Population density and virus strains will affect how regions can resume normal life

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON

Research News

 

MADISON, Wis. -- As a new, apparently more transmissible version of the virus that causes COVID-19 has appeared in several countries, new research finds that the transmissibility of viral strains and the population density of a region will play big roles in how vaccination campaigns can help towns and cities return to more normal activities.

The findings suggest that directing vaccines toward densely populated counties would help to interrupt transmission of the disease. Current vaccination distribution plans don't take density into account.

Tony Ives at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Claudio Bozzuto of the independent data research company Wildlife Analysis GmbH studied the spread of COVID-19 in the U.S. at the start of the pandemic, before people changed their behavior to avoid the disease. This let them uncover factors that may affect the transmission of COVID-19 when masking and physical distancing start to wane and behavior once again resembles the pre-pandemic normal.

"We wanted to get at two things: the first was to try and understand what the dynamics were very early in the pandemic. If we need a vaccination program in place that lets people act normally, then we need to understand the state under those conditions," says Ives, a professor of integrative biology at UW-Madison. "The second was trying to get at a fairly small spatial scale of counties instead of states."

Parsing out county-by-county data from 39 states through May 23, 2020, Ives and Bozzuto found that the higher a county's population density, the more readily SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, spread from person to person. This county-level spread is ultimately quantified in the basic reproduction number of the virus, a measure of the average number of people an infected person goes on to infect.

The researchers also found compelling evidence that viral strain matters. Ives and Bozzuto saw that the regions hosting a greater proportion of strains containing a mutation called G614 experienced greater viral spread, a finding supported by other research showing that this strain could be transmitted more readily.

While the G614 mutant is unrelated to B.1.1.7, a strain first identified in the United Kingdom that appears to be spreading more easily right now, the new study reflects the importance that viral strain can play in a local area's overall disease spread.

"We found a clear pattern in the spread rate due to different strains," says Bozzuto. "Our approach was novel because we went directly to the community level to ask, 'Can we see any patterns in the data without making assumptions about individual behavior, including strain-related transmissibility and pathogenicity?'"

To track the rate of viral spread, Ives and Bozzuto worked with the number of people who died of COVID-19 last spring. When testing was limited at the beginning of the pandemic, deaths much more accurately tracked COVID-19 transmission. As long as a relatively constant proportion of infected people die from the disease, data on how deaths increase over time will be directly proportional to the overall rate of spread.

Population density predicted a considerable amount of the difference in the rate of viral spread from county to county during the time period the researchers studied. Counties with low or moderate density did not have high rates of infection spread, though lower transmission rates do not necessarily protect a region from eventually seeing high case counts.

Location explained an even greater fraction of the spread in the researchers' model. Regions within a few hundred miles of one another had similar transmission rates. This regional similarity might have been caused in part by similar public health responses in neighboring counties.

But Ives and Bozzuto also found evidence that regional differences in viral strains explained why neighboring counties looked similar. For example, the low proportion of G614 mutants in the Northwest and Southeast was associated with lower transmission rates.

The researchers investigated several other factors -- such as prevalence of obesity and diabetes, socioeconomic status, and political affiliation -- and found that none of them contributed significantly to the rate of spread of COVID-19 at the very start of the epidemic. Although these factors may affect how susceptible individuals and populations are to complications from the disease, they didn't appear to affect the transmission of the virus from person to person.

The new findings were published in the journal Communications Biology on Jan. 5. Ives and Bozzuto say their work can help public health officials decide where vaccines would do the most good.

"Vaccination programs should consider potential spread rate in different areas. The main driver that will be important is density," says Ives. "From an epidemiological perspective, we would argue that metropolitan areas should be targeted because the level of vaccination or acquired immunity has to be higher than in largely rural areas."

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This work was supported by NASA (grant 80NSSC20K0282).

--Eric Hamilton, (608) 263-1986, eshamilton@wisc.edu

CONTACT: Tony Ives, arives@wisc.edu; Claudio Bozzuto, bozzuto@wildlifeanalysis.ch

READ ON THE WEB: https://news.wisc.edu/population-density-and-virus-strains-will-affect-how-regions-can-resume-normal-life/

Discrimination may increase risk of anxiety disorders regardless of genetics, study finds

Findings, the first of their kind, could help drive public health policy on reducing impact of discrimination on mental health

TUFTS UNIVERSITY

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. (Jan. 14, 2021)-- Exposure to discrimination plays a significant role in the risk of developing anxiety and related disorders, even - in a first - after accounting for potential genetic risks, according to a multidisciplinary team of health researchers led by Tufts University and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Researchers determined that even after controlling for genetic risk for anxiety, depression, and neuroticism, greater reports of discrimination experiences remained associated with higher scores of anxiety and related disorders. The findings, recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that discrimination is a risk factor for anxiety and related disorders rather than solely a result of common genetic liability.

The study authors included researchers from Stony Brook University, University of Minnesota, in addition to Harvard's School of Public Health and Tufts.

"The study results demonstrate that discriminatory experiences can potentially cause stress and mental health problems regardless of the genetic constitution of the individual," said Adolfo G. Cuevas, an assistant professor of community health and director of the Psychosocial Determinants of Health Lab at Tufts' School of Arts and Sciences, who is first author of the study. "From regular slights in public spaces to more significant incidents, such as being passed over for a promotion or a loan, these experiences can take a toll on your mental health."

Anxiety disorders, including generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder or phobias, are the most common mental illness, affecting over 40 million people in the United States every year, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. While exposure to discrimination has long been established as a risk factor in the development of these disorders, the relationship between discrimination and anxiety, when factoring in the role genetics play, has remained less clear.

To gain insight on the connection, the research team used data from a national probability sample of approximately 1,500 non-institutionalized, all English-speaking adults aged 25-74 and living in the mainland United States. Approximately 49 percent of the sample were women.

Three self-report scales were used to measure discrimination and other forms of social exclusion, including:
everyday discrimination, e.g. "being treated with less courtesy than other people" and "receiving poorer service than other people at restaurants or stores;"
major discrimination, e.g. "discouraged by a teacher or advisor from seeking higher education" and "being prevented from renting or buying a home in the neighborhood you wanted;" and
chronic job discrimination, e.g. "being unfairly given the jobs that no one else wanted to do" and "whether your supervisor or boss use ethnic, racial, or sexual slurs or jokes."

After accounting for increased genetic liability for anxiety, depression, neuroticism, and other potential genetic and sociodemographic factors, the researchers found a high degree of interdependence between discrimination and anxiety.

The team said the findings demonstrate that alleviating the impact of discrimination has the potential to improve mental health within the overall population. "Anxiety is one of the most significant issues in mental health today, and our study conclusions underscore the importance of reducing discrimination exposure and thereby improving the public's mental health overall," said the senior author of the study, Robert F. Krueger, Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota.

"These findings allow us to engage in conversations with political leaders, health officials, and community members to develop functional approaches to reduce exposure to discrimination and improve the mental health of all," David R. Williams, a study co-author and the Florence Sprague Norman and Laura Smart Norman Professor of Public Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Williams is also a professor in the department of African and African American Studies at Harvard.

The impact of anxiety disorders is significant. Symptoms are a common associated feature of depressive disorders and, generally, account for a substantial burden of morbidity and mortality as well as long-term work disability and absenteeism. For instance, anxiety disorders are associated with several chronic health conditions, including heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes.

The researchers identified key limitations of the study, including the use of a cohort of white-identifying respondents who were predominately of European ancestry. They noted while the effects of discrimination seem to be similar across racial/ethnic groups, racial/ethnic minorities experience more discrimination than their white counterparts, placing them at an increased risk for poor mental health. In addition, questions remain about the extent to which self-reported experiences of discrimination by whites are equivalent to those of more socially stigmatized groups.

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The study uses data from the MIDUS (the study of Midlife in the United States Biomarker) study, which is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network, National Institute on Aging and other funders. The development of the manuscript was partially supported by Cancer Disparities Research Network/Geographic Management Program and other supporters. See the paper for detailed information on all funders.

Cuevas, A.G., Mann, F.D., Williams, D.R., and Krueger, R. F. (2020), Discrimination and anxiety: Using multiple polygenic scores to control for genetic liability," PNAS. DOI: 20172244118

About Tufts University

Tufts University, located on campuses in Boston, Medford/Somerville and Grafton, Massachusetts, and in Talloires, France, is recognized among the premier research universities in the United States. Tufts enjoys a global reputation for academic excellence and for the preparation of students as leaders in a wide range of professions. A growing number of innovative teaching and research initiatives span all Tufts campuses, and collaboration among the faculty and students in the undergraduate, graduate and professional programs across the university's schools is widely encouraged.

 

Kilauea Eruption Update: Volcano Summit Overflight (Jan. 11, 2021)

Climate change doesn't spare the smallest

Changing conditions have taken a toll on insects in the tropics, according to research by University of Pennsylvania biologists Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

Research News

 

In a normal year, biologists Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs spend about six months in Costa Rica, where they conduct research and pursue conservation efforts in Área de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG), a World Heritage Site in the northwest that encompasses, a network of parks and preserves they helped establish in the 1980s and that has grown to more than 400,000 acres, including marine, dry forest, cloud forest, and rain forest environments.

In 2020 that is where the married couple was when the COVID-19 pandemic took hold of the world, and compelled them to extend their stay in the virus-free forest until the fall, when they felt safe enough to travel back to their other home in Philadelphia.

"With modern laptops and internet, we could watch the world go by from the safety of the forest," says Janzen, a biology professor in the School of Arts & Sciences.

The extra time in the forest gave them added time for reflection, some of the fruits of which appear in a piece published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, part of a special issue on global insect decline.

Their contribution draws on data collected since the 1970s on insect abundance and diversity in the tropics, as well as on observations about climate change that go back even further. Although the ACG's protected status has effectively eliminated certain threats to biodiversity loss, such as fire, hunting, deforestation, and pesticide use, the creatures that dwell there are not exempt from what Janzen and Hallwachs call the "heterogenous blanket" of climate change effects.

"What we have seen and lived since the mid-1970s, unambiguously, in our Costa Rican tropical wild world is that the biomass and species richness of insect individuals and species, and their interactions with everything, are decomposing," they write.

To respond to this decline, the scientists have focused their efforts locally. Keeping track of the effects of climate change through consistent monitoring is essential, they say, but what even more critical is engaging the people who own the preserved land: all five million Costa Ricans, in this case. Janzen and Hallwachs are internationally known for their work on this front, having created a model in ACG that empowers and employs local people in conservation work and attempts to facilitate the movement of these processes throughout the national park system and abroad.

In their article, the researchers describe a new approach to expand on these successes: BioAlfa, a nationwide program designed to enlist Costa Ricans themselves in hands-on learning and research about their nation's wild ecosystems. The initiative's name comes from the Spanish for bioliterate, "bioalfabetizado."

"The tradition in tropical countries is that when you want to know something about the biology of your country, expeditions from the North come and do studies of one sort or another and then they take the information home with them," Janzen and Hallwachs say. "What we said is, 'Look, you're capable of doing this all yourselves. You can find all the bugs and the plants and the birds and everything in your own country and, in the process, learn about them.'"

Measuring climate's toll

Janzen and Hallwachs never intended to explicitly study climate change. But its effects have been impossible to ignore. They note that in the 1980s cloud cover was a constant presence over the aptly named cloud forests of ACG, shrouding peaks like Volcán Orosí and Volcán Cacao. Yet the cloud layer shrank by the 1990s and now,many days pass with no cloud cover whatsoever. The result is a drying of forest ecosystems to the detriment of insects and other wildlife that thrive in damp leaf litter and moist conditions, to say nothing of the drying waterways that used to adequately irrigate flatland crops and other development.

The ACG now experiences far more days of temperatures that approach and exceed 90 degrees Fahrenheit than it did in past decades. In addition, a prolonged dry season and greater irregularities in rainfall amount and timing compound the stresses on the biodiversity that lives there. Essentially all tropical organisms use weather cues to guide their lives, and when these change and fracture everyone takes a hit.

Janzen and Hallwachs note that these climatic perturbations have extracted a price on insect biodiversity, a bellwether for impacts on the food web bottom to top. In their report, they compare photos from moth surveys--conducted at night by using a bright light to attract moths to a light-colored sheet, where they can be counted--that indicate a dramatic drop in both moth numbers and species diversity since the 1980s.

Looking at a different types of insects, they say that, despite a constant search effort by ACG's on-the-ground staff of trained and experienced neighbor researchers, the overall number of caterpillars found during regular surveys has fallen in half since 2005, a clear sign of decline.

Supporting this finding, when caterpillars are found, they are now less likely to be parasitized by another insect species. About a fifth of caterpillars were found parasitized in 1985; that has fallen to just 5% in recent years. While this may be a good thing for individual caterpillars, it's a worrying sign overall. Because parasites are hyperspecialized to associate with particular caterpillar species, Janzen says that this lack of parasitized caterpillars suggests that caterpillar numbers are so few that the parasites are unable to locate their desired species and maintain their populations.

"When caterpillar density goes down, the parasites go extinct faster," Janzen says. "So now you've lost that carnivore. And you repeat that a thousand times, 10,000 times."

Being 'kind to the survivors'

Mitigating climate change can be an overwhelming task, and Janzen says that "little guys"--like the economically-small but biodiversity-big country of Costa Rica--are unlikely to make a big-picture impact, except by example. In his eyes, it's essential for small tropical nations to focus energy on creating the conditions that enable the survivors of climate change to maintain a foothold. And that is where BioAlfa comes in.

While international conservation groups contribute money to preserve land in lush, biodiverse locales, such as ACG, the researchers argue that gaining buy-in from all levels of the owners of that preserved land, rather than outsiders who may never step foot in the country, is a necessary ingredient in tropical conservation.

"Charismatic vertebrates, tourist snapshots, and marketable big tree trunks are not even 0.001% of tropical biodiversity," Janzen and Hallwachs write. "The millions to billions of species, and billions of wild interactions still viable, are largely invisible without bioliteracy."

That's why underscoring bioliteracy is the foundation of BioAlfa. The Penn scientists' vision is that, just as elementary school children are taught to read, they should also be taught about the biodiversity around them, and not just in a classroom but by going on the land and learning by doing. And like reading, this knowledge becomes something one takes into whatever social sector becomes home.

This enhanced bioliteracy would then feed back into conservation, they say. Not only might a greater understanding of ecosystems among Costa Ricans translate into greater appreciation but concrete results by using biodiversity information wherever they are. Specifically, Janzen and Hallwachs want to expand the practice of having local researchers carry out their DNA barcoding work, in which species are identified by sequencing stretches of their genetic material.

While the Costa Rican government has committed to the idea of BioAlfa, fully fleshing it out over 10 years will take an estimated $100 million, a hefty sum that Janzen and Hallwachs hope can come from both international governmental and private sources.

"Right now Costa Rica has the political permission for this project, but it also needs the financial permission," says Janzen.

For their part, the couple continues to plug away at building their biodiversity inventory and studies in ACG, while sharing their successes at international meetings (for now virtually), hoping that other tropical nations will follow in their footsteps, protecting land to, in the words of their scientific paper, "be kind to the survivors" of climate change.

As soon as they're vaccinated for the coronavirus, Janzen and Hallwachs plan to be back on the ground in Costa Rica, continuing to pursue that goal.

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Daniel Janzen is professor of biology and Thomas G. and Louise E. DiMaura Term Chair in the School of Arts & Sciences' Department of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Winnie Hallwachs is research biologist in the School of Arts & Sciences' Department of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Scholars link diet, dentition, and linguistics

In a new study that scrutinized the speech patterns of Freddie Mercury, Michael Phelps, and other celebrities, University of Miami researchers offer insights on how diet ultimately reshapes language

UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI

Anthropologist Caleb Everett and former student Sihan Chen used a novel data analysis of thousands of languages, in addition to studying a unique subset of celebrities, to reveal how a soft food diet--contrasted with the diet of hunter-gatherers--is restructuring dentition and changing how people speak.

Their findings, published in Scientific Reports, counter the longstanding belief within the field that maintains that languages are susceptible to the same pressures and so are essentially immune to external factors.

"Our results represent the most compelling evidence to date that languages are very much affected by external factors that differ across populations," said Everett, professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Miami.

"Languages change--we can see this in any language--but the thinking has long been that all languages have the same pressures, that there is no difference across populations that make some people more prone than others to use certain sounds," he noted.

Everett said that in the past decade, he and others have produced new evidence suggesting that there might be other factors that are likely to influence speech patterns. He highlighted a "highly publicized" paper published in Science Magazine two years ago, while noting that in addition to this new research, he has spent several years studying how environmental factors such as ambient aridity--extreme dryness--shift speech patterns by reducing vowel usage, which requires more effort to pronounce.

He credited the linguistic acumen and diligence of Chen, his former student now pursuing a doctorate in cognitive science, with advancing the dentition study.

"Sihan took a linguistics course and fell in love with the study of languages. An exceptionally bright student, he demonstrated an incredible aptitude for phonetics and transcribing precisely what's going on in people's mouths as they speak," said Everett, who holds a secondary appointment in psychology.

Yet changes in language take hundreds of years to emerge, Everett explained. So, to obtain a quicker accounting, the two examined the speech patterns of 10 celebrities--including British singing phenom Freddie Mercury and former Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps--a research subset that offered a spectrum of dentition variance.

Mercury's four additional teeth--a hereditary dental condition--caused a famously unusual overbite. (Mercury was embarrassed by the protrusion but resisted any oral surgery believing the anomaly contributed to his exceptional four-octave vocal range.) And Phelps also presented a unique alignment issue.

Everett recognized that, from a research standpoint, utilizing the data from the 10 celebrities was "a bit tricky."

"Freddie Mercury's bite isn't the way that it is because of his diet; there are obviously genetic factors here," he said. "Yet the data from the celebrities provides us insight in real time and contributes to understanding this story of human language that is changing over time."

Additionally, using the publicly accessible videos created a research trail that allowed others to check the data and transcriptions, Everett noted, adding, "the pattern was a lot clearer than I would have expected."

In meticulously transcribing the online videos of the celebrities, Chen focused on establishing the ratio of labiodental sounds such as "f" and "v"--sounds common today but that rarely existed until soft diets became pervasive. Mercury in particular was known to pronounce these particular sounds with abnormal frequency due to his dental abnormality.

"He was really an extreme because he produced these labiodental sounds all over the place even when they shouldn't be there," Everett said. "On the other end of the spectrum Michael Phelps is kind of doing the reverse."

In studying thousands of languages, the researchers established two linguistic camps--hunter-gatherers, whose diets have changed little and whose mouths get a lot more wear, and non-hunter-gatherers. Everett's extensive previous research on indigenous peoples in the Amazon--whose diets remain akin to those of hunter-gatherers--aided the study.

Previous research on the subject has examined whether languages have this sound, or they don't. Everett and Chen delved deeper, analyzing the ratios of frequency between the two research groups.

"We basically adopted a whole new series of methods to test this and we found extensive support for it," he said, yet emphasized that the findings show correlational, not causal, links between diet, dentition, and speech patterns.

"These pressures are subtle and operate over hundreds and thousands of years, so it's a hard thing to know for sure," he said. "But what we see are these probabilistic tendencies in the worlds 7,000 languages.

"These new findings provide a better understanding of why languages--which are a key distinguishing characteristic for anthropologists and a key aspect of being human--take the shape they do, how they diverge, and what factors impact their evolvement," Everett said.

 

Lead poisoning of children

Stanford researchers and others reveal pervasive health threats of unregulated battery recycling

STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

IMAGE: WORKERS DIG UP CONTAMINATED SOIL AND WASTE AT THE SITE OF A FORMER LEAD BATTERY RECYCLING OPERATION IN KATHGORA, BANGLADESH. view more 

CREDIT: PURE EARTH

Decades after the industrialized world largely eliminated lead poisoning in children, the potent neurotoxin still lurks in one in three children globally. A new study in Bangladesh by researchers at Stanford University and other institutions finds that a relatively affordable remediation process can almost entirely remove lead left behind by unregulated battery recycling - an industry responsible for much of the lead soil contamination in poor and middle-income countries - and raises troubling questions about how to effectively eliminate the poison from children's bodies.

"Once the lead is in the environment, it stays there pretty much indefinitely without remediation," said study lead author Jenna Forsyth, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. "Ultimately, we want to work toward a world in which battery recycling is done safely, and lead never makes it into the soil or people's bodies in the first place."

Among toxins, lead is a supervillain. There is no safe level of exposure to lead, which damages nearly every system in the body. Early childhood exposure leads to irreversible brain damage and permanently lowered IQ, among other severe symptoms. Worldwide, one in three children suffers from lead poisoning, according to a recent report by Unicef and international NGO Pure Earth that describes the problem as "a much greater threat to the health of children than previously understood." The annual cost of resulting lost productivity is estimated to be nearly $1 trillion dollars globally and $16 billion in Bangladesh alone.

A dangerous industry's legacy

Lead acid batteries, such as those used in many cars and backup power storage systems, account for at least 80% of global lead use. In poor and middle-income countries, informal or "backyard" recycling of leaded batteries often uses highly polluting techniques, such as open-pit smelting, that put approximately 16 million people at risk of lead poisoning. An earlier assessment in Bangladesh found nearly 300 such recycling sites with elevated soil lead concentrations and estimated that nearly 700,000 people across the country are living within the contaminated sites.

To better understand informal battery recycling's impact on children, study partners from the International Centre for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh, observed daily activities of people living adjacent to an abandoned battery recycling operation in rural Bangladesh and surveyed childcare givers. They noted, for instance, that women and children were regular visitors to the abandoned battery recycling site, spending hours a day there. The residents explored the area, scavenged battery scraps to use as household materials or toys, and even collected soil colored white by smelting ash to add visual appeal to their home exteriors, yards and earthen stoves. Children often played in the dirt, while women collected firewood and building materials or hung laundry out for drying in the area.

The researchers also tested children's blood before and after a multi-phased intervention that involved removing and burying contaminated soil, cleaning area households and educating residents about the dangers of soil lead exposure. Study partners from Dhaka University's Department of Geology and Pure Earth conducted the remediation work.

CAPTION

Workers dig up contaminated soil and waste at the site of a former lead battery recycling operation in Kathgora, Bangladesh.

Challenges and solutions

Blood tests conducted prior to the remediation work showed many children had lead in their blood at levels up to 10 times higher than what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers elevated. And while the remediation effort led to a 96% reduction in lead soil concentrations over 14 months, the researchers were surprised to find child blood lead levels decreased only 35% on average during the same period.

The discrepancy may lie in the children's chronic soil lead exposure over a long enough time that lead stored in their bones continued to leach into their blood more than a year after the soil had been cleaned. A likely contributing reason, according to the researchers: other sources of lead exposure, such as turmeric adulterated with lead chromate and lead soldered cans used for food storage.

Additionally, the research team's housecleaning efforts were unable to remove and wash mattresses and upholstered furniture, which could have continued to harbor lead-contaminated dust. Other potential ongoing sources of contamination could have been home foundations or earthen stoves that local women amended with soil from the site.

"We are gratified that focused efforts to clean up the environment can help," said study co-author Stephen Luby, a professor of infectious diseases at Stanford's School of Medicine. "But with the huge burden of lead toxicity on children globally, more radical efforts to remove lead from the economy are needed."

Since 2014, Forsyth, Luby and other Stanford researchers have worked in rural Bangladesh to assess lead exposure. With funding from the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment's Environmental Venture Projects program, they first conducted a population assessment that found more than 30% of pregnant women had elevated blood lead levels.

Although the total cost of supplies and labor to implement the intervention - $40,300 - was relatively cheap by developed world standards, it's likely unfeasible in many regions of the developing world. The researchers suggest several ways to lower costs for such interventions, such as prioritizing house cleaning for children with the highest blood lead levels, but they emphasize the greater imperative to shift incentives away from informal battery recycling altogether.

Forsyth and Luby, together with researchers at Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences, Graduate School of Business, d.school and International Policy Studies Program; are part of an initiative aimed at eliminating lead from the value chain or otherwise find ways to ensure it does not contaminate the environment. The effort, funded by the Stanford King Center on Global Development, focuses on reducing lead exposure from batteries and turmeric in Bangladesh.

CAPTION

Children playing in waste at the site of a former lead battery recycling operation in Kathgora, Bangladesh.

CREDIT

Pure Earth

Luby is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a member of Stanford Bio-X and the Stanford Maternal & Child Health Research Institute. Co-authors of the study also include a researcher from Virginia Commonwealth University.

The research was funded by the United States Agency for International Development, the European Commission and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization.

Geologic history written in garnet sand

SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

IMAGE: SUZANNE BALDWIN, THONIS FAMILY PROFESSOR, EXAMINING A GNEISS, A TYPE OF METAMORPHIC ROCK ON A FIELD EXPEDITION TO GOODENOUGH ISLAND, MILNE BAY PROVINCE, PAPUA NEW GUINEA. view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO CREDIT: PROFESSOR PAUL FITZGERALD

On a beach on a remote island in eastern Papua New Guinea, a country located in the southwestern Pacific to the north of Australia, garnet sand reveals an important geologic discovery. Similar to messages in bottles that have traveled across the oceans, sediments derived from the erosion of rocks carry information from another time and place. In this case the grains of garnet sand reveal a story of traveling from the surface to deep into the Earth (~75 miles), and then returning to the surface before ending up on a beach as sand grains. Over the course of this geologic journey, the rock type changed as some minerals were changed, and other materials were included (trapped) within the newly formed garnets. The story is preserved in garnet compositions, as well as in their trapped inclusions: solids (e.g., very rare minerals such as coesite - a high pressure form of quartz), liquids (e.g., water) and gases (e.g., CO2).

Suzanne Baldwin, Thonis Family Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences, has led many field expeditions to Papua New Guinea. Her team's latest results on this tectonically active region have just been published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

By reading the rock record researchers revealed the recycling pathway from the surface to deep within the upper mantle and then back to the surface as a result of tectonic and sedimentary processes. The compositions of that sand also hold various key components that reveal how quickly this recycling happened. In this case, transit through the rock cycle happened in less than ~10 million years. This may seem like a long time, but for these geologic processes, it is actually remarkably short.

The garnet sands are just the latest piece of the puzzle to understand the geologic evolution of this region. It is the only location on Earth where active exhumation of high- and ultrahigh- pressure metamorphic rocks is occurring during the same rock cycle that produced these metamorphic rocks. The international group of researchers, including Joseph Gonzalez '19 Ph.D. from Syracuse University (now a European Research Council postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pavia, Italy), Ph.D. student Jan Schönig and Professor Hilmar von Eynatten from the University Göttingen in Germany, and Professor Hugh Davies (formerly from the University of Papua New Guinea, now at The Australian National University), revealed how the trapped inclusions in garnet sand can be used to determine rock recycling processes within active plate boundary zones.

CAPTION

Garnet sand beach on Goodenough Island, Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea. These garnets originate from rocks such as the gneiss (pictured above), and are then concentrated as a placer deposit on the beach.

At active plate boundaries, like the one the team studied in eastern Papua New Guinea, converging tectonic plates slide toward each other with one plate moving underneath the other to form a subduction zone. During this process, rocks are subducted deep into the Earth. Over time, forces on the plate boundaries may change and rocks can be exhumed to the surface through a process known as lithospheric deformation. The trapped inclusions preserve a record of crustal subduction and rapid exhumation linking upper mantle and surface processes on these short geologic timescales. By applying their approach to both modern sediments and sedimentary rocks, researchers can now reveal the tempo of rock recycling processes throughout Earth's history.

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This study was funded by the Syracuse University Thonis endowment, grants from NSF Division of Earth Sciences, NSF Major Research Instrumentation Grant and a German Research Foundation Grant.

SCAPEGOAT 

Braid: Kenney kicks out MLA while sending a wider message to his careless caucus
Don Braid, Calgary Herald 

An MLA named Pat Rehn is now ejected from the UCP fold, a deserving sacrifice to Premier Jason Kenney’s new clampdown on caucus discipline.  

© Provided by Calgary Herald Pat Rehn was one of several government MLAs caught travelling abroad over the Christmas holidays. Rehn had posted a photo on Facebook on Christmas Eve that appeared to show he was in Mexico.

Kenney was surely looking for somebody to symbolically sack following the travel scandal that showed, as Kenney himself admits, a very lax caucus attitude toward the government’s reputation.

Pat Rehn walked into this chin first. It’s quite a story that goes well beyond his holiday trip to Mexico.

Rehn is a guy with “charisma,” according to Slave Lake Mayor Tyler Warman. He’s said to be a friendly fellow with allies in the government caucus.

Kenney was certainly high on him as the election loomed in 2019. A YouTube video of Kenney talking to Rehn shows no detectable charisma, but Rehn talked a good game with his enthusiastic party leader.

After the election, the Slave Lake town council came to believe Rehn put more effort into the campaign than the job of being an MLA.

On Jan. 5, after the travel scandal broke, the entire council put out a statement saying that Rehn just wasn’t doing the work .

He was absent from key meetings, they said. He failed to press local issues with the government. Council was even unsure about where he actually lives.

Local councils sometimes complain about absentee MLAs, but rarely in public and hardly ever with such force.

Rehn responded on Facebook and Twitter, saying he did a fine job although he made “some poor choices around travel, for which I take full responsibility.

“It’s disappointing to see some municipal officials seizing on this to sow political division at this difficult time.”

Warman says politics has nothing to do with it. The council is strongly UCP, he told me. A couple of councillors are on the local riding association.

© Facebook The photo posted by UCP MLA Pat Rehn on Facebook Dec. 24.

On Jan. 4, Kenney stripped Rehn of his committee memberships. He was one of six travellers who were similarly punished with internal demotion.

There were many demands to kick the travelling miscreants out of caucus as well. But Kenney didn’t do that to any of them — until he ejected Rehn on Thursday.

Why wait so long after the Slave Lake council had given him a second reason?

The trigger may have been a Twitter post Wednesday by @Tony__Clark of the Alberta Federation of Labour.

Clark put up Rehn’s publicly disclosed expense claims, which show that from April to July 2020 he booked meals in Edmonton nearly every day — a total of $4,713.45.

Besides showing a very healthy appetite, this suggests the MLA wasn’t spending much time in his riding — exactly as the town council claims.

Suddenly, the irritants escalated beyond Mexico and the town’s disapproval.



In a statement, the premier said: “He (Rehn) has made no meaningful effort to work in his constituency, or properly to represent his hard-working constituents.

“I have repeatedly asked Mr. Rehn to be more present in his constituency. He has ignored calls from me, UCP caucus leadership and his constituents to do so.”

The much larger issue is the cluelessness of many MLAs, including a minister, who infuriated Albertans with their travels while most people were staying home.

On Jan. 7, Kenney said it points to “a breakdown of discipline in this caucus that has to change and that will change.

“I’m ultimately responsible for creating a culture in our caucus that has not been one of sufficient oversight on what people are doing. That simply has to change.”

Pat Rehn got the memo Thursday. Any UCP member who didn’t pay attention during the travel uproar certainly will now.

It remains true, of course, that even though Rehn is fired from Kenney’s caucus he is still an Independent MLA with full $120,000 salary. There is a political afterlife.

Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Herald

dbraid@postmedia.com

Twitter: @DonBraid

Facebook: Don Braid Politics

Premier Jason Kenney removes Lesser Slave Lake MLA from UCP caucus

Premier Jason Kenney has removed embattled MLA Pat Rehn from the UCP caucus saying he has failed to represent his constituents.

The Lesser Slave Lake MLA has faced allegations of absenteeism and a lack of preparedness from multiple municipal councils within his riding. The mayor and council of Slave Lake issued an open letter Jan. 5 calling on him to resign.

The letter said Rehn — who will now sit as an independent MLA and not be permitted to run for future UCP nominations — has hardly been in the area since he was elected in 2019, has missed meetings and isn’t prepared for the meetings he does attend.

On Thursday, the premier issued a statement on Twitter saying Rehn has ignored calls from the UCP caucus, his constituents and from Kenney himself to be more present in his riding.

“The most important job of an MLA is to represent his or her constituents,” wrote Kenney. “It has become clear that Lesser Slave Lake MLA Pat Rehn has failed to do so. He has made no meaningful effort to work in his constituency, or properly to represent his hard-working constituents.”

‘He’s lost the support of the people’

Slave Lake Mayor Tyler Warman said Rehn being removed from caucus is good news for the residents but Warman still believes Rehn should resign as MLA all together.

“That’s something that because of the way the democratic process currently exists, he has to decide on his own. But at this point, he’s lost the support of the people of this region that he represents and now he’s lost the support of the party in the government that he works with,” he said.

“At this point, you have to ask yourself, what are you holding on to? He said repeatedly that he wants to work hard for this region, and do what’s best for this region, and represent this region. If he really, truly cares, he’ll let somebody that the people have the confidence in take that position and make sure that we get the representation that we need.”

© Ian Kucerak Slave Lake Mayor Tyler Warman gives an update on the wildfires raging near the town outside the Slave Lake fire hall on June 1, 2019.

Warman said removing Rehn from caucus shows that the government recognizes Slave Lake has poor representation.

“This isn’t just about some media stuff. This is about the fact that our residents deserve to be looked after and we deserve to have an MLA that does their job and it’s not just us saying that anymore,” he said.

The council for High Prairie sent Rehn a letter the day before Kenney removed him from caucus. Similar to Slave Lake, the letter raised concerns about Rehn’s absence from the riding and lack of preparedness at meetings, said Mayor Brian Panasiuk Thursday. It stopped short of asking for his resignation.

Panasiuk said Rehn has been putting in more effort in the last week since news of community concerns was made public.

“If he’s willing to keep following through like he has been we’re fine with working with him,” Panasiuk said,

Publicly available financial records suggest Rehn spent the majority of his time in Edmonton. Records show he expensed three meals a day in Edmonton almost every day in April, May , June and July 2020.



The NDP Opposition has also called for Rehn to resign and a byelection be held for his seat.

“(Rehn) clearly doesn’t want the job. He no longer has the support of the Albertans who elected him, and there is simply no way that we can expect he will do better as a representative when he’s sitting by himself,” NDP Leader Rachel Notley said Thursday.

Multiple attempts to reach Rehn Thursday, through his constituency office and social media, were unsuccessful.
Holiday travel

Rehn was among six UCP MLAs involved in scandal over the holidays after he was found to have travelled to Mexico , despite there being a provincial guideline to avoid all non-essential travel. Kenney eventually stripped him of his committee roles.

The open letter from Slave Lake asking Rehn to resign was published shortly after.

Rehn issued a statement at the time saying he has worked hard on a number of policy items presented by the UCP including the scrapping of the provincial carbon tax and cutting red tape.

Kenney said government ministers will be meeting with Lesser Slave Lake constituents in the weeks to come to ensure they have direct access to the government.

Warman said he has already heard from “senior members of the provincial government” though he wouldn’t specify who.

Becoming an independent MLA means that Rehn will be moved out of the UCP caucus office space to elsewhere in the Federal Building. His salary is unchanged.

Related

Slave Lake working around its MLA to get things done: mayor

Allard resigns as Alberta municipal affairs minister, Kenney's chief of staff steps down amid controversy over international travel

Why The Capitol Hill Rampage Felt Like Déjà Vu

Sadiya Ansari  CHATELAINE

The streets started to empty out as sunset descended on Washington after a raucous day of protests. As I descended the stairs of a subway station, a sea of red MAGA hats came into view. Panic roiled inside me. I told myself I was overreacting, and fought the impulse to climb back up the stairs. I wondered if I should talk to some of the people standing near me about what their day was like, why they’d shown up at the centre of American power and what they’d hoped to see. As a reporter, my impulse is often to have as many conversations as possible, but I was truly uncomfortable—and deep down, worried about my safety. An eerie feeling coated me as I witnessed the result of U.S. President Donald Trump whipping up his fans, promising “from this day forward, it’s going to be only America first.” On the subway, I watched as a woman a few seats ahead of me on the train leafed through print-outs of Trump photos.

 

This felt more like a cult than a presidency.

That scene isn’t the aftermath of last week’s “Save America March,” in which thousands arrived in Washington to attend a rally where Trump encouraged them to“fight like hell” against the “stolen” election, prompting a march to the Capitol. It’s from four years ago on Trump’s inauguration day, when I’d travelled to Washington, D.C. as a reporter for Chatelaine to cover the mood on that day, and the Women’s March that followed. For days after I returned from that reporting trip, I’d recount that feeling of unease to colleagues and friends; sometimes, some people gave me strained polite looks in response, as if that feeling were an overreaction. It was part of a wider insistence at the time by some that Trump’s call to “make American great again” was just a slogan, not a ceremonial uncaging of white nationalism.

Last week, while watching a roaring crowd run through the Capitol—ransacking offices, brandishing guns, carrying a Confederate flag, smearing feces on the walls—I realized it was likely those who held that strained expressions when I described my fears four years ago who were absolutely gobsmacked at what happened on January 6. That it was the same people shocked that Trump would go so far to undermine an election that he incited a raging mob resulting in five deaths. This denial of how extreme Trumpism has become goes all the way up the chain. In an attempt to calm the nation, President-Elect Joe Biden emphasized in a public address that “the scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect a true America.” He characterized those involved as “a small number of extremists dedicated to lawlessness.”

Let’s be clear: there’s a direct line between those who celebrated Trump’s win four years ago and those who crusaded to the Capitol to keep him in power last week. His disdain for democracy and proclivities for fascism were either celebrated by his supporters or—just as damningly—readily ignored because his version of America suited them.

Nearly 63 million Americans voted for Trump in 2016. He had zero record of serving in public office at the time, but we knew enough about him then to know he was unfit for it. He was accused of sexual assault by multiple women. He said Muslims should be put on a registry. He cast undocumented people as “illegals” and murderers; Mexican immigrants as rapists. He pledged to build a wall between Mexico and the U.S. and have Mexico pay for it. The tough-on-immigration speech he gave in September 2016 in Phoenix earned praise from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

Many people—especially racialized and/or LGBTQ+ activists, writers and thinkers—rang the alarm. My concern then was not only the damage Trump would do, but that there were millions who voted for him knowing what he stood for, millions who either loved his vision for the country, or didn’t care enough about the people that vision cast aside.

Video: Denial, defiance, disruption: U.S. Capitol riot is legacy of Trump’s presidency 

(Global News)

Political observers here in Canada weren’t immune to this line of thinking, or this kind of willful ignorance about what such hateful rhetoric can do. Just eight days after Trump’s inauguration, Alexendre Bissonette, a 28-year-old university student and former RCA cadet, walked up to a Quebec City mosque and shot at the 53 people gathered inside, killing six and injuring 19 more. He was motivated by the same ideology partly buoying Trump’s popularity, and obsessively checked Trump’s Twitter feed in the month leading up to the attack. The connection between ideology and action wasn’t acknowledged in the case of Bissonnette—he was cast as lone wolf rather than a disciple of the type of white nationalism Trump peddles. My fears were clearly not abstract, and yet, I felt I had to keep writing the same column explaining them, over and over again.

So what did we see over those four years? An aggressive agenda aimed to “take America back.” Rolling back LGBTQ+ rights, including in schools and in the military. An immediate “Muslim ban,” deportation raids targeting Latine communities, the separation of at least 2,500 children from their families at the southern border, a disgusting show of force against peaceful Black Lives Matter protests against police violence, stacking the Supreme Court with another conservative judge a week before the election. And let’s not forget the revolving door of terrifying people ranging from unapologetic racists to straight-up white supremacists that helped enact these policies: Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, and Stephen Miller, to name a few.

In 2016, sympathetic explanations for Trump supporters flooded in: vague statements about “middle America,” the unemployed and those who felt left behind. And yet, over 74 million voted for him again in 2020 knowing exactly the damage he did. He kept serving up a toxic cocktail of nationalism to his supporters and solidifying support while softening the edges of his pathological lies, attempts to undermine nearly every democratic institution in the country, shady business dealings, and his staggeringly inept response to a pandemic that has taken the lives of more than 373,000 Americans.

Biden’s narrow win came as a relief for many—a feeling America can get back to “normal.” It reminded me of how I felt four years ago at the Women’s March, the day after attending Trump’s inauguration. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with women (and men!) packed so tightly for the first few hours we could barely move was a sign that Trump didn’t represent the entire country; that people cared enough to fly, drive, bus in from every corner of the country to make that clear. The gathering was a salve for liberals left raw after Trump’s inauguration.

What the Women’s March represented to American liberals is exactly what the Save America March is for Trump supporters—a show of strength. And while many will characterize those who rioted a small minority, these were just the people with the means and motivation (during a pandemic, no less) to board buses and arrive in Washington in response to Trump’s call to “stop the steal.”

Trump isn’t solely responsible for this. Many Republicans shamefully supported this increasingly fascist behaviour because Trump’s march towards consolidating power stood to benefit them. It wasn’t until his supporters came for their house—the physical halls of power they felt so safely ensconced in—that some of these Republicans came to understand the consequences of aiding and abetting the derailing of democracy .

Two weeks before a wannabe dictator will be ousted from power is four years too late to find your principles. In the meanwhile, Trump’s base of support has fortified. His supporters will pose ongoing danger. Seventy-four million are not a misguided minority—they’re a movement.

Attorney on ‘Bones’ and ‘Walking Dead’ Profits Cases Sues Her Former Law Firm

By Gene Maddaus

Courtesy of Fox

An attorney who worked on two high-profile profit participation lawsuits has filed a suit against her former law firm, alleging she was never paid her fair share of the legal fees from those cases.

Mansi Shah worked on the “Bones” lawsuit for Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP. The case resulted in a $179 million arbitration judgment against Fox, though the award was later slashed to $50 million by an L.A. Superior Court judge, and ultimately settled out of court. She also worked on the “Walking Dead” profits case, representing AMC Networks in its long-running fight with show creator Frank Darabont.

Shah co-founded the law firm’s entertainment practice group in 2013 with John Berlinski, after both left NBCUniversal. According to the suit, they built up a lucrative practice representing profit participants against studios.

Shah says she was the only non-white partner in the firm’s Los Angeles office, and one of only a few nationwide. She alleges that she soon found herself cut off from the opportunities afforded to white partners. She resigned from the firm in May 2016 and now works for Warner Bros.

Shah alleges that Kasowitz Benson is now employing Hollywood studio tactics to deny her share of the fees from her work.

“Ironically, now that Ms. Shah is no longer at the Firm, it has chosen to engage in the same delay and denial tactics it routinely accuses Hollywood studios of employing, in an attempt to avoid its clear contractual and fiduciary obligation to pay Ms. Shah her agreed upon share of the significant revenues generated by the matters she originated with Mr. Berlinski,” the suit alleges.

Under her contract, Shah was entitled to 6.25% of all fees above $1 million generated by her work with Berlinski, up to $500,000 per year. She alleges that she is owed the full $500,000 for each of her two years there, including fees from the “Bones” and “Walking Dead” cases. She also represented Genting Malaysia Berhad, which later sued Fox over a theme park near Kuala Lumpur.

The suit states that the firm initially refused to pay Shah any of her cut of the fees, saying she had given up those rights by resigning. The firm later relented and paid her small amounts, eventually totaling $282,020. The firm has offered to pay her another $324,739, but has not done so, according to the claim.

Shah claims that Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP still owes her more than $717,980, plus interest.