OUR COMMONWEALTH

Oxfam: Billionaires' wealth grew by $5T amid pandemic while 160M forced into poverty

Workers and family members bring bodies for cremation near multiple funeral pyres of victims of COVID-19 burn at a ground that has been converted into a crematorium for mass cremation in New Delhi, India on May 1, 2021. On Monday, Oxfam released a new report stating inequality is making the pandemic more deadly and prolonged. 

File Photo by Abhishek/UPI | License Photo

Jan. 17 (UPI) -- The two years of the pandemic have exacerbated the gap between the haves and have nots with the world's billionaires seeing their fortunes balloon while more than 160 million people have been pushed into poverty, according to a new report from Oxfam.

Published Monday by the Britain-based charity organization, "Inequality Kills" says the COVID-19 pandemic has been made deadlier and prolonged due to inequality.

According to Oxfam, the wealth of the world's 2,755 billionaires has grown amid the pandemic at a rate never seen before. As governments injected some $16 trillion into economies to keep the world economy working, billionaires saw their wealth jump from $8.6 trillion before the pandemic to $13.8 trillion as of March 2021.

The pandemic has seen a billionaire created every 26 hours, the wealth of the world's richest 10 men grow by about $1.3 billion every day and at least one person die every four seconds with inequality playing a contributing factor, the report said.

"Billionaires have had a terrific pandemic. Central banks pumped trillions of dollars into financial markets to save the economy, yet much of that has ended up lining the pockets of billionaires riding a stock market boom," Gabriela Bucher, Oxfam's executive director, said in a statement. "Vaccines were meant to end this pandemic, yet rich governments allowed pharma billionaires and monopolies to cut off the supply to billions of people. The result is that every kind of inequality imaginable risks rising."

The report states income inequality is a stronger indicator of whether a person will die from COVID-19 than age and that millions would still be alive today if they had access to a vaccine.

"Over the last two years people have died when they contracted an infectious disease because they did not get vaccines in time, even though those vaccines could have been more widely produced and distributed if the technology had been shared," Jayati Ghosh, a member of the World Health Organization's Council on the Economics of Health For All, wrote in the report's introduction.

The report was released ahead of the opening of the World Economic Forum's Davos Agenda on Monday, and Oxfam is calling on governments to tax this new wealth made since the start of the pandemic through permanent wealth and capital taxes and then invest these funds on universal healthcare and social protection, climate change adaptation and gender-based violence prevention.

It also calls for governments to end laws that bar workers from unionizing, tackle sexist and racist laws that discriminate against women and racialized people while creating gender-equal laws.

And to allow for more countries to produce vaccines, it is urging rich governments to waive intellectual property rules over COVID-19 technologies.

"Inequality at such pace and scale is happening by choice, not chance," Bucher said. "Not only have our economic structures made all of us less safe against this pandemic, they are actively enabling those who are already extremely rich and powerful to exploit this crisis for their own profit."

The gamma-ray binary HESS J0632+057

by Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Gamma rays are the most energetic known form of electromagnetic radiation, with each gamma-ray being at least one hundred thousand times more energetic than an optical light photon. Very high energy (VHE) gamma rays pack energies a billion times this amount, or even more. Astronomers think that VHE gamma rays are produced in the environment of the winds or jets of the compact, ultra-dense remnant ashes of massive stars left behind from supernova explosions. There are two kinds of compact remnants: black holes and neutron stars (stars made up predominantly of neutrons, with densities equivalent to the mass of the Sun packed into a volume about 10 kilometers in radius). The winds or jets from the environments of such objects can accelerate charged particles to very close to the speed of light, and radiation that scatters off such energetic particles can become energized, as well, sometimes turning into VHE gamma rays.

Nine known or suspected gamma-ray sources are in binary systems, compact objects orbiting a star with periodic releases of energy. Every member of this class has its own unique characteristics but in all but one case it is known that the stellar component is a massive hot star, often surrounded by an equatorial disk. In contrast, the nature of the compact objects in these binary systems is usually not known. The gamma-ray binary HESS J0632+057, located about five thousand light-years away in our galaxy, is coincident with the hot optical star MWC 148 and an associated X-ray source. In 2007, HESS (The High Energy Stereoscopic System) discovered that this source emitted gamma rays, but in 2009 VERITAS (the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System, located at the SAO's Fred L. Whipple Observatory in Arizona) could not detect it and set a limit that showed the source was variable at gamma-ray energies. Then in 2009, VERITAS and the MAGIC gamma-ray telescopes detected the source with enhanced emission. Around the same time observations taken with the Swift-XRT mission found that the source had a period in X-ray emission of about 321 days, establishing the binary nature of the object; radio observations found it had a jet a few astronomical units in length.

CfA astronomer Wystan Benbow and a large international team probed the nature of the compact object in this binary system. They completed an analysis of 15 years of gamma-ray observations, as well as X-ray observations from a number of facilities. For the first time they were able to determine the orbital period in VHE emission, 316.7 days with an uncertainty of about 1.4 percent, and consistent with the period measured at other wavelengths. The strong correlation between the X-ray and gamma-ray behaviors suggests that a single population of rapidly moving charged particles is responsible for both, while the absence of a correlation with emission lines of atomic hydrogen implies that any variations in the hot star play a negligible role. The astronomers now are planning deeper, multi-year simultaneous multiwavelength observations to further characterize the emission and the source structure.Study sheds more light on the nature of HESS J1857+026

More information: C. B. Adams et al, Observation of the Gamma-Ray Binary HESS J0632+057 with the H.E.S.S., MAGIC, and VERITAS Telescopes, The Astrophysical Journal (2021). DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ac29b7

Journal information: Astrophysical Journal 

Provided by Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics 

Better mental health found among transgender people who started hormones as teens

Peer-Reviewed Publication

STANFORD MEDICINE

For transgender people, starting gender-affirming hormone treatment in adolescence is linked to better mental health than waiting until adulthood, according to new research led by the Stanford University School of Medicine. 

The study, which will appear online Jan. 12 in PLOS ONE, drew on data from the largest-ever survey of U.S. transgender adults, a group of more than 27,000 people who responded in 2015. The new study found that transgender people who began hormone treatment in adolescence had fewer thoughts of suicide, were less likely to experience major mental health disorders and had fewer problems with substance abuse than those who started hormones in adulthood. The study also documented better mental health among those who received hormones at any age than those who desired but never received the treatment. 

Gender-affirming hormone treatment with estrogen or testosterone can help bring a transgender person’s physical characteristics in line with their gender identity. In adolescence, hormone therapy can enable a transgender teenager to go through puberty in a way that matches their gender identity.

“This study is particularly relevant now because many state legislatures are introducing bills that would outlaw this kind of care for transgender youth,” said Jack Turban, MD, a postdoctoral scholar in pediatric and adolescent psychiatry at Stanford Medicine. “We are adding to the evidence base that shows why gender-affirming care is beneficial from a mental health perspective.”

Turban is the study’s lead author. The senior author is Alex Keuroghlian, MD, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the National LGBTQIA+ Health Education Center at The Fenway Institute.

Largest survey of transgender adults

The researchers analyzed data from the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, which comprises survey responses from 27,715 transgender people nationwide. Participants, who were at least 18 when they were surveyed, completed extensive questionnaires about their lives.

Because some transgender people do not want hormone treatment, the study focused on 21,598 participants who had reported that they wanted to receive hormones. Results were analyzed based on when participants began hormone therapy: 119 began at age 14 or 15 (early adolescence), 362 began at age 16 or 17 (late adolescence), 12,257 began after their 18th birthday (adulthood), and 8,860 participants, who served as the control group, wanted but never received hormone therapy

The participants answered several questions about their mental health, including their history of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts, and their history of binge drinking and illicit drug use. They completed a questionnaire to assess whether they had experienced severe psychological distress, meaning they met criteria for a diagnosable mental illness, within the prior month.

The analysis was controlled for several factors that could influence participants’ mental health independently of whether they received hormone treatment: age at the time of the survey; gender identity; sex assigned at birth; sexual orientation; race or ethnicity; level of family support for gender identity; relationship status; level of education; employment status; household income; use of pubertal suppression treatment; any attempts to force them to be cisgender; and experience of any verbal, physical or sexual harassment based on their gender identity in grades K-12.

Compared with members of the control group, participants who underwent hormone treatment had lower odds of experiencing severe psychological distress during the previous month and lower odds of suicidal ideation in the previous year. Odds of severe psychological distress were reduced by 222%, 153% and 81% for those who began hormones in early adolescence, late adolescence and adulthood, respectively. Odds of previous-year suicidal ideation were 135% lower in people who began hormones in early adolescence, 62% lower in those who began in late adolescence and 21% lower in those who began as adults, compared with the control group.

In addition, participants who began hormones in early or late adolescence had lower odds of past-month binge drinking and lifetime illicit drug use than those who began hormones in adulthood. 

But the researchers found that those who started hormone treatment in adulthood were more likely to engage in binge drinking and use of illicit substances than those who never accessed the treatment. “Some individuals may become more confident and socially engaged when they begin taking hormones,” Turban said, adding that, in some cases, this increased confidence and social engagement may be linked to substance use. “This finding speaks to the importance of creating culturally tailored substance-use counseling programs for transgender individuals.” 

To get a sense of whether participants’ mental health before treatment influenced their ability to gain access to treatment, the researchers also assessed whether participants in each group had ever been suicidal but had not had suicidal feelings in the previous year. 

“This was a measure of mental health improving over time,” Turban said. “People were more likely to meet those criteria if they accessed and took hormones than if they hadn’t.” The finding implies that access to hormones improved mental health rather than the other way around, he said.

Building evidence for gender-affirming medical care

Turban and his colleagues hope legislators across the country will use the new findings to inform their policy decisions. Although several bills to ban gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth have been introduced in state legislatures in recent years, nearly all have failed to become law, he said, adding that all major medical organizations support provision of gender-affirming medical care, including hormone therapy for patients who desire it and who meet criteria set out by the Endocrine Society and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.

“There’s no one correct way to be transgender,” Turban said. Some transgender people do not want to take hormones and feel comfortable with their bodies the way they are. Young people seeking care at gender clinics are routinely offered counseling as part of their treatment to help them figure out what types of care best fit their circumstances

For those who desire gender-affirming hormones, being denied access to the treatment can cause significant distress, Turban said.

“For some transgender youth, their negative reactions to living in bodies that develop during puberty in ways that don’t match who they know themselves to be can be very damaging,” he said. For instance, individuals who feel uncomfortable developing breasts may react by binding their chests so tightly they develop skin infections or rib fractures.

“These results won’t be surprising to providers, but unfortunately a lot of legislators have never met any transgender youth,” Turban said. “It’s important for legislators to see the numbers that back up the experiences of transgender youth, their families and the people who work in this field.”

Researchers from The Fenway Institute, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health contributed to the study.

The research was funded by the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (supported by industry sponsors Arbor and Pfizer), the Harvey L. and Maud C. Sorensen Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health (grant MH094612), and the Health Resources and Services Administration (grant U30CS22742).

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The Stanford University School of Medicine consistently ranks among the nation’s top medical schools, integrating research, medical education, patient care and community service. For more news about the school, please visit http://med.stanford.edu/school.html The medical school is part of Stanford Medicine, which includes Stanford Health Care and Stanford Children’s Health. For information about all three, please visit http://med.stanford.edu

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JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

New study calls into question early claims of COVID-19 ‘infodemic’ of health misinformation

Findings suggest online health misinformation was already widespread before the COVID-19 pandemic

Peer-Reviewed Publication

GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

WASHINGTON (Jan. 12, 2022) — In a first-of-its-kind study comparing hundreds of millions of social media posts about online health topics, a team of researchers found that posts about COVID-19 were less likely to contain misinformation than posts about other health topics. The researchers found that health misinformation was already widespread before the COVID-19 pandemic. Although all types of information about COVID-19 — including misinformation — were popular between March and May 2020, posts about COVID-19 were more likely to come from governments and academic institutions. In many cases, these posts were more likely to go viral than posts from sources that routinely spread misinformation. 

“At the start of the pandemic, governments and organizations around the world started paying attention to the problem of health misinformation online,” David Broniatowski, an associate professor of engineering management and systems engineering at the George Washington University and associate director of GW’s Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics, said. “But when you compare it to what was going on before the pandemic, you start to see that health misinformation was already widespread. What changed is that, when  COVID-19 hit, governments and social media platforms started paying attention and taking action.”

The team collected public posts on Twitter and Facebook at the very start of the pandemic –  between March 2020 and May 2020 – when content about COVID-19 was growing rapidly. They compared those posts to posts about other health topics from the same time period in 2019, looking at the credibility of the websites that each post shared. More credible sources included government and academic sources as well as the traditional news media. Sources deemed “not credible” comprised conspiracy-oriented sites and state-sponsored sites known for spreading  propaganda, which were 3.67 times more likely to spread misinformation than credible sites. 

“Misinformation has always been present, even at higher proportions before COVID-19 started. Many people knew this, which makes the ensuing misinformation spread during COVID-19 entirely predictable,” Mark Dredze, an associate professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, and co-author of the study, said. “Had we been more proactive in fighting misinformation, we may not have been in an anti-vaccination crisis today.”

“These findings suggest that the ‘infodemic’ of misinformation is a general feature of health information online, not one restricted to COVID-19,” Broniatowski said. “Clearly there is a lot of misinformation about COVID-19, but attempts to combat it might be better informed by comparison to the broader health misformation ecosystem.”  

Sandra Crouse Quinn, a professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Health and a co-author on the paper, emphasized the research’s focus on the pandemic’s beginning. 

“At this point in the pandemic, it is critical for new research to further explore COVID-19 misinformation within the health misinformation ecosystem, but most importantly, how we can combat this challenge,” Quinn said.

The paper, “Twitter and Facebook posts about COVID-19 are less likely to spread misinformation compared to other health topics” was published in the journal PLOS ONE on Jan. 12. The research team also included researchers at the University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, University of Pittsburgh, University of Memphis and San Diego State University.

Broniatowski is affiliated with the GW Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics, which launched in 2019 with the support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The institute’s mission is to help the public, journalists and policy makers understand digital media’s influence on public dialogue and opinion, and to develop sound solutions to disinformation and other ills that arise in these spaces.

-GW-

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JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0261768 

ARTICLE TITLE

Twitter and Facebook posts about COVID-19 are less likely to spread misinformation compared to other health topics

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

12-Jan-2022

Microplastic pollution linger in rivers for years before entering oceans

Water dynamics can trap lightweight microplastics that otherwise might float

Peer-Reviewed Publication

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: STUDY SITES INCLUDED THE SEVERN RIVER, DIRECTLY DOWNSTREAM FROM BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND. view more 

CREDIT: AARON PACKMAN/NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

Microplastics can deposit and linger within riverbeds for as long as seven years before washing into the ocean, a new study has found.

Because rivers are in near-constant motion, researchers previously assumed lightweight microplastics quickly flowed through rivers, rarely interacting with riverbed sediments. 

Now, researchers led by Northwestern University and the University of Birmingham in England, have found hyporheic exchange — a process in which surface water mixes with water in the riverbed — can trap lightweight microplastics that otherwise might be expected to float.

The study was published today (Jan. 12) in the journal Science Advances. It marks the first assessment of microplastic accumulation and residence times within freshwater systems, from sources of plastic pollution throughout the entire water stream. The new model describes dynamical processes that influence particles, including hyporheic exchange, and focuses on hard-to-measure but abundant microplastics at 100 micrometers in size and smaller.

“Most of what we know about plastics pollution is from the oceans because it’s very visible there,” said Northwestern’s Aaron Packman, one of the study’s senior authors. “Now, we know that small plastic particles, fragments and fibers can be found nearly everywhere. However, we still don’t know what happens to the particles discharged from cities and wastewater. Most of the work thus far has been to document where plastic particles can be found and how much is reaching the ocean. 

“Our work shows that a lot of microplastics from urban wastewater end up depositing near the river’s source and take a long time to be transported downstream to oceans.”

Packman is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineeringand director of the Northwestern Center for Water Research. He also is a member of the Program on Plastics, Ecosystems and Public Healthat the Institute for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern. Jennifer Drummond, a research fellow at the University of Birmingham and former Ph.D. student in Packman’s laboratory, is the study’s first author.

Modeling microplastic movement

To conduct the study, Packman, Drummond and their teams developed a new model to simulate how individual particles enter freshwater systems, settle and then later remobilize and redistribute. 

The model is the first to include hyporheic exchange processes, which play a significant role in retaining microplastics within rivers. Although it is well-known that the hyporheic exchange process affects how natural organic particles move and flow through freshwater systems, the process is rarely considered microplastic accumulation.

“The retention of microplastics we observed wasn’t a surprise because we already understood this happens with natural organic particles,” Packman said. “The difference is that natural particles biodegrade, whereas a lot of plastics just accumulate. Because plastics don’t degrade, they stay in the freshwater environment for a long time — until they are washed out by river flow.”

To run the model, the researchers used global data on urban wastewater discharges and river flow conditions.

Trapped in headwaters

Using the new model, the researchers found microplastic pollution resides the longest at the source of a river or stream (known as the “headwaters”). In headwaters, microplastic particles moved at an average rate of five hours per kilometer. But during low-flow conditions, this movement slowed to a creep — taking up to seven years to move just one kilometer. In these areas, organisms are more likely to ingest microplastics in the water, potentially degrading ecosystem health.

The residence time decreased as microplastics moved away from the headwaters, farther downstream. And residence times were shortest in large creeks.

Now that this information is available, Packman hopes researchers can better assess and understand the long-term impacts of microplastic pollution on freshwater systems.

“These deposited microplastics cause ecological damage, and the large amount of deposited particles means that it will take a very long time for all of them to be washed out of our freshwater ecosystems,” he said. “This information points us to consider whether we need solutions to remove these plastics to restore freshwater ecosystems.”

The study, “Microplastic accumulation in riverbed sediment via hyporheic exchange from headwaters to mainstems,” was supported by a Royal Society Newton International Fellowship, Marie Curie Individual Fellowship, the German Research Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust and the National Science Foundation.

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JOURNAL

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.abi9305 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Microplastic accumulation in riverbed sediment via hyporheic exchange from headwaters to mainstems

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

12-Jan-2022

My what big eyes you have

The ‘Platypus’ of the crab world was an active predator that lurked the Cretaceous seas

Peer-Reviewed Publication

HARVARD UNIVERSITY, DEPARTMENT OF ORGANISMIC AND EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY

 

IMAGE: ARTISTIC RECONSTRUCTION OF CALLICHIMAERA PERPLEXA: THE STRANGEST CRAB THAT HAS EVER LIVED. —SWIMMING AFTER A COMMA SHRIMP EOBODOTRIA MUISCA (CUMACEA). view more 

CREDIT: CREDIT: MASATO HATTORI

Eyes are crucial players in the evolution of organisms. They allow an animal to find food, a mate, potential prey, to avoid predators and aid in regulating the internal clock by differentiating day from night. Eyes are also delicate features that tend to be not well preserved in fossil crustaceans.

One such rare finding is Callichimaera perplexa, a 95-million-year-old crab fossil  discovered by senior author Javier Luque, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, and fully described in 2019 in the journal Sciences Avances. The fossil, found in a Cretaceous layer of rock in the Andes of Colombia, had rare preservation of both the external eye elements and the internal optic neural tissue. In a new study Luque and researchers from Yale describe the unusually large optical features of Callichimaera which suggest it was a highly visual, swimming predator.

Callichimaera’s eyes are one of its most unusual and striking feature due to their enormity. Living crabs usually have tiny compound eyes located at the end of a long stalk with an orbit to cover and protect. Callichimaera, however, has large compound eyes with no sockets to protect them. The researchers first thought Callichimaera was a crab in the last larval stage called megalopa, which means big eyes. In this stage crabs have very large eyes; however, this is a brief moment in the development of the crab. As the crab matures into a juvenile the body outgrows the eyes.

To test this, Luque and first author Kelsey Jenkins, PhD candidate at Yale, analyzed over 1,000 specimens of living and extinct crabs representing 15 crab species from across the crab family tree. The specimens included crabs at different stages of development and encompassed a range of habitats, ecologies, lifestyles, and bathymetric ranges. They measured the dimensions of the eyes and bodies of the crab specimens from infant to adult and found that, unlike the other crab species, Callichimaera retained its large eyes throughout development. In fact, Callichimaera’s eyes were the fastest growing of all species and could reach up to 16% of their entire body, which is about the size of a quarter. For comparison imagine a human with eyes the size of soccer balls.

“Having such big and unprotected eyes implies that they were exposed at all times, plus eyes that big impose a huge investment of energy and resources to maintain them. Thus, this animal must have relied considerably on vision,” Luque said.

CAPTION

Callichimaera perplexa: The oldest swimming crab from the dinosaur era.

CREDIT

Credit: Daniel Ocampo R. (Vencejo Films)

CAPTION

Beautiful fossil chimaera crab showing its large eyes.

CREDIT

Credit: Daniel Ocampo R. (Vencejo Films)

CAPTION

Figure from iScience: Visual acuity and eye parameter of Callichimaera .Figure (A) Interommatidial angles D4 of C. perplexa and marine and terrestrial arthropods reflecting visual acuity. Figure (B) Eye parameter (P) values in C. perplexa and marine and terrestrial arthropods that correspond to decreasing environmental luminosity.

CREDIT

Credit: From iScience paper

 “If something has eyes this big, they're definitely very highly visual. This is in stark contrast to crabs with tiny, vestigial eyes where they may only be 1 to 3% of the animal's body size,” Jenkins said.

Further analysis showed that Callichimaera was an animal with high visual acuity similar to dragonflies – which are among the apex predators of the insect world – and a mantis shrimp. The remarkable preservation of internal soft tissues in the eyes of Callichimaera, such as the optic lobes (neural tissues), shows they were more similar to the eyes of bees and other large-eyed insects than the stalked eyes of crabs. The animal was also more adapted to well-lit conditions. All of the anatomical information available pointed towards Callichimaera being a predator.

“Even though it’s the cutest, smallest crab, the big eyes of Callichimaera and its overall body form with unusually large oar-like legs indicate that it might have been a fierce, swimming predator, rather than a bottom-crawler as most crabs are,” Luque said.

“Crabs whose eyes are growing very quickly are more visually inclined — likely they're very good predators who use their eyes when hunting — whereas slow-growing eyes tend to be found in scavenger crabs that are less visually reliant,” said co-author Professor Derek E.G. Briggs, Yale.

Callichimaera's continued surprise findings matches the name’s translation of "perplexing beautiful chimera." “I call it my beautiful nightmare because it took me over a decade of visiting museums around the world and analyzing thousands of fossils and living crabs to understand how unique the animal was. It is so perplexing, so different from anything else, that it can be considered the platypus of the crab world,” Luque said. “The exceptional preservation of organisms with soft or lightly mineralized tissues, such as eyes, allows us to take new glimpses into the history and evolution of life through deep time in spectacular ways. To make sense of our present, we must look at our past, and for this, the data is in the strata.”

Video1_Callichimaera perplexa_by Alex Duque.mp4 (VIDEO)

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The study is available online at iScience. It will be available in print on January 21.

The work was funded in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF, grant DEB #1856679), the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Fondo Corrigan-ACGGP-ARES (Colombia), and the Colombian Geological Survey, to the senior author.

Corresponding authors

Kelsey M. Jenkins, Kelsey.jenkins@yale.edu Twitter: @reptiliferous

Javier Luque, jluque@fas.harvard.edu Twitter & Instagram: @javipaleobio

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JOURNAL

iScience

DOI

10.1016/j.isci.2021.103579 

ARTICLE TITLE

The remarkable visual system of a Cretaceous crab

New study shows the toll industrial farming takes on bird diversity

UBC researchers found that increased farm sizes resulted in a 15 per cent decline in bird diversity.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

A new UBC-led study looking into the impacts that large industrial farming has on biodiversity found that increased farm size causes a decline in bird diversity.

“Wildlife is a good indicator of a healthy agroecosystem and one thing we wanted to understand was the link between farm size and biodiversity in surrounding areas,” says Frederik Noack, Assistant Professor in the Food and Resource Economics Group, part of UBC’s Faculty of Land and Food Systems.

To understand this relationship, the researchers studied how different farming indicators impact the diversity of local birds in the farmland bordering the former Iron Curtain in Germany.

Researchers found that increased farm sizes resulted in a 15 per cent decline in bird diversity.

Although the former inner German border has lost its political implications after the German reunification, farms are still five times larger on the eastern side of the border compared to the western side as a legacy of the former farm collectivization in East Germany.

Farms in East Germany have been privatized for 30 years now, but the sharp differences in farm sizes remains along the former border. This provides an ideal setup to study the impact of farm size on biodiversity in an otherwise ecological and politically similar environment.

A diverse bird population provides natural pest control and maintenance of an overall healthy ecosystem.

“Surprisingly, we found that larger farms are not damaging themselves, but their typical characteristics tend to harm bird diversity,” Noack explains. “Larger farms have typically larger fields and create more homogenous landscapes with less diverse bird habitats.”

He says these results suggest that maintaining diverse habitats within the agricultural landscape plays a crucial role for conserving bird diversity.

“Providing a mix of different crop type and other land uses such as forests and grassland within the agricultural landscape is crucial for biodiversity conservation and can mitigate the negative impact of agricultural industrialization,” he said.

Noack says that their findings highlight the importance of analyzing the agricultural changes in a landscape context.

The study used a biodiversity database along with citizen science observations, and layered this on top of satellite farm images to make correlations between farm size, crop cover, land cover diversity and land use intensity.

Combining geolocalized bird diversity data from systematic bird surveys and opportunistic citizen science data with high resolution satellite images allowed researchers to study the mechanisms that relate farm size to biodiversity.

“The high resolution land cover data allowed us to characterize the bird habitat for each bird diversity observation including field size, crop type, and land use intensity. Based on our results we can then provide the information for policies to mitigate the negative impact of agricultural industrialization on biodiversity.”

Noack says agri-environmental policies play an important role in harmonizing agricultural intensification with biodiversity conservation targets.

“Our results show that the negative impact of increased farm size can be mitigated by conserving land cover diversity within the agricultural landscape. In practice, this could mean incentivizing riparian buffer strips, forest patches, hedgerows, or agroforestry.”

Other researchers involved include Ashley Larsen, Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, University of California, Santa Barbara; Johannes Kamp, Department of Conservation Biology, University of Göttingen, Germany; and Christian Levers, Department of Environmental Geography, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Click to read the American Journal of Economics study A bird’s eye view of farm size and biodiversity: The ecological legacy of the Iron Curtain.

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JOURNAL

American Journal of Agricultural Economics

DOI

10.1111/ajae.12274 

We conclude' or 'I believe'? Rationality declined decades ago

The use of rationality related words has been on the rise since 1850, but started an accelerating decline around 1980

Peer-Reviewed Publication

WAGENINGEN UNIVERSITY AND RESEARCH

 

IMAGE: EXAMPLES OF TRENDS IN THE USE OF WORDS RELATED TO RATIONALITY (TOP PANEL) VERSUS INTUITION (BOTTOM PANEL) view more 

CREDIT: MARTEN SCHEFFER INGRID VAN DE LEEMPUT JOHAN BOLLEN

Scientists from Wageningen University and Research (WUR) and Indiana University discovered that the increasing irrelevance of factual truth in public discourse is part of a groundswell trend that started decades ago.

While the current ‘post-truth era’ has taken many by surprise, the study shows that over the past forty years public interest has undergone an accelerating shift from the collective to the individual, and from rationality towards emotion.

From ratio to sentiment

Analysing language from millions of books the researchers found that words associated to reasoning such as ‘determine’ and ‘conclusion’ rose systematically since 1850, while words related to human experience such as ‘feel’ and ‘believe’ declined. This pattern reversed over the past 40 years paralleled by a shift from a collectivistic to an individualistic focus as reflected by the ratio of singular to plural pronouns such as ‘I’/‘we’.

“Interpreting this synchronous sea-change in book language remains challenging.” says co-author Johan Bollen of Indiana University. “However, as we show, the nature of this reversal occurs in fiction as well as non-fiction. Moreover, we observe the same pattern of change between sentiment and rationality flag words in New York Times articles, suggesting that it is not an artefact of the book corpora we analysed.”

Causes

“Inferring the drivers of long-term patterns seen from 1850 until 1980 necessarily remains speculative.” Says lead author Marten Scheffer of WUR. “One possibility when it comes to the trends from 1850 to 1980 is that the rapid developments in science and technology and their socio-economic benefits drove a rise in status of the scientific approach, which gradually permeated culture, society, and its institutions ranging from the education to politics. As argued early on by Max Weber, this may have led to a process of ‘disenchantment’ as the role of spiritualism dwindled in modernized, bureaucratic, and secularized societies.”

What precisely caused the observed reversal of the long-term trend around 1980 remains perhaps even more difficult to pinpoint. However, according to the authors there could be a connection to tensions arising from  changes in economic policies since the early 1980s, which may have been defended on rational arguments but the benefits of which were not equally distributed.

Social media

The authors did find that the shift from rationality to sentiment in book language accelerated around 2007 with the rise of social media, when across languages the frequency of fact-related words dropped while emotion-laden language surged, a trend paralleled by a shift from collectivistic to individualistic language.

Co-author Ingrid van de Leemput from WUR: “Whatever the drivers, our results suggest that the post-truth phenomenon is linked to a historical seesaw in the balance between our two fundamental modes of thinking: reasoning versus intuition. If true, it may well be impossible to reverse the sea-change we signal. Instead, societies may need to find a new balance, explicitly recognizing the importance of intuition and emotion, while at the same time making best use of the much needed power of rationality and science to deal with topics in their full complexity.”

Notes for editors

Full scientific article: “The rise and fall of rationality in language”: PNAS December 2021

Original news article on website Wageningen University & Research

For interviews and further information, please contact:

Europe:

Marten Scheffer, marten.scheffer@wur.nl  (English, Dutch and Spanish)

Ingrid van de Leemput, ingrid.vandeleemput@wur.nl (English, Dutch)

USA:

Johan Bollen jbollen@indiana.edu (English, Dutch)

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DOI

10.1073/pnas.2107848118 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Should e-cigarettes be licensed as medicines?

As the UK announces support for medicinal licensing of electronic cigarettes, experts debate the issue in The BMJ

Peer-Reviewed Publication

BMJ

Nicholas Hopkinson at Imperial College London welcomes the move, saying this will give doctors another means to help smokers quit.

E-cigarettes are currently regulated as consumer products so cannot be promoted as smoking cessation aids, he explains. Yet a Cochrane review already supports existing e-cigarettes as a smoking cessation aid, as does recently updated guidance from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.

The introduction of e-cigarettes that have been through a stricter medicinal licensing process “should provide further reassurance to healthcare professionals that they can help their patients to quit smoking in this way, particularly in mental health settings where smoking rates remain high,” he writes.

It is also likely to improve confidence among smokers who so far have been reluctant to try this approach, as well as reversing false beliefs about relative harm when compared with smoking, he adds.

He emphasises that medically licensed e-cigarettes, as and when they become available, will be only one among many tools to support smoking cessation, all ideally delivered alongside psychological support for behaviour change. 

It is also important to ensure that debate around e-cigarettes does not distract from other necessary tasks to achieve the UK’s ambition to be smoke free by 2030, such as introducing a “polluter pays” levy on tobacco industry profits and raising the age of sale from 18 to 21, he adds.

There are still more than six million people who smoke in the UK: medicinal licensing of e-cigarettes could help many of them to live longer, healthier lives, he concludes.

But Jørgen Vestbo at the University of Manchester and colleagues say that the effectiveness of e-cigarettes in helping people to quit is unproved and potentially harmful.

They point to trial evidence showing that people using e-cigarettes tend to continue vaping, whereas most people using medicinal nicotine products quit, and many restart smoking while they continue vaping (known as “dual use”). The widespread use of e-cigarettes also carries a substantial societal risk of accepting addiction, they add.

What’s more, many e-cigarettes are produced and marketed by companies owned by the tobacco industry - an industry with a history of lying to the public and spending fortunes on marketing, including to teenagers. “We should protect children and adolescents from these cynical marketeers and allow them to be the first generation in a century not addicted to nicotine,” they write.

To disguise e-cigarettes as a sensible harm reduction strategy “will risk weakening sustainable smoking cessation strategies,” they argue. 

“Instead, doctors should help to revive a decent NHS funded smoking cessation service, lobby politicians to increase taxes on products containing nicotine, and restrict smoking - as well as vaping - even more.” 

[Ends]

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JOURNAL

The BMJ

DOI

10.1136/bmj.n2912 

ARTICLE TITLE

Head to Head: Should e-cigarettes be licensed as medicines?

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

12-Jan-2022