It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Sunday, December 04, 2022
In utero exposure to maternal injury, associated risk of cerebral palsy
About The Study: In this study of approximately 2 million births, maternal unintentional injury during pregnancy was associated with an increased risk of cerebral palsy in children, particularly among those who were exposed to maternal injuries that resulted in hospitalization and those who were delivered shortly after the injury. Public health professionals and stakeholders should be aware of these potential long-term consequences on offspring when designing programs and providing recommendations about safety during pregnancy. Early monitoring and developmental assessment of children exposed to maternal injury might be warranted.
Authors: Asma Ahmed, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., of the Hospital for Sick Children Research Institute in Toronto, is the corresponding author.
Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.
About The Study: Researchers found in this secondary analysis of a randomized clinical trial including 8,800 school-age children with a high prevalence of vitamin D deficiency that weekly oral administration of vitamin D for 3 years did not influence growth, body composition, or pubertal development. Vitamin D deficiency is prevalent among children living in temperate climates and has been reported to associate independently with stunting and obesity.
Authors: Davaasambuu Ganmaa, Ph.D., of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, and Adrian R. Martineau, Ph.D., of the Queen Mary University of London, are the corresponding authors.
Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.
Researchers have been able to make some key determinations about the first galaxies to exist, in one of the first astrophysical studies of the period in the early Universe when the first stars and galaxies formed, known as the cosmic dawn.
Using data from India’s SARAS3 radio telescope, researchers led by the University of Cambridge were able to look at the very early Universe – just 200 million years after the Big Bang – and place limits on the mass and energy output of the first stars and galaxies.
Counterintuitively, the researchers were able to place these limits on the earliest galaxies by not finding the signal they had been looking for, known as the 21-centimetre hydrogen line.
This non-detection allowed the researchers to make other determinations about the cosmic dawn, placing restraints on the first galaxies, enabling them to rule out scenarios including galaxies which were inefficient heaters of cosmic gas and efficient producers of radio emissions.
While we cannot yet directly observe these early galaxies, the results, reported in the journal Nature Astronomy, represent an important step in understanding how our Universe transitioned from mostly empty to one full of stars.
Understanding the early Universe, when the first stars and galaxies formed, is one of the major goals of new observatories. The results obtained using the SARAS3 data are a proof-of-concept study that paves the way to understanding this period in the development of the Universe.
The SKA project – involving two next-generation telescopes due to be completed by the end of the decade – will likely be able to make images of the early Universe, but for current telescopes the challenge is to detect the cosmological signal of the first stars re-radiated by thick hydrogen clouds.
This signal is known as the 21-centimetre line – a radio signal produced by hydrogen atoms in the early Universe. Unlike the recently launched JWST, which will be able to directly image individual galaxies in the early Universe, studies of the 21-centimetre line, made with radio telescopes such as the Cambridge-led REACH (Radio Experiment for the Analysis of Cosmic Hydrogen), can tell us about entire populations of even earlier galaxies. The first results are expected from REACH early in 2023.
To detect the 21-centimetre line, astronomers look for a radio signal produced by hydrogen atoms in the early Universe, affected by light from the first stars and the radiation behind the hydrogen fog. Earlier this year, the same researchers developed a method which they say will allow them to see through the fog of the early universe and detect light from the first stars. Some of these techniques have been already put to practice in the current study.
In 2018, another research group operating the EDGES experiment published a result that hinted at a possible detection of this earliest light. The reported signal was unusually strong compared to what is expected in the simplest astrophysical picture of the early Universe. Recently, the SARAS3 data disputed this detection: the EDGES result is still awaiting confirmation from independent observations.
In a re-analysis of the SARAS3 data, the Cambridge-led team tested a variety of astrophysical scenarios which could potentially explain the EDGES result, but they did not find a corresponding signal. Instead, the team was able to place some limits on properties of the first stars and galaxies.
The results of the SARAS3 analysis are the first time that radio observations of the averaged 21-centimetre line have been able to provide an insight to the properties of the first galaxies in the form of limits of their main physical properties.
Working with collaborators in India, Australia and Israel, the Cambridge team used data from the SARAS3 experiment to look for signals from cosmic dawn, when the first galaxies formed. Using statistical modelling techniques, the researchers were not able to find a signal in the SARAS3 data.
"We were looking for a signal with a certain amplitude,” said Harry Bevins, a PhD student from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory and the paper’s lead author. “But by not finding that signal, we can put a limit on its depth. That, in turn, begins to inform us about how bright the first galaxies were.”
“Our analysis showed that the hydrogen signal can inform us about the population of first stars and galaxies,” said co-lead author Dr Anastasia Fialkov from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy. “Our analysis places limits on some of the key properties of the first sources of light including the masses of the earliest galaxies and the efficiency with which these galaxies can form stars. We also address the question of how efficiently these sources emit X-ray, radio and ultraviolet radiation.”
“This is an early step for us in what we hope will be a decade of discoveries about how the Universe transitioned from darkness and emptiness to the complex realm of stars, galaxies and other celestial objects we can see from Earth today,” said Dr Eloy de Lera Acedo from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, who co-led the research.
The observational study, the first of its kind in many respects, excludes scenarios in which the earliest galaxies were both more than a thousand times as bright as present galaxies in their radio-band emission and were poor heaters of hydrogen gas.
“Our data also reveals something which has been hinted at before, which is that the first stars and galaxies could have had a measurable contribution to the background radiation that appeared as a result of the Big Bang and which has been travelling towards us ever since,” said de Lera Acedo, “We are also establishing a limit to that contribution.”
“It’s amazing to be able to look so far back in time – to just 200 million years after the Big Bang- and be able to learn about the early Universe,” said Bevins.
The research was supported in part by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), part of UK Research & Innovation (UKRI), and the Royal Society. The Cambridge authors are all members of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology in Cambridge.
IMAGE: A HORIZONTAL A SLICE AT THE BASE OF THE ARMS (LABELED AS A) SHOWING THE ORAL INCS (LABELED AS O) CONVERGING AND CROSSING.view more
CREDIT: KUUSPALU ET AL., CURRENT BIOLOGY, 2022
Octopuses are not much like humans — they are invertebrates with eight arms, and more closely related to clams and snails. Still, they have evolved complex nervous systems with as many neurons as in the brains of dogs, and are capable of a wide array of complicated behaviors. In the eyes of Melina Hale, PhD, and other researchers in the field, this means they provide a great opportunity to explore how alternative nervous system structures can serve the same basic functions of limb sensation and movement.
Now, in a new study published on November 28 in Current Biology, Hale, William Rainey Harper Professor of Organismal Biology and Vice Provost at UChicago, and her colleagues have described something new and totally unexpected about the octopus nervous system: a structure by which the intramuscular nerve cords (INCs), which help the animal sense its arm movement, connect arms on the opposite sides of the animal.
The startling discovery provides new insights into how invertebrate species have independently evolved complex nervous systems. It can also provide inspiration for robotic engineering, such as new autonomous underwater devices.
“In my lab, we study mechanosensation and proprioception — how the movement and positioning of limbs is sensed,” said Hale. “These INCs have long been thought to be proprioceptive, so they were an interesting target for helping to answer the kinds of questions our lab is asking. Up until now, there hasn’t been a lot of work done on them, but past experiments had indicated that they’re important for arm control.”
Thanks to the support for cephalopod research offered by the Marine Biological Laboratory, Hale and her team were able to use young octopuses for the study, which were small enough to allow the researchers to image the base of all eight arms at once. This let the team trace the INCs through the tissue to determine their path.
“These octopuses were about the size of a nickel or maybe a quarter, so it was a process to affix the specimens in the right orientation and to get the angle right during the sectioning [for imaging],” said Adam Kuuspalu, a Senior Research Analyst at UChicago and the lead author on the study.
Initially the team was studying the larger axial nerve cords in the arms, but began to notice that the INCs didn’t stop at the base of the arm, but rather continued out of the arm and into the body of the animal. Realizing that little work had been done to explore the anatomy of the INCs, they began to trace the nerves, expecting them to form a ring in the body of the octopus, similar to the axial nerve cords.
Through imaging, the team determined that in addition to running the length of each arm, at least two of the four INCs extend into the body of the octopus, where they bypass the two adjacent arms and merge with the INC of the third arm over. This pattern means that all the arms are connected symmetrically.
It was challenging, however, to determine how the pattern would hold in all eight arms. “As we were imaging, we realized, they’re not all coming together as we expected, they all seem to be going in different directions, and we were trying to figure out how if the pattern held for all of the arms, how would that work?” said Hale. “I even got out one of those children’s toys — a Spirograph — to play around with what it would look like, how it would all connect in the end. It took a lot of imaging and playing with drawings while we wracked our brains about what could be going on before it became clear how it all fits together.”
The results were not at all what the researchers expected to find.
“We think this is a new design for a limb-based nervous system,” said Hale. “We haven’t seen anything like this in other animals.”
The researchers don’t yet know what function this anatomical design might serve, but they have some ideas. “Some older papers have shared interesting insights,” said Hale. “One study from the 1950s showed that when you manipulate an arm on one side of the octopus with lesioned brain areas, you’ll see the arms responding on the other side. So it could be that these nerves allow for decentralized control of a reflexive response or behavior. That said, we also see that fibers go out from the nerve cords into the muscles all along their tracts, so they might also allow for a continuity of proprioceptive feedback and motor control along their lengths.”
The team is currently conducting experiments to see if they can gain insights into this question by parsing out the physiology of the INCs and their unique layout. They are also studying the nervous systems of other cephalopods, including squid and cuttlefish, to see if they share similar anatomy.
Ultimately, Hale believes that in addition to illuminating the unexpected ways an invertebrate species might design a nervous system, understanding these systems can aid in the development of new engineered technologies, such as robots.
“Octopuses can be a biological inspiration for the design of autonomous undersea devices,” said Hale. “Think about their arms — they can bend anywhere, not just at joints. They can twist, extend their arms, and operate their suckers, all independently. The function of an octopus arm is a lot more sophisticated than ours, so understanding how octopuses integrate sensory motor information and movement control can support the development of new technologies.”
The study, “Multiple nerve cords connect the arms of octopus providing alternative paths for inter-arm signaling,” was supported by the US Office of Naval Research (N00014-22-1-2208). Samantha Cody of the University of Chicago was also an author on the paper.
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About the University of Chicago Medicine & Biological Sciences
The University of Chicago Medicine, with a history dating back to 1927, is one of the nation’s leading academic health systems. It unites the missions of the University of Chicago Medical Center, Pritzker School of Medicine and the Biological Sciences Division. Twelve Nobel Prize winners in physiology or medicine have been affiliated with the University of Chicago Medicine. Its main Hyde Park campus is home to the Center for Care and Discovery, Bernard Mitchell Hospital, Comer Children’s Hospital and the Duchossois Center for Advanced Medicine. It also has ambulatory facilities in Orland Park, South Loop, Homewood and River East as well as affiliations and partnerships that create a regional network of care. UChicago Medicine offers a full range of specialty-care services for adults and children through more than 40 institutes and centers including an NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center. Together with Harvey-based Ingalls Memorial, UChicago Medicine has 1,296 licensed beds, nearly 1,300 attending physicians, over 2,800 nurses and about 970 residents and fellows.
From pangolin scales that can stand up to hard hits to colorful but sturdy peacock feathers, nature can do a lot with a few simple molecules.
In a new review paper, a team of international researchers have laid out how engineers are taking inspiration from the biological world—and designing new kinds of materials that are potentially tougher, more versatile and more sustainable than what humans can make on their own.
“Even today, nature makes things way simpler and way smarter than what we can do synthetically in the lab,” said Dhriti Nepal, first author and a research materials engineer at the Air Force Research Laboratory in Ohio.
Nepal along with Vladimir Tsukruk from Georgia Institute of Technology and Hendrik Heinz of the University of Colorado Boulder served as co-corresponding authors for the new analysis. The team published its findings Nov. 28 in the journal Nature Materials.
The researchers, who come from three countries, delve into the promise and challenges behind “bioinspired nanocomposites.” These materials mix together different kinds of proteins and other molecules at incredibly small scales to achieve properties that may not be possible with traditional metals or plastics. Researchers often design them using advanced computer simulations or models. Examples include thin films that resist wear and tear by incorporating proteins from silkworm cocoons; new kinds of laminates made from polymers and clay materials; carbon fibers produced using bioinspired principles; and panes of glass that don’t easily crack because they include nacre—the iridescent lining inside many mollusk shells.
Such nature-inspired materials could, one day, lead to new and better solar panels, soft robots and even coatings for hypersonic jets, said Heinz, professor of chemical and biological engineering at CU Boulder. But first, researchers will need to learn how to build them from the bottom up, ensuring that every molecule is in the right place.
“One of the main challenges in this field is how do we structure these materials down to the atomic level,” Heinz said. “We need to know how nature does it so we can try it in the lab and use guidance from computational models.”
The amazing keratin
In the new study, Nepal, Tsukruk, Heinz and their colleagues take a close look at keratin, one of nature’s most adaptable building blocks.
These simple proteins, which often form into twisting helical shapes like DNA, can join together in different ways to make a huge variety of structures—from human fingernails and hair to porcupine quills, rhinoceros horns and the overlapping scales of pangolins.
“Keratin is everywhere, and we’ve hardly even begun to appreciate its utility,” Nepal said.
That’s one of nature’s secrets, she added: Biological materials can exhibit a wide array of complex architectures at many levels—what engineers call “hierarchical” engineering. Some of those structures are large enough to see with the naked eye, while others are so small researchers need powerful microscopes to study them.
The keratin in pangolin scales, for example, takes on a wavy pattern that makes the scales hard to crack. Peafowl feathers, meanwhile, are made up of melanin rods embedded in a matrix of keratin, which allows these adornments to be both colorful and stiff at the same time—perfect for peacocks that want to spread their tail feathers.
“One of the biggest things we can learn from nature is how these materials exhibit multiple functions that work together in perfect synergy,” Nepal said.
From atoms up
Making advanced synthetic materials with multiple functions in the lab, however, can get tricky.
“Most of current human-made materials are simple, single-component materials with simplistic uniform morphology and composition,” Tsukruk said. “And what we learnt from nature is that much more complex and sustainable organization is required to make new bio-inspired materials for advanced applications in the near future.”
One of the biggest challenges, Heinz said, comes down to models. His research group uses these tools to simulate new kinds of materials at the scale of a few hundred to millions of atoms. But taking those kinds of tiny designs and scaling them up to the size of something you can actually see becomes an increasingly difficult task.
“From the scale of atoms to the millimeter or even centimeter scale, there are so many levels of organization in natural materials,” Heinz said.
Heinz noted that NASA has recently invested in exploring hierarchically-engineered materials for aerospace applications—such as stronger and more lightweight panels of nanostructured carbon for use in spacecraft to carry life supplies to Mars. Heinz, for example, is part of a $15 million effort funded by NASA to study these kinds of “ultrastrong composites.”
Engineers, he added, are also discovering new ways to make nanocomposites in large quantities in a manufacturing setting. Today, researchers often use tools like 3D printers to make these materials, laying them down drop by drop.
Heinz, Tsukruk, Nepal, and their colleagues are optimistic. Nature, they report, has had millions of years to learn how to construct materials like pangolin scales or oyster nacre as efficiently as possible. Engineers may be able to take clues from pangolins and oysters to build materials without creating a lot of harmful waste in the process.
“If we learn from nature, we can find alternatives to many current energy-intensive manufacturing processes or hazardous chemicals,” Heinz said.
Krishan Kanhaiya, a recent PhD graduate in chemical and biological engineering at CU Boulder, also served as a co-author on the new study. Other co-authors include researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology; Carnegie Mellon University; Duke University; MIT; University College London; Johns Hopkins University; Deakin University; Tufts University; University of Michigan; University of Cambridge; University of Oxford; University of California San Diego; and Rice University.
IMAGE: RICE UNIVERSITY RESEARCHERS HAVE DEVELOPED A METHOD TO PREDICT HOW CRYSTALS TAKE SHAPE FROM THEIR INTERNAL CHEMISTRY, EVEN WHEN THE CRYSTAL LACKS SYMMETRY. THIS REPRESENTATION OF A SILVER NITRATE CRYSTAL HAS EIGHT EDGES, NONE OF WHICH MATCH THE OTHERS. THE RICE TEAM’S ALGORITHM WAS STILL ABLE TO PREDICT ITS SHAPE.view more
CREDIT: ILLUSTRATION BY LUQING WANG/RICE UNIVERSITY
HOUSTON – (Nov. 28, 2022) – A crystal’s shape is determined by its inherent chemistry, a characteristic that ultimately determines its final form from the most basic of details. But sometimes the lack of symmetry in a crystal makes the surface energies of its facets unknowable, confounding any theoretical prediction of its shape.
Theorists at Rice University say they’ve found a way around this conundrum by assigning arbitrary latent energies to its surfaces or, in the case of two-dimensional materials, its edges.
Yes, it seems like cheating, but in the same way a magician finds a select card in a deck by narrowing the possibilities, a little algebraic sleight-of-hand goes a long way to solve the problem of predicting a crystal’s shape.
The method described in Nature Computational Science shows using what they call auxiliary edge energies can bring predictions back in line with the Wulff construction, a geometrical recipe in use for more than a century to determine how crystals arrive at their final equilibrium shapes.
The open-access paper by materials physicist Boris Yakobson, lead author and alumnus Luqing Wang and their colleagues at Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering introduces algorithms that employ arbitrary numbers for the right-hand factors in the equations and still deliver the proper unique shape-solution.
“The issue of shape is compelling, but researchers have been trying and failing for years to compute surface energies for asymmetrical crystals,” Yakobson said. “It turns out we were falling down a rabbit hole, but we knew that if nature can find a solution through a gazillion atomic movements, there should also be a way for us to determine it.”
He said the rise of interest in 2D materials in recent times motivated the new study. “We had a ‘eureka’ moment: After switching our geometrical thinking to algebraic we added closure equations that contain arbitrary parameters,” Yakobson said. “These seem useless, but we passed it all through the computer and observed a well-defined shape coming out,” he said.
“The hard part was convincing our reviewers that edge energy is truly undefinable, but a solution can still be achieved,” Wang said.
The work could provide a valuable tool to researchers who grow crystals from the bottom up for catalytic, light-emitting, sensing, magnetic and plasmonic applications, especially when their shapes and active edges are of particular importance.
The researchers pointed out that natural crystals enjoy the luxury of geological time. They arrive at their shapes by “relentlessly performing a trial-and-error experiment” as they seek equilibrium, the minimal energy of all their constituent atoms.
But computational and theoretical approaches simply can’t deal with billions of atoms at once, so they generally lean on the energies of outward-facing atoms. For many crystals that have equivalent facets or edges, that works just fine.
In 2D materials, essentially all of the atoms are “outward-facing.” When their edges are equivalent by symmetry — in rectangles, for instance — completing a Wulff construction is simple after calculating the edge energies via density functional theory.
But in the absence of symmetry, when all the edges are different, the calculated average energy is meaningless, Yakobson said.
“Nature has the answer to shape a crystal regardless of what it ‘knows’ or doesn’t about the edge energies,” he said. “So there is an answer. Our challenge was to mimic it with theory.”
The first step toward a solution was to consciously give up on finding the unknowable absolute edge energies and deal instead with their well-defined computable combinations, Yakobson said. Geometrically, this was quite a riddle, and for asymmetric bulk materials was hopelessly complicated.
“But 2D materials and their planar polygons made solving the problem easier to think about than having to deal with multifaceted polyhedra,” he said.
Finding and establishing average energies was just the first step, followed by “closure equations” that used arbitrary latent material energy for the right-hand side of the equation. Even if the latter numbers were intentionally incorrect, applying all to the textbook Wulff construction resulted in the correct crystal shape.
The group tested its theory on several 2D crystals and compared the results to the crystals’ observed final forms. Their versatile equations successfully predicted the shapes, shown experimentally, of the truncated rectangle formed by 2D tin selenide, a promising thermo- and piezoelectric material, and the asymmetric needles formed by silver nitrite.
Rice alumni Sharmila Shirodkar and Zhuhua Zhang are co-authors of the paper. The work was primarily supported by the Department of Energy and the Basic Energy Sciences program (DE-SC0012547) and in part by the Army Research Office Electronics Division (W911NF-16-1-0255).
Rice University scientists have developed a method to predict how crystals take shape from their internal chemistry, even when the crystal lacks symmetry. This representation of a silver nitrate crystal has eight edges, none of which match the others. The Rice team’s algorithm was still able to predict its shape. (Credit: Illustration by Luqing Wang/Rice University)
Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 4,240 undergraduates and 3,972 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 1 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.
KAVLI INSTITUTE FOR THE PHYSICS AND MATHEMATICS OF THE UNIVERSE
IMAGE: (FROM LEFT) UC BERKELEY POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW VANESSA BOHM (CREDIT:TRAVIS CLOSE) AND KAVLI IPMU PROJECT ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR JIA LIU (CREDIT: KAVLI IPMU).view more
CREDIT: (FROM LEFT) UC BERKELEY POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW VANESSA BOHM (CREDIT:TRAVIS CLOSE) AND KAVLI IPMU PROJECT ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR JIA LIU (CREDIT: KAVLI IPMU).
The COVID-19 pandemic has had both positive and negative impacts on astronomy research, where overall the number of research papers being produced increased, but the number of new or junior researchers entering the field has dropped. The researchers who carried out the study also found that no single country's female astronomers were able to be more productive than their male colleagues on average, suggests a new study in Nature Astronomy.
In 2021, Project Associate Professor Jia Liu joined the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) in Tokyo and settled into a new country and job in amidst a global pandemic.
”As a new mother and an early career scientist, my life has been heavily affected by the pandemic –– lost childcare, dropped productivity, disconnection from my colleagues, and a tough job market. While rebuilding my research and life routines, I couldn’t stop wondering: how are others in my field affected by the pandemic? Am I alone," said Liu.
Collaborating with University of California, Berkeley, Postdoctoral Fellow Vanessa Böhm, the researchers decided to find out themselves after not finding the answers in the limited studies available at the time.
The computational cosmologists used their data mining skills to download more than 1.2 million records of astronomical publications since 1950. They wanted to analyze publication patterns by gender and country, but such information is confidential. So, the researchers assigned a gender probability to each author based on their given name and assigned a country based on the paper author's affiliation or affiliations listed in their paper.
The results were surprising, said Liu.
Overall output in astronomy, measured by the annual paper count, had increased.
"While one may assume that COVID has mostly negative impacts on the world, this positive phenomenon may not be hard to understand: COVID-induced changes such as increased flexibility in work arrangement, reduced commutes and business trips, as well as improved virtual technologies, among others, are potentially favorable for conducting scientific research," said Liu.
However, when the researchers looked into whether the positive outcome was result of more researchers entering the field, or an increase in individual productivity, they found the latter was mainly responsible for the trend.
"When we counted the average number of papers each researcher produced, we saw boosted individual productivity seen across most countries. Meanwhile, a decreasing number of incoming new researchers is seen in most of the countries we studied. This result indicates larger barriers for new researchers to enter the field, or for junior researchers to complete their very first project during COVID," said Liu.
Finally, the researchers found the productivity of female astronomers was worst affected. Fourteen out of 25 countries studied saw a smaller fraction of papers written by women, and fewer women researchers entering the astronomy field. During COVID-19 so far, no female researchers were able to be more productive than their male colleagues, even in countries including the Netherlands, Australia, and Switzerland, where female researchers had been as productive as male colleagues before the pandemic.
The researchers say their data only studies trends over a limited period of time as the pandemic still continues. While they were able to study quantitative outputs during the pandemic, the quality of these papers is yet to be studied.
Details of this study were published in Nature Astronomy on 28 November.
IMAGE: WOMEN COMPRISE ABOUT 20% OF ALL ASTRONOMERS WORLDWIDE, BUT THEIR PRODUCTIVITY, AS MEASURED BY ANNUAL NUMBER OF PUBLICATIONS, HAS LAGGED BEHIND THAT OF THEIR MALE COLLEAGUES. THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC SET THEM BACK EVEN MORE, A NEW STUDY FINDS.view more
CREDIT: NIEL FREESE, UC BERKELEY
Before the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly shut down labs and sent scientists home to work, female astronomers on average published about nine papers for every 10 published by men — a rate that has remained stagnant for decades.
The pandemic appears to have worsened that gender imbalance.
In a paper appearing today in the journal Nature Astronomy, two cosmologists — Vanessa Böhm of the University of California, Berkeley, and Jia Liu of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) in Japan — report their analysis of publication rates in the field of astronomy pre-pandemic and as of February 2022, two years into the pandemic.
They found that, while both men and women on average have published more papers since March 2020, when most universities and research institutions closed their doors to prevent the spread of COVID-19, men published a greater number, widening the gender gap. Worldwide, astronomy publications increased by about 13%.
Part of the increase was from publications by new researchers entering the field, Böhm said, though that was caused primarily by an uptick in new researchers publishing in Asia: Japan, Taiwan and China, primarily. In most other countries, though, fewer new researchers published in the field of astronomy during the pandemic, with women lagging behind men. About 25% of new authors are women, a percentage that also hasn’t budged in the past 10 years.
“A decrease in the number of first-time authors indicates barriers for young researchers to enter the field or complete their first projects,” Böhm noted.
When the two looked only at papers by veteran astronomers, however, publications per researcher still were higher than pre-pandemic trends.
“Once we took this out, we still saw an increase in the number of papers — an increase driven by an increase in individual productivity,” Böhm said. “I think the interesting part was that we saw that this increase in productivity was not equally shared by women. Before the pandemic, there were about two or three countries where women were equally as productive as men, among them the Netherlands, Australia and Switzerland. But even there, we saw that after the pandemic, women were less productive than their male counterparts.”
Of 25 countries studied, 14 saw a smaller fraction of astronomy papers written by women and fewer female researchers entering the astronomy field.
Presumably, both men and women were able to devote more time to writing papers during the pandemic because they were not allowed access to research facilities, such as observatories, to obtain new data. With more time, including relief from in-person administrative duties, the pandemic was ideal for finishing off deferred projects.
"While one may assume that COVID has mostly negative impacts on the world, this positive phenomenon may not be hard to understand: COVID-induced changes, such as increased flexibility in work arrangements, reduced commutes and business trips, as well as improved virtual technologies, among others, are potentially favorable for conducting scientific research," Liu said.
The widened gap between men and women’s productivity echo those of other studies that show women regressed, in terms of workplace equity, during the pandemic. While the current study does not address why, some of these other studies found that women, more than men, were saddled with child care and elder care, allowing less time for writing up research results.
Böhm suspects an additional reason: less mentoring of young female astrophysics researchers who may be dealing with “imposter syndrome,” or the idea that they may not be up to par. Women make up only about 20% of the world’s astronomers.
“There are a lot of confidence barriers for young women in the field that are holding them back,” she said.
Child care issues
Liu was a postdoctoral fellow at the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics (BCCP) when the pandemic began and was one of those affected by the sudden loss of child care. With a toddler at home and on the hunt for an academic job, she and her husband had to move away from Berkeley to find affordable child care.
”As a new mother and an early career scientist, my life has been heavily affected by the pandemic –– lost child care, dropped productivity, disconnection from my colleagues and a tough job market,” said Liu, who in 2021 joined the Kavli IPMU in Tokyo as a project associate professor. “While rebuilding my research and life routines, I couldn’t stop wondering, ‘How are others in my field affected by the pandemic? Am I alone?’"
Böhm, also a postdoctoral fellow, met Liu at BCCP, and they decided to embark on what they called an “all-girls” research project to look at the history of publishing rates in astronomy by gender and country, which had never been done comprehensively, and the impact of the pandemic on those rates.
Their study looked at data from 1950 until February 2022. The computational cosmologists used their data mining skills to download more than 1.2 million records of astronomical publications. They wanted to analyze publication patterns by gender and country, but such information is confidential. So, the researchers assigned a gender probability to each author based on the individual’s given name and assigned a country based on the author's affiliation or affiliations listed in their paper.
"When we counted the average number of papers each researcher produced, we saw boosted individual productivity across most countries. Meanwhile, a decreasing number of incoming new researchers is seen in most of the countries we studied. This result indicates larger barriers for new researchers to enter the field, or for junior researchers to complete their very first project during COVID," said Liu.
They also looked at researchers who had not published in the field of astronomy for the past two years, and found that the chance is about 87% that they will not never publish in the field again. People dropping out of the field also disproportionately affects women.
That includes Böhm herself. With her postdoctoral felliowship now ending, she has elected to apply her data analysis skills elsewhere. She is joining a start-up that uses machine learning-based predictions to reduce fuel waste in the ocean shipping industry.
“This paper was part of an interest shift that I've had — to go to use the skills that I've learned in the last couple of years on more earthbound topics. I'm a little bit more driven these days by what's actually going to make a change here on Earth,” she said.
