Researchers track how housing hardships during childhood influences housing insecurity in young adults

A Rutgers-led study compares housing outcomes of people in early adulthood with their experiences as young children

Rutgers University

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Exposure to housing hardship before the age of 5 may influence “housing insecurity” in early adulthood, according to Rutgers-led research.

“There’s something unique about early childhood,” said Katherine Marçal, an assistant professor with the School of Social Work and lead author of the study published in the journal Youth & Society. “When kids live with socio-economic adversity at a young age, those effects can persist for a very long time.”

While there is no standard definition of housing insecurity, Marçal said it includes the inability to maintain safe, secure and affordable housing. Researchers have long suspected that exposure to housing insecurity in childhood increases the odds of similar challenges as adults, though little research has been conducted to corroborate the assumption, she said.

To close this research gap, Marçal and Nicholas Barr, an associate professor of social work at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, examined 1,576 responses from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study, which followed families with children born between 1998 and 2000 in 20 large cities in the United States.

Caregivers were asked at five separate intervals during the first 15 years of the study whether they had experienced any one of the following in the past 12 months: missed a rent or mortgage payment; moved in with others; been evicted for nonpayment; or spent at least one night living on the streets, in a vehicle or in a shelter.

Three housing insecurity subgroups were identified from the caregiver responses. These included “low,” in which children were stably housed; “chronic,” where housing was precarious at each time point; and “early childhood,” where housing was unstable for the first five years of the focal child’s life but stabilized afterwards.

Next, during the 22nd year of the study, when the study’s target subjects were about 22 years old, the same questions were asked of them. Those who reported experiencing at least one housing hardship during the past 12 months were considered to have experienced emerging adulthood housing insecurity.

By comparing the young adults’ housing outcomes with their childhood experiences, the researchers were able to predict the risk of housing precarity.

Not surprisingly, adults who belonged to the low housing insecurity class, characterized by a near-absence of housing insecurity during the first 15 years of study, had lower levels of housing insecurity at age 22.

What surprised the researchers was that both the childhood insecurity and the chronic insecurity groups demonstrated similar probabilities of housing insecurity at age 22. Even though housing precarity reduced after year five for the childhood insecurity group, the risk of housing insecurity in early adulthood remained high.

“Even though none of those kids were housing unstable by age 9, they still showed the same vulnerability at age 22 as kids whose childhood housing insecurity never resolved,” Marçal said

Although the study didn’t explore causes, Marçal said there are several possible explanations for the findings. For starters, certain demographic characteristics, such as being Black or male, are associated with increased risk for housing insecurity at any age. Therefore, it would make sense to see members of these groups experience homelessness or eviction in both childhood and adulthood.

Additionally, “experiences of childhood housing insecurity likely signal limited family resources, such that these children may lack family economic assistance or community connections that can be crucial supports in the transition to adulthood,” Marçal wrote.

She said small interventions – child-care subsidies or free school lunches, for instance – can be the difference in making or missing rent.

“People often just need a little help, but if we do nothing, and things fall apart, by the time these kids are on their own we will have a new generation of unstably housed,” Marçal said. “The sooner we intervene, the better.”

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Journal

Youth & Society

DOI

10.1177/0044118X251375110 

 

Quantum calculations expose hidden chemistry of ice

The new theoretical research by UChicago PME and ICTP researchers has implications for melting permafrost and climate change

University of Chicago

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image: 

New research paves the way for scientists to better understand what happens at a sub-atomic scale when ice melts, which has implications including improving predictions of the release of greenhouse gases from thawing permafrost. (Image courtesy of Galli Group)

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Credit: Galli Group

When ultraviolet light hits ice—whether in Earth's polar regions or on distant planets—it triggers a cascade of chemical reactions that have puzzled scientists for decades.

Now, researchers at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) and collaborators at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) have used quantum mechanical simulations to reveal how tiny imperfections in ice's crystal structure dramatically alter how ice absorbs and emits light. The findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, pave the way for scientists to better understand what happens at a sub-atomic scale when ice melts, which has implications including improving predictions of the release of greenhouse gases from thawing permafrost.

“No one has been able to model what happens when UV light hits ice with this level of accuracy before,” said Giulia Galli, Liew Family Professor of Molecular Engineering and one of the senior authors of the new work. “Our paper provides an important starting point to understand the interaction of light with ice.”

“The Trieste-Chicago collaboration brought together our expertise in water and ice physics with advanced computational methods for studying light-matter interactions. Together, we could start to unravel a problem that has been very challenging to tackle,” added Ali Hassanali, a senior scientist at ICTP), Trieste, who collaborated with Galli on the new research.

A decades-old puzzle

The mystery about ice and light goes back to experiments in the 1980s, when researchers discovered something puzzling: ice samples exposed to UV light for just a few minutes absorbed certain wavelengths of light, but samples exposed to UV for hours absorbed different wavelengths, suggesting that the ice chemistry had changed over time. Scientists proposed various chemical products that might form in the ice to explain these observations, but lacked the tools to test their theories.

“Ice is deceptively difficult to study. When light interacts with ice, chemical bonds break,  forming new molecules and charged ions that, in turn, fundamentally alter its properties,” said Marta Monti, from ICTP, the first author of the study.  

In the new work, the team turned to advanced modeling approaches that the Galli lab developed in recent years to study materials for quantum technologies. The methods let them study ice at a level which was not possible before. 

"Ice is extremely hard to study experimentally, but computationally we can study a sample and isolate the effect of specific chemistry in ways that can't be done in experiments, thanks to the sophisticated computational methods we have developed to study the properties of defects in complex materials," said second author Yu Jin, a former UChicago graduate student, now a postdoctoral research fellow at the Flatiron Institute.

The fingerprints of imperfections

The research team simulated four types of ice: defect-free ice arranged in a perfect crystal lattice and ice with three different imperfections in its structure. In one case, water molecules were missing from the water crystal, leaving a gap called a vacancy. In other instances, charged hydroxide ions were introduced into the structure. For the third set of computational experiments, ice’s strict hydrogen bonding rules were violated in a Bjerrum defect—either two hydrogen atoms end up between the same pair of oxygen atoms, or none, disrupting the normally orderly structure.  

The researchers could add these defects one at a time and observe how each type changed the way ice absorbed and emitted light. This type of precise control is impossible in physical ice samples, but can be attained computationally.

The team showed that the onset of absorption of UV light occurs at different energies in defect-free ice and when hydroxide ions are inserted in the sample, explaining, at least qualitatively, decades-old experiments. Bjerrum defects produced even more extreme changes in light absorption, potentially explaining the unexplained absorption features that appear in ice exposed to UV light for extended periods.

Each type of defect created a unique optical signature—like a fingerprint that experimentalists can now look for in real ice samples. The simulations also revealed what happens at the molecular level: when UV light hits ice, water molecules can break apart to form hydronium ions, hydroxyl radicals, and free electrons. Depending on the defects present, these electrons can either spread through the ice, or become trapped in tiny cavities.

“This is the foundation for understanding much more complex scenarios. Now that we know how individual defects behave, we can start modeling ice with multiple defects, surfaces, and eventually the messiness of real natural samples,” Monti said.

From fundamental physics to melting permafrost

For now, the work addresses the tip of the iceberg when it comes to fundamental questions about ice photochemistry. But eventually, deeper studies of the interactions of UV light and ice could extend our understanding of environmental challenges and astrochemistry. Permafrost—permanently frozen ground in polar regions—traps greenhouse gases. As global temperatures rise and sunlight hits this ice, understanding how it releases those gases becomes critical for predicting climate change.

"There is ice in certain parts of the Earth that contains gases, and when it's hit by light or when you raise the temperature just a little bit, these gases are released," Galli said. "Better knowledge about how ice melts and what it releases under illumination could have incredible impacts on understanding these gases."

The findings also may have implications for understanding chemistry on icy moons like Jupiter's Europa and Saturn's Enceladus, where UV radiation constantly bombards ice-covered surfaces and may drive the formation of complex molecules. 

The team is now working with experimentalists to design measurements that can validate their computational predictions. They're also extending the work to study more complex collections of defects in ice and probe the impact of melted water as it accumulates on the surface of ice. 

Citation: “Defects at Play: Shaping the Photophysics and Photochemistry of Ice,” Monti et al, PNAS, November 20, 2025. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2516805122

 

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2516805122 

Article Title

Defects at play: Shaping the photophysics and photochemistry of ice

Article Publication Date

20-Nov-2025

2025 Santorini seismic unrest triggered by “pumping” magma flow

Summary author: Walter Beckwith

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

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The massive swarm of earthquakes that rattled the Greek islands of Santorini and Amorgos in 2025 was not caused by a slipping fault – it was triggered by pulses of magma tunneling far below the seafloor, according to a new study. The findings offer a detailed look at a “pumping” magmatic dike in action and provide a foundation for more reliable, physics-based eruption forecasting and volcanic hazard assessment. In early 2025, a burst of intense earthquakes – including several around magnitude 5 – shook the region between the islands of Santorini and Amorgos in the Aegean Sea. Because Santorini is an active volcano with a history of catastrophic eruptions, the event raised serious concerns. Exactly what triggered this seismic unrest remains debated, but it is generally attributed to magmatic dike intrusion or fluid-driven tectonic fault slip. However, fully determining the processes that contributed to the event is difficult to resolve because most magmatic dike activity occurs deep underground or far offshore, beyond the scope of traditional monitoring methods.

 

To overcome these limits, Anthony Lomax and colleagues applied machine learning methods to detect and precisely locate ~25,000 earthquakes recorded during the 2025 Santorini-Amorgos. By applying a new three-dimensional imaging technique, CoulSeS, which treats earthquake locations and indicators of stress change at depth, Lomaxz et al. were able to use the tremblors as “virtual sensors” to map the underlying geologic source of the unrest. By modeling how evolving patterns of stress triggered seismic activity and tracing how earthquakes migrated, the authors found that the event was driven by the intrusion of a horizontally propagating magma-filled dike, which extended about 30 kilometers below the seafloor between the two islands. High-resolution imaging revealed a complex pattern of pressure fluctuations – as the dike propagated, it repeatedly broke through stress barriers in the crust, surged forward, and then underwent cycles of contraction and expansion, creating a dynamic pumping behavior that earlier studies had overlooked. “The study of Lomax et al. could lead to new dynamic models of magma transport that account for spatial variations in the fracture resistance of surrounding rocks,” writes Virginie Pinel in a related Perspective. “Furthermore, combining real-time observations and dynamic models could predict the location and timing of eruptions by using advanced data assimilation or machine-learning techniques."

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Journal

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.adz8538 

Article Title

The 2025 Santorini unrest unveiled: Rebounding magmatic dike intrusion with triggered seismicity

Article Publication Date

20-Nov-2025

Hidden process behind 2025 Santorini earthquakes uncovered

University College London

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video: 

Earthquakes and imaged magmatic dike intrusion. Dots show machine-learning relocated earthquakes from 1 January to 28 February 2025 color-coded according to occurrence time (OTime). Orange patches show dike opening and magma intrusion imaged using the earthquakes as virtual measures of stress change due to the opening. Orange arrow indicates how magma is supplied to the dike from a source reservoir to the southwest under Santorini and the submerged Kolumbo volcano (orange disk). Animation shows progression of dike intrusion and triggered earthquakes in 12-hour sliding windows.

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Credit: ALomax Scientific; Geophysics Department, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece; Department of Earth Sciences, University College London, London, UK. Graphic design: Anthony Lomax

A mysterious swarm of earthquakes that occurred near the Greek island of Santorini in early 2025 was caused by rebounding sheets of magma slicing through Earth’s crust, finds a new study by an international team involving a UCL (University College London) researcher.

Between late January and early March, the team analysed over 25,000 earthquakes that occurred between Santorini and Amorgos Islands. Hundreds of these were large enough to be felt at the time, with magnitudes exceeding 4.5. The seismic unrest prompted a local state of emergency, school closures, and alarm among residents and tourists on Santorini.

At the beginning, it was not known whether the quakes were linked with volcanic activity either in Santorini’s volcanic centre or the nearby underwater volcano Kolumbo, and were possibly the signal of a coming eruption, or were due to tectonic fault slip and possibly the prelude to a larger earthquake (like the destructive, magnitude 7.7 quake that struck the same region in 1956).

In the new study, published in the journal Science, researchers looked at ground vibrations recorded by seismometers over two months. They applied advanced machine learning (artificial intelligence) techniques to firstly detect and then precisely determine the position in Earth’s crust of over 25,000 quakes. 

They inferred from the earthquakes’ distribution the stress changes underground that triggered them, allowing the team to image the movement of pressurised magma with unprecedented detail in space and time. 

They found that sheets of magma sliced in waves or pulses at a depth of more than 10km below the surface. These magma intrusions, or dikes, smashed horizontally* through layers of rock across an area of 20km. The volume of magma could have filled 200,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, the researchers estimated. 

The intrusions shot out of an underground reservoir of magma that links the Santorini volcano (caldera) and the nearby Kolumbo underwater volcano. But the intruded magma did not have the pressure or buoyancy needed to reach the surface and cause an eruption.

Co-author Dr Stephen Hicks, based at UCL’s Department of Earth Sciences, said: “We used a new method to work out the cause of a swarm of earthquakes, treating each of the 25,000 precisely located quakes as ‘virtual stress meters’ – clues as to how stress was changing underground. This gave us a robust and higher-resolution picture of what was happening, allowing us to rule out fault slippage as the earthquakes’ main cause. 

“Our technique could be applied to future earthquake swarms almost in real time and could allow us to better forecast the likelihood of volcanic eruptions or larger earthquakes. 

“Our evidence suggests the magma causing the Santorini earthquakes wasn’t getting close to the surface. If we apply our technique to similar swarms of earthquakes in future, we could pinpoint where the magma would likely come out and potentially the amount. 

“Our approach only uses data from seismometers recording ground vibrations, and so it is especially useful for underwater events where satellite images, or on-land GPS, used to spot changes in the position of the land, may not be available.”

The distribution of quakes, the researchers found, matched zones consistent with magma opening cracks, not zones where tectonic slip would be expected. 

In addition, they looked at GPS data from satellites showing the uplift and bulging of the Earth’s surface caused by the upward-slicing magma. From these changes to the Earth’s surface, they were able to estimate the size of the intrusions and their total volume. 

Lead author Anthony Lomax, an independent researcher, said: “Our results show that magma intrusions, which help build Earth’s crust, generate earthquakes, and can lead to hazardous volcanic eruptions, do not involve a simple one-way process of magma moving laterally or vertically. Most striking was that the intrusion did not move smoothly. Instead, it rebounded in waves - opening new fractures, closing others, and pumping magma forward in pulses. These pulses of magma pressure created a vast, dynamic and cascading pattern of stress and triggered earthquakes in the surrounding crust.”

Co-author Eleftheria Papadimitriou from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece said: “This rebounding, wave-like process of magma intrusion may not be unique to Santorini but may be a fundamental mechanism by which magma is transported beneath volcanoes worldwide.” 

Santorini is part of the Hellenic arc, a chain of mountains and volcanoes on the boundary of the African and Eurasian tectonic plates. The area has a history of devastating eruptions, including the “Minoan eruption” around 1620 BC, one of the largest eruptions in human history. 

The 2025 seismic crisis, although it did not culminate in an eruption, highlights the potential hazards facing local populations and underscores the importance of high-resolution monitoring, the researchers said.

*The sheets of magma were vertically oriented but travelled horizontally. If the sheets were a knife pushing through bread, the blade would be pointing downwards, but the knife would be moving sideways.

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Journal

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.adz8538 

 

Earthquakes and imaged magmatic dike intrusion. Dots show machine-learning relocated earthquakes from 1 January to 28 February 2025 color-coded according to occurrence time (OTime). 

Credit

ALomax Scientific; Geophysics Department, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece; Department of Earth Sciences, University College London, London, UK. Graphic design: Anthony Lomax