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)
Sunday, November 15, 2026
Feeling safe, being heard and staying connected are important to children receiving end-of-life care
A systematic review conducted by researchers at the University of Eastern Finland brings together studies from mainland China and Taiwan. The review highlights the importance of emotional security, family relationships and culturally sensitive support for children receiving end-of-life care.
The needs of children approaching the end of life extend beyond pain relief and the management of physical symptoms. Children may worry about losing loved ones, wish to stay in touch with friends and seek reassurance that they will be remembered.
The systematic review, published in Palliative Medicine, analysed 16 studies conducted in mainland China and Taiwan and published between 2000 and 2025. The researchers examined the psychosocial and spiritual needs of children and their families, as well as how these needs were identified and addressed.
The findings highlight children’s need for emotional security, meaningful relationships, connection with others and opportunities to express their feelings and thoughts. Children’s spiritual concerns do not necessarily take a religious form. They may emerge through stories and imagination, or through questions about the meaning of life.
Family relationships play an important role in how children’s needs are addressed. Parents sometimes try to protect their child by avoiding conversations about death. Although well-intentioned, this may also limit children’s opportunities to express their fears, wishes and preferences.
The review also identified gaps in the support provided by professionals. Psychosocial and spiritual support was sometimes fragmented, while culturally informed guidance on communication and support for coping with grief were not consistently available.
“A child approaching the end of life needs more than physical care. Children should have opportunities to express their feelings, maintain their relationships and have their voices heard. Addressing these needs requires close collaboration between healthcare professionals, children and their families,” says Doctoral Researcher Xiao Liu of the University of Eastern Finland.
The researchers emphasise that the findings do not necessarily suggest that children’s needs in mainland China and Taiwan differ from those elsewhere. Rather, cultural expectations, family relationships and healthcare structures shape how needs are expressed and addressed.
The findings support integrating psychosocial support into paediatric end-of-life care. As members of multidisciplinary teams, social workers can support communication between children and their families, help identify psychosocial needs and connect families with appropriate services. Coordination between health and social care professionals and providers of psychosocial support should also be strengthened.
Relatively few of the studies included in the review explored children’s experiences directly through their own accounts. Children’s and families’ needs were more often described from the perspectives of parents and professionals.
Credit: American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology
PHOENIX, Ariz. (Nov. 12, 2026) – Babies whose mothers breathed in wildfire smoke and other air pollution during the middle and later months of pregnancy were more likely to develop asthma as young children. That’s according to a new study being presented at the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI) 2026 Annual Scientific Meeting.
Devastating large wildfires burned across Northern California from 2017 to 2020, spreading smoke over areas where millions of people live. Pregnant women and young children are among those most at risk from any smoke exposure, including wildfire. A baby’s lungs are still growing in the womb, so researchers wanted to know whether wildfire smoke during pregnancy could affect a child’s breathing and lung health in later years.
“A baby’s lung development begins before birth, and our study suggests that certain stages of pregnancy maybe be especially vulnerable to the effects of wildfire smoke,” said Anh Nguyen, MD, lead author of the study and ACAAI member. “As wildfires become more frequent and affect larger population, knowing when the exposure poses the greatest risk can help families, healthcare providers, and public health officials to take steps to protect both mothers and babies.”
The researchers studied 1,097 children who were born full-term in Northern California. 108 children were born from mothers who were pregnant during the 2017 – 2020 Northern California wildfires and were recruited from B-SAFE (Bio-Specimen Assessment of Fire Effects) study. 989 children who were born at UC Davis Medical center between 2017-2019 and from areas affected by the recent Northern California wildfires were also included through chart review.
The researchers estimated how much polluted air each mother breathed every day during pregnancy and after the baby was born. They looked at two things:
Fine particulate matter (PM2.5): Tiny bits of pollution in the air, many times smaller than the width of a human hair. They can come from smoke, cars, and factories, and they can travel deep into the lungs.
Wildfire pollution: Pollution that came from the wildfire smoke itself.
The researchers accounted for other things that can affect asthma development, such as the child’s age and sex, how far along the pregnancy was at birth, family history of asthma and whether the mother was around cigarette smoke while pregnant. Then they found:
More fine-particle pollution during the second trimester (months 4 to 6 of pregnancy) was linked to asthma in early childhood.
More wildfire pollution during the third trimester (months 7 to 9) and around the time of birth was also linked to asthma in early childhood.
The study shows a link between wildfire smoke and asthma. It does not prove that smoke causes asthma. Still, knowing which months of pregnancy may matter most could help doctors offer pregnant women clearer advice during wildfire season. It could also help health leaders plan ways to protect pregnant women when the air is affected by smoke.
“Pregnant women can’t control when a wildfire happens, but there are things they can do on smoky days,” said Dr. Nguyen. “Staying indoors, keeping windows closed, and using an air purifier can help lower how much smoke they breathe in.”
Abstract Title: Effect of Prenatal Wildfire Exposure on Asthma Development
Presenter: Anh Nguyen, MD
If your child’s asthma is not well controlled, talk with a board-certified allergist about treatment options. To find an allergist near you, visit AllergyandAsthmaRelief.org. The ACAAI Annual Scientific Meeting is Nov. 12-16. For more news and research from the ACAAI Scientific Meeting, go to our newsroom and follow the conversation on X/Twitter #ACAAI26.
About ACAAI
The American College of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology (ACAAI) is a professional medical organization of more than 6,500 allergists-immunologists and allied health professionals, headquartered in Arlington Heights, Ill. Founded in 1942, the College fosters a culture of collaboration and congeniality in which its members work together and with others toward the common goals of patient care, education, advocacy, and research. ACAAI allergists are board-certified physicians trained to diagnose allergies and asthma, administer immunotherapy, and provide patients with the best treatment outcomes. For more information and to find relief, visit AllergyandAsthmaRelief.org. Join us on Facebook, Instagram, Threads and X.
EFFECT OF PRENATAL WILDFIRE EXPOSURE ON ASTHMA DEVELOPMENT
R141 A. Nguyen*, A. Goodrich, Y. Ren, K. Kim, R. Schmidt, Sacramento, CA.
Introduction: In the past few years, multiple wildfires caused devastating destruction in Northern California, affecting millions, especially pregnant women and children who are particularly vulnerable. Our study aims to investigate the impact of wildfire smoke on developing fetal lung.
Methods: Analyses included 1097 full term (≥ 37 gestation weeks) children. 108 children were born from mothers who were pregnant during the 2017 – 2020 Northern California wildfires and were recruited from B-SAFE (Bio-Specimen Assessment of Fire Effects) study. 989 children who were born at UC Davis Medical center between 2017-2019 and from areas affected by the recent Northern California wildfires were also included through chart review. Daily air pollution exposures were estimated using a hybrid modeling approach that captured estimate PM2.5 exposure for each subject. A Cox proportional hazards model combined with distributed lag nonlinear model was used to evaluate the associations of asthma and wheezing with PM2.5 exposure and wildfire (WF)-specific pollutant during pregnancy and infancy.
Results: Distributed lag models adjusting for child age, sex, gestational age, and secondhand smoking during pregnancy showed that increased PM2.5 exposure levels during second trimester and increased WF-specific pollutant during third trimester and at birth were significantly associated with early childhood asthma development.
Conclusion: Prenatal exposures to PM2.5 and WF-specific pollutants, especially during second and third trimester, were associated with later development of asthma. In identifying sensitive window of gestation exposure to wildfire smoke, this can help shape preventive strategies that mitigate maternal exposure and ultimately protect children’s health.
Journal
Annals of Allergy Asthma & Immunology
Method of Research
Content analysis
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
EFFECT OF PRENATAL WILDFIRE EXPOSURE ON ASTHMA DEVELOPMENT
Article Publication Date
12-Nov-2026
Wildfire in a wood stove: on the trail of the nitrogen oxide mystery
Markus Ammann and Fengxia Bao have elucidated how brown carbon produced by wildfires accelerates the conversion of nitrate to nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere.
Credit: Paul Scherrer Institute PSI/Markus Fischer
In laboratory experiments, researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI have discovered how brown carbon from wildfires promotes the formation of harmful nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere. This could improve prediction of the effects wildfires have on air quality and climate. The results have now been published in the journal Science Advances.
Wildfires bring to mind a blazing sea of flames. But what happens to the smoke? Anyone observing a wildfire from a safe distance notices mainly the enormous clouds that tower above the fire. These rise several kilometres and then embark on journeys that can extend across continents and oceans. Pollutants from wildfires in Canada can still be detected, for example, at the Jungfraujoch in the Swiss Alps.
These pollutants – which include particulate matter, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen oxides – have diverse and well-documented effects on air quality and climate. Among other things, they lead to respiratory illnesses and accelerate climate change through the greenhouse effect. Now researchers led by Markus Ammann at the PSI Center for Energy and Environmental Sciences have investigated the formation of these pollutants in more detail, and they found an explanation for why elevated nitrogen oxide concentrations are still present even at great distances from wildfires.
The path of nitrogen oxides
Nitrogen oxides (NOx) – compounds consisting of one nitrogen atom and one or two oxygen atoms – are produced during combustion processes. Wildfires and lightning are natural sources. However, due to the burning of fossil fuels, current nitrogen oxide levels in urban areas are many times higher than in pre-industrial times.
In the lower atmosphere, nitrogen oxides are responsible for the formation of ozone, a greenhouse gas and irritant. Furthermore, nitrogen oxides oxidise to nitric acid (HNO3) in the atmosphere. This dissolves as nitrate in tiny aerosol particles, which act as nuclei for cloud droplets. Rain carries the nitrate back to earth, where it is deposited in the soil.
This continuous conversion of nitrogen oxides to nitrate should ultimately result in a much lower amount of nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere than is actually present.
There is also a known reverse pathway in the atmosphere: triggered by sunlight, nitrate can be converted back into nitrogen oxide. This process is called photolysis. “However, this process is far too slow to account for the observed amounts of nitrogen oxide,” Ammann says.
One hypothesis in aerosol chemistry was, therefore, that in addition to this known, slow photolysis, there must be another, faster photolysis process – and that other substances released during wildfires could play a role in this.
Simulated wildfire in a wood-burning stove
Wildfires differ from other sources of nitrogen oxide in that they also produce a large amount of particulate matter from organic compounds, including some soot. The cause of this is incomplete combustion of wood and other biomass. This organic particulate matter is responsible for the greyish-white colour of the smoke. Some of the organic compounds absorb light in the visible spectrum. These are collectively referred to as brown carbon.
To investigate the influence of brown carbon on photolysis, researchers at PSI conducted a laboratory experiment: in a wood-burning stove, they first simulated a wildfire by reducing the air supply to produce more smoke – and thus more brown carbon. This was collected using filters, then dissolved in water, and finally placed in a temperature-stabilised glass tube.
The researchers then exposed nitrate to the light of various UV lamps that simulated sunlight under different conditions – once without the added brown carbon and once with it. In each case, they measured the concentration of nitrogen oxides produced.
Nitrogen oxides were always produced with light containing a particularly high-energy ultraviolet component, that is, hard UV light. The photolysis of nitrate under hard UV light is known. However, the amount of nitrogen oxide was significantly higher in the samples that also contained brown carbon.
“When we then used lamps without a hard UV component, we could only detect nitrogen oxides in the presence of brown carbon,” says Fengxia Bao, a researcher in Markus Ammann’s group and first author of the study.
Since direct photolysis with the remaining soft UV light is not possible, the researchers concluded that the path to nitrogen oxide in this case is indirect: the organic substances in the brown carbon absorb the soft UV light. This causes them to enter an excited state and donate an electron to the nitrate. That’s how the nitrate is converted into nitrogen oxide. In this way, nitrogen oxide production is accelerated tenfold compared to the known process with hard UV light.
A powerful effect
“This is a clear, powerful result,” Ammann says. “We were able to demonstrate experimentally what up to now had only been vaguely suspected. Our study will enable better predictions about the effects of wildfires on air quality and climate.”
Further research will be needed to clarify additional pathways for the formation of nitrogen oxides, Ammann continues: “Our result can explain a larger proportion of the nitrogen oxides present in the atmosphere – but not yet all of them.”
In the future, he would like to make his research, which was funded by the ETH Board’s ReCLEAN project, even more realistic. For example, the simulation chamber at PSI could use all of the burned material, not just the components filtered out and dissolved in water.
Text: Oliver Morsch
About PSI
The Paul Scherrer Institute PSI is the largest research institute for natural and engineering sciences in Switzerland. It is the central location of Switzerland’s large research facilities, available to both the scientific community and industry. Its research spans future technologies, energy and climate, health innovation and fundamentals of nature. The annual budget is CHF 450 million. PSI employs 2300 people; around a quarter of these are postdoctoral researchers, PhD students or apprentices. PSI is part of the ETH Domain, which also includes ETH Zurich and ETH Lausanne, as well as the other federal research institutes Empa, Eawag and WSL.
Leading knowledge publisher Taylor & Francis has announced a new collection of key books and journal articles, supporting the global response to the current Ebola outbreak. Curated by expert editors, the featured content is free for everyone to access, making trusted research available to all frontline workers, researchers and policymakers.
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Across seven sections, the resource brings together articles and book chapters covering transmission and diagnosis; vaccine strategy; treatment; health communication; and international relations. Context for the latest outbreak is provided by resources examining the origins and history of the disease.
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Proton–proton collisions at the LHC produce, among other particles, mesons containing beauty and strange quarks and antiquarks. Differences between matter and antimatter were investigated in their decays into secondary particles.
The Universe's dominance by ordinary matter is compelling evidence that matter and antimatter are not perfect reflections of each other. However, known differences do not explain the scale of this imbalance, leaving open the possibility that unknown physics is responsible. A new analysis of meson decays, conducted by the LHCb collaboration, has narrowed the scope of the search for such a scenario while paving the way for more precise measurements in the future.
Over the past decade, scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider have focused their efforts on searching for differences between particles of matter and antimatter produced in proton-proton collisions. The latest and exceptionally thorough analysis of data collected between 2016 and 2018 as part of the LHCb experiment was carried out by a team of physicists from the universities of Warwick, Manchester and Oxford in the UK, TU Dortmund University in Germany, and the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow.
The motivation behind this research lies in what is arguably the most astonishing feature of our world: the fact that it... simply exists. Why is this so surprising? Because, in its present form, it should not exist – at least according to our current understanding of physics. Cosmological models suggest that, shortly after the Big Bang, equal amounts of matter and antimatter must have been produced in the Universe. Yet when a particle meets its antiparticle, both are converted into energy in a process known as annihilation. Meanwhile, our reality is clearly dominated by particles of matter that have escaped annihilation. The worlds of matter and antimatter particles therefore cannot have been – and still are not – perfectly symmetrical.
“In many physical processes, simultaneously replacing all particles with their antiparticles and inverting all spatial coordinates leaves the laws governing these phenomena unchanged. This principle is known as charge-parity symmetry, or CP symmetry. We have been searching for processes that violate this symmetry in the decays of particles produced in proton–proton collisions at the LHC, specifically in the decays of mesons containing beauty and strange quarks and antiquarks,” explains Dr. Agnieszka Dziurda (IFJ PAN), an expert in the physics of these decays.
The Standard Model, a theoretical framework developed in the 1970s, describes the elementary particles and their interactions. According to this model, matter is made up of elementary particles known as fermions. These include quarks (down, up, strange, charm, beauty and top) and leptons (electrons, muons, tau leptons and their associated neutrinos). In addition, every type of matter particle has a corresponding antiparticle.
Each proton–proton collision at the LHC produces a large number of massive, short-lived particles. In earlier studies of CP violation, physicists have observed asymmetries in certain decay processes involving particles and antiparticles. However, these phenomena alone cannot account for the present-day dominance of matter. Now, in a paper published in the renowned journal Physical Review Letters, researchers have presented an analysis of the decays of Bs0 mesons. These mesons decay into lighter particles, and the Standard Model allows scientists to calculate the expected frequency of a given decay process and compare these predictions with experimental data.
“Interestingly, we chose to investigate a process in which the Standard Model predicts no asymmetry at all. So why study it at all?” asks Dr. Dziurda. She explains: “Because if an asymmetry were nevertheless observed, it could be a signal that previously unknown physics was at work. We also know that current theoretical predictions for the probabilities of certain beauty-meson decay channels differ significantly from the values obtained experimentally. This discrepancy could, for example, stem from theoretical effects that have not yet been fully accounted for in our calculations. At this stage, however, we cannot rule out the possibility that it points to physics beyond the Standard Model.”
Beauty mesons were exceptionally well suited to the search for CP symmetry breaking for another reason. They possess a remarkable property: they oscillate extremely rapidly between states corresponding to matter (a strange quark paired with a beauty antiquark) and antimatter (a beauty quark paired with a strange antiquark). One of the earlier measurements by the LHCb experiment showed that these oscillations can occur several trillion times per second. Thanks to such fast oscillations, the analysis could be carried out without having to determine the initial state of each meson.
A particular challenge for researchers was to thoroughly understand and characterise detector asymmetries, that is, differences in the detection of particles and antiparticles arising from the detector itself. This is because positively and negatively charged particles curve in opposite directions as they travel through the detector's magnetic field. Because detection efficiencies vary across the detector, this can affect the numbers of recorded particles and antiparticles. Such effects can produce an apparent asymmetry in the data even when the process being studied occurs with equal probability for particles and antiparticles. To account for these effects, the researchers used extensive calibration samples and computer simulations, and regularly reversed the direction of the detector's magnetic field. Corrections for differences in particle and antiparticle detection efficiencies were also applied when determining the final asymmetry in beauty-meson decays.
“We had to make sure that any asymmetry observed in the data, however small, was not caused by the detector itself. This was a crucial aspect of the entire analysis because, given the precision of our measurement, detector-related effects could have been of the same magnitude as the asymmetry we were looking for,” says Dr. Dziurda.
The data from the LHCb experiment analysed in this study revealed a difference of approximately one to two cases per thousand decays. However, since the measurement uncertainty was larger than the observed effect, the result is consistent with the predictions of the Standard Model. Although the finding does not solve the mystery of the missing antimatter or rule out the existence of new physics, it narrows down the range of possibilities in which new phenomena might be hiding. In the decays studied, any unknown process that would cause an asymmetry greater than about 2% would almost certainly have been detected.
Future research, using the larger datasets already collected with the upgraded LHCb detector, will allow scientists to investigate even more subtle effects in the discussed meson decays. Should a new source of CP violation be hidden therein, the analysis presented here provides physicists with a clearer understanding of where – and precisely how – the search should be conducted.
The Polish contribution to the research was funded by a grant awarded by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education.
The Henryk NiewodniczaÅ„ski Institute of Nuclear Physics (IFJ PAN) is currently one of the largest research institutes of the Polish Academy of Sciences. A wide range of research carried out at IFJ PAN covers basic and applied studies, from particle physics and astrophysics, through hadron physics, high-, medium-, and low-energy nuclear physics, condensed matter physics (including materials engineering), to various applications of nuclear physics in interdisciplinary research, covering medical physics, dosimetry, radiation and environmental biology, environmental protection, and other related disciplines. The average yearly publication output of IFJ PAN includes over 600 scientific papers in high-impact international journals. Each year the Institute hosts about 20 international and national scientific conferences. One of the most important establishments of the Institute is the Bronowice Cyclotron Centre (CCB), which is an infrastructure unique in Central Europe, serving as a clinical and research centre in the field of medical and nuclear physics. In addition, IFJ PAN runs four accredited research and measurement laboratories. IFJ PAN is a member of the Marian Smoluchowski Kraków Research Consortium: “Matter-Energy-Future”, which in 2012-2017 enjoyed the status of the Leading National Research Centre (KNOW) in physics. In 2017, the European Commission granted the Institute the HR Excellence in Research award. As a result of the categorization of the Ministry of Education and Science, the Institute has been classified into the A+ category (the highest scientific category in Poland) in the field of physical sciences.
SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS:
“First Measurement of the Decay-Time-Integrated CP Asymmetry in Bs0→Ds–Ï€+ Decays”
Proton–proton collisions at the LHC produce, among other particles, mesons containing beauty and strange quarks and antiquarks. Differences between matter and antimatter were investigated in their decays into secondary particles. (Source: IFJ PAN)
