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)
Saturday, July 05, 2025
Stuckeman professor’s new book explores ‘socially sustainable’ architecture
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Alexandra Staub, author and professor of architecture in the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School at Penn State, examines how architects can better serve society by changing their approach to the building process in her latest book titled “Architecture and Social Sustainability: Understanding the New Paradigm.”
Published by Routledge, the book presents examples of “how we can better design for stakeholder agency, serve historically marginalized populations, and further our theoretical thinking about sustainability writ large,” according to the book’s abstract.
As Staub discusses, sustainability is usually presented as having three components: ecological, economic and social. Architects often talk about ecological sustainability, such as designing energy efficient buildings or using materials that don’t harm the planet. Social sustainability in the context of the built environment is less discussed and remains poorly defined.
“The book explores the design of buildings and urban settings to illustrate how we can create more inclusive and equitable communities through broadening our design approach,” said Staub, who is an affiliate researcher with Penn State's Rock Ethics Institute and the Hamer Center for Community Design.
The first section of the book traces the history of how architecture and urban design became exclusionary and identifies theoretical and practical tools that can be used to bring more stakeholders into the process of constructing a building.
Part two of the book offers nine case studies from the United States, Brazil, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden and India that illustrate instances of socially sustainable design at a variety of scales.
Thanks to a grant from the College of Arts and Architecture, the book is open access and can be viewed and downloaded via the Routledge website.
“Having the publication readily available was important for me because a book that discusses social sustainability should be available to everyone, regardless of [their] ability to pay,” Staub said.
“Architecture and Social Sustainability: Understanding the New Paradigm” is written for students, professionals, educators and anyone interested in how the built environment is shaped — and what could be done to make that process more sustainable.
CLEVELAND—Researchers at Case Western Reserve University have developed an environmentally safer type of plastic that can be used for wearable electronics, sensors and other electrical applications.
The material, a so-called ferroelectric polymer, is made without fluorine, considered a “forever” chemical that hurts the environment because compounds made with it don’t break down quickly or at all.
Although the researchers are still working to improve the material’s electric and elastic properties, the potential is vast for its flexibility of electronic uses and eco-friendly structure.
“How this material generates its electric properties is also fundamentally new,” said lead researcher Lei Zhu, a professor of macromolecular science and engineering at the Case School of Engineering. “Unlike current ferroelectric materials, it doesn’t have to crystallize to lock in the polarity that gives it electrical properties.”
The research explaining the discovery was recently published in the journal Science. The new material is patent pending.
Electronic polymers
Polymers are large molecules comprised of long chains of smaller molecular units that can be man-made—such as plastics—or natural—like in a person’s hair or DNA. By changing a polymer’s molecular structure and length, it can vary its strength, flexibility, heat-resistance and ability to be recycled.
Ferroelectricity refers to certain materials with what is known as “spontaneous polarization” that can be reversed by applying an electric field—like an on-off switch. Ferroelectric materials allow for the development of smaller, more efficient electronic devices, reducing our reliance on traditional energy sources.
Flexible on-off switches
The new material Zhu and his research team have created is both flexible and has what is known as tunable electronic properties, which means they can be switched on and off.
They have wide applications in infrared detectors and sensors in wearable electronics, for which the materials need to be soft, pliable and elastic to be compatible with the human body. Conventional ceramic ferroelectric materials are rigid and brittle.
Polymers have the advantage of being flexible and lightweight, but the dominant ferroelectric polymer, poly(vinylidene fluoride), or PVDF, doesn’t naturally degrade in the environment, making it a “forever chemical.” The new material is made without fluorine.
Ferroelectric polymers also have applications in sensors for ultrasound diagnostic tools because they are acoustically compatible with biological tissues. They are also potentially useful in augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR) goggles.
The research was supported with a research grant from the U.S. Department of Energy in 2017. When the grant funding expired in 2022, the researchers kept working on it, until finally they “hit the jackpot,” Zhu said.
“We’re still in the development stage of synthesizing small quantities and investigating the properties,” he added. “But we’re excited about the potential to replace environmentally harmful plastics in sensors and detectors.”
The research team includes: from Case Western Reserve, Philip Taylor, the Perkins Professor of Physics Emeritus, Elshad Allahyarov, visiting professor of physics, Jiahao Huang, research associate in macromolecular science and engineering; and researchers from Penn State University, Vanderbilt University, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Tennessee State University and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
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Physician associates provide safe and effective care when they work under the direct supervision of doctors and care for patients who have already been diagnosed, or when they undertake procedures for which they have been highly trained, finds a rapid review published in The BMJ today.
However, the rapid review on the safety and effectiveness of physician associates found insufficient evidence to support them assessing undiagnosed patients under indirect supervision—when seeing undiagnosed patients in primary care, for example.
Patient satisfaction levels for care provided by physician associates were similar to those provided by doctors, but there was limited evidence on the cost effectiveness of physician associates.
The rapid review, which was prompted by concerns about the impact of the physician assistant role in the UK, also found that they increased access to care. But this may reflect the benefits of increased staffing rather than the unique contribution of the role, it suggests. In the UK, most have been deployed in socio-economically deprived areas.
Physician associates are known as physician assistants in most other countries and were first introduced in the US in the 1960s to tackle resident doctor shortages in rural areas. They have since been adopted by many other countries facing medical workforce difficulties and/or cost pressures in their health systems.
In the UK, physician associates require a bachelor’s degree in a science or a health-related discipline plus a diploma or master’s degree in physician assistant studies focusing on the clinical skills necessary to assist doctors in patient care.
The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges called for a rapid review of the safety, cost effectiveness, and efficiency of physician associates after concerns were raised about the implementation of the role in the UK in six broad areas.
These were: scope of practice; patient safety; informed consent; preferential employment conditions; additional workload of physicians supervising physician associates; and impact on medical training.
In November 2024, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care commissioned an independent review of the impact of physician and anaesthesia associates on quality of care from Professor Gillian Leng.
The rapid review included 40 studies comparing the quality of care delivered by physician associates and doctors in economically developed countries (North America and Europe, plus Israel, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand) using outcomes on safety, effectiveness, patient-centredness, timeliness, efficiency, and equity.
Although focused on the UK, the rapid review’s findings would be relevant to the physician associate role in other high income countries, say the authors.
They acknowledge several limitations to findings, most notably that only four of the studies included were carried out in the UK. Most were carried out in the US and were of weak quality, using retrospective analyses of routinely collected data which did not always take confounding factors into account. Few assessed cost-effectiveness and none was conducted in the post-covid healthcare environment.
The authors conclude: “There is a legitimate role for [physician associates] working alongside physicians in well-defined roles under supervision. However, indirect or unsupervised management by [physician associates] of undifferentiated symptoms and disease may risk patient safety.”
They add: “National guidance on the supervision and scope of practice for physician [associates] can ensure that physician [associates] practise safely and effectively.”
Impact of physician assistants on quality of care: rapid review
Article Publication Date
3-Jul-2025
COI Statement
All authors have completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form at https://www.icmje.org/disclosure-of-interest/ and declare: no support from any organisation for the submitted work; no financial relationships with any organisations that might have an interest in the submitted work in the previous three years; no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work.
MIND OVER MATTER
Asthma: patient expectations influence the course of the disease
A study led by a team of psychologists at the Università Cattolica of Milan shows the impact of our beliefs and mindset on the speed of progression of a disease. Thinking positively can help keep symptoms at bay and maintain respiratory function
Individual expectations about one's health can influence him/her future condition and the speed of the progression of a disease: in fact, a research conducted by researchers of psychology at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan campus, shows that, after a diagnosis of asthma, people who are optimistic about their health will have a slower progression of the disease.
The study was published in the journal Health Expectations (Wiley) and conducted by full Professor Francesco Pagnini of the Department of Psychology at the Università Cattolica and colleagues.
Professor Pagnini explains: “this study was developed in response to the difficulties reported by patients in managing asthma. Patients helped identify key areas of concern, and their perspectives influenced the choice of outcomes and tools”. Although direct involvement in recruitment and dissemination was limited due to the pandemic, the design and focus of the study were guided by patient priorities, with potential applications in clinical consultations and future co-designed interventions.
BACKGROUND
After receiving a diagnosis, people often develop expectations about how their condition will evolve, Professor Pagnini explains. This cognitive framework, known as “illness expectations” (IE), comprises future-oriented beliefs about the course of the disease and its symptoms. In chronic conditions such as asthma, IEs can play a crucial role in determining patient-reported outcomes and also variations in clinical markers indicative of disease progression. “In this study, we empirically assessed the impact of IEs on asthma symptoms and respiratory function in patients,” Pagnini affirms.
THE STUDY
‘We involved a group of 310 people diagnosed with asthma who were followed for a period of 6 months, with three assessment points, measuring the level of asthma control with the Asthma Control Test (ACT), while respiratory function was assessed through forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV1) using spirometry,’ he explains. At the beginning of the study, we assessed each person's IE using the validated Illness Expectation Test (IET), which captures both explicit (conscious) and implicit (unconscious) expectations.
It emerged that people with more negative explicit IE about their asthma reported worse symptoms over time. Explicit IE about symptom progression was also associated with changes in lung function, with more negative expectations predicting greater decline in respiratory performance, the professor adds.
These findings suggest that IE may be significantly associated with asthma outcomes, highlighting their potential relevance in understanding patient experiences and symptom perception. “In experiments with patients affected by other diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, we obtained similar results”, the expert continues.
The hypothesis suggested to explain these results is that, as with the placebo effect, what happens is that if I have an idea about the world and the future that awaits me, that idea will prevail, largely influencing behaviour and thus, for example, modifying adherence to therapies and clinical recommendations, he concludes.
Journal
Health Expectations
Article Title
Illness Expectations and Asthma Symptoms: A 6-Month Longitudinal Study
Can the Large Hadron Collider snap string theory?
Penn physicists and collaborators at Arizona State University "test" the fallibility of a framework that seeks to unite physics across the universe.
Event display in the signal region from data taken in 2018. The pixel tracklet candidate with pT = 1.2 TeV is shown by the red solid line and other inner detector tracks by the thin orange lines. Jets are shown by the transparent yellow, blue, and red cones. The missing transverse momentum is shown by the white dotted line. The green and yellow bars indicate energy deposits in the liquid argon and scintillating tile calorimeters respectively. The event is common to both the electroweak and strong production signal regions. Event and run numbers are shown in the bottom left corner.
Researchers from Penn and Arizona State University pinpoint a lone five-particle package (a 5-plet) that could upend string theory by detecting it at the Large Hadron Collider.
“Ghost” tracks that vanish mid-flight may be the smoking gun physicists are chasing.
Early data squeeze the search window, but the next collider runs could make—or break—the case.
In physics, there are two great pillars of thought that don’t quite fit together. The Standard Model of particle physics describes all known fundamental particles and three forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. Meanwhile, Einstein’s general relativity describes gravity and the fabric of spacetime.
However, these frameworks are fundamentally incompatible in many ways, says Jonathan Heckman, a theoretical physicist at the University of Pennsylvania. The Standard Model treats forces as dynamic fields of particles, while general relativity treats gravity as the smooth geometry of spacetime, so gravity “doesn’t fit into physics’ Standard Model,” he explains.
In a recent paper, Heckman; Rebecca Hicks, a Ph.D. student at Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences; and their collaborators turn that critique on its head. Instead of asking what string theory predicts, the authors ask what it definitively cannot create. Their answer points to a single exotic particle that could show up at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). If that particle appears, the entire string-theory edifice would be, in Heckman’s words, “in enormous trouble.”
String theory: the good, the bad, the energy-hungry
For decades, physicists have sought a unified theory that can reconcile quantum mechanics,and, by extension, the behavior of subatomic particles, with gravity—which is described as a dynamic force in general relativity but is not fully understood within quantum contexts, Heckman says. A good contender for marrying gravity and quantum phenomena is string theory, which posits that all particles, including a hypothetical one representing gravity, are tiny vibrating strings and which promises a single framework encompassing all forces and matter. “But one of the drawbacks of string theory is that it operates in high-dimensional math and a vast ‘landscape’ of possible universes, making it fiendishly difficult to test experimentally,” Heckman says, pointing to how string theory necessitates more than the familiar four dimensions— x, y, z, and time—to be mathematically consistent.
“Most versions of string theory require a total of 10 or 11 spacetime dimensions, with the extra dimensions being sort of ‘curled up’ or folding in on one another to extremely small scales,” Hicks says.
To make matters even trickier, string theory’s distinctive behaviors only clearly reveal themselves at enormous energies, “those far beyond what we typically encounter or even generate in current colliders,” Heckman says.
Hicks likens it to zooming in on a distant object: at everyday, lower energies, strings look like regular point-like particles, just as a faraway rope might appear to be a single line. “But when you crank the energy way up, you start seeing the interactions as they truly are—strings vibrating and colliding,” she explains. “At lower energies, the details get lost, and we just see the familiar particles again. It’s like how from far away, you can’t make out the individual fibers in the rope. You just see a single, smooth line.”
That’s why physicists hunting for signatures of string theory must push their colliders—like the LHC—to ever-higher energies, hoping to catch glimpses of fundamental strings rather than just their lower-energy disguises as ordinary particles.
Why serve string theory a particle it likely won’t be able to return?
Testing a theory often means searching for predictions that confirm its validity. But a more powerful test, Heckman says, is finding exactly where a theory fails. If scientists discover that something a theory forbids actually exists, the theory is fundamentally incomplete or flawed. Because string theory’s predictions are vast and varied, the researchers instead asked if there’s a simple particle scenario that string theory just can’t accommodate.
They zeroed in on how string theory deals with particle “families,” groups of related particles bound together by the rules of the weak nuclear force, responsible for radioactive decay. Typically, particle families are small packages, like the electron and its neutrino sibling, that form a tidy two-member package called a doublet. String theory handles these modest particle families fairly well, without issue.
However, Heckman and Hicks identified a family that is conspicuously absent from any known string-based calculation: a five-member particle package, or a 5-plet. Heckman likens this to trying to order a Whopper meal from McDonald’s, “no matter how creatively you search the menu, it never materializes.”
“We scoured every toolbox we have, and this five-member package just never shows up,” Heckman says. But what exactly is this elusive 5-plet?
Hicks explains it as an expanded version of the doublet, “the 5-plet is its supersized cousin, packing five related particles together.” Physicists encapsulate this particle family in a concise mathematical formula known as the Lagrangian, essentially the particle-physics cookbook. The particle itself is called a Majorana fermion, meaning it acts as its own antiparticle, akin to a coin that has heads on both sides. Identifying such a particle would directly contradict what current string theory models predict is possible, making the detection of this specific particle family at the LHC a high-stakes test, one that could potentially snap string theory.
Why a 5-plet hasn’t been spotted and the vanishing-Track clue
Hicks cites two major hurdles for spotting these 5-plet structures: “production and subtlety.” In a collider, energy can literally turn into mass; Einstein’s E = mc² says that enough kinetic oomph (E) can be converted into the heft (m) of brand-new particles, so the heavier the quarry the rarer the creation event.
“The LHC has to slam protons together hard enough to conjure these hefty particles out of pure energy,” Hicks explains, citing Einstein’s E = mc², which directly links energy (E) to mass (m). “As the masses of these particles climb toward a trillion electron volts, the chance of creating them drops dramatically.”
Even if produced, detection is challenging. The charged particles in the 5-plet decay very quickly into nearly invisible products. “The heavier states decay into a soft pion and an invisible neutral particle, zero (X0),” Hicks says. “The pion is so low-energy it’s basically invisible, and X0 passes straight through. The result is a track that vanishes mid-detector, like footprints in snow suddenly stopping.”
Those signature tracks get picked up by LHC’s ATLAS (short for A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) and CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid), house-sized “digital cameras” wrapped around the collision center. They sit at opposite collision points and operate independently, giving the physics community two sets of eyes on every big discovery. Penn physicists like Hicks are part of the ATLAS Collaboration, helping perform the searches that look for quirky signals like disappearing tracks.
Why a 5-plet matters for dark matter
Hicks says finding the 5-plet isn’t only important for testing string theory, pointing to another exciting possibility: “The neutral member of the 5-plet could explain dark matter, the mysterious mass shaping up most of our universe’s matter.”
Dark matter constitutes roughly 85 percent of all matter in the universe, yet scientists still don't know what exactly it is. “If the 5-plet weighs around 10 TeV—about 10,000 proton masses—it neatly fits theories about dark matter’s formation after the Big Bang,” Hicks says. “Even lighter 5-plets could still play a role as part of a broader dark matter landscape.”
“If we detect a 5-plet, it’s a double win," says Hicks. “We’d have disproven key predictions of string theory and simultaneously uncovered new clues about dark matter.”
What the LHC has already ruled out
Using existing ATLAS data from collider runs, the team searched specifically for 5-plet signals.“We reinterpreted searches originally designed for ‘charginos’—hypothetical charged particles predicted by supersymmetry—and looked for 5-plet signatures,” Hicks says of the team’s search through the repurposed ATLAS disappearing-track data. “We found no evidence yet, which means any 5-plet particle must weigh at least 650–700 GeV, five times heavier than the Higgs boson.”
For context, Heckman says, “this early result is already a strong statement; it means lighter 5-plets don’t exist. But heavier ones are still very much on the table.”
Future searches with upgraded LHC experiments promise even sharper tests. “We're not rooting for string theory to fail,” Hicks says. “We're stress-testing it, applying more pressure to see if it holds up."
“If string theory survives, fantastic," Heckman says. "If it snaps, we'll learn something profound about nature.”
Jonathan Heckman is a professor at the School of Arts & Sciences’ Department of Physics and Astronomy, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Mathematics.
Rebecca Hicks is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Penn Arts & Sciences.
Other authors include Matthew Baumgart and Panagiotis Christeas of Arizona State University. This work received support from the Department of Energy (awards DE-SC0019470 and DE-SC0013528), the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation (Grant No. 2022100), and the National Science Foundation.
ATLAS’s wheel-like end-cap reveals the maze of sensors primed to catch proton smash-ups at the LHC. Researchers comb through billions of events in search of fleeting “ghost” tracks that might expose cracks in string theory.
