COVID-19 took serious toll on Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander mental and physical health

Two UC Riverside-led studies found concerning psychological and physical health problems among more than 300 NH/PIs in five US states

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - RIVERSIDE

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders, or NH/PIs, comprising more than 20 ethnic groups hailing from Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia, are understudied despite being the third fastest growing racial group in the United States. Two studies now report that NH/PIs have been deeply affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Andrew Subica at the University of California, Riverside, led research groups that surveyed more than 300 NH/PIs from April-November 2021 in Washington, Utah, Oregon, California, and Arkansas — states with large NH/PI populations. Their findings are published in two journals.

Described in the first paper, published in Public Health Reports, the researchers found 30% of the NH/PI participants reported being diagnosed with COVID-19 and approximately 50% of the participants reported having a close family member with COVID-19.

Further, nearly 1 out of 5 NH/PIs reported the death of a close family member due to COVID-19 infection; the overall U.S. COVID-19 mortality rate was 1 death per 400 persons at the end of 2021.

“NH/PIs may carry the highest rates of COVID-19 infections and deaths of any U.S. racial/ethnic minority group during the pandemic,” said Subica, an associate professor in the School of Medicine’s Department of Social Medicine, Population, and Public Health. “For example, an earlier report found NH/PIs possessed the highest per capita death rate in 90% of states reporting NH/PI COVID-19 deaths.”

According to Subica, several factors increase NH/PIs’ risk for exposure to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that spreads COVID-19. These factors include employment in essential frontline positions, dwelling in dense households and neighborhoods, and traditional sociocultural practices and obligations that result in large in-person group contact.

“Our findings call for greater attention and funding of NH/PI research to prevent and reduce NH/PIs’ glaring health disparities associated with COVID-19,” Subica said. “Due to their high rates of comorbidities such as obesity, cancer, heart disease, and smoking that increase their risk of severe COVID-19 outcomes, it is crucial that future studies monitor and evaluate long-term COVID-19-related health issues facing NH/PI communities.”

The research paper is titled “Assessing the Health and Impact of COVID-19 on Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders.”

Substance use patterns and treatment needs

In the second paper, published in Drug and Alcohol Review, Subica and his team share their findings after conducting a large-scale investigation of NH/PI substance use, mental health, and treatment need during COVID-19.

The research team found NH/PI communities experienced high levels of alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use, depression, anxiety, and unmet treatment need during COVID-19; 47% and 22% of NH/PI adults reported current alcohol and cigarette use, respectively, while 35% reported lifetime illicit substance use. The national smoking rate during COVID-19 is 13%.

Further, more than 1 in 4 NH/PI adults, or 27%, screened positive for alcohol use disorder, a rate that is more than 2.6 times the national alcohol use disorder rate during the pandemic. 

Participants also reported heightened depression, anxiety, and psychological distress during COVID-19 with 27% of NH/PIs screening positive for major depressive disorder and 20% for generalized anxiety disorder, vastly exceeding the general population rates for these disorders.

“What our work makes clear is that we need targeted research and treatment services to mitigate COVID-19’s negative behavioral health impact on NH/PI communities,” Subica said. 

The researchers also found that approximately 50% of non-binary NH/PIs in the sample screened positive for probable alcohol use disorder and more than 50% reported needing mental health treatment during COVID-19.

“This illuminates the need for further research exploring the behavioral health needs of these at-risk individuals,” Subica said. “We need to develop and implement culturally responsive prevention, intervention, and recovery programs to reduce NH/PI substance use and mental health disparities during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The research paper is titled “Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use, mental health, and treatment need in the United States during COVID-19.”
 
Subica was joined in the first study by Dr. Howard B. Moss of UCR; Nia Aitaoto of Pacific Islander Center of Primary Care Excellence; Quixi Li of Special Services for Groups; Brittany N. Morey of UCI; Li-Tzy Wu of Duke University; Derek K. Iwamoto of the University of Maryland; and Erick G. Guerrero of I-Lead Institute.

Subica, Moss, Guerrero, Aitaoto, Morey, and Wu were joined in the second study by Tammy K. K. Martin and Scott K. Okamoto of Hawaii Pacific University.

Both projects were supported by the National Institute of Drug Abuse and National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism of the National Institutes of Health. None of the content of this news release represents the official views of these institutes.

The University of California, Riverside is a doctoral research university, a living laboratory for groundbreaking exploration of issues critical to Inland Southern California, the state and communities around the world. Reflecting California's diverse culture, UCR's enrollment is more than 26,000 students. The campus opened a medical school in 2013 and has reached the heart of the Coachella Valley by way of the UCR Palm Desert Center. The campus has an annual impact of more than $2.7 billion on the U.S. economy. To learn more, visit www.ucr.edu.

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JOURNAL

Public Health Reports

DOI

10.1177/00333549221123579 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Survey

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Assessing the Health and Impact of COVID-19 on Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders.

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

16-Sep-2022

The building blocks for exploring new exotic states of matter

Combining synthesis, characterization, and theory confirmed the exotic properties and structure of a new intrinsic ferromagnetic topological material.

DOE/US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

Using the High Flux Isotope Reactor’s DEMAND instrument, neutron scattering studies identified the crystal & magnetic structure of an intrinsic ferromagnetic topological insulator MnBi8Te13. The last column of inset shows its crystal & magnetic structures view more
Credit: Image courtesy Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The Science

Topological insulators act as electrical insulators on the inside but conduct electricity along their surfaces. Researchers study some of these insulators’ exotic behavior using an external magnetic field to force the ion spins within a topological insulator to be parallel to each other. This process is known as breaking time-reversal symmetry. Now, a research team has created an intrinsic ferromagnetic topological insulator. This means the time-reversal symmetry is broken without applying a magnetic field. The team employed a combination of synthesis, characterization tools, and theory to confirm the structure and properties of new magnetic topological materials. In the process, they discovered an exotic axion insulator in MnBi8Te13.

The Impact

Researchers can use magnetic topological materials to realize exotic forms of matter that are not seen in other types of material. Scientists believe that the phenomena these materials exhibit could help advance quantum technology and increase the energy efficiency of future electronic devices. Researchers believe that a topological insulator that is inherently ferromagnetic, rather than gaining its properties by adding small numbers of magnetic atoms, is ideal for studying novel topological behaviors. This is because no external magnetic field is needed to study the material’s properties. It also means the material’s magnetism is more uniformly distributed. However, scientists have previously faced challenges in creating this kind of material. This new material consists of layers of manganese, bismuth, and tellurium atoms. It could provide opportunities for exploring novel phases of matter and developing new technologies. It also helps researchers study basic scientific questions about quantum materials.

Summary

The research team, led by scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles, developed the intrinsic ferromagnetic topological insulator by making a compound with alternating layers of MnBi2Te4 and Bi2Te3, bonded by weak interlayer forces of attraction between molecules. Scientists recently discovered that MnBi2Te4 is a naturally magnetic topological material. However, when layers of magnetic MnBi2Te4 are directly stacked on one another, the magnetic moments within neighboring layers point in opposite directions, making the material antiferromagnetic as a whole – losing the topological aspects of the properties that are important for technologies. The researchers solved this problem by making a new compound with three nonmagnetic layers of Bi2Te3 between layers of MnBi2Te4, which, combined, creates MnBi8Te13. This material design increases the distance between the MnBi2Te4 layers, which successfully eliminates the antiferromagnetic effect, leading to long-range ferromagnetism below 10.5 K with strong coupling between magnetism and charge carriers.

Important aspects of this research were neutron scattering experiments through the DEMAND instrument at the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) that pinpointed how atoms are arranged within the MnBi8Te13 material and confirmed its ferromagnetic state. Because neutrons have their own magnetic moment, they can be used to determine the magnetic structure inside a material. The scientists additionally used angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy experiments at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, a Department of Energy user facility, and first-principles, density functional theory calculations to investigate the material’s electronic and topological state. Combining the assessments from all of these methods, the researchers were able to validate the ferromagnetic and topological properties consistent with an axion insulator with sizable surface hybridization gaps and a nontrivial Chern number.

 

Funding

The research was supported by the DOE Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division and the Scientific User Facilities Division, the National Science Foundation, the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in India, the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan, the National Cheng Kung University, the National Center for Theoretical Sciences in Taiwan, and the Ministry of Education in Taiwan. Research was performed at three DOE Office of Science user facilities: the High Flux Isotope Reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 

World Patient Safety Day 2022 –improving medication safety and other safety initiatives

European Society of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care (ESAIC) fully supports WHO’s Medication without Harm campaign; other society initiatives present a broad response and include the key patient safety education program Safer Care to Save Lives

Reports and Proceedings

THE EUROPEAN SOCIETY OF ANAESTHESIOLOGY AND INTENSIVE CARE (ESAIC)

• European Society of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care (ESAIC) fully supports WHO’s Medication without Harm campaign

 

• Recommendations to reduce medication-related harm formed part of the 2010 ESAIC global patient safety project ‘Helsinki Declaration on Patient Safety in Anaesthesiology’ since signed by 94 countries

 

• Other society initiatives present a broad response and include the key patient safety education programme Safer Care to Save Lives

 

• ESAIC is also creating ‘peer networks’ connecting anaesthesiologists and critical care physicians to allow them to share vital patient safety knowledge and experience

WHO’s World Patient Safety Day in 2022 (Saturday, 17 September) will focus on improving medication safety. The European Society of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care (ESAIC) fully endorses this initiative and highlights that it first promoted medication safety back in 2010 as part of its ‘Helsinki Declaration on Patient Safety in Anaesthesiology’, signed by all anaesthesiology national societies in Europe and many countries beyond Europe’s borders.

Initiatives to further promote medication safety have been made since the Helsinki Declaration by ESAIC and its sister organisation, the European Board of Anaesthesiology, including through publications in the European Journal of Anaesthesiology.

According to WHO, medication harm accounts for 50% of the overall preventable harm in medical care. Furthermore, US$ 42 billion of global total health expenditure worldwide can be avoided if medication errors are prevented.

Dr David Whitaker, European Board of Anaesthesiology (EBA) representative in ESAIC’s Patient Safety and Quality Committee, and Chair the EBA Patient Safety Committee, Manchester UK, commenting on the WHO initiative, said: “Great opportunities exist to reduce and remove human factor errors in medication safety through better pharmacy procurement of safer, end-user friendly medicine preparations, avoiding preparations that look and sound alike, can easily be confused with others, using ready-to-administer prefilled syringes and standardisation of work surfaces and medication processes.”

He adds: “Key factors around this that ESAIC would like to emphasise are that the manipulation of medicines in clinical areas should be minimised to avoid errors – ideally medications should already be prepared and require no further staff interventions. Injectable medicines should be presented as prefilled syringes, already labelled or as other ‘ready-to-administer’ preparations wherever possible.”

“All medications prepared for routine use in anaesthesia, intensive care, critical emergency medicine and pain medicine should be clearly labelled. In addition, when drawing up medicines into syringes they should always be labelled immediately after filling before they leave the operator’s hand. Empty syringes should never be labelled. In combination, these interventions would reduce much of the avoidable medication harm we regrettably still see with injectable medicines today.”

While ESAIC welcomes the WHO project on patient safety, the society highlights that this is only one part of the overall patient safety picture and points to several other initiatives it has launched to improve all aspects of the patient safety continuum. Patient Safety is central to ESAIC’s core strategy: the society is dedicated to improving patients' experience as they undergo care and reducing unnecessary harm wherever it occurs.

ESAIC’s Safer Care to Save Lives project is a comprehensive package of Patient Safety education for anaesthesiologists, healthcare professionals, hospital management and patients, driven by the society’s Patient Safety and Quality Committee working with industry partners. The project was born out of extensive research. It is built on the principles laid out by the Helsinki Declaration, the Consensus Statement of the multi-Society Patient Safety Summit at the European Parliament in 2020, and the WHO Multi-professional Patient Safety Curriculum.

ESAIC’s Dr Jannicke Mellin-Olsen (ESAIC Patient Safety and Quality Committee Member and Past President, World Federation of Societies of Anaesthesiologists) said: “Education in patient safety will empower all those involved in healthcare to contribute with their knowledge and experience. This will ensure that no patient is harmed when they trust their medical team to safeguard their life and health when they are at their most vulnerable during our care.”

Recommendations for this new safety project also came from the ESAIC-convened Patient Safety Summit in 2020. The summit saw ESAIC leading a collaboration with the major medical societies in Europe to bring Patient Safety to the EU parliament. The result of the was “Multi-disciplinary and patient-centred approaches to perioperative patient safety: A European consensus statement”.

Safer Care to Save Lives includes a series of eLearning modules for the beginner. Another component is the Advanced Patient Safety Course, a unique course to earn a qualification in Patient Safety, which takes place in Amsterdam on September 19 and 20, the days immediately following World Patient Safety Day (the course is completely sold out). There will also be an annual Patient Safety and Quality Masterclass - a deeper, interactive experience covering 3 days; and an annual Anaesthesia and Intensive Care Crisis Simulation Masterclass, which helps improve the practice of key requirements of the Helsinki Declaration through high fidelity simulation scenarios.

The COVID-19 pandemic also thrust anaesthesiologists and intensive care specialists into the headlines as never before, with every part of their work, mostly previously unseen by and unknown to the public, suddenly part of the daily news agenda. This, along with the research as mentioned above on the implementation of the Helsinki Declaration, was the inspiration for another ESAIC project:  Peer Review in Patient Safety in Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care (PRiPSAIC).

PRiPSAIC will create networks of anaesthesiologists and intensive care physicians both within and between countries and give them the tools and support they need to examine their own practice and those of their peers and provide solutions for the future.

ESAIC will work with industry partners, national societies of anaesthesiology and intensive care to find and network ‘change champions’ and ambassadors for patient safety in hospitals in selected European countries; the project will be run in four countries: Lithuania, Finland, Republic of Moldova and the Czech Republic.

PRiPSAIC will involve training participants in evaluating patient safety using the implementation methodology and the site visit process used in the Helsinki Declaration Follow-Up research project; allow international exchange of knowledge and experience in patient safety and provide a practical ‘toolkit’ for the self-assessment of patient safety by departments of anaesthesiology to support further implementation of the Helsinki Declaration. One site visit has already been completed, in which doctors from Lithuania visited Glasgow Royal Infirmary in Scotland.

Prof Andrew Smith (Lancaster Patient Safety and Health Services Research Unit and representative in ESAIC’s Patient Safety and Quality Committee) said: “Every anaesthesiologist and every department they work in have skills, knowledge, and experience in patient safety. Unfortunately, too often, anaesthesiologists work in isolation. This new project is about bringing people together in the name of sharing our knowledge on patient safety.”

Ultimately, ESAIC joins other organisations worldwide to mark #WPSD and help raise awareness of medication-safety harm due to medication errors and unsafe practices, as well as of ways to improve safety standards and is dedicated to leading the way in patient safety and ensuring the best care for every patient.

 

- END –

Note to Editors

About ESAIC

The European Association of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care (ESAIC) is the leading European organisation for members and national societies for Anaesthesia, Intensive Care, Pain and Perioperative Medicine. ESAIC aims to: promote the exchange of information between European anaesthesiologists; it serves as the hub to disseminate information in regard to anaesthesiology. The Society helps raise the standards of the speciality by fostering and encouraging education, research, scientific progress and exchange of information while promoting improvements in the safety and quality of care of patients who are under the care of anaesthesiologists inside and outside the operating room by facilitating and harmonising the activities of national and international societies of anaesthesiologists in Europe. Furthermore, ESAIC promotes the professional role of anaesthesiologists to improve the care of patients in the fields of anaesthesiology, intensive care, perioperative medicine, emergency medicine, and pain medicine.

For more information, please visit:  https://www.esaic.org/patient-safety/

About the KOLs quoted on this PR

• Dr David Whitaker, ESAIC Patient Safety and Quality Committee (Chair the EBA Patient Safety Committee, Manchester UK. Please e-mail to arrange interview. E) whitaker2000@gmail.com
• Dr Jannicke Mellin-Olsen, ESAIC Patient Safety and Quality Committee; Trondheim University, Norway; and Immediate Past-President of World Federation of Societies of Anaesthesiologists. Please e-mail to arrange interview. E) jannicke@mellin.no / mellinolsen@gmail.com
• Professor Andrew Smith, ESAIC Patient Safety and Quality Committee; consultant anaesthetist at the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust and Director of the Lancaster Patient Safety Research Unit, Lancaster University, not available for interview as currently on holiday.

For further information, please contact:

Tony Kirby of Tony Kirby PR T) +44 7834 385827 E) tony@tonykirby.com

Sources:

1. WHO Patient Safety pages and WHO World Patient Safety Day campaign Medication without Harm https://www.who.int/campaigns/world-patient-safety-day/2022
2. Recommendations for safe medication practice from European Board of Anaesthesiology, as published in EJA
3. European Consensus Statement (note, ESAIC was formerly known as ESA, until 2020)
4. The Helsinki Declaration on Patient Safety in Anaesthesiology and country signatories
5. Safer Care to Save Lives
6. PRiPSAIC
7. The WHO Multi-professional Patient Safety Curriculum

Damage-free way to gauge the health of next-gen batteries for electric vehicles

Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy shows how solid-state lithium metal batteries degrade

Peer-Reviewed Publication

TOKYO METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: AEROSOL DEPOSITION OF CATHODE MATERIAL INVOLVES ACCELERATING MICROSCOPIC CHUNKS AND COLLIDING THEM WITH AN ELECTROLYTE SURFACE TO FORM A DENSE FILM. TO UNDERSTAND THE STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF THEIR NEW BATTERY DESIGN, THE TEAM USED ELECTROCHEMICAL IMPEDANCE SPECTROSCOPY, APPLYING ELECTRICAL SIGNALS TO MEASURE THE EFFECTIVE RESISTANCES OF THE RANGE OF INTERFACES PRESENT IN THE BATTERY. view more 

CREDIT: TOKYO METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY

Tokyo, Japan – Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have demonstrated that electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) can be a powerful non-destructive tool to study the degradation mechanisms of all-solid-state lithium metal batteries. They studied ceramic-based all-solid-state Li metal batteries prepared by aerosol deposition and heating, identifying the specific interface responsible for the drop in performance. Their work accurately highlights the engineering hurdles that need to be overcome to bring these top-in-class batteries to the market.

Electric vehicles (EVs) are a crucial part of efforts worldwide to cut carbon emissions. And at the heart of every EV is its battery. Battery design remains a key bottleneck when it comes to maximizing driving range and improving vehicle safety. One of the proposed solutions, all-solid-state lithium metal batteries, has the potential to provide higher energy density, safety, and lower complexity, but technical issues continue to hamper their transition into everyday vehicles.

A major problem is the large interfacial resistance between electrodes and solid electrolytes. In many battery designs, both cathode and electrolyte materials are brittle ceramics; this makes it difficult to have good contact between them. There is also the challenge of diagnosing which interface is actually causing problems. Studying degradation in all-solid-state lithium metal batteries generally requires cutting them open: this makes it impossible to find out what is happening while the battery is operating.

A team led by Professor Kiyoshi Kanamura at Tokyo Metropolitan University have been developing all-solid-state Li metal batteries with lower interfacial resistance using a technique called aerosol deposition. Microscopic chunks of cathode material are accelerated towards a layer of ceramic electrolyte material where they collide and form a dense layer. To overcome the issue of cracks forming on collision, the team coated the chunks of cathode material with a “solder” material, that is, a softer, low melting point material which can be heat treated to generate excellent contact between the newly formed cathode and electrolyte. Their final all-solid-state Li/Li7La3Zr2O12/LiCoO2 cell delivers a high initial discharge capacity of 128 mAh g-1 at both 0.2 and 60 °C and maintains a high-capacity retention of 87% after 30 charge/discharge cycles. This is a best-in-class result for all-solid-state Li metal batteries with ceramic oxide electrolytes, making it all the more important to really get to grips with how they might degrade.

Here, the team used electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), a widely used diagnostic tool in electrochemistry. By interpreting how the cell responds to electrical signals of different frequency, they could separate out the resistances of the range of different interfaces in their battery. In the case of their new cell, they found that a resistance increase between the cathode material and the solder was the main reason for cell capacity decay. Importantly, they achieved this without tearing the cell apart. They were also able to back this up using in-situ electron microscopy, clearly identifying interface cracking during cycling.

The team’s innovations have not only realized a cutting-edge battery design but highlighted the next steps for making further improvements using a damage-free, widely available method. Their new paradigm promises exciting new advances for batteries in the next generation of EVs.

This work was supported by the Advanced Low Carbon Technology Research and Development Program (ALCA)—Specially Promoted Research for Innovative Next Generation Batteries (SPRING) (Grant No. JPMJAL1301) from the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST).

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DOI

10.1021/acsami.2c09841 

ARTICLE TITLE

Degradation Mechanism of All-Solid-State Li-Metal Batteries Studied by Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy

Lithium-ion batteries: One size does not fit all in application or in assessment

Electron microscopy reveals molecular mechanisms of lithium-ion batteries

Peer-Reviewed Publication

TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY PRESS

 

IMAGE: A REVIEW PAPER BY A TIANJIN UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH TEAM USED VARIOUS ADVANCED ELECTRON MICROSCOPY AND ASSOCIATE CHARACTERIZATION TECHNIQUES TO CLARIFY TWO STRUCTURE-BASED MECHANISMS OF LITHIUM-ION BATTERIES. view more 

CREDIT: NANO RESEARCH ENERGY, TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Seeing is believing — or, rather, seeing can aid in understanding, especially when it comes to the mechanisms underpinning lithium-ion batteries. Despite near-ubiquitous use in cell phones, computers and more, the complex electrochemical environments of lithium-ion batteries remain murky. To better understand and to improve battery performance, researchers examined the current scientific literature and used electron microscopy to take a closer look at the charge-transfer and lithium-ion migration mechanisms that produce power.

 

This study was publicly available online on Sept. 6 in Nano Research Energy.

 

“Commercial lithium-ion batteries are widely used as energy storage devices, including electric vehicles, portable electronics and grid energy storage,” said Yi Ding, a professor of Tianjin University of Technology. “Energy, power, charge-discharge rate, cost, cycle life, safety and environmental impact are to be considered while adopting lithium-ion batteries for a suitable application, but each specific application faces a variety of different challenges.”

 

The amount of energy stored is important for portable electronics, while cost and safety are more important for electric vehicles, for example. Cost and safety are also important for energy grid needs, but energy density becomes less so than for electric vehicles. The trade-off between these elements shift based on need, but the ability to tune performance is limited by incomplete understanding of the materials used in batteries.

 

“The active electrode materials are the main portion responsible for the cell chemistry and performance and, ultimately, affect the commercialization of the constructed battery,” Ding said. “The performances, such as cycle life and energy density, of existing commercial electrode material systems still need to be improved, so it is important to understand the inherent physical and chemical properties, such as structural evolution/kinetics during lithium de-embedding and the effect of electrode-electrolyte interface on the performance of lithium-ion batteries.”

 

The researchers reviewed recent advances in electron microscopy to see how traditional characterization techniques measure up when it comes to understanding the structure-activity relationships of commercial lithium-ion batteries.

 

“By comparing with the characterization content obtained by traditional characterization techniques, such as X-ray diffraction and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, we illustrate the advantages and limitations of common electronic microscopes and recently developed advanced electronic microscopic characterization techniques, such as in situ electron microscopy technology, in this critical research,” Ding said.

 

The researchers examined how advanced electron microscopy and the associated characterization techniques can provide different insights into how, for example, lithium ions migrate in the battery to produce charge or how charge transfer can trigger energy use. They specifically focused on transition metal dissolution and charge transfer mechanism in the charging-discharging process of lithium-ion battery positive electrodes; the structure and evolution of cathode-electrode interfaces and solid electrolyte interphase during long-term cycling; and the effect of electrode structure and interface on lithium-ion migration.  

 

The conclusion, according to Ding, is that next-generation lithium-ion battery technologies with better cost and performance benefits are needed.  

 

“We propose the possibility of combining electron microscopy with other techniques to obtain more comprehensive information,” Ding said, noting that electron microscopy has three common limitations in battery assessment. These include inconsistent electrochemical environments between electron microscopy fields and actual batteries; unstable time windows that can skew data related to evolution of the sample; and certain batteries cannot be quantitatively assessed at the nanoscale. “Even with limitations, these discussions allow researchers to gain a deeper understanding of how commercial lithium-ion batteries operate at the microscale and provide guidance for design strategies for high-performance practical batteries.”

 

Other contributors include Chao Li, Bowen Liu and co-corresponding author Ningyi Jiang, Tianjin Key Laboratory of Advanced Functional Porous Materials, Institute for New Energy Materials and Low-Carbon Technology, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tianjin University of Technology. Jiang is also affiliated with Tianjin University’s School of Chemical Engineering and Technology.

 

The National Key Research and Development Program of China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars funded this work.

 

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About Nano Research Energy 

 

Nano Research Energy is launched by Tsinghua University Press, aiming at being an international, open-access and interdisciplinary journal. We will publish research on cutting-edge advanced nanomaterials and nanotechnology for energy. It is dedicated to exploring various aspects of energy-related research that utilizes nanomaterials and nanotechnology, including but not limited to energy generation, conversion, storage, conservation, clean energy, etc. Nano Research Energy will publish four types of manuscripts, that is, Communications, Research Articles, Reviews, and Perspectives in an open-access form.

 

About SciOpen 

 

SciOpen is a professional open access resource for discovery of scientific and technical content published by the Tsinghua University Press and its publishing partners, providing the scholarly publishing community with innovative technology and market-leading capabilities. SciOpen provides end-to-end services across manuscript submission, peer review, content hosting, analytics, and identity management and expert advice to ensure each journal’s development by offering a range of options across all functions as Journal Layout, Production Services, Editorial Services, Marketing and Promotions, Online Functionality, etc. By digitalizing the publishing process, SciOpen widens the reach, deepens the impact, and accelerates the exchange of ideas.

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JOURNAL

Nano Research Energy

DOI

10.26599/NRE.2022.9120032 

ARTICLE TITLE

Elucidating the charge-transfer and Li-ion-migration mechanisms in commercial lithium-ion batteries with advanced electron microscopy

UCLA to participate in phase 3 trial evaluating monkeypox treatment

Grant and Award Announcement

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - LOS ANGELES HEALTH SCIENCES

The UCLA Clinical AIDS Research and Education (CARE) Center today announced its participation in STOMP (Study of Tecovirimat for Human Monkeypox Virus), or A5418, a phase 3, randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind trial evaluating the safety and efficacy of tecovirimat for the treatment of human monkeypox. STOMP, which is being led by the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG), has been designed to learn as much as possible in a broad population of people with monkeypox.

A global outbreak of monkeypox emerged in the spring of 2022 and has since spread throughout the world, with more than 56,000 cases in 103 countries and more than 21,000 cases in the United States. Monkeypox was first identified in 1958 and has caused an increasing number of infections annually in endemic countries. The current outbreak has been characterized by increased person-to-person transmission. Close contact during sexual activity is believed to play an important role in this outbreak. While most cases thus far have been reported among men who have sex with men, women and children have also been infected. There are currently no therapies approved to treat human monkeypox.

Tecovirimat (SIGA Technologies, Inc.) is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat smallpox, but it is not yet known if it can effectively or safely treat monkeypox.

This multi-center trial will enroll more than 500 adults with monkeypox virus infection. Importantly, this trial will include people with severe disease and those at high risk of severe disease including pregnant and breastfeeding people, children, and individuals with underlying immune deficiency and active inflammatory skin conditions who will receive open-label tecovirimat. Study participants with symptomatic monkeypox virus infection who do not meet the criteria for the open-label cohort will be randomly assigned in a ratio of two to one to receive either tecovirimat or placebo orally for 14 days. Participants who are randomized in the double-blinded cohort of the study who later progress to severe disease will be offered the option to switch to open-label tecovirimat, as will participants who report persistent severe pain from monkeypox virus infection.

All participants in STOMP will be followed for at least eight weeks through a combination of virtual and in-person visits, and daily self-reports to determine if those receiving tecovirimat heal more quickly compared to those receiving placebo. STOMP will also provide critical data on the optimal dosing and safety of tecovirimat in children and people who are pregnant and breastfeeding.

Individuals who have presumptive or confirmed monkeypox infection (testing positive within seven days) and started experiencing symptoms within 13 days are eligible. Testing will be provided by the study. Participants with presumptive monkeypox virus infection who have not yet been tested are able to enroll as long as their study-provided test is positive. Participants must also have at least one active skin lesion that has not yet scabbed, a mouth lesion, or proctitis (inflammation in the lining of the rectum).

“The ACTG has designed this study to give us the greatest possible insights into whether and how tecovirimat works against monkeypox, including whether the virus develops resistance to the treatment,” said ACTG chair Judith Currier, M.D., M.Sc., of UCLA. “An important part of that design is the inclusion of children and pregnant people. The study will also evaluate markers that may tell us that the drug is working so we can identify future promising drugs. Beyond addressing the current outbreak, this study has the potential to profoundly inform the treatment of individuals who acquire monkeypox virus in endemic countries.”

STOMP is sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which also funds the ACTG.  A list of participating sites in the United States can be found here.

STOMP is led by Timothy Wilkin, M.D., M.P.H., Weill Cornell Medicine and William Fischer, M.D., University of North Carolina (UNC) and Jason Zucker, M.D., Columbia University (vice-chairs) and is supported by Dr. Currier and Joseph J. Eron, M.D., UNC (ACTG Co-Chair).

Caller ID: Hyena ‘whoops’ feature individual signatures

Study also finds repetition of whoops may improve identification

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA-LINCOLN

 

IMAGE: A STUDY HAS REVEALED THAT LONG-DISTANCE HYENA CALLS FEATURE SIGNATURES UNIQUE TO INDIVIDUALS — A FORM OF CALLER ID DISTINCT ENOUGH THAT HYENAS CAN LIKELY TELL ONE FROM ANOTHER. view more 

CREDIT: ELI STRAUSS

As dusk begins cloaking the Maasai Mara grasslands of southwestern Kenya, a spotted hyena slinks beneath the woody umbrella that is the acacia tree.

The carnivore pauses, its rounded ears cocking forward as a faint sound sails in, an airborne missive traversing three miles at 767 miles per hour. Again, then again. Whhhhhooo-OOOppp! There it is… the call of a fellow spotted hyena, repeated rapidly enough to warrant attention. A warning of lions in the area, maybe, or of one hyena clan encroaching on another’s territory.

To help or not to help? With so much ground to cover, and so much potential peril lying beyond it, the answer could depend on who, exactly, is on the other end of the long-distance call. For spotted hyenas, then, identification is no laughing matter. But it is a whooping one, says a new study from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Kenna Lehmann and colleagues.

By applying machine learning to audio clips collected from the field, the team has concluded that hyena whoops feature signatures unique to individuals — a form of caller ID distinct enough that hyenas can likely tell one from another. For the first time, the researchers also managed to quantify how much repeating a call, as spotted hyenas do, might improve the odds of being identified.

The fact that spotted hyena clans are built on hierarchies of social rank, yet consist of multiple families that regularly come together and disperse across the savanna, makes individual identity especially important.

“Hyenas don’t treat every individual in the clan the same, so if they’re deciding whether to show up and help someone, they want to know who they’re showing up to help,” said Lehmann, a postdoctoral researcher at Nebraska.

In its search for vocal signatures, the team turned to what’s known as a random forest model. The researchers first trained the model by feeding it the identities of each hyena they had recorded, along with a massive number of acoustic traits extracted from each of its whoops.

From there, the model used a randomly selected series, or bout, of whoops from one hyena to generate decision trees. Each branch of a tree represented a binary choice in an acoustic trait from a batch that was also randomly selected. The model might begin by splitting the hyena whoops by higher vs. lower frequencies, for instance, then further divide those groupings into, say, longer vs. shorter calls, and so on. Ultimately, the tip of every branch represented a vote in favor of a particular hyena.

After assembling 500 of those haphazard decision trees — a random forest — the model predicted a given whoop’s identity based on which hyena received the most votes from those 500 trees. The team put its trained model to the test by asking it to identify which one of 13 hyenas produced a randomly selected bout of whoops, then repeated that test 999 times.

The model correctly paired a whoop bout with its hyena roughly 54% of the time, or about six times more often than would be expected by chance. That success rate suggests there’s enough variation in the whoops of different hyenas, and enough consistency within the whoops of a single hyena, for the model to reasonably tell them apart. And if the model can discern those differences, Lehmann said, it’s reasonable to presume that the hyenas can, too.

Three traits of the whoops seemed especially instructive: the duration of a call, the highest frequency of the call, and the average frequency during the portion of the call that was most consistent in pitch. The greater the disparity in those traits, the more likely the model — and potentially, hyenas themselves — would be to distinguish among the sources of the respective whoops.

Still, 54% is well short of 100%, even before accounting for the challenges inherent to communicating with a fellow hyena in the Maasai Mara. For one, spotted hyena clans can swell to more than 125 members, a number to seemingly strain even the most voluminous, airtight memories. There’s also the possibility of acoustic nuances getting lost in transmission, particularly when those signals are traveling multiple miles before reaching rounded ears. Wind, rain and other animal calls, meanwhile, can introduce noise to the signal.

“There’s an understanding that one of the ways to get your message across is to repeat it,” Lehmann said, “especially if you’re in a noisy environment or if you’re communicating over long distances.”

Prior research has shown that penguins, for example, reiterate their calls more often when the wind picks up. And other studies have found evidence that various animal species favor repetition under similarly noisy circumstances. But as far as Lehmann and her colleagues could tell, none had quantified the extent to which repeating an animal call might actually improve the transmission of information.

So the team again resorted to its random forest model. When the model guessed the identity of a hyena on the basis of just one whoop, it correctly pegged that identity only about half as often as it did when provided with three whoops. That accuracy rose even further with additional calls, peaking at seven whoops.

“It’s like getting a little bit more information (each time),” said Lehmann, who previously studied vocalizations in orcas. “The first time you hear it, you might notice: Oh, that was definitely a male or a female voice. Then, the next whoop, you might be able to narrow it down further.”

Lehmann and her colleagues knew that the calls of some animal species also contain signatures that differentiate the groups to which they belong from other same-species groups they might come across — somewhat akin to human accents or dialects. She recalled that some researchers studying orcas had become so familiar with pod signatures that the researchers could instinctively tell them apart. (One researcher claimed that a certain pod’s calls were “more nasally” than others’.)

Given the size of spotted hyena clans, Lehmann figured that their whoops, too, might employ a group-specific signature.

“Obviously, if you just have to remember what your group sounds like, and you don’t have to remember each of the 100-plus individual voices, that would be a lot easier to do,” she said.

When the researchers went looking for a group signature in the random forest, though, they couldn’t find one. One potential explanation: The apparent ability to memorize so many individual signatures may have rendered a clan signature either useless or, at best, not useful enough to bother developing.

“If you know who the individual is, you know what group they’re in,” Lehmann said. “Animals are pretty good at associating that information.

“So if they need individual signatures for other reasons, then there just may have never been a need to also develop a group signature, which is what this finding suggests. They should be able to keep track of all the individual voices and be able to distinguish: If this is Individual X, they’re in my group. I can choose to help them based on them being a group member, but maybe there are more decisions to be made about whether they’re a group mate that I actually want to help.”

‘A million different stars that have to align’

All of the team’s findings — the presence of individual signatures, the absence of a clan signature, the utility of repetition — ultimately originated not from a random forest but from the savanna of Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve. There, Michigan State University’s Kay Holekamp and colleagues have been conducting research on the spotted hyena since the late 1980s.

Lehmann herself spent a year in the Maasai Mara, which takes its name from the Maasai people who have long inhabited it. From 2014 to 2015, the then-doctoral student and several colleagues regularly drove west from Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, to a field site at the reserve.

“The first time I went out there … I thought, ‘Oh, I’m gonna be sleeping on the ground for 10 months, in a sleeping bag,’” said Lehmann, who soon learned that a sizable canvas tent and a soft bed awaited her. “But we were pretty spoiled out there, to be perfectly honest.”

If the accommodations were cushier than expected, the data collection proved anything but. From their vantage point in a Toyota Land Cruiser, Lehmann and her colleagues would point a directional microphone out the window and flip on an audio recorder. Unfortunately, the team was very much subject to the vagaries of Murphy’s law.

“You need to not be driving. And the car has to be turned off,” she said, noting that its engine drowned out the sounds of the Maasai Mara. “And the hyena has to whoop. And you have to be able to actually … see who it is. They can’t be in a bush. And they have to be close enough so that you can get a good recording. And the other hyenas need to be quiet at the same time. There are just, like, a million different stars that have to align to get a good recording that you can then use in an analysis like this.”

Under those circumstances, Lehmann said, patience was more than a virtue. It was a necessity.

“With this handheld recording equipment, we were opportunistically, constantly recording and just hoping that they whooped for us,” she said, laughing.

Over those months of hoping and waiting, the researchers stayed busy observing and chronicling behaviors that would inform other studies. As they did, they caught glimpses of the individuality that their analyses of the hyenas’ whoops would, years later, come to affirm.

“You definitely get to know that different individuals have different personalities or might react a certain way in different situations,” Lehmann said. “So it’s always fun to just get to know the hyenas and their little interactions and the dramas that might be going on in their lives.”

The team reported its findings in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Lehmann and Holekamp authored the study with Ariana Strandburg-Peshkin of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Frants Jensen of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Andrew Gersick of Princeton University. The researchers received support in part from the National Science Foundation.

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences

DOI

10.1098/rspb.2022.0548 

Users trust AI as much as humans for flagging problematic content

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PENN STATE

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Social media users may trust artificial intelligence — AI — as much as human editors to flag hate speech and harmful content, according to researchers at Penn State. 

The researchers said that when users think about positive attributes of machines, like their accuracy and objectivity, they show more faith in AI. However, if users are reminded about the inability of machines to make subjective decisions, their trust is lower.

The findings may help developers design better AI-powered content curation systems that can handle the large amounts of information currently being generated while avoiding the perception that the material has been censored, or inaccurately classified, said S. Shyam Sundar, James P. Jimirro Professor of Media Effects in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory.

“There's this dire need for content moderation on social media and more generally, online media,” said Sundar, who is also an affiliate of Penn State’s Institute for Computational and Data Sciences. “In traditional media, we have news editors who serve as gatekeepers. But online, the gates are so wide open, and gatekeeping is not necessarily feasible for humans to perform, especially with the volume of information being generated. So, with the industry increasingly moving towards automated solutions, this study looks at the difference between human and automated content moderators, in terms of how people respond to them.”

Both human and AI editors have advantages and disadvantages. Humans tend to more accurately assess whether content is harmful, such as when it is racist or potentially could provoke self-harm, according to Maria D. Molina, assistant professor of advertising and public relations, Michigan State, who is first author of the study. People, however, are unable to process the large amounts of content that is now being generated and shared online.

On the other hand, while AI editors can swiftly analyze content, people often distrust these algorithms to make accurate recommendations, as well as fear that the information could be censored.

“When we think about automated content moderation, it raises the question of whether artificial intelligence editors are impinging on a person’s freedom of expression,” said Molina. “This creates a dichotomy between the fact that we need content moderation — because people are sharing all of this problematic content — and, at the same time, people are worried about AI’s ability to moderate content. So, ultimately, we want to know how we can build AI content moderators that people can trust in a way that doesn’t impinge on that freedom of expression.”

Transparency and interactive transparency

According to Molina, bringing people and AI together in the moderation process may be one way to build a trusted moderation system. She added that transparency — or signaling to users that a machine is involved in moderation — is one approach to improving trust in AI. However, allowing users to offer suggestions to the AIs, which the researchers refer to as “interactive transparency,” seems to boost user trust even more.

To study transparency and interactive transparency, among other variables, the researchers recruited 676 participants to interact with a content classification system. Participants were randomly assigned to one of 18 experimental conditions, designed to test how the source of moderation — AI, human or both — and transparency — regular, interactive or no transparency — might affect the participant’s trust in AI content editors.  The researchers tested classification decisions — whether the content was classified as “flagged” or “not flagged” for being harmful or hateful. The “harmful” test content dealt with suicidal ideation, while the “hateful” test content included hate speech.

Among other findings, the researchers found that users’ trust depends on whether the presence of an AI content moderator invokes positive attributes of machines, such as their accuracy and objectivity, or negative attributes, such as their inability to make subjective judgments about nuances in human language.

Giving users a chance to help the AI system decide whether online information is harmful or not may also boost their trust. The researchers said that study participants who added their own terms to the results of an AI-selected list of words used to classify posts trusted the AI editor just as much as they trusted a human editor.

Ethical concerns

Sundar said that relieving humans of reviewing content goes beyond just giving workers a respite from a tedious chore. Hiring human editors for the chore means that these workers are exposed to hours of hateful and violent images and content, he said.

“There's an ethical need for automated content moderation,” said Sundar, who is also director of Penn State’s Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence. “There’s a need to protect human content moderators — who are performing a social benefit when they do this — from constant exposure to harmful content day in and day out.”

According to Molina, future work could look at how to help people not just trust AI, but also to understand it. Interactive transparency may be a key part of understanding AI, too, she added.

“Something that is really important is not only trust in systems, but also engaging people in a way that they actually understand AI,” said Molina. “How can we use this concept of interactive transparency and other methods to help people understand AI better? How can we best present AI so that it invokes the right balance of appreciation of machine ability and skepticism about its weaknesses? These questions are worthy of research.”

The researchers present their findings in the current issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

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DOI

10.1093/jcmc/zmac010