Up in smoke: new study suggests it’s time to ditch long-held stereotypes about stoners

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

Stoners are not as lazy and unmotivated as stereotypes suggest, according to new U of T Scarborough research.

The study, published by the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, surveyed chronic cannabis users to see what effect getting high has on their everyday lives. 

“There is a stereotype that chronic cannabis users are somehow lazy or unproductive,” says Michael Inzlicht, a professor in the Department of Psychology at U of T Scarborough who led the study. 

“We found that’s not the case — their behaviours might change a bit in the moment while they’re high, but our evidence shows they are not lazy or lacking motivation at all.” 

The researchers surveyed 260 chronic users (those who consume cannabis at least three times a week or more), who received regular messages through an app asking if they were high. The participants were then asked about their emotional state, levels of motivation, willingness to invest effort and self-regulation. 

Inzlicht says the most interesting finding relates to motivation. 

The researchers studied the participants’ willingness to exert effort in completing a task while high. They found participants were willing and motivated to exert the same amount of effort while high compared to when they are not.   

Past research has shown mixed results when it comes to chronic cannabis use and motivation. Inzlicht notes much of it relied on limited experimental designs that didn't account for differences between cannabis users and non-users, such as variations in personality, mental health, or use of other psychoactive substances. He says this study instead looked at chronic cannabis use while participants were actively high, while also accounting for these pre-existing differences.

 

Emotions, self-regulation and ‘weed hangover’     

 

The researchers found that getting high did lead to lower levels of self-regulation, which is an important trait for being able to accomplish tasks. They found that when chronic users are high it does impact certain behaviours linked to self-regulation, such as being more impulsive, less thoughtful and less orderly. 

“These things can detract someone from getting stuff done, but we didn’t find it made them less hard-working, responsible or able to focus,” says Inzlicht. 

They also found that chronic cannabis users experience a boost in positive emotions such as awe and gratitude, and a reduction in some negative emotions such as fear and anxiety while high. However, the researchers found those who get high a lot, on the higher end of chronic use, experience more negative emotions while high and while sober. 

The researchers found no evidence of “weed hangover,” that is, chronic users didn’t experience a decline in function (emotion or motivation) the day after being high. 

 

New frontier for cannabis research

 

Studying the effects of daily cannabis use was difficult in the past given its legal status, and most research tended to focus only on the negative side in an effort to curb use. Now that cannabis is legal in Canada, he says it’s much easier to study, and he expects there will be greater research focusing on the risks as well as the possible positive effects. 

“The cannabis literature, historically, tended to focus a lot on the negative medical consequences of chronic use,” says Inzlicht, who runs the Work and Play Lab, which does research on self-control, motivation and empathy as well as social media, digital device and recreational cannabis use. 

“Part of the motivation for this study is to take a neutral, clear-eyed approach to see how cannabis affects chronic users in their everyday lives.” 

Inzlicht says this study isn’t an endorsement of heavy cannabis use, adding there is plenty of research highlighting the risks associated with heavy use, especially among adolescents. 

Rather, he points to Statistics Canada data showing that nearly one in 10 adult Canadians are regular cannabis users, and they come from all walks of life. Cannabis is also the fourth most used recreational drug after caffeine, alcohol and tobacco. But despite its increased legal and social acceptance, relatively little is known about the everyday experiences of regular users.  

“Our data suggests that you can be hard-working, motivated and a chronic cannabis user at the same time.” 

 

The study received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 

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JOURNAL

Social Psychological and Personality Science

DOI

10.1177/19485506241245744 

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Chronic Cannabis Use in Everyday Life: Emotional, Motivational, and Self-Regulatory Effects of Frequently Getting High

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

23-Apr-2024

 

Researchers introduce new way to study, help prevent landslides

RIT Ph.D. student and professor co-author paper published in Nature Communications

ROCHESTER INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Landslides are one of the most destructive natural disasters on the planet, causing billions of dollars of damage and devastating loss of life every year. By introducing a new paradigm for studying landslide shapes and failure types, a global team of researchers has provided help for those who work to predict landslides and risk evaluations.

Rochester Institute of Technology Ph.D. student Kamal Rana (imaging science) was a lead author on a paper recently published in Nature Communications announcing the research, along with co-author Nishant Malik, assistant professor in RIT’s School of Mathematics and Statistics. Kushanav Bhuyan, from the University of Padova and Machine Intelligence and Slope Stability Laboratory, was also a lead co-author.

Current predictive models rely on databases that do not generally include information on the type of failure of mapped landslides. By using the aerial view and elevation data of landslide sites combined with machine learning, the researchers were able to achieve 80-94 percent accuracy in identifying landslide movements in diverse locations around the world. Specifically, the study introduces a method of examining slides, flows, and fails, finding distinct patterns.

Researchers studied landslides around the world, like the 2008 disaster in Beichuan, China, to develop a new paradigm to understand their movements and failure types.

“Our algorithm is not predicting landslides,” explained Malik. “But the people who are in the business of predicting landslides need to know more information about them, like what caused them and what mechanisms they were.”

Various locations were studied, including Italy, the United States, Denmark, Turkey, and China. The wide array of countries helped confirm the strength of the findings, since they can be successfully utilized in diverse regions and climates.

“It was quite exhilarating when we saw the success numbers,” said Bhuyan. “We got the results, which are really good, but we need to be able to connect this to reality.”

The real-world application of this research has a personal impact for Rana, who is from the Himalayan region of India.

“I have seen so many cases when landslides have occurred,” said Rana. “The roads are blocked for two or three weeks. There is no communication from the cities to the villages. It blocks people from going to their jobs or students going to school.”

The hope is that this deeper understanding of failure movements will help those who work to predict deadly events and enhance the accuracy and reliability of hazard and risk assessment models, which will help save lives and reduce damage.

Along with Rana, Bhuyan, and Malik, co-authors of the paper include Joaquin V. Ferrer, Fabrice Cotton, and Ugur Ozturk from the University of Potsdam, and Filippo Catani from the University of Padova.

 

People with rare longevity mutation may also be protected from cardiovascular disease

Patients with growth hormone receptor deficiency, or Laron syndrome, appear to have lower than average risk factors for cardiovascular disease, according to a new study.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

 

IMAGE: 

JAIME GUEVARA-AGUIRRE (BACK LEFT), VALTER LONGO (BACK RIGHT), AND SEVERAL OF THE LARON STUDY PARTICIPANTS AT THE USC LEONARD DAVIS SCHOOL OF GERONTOLOGY IN LOS ANGELES.

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CREDIT: COURTESY JAIME GUEVARA-AGUIRRE AND VALTER LONGO

A new study highlights possible cardiovascular health advantages in individuals with a rare condition known as growth hormone receptor deficiency (GHRD), also called Laron syndrome.

GHRD, which is characterized by the body’s impaired ability to use its own growth hormone and results in stunted growth, has been linked in mice to a record 40% longevity extension and lower risks for various age-related diseases. However, the risk of cardiovascular disease in individuals with GHRD has remained unclear until now, leading to the speculation that in people, this mouse longevity mutation may actually increase cardiovascular disease.

The study, appearing in Med on April 26, 2024, is the latest product of an international  collaboration spanning nearly 20 years between Valter Longo, professor of gerontology at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, and endocrinologist Jaime Guevara-Aguirre of the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador.

Over the past two decades, Longo, Guevara-Aguirre and colleagues have examined the health and aging of people with the gene mutation that causes GHRD. This rare mutation – found in just 400 to 500 people worldwide – was identified in a group of Ecuadorians whose ancestors had fled Spain during the Inquisition more than three centuries ago. The mutation leaves them with ineffective growth hormone receptors and results in a type of dwarfism. 

The team’s previous research has indicated that while GHRD/Laron syndrome reduces growth, it also appears to reduce the risk of several age-related diseases. Although the Ecuadorians with GHRD have a higher rate of obesity, they have a very low risk of cancer and Type 2 diabetes. They also appear to have healthier brains and better performance on tests of cognition and memory.

For the current study, the research team examined cardiovascular function, damage, and risk factors in GHRD subjects and their relatives. Researchers conducted two phases of measurements in Los Angeles and Ecuador, involving a total of 51 individuals, with 24 diagnosed with GHRD and 27 relatives without GHRD serving as controls.

Key findings from the study included:

• GHRD subjects displayed lower blood sugar, insulin resistance, and blood pressure compared to the control group.
• They also had smaller heart dimensions and similar pulse wave velocity – a measure of stiffness in the arteries – but had lower carotid artery thickness compared to control subjects.
• Despite elevated low-density lipoprotein (LDL), or “bad cholesterol,” levels, GHRD subjects showed a trend for lower carotid artery atherosclerotic plaques compared to controls (7% vs 36%).

"These findings suggest that individuals with GHRD have normal or improved levels of cardiovascular disease risk factors compared to their relatives," said Longo, senior author of the new study. “Although the population tested is small, together with studies in mice and other organisms this human data provide valuable insights into the health effects of growth hormone receptor deficiency and suggest that drugs or dietary interventions that cause similar effects could reduce disease incidence and possibly extend longevity.”

Along with co-corresponding authors Longo and Guevara-Aguirre, the study’s coauthors included Amrendra Mishra and Priya Balasubramanian of USC; Carolina Guevara, Álvaro Villacres, Gabriela Peña, and Daniela Lescano of the Universidad San Francisco de Quito; Alexandra Guevara of the Instituto de Endocrinologia Metabolismo y Reproducción (IEMYR) in Quito; Marco Canepa of the University of Genova, Italy; and John Kopchick of Ohio University. Funding including National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Aging grant P01 AG034906 to Longo.

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JOURNAL

Med

DOI

10.1016/j.medj.2024.03.022 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Normal or improved cardiovascular risk factors in IGF-I deficient adults with growth hormone receptor deficiency

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

26-Apr-2024

 

Mobile device location data is already used by private companies, so why not for studying human-wildlife interactions, scientists ask

CELL PRESS

 

IMAGE: 

BISON ROAD CROSSING

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CREDIT: MATTHIAS LORETTO

When did you last go anywhere without your cell phone? From maps and weather apps to social media platforms, we give consent for our phones to trace our footsteps and behavior. These curated mobility data are often used for personalized advertisements. In a commentary, published April 26 in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability, scientists argue mobility data can offer so much more—it is key to understanding human-wildlife interactions for guiding policy decisions on sustainability-related issues and should be free and accessible for research. 

As the COVID-19 pandemic confined humans indoors and hushed bustling cities, reports of wildlife wandering the streets flooded the internet. To ecologists and sustainability researchers, this was a unique opportunity to understand human-wildlife interactions, afforded by the most tragic of circumstances. Scientists, including some of the authors of the commentary, quickly joined hands to form the COVID-19 Bio-Logging Initiative.

"Our global consortium has been investigating wildlife responses to sudden reductions in human mobility during pandemic lockdowns, using tracking data from animal-attached devices," says senior author Christian Rutz, of University of St Andrews, UK, who is the chair of the COVID-19 Bio-Logging Initiative. "Such analyses of human-wildlife interactions would benefit tremendously from improved access to human-mobility data."

"What we very quickly realized is that we had a wealth of data on what animals were doing, but gaining access to data on what humans were doing was a major challenge," says first author Ruth Oliver of the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Generally, human-mobility data are held by private companies and sold for corporate interests. There are financial and logistical barriers for researchers to access the data to understand sustainability challenges."

To address this issue, the authors propose that governments and international organizations work together with companies on finding ways to make human-mobility data freely available for research. Drawing on lessons learned from the precedent of government-facilitated access to satellite remote sensing data for public good, the researchers believe human-mobility data hold similar potential, if access barriers were addressed.

Unlike human-mobility data for commercial purposes, which comprise detailed time-stamped movement trajectories of individual users, potentially posing privacy concerns when shared, what the researchers call for is much simpler. The researchers envision aggregated datasets, stripped of personal identifiers, counting the number of devices in an area over a defined time period. About three out of every four people aged 10 or older—roughly 5.9 billion individuals globally—own a cellular phone. This wealth of data can help address how the health of humans, animals, and ecosystems are connected. For example, analyses could help pinpoint hotspots where wildlife and humans interact frequently, informing zoonotic disease prevention and invasive species management.

"Because the aggregated datasets we're advocating for are very different from what’s needed for commercial applications, making them accessible to researchers wouldn't harm the market for more detailed data," says Oliver.

In fact, Oliver and her colleagues say that making human-mobility data available to researchers can also benefit private companies. Sharing aggregated data may generate further demand for bespoke, detailed data products and grow the global user base. With movements towards corporate digital responsibility, sharing data for conservation and sustainability research can also be a way to mitigate impact and contribute to societal good. 

"Our vision is to have this movement be a community-driven, collaborative effort. We want to understand the companies' concerns and collaborate on finding win-win solutions. Because privacy policies around human mobility-data vary around the world, government bodies' facilitation will be crucial," says Oliver. "More broadly, we feel it’s crucial to empower individuals to think about how they want their data used."

###

This work was supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, NASA FINESST, the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies, the National Biodiversity Future Center via the PNRR funds of the Italian Ministry of University and Research, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Cell Reports Sustainability, Oliver et al. “Access to human-mobility data is essential for building a sustainable future” https://cell.com/cell-reports-sustainability/fulltext/S2949-7906(24)00105-8

Cell Reports Sustainability (@CellRepSustain), published by Cell Press, is a monthly gold open access journal that publishes high-quality research and discussion that contribute to understanding and responding to environmental, social-ecological, technological, and energy- and health-related challenges. Visit https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-sustainability/home. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.

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JOURNAL

Cell Reports Sustainability

DOI

10.1016/j.crsus.2024.100077 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Commentary/editorial

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Access to human mobility data is essential for building a sustainable future

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

26-Apr-2024

 

Test reveals mice think like babies

‘Surprisingly strategic’ behavior deepens our understanding of animal cognition

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: 

OVER CONSECUTIVE TRIALS, THE MICE WOULD TURN THE WHEEL LEFT FOR A BIT, THEN SWITCH TO TURNING IT RIGHT, SEEMINGLY MAKING MISTAKES BUT ACTUALLY BEING STRATEGIC.

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CREDIT: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

Are mice clever enough to be strategic?

Kishore Kuchibhotla, a Johns Hopkins University neuroscientist who studies learning in humans and animals, and who has long worked with mice, wondered why rodents often performed poorly in tests when they knew how to perform well. With a simple experiment, and by acting as “a little bit of a mouse psychologist,” he and his team figured it out.

“It appears that a big part of this gap between knowledge and performance is that the animal is engaging in a form of exploration—what the animal is doing is very clever,” he said. “It’s hard to say animals are making hypotheses, but our view is that animals, like humans, can make hypotheses and they can test them and may use higher cognitive processes to do it.”

The work, which deepens our understanding of animal cognition, and could lead to identifying the neural basis for strategizing, published today in Current Biology.

Kuchibhotla’s lab previously found that animals know a lot more about tasks than they demonstrate in tests. The team had two theories about what could be behind this gap. Either the mice were making mistakes because they were stressed, or they were doing something more purposeful: exploring and testing their knowledge.

To figure it out Kuchibhotla and Ziyi Zhu, a graduate student studying neuroscience, came up with a new experiment.

Mice heard two sounds. For one sound they were supposed to turn a wheel to the left. For the other sound, they’d turn the wheel to the right. When the mice performed correctly they were rewarded.

The researchers observed how upon hearing either sound over consecutive trials, the mice would turn the wheel left for a bit, then switch to turning it right, seemingly making mistakes but actually being purposeful.

“We find that when the animal is exploring, they engage in a really simple strategy, which is, ‘I’m going to go left for a while, figure things out, and then I’m going to switch and go right for a while,’” Kuchibhotla said. “Mice are more strategic than some might believe.”

Zhu added, “Errors during animal learning are often considered as mistakes. Our work brings new insight that not all errors are the same.”

The team learned even more about the rodents’ actions by taking the reward out of the equation.

When a mouse performed correctly and wasn’t rewarded, it immediately doubled down on the correct response when retested.

“If the animal has an internal model of the task, the lack of reward should violate its expectation. And if that’s the case, it should affect the behavior on subsequent trials. And that’s exactly what we found. On subsequent trials the animal just does a lot better,” Kuchibhotla said. “The animal is like, ‘Hey, I was expecting to be rewarded, I wasn’t, so let me test my knowledge, let me use the knowledge I have and see if it’s correct.’”

If the animal didn’t have an internal model of the task, there would be no expectations to violate and the mice would keep performing poorly.

“At a very early time in learning the animal has an expectation and when we violate it, it changes its strategy,” Kuchibhotla said. “It was surprisingly strategic.”

This mouse strategizing is comparable to how nonverbal human babies learn. Both are highly exploratory and both may test hypotheses in various ways, Kuchibhotla said.

During the experiments Kuchibhotla said he became “a little bit of a mouse psychologist” to interpret their behavior. Like working with a nonverbal infant, he and Zhu had to infer the underlying mental processes from the behavior alone.

“That’s what was really fun in this project, trying to figure out what the mouse is thinking,” he said. “You have to think about it from the perspective of the animal.”

Next the team hopes to determine the neural basis for strategic thinking, and how those strategies might compare across different animals.

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JOURNAL

Current Biology

DOI

10.1016/j.cub.2024.04.017 

 

From disorder to order: flocking birds and “spinning” particles

Research demonstrates a new mechanism of order formation in quantum systems, with potential applications for quantum technology

SCHOOL OF SCIENCE, THE UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO

 

IMAGE: 

SCHEMATIC PICTURE OF ACTIVITY-INDUCED FERROMAGNETISM IN QUANTUM ACTIVE MATTER. HERE, MOVING ATOMS WITH SPINS EXHIBITS THE FERROMAGNETIC ORDER (I.E., ALIGNING IN ONE DIRECTION) LIKE A FLOCK OF BIRDS DEPICTED ABOVE

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CREDIT: TAKASAN ET AL 2024

Researchers Kazuaki Takasan and Kyogo Kawaguchi of the University of Tokyo with Kyosuke Adachi of RIKEN, Japan's largest comprehensive research institution, have demonstrated that ferromagnetism, an ordered state of atoms, can be induced by increasing particle motility and that repulsive forces between atoms are sufficient to maintain it. The discovery not only extends the concept of active matter to quantum systems but also contributes to the development of novel technologies that rely on the magnetic properties of particles, such as magnetic memory and quantum computing. The findings were published in the journal Physical Review Research.

Flocking birds, swarming bacteria, cellular flows. These are all examples of active matter, a state in which individual agents, such as birds, bacteria, or cells, self-organize. The agents change from a disordered to an ordered state in what is called a "phase transition." As a result, they move together in an organized fashion without an external controller.

“Previous studies have shown that the concept of active matter can apply to a wide range of scales, from nanometers (biomolecules) to meters (animals),” says Takasan, the first author. “However, it has not been known whether the physics of active matter can be applied usefully in the quantum regime. We wanted to fill in that gap.”

To fill the gap, the researchers needed to demonstrate a possible mechanism that could induce and maintain an ordered state in a quantum system. It was a collaborative work between physics and biophysics. The researchers took inspiration from the phenomena of flocking birds because, due to the activity of each agent, the ordered state is more easily achieved than in other types of active matter. They created a theoretical model in which atoms were essentially mimicking the behavior of birds. In this model, when they increased the motility of the atoms, the repulsive forces between atoms rearranged them into an ordered state called ferromagnetism. In the ferromagnetic state, spins, the angular momentum of subatomic particles and nuclei, align in one direction, just like how flocking birds face the same direction while flying.

“It was surprising at first to find that the ordering can appear without elaborate interactions between the agents in the quantum model,” Takasan reflects on the finding. “It was different from what was expected based on biophysical models.”

The researcher took a multi-faceted approach to ensure their finding was not a fluke. Thankfully, the results of computer simulations, mean-field theory, a statistical theory of particles, and mathematical proofs based on linear algebra were all consistent. This strengthened the reliability of their finding, the first step in a new line of research.

“The extension of active matter to the quantum world has only recently begun, and many aspects are still open,” says Takasan. “We would like to further develop the theory of quantum active matter and reveal its universal properties.”

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JOURNAL

Physical Review Research

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Activity-induced ferromagnetism in one-dimensional quantum many-body systems

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

26-Apr-2024

 

Experimental NIH malaria monoclonal antibody protective in Malian children

Mid-stage trial shows treatment prevents infection, disease

NIH/NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES

 

IMAGE: 

A SINGLE INJECTION OF AN EXPERIMENTAL MONOCLONAL ANTIBODY CALLED L9LS PREVENTED MALARIA INFECTION IN CHILDREN IN MALI. L9LS BINDS TO AND NEUTRALIZES “SPOROZOITES,” THE FORM OF THE MALARIA PARASITE TRANSMITTED BY MOSQUITOES THAT INVADES THE LIVER TO INITIATE INFECTION.

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CREDIT: NIH

One injected dose of an experimental malaria monoclonal antibody was 77% effective against malaria disease in children in Mali during the country’s six-month malaria season, according to the results of a mid-stage clinical trial. The trial assessed an investigational monoclonal antibody developed by scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and results appear in The New England Journal of Medicine.

“A long-acting monoclonal antibody delivered at a single health care visit that rapidly provides high-level protection against malaria in these vulnerable populations would fulfill an unmet public health need,” said Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of NIH. 

The clinical trial assessed two dose levels, with 19% of the 300mg-dose group and 28% of the 150mg-dose group developing symptomatic malaria, providing protective efficacy of 77% and 67% against symptomatic malaria, respectively. Among children who received placebo, 81% became infected with Plasmodium falciparum, and 59% had symptomatic malaria during the six-month study period. The authors note that the trial demonstrated for the first time that a single dose of a monoclonal antibody given by subcutaneous injection can provide high-level protection against malaria in children in an area of intense malaria transmission.

In 2022, the P. falciparum parasite caused a majority of the nearly 250 million estimated cases of malaria globally and most of the more than 600,000 malaria deaths, according to the World Health Organization. Most malaria cases and deaths are among children in Africa. Malaria parasites such as P. falciparum are transmitted to people by mosquito bites.

In 2020, scientists at NIAID’s Vaccine Research Center reported that they had isolated the antibody from a volunteer who had been vaccinated with an experimental malaria vaccine. The antibody was modified with a mutation that prolonged its durability in the bloodstream following administration. In an earlier study, conducted in Mali by the same research group, a previously discovered antibody was highly protective against P. falciparum infection in adults when given intravenously. However, the new antibody was shown to be more potent in animal studies and was manufactured at a higher concentration than CIS43LS, allowing it to be given by subcutaneous injection. 

The trial in Mali took place in two parts, first to assess safety in a small number of adults and children, and then in a larger clinical efficacy trial involving 225 children. The efficacy trial took place from July 2022 to January 2023 and included healthy children 6 to 10 years of age, 75 of whom received a 300 mg dose, 75 a 150 mg dose, and 75 of whom received a placebo.

The researchers are continuing clinical development of the experimental antibody, focusing on other high-risk populations, such as infants and young children, children hospitalized with severe anemia, and pregnant women. An ongoing clinical trial in Kenya is assessing the efficacy of the antibody in children 5 months to 5 years of age over a 12-month study period, and scientists are also conducting a clinical trial in Mali to assess the antibody in women of childbearing potential to prepare to test the antibody in pregnancy. 

NIAID led the clinical trial in conjunction with the University of Sciences, Techniques and Technologies of Bamako, Mali, through NIAID’s Division of Intramural Research International Centers of Excellence in Research (ICER) program. For more details about the clinical trial, see ClinicalTrials.gov using identifier NCT05304611.

Reference:
K Kayentao et al. Subcutaneous Administration of a Monoclonal Antibody to Prevent Malaria. The New England Journal of Medicine DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2312775 (2024).

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NIAID conducts and supports research—at NIH, throughout the United States, and worldwide—to study the causes of infectious and immune-mediated diseases, and to develop better means of preventing, diagnosing and treating these illnesses. News releases, fact sheets and other NIAID-related materials are available on the NIAID website. 

About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit https://www.nih.gov/. 

NIH...Turning Discovery Into Health®

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JOURNAL

New England Journal of Medicine

DOI

10.1056/NEJMoa2312775 

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are n

 

Energy trades could help resolve Nile conflict

UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

Scientists have shed light on a new, transformative approach that could help resolve a dispute over the Nile river’s water resources.

The Nile is one of the longest rivers globally and spreads over 11 countries in East Africa, supplying water, energy production, environmental quality and cultural wealth. However, the use of Nile resources has been a long-standing source of tension, often overshadowing opportunities for cooperation and mutual benefit.

But as the demand for energy, water, and food in Africa is steadily increasing, the study, led by The University of Manchester in collaboration with regional organisations, offers a glimmer of hope at a resolution.

The research, published today in the journal Nature Water, moves away from traditional water-centric agreements, and presents a detailed simulation of the combined energy-water system to reveal how different scenarios of international energy trades could help alleviate the Nile water conflict.

First author Dr Mikiyas Etichia from The University of Manchester, said: “Traditionally, water disputes in transboundary river basins like the Nile have been approached through a water-centric viewpoint. However, sharing benefits of water resources, such as hydro-generated electricity, crops and fisheries can result in a win-win situation.”

Co-author Dr Mohammed Basheer, Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, added: “In the Nile Basin, energy-river basin benefit-sharing projects have been implemented in the past at a small scale, but detailed tools like the one presented in the paper can help create actionable large-scale proposals.”

At the heart of the dispute lies the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) - a large dam on the Blue Nile River in Ethiopia constructed to improve Ethiopia's electricity access and to export electricity to neighbouring countries. The project sparked tensions between Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt over water rights and access.

The simulator, designed by the scientists using open-source technology, covers 13 East African countries, including those within the Nile Basin, to model potential energy trade agreements between Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt.

By increasing electricity trade, countries can simultaneously address water deficits, boost hydropower generation, reduce energy curtailment, and cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Corresponding author Professor Julien Harou from The University of Manchester, said: “The energy trades tested in this study provide the countries a range of solutions that are likely in their national interest.

“The study highlights the value of detailed multisector simulation to unpick the complex interdependencies of large multi-country resource systems. Implementation of the arrangements proposed here would need to be further assessed from governance and legal perspectives to become viable proposals. If successful, they could contribute to sustainable resource management and regional stability.

“We are hopeful the new analytical tools or their results will be taken up by the negotiating parties.”

-ends-

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JOURNAL

Nature Water

DOI

10.1038/s44221-024-00222-9 

ARTICLE TITLE

Energy trade tempers Nile water conflict

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

26-Apr-2024