COVID-19 shutdowns reveal racial disparities in exposure to air pollution

Disenfranchised, minority neighborhoods still exposed to disproportionately high levels of health harming nitrogen dioxide

GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

IMAGE: A NEW GW STUDY OF COVID-19 SHUTDOWNS IN THE UNITED STATES REVEALS PRONOUNCED DISPARITIES IN AIR POLLUTION -- WITH DISENFRANCHISED, MINORITY NEIGHBORHOODS STILL EXPERIENCING MORE EXPOSURE TO A HARMFUL AIR... view more 

CREDIT: GW

WASHINGTON (July 20, 2021)--A new study of COVID-19 shutdowns in the United States reveals pronounced disparities in air pollution -- with disenfranchised, minority neighborhoods still experiencing more exposure to a harmful air pollutant compared to wealthier, white communities. This first-of-a-kind study published today by researchers at the George Washington University looks at how air pollution changed after schools and businesses shut down in March 2020 in attempts to curb the spread of COVID-19.

"New York and other major urban areas had cleaner air as many commuters and others stayed off the roads," Gaige Kerr, the lead researcher on the study and a research scientist at the GW Milken Institute School of Public Health, said. "At the same time, our study shows that an air pollutant called nitrogen dioxide was still disproportionately higher in marginalized, mostly Latino and Black neighborhoods."

Nitrogen dioxide is formed when fossil fuels such as coal, oil, gas or diesel are burned at high temperatures. Cars, trucks and buses are the largest source of nitrogen dioxide emissions in urban areas followed by stationary sources, including power plants and factories.

With support from NASA, the researchers used data from a recently launched satellite orbiting the earth called the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument, along with ground measurements of pollution, to estimate nitrogen dioxide levels both before and after COVID-19 shutdowns. This method allowed the researchers to zoom in and compare one neighborhood's pollution level to another in urban areas throughout the U.S. They then used demographic data to compare how nitrogen dioxide levels changed for different population sub-groups.

While previous studies have documented the inequity in air pollution exposure using models or spatially limited networks of ground monitors, this study relied on both observational and spatially complete satellite data to reveal how these inequities persisted during the unparalleled changes in human activity during COVID-19, the authors said.

The team found that changes in human activity during the COVID-19 pandemic, largely less passenger vehicle traffic, resulted in lower nitrogen dioxide levels among the vast majority of urban areas.

Yet even that sharp decrease was not large enough to eliminate the racial, ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in exposure to this traffic-related pollutant. Marginalized, minority communities still experienced nitrogen dioxide levels during the shutdowns that, in some cities, were 50% higher than pre-pandemic levels in the nearby highest income and mostly white communities, Kerr said.

The researchers linked the biggest drops in nitrogen dioxide pollution during COVID-19 shutdowns to a community's proximity to highways and interstates. Kerr says that marginalized urban areas are also more likely to be located near interstates, where traffic is responsible for a large portion of urban nitrogen dioxide pollution and other forms of pollution.

For example, in New York, the largest reductions in nitrogen dioxide were found near the convergence of the George Washington Bridge and Major Deegan Expressway, an area that also has a heavy concentration of industries. The largest drops in Atlanta were located in the southwest part of the city near the airport and several major roadways. In Detroit, the biggest reduction in nitrogen dioxide occurred on the west shores of the Detroit River, where several interstates and the Ambassador Bridge, a busy U.S.-Canadian border crossing, come together. While passenger vehicle traffic dropped on these highways, heavy-duty trucking was less affected by the pandemic, and, along with other emission sources, continued contributing to high pollution levels in nearby communities.

Previous research by the senior author of the paper, Susan C. Anenberg, an associate professor of environmental and occupational health at GW, shows that nitrogen dioxide triggers millions of serious asthma attacks worldwide and may cause children to develop asthma for the first time.

Other evidence indicates that exposure to air pollution, including nitrogen dioxide, may increase the likelihood of people getting very sick or dying from COVID-19. Researchers also know that COVID-19 disproportionately strikes minority communities.

"With new satellite data, we can actually observe how pollution levels differ between neighborhoods within cities and track changes over time," Anenberg said. "Our research shows how individual behavior change won't solve environmental injustice. We need long-term policy solutions to reduce emissions and help keep people healthy, especially those living in disadvantaged neighborhoods."

Policies aimed at reducing traffic related emissions -- such as public transportation and widespread use of electric cars -- may not be enough to reduce the nitrogen dioxide pollution in disenfranchised, minority neighborhoods, the authors note. Policymakers who want to reduce the disparities in air pollution across demographic subgroups should also target other sources of pollution that are found in disadvantaged neighborhoods, such as heavy-duty trucking.

"This study shows that an unparalleled pandemic and an unprecedented drop in emissions were not large enough to clean the air for poor, minority neighborhoods," Kerr said. "Urgent action is need to reduce or eliminate these disparities, protect public health, and advance environmental justice."

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The study, "COVID-19 Pandemic Reveals Persistent Disparities in Nitrogen Dioxide Pollution," was published online July, 20, 2021 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In addition to Kerr and Anenberg, the research team included Daniel L. Goldberg, an air quality scientist also at GW.

PRIVATIZED MEDICINE USA

Patients billed up to $219 million in total for preventive services that should be free

Experts say these unexpected healthcare costs may discourage people from seeking recommended preventive care

BOSTON UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

Research News

Experts say these unexpected healthcare costs may discourage people from seeking recommended preventive care.

Despite a sharp reduction in out-of-pocket (OOP) costs for preventive care since the Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010, patients are still receiving unexpected bills for preventive services that should be free, according to a new study co-authored by a Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) researcher.

Published in the journal Preventive Medicine, study found that total out-of-pocket costs billed for preventive services to Americans with employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) in 2018 ranged from $75.6 million to $219 million, with 1 in 4 patients who used preventive care incurring these charges.

"The ACA enabled great strides in making preventive care free to patients, but the job is not done," says Dr. Paul Shafer, senior author of the study and an assistant professor of health law, policy & management at BUSPH. "As with any benefit that has to be implemented by thousands of different health insurance plans that are subject to the ACA, it won't always be perfect. We found that a majority of patients are receiving preventive care for free and those who were charged only paid about $20 or less. This is great news in light of the next legal attack on the ACA with Kelly v. Becerra, but too many people are still footing the bill for care that most likely should be covered by their insurance plan."

Shafer and study lead author Alexander Hoagland, PhD student in economics at Boston University College of Arts & Sciences, calculated these estimates by analyzing national health insurance claims data from 2018 for adults and children covered by ESI. To accommodate for variations in the way insurance plans cover preventive care, the researchers categorized preventive care ranging from "least restrictive" (including all preventive services) to "most restrictive" (including cheapest in-network claim for each type of preventive service during the year).

The researchers found that the likelihood of a patient being charged an OOP cost for any covered preventive service that they used ranged from 19.2 percent for the most restrictive measure, to 32.1 percent for the least restrictive, with a median cost of $20-$23 per person each year.

They also found that OOP charges varied widely depending on the type of preventive service patients received, as well as the patients' geographic location. Annual wellness visits accounted for a majority of the costs, at more than 35 percent. Unexpected charges were also common for routine screenings for cancer, diabetes, cholesterol, depression, obesity, and sexually transmitted infections as well as pregnancy-related services, with OOP costs for these services ranging from $3.63 to $293.28 per person.

The findings also revealed that patients in the South and rural areas were more likely to be billed for preventive services. On average, less than 10 percent of patients in Massachusetts and Colorado were charged for OOP costs, compared to more than 20 percent of patients in Mississippi and Alabama. Covered preventive care may also be more difficult to access in rural areas with fewer in-network providers.

This wide range of OOP costs may be driven by inadvertent errors and inconsistencies in coding by providers or practices, the researchers say. There are no federal standards for what combinations of diagnosis and procedure codes--these are filed in insurance claims by doctors for reimbursement--related to preventive services should be free so insurers set up their own guidelines, which creates unnecessary complexity.

These OOP charges for preventive care can cause direct and indirect effects that ultimately discourage patients from receiving recommended care, says Hoagland.

"The direct effect arises from patients who unexpectedly had to pay for a preventive service, and who are now less likely to return for repeated screenings," Hoagland says. "Indirectly, other potential patients who hear about these negative experiences may be less likely to seek out any screenings for fear of getting stuck with a bill."

Standardizing and simplifying how preventive care is delivered would solve a lot of problems, Shafer says.

"Instead of having insurer-specific coding criteria for wellness visits or to determine whether a particular screening is preventive or no, what if the first office visit or cancer screening was fully covered each year?" says Shafer. "That would be take a lot of the guesswork and frustration out of the equation for patients. If that is a step too far, we could at least standardize the coding criteria across insurers so that patients aren't left footing the bill when the practice gets it wrong."

###

About Boston University School of Public Health

Founded in 1976, the Boston University School of Public Health is one of the top five ranked private schools of public health in the world. It offers master's- and doctoral-level education in public health. The faculty in six departments conduct policy-changing public health research around the world, with the mission of improving the health of populations--especially the disadvantaged, underserved, and vulnerable--locally and globally.

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accur

 

Research shows employer-based weight management program with access to anti-obesity medications results in greater weight loss

Clinical trial was conducted in the real-world setting of a workplace health plan

CLEVELAND CLINIC

Research News

Tuesday, July 20, 2021, CLEVELAND: A Cleveland Clinic study demonstrates that adults with obesity lost significantly more weight when they had access to medications for chronic weight management in conjunction with their employer-based weight management program, compared to adults who did not have access to the medications. The study was published in JAMA Network Open.

Obesity is a complex disease that is caused by multiple factors, including genetic, environmental, and biological. A lifestyle intervention with a focus on nutrition and exercise is often not enough to treat obesity, which is a chronic disease that requires long-term therapy. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved several prescription medications for weight loss and chronic weight management, also called anti-obesity medications. However, they have limited health insurance coverage.

"The research results support the need to treat patients with a multidisciplinary weight management program that incorporates safe and effective medications to lose weight and maintain weight loss," said Bartolome Burguera, M.D., Ph.D., chair of Cleveland Clinic's Endocrinology & Metabolism Institute and primary investigator of the study. "Doctors prescribe medications to treat some of the health consequences associated with obesity, such as hypertension and type 2 diabetes. However, medications for weight loss and chronic weight management are underutilized."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that more than 42% of U.S. adults have obesity. In addition to the serious health conditions associated with obesity – such as type 2 diabetes, obstructive sleep apnea, high-blood pressure, heart disease and stroke – the CDC also reported the economic impact of obesity on the U.S. healthcare system. The estimated medical care costs of the disease in the United States represented $147 billion (in 2008 dollars).

The objective of this study was to determine the effect of combining anti-obesity medications with a multidisciplinary employer-based weight management program.

The one-year, single-center, pragmatic clinical trial was conducted in the real-world setting of a workplace health plan. The study included 200 adults with obesity (body mass index of 30 or greater) who were enrolled in the Cleveland Clinic Employee Health Plan between January 2019 and May 2020. As part of the health plan, participants had access to a comprehensive weight management program.

In this real-world setting, eligible participants were randomized 1:1 to either a weight management program with FDA-approved anti-obesity medications or a weight management program alone. The weight management program was administered through monthly shared medical appointments (SMAs) that offered a multidisciplinary approach, including nutrition education. The monthly SMA visits focused on adopting a healthier lifestyle and addressed the five components of the weight management program: nutrition, physical activity, appetite control, sleep, and mental health. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, some of the SMAs were conducted virtually.

The 100 study participants, randomized to the weight management program combined with access to the medications, received their prescriptions at the time of their monthly SMAs, based on recommended clinical practice.

Patients were prescribed one of five FDA-approved medications for chronic weight management - orlistat, lorcaserin, phentermine/topiramate, naltrexone/bupropion, liraglutide 3.0 mg. The medication selected for each patient was at the discretion of the treating provider, and was determined after a thorough assessment and discussion with the participants. (Lorcaserin was withdrawn from the market in February 2020. The eight patients taking lorcaserin at the time were notified immediately and either switched medications or discontinued medication due to proximity to the end of the study.)

Research results showed that the participants who had access to the anti-obesity medications averaged significantly greater weight loss at 12 months (-7.7%), compared to the participants who were in the weight management program alone (-4.2%). In the group who had access to the medications, 62.5% of the participants lost at least 5% of their weight, compared to 44.8% of the participants in the group with the weight management program alone. SMA attendance was higher among the participants who had access to the weight loss medications.

"Many patients see improvement in their health when they lose 5% of their weight," said Kevin M. Pantalone, D.O., first author of the study and an endocrinologist at Cleveland Clinic. "Based on our study results, access to anti-obesity medications combined with a multidisciplinary weight management program provides a more effective treatment compared to a weight management program without access to these medications."

More long-term research is needed in real-world, employer-based settings to evaluate the costs and benefits of anti-obesity medications and their use in conjunction with workplace wellness plans.

###

This study was funded by Novo Nordisk. Representatives of Novo Nordisk (the sponsor) were involved in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript. Dr. Burguera reported receiving consulting honorarium as a member of the U.S. National Expert Panel for the SELECT trial, a steering committee member for the study being reported, and research support from Novo Nordisk. Dr. Pantalone reported receiving consulting and speaking honorarium, as well as research support from Novo Nordisk, and currently serves as the principal investigator at Cleveland Clinic for the Novo Nordisk sponsored SOUL trial.

About Cleveland Clinic
Cleveland Clinic - now in its centennial year - is a nonprofit multispecialty academic medical center that integrates clinical and hospital care with research and education. Located in Cleveland, Ohio, it was founded in 1921 by four renowned physicians with a vision of providing outstanding patient care based upon the principles of cooperation, compassion and innovation. Cleveland Clinic has pioneered many medical breakthroughs, including coronary artery bypass surgery and the first face transplant in the United States. U.S. News & World Report consistently names Cleveland Clinic as one of the nation's best hospitals in its annual "America's Best Hospitals" survey. Among Cleveland Clinic's 70,800 employees worldwide are more than 4,660 salaried physicians and researchers, and 18,500 registered nurses and advanced practice providers, representing 140 medical specialties and subspecialties. Cleveland Clinic is a 6,500-bed health system that includes a 173-acre main campus near downtown Cleveland, 19 hospitals, more than 220 outpatient facilities, and locations in southeast Florida; Las Vegas, Nevada; Toronto, Canada; Abu Dhabi, UAE; and London, England. In 2020, there were 8.7 million total outpatient visits, 273,000 hospital admissions and observations, and 217,000 surgical cases throughout Cleveland Clinic's health system. Patients came for treatment from every state and 185 countries. Visit us at clevelandclinic.org. Follow us at twitter.com/ClevelandClinic. News and resources available at newsroom.clevelandclinic.org.

Editor's Note: Cleveland Clinic News Service is available to provide broadcast-quality interviews and B-roll upon request.

 

Is bacterial acidity a key to tackle antimicrobial resistance?

UNIVERSITY OF EXETER

Research News

 

Decreasing bacterial acidity could help reduce antimicrobial resistance by eliminating bacteria that can survive being treated with antibiotics.

Scientists at the University of Exeter have developed a novel method, which allows users to measure the pH of individual bacteria before, during and after treatment with antibiotics.

The research, published in the journal mBio, lays the foundation for understanding the special properties of bacteria that survive being treated with antibiotics, so that new ways of targeting them can be developed.

The Exeter University research team found that even before antibiotic treatment, common infection causing Escherichia coli cells that can survive treatment have a more acidic intracellular pH compared to clonal cells that are eliminated by the antibiotic treatment. These surviving cells are called persisters because they are responsible for persistent bacterial infections and contribute to antibiotic resistance.

Antibiotic resistance is one of the most pressing public health challenges and threatens the ability to effectively fight infectious diseases, with around 10 million people predicted to die annually of infections by 2050.

The University of Exeter research team has discovered the mechanisms that permit persisters to have an acidic pH. By measuring the genetic properties of these cells, they found that two cellular processes, namely tryptophan metabolism and carboxylic acid catabolism, are responsible for the low pH measured in persister bacteria.

Dr Stefano Pagliara, a biophysicist in the Living Systems Institute, leading this research at the University of Exeter, said: "Our findings indicate that the manipulation of the intracellular pH represents a bacterial strategy for surviving antibiotic treatment. Our new data suggest a strategy for developing antibiotics that interfere with key cellular components of persisters and decrease their acidity."

The team is now working on expanding this research to find out whether cell acidity is key for antibiotic resistance in other critical bacterial pathogens such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Burkholderia pseudomallei and to identify drug molecules that can alter the pH of persister cells before antibiotic treatment.

###

"Persister Escherichia coli Cells Have a Lower Intracellular pH than Susceptible Cells but Maintain Their pH in Response to Antibiotic Treatment" is published on Tuesday, July 20th 2021. The DOI is https://doi.org/10.1128/mBio.00909-21

The Living Systems Institute is the University of Exeter flagship for fundamental research. The Institute combines biological and physical sciences to make discoveries that will transform future healthcare Living Systems Institute | Living Systems Institute | University of Exeter.

 

Small-scale worker resistance impacts food delivery economy in China

CORNELL UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

ITHACA, N.Y. - Small-scale. Short-lived. All digital. Out of public view. That's how a new form of collective worker resistance is unfolding in China's app-based food delivery economy, new Cornell University research finds.

Though highly fragmented and not always successful, "mini-strikes" by small groups of food couriers - conducted via WeChat - reflect a new form of leverage, suggest Chuxuan "Victoria" Liu and Eli Friedman, associate professor in the ILR School.

Food couriers are able to maintain complete physical invisibility, and each individual worker can 'strike' from anywhere, they write.

The scholars interviewed couriers, in-person and online, who delivered food for Ele.me, an Alibaba-owned company that controlled nearly half the nation's food-delivery market.

Platform-based delivery work has grown exponentially over the past decade. In 2020, Ele.me and Meituan, a slightly larger competitor, together had more than 8 million registered food-delivery couriers, the result of rapid growth achieved in part through exploitative working conditions, according to the researchers.

Friedman said scholars have wondered whether high levels of worker dissatisfaction seen in manufacturing would appear in this new sector. Their research determined it has - if you know where to look.

In addition to crowd sourced freelance couriers who work individually, Ele.me relies on a network of subcontractors that operate "stations" within city districts to provide restaurants with more reliable delivery services.

Like the workers themselves, the app rewards or punishes stations financially based on metrics including numbers of deliveries, worker attendance, on-time performance and customer ratings. That pressure on stations creates bargaining power for couriers who may choose to stay offline during peak lunch and dinner times.

"Simply by refusing to login to the system," they wrote, "a handful of couriers can cause considerable damage to the station's statistics."

Significantly, the government is either unable to monitor such small-scale labor resistance or tolerates it, since it causes minimal social disruption and appears apolitical.

"We've seen in the last few years that any kind of collective, coordinated action in China - for all kinds of activists - is really dangerous," Friedman said. "This refines our understanding of the way public protest can work in light of that new, highly repressive environment, and the role digital media can play in fomenting that kind of action, even on a small scale."

Strikes by food couriers are distinctive for their very small numbers, short duration and concealed nature, the authors wrote, revealing "one of the ways that labor unrest has evolved alongside shifting political, economic and technological conditions."

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The study "Resistance Under the Radar: Organization of Work and Collective Action in China's Food Delivery Industry," was published in the July issue of The China Journal.

For additional information, see this Cornell Chronicle story.

Philosophical Football Match MONTY PYTHON

The Philosophers' Football Match is a Monty Python sketch originally featured in the second Monty Python's Fliegender Zirkus episode and later included in Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl (1982). The sketch depicted a football match in the Olympiastadion at the 1972 Munich Olympics, between philosophers representing Greece and Germany, including Plato, Socrates and Aristotle on the Greek team, and Heidegger, Marx and Nietzsche on the German team. Instead of playing, the philosophers competed by thinking while walking on the pitch in circles. This left Franz Beckenbauer, the sole genuine footballer on the pitch (and a "surprise inclusion" in the German team, according to the commentary), more than a little confused. Confucius was the referee and Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine (sporting haloes) were the linesmen. The German manager was Martin Luther.

 From Wikipedia

MAGICKAL THINKING

Can consciousness be explained by quantum physics? 

My research takes us a step closer to finding out

July 19, 2021 

Some scientists believe consciousness is generated by quantum processes, but the theory is yet to be empirically tested. vitstudio/Shutterstock


One of the most important open questions in science is how our consciousness is established. In the 1990s, long before winning the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for his prediction of black holes, physicist Roger Penrose teamed up with anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff to propose an ambitious answer.

They claimed that the brain’s neuronal system forms an intricate network and that the consciousness this produces should obey the rules of quantum mechanics – the theory that determines how tiny particles like electrons move around. This, they argue, could explain the mysterious complexity of human consciousness.

Penrose and Hameroff were met with incredulity. Quantum mechanical laws are usually only found to apply at very low temperatures. Quantum computers, for example, currently operate at around -272°C. At higher temperatures, classical mechanics takes over. Since our body works at room temperature, you would expect it to be governed by the classical laws of physics. For this reason, the quantum consciousness theory has been dismissed outright by many scientists – though others are persuaded supporters.

Instead of entering into this debate, I decided to join forces with colleagues from China, led by Professor Xian-Min Jin at Shanghai Jiaotong University, to test some of the principles underpinning the quantum theory of consciousness.

In our new paper, we’ve investigated how quantum particles could move in a complex structure like the brain – but in a lab setting. If our findings can one day be compared with activity measured in the brain, we may come one step closer to validating or dismissing Penrose and Hameroff’s controversial theory.
Brains and fractals

Our brains are composed of cells called neurons, and their combined activity is believed to generate consciousness. Each neuron contains microtubules, which transport substances to different parts of the cell. The Penrose-Hameroff theory of quantum consciousness argues that microtubules are structured in a fractal pattern which would enable quantum processes to occur.

Fractals are structures that are neither two-dimensional nor three-dimensional, but are instead some fractional value in between. In mathematics, fractals emerge as beautiful patterns that repeat themselves infinitely, generating what is seemingly impossible: a structure that has a finite area, but an infinite perimeter.


Read more: Explainer: what are fractals?

This might sound impossible to visualise, but fractals actually occur frequently in nature. If you look closely at the florets of a cauliflower or the branches of a fern, you’ll see that they’re both made up of the same basic shape repeating itself over and over again, but at smaller and smaller scales. That’s a key characteristic of fractals.

The same happens if you look inside your own body: the structure of your lungs, for instance, is fractal, as are the blood vessels in your circulatory system. Fractals also feature in the enchanting repeating artworks of MC Escher and Jackson Pollock, and they’ve been used for decades in technology, such as in the design of antennas. These are all examples of classical fractals – fractals that abide by the laws of classical physics rather than quantum physics.

This extension of Escher’s Circle Limit III shows its fractal, repeating nature. Vladimir-Bulatov/Deviantart, CC BY-NC-SA

It’s easy to see why fractals have been used to explain the complexity of human consciousness. Because they’re infinitely intricate, allowing complexity to emerge from simple repeated patterns, they could be the structures that support the mysterious depths of our minds.

But if this is the case, it could only be happening on the quantum level, with tiny particles moving in fractal patterns within the brain’s neurons. That’s why Penrose and Hameroff’s proposal is called a theory of “quantum consciousness”.

Quantum consciousness

We’re not yet able to measure the behaviour of quantum fractals in the brain – if they exist at all. But advanced technology means we can now measure quantum fractals in the lab. In recent research involving a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM), my colleagues at Utrecht and I carefully arranged electrons in a fractal pattern, creating a quantum fractal.

When we then measured the wave function of the electrons, which describes their quantum state, we found that they too lived at the fractal dimension dictated by the physical pattern we’d made. In this case, the pattern we used on the quantum scale was the Sierpiński triangle, which is a shape that’s somewhere between one-dimensional and two-dimensional.

This was an exciting finding, but STM techniques cannot probe how quantum particles move – which would tell us more about how quantum processes might occur in the brain. So in our latest research, my colleagues at Shanghai Jiaotong University and I went one step further. Using state-of-the-art photonics experiments, we were able to reveal the quantum motion that takes place within fractals in unprecedented detail.

We achieved this by injecting photons (particles of light) into an artificial chip that was painstakingly engineered into a tiny Sierpiński triangle. We injected photons at the tip of the triangle and watched how they spread throughout its fractal structure in a process called quantum transport. We then repeated this experiment on two different fractal structures, both shaped as squares rather than triangles. And in each of these structures we conducted hundreds of experiments.  

We also conducted experiments on a square-shaped fractal called the Sierpiński carpet. Johannes Rössel/wikimedia

Our observations from these experiments reveal that quantum fractals actually behave in a different way to classical ones. Specifically, we found that the spread of light across a fractal is governed by different laws in the quantum case compared to the classical case.

This new knowledge of quantum fractals could provide the foundations for scientists to experimentally test the theory of quantum consciousness. If quantum measurements are one day taken from the human brain, they could be compared against our results to definitely decide whether consciousness is a classical or a quantum phenomenon.

Our work could also have profound implications across scientific fields. By investigating quantum transport in our artificially designed fractal structures, we may have taken the first tiny steps towards the unification of physics, mathematics and biology, which could greatly enrich our understanding of the world around us as well as the world that exists in our heads.

1. Cristiane de Morais Smith

   Professor, Theoretical Physics, Utrecht University

Disclosure statement

Cristiane de Morais Smith receives funding from NWO.

Partners

Utrecht University provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

CYBORGS & TRANSHUMANISM

CABINET OF CURIOSITIES

The Anatomical Machines of Naples’ Alchemist Prince

Rumor had it that these machines were once the Prince’s servants, whom he murdered and transformed into anatomical displays. Scholars showed otherwise.

An anatomical machine of Prince Raimondo di Sangro
via Flickr

By: Amelia Soth

JSTOR DAILY
June 17, 2021


Two skeletons stand in a chapel in Naples. Their bones are knit together with an intricate web of veins and arteries that crawl over their ribs and skulls like gray lace. These were the “anatomical machines” of Prince Raimondo di Sangro, an alchemist, Freemason, inventor, and military historian. For centuries, eerie legends have swirled around these two figures.

The rumor goes that they were once the Prince’s servants, whom he murdered and transformed into anatomical displays. In 2007, however, a pair of scholars, Lucia Dacome and Renata Peters, published research revealing that the veins were in fact artificial, an astonishingly complex network of silk, wax, and wire, rather than the preserved remains of a living body.
He developed a method of mixing fireworks that detonated with the sound of birdsong, and lit up with an array of new colors.

Nothing could be more emblematic of di Sangro’s enduringly bizarre and contradictory legacy. The man seems to have resided somewhere between a true Renaissance polymath and a carnival huckster. Di Sangro’s inventions tended toward the spectacular. He developed a method of mixing fireworks that detonated with the sound of birdsong, and lit up with an array of new colors: the hues of milk, lemon peels, grass, rubies, and turquoise. In the pyrotechnical theaters he designed, fireworks seemed to trace in fiery light the outlines of temples, huts, and fountains.

Di Sangro was nothing if not theatrical. One writer described the scene on the street outside the alchemist’s laboratory:

Wandering flames, infernal lights—the people said—passed through the huge windows that look out, from the ground floor, onto Vico Sansevero… The flames disappeared, darkness returned, and then thuds and prolonged noises were heard there. From time to time, in the silence of the night, there was a sound like the clink of an anvil struck by a heavy hammer, or the cobble of the alley throbbed and trembled, as if with the nearby passage of huge invisible wagons.

At one point, an accidental fire in his laboratory revealed to him the formula for a “perpetual lamp” fueled by gunpowder mixed with pulverized human skull. He knew how to make faux lapis lazuli that was indistinguishable from the real thing, and how to bleach sapphires until they looked like diamonds. The floors of his palace were paved not with marble, but with a paste he invented which hardened into something with the appearance and texture of real stone.

Museo Cappella Sansevero

Then there are the more dubious “discoveries.” Di Sangro claimed to have found a means of extracting blood from manure. He claimed to have reduced river crabs to ash and then resurrected them with infusions of ox blood, and to have caused fennel plants to grow again from their cinders. Bringing Cicero back to life, one writer suggested, might be as simple as giving di Sangro one of the philosopher’s bones.

Some part of the prince’s mystique comes from superstitious rumors of murder and black magic; others come from the flattering myths that he himself spread. But both sources, positive and negative, center around one image: a gifted man on the threshold between life and death, capable of both killing and resurrection. This is perhaps most clear in the legend of di Sangro’s death, which recounts that before di Sangro died, he had himself hacked into pieces and placed in a chest. But the chest was opened too soon, “while the pieces of the body were still welding together.” He awoke for an instant, tried to rise, then shrieked and fell to pieces once again.

Di Sangro’s friend Giovanni Vincenzo Antonio Ganganelli, later to become Pope Clement XIV, wrote that the prince’s alchemical skill was powerful enough to create “a second world from the first.” It was a bit of a flim-flam world, however: wax and wire in the place of veins and arteries, hardened pastes in the place of gemstones, palaces of light that flicker into existence and then go out.

Nonetheless, you have to admire his sense of style. In one of his final public appearances, di Sangro stunned the citizens of Naples with a beautiful carriage that traveled not on the street but over the waves; it churned along on paddle-wheels, led by a pair of floating seahorses fashioned out of cork. The alchemist within was nearing the end of his life, suffering from an illness possibly brought on by inhaling the fumes of his own experiments. But what the Neopolitans saw was the glittering carriage riding proudly over the waves.

 K9

Don't try to replace pets with robots; design robots to be more like service animals

by L.f. Carver, The Conversation

Service robots can support people with caring for their pet companions. Credit: Shutterstock

Robopets are artificially intelligent machines created to look like an animal (usually a cat or dog, but they can be any animal). There are numerous robopets on the market right now, being sold to consumers as "pets" or companions. There is an especially fervent effort being made to set caregivers' minds at ease by buying these robopets for older adults to replace their deceased or surrendered companion animals.

Animal lovers will tell you they would rather have nothing than have a robot for a pet. While a robopet can be programmed to simulate the actions of a real animal, people know it is fake.

There should be a pivot from the companion-based marketing strategy for robopets —which has deep ethical issues associated with replacing emotional bonding between living beings —to address the needs currently being met by service animals.

In my research on the effects of the human-animal bond on human health, participants point out the reciprocal nature of their relationship with pets. The human showers the animal with love, yummy food, cuddles, scratches and pats, and the animal, in turn, responds with unconditional love. The vast majority also say that the non-human animals in their lives are family members, integral to their happiness and well-being.

It is condescending to present an adult with a robot and suggest that it will take the place of a loved one—whether that loved one is human or non-human.

New markets

However, there is a huge and, as of yet, untapped market for robopets and other social robots to perform the role of service robots. Let's call them Serv-U-Bots. These personal service robots are different from those developed to replace humans in some manufacturing and service sectors.

Serv-U-Bots would be much like a robotpet—small, portable and intended for personal use—and would employ many of the technologies already built into social robots. These onboard sensors could include cameras for observation, microphones for audio recording, temperature sensors, communication technologies and even autonomous motion, moving around based on programnming rather than human input.

Serv-U-Bots would be programmed to replace service animals, which are currently raised and trained to support human mobility and independence. However, this is an expensive endeavor.

Many organizations that provide service animals have breeding programs, training facilities and huge budgets that are subsidized by donors or get charged back to governments, insurers or families. The Canadian Guide Dogs for the Blind graduates approximately 23 dogs per year from its training program, at an average operating cost of more than $74,300 per dog.

These dogs are not considered pets by the organizations that breed and train them. They are service dogs, trained to provide assistance. If their current placement ends due to death of the person they were helping or for other reasons, they are generally returned to the organization for another placement.

Robots as service animals

But what about replacing service dogs with Serv-U-Bots: social robots that are programmed to perform service related functions? We have the technological know-how to create Serv-U-Bots that can increase independence through programming that can provide an alert if the toast is burning, the kettle boiling, the doorbell ringing and so on. They could even take on the functions of medical alert dogs which can detect medical issues such as a seizure or low blood sugar, or alert the user to the presence of allergens.

Serv-U-Bots could even support older adults to continue to enjoy the companionship of animals by feeding them, checking that they have water and even cleaning the litter box.

If an automobile can be programmed to drive itself, avoiding obstacles and life forms, why not program a Serv-U-Bot to guide people around the city? They could also be programmed to facilitate actual interactions with living beings. This technology can save and enrich lives and help people to be mobile.

Serv-U-Bots would be able to support the independence and mobility needs of humans without exploiting non-human animals.

How the human-animal bond complements treatment for veterans

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Provided by The Conversation 

Alchemy Arrives in a Burst of Light
Researchers have shown how to effectively transform one material into another using a finely shaped laser pulse.




Though it’s not quite as dramatic as changing a bunny into a unicorn, the right laser pulse can make one material behave like another.


Runbo Chen for Quanta Magazine


Philip Ball

Contributing Writer

September 30, 2020


The idea sounds like magic, pure and simple. You create a light beam that can make substances vanish, give them properties they shouldn’t possess, or turn them into a perfect mimic of another substance entirely. It’s 21st-century alchemy, in principle capable not just of making lead resemble gold, but of turning ordinary materials into superconductors.

The general approach, developed over the course of decades, is to use tailored optical pulses to reshape the electron clouds of atoms and molecules. Earlier this summer, a team of researchers at Tulane University in New Orleans and their collaborators extended the idea. They figured out how to apply the pulse strategy to solids and bulk materials, rewriting the usual laws governing how their properties are dictated by their chemical composition and structure. Using quantum control, said Gerard McCaul at Tulane, “you can almost make anything look like anything.”

Meanwhile, other researchers have already used light pulses to conjure up superconductivity — the ability to conduct electricity without resistance — in materials that would not otherwise behave this way.

But perhaps the real potential of the technique doesn’t lie in enabling marvels of mimicry, but in inducing other kinds of transformation. Light beams might be used to create optical computers powerful enough to solve difficult problems such as factorization. Chemical substances could become temporarily and selectively invisible, which would assist the analysis of complex mixtures. The theoretical possibilities seem limited only by our imagination. In practice, the limitations may stem from how well we can understand and control the interactions of light and matter.
A Plan for a Pulse

After the invention of the laser in the early 1960s, many researchers quickly realized that these devices could be used to manipulate molecules, since the molecules’ electron clouds feel and respond to the laser light’s electromagnetic fields, in which all the waves oscillate in step (that is, coherently). But to truly control something, you need to be able to prod or guide it on the timescale on which its trajectory changes — which is very fast for molecules and even faster for electrons. At first, laser pulses simply couldn’t be made short enough to deliver a sufficiently rapid sequence of nudges.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, the pulse durations were brought down to as little as a few femtoseconds (a femtosecond is equal to 10–15 second), approaching the time frame of atomic motions. This enabled lasers to stimulate and probe those motions selectively. However, to actually control such movements, in the early 1990s Herschel Rabitz, a chemist at Princeton University, and his co-workers pointed out that one would need shaped pulses: complex waveforms that might guide molecular behavior along particular paths. That technology for pulse-shaping was, by good fortune, being developed at the time for optical telecommunications.






Herschel Rabitz, a chemist at Princeton University, pioneered the use of laser pulses to alter a substance’s quantum properties.


C. Todd Reichart, Dept. of Chemistry, Princeton University

But the challenge is immense. To control the path taken by a macroscopic object — a glider, say — you need to know the trajectory that you’re seeking to modify. For a quantum mechanical system, the equivalent is to know how its quantum wave function evolves in time, which is determined by a mathematical function called the Hamiltonian. And there’s the rub — in all but the simplest systems, such as a hydrogen atom, the Hamiltonian becomes too complicated for researchers to calculate the dynamics of the wave function exactly.

In the absence of that knowledge — needed to calculate in advance what control pulse you need — the only alternative seemed to be trial and error: trying out some initial control pulse and then iterating it by running the same experiment again and again. It’s like a glider pilot learning to land by trying out random motions of the control stick and then gradually refining those movements after seeing what works.

That’s a lot more complicated (if less hazardous) for quantum systems than gliders. Shaping the pulse means adding more frequencies. The challenge is to figure out which combination of frequencies is needed. “It’s like a piano, but worse, because it had about 128 keys,” said Rabitz. (Today, pulse-shaping might involve a thousand or so frequency components.)

Now McCaul, working with Denys Bondar at Tulane and his colleagues, has described a theoretical scheme for calculating the required pulse in advance.

In quantum mechanics, a particular property of a substance — electrical conductivity, say, or optical transparency or reflectivity — corresponds to the average or “expectation value” of an observable quantity. If you have the wave function of a substance and you know what kind of light pulse you’re using, you can predict the result — the expectation value — you’re going to get.

Bondar’s team inverts the problem: You start with the outcome you want to achieve (the expectation value) and calculate the light pulse that will produce it. To do that, you also need to know the system’s wave function, or equivalently its Hamiltonian — which in general you don’t. But that’s OK, so long as you can identify a good enough approximation: a kind of “toy” wave function that comes close enough to capturing the important features of the real one.






Gerard McCaul, a theoretical physicist at Tulane University, has shown exactly what kinds of light pulses are needed to change a material’s properties.


Sally Asher

In this way, the researchers figured out how to extend the methods from small collections of molecules, where there are just a handful of electrons to control, to large, bulky solids with a whole sea of electrons. “We look at the system as a cloud of electrons, and we start deforming the cloud,” said Bondar. The control pulse creates a kind of track that the electrons must follow, so the approach is called tracking control.

Christian Arenz, a theoretical chemist in Rabitz’s group at Princeton who is collaborating with Bondar’s team, explained that this approach makes it much easier to find the right control field for manipulating a substance’s properties. Previously, designing the control field was a matter of gradual, iterative improvement, but the tracking approach establishes “a new avenue for controlling many-body systems,” Arenz said. “I believe that this work will greatly inspire future control methods.”
To Reshape a Solid

Much of the early work on quantum coherent control focused (literally) on inducing well-defined changes in individual molecules — for example, selectively pumping energy into a given chemical bond to make it vibrate to breaking point, and perhaps thereby controlling the course of a chemical reaction. But manipulating many electrons coherently all at once in a material is a tougher challenge.

When atoms come together in solids, the outermost electron shells of neighbors overlap and form “bands” that extend throughout the material. The electronic and optical properties depend on the features of these bands. In metals, for example, the electrons with the highest energies occupy a band that is not filled to capacity, so the electrons can move throughout the atomic lattice, allowing the material to conduct electricity. In an insulating material, meanwhile, the highest-energy band occupied by electrons is entirely filled, so there are no “spaces” for these electrons to move into. They remain localized on their atoms, and the material won’t conduct.

More exotic types of electronic behavior can arise from quantum mechanical effects that make the electrons’ movements interdependent (that is, correlated), like the movement of groups of people in a crowd. In conventional superconductors, for example, the highest-energy electrons form correlated pairs (called Cooper pairs) that move in synchrony even though the two electrons might be some distance apart — like a person chasing another through a crowd. These Cooper pairs all behave identically, giving them an unstoppable momentum that enables a superconductor to conduct electricity without any resistance. It’s as if the electrons no longer notice the underlying lattice of atomic nuclei.

But what kinds of materials give rise to such properties? Usually in order to find them you need to go fishing in the sea of permutations of different elements. That’s very slow and labor-intensive — witness the huge amount of time and effort spent on developing new superconducting materials.

Imagine, though, that it’s possible to invoke a desired property in more or less any material by using light pulses to reshape the way the electrons are distributed. In this view, electron band structure is not something fixed by the material itself: The bands instead become a kind of putty that can be molded into whatever form you desire. Find the right control pulse and you might be able to join an array of mobile electrons into Cooper pairs, say, and thereby make a superconductor, perhaps from some humble substance such as iron or copper, under conditions in which it would otherwise be impossible.






Denys Bondar, a theoretical physicist at Tulane, believes that it should be possible to implement a quantum factorization algorithm in an optical computing device.


Sally Asher

This notion of using shaped laser pulses to specify and control the properties of materials has already borne fruit. For example, researchers have used it to switch materials between insulating and metallic behavior, to control magnetic properties, and to trigger superconductivity. The general idea is that the light pulses redistribute electrons among the energy bands in a way that tips the balance between one phase of the system and another — between a metal and an insulator, say. In this way, researchers have produced superconductivity at temperatures tens of degrees above the frigid extremes usually needed.

Yet despite its early promise, researchers caution that the experimental work is just getting underway. “Moving this research into the domain of extended solids, especially in the presence of strong [electron] correlation effects, is very much in its infancy,” said George Booth, a theoretical physicist at King’s College London who is collaborating with Bondar’s team. It remains to be seen, cautioned Arenz, to what extent their calculations for simple models of materials “can be generalized to other phenomena and systems.”

And no matter how successful the strategy is, these altered properties will persist only as long as you apply the control pulse. The remolded electronic structure won’t stay in place of its own accord, just as a piece of elastic won’t stay stretched if you don’t keep pulling. But for some applications — in electronic devices, say — that may not matter: You might be able to “write” the desired properties into the material only at the moment they are needed.
All That Can Be

You might object that the approach creates only superficial mimicry — the way some alchemists claimed to have “made gold” by applying some surface treatment to another metal that induced chemical reactions to gave the metal a golden sheen. That wasn’t gold in any real sense.

Bondar disagrees: The optically induced transformation, he said, “is really fundamental, actually.” To induce one type of alkali metal atom (like sodium) to optically mimic another (like rubidium), you have to use the control beam to manipulate the dipole moment of the atoms — the nonuniform way each atom’s electrical charge is distributed in space, which determines its interactions with the electric fields of light. “The dipole moment affects other things — including some chemical properties,” Bondar said. The transformation goes deeper than mere appearance.

This does not mean that would-be laser alchemists will have the ability to turn any substance into anything else, though. Michael Först, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter in Hamburg, Germany, thinks that it’s only feasible to induce behaviors that potentially exist already in the material under certain conditions. “We can’t mimic a response of a material if it doesn’t exist at all,” he said. “There has to be something in the equilibrium properties — maybe at a different temperature or pressure or in a magnetic field, say — where the material already holds the property you’re looking for.”

So rather than turning lead into gold, researchers are awakening a particular gold-like response from something that is and always remains lead. Light-induced superconductivity, then — which Först has studied experimentally — isn’t a matter of creating superconductivity from scratch, but of enabling it at higher temperatures than would otherwise be possible. “Our coherent control pulse just wakes it up,” he said. Först’s collaborator Michele Buzzi at the Max Planck Institute agrees. “You can access very fancy states using driving, but I wouldn’t go so far as saying you can take a material and make it something totally different.”

If that’s so, how far does the light-induced transformation actually go? Are you really making Cooper pairs in such a superconductor? That’s not yet entirely clear. Buzzi thinks that in their experiments “we are synchronizing Cooper pairs rather than creating them to begin with” — that is, allowing them to act in a concerted way to produce the superconducting state. “But we’re not completely sure about this,” he said.

Christiane Koch of the Free University of Berlin, who works on quantum control methods for many-particle systems, thinks that to truly change the material at a fundamental level, rather than getting it to superficially mimic a specific response, researchers will need to dig very deep into the electron clouds. That will require very intense control beams, so that the strengths of the electromagnetic fields involved rival the internal forces that shape the intrinsic electronic structure. Maybe it can be done, she said — but not easily.
Making Light of Hard Problems

Some potential uses of quantum coherent control don’t hinge on mimicry, but trade instead on the way it couples light and matter in a “designed” fashion. One such use is optical computing. Light beams are in principle great carriers of information for computing, said Bondar, not least because you can cram a lot of information into them by using many wavelengths at once. But the fundamental problem is that it’s hard to get two or more beams to talk to one another. Unlike electrons, Bondar said, “light hates to interact with light.”

Bondar’s tracking control scheme shows how that coupling could be achieved: with a piece of matter, in principle as small as a single atom, that is manipulated by a control beam. A second beam that contains incoming data then interacts with the matter. The interaction transforms the data to enact a computation. “This opens the way to single-atom computing,” said Bondar.

More strikingly, it might be possible to use this optical approach to solve difficult problems such as factorization much more quickly than classical electronic computers can. Bondar and McCaul believe it should be possible to implement a quantum factorization algorithm called Shor’s algorithm, one of the first to be proposed for quantum computers, using what amounts to just classical optics. “It’s too early to put classical computing in the dustbin of history,” Bondar said.

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McCaul also hopes to use tracking control to analyze complex chemical mixtures — a problem often faced, for example, in drug discovery. Say you have a large mixture of different chemicals, he said. If you know each component’s spectrum — how it absorbs light of different frequencies to create a characteristic signature — then you can work out which compounds are in the mixture. “But the spectra can often be similar to each other, and so it becomes very hard if there are many components,” said McCaul. Tracking control could allow researchers to “turn off the optical response of each species one at a time,” he said, making them selectively invisible. McCaul has shown that in principle this could boost the discrimination between different chemicals by orders of magnitude.

Add invisibility, then, to the feats of optical alchemy that may be made possible by tracking control. In theory at least, it shows us that, seen in the right light, nothing may be quite what it seems.

This article was reprinted on Wired.com.