflective of brain maturity -- to potentially describe their intricate role in mental distress.

"Taken all together, our results confirmed the hypothesis that risk factors for mental distress are dynamic," said Begdache. "They also suggest that improving one factor may positively impact all others. For instance, if it is hard to improve diet or up exercise frequency, starting with adjusting the sleep cycle may ease the task. Likewise, upping exercise frequency may improve diet and sleep quality. This virtuous cycle will eventually lead to improving mental wellbeing, according to our results.

Additionally, our results support the notion of personalizing therapies based on gender and age-groups."

The researchers collected daily data on diet, sleep, overall well-being, exercise and mental distress from individuals of different ages and followed them for four weeks in the summer and fall, for two years. The reason for the seasonal change was to account for alterations in circadian rhythm.

The researchers found the following:

- Good quality diet was associated with mental well-being.

- Good sleep quality was associated with mental and overall well-being, as well as with higher diet quality and exercise frequency.

- Seasonal changes had an impact on diet quality and mental health. - Mental distress tended to be lower in the summer when compared to the fall.

- Seasonal changes were associated with alterations in diet quality and mental wellbeing.

"The association between diet, sleep, exercise, and seasonal changes in relation to mental distress is complex and multidimensional. These variables are intertwined in a way that a shift in one factor may alter directionality of others and, consequently, impact mood," said Begdache. "Therefore, it is crucial to recognize the dynamic relationships between these lifestyle factors and mental distress to provide the groundwork necessary for nutritionists and healthcare professionals to improve prophylactic and therapeutic approaches."

X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) is often used to determine the chemical composition of materials. It was developed in the 1960s and is accepted as a standard method in materials science. Researchers at Linköping University, Sweden, however, have shown that the method is often used erroneously.

"It is, of course, an ideal in research that the methods used are critically examined, but it seems that a couple of generations of researchers have failed to take seriously early signals that the calibration method was deficient. This was the case also for a long time in our own research group. Now, however, we hope that XPS will be used with greater care", says Grzegorz Greczynski, senior lecturer in the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology at Linköping University.

Grzegorz Greczynski and his colleague in the department, Professor Lars Hultman, have shown that XPS can give misleading analysis results due to an erroneous assumption during calibration. The results have been published in Scientific Reports.

XPS is used to determine the chemical composition of materials. It is a standard method in materials science, and more than 12,000 scientific articles with results obtained by XPS are published each year. The technique was developed during the 1960s by Professor Kai Siegbahn at Uppsala University to become a useful and powerful method for chemical analysis, and the work led to him being awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1981.

"The pioneering work that led to the Nobel Prize is not in question here. When the technique was developed initially, the error was comparatively small, due to the low calibration precision of the spectrometers used at the time. However, as spectroscopy developed rapidly and spread to other scientific fields, the instruments have been improved to such a degree that the underlying error has grown into a significant obstacle to future development", says Lars Hultman.

What the researchers have discovered is that the original method is being used wrongly, through an erroneous assumption used in the calibration process. When calibrating the experiment, the signal from elemental carbon accumulating on the sample surface is often used.

It turns out that the carbon-based compounds that are formed naturally by condensation onto most samples give rise to signals that depend on the surroundings and the substrate onto which they are attached, in other words, the sample itself. This means that a unique signal is not produced, and large errors arise when a more or less arbitrary value is used as reference to calibrate the measuring instrument.

Criticism against the method was raised as early as the 1970s and a bit into the 1980s. After that, however, knowledge about the error fell into oblivion. Lars Hultman suggests that several factors have interacted to allow the error to pass unnoticed for nearly 40 years. He believes that the dramatic increase in the number of journals that digital publishing has made possible is one such factor, while deficient reviewing procedures are another.

"Not only has a rapidly growing number of scientists failed to be critical, it seems that there is a form of carelessness among editors and reviewers for the scientific journals. This has led to the publishing of interpretations of data that are clearly in conflict with basic physics. You could call it a perfect storm. It's likely that the same type of problem with deficient critical assessment of methods is present in several scientific disciplines, and in the long term this risks damaging research credibility", says Lars Hultman.

Grzegorz Greczynski hopes that their discovery can not only continue to improve the XPS technique, but also contribute to a more critical approach within the research community.

"Our experiments show that the most popular calibration method leads to nonsense results and the use of it should therefore be terminated. There exist alternatives that can give more reliable calibration, but these are more demanding of the user and some need refinement. However, it is just as important to encourage people to be critical of established methods in lab discussions, in the development department, and in seminars", Grzegorz Greczynski concludes.

When a University of Michigan-led research team reported last year that North American migratory birds have been getting smaller over the past four decades and that their wings have gotten a bit longer, the scientists wondered if they were seeing the fingerprint of earlier spring migrations.

Multiple studies have demonstrated that birds are migrating earlier in the spring as the world warms. Perhaps the evolutionary pressure to migrate faster and arrive at breeding grounds earlier led to the physical changes the U-M-led team observed.

"We know that bird morphology has a major effect on the efficiency and speed of flight, so we became curious whether the environmental pressure to advance spring migration would lead to natural selection for longer wings," said U-M evolutionary biologist Marketa Zimova.

In a new study scheduled for publication June 21 in the Journal of Animal Ecology, Zimova and her colleagues test for a link between the observed morphological changes and earlier spring migration, which is an example of timing shifts biologists call phenological changes.

Unexpectedly, they found that the morphological and phenological changes are happening in parallel but appear to be unrelated or "decoupled."

"We found that birds are changing in size and shape independently of changes in their migration timing, which was surprising," said Zimova, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the U-M Institute for Global Change Biology.

Both the new study and the 2020 paper that described the changes in body size and wing length were based on analyses of some 70,000 bird specimens from 52 species at the Field Museum. The birds were collected after colliding with Chicago buildings during spring and fall migrations between 1978 and 2016.

In addition to its finding about the decoupling of morphological and phenological changes, the new study is believed to be the first to use museum specimens from building collisions to examine long-term trends in bird migration timing. Several previous reports relied on data from bird-banding studies or, more recently, the analysis of weather radar records.

The U-M-led team confirmed previous findings about earlier spring migration and provided new insights about fall bird migrations in North America, which have been less studied. Specifically, they found that the earliest spring migrants are now arriving nearly five days sooner than they did four decades ago, while the earliest fall migrants are heading south about 10 days earlier than they used to.

Notably, the last fall stragglers now depart about a week later than they used to so that, overall, the duration of the fall migration season has been stretched considerably.

"It is unusual to have a dataset that can provide insights into multiple aspects of global change--such as phenology and morphology--at the same time," said U-M evolutionary biologist and ornithologist Ben Winger, a senior author of the study.

"I was impressed that the collision data so clearly showed evidence of advancing spring migration. The collision monitors in Chicago have been collecting these data on bird building collisions for 40 years and, meanwhile, the birds have been changing the timing of their migratory patterns in ways that were imperceptible until the dataset as a whole was examined," said Winger, an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and an assistant curator at the Museum of Zoology.

Last year in the journal Ecology Letters, the U-M-led team reported that nearly all of the 52 bird species in their study experienced both declines in body size and simultaneous increases in wing length over the four-decade period.

At the time, they linked the measured body-size reductions to warmer temperatures at the birds' breeding grounds. Since smaller bodies are more efficient at dissipating heat, perhaps smaller birds gained a competitive advantage and were favored by natural selection. Alternatively, the body-size reductions could be the result of a process called developmental plasticity, the ability of an individual to modify its development in response to changing environmental conditions.

The researchers also suggested that the observed increases in wing length helped compensate for the smaller body size, allowing the birds to maintain migration by increasing flight efficiency.

But the previous study did not test to see whether the changes in body size and wing length were driven by climate-related shifts in migration timing. In the new study, they tested for that link.

For each of the 52 species, the researchers estimated temporal trends in morphology and changes in the timing of migration. Then they tested for associations between species-specific rates of phenological and morphological change, taking into account the potential effects of migratory distance and breeding latitude.

They found no evidence that rates of phenological change across years, or migratory distance and breeding latitude, are predictive of rates of concurrent changes in morphological traits.

"Scientifically, this is really the most interesting and novel finding," said U-M evolutionary biologist and ornithologist Brian Weeks, a senior author of the new Journal of Animal Ecology study.

Advances in phenology, such as flowering plants blooming earlier in the spring, and changes in morphology, including body size reductions, are among the most commonly described biological responses to global warming temperatures.

Many studies of plant and animal adaptive responses to climate warming have looked at either phenological or morphological changes, but few have been able to examine both at the same time. The depth of the Field Museum dataset enabled the U-M-led team to examine multiple responses to climate warming simultaneously and to test for connections between them.

"It is often assumed that morphological changes driven by climate and changes in the timing of migration must interact to either facilitate or constrain adaptive responses to climate change," said Weeks, an assistant professor at the School for Environment and Sustainability. "But this has never to my knowledge been tested empirically at a significant scale, until now, due to lack of data."

So, if increased wing length is not responsible for the earlier arrival of migratory birds in Chicago each spring, then what is? Previous studies suggest that shorter, less frequent stopovers during the northbound trek may be a factor.

"And there might be other adjustments that allow birds to migrate faster that we haven't thought about--maybe some physiological adaptation that might allow faster flight without causing the birds to overheat and lose too much water," Zimova said.

First and only report to interview large sample of workers in garment supply chain (1200 workers across 302 factories and four countries) found an increase in risk of forced labour during pandemic

This risk has been exacerbated by the response of retail companies, and there is little evidence most have acted in line with their social responsibilities to support their supply chain workers, despite many accessing pandemic recovery funds

A new comprehensive system was used during the study to look for the indicators that someone is vulnerable to forced labour

The recovery from the pandemic should include support for supply chain workers to mitigate the deterioration of their living and working conditions

Deteriorating living and working conditions for workers in garment supply chains during the Covid-19 pandemic have increased the risk of forced labour, according to a new report from the University of Sheffield.

'The Unequal Impacts of Covid-19 on Global Garment Supply Chains' has found that workers in Ethiopia, Honduras, India, and Myanmar who produce many of the clothes we buy from our favourite brands in the UK and Europe were severely affected by the pandemic.

Both those that were fortunate enough to remain employed, and those that lost their jobs during the past year and found new work, reported a sharp decline in their earnings and working conditions; and both groups experienced being at increased risk of forced labour during this time.

The study is the largest to directly involve the voices of those employed to make the clothes we buy in the UK during the pandemic alongside interviews with retailers and analysis of company documentation. Previous ones have focused solely on the impact for the multinational corporations (MNCs) which own major fashion brands and retailers. It uses a comprehensive new system to look for the indicators that someone is vulnerable to forced labour.

Professor Genevieve LeBaron, from the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield, said: "There is no commonly held definition of what constitutes forced labour, and unlike the public perceptions of modern slavery, people may not be held against their will or trafficked unknowingly into their situation.

"They may end up in a job that they are unable to leave due to a number of reasons; false promises and deception to keep a person working in increasing worsening conditions, threat of penalties against the worker or their family if they left, or sometimes bonding a person into debt to the manufacturer through poor pay, leaving them struggling to cover their basic needs for housing and food."

The study found that both groups of workers experienced indicators of forced labour, with the situation clearly deteriorating during the pandemic. It highlighted that many companies fell far short of their commitments to good practice; including sourcing sustainable goods from manufacturers with fair working conditions, pay and no use of exploitation.

The commercial actions of companies during the pandemic has brought to light how many business models within the garment industry are fundamentally at odds with these commitments, and that current government regulation does not go far enough to protect the workers.

Although the study found there were examples of some companies acting in ways that honoured their social commitments, this was mainly from companies that had direct ownership of factories, or long-standing partnerships with manufacturers that were crucial to protect. In these cases, workers were more likely to retain a job through the pandemic.

Professor LeBaron said: "It appears many companies in the garment industry accessed emergency funding during the pandemic, but also provided little to no evidence that they honoured the social responsibilities most brands we recognise have to the workers in their supply chains at the same time.

"At the beginning of the pandemic, millions of pounds worth of cancelled orders forced many manufacturers in places like Ethiopia to lay off staff, who then became vulnerable to exploitation during the desperate search to find a new job.

Those lucky enough to retain their job reported experiencing worsening working conditions and pay, exacerbating the already troubling inequalities between the countries who benefit from their labour and the workers themselves."

Already some manufacturers are pursuing legal action against companies which cancelled orders worth millions of pounds during the pandemic, and there is increasing discussion about whether the conduct of clothing brands during the pandemic was legal.

The report calls for governments to increase the governance of supply chains and for retailers to address the damage done during the pandemic.

Professor LeBaron added: "Our report shows that retail companies tried to offset the potential damage of the pandemic by shifting losses onto their suppliers and workers who would least afford it. Most of these companies have very deep pockets and need to act immediately to address the social challenges their pandemic responses have created.

"Banning the sale of below-cost price and forced labour made goods, ensuring companies relieve the supply chain pressures that cause suppliers to use unfair labour practices, and requiring brands to report on public bail out funds received and how these have been used, would be a good start to force retailers to be more transparent about how they work; helping tackle the increasing inequality experienced by supply chain workers that satisfy our demand for high-end, and fast fashions and helping consumers make more sustainable and ethical choices when shopping."

Jakub Sobik, Communications Director at the Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre (the Modern Slavery PEC), which funded the research under its call on the impact of Covid-19 on modern slavery across the world, said:

"This report highlights the unequal impact of Covid-19 across complex business supply chains and the need to do more to protect workers producing garments sold across the world from exploitation.

"Businesses should consider how their actions can rectify the situation and develop different responses for the future, while working with governments to ensure a level playing field for all businesses, incentivising those which apply good practice already."

University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) researchers identified a new gene that may be linked to certain neurodevelopmental disorders and intellectual disabilities. The researchers believe that finding genes involved in certain types of developmental disorders, provide an important first step in determining the cause of these disorders and ultimately in developing potential therapies for treating them. The paper was recently published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

About 3 percent of the world's population has intellectual disability. Up to half the cases are due to genetics, however, because many thousands of genes contribute to brain development, it has been difficult to identify the specific cause for each patient.

Once the researchers identified the gene, they worked with collaborators to give clinical diagnoses to 10 other families around the world, who had relatives with this condition. The researchers also used zebrafish to show the gene's role in development and survival, demonstrating its importance in helping the brain's neurons function properly.

"Our goal is to find as many of these genes required for brain function and take this knowledge back to patients and families to provide a clinically relevant genetic diagnosis," says Saima Riazuddin, PhD, MPH, MBA, Professor of Otorhinolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery and Biochemistry & Molecular Biology at UMSOM.

Dr. Riazuddin and her team collaborate regularly with several scientists in Pakistan studying a group of 350 families geographically isolated, which as a result has led to inbreeding resulting in genetic disorders such as neurodevelopmental disorder and intellectual disability.

The team focused on one particular family with two brothers and an uncle with symptoms of intellectual disability, delayed speech and other developmental milestones and epilepsy. Other members of the family with similar symptoms had since passed in childhood or early adulthood. Dr. Riazuddin and her team identified the gene AP1G1 as the culprit.

Then through collaboration with 27 other institutions, her team was able to identify ten other families with the variations in the same gene that led to growth retardation and intellectual disability. These families lived in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and the United States.

To determine the gene's role in development, the researchers engineered zebrafish without Ap1g1. These zebrafish embryos all began to die off by the fourth day. When the researchers added back mutated versions of the genes, like those found in the families with neurodevelopment disorder and intellectual disability, they observed a spectrum of symptoms with some zebrafish embryos dying off, some with major structural defects, and others with only minor tail deformities.

The gene AP1G1 contains the blueprints to make the protein Adaptor Protein 1 gamma 1 (AP1γ1). This protein is one of five pieces that makes up the Adaptor Protein Complex, which builds transport vesicles to move materials around cells.

"Think of these transport vesicles as little vehicles like trucks that have to load, transport, and unload their cargo around the cells (e.g. neurons) to provide the necessary supplies for the cell to function," says Dr. Riazuddin.

Dr. Riazuddin's team made normal and mutant versions of AP1G1 which they put in mammalian cells with cargo molecules labeled in red. The cells with the mutant versions of AP1G1 had vesicles that were delayed in delivering their cargo or did not make their deliveries at all.

"Improving clinical diagnosis of these developmental disorders may eventually provide new targets for therapies, in order to one day be able to treat these conditions allowing more people to live independently," says E. Albert Reece, MD, PhD, MBA, Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs, UM Baltimore, and the John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor and Dean, University of Maryland School of Medicine.

People who struggle with social anxiety might experience increased distress related to mask-wearing during and even after the COVID-19 pandemic.

A paper authored by researchers from the University of Waterloo's Department of Psychology and Centre for Mental Health Research and Treatment also has implications for those who haven't necessarily suffered from social anxiety in the past.

"The adverse effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health outcomes, including anxiety and depression, have been well-documented," said David Moscovitch, professor of clinical psychology and co-author of the paper. "However, little is known about effects of increased mask-wearing on social interactions, social anxiety, or overall mental health.

"It is also possible that many people who didn't struggle with social anxiety before the pandemic may find themselves feeling more anxious than usual as we emerge out of the pandemic and into a more uncertain future -- especially within social situations where our social skills are rusty and the new rules for social engagement are yet to be written."

Social anxiety is characterized by negative self-perception and fear that one's appearance or behaviour will fail to conform with social expectations and norms. Social anxiety disorder is an extreme manifestation that affects up to 13 per cent of the population.

The researchers reviewed existing literature addressing three factors that they hypothesized might contribute to social anxiety associated with mask-wearing: hypersensitivity to social norms, bias in the detection of social and emotional facial cues, and propensity for self-concealment as a form of safety behaviour.

"We found that mask-wearing by people with social anxiety is likely to be influenced by their perception of social norms and expectations, which may or may not be consistent with public-health guidelines and can vary widely by region and context," said Sidney Saint, an undergraduate psychology student at Waterloo and lead author of the paper.

The paper also highlights that people with social anxiety have difficulty detecting ambiguous social cues and are likely to interpret them negatively. These individuals also tend to worry about sounding incomprehensible or awkward. "We believe that both issues are likely to be magnified during interactions with masks," Saint said.

Another highlighted impact is that masks can function as a type of self-concealment strategy that enables people with social anxiety to hide their self-perceived flaws. Therefore, the desire for self-concealment may motivate their use of masks over and above their desire to protect themselves from contagion. "Due to their self-concealing function, masks may be difficult for some people to discard even when mask-wearing is no longer required by public health mandates," Saint said.

In addition to contributing insights to guide clinicians toward effective assessment and treatment, the paper shows that people with social anxiety may be particularly vulnerable to periods of norm transitions where expectations for mask-wearing are in flux or become a matter of personal choice.

Team used Argonne’s GREET model to simulate changes, predict outcomes.

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory participated in a study that shows innovation in technologies and agricultural practices could reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from grain production by up to 70% within the next 15 years.

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, the study identifies a combination of readily adoptable technological innovations that can significantly reduce emissions and fit within current production systems and established grain markets.

The study, “Novel technologies for emission reduction complement conservation agriculture to achieve negative emissions from row crop production,” maintains that reductions in GHG emissions could be attained through digital agriculture, crop and microbial genetics and electrification. The new technologies, when implemented, promise to drive the decarbonization of agriculture while supporting farm resilience and maintaining profitability and productivity. 

Technologies were grouped across three phases: optimize, replace and redesign. The team used Argonne’s GREET® model to simulate adoption of the new technologies for holistic greenhouse gas emission reductions of grain production. Argonne developed GREET (the Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Technologies Model), a one-of-a-kind lifecycle analytical tool now used worldwide by government, industry and the science community.

The study offers insights for the development of possible new approaches for agriculture decarbonization and suggests entry points for public and private investment based on a timeline of expected returns on investments in new technologies.

“Our study emphasizes the importance of a two-pronged approach — reducing farming emissions and maximizing soil carbon storage — to addressing the climate crisis through agriculture. Practices that enhance soil carbon storage continue to gain momentum. Complementing this approach by developing and broadly applying emission reduction technologies, including seed genetics, is critical to achieving net negative production,” said Dan Northrup, lead author of the study and director of special projects at Benson Hill, a St Louis based company leveraging the natural genetic diversity of plants to develop more healthy and sustainable food choices.

Argonne Energy Systems Division’s senior scientist Michael Wang, who leads the Systems Assessment Center and is one of the study’s principal investigators, added, “Our holistic assessment of agriculture decarbonization highlights technical areas and focus points so that U.S. agriculture will be a solution to the climate challenge.”