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)
Tuesday, April 07, 2026
Global EV transition hinges on policy adoption, cost reductions
ITHACA, N.Y. – A new study finds that the global shift to electric vehicles (EVs) could significantly reduce energy use and carbon emissions, but only if governments act aggressively to lower costs and align policies across regions.
The paper, published in the journal Resources, Environment and Sustainability, examines how the pace and scale of EV adoption vary widely worldwide, shaped by policy strength, economic conditions and infrastructure readiness within each country.
The researchers used the widely accepted Global Change Analysis Model developed by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Joint Global Change Research Institute to evaluate how different policy scenarios influence vehicle electrification and its downstream impacts on energy systems and emissions.
The team found that a uniform 20% reduction in non-energy costs, including factors such as vehicle purchase price, maintenance and insurance, could dramatically accelerate EV adoption. Under such a scenario, EV market share could rise from roughly 25 to 50% to as high as 70 to 85% globally after 2035, depending on assumptions about technology, energy prices and regional trends.
First author Shuai Pan, former postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University who is now at China’s Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, said that such a marked shift in EV adoption rates would substantially cut energy consumption and tailpipe carbon dioxide emissions in major markets including the United States, Europe and China, while slowing emissions growth in developing regions such as India, Southeast Asia and West Africa.
“Cost remains the most powerful lever,” Pan said.
The authors conclude that policy-driven reductions in non-energy costs achieved through subsidies, manufacturing scale and technological innovation are essential to making EVs competitive with conventional internal combustion engine vehicles.
The study also highlights stark regional disparities. Wealthier economies with established infrastructure and strong policy support are currently leading the transition, while many developing countries face barriers including limited charging networks, lower consumer purchasing power and weaker policy frameworks.
Even with rapid EV adoption, the researchers emphasize that electrification alone is not a climate solution.
“While EVs reduce emissions from transportation, they can shift emissions to other sectors – particularly electricity generation and hydrogen production – if those systems remain reliant on fossil fuels,” said co-author H. Oliver Gao, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell.
The modeling shows that battery electric vehicles would increase electricity demand, but only modestly, accounting for about 13.5% of total electricity consumption in the U.S. under a high-adoption scenario. However, without cleaner power generation, emissions from the electricity sector could offset a significant share of the gains from electrification.
Similarly, expanded use of hydrogen-powered vehicles would increase demand for hydrogen production, which today is largely fossil fuel-based.
“Scaling up low-carbon, green hydrogen will be critical to realizing the full emissions benefits of fuel cell vehicles,” Gao said.
The study underscores the importance of coordinated, cross-sector policy. Scenarios that paired EV adoption with clean energy standards produced far greater net emissions reductions than electrification alone.
Afrobatrachian frogs account for roughly half of all frog diversity in Africa, and their modern distribution is significantly influenced by a global climate event that ended 12,000 years ago.
Why are frogs diverse in some parts of Africa’s rainforests and less so in others? The patterns of cooling and glaciation during the last ice age would probably not have been your first answer or even your last-ditch guess, but it is, nonetheless, correct.
“When the glaciers were at their maximum global extent, the earth’s climate was cooler and drier, and forests that are continuous today contracted to what were essentially islands in a sea of savannah,” said Gregory Jongsma, the acting curator of Zoology at the New Brunswick Museum.
Jongsma is the lead author of a new study, conducted by researchers at the Florida Museum of Natural History and published in the journal Ecology and Evolution, which shows that even though it’s been 12,000 years since the last ice age, tropical African frogs still haven’t forgotten about it.
The study specifically focuses on the Lower Guinean Forests of Central Africa, part of what’s better known as the Guineo-Congolian rainforest or, more simply, the Congo. Centered around 0 degrees latitude, these forests are a visual representation of the planet’s obliquely unequal heating by the sun, which wrings water from the atmosphere like a damp rag onto the equator, creating a humid belt of jungle prominently bookended by deserts.
“I became obsessed with this area of the world, and Gabon specifically, around the age of 10,” Jongsma said. “I read a series of National Geographic articles about this individual named Mike Fay doing what was called a mega transect, where he walked from the Republic of Congo west across Gabon.”
Fay was a conservationist who made the 2,000-mile, cross-jungle trek wearing sandals and shorts, his blistered feet regularly coated in iodine and laminated in duct tape to stave off infection. He and his crew bushwacked their way through trailless forest until they reached the Atlantic Ocean, 456 days after they’d started. He undertook the trip to record biological data and stopped frequently to do things like identify the seeds embedded in elephant dung, count gorillas and chimpanzees, and take video recordings of anything that moved, slapping away the maddeningly insistent mosquitos and tsetse flies all the while.
“So Gabon became enlarged in my brain at a young age, which worked out really well, because it’s an incredibly interesting part of the world from the standpoint of an evolutionary biologist,” Jongsma said.
Documenting biodiversity is the first, most essential step toward understanding how species in a given area have evolved and why their ecologies look and function in a particular way. Scientists have learned a lot about the diversity of Africa’s rainforests since the time of Mike Fay, to the extent that they can now answer some of these higher-order questions.
Jongsma’s specialty is frogs. For several years, while working on a doctoral degree at the Florida Museum of Natural History, he’d frequently travel to Central Africa to tick off the miles on his own Fay-esque expeditions in Cameroon, Uganda, Angola, the Republic of Congo and Gabon, collecting frogs along the way.
Slowly, he began to notice a pattern. Some lowland forests that seemed perfectly suitable for frogs strangely supported less diversity than others. Additionally, endemic species — those that live in a restricted area defined by geographic or cultural borders — were mostly clumped together in what appeared to be random spots in Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea.
Back in Florida, Jongsma looked to see whether environmental conditions in central sub-Saharan Africa could explain the distributions he’d seen.
He narrowed his focus to frogs in the clade Afrobatrachia, a group that study co-author David Blackburn, curator of herpetology at the Florida Museum, has studied since his own days as a graduate student doing fieldwork in Central Africa.
Afrobatrachia was ideal for answering this sort of question for several reasons, not least of which because it accounts for more than half of all frog diversity on the entire African continent. And although species in this group were once thought to be distantly related to each other, with geographic origins in multiple parts of the world, work done by Blackburn and others has shown that it’s actually a tight-knit clade that evolved in and is endemic to Africa.
It includes the rainfrogs, known for their visual and auditory similarity to an angrily deflating balloon. It also includes the hairy frog, which has long, hair-like structures protruding from its abdomen and internal claws that it can only deploy against adversaries by breaking its fingers and pushing the claws out through its skin.
Most importantly for this study, there are species in Afrobatrachia that are specialized to live in all sorts of forest environments. Some live in the canopy, others in burrows. Some prefer the more typical pond or stream habitat, while others have evolved a degree of independence from water by skipping the tadpole stage of their lifecycle and laying eggs that hatch into fully assembled frogs.
The environmental conditions most closely associated with frog diversity were sure to be discernible in this ecologically varied group.
The next thing to consider was whether the distribution of frogs aligned most closely with current or historical conditions.
“There are two competing hypotheses when predicting diversity,” he said. “The ecological hypothesis says species are essentially in equilibrium with current conditions. Therefore, if there’s high rainfall and temperature or productivity, you’re going to have high diversity.”
This was true in some of the areas he’d been to, but the seemingly suitable lowland forests that maintained less frog diversity were just as hot and wet as the others. Current environmental conditions similarly did nothing to explain why endemics showed up where they did.
So Jongsma moved on to the alternative hypothesis.
“In the evolutionary camp, you’d say it’s the past conditions that have the largest impact on current-day diversity.”
Scientists infer the climatic conditions of past environments using multiple lines of evidence, including the composition of greenhouse gasses trapped in the air bubbles of ancient glaciers, the types of plants that grew in a given time period based on spores and pollen preserved in lake sediments, and the ratio of oxygen isotopes in the fossils of marine protists. This type of data has been collected and compiled for several decades and is easily accessible to anyone attempting to reconstruct general patterns of temperature and rainfall on Earth over the past few million years.
The authors created a 2.58 million-year historical climate map for Central Africa, but the resolution wasn’t fine enough to track the distribution of frogs. Earth’s complicated topography creates atmospheric currents and eddies as air flows over it, and these local patterns become increasingly hard to measure and predict as climate changes drastically on a global scale, as notably occurred during the last ice age.
The authors needed another variable in the mix to determine whether historical conditions in sub-Saharan Africa were responsible for the modern diversity of frogs.
So, naturally, they added more information about frogs! This time Jongsma chose ten abundant species that were not in Afrobatrachia, for which he created niche models.
“They’re common, widespread, and largely co-distributed, so there’s enough data there to build a really robust model of their distribution,” he said.
The extra step of modeling their distributions meant they could tie modern rainfall and temperature to the presence or absence of a frog species in a particular area, then hindcast back through time to see whether the general diversity of Afrobatrachian frogs would have been high or low in an environment based on the historical climate data.
Having done this, the authors used their analyses to peer into the past and compare what they observed to what exists now.
For the most part, the Congo rainforest remained stable throughout the Pleistocene ice ages. But as Earth’s climate cooled and dried, the Congo’s forest borders receded in some places, creating pockets of more or less stable forested areas called refugia. The name comes from the idea that when the global climate rapidly warms or cools, environments that remain stable offer a refuge to species that are otherwise displaced in areas that undergo significant change.
According to the study’s results, the ancient forest refugia in Central Africa aligned with the modern diversity of frogs. They are also closely aligned with the small distributions of endemic species.
There are two main reasons why refugia may harbor more diversity than surrounding areas, even after they’ve ceased to be a refuge.
The first is a sort of lag effect. As suitable environments contract during climate change, species crowd into refugia, and when environments expand again, they fan out. But this doesn’t happen automatically. Though the 12,000 years since the last ice age seems like a long time to humans, who live on the order of decades, it’s hardly even worth mentioning on the vast scale of geological processes on which evolution and migration operate. It’s possible, therefore, that frogs simply haven’t had enough time to even out their distributions since the last cold snap.
Secondly, the isolation that’s inherent to living in a refugia does funny things to species. Most notably, it makes more of them.
“Refugia have been proposed as species pumps,” Jongsma said
In this case, explained Blackburn, that might look like a frog that once had a wide distribution throughout much of the historic Congo. As the forest was partitioned by climate change, this one big population of frogs would have become several smaller populations, all isolated from each other. If this went on long enough, these populations would eventually evolve into new species. Refugia tend to have higher rates of diversity as a result.
Additionally, while some species expand back out into their former ranges when the climate reverses course, others stay put for one reason or another, which explains the higher rate of endemism in refugia.
The results have implications far beyond the interests of frog enthusiasts.
“All of the countries where this study was conducted have signed on to the 30X30 goal, which is an initiative to conserve 30% of their country’s land area by 2030,” Jongsma said. “If you’re going to expand a protected area or create a new one, considering where forests have been most stable might be an important consideration, depending on what you’re trying to conserve.”
Additional co-authors of the study are Narayana Barve of the Florida Museum of Natural History; Julie Allen of Virginia Tech; and Hannah Owens of the University of Florida.
CLEVELAND—As the COVID-19 pandemic upended virtually every aspect of people’s lives, one critical question loomed large for millions of low-income and underserved healthcare patients: Would they still be able to see their own doctor?
Researchers at Case Western Reserve University and the OCHIN nonprofit consultancy conducted a comprehensive, nationwide study of community-based health centers—the frontline primary care providers serving millions of America’s most vulnerable patients. The goal: to assess how consistently patients were able to see their primary care provider before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
The study, published in Annals of Family Medicine,tracked on average 354,000 patients treated at 186 community health centers yearly from 2019 to 2023. The researchers found that the centers maintained consistently high levels of continuous care throughout the five-year study.
For these patients, a community health center is not just a convenience—it is their only option. Knowing that these centers maintained consistent, high-quality care throughout one of the most turbulent periods in modern healthcare history is deeply meaningful for the communities they serve.
“Our findings reveal a remarkable story of resilience despite the unprecedented disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced healthcare systems across the country to cancel appointments, shift to telehealth and operate under severe staffing constraints,” said Kurt C. Stange, Distinguished University Professor and the Dorothy Jones Weatherhead Professor of Medicine at the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine.
The methodology
The researchers gauged continuity using the Usual Provider of Care (UPC) index, which measures how consistently patients were able to be treated by their primary care provider rather than a different clinician at each visit. A score of 1.0 represents perfect continuity—meaning a patient saw the same provider for every visit.
The median UPC score was 1.0 each year—the highest possible level—even during the height of the pandemic. The average UPC varied from a low of 0.822 in 2020 to a high of 0.831 in 2021—so it was consistently high.
But the study also identified some flaws.
“When we dug deeper into the 2023 data, we found that not all patients experienced the same level of care continuity,” Stange said. “Significant gaps emerged along racial, ethnic, economic and demographic lines.”
Patients less likely to see their own doctor consistently:
Patients with multiple chronic conditions faced greater difficulty seeing the same provider consistently.
Hispanic patients faced lower care continuity among both adults and children.
Black and African American patients faced lower care continuity among adults.
Low-income patients—those living below 138% of the federal poverty level— were less likely to achieve consistent care.
Telehealth users—both adults and children—were less likely to achieve consistent care.
Patients at large clinics faced lower continuity than those at smaller practices.
“The differences identified in this study occurred even in these community health centers focused on caring for historically underserved populations,” Stange said. “These disparities are targets for systematic intervention—specific, identifiable gaps that healthcare systems, policymakers and community health centers can address so that everyone can have the advantages of being cared for by a clinician who knows them.”
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About Case Western Reserve University
At Case Western Reserve, one of the nation’s leading research universities, we’re driven to seek knowledge and find solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems. Nearly 6,200 undergraduate and 6,100 graduate students from across 96 countries study in our more than 250 degree programs across arts, dental medicine, engineering, law, management, medicine, nursing, science and social work. Our location in Cleveland, Ohio—a hub of cultural, business and healthcare activity—gives students unparalleled access to engaging academic, research, clinical, entrepreneurial and volunteer opportunities and prepares them to join our network of 125,000+ alumni making an impact worldwide. Visit case.edu to learn more.
Illustration of a representative architecture for egocentric pose estimation. Visual features are extracted from first-personframes and used to locate (a) body or (b) hand regions.
Egocentric vision, which captures the world from cameras worn on the human body, is rapidly emerging as a crucial frontier in artificial intelligence. A new survey maps this fast-growing field by organizing its major tasks into a coherent framework spanning subject understanding, object understanding, environment understanding, and hybrid understanding. The study not only synthesizes recent advances across gaze estimation, action analysis, social perception, localization, summarization, and video question answering, but also identifies the bottlenecks that continue to limit progress. By clarifying where the field stands and where it is heading, the work offers a valuable roadmap for next-generation human-centered AI systems.
Unlike traditional computer vision, egocentric vision records scenes from a first-person perspective, allowing machines to perceive actions, interactions, and surroundings in ways that more closely resemble human experience. This makes it highly relevant to applications such as augmented reality, virtual reality, robotics, intelligent surveillance, and human-computer interaction. However, first-person video is far more difficult to interpret than standard third-person imagery. It often contains rapid viewpoint shifts, severe motion blur, object occlusion, and complex interactions unfolding over time. The survey also highlights a critical data gap: compared with large exocentric datasets, egocentric datasets remain limited in both scale and annotation quality. Because of these challenges, deeper research into egocentric vision is needed.
Researchers from the Department of Information and Communication Engineering at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China reported (DOI: 10.1007/s11633-025-1599-4) this review in Machine Intelligence Research (Vol. 23, No. 1, February 2026). The paper systematically examines the architecture of egocentric vision research, classifies its major tasks, summarizes representative methods and datasets, and highlights the central challenges and future trends shaping first-person AI.
A major contribution of the survey is its scene-centered task taxonomy. Instead of grouping studies only by method, the authors decompose egocentric scenes into three core elements—subject, interacting objects, and environment—and then extend this into four research categories: subject understanding, object understanding, environment understanding, and hybrid understanding. Under this structure, the paper reviews 11 sub-tasks, including gaze understanding, pose estimation, action understanding, social perception, human identity and trajectory recognition, object recognition, environment modeling, scene localization, content summarization, multi-view joint understanding, and video question answering. The survey argues that this is the first hierarchical analysis of egocentric scenarios, giving the field a clearer conceptual map. It also pinpoints three dominant barriers: limited specialized datasets and benchmarks, the highly dynamic nature of first-person video, and the challenge of representing information across multiple layers and granularities. To support future work, the authors further compile 21 egocentric datasets and discuss five major trends that may help the field move toward more robust, multimodal, and embodied intelligence systems.
Rather than presenting egocentric vision as a collection of isolated benchmarks, the authors position it as a foundational capability for machine intelligence. They emphasize that understanding first-person data requires models that can connect attention, motion, objects, context, memory, and reasoning over time. Their conclusion is clear: progress will depend not only on better architectures, but also on stronger datasets, clearer task definitions, and deeper integration across modalities and scene elements.
The implications of this roadmap extend well beyond academic computer vision. More capable egocentric systems could support wearable assistants that understand what users are doing, AR and VR platforms that respond naturally to gaze and action, robots that learn from human demonstrations, and embodied agents that reason within real environments. The survey suggests that as sensing hardware improves and large multimodal models mature, first-person AI may become a key bridge between perception and action. By organizing the field’s knowledge base and clarifying its next steps, this work helps prepare egocentric vision for broader real-world impact.
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. U23A20286 and 62301121) and Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (Grade B) of China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No. GZB20240120).
Machine Intelligence Research (original title: International Journal of Automation and Computing) is published by Springer and sponsored by the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The journal publishes high-quality papers on original theoretical and experimental research, targets special issues on emerging topics, and strives to bridge the gap between theoretical research and practical applications.
Herndon, VA, April 7, 2026 — Exposure to “forever chemicals,” per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), has been linked to serious health issues, like immune system damage, cancers, pregnancy complications and liver damage. A new study, published in Risk Analysis, finds that the websites people are visiting for PFAS information are leaving them without a lot of the guidance they need to protect themselves.
A study from the University of Wisconsin performed a human content analysis and computational linguistic analysis of the top 98 websites accessed by Google users in the United States searching for information about PFAS in drinking water. Websites spanned all levels of government, non-profit, water utility, news media, research and corporate sources.
As the primary destination for information seekers, online sources must balance the threats posed by PFAS, while providing accurate information on protection strategies to help the public reduce exposure. The authors of the study recommend messengers use clear, straightforward language about known threats while separately acknowledging uncertainty. Additionally, online sources should improve their depiction of audience susceptibility level.
The analysis found that:
News media gets it right on threat, wrong on solutions. They accurately report severity but still fall short on actionable advice.
Most websites did not forefront information to reduce risk. Most websites did not provide information about how to reduce the risk of PFAS on their landing page, despite previous research suggesting that people are hungry for this information.
News media and nonprofit groups talk about PFAS risks from an anxiety-evoking tone. This sharply contrasts language used by local government sites and water utility boards, creating inconsistency.
Without skin in the game, people don’t care. Local government and water utility sites rarely emphasized individual risk, even when their local area had documented higher PFAS levels.
Government sites can send people on a wild goose chase. Efficacy information was frequently buried behind links rather than presented upfront. In one case, a local government site redirected users from report to report burying data that showed PFAS contamination exceeded safe levels.
PFAS communicators face a difficult challenge, as the risks associated with exposure vary drastically by location, and the science is still evolving. Effectively communicating about mitigation strategies without downplaying the threat of PFAS in drinking water is key.
“If people searching for PFAS information are initially confronted with messages that don’t strike that balance, they won’t continue to seek more information on how to reduce their exposure,” said Lyn M. van Swol, professor of communication science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of the study. “That’s why we focused on PFAS messaging that information-seeking publics actually view rather than all the available sources out there.”
