New report highlights the benefits of bringing nature into our cities

BRITISH ECOLOGICAL SOCIETY

Research News

 

The report highlights planting urban trees, increasing community green spaces, utilising brownfield sites and building sustainable drainage systems as effective nature-based solutions in cities to improve wellbeing, bring economic benefit, increase biodiversity and fight climate change.

These conclusions, released today (29 April), form part of the Nature-based Solutions report produced by the British Ecological Society which will be published in full on the 12th May. The report will offer, for the first time, a complete assessment of the potential of nature-based solutions to mitigate climate change and benefit biodiversity in the UK.

Our cities and towns may not seem an obvious place to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss. But the high concentration of people mean that nature-based solutions can have significant and direct impacts on people's lives.

Professor Marc Cadotte of University of Toronto-Scarborough and lead author of the built environment chapter of the report said: "Cities are a place where most people interact with nature so improving this environment with nature-based solutions makes a lot of sense. Any space, no matter how small, has value and can have a major contribution to environmental wellbeing.

"The multiple benefits that nature-based solutions bring to cities are inseparable from each other. For example, a project to improve biodiversity in a park will also directly benefit local people, providing access to nature and the wellbeing benefits associated with that."

A key message from the authors' assessment of all the evidence is that there is no single nature-based solution that should be applied to cities. Multiple approaches are needed across different contexts and these need to be diverse, multifaceted and inclusive.

Professor Cadotte added "The implementation of nature-based solutions in cities is inherently complex and at odds with siloed governance structures. Unified top-level vision is needed to coordinate nature-based solutions across disparate agencies in urban areas, such as parks, construction and sewerage."

Examples of nature-based solutions

The report reviews a wide range of evidence to highlight several ways nature-based solutions can be used to tackle the sustainability and resilience challenges our cities face, such as air pollution, rising temperatures, flood risk and a disconnect with the natural world.

Storing carbon

The report finds that urban areas have substantial potential for carbon capture. One case featured in the report found that despite the city Leicester covering 0.03% of Britain's land area, it accounts for approximately 0.2% of Britain's aboveground carbon store, with over 97% of this is attributable to trees.

Urban soils can also act as an important carbon sink if managed correctly. The retention of fine material derived from demolition on urban brownfield land can result in carbon sequestration. Providing a source of calcium, in the form of crushed concrete or other sources to just 1% of the UK's urban and suburban soils could remove up to 1 million tonnes carbon dioxide annually.

Providing shade

Planting urban trees can also help cool cities and mitigate air pollution. UK cities already experience average day and night temperatures 1 to 3°C warmer than surrounding natural and agricultural areas. Urban temperatures and the frequency of extreme heatwaves in the UK are predicted to increase.

Nature-based solutions such as planting street trees and green roofs can reduce urban temperatures through shading and the movement of water to the air (termed evapotranspiration). In Greater London, current greenspace reduces temperatures by over 0.5°C on clear, still and warm nights.

Removing particulates

40,000 premature deaths each year are attributable to exposure to outdoor air pollution in the UK, and cities are focal points for the production of these pollutants. The report details how urban trees and other vegetation can both sequester carbon dioxide and intercept airborne particulate matter (PM) and other aerial emissions. Modelling in Glasgow has shown that current tree cover in the city removes 3% of the primary particulate matter.

Reducing flood risk while benefiting biodiversity

Storms and the severe flooding they cause are predicted to become more frequent. Sustainable drainage systems which include wetlands, swales and raingardens can be combined with green roofs, urban forests and meadows to reduce flood surges and mover water safely.

By incorporating these features into our built environments, we also encourage greater biodiversity and there is the potential to support rare species. For example, in London, the building of green roofs has provided habitats for black redstarts. Brownfields can also be used to mimic many of the traditional habitats used by rare butterflies.

Access to green space

Nature-based solutions in cities can also help solve a disconnect many urban populations have with nature, as well as improve health and wellbeing. Green spaces are known to reduce stress and increase physical activity while the presence of urban forests has been shown to reduce incidence of cardiovascular and pulmonary disease.

Access to green space is often a socio-economic issue with marginalised communities having less access. Brownfield sites are common in areas of high deprivation and the report highlights that through working with local communities, nature-based solutions can turn these sites into resilient, accessible, and useable assets that provide considerable health, economic, climate and biodiversity benefits.

Economic benefits

Nature-based solutions can also provide considerable economic benefits through improved population health, climate change mitigation and green job creation. Attempts to account for the monetary value of ecosystem benefits have shown that natural systems add millions of pounds of value to cities. For instance, Birmingham valued its ecosystem services at £11.66 million per year, recognising that this was a substantial undervaluation. The City of London calculated the annual economic contribution of its eight million trees to be £132.7 million annually, equalling about £15 per tree.

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Using cosmic-ray neutron bursts to understand gamma-ray bursts from lightning

An 'accidental discovery' confirms what simulations show

DOE/LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY

Research News

 

IMAGE: A LIGHTNING MAPPER AT THE HIGH ALTITUDE WATER CHERENKOV (HAWC) COSMIC RAY OBSERVATORY IN MEXICO UNEXPECTEDLY OBSERVED THAT GAMMA RAYS PRODUCE MORE NEUTRONS THAN PREVIOUSLY KNOWN. view more 

CREDIT: JORDAN GOODMAN, HAWC COLLABORATION (NSF.GOV)

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., April 28, 2021--Analysis of data from a lightning mapper and a small, hand-held radiation detector has unexpectedly shed light on what a gamma-ray burst from lightning might look like - by observing neutrons generated from soil by very large cosmic-ray showers. The work took place at the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Cosmic Ray Observatory in Mexico.

"This was an accidental discovery," said Greg Bowers, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and lead author of the study published in Geophysical Research Letters. "We set up this system to study terrestrial gamma-ray flashes - or gamma-ray bursts from lightning - that are typically so bright you can see them from space. The idea was that HAWC would be sensitive to the gamma-ray bursts, so we installed a lightning mapper to capture the anatomy of the lightning development and pinpoint the lightning processes producing them."

The team, including Xuan-Min Shao and Brenda Dingus also from Los Alamos, used a small, handheld particle detector, expecting that a terrestrial gamma-ray flash would generate a clear gamma-ray signal in the small particle detector.

"Our system ran for almost two years, and we saw a lot of lightning," said Bowers. But during those storms, they did not observe anything that looked like terrestrial gamma-ray flashes. "We did, however, see large count-rate bursts during clear, fair-weather days, which made us scratch our heads."

HAWC data gathered during these times showed that, in every case, the large array that comprises HAWC had been overwhelmed by extremely large cosmic-ray showers--so large that the Los Alamos researchers couldn't estimate their size.

UC Santa Cruz collaborator David Smith found that these fair-weather bursts had previously been observed by scientists in Russia, who called them "neutron bursts," and determined that they were the result of neutron production in the soil around the impact point of cosmic ray shower cores.

Previous work that simulated these events had only considered hadrons - a type of subatomic particle - in the core of the showers. In addition to hadrons and other particles, cosmic-ray shower cores also contain a lot of gamma rays.

For this work, William Blaine, also of Los Alamos, simulated large cosmic ray-showers, and included both hadrons and gamma rays. "We were able to match our observations with the simulations," said Bowers. "We found that the gamma rays produce the same type of neutron burst as the hadrons."

This study suggests that any natural phenomena that produces a beam of gamma-rays pointed towards the ground (such as downward terrestrial gamma-ray flashes), could produce a similar "neutron burst" signature. This is significant for future terrestrial gamma-ray flash observation modeling efforts.

"It tell us that you can't just model the gamma rays hitting your detector, you'll also have to consider the neutron burst that's happening nearby," said Bowers.

The HAWC Observatory comprises an array of water-filled tanks high on the flanks of the Sierra Negra volcano in Puebla, Mexico, where the thin atmosphere offers better conditions for observing gamma rays. When gamma rays strike molecules in the atmosphere they produce showers of energetic particles. When some of those particles strike the water inside the HAWC detector tanks, they produce flashes of light called Cherenkov radiation. By studying these Cherenkov flashes, researchers reconstruct the sources of the showers to learn about the particles that caused them.

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Paper: Bowers, G. S., Shao, X.?M., Blaine, W., Dingus, B., Smith, D. M., Chaffin, J., et al. (2021). Fair weather neutron bursts from photonuclear reactions by extensive air shower core interactions in the ground and implications for Terrestrial gamma?ray flash signatures. Geophysical Research Letters, 48, e2020GL090033. https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL090033

Funding: Los Alamos Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program, U.S. National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy Office of High-Energy Physics

About Los Alamos National Laboratory (http://www.lanl.gov)

Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is managed by Triad, a public service oriented, national security science organization equally owned by its three founding members: Battelle Memorial Institute (Battelle), the Texas A&M University System (TAMUS), and the Regents of the University of California (UC) for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.

Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns.

LA-UR-21-23994

The state of China's climate in 2020: Warmer and wetter again

INSTITUTE OF ATMOSPHERIC PHYSICS, CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

Research News

 

IMAGE: AUTOMATIC WEATHER STATION NEAR THE YANGTZE RIVER IN NANJING, WHICH FLOODED ON 23 JULY 2020 view more 

CREDIT: BING ZHOU

The National Climate Center (NCC) of China has just completed a report that gives an authoritative assessment of China's climate in 2020. It provides a summary of China's climate as well as the major weather and climate events that took place throughout the year. This is the third consecutive year that the NCC has published an annual national climate statement in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters (AOSL).

"Against the background of global warming, extreme weather and climate events occur more frequently and have wide influence on society and economies. Last year, floods, droughts, typhoons, low-temperature freezing and snow disasters, and dust storms attacked China and caused severe losses," says Wei Li, Director of the Climate Services Division of the NCC.

According to the report, in 2020, China's climate was warm and wet on the whole, and disasters caused by rainstorms and flooding were more serious than those by drought. The mean air temperature in China was 0.7? above normal, and the annual rainfall was 694.8 mm, which was 10.3% above normal.

In summer, southern China experienced the most severe flooding with extreme heavy rainstorms since 1998. Drought brought slight impacts and losses in China. High temperatures occurred earlier than normal with extreme values, and lasted longer than normal in summer over the south of China. The number of landfalling typhoons was lower than normal, while three typhoons successively affected Northeast China from late August to early September, which was the first time since 1949. Cold-air processes had a wide influence and brought a substantial decrease in air temperature in local areas.

Compared with the average values of the past 10 years, the affected crop area and the numbers of deaths and missing persons in 2020 were significantly smaller, while direct economic losses were slightly larger.

Nonetheless, Li warns that the hazards of climate disasters are increasing: "The WMO announced in January 2021 that the global average air temperature in 2020 was 1.2°C ± 0.1°C above the pre-industrial level and one of the three warmest on record. China also experienced a serious heatwave in summer and the mean air temperature in China was warmer than normal. Disaster prevention and reduction remains the focus of society."

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New computer model helps brings the sun into the laboratory

DOE/PRINCETON PLASMA PHYSICS LABORATORY

Research News

 

IMAGE: PPPL PHYSICIST ANDREW ALT IN FRONT OF AN IMAGE OF THE SUN view more 

CREDIT: COMPOSITE IMAGE BY ELLE STARKMAN / SOLAR IMAGE BY NASA GODDARD MEDIA STUDIOS

Every day, the sun ejects large amounts of a hot particle soup known as plasma toward Earth where it can disrupt telecommunications satellites and damage electrical grids. Now, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Princeton University's Department of Astrophysical Sciences have made a discovery that could lead to better predictions of this space weather and help safeguard sensitive infrastructure.

The discovery comes from a new computer model that predicts the behavior of the plasma in the region above the surface of the sun known as the solar corona. The model was originally inspired by a similar model that describes the behavior of the plasma that fuels fusion reactions in doughnut-shaped fusion facilities known as tokamaks.

Fusion, the power that drives the sun and stars, combines light elements in the form of plasma -- the hot, charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei -- that generates massive amounts of energy. Scientists are seeking to replicate fusion on Earth for a virtually inexhaustible supply of power to generate electricity.

The Princeton scientists made their findings while studying roped-together magnetic fields that loop into and out of the sun. Under certain conditions, the loops can cause hot particles to erupt from the sun's surface in enormous burps known as coronal mass ejections. Those particles can eventually hit the magnetic field surrounding Earth and cause auroras, as well as interfere with electrical and communications systems.

"We need to understand the causes of these eruptions to predict space weather," said Andrew Alt, a graduate student in the Princeton Program in Plasma Physics at PPPL and lead author of the paper reporting the results in the Astrophysical Journal.

The model relies on a new mathematical method that incorporates a novel insight that Alt and collaborators discovered into what causes the instability. The scientists found that a type of jiggling known as the "torus instability" could cause roped magnetic fields to untether from the sun's surface, triggering a flood of plasma.

The torus instability loosens some of the forces keeping the ropes tied down. Once those forces weaken, another force causes the ropes to expand and lift further off the solar surface. "Our model's ability to accurately predict the behavior of magnetic ropes indicates that our method could ultimately be used to improve space weather prediction," Alt said.

The scientists have also developed a way to more accurately translate laboratory results to conditions on the sun. Past models have relied on assumptions that made calculations easier but did not always simulate plasma precisely. The new technique relies only on raw data. "The assumptions built into previous models remove important physical effects that we want to consider," Alt said. "Without these assumptions, we can make more accurate predictions."

To conduct their research, the scientists created magnetic flux ropes inside PPPL's Magnetic Reconnection Experiment (MRX), a barrel-shaped machine designed to study the coming together and explosive breaking apart of the magnetic field lines in plasma. But flux ropes created in the lab behave differently than ropes on the sun, since, for example, the flux ropes in the lab have to be contained by a metal vessel.

The researchers made alterations to their mathematical tools to account for these differences, ensuring that results from MRX could be translated to the sun. "There are conditions on the sun that we cannot mimic in the laboratory," said PPPL physicist Hantao Ji, a Princeton University professor who advises Alt and contributed to the research. "So, we adjust our equations to account for the absence or presence of certain physical properties. We have to make sure our research compares apples to apples so our results will be accurate."

Discovery of the jiggling plasma behavior could also lead to more efficient generation of fusion-powered electricity. Magnetic reconnection and related plasma behavior occur in tokamaks as well as on the sun, so any insight into these processes could help scientists control them in the future.

Support for this research came from the DOE, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the German Research Foundation. Research partners include Princeton University, Sandia National Laboratories, the University of Potsdam, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

PPPL, on Princeton University's Forrestal Campus in Plainsboro, N.J., is devoted to creating new knowledge about the physics of plasmas -- ultra-hot, charged gases -- and to developing practical solutions for the creation of fusion energy. The Laboratory is managed by the University for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, which is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science

Alcohol and sexist attitudes combine to increase male violence towards women

SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF ADDICTION

Researc News

 

Researchers have long known that problem drinking increases a man's likelihood of being violent towards his wife or girlfriend, but a new study published today by the scientific journal Addiction suggests that this relationship between drinking and violence is also affected by the man's attitude toward women's equality; that is, toxic masculinity also plays a role. In a study of men in low and middle income countries, heavy drinking males were more likely to commit violence against their wives and girlfriends (intimate partner violence, or IPV) if they held sexist rather than egalitarian attitudes about women.

Male violence against women is a global problem. But the interaction of heavy drinking, sexism, and male violence is particularly important to understand in low and middle income countries (LMIC), where male harmful heavy drinking, inequitable attitudes toward women, and IPV rates are all higher than in high-income countries.

This study used data from 9,148 male married or ever-partnered (with women) respondents aged 18-49 years from seven Asian-Pacific LMIC: Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka and Timor Leste. Respondents who reported having 6+ drinks in one session at least monthly were defined as regular heavy episodic drinkers. Gender attitudes were scored using the Gender-Equitable Men (GEM) scale, which measures attitudes toward gender norms related to sexual and reproductive health, sexual relations, violence, domestic work and homophobia.

Overall, 13% of the men interviewed reported committing physical or sexual IPV in the previous 12 months. As expected, both binge drinking and lower gender-equitable attitudes independently increased IPV. The pooled odds ratio of men reporting IPV was 3.42 times greater for regular heavy episodic drinkers than for abstainers, and every point decrease in gender equitability attitude on the GEM scale was associated with 7% increased odds of IPV.

When their effects were combined, regular heavy episodic drinking and lower gender-equitable attitudes were together associated with IPV over and above the relationship of the two factors separately.

Lead author Dr. Anne-Marie Laslett explains: "This interaction suggests that traditional gender norms, which we already know increase the risk of IPV victimisation, may be particularly dangerous when combined with binge drinking. To address the problem of intimate partner violence everywhere, but especially in low and middle income countries, we will need to tackle both entrenched inequitable attitudes toward women and risky alcohol consumption."

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For editors:

Peer reviewed: Yes
Type of study: Secondary analysis of a longitudinal study
Subject of study: People
Funding: Intergovernmental organization

This paper is free to download for one month from the Wiley Online Library: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/add.15485 or by contacting Jean O'Reilly, Editorial Manager, Addiction, jean@addictionjournal.org

Funding: Partners for Prevention: a UNDP, UNFPA, UN Women and UNV regional joint programme for the prevention of violence against women and girls in Asia and the Pacific and the Australian Research Council.

Full citation for article: Laslett A-M, Graham K, Wilson IM, Kuntsche S, Fulu E, Jewkes R, and Taft A (2021) Does drinking modify the relationship between men's gender-inequitable attitudes and their perpetration of intimate partner violence? A meta-analysis of surveys of men from seven countries in the Asia Pacific region. Addiction 116: doi: 10.1111/add.15485

Addiction is a monthly international scientific journal publishing peer-reviewed research reports on alcohol, substances, tobacco, and gambling as well as editorials and other debate pieces. Owned by the Society for the Study of Addiction, it has been in continuous publication since 1884.

SHOULD 14 YEAR OLDS DRINK BOOZE IF SO CAN THEY VOTE TOO

Study shows both parents and peers play a role in greater alcohol use among adolescents who experience early puberty

SOCIETY FOR RESEARCH IN CHILD DEVELOPMENT

Research News

 

Research shows that children who experience puberty earlier than their peers are more likely to begin drinking alcohol at a young age and early alcohol exposure is also known to be related to alcohol dependence later in life. Specifically, adolescents who mature early are two to three times more likely to drink than other youth. In addition, early maturing girls are two to three times more likely to drink until intoxication and three times as likely to have an alcohol use disorder. A new study examined why early developing 14-year-old adolescents are more likely to drink alcohol compared to those whose pubertal development is on-time or late. The findings show these adolescents are more likely to have peers who drink alcohol and are also given greater permission to drink by their parents.

The findings were published in a Child Development article, written by researchers at The Pennsylvania State University.

"Peer drinking and parent permissiveness explained a substantial percentage of the links between early puberty and alcohol use," said Rebecca Bucci, doctoral candidate in the department of sociology and criminology at The Pennsylvania State University. "This is important because early alcohol exposure is known to be related to alcohol dependence later in life."

The study included intergenerational, nationally representative data from over 11,000 adolescents (5,799 girls and 5,757 boys) in the United Kingdom followed since infancy in the ongoing Millennium Cohort Study (MCS). The current study relied on data collected when the children were aged 9 months, 7, 11, and 14 years. At age 14, adolescents self-reported information about the following:

• Alcohol use: Whether they had ever (in their lifetime) had a drink of alcohol. If yes, they were asked: frequency (3+ times in the prior year denoted frequent drinking given the seriousness of alcohol at age 14) and if they binge drank (consumed 5 or more alcoholic drinks at a time).
• Perceived Pubertal Timing: Girls and boys both reported on personal growth spurts, skin changes, and body hair for boys and girls. Gender-specific questions queried breast development and menstruation for girls and voice changes and facial hair for boys.
• Friend Risk Behavior: To assess risk factors from their peers, adolescents were asked about their friends' drinking behavior, other-sex friends, and dating from age 11 to 14.

To help assess other childhood risk factors that could contribute to alcohol use, parents and children self-reported information about the following:

• Parental Behavior between the ages of 11 to 14 years: Permissiveness about alcohol use, parental drinking frequency, lack of parental knowledge (how often the parent knew where the child was going, what they were doing, and who they were with), child-parent distance (how close adolescents were to both their mother and father), and unsupervised time.
• Childhood at 9 months and 7 years: Low birth weight was reported on by parents when the children were age 9 months. In addition, parental education and occupational status, single parent household, biological father absence, parental psychological distress, and childhood externalizing, and internalizing behavior problems were measured at age 7.

The findings showed that at age 14, boys and girls who had experienced early puberty were more likely to have consumed alcohol in their lifetime, to drink frequently and to binge drink. They were also more likely to have peers who drank alcohol and parents who permitted them to drink. Later puberty was protective against drinking at age 14. The data showed that only 11% of parents allowed late developing adolescents to drink but 17% of parents of early puberty boys and 22% of parents of early puberty girls allowed them to drink at age 14.

"Children who experience early puberty are no more mature with respect to social or cognitive development than those who experience puberty later, and the potential harms of alcohol are greater at younger ages," said Jeremy Staff, professor of sociology and criminology at The Pennsylvania State University. "Parents deserve support to continue age-appropriate monitoring throughout adolescence. Looking more like an adult does not mean a teen can drink safely. Being more permissive about alcohol use does not prevent future problems."

Additionally, the authors suggest that schools and communities should invest in evidence-based universal prevention efforts regarding alcohol use and medical providers and should follow American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines to begin universal screening for alcohol exposure at age 11. Providers can support parents in aiming for alcohol-free childhoods.

Researchers note that the context of the analysis is based in the UK which differs from alcohol and pubertal timing studies conducted in the United States (UK alcohol use among teens is high - around 70% of 16-year-olds reported alcohol consumption in 2007). The authors also acknowledge that other unobserved factors may contribute to the association between early pubertal timing and adolescent drinking including hormonal changes and structural and functional changes to the brain. Future research should parse out further nuances regarding parental alcohol permissiveness, such as whether parents supplied alcohol for parties or only allowed the child to drink in their presence. Future studies could also be strengthened by using clinician (rather than self-report) of pubertal timing and peer reports of their own alcohol use (rather than peer use as perceived by the child who is the focus of the study).

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This work is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council UK (ESRC) and the United States National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

Summarized from Child Development, Pubertal Timing and Adolescent Alcohol Use: The Mediating Role of Parental and Peer Influences by Bucci, R., Staff, J., Maggs, J., and Dorn, L. (The Pennsylvania State University). Copyright 2021 The Society for Research in Child Development, Inc. All rights reserved.

Parents more lenient about alcohol with teens who experience puberty early

PENN STATE

Research News

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Parents of teens who went through puberty early may be more lenient when it comes to letting them consume alcohol, according to a new Penn State study. But the researchers said that even if adolescents appear more mature, drinking alcohol is still not safe for them.

Rebecca Bucci, a PhD candidate in criminology at Penn State, said the study -- published today (April 28) in Child Development -- aimed to discover why adolescents who go through puberty early are more likely than their peers to drink alcohol.

"A surprising proportion of parents in our study allowed their early-developing children to drink alcohol at the age of 14 -- in fact, one in seven," Bucci said. "It is important to remember that early puberty does not mean the child is more advanced in cognitive or brain development. They are not older in years or more socially mature. So allowing them freedoms common for young adults is risky."

According to the researchers, previous studies have found that adolescents who go through puberty early compared to their peers are at a greater risk for problem behaviors, including being two to three times as likely to drink alcohol.

While prior studies often didn't delve into why these heightened risks exist, the researchers said there are theories. For example, adolescents who develop earlier than their peers may have weaker relationships with their parents or have less parental supervision.

To this point, Bucci said there are conflicting theories about how to parent adolescents who are more physically mature than their peers.

"Parents want to do what is best for their children, and some may wonder whether a child who starts looking older should begin to have some adult freedoms," said Jennifer Maggs, professor of human development and family studies. "Ultimately, we wanted to understand why adolescents who experience puberty at younger ages drink more than others, including factors involving the parents."

The researchers used data from more than 11,000 adolescents in the Millennium Cohort Study -- a nationally representative sample of children in the United Kingdom. Data was collected at various checkpoints throughout the children's lives, including information on whether they'd ever drank alcohol, how often they drank and whether they had ever drank five or more drinks on one day.

They also gathered information about whether the parents permitted alcohol use, as well as the adolescents' "perceived pubertal timing."

"In our study, the measure of pubertal timing is based on adolescents' reports of their own pubertal changes," said Lorah Dorn, professor of nursing. "Adolescents were asked a series of questions about their physical development and we averaged these scores for each person and compared them to the scores of same-sex adolescents who were very close to them in age."

The researchers then grouped participants into three perceived pubertal timing groups -- early, on-time and late.

After analyzing the data, the researchers found that adolescents who experienced early puberty were more likely to drink at age 14 than their on-time peers. 

Girls who went through puberty early were 29% more likely to have ever drank and 55% more likely to frequently drink. Among boys, the results were 22% and 61% more likely, respectively. Boys who developed early were also 78% more likely to have binge drank compared to boys who went through puberty on time.

Additionally, the researchers found that adolescents who experienced earlier puberty were more likely to be allowed to drink by their parents.

Specifically, while 15 percent of parents overall allowed their adolescents to drink alcohol at age 14, this was largely driven by parents of adolescents who went through puberty early -- 20 percent of those parents allowed their children to drink. Teens who developed early were also more likely to have friends who drank and more likely to be allowed to hang out with peers without adult supervision.

According to the researchers, these factors partially explained why adolescents with early puberty had higher rates of drinking.

Bucci said the results suggest that parents can have a hand in helping their teens avoid early drinking.

"This further instills the idea that parents should consider not allowing their child to drink alcohol, even if they appear more physically mature," said Jeremy Staff, professor of sociology, criminology, and demography. "Even if their child starts to look like a teenager or adult at a young age, parents should maintain the level of support and structure that matches their child's actual age and developmental maturity level."

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The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the Economic and Social Research Council UK helped support this research.

Research delves into link between test anxiety and poor sleep

UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS

Research News

LAWRENCE -- College students across the country struggle with a vicious cycle: Test anxiety triggers poor sleep, which in turn reduces performance on the tests that caused the anxiety in the first place.

New research from the University of Kansas just published in the International Journal of Behavioral Medicine is shedding light on this biopsychosocial process that can lead to poor grades, withdrawal from classes and even students who drop out. Indeed, about 40% of freshman don't return to their universities for a second year in the United States.

"We were interested in finding out what predicted students' performance in statistics classes -- stats classes are usually the most dreaded undergrad class," said lead author Nancy Hamilton, professor of psychology at KU. "It can be a particular problem that can be a sticking point for a lot of students. I'm interested in sleep, and sleep and anxiety are related. So, we wanted to find out what the relationship was between sleep, anxiety and test performance to find the correlation and how it unfolds over time."

Hamilton and graduate student co-authors Ronald Freche and Ian Carroll and undergraduates Yichi Zhang and Gabriella Zeller surveyed the sleep quality, anxiety levels and test scores for 167 students enrolled in a statistics class at KU. Participants completed an electronic battery of measures and filled out Sleep Mood Study Diaries during the mornings in the days before a statistics exam. Instructors confirmed exam scores. The study showed "sleep and anxiety feed one another" and can hurt academic performance predictably.

"We looked at test anxiety to determine whether that did predict who passed, and it was a predictor," Hamilton said. "It was a predictor even after controlling for students' past performance and increased the likelihood of students failing in class. When you look at students who are especially anxious, it was almost a five-point difference in their score over students who had average levels of anxiety. This is not small potatoes. It's the difference between a C-minus abd a D. It's the difference between a B-plus and an A-minus. It's real."

Beyond falling grades, a student's overall health could suffer when test anxiety and poor sleep reinforce each other.

"Studies have shown students tend to cope with anxiety through health behaviors," Hamilton said. "Students may use more caffeine to combat sleep problems associated with anxiety, and caffeine can actually enhance sleep problems, specifically if you're using caffeine in the afternoon or in the evening. Students sometimes self-medicate for anxiety by using alcohol or other sedating drugs. Those are things that we know are related."

Hamilton said universities could do more to communicate to students the prevalence of test anxiety and provide them with resources.

"What would be really helpful for a university to do is to talk about testing anxiety and to talk about the fact that it's very common and that there are things that can be done for students who have test anxiety," she said. "A university can also talk to instructors about doing things that they can do to help minimize the effect of testing anxiety."

According to Hamilton, instructors are hindered by the phenomenon as well: Anxiety and associated sleep problems actually distort instructors' ability to measure student knowledge in a given subject.

"As an instructor, my goal when I'm writing a test is to assess how much a student understands," she said. "So having a psychological or an emotional problem gets in the way of that. It actually impedes my ability to effectively assess learning. It's noise. It's unrelated to what they understand and what they know. So, I think it behooves all of us to see if we can figure out ways to help students minimize the effects of anxiety on their performance."

The KU researcher said testing itself isn't the problem and suggested an increase in regular tests might reduce anxiety through regular exposure. However, she said a few small changes to how tests are administered also could calm student anxiety.

"In classes that use performance-based measures like math or statistics, classes that tend to really induce a lot of anxiety for some students, encouraging those students to take five minutes right before an exam to physically write about what they're anxious about can help -- that's cheap, that's easy," Hamilton said. "Also, eliminating a time limit on a test can help. There's just really nothing to be gained by telling students, 'You have an hour to complete a test and what you don't get done you just don't get done.' That's really not assessing what a student can do -- it's only assessing what a student can do quickly."

Hamilton said going forward she'd like research into the link between test anxiety and poor sleep broadened to include a more diverse group of students and also to include its influence on remote learning.

"The students in this study were mostly middle-class, Caucasian students," she said. "So, I hesitate to say these results would generalize necessarily to universities that have a more heterogeneous student body. I also would hesitate to say how this would generalize into our current Zoom environment. I don't know how that shakes out because the demands of doing exams online are likely to be very different."

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Research gives trees an edge in landfill clean-up

USDA FOREST SERVICE - NORTHERN RESEARCH STATION

Research News

 

IMAGE: A RESEARCH TEAM FROM THE USDA FOREST SERVICE AND THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI HAS DEVELOPED A NEW CONTAMINANT PRIORITIZATION TOOL THAT HAS THE POTENTIAL TO INCREASE THE EFFECTIVENESS OF ENVIRONMENTAL... view more 

CREDIT: PAUL MANLEY, MISSOURI UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY; USED WITH PERMISSION

Rhinelander, Wis., April 28, 2021-- A research team from the USDA Forest Service and the University of Missouri has developed a new contaminant prioritization tool that has the potential to increase the effectiveness of environmental approaches to landfill clean-up.

Phytoremediation - an environmental approach in which trees and other plants are used to control leachate and treat polluted water and soil - hinges on matching the capability of different tree species with the types of contaminants present in soil and water. Identifying the worst contaminants within the dynamic conditions of a landfill has been challenging.

"Thousands of contaminants can be present in landfill leachate, and contamination can vary by location and over time, so it can be difficult to determine what needs to be, or even can be targeted with environmental remediation," said Elizabeth Rogers, a USDA Forest Service Pathways intern and the lead author of the study. "This tool allows site managers to prioritize the most hazardous contaminants or customize the tool to address local concerns."

Rogers and co-authors Ron Zalesny, Jr., a supervisory research plant geneticist with the Northern Research Station, and Chung-Ho Lin, a Research Associate Professor at the University of Missouri's Center for Agroforestry, combined multiple sources of data to develop a pollutant prioritization tool that systematically prioritizes contaminants according to reported toxicity values. The study, "A systematic approach for prioritizing landfill pollutants based on toxicity: Applications and opportunities," is available through the Northern Research Station at: https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/62410

Knowing which contaminants are the most hazardous allows scientists like Zalesny to better match trees and tree placement in landfills. "Phytoremediation research has focused on discovering which trees work best in particular soils and sites," Zalesny said. "The ability to home in on specific contaminants will enhance phytoremediation outcomes."

The pollutant prioritization tool allows for greater transparency on the benefits of phytoremediation. "When you know what you are targeting, you can provide better information to your community on how long remediation will take and how effective it is," Lin said.

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Business school research is broken - here's how to fix it

News from the Journal of Marketing

AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

Research News

 

Researchers from Erasmus School of Economics, IESE Business School, and New York University published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that examines what business schools do wrong when conducting academic research and what changes they can make so that research contributes to improving society.

The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled "Faculty Research Incentives and Business School Health: A New Perspective from and for Marketing" and is authored by Stefan Stremersch, Russell Winer, and Nuno Camacho.

In February 2020, an article in the Financial Times stated that business schools' research model is "ill," with faculty increasingly focusing on "abstract, abstruse and overly academic topics with little resonance beyond the higher education sector."

The researchers demonstrate that business schools use the wrong research metrics and incentives with research faculty. As Stremersch explains, "We show that business schools focus excessively on the quantity of research and insufficiently on other critical aspects such as the quality, rigor, relevance, and creativity of such research." To gauge whether research incentives in business schools are indeed badly designed, they surveyed 234 marketing professors in business schools across 20 countries and completed 22 interviews with 14 (associate) deans and eight external institution stakeholders.

Results show that business schools' research incentives are badly designed for three main reasons. First, business schools use the wrong research metrics to monitor their faculty's research, often harming the quality (rigor and relevance) of the research produced by their research faculty. Second, research with lower-than-desired practical importance may hurt teaching quality, which negatively impacts business school health. Third, while research faculty feel undercompensated for the research they do, (associate) deans feel that the current compensation levels for faculty are not sustainable.

The researchers assert that business schools need to recalibrate their faculty research incentives. To do so, business schools can start with three concrete actions. First, business schools need to develop better research metrics. "Schools need to reduce the weight they place in low-effort metrics (such as the mere number of publications or citations) and increase the weight they place in effortful metrics such as awards, research creativity, literacy, and relevance to non-academic audiences," says Winer.

Second, business schools need to develop a high commitment working environment where research faculty internalize and actively contribute to the health of the business school. Such high commitment environments should improve alignment between schools and their research faculty in terms of compensation.

Third, business schools need to improve the practical importance of their faculty's research. Several (associate) deans at top business schools whom the researchers interviewed report that the business schools they lead have made more progress on rigor than on practical importance and that they are concerned about a further decline in such practical importance in recent years.

In sum, business schools need to revise their faculty research incentives to ensure their faculty produce research that lives up to society's expectations and improves managers and firms' decision making.

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Full article and author contact information available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429211001050

Driving behaviors harbor early signals of dementia

Researchers develop highly accurate algorithms for early detection of mild cognitive impairment and dementia using naturalistic driving data

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY'S MAILMAN SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH

Research News

April 28, 2021 -- Using naturalistic driving data and machine learning techniques, researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Columbia's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed highly accurate algorithms for detecting mild cognitive impairment and dementia in older drivers. Naturalistic driving data refer to data captured through in-vehicle recording devices or other technologies in the real-world setting. These data could be processed to measure driving exposure, space and performance in great detail. The findings are published in the journal Geriatrics.

The researchers developed random forests models, a statistical technique widely used in AI for classifying disease status, that performed exceptionally well. "Based on variables derived from the naturalistic driving data and basic demographic characteristics, such as age, sex, race/ethnicity and education level, we could predict mild cognitive impairment and dementia with 88 percent accuracy, "said Sharon Di, associate professor of civil engineering and engineering mechanics at Columbia Engineering and the study's lead author.

The investigators constructed 29 variables using the naturalistic driving data captured by in-vehicle recording devices from 2977 participants of the Longitudinal Research on Aging Drivers (LongROAD) project, a multisite cohort study sponsored by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. At the time of enrollment, the participants were active drivers aged 65-79 years and had no significant cognitive impairment and degenerative medical conditions. Data used in this study spanned the time period from August 2015 through March 2019.

Among the 2977 participants whose cars were instrumented with the in-vehicle recording devices, 33 were newly diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment and 31 with dementia by April 2019. The researchers trained a series of machine learning models for detecting mild cognitive impairment/dementia and found that the model based on driving variables and demographic characteristics was 88 percent accurate, much better than models based on demographic characteristics only (29 percent) and driving variables only (66 percent). Further analysis revealed that age was most predictive of mild cognitive impairment and dementia, followed by the percentage of trips traveled within 15 miles of home, race/ethnicity, minutes per trip chain (i.e., length of trips starting and ending at home), minutes per trip, and number of hard braking events with deceleration rates ≥ 0.35 g.

"Driving is a complex task involving dynamic cognitive processes and requiring essential cognitive functions and perceptual motor skills. Our study indicates that naturalistic driving behaviors can be used as comprehensive and reliable markers for mild cognitive impairment and dementia," said Guohua Li, MD, DrPH, professor of epidemiology and anesthesiology at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health and Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, and senior author. "If validated, the algorithms developed in this study could provide a novel, unobtrusive screening tool for early detection and management of mild cognitive impairment and dementia in older drivers."

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Co-authors are Carolyn DiGuiseppi, Colorado School of Public Health; David W. Eby and Lisa Molnar, University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute; Linda Hill, University of California San Diego School of Public Health; Thelma J. Mielenz, Columbia Mailman School of Public Health; David Strogatz, Bassett Research Institute; Howard Andrews, Terry Goldberg, Barbara Lang, and Minjae Kim, Columbia Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.

The study was supported by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.

Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health

Founded in 1922, the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health pursues an agenda of research, education, and service to address the critical and complex public health issues affecting New Yorkers, the nation and the world. The Columbia Mailman School is the seventh largest recipient of NIH grants among schools of public health. Its nearly 300 multi-disciplinary faculty members work in more than 100 countries around the world, addressing such issues as preventing infectious and chronic diseases, environmental health, maternal and child health, health policy, climate change and health, and public health preparedness. It is a leader in public health education with more than 1,300 graduate students from 55 nations pursuing a variety of master's and doctoral degree programs. The Columbia Mailman School is also home to numerous world-renowned research centers, including ICAP and the Center for Infection and Immunity. For more information, please visit http://www.mailman.columbia.edu.

Columbia Engineering, based in New York City, is one of the top engineering schools in the U.S. and one of the oldest in the nation. Also known as The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, the School expands knowledge and advances technology through the pioneering research of its more than 220 faculty, while educating undergraduate and graduate students in a collaborative environment to become leaders informed by a firm foundation in engineering. The School's faculty are at the center of the University's cross-disciplinary research, contributing to the Data Science Institute, Earth Institute, Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Precision Medicine Initiative, and the Columbia Nano Initiative. Guided by its strategic vision, "Columbia Engineering for Humanity," the School aims to translate ideas into innovations that foster a sustainable, healthy, secure, connected, and creative humanity.