It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, April 16, 2025
Veterinary: UK dog owners prefer crossbreeds and imports to domestic pedigree breeds
The UK pedigree dog population shrank by a yearly decline of 0.9% between 1990 and 2021, according to research published in Companion Animal Genetics and Health. The study highlights a rise in the populations of crossbreeds and imported pedigree dogs since 1990, but finds that only 13.7% of registered domestic pedigree dogs were used for breeding between 2005 and 2015.
There are more than 400 breeds of dogs globally, characterised by different appearances and behaviours. While the overall population of pet dogs in the UK has increased from 7.6 million in 2012 to 12 million in 2021, limited genetic diversity in pedigree (or purebred) dog populations has heightened the risk of inherited diseases, supported by accumulating evidence for breed-specific diseases.
Joanna Ilska and colleagues analysed demographic data for 222 dog breeds from the Kennel Club’s electronic database, including breed, parentage, and country of origin. The ten most popular pedigree dog breeds represented 44% of the whole pedigree population, with Labrador Retrievers, French Bulldogs, and Cocker Spaniels being the most common. The researchers found that pedigree populations have decreased markedly since 2010. Yorkshire Terriers saw the largest decline in population of 10.6% from 1990 to 2021, while French Bulldogs saw the biggest increase of 22.1%. Meanwhile, trends for imported pedigree dogs rose sharply after 2010, with more than 3,000 dogs imported each year between 2011 and 2019. Ireland exported 11,577 dogs to the UK between 1990 and 2021, Russia exported 4,396 dogs, and Poland exported 3,905 dogs.
The authors suggest the pedigree population drop may be linked to negative attitudes towards dog breeding, compounded by the routine neutering of dogs — it is estimated that 44% of dogs in the UK are neutered. They note that the decline in the number of pedigree dogs may also reflect changing attitudes in favour of mixed and crossbred dogs, such as Cockapoos. Ilska and co-authors suggest management strategies for pedigree dogs should account for declining population sizes and be tailored to the circumstances of individual breeds, with the increased number of imported dogs used in breeding potentially benefiting the overall genetic diversity of dog populations.
“Harm reduction” interventions for substance use – measures like needle exchange programs and methadone distribution that aim to reduce the adverse effects of substance use, rather than punish or prevent it – have been repeatedly shown to lower the risk of overdoses, mortality, and drug-related crime. But in many communities in rural America, there is a stigma attached to these approaches. Consequently, policymakers and health professionals in some communities have hesitated to implement or recommend harm reduction measures, fearing backlash.
But does support for comprehensive drug policies, including harm reduction, actually erode the public’s trust in local government?
A team of psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) and the Social Action Lab aimed to answer this question empirically, by examining the relationship between harm reduction policies and citizens’ belief that their government is competent and has their best interests at heart. In a recently published paper, postdoctoral research associate Xi Liu of the Social Action Lab, research associate professor Man-Pui Sally Chan of the Annenberg School, and Penn PIK Professor Dolores Albarracín, director of APPC’s Communication Science Division and director of the Social Action Lab, report that trust in local government is positively associated with perceptions of governmental support for comprehensive drug policies. The paper is part of the Grid for the Reduction of Vulnerability project, which is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
“Comprehensive drug policies increase trust in local government: An analysis of authorities’ and residents’ perspectives in rural US Appalachian and Midwestern counties” begins by flipping a common premise on its head: instead of concerning itself with how trust in government influences policy support, it asks how policy choices might influence trust in government. The researchers surveyed authorities and residents in Appalachian and Midwestern counties of states vulnerable to the spread of HIV and hepatitis C, comparing leaders’ estimation of community trust in local government and residents’ actual trust in local government, and also analyzing trust as a function of perceived governmental support for comprehensive substance use policies – those that include harm reduction. They also conducted an experiment to test the effects of perceived government support for comprehensive drug policies on trust, and possible causes of those effects.
Data from the field surveys showed a clear positive association between the perception of governmental support for comprehensive drug policies and trust in the local government, both as assessed by the community authorities and as self-reported by the community residents.
In the experiment, participants were randomly assigned a role of either mayor or resident of a rural Appalachian town and given information about whether residents considered the local government to be supportive of harm reduction and substance use reduction policies. Then, they were asked to estimate the level of trust that community residents have in their local government. Once again, the researchers found evidence that support for comprehensive drug policies increases trust in local government, both among participants assigned to play authorities and those assigned to play residents, and regardless of political ideology. They also found evidence that this was because comprehensive drug policies enhanced perceptions of governmental effort, and engendered optimism about future improvement of drug-related issues.
“Our findings highlight the nuanced perceptions of comprehensive drug policy within Appalachian and Midwestern communities,” said Liu, the lead author. “Despite concerns that harm reduction policies might inadvertently promote drug use, residents trust local authorities more when the authorities promote these policies. These insights should alleviate the common fears of policymakers that prevent these life-saving policies from being implemented in their local communities.”
Comprehensive drug policies increase trust in local government: an analysis of authorities’ and residents’ perspectives in rural US Appalachian and Midwestern counties
Making desalination more eco-friendly: New membranes could help eliminate brine waste
Membranes packed with charge help overcome the current salinity limit, making it easier to crystallize ocean salts and harvest valuable minerals from desalination waste
Desalination plants, a major and growing source of freshwater in dry regions, could produce less harmful waste using electricity and new membranes made at the University of Michigan.
The membranes could help desalination plants minimize or eliminate brine waste produced as a byproduct of turning seawater into drinking water. Today, liquid brine waste is stored in ponds until the water evaporates, leaving behind solid salt or a concentrated brine that can be further processed. But brine needs time to evaporate, providing ample opportunities to contaminate groundwater.
Space is also an issue. For every liter of drinking water produced at the typical desalination plant, 1.5 liters of brine are produced. Over 37 billion gallons of brine waste is produced globally every day, according to a UN study. When space for evaporation ponds is lacking, desalination plants inject the brine underground or dump it into the ocean. Rising salt levels near desalination plants can harm marine ecosystems.
"There's a big push in the desalination industry for a better solution," said Jovan Kamcev, U-M assistant professor of chemical engineering and the corresponding author of the study published today in Nature Chemical Engineering. "Our technology could help desalination plants be more sustainable by reducing waste while using less energy."
To eliminate brine waste, desalination engineers would like to concentrate the salt such that it can be easily crystallized in industrial vats rather than ponds that can occupy over a hundred acres. The separated water could be used for drinking or agriculture, while the solid salt could then be harvested for useful products. Seawater not only contains sodium chloride—or table salt—but valuable metals such as lithium for batteries, magnesium for lightweight alloys and potassium for fertilizer.
Desalination plants can concentrate brines by heating and evaporating the water, which is very energy intensive, or with reverse osmosis, which only works at relatively low salinity. Electrodialysis is a promising alternative because it works at high salt concentrations and requires relatively little energy. The process uses electricity to concentrate salt, which exists in water as charged atoms and molecules called ions.
Here's how the process works. Water flows into many channels separated by membranes, and each membrane has the opposite electrical charge of its neighbors. The entire stream is flanked by a pair of electrodes. The positive salt ions move toward the negatively charged electrode, and are stopped by a positively charged membrane. Negative ions move toward the positive electrode, stopped by a negative membrane. This creates two types of channels—one that both positive and negative ions leave and another that the ions enter, resulting in streams of purified water and concentrated brine.
But, electrodialysis has its own salinity limits. As the salt concentrations rise, ions start to leak through electrodialysis membranes. While leak-resistant membranes exist on the market, they tend to transport ions too slowly, making the power requirements impractical for brines more than six times saltier than average seawater.
The researchers overcome this limit by packing a record number of charged molecules into the membrane, increasing their ion-repelling power and their conductivity—meaning they can move more salt with less power. With their chemistry, the researchers can produce membranes that are ten times more conductive than relatively leak-proof membranes on the market today.
The dense charge ordinarily attracts a lot of water molecules, which limits how much charge can fit in conventional electrodialysis membranes. The membranes swell as they absorb water, and the charge is diluted. In the new membranes, connectors made of carbon prevent swelling by locking the charged molecules together.
The level of restriction can be changed to control the leakiness and the conductivity of the membranes. Allowing some level of leakiness can push the conductivity beyond today's commercially available membranes. The researchers hope the membrane's customizability will help it take off.
"Each membrane isn't fit for every purpose, but our study demonstrates a broad range of choices," said David Kitto, a postdoctoral fellow in chemical engineering and the study's first author. "Water is such an important resource, so it would be amazing to help to make desalination a sustainable solution to our global water crisis."
The research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and relied on NSF-funded X-ray facilities at the University of Pennsylvania Materials Research Science and Engineering Center.
The team filed for patent protection with the assistance of U-M Innovation Partnerships.
A USBC-approved bowling lane has 39 boards, each measuring approximately 2.73 cm (1.07 in). The x-axis is measured in boards. The y-axis is aligned with the minimum moment of inertia axis of the weight block.
WASHINGTON, April 15, 2025 – With millions of dollars at stake across tournaments and more than 45 million regular annual participants, bowling continues to reign as a top sport in the U.S. A unified model that predicts how a bowling ball behaves down the lane, however, remains elusive.
In AIP Advances, by AIP Publishing, researchers from Princeton, MIT, the University of New Mexico, Loughborough University, and Swarthmore College share a model that identifies the optimal location for bowling ball placement. Employing a system of six differential equations derived from Euler’s equations for a rotating rigid body, their model creates a plot that shows the best conditions for a strike.
“The simulation model we created could become a useful tool for players, coaches, equipment companies and tournament designers,” said author Curtis Hooper. “The ability to accurately predict ball trajectories could lead to the discoveries of new strategies and equipment designs.”
To date, most methods for predicting the outcome of bowling shots have relied on statistics describing real-life bowlers, rather than analyzing the dynamics of the ball and shot itself. Such approaches have often come short when players introduce slight variability in how they bowl.
Instead, the group’s model accounts for a variety factors. One example is the thin layer of oil applied to bowling lanes; the oil layer can vary widely in volume and shape between competitive tournaments, requiring specific styles and targeting strategies for each. The oil is seldom applied uniformly, which creates an uneven friction surface.
The issue is that bowlers and coaches can currently only rely on their own experience and instinct, which Hooper said is often imprecise and suboptimal.
“Our model provides a solution to both of these problems by constructing a bowling model that accurately computes bowling trajectories when given inputs for all significant factors that may affect ball motion,” Hooper said. “A ‘miss-room’ is also calculated to account for human inaccuracies which allows bowlers to find their own optimal targeting strategy.”
Making the model posed several challenges, including how to describe the motion of the subtly asymmetric bowling ball. More challenging still was distilling the inputs required for predicting the trajectory into terms that a bowler or coach could understand and that could be measured with accessories bowlers already use.
In the future, the group aims to improve the model’s accuracy by incorporating even more factors, including uneven bowling lanes, as well as connect with professionals in the industry to better understand how the model may be tailored to fit their applications.
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The article “Using physics simulations to find targeting strategies in competitive tenpin bowling” is authored by Simon Si Ming Ji, Shouzhuo Yang, Wilber Dominguez, Curtis George Hooper, and Cacey Stevens Bester. It will appear in AIP Advances on April 15, 2025 (DOI: 10.1063/5.0247761). After that date, it can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0247761.
ABOUT THE JOURNAL
AIP Advances is an open access journal publishing in all areas of physical sciences—applied, theoretical, and experimental. The inclusive scope of AIP Advances makes it an essential outlet for scientists across the physical sciences. See https://pubs.aip.org/aip/adv.
The Endangered Species Act (ESA), now 50 years old, was once a rare beacon of bipartisan unity, signed into law by President Richard Nixon with near-unanimous political support. Its purpose was clear: protect imperiled species and enable their recovery using the best available science to do so. Yet, as our case study on the grizzly bear in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem reveals, wildlife management under the ESA has changed, becoming a political battleground where science is increasingly drowned out by partisan ideology, bureaucratic delays, power struggles, and competing political interests. The survival of the ESA, a wildlife policy mimicked all over the world, may depend on our ability to navigate these waters.
The grizzly bear, a cultural symbol of the American West, embodies this shift. Listed as threatened in 1975 when its numbers dwindled to fewer than 1,000 and its range contracted by 98%, the species has managed to come back from the brink. In the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the population now exceeds 700, a number that surpassed recovery goals set by the federal wildlife management agency tasked with recovery, the US Fish & Wildlife Service. By the ESA’s own metrics, this is a success story, which now means the grizzly bear is eligible for ‘delisting’. Yet, attempts to remove federal protections in 2007 and 2017 were overturned by courts, not because the science was lacking, but because the process has become a lightning rod for political interests.
Our study looks at 750 documents and 2,832 stakeholder quotes to track this politicization. Historically, wildlife management is the strict domain of agency scientists in the executive branch. These scientists are experts trained to interpret interdisciplinary scientific data and balance both human and ecological needs.
Our work shows that today, the most dominant voices belong to legislators, legal advocates, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who are increasingly crowding out the agency scientists. Senators, elected politicians, like Wyoming’s John Barrasso proclaim, “The grizzly is fully recovered in Wyoming. End of story,” pushing for state control and criticizing the ESA as sluggish and outdated. Can you blame him though? Senator Barraso advocates for his Wyoming constituents who have collaborated in grizzly recovery and are now on the frontlines of human-wildlife conflict issues where grizzlies might harm livestock or tourists. All the while, population targets set by the ESA have been met, and the species remains listed.
Meanwhile, NGOs and their attorneys, such as the well-known environmental advocacy group Earthjustice, argue that delisting is premature, citing ‘political pressure’ overriding ‘biological evidence.’ The courts, too, have flexed their muscle, with rulings hinging on genetic connectivity’s role in population recovery. Ranchers with increasing grizzly conflict see these scientific developments as intentional delays to delisting rather than advancements in the field of conservation. There are no easy answers.
Wildlife management turned politics
This conflict reveals a stark reality: wildlife management is no longer just about science, it's about who dominates the political discourse, and the power that accompanies it. Legislators see delisting as a way to reclaim state authority from what they consider federal overreach. Their rhetoric, steeped in populist appeals to the Western ranching community, frames grizzlies as a recovered species with bureaucrats in Washington stalling the process of handing management back over to the states.
Montana Senator Steve Daines, for instance, highlights ‘skyrocketing’ livestock losses and bears roaming beyond their historic range. These issues resonate with rural constituents tired of federal wildlife law superseding local management by trusted state agencies. On the other hand, NGOs and legal advocates rely on the courts to maintain federal oversight, warning that state management could unleash ‘trigger-happy’ hunting seasons and jeopardize long-term survival. These advocates argue that we are facing a generational extinction crisis, where every decision we make about imperiled species could approach extinction, a route that we cannot come back from. The public, caught in the middle, may be unaware that conversations over wildlife protection have shifted from credentialed agency biologists and scientists over to politicians.
Our data underscore this shift in power. While executive branch officials, with whom scientific expertise resides, once dominated the discourse (eg fish and wildlife agency personnel at the federal and state level), they are no longer the leading voices in ESA recovery conversations. Elected politicians now lead the charge. Their influence is growing threefold over time compared to scientific agency voices. Legal advocates and NGOs, meanwhile, are shaping the debate over wildlife science with their roles amplified by lawsuits that keep grizzlies listed. Even tribes, historically sidelined, find their strongest platform in court, a sign that political systems still fail to integrate Indigenous perspectives outside litigation.
What’s lost in this debate is the ESA’s original intent: a science-driven process to recover species and then allow federal agency experts to step back so that states, who may better represent local interests, can manage species.
The path forward
This politicization threatens the ESA’s future. When politicians outshout scientists, when courts dictate biology or delay timely management responses, and when recovery becomes a bargaining chip, the law risks losing its credibility with the public. The grizzly saga suggests a path forward: agencies must adapt to this political reality, not retreat from it. Scientists can’t afford to ‘stay out of politics’ when protected species like grizzlies are lightning rods for political debate. Multi-stakeholder groups, like the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee, offer a model bridging agencies, states, tribes, and NGOs to tackle thorny issues like genetics collaboratively rather than through unending lawsuits in the courts.
The grizzly bear’s fate isn’t just about one species: this pattern is playing out across a range of species in the West and beyond. It will prove itself as the greatest challenge for wildlife managers in an era of increased polarization. If the ESA is to endure another 50 years, it must evolve beyond a scientific ideal into a framework that navigates the messy, human politics of conservation. Otherwise, the grizzly’s roar will be drowned out by an even greater sound: the chaos of our own imperfect politics.
