The UCP Has Kneecapped Alberta Education Workers’ Strike Rights

There’s little on which the UCP and federal Liberals agree, but when it comes to undermining workers, they’re of the same mind.


by Adam D.K. King

November 11, 2024 ∙ 

Photo via CUPE Alberta on Twitter, cropped by Maple staff.

On October 24, around 3,200 education workers from Edmonton defied government intervention and rallied at the Alberta legislature. Joined by union supporters from across the labour movement, workers engaged in a one-day wildcat strike to protest the United Conservative Party (UCP) government’s interference with their right to strike. 

These workers are members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) local 3550, which represents education support staff, and CUPE 474, which represents custodial staff. Workers have been without a new collective agreement since August 2020. 

In early October, education support workers entered a two-week “cooling off” period, after talks and mediation aimed at securing a new contract with the Edmonton School Division broke down. 

As the date on which the union could call a legal strike approached, the government granted the employer’s request for a “disputes inquiry board” (DIB), effectively kneecapping the unions’ ability to strike for an additional 30 days. By sending the parties to a DIB, the union’s right to strike and the employer’s ability to impose a lockout are halted until the inquiry process is completed. 

No DIB has yet been imposed on CUPE 474, but the prospects for a fair resolution look no better for custodial staff at Edmonton public schools. 

According to CUPE 3550 president Mandy Lamoureux, the union has been attempting to bargain for a new contract for four years and to address the cost-of-living crisis faced by members. Education support staff are some of the lowest paid public sector employees in Alberta, and the government apparently intends to keep it that way. 

At present, salaries range from $27,000 to $30,000, according to the union. Rather than meaningfully increase these insultingly low salaries, the employer informed the union that it would adhere to the government’s bargaining mandate of 2.75 per cent over the first four years of a new contract. As Lamoureux relayed in a union media release, this would amount to a raise of just 70 cents per hour in total across the entire contract. 

In their last contracts, education support workers and custodial staff only received total wage increases of between 1.25 and 1.5 per cent over three years. Workers’ wages have thus been outstripped by inflation by double-digits since 2016. 

According to the Edmonton Social Planning Council (ESPC), the living wage for the city in 2023 was $22.25 per hour, or a little more than $46,000 annually for someone working full-time. By this measure, the salaries of educational assistants would need to increase by nearly $20,000 per year just for them to earn a living wage, which the ESPC defines as “the hourly wage that a primary income earner must make to provide for themselves, their families, and reach basic financial security.”  

As with so many other underpaid and overworked public sector workers, burnout and staff retention are pressing issues for education support workers in Edmonton. Addressing punishingly low salaries is thus a prerequisite for solving staffing issues. “We know our membership needs to see more, given the years of rising cost-of-living, increasing workloads, and understaffing they have been enduring. Our bargaining committee is very committed to achieving a fair deal,” said Lamoureux.

Custodial staff also received the same lacklustre offer as their support staff colleagues. CUPE 474 president Barry Benoit explained in the same communication released with the two union locals that “health, safety, and respect for the work it takes to keep schools running are important to custodial staff, but the overwhelming issue is wages having fallen so far behind.” He added, “Members are also concerned our benefits are at a lower level than any other staff group in Edmonton Public Schools.” 

On October 16, CUPE 3550 held a strike vote, which indicated an overwhelming majority in favour of strike action. With 92 per cent of eligible members voting by 97 per cent to walk out, picket lines were set to go up on October 24. The custodial staff union was not far behind. But following the UCP government’s heavy-handed intervention, both are now left in limbo. 

Edmonton education workers are not the first to have this government interfere with their collective bargaining and right to strike. In September, education workers in Fort McMurray also voted to strike, only to have the government utilize the same DIB tactic. 

Although the school board bargains directly with the unions, it’s the government that ultimately sets the funding model, and it’s also imposing strict bargaining mandates capping how much workers’ wages can increase. As the Alberta Teachers’ Association has pointed out, Alberta ranks dead last among provinces when it comes to education funding per student, according to data released by Statistics Canada in February. 

Government officials may seek to deflect and absolve themselves of responsibility for education workers’ extremely low pay, but its own program of austerity and bargaining mandates are the primary reasons the school board refuses to budge. It’s within this context that the unions and their members have sought to directly confront the government’s education program. 

“The (provincial) government has imposed that the school boards cannot give us more than 2.75 per cent, so they’re offering us the first year zero per cent, second year zero per cent, third year 1.25 per cent, and the fourth year 1.5 per cent, where the cost of living has gone up by 30 per cent in that amount of time, so 2.75 per cent is not going to cut it,” Lamoureux told the Edmonton Journal.

Although the government’s imposition of a DIB only temporarily impedes the union’s strike action, how long the delay will ultimately last remains an open question. 

The board itself will have 30 days to issue a report, but additional steps will then follow. First, the DIB will issue a recommendation for settlement to the minister of Jobs, Economy and Trade, which will then be forwarded to the union and school board. Both sides have 10 days to inform the minister about their decisions to accept or reject the deal. If one or both decline the recommendation, the Alberta Labour Relations Board will conduct a vote of the membership of the side opting to reject. If this vote fails, the union regains its right to issue a 72-hour strike notice and, eventually, have members walk off the job. 

If that all sounds labyrinthine, that’s because it is. The challenge for the union is that this prolonged interruption quashes member mobilization and may weaken workers’ resolve to fight back, which I’m sure is precisely the government’s intention.    

Like the federal Liberal government, the UCP has sought to frustrate workers’ right to strike through bureaucratic manoeuvring. There may be very little on which Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s UCP and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party agree, but when it comes to undermining workers, they seem to be largely of the same mind. 

Yet, the UCP’s labour woes will only continue. With tens of thousands of public sector workers seeking new contracts, and the government remaining steadfast in its commitment to impose its now not-so-secret bargaining mandates, more class conflict is all but inevitable. In recent days, for example, nurses rejected a mediated collective agreement and may soon begin a partial strike. Expect more of this as workers come up against the province’s anti-union agenda. 

How will Alberta’s labour movement respond? Given the large number of workers set to bargain, there is huge potential for organized resistance across the province, if unions choose to strategize and collaborate. The only way to stop the agenda of an anti-labour government is through mass resistance.

 

A development by Graz University of Technology makes concreting more reliable, safer and more economical

With a digital monitoring system developed in-house, researchers at TU Graz want to help make costly and potentially dangerous mistakes in concrete work a thing of the past

Graz University of Technology

Concreting mistakes can be expensive. Concrete poured too quickly often leads to a lack of colour uniformity, irregularities in the structure and uneven surfaces. Particularly in the case of exposed concrete, expensive reworking using concrete cosmetics is then necessary, sometimes a wall may even have to be demolished. In addition, if the fresh concrete rises too quickly in the formwork, there is a certain risk potential for the workers, as this can cause the formwork to break. In their DigiCoPro project, Ralph Stöckl and his brother Christoph Stöckl, together with Christian Hofstadler at the Institute of Construction Management and Economics at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz), have developed a prototype of a control system for concreting processes on construction sites that uses numerous sensors and sophisticated algorithms to prevent such errors and saves resources by eliminating the need for rework.

They were supported by a spin-off fellowship from the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG). The establishment of a TU Graz spin-off, in which the patent-pending system will be brought to market maturity, is planned for 2025.

First test with parts from the internet

“Exposed concrete is the pinnacle of concreting and any mistake here can quickly become very expensive,” explains Ralph Stöckl. “It often happens that the concrete is poured too quickly and not compacted uniformly, meaning that the air cannot escape evenly from the concrete.” The former head of the Institute of Construction Management and Economics, Christian Hofstadler, drew Ralph Stöckl’s attention to this topic during his doctoral thesis and explained the need for a monitoring system designed for this purpose. Ralph Stöckl then discussed the issue with his brother and the two quickly agreed that they would like to develop such a system. They ordered the first sensors and other components online, produced a proof of concept and realised that they could measure the concrete’s climb rate. Together with Christian Hofstadler, they registered their development as a service invention and applied – successfully – to the FFG for a spin-off fellowship.

However, developing a finished prototype from the provisionally assembled concept that could revolutionise work with exposed concrete proved longer than they thought. After all, the monitoring system should measure and analyse dozens of other parameters in addition to the rate at which concrete climbs in order to provide a real-time warning if something goes wrong during concreting. The prototype now also measures humidity and the temperature of the air and the concrete surface, and records sound waves to determine when the vibrator is shaking air out of the concrete and when it is not. An algorithm works in the background, inferring from the data whether everything is in order or whether intervention is required.

Algorithms for harsh working environments

The built of the prototype and the development of the algorithm were done entirely in-house. The brothers brought electrical engineer Anja Elsässer on board for the construction, including all the necessary soldering work and circuit programming. Testing showed that the algorithm in particular had to be very carefully designed to ensure that interference factors, which inevitably occur in a harsh working environment such as a construction site, do not distort the measurement results. After 18 months of research work, the prototype has now been fully developed and the task now is to make it market-ready. In order to raise the necessary funds, Ralph and Christoph Stöckl will focus on a second mainstay after founding their spin-off at the beginning of 2025. They will use their expertise in AI and algorithms to develop service chatbots for companies.

“The work on DigiCoPro so far has been intensive and exciting. In addition to the spin-off fellowship from the FFG, we were also lucky to receive a lot of support internally at TU Graz, as entrepreneurial ambitions are very much encouraged here,” says Christoph Stöckl. “Now all we need to do is to obtain all the necessary certifications for our monitoring system so that we can officially offer it. We expect to be ready by 2026.”

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Method of Research

Computational simulation/modeling

 

Can AI improve plant-based meats?

Stanford University

 

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Is it possible to close the texture gap between plant-based meat and animal meat? Ellen Kuhl and her lab are trying. From left: Skyler St. Pierre, Marc Levenston, Ellen Kuhl, Reese Dunne, Ethan Darwin, Valerie Perez Medina, and Divya Adil pose with the meat and plant-based meat they analyzed. 

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Credit: Credit: Kurt Hickman/Stanford University

Cutting back on animal protein in our diets can save on resources and greenhouse gas emissions. But convincing meat-loving consumers to switch up their menu is a challenge. Looking at this problem from a mechanical engineering angle, Stanford engineers are pioneering a new approach to food texture testing that could pave the way for faux filets that fool even committed carnivores.

In a new paper in Science of Food, the team demonstrated that a combination of mechanical testing and machine learning can describe food texture with striking similarity to human taste testers. Such a method could speed up the development of new and better plant-based meats. The team also found that some plant-based products are already nailing the texture of the meats they’re mimicking.

“We were surprised to find that today’s plant-based products can reproduce the whole texture spectrum of animal meats,” said Ellen Kuhl, professor of mechanical engineering and senior author of the study. Meat substitutes have come a long way from when tofu was the only option, she added.

Industrial animal agriculture contributes to climate change, pollution, habitat loss, and antibiotic resistance. That burden on the planet can be eased by swapping animal proteins for plant proteins in diets. One study estimated that plant-based meats, on average, have half the environmental impact as animal meat. But many meat eaters are reluctant to change; only about a third of Americans in one survey indicated they were “very likely” or “extremely likely” to buy plant-based alternatives.

“People love meat,” said Skyler St. Pierre, a PhD student in mechanical engineering and lead author of the paper. “If we want to convince the hardcore meat eaters that alternatives are worth trying, the closer we can mimic animal meat with plant-based products, the more likely people might be open to trying something new.”

To successfully mimic animal meat, food scientists analyze the texture of plant-based meat products. Unfortunately, traditional food testing methods are not standardized and the results are rarely made available to science and to the public, said St. Pierre. This makes it harder for scientists to collaborate and create new recipes for alternatives.

New food texture tests

The research grew out of a class project by St. Pierre. Looking for affordable materials to use in mechanical tests, he turned to hot dogs and tofu. Over the summer of 2023, undergraduate researchers joined in to test the foods and learn how engineers depict material responses to stress, loading, and stretching.

Realizing how this work could aid the development of plant-based meats, the Stanford team debuted a three-dimensional food test. They put eight products to the test: animal and plant-based hot dog, animal and plant-based sausage, animal and plant-based turkey, and extra firm and firm tofu. They mounted bits of meat into a machine that pulled, pushed, and sheared on the samples. “These three loading modes represent what you do when you chew,” said Kuhl, who is also the Catherine Holman Johnson Director of Stanford Bio-X and the Walter B. Reinhold Professor in the School of Engineering.

Then, they used machine learning to process the data from these tests: They designed a new type of neural network that takes the raw data from the tests and produces equations that explain the properties of the meats.

To see if these equations can explain the perception of texture, the team carried out a test survey. The testers – who first completed surveys on their openness to new foods and their attachment to meat – ate samples of the eight products and rated them on 5-point scale for 12 categories: soft, hard, brittle, chewy, gummy, viscous, springy, sticky, fibrous, fatty, moist, and meat-like.

Impressive hot dogs and sausages

In the mechanical testing, the plant-based hot dog and sausage behaved very similarly in the pulling, pushing, and shear tests to their animal counterparts, and showed similar stiffnesses. Meanwhile, the plant-based turkey was twice as stiff as animal turkey, and the tofu was much softer than the meat products. Strikingly, the human testers also ranked the stiffness of the hot dogs and sausages very similarly to the mechanical tests. “What’s really cool is that the ranking of the people was almost identical to the ranking of the machine,” said Kuhl. “That’s great because now we can use the machine to have a quantitative, very reproducible test.”

The findings suggest that new, data-driven methods hold promise for speeding up the process of developing tasty plant-based products. “Instead of using a trial-and-error approach to improve the texture of plant-based meat, we could envision using generative artificial intelligence to scientifically generate recipes for plant-based meat products with precisely desired properties,” the authors wrote in the paper.

But artificial intelligence recipe development, like other AIs, needs lots of data. That’s why the team is sharing their dataonline, making it open for other researchers to view and add to. “Historically, some researchers, and especially companies, don’t share their data and that’s a really big barrier to innovation,” said St. Pierre. Without sharing information and working together, he added, “how are we going to come up with a steak mimic together?”

The team is continuing to test foods and build a public database. This summer, St. Pierre oversaw undergraduates testing veggie and meat deli slices. The researchers also plan to test engineered fungi developed by Vayu Hill-Maini, who recently joined Stanford as an assistant professor of bioengineering. “If anybody has an artificial or a plant-based meat they want to test,” said Kuhl, “we’re so happy to test it to see how it stacks up.” 

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For more information

Additional Stanford co-authors of the paper include Marc Levenston, associate professor of mechanical engineering; postdoctoral researcher Kevin Linka; graduate students Ethan C. Darwin, Divya Adil, and Valerie A. Perez Medina; visiting researcher María Parra Vallecillo; and undergraduate researchers Magaly C. Aviles, Archer Date, Reese A. Dunne, and Yanav Lall.

Kuhl is also a professor, by courtesy, of bioengineering in the schools of Engineering and Medicine, and a member of the Cardiovascular Institute, the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering, and the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. Levenston is also a member of Bio-X, the Cardiovascular Institute, the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance and the Maternal & Child Health Research Institute.

This work was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Emmy Noether Programme, and the European Research Council.

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Journal

npj Science of Food

DOI

10.1038/s41538-024-00330-6 

Article Title

The mechanical and sensory signature of plant-based and animal meat

Article Publication Date

15-Nov-2024

 

How microbes create the most toxic form of mercury

DOE/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Mercury is extraordinarily toxic, but it becomes especially dangerous when transformed into methylmercury – a form so harmful that just a few billionths of a gram can cause severe and lasting neurological damage to a developing fetus. Unfortunately, methylmercury often makes its way into our bodies through seafood – but once it’s in our food and the environment, there’s no easy way to get rid of it.

Now, leveraging high-energy X-rays at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, researchers have identified an unexpected major player in methylmercury poisoning – a molecule called S-adenosyl-L-methionine (SAM).

The results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could help researchers figure out new ways to address methylmercury poisoning.

“Nobody knew how mercury is methylated biologically,” said Riti Sarangi, a senior scientist in SSRL’s Structural Molecular Biologyprogram and co-author on the paper. “We need to understand that fundamental process before we can develop an effective methylmercury remediation strategy. This study is a step toward that.”

At issue in the new paper is a narrow but essential mystery concerning how methylmercury is produced. Scientists knew that most of the mercury we consume starts out as industrial emissions that make their way into bodies of water, where microbes convert it into methylmercury. That form concentrates in fish – and ultimately us – as it moves up the food web.

Still, researchers weren’t sure how microorganisms make methylmercury. A key confounding factor, Sarangi said, is that the protein system that converts mercury to methylmercury, called HgcAB, is present only in very small amounts in microbes, making it extremely difficult to gather and purify enough to study. It’s also extremely finicky: The slightest exposure to oxygen and light deactivates HgcAB.

In an effort spanning 10 years and collaborations across national laboratories and universities, University of Michigan professor Steve Ragsdale, his graduate student Katherine Rush, now an assistant professor at Auburn University, and postdoctoral associate Kaiyuan Zheng developed a new protocol to yield enough stable HgcAB to finally investigate how it transforms mercury into methylmercury.

“We’ve worked with a lot of very difficult proteins, but this one had everything you would not want to have in a protein if you wanted to purify it. It was very complicated,” Ragsdale said.

Once the team purified enough HgcAB, they transported the samples – cooled by liquid nitrogen and shielded from light – to SSRL for X-ray absorption spectroscopy measurements. There, SSRL associate scientist Macon Abernathy used a method called extended X-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy to study HgcAB.

“SSRL’s X-ray spectroscopy facilities are especially equipped to study biological samples and have powerful detector systems that can resolve the extremely weak signals of ultra dilute protein samples like these,” Sarangi said.

While previous studies hypothesized that the methyl group in question came from methyltetrahydrofolate, a common methyl donor in cellular reactions, the new study finds that it was donated by SAM instead. The researchers said that the results, which narrow in on the main actors in the production of methylmercury, could aid in the development of environmental remediation strategies.

“No one has tried it yet, but perhaps analogs of SAM could be developed that could address methylmercury in the environment,” Ragsdale said.

SSRL is a DOE Office of Science user facility. The SSRL Structural Molecular Biology program is supported by the DOE Office of Science and the NIH National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2408086121 

Article Title

S-adenosyl-L-methionine is the unexpected methyl donor for the methylation of mercury by the membrane-associated HgcAB complex

Article Publication Date

15-Nov-2024

 

University of Tennessee wins funding for green jobs initiative

University of Tennessee at Knoxville

 

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Ayers Hall at the University of Tennessee.

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Credit: University of Tennessee

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has been awarded a $750,000 grant for East Tennessee Works, a regional green jobs initiative led by the university and focused on Knoxville’s inner-city and rural Southern Appalachian communities.

An interdisciplinary team from UT is one of six groups nationwide receiving funding in the Jobs for the Future Quality Green Jobs Regional Challenge. The university is working with community partners, industry, labor organizations and other educational institutions to train and support job seekers in advanced manufacturing and green construction.

Over the next three years, East Tennessee Works intends to place 5,000 East Tennesseans on the path to good jobs in the green economy, with a flexible, scalable approach. The team will be led by Sociology Professor Jon Shefner, along with Stephanie Bohon, head of the Department of Sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Associate Professor Mitsunori Misawa from the College of Education, Health and Human Sciences.

The grant will allow UT to act as a labor market intermediary, connecting employers, workers, training programs, labor organizations and community-based groups offering essential services like transportation and childcare.

The grant builds on ongoing efforts to integrate academic excellence with community service to prepare students and local residents for the high-demand jobs of today and tomorrow.

“We will be funding many of these organizations that provide these services,” said Shefner. “We’ll be bringing them together in ways that help recruit potential workers, and we will be reaching out to industry to find out what their hiring possibilities are, their specific needs and how to bring them together with the newly trained, newly skilled folks.”

Filling Job Demand

East Tennessee Works will focus on underrepresented workers in the green economy and address the growing demand for skilled labor as job roles evolve.

According to Shefner, many individuals are either underemployed, working multiple low-paying jobs or not fully utilizing their skills. With proper training, they can transition into positions that offer $30 or more per hour, with benefits and opportunities for advancement, he added.

The university has been working with organizations in Knox, Anderson, and Campbell counties, including TELOS Global, a manufacturer in Caryville, Tennessee, that provides parts for electric vehicles; Socially Equal Energy Efficient Development, a nonprofit in East Knoxville that provides career training and is building energy-efficient homes for low-income families; Community Organizations Networking Neighborhoods Encouraging Change Together Ministries; and a local labor council of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations.

Knoxville’s Green Economy Booming

East Tennessee Works will prioritize green jobs, targeting companies that reduce their ecological footprint, produce components for electric vehicles, install solar panels and construct energy-efficient buildings.

According to Shefner, the Brookings Institution identified Knoxville as one of the largest and fastest-growing areas for the green economy more than a decade ago, and the green construction world is set to explode. He added that Black and rural communities have been underrepresented, and this initiative is aimed at providing equitable access to training.

This is the final round of funding under the Jobs for the Future Quality Green Jobs Regional Challenge, which the Ares Charitable Foundation funds through Climate-Resilient Employees for a Sustainable Tomorrow. This program is a five-year, $25 million initiative that seeks to close the gap between employer demand for a skilled green workforce and the number of people ready for these opportunities to help advance economic mobility.

“These recipients embody the forward-thinking solutions we need when it comes to addressing the dual challenges of climate change and economic inequality,” said Taj Eldridge, managing director for climate innovation at JFFLabs. “We’re proud to support these organizations as they create new opportunities for their communities and develop solutions that contribute to a more sustainable and equitable future.”

 

New study finds air pollution increases inflammation primarily in patients with heart disease

Intermountain Healthcare

 

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New study by heart researchers at Intermountain Health in Salt Lake City finds that patients with heart disease, specifically those with heart failure, are especially vulnerable to the impacts of air pollution and poor air quality and can take steps to protect themselves. 

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Credit: Intermountain Health

A new study by heart researchers at Intermountain Health in Salt Lake City finds that patients with heart disease, specifically those with heart failure, are especially vulnerable to the impacts of air pollution and poor air quality and can take steps to protect themselves. 

Results from the Intermountain Health study, presented on Saturday at the American Heart Association’s 2024 Scientific Sessions international conference in Chicago, found that two inflammatory markers — CCL27 (C-C motif chemokine ligand 27) and IL-18 (interleukin 18) — were elevated in heart failure patients who were exposed to poor air quality, but did not change in those without heart disease.

This indicates that such air pollution events put more strain on the bodies of patients who already have heart problems.

While previous research has shown that people with some chronic health conditions, like heart failure, coronary disease, asthma, and COPD, struggle during spikes in air pollution, the new Intermountain Health study demonstrates that cardiac inflammation levels specifically rise in people with heart disease during periods of poor air quality.  

“These biomarkers rose in response to air pollution in people who already had heart disease, but not in patients who were heart disease free, showing that heart failure patients are not as able to adapt to changes in the environment,” said Benjamin Horne, PhD, principal investigator of the study and professor of research at Intermountain Health.

For the retrospective study, Intermountain Health researchers worked with scientists at Stanford University and the Harvard School of Public Health to examine the blood of patients enrolled in the Intermountain INSPIRE registry, which collects blood and other biological samples, medical information and laboratory data from healthy individuals and those who have been diagnosed with a variety of medical conditions.

Researchers specifically looked at blood tests for 115 different proteins that are signs of increased inflammation in the body.

They then examined blood draws of 44 patients with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, and 35 people without heart disease. Some blood was drawn on days with low air pollution, where ambient PM2.5 levels were under 7 micrograms per cubic meter (μg/m3) of air; those test results were compared to draws done in other people on days when air pollution spiked to PM2.5 levels of 20 μg/m3 or over.

These spikes were caused by either wildfire smoke in the summer, or during a winter inversion, where air pollution is trapped when warm air holds pollution closer to the ground.

Researchers found that two inflammatory markers — CCL27 and IL-18 — were elevated in heart failure patients, but did not change in those without heart disease, indicating that such air pollution events put more strain on the bodies of patients who already have heart problems.

These findings “give us some information about mechanisms in people with heart failure who are having inflammation and suggest they’re not as capable in responding to acute inflammation as people who are healthy,” said Dr. Horne.

He added that the results from the study suggest that heart failure patients need to take extra precautions during times when air pollution is high.

“It’s important that individuals with known heart disease, including those diagnosed with heart failure, need to be especially cautious during periods of poor air quality. This includes exercising indoors, making sure to take their prescribed medications, and avoiding areas like roadways and highways where there’s a lot more traffic and pollution,” he said.

 

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Hormone therapy reshapes the skeleton in transgender individuals who previously blocked puberty

Bioscientifica Ltd

Skeletal size may be altered by gender-affirming hormone therapy only if puberty has also been suppressed during adolescence, according to research presented at the 62nd Annual European Society for Paediatric Endocrinology Meeting in Liverpool. The findings from this research, carried out by Amsterdam UMC, not only help researchers further understand the roles sex hormones play on the skeleton but may also improve counselling on gender-affirming treatment in transgender individuals.

Skeletons of men and women vary in size and proportion. For instance, men typically have broader shoulders while women have a wider pelvis. Gender-affirming hormones are used to better align an individual’s physical appearance with their gender identity. What’s more, puberty blockers (gonadotrophin-releasing hormone analogues) can be used to delay or prevent the changes associated with puberty in transgender youth. However, how sex hormones affect the skeleton such as the shoulders and pelvis of transgender individuals is still unclear.

To investigate this, researchers from the Amsterdam University Medical Center (UMC) in the Netherlands analysed data on the shoulder and pelvis dimensions of 121 transgender women and 122 transgender men who were either undergoing gender-affirming hormone therapy – with or without previously taking puberty blockers – or had not taken any therapy.  The researchers found that only transgender men who had been treated with puberty blockers from early puberty, followed by hormone therapy, had broader shoulders and a smaller pelvic inlet (upper opening of the pelvis) compared to untreated individuals, while transgender women had smaller shoulders only after treatment from early puberty. In addition, transgender women under treatment had a larger pelvis, but this change was most noticeable in those who started blocking puberty earlier.

“To our knowledge, this is the first study to explore the effect of both gender-affirming hormones and puberty blockers on the pelvic dimensions,” said Ms Lidewij Boogers, a PhD student at Amsterdam UMC who led the study. “Shoulder width is only affected when puberty suppression is initiated in early puberty, while pelvic dimensions may be sensitive to hormonal changes even after puberty has ended.”

Ms Boogers added: “Since skeletal dimensions from individuals who started puberty suppression in early puberty were most similar to those of the affirmed gender, our findings suggest that irreversible skeletal changes occur during puberty.”

The researchers will next assess the extent to which physical changes that occur during puberty suppression and gender-affirming hormones impact body image and quality of life in transgender adolescents. “We are currently conducting a prospective study, with the collected data we aim to further evaluate the relation between physical changes and psychological outcomes in this population. This could help optimise treatment and improve counselling for individuals who seek treatment,” said Ms Boogers.

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Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

 MUTUAL  AID

New model can help understand coexistence in nature

Uppsala University

 

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A seabird colony i Norway, on which this model could be applied.
Photographer: Claus Rüffler

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Credit: Claus Rüffler

Different species of seabirds can coexist on small, isolated islands despite eating the same kind of fish. A researcher at Uppsala University has been involved in developing a mathematical model that can be used to better understand how this ecosystem works.

“Our model shows that coexistence occurs naturally when species differ in their ability to catch fish and to efficiently fly long distances to the area where they catch fish,” says Claus Rüffler, Associate Professor of Animal Ecology at Uppsala University.

Seabirds can breed in very large colonies, sometimes consisting of several hundred thousand pairs. Ecologists working with seabirds have long been interested in what regulates the size of such colonies. Researchers at Uppsala University and the University of Lausanne have developed a mathematical model that studies how the behavioural decisions of seabirds about where to catch fish affect the distribution of fish around a breeding colony, how this in turn regulates the size of bird populations, and how different bird species breeding in the same colony and eating the same resource can coexist.

According to basic ecological theory, two different species cannot exist on the same limiting resource – the better competitor is expected to drive the other to extinction. The researchers wanted to understand what makes the coexistence of seabird species breeding on the same isolated island possible.

“For all species, it would be most beneficial to fish close to the island because it would cost them the least energy. But bird species differ in traits such as wing length and how deep they can dive. Our model shows that different species, all maximising their energy intake, automatically use different distances from the colony,” says Rüffler.

The model predicts that seabirds will divide the waters around a colony into different circular zones, with each species using its own zone to fish in.

“Our model is fundamentally about coexistence and biodiversity. Understanding this is important in itself – we humans have a desire to understand how nature works. However, such an understanding is also crucial for any management strategy for an endangered ecosystem. Also, we believe that our results contribute to ecology more generally because the mechanism for coexistence discovered in our model likely applies to systems other than seabirds,” Rüffler concludes.

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2411780121 

Method of Research

Computational simulation/modeling

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Central place foragers, prey depletion halos, and how behavioral niche partitioning promotes consumer coexistence

 

Cocoa or green tea could protect you from the negative effects of fatty foods during mental stress - study

University of Birmingham

New research has found that a flavanol-rich cocoa drink can protect the body’s vasculature against stress even after eating high-fat food.

Food choices made during periods of stress can influence the effect of stress on cardiovascular health. For example, recent research from the University of Birmingham found that high-fat foods can negatively affect vascular function and oxygen delivery to the brain, meanwhile flavanol  compounds found in abundance in cocoa and green tea can protect vascular function during periods of everyday stress.

Now, in a new study, the same research team has found that drinking cocoa high in flavanols in combination with a fatty meal can counteract some of the impact of fatty food and protect the vascular system from stress.

The research has been published today (18th November) in the journal Food and Function.

Dr Catarina Rendeiro, Assistant Professor in Nutritional Sciences at the University of Birmingham, and leading author said: “We know that when people are stressed, they tend to gravitate towards high-fat foods. We have previously shown that fatty food can impair the body’s vascular recovery from stress. In this study, we wanted to see if adding a high-flavanol food to the fatty meal would alleviate the negative impact of stress in the body”

Rosalind Baynham, first author on the paper, explained: “Flavanols are a type of compound that occur in different fruits, vegetables, tea and nuts including berries and unprocessed cocoa. Flavanols are known to have health benefits, particularly for regulating blood pressure and protecting cardiovascular health.

“We took a group of young healthy adults and gave them two butter croissants with 10 g salted butter, 1.5 slices of cheddar cheese and 250 ml whole milk as breakfast, and either a high-flavanol cocoa or a low-flavanol cocoa drink. Following a rest period, we asked the participants to complete a mental maths test which increased in speed for eight minutes, alerting them when they got an answer wrong. During the 8 minute rest period and 8 minute mental maths test, we measured forearm blood flow, cardiovascular activity and prefrontal cortex (PFC) tissue oxygenation. We also measured vascular function using Brachial Flow-mediated dilatation (FMD), which is a prognostic measure for future risk of cardiovascular disease. This stress task induced significant increases in heart rate and blood pressure, similar to the stress you may encounter in daily life.”

The cocoa beverages were prepared by dissolving 12 g cocoa powder into 250 ml of whole milk. The low-flavanol powder was an alkalized cocoa powder which was processed to reduce total flavanols to 5.6 mg per serving; and the high-flavanol cocoa powder was a non-alkalized powder, delivering 695.0 mg total flavanols per serving. Alkalization is a process typically used in chocolate making to enhance flavour, but unfortunately it reduces the amount of flavanols.

The team confirmed that consuming fatty foods with the low-flavanol drink when mentally stressed reduced vascular function (by 1.29% FMD) and lasted up to 90 minutes after the stressful event was over. The findings also showed that the cocoa drink high in flavanols was effective at preventing the decline in vascular function following stress and fat consumption. Brachial flow-mediated dilatation was significantly higher following high-flavanol cocoa compared to low-flavanol cocoa 30 and 90 minutes after the stressful period. The team had also found in their previous work, that eating high-fat foods attenuated cerebral oxygenation in the pre-frontal cortex, during stress. However, cocoa flavanols did not improve cerebral oxygenation or impact mood.

Dr Catarina Rendeiro, Assistant Professor in Nutritional Sciences at the University of Birmingham, added: “This research shows that drinking or eating a food high in flavanols can be used as a strategy to mitigate some of the impact of poorer food choices on the vascular system. This can help us make more informed decisions about what we eat and drink during stressful periods.”

In the supermarket look for a minimally processed cocoa powder, and if cocoa isn’t quite your beverage of choice, there are other ways you can get a higher dose of flavanols, such as green tea, black tea and berries. Recent published guidelines for flavanol intake recommend between 400 to 600 mg/day, which can be achieved for example, by consuming two cups of black or green tea, or a combination of berries, apples and high-quality cocoa.

Jet Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Professor of Biological Psychology at the University of Birmingham, and author of this paper added: “Modern life is stressful and the impact of stress on our health and the economy has been well documented, so any changes we can make to protect ourselves from some of the symptoms of stress is positive. For those who tend to reach for a treat when stressed or depend on convenient food because they work high-pressure jobs or are time-poor, incorporating some of these small changes could make a real difference.”

ENDS

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Journal

Food & Function

DOI

10.1039/D4FO03834G