Human empathy makes us better at understanding animal sounds

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN - FACULTY OF SCIENCE

 

IMAGE: RESEARCHER ELODIE BRIEFER IN FRONT OF RECORDING EQUIPMENT view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO: KRISTIAN BJØRN-HANSEN, COPENHAGEN UNIVERSITY

Those who do well on human empathy tests are also measurably better at decoding the emotional sounds of animals, according to a new study from the University of Copenhagen. Other aspects, such as age and work related to animals, are also shown to play a crucial role.

If you have a Jolly Jumper in the barn or have ever made bacon out of Babe, chances are you're better at hearing when an animal is having a good or bad time than other people are. And, if you are between 20-29 years old and empathetic towards fellow humans, then your chances are even greater. This is demonstrated by new research from the Department of Biology, conducted in a collaboration with Swiss institutions, ETH Zurich and Agroscope.

In the big picture, the researchers were looking for traces of a so-called common emotional system among mammals, but the research also has specific applications related to animal welfare.

"Our results show that based on its sounds we, humans, can determine whether or not an animal is stressed (or excited), and whether it is expressing positive or negative emotions. This applies across a number of different mammals. We can also see that our ability to interpret the sounds depends on several factors, such as age, close knowledge of animals and, not least, how empathetic we are towards other people," says behavioural biologist Elodie Briefer from the Department of Biology.

This marks the first time that so many different animal sounds were tested on humans, both in terms of arousal (i.e. stress/excitement) and valence (i.e. the charge of emotions positive vs negative).

1024 people from 48 different countries participated in the study, which included the vocalizations, or calls, of 6 mammals. The sounds of goats, cattle, Asian wild horses (Przewalski's horses), domesticated horses, pigs and wild boars were played to participants along with the sounds of human gibberish from actors.

Ability to interpret animal sounds varies

On average, we humans, among animal species, can "guess" accurately more often than if you rolled a single dice and got random bids, the results show. For arousal, the correct answers amounted to 54.1% and for valence, that figure was 55.3%.

Participants were also asked to provide information about a range of factors including their age, gender and level of education, just as they wrapped up their participation with an empathy test, and the researchers observed several interesting factors in relation to how well humans understand animal sounds.

First and foremost, the results are significantly better when participants work with animals - even when the task is to listen to animals other than the ones that they are immediately familiar with. Thus, the results suggest that an intimate knowledge of animals generally promotes the understanding of animals' emotional lives.

"This is good news for animal welfare. For example, farmers who want to ensure that their pigs are thriving are well-equipped to capture that," says Elodie Briefer.

Age plays a role as well. Here, the study data shows that the better scores were found among the 20-29-year olds. On the other hand, the results demonstrate that participants under the age of twenty are the worst performers, and that the number of correct answers decreases with age.

Empathy for humans and animals is linked

Most surprising to the researchers was that their results showed a marked correlation between empathy for humans and animals.

"It was really surprising for me and very interesting that those who performed well in a recognized test to assess people's empathic level - towards other people, mind you - were also significantly better at understanding the emotional lives of animals," says Elodie Briefer.

"We could have used other tests that measure how a person relates to animals, but to make it simpler, we stuck to this particular empathy test, which was translated and validated for the eight languages in the study. It is a recognized test, but it measures empathy towards other people. Nevertheless, we see a clear correlation with the ability to interpret animal sounds," she continues.

Animal welfare is all about emotions

"Today, animal welfare is defined by the emotional life of animals. Therefore, new knowledge provided by this study is important for both basic and applied research. On the one hand, it increases the understanding of animal emotions, and it opens opportunities to improve that understanding," says Elodie Briefer.

According to the researcher, the knowledge contributed by the study shows the path to concrete ways to work on improving animal welfare through an understanding of their emotional lives.

"For example, the development of an app where AI supports those who work with animals offers promising perspectives. But it is also important to note that there is nothing to prevent someone from beginning to improve their own skills now if they interact with animals on a daily basis," Briefer points out.

"When students try the test in class, they obtain an average of 50 percent of correct answers on the first try. After we talk about the sounds and knowledge that we have about animal vocalizations, they improve. On their second attempts, they typically get above 70% correct. It is natural to explore this potential in future studies. I definitely think that it's possible to practice and improve this ability for the vast majority of people," says Elodie

 

 

 

Extra info: The evolution of emotions

The researchers searched for traces of a common emotional system between mammals, which may have been preserved throughout evolutionary history. The study supports that thesis when it comes to recognizing arousal in particular. While results show large variation in how good people are in discerning whether the animals are experiencing positive or negative emotions, there is much less difference in how humans distinguish between high and low arousal among mammals.

According to Elodie Briefer, this may be because we in the mammalian family share common traits when it comes to how we express the intensity of our emotions (i.e. arousal) - giving participants some innate ability to interpret arousal, and making results less dependent on acquired knowledge.

"Roughly speaking, higher-frequency sounds (in addition to other features) are often a sign of higher arousal, and lower-frequency sounds a sign of lower. If a subject uses the same standard to interpret animal sounds that he or she would use to understand a human, then it is often correct. We express arousal more similarly than valence because it is linked to stress pathways, which are evolutionarily well preserved in mammals," explains the researcher.

 

Facts: How researchers define animal emotions

Emotions are intense, short-term reactions triggered in response to certain internal or external stimuli.

They are characterized by a certain level of arousal (bodily activation) and valence (positive versus negative).

In the study, test animals were recorded in situations of various arousal and associated with positive or negative valence (e.g. expectation of food / food frustration).

The emotional valence was then verified using behavioral indicators described in the research literature. Emotional arousal was assessed based on the heart rates of domestic animals and on movement (a good behavioural indicator of arousal) in wild species.

 

Facts: Who performed best in the test?

The researchers studied several demographic characteristics that could affect the ability to interpret the animals' sounds.

+ Work with animals - The researchers observed a decisive factor in the group of test subjects that interact with animals in their work - also when it comes to other animals.

+ Age - The results show a clear difference. People under 20 perform worse, 20-29-year-olds are best in the test, and the ability to decode animal sounds decreases steadily with age.

+ Empathy - The researchers were most surprised that good results in an empathy test towards humans also yielded significantly better results with the animal sounds.

- Gender - On the other hand, there was no measurable difference between men and women, despite the popular assumption that women are more empathetic/emotionally intelligent.

- Parenthood - Neither was there a measurable difference between whether the subjects had children or not.

- Educational level (with or without a BA) did not make a noticeable difference.

+ Domestication - a final aspect that influenced the results was about the animals rather than the subjects. Domesticated pigs and horses were easier to decode for subjects than their wild relatives.

 

Facts: How the researchers did it

Before the test, participants were asked to answer demographic questions - i.e., their gender, age, level of educational and whether they had children. And whether their work or studies were related to animals, and/or they had species, which they were familiar with.

The test itself. Participants were presented with several questions, each containing two animal sounds from one particular animal, with either different arousal (but same valence), or different valence (but same arousal). They then had to guess if the sound was - high or low arousal / positive or negative emotional charge (i.e. valence).

After the test, they were asked to complete a standard empathy test, which assigns scores in 4 dimensions of empathy towards people.

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JOURNAL

Royal Society Open Science

DOI

10.1098/rsos.221138 

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Age, empathy, familiarity, domestication and call features enhance human perception of animal emotion expressions

Carbon dioxide removal should receive additional financial support

Peer-Reviewed Publication

POTSDAM INSTITUTE FOR CLIMATE IMPACT RESEARCH (PIK)

Cleaning up greenhouse gases after they have been emitted should be incentivized by subsidies. New evidence from an economic analysis considering international markets suggests an important reason why subsidies should be higher than the price put on carbon emissions to incentivize their reduction. In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers analyze policies for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it underground or in products. The suggested different pricing is not due to technological challenges, but linked to an economic effect called leakage.

“We are looking at climate pioneers, countries that are more ambitious in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions than others. We have studied how they should subsidize carbon dioxide removal to make it work, hence to create a supply of removal technologies and businesses.”, says Max Franks, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, one of the study’s authors. “This question is relevant, for instance, for the Climate Club recently founded by the G7.” The seven globally most important economies aim at advancing climate change mitigation.

“To achieve the Paris climate targets, all available options are needed,“ says Max Franks. „We must reduce and remove emissions. Carbon removal capacities are limited, they can compensate only a certain share of emissions. Accordingly, for policy makers like those of a Climate Club, the question remains what the best mix of all options and policies is – especially given the fact that other countries continue increasing fossil fuel use, and markets are interconnected.“

If climate pioneers buy less oil, the international oil price falls

If climate pioneers buy less oil, for example, then the international oil price falls. “Other countries will see a drop in oil prices and therefore might buy more oil,” warns Matthias Kalkuhl from the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, who co-authored the study. “Thus, if the more ambitious countries reduce carbon emissions by, say, 1000 tons of carbon unilaterally, it might lead other countries to increase their emissions by perhaps 150 tons. The original reduction of 1000 tons is then de facto only a reduction by 850 tons. Then, we can think of these 150 tons as leaking out through the international oil market.“ Hence the economic term of leakage.

The overall emissions reduction is, thus, smaller than the emissions reduction in ambitious countries – which is of course bad for our climate. It’s different with carbon dioxide removal. If ambitious countries remove carbon from the atmosphere, it does not affect supply and demand for fossil fuel. Therefore, it also does not affect international fossil fuel prices. This is why it makes sense to subsidize each ton of carbon removal more than the carbon price for emissions. The specific kind of leakage through fossil fuel markets caused by carbon pricing does not occur with carbon dioxide removal.

From afforestation to big machines sucking CO2 out of the air

Assessing economic policies for carbon removal is highly relevant since it is considered to be important for achieving the Paris climate targets. Carbon removal technologies include, for example, afforestation, because trees take carbon out of the air naturally and store it in their trunks. Another example is direct air capture, that is, big machines sucking greenhouse gases directly out of the air and putting it in underground reservoirs.

“Our results are particularly important for policy design today and over the next couple of years, where we expect the international climate policy regime to remain fragmented”, co-author Kai Lessmann explains. “In the long run, of course, we need all countries to cooperate in order to achieve the Paris target of keeping the temperature increase relative to pre-industrial times well below 2°C”.
 

Article: Max Franks, Matthias Kalkuhl, Kai Lessmann (2022): Optimal pricing for carbon dioxide removal under inter-regional leakage. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management [DOI: 10.1016/j.jeem.2022.102769]

Link to the article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S009506962200122X

For further information please contact:
PIK press office
Phone: +49 331 288 25 07
E-Mail: press@pik-potsdam.de
www.pik-potsdam.de

Who we are: The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) is one of the leading research institutions addressing relevant questions in the fields of global change, climate impacts and sustainable development. Natural and social scientists work closely together to generate interdisciplinary insights that provide a sound basis for decision-making for society, businesses and politics. PIK is a member of the Leibniz Association.

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JOURNAL

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management

DOI

10.1016/j.jeem.2022.102769 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Optimal pricing for carbon dioxide removal under inter-regional leakage

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

20-Dec-2022

COP15
The world’s plan to protect nature recognizes Indigenous rights, but worries over green colonialism remain

Early Monday morning, countries finalized a plan to protect nature at the COP15 biodiversity conference in Montreal. It was a bittersweet deal for some Indigenous Peoples, with both victories and major concerns.

The plan’s top-line pledge is to protect 30 per cent of the world’s land and water ecosystems by 2030. It recognizes Indigenous rights and ancestral territory by acknowledging Mother Earth, the use of traditional knowledge and reinforcing the need for Indigenous Peoples’ free, prior and informed consent before undertaking any conservation projects on their lands.

The International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity celebrated the recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ contributions, rights and responsibilities to Mother Earth and biodiversity — the variety of living things on the planet — in the plan.

“We have spoken and you have heard us. Let us now put those words into action,” the forum, which serves as a caucus for Indigenous Peoples discussing COP negotiations, wrote in a letter to the chair of the UN conference.

But not everybody is happy with the outcome. Critics like Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, executive director of Indigenous Climate Action, are concerned that without strong rules in place, recognizing the rights of Indigenous Peoples on their traditional territories won’t be enough to shake off the chains of colonialism.

The recognition of those rights, including the right to self-determination, is critical to the success of curbing a rapid decline in species. Biodiversity remains high on Indigenous territories without the interference of national governments. Eighty per cent of the world’s biodiversity is on Indigenous lands, despite Indigenous Peoples only making up five per cent of the global population, according to the United Nations.

Some Indigenous Peoples — like Lena Estrada Añokazi, co-ordinator at Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin — were fighting to have Indigenous territories recognized as a separate category for land conservation in the COP15 plan. The current agreement recognizes protected areas and “other effective area-based conservation measures” as ways of conserving nature.

Adding Indigenous territories as their own category would have sewn Indigenous sovereignty into the plan, empowering Indigenous nations to self-determine on their own territories. Without that extra category, Indigenous-led conservation efforts are considered protected areas — over which states ultimately have control.

“We need to stay outside. We are not protected areas, we are not another form of conservation that is part of the state,” Añokazi said.

“We are separate from the states … we existed before these organizations [and governments].”

Civil society groups and Indigenous Peoples have told Canada’s National Observer there is worry the plan might usher in a new era of green colonialism, where Indigenous Peoples are dispossessed of their lands and ancestral practices like harvesting medicines or hunting under the guise of protecting biodiversity and conserving nature. Historical examples of Indigenous Peoples being forced off their lands to create national parks, for example, can be found across the world, including in Canada, New Zealand and the United States.

Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault told Canada’s National Observer he has heard from many people the concerns about land dispossession and banning ancestral practices.

His solution is to ensure good reporting mechanisms are in place to hold the world’s nation states accountable as they move towards protecting land and water ecosystems. Institutions funding conservation, whether governments or multinational institutions, must know the risks posed to Indigenous Peoples and create safeguards to make sure land grabs and bans on ancestral practices don’t happen while governments applaud their own efforts to save the planet, Guilbeault said.

“I’m not telling you that there’s zero chance of any of this happening, but I think collectively, we can work to minimize the risk,” he added.

For Deranger, another major concern is the increased presence and participation of corporations at global climate and biodiversity conferences.

Canada’s National Observer identified several lobby groups present at the COP15 conference. These groups represent scores of companies that are either highly polluting, habitat-destroying or both.

“When we talk about colonialism, we have to understand that one of the big byproducts is capitalism,” Deranger said.

For example, Deranger has been involved in global climate and biodiversity conferences for years. She has seen the boom of corporate lobbying granted by a “pseudo-personhood,” which allows corporations to attend conferences as members of civil society, a term usually reserved for Indigenous groups and non-governmental organizations.

“Political power is often contingent on economic power, which is contingent on having lands and territories,” Deranger said.

Colonization past and present have fed a cosy relationship between corporate power and political power, which perverts conferences like COP15 and its climate counterpart, COP27, Deranger said.

For Indigenous Peoples, who continue to be removed from their ancestral lands to this day, the imbalance of political power shows between the influence of Indigenous Peoples and civil society, despite using the same tactics with governments.

“For us, we’re trying to hold (government) accountable, while (corporate lobbyists) are holding them hostage,” she said.

Without a sovereign role at negotiation tables, Indigenous Peoples must sit, listen and wait, discussing among their peers in the global Indigenous movement whether their territories and rights will become vulnerable to extinction because of climate diplomacy and geopolitics.

At COP15, those rights were recognized, but Deranger knows there are caveats. The plan hinges on nation states holding the power, with Indigenous nations still under the thumb of countries’ governments.

“The coming years will determine what’s going to happen, but I think the risk and the threat against Indigenous Peoples globally have increased. Even in places like Canada,” Deranger said.

— With files from John Woodside and Natasha Bulowski

Matteo Cimellaro, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Canada's National Observer

Shock wave from sun has opened up a crack in Earth's magnetic field, and it could trigger a geomagnetic storm

A mysterious shock wave in a gust of solar wind has sent a barrage of high-speed material smashing into Earth's magnetic field, opening up a crack in the magnetosphere. The barrage of plasma could lead to a geomagnetic storm today (Dec. 19), according to SpaceWeather.com.


null© NASA/STEREO

The shockwave's origins aren't exactly known, but scientists think it could have come from a coronal mass ejection launched by the sunspot AR3165, a fizzing region on the sun's surface that released a flurry of at least eight solar flares on Dec. 14, causing a brief radio blackout over the Atlantic Ocean.

Sunspots are areas on the sun's surface where powerful magnetic fields, created by the flow of electrical charges, knot into kinks before suddenly snapping. The resulting release of energy launches bursts of radiation called solar flares, or plumes of solar material called coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Once launched, CMEs travel at speeds in the millions of miles per hour, sweeping up charged particles from the solar wind to form a giant, combined wavefront that (if pointed toward Earth) can trigger geomagnetic storms.

Related: Listen to the terrifying rumble of Earth's magnetic field being assaulted by a solar storm
Duration 1:23
View on Watch

Geomagnetic storms occur when energetic solar debris (mostly consisting of electrons, protons and alpha particles) gets absorbed by, and subsequently compresses, Earth's magnetic field. The solar particles zip through the atmosphere near the poles where Earth's protective magnetic field is weakest and agitate oxygen and nitrogen molecules — causing them to release energy in the form of light to form colorful auroras such as the northern lights.

The storms can also create cracks in the magnetosphere which remain open for hours at a time, enabling some solar material to stream through and disrupt satellites, radio communications, and power systems.

Thankfully today's potential storm, predicted to be a G-1 class, will be fairly weak. It may cause minor fluctuations in power grids and impair some satellite functions — including those for mobile devices and GPS systems. It could also cause an aurora to appear as far south as Michigan and Maine.

More extreme geomagnetic storms, however, can have far more serious effects. They can not only warp our planet's magnetic field powerfully enough to send satellites tumbling to Earth, but can disrupt electrical systems and even cripple the internet.

The upcoming storm is just the latest in a string of solar attacks fired at Earth as the sun ramps up into the most active phase of its roughly 11-year solar cycle.

Astronomers have known since 1775 that solar activity rises and falls in cycles, but recently, the sun has been more active than expected, with nearly double the sunspot appearances predicted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Scientists anticipate that the sun's activity will steadily climb for the next few years, reaching an overall maximum in 2025 before decreasing again.

The largest solar storm in recent history was the 1859 Carrington Event, which released roughly the same energy as 10 billion 1-megaton atomic bombs. After slamming into Earth, the powerful stream of solar particles fried telegraph systems around the world and caused auroras brighter than the light of the full moon to appear as far south as the Caribbean.

If a similar event were to happen today, scientists warn it would cause trillions of dollars' worth of damage, trigger widespread blackouts, and endanger thousands of lives. A previous solar storm in 1989 released a billion-ton plume of gas that caused a blackout across the entire Canadian province of Quebec, NASA reported.

But this may not even scratch the surface of what our star is capable of hurling at us. Scientists are also investigating the cause of a series of sudden and colossal spikes in radiation levels recorded in ancient tree rings across Earth's history. A leading theory is that the spikes could have come from solar storms 80 times more powerful than the Carrington Event, but scientists have yet to rule out some other potentially unknown cosmic source.

Originally published on LiveScience.com.

Using deep learning to monitor India’s disappearing forest cover

A new system aims to track global forest changes, natural hazards

Reports and Proceedings

OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

CHICAGO – Using satellite monitoring data, researchers have developed a deep learning algorithm that could provide real-time monthly land use and land cover maps for parts of India. 

One of the 10 most forest-rich countries in the world, about 80.9 million hectares of trees cover India — about 25% of the nation — but this is a significant decline from years past. Between the 1890s and the 1990s, a combination of rapid economic development and overexploitation of local resources led to India losing nearly 80% of its native forest area. Now, as India’s forests still continue to disappear, researchers are focused on helping preserve what remains.  

“Our work was done in an effort to help India’s government and industries improve the country’s attempts at forest sustainability,” said Ying Zuo, lead author of the project and a graduate student in earth sciences at The Ohio State University.  

The land use monitoring system was trained using data provided by Norway’s International Climate and Forests Initiative (NICFI), an enterprise of the Norwegian government that aims to reduce the destruction of tropical forests, in part by providing high-resolution images of the world’s tropics. The product is generated using images from PlanetScope, a constellation of satellites that takes daily images of the entire globe. 

By combining the NICFI products’ data with a global land cover map produced by Tsinghua University, their deep learning model was able to acquire a more detailed type of base map of the area.  

“In an effort to combine two datasets into the same system, we resampled them into the same spatial resolution and aligned each pixel to create an image-labeled paired training dataset,” said Zuo. “The process helps us to assimilate the two datasets so they can be used to train our deep learning model.” This essentially merges thousands of small pictures into one larger base map. 

After training their deep learning model on these new satellite images, the team was able to process 10 base maps of the area, ranging from January to October 2022.  

The research poster was presented last week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. During her presentation, Zuo said that using these maps, the team was able to detect seasonal shifts across India, such as changes to barren land, how crop land was affected by monsoons during the rainy season, and the distribution of forests in mountainous regions.  

One conclusion from the study was that it is vital for ecologists to more closely study the seasonal impact of monsoons on India’s forest cover. Understanding these seasonal changes can help scientists understand the effects of climate change on forests. 

“As the average temperature of our Earth increases, natural hazards will become a lot more frequent, so having these maps at our disposal benefits everyone’s understanding of how this problem affects life on Earth,” she said. 

Additionally, if the team can expand the timespan of these base maps over several years instead of several months, Zuo said better results could help scientists study other annual changes around the globe, such as floods.  

“The characteristics of local forests and their surrounding habitats might likely be different in other regions,” said Zuo. “But with the help of more detailed datasets, our work could easily be used in areas of the world where detecting and alerting the public to forest degradation and its side effects need to become a priority.” 

Co-authors of the poster include C.K Shum, Rongjun Qin, Yuanyuan Jia, Guixiang Zhang and Shengxi Gui, all researchers at Ohio State. This work was supported by the USAID Forest Sustainability Project. 

#

Contact: Ying Zuo, Zuo.156@osu.edu 

Written by: Tatyana Woodall, Woodall.52@osu.edu. 

Expert group proposes revisions to guidelines for gender-affirming health care

Gender-affirming care should be individualized without universal requirements that limit access to care, such as hormone therapy initiation prior to surgery

Peer-Reviewed Publication

WOLTERS KLUWER HEALTH

December 19, 2022 – Transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) people often seek social, medical, and surgical gender-affirming care from a variety of healthcare professionals. Individualized care for optimal gender identity confirmation should be the main goal, rather than strict rules to guide interventions, according to an expert panel’s commentary in the November issue of Harvard Review of Psychiatry (HRP). The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.

The panel’s opinion was prompted by proposed updates to the gender-affirming care guidelines of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). The WPATH is an interdisciplinary professional and educational organization devoted to promoting the health of TGD people in all cultural settings. As part of that mission, WPATH publishes Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People, which are updated regularly to reflect the latest scientific evidence and expert consensus.

Gender-affirming inventions and care promoted in revised guidelines

The next version  of these guidelines is scheduled for release in 2023. Accordingly, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University hosted an exploratory seminar that brought together experts from the United States, Mexico, and the United Kingdom to share knowledge and propose revisions to the WPATH update. Christina Macenski, MD, a Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, hosted the seminar with John A. Fromson, MD, Vice Chair of Community Psychiatry at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

As outlined in the HRP column, gender-affirming interventions can be grouped into three major categories:

• Social interventions that allow for a person to live their identified gender through changes in behavior or appearance (e.g., changing their names, pronouns, and aspects of gender expression such as clothing and voice pitch)
• Prescribed hormones (or hormone blockers) that result in changes to secondary sexual characteristics, such as muscle, weight, and hair redistribution
• Surgical interventions that allow for body anatomy to match gender identity

The seminar participants recommend promoting gender-affirming care by:

• Providing patients with a balanced risk–benefit analysis for interventions
• Avoiding the assumption that mental health concerns automatically affect a person’s ability to make decisions about gender-affirming interventions
• Taking care of patients with language which reflects the continuum of gender, rather than a gender binary; using words like “needed” rather than “desired” when discussing medical treatments; and being mindful that TGD people do not necessarily have “dysphoria” related to their gender
• Firmly and unequivocally condemning conversion therapy (attempts to change a person’s gender identity by force)

Unique needs of TGD adolescents taken into consideration

The authors highlight the need to individualize the sequence of gender-affirming interventions. Some physicians recommend hormone initiation prior to any surgery, but the workgroup does not consider hormone therapy a prerequisite for specific interventions. As stated in their paper, “Some individuals may require surgical intervention . . . without the need or desire for prior hormone treatment (or hormone treatment at all).”

The workgroup also draws attention to the unique needs of TGD adolescents. Gender-affirming care for adolescents can be complicated by requirements for parental consent for many interventions. Some parents are hesitant to support social, medical, or surgical treatment for a variety of reasons, including fear of their child regretting their decision. However, the authors note that detransition rates are very low, even in adolescence. They recommend that requirements for specific interventions should consider the emotional, physical, and developmental stage of the individual patient, rather than be based on an arbitrary age.

The authors conclude that when considered together, their recommendations “represent a more comprehensive way to provide care that promotes justice in gender-affirming treatment.”

Read [(In)Equality and Beyond: Achieving Justice in Gender-Affirming Hormone Initiation]

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About Harvard Review of Psychiatry (HRP)

Harvard Review of Psychiatry is the authoritative source for scholarly reviews and perspectives on a diverse range of important topics in psychiatry. Founded by the Harvard Medical School Department of Psychiatry, HRP is peer-reviewed and not industry sponsored. It is affiliated with all of the Departments of Psychiatry at the Harvard teaching hospitals.

Articles encompass all major issues in contemporary psychiatry, including (but not limited to) neuroscience, psychopharmacology, psychotherapy, history of psychiatry, and ethics. In addition to scholarly reviews, perspectives articles, and columns, the journal includes a Clinical Challenge section that presents a case followed by discussion and debate from a panel of experts. HRP is committed to the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion as part of its core mission.

About Wolters Kluwer

Wolters Kluwer (WKL) is a global leader in professional information, software solutions, and services for the clinicians, nurses, accountants, lawyers, and tax, finance, audit, risk, compliance, and regulatory sectors. We help our customers make critical decisions every day by providing expert solutions that combine deep domain knowledge with advanced technology and services.

Wolters Kluwer reported 2021 annual revenues of €4.8 billion. The group serves customers in over 180 countries, maintains operations in over 40 countries, and employs approximately 19,800 people worldwide. The company is headquartered in Alphen aan den Rijn, the Netherlands.

Wolters Kluwer provides trusted clinical technology and evidence-based solutions that engage clinicians, patients, researchers and students in effective decision-making and outcomes across healthcare. We support clinical effectiveness, learning and research, clinical surveillance and compliance, as well as data solutions. For more information about our solutions, visit https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/health and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter @WKHealth.

For more information, visit www.wolterskluwer.com, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

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JOURNAL

Harvard Review of Psychiatry

Alien planet found spiraling to its doom around an aging star

The condemned planet could help answer questions about the fate of other worlds as their solar systems evolve

Peer-Reviewed Publication

HARVARD-SMITHSONIAN CENTER FOR ASTROPHYSICS

 

IMAGE: AN ARTIST'S CONCEPT OF THE KEPLER-1658 SYSTEM. KEPLER-1658B, ORBITING WITH A PERIOD OF JUST 3.8 DAYS, WAS THE FIRST EXOPLANET CANDIDATE DISCOVERED BY KEPLER. view more 

CREDIT: CREDIT: GABRIEL PEREZ DIAZ/INSTITUTO DE ASTROFÍSICA DE CANARIAS

Cambridge, Mass. – For the first time, astronomers have spotted an exoplanet whose orbit is decaying around an evolved, or older, host star. The stricken world appears destined to spiral closer and closer to its maturing star until collision and ultimate obliteration.  

The discovery offers new insights into the long-winded process of planetary orbital decay by providing the first look at a system at this late stage of evolution.  

Death-by-star is a fate thought to await many worlds and could be the Earth's ultimate adios billions of years from now as our Sun grows older.

"We've previously detected evidence for exoplanets inspiraling toward their stars, but we have never before seen such a planet around an evolved star," says Shreyas Vissapragada, a 51 Pegasi b Fellow at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and lead author of a new study describing the results. "Theory predicts that evolved stars are very effective at sapping energy from their planets' orbits, and now we can test those theories with observations." 

The findings were published Monday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. 

The ill-fated exoplanet is designated Kepler-1658b. As its name indicates, astronomers discovered the exoplanet with the Kepler space telescope, a pioneering planet-hunting mission that launched in 2009. Oddly enough, the world was the very first new exoplanet candidate Kepler ever observed. Yet it took nearly a decade to confirm the planet's existence, at which time the object entered Kepler's catalogue officially as the 1658th entry. 

Kepler-1658b is a so-called hot Jupiter, the nickname given to exoplanets on par with Jupiter's mass and size but in scorchingly ultra-close orbits about their host stars. For Kepler-1658b, that distance is merely an eighth of the space between our Sun and its tightest orbiting planet, Mercury. For hot Jupiters and other planets like Kepler-1658b that are already very close to their stars, orbital decay looks certain to culminate in destruction. 

Measuring the orbital decay of exoplanets has challenged researchers because the process is very slow and gradual. In the case of Kepler-1658b, according to the new study, its orbital period is decreasing at the miniscule rate of about 131 milliseconds (thousandths of a second) per year, with a shorter orbit indicating the planet has moved closer to its star. 

Detecting this decline required multiple years of careful observation. The watch started with Kepler and then was picked up by the Palomar Observatory’s Hale Telescope in Southern California and finally the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Telescope, or TESS, which launched in 2018. All three instruments captured transits, the term for when an exoplanet crosses the face of its star and causes a very slight dimming of the star’s brightness. Over the past 13 years, the interval between Kepler-1658b’s transits has slightly but steadily decreased.

The root cause of the orbital decay experienced by Kepler-1658b is tides — the same phenomenon responsible for the daily rise and fall in Earth’s oceans. Tides are generated by gravitational interactions between two orbiting bodies, such as between our world and the Moon or Kepler-1658b and its star. The bodies’ gravities distort each other’s shapes, and as the bodies respond to these changes, energy is released. Depending on the distances between, sizes, and rotation rates of the bodies involved, these tidal interactions can result in bodies pushing each other away — the case for the Earth and the slowly outward-spiraling Moon — or inward, as with Kepler-1658b toward its star. 

There is still a lot researchers do not understand about these dynamics, particularly in star-planet scenarios. Accordingly, further study of the Kepler-1658 system should prove instructive. 

The star has evolved to the point in its stellar life cycle where it has started to expand, just as our Sun is expected to, and has entered into what astronomers call a subgiant phase. The internal structure of evolved stars should more readily lead to dissipation of tidal energy taken from hosted planets’ orbits compared to unevolved stars like our Sun. This accelerates the orbital decay process, making it easier to study on human timescales. 

The results further help in explaining an intrinsic oddity about Kepler-1658b, which appears brighter and hotter than expected. The tidal interactions shrinking the planet’s orbit may also be cranking out extra energy within the planet itself, the team says. 

Vissapragada points to a similar situation with Jupiter’s moon Io, the most volcanic body in the Solar System. The gravitational push-and-pull from Jupiter on Io melts the planet’s innards. This molten rock then erupts out onto the moon’s famously infernal, pizza-like surface of yellow sulfurous deposits and fresh red lava. 

Stacking additional observations of Kepler-1658b should shed more light on celestial body interactions. And, with TESS slated to keep scrutinizing thousands of nearby stars, Vissapragada and colleagues expect the telescope to uncover numerous other instances of exoplanets circling down the drains of their host stars. 

"Now that we have evidence of inspiraling of a planet around an evolved star, we can really start to refine our models of tidal physics," Vissapragada says. "The Kepler-1658 system can serve as a celestial laboratory in this way for years to come, and with any luck, there will soon be many more of these labs." 

Vissapragada, who recently joined the Center for Astrophysics a few months ago and is now being mentored by Mercedes López-Morales, looks forward to the science of exoplanets continuing to dramatically advance. 

"Shreyas has been a welcome addition to our team working on characterizing the evolution of exoplanets and their atmospheres," says López-Morales, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics. 

"I can't wait to see what all of us end up discovering together," adds Vissapragada.

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About the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian is a collaboration between Harvard and the Smithsonian designed to ask—and ultimately answer—humanity's greatest unresolved questions about the nature of the universe. The Center for Astrophysics is headquartered in Cambridge, MA, with research facilities across the U.S. and around the world.

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JOURNAL

The Astrophysical Journal Letters

DOI

10.3847/2041-8213/aca47e 

ARTICLE TITLE

The Possible Tidal Demise of Kepler’s First Planetary System

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

19-Dec-2022

New theory on timing for human settlement of some parts of tropical Pacific

Sea-level rise data suggest some islands in Micronesia were possibly settled much earlier than supposed

Peer-Reviewed Publication

TUFTS UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: A MANGROVE FOREST ON THE ISLAND OF KOSRAE, FEDERATED STATES OF MICRONESIA. THESE MANGROVE FORESTS HAVE BEEN GROWING ON THE COASTLINE OF KOSRAE FOR AT LEAST 5,000 YEARS, KEEPING PACE WITH RISING SEA LEVEL view more 

CREDIT: JULIET SEFTON

Spread across vast distances, the islands of the tropical Pacific Ocean are thought to have been populated by humans in two distinct migrations beginning approximately 3,330 years ago.

The first followed a northern route out of what is today the Philippines and the second followed a southern route from Taiwan and New Guinea. People arrived on the islands between these routes—now making up the Federated States of Micronesia—about 1,000 years later.

But a new finding by a Tufts sea-level researcher and his colleagues suggests that the islands in Micronesia were possibly settled much earlier than supposed and that voyagers on the two routes may have interacted with one another. They reported their research in the journal PNAS.

Andrew Kemp, an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Climate Sciences, was drawn to Micronesia to improve understanding of how climate change impacts global sea level change by collecting new data from the tropical Pacific Ocean, which is not nearly as well documented as the north Atlantic Ocean.

With support from the National Science Foundation, the research team collected cores of mangrove sediment on the islands of Kosrae and Pohnpei in the Federated States of Micronesia.

Although relative sea level—the height of the land relative to the height of the ocean next to it—fell during the past 5,000 years across much of the tropical Pacific, in Micronesia radiocarbon dating showed that relative sea level rose significantly, by about 4.3 meters (14 feet) because the islands are sinking.

Although the researchers can’t yet fully explain why the two islands are subsiding so much faster than others in the Pacific, they could clearly see the results and their meaning for understanding how people came to populate remote Oceania.

The team—including Juliet Sefton, then a postdoctoral researcher at Tufts and now an assistant lecturer at Monash University in Australia, and Mark McCoy, an associate professor of anthropology at Southern Methodist University—was struck by the implications of relative sea level for interpreting the monumental ruins of Nan Madol, a large series of stone buildings constructed on islets separated by canals filled with ocean water just offshore from the island of Pohnpei.

The ruins, now a U.N. World Heritage site, are long presumed to have been administrative or religious buildings constructed about 1,000 years ago for the island’s elite to live apart from the main population in the island.

But Kemp and his colleagues realized that long-term relative sea-level rise meant that this presumption was incorrect. When the structures were built, they were on the island itself, not separated by water. According to McCoy, the prevailing description of Nan Madol as the “Venice of the Pacific” may not have been accurate when it was constructed.

It got the researchers thinking about when these islands were in fact first settled. Kemp notes that the seafaring people who first came to the islands would probably have lived at the coastline—that’s why researchers look for archaeological evidence there, but haven’t seen it for older inhabitation.  

“We propose that Pohnpei and Kosrae perhaps weren’t settled anomalously late, but rather they were settled around the same time as the other islands in the Pacific,” Sefton says. “People arrived and lived at the coast, but subsidence of the islands caused relative sea level rise, which submerged the oldest archeological evidence. It’s probably underwater, yet to be found—if it will ever be found.”

If that is the case, people on the northern and southern migrations may have interacted with one another around the volcanic islands of Micronesia—Kosrae, Pohnpei, Chuuk, and Yap.

There’s been no evidence of this before because researchers were building on the wrong assumptions about when the islands were first inhabited based on sea levels. McCoy points out that archaeologists “have been looking in the wrong place for years, because we assumed that relative sea level was falling.”

“Although we can’t prove that there was interaction between these two pathways, we can present an argument that says the data that exists now about migration in the Pacific is probably a lot more incomplete than it is thought to be,” says Kemp.

 

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2210863119 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Meta-analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Implications of anomalous relative sea-level rise for the peopling of Remote Oceania

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

19-Dec-2022