Researchers at KU launch new Kansas Flood Mapping Dashboard

University of Kansas

FacebookXLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

Screenshot from the cutting-edge digital tool developed at the Uiversity of Kansas for emergency managers across the state, as well as the public.

view more 

Credit: Jude Kastens

LAWRENCE — For Jude Kastens, who grew up on a farm in northwest Kansas, rainfall always was serious business. Although flooding wasn’t as big a problem in his hometown as in central and eastern Kansas, it was “always memorable” when heavy rain caused local streams to swell from their banks into surrounding river valleys.

“Being a farm kid in rural Rawlins County shaped my interests in geography, weather and the environment,” Kastens said. “I got my degrees in math at KU and eventually transitioned into applied geospatial work.”

Now, he works as a research professor at the Kansas Biological Survey & Center for Ecological Research at the University of Kansas, where he still watches for extreme rainfall in Kansas and beyond. Kastens, who directs the Kansas Applied Remote Sensing (KARS) program at the Biological Survey, recently oversaw launch of the Kansas Flood Mapping Dashboard, a cutting-edge digital tool for emergency managers across the state, as well as the public.

“The dashboard grew out of our flood modeling research,” Kastens said. “We started building it after the 2019 floods, and it’s been evolving ever since. It’s now a web-based system that automatically maps flood extent and depth in near real time. When a natural disaster strikes, the State Emergency Operations Center activates, and flooding is frequently in focus. This tool gives them a clear picture of where the water is and how deep it’s expected to be along most major Kansas waterways.”

The Kansas Flood Mapping Dashboard uses stream gauge data from the National Weather Service and the U.S. Geological Survey, among other sources, along with the terrain-based FLDPLN (“Floodplain”) model developed in Kastens’ 2008 dissertation to generate flood inundation maps. 

“We’ve automated the maps to update every two hours,” Kastens said. “Over the years, a big part of my research has focused on flooding. It started with mapping river valleys, which are historic floodplains – using hydrologic flow principles applied to terrain data. After realizing we could convert river stage readings to realistic flood inundation maps, we began to develop the Kansas flood mapping system.”

KARS works with Kansas state agencies like the Kansas Water Office and the Department of Agriculture to provide research that helps them better understand and manage land and water resources across the state.

“One of my biggest drives is to utilize science and research for the benefit of the state. Developing applications that get used makes me happy,” Kastens said.

Kastens also was part of a team to report new flood mapping research in a scholarly paper recently featured on the cover of the peer-reviewed journal Remote Sensing.

“The approach is called ‘FLDSensing,’” said the KU researcher. “It uses the FLDPLN model and floodwater boundary points extracted from satellite imagery to estimate floodwater extent and depth. If you know the location of a flood’s shoreline, that’s essentially a proxy gauge. This research demonstrates how edge-of-water coordinates from the field could be used for area-wide flood mapping in the absence of stream gauges.”

The lead author of the study is Jackson Edwards, whose master’s research at KU produced the work. Other co-authors include David Weiss and Xingong Li of KU; Francisco Gomez, Hamid Moradkhani and Sagy Cohen of the University of Alabama; and Son Kim Do and Venkataraman Lakshmi of the University of Virginia.

While Kastens headed work that led to the flood mapping dashboard, he stressed it was a “total” team effort.

“A lot of people contributed to this project,” Kastens said. “My colleague Xingong Li, professor in the KU Department of Geography & Atmospheric Science, laid the groundwork for the real-time mapping, and we’ve had several researchers and graduate students involved over the years. KARS researcher and PhD student David Weiss is the lead architect of the current dashboard, which received praise from the Kansas Division of Emergency Management for its responsiveness and accuracy during severe spring flooding earlier this year.”

Kastens said his group would continue making improvements to the dashboard, with next steps aimed at completing coverage for the western one-third of the state and incorporating roadway impacts. Support from Kansas NSF EPSCoR ARISE is helping with the latter effort.

“The goal is to make this resource as helpful as possible for the public and our emergency responders during a flood event,” he said.

 

---

DOI

10.3390/rs17193362 

 

Microplastics hit male arteries hard

UC Riverside-led mouse study finds link between microplastic exposure and atherosclerosis

University of California - Riverside

FacebookXLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- A mouse study led by University of California, Riverside biomedical scientists suggests that everyday exposure to microplastics — tiny fragments shed from packaging, clothing, and countless plastic products — may accelerate the development of atherosclerosis, the artery-clogging process that leads to heart attacks and strokes. The harmful effects were seen only in male mice, offering new clues about how microplastics may affect cardiovascular health in humans.

“Our findings fit into a broader pattern seen in cardiovascular research, where males and females often respond differently,” said lead researcher Changcheng Zhou, a professor of biomedical sciences in the UCR School of Medicine. “Although the precise mechanism isn’t yet known, factors like sex chromosomes and hormones, particularly the protective effects of estrogen, may play a role.”

Microplastics are now found nearly everywhere: in food, water, the air, and even inside the human body. Recent human studies have detected microplastics in atherosclerotic plaques and linked higher levels to increased risk of cardiovascular disease. However, scientists didn’t understand whether or how microplastics directly contribute to artery damage.

“It’s nearly impossible to avoid microplastics completely,” Zhou said. “Still, the best strategy is to reduce exposure by limiting plastic use in food and water containers, reducing single-use plastics, and avoiding highly-processed foods. There are currently no effective ways to remove microplastics from the body, so minimizing exposure and maintaining overall cardiovascular health — through diet, exercise, and managing risk factors — remains essential.”

In a paper published in Environment International, Zhou and his team report their use of a well-established mouse model for studying heart disease: LDLR-deficient mice, which are prone to developing atherosclerosis. They fed both male and female mice a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet, similar to a lean, healthy person’s diet.

The researchers then gave the mice a daily dose of microplastics (10 milligrams per kilogram of body weight) for nine weeks at levels considered environmentally relevant and similar to what humans may encounter through contaminated food and water.

The researchers found microplastics dramatically worsened atherosclerosis, but only in males. In male mice, microplastic exposure increased plaque buildup by 63% in the aortic root, the first section of the aorta that attaches to the heart; and 624% in the brachiocephalic artery, a blood vessel that branches off the aorta in the upper chest. In female mice, the same exposure did not significantly worsen plaque formation.

The study found microplastics did not make the mice obese or raise their cholesterol. The mice remained lean, and their blood lipid levels did not change, meaning the increased artery damage was not due to traditional risk factors like weight gain or high cholesterol.

The study also found microplastics altered key cells that line the arteries. Using single-cell RNA sequencing, a technology that helps identify which genes are expressed in each cell and at what level, the team found that microplastics disrupted the activity and proportions of several types of cells involved in atherosclerosis, especially endothelial cells — the cells that line blood vessels and regulate inflammation and blood flow.

“We found endothelial cells were the most affected by microplastic exposure,” Zhou said. “Since endothelial cells are the first to encounter circulating microplastics, their dysfunction can initiate inflammation and plaque formation.” 

In the team’s experiments, fluorescent microplastics were found to enter plaques and localize within the endothelial layer — findings consistent with recent human studies showing microplastics in arterial lesions.  

Another finding the researchers report from their experiments is that microplastics triggered harmful gene activity in both mouse and human endothelial cells. Exposure to microplastics was found to activate pro-atherogenic (plaque-promoting) genes in endothelial cells from mice and humans, suggesting a shared biological response. 

“Our study provides some of the strongest evidence so far that microplastics may directly contribute to cardiovascular disease, not just correlate with it,” Zhou said. “The surprising sex-specific effect — harming males but not females — could help researchers uncover protective factors or mechanisms that differ between men and women.”

Zhou and his team acknowledge that more research is needed to understand why males are more vulnerable. The researchers plan to perform studies to determine if similar effects occur in humans.

“We would like to investigate how different types or sizes of microplastics affect vascular cells,” Zhou said. “We will also look into the molecular mechanisms behind endothelial dysfunction and explore how microplastics affect male and female arteries differently. As microplastic pollution continues to rise worldwide, understanding its impacts on human health — including heart disease — is becoming more urgent than ever.”

Zhou was joined in the study by colleagues at UCR, Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts, and the University of New Mexico Health Sciences.

The study was partially supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health.

The title of the paper is “Microplastic exposure elicits sex-specific atherosclerosis development in lean low-density lipoprotein receptor-deficient mice.”

The University of California, Riverside is a doctoral research university, a living laboratory for groundbreaking exploration of issues critical to Inland Southern California, the state and communities around the world. Reflecting California's diverse culture, UCR's enrollment is more than 26,000 students. The campus opened a medical school in 2013 and has reached the heart of the Coachella Valley by way of the UCR Palm Desert Center. The campus has an annual impact of more than $2.7 billion on the U.S. economy. To learn more, visit www.ucr.edu.

---

Journal

Environment International

DOI

10.1016/j.envint.2025.109938 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Microplastic exposure elicits sex-specific atherosclerosis development in lean low-density lipoprotein receptor-deficient mice

Article Publication Date

17-Nov-2025

Blink to the beat

Scientists discover that when we listen to music, we unconsciously blink our eyes along with the rhythm

PLOS

FacebookXLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

As music flows, a woman’s eyes blink to the beat—capturing a hidden synchrony between hearing and movement that links auditory rhythm to the oculomotor system.

view more 

Credit: Yuxi Gao (CC-BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Yi Du and colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences published an article in the open access journal PLOS Biology on November 18th detailing their findings about a new way our bodies naturally respond to music. Given a steady beat, our eyes blink in synchrony.

The neurological process that helps us move with the music is known as auditory-motor synchronization. This describes the way you tap your foot along with the radio or bob your head at a concert, or why some runners listen to songs with a specific number of beats per minute to keep pace. However, this new study found that we don’t just respond to music with these gestures we can choose to start or stop. Some of our most involuntary movements are affected as well. 

In over 100 participants, the researchers measured spontaneous blinks, the ones our eyes do without us usually even noticing. The researchers treated the participants to Western classical music, selecting songs that provided an even tempo. Not only did the participants’ blinks begin to sync up with the music, but their brainwaves also aligned.

The researchers played the tunes backwards to be sure the participants weren’t responding to other familiar musical queues, and the participants blinked in time regardless. The researchers also played participants beats mimicking the pace of the music but at a single tone. Participants seemed to blink in rhythm slightly worse with real music, but the difference was not statistically significant.

The only factor that disrupted this synchronization was when the researchers gave the participants an unrelated task. While the music played, the participants had to wait for a red dot to appear on the screen in front of them. Originally, the researchers had suspected that if the dot appeared in-beat with the music, the participants would notice it faster, but regardless of when the dot appeared in relation to the music, participants’ blinking was no longer matching up with the song. This finding surprised the researchers and demonstrated that even if we’re not aware of it, this response requires us to focus on the music.

The participants in the study were not musicians, meaning these synchronized blinks are not a product of musical training or ability. Studying phenomena like these can help us understand how pathways in the brain connect and how different senses and brain functions interact. Some evidence also indicates that certain neurological conditions affecting body movement can be treated with music therapies that engage auditory-motor synchronization. The more uncovered about these neural pathways, the more useful these treatments can become.

Author Yi Du speaks to the study’s methodology:

"We found that people’s spontaneous eye blinks fall in step with the musical beat—even without being told to move—revealing a hidden link between hearing music and the oculomotor system."

"Because blinks are effortless to measure, this behavior offers a simple, implicit window into how we process rhythm—and could one day support clinical screening for rhythm-related difficulties."

“What surprised us most was how reliably a ‘small-movement’ like blinking locks to the beat—it’s a tiny action that reveals a deep coordination between hearing and action, which we did not expect at all”

“I loved that a simple, non-invasive signal—blinks—can act as a window into rhythm processing. It opens doors for studies outside the lab.”

“As someone who studies rhythm and prediction, I was struck that the eyes keep time with the ears—it’s an elegant, everyday signature of the brain’s timing mechanisms.”

“This project reminded us that small, overlooked behaviors can expose big principles of brain function.”

 

In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Biology: https://plos.io/42AvHGj 

Citation: Wu Y, Teng X, Du Y (2025) Eye blinks synchronize with musical beats during music listening. PLoS Biol 23(11): e3003456. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3003456

Author countries: China

Funding: This work was supported by the Science and Technology Innovation 2030-Brain Science and Brain-inspired Artificial Intelligence Major Project (STI 2030—Major Project No. 2021ZD0201500) (https://www.most.gov.cn/index) to Y.D. and the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Early Career Scheme; Project No. 24618124) (https://www.ugc.edu.hk/eng/rgc/) to X.T. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

---

Journal

PLOS Biology

DOI

10.1371/journal.pbio.3003456 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

People

COI Statement

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

 

Artificial Intelligence may help save lives in ICUs

A new AI-based tool proves effective in assessing individual risk in severe cases of community-acquired pneumonia in Intensive Care Units (ICUs)

D'Or Institute for Research and Education

FacebookXLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

A study published in the Journal of Critical Care, conducted with the participation of the D’Or Institute for Research and Education (IDOR), investigated how to measure efficiency in the use of resources for patients with severe community-acquired pneumonia (CAP), an illness contracted outside hospital settings and most common among older adults.

Severe CAP represents one of the greatest challenges for ICUs. It requires complex resources, ranging from prolonged hospitalizations to respiratory support, directly affecting hospitals’ ability to deliver quality care. Despite its relevance, traditional methods of evaluating hospital performance do not always take patient severity into account, which undermines fair comparisons between institutions and hinders more effective management strategies.

Risk-adjusted care
To address this problem, researchers tested the Standardized Length of Stay Ratio (SLOSR), a tool developed with machine learning techniques, a branch of Artificial Intelligence. The aim was to determine whether SLOSR could predict, in a patient risk–adjusted way, the appropriate length of ICU stay. This would allow for more accurate comparisons across hospitals, highlighting both overuse and underuse of resources.

The study was retrospective and multicenter, analyzing 16,985 adult CAP admissions in 220 ICUs across 57 Brazilian hospitals during 2023. Variables such as age, comorbidities, need for mechanical ventilation, and disease severity were taken into account.

A machine learning model was applied to predict expected length of stay, allowing researchers to calculate the SLOSR as the ratio between observed and predicted times. To ensure robustness, they performed strict statistical validation, including calibration plots, cross-validation, and error metrics, confirming the model’s alignment with clinical reality.

Key findings
Median length of stay was four days, and approximately 28% of patients required ventilatory support. The model showed strong explanatory power with low prediction errors, reinforcing SLOSR’s potential as a reliable indicator of resource efficiency across ICUs.

The study demonstrates that SLOSR could be a valuable tool for hospitals and healthcare managers, enabling ICU performance evaluation adjusted for patient severity. This approach helps identify where resources are being used efficiently and where waste may be occurring. Researchers, however, note that further investigations are needed to test the method’s applicability in other contexts, such as different countries and healthcare systems.

---

Journal

Journal of Critical Care

DOI

10.1016/j.jcrc.2025.155208