The power of cinema: Study shows film intervention reduces violence against children

McMaster University

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A new study from McMaster University, in collaboration with community partners and researchers from Duke University, Oxford University, and Mahidol University, shows that screenings of a locally-produced narrative film about parenting led to a significant reduction in physical violence against children.

The research, published on Jan. 16, 2025 in The Lancet Regional Health - Southeast Asia, aimed to promote positive parenting among families who have migrated or been displaced from Myanmar into Thailand. These families face extreme poverty and daily adversity, which can negatively impact parent-child relationships and family well-being.

"Parenting support is quite limited in this setting because of lack of funding and capacity," says Amanda Sim, lead author of the study and assistant professor with McMaster’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences and Mary Heersink Program in Global Health.

“The innovative solution we came up with and tested in this study was to use entertainment education, embedding educational content about positive parenting into a film."

Researchers partnered with the Sermpanya Foundation, a grassroots organization in Thailand that works with refugees and migrants, to create a 66-minute narrative drama film about parenting. The film was entirely created with and by refugees and migrants from the Thailand-Myanmar border, ensuring authenticity through community involvement.

"The fact that local community members were the ones who co-created this film gives an authenticity that I think really resonates. When people watch the film, they can really identify with the situations and struggles that are shown. That makes it so much more powerful," says Sim, who is also a core member of the Offord Centre for Child Studies.

Reduction in violence against children

The study involved more than 2,000 caregivers from 44 communities who were randomly assigned to either watch the film or receive information about local health and social services. Those who watched the film showed a nine per cent reduction in the use of physical violence against children and an increase in positive parenting practices, family functioning, and social support.

“The fact that families can use the examples that they're seeing in the film and connect that to their everyday life has really promoted behavioural change and enabled the parents to learn from the film and use those skills with their own children,” Sim says.

These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of using media and entertainment education to deliver parenting support in challenging contexts. Researchers are now digging deeper into the data to learn more about what resonated with viewers and how this type of intervention can be scaled up to reach more families in this and other settings. The study is also testing the impact of a five-week program that builds on the film to improve caregiver mental health and parenting practices. The goal is to increase access to multi-layered interventions that provide different levels of support based on need.

The study is part of the Global Parenting Initiative, which receives funding through The LEGO Foundation, the Oak Foundation, the World Childhood Foundation, The Human Safety Net, and the UK Research and Innovation Global Challenges Research Fund. The LEGO Foundation also donated LEGO bricks to promote playful learning in schools and learning centres on the Thailand-Myanmar border.

Interested in covering the study? Amanda Sim, lead author of the study and assistant professor with McMaster’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences, can be reached directly at siml3@mcmaster.ca.

For any other assistance, contact Adam Ward, media relations officer with McMaster University’s Faculty of Health Sciences, at warda17@mcmaster.ca.

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Journal

The Lancet Regional Health - Southeast Asia

 

New research: How Spotify shapes your music listening habits with playlists

Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences

New INFORMS Journal Marketing Science Study Key Takeaways:

• Professionally curated Spotify playlists exert a major influence on user listening habits.
• Being featured on Spotify’s Search Page has a greater impact on playlist listenership than adding tracks from major label superstars.
• Music label superstars, although somewhat less influential, remain a major factor in listenership.

 

BALTIMORE, MD, January 17, 2025 – It’s a common assumption that music streaming has changed how we listen to music in a physical sense, but a new study has revealed just how streaming has impacted consumers’ listening tastes. The research, which focused on Spotify, has found that when people listen to music via streaming, they are more likely to listen to platform-generated playlists, especially those prominently featured on Spotify’s Search Page, instead of playlists created by third parties such as major music labels. The study also finds that users are more likely to listen to certain playlists as superstar artists are added to them, and featuring playlists prominently on Spotify attracts about two times more followers than the presence of major label superstars on playlists.

The research study, published in the INFORMS peer-reviewed journal Marketing Science, is titled, “What Drives Demand for Playlists on Spotify?” The authors of the study are Max Pachali and Hannes Datta, both of Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

“Before our work, little was known about how strongly users respond to the drivers of playlist demand,” says Datta. “We decided to more deeply explore the cause-and-effect nature and influence of curated playlists.”

The researchers found that Spotify users strongly value playlists that are featured in the app, where followers increase by about 1% if a playlist is included in a search page.

“This demonstrates Spotify’s ability to steer user engagement and listening behavior through its platform design,” says Pachali. “In comparison, we find that users are about half as sensitive to the addition of popular label artists. When a major label superstar is added to a playlist, it increases daily followers by about 0.5%.”

To conduct their research, the authors used data collected from Chartmetric.com, which tracked 34,483 playlists on Spotify from professional curators, including Spotify and other major and independent music labels. They then obtained daily data on a playlist’s number of followers from October 2019 to March 2020, along with information on which music track was available on a list and when. Ultimately, the researchers compiled comprehensive track-level data on about 2 million tracks.

“In the end, we found that playlist curators attract followers twice as easily when their list is featured on the search page, as when they add a music track from a major superstar,” says Datta. “These results imply that while superstar artists remain a relevant asset for major music labels, the professional curation of playlists in combination with the search function are even more powerful.”

Historically, major music labels controlled content distribution in the music industry and exerted their influence over how music was promoted and sold offline. This study confirms that today’s music streaming platforms now have greater influence over users’ listening behavior when compared to past practice.

Pachali concludes, “For industry players, understanding playlist curation strategies – especially the role of major label superstar content and how platform algorithms prioritize playlists on the search page – is more important than ever.”

 

About INFORMS and Marketing Science

INFORMS is the world’s largest association for professionals and students in operations research, AI, analytics, data science and related disciplines, serving as a global authority in advancing cutting-edge practices and fostering an interdisciplinary community of innovation. Marketing Science, a peer-reviewed journal published by INFORMS, focuses on quantitative research at the intersection of consumers and firms. INFORMS fosters smarter decision-making and innovation through its journals, conferences and professional resources. Learn more at www.informs.org or @informs.

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Journal

Marketing Science

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

What Drives Demand for Playlists on Spotify?

 

From lab to field: CABBI pipeline delivers oil-rich sorghum

Higher levels of TAG production could provide 1.4 times more oil per hectare than soybeans, making this a promising new feedstock for renewable fuels.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment

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Left to right: Kiyoul Park, Truyen Quach, and Ming Guo harvesting sorghum biomass to deliver to IBRL at the University of Illinois for bioprocessing

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Credit: Edgar Cahoon

Researchers at the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) have developed a new sorghum variant that can outperform soybeans in oil production, with great potential as a clean source of renewable fuel.

Scientists have long worked to create new sustainable sources of vegetable oils, known as triacylglycerols (TAG), to meet the growing demand for renewable fuels like sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and renewable diesel.

Currently, oil palm and oilseeds such as soybeans provide most TAG for renewable fuels, but these sources alone cannot meet future global needs. To address this, researchers have been engineering high-biomass grasses like sorghum to produce oil. These grasses are highly efficient at photosynthesis, produce large amounts of biomass, and can grow in tough climates, making them excellent candidates.

In their new study, published in Plant Biotechnology Journal, CABBI scientists highlight the utility of a lab-to-field pipeline to deliver sorghum that’s high in TAG. Researchers engineered sorghum to accumulate up to 5.5% dry weight TAG in its leaves and 3.5% dry weight in its stems under field conditions — 78 times and 58 times more than unmodified sorghum, respectively. This level of production could provide about 1.4 times more oil per hectare than soybeans, making this a promising new feedstock for renewable fuels.

“This work is the culmination of a large team effort that demonstrates how fundamental research can be used to develop new crop feedstocks to address global energy demands,” said Edgar Cahoon, Director of the Center for Plant Science Innovation at University of Nebraska and one of the corresponding authors on the paper. Cahoon worked with Kiyoul Park, Senior Research Associate in the Department of Biochemistry at University of Nebraska and lead author on the paper; and Tom Clemente, Eugene W. Price Distinguished Professor of Biotechnology at the University of Nebraska; along with many other CABBI experts.

In contrast to oil-rich seeds and fruit from plants like oil palm and soybean, TAG typically only accumulates in a plant’s vegetative organs (leaves and stems) as a stress response to membrane damage.

To design sorghum for vegetative oil accumulation, the researchers used a “push-pull-protect” strategy, which CABBI researchers have previously used to increase vegetative oil accumulation in other plants. They introduced genes to “push” more carbon from photosynthesis into oil production, “pull” fatty acids into TAG molecules, and “protect” the stored oil from breaking down. This approach built on previous successes with other crops, focusing in on sorghum for its heat and drought tolerance and well-understood genome.

By using advanced gene transfer methods, CABBI scientists engineered sorghum lines that, when grown in the field at the Eastern Nebraska Research, Extension, and Education Center, not only maintained stable oil production over multiple generations, but also avoided the biomass reductions seen in similar studies with other biomass crops.

“The breadth of expertise in CABBI has allowed us to take a concept from the lab and put it to practice for field production of a new bioenergy and bioproduct feedstock,” Cahoon said.

These newly engineered oil sorghum lines provide potential new sources of feedstocks for renewable diesel and SAF, reducing reliance on traditional oil crops while meeting the growing demand for renewable energy. And this oil sorghum also has the potential to provide new income streams and markets for farmers. Oil sorghum bioprocessing opens up new ways to spur the bioeconomy and support rural vitality.

The research team will continue to study how to further increase oil yields to meet CABBI’s goal of growing crops that are 10% TAG by dry weight.

“The basis for further improvement of TAG yields will depend on in-depth analysis of the effects of the ‘push-pull-protect’ metabolic engineering approach applied in the study,” said Jörg Schwender, Senior Scientist of the Plant Science Group at Brookhaven National Laboratory and another corresponding author on the paper. “For example, in the current study, the team used whole transcriptome shotgun sequencing (or RNA sequencing), a technique that analyzes the activity of thousands of genes at the same time in tissue samples.”

This analysis found that the oil sorghum lines increase production of an enzyme in their leaves that breaks down lipids, and as such likely also attacks TAG. Further analysis of metabolic flux with isotope tracers confirmed that lipids, although being made at a higher rate in the oil sorghum leaves, are degraded faster at the same time. These findings likely can be translated into a refined engineering strategy that further increases oil levels. The research team aims to refine this approach to make sorghum a reliable, sustainable biofuel feedstock.

Other co-authors on this study include CABBI researchers Truyen Quach, Teresa J. Clark, Hyojin Kim, Tieling Zhang, Shirley Sato, Tara J. Nazarenus; CABBI PIs Stephen P. Moose and Kankshita Swaminathan; Mengyuan Wang from the Plant Transformation Core Research Facility at Nebraska; Ming Guo and Chi Zhang from the Center for Plant Science Innovation at Nebraska; and Rostislav Blume and Yaroslav Blume from the Institute of Food Biotechnology and Genomics in Ukraine.

— Article by CABBI Communications Specialist April Wendling

Hyojin Kim bagging sorghum heads — an essential step for APHIS-compliant transgenic sorghum field trials

Credit

Edgar Cahoon

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Journal

Plant Biotechnology Journal

DOI

10.1111/pbi.14527 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Development of vegetative oil sorghum: From lab-to-field

 

Polymer editing can upcycle waste into higher-performance plastics

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory

 

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To upcycle the polymers of discarded plastics, chemists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory invented a way to generate new macromolecules with more valuable properties than those of the starting material.

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Credit: Adam Malin/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

 

By editing the polymers of discarded plastics, chemists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have found a way to generate new macromolecules with more valuable properties than those of the starting material. Upcycling may help remedy the roughly 450 million tons of plastic discarded worldwide annually, of which only 9% gets recycled; the rest is incinerated or winds up in landfills, oceans or elsewhere.

 

ORNL’s invention may change plastic’s environmental fate by rearranging polymeric building blocks to customize the properties of plastics. Molecular subunits link to produce polymer chains that can connect through their backbones and cross-linked molecules to form multipurpose plastics. The makeup of polymer chains determines how strong, rigid or heat-resistant those plastics will be.

 

Molecular editing is so promising that it has been the basis of two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry. In 2005, the prize went to developers of the metathesis reaction, which breaks and makes double bonds between carbon atoms in rings and chains so their subunits can swap to create new molecules limited only by imagination. Similarly, in 2020, the prize went to developers of CRISPR, “genetic scissors” for editing DNA strands, biopolymers made of nucleotide subunits that carry the code of life.

 

”This is CRISPR for editing polymers,” said ORNL’s Jeffrey Foster, who led a study that was published in Journal of the American Chemical Society. “However, instead of editing strands of genes, we are editing polymer chains. This isn’t the typical plastic recycling ‘melt and hope for the best’ scenario.”

 

The ORNL researchers precisely edited commodity polymers that significantly contribute to plastic waste. In some experiments, the researchers worked with soft polybutadiene, which is common in rubber tires. In other experiments, they worked with tough acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, the stuff of plastic toys, computer keyboards, ventilation pipes, protective headgear, vehicle trim and molding, and kitchen appliances.

 

“This is a waste stream that's really not recycled at all,” Foster said. “We're addressing a significant component of the waste stream with this technology. That'd make a pretty big impact just from conservation of mass and energy from materials that are now going into landfills.”

 

Dissolving the waste polymers is the first step in creating drop-in additives for polymer synthesis. The researchers shredded synthetic or commercial polybutadiene and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene and immersed the material in a solvent, dichloromethane, to conduct a chemical reaction at a low temperature (40 degrees Celsius) for less than two hours.

 

A ruthenium catalyst facilitated the polymerization, or polymer addition. Industrial firms have used this catalyst to make robust plastics and to convert biomass such as plant oils into fuels and other high-value organic compounds with no difficulty, highlighting the potential for its use in chemical upcycling.

 

The molecular building blocks of the polymer backbone contain functional groups, or clusters of atoms that serve as reactive sites for modification. Notably, the  double bonds between carbons increase the chances for chemical reactions that enable polymerization. A carbon ring opens at a double bond to create a polymer chain that grows as each functional polymer unit directly slips in, conserving the material. The plastic additive also helps control the molecular weight of the synthesized material and, in turn, its properties and performance.

 

If this material synthesis strategy could be expanded to a broader range of industrially important polymers, then it could prove an economically viable path for reusing manufacturing materials that today can only be used in a single product. The upcycled materials might be, for instance, softer and stretchier than the original polymers or, perhaps, easier to shape and harden into durable thermoset products.

 

The scientists upcycled plastic waste by employing two processes in tandem. Both are types of metathesis, which means a change of places. Double bonds break and form between carbon atoms, allowing polymer subunits to swap.

 

One process, called ring-opening metathesis polymerization, opens carbon rings and elongates them into chains. The other process, called cross metathesis, inserts chains of polymer subunits from one polymer chain into another.

 

Traditional recycling fails to capture the value in discarded plastics because it reuses polymers that become less valuable through degradation with each melt and reuse. By contrast, ORNL’s innovative upcycling utilizes the existing building blocks to incorporate the mass and characteristics of the waste material and provide added functionality and value.

 

”The new process has high atom economy,” Foster said. “That means that we can pretty much recover all the material that we put in.”

 

The ORNL scientists demonstrated that the process, which uses less energy and produces fewer emissions than traditional recycling, efficiently integrates waste materials without compromising polymer quality. Foster, Ilja Popovs and Tomonori Saito conceptualized the paper’s ideas. Nicholas Galan, Isaiah Dishner and Foster synthesized monomer subunits and optimized their polymerization. Joshua Damron performed nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy experiments to analyze reaction kinetics. Jackie Zheng, Chao Guan and Anisur Rahman characterized mechanical and thermal properties of final materials.

 

“The vision is that this concept could be extended to any polymer that has some sort of backbone functional group to react with,” Foster said. If scaled up and expanded to employ other additives, broader classes of waste could be mined for molecular building blocks, dramatically reducing the environmental impact of other difficult-to-process plastics. The circular economy — in which waste materials are repurposed rather than discarded — then becomes a more realistic goal.

 

Next, the researchers are interested in changing the types of subunits in the polymer chain and rearranging them to see whether they can create high-performance thermoset materials. Examples are epoxy resins, vulcanized rubber, polyurethane and silicone. Once cured, thermoset materials cannot be remelted or reshaped because their molecular structure is cross-linked. That makes their recycling a challenge.

 

The researchers are also interested in optimizing solvents for environmental sustainability during industrial processing.

 

”Some preprocessing is going to be required on these waste plastics that we still have to figure out,” Foster said.

 

The DOE Office of Science (Materials Science and Engineering program)[DL1]  and ORNL Laboratory Directed Research and Development program funded the research.

 

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science. The single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, the Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science. — Dawn Levy

 

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Journal

Journal of the American Chemical Society

DOI

10.1021/jacs.4c10588 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Polyalkenamers as Drop-In Additives for Ring-Opening Metathesis Polymerization: A Promising Upcycling Paradigm

 

‘Turn on the lights’: DAVD display helps navy divers navigate undersea conditions

Office of Naval Research

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U.S. Navy divers test the Divers Augmented Vision Display (DAVD) during a training exercise in Little Creek, Virginia. Outfitted with components such as a heads-up display resembling virtual-reality glasses (which can be adapted to any Navy dive helmet), DAVD enables divers to better operate in inhospitable underwater environments.

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Credit: Photo courtesy of Coda Octopus

ARLINGTON, Va.—A favorite childhood memory for Dr. Sandra Chapman was visiting the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor with her father. They hung out at the memorial so often that they memorized lines to the movie playing prior to the boat ride to the memorial.

So it’s appropriate that Chapman — a program officer in the Office of Naval Research’s (ONR) Warfighter Performance Department — is passionate about her involvement in the development of an innovative technology recently applied to efforts to preserve the area around the USS Arizona Memorial.

Developed in partnership with Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) and Coda Octopus, the system is the Divers Augmented Vision Display (DAVD), which enables divers to better operate in inhospitable underwater environments.

“Through real-time information sharing, high-resolution imagery and an augmented-reality display, DAVD allows Navy divers to operate more effectively in dark, low-visibility environments,” said Chapman. “This increases their productivity, improves communications, keeps them safe and turns on the lights underwater, so to speak.”

Navy diving missions include deep ocean salvage of vessels and aircraft, underwater rescues, explosive ordnance disposal, ship hull maintenance and recovery of sunken equipment. This often involves working in pitch-black, dangerous conditions littered with hazards such as pier pilings, rock and jagged metal.

Designed to address these challenges, DAVD’s most prominent feature is a heads-up display resembling virtual-reality glasses, which can be adapted to any Navy dive helmet. Other components include specialized augmented-reality software (which allows the Coda Octopus 3D sonar or virtual images to be overlaid on a physical landscape), laptops, cables, cameras and lighting.

While using DAVD, a diver is tethered to a ship or floating platform by cables transmitting vital information between the diver and surface team — including rate of ascent and descent, time elapsed, current and maximum depth, and remaining levels of breathing gas.

DAVD can take sonar imagery gathered before and during a dive and use it to create a detailed 3D model of the dive site. In addition, divers are able to receive videos, technical manuals, images, messages and other data to help them navigate underwater and maintain smooth communications with the surface.

“As a diver, I’ll say DAVD is a game-changer,” said Lt. Matthew Coleman, a NAVSEA assistant for salvage. “It gives us an extremely detailed view of the bottom — with much more accuracy than what we used previously — and is an excellent tool for completing any mission, in all working conditions.”

DAVD’s roots stretch back to 2019, when ONR sponsored its development to answer a need voiced by NAVSEA to improve diver visibility underwater. It eventually was moved to ONR’s Future Naval Capabilities program, which is designed to complete development of mature technologies and transition them into naval programs of record.

In the subsequent years, multiple versions of DAVD were introduced into the fleet for testing, demonstration and transition, each with new improvements and upgrades. The latest iteration entered service in 2023.

Approximately 15 DAVD systems are currently being used by nine naval commands — and have played important roles in both naval and non-naval operations. For example, in the aftermath of the 2023 wildfires in Maui, Hawaii, Navy divers used DAVD to locate 26 boats that had sunk along a marina during the disaster.

Navy and Coda Octopus engineers also employed the DAVD 3D sonar systems to assist in salvage efforts after the March 2024 collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge. And DAVD was instrumental in efforts to map the murky waters surrounding the sunken USS Arizona. The purpose was to help U.S. Pacific Fleet and the National Park Service inspect the condition of submerged, severely degraded construction moorings used to build the memorial in the 1950s.

In the future, Chapman and McMurtrie envision potential upgrades to DAVD that could include GPS for georeferencing (relating a digital map or image to geographic coordinates), physiological monitoring such as an eye-tracking device, or enabling DAVD to work without cables connecting to the surface.

“As we get regular feedback from divers, we want to continuously upgrade and improve DAVD to ensure it stays effective and relevant,” said Paul McMurtrie, NAVSEA diving systems program manager. “Similar to how your iPhone is always getting upgrades.”

Super-sized electric vehicles (EVs) will not solve the climate crisis

Lithium-ion batteries in EVs weigh an average of 595 kg (1,311 pounds)

Reports and Proceedings

OK International

San Francisco, January 17, 2025 – As Electric vehicles (EVs) are growing in popularity and size, there has been an enormous increase in the size of their batteries to provide greater range and performance. However, these larger EVs that are coming to dominate the market are failing to substantially reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in comparison to smaller EVs and conventional vehicles.

A recent article titled Super-sized electric vehicles will not solve the climate crisis, published in the journal PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, indicates that the lithium-ion batteries in the most popular EVs have increased in weight by 68% over the past five years. The batteries in the top ten EV models sold now weigh an average of 595 kg (1,311 pounds).

The largest model now on the market, the GMC Hummer EV, has a battery weighing  1,326 kg (2,923 pounds) that outweighs many conventional cars and even the Fiat 500e electric vehicle.

The article notes that the combined weight of the top ten EVs sold in the U.S. in 2023 is approximately 1.5 times the weight of the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge. The mass of these batteries poses a significant challenge for future waste processing and hazardous waste disposal given the existing limitations of recycling technologies.

Furthermore, the article notes that larger EVs require approximately 75% more critical minerals to produce than small electric cars and their CO2 emissions from mineral processing, manufacturing and assembly are 70% greater.  This trend to larger batteries may also delay efforts to decarbonize the electricity grid as they require much greater energy consumption.

The growing size of EVs and their batteries is reversing the potential environmental gains from adopting this technology. Furthermore, there is no realistic economic model for fully recycling these batteries to make new lithium-ion batteries as is the practice for recycling paper, aluminum or glass waste.

Perry Gottesfeld, author of the article and Executive Director of Occupational Knowledge International said, “Not all EVs are making a positive contribution to environmental sustainability and we need to better inform consumers to select vehicles that actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

The article concludes that improved public policy, incentives and messaging are needed to drive consumer demand to smaller EVs to reduce carbon emissions and yield environmental sustainability benefits. Government subsidies and tax incentives should be better aligned to account for greenhouse gas emissions over the vehicle lifecycle.

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Journal

PLOS Sustainability and Transformation

Method of Research

Commentary/editorial

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Super-Sized Electric Vehicles (EVs) Will Not Solve the Climate Crisis

Article Publication Date

17-Jan-2025