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Tests on sunglasses show deficiencies in protection against ultraviolet rays

A study conducted at the University of São Paulo analyzed the effectiveness of 12 models and showed that only one met the safety limits set by an international organization.

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo

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Solar simulator, with lenses in position, used in sunglasses testing

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Credit: Mauro Masili

Solar ultraviolet radiation is one of the causes of a series of eye diseases, including cataracts and a type of corneal inflammation (photokeratitis), which can be delayed or prevented by using UV protection, with sunglasses being the most popular accessory for this function. However, a study published in the journal Research on Biomedical Engineering raises alarm bells by revealing shortcomings in this protection.

The study analyzed the effectiveness of 12 models of sunglasses and found that only one model met the safety limits for ultraviolet radiation exposure established by the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP).      

Researchers from the Ophthalmic Instrumentation Laboratory at the São Carlos School of Engineering of the University of São Paulo (EESC-USP) in Brazil showed that the lenses do not meet at least one of the safety limits defined in the standards and that over time they lose some of their ability to block UV radiation, increasing the risk of eye damage.

Only one lens proved to be “optimal” because it completely blocked the radiation even after the aging test, which simulated 2,500 hours of sun exposure. The study does not mention the brands of glasses.

To ensure effective and comprehensive vision protection, scientists suggest that the industry adopt the ICNIRP limits as standard practice, thereby improving product quality.

The standards for certification of sunglasses and eye protection set limits for solar radiation filters at wavelengths between 280 and 380 nanometers (nm). The World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Commission set these limits between 280 and 400 nm. UV radiation is divided into three bands – UVC (100 to 280 nm), UVB (280 to 315 nm), and UVA (315 to 400 nm).

“We’ve been researching this in our lab since the 1990s. We’ve developed a science that can be used as a basis for establishing safety standards and norms. Today, we’re internationally recognized and cited by several authors in books and guidelines,” says Professor Liliane Ventura of the EESC-USP Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, corresponding author of the article.

Ventura, who is coordinating a project supported by FAPESP, is also leading patent applications for two prototypes. One to measure the radiant exposure of the eye to direct, diffuse and reflected radiation from the inside of sunglass lenses. And another for testing the blocking of ultraviolet radiation in sunglasses sold to the public. Both are being processed by the USP Innovation Agency for submission to the National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI).

Ventura and her student at the time, Artur Duarte Loureiro, were recently granted a patent, also thanks to the support of FAPESP, for a technology that assesses the condition of sunglasses for driving by measuring the transmission of light at different wavelengths, such as green, yellow and red.

Researcher Mauro Masili, first author of the article and a member of the laboratory, highlights another study by the group, published in March 2024 in the journal Scientific Reports, which shows that regardless of the category of lenses – lighter or darker – glasses must guarantee UVA protection of over 86%. Lenses are categorized from 0 (lightest) to 4. A 0 is recommended for situations where there is little or no apparent sunlight. A 4, which is very dark, is not recommended for driving.

The results showed that less than 86% protection may actually increase the risk to eye health because the lenses allow more UV radiation to enter the eye. However, contrary to what has been argued in the scientific literature, this increase is not due to the dilation of the pupil caused by sunglasses, but rather to the widening of the field of vision.

“We put together a table that calculates UV, UVA and UVB protection. In terms of pupil dilation, there are no bad glasses. They’ll all protect. But when we include field of vision magnification, that changes. In bright outdoor environments, the natural reflex is to try to close your eyes and wrinkle your forehead to reduce the light. Wearing sunglasses creates a darker environment, preventing the natural response and increasing the field of vision, which can lead to greater UV exposure if the lenses don’t provide adequate protection,” Masili explains.

Therefore, extending protection to up to 400 nm could minimize the risk of unnecessary exposure, according to the study.

Comings and goings

Since the late 1990s, when there were no standards for sunglass protection requirements in Brazil, Ventura and Masili have been helping the regulatory bodies to establish these guidelines, including the first analyses of optical characteristics that the professor conducted for the National Institute of Metrology, Quality and Technology (INMETRO) in 1997, based on international standards.

In 2003, the Brazilian Association of Technical Standards (ABNT) published NBR 15111, which established the physical characteristics of sunglasses for general use, such as driving and transit, with parameters similar to those in Europe. It established that protection in Brazil should be filters between 280 and 380 nm.

The standard was revised in 2013, following research conducted by the group and supported by FAPESP, extending UV protection to 280-400 nm and increasing the irradiation resistance test from 25 hours to 50 hours. However, in 2015 it was withdrawn and replaced by ISO 12312-1, which reinstated the parameters of UV protection filters from 280 to 380 nm.

In 2016, another study conducted by the two researchers calculated solar radiation exposure in 27 Brazilian state capitals and 110 capitals in the northern hemisphere and showed that the test was ineffective in ensuring sunglass lens protection from UV radiation exposure.

Currently, there is no requirement for sunglasses to be certified for sale in Brazil. For example, for equipment used to drive vehicles, it is possible to perform the analysis using a spectrophotometer, equipment used for scientific purposes and handled by specialists.

Ventura says that she is developing a prototype for measuring radiant exposure of the eye, with a proposal for a sun protection factor label that could help consumers choose when shopping.

About FAPESP

The São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) is a public institution with the mission of supporting scientific research in all fields of knowledge by awarding scholarships, fellowships and grants to investigators linked with higher education and research institutions in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. FAPESP is aware that the very best research can only be done by working with the best researchers internationally. Therefore, it has established partnerships with funding agencies, higher education, private companies, and research organizations in other countries known for the quality of their research and has been encouraging scientists funded by its grants to further develop their international collaboration.

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Journal

Research on Biomedical Engineering

DOI

10.1007/s42600-024-00390-3 

Article Title

Evaluation of solar ultraviolet blocking by sunglasses and their compliance with recommended safety limits

 

Rooftop panels, EV chargers, and smart thermostats could chip in to boost power grid resilience

MIT engineers propose a new “local electricity market” to tap into the power potential of homeowners’ grid-edge devices.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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An example of the different types of IoT devices, physical objects that contain sensors and software that connect to the internet, that are coordinated to increase power grid resilience.

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Credit: Courtesy of Anu Annaswamy and Vineet Nair

There’s a lot of untapped potential in our homes and vehicles that could be harnessed to reinforce local power grids and make them more resilient to unforeseen outages, a new study shows. 

In response to a cyber attack or natural disaster, a backup network of decentralized devices — such as residential solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, heat pumps, and water heaters — could restore electricity or relieve stress on the grid, MIT engineers say. 

Such devices are “grid-edge” resources found close to the consumer rather than near central power plants, substations, or transmission lines. Grid-edge devices can independently generate, store, or tune their consumption of power. In their study, the research team shows how such devices could one day be called upon to either pump power into the grid, or rebalance it by dialing down or delaying their power use. 

In a paper appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the engineers present a blueprint for how grid-edge devices could reinforce the power grid through a “local electricity market.” Owners of grid-edge devices could subscribe to a regional market and essentially loan out their device to be part of a microgrid or a local network of on-call energy resources. 

In the event that the main power grid is compromised, an algorithm developed by the researchers would kick in for each local electricity market, to quickly determine which devices in the network are trustworthy. The algorithm would then identify the combination of trustworthy devices that would most effectively mitigate the power failure, by either pumping power into the grid or reducing the power they draw from it, by an amount that the algorithm would calculate and communicate to the relevant subscribers. The subscribers could then be compensated through the market, depending on their participation.

The team illustrated this new framework through a number of grid attack scenarios, in which they considered failures at different levels of a power grid, from various sources such as a cyber attack or a natural disaster. Applying their algorithm, they showed that various networks of grid-edge devices were able to dissolve the various attacks. 

The results demonstrate that grid-edge devices such as rooftop solar panels, EV chargers, batteries, and smart thermostats (for HVAC devices or heat pumps) could be tapped to stabilize the power grid in the event of an attack. 

“All these small devices can do their little bit in terms of adjusting their consumption,” says study co-author Anu Annaswamy, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “If we can harness our smart dishwashers, rooftop panels, and EVs, and put our combined shoulders to the wheel, we can really have a resilient grid.”

The study’s MIT co-authors include lead author Vineet Nair and John Williams, along with collaborators from multiple institutions including the Indian Institute of Technology, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and elsewhere.

Power boost

The team’s study is an extension of their broader work in adaptive control theory and designing systems to automatically adapt to changing conditions. Annaswamy, who leads the Active-Adaptive Control Laboratory at MIT, explores ways to boost the reliability of renewable energy sources such as solar power.

“These renewables come with a strong temporal signature, in that we know for sure the sun will set every day, so the solar power will go away,” Annaswamy says. “How do you make up for the shortfall?”

The researchers found the answer could lie in the many grid-edge devices that consumers are increasingly installing in their own homes.

“There are lots of distributed energy resources that are coming up now, closer to the customer rather than near large power plants, and it’s mainly because of individual efforts to decarbonize,” Nair says. “So you have all this capability at the grid edge. Surely we should be able to put them to good use.”

While considering ways to deal with drops in energy from the normal operation of renewable sources, the team also began to look into other causes of power dips, such as from cyber attacks. They wondered, in these malicious instances, whether and how the same grid-edge devices could step in to stabilize the grid following an unforeseen, targeted attack. 

Attack mode

In their new work, Annaswamy, Nair, and their colleagues developed a framework for incorporating grid-edge devices, and in particular, internet-of-things (IoT) devices, in a way that would support the larger grid in the event of an attack or disruption. IoT devices are physical objects that contain sensors and software that connect to the internet. 

For their new framework, named EUREICA (Efficient, Ultra-REsilient, IoT-Coordinated Assets), the researchers start with the assumption that one day, most grid-edge devices will also be IoT devices, enabling rooftop panels, EV chargers, and smart thermostats to wirelessly connect to a larger network of similarly independent and distributed devices.  

The team envisions that for a given region, such as a community of 1,000 homes, there exists a certain number of IoT devices that could potentially be enlisted in the region’s local network, or microgrid. Such a network would be managed by an operator, who would be able to communicate with operators of other nearby microgrids. 

If the main power grid is compromised or attacked, operators would run the researchers’ decision-making algorithm to determine trustworthy devices within the network that can pitch in to help mitigate the attack.

The team tested the algorithm on a number of scenarios, such as a cyber attack in which all smart thermostats made by a certain manufacturer are hacked to raise their setpoints simultaneously to a degree that dramatically alters a region’s energy load and destabilizes the grid. The researchers also considered attacks and weather events that would shut off the transmission of energy at various levels and nodes throughout a power grid. 

“In our attacks we consider between 5 and 40 percent of the power being lost. We assume some nodes are attacked, and some are still available and have some IoT resources, whether a battery with energy available or an EV or HVAC device that’s controllable,” Nair explains. “So, our algorithm decides which of those houses can step in to either provide extra power generation to inject into the grid or reduce their demand to meet the shortfall.”

In every scenario that they tested, the team found that the algorithm was able to successfully restabilize the grid and mitigate the attack or power failure. They acknowledge that to put in place such a network of grid-edge devices will require buy-in from customers, policymakers, and local officials, as well as innovations such as advanced power inverters that enable EVs to inject power back into the grid. 

“This is just the first of many steps that have to happen in quick succession for this idea of local electricity markets to be implemented and expanded upon,” Annaswamy says. “But we believe it’s a good start.”

This work was supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy and the MIT Energy Initiative.

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Written by Jennifer Chu, MIT News

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2413967121 

Article Title

Resilience of the Electric Grid through Trustable IoT-Coordinated Assets”

DEI IS MERIT BASED

AIBS identifies 2025 Emerging Public Policy leader UNC Chapel Hill graduate student recognized

UNC Chapel Hill graduate student recognized

American Institute of Biological Sciences

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John Patrick “JP” Flores, recipient of the 2025 AIBS Emerging Public Policy Leadership Award (EPPLA).

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Credit: Katherine Apuzzo

The American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) is pleased to announce that John Patrick “JP” Flores has been selected to receive the 2025 AIBS Emerging Public Policy Leadership Award (EPPLA). The award recognizes graduate students in the biological sciences who have demonstrated leadership skills and an aptitude for working at the intersection of science and public policy.

 

JP Flores is a Ph.D. candidate in bioinformatics and computational biology at the University of North Carolina (UNC) in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He is interested in mechanisms of gene regulation, with his doctoral research focused on investigating the role of 3D chromatin structure in response to environmental stress. In 2024, Flores did a science policy internship at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of the Director Office of Science Policy, where he worked on developing a public vision and framework for including patient and community voices in the design and conduct of NIH-funded clinical research. He also serves as Director of External Affairs for the Science Policy and Advocacy Group at UNC.

 

Flores is an enthusiastic science communicator. Inspired by his journey as a first-generation college student, in 2020, he launched From where does it STEM?—a podcast born of his “passion for diversifying the scientific workforce.” As the host, he has interviewed influential scientists, such as former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins and President of the National Academy of Sciences Dr. Marcia McNutt. In addition, Flores serves as senior editor for GeneBites, a blog that publishes articles about current research in genetics written by early-career scientists.

 

“I applied for the EPPLA because I believe that the intersection of science and policy can help us unlock and empower a new generation of scientists that will bring innovative and impactful solutions to society,” said Flores. He thinks it is critical for scientists to engage in policy. “By engaging in policy, we can start to share how our work impacts society with those outside of our scientific communities. Bridging policy and science can help fund the next breakthrough discovery and provide opportunities for individuals with identities that have been historically excluded from science to contribute in ways they could've never imagined.”

 

Since 2003, AIBS has recognized the achievements of biology graduate students who have demonstrated an interest and aptitude for making contributions to science and science policy. “AIBS is proud to recognize Mr. Flores for his outstanding contributions to science communication and policy,” said AIBS Chief Executive Officer Scott Glisson. “Year after year, we are continually impressed by the exceptional leadership and policy achievements demonstrated by the graduate students who apply for the Emerging Public Policy Leadership Award.”

 

Flores will travel to Washington, DC, in April to participate in an AIBS science communications training program and to meet with his members of Congress as part of the annual AIBS Congressional Visits Day. In addition, he will receive a one-year subscription to the scientific journal BioScience.

 

AIBS is also recognizing two additional outstanding leaders with an Honorable Mention award. Anna LoPresti is a Ph.D. candidate in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado. Jon Judd is a Ph.D. student in genetics at Stanford University in Stanford, California. LoPresti and Judd will receive a one-year subscription to BioScience.

 

AIBS is the national organization dedicated to promoting informed decision-making that advances the biological sciences for the benefit of science and society. The EPPLA program is one way that AIBS builds the capacity of the scientific community to promote sound decision-making. The EPPLA program is made possible by the generous financial support of AIBS donors. More information about the EPPLA program and AIBS is available at https://www.aibs.org/.

 

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Carnegie Mellon University researchers propose framework to identify food selectivity origins in the brain

Carnegie Mellon University

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CMU researchers have identified a region in the brain's visual cortex that responds to food and have developed a theoretical framework that could explain the origins of this selectivity.

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Credit: Carnegie Mellon University

Human evolution has revolved around food, from identifying and foraging for it to growing and preparing it. Carnegie Mellon University researchers have identified a region in the brain's visual cortex that responds to food and have developed a theoretical framework that could explain the origins of this selectivity.

"It's crazy how many different aspects of life food touches and how many different factors might contribute to creating any particular category of food," said Leila Wehbe, an associate professor in the School of Computer Science's Machine Learning Department and CMU's Neuroscience Institute. "If you think about it, food is even more primal than social cognition. If you don't have food, you die. It's necessary for survival in all species. Even the ones that don't have that much social interaction need food. And so, I like to think of it as the brain has evolved to either help you find food or keep you from being food."

Wehbe was part of a team that recently published a paper in Trends in Neurosciences that outlines how visual and nonvisual signals contribute to the brain's cortical responses when people were shown images of food. Team members include Michael Tarr, the Kavčić-Moura Professor of Cognitive and Brain Science in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences Department of Psychology and the Neuroscience Institute; and Maggie Henderson, an assistant professor in the Psychology Department and the Neuroscience Institute.

Tarr said there are regions of the brain that show some specialization for behaviorally critical domains, such as processing images of faces or tools. Until recently, researchers hadn't identified a similar region involved in processing images of food.

Recent studies using the Natural Scenes Dataset, however, have identified a food region in the brain. The Natural Scenes Dataset is a large-scale fMRI dataset comprising scans taken of people's brains while they were looking at images of objects, such as food, in their natural context or environment — like dishes at a buffet, or a hot dog and soda at a picnic table. The dataset's growth has made research into the brain's food region possible.

"In the past, standard approaches tended to average across participants, which obscured more nuanced findings," Tarr said. "Large, naturalistic data allowed us to better study individual participants, which, in turn, revealed a pattern of food specialization present in every subject." 

Researchers also found that images of food in context elicited additional responses in the brain, as compared to images without context. One explanation for this finding is that seeing these objects in their natural context might invoke the varied experiences of interacting with food or other information related to identifying food as just that: food. For example, signals that could influence food selectivity in the visual cortex include color, social cues or the motor actions of eating.

Henderson said while this work examined food selectivity in the brain's visual system, the scope isn't limited to food.

"This finding of food selectivity reveals general principles of high-level information processing in the brain," Henderson said. "How far can we get by thinking about the visual statistics of the environment, and how does that interact with other brain systems, like reward circuitry, social cognition and action recognition? We can think of food as one particular case study for how a range of visual and nonvisual factors might interact to give rise to how the brain is ultimately organized."

For researchers, this work provides a framework to answer open questions about how visual and nonvisual factors influence the brain's network for processing any ecologically critical domain. Learn more about their research in the Trends in Neurosciences paper.

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Journal

Trends in Neurosciences

DOI

10.1016/j.tins.2024.12.001 

Article Title

Origins of food selectivity in human visual cortex

Successful mobile phone intervention for eating disorders on college campuses will expand

University of Kansas

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Kelsie Forbush, who leads the BEST-U intervention, has been conducting research and treatment in the field of eating disorders since 2000. 

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Credit: University of Kansas

LAWRENCE — Eating disorders are the most common mental health concern on college campuses, yet there is a serious shortage of treatment providers on campuses. A new program leveraging the phone to increase treatment access for college students experiencing eating disorders is expanding after a pilot program’s positive results at the University of Kansas where most participants saw recovery.

The timing couldn’t be better. In the few years since the COVID-19 pandemic, eating disorder prevalence has increased by 62% in university women and 140% in university men, according to the KU researchers, citing a Journal of Psychosocial Nursing and Mental Health Services study. But with a shortage of practical and affordable treatments for many of these students, the team behind BEST-U hopes to fill gaps in eating disorder treatment accessibility for universities across the country.

The BEST-U program, an 11-week treatment underpinned by guided self-help cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), has shown “most participants were fully recovered from their eating disorder” at KU, according to researcher Kelsie Forbush, professor of clinical child psychology at KU and co-principal investigator of a new $715,516 grant from the National Institutes of Health to expand the program to train non-mental health care professionals within student health settings to deliver the treatment.

Her co-principal investigator is Kara Christensen-Pacella, an assistant professor from the University of Nevada Las Vegas, who was previously a researcher and therapist on the pilot trial. The expanded study will take place at both KU and UNLV.

“We were inspired to create BEST-U because we saw a high demand for eating disorder treatment but very few resources in our community,” said Forbush, who also serves as a senior scientist with KU’s Life Span Institute and director of its newly founded Center for the Advancement of Research on Eating Behaviors (CARE). “In many cases, KU students had to drive to Kansas City for treatment, but some didn’t have a car. It was also very cost-prohibitive because most area providers did not take insurance.”

Forbush and her colleagues wanted to address the problem after seeing the obvious effect on students. First, they looked at the scope of the issue and found “incredibly” high rates of eating disorders on KU’s campus, matching national data. Then, they explored models that could expand access to intervention while remaining effective.

Forbush’s main collaborator was Sara Gould of Children's Mercy Hospital-Kansas City, where she directs the eating disorder center and is a full-time clinician. Other key collaborators include KU faculty member Alesha Doan, who will lead qualitative aims and analyses to determine how to best scale the program to other colleges across the United States, and Angeline Bottera, who is the associate director of CARE.

“Together, we created an 11-week intervention using a mobile health app,” Forbush said. “Students spend about 10 minutes per week on the app, which is highly interactive, and they also receive 25 to 30 minutes of telehealth coaching from a trained graduate student. By the end of the 11 weeks, most participants were recovered from their eating disorder.”

Besides pairing participants with a trained BEST-U coach, the BEST-U interface includes videos, interactive quizzes, short questions and surveys to track progress each week.

Forbush will partner closely with Watkins Health Services by training their providers to serve as coaches, which will help expand the reach of the intervention to colleges that do not have trained mental health eating-disorder providers. Forbush is also conducting an additional clinical trial of BEST-U to identify if some clients can recover without receiving coaching sessions and who may need additional support.

“We were very excited about the results of our pilot trials and received great feedback,” Forbush said. “One of my favorite stories is about a new coordinator I hired to help run the study. She and her mom were shopping, and the cashier overheard their conversation. When the cashier realized our coordinator was working on the BEST-U study, the cashier said, ‘I participated in that study, and it changed my life.’”

Forbush’s other projects have included addressing eating disorders in the military and developing digital health tools for teens suffering from anorexia nervosa.

The CARE Center, formerly a lab, was established in recent months as a fully fledged research center under the Life Span Institute. CARE conducts research to better identify people with eating disorders for early screening, intervention and treatment-progress monitoring. The center’s mission is “to improve the way eating disorders are assessed, diagnosed and treated through cutting-edge methods and research.” CARE then applies findings to clinical settings with university students.

“The peak age of onset for eating disorders is usually late adolescence to early adulthood,” Forbush said. “So, we're reaching people right in that peak window — when an eating disorder often starts or when they may have already had it for a few years before coming to college. That can be a good time to seek treatment. Sometimes people notice their eating disorder symptoms getting worse as they transition to college.”

It's this work with university students Forbush cited as the most rewarding part of her research and clinical studies. Forbush said expanding the BEST-U program that has succeeded so well at KU makes her “very excited” because it means changing more lives for the better.

“It feels so rewarding to have identified a need — there's a gap, and students need this service — and then to be able to help start filling that gap has felt amazing,” she said. “When you have an eating disorder in college, you really do miss out on a lot of the developmental experiences of becoming an adult — things like making friends and fully engaging in your classes — and you don't get those years back. If we can help a student overcome an eating disorder and get back on track with the developmental trajectory of early adulthood, that’s extremely important. And that's very rewarding.”

 

Researchers outline new approach for better understanding animal consciousness

Proposed behavioral markers offer innovative way for better understanding both animals and humans

New York University

A team of researchers has outlined a new approach for better understanding the depths of animal consciousness, a method that may yield new insights into the similarities and differences among living organisms.  

The essay, which appears in the journal Science, describes a “marker method” that scientists can use to assess animal consciousness. It involves identifying behavioral and anatomical features associated with conscious processing in humans and searching for similar properties in nonhumans. By making progress in the science of animal consciousness, the authors propose, we can make progress on foundational questions about the nature of consciousness, potentially improving our understanding of the human mind. 

“When humans and other animals perform similar behaviors, and when the best explanation for these behaviors in humans involves conscious experience, then that could be considered evidence…of conscious experience in other animals, too,” write Kristin Andrews, a philosophy professor at York University, Jonathan Birch, a philosophy professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Jeff Sebo, a professor in New York University’s Department of Environmental Studies, in the Science essay “Evaluating Animal Consciousness.”

The publication comes nearly a year after the “New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness,” which demonstrated the scientific backing for consciousness among all vertebrates and many invertebrates, among other species, the Times of London and others reported. The declaration, organized by Andrews, Birch, and Sebo, has now been signed by more than 500 scientists and other researchers around the globe. 

Philosophers, including Jeremy Bentham, and scientists, notably Charles Darwin, have considered questions linked to animal consciousness while John Stuart Mill, in the mid-19th century, acknowledged the challenge of broadly assessing consciousness. Well into the 21st century, a secure theory of consciousness remains elusive, and disagreement and uncertainty about the scope of consciousness in the animal kingdom remain ongoing.

In their essay, Andrews, Birch, and Sebo describe an approach that includes “identifying a particular dimension of consciousness,” such as experiencing pain or seeing an object, and then “seeking evidence that such markers are present (or absent) in the target species.” They then call  for new directions of inquiry, including research on dimensions of consciousness other than pain experience and non-invasive research methods.

However, they recognize the limitations of individual markers to serve as strong evidence by themselves. “The degree to which a particular marker can increase or decrease confidence in particular dimensions of animal consciousness depends on context,” they write. “For instance, linguistic behavior is a marker of specific kinds of conscious thought and emotion in humans. But as demonstrated by large language models that simulate human conversation, linguistic behavior alone is not strong evidence of consciousness in nonhuman systems.”

Despite these challenges, the authors emphasize the importance of continued exploration. “The idea that there is a ‘realistic possibility’ of consciousness in all vertebrates and many invertebrates may eventually be replaced by more confident language,” they conclude. “But for as long as the evidence remains limited and mixed, it is important to keep an open mind and strive to learn more.” 

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Journal

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.adp4990 

Article Title

Evaluating Animal Consciousness

Article Publication Date

20-Feb-2025