Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Researchers learn how nectar-laden honey bees avoid overheating

UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING

Honey bees on cactus — IMAGE:
HONEY BEES DRAW NECTAR FROM A CACTUS.
view more
CREDIT: JON F. HARRISON

Honey bees carrying nectar have the remarkable ability to adjust their flight behavior to avoid overheating when air temperatures increase, according to research led by a University of Wyoming scientist.

Jordan Glass, a postdoctoral research associate in UW’s Department of Zoology and Physiology, conducted the study to determine how high air temperatures may limit the ability of honey bees to forage for nectar. His research findings appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the world’s most prestigious multidisciplinary scientific journals covering the biological, physical and social sciences.

Insect pollinators are declining at an alarming rate, due in part to climate change. While it is thought that extremely hot, dry conditions should limit when a honey bee can forage, Glass and colleagues found that these pollinating insects have the ability to remain active in significant heat. In fact, this study showed that honey bees can carry the same amount of nectar without a threat to their lives in temperatures ranging from 77 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit.

The researchers measured the flight muscle temperatures, metabolism and water loss of honey bees carrying nectar inside a temperature-controlled flight room to determine the insects’ ability to fly at high air temperatures. And, to determine how carrying nectar might change the flight behavior, the scientists also used high-speed videos of the flying bees to measure changes in how they flap their wings.

Specifically, their results demonstrated that the honey bees’ flight muscle temperatures and metabolism increased while carrying nectar at 68 and 86 degrees. However, at 104 degrees, muscle temperatures did not change, and flight metabolism only slightly increased with increasing nectar loads.

Analysis of the high-speed videos of honey bees flying at air temperatures of 77 and 104 degrees showed that, at high body temperatures, “bees apparently increase flight efficiency by lowering their wingbeat frequency and increasing stroke amplitude to compensate, reducing the need for evaporative cooling,” wrote Glass, who led the research as a doctoral student at Arizona State University.

In other words, as temperatures rise, the bees change how they fly to decrease the heat they generate from metabolism, which helps these insects avoid overheating and save precious water.

“Due to the capacity of hot bees to reduce metabolic heat production during flight, our data suggest that, under dry and poor forage conditions, (dehydration) may limit activity before overheating, impairing critical pollination services provided by honey bees,” Glass wrote. “Even with reductions in metabolic heat production, (dehydration) likely limits foraging at temperatures well below bees’ critical thermal maxima in hot, dry conditions.”

Although the findings from this study relieve some concern about the impact of a warming climate on honey bees, Glass says there is still reason for worry as the world becomes warmer and drier.

JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2311025121

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Flying, nectar-loaded honey bees conserve water and improve heat tolerance by reducing wingbeat frequency and metabolic heat production

Benefits of heat pumps detailed in new NREL report

Millions of homes can benefit today, but installation costs keep technology out of reach for some

Peer-Reviewed Publication

DOE/NATIONAL RENEWABLE ENERGY LABORATORY

Millions of U.S. households would benefit from heat pumps, but the cost of installing the technology needs to come down to make their use a more attractive proposition, according to researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

The findings, detailed in the journal Joule, quantify the costs and benefits of air-source heat pumps across the United States and consider various climates, heating sources, and types of homes. The researchers based their conclusions on simulations of 550,000 statistically representative households. Their analysis considered such factors as the performance of different heat pumps and whether additional steps to upgrade the insulation had occurred.

The analysis revealed a majority of Americans (62% to 95% of households, depending upon heat pump efficiency) would see a drop in their energy bills by using a heat pump. Improving the weatherization of a home, such as by installing better insulation, would increase the range to 82% to 97%. However, due to high installation costs, heat pumps may only be financially feasible for a smaller portion of households.

“There are millions of people who would benefit from putting in heat pumps, and there are incentives made available through the Inflation Reduction Act, both tax credits and rebates, that millions of households can benefit from,” said Eric Wilson, a senior research engineer in the Buildings Technologies and Science Center at NREL and lead author of the paper, “Heat pumps for all? Distributions of costs and benefits of residential air-source heat pumps in the United States.” “But what this paper shows is that there are still millions more households for whom the technology is still pretty expensive, and we need work to bring down the cost of installing heat pumps.”

His co-authors are Prateek Munankarmi, Janet Reyna, and Stacey Rothgeb, all from NREL; and Brennan Less from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Because heat pumps provide both heating and air conditioning, homeowners who do not already have air conditioning benefit from additional comfort, but that comes with an additional cost. The researchers also noted installers who lack experience with heat pumps may also charge higher prices “to cover the hassle and risk of working with unfamiliar equipment and sizing procedures.”

Nationally, the researchers calculated, heat pumps would cut home site energy use by 31% to 47% on average, depending on its efficiency level, and 41% to 52% when combined with building upgrades such as better insulation. The big difference between energy savings and energy cost savings is because natural gas prices are much lower than electricity prices on a Btu basis in many parts of the country.

The housing characteristics that had the largest bearing on savings were the heating fuel type and the presence of air conditioning. For the 49 million homes that use electricity, fuel oil, or propane for heat and have air conditioning, 92% to 100% of homes would see energy bill savings, with median savings of $300 to $650 a year depending on heat pump efficiency.

Co-author Munankarmi said the savings were most significant in colder climates. Additionally, he said, homeowners can “save thousands of dollars on average” by putting in a smaller heat pump if they first have taken steps to improve the energy efficiency of their dwellings.

The researchers also found that installation of a heat pump prompted greenhouse gas emissions to decline in every state, but the drop was especially large when it replaced a heating system that had been powered by fossil fuels. Nationally, heat pumps would cut residential sector greenhouse gas emissions by 36%–64%, including the emissions from new electricity generation.

The Department of Energy’s Building Technologies Office funded the research.

NREL is the U.S. Department of Energy's primary national laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development. NREL is operated for DOE by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy LLC.

JOURNAL

Joule

DOI

10.1016/j.joule.2024.01.022

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Meta-analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Heat pumps for all? Distributions of the costs and benefits of residential air-source heat pumps in the United States

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

12-Feb-2024

Children's Hospital Los Angeles researchers uncover social and economic factors that influence acute liver failure in children—and ways to overcome them

CHLA study identifies socioeconomic factors that can impact the health outcomes of patients with pediatric acute liver failure (PALF)

Peer-Reviewed Publication

CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL LOS ANGELES

Imagine your healthy child gets sick—so sick that you take them to the emergency department. You are shocked to find out that their liver is failing, and they will need a transplant to survive. Studies show that their chances of survival are higher the faster they can get to a hospital that performs liver transplants. But what factors affect how quickly that happens?

Pediatric acute liver failure, also called PALF, is a life-threatening condition that emerges with very little warning in previously healthy children. It is rare, affecting about 5,000 children in the United States a year, and can result from viral hepatitis or drug-induced liver injury (such as a child accidentally swallowing too much Tylenol)—or appear with no apparent cause at all. Many children recover with supportive care or medications, but for some, an emergency liver transplant is the only way to save their lives.

A Children’s Hospital Los Angeles research team found that, for these children, the likelihood of receiving a liver transplant and the prospects of recovery can depend upon factors outside of their overall health.

“Studies have shown that prompt referral to a liver transplant center reduces the chances of death,” says Johanna Ascher Bartlett, MD, Transplant Hepatology fellow at CHLA and corresponding author on the paper. “But is everybody who needs a transplant referred to a transplant center in time? Outside of the clinical factors we are monitoring, we wanted to understand if there were any overlooked disparities that we could address to improve our patients’ ability to receive transplants and care.”

The researchers wanted to know if patient race, ethnicity and social determinants of health—the environmental factors like neighborhood, social support systems, economic stability and more that can affect a person’s health in unexpected ways—could impact the outcomes of children with acute liver failure. The researchers examined the medical records of 145 children admitted to CHLA with acute liver failure over the past two decades. The team then validated the CHLA results with data from 156 patients who were part of the larger National Institutes of Health Pediatric Acute Liver Failure Study Group, which included patients from 12 different centers.

The analysis, published in January 2024 in the journal Pediatric Transplantation, showed that factors like family support, employment (parent or caretaker), patient age, race and language spoken can affect clinical outcomes. “Families with more financial and interpersonal support tend to experience better outcomes—spontaneous recovery or liver transplant rather than death—while patients from lower-income families have worse outcomes, regardless of insurance status,” says Dr. Ascher Bartlett. “Overall, our data indicate that the children who died more often had limited social support systems and parents who were the primary caregiver but who worked full-time.”

Uncovering hidden influences

In the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles group:

55% of CHLA liver transplant patients reported having “extensive” community and family/friend support
40% of families of patients who died reported having extensive support
11% of primary caregivers were unemployed in the group of transplant patients with worse outcomes
7% of transplant patients who died had primary caregivers who were unemployed
5% of patients in the spontaneous recovery group had primary caregivers who were unemployed

“These data show that barriers still exist for children with acute liver failure who are admitted to pediatric transplant centers,” says Juliet Emamaullee, MD, PhD, FRCSC, FACS, transplant surgeon at CHLA and senior author on the paper. “There may be unconscious biases held by medical teams in evaluating children with acute liver failure. Our data serves as a reminder that we need to maintain a patient-centered approach when evaluating patients, especially for families that may struggle to navigate the complexities of the health care system.”

Overcoming disparities

However, when the researchers examined CHLA acute liver failure patients for disparities using the social deprivation index—a standard statistical tool measuring income, poverty rate and education according to zip code—they found that socio-economic disparities existed, but did not necessarily interfere with these children’s chances of getting a transplant or their health outcomes.

“While similar studies on a larger scale and in different urban settings are needed to truly determine the relationships between social determinants of health and access to prompt care at a transplant center, our data suggests that current referral patterns to CHLA—the only freestanding pediatric hospital in the U.S. that serves under-resourced communities—may be effective in overcoming these potential barriers,” says Dr. Emamaullee, Research Director, Division of Abdominal Organ Transplantation. “From our experience, screening for inequities can equip clinicians with the tools needed to identify unmet health-related social and economic needs of patients, and collaborating with community health organizations could allow providers to refer patients with socioeconomic insecurities so they can be more quickly routed to transplant centers.”

JOURNAL

Pediatric Transplantation

DOI

10.1111/petr.14686

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Finance, race, ethnicity, and spoken language impact clinical outcomes for children with acute liver failure

Business operations affect fishermen's resilience to climate change, new study finds

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF MAINE

IMAGE:
A SMALL-SCALE FISHERMAN LANDS A YELLOWTAIL WHILE FISHING OFF OF ISLA TORTUGA IN THE CENTRAL GULF OF CALIFORNIA.
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CREDIT: TIMOTHY FRAWLEY

Timothy Frawley has spent the better of the past two decades working in and around commercial fisheries. Born and raised in Casco Bay, Maine, he grew up packing lobsters and pitching bait on Portland’s working waterfront. He has worked in commercial fisheries in California, Alaska and the Mexican state of Baja California Sur.

Throughout his years spent on working waterfronts, Frawley, a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the University of Maine’s Darling Marine Center, closely observed the ways in which fishermen conducted their business, making decisions about what and how they fished, and how it affected their operations and profit.

“While the desert of northwest Mexico and the rocky coast of Maine might seem to be worlds apart, I found surprising similarities between the coast of Baja and the coast of Maine,” Frawley reflected. “Both places include communities that are quite remote with local cultures and traditions defined by people’s strong and enduring connections to the ocean.”

With extensive knowledge of commercial fishing and observational and investigative skills he’s refined over the years, Frawley led an international team of researchers to determine how fishermen’s operational decisions affected their ability to adapt to climate change, a global force threatening their livelihoods.

In their new study published in the journal Global Environmental Change, researchers found that fishermen’s responses to a changing climate can be strongly influenced by how they fish and how they’re organized. The study highlights the role that distinct strategies associated with different group sizes and levels of cooperation play in how fishers respond and adapt to climate change.

“Climate variability and change in ocean ecosystems create challenges for fisheries’ sustainability, both economically and environmentally,” said Frawley, a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the University of Maine Darling Marine Center. “While we know quite a bit about how individual fishermen and coastal fishing communities are responding to changing oceans, less is known about how the social structures through which they choose to organize themselves may influence their vulnerability to associated shocks and stressors and their capacity to adapt.”

Understanding factors that enhance fishers’ ability to adapt to environmental variability and change is critical. Coastal communities worldwide, including many fishing-dependent communities in Maine, are challenged by impacts of the climate crisis, including rising seas, reduced access to working waterfronts, shifting ranges of economically important species and rapidly changing technologies and economic conditions.

Frawley conducted this research while working as a postdoctoral research associate affiliated with the University of California Santa Cruz, NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center and UMaine. Together with collaborators at UMaine, Stanford University, Stockholm University, University of Rhode Island, Duke University, Oregon State University, Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, Sociedad de Historia Natural Niparajá, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Comunidad y Biodiversidad (COBI), Frawley synthesized information on how and what people fish throughout northwest Mexico and how those behaviors shifted in the face of changing ocean conditions.

Some of these fishers belong to cooperatives, while others worked as independent owner-operators or as part of businesses backed by private capital from patrons. The regular “fish-tickets” through which fishers are required to report their harvests to the Mexican government provided the team an opportunity to examine how fishing strategies differed among business types before and after a series of marine heatwaves, and what it meant for the profitability of each.

The results indicate that while fishers working as part of cooperatives can be resilient to short-term environmental shocks, the narrow scope of the species they target may increase their vulnerability as climate change progresses. In many ways, small-scale cooperative fishers on the Pacific Coast of Baja California are becoming more and more like their counterparts in Maine and California. As other fisheries have faltered, the harvest of crustaceans such as lobster or Dungeness Crab is becoming increasingly dominant.

This study is part of MAREA+, a long-term interdisciplinary project focused on the environmental and human dimensions of small-scale fisheries in the Gulf of California region. The study was funded by the National Science Foundation and based on more than 10 years of fisheries data collected by fishermen and curated by the Mexican government.

Heather Leslie, a professor of marine sciences at the University of Maine based at the Darling Marine Center, mentored Frawley as part of this project.

“It is really exciting to see how fine-scale information on fishing organizations can illuminate our understanding of responses to climate impacts,” she observed. “It would be great to be able to do this type of analysis in New England, particularly given the growing interest in innovative approaches to fisheries, aquaculture and other dimensions of the blue economy.”

JOURNAL

Global Environmental Change

DOI

10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.102805

ARTICLE TITLE

Self-governance mediates small-scale fishing strategies, vulnerability and adaptive response

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

12-Feb-2024

Seeking a middle ground for reducing greenhouse emissions

New study looks at the underlying barriers that might prevent people from adopting newer, greener technology

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE

As the world gradually transitions to making meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, one of the most crucial questions that needs to be answered is how much that change is going to cost.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has put out reports on this potential cost that showed global greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced by at least half in 2030 at a cost of less than $100 per ton of CO2 equivalent. A new study from the University of Delaware, Yale University and Columbia University, however, points out that these estimates do not consider some hidden, underlying frictions that might prevent people from simply adopting a newer, greener technology to replace an older, more familiar one.

The paper was recently published in Science and was written by James Rising, assistant professor in UD’s School of Marine Science and Policy; Matthew Kotchen, professor of economics at Yale University; and Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School.

The researchers focused on the IPCC’s headline costs that were reported as mitigation potentials in the Summary for Policymakers of Working Group III in the Sixth Assessment Report.

“The IPCC has three different reports that they put out about every seven years,” Rising said. “The third report focuses on mitigation: how we reduce carbon emissions. These reports bring together all the academic work that has happened over the previous seven years. It’s an impressive process that they go through but not without its challenges.”

Rising said one of the issues with this report is that it mainly looks at the problem of greenhouse gas emissions using end-numbers that reflect an engineering and not an economic perspective.

For instance, with regard to something like making the change away from incandescent lights, it might be cheaper to use LED lights, so from an engineer’s perspective, there’s no reason not to do it. But still, some people might persist in using incandescent lights and the trade-offs go beyond just the cost of the bulb.

“The economists’ answer to this problem is that there is no such thing as a free lunch,” Rising said. “You can’t get something for nothing. If people are not switching to a technology on their own, it is because there must be some extra costs associated with it. It might just be behavioral cost or costs that are built into the supply chain, but somehow, there are frictions. And those are real barriers to people switching over.”

Rising said that if those costs can be better understood, it would allow for the development of the realistic estimates that policymakers need when making mitigation decisions.

“On their own, the engineering cost estimates are really informative, but they are not a full reflection of the costs that policymakers need to know,” Rising said. “Policymakers need to understand when barriers exist, so that they can step in.”

In addition, the models need to account for the fact that the landscape will be changing in significant ways thanks to technology.

“There are broader changes that go with every choice between technologies: Some sectors get bigger and become more prominent, while elsewhere, people will lose their jobs because the technology they were involved in is no longer as significant a part of the economic system,” Rising said.

The goal of the paper is to try to have the IPCC reports become more collaborative with regard to the social sciences, which in turn will help the scientists to come up with better overall cost estimates of switching from greenhouse gases. Rising said this has been the case with early IPCC reports, which used economists’ input, but it has not been as collaborative in recent IPCC reports.

“To understand the cost of mitigation, the most important place to focus is on these so-called negative costs. It’s about these frictions,” Rising said. “The comprehensive view that the IPCC aims for needs economists and needs to try to integrate these two views. I think economists have a crucial perspective. To finally eliminate CO2 emissions, we need to create a very different world and getting there requires an understanding of social science, not just technology.”

JOURNAL

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.adj2453

A century of reforestation helped keep the eastern US cool

Much of the U.S. warmed during the 20th century, but the eastern part of the country remained mysteriously cool. The recovery of forests could explain why

Peer-Reviewed Publication

AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION

American Geophysical Union
13 February 2024
AGU Release No. 24-5
For Immediate Release

This press release and accompanying multimedia are available online at: https://news.agu.org/press-release/a-century-of-reforestation-helped-keep-the-eastern-us-cool/

A century of reforestation helped keep the eastern US cool
Much of the U.S. warmed during the 20th century, but the eastern part of the country remained mysteriously cool. The recovery of forests could explain why

AGU press contact:
Liza Lester, +1 (202) 777-7494, news@agu.org (UTC-5 hours)

Contact information for the researchers:
Kim Novick, Indiana University, knovick@iu.edu (UTC-5 hours)
Mallory Barnes, Indiana University, malbarn@iu.edu (UTC-5 hours)

WASHINGTON — Widespread 20th-century reforestation in the eastern United States helped counter rising temperatures due to climate change, according to new research. The authors highlight the potential of forests as regional climate adaptation tools, which are needed along with a decrease in carbon emissions.

“It’s all about figuring out how much forests can cool down our environment and the extent of the effect,” said Mallory Barnes, lead author of the study and an environmental scientist at Indiana University. “This knowledge is key not only for large-scale reforestation projections aimed at climate mitigation, but also for initiatives like urban tree planting.”

The study was published in the AGU journal Earth’s Future, which publishes interdisciplinary research on the past, present and future of our planet and its inhabitants.

Return of the trees

Before European colonization, the eastern United States was almost entirely covered in temperate forests. From the late 18th to early 20th centuries, timber harvests and clearing for agriculture led to forest losses exceeding 90% in some areas. In the 1930s, efforts to revive the forests, coupled with the abandonment and subsequent reforestation of subpar agricultural fields, kicked off an almost century-long comeback for eastern forests. About 15 million hectares of forest have since grown in these areas.

“The extent of the deforestation that happened in the eastern United States is remarkable, and the consequences were grave,” said Kim Novick, an environmental scientist at Indiana University and co-author of the new study. “It was a dramatic land cover change, and not that long ago.”

During the period of regrowth, global warming was well underway, with temperatures across North America rising 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.23 degrees Fahrenheit) on average. In contrast, from 1900 to 2000, the East Coast and Southeast cooled by about 0.3 degrees Celsius (0.5 degrees Fahrenheit), with the strongest cooling in the southeast.

Previous studies suggested the cooling could be caused by aerosols, agricultural activity or increased precipitation, but many of these factors would only explain highly localized cooling. Despite known relationships between forests and cooling, studies had not considered forests as a possible explanation for the anomalous, widespread cooling.

“This widespread history of reforestation, a huge shift in land cover, hasn’t been widely studied for how it could’ve contributed to the anomalous lack of warming in the eastern U.S., which climate scientists call a ‘warming hole,’” Barnes said. “That’s why we initially set out to do this work.”

Trees are cool

Barnes, Novick and their team used a combination of data from satellites and 58 meteorological towers to compare forests to nearby grasslands and croplands, allowing an examination of how changes in forest cover can influence ground surface temperatures and in the few meters of air right above the surface.

The researchers found that forests in the eastern U.S. today cool the land’s surface by 1 to 2 degrees Celsius (1.8 to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) annually. The strongest cooling effect occurs at midday in the summer, when trees lower temperatures by 2 to 5 degrees Celsius (3.6 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit) — providing relief when it’s needed most.

Using data from a network of gas-measuring towers, the team showed that this cooling effect also extends to the air, with forests lowering the near-surface air temperature by up to 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) during midday. (Previous work on trees’ cooling effect has focused on land, not air, temperatures.)

The team then used historic land cover and daily weather data from 398 weather stations to track the relationship between forest cover and land and near-surface air temperatures from 1900 to 2010. They found that by the end of the 20th century, weather stations surrounded by forests were up to 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) cooler than locations that did not undergo reforestation. Spots up to 300 meters (984 feet) away were also cooled, suggesting the cooling effect of reforestation could have extended even to unforested parts of the landscape.

Other factors, such as changes in agricultural irrigation, may have also had a cooling effect on the study region. The reforestation of the eastern United States in the 20th century likely contributed to, but cannot fully explain, the cooling anomaly, the authors said.

“It’s exciting to be able to contribute additional information to the long-standing and perplexing question of, ‘Why hasn’t the eastern United States warmed at a rate commensurate with the rest of the world?’” Barnes said. “We can’t explain all of the cooling, but we propose that reforestation is an important part of the story.”

Reforestation in the eastern United States is generally regarded as a viable strategy for climate mitigation due to the capacity of these forests to sequester and store carbon. The authors note that their work suggests that eastern United States reforestation also represents an important tool for climate adaptation. However, in different environments, such as snow-covered boreal regions, adding trees could have a warming effect. In some locations, reforestation can also affect precipitation, cloud cover, and other regional scale processes in ways that may or may not be beneficial. Land managers must therefore consider other environmental factors when evaluating the utility of forests as a climate adaptation tool.

***

Notes for Journalists:
This study is published in Earth’s Future, an open-access journal. Neither the paper nor this press release is under embargo. View and download a pdf of the study here.

This study is part of an ongoing special collection, “Quantifying Nature-based Climate Solutions,” from AGU’s publications.

Paper title:
“A Century of Reforestation Reduced Anthropogenic Warming in the Eastern United States”

Authors:

Mallory L. Barnes (corresponding author), Indiana University, Indiana, USA
Kim Novick (corresponding author), Indiana University, Indiana, USA
Quan Zhang, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China
Scott M. Robeson, Indiana University, Indiana, USA
Lily Young, Indiana University, Indiana, USA
Elizabeth A. Burakowski, University of New Hampshire, New Hampshire, USA
A. Christopher. Oishi, USDA Forest Service, North Carolina, USA
Paul C. Stoy, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Gaby Katul, Duke University, North Carolina, USA

###

AGU (www.agu.org) is a global community supporting more than half a million advocates and professionals in Earth and space sciences. Through broad and inclusive partnerships, we advance discovery and solution science that accelerate knowledge and create solutions that are ethical, unbiased and respectful of communities and their values. Our programs include serving as a scholarly publisher, convening virtual and in-person events and providing career support. We live our values in everything we do, such as our net zero energy renovated building in Washington, D.C. and our Ethics and Equity Center, which fosters a diverse and inclusive geoscience community to ensure responsible conduct.

JOURNAL

Earth's Future

DOI

10.1029/2023EF003663

ARTICLE TITLE

A Century of Reforestation Reduced Anthropogenic Warming in the Eastern United States

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

13-Feb-2024

UK

Hostile environment policies linked to prolonged distress in people with Black Caribbean ancestry

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON

Psychological distress increased among people with Black Caribbean heritage in the UK, relative to the White population, following the 2014 Immigration Act and the Windrush scandal, finds a new study led by UCL researchers.

The researchers say their findings, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, suggest a causal link between government policies and a subsequent decline in mental health.

They were investigating the impact of the Immigration Act 2014, requiring landlords, employers, the NHS, banks and the police to check right-to-stay documentation. This was a key part of a set of measures known as the Home Office hostile environment policy, seeking to target people without leave to remain in the UK. The research team also specifically investigated the impact of the Windrush scandal, after news reports from late 2017 onwards documented how the UK government had, over the preceding years, been wrongly detaining British subjects who had come over from the Caribbean or threatening them with deportation.

The research team used longitudinal data from 58,087 people in the Understanding Society cohort study, which has a diverse group of study participants including over 2,000 people of Black Caribbean background. Participants regularly completed a questionnaire to screen for mental health problems, which was used in the study as a measure of overall psychological distress that includes symptoms of depression and anxiety.

The findings showed an increase in psychological distress in people of Black Caribbean heritage in the UK after 2014, relative to White study participants. This difference was a decline of 0.7 points on a mental wellbeing scale of 1-36, which is slightly larger than the declines in mental health seen across the whole UK population at the time of the first Covid-19 lockdown, but, unlike the lockdown impact, the increased psychological distress in the Black Caribbean population persisted for several years.

Black Caribbean study participants then experienced a further increase in psychological distress relative to the White population after the Windrush scandal was uncovered.

Further analysis revealed that the 2014 Act affected first generation Black Caribbean migrants more, while media coverage of the Windrush scandal affected British people of Caribbean heritage more.

The researchers say their findings suggest there was a causal effect of the Government’s policies and the Windrush scandal on greater psychological distress for people of Black Caribbean heritage in the UK.

The researchers did not find similar effects for other ethnic groups, even though some might have been similarly impacted by the hostile environment policy, but the researchers caution that the measure of psychological distress they used could have missed harms such as moral injury or psychosocial disempowerment.

Lead author Dr Annie Jeffery (UCL Psychiatry) said: “Our study highlights the harms to mental health that the Government’s hostile environment policy had on certain groups of people, in addition to other well-documented harms such as deportation, job loss, eviction, and discrimination.

“The mental health impacts may have stemmed from the direct impacts of such threats to people’s homes and livelihoods, but could also have resulted from a wider, pervasive sense of racial injustice and bias, faced by a group already experiencing systemic and sometimes institutionalised racism and discrimination.

“When the Windrush scandal dominated the news, there may have been a risk of retraumatisation for some people, while even those not directly affected may have experienced a form of vicarious trauma or fear of what could happen to them.”

Senior author Professor James Kirkbride (UCL Psychiatry) said: “Our findings show that government policies can produce, maintain and exacerbate systemic inequities in mental health.

“Policymakers should consider the mental health impact of immigration policies, as they can impact not only prospective immigrants or people without leave to remain, but also those who are already settled legally in the country, and thus they should design them to minimise all harms including mental health inequalities.”

Co-author Professor Gianluca Baio (UCL Statistical Science) said: “Our analysis is based on a combination of a quasi-experimental design (called interrupted time series) and suitable statistical methodology, which can robustly limit the impacts of potential confounders or biases. Thus, our results suggest a strong causal link between the political environment and subsequent mental health outcomes.”

The study was funded by Wellcome alongside support from the National Institute for Health and Care Research UCLH Biomedical Research Centre, and involved researchers at UCL, Imperial College London and LSE.

JOURNAL

The Lancet Psychiatry

DOI

10.1016/S2215-0366(23)00412-1

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

The effect of immigration policy reform on mental health in people from minoritised ethnic groups in England: an interrupted time series analysis of longitudinal data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study cohort

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

13-Feb-2024

Can hydrogels help mend a broken heart?

Researchers design gel from wood pulp to heal damaged heart tissue and improve cancer treatments

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO

You can mend a broken heart this valentine’s day now that researchers invented a new hydrogel that can be used to heal damaged heart tissue and improve cancer treatments.

University of Waterloo chemical engineering researcher Dr. Elisabeth Prince teamed up with researchers from the University of Toronto and Duke University to design the synthetic material made using cellulose nanocrystals, which are derived from wood pulp. The material is engineered to replicate the fibrous nanostructures and properties of human tissues, thereby recreating its unique biomechanical properties.

"Cancer is a diverse disease and two patients with the same type of cancer will often respond to the same treatment in very different ways," Prince said. "Tumour organoids are essentially a miniaturized version of an individual patient's tumour that can be used for drug testing, which could allow researchers to develop personalized therapies for a specific patient."

As director of the Prince Polymer Materials Lab, Prince designs synthetic biomimetic hydrogels for biomedical applications. The hydrogels have a nanofibrous architecture with large pores for nutrient and waste transport, which affect mechanical properties and cell interaction.

Prince, a professor in Waterloo’s Department of Chemical Engineering, utilized these human-tissue mimetic hydrogels to promote the growth of small-scale tumour replicas derived from donated tumour tissue.

She aims to test the effectiveness of cancer treatments on the mini-tumour organoids before administering the treatment to patients, potentially allowing for personalized cancer therapies. This research was conducted alongside Professor David Cescon at the Princess Margaret Cancer Center.

Prince's research group at Waterloo is developing similar biomimetic hydrogels to be injectable for drug delivery and regenerative medical applications as Waterloo researchers continue to lead health innovation in Canada.

Her research aims to use injected filamentous hydrogel material to regrow heart tissue damaged after a heart attack. She used nanofibers as a scaffolding for the regrowth and healing of damaged heart tissue.

"We are building on the work that I started during my PhD to design human-tissue mimetic hydrogels that can be injected into the human body to deliver therapeutics and repair the damage caused to the heart when a patient suffers a heart attack," Prince said.

Prince's research is unique as most gels currently used in tissue engineering or 3D cell culture don't possess this nanofibrous architecture. Prince's group uses nanoparticles and polymers as building blocks for materials and develops chemistry for nanostructures that accurately mimic human tissues.

The next step in Prince's research is to use conductive nanoparticles to make electrically conductive nanofibrous gels that can be used to heal heart and skeletal muscle tissue.

The research was recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences