Earliest evidence of humans decorating jewelery in Eurasia

by Max Planck Society

The Stajnia pendant is decorated with a pattern of at least 50 punctures, creating an 

 irregular looping curve. Credit: © Antonino Vazzana - BONES Lab

A new multidisciplinary study by an international team reports the discovery of an ivory pendant decorated with a pattern of at least 50 punctures, creating an irregular looping curve. The direct radiocarbon date of the ornament yields an age of 41,500 years. This result indicates that the Stajnia Cave jewelry is the oldest punctate ornament known to date in Eurasia, predating other instances of this type of decoration activity by 2,000 years. This finding broadens our current knowledge on the timing of the appearance of decorative objects by Homo sapiens in Eurasia. The study is published in Scientific Reports.

Upon their dispersals in Central and Western Europe by around 42,000 years ago, groups of Homo sapiens started to manipulate mammoth tusks for the production of pendants and mobiliary objects, like carved statuettes, at times decorated with geometric motifs. In addition to lines, crosses and hashtags, a new type of decoration—the alignment of punctuations—appeared in some ornaments in south-western France and figurines in Swabian Jura in Germany. Until now, most of these adornments were discovered from older excavations, and their chronological attributions remain uncertain. Hence, questions regarding the emergence of human body augmentation and the diffusion of mobiliary art in Europe remained strongly debated.

A new study, led by researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, the University of Bologna in Italy, Wrocław University in Poland, the Polish Geological Institute-National Research Institute, Warsaw, Poland, and the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals Polish Academy of Sciences, reports the oldest known punctate ivory pendant found in Eurasia. Its age of 41,500 years places this personal ornament from Stajnia Cave within the record of the earliest dispersals of Homo sapiens in Europe.

Methodological advances in radiocarbon dating

"Determining the exact age of this jewelry was fundamental for its cultural attribution, and we are thrilled of the result. This work demonstrates that using the most recent methodological advances in the radiocarbon method enables us to minimize the amount of sampling and achieve highly precise dates with a very small error range. If we want to seriously solve the debate on when mobiliary art emerged in Paleolithic groups, we need to radiocarbon date these ornaments, especially those found during past fieldwork or in complex stratigraphic sequences," says Sahra Talamo, lead author of the study and director of the BRAVHO radiocarbon lab at the Department of Chemistry G. Ciamician of Bologna University.

The study of the pendant and the awl was also carried out through digital methodologies starting from the micro-tomographic scans of the finds. "Through 3D modeling techniques, the finds were virtually reconstructed and the pendant appropriately restored, allowing detailed measurements and supporting the description of the decorations," notes co-author Stefano Benazzi, director of the Osteoarchaeology and Paleoanthropology Laboratory (BONES Lab) at the Department of Cultural Heritage, University of Bologna.

Aerial view of Stajnia Cave in Poland. Credit: © Marcin Żarski

The personal ornament was discovered in 2010 during fieldwork directed by co-author Mikołaj Urbanowski among animal bones and a few Upper Paleolithic stone tools. Separate short term occupations by Neanderthals and Homo sapiens groups have been identified from the cave's archaeological record. The disposal of the pendant is probably occurred duringa hunting expedition into the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland where the pendant broke and was left behind in the cave.

Similar decorations appeared independently across Europe

"This piece of jewelry shows the great creativity and extraordinary manual skills of members of the group of Homo sapiens that occupied the site. The thickness of the plate is about 3.7 millimeters showing an astonishing precision on carving the punctures and the two holes for wearing it," says co-author Wioletta Nowaczewska of Wrocław University.

"If the Stajnia pendant's looping curve indicates a lunar analemma or kill scores will remain an open question. However, it is fascinating that similar decorations appeared independently across Europe," says co-author Adam Nadachowski from the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals Polish Academy of Sciences.

In broad-scale scenarios on the earliest expansion of Homo sapiens in Europe, the territory of Poland is often excluded suggesting that it remained deserted for several millennia after the demise of Neanderthals. "The ages of the ivory pendant and the bone awl found at Stajnia Cave finally demonstrate that the dispersal of Homo sapiens in Poland took place as early as in Central and Western Europe. This remarkable result will change the perspective on how adaptable these early groups were and call into question the monocentric model of diffusion of the artistic innovation in the Aurignacian," says co-author Andrea Picin from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

Further detailed analyses on the ivory assemblages of Stajnia Cave and other sites in Poland are currently underway and promise to yield more insights into the strategies of production of personal ornaments in Central-Eastern Europe.

The oldest Neanderthal DNA of Central-Eastern Europe

More information: Sahra Talamo, A 41,500 year-old decorated ivory pendant from Stajnia Cave (Poland), Scientific Reports (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-01221-6. www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-01221-6

Journal information: Scientific Reports 

Provided by Max Planck Society 

We identified who's most at risk of homelessness and where they are. Now we must act, before it's too late

by Deb Batterham, The Conversation

Risk of homelessness (rate per 10,000 people), unit-level SA3 estimates.

Credit: Batterham et al, 2021

Homelessness is traumatic. It affects not just housing arrangements but whether or not someone can get enough food, feel safe and maintain relationships with friends and family. The physical and mental health effects often persist long after people are rehoused, and the community and government costs are high.

Much of the current response to homelessness is focused on supporting people after they become homeless or just before they do so.

However, to really reduce homelessness we need to prevent those at risk from ever becoming homeless in the first place. It's akin to turning off a tap at the source to prevent a flood downstream.

Our recent research, published by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, gives critical insights into how we can do that.

Who is at risk of homelessness?

In our study, people were considered at risk of homelessness if they lived in rental housing and were experiencing at least two of the following:

• low income
• vulnerability to discrimination in the housing or job markets
• low social resources and supports
• needing support to access or maintain a living situation due to significant ill health, disability, mental health issues or problematic alcohol and/or drug use
• rental stress (when lower-income households put more than 30% of income towards housing costs).

From here, it often doesn't take much to tip those at risk into actual homelessness.

To estimate the number, profile and geography of the Australian population at risk of homelessness we combined data from two sources: the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey and the 2016 Census. We estimated the size of the population at risk at the national and also small area (SA2/suburb) level.

We found between 8.5% and 11.7% of the total population aged 15 years and over were at risk of homelessness. This equates to between 1.5 and 2 million people.

These numbers are large but shouldn't be surprising. In the nine years between July 2011 and July 2020, some 1.3 million people received assistance from specialist homelessness ervices (agencies that provide support to people experiencing homelessness).

Who's at risk of homelessness?

Compared to the national population, those at risk of homelessness are more likely to be:

• female
• Indigenous
• living in a lone-person or lone-parent household
• low income
• unemployed or outside the labour force
• in receipt of income support payments.

They are more likely to identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual, and report fair or poor health.

Those at risk have lower levels of education and are more likely to report difficulty paying bills and rent on time.

They are also more likely to experience rental stress and forms of material deprivation such as skipping meals and being unable to heat their home.

A third have children in their care.

Where are they?

The highest rates (per head of population) of homelessness risk are typically found in remote areas and small pockets of capital cities.

However, the greatest numbers of people at risk of homelessness are located in capital cities on the eastern coast of Australia. These high numbers extend well beyond inner city areas and into the suburbs.

In several states (Queensland, New South Wales, Western Australia and South Australia), high rates of homelessness risk are spread across greater capital cities and regional areas.

In Victoria, however, risk is concentrated in Greater Melbourne.

And in the Northern Territory, risk is highly concentrated in remote areas.

Preventing homelessness in Australia

Our findings suggest Australia urgently needs more rental housing specifically targeted to those on low incomes and at risk of homelessness.

Our fine-grain data on homelessness risk can help state and territory governments, as well as local governments, decide where this housing will be most effective to reduce homelessness risk.

Australia also needs more private rental access programs, which provide ongoing subsidies and financial help with rent arrears to people at risk of homelessness. They also provide advocacy help in negotiations with landlords.

Given Indigenous Australians are over represented in the at-risk and homeless populations, especially in remote areas, we need targeted support developed in consultation with Indigenous communities.

Those living with a disability or reporting fair or poor health are particularly vulnerable. There is a clear role for state and territory governments in ensuring access to health and disability supports, especially for those on low incomes.

Key priorities for the federal government and agencies include:

• increasing the levels of income support payments and Commonwealth Rent Assistance
• increasing the wages for the lowest paid workers;
• increasing funding for the construction of social and affordable housing, and;
• playing a coordinating role in primary prevention policy through a national housing and homelessness strategy.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted homelessness can be closer than many think—especially after sudden loss of employment or a health crisis.

Now we know who is at risk of homelessness and where they are, it's time for governments to act.New research reveals impact of homelessness on EU citizens living in BritainProvided by The Conversation 

Understanding the hive mind: What drives crowdsourcing

by Inderscience

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Crowdsourcing is a method of problem solving that taps the intellectual potential and skills of a large number of people simultaneously, commonly by using the tools of social media and the internet. New research published in the International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing has investigated this phenomenon from the perspective of the various influencing factors and incentive strategies used to make crowdsourcing work the most effectively.

Xu Zhang, Zhanglin Peng, Qiang Zhang, Xiaonong Lu, and Hao Song of the School of Management at Hefei University of Technology in China, explain how crowdsourcing has been used in many different settings by companies, organizations, and innovators around the world. For instance, it has been used to guide the development of new products; it has been used in citizen science and data collection; to provide fodder for machine learning applications; for the testing of new software (often referred to alpha and beta testing); and it has even been used in political rallying and in the creative world to nudge performers and producers in a particular artistic direction or to specific places.

The team writes about how crowdsourcing was defined in 2006 by Jeff Howe as "the act of taking a task that is traditionally performed by an employee and outsourcing it to a large and undefined crowd of individuals through an open call."

The team has reviewed the research literature in this field and found that there are numerous factors influencing the behavior of individuals in the "crowd," including enjoyment and fun, monetary reward, peer recognition, skill improvement, self-marketing, a sense of belonging, work autonomy, altruism, and task complexity.

Their work offers related behavioral theories to explain the relationship between those influencing factors and how the crowd behaves when presented with a particular problem to be solved. They highlight the incentive strategies that might be used, from the perspective of both the requester and also the available crowdsourcing platforms. Finally, they discuss the current directions being taken by research and highlight new avenues that might be taken to allow the field to mature.

Study develops framework to help firms use crowdsourcing more effectively

More information: Xu Zhang et al, User participation behaviour in crowdsourcing initiatives: influencing factors, related theories and incentive strategies, International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing (2021). DOI: 10.1504/IJAHUC.2021.119084

Provided by Inderscience 

Study shows people who believe in astrology tend to be less intelligent and more narcissistic

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

A trio of psychologists at Lund University has found via online questionnaire, that people who believe in astrology tend to be less intelligent than the norm and more narcissistic. In their paper published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, Ida Andersson, Julia Persson and Petri Kajonius describe their study and what they learned from it.

Over the past several decades, scientists have occasionally put astrology to the test despite logic suggesting there is no possible way for the movements of stars and their relative positions to influence human behavior. To date, all have concluded that the idea is nonsense. Still, millions of people around the world believe that it is a true science. In this new effort, the researchers started by noting that belief in astrology has grown in recent years, possibly as a reaction to stresses such as the COVID-19 pandemic. They then set out to find if there were some traits that were common among people who were willing to believe in a pseudo-science that has no evidence of its usefulness.

They created an online questionnaire designed to identify personality traits and then added those questions to an abbreviated version of the Belief in Astrology Inventory assessment, which was created by a pair of researchers at Rovira i Virgili University in 2006. They also added a short IQ test. They then recruited 264 English speaking adults using Facebook to take their questionnaire.

The researchers found that those people who professed a belief in the powers of astrology tended to score higher than average on narcissistic measurements and also did poorly on the IQ test. They suggest this indicates that people who have faith in astrology tend to be more self-focused than average and see themselves as special people with natural leadership skills, and who also happen to be less intelligent than the average person. They noted that the higher a volunteer scored on the IQ portion of the questionnaire, the lower their chances were of being a believer in astrology.

How many people actually believe in astrology?

More information: Ida Andersson et al, Even the stars think that I am superior: Personality, intelligence and belief in astrology, Personality and Individual Differences (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2021.111389

Journal information: Personality and Individual Differences 

© 2021 Science X Network

Mosaic brain evolution in guppies helps to explain vertebrate cognitive evolution

Peer-Reviewed Publication

STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: NICLAS KOLM. PHOTO: NIKLAS BJÖRLING view more 

CREDIT: NIKLAS BJÖRLING

Researchers at Stockholm University have provided the first experimental evidence that brain regions can evolve independently of each other during cognitive evolution. This so called mosaic brain evolution was verified empirically in an artificial selection experiment with guppies (Poecilia reticulata) where telencephalon size (but no other regions) differed by 10 percent after only four generations of selection. The findings can have wide implications for the understanding of cognitive evolution in other vertebrates, such as primates and humans.

The study indicates that brain evolution can occur in the form of changes in specific brain regions in a mosaic pattern, where the different parts evolve independently from each other. The researchers showed that when under strong artificial selection, the relative size of the telencephalon, or Cerebrum, changes quickly, and in an independent way. 

“The finding has large implication for our understanding of how vertebrate brains evolve, and can help us explain even human brain evolution. For instance, it is possible that cognitive demands in the environment led to gradual evolutionary changes in the size of the neocortex towards the large neocortex in humans.”, says Niclas Kolm, professor at the Department of Zoology at Stockholm University and lead principal investigator on the project.

The experiment was carried out with artificial selection experiment with guppies by Stephanie Fong, who recently defended her PhD thesis on the project. After four generations of selection on relative telencephalon volume relative to the rest of the brain, a three-year endeavor that required near 2000 aquaria and many hundreds of brain dissections by Stephanie, she found substantial changes in telencephalon size in both males and females. But no significant changes occurred in other regions, which support the mosaic brain hypothesis.

According to the mosaic brain evolution hypothesis there are selective forces, for instance cognitive demands from the environment to catch food or find mates, that affect specific areas of the brain, but when these adaptive responses occur, they do not involve other parts of the brain. Hence, different brain regions can evolve in a “mosaic” pattern, in different ways and with different rates, and thus save energy in relation to changing the entire brain.

“The study is unique because it demonstrates that targeted selection on a single region can quickly increase and decrease its size without strong correlated changes in other regions”, says Stephanie Fong.

The general layout of the vertebrate brain is remarkably conserved with regards to the different regions in the vertebrate brain. However, size variation is enormous in the different regions among species. And this size variation could have been caused by this type of mosaic brain evolution and have great general cognitive consequences.

“The study suggests that strong selection can independently change separate brain regions and thus potentially yield cost-efficient neural responses to very specific cognitive demands from the environment. The next important step, and we already have publications on the way, is to investigate the functional consequences of these fast evolutionary changes in relative telencephalon size”, says Niclas Kolm..  

CAPTION

Group of guppies

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JOURNAL

Science Advances

DOI

doi.org/10.1038/s42003-021-02689-8 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animal tissue samples

ARTICLE TITLE

Rapid mosaic brain evolution under artificial selection for relative telencephalon size in the guppy (Poecilia reticulata)

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

10-Nov-2021

Disclaimer: AAAS and

A personalized exosuit for real-world walking

Ultrasound measurements of muscle dynamics provide customized, activity-specific assistance

Peer-Reviewed Publication

HARVARD JOHN A. PAULSON SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCES

 

IMAGE: RESEARCHERS FROM THE HARVARD JOHN A. PAULSON SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCES (SEAS) HAVE DEVELOPED A NEW APPROACH IN WHICH ROBOTIC EXOSUIT ASSISTANCE CAN BE CALIBRATED TO AN INDIVIDUAL AND ADAPT TO A VARIETY OF REAL-WORLD WALKING TASKS. view more 

CREDIT: BIODESIGN LAB, HARVARD JOHN A. PAULSON SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCE AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY

People rarely walk at a constant speed and a single incline. We change speed when rushing to the next appointment, catching a crosswalk signal, or going for a casual stroll in the park. Slopes change all the time too, whether we’re going for a hike or up a ramp into a building. In addition to environmental variably, how we walk is influenced by sex, height, age, and muscle strength, and sometimes by neural or muscular disorders such as stroke or Parkinson’s Disease. 

This human and task variability is a major challenge in designing wearable robotics to assist or augment walking in real-world conditions. To date, customizing wearable robotic assistance to an individual’s walking requires hours of manual or automatic tuning — a tedious task for healthy individuals and often impossible for older adults or clinical patients.

Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a new approach in which robotic exosuit assistance can be calibrated to an individual and adapt to a variety of real-world walking tasks in a matter of seconds. The bioinspired system uses ultrasound measurements of muscle dynamics to develop a personalized and activity-specific assistance profile for users of the exosuit.

“Our muscle-based approach enables relatively rapid generation of individualized assistance profiles that provide real benefit to the person walking,” said Robert D. Howe, the Abbott and James Lawrence Professor of Engineering, and co-author of the paper.

The research is published in Science Robotics. 

Previous bioinspired attempts at developing individualized assistance profiles for robotic exosuits focused on the dynamic movements of the limbs of the wearer. The SEAS researchers took a different approach. The research was a collaboration between Howe’s Harvard Biorobotics Laboratory, which has extensive experience in ultrasound imaging and real-time image processing, and the Harvard Biodesign Lab, run by Conor J. Walsh, the Paul A. Maeder Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at SEAS, which develops soft wearable robots for augmenting and restoring human performance. 

“We used ultrasound to look under the skin and directly measured what the user’s muscles were doing during several walking tasks,” said Richard Nuckols, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at SEAS and co-first author of the paper. “Our muscles and tendons have compliance which means there is not necessarily a direct mapping between the movement of the limbs and that of the underlying muscles driving their motion.” 

The research team strapped a portable ultrasound system to the calves of participants and imaged their muscles as they performed a series of walking tasks. 

“From these pre-recorded images, we estimated the assistive force to be applied in parallel with the calf muscles to offset the additional work they need to perform during the push off phase of the walking cycle,” said Krithika Swaminathan, a graduate student at SEAS and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) and co-first author of the study. 

The new system only needs a few seconds of walking, even one stride may be sufficient, to capture the muscle’s profile.   

For each of the ultrasound-generated profiles, the researchers then measured how much metabolic energy the person used during walking with and without the exosuit. The researchers found that the muscle-based assistance provided by the exosuit significantly reduced the metabolic energy of walking across a range of walking speeds and inclines. 

The exosuit also applied lower assistance force to achieve the same or improved metabolic energy benefit than previous published studies. 

“By measuring the muscle directly, we can work more intuitively with the person using the exosuit,” said Sangjun Lee, a graduate student at SEAS and GSAS and co-first author of the study. “With this approach, the exosuit isn’t overpowering the wearer, it’s working cooperatively with them.”

When tested in real-world situations, the exosuit was able to quickly adapt to changes in walking speed and incline.

Next, the research team aims to test the system making constant, real-time adjustments. 

“This approach may help support the adoption of wearable robotics in real-world, dynamic situations by enabling comfortable, tailored, and adaptive assistance,” said  Walsh, the senior author of the paper.

This research was also co-authored by Dorothy Orzel. It was supported by National Institutes of Health grants BRG-R01HD088619, U01TR002775 and R21AR076686, National Science Foundation grant CMMI-1925085.

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JOURNAL

Science Robotics

DOI

10.1126/scirobotics.abj1362 

Local exhaust ventilation to control dental aerosols and droplets

Peer-Reviewed Publication

INTERNATIONAL & AMERICAN ASSOCIATIONS FOR DENTAL RESEARCH

Alexandria, VA, USA — Dental procedures produce aerosols which contain oral microbes, creating potential for infectious disease transmission. This study, “Local Exhaust Ventilation to Control Dental Aerosols and Droplets” published in the Journal of Dental Research (JDR), investigated the effect of a Local Exhaust Ventilation (LEV) device on aerosols and droplets produced during dental procedures. These devices are designed to be placed over the patient’s mouth to capture aerosols and droplets at the source. 

Researchers at Newcastle University, England, conducted experiments on dental mannequins. Ten-minute crown preparations were performed with an air-turbine handpiece in a large open plan clinic, and full mouth ultrasonic scaling was performed for ten minutes in a single dental surgery. Fluorescein was added to instrument irrigation reservoirs as a tracer. In both settings, Optical Particle Counters (OPCs) were used to measure aerosol particles between 0.3 – 10.0 μm and liquid cyclone air samplers were used to capture aerosolised fluorescein tracer. An LEV device with High Efficiency Particulate Air (HEPA) filtration and a flow rate of 5,000 L/min was tested during the experiments. 

 

The results show that using LEV reduced the dispersion of aerosols from the air turbine handpiece by 90% within 0.5 m, and this was 99% for the ultrasonic scaler. The settling of larger droplets was also measured for the air-turbine, and this was reduced by 95% within 0.5 m when LEV was used.

 

"This study shows that the effect of LEV was substantially greater than suction alone for the air-turbine and was similar to the effect of suction for the ultrasonic scaler,” said IADR President Eric Reynolds, The University of Melbourne, Australia. “While no mitigation measure alone will completely eliminate risk, LEV appears to be a useful approach, which in addition to other measures, substantially reduces dispersion of aerosols, and therefore risk of exposure to pathogens."

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View a PDF of this press release. 

About the Journal of Dental Research The IADR/AADOCR Journal of Dental Research (JDR) is a multidisciplinary journal dedicated to the dissemination of new knowledge in all sciences relevant to dentistry and the oral cavity and associated structures in health and disease. The JDR 2-year Journal Impact Factor™ is 6.116, ranking #5 of 91 journals in the “Dentistry, Oral Surgery & Medicine” category, and the JDR 5-year Journal Impact Factor™ is 7.199. The JDR ranks #1 of 91 journals in total citations at 26,197 and Eigenfactor at 0.01683. The JDR Editor-in-Chief is Nicholas Jakubovics, Newcastle University, England. Follow the JDR on Twitter at @JDentRes!

International Association for Dental Research

The International Association for Dental Research (IADR) is a nonprofit organization with over 10,000 individual members worldwide, with a mission to drive dental, oral and craniofacial research for health and well-being worldwide. To learn more, visit www.iadr.org. The American Association for Dental, Oral, and Craniofacial Research (AADOCR) is the largest Division of IADR with 3,100 members in the United States. To learn more, visit www.iadr.org/aadocr

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JOURNAL

Journal of Dental Research

DOI

10.1177/00220345211056287 

ARTICLE TITLE

Local Exhaust Ventilation to Control Dental Aerosols and Droplets

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

10-Nov-2021

Does previous SARS experience help healthcare workers cope with COVID-19?

Over half of surveyed healthcare workers reported PTSD symptoms, whether or not they had previously worked during the SARS outbreak

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

 

IMAGE: A DOCTOR HOLDS A FACE MASK AND STETHOSCOPE. view more 

CREDIT: ASHKAN FOROUZANI, UNSPLASH, CC0 (HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/PUBLICDOMAIN/ZERO/1.0/)

Previous work during the 2003 SARS outbreak has no overall impact on the psychological distress seen in healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, although it was associated with lower scores of PTSD and depression, according to a new study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Rima Styra of University Health Network, Toronto, Canada, and colleagues.

Surveys of physicians and nurses conducted during the current COVID-19 pandemic have found significant levels of depression, anxiety, insomnia and post-traumatic distress, similar to those seen during the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreaks. Experience working during a prior infectious disease could either heighten or attenuate a person’s psychological response to an emerging infectious disease.

In the new study, Styra and colleagues conducted an online survey of 3,852 healthcare workers in the greater Toronto area, including 1256 nurses (34.1%), 1243 non-clinical staff (28.3%), 1034 allied health staff (28.1%) and 345 physicians (9.4%). 29.1% of respondents had also worked during the 2003 SARS outbreak. Mental health outcomes of healthcare workers were measured using three distinct scales.

More than half (50.2%) of all healthcare workers surveyed had moderate or severe scores for symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), while rates of anxiety (24.6%) and depression (31.5%) were also high. Non-clinical healthcare workers were found to be at higher risk of anxiety (OR, 1.68; 95% CI, 1.19–2.15, P = .01) and depression (OR 2.03, 95% CI, 1.34–3.07, P < .001), while healthcare workers using sedatives (OR, 2.55; 95% CI, 1.61–4.03, P < .001), those who cared for only 2-5 patients with COVID-19 (OR, 1.59; 95% CI, 1.06–2.38, P = .01), and those who had been in isolation for COVID-19 (OR, 1.36; 95% CI, 0.96–1.93, P = .05) had a higher risk of PTSD. There was no statistically significant effect of previous SARS work experience on clinical or non-clinical healthcare workers’ overall psychological distress. While those who worked during the SARS outbreak experienced lower scores of PTSD (p=0.002) and depression (p<0.001), these differences disappeared after correcting for other factors such as age and career experience. The authors suggest that the data is important in guiding healthcare systems to provide appropriate, targeted and timely support to healthcare workers. 

The authors add: “Our study highlights the universal emotional distress experienced by healthcare workers, both clinical and non-clinical during the COVID-19 pandemic. It identifies that there are risk and protective factors of which we should be mindful given the wide reaching implications for staff wellness and  staff retention.”

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JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0258893 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Survey

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Surviving SARS and living through COVID-19: Healthcare worker mental health outcomes and insights for coping

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

10-Nov-2021

COI STATEMENT

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Pet cats seem to track their owner's location - and are surprised in experiments when their voice appears to come from somewhere else

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

 

IMAGE: A CAT RECEIVING ATTENTION view more 

CREDIT: YERLIN MATU, UNSPLASH, CC0 (HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/PUBLICDOMAIN/ZERO/1.0/)

Pet cats seem to track their owner's location - and are surprised in experiments when their voice appears to come from somewhere else

###

Article Title: Socio-spatial cognition in cats: Mentally mapping owner’s location from voice

Author Countries: Japan

Funding: This study was financially supported by the Grant-in-aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI) No. 17J08974, No. 19J01485 to S. Takagi, Nos. 25240020, 26119514, 16H01505, 15K12047, 25118002, and 16H06301 to K. Fujita, No. 25118003 to A. Saito, No. JP16J08691 to H. Chijiiwa, and No. JP16J1034 to M. Arahori from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). Anicom Speciality Medical Institute Inc. provided support in the form of salaries for author M.A, but had no role in study design, data collection or analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section.

Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0257611

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JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0257611 

ARTICLE TITLE

Socio-spatial cognition in cats: Mentally mapping owner’s location from voice

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

10-Nov-2021

COI STATEMENT

The authors declare no conflicts of interest. Anicom Speciality Medical Institute Inc. played no role in the study design, data collection or analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript, providing only financial support in the form of M.A.’s salary. This does not alter the authors’ adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.