LGBTQ youths, adults face gaps in care due to gender identity


LGTBQ youths face gaps in healthcare because of gender identity, which researchers and experts this week said needs to be addressed for these people to receive proper treatment.

 Photo by Semevent/Pixabay


Oct. 29 (UPI) -- Medicine must rethink the way it handles patient gender and sexuality to ensure everyone receives the care needed, researchers said Friday.

Compared with "non-lesbian, gay or bisexual" youth, those who identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual were 71% less likely to receive needed medical care, an analysis published Friday by JAMA Network Open found.

This included treatment for sexually transmitted infections, contraception needs and substance use disorders, according to the researchers, who said that most of the lesbian, gay or bisexual participants cited "difficulty communicating" with their physicians as a problem.

To improve understanding of these issues, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a volunteer panel of national experts in prevention and evidence-based medicine, in a JAMA editorial published on Monday called on researchers to consider sex and gender in clinical studies.

RELATED Texas GOP moved beyond bathroom bill to ban transgender student athletes

The task force also committed to "strengthening the way it communicates about sex and gender in recommendation statements, helping [to] ensure ... specificity and inclusivity," it said in a statement.

In addition, more research is needed "to address sex and gender in a more nuanced and comprehensive way" in diagnostic and treatment guidelines, it said.

"Clinicians nationwide are caring for people across the spectrum of gender diversity, and we want to help ensure that they have the best possible information to keep people healthy," task force member Dr. Aaron Caughey said in a press release.

RELATED LGBTQ teens more likely to contemplate suicide at younger age, study says

"Unfortunately, research studies of clinical preventive services often do not fully consider biological sex and gender identity. ... We are calling for all clinical research to adopt a more inclusive approach," said Caughey, chair of obstetrics and gynecology at Oregon Health and Science University.

Discussion of these issues within the field is long overdue, Dr. Gina Marie Sequeira, a pediatrician in the Gender Clinic at Seattle Children's Hospital, told UPI in a phone interview.

"We as providers see the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force as an important group and they have a strong influence in the way we practice and treat patients," said Sequeira, who was not part of the task force or the JAMA Network Open study.

RELATED Education Department to protect students based on sexual orientation, gender identity

"To see them take a stand and acknowledge gaps in current treatment guidelines in terms of sex and gender is really a landmark moment," Sequeira said.

In a study published last year, she and her colleagues found that nearly half of transgender youth avoid disclosing their gender identity to healthcare providers for fear of discrimination and stigmatization.

As problematic as this in the short-term, in terms of these patients getting the care -- and support -- they need, it can create even more serious health issues in the long term, according to Sequeira.

For example, current guidelines on heart disease may make specific, and different, recommendations for men and women, but would likely be unclear on how they would apply to a transgender person "who has been on testosterone therapy for more than 40 years," Sequeira said.

To assess the potential near-term challenges, in the JAMA Network Open study published Friday, researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health tracked 4,300 youths from fifth grade through 10th grade, starting in 2010.

By their 10th grade year, roughly 15% of the study participants identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual.

Of those who identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual by 10th grade, 14% reported that they had not gone to a physician or other healthcare professional "for regular or routine care" in the past 12 months, the data showed.

In addition, 18% said that they had not visited a physician or other provider in the past 12 months, even when they were sick.

In comparison, among youth who did not identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual by 10th grade, 11% said they had not had routine care in the past 12 months and 14% said they hadn't visited a physician or other provider int he past 12 months, according to the researchers.

Just over 15% of the lesbian, gay or bisexual youth said they did not feel comfortable discussing healthcare problems with clinicians they saw, while just under 10% of non-lesbian, gay or bisexual youth indicated that they had similar issues.

Although the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommendations do not consider clinician-patient communication problems specifically, the group said that it plans to "consider whether [any] preventive service is expected to be applied according to biological or physiological sex characteristics, gender identity or potentially both."

When assessing clinical evidence, the group will "consider how applicable it is to transgender, gender nonbinary, gender diverse and intersex people," it said.

As part of its ongoing work, the task force plans to also continue to "engage stakeholders with specific expertise in representing these populations ... to help promote health equity for all people, regardless of their sex or gender," the group said.

"While better data is essential, we are also committed to updating our own processes now so that we can better support the health of people of all genders," task force member Dr. Michael Barry said in a press release.

"This includes using gender-neutral language when appropriate, and clearly stating whether each given recommendation should be applied based on someone's sex at birth, current anatomy or gender identity," said Barry, director of the Informed Medical Decisions Program at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

More fast food outlets in a neighborhood means more Type 2 diabetes, study says

By Denise Mann, HealthDay News

The more fast food restaurants there are in a neighborhood, the more people have Type 2 diabetes, according to a new study. File Photo by Billie Jean Shaw/UPI

Living near a fast-food restaurant may provide a quick fix if you're famished and pressed for time, but it may also boost your odds for Type 2 diabetes, a large study of U.S veterans suggests.

Neighborhoods with more supermarkets, however, may protect you against developing diabetes, especially in suburban and rural areas, the researchers said.

"The food availability choices in your environment really matter across the country and in a variety of different environments," said study co-author Lorna Thorpe. She is a professor of population health at NYU Langone Health in New York City.

For the study, Thorpe and her colleagues followed more than 4 million U.S. military veterans without diabetes who lived in almost all parts of the United States for five-plus years.

The researchers tallied fast-food restaurants and supermarkets relative to other food outlets in four types of neighborhoods: high-density urban low-density urban suburban and rural.

During the study, just over 13% of the veterans were diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, the form of the disease most closely tied to obesity. The more fast-food restaurants the study participants had within walking distance of home, the greater their risk of developing diabetes in all four types of neighborhoods.

By contrast, those in suburban and rural areas who lived near supermarkets were less likely to develop diabetes during the study period, the findings showed. IN OTHER WORDS WHITE NEIGHBOURHOODS

RELATED Study: Ultra-processed foods supply two-thirds of calories in U.S. child, teen diets

Enacting measures that limit the number of fast-food restaurants or increase supermarkets in target areas may help buck these trends, the study authors suggested.

"If we restrict access to unhealthy food and increase access to healthy foods, we may decrease risk for weight gain and the development of diabetes," said lead author Rania Kanchi, a data analyst at NYU Langone Health. "Improving the healthy versus the unhealthy ratio of food that is sold in these settings may also make a difference."

The new study did have its share of limitations. All participants were U.S. veterans, a population that tends to be predominantly male and have more health and financial issues than non-military folks.

RELATED Report: Rise in fast-food advertising largely targets Black, Hispanic youths

The findings were published online Friday in JAMA Network Open.

Experts not involved with the study agreed that a person's environment does influence their food choices, but stressed that this doesn't mean people are doomed or saved based on their ZIP codes alone.

Cooking at home more often and making smarter choices at fast-food restaurants can go a long way toward improving health and preventing diabetes, they pointed out.

"Buying food from the grocery store, preparing it and making more than is needed allows us to eat something more healthful at home before we go out so we are not encountering these places in a hungry state when we make worse choices," said Dr. Minisha Sood, an endocrinologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.

If you're hungry and find yourself at a fast-food restaurant, choose wisely, she added.

"Go for the plant-based options, or try to order something not fried," Sood suggested.

New York City dietitian Joy Bauer offered similar advice.

"If you really want the fries, have them ... but opt for the smallest size," she said. "Feel free to order from the kids' menu as these items are more realistic in size and lighter in calories, carbs, fat, sugar and sodium."

Fast food may seem tempting from a budget standpoint, but it adds up quickly and doesn't go very far, Bauer added.

When you do go food shopping, choose convenient and semi-prepared foods that are easy on your wallet. "Frozen veggies, store-bought rotisserie chicken and packaged pre-cut veggies are a cook's best-kept secret," she said.

Another pro tip? Foods that are in season are always less expensive, Bauer said.

"Canned or dried beans and lentils are inexpensive and add a huge nutrition boost [fiber and protein] to your meals, and eggs are another usually inexpensive item that is packed with protein and super versatile," she noted.

More information

Learn how to prevent diabetes at the American Diabetes Association.

Copyright © 2021 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Dutch university's rare 'penis plant' blooms

Oct. 29 (UPI) -- A rare flower nicknamed the "penis plant" bloomed at a Netherlands university's botanical garden, a rare occurrence in Europe.

The University of Leiden said the penis plant, known scientifically as Amorphophallus decus-silvae, blooms only once every two decades, and the university's botanical garden hasn't had one of the plants bloom since 1997.

The flower is known as a "penis plant" due to the phallic shape of its bloom.

The school said it is rare for the Indonesia-native plants to bloom in Europe due to the vastly different climate and weather conditions.

The plant that bloomed this month is 6 years old, and researchers noticed it was budding in mid-September. The university made arrangements to allow the public to see the blooming flower and experience its famously foul odor, which often is compared to rotting flesh.

The Amorphophallus decus-silvae is a smaller cousin of the Amorphophallus titanum, more commonly known as a "corpse flower."

A corpse flower went on display in May of this year at an abandoned gas station in Alameda, Calif. Gardener Solomon Leyva grew the plant and brought it to the closed gas station so the public could view it.

Amount of information in visible universe quantified

Estimate measures information encoded in particles, opens door to practical experiments

Peer-Reviewed Publication

AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS

WASHINGTON, October 19, 2021 -- Researchers have long suspected a connection between information and the physical universe, with various paradoxes and thought experiments used to explore how or why information could be encoded in physical matter. The digital age propelled this field of study, suggesting that solving these research questions could have tangible applications across multiple branches of physics and computing.

In AIP Advances, from AIP Publishing, a University of Portsmouth researcher attempts to shed light on exactly how much of this information is out there and presents a numerical estimate for the amount of encoded information in all the visible matter in the universe -- approximately 6 times 10 to the power of 80 bits of information. While not the first estimate of its kind, this study's approach relies on information theory.

"The information capacity of the universe has been a topic of debate for over half a century," said author Melvin M. Vopson. "There have been various attempts to estimate the information content of the universe, but in this paper, I describe a unique approach that additionally postulates how much information could be compressed into a single elementary particle."

To produce the estimate, the author used Shannon's information theory to quantify the amount of information encoded in each elementary particle in the observable universe as 1.509 bits of information. Mathematician Claude Shannon, called the Father of the Digital Age because of his work in information theory, defined this method for quantifying information in 1948.

"It is the first time this approach has been taken in measuring the information content of the universe, and it provides a clear numerical prediction," said Vopson. "Even if not entirely accurate, the numerical prediction offers a potential avenue toward experimental testing."

Recent research sheds light on the ways information and physics interact, such as how information exits a black hole. However, the precise physical significance of information remains elusive, but multiple radical theories contend information is physical and can be measured.

In previous studies, Vopson postulated information is a fifth state of matter alongside solid, liquid, gas, and plasma, and that elusive dark matter could be information. Vopson's study also included derivation of a formula that reproduces accurately the well-known Eddington number, the total number of protons in the observable universe.

While the approach in this study ignored antiparticles and neutrinos and made certain assumptions about information transfer and storage, it offers a unique tool for estimating the information content per elementary particle. Practical experiments can now be used to test and refine these predictions, including research to prove or disprove the hypothesis that information is the fifth state of matter in the universe.

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The article "Estimation of the information contained in the visible matter of the universe" is authored by Melvin M. Vopson. The article will appear in AIP Advances on Oct. 19, 2021 (DOI: 10.1063/5.0064475). After that date, it can be accessed at https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/5.0064475.

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

AIP Advances is an open access journal publishing in all areas of physical sciences—applied, theoretical, and experimental. The inclusive scope of AIP Advances makes it an essential outlet for scientists across the physical sciences. See https://aip.scitation.org/journal/adv.

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JOURNAL

AIP Advances

DOI

10.1063/5.0064475 

ARTICLE TITLE

Estimation of the information contained in the visible matter of the universe

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

19-Oct-2021

Brain activation in sleeping toddlers shows memory for words

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - DAVIS

Very young children learn words at a tremendous rate. Now researchers at the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis, have for the first time seen how specific brain regions activate as two-year-olds remember newly learned words — while the children were sleeping. The work is published Oct. 19 in Current Biology. 

“We can now leverage sleep to look at basic mechanisms of learning new words,” said Simona Ghetti, professor at the Center for Mind and Brain and UC Davis Department of Psychology. 

At two to three years old, children enter a unique age in memory development, Ghetti said. But young children are challenging to study, and they especially dislike being in a functional MRI scanner. 

“The scariest things to small children are darkness and loud noises, and that’s what it’s like during an MRI scan,” Ghetti said. 

Ghetti’s team had previously found that if children fell asleep in a scanner while it wasn’t working, they could later start the scan and see brain activation in response to songs the children had heard earlier. 

In the new study, they looked at how toddlers retained memories of words. 

Graduate student Elliott Johnson and Ghetti created a series of made-up, but realistic sounding words as names for a series of objects and puppets. In the first session, two-year-olds were introduced to two objects and two puppets, then tested on their memory of the names after a few minutes. A week later, they returned and were tested on whether they remembered the names of the objects and puppets. Soon after the second test, they slept overnight in an MRI scanner. The researchers played back the words the children had learned, as well as other words, as they slept. 

Activation of the hippocampus in learning

The researchers found activation of the hippocampus and the anterior medial temporal lobe when the sleeping children were played words they had previously learned. This activation correlated with how well they had performed when they initially learned the words a week earlier. 

“This suggests that the hippocampus is particularly important for laying down the initial memory for words,” Ghetti said. “This compares quite well with findings from older children and adults, where the hippocampus is associated with learning and with recalling recent memories” Johnson added. 

Although young children are rapidly forming memories of new words, they are also losing a lot of memories. When we form a memory, it includes the context: where, when, what else was going on. But if we just learned the name of an object, we don’t need to remember the context to use the word again. That extra detail can go. 

It’s not clear how children remember some things, such as names, while losing the rest. Ghetti suspects that overlapping learning experiences interfere with each other and cancel out the unneeded details. Future research will focus on the memory processes that support these changes.

###

Additional authors on the paper are: graduate student Lindsey Mooney, Center for Mind and Brain; Katharine Graf Estes, associate professor at the Center for Mind and Brain and Department of Psychology; and Christine Nordahl, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and MIND Institute. The work was funded by the NIH.

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JOURNAL

Current Biology

DOI

10.1016/j.cub.2021.09.058 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Activation for newly learned words in left medial-temporal lobe during toddlers’ sleep is associated with memory for words

Study: Dogs interpret words, speech

patterns the same way as human infants


A study suggests that dogs interpret speech patterns the same way humans do.

 Photo by jarmoluk/Pixabay

Oct. 29 (UPI) -- Dogs interpret words from speech using computations and brain regions similar to human infants, a study published Friday by Current Biology found.

Based on measurements of electrical activity and changes in blood flow in the brain, dogs appear to be able to track words and syllables spoken by humans the same way humans do, the researchers said.

Electroencephalograms, which measure electrical activity in the brain, and functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, scans, which detect changes in blood flow in the brain, performed on dogs suggests that the animals use similar brain regions to interpret speech.

"We know that in humans both general learning-related and language-related brain regions participate in this process -- and we found the same duality in dogs," study co-author Marianna Boros said in a press release.

RELATED Head shape, breed function play a part in dog-to-human communication

"Both a generalist and a specialist brain region seemed to be involved in statistical learning from speech, but the activation patterns were different in the two," said Boros, a postdoctoral researcher at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary.

In dogs, the "generalist" brain region -- the basal ganglia -- responded more to a random speech stream, where no specific words could be detected using syllables, than to a structured speech stream in which words were easy to spot just by computing syllables.

Meanwhile, in dogs, the specialist brain region -- the auditory cortex -- responded more to the structured speech stream.

   
RELATED  Dogs process speech hierarchically, just like humans

In humans, the auditory cortex plays a key role in statistical learning from speech, Boros said.

"We believe that this activity increase is the trace word learning leaves on the auditory cortex" in dogs, she said.

A study published in August by Scientific Reports suggested that dogs process speech hierarchically, just like humans, meaning they process intonations first, at lower stages, and word meanings at higher stages.

Similarly, human infants can spot new words in a speech stream before they learn what those words mean, according to the researchers.

To learn new words from continuous speech, infants must not only count how often certain syllables occur together, they need to also calculate how likely it is that these syllables occur together.

To tell where a word ends and another one begins, they make complex calculations to keep track of syllable patterns, in essence learning that syllables that usually appear together are probably words, and those that do not probably are not words.

This is how infants solve the seemingly difficult task of word segmentation -- "they calculate complex statistics about the probability of one syllable following the other," Boros said.

The new findings suggest dogs may also recognize such complex regularities in speech, according to the researchers.

For this study, Boros and her colleagues measured their electrical brain activity using electroencephalogram, or EEG, readings, as well as fMRI scans, which revealed the brain regions responsible for the complex computational capacity in dogs.

The tests were performed on awake, cooperating, unrestrained animals previously trained to lay motionless during the time of the measurements, the researchers said.

The researchers observed differences in dogs' brain waves with frequent versus rare words, as well as brain wave differences for syllables that frequently occur together compared with syllables that only occasionally do.

This indicates dogs keep track not only of simple statistics, or the number of times a word occurs, but also of complex statistics, or the probability that a word's syllables occur together, which has never been seen in other non-human mammals, according to the researchers.

However, how these human-analogue brain mechanisms for word learning emerged in dogs remains unknown, the researchers said.

"Until now we did not know if any other mammal can also use such complex computations to extract words from speech," Boros said.

"Dogs are the earliest domesticated animal species and probably the one we speak most often to, [but] we know very little about the neural processes underlying their word learning capacities," she said.

The surprising marine biodiversity in the Barcelona Forum beach

Biodiversity in anthropized marinas

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA

 

IMAGE: THE SEA SLUG 'FELIMARE PICTA'. view more 

CREDIT: MANUEL BALLESTEROS (UB)

A study identified 514 marine species in the bathing areas of the Barcelona Forum, an artificial beach affected by different anthropogenic impacts. This high biodiversity –which includes the presence of exotic species– is a shocking finding in such an altered marine habitat like this city beach in Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain).

The authors of the study are the experts Manuel Ballesteros and Àlex Parera, from the Faculty of Biology of the University of Barcelona (UB), together with Miquel Pontes, from the Marine Life Study Group (VIMAR); Xavier Salvador, from the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM-CSIC), and Guillermo Álvarez, from the Catalan Federation of Underwater Activities (FECDAS). The paper was published in Monografies de la Institució Catalana d’Història Natural –a subsidiary of the Institute for Catalan Studies–, whose editor in chief is Professor Juli Pujade-Villar, from the Faculty of Biology of the UB.

Citizen science to uncover the hidden marine biodiversity

The beach in Forum, located between the mouth of the Besòs River and the harbour of the Forum, is a small area, which is enclosed but connected to the open sea. A large part of the studied area is for nautical sports activities –it features a number of small recreational boats– and for bathing.

From 2017 to 2019, after more than 250 hours of diving, UB-IRBio experts and teams of citizen science volunteer collaborators from FECDAS and VIMAR analysed the marine life of the Fòrum beach. Molluscs, fish, crustaceans, and algae are the most abundant groups identified in the study, according to the subsequent analysis of photographs and specimens examined in the laboratory.

The marine habitat of this artificial environment is quite stable "and that could be one of the factors that explain this great biodiversity", says lecturer Manuel Ballesteros, from the Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences at the University of Barcelona. "The high specific diversity found in the bathing area –514 marine species– is surprising, since it is an area that is quite polluted anthropically, with remains from the construction of the pier itself, effluents from the Fòrum wastewater treatment plant and other waste (towelettes, pieces of metal plate, plastic containers, beverage cans, etc.)".

Apart from the exotic species, the organisms that have benefited most from the urban transformation of the Fòrum line are algae, sponges, bryozoans and colonial tunicates and fish typical of rocky substrates, i.e. benthic species that settle on a hard substrate.

Some species of algae and benthic invertebrates are able to settle on the surface of the vertical walls of the urban beach –and also on the stairs at the bottom of the bathing area and on the concrete base of the piles.

"The stones that are in the shallows create a good habitat for infralapidicolar invertebrate species, both mobile and sedentary. At the muddy bottom, beyond the central pylons, species capable of burying themselves find their ideal habitat. It is also a good spawning ground for cuttlefish and sea hares, and some fish species find shelter there during their juvenile phase", explains Àlex Parera, an expert from the Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences at the University of Barcelona.

CAPTION

The exotic polychaete 'Branchiomma luctuosum'.

CREDIT

Manuel Ballesteros (UB)

Exotic species in an artificial environment

The findings of fifteen exotic marine species in the Forum beach confirms the hypothesis of the tropicalization phenomenon that is taking place in some areas of the Mediterranean according to some research studies. “With the water temperature risings, especially in the interior of harbours and marinas, these coastal habitats are more and more favourable to the settlement of species from warmer waters”, notes the expert Miquel Pontes (VIMAR).

Regarding the sea hare Bursatella leachii, an invertebrate that appears only in the beach in Forum sporadically, everything suggests that it does not have a negative impact on other marine species. Since it eats diatoms, this mollusc does not compete with other native species of sea hares, which are macroherbivorous.

"However, the polychaete Branchiomma luctuosum is a more abundant exotic species than Bursatella leachii and it is present on this beach almost all year round. Therefore, it could compete against other filter-feeding and suspension-feeding species", says Xavier Salvador (ICM-CSIC).

Goodbye to the fan mussel in the Forum city beach

According to the study, the fan mussel (Pinna nobilis) –the largest bivalve mollusc endemic to the Mediterranean– has disappeared from this urban beach. In 2018, at a depth of two metres in the bathing area, four live specimens could be counted, apart from some empty shells of the same species.

“Unfortunately, in previous dives, it was found that all specimens were dead, many probably due to the infection caused by the protozoan Haplosporidium pinnae, which has decimated the populations of fan mussels in almost the whole Mediterranean”, says Guillermo Álvarez (FECDAS).

Waste and marine biodiversity

The deterioration of the quality of water –especially due to inputs from the Besòs river and effluents from the Fòrum wastewater treatment plant– is one of the main factors that endanger the conservation of marine species populations along the urban coastline. The behaviour of some bathers or visitors does not help, since many throw rubbish on the urban beach and threaten marine biodiversity.

"Algae and invertebrate species have been found living on or under metal plates, or empty cans", authors say. "It seems a contradiction, but despite the deplorable appearance of some areas due to the accumulation of marine litter, some species can take advantage of the substrate created by these materials”.

"In the future, it would be important to promote regular cleanings of the urban beach, promote environmental education for visitors –with a special emphasis on school groups and young students–, ban people from throwing objects into the water and place ecological containers as priority actions to preserve the ecological values of the marine environment in the bathing area of the Barcelona Forum", the authors conclude.

 VIDEO THE DIVA PROJECT [VIDEO] | EurekAlert! Science News Releases

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DOI

10.2436/20.1502.04.03 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Biodiversity in anthropized marinas. The case of the Barcelona Forum bathing area (Spain)

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

30-Sep-2021

Disclaimer: AA

 PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY

How the brain navigates cities: We seem to be wired to calculate not the shortest path but the 'pointiest' one

by Massachusetts Institute of Technology

An MIT study suggests our brains are not optimized to calculate the shortest

 possible route when navigating on foot. In this figure, pedestrian paths are

 shown in red while the shortest path is in blue. Credit: MIT

Everyone knows the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. However, when you're walking along city streets, a straight line may not be possible. How do you decide which way to go?

A new MIT study suggests that our brains are actually not optimized to calculate the so-called "shortest path" when navigating on foot. Based on a dataset of more than 14,000 people going about their daily lives, the MIT team found that instead, pedestrians appear to choose paths that seem to point most directly toward their destination, even if those routes end up being longer. They call this the "pointiest path."

This strategy, known as vector-based navigation, has also been seen in studies of animals, from insects to primates. The MIT team suggests vector-based navigation, which requires less brainpower than actually calculating the shortest route, may have evolved to let the brain devote more power to other tasks.

"There appears to be a tradeoff that allows computational power in our brain to be used for other things—30,000 years ago, to avoid a lion, or now, to avoid a perilious SUV," says Carlo Ratti, a professor of urban technologies in MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning and director of the Senseable City Laboratory. "Vector-based navigation does not produce the shortest path, but it's close enough to the shortest path, and it's very simple to compute it."

Ratti is the senior author of the study, which appears today in Nature Computational Science. Christian Bongiorno, an associate professor at Université Paris-Saclay and a member of MIT's Senseable City Laboratory, is the study's lead author. Joshua Tenenbaum, a professor of computational cognitive science at MIT and a member of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), is also an author of the paper. A preprint version of this study was posted to arXiv.org earlier this year.

Vector-based navigation

Twenty years ago, while a graduate student at Cambridge University, Ratti walked the route between his residential college and his departmental office nearly every day. One day, he realized that he was actually taking two different routes—one on to the way to the office and a slightly different one on the way back.

"Surely one route was more efficient than the other, but I had drifted into adapting two, one for each direction," Ratti says. "I was consistently inconsistent, a small but frustrating realization for a student devoting his life to rational thinking."

At the Senseable City Laboratory, one of Ratti's research interests is using large datasets from mobile devices to study how people behave in urban environments. Several years ago, the lab acquired a dataset of anonymized GPS signals from cell phones of pedestrians as they walked through Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, over a period of one year. Ratti thought that these data, which included more than 550,000 paths taken by more than 14,000 people, could help to answer the question of how people choose their routes when navigating a city on foot.

The research team's analysis of the data showed that instead of choosing the shortest routes, pedestrians chose routes that were slightly longer but minimized their angular deviation from the destination. That is, they choose paths that allow them to more directly face their endpoint as they start the route, even if a path that began by heading more to the left or right might actually end up being shorter.

"Instead of calculating minimal distances, we found that the most predictive model was not one that found the shortest path, but instead one that tried to minimize angular displacement—pointing directly toward the destination as much as possible, even if traveling at larger angles would actually be more efficient," says Paolo Santi, a principal research scientist in the Senseable City Lab and at the Italian National Research Council, and a corresponding author of the paper. "We have proposed to call this the pointiest path."

This was true for pedestrians in Boston and Cambridge, which have a convoluted network of streets, and in San Francisco, which has a grid-style street layout. In both cities, the researchers also observed that people tended to choose different routes when making a round trip between two destinations, just as Ratti did back in his graduate school days.

"When we make decisions based on angle to destination, the street network will lead you to an asymmetrical path," Ratti says. "Based on thousands of walkers, it is very clear that I am not the only one: Human beings are not optimal navigators."

Moving around in the world

Studies of animal behavior and brain activity, particularly in the hippocampus, have also suggested that the brain's navigation strategies are based on calculating vectors. This type of navigation is very different from the computer algorithms used by your smartphone or GPS device, which can calculate the shortest route between any two points nearly flawlessly, based on the maps stored in their memory.

Without access to those kinds of maps, the animal brain has had to come up with alternative strategies to navigate between locations, Tenenbaum says.

"You can't have a detailed, distance-based map downloaded into the brain, so how else are you going to do it? The more natural thing might be use information that's more available to us from our experience," he says. "Thinking in terms of points of reference, landmarks, and angles is a very natural way to build algorithms for mapping and navigating space based on what you learn from your own experience moving around in the world."

"As smartphone and portable electronics increasingly couple human and artificial intelligence, it is becoming increasingly important to better understand the computational mechanisms used by our brain and how they relate to those used by machines," Ratti says.Communicating vehicles could ease through intersections more efficiently

More information: Paolo Santi, Vector-based pedestrian navigation in cities, Nature Computational Science (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s43588-021-00130-y. www.nature.com/articles/s43588-021-00130-y

Journal information: Nature Computational Science 

Provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

Researchers suggest electric vehicles need to be made lighter

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

A pair of economists, one with the University of Calgary, the other, the University of California, along with a civil engineer from Carnegie Mellon University, is suggesting in a Comment piece in the journal Nature, that electric vehicles (EVs) need to be lighter if they are to replace gasoline-powered vehicles. In their paper, Blake Shaffer, Maximilian Auffhammer and Constantine Samaras suggest that the added weight of EVs makes them less safe and less efficient and therefore less economical.

In their paper, the authors note that climate change has put EVs on a path to replace cars powered by gasoline. But they also note that for the changeover to be successful EVs need to be made much lighter.

EVs are heavier than gasoline-powered vehicles because of their heavy battery packs. They are also heavier because engineers have to add strength to the vehicles to allow them to carry such heavy batteries. Therefore, the authors conclude, batteries need to be made lighter. They note that up until now, most of the engineering effort involved with batteries has been focused on making them hold more energy so that EVs can travel farther on a charge. But they suggest that focus now needs to include reducing weight. They point out that heavier EVs, in addition to being less efficient because of their weight, pose a danger in collisions with gasoline powered cars due to the weight differential. They note also that heavier vehicles produce more tread wear on tires, which means more roadside pollution.

The authors have several suggestions to help the EV industry reduce its weight problem. The first is to shrink the size of the batteries by using other materials that are more energy dense and removing those that are heavy, such as the liquid electrolytes. They also suggest it should be possible to lighten the frames of EVs that had been made heavier to hold the heavy batteries—again, by using other, lighter materials. They note also that adding technology to reduce crashes could help with acceptance of EVs. And they suggest that efforts could be made by communities to promote less driving. The pandemic, they point out, has shown that more people could be working at home.Why some electric car owners revert back to buying gasoline-powered vehicles

More information: Blake Shaffer et al, Make electric vehicles lighter to maximize climate and safety benefits, Nature (2021). DOI: 10.1038/d41586-021-02760-8

Journal information: Nature 

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Method discovered to boost energy generation from microalgae

by Nanyang Technological University

Credit: Nanyang Technological University

The variety of humble algae that cover the surface of ponds and seas could hold the key to boosting the efficiency of artificial photosynthesis, allowing scientists to produce more energy and lower waste in the process.

A study by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) scientists showed how encasing algae protein in liquid droplets can dramatically enhance the algae's light-harvesting and energy-conversion properties, making it up to three times more efficient. This energy is produced as the algae undergoes photosynthesis, which is the process used by plants, algae and certain bacteria to harness energy from sunlight and turn it into chemical energy.

By mimicking how plants convert sunlight into energy, artificial photosynthesis may be a sustainable way of generating electricity that does not rely on fossil fuels or natural gas, which are non-renewable. As the natural energy conversion rate from sunlight to electricity is low, boosting the overall electricity produced could make artificial photosynthesis commercially viable.

The study, led by Assistant Professor Chen Yu-Cheng from the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, looked at a particular type of protein found in red algae. These proteins, called phycobiliproteins, are responsible for absorbing light within algae cells to kick-start photosynthesis.

Phycobiliproteins harvest light energy from across the spectral range of light wavelengths, including those which chlorophylls absorb poorly, and convert it to electricity.

Asst Prof Chen said: "Due to their unique light-emitting and photosynthetic properties, phycobiliproteins have promising potential applications in biotechnology and solid-state devices. Boosting the energy from the light-harvesting apparatus has been at the center of development efforts for organic devices that use light as a power source."

Using algae as a source of biological energy is a popular topic of interest in sustainability and renewable energy, as algae usage potentially reduces the amount of toxic by-products created in the manufacturing of solar panels.

The study supports NTU's commitment to sustainability as part of its 2025 strategic plan, which seeks to understand, articulate, and address humanity's impact on the environment

The findings were published and selected as the cover of the scientific journal ACS Applied Materials Interfaces.

Tripling artificial photosynthesis efficiency

Microalgae absorb sunlight and convert it into energy. In order to amplify the amount of energy that algae can generate, the research team developed a method to encase red algae within small liquid crystal micro-droplets that are 20 to 40 microns in size and exposed them to light.

When light hits the droplet, an effect known as the "whispering-gallery mode" occurs, in which light waves travel around the curved edges of the droplet. Light is effectively trapped within the droplet for a longer period of time, giving more opportunity for photosynthesis to take place, hence generating more energy.

The energy generated during photosynthesis in the form of free electrons can then be captured through electrodes as an electrical current.

"The droplet behaves like a resonator that confines a lot of light," said Asst Prof Chen.

"This gives the algae more exposure to light, increasing the rate of photosynthesis. A similar result can be obtained by coating the outside of the droplet with the algae protein too."

"By exploiting microdroplets as a carrier for light-harvesting biomaterials, the strong local electric field enhancement and photon confinement inside the droplet resulted in significantly higher electricity generation," he said.

The droplets can be easily produced in bulk at low cost, making the research team's method widely applicable.

According to Asst Prof Chen, most algae-based solar cells produce an electrical power of 20–30 microwatts per square centimeter (µW/cm2). The NTU algae-droplet combination boosted this level of energy generation by at least two to three times, compared to the energy generation rate of the algae protein alone.

Converting 'bio-trash' to bio-energy

One of the challenges of artificial photosynthesis is generating energy as efficiently as other solar-powered energy sources, such as solar panels. On average, solar panels have an efficiency rating of 15 to 20 percent while artificial photosynthesis is currently estimated to be 4.5 percent efficient.

Asst Prof Chen said: "Artificial photosynthesis is not as efficient as solar cells in generating electricity. However, it is more renewable and sustainable. Due to increasing interest in environmentally-friendly and renewable technologies, extracting energy from light-harvesting proteins in algae has attracted substantial interest in the field of bio-energy."

Asst Prof Chen envisions one potential use case of "algae farms," where densely growing algae in bodies of water could eventually be combined with larger liquid crystal droplets to create floating power generators.

"The micro-droplets used in our experiments have the potential to be scaled up to larger droplets which can then be applied to algae outside of a laboratory environment to create energy. While some might consider algae growth to be unsightly, they play a very important role in the environment. Our findings show that there is a way to convert what some might view as 'bio-trash' into bio-power," said Asst Prof ChenEngineered cyanobacteria uses electricity to turn carbon dioxide into fuel

More information: Zhiyi Yuan et al, Light-Harvesting in Biophotonic Optofluidic Microcavities via Whispering-Gallery Modes, ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces (2021). DOI: 10.1021/acsami.1c09845

Journal information: ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces 

Provided by Nanyang Technological University