People sympathize with bullied AI bots

Imperial College London

In an Imperial College London study, humans displayed sympathy towards and protected AI bots who were excluded from playtime.

The researchers say the study, which used a virtual ball game, highlights humans' tendency to treat AI agents as social beings – an inclination that should be considered when designing AI bots.

The study is published in Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies.

Lead author Jianan Zhou, from Imperial’s Dyson School of Design Engineering, said: “This is a unique insight into how humans interact with AI, with exciting implications for their design and our psychology.”

People are increasingly required to interact with AI virtual agents when accessing services, and many also use them as companions for social interaction. However, these findings suggest that developers should avoid designing agents as overly human-like.

Senior author Dr Nejra van Zalk, also from Imperial’s Dyson School of Design Engineering, said: “A small but increasing body of research shows conflicting findings regarding whether humans treat AI virtual agents as social beings. This raises important questions about how people perceive and interact with these agents.

“Our results show that participants tended to treat AI virtual agents as social beings, because they tried to include them into the ball-tossing game if they felt the AI was being excluded. This is common in human-to-human interactions, and our participants showed the same tendency even though they knew they were tossing a ball to a virtual agent. Interestingly this effect was stronger in the older participants.”

People don’t like ostracism – even toward AI

Feeling empathy and taking corrective action against unfairness is something most humans appear hardwired to do. Prior studies not involving AI found that people tended to compensate ostracised targets by tossing the ball to them more frequently, and that people also tended to dislike the perpetrator of exclusionary behaviour while feeling preference and sympathy towards the target.

To carry out the study, the researchers looked at how 244 human participants responded when they observed an AI virtual agent being excluded from play by another human in a game called 'Cyberball', in which players pass a virtual ball to each other on-screen. The participants were aged between 18 and 62.

In some games, the non-participant human threw the ball a fair number of times to the bot, and in others, the non-participant human blatantly excluded the bot by throwing the ball only to the participant.

Participants were observed and subsequently surveyed for their reactions to test whether they favoured throwing the ball to the bot after it was treated unfairly, and why.

They found that most of the time, the participants tried to rectify the unfairness towards the bot by favouring throwing the ball to the bot. Older participants were more likely to perceive unfairness.

Human caution

The researchers say that as AI virtual agents become more popular in collaborative tasks, increased engagement with humans could increase our familiarity and trigger automatic processing. This would mean users would likely intuitively include virtual agents as real team members and engage with them socially.

This, they say, can be an advantage for work collaboration but might be concerning where virtual agents are used as friends to replace human relationships, or as advisors on physical or mental health.

Jianan said: “By avoiding designing overly human-like agents, developers could help people distinguish between virtual and real interaction. They could also tailor their design for specific age ranges, for example, by accounting for how our varying human characteristics affect our perception.”

The researchers point out that Cyberball might not represent how humans interact in real-life scenarios, which typically occur through written or spoken language with chatbots or voice assistants. This might have conflicted with some participants’ user expectations and raised feelings of strangeness, affecting their responses during the experiment.

Therefore, they are now designing similar experiments using face-to-face conversations with agents in varying contexts such as in the lab or more casual settings. This way, they can test how far their findings extend.

---

DOI

10.1155/2024/8864909 

Article Title

Humans Mindlessly Treat AI Virtual Agents as Social Beings, but This Tendency Diminishes Among the Young: Evidence From a Cyberball Experiment

 

Buy your groceries online? Watch out for this food labeling gap

Online grocery shopping has soared in popularity, but new Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy research shows food information—like nutrition facts, ingredients, or allergens—isn’t always accessible to consumers

Tufts University

Picture this: You’re shopping online for this week’s groceries. You try to pick healthy options based on the information provided by the online retailer. You can tell that the products you’re choosing are organic, non-GMO, or Fair Trade Certified. But in many cases, you can’t find the nutrition facts, ingredient list, or even a list of allergens.

A new, comprehensive study of online grocery retailers shows this problem is pervasive, to the detriment of public health and safety in the U.S. The study, led by researchers at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University and published in Public Health Nutrition on Oct. 17, shows a lack of present, accessible, and legible information about the food consumers buy, while marketing claims are still prominent. The absence of accessible food labeling has tangible consequences for public health, said Julia Sharib, first author on the study and manager of research and communications for the Food is Medicine Institute at the Friedman School.

“The government has clearly intended that you should be able to know certain things about your food,” said Sean Cash, Bergstrom Foundation Professor in Global Nutrition at the Friedman School and senior author on the study. “The way we’ve regulated that in the United States is to put that information on the packaging. But that hasn’t carried over to online spaces very well.”

A Lack of Information

Cash and researchers at the Friedman School and New York University (NYU) first identified the lack of accessible food labeling among online retailers in a 2022 pilot study of 10 food products across nine online grocery retailers. That study found that information required by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) about food, such as nutrition facts, an ingredient list, and an allergen list were often absent, and were less present than marketing claims.

The lack of information accessible in online settings reveals a “major gap” in federal regulations, Cash said. While food manufacturers are required by the FDA to present certain information on food packaging, online grocery retailers aren’t required to reproduce that information on their websites. That means that consumers won’t necessarily be able to access information about calories, nutrition content, or allergens when buying their groceries online.

Since 2022, there were some reasons to think that retailers would step up their game. First, online grocery shopping is here to stay—recent data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) indicates that 20% of Americans buy their groceries online, while over 80% have done so in the past three years. The trend has been aided by a drop in online food prices relative to in-store shopping: Prices are now roughly comparable between in-store and online groceries, which hasn’t always been the case.

Second, online food retailers could have responded to the growing market by deciding to get out ahead of any regulatory action. “We thought there might be practical changes in what food retailers are doing,” Cash said.

There have been signs that the FDA is considering regulatory action, too. In 2023, the agency issued a request for information on food labeling in online grocery shopping, citing previous research from Cash and his colleagues as one basis of their request. “We, and others, have been pushing for change,” Cash said. But the agency has not yet taken regulatory action to close the gap.

The new study, with co-authors Jennifer Pomeranz, associate professor of public health policy and management at the NYU School of Global Public Health, and Dariush Mozaffarian, director of the Food is Medicine Institute and Jean Mayer Professor of Nutrition at the Friedman School, gives a more complete look at the issue and analyzes 60 food products across 10 different online grocery retailers. The food products were chosen to represent the typical range of food commonly sold at supermarkets, based on a formula used by the USDA for administering food assistance programs. The results show the trend has persisted: Each FDA-required label was present, accessible, and legible for just 35.1% of products.

Marketing claims and labels, though, were present for 83.7% of products. That’s what Cash finds unpalatable. “It’s far easier to find marketing that’s trying to sell you the food rather than the information that our society agrees should be there to tell you about your food,” he said.

“We saw many cases in which a nutrition facts label, for example, was only accessible after scrolling through a dozen marketing images, essentially forcing any consumers seeking that label to interact with marketing language,” Sharib said.

Making Shopping More Accessible

Studies show that population health is better when ingredient lists and nutrition facts are provided. When consumers can’t access that information, retailers “run the risk of perpetuating consumer’s incorrect understandings about the healthfulness of the foods they buy,” Sharib said.

Additionally, plenty of Americans follow specific diets meant to control certain health conditions and may be looking for foods with a specific nutrition content. “For example, if you’re worried about sodium intake because you have hypertension, food labeling is something that can be a very important part of your life,” Cash said. For people with specific allergies, a lack of food labeling can be dangerous, too.

The best way consumers can get the FDA-required information is to visit the websites of the food manufacturers themselves, Cash said. On those sites, nutrition information and ingredient lists are much more likely to be present and legible. Cash cautions that food labeling found in product reviews can be helpful, but may also be out of date or inaccurate.

And ultimately, the onus should be on regulators and the industry to provide important information to consumers, Cash said. “Putting the burden on consumers is not what we should be doing,” he said.

There are a few solutions: First, regulators or congress could pass new laws or issue new regulations to compel food retailers to make food labeling accessible. Second, the U.S. government could help online retailers to make food labeling accessible by providing a public database of nutrition, ingredient, and allergen information of packaged foods, Cash said.

“We simply cannot continue to let this sector grow without modern regulation,” Sharib said.

 

Research reported in this article was supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health under award R01HL115189. Complete information on authors, funders, and conflicts of interest is available in the published paper. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the funders.

---

Journal

Public Health Nutrition

DOI

10.1017/S1368980024001289 

Article Publication Date

17-Oct-2024

 

City microbes surviving on disinfectants, research reveals

New research shows microbes in our cities are evolving to resist the very cleaners we use to eliminate them. It also identifies novel strains living in Hong Kong that were previously only found in Antarctic desert soil.

Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University

 

image: 

The Human Microbiome Project, which was launched by NIH in 2007, provided the first glimpse of the microbial diversity of healthy humans and is exploring the possible relationships between particular human diseases and the microbiome. (Clockwise from top left): Streptococcus (Credit: Tom Schmidt); microbial biofilm, of mixed species, from the human body (credit: A. Earl, Broad Institute/MIT); Bacillus (Credit: Tom Schmid); Malassezia lopophilis (Credit: J.H, CDC).
 

view more 

Credit: For composite image: Jonathan Bailey, National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH

After the recent pandemic, our use of disinfectants has increased, but are our efforts to create sterile urban environments backfiring?

A new study published in the journal Microbiome has identified novel strains of microbes that have adapted to use the limited resources available in cities and shown that our everyday behaviour is changing the makeup of microorganisms in indoor environments.

“Built environments offer distinct conditions that set them apart from natural and engineered habitats,” says Dr Xinzhao Tong, an assistant professor at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU), China, and lead author of the study.

“Areas with many buildings are low in the traditional nutrients and essential resources microbes need for survival, so these built environments have a unique microbiome.

“Our use of cleaning and other manufactured products creates a unique setting that puts selective pressures on microbes, which they must adapt to or be eliminated, but the mechanisms by which microbes adapt and survive in built environments are poorly understood,” Dr Tong explains.

City dwellers

The researchers collected 738 samples from a variety of built environments, including subways, residences, public facilities, piers and human skin in Hong Kong. They then used shotgun metagenomic sequencing to analyse the microbes’ genomic content and understand how they have adapted to the challenging urban conditions.

The team identified 363 microbial strains that have not been previously identified that live on our skin and the environment around us. Some of these strains’ genomes contained genes for metabolising manufactured products found in cities and using them as carbon and energy sources. This includes the discovery of a strain of Candidatus phylum Eremiobacterota, previously only reported in Antarctic desert soil.

Dr Tong says: “The genome of this novel strain of Eremiobacterota enables it to metabolise ammonium ions found in cleaning products. The strain also has genes for alcohol and aldehyde dehydrogenases to break down residual alcohol found in common disinfectants.

“Microbes possessing enhanced capabilities to utilise limited resources and tolerate manufactured products, such as disinfectants and metals, out-compete non-resistant strains, enhancing their survival and even evolution within built environments. They could, therefore, pose health risks if they are pathogenic.”

The team identified 11 unique, previously uncharacterised strains of Micrococcus luteus, typically non-pathogenic but capable of causing opportunistic infections in immunocompromised individuals.

“The issue of their adaptation to our behaviour becomes particularly critical in clinical settings where hospitals serve as hotspots for diverse pathogens that cause hospital-acquired infections (HAIs). HAIs pose a significant threat, particularly in intensive care units where mortality rates can reach up to 30%,” says Dr Tong.

A balancing act

The researchers also characterised two novel strains of Patescibacteria, known as “nanobacteria”, as they have tiny genomes that do not contain many genes for producing their own resources.

Dr Tong says: “Some strains of Patescibacteria are considered parasitic as they rely on bacterial hosts to supply their nutrients. However, in this study, the researchers found that one of the nanobacteria strains, recovered from human skin, contains genes for the biosynthesis of carotenoids and ubiquinone. These antioxidant compounds are vital to humans, and we typically acquire them, especially carotenoids, through our diets, suggesting a possible mutualistic relationship between bacteria and us as their hosts.”

This enhanced understanding of microbial metabolic functions within built environments helps develop strategies to create a healthy indoor ecosystem of microbes for us to live alongside.

The team is now investigating the transmission and evolution of resistance in pathogenic microbes in intensive care units that are exposed to stringent and extensive disinfectant practices. They hope to improve infection control practices and increase the safety of clinical environments for healthcare workers and patients.

---

Journal

Microbiome

DOI

10.1186/s40168-024-01926-6 

Method of Research

Meta-analysis

Article Title

Diverse and specialized metabolic capabilities of microbes in oligotrophic built environments

Article Publication Date

17-Oct-2024

 

Mangrove microbes to munch on plastic

King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST)

 

image: 

Mangrove soils contain bacteria with PET-degrading enzymes capable of breaking down and transforming plastic. 

view more 

Credit: © 2024 KAUST.

A way to select a suite of mangrove bacteria that can transform plastic has been developed that potentially offers a new strategy in the global toolkit of plastic waste cleanup. Researchers have assessed the impact of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) particles and seawater intrusion on the microbiome of mangrove soil and then experimented with an enrichment culture to select a suite of PET-transforming microbes[1].

Plastic ocean pollution is growing globally at an alarming rate, with plastic fragments found even in deep oceans far from from human habitation. Mangroves are important biodiversity hotspots that offer a range of ecosystem services but are increasingly at risk from many stressors including plastic pollution.

“Mangrove ecosystems are exposed to high levels of plastic and their soils have been reported to contain diverse microbial communities including plastic-active microorganisms,” explains Diego Javier Jiménez Avella, a research scientist in the Microbial EcoGenomics and Biotechnology Laboratory (MEGBLab) at KAUST, who led this research project. “So we thought these soils could be a good source of microbes with potential for breaking down plastics. Yet microbial diversity and metabolic activities in mangrove soils are still largely unknown.”

Analyzing the collective genomic information of two bacterial consortia showed that some bacterial species have novel enzymes capable of breaking down and transforming PET. The novel bacterial genus Mangrovimarina plasticivorans is a particularly important member of these consortia as it carries two genes that code synthesis of monohydroxyethyl terephthalates hydrolases — enzymes that are capable of degrading a PET byproduct.

These results are important as they increase our ecological understanding of PET transformation in nature and describe a novel bacterial genus and enzymes potentially capable of degrading PET. This is also the first time researchers have demonstrated that a bacterial consortia derived from mangrove soils can transform a fossil-fuel-based hydrolysable plastic.

“Engineering microbiomes to effectively transform plastics is an exciting research theme in microbiology and biotechnology,” explains Jiménez. “It is also a daunting task: bioremediation of microplastics in natural marine ecosystems is challenging due to low effectiveness, problems with scalability, testing, implementation, evaluation and legislation.”

The team’s approach to designing microbial inoculants and/or enzyme cocktails capable of accelerating PET degradation could be broadly applied using microbial inocula from a range of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. This in turn could identify more novel plastic-degrading microbes or enzymes. 

“These laboratory-scale findings are a step to addressing plastic pollution and require further research and development — such as optimization and scalability — before they can be practically applied,” notes Alexandre S. Rosado, principal investigator at KAUST and leader of the MEGBLab.

Led by KAUST scientists, the research team — a collaboration that began in 2021 with eight institutions in Colombia, Brazil, USA, Germany, Australia, U.K. and Saudi Arabia — anticipates that broad use of this approach could help the design of efficient microbial consortia targeting plastic transformation both in the laboratory and in large-scale industrial settings.

The team are continuing to investigate the selection of plastic-transforming microbial communities from Red Sea mangroves and enzymatic activity of putative novel PET-degrading enzymes found in this study.

---

Journal

Trends in Biotechnology

DOI

10.1016/j.tibtech.2024.08.013 

Article Title

Engineering the mangrove soil microbiome for selection of polyethylene terephthalate-transforming bacterial consortia

 

Controlling prosthetic hands more precisely by the power of thought

Neuroscientists show how fine motor skills of neural prostheses can be improved

Deutsches Primatenzentrum (DPZ)/German Primate Center

 

image: 

In a study with rhesus monkeys, neuroscientists at the German Primates Center have investigated how the functionality of brain-computer interfaces and thus also the fine motor skills of neuroprostheses can be improved.

view more 

Credit: Andres Agudelo-Toro

Carrying shopping bags, pulling a thread into the eye of a needle – power and precision grips are part of our everyday lives. We only realize how important (and great) our hands are when we can no longer use them, for example due to paraplegia or diseases such as ALS, which cause progressive muscle paralysis.

In order to help patients, scientists have been researching neuroprostheses for decades. These artificial hands, arms or legs could give people with disabilities their mobility back. Damaged nerve connections are bridged via brain-computer interfaces that decode the signals from the brain, translate them into movements and can thus control the prosthesis. Until now, however, hand prostheses in particular have lacked the necessary fine motor skills to be used in everyday life.

“How well a prosthesis works depends primarily on the neural data read by the computer interface that controls it,” says Andres Agudelo-Toro, scientist in the Neurobiology Laboratory at the German Primate Center and first author of the study. “Previous studies on arm and hand movements have focused on the signals that control the velocity of a grasping movement. We wanted to find out whether neural signals representing hand postures might be better suited to control neuroprostheses.”

For the study, the researchers worked with rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta). Like humans, they have a highly developed nervous and visual system as well as pronounced fine motor skills. This makes them particularly suitable for researching grasping movements.

To prepare for the main experiment, the scientists trained two rhesus monkeys to move a virtual avatar hand on a screen. During this training phase, the monkeys performed the hand movements with their own hand while simultaneously seeing the corresponding movement of the virtual hand on the screen. A data glove with magnetic sensors, which the monkeys wore during the task, recorded the animals' hand movements.

Once the monkeys had learned the task, they were trained to control the virtual hand in a next step by “imagining” the grip. The activity of populations of neurons in the cortical brain areas that are specifically responsible for controlling hand movements was measured. The researchers focused on the signals that represent the different hand and finger postures, and adapted the algorithm of the brain-computer interface, which translates the neural data into movement, in a corresponding protocol.

“Deviating from the classic protocol, we adapted the algorithm so that not only the destination of a movement is important, but also how you get there, i.e., the path of execution,” explains Andres Agudelo-Toro. “This ultimately led to the most accurate results.”

The researchers then compared the movements of the avatar hand with the data of the real hand that they had previously recorded and were able to show that these were executed with comparable precision.

“In our study, we were able to show that the signals that control the posture of a hand are particularly important for controlling a neuroprosthesis,” says Hansjörg Scherberger, head of the Neurobiology Laboratory and senior author of the study. “These results can now be used to improve the functionality of future brain-computer interfaces and thus also to improve the fine motor skills of neural prostheses.”

The study was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG, grants FOR-1847 and SFB-889) and by the European Union Horizon 2020 project B-CRATOS (GA 965044).

---

Journal

Neuron

DOI

10.1016/j.neuron.2024.09.018 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Accurate neural control of a hand prothesis by posture-related activity in the primate grasping circuit

Article Publication Date

16-Oct-2024

 

International study reveals significant impacts of chlorine emissions from open biomass burning on air quality in Asia

Science China Press

 

image: 

The central panel displays the average spatial distribution of total chlorine emissions from 2001 to 2018, highlighting five high-density regions. The left and right panels illustrate the trends in chlorine emissions and the corresponding simulated ambient concentrations over the 18-year period.

view more 

Credit: ©Science China Press

An international research team led by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), has uncovered the significant impacts of chlorine emissions from open biomass burning on air quality in Asia. The study offers valuable insights into the influence of these emissions on atmospheric chemistry and crucial information that can help mitigate regional air pollution.

Biomass burning is known as a major source of air pollutants and greenhouse gases, affecting air quality, radiative balance, and climate. While prior research has primarily focused on the releases of carbon and nitrogen species, chlorine emissions and their atmospheric impacts are not well understood. There is a lack of detailed quantitative information on chlorine emissions from biomass burning, particularly the high-resolution emission inventories, long-term trends, and associated atmospheric impacts on both regional and global scales.

To fill this gap, a team led by Prof. WANG Zhe, Associate Professor of HKUST’s Division of Environment and Sustainability has developed a comprehensive, long-term, high-resolution chlorine emission inventory for open biomass burning across Asia. Through extensive simulations and analyses of the data from 2001 to 2018, the study has indicated substantial chlorine emissions from biomass burning in key regions such as North China, Northern India, and Southeast Asia. The study also highlights distinct seasonal patterns and significant spatial and interannual variability, primarily driven by changes in agricultural practices.

The results demonstrate that biomass burning is not only a significant source of air pollutants, but also a key contributor to the production of atmospheric oxidants, affecting the atmospheric oxidation capacity directly and indirectly. This finding suggests that biomass burning emissions have a greater impact on atmospheric chemistry than previously acknowledged. With the expected increase in global biomass burning activities due to climate change, their role in shaping atmospheric composition could become even more pronounced.

"As efforts to reduce industrial emissions continue, the role of biomass burning in influencing atmospheric composition could become increasingly significant, especially as global warming expands fire-prone areas, potentially shifting toward more northern and colder regions," Prof. Wang said.

The study underscores the often-overlooked contribution of biomass burning to the global chlorine budget and its extensive effects on air quality and climate. The researchers emphasize that these emissions must be factored into future air quality management and climate change mitigation strategies. The role of biomass burning in chlorine emissions should be considered by policymakers when setting air quality targets to avoid underestimating the efforts needed to achieve them.

The findings of this study were recently published in the journal National Science Review (https://doi.org/10.1093/nsr/nwae285), lead authors Prof. WANG Zhe from HKUST, Dr. CHANG Di from Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and Prof. LI Qinyi from Environment Research Institute, Shandong University in collaboration with scientists across the United States, Spain, Germany, France, Argentina, Hong Kong and mainland China.

---

Journal

National Science Review

DOI

10.1093/nsr/nwae285 

PeerJ launches PeerJ Open Advances in Zoology: A new free to read, free to publish open access journal dedicated to tackling the most pressing issues to animal life

PeerJ

 

image: 

PeerJ Open Advances in Zoology 

view more 

Credit: PeerJ

PeerJ has announced the launch of PeerJ Open Advances in Zoology, a new Open Access journal dedicated to publishing research and commentary that addresses the most pressing challenges in the field of zoology. With a focus on equity, collaboration, and openness, the journal will eliminate financial barriers to publication and dissemination, making high-impact research and commentary accessible to all by being free to read and free to publish.

Editors-in-Chief Professors Lesley Rogers and Michael Wink lead the journal, supported by a global Editorial Board. The journal will publish impactful work that responds to one of the journal's Global Challenges, which are owned by dedicated Associate Editors. Articles and contributors will be grouped by Global Challenge, building a corpus of research - and a community - that contributes to answering key questions and overcoming obstacles to completing that Challenge. Every research article will be accompanied by comprehensive peer-review reports and Impact Statements highlighting how the research addresses the journal’s Global Challenges.

Emphasizing the journal’s importance, Prof. Rogers said: “Amidst the rising costs and competition for Open Access publication of scientific papers, this new journal offers free and equitable publication of excellent science to researchers in all countries. This is an exciting new venture aimed at cutting-edge research and discussion of ideas addressing the pressing challenges to animal life now and into the future.”

Prof. Wink adds: “This novel series opens up a new era of Open Access publishing. We hope to attract excellent reviews and original contributions that provide new data, new syntheses, and that tackles the challenges set by the Editorial Board.”

The journal is now open for submissions and invites contributions from researchers who wish to address critical questions in the field of zoology.  Eliminating author fees will ensure that financial barriers don’t hinder the dissemination of critical research, meaning research with the potential to impact the world is available to everyone.

"The journal's aim  is to provide a collaborative forum for new ideas, and to generate networks of researchers working on the most pressing questions in the field of animal research, to address challenges concerning zoological topics of a global scale," said Stephen Johnson, Publishing Editor of the Open Advances series.

For more information, visit https://peerj.com/journals/openadv-zoology 

About: PeerJ is an award-winning Open Access publisher, committed to transforming the way research is communicated. By embracing transparency, collaboration, and equity, PeerJ empowers researchers to share their discoveries with the world. Launched in 2012, PeerJ publishes eight fully Open Access journals in biomedical, life, environmental, physical and computer sciences, and aims to give researchers the publishing tools and services they want, with a unique and exciting experience. PeerJ is wholly owned by Taylor & Francis, an Informa Group company.

PeerJ Open dvances in Zoology 

Credit

PeerJ

 

Forever Chemicals found in bottled and tap water from around the world

University of Birmingham

Scientists have discovered toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ present in samples of drinking water from around the world, a new study reveals. 

Researchers found 10 ‘target’ PFAS (perfluoroalkyl substances) – chemicals which do not break down in nature – in tap and bottled water available for consumption in major cities in the UK and China. Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) were detected in over 99% of samples of bottled water sourced from 15 countries around the world. 

They observed significant differences in PFAS concentrations between tap water samples from Birmingham, UK, and Shenzhen, China, with Chinese tap water found to have higher concentrations of PFAS compared to UK tap water. 

However, the study demonstrates that measures such as boiling and/or activated carbon filtration – typically using a ‘jug’ water filter - can substantially reduce PFAS concentrations in drinking water, with removal rates ranging from 50% to 90% depending on the PFAS and treatment type. 

Publishing their findings today (17 October) in ACS ES&T Water, researchers from the University of Birmingham, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, and Hainan University, Haikou, reveal a wide range of PFAS contamination for target PFAS, starting at 63% of bottled waters tested. 

Co-author Professor Stuart Harrad, from the University of Birmingham, commented: “Our findings highlight the widespread presence of PFAS in drinking water and the effectiveness of simple treatment methods to reduce their levels. Either using a simple water filtration jug or boiling the water removes a substantial proportion of these substances. 

“While current PFAS levels in most water samples are not a major health concern, ongoing monitoring and regulation are crucial to protect public health. We provide valuable data on the presence of PFAS in drinking water alongside practical solutions to mitigate consumer exposure via drinking water. This is a significant step towards ensuring safer drinking water for communities worldwide.” 

Bottled water from various countries showed varying levels of PFAS, with natural mineral water containing higher concentrations than purified water, but the concentrations were generally below health advisory levels set by regulatory agencies. 

Co-author Professor Yi Zheng, from Southern University of Science and Technology, commented: “Increased awareness about the presence of PFAS in both tap and bottled water can lead to more informed choices by consumers, encouraging the use of water purification methods.  

Our findings also suggest that the potential health risks of PFAS in drinking water may be influenced by lifestyle and economic conditions, highlighting the need for future research to further explore these factors from a socio-economic perspective.” 

Except for comparisons between natural mineral and purified water, the researchers observed no significant difference in target PFAS concentrations between glass and plastic or still and sparkling bottled water.  

While concentrations of most individual PFAS were well below corresponding health-based reference values, average PFOS concentrations in tap water samples from Shenzhen, China exceeded the maximum contaminant level (MCL) of 4 ng/L newly promulgated by the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) in 2024.  

Researchers purchased 112 bottled water samples from local shops and online supermarkets in the UK and China including 89 still and 23 sparkling waters in either plastic or glass bottles. The samples covered 87 brands with water sources originating from 15 countries in Asia, Europe, North America, and Oceania 

They collected 41 tap water samples from homes in Birmingham and the nearby cities of Worcester, Coventry, and Derby - provided by two suppliers: South Staffordshire Water and Seven Trent Water, with a further 14 tap water samples collected from homes in Shenzhen, China.  

PFAS are used widely in industry, in fire-fighting foams, and consumer products from waterproof clothing and school uniforms to personal care products because of their water and stain repellent properties. While some have been banned by government regulation, others are still widely used and their toxic effects not yet fully investigated. 

The chemicals are already known to enter the body in different ways, for example being breathed in, ingested via food or drinking water, or absorbed through the skin. They are known to cause adverse health effects such as a lowered immune response to vaccination, impaired liver function, decreased birth weight, and increased risk of some cancers. 

ENDS 

For more information or an embargoed copy of the paper, please contact Tony Moran, International Communications Manager, University of Birmingham on +44 (0)782 783 2312 or t.moran@bham.ac.uk. For out-of-hours enquiries, please call +44 (0) 121 414 2772. 

Notes to Editors 

• The University of Birmingham is ranked amongst the world’s top 100 institutions, its work brings people from across the world to Birmingham, including researchers and teachers and more than 8,000 international students from over 150 countries. 

• ‘Factors Influencing Concentrations of PFAS in Drinking Water: Implications for Human Exposure’ - Chuanzi Gao, Daniel Simon Drage, Mohamed Abou-Elwafa Abdallah, Feng Quan, Kun Zhang, Shiyao Hu, Xue Zhao,  Yi Zheng, Stuart Harrad, and Wenhui Qiu is published in ACS ES&T Water. 

---

Journal

ACS ES&T Water

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Factors Influencing Concentrations of PFAS in Drinking Water: Implications for Human Exposure

Article Publication Date

17-Oct-2024