Can robotics help us achieve sustainable development?

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS

An international team of scientists, led by the University of Leeds, have assessed how robotics and autonomous systems might facilitate or impede the delivery of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Their findings identify key opportunities and key threats that need to be considered while developing, deploying and governing robotics and autonomous systems’.

The key opportunities robotics and autonomous systems present are through autonomous task completion, supporting human activities, fostering innovation, enhancing remote access and improving monitoring.

Emerging threats relate to reinforcing inequalities, exacerbating environmental change, diverting resources from tried-and-tested solutions, and reducing freedom and privacy through inadequate governance.

Technological advancements have already profoundly altered how economies operate and how people, society and environments inter-relate. Robotics and autonomous systems are reshaping the world, changing healthcare, food production and biodiversity management.

However, the associated potential positive and negative effects caused by their involvement in the SDGs had not been considered systematically. Now, international researchers conducted a horizon scan to evaluate the impact this cutting-edge technology could have on SDGs delivery. It involved more than 102 experts from around the world, including 44 experts from low- and middle-income countries.

The report is published in Nature Communications.

Lead author Dr Solène Guenat began the research while at the Sustainability Research Institute at Leeds. She is now at the Institute for Landscape Planning and Ecology of the University of Stuttgart. The research was conducted as part of Leeds’ Self Repairing Cities project. This project, concluded in 2021, aimed to enable robots and autonomous systems to maintain urban infrastructure without causing disruption to citizens.

Dr Guenat said: “Robotics and autonomous systems are here to stay and will fundamentally transform how we interact with one another, technology and the environment.

“This transformation offers many potential benefits for sustainable development. However, realising those benefits while minimising unintended consequences is a complex challenge. Early identification of possible negative impacts along with early collaboration and continued dialogue across stakeholders will help us seize opportunities while avoiding pitfalls.”

Horizon scanning

Horizon scans have been used to study a wide range of topics, including bioengineering, medicine and biodiversity conservation. They are increasingly used by private and public organisations worldwide to inform decision-making.

For this horizon scan, the researchers recruited 102 experts in either robotics and autonomous systems and/or the SDGs to participate in online surveys, group discussions and workshops to identify positive and negative impacts robotics could have on delivering the SDGs. The team then evaluated and synthesised the expert responses to determine the key opportunities and threats.

Key opportunities

• Replacing human activities: Robotics and autonomous systems will take over manual tasks deemed too dangerous, repetitive, or for which labour cannot be found
• Supporting human activities: Assistive autonomous robotics will work hands-in-hands with humans to facilitate human activities in the work-, private and public-environment
• Fostering innovation: Technological advances in robotics and autonomous systems will speed up research and development while improving collaborations
• Enhancing access: Autonomous transport systems, including drones, will facilitate access to remote and/or dangerous areas, ease distance communication, improve supply chains, and transform current modes of transport
• Monitoring for decision making: Automatic data collection will be used widely with speed and accuracy, and will influence decision-making

Key threats

• Reinforcing inequalities: Autonomous systems will be unaffordable for most countries and governments, shunned by some due to negative perceptions, and decrease the need for low-skilled labour, thus reinforcing gender and global inequalities
• Negative environmental impact: Robotics and autonomous systems will have wide-ranging impact on the environment through the use of resources needed for their production, the pollution created by their use and disposal, the landscape simplification they will require, and the disturbance of ecosystems they will provoke
• Resource diversion from tried-and tested solutions: Robotics and autonomous systems will require large amounts of financial resources to be implemented   widely and competition for resources will put other proof-tested measures at risk, especially where goals address socio-political issues
• Inadequate governance: A robust and regulatory framework around robotics and autonomous systems use and ownership of the data they collect will not be developed in time, leading to ethical issues and increasing the risk of reinforcing inequalities and negative environmental impact

Despite identifying emerging threats, participants indicated that the impact of robotics and autonomous systems on progress towards the SDGs was likely to be overwhelmingly positive. No SDG was determined to be predominately negatively impacted by robotics and autonomous systems. 

However, the future overall impact of robotics and autonomous systems on achieving the SDGs was acknowledged to be hard to predict, especially for goals dealing with inequalities.

Study co-author Professor Martin Dallimer from the School of Earth and Environment at Leeds and the Sustainability Research Institute said: “There are already promising ways to mitigate some of the identified threats robotics and autonomous systems could present.

“For example with issues regarding inequalities, there is a clear need to empower more women and those from diverse backgrounds to engage with robotics development.  

“This, along with greater engagement by engineers with sustainable development professionals would ensure that robotics and autonomous systems are developed and deployed while respecting the needs of multiple different groups.

“Indeed, appropriate mitigation measures to counter the potential negative impacts of robotics and autonomous systems would, by their very nature, contribute to achieving Sustainable Development Goals.”

Planning for the future

The paper highlights warnings that as of early 2020, insufficient progress was being made towards meeting the SDGs by 2030. The coronavirus pandemic has also stalled some previous progress, for example by pushing an extra 124 million people into poverty and exacerbating health inequalities.

Mobilising digital technology could significantly help facilitate the achievement of the SDGs. Yet the opportunities and threats posed by robotics and autonomous systems are so far not integrated into any other global initiatives, strategies or social goal setting. 

The study authors suggest this is likely in part due to the relatively slow pace of regulation and goal setting when compared to robotics development, leaving the door open to poor regulation or non-binding guidelines.

Study co-author Professor Phil Purnell from the School of Civil Engineering at Leeds and Principal Investigator on the Self Repairing Cities projects said: “Regulatory processes developed in parallel with emerging new technologies are needed to ensure appropriate robotics and autonomous systems.

“Although the full impact of robotics and autonomous systems across the Sustainable Development Goals are hard to predict, inclusion of robotics in future iterations of the goals will be essential to avoid detrimental and unintended consequences while realising the opportunities they offer.”

Further information:

The Self Repairing Cities project was funded as part of Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s Grand Challenge” programme.

The paper ‘Meeting Sustainable Development Goals via Robotics and Autonomous Systems’ is published in Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-31150-5) 

Full list of authors: Solène Guenat, Phil Purnell, Zoe G. Davies, Maximilian Nawrath1, Lindsay C. Stringer, G.R. Babu, Muniyandi Balasubramanian, Erica E.F. Ballantyne, Bhuvana Kolar Bylappa, Bei Chen, Peta De Jager, Andrea Del Prete, Alessandro Di Nuovo, Cyril O. Ehi-Eromosele, Mehran Eskandari Torbaghan, Karl L. Evans, Markus Fraundorfer, Wissem Haouas, Josephat Izunobi, Juan Carlos Jauregui-Correa, Bilal Y. Kaddouh, Sonia Lewycka, Ana C. MacIntosh, Christine Mady, Carsten Maple, Worku N. Mhiret, Rozhen Kamal Mohammed-Amin, Olukunle Charles Olawole, Temilola Oluseyi, Caroline Orfila, Alessandro Ossola, Marion Pfeifer, Tony Pridmore, Moti L. Rijal, Christine C. Rega-Brodsky, Ian D. Robertson, Christopher D.F. Rogers, Charles Rougé, Maryam B. Rumaney, Mmabaledi K. Seeletso, Mohammed Z. Shaqura, L. M. Suresh, Martin N. Sweeting, Nick Taylor Buck, M.U. Ukwuru, Thomas Verbeek, Hinrich Voss, Zia Wadud, Xinjun Wang, Neil Winn, Martin Dallimer

For additional information, contact University of Leeds at pressoffice@leeds.ac.uk

University of Leeds 

The University of Leeds is one of the largest higher education institutions in the UK, with more than 39,000 students from more than 137 different countries. We are renowned globally for the quality of our teaching and research. 

We are a values-driven university, and we harness our expertise in research and education to help shape a better future for humanity, working through collaboration to tackle inequalities, achieve societal impact and drive change.  

The University is a member of the Russell Group of research-intensive universities, and plays a significant role in the Turing, Rosalind Franklin and Royce Institutes. www.leeds.ac.uk  

Follow University of Leeds or tag us in to coverage: Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Instagram 

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JOURNAL

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-022-31150-5 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Meta-analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

‘Meeting Sustainable Development Goals via Robotics and Autonomous Systems’

How humans evolved to get along (to extent that we do)

Research looks at social structures, behaviors of bonobos compared to more hostile, territorial chimpanzees

Peer-Reviewed Publication

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: SHARED GROOMING AMONG BONOBOS IS INDICATIVE OF THEIR GROUP DYNAMICS, WHICH INCLUDES TOLERANCE AND COOPERATION. view more 

CREDIT: COURTESY OF MARTIN SURBECK

Humans display a capacity for tolerance and cooperation among social groups that is rare in the animal kingdom, our long history of war and political strife notwithstanding. But how did we get that way?

Scientists believe bonobos might serve as an evolutionary model. The endangered primates share 99 percent of their DNA with humans and have a reputation for generally being peace-loving and sexually active — researchers jokingly refer to them “hippie apes.” And interactions between their social groups are thought to be much less hostile than among their more violent cousins, the chimpanzees.

Some, however, have challenged this because of a lack of detailed data on how these groups work and how they separate themselves. A new study led by Harvard primatologists Liran Samuni and Martin Surbeck on the social structure of bonobos may begin to fill in some of the blanks.

The research, published in PNAS, shows that four neighboring groups of bonobos they studied at the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve in the Democratic Republic of Congo maintained exclusive and stable social and spatial borders between them, showing they are indeed part of distinct social groups that interact regularly and peacefully with each other.

“It was a very necessary first step,” said Samuni, a postdoctoral fellow in Harvard’s Pan Lab and the paper’s lead author. “Now that we know that despite the fact that they spend so much time together, [neighboring] bonobo populations still have these distinct groups, we can really examine the bonobo model as something that is potentially the building block or the state upon which us humans evolved our way of more complex, multilevel societies and cooperation that extends beyond borders.”

The study is a result of three consecutive years of observing the bonobo community in the Kokolopori reserve from 2017 to 2019. Previous research showed evidence of the 59 bonobos forming four separate groups that routinely crossed paths to interact, groom each other, and share meals. What hasn’t been clear is the extent to which the behavior of these bonobo groups resembles that of chimpanzee subgroups that form within one larger community.

Primatologists refer to chimp subgroups, which are highly territorial and hostile to those in different communities, as neighborhoods. Essentially, members of these subgroups don’t spend all their time together as part of one large group but are all still part it, maintaining relationships with each other and (most importantly) not battling each other when they meet.

Bonobos have been far less studied than chimps due to political instability and logistical challenges to setting up research sites in the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the only place where the primates are found. In addition, studying relationships among and between Bonobo groups has been further complicated by the fact that subgroups appear to intermingle with some frequency.

“There aren’t really behavioral indications that allow us to distinguish this is group A, this is group B when they meet,” Samuni said. “They behave the same way they behave with their own group members. People are basically asking us, how do we know these are two different groups? Maybe instead of those being two different groups, these groups are just one very large group made up of individuals that just don’t spend all their time together [as we see with chimpanzee neighborhoods].”

To get at the answer, at least two observers from the reserve followed each bonobo group daily from dawn to dusk, recording behavioral and location data that was then analyzed.

The researchers primarily tracked how much time individual bonobos spent together, with whom, and what activities they engaged in. This helped the researchers perform a statistical method called a cluster analysis. This method groups data points in a cluster so that points from the same group are clustered closely on a plot, while data points not in the same group are clustered in another space.

Essentially, they tracked which bonobos shared significant associations with one another, which ones tended to come together for meals more often, which ones tended to stick together when faced with a choice of whom to go with, and which ones interacted more in the same home range. This helped them draw clear distinctions between what bonobos were part of the same group and when members of one group were peacefully interacting with neighboring groups across each other’s borders.

They compared this to data collected on 104 chimpanzees that lived in the Ngogo community in Uganda’s Kibale National Park between 2011 and 2013.

The researchers found the bonobo clusters were overall more consistent and stable than the subgroups of chimps. This suggests that the bonobos within each cluster had a stronger social preference for one another than was seen within chimpanzee subgroups.

When it comes to the Kokolopori bonobos, this helped the researchers not only confirm the four groups — which they named the Ekalakala, the Kokoalongo, the Fekako, and the Bekako — but also come up with a reliable way to predict which bonobos were most likely to stick together when the different groups of bonobos met and separated.

Samuni and Surbeck, an assistant professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology and the paper’s senior author, say the results show that bonobos, like humans, are capable of complicated relationships outside their immediate core network.

Now that the researchers have firmly established that these bonobos have distinct groups, they want to dig further into what cooperation and trade look between these groups and whether it can potentially represent what it looked like in our common ancestor. This would help explain how humans, to an extent, overcame antagonism between different groups and developed peaceful cooperation.

Surbeck, who founded and directs the Kokolopori Bonobo Research Project, points out the window to gain these powerful insights is closing as bonobos near extinction.

“There are very few left,” he said. “We gather here information that potentially will not be available anymore in 50 years if things continue the way they do.”

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.220112211 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Characterization of Pan social systems reveals in-group/out-group distinction and out-group tolerance in bonobos

Potential market for liquid hydrogen as marine fuel in the Aleutian Islands

Reports and Proceedings

INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL ON CLEAN TRANSPORTATION

 

IMAGE: POTENTIAL LIQUID HYDROGEN DEMAND IN THE ALEUTIAN ISLANDS BY SHIP TYPE UNDER THE THREE SCENARIOS ANALYZED. view more 

CREDIT: INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL ON CLEAN TRANSPORTATION.

Washington, DC, 22 June 2022 — As interest grows in the potential of using “green” hydrogen generated from renewable electricity to help decarbonize maritime shipping, a new study from the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) estimates there could be substantial demand for liquid hydrogen (LH2) at the Aleutian Islands ports in Alaska, including 10,000 tonnes annually from ships that already call on Dutch Harbor.

The introduction of hydrogen-powered ships is likely to happen in stages, and meeting the 10,000 tonnes of latent demand, about 77% of it from local fishing vessels, might stimulate a market for LH2 that could later be expanded to oceangoing vessels. Indeed, the study finds that in a future scenario where additional oceangoing vessels divert to Alaska to refuel as part of a mature transpacific hydrogen network, the annual demand at the Aleutian Islands could be up to 260,000 tonnes of LH2. That is a market value of more than $1 billion, assuming 2035 LH2 prices. An even larger potential market of up to $1.6 billion could potentially be captured if Alaska is an early mover and makes proactive investments in LH2 bunkering infrastructure to lock in customers.

“Our research highlights that Alaska has both potential supply of and demand for renewable marine fuels,” said Elise Georgeff, associate researcher at ICCT and the study's lead author. “Building a market for hydrogen at Aleutian Islands ports could reduce pollution, spur local economic development, and help local Indigenous communities reduce their dependence on fossil fuels,” she added.

The study also finds that most current models are underestimating energy use from fishing vessels by about one-quarter because they neglect substantial hydraulic and refrigeration loads. Further, fishing fuel use is bimodal: Though propulsion demands most of the energy on transit voyages, energy use for hydraulics and refrigeration is essential during and after active fishing. This improved understanding could be of help to those designing future zero-emission fishing vessels and engines.

“There is a strong case here for U.S. federal funding to help jumpstart hydrogen bunkering at Aleutian ports, as it would leverage their favorable geography, significant latent demand, and untapped renewable energy potential,” said Marine Program Director Dan Rutherford.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed by the United States in 2021 included $2.25 billion for port infrastructure. “Supporting liquid hydrogen in the Aleutians is a unique opportunity to decarbonize shipping in the United States,” Rutherford said.

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Contacts
Dan Rutherford (San Francisco), marine program director, dan@theicct.org   

Publication details
“Scaling U.S. zero-emission shipping: Potential hydrogen demand at Aleutian Islands ports”
Authors: Elise Georgeff, Xiaoli Mao, and Dan Rutherford
Download: https://theicct.org/publication/marine-us-aleutians-hydrogen-jun22

The International Council on Clean Transportation is an independent nonprofit organization founded to provide first-rate, unbiased research and technical and scientific analysis to environmental regulators. Our mission is to improve the environmental performance and energy efficiency of road, marine, and air transportation, in order to benefit public health and mitigate climate change.

https://www.theicct.org

@TheICCT

New tool will assess water discharge impacts from Florida’s Everglades

FAU Harbor Branch receives U.S. EPA grant to study connectivity between Everglades and Florida Keys via Florida Bay

Grant and Award Announcement

FLORIDA ATLANTIC UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: RESEARCHERS DEPLOY A MOORING, WHICH WILL HELP THEM MEASURE EXCHANGES OF WATERS. view more 

CREDIT: FLORIDA ATLANTIC UNIVERSITY/HARBOR BRANCH

The ongoing Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) is working to restore the historical flow of the Florida Everglades to bring back the health of the ecosystem, which has seen declines in water quality and habitat loss and degradation.

The Southwest Florida coast, the Florida Keys Reef Tract and Florida Bay together support abundant underwater vegetation, corals and fishes as well as a prosperous tourist economy. At the epicenter of this region is the Florida Bay ecosystem, which is directly impacted by these watershed inputs and plays a critical role in buffering for downstream ecosystems.

Reallocating freshwater flow to the Florida Bay is expected to reduce hypersaline conditions, which, on the other hand, may deliver more nutrients that elevate phytoplankton blooms. 

Significant evidence shows that these waters and associated nutrients can move further downstream and impact the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and the Florida Keys Reef Tract. Interactions between nutrient inputs, phytoplankton blooms and sediment processes change water properties before they reach the Florida Keys, and the transport pathways and subsequent biogeochemical responses are complex. At the same time, climate change including sea level rise is modifying both oceanic boundary conditions of the regions, and watershed hydrological conditions and outputs, among other effects.

Currently, the predictive capability of these watershed impacts is limited. Most of the biogeochemical observations are through discrete water samples that are not continuous. New methods are urgently needed to synthesize all of the available sporadic observations and empirical biogeochemical theories into a coherent system for the region.

Researchers from Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute have received a $350,000 grant from the United States Environmental Protection Agency to study the connectivity between the Everglades and the Florida Keys via the Florida Bay. They are developing an ocean model for the region, an innovative tool to holistically examine and diagnose key processes with numerical simulations and experiments, and to predict changes in responses to water management, ecological restoration and climate change. 

“Our model, when fully developed and validated, is expected to be a powerful tool that is currently lacking for this region,” said Mingshun Jiang, Ph.D., principal investigator, physical oceanographer specializing in ocean coupled physical-biogeochemical-ecological modeling, and an associate research professor at FAU Harbor Branch. “It is designed to provide a suite of environmental and ecological information on the state of the greater Florida Bay ecosystem as well as potential future changes. Importantly, our model could potentially predict underwater aquatic vegetation coverage, harmful algal blooms, and fisheries resources under climate change and/or CERP management scenarios.”

To assist in the model development, Jiang and co-PI Laurent Chérubin, Ph.D., a physical oceanographer who specializes in the understanding of ocean dynamics and a research professor at FAU Harbor Branch, will measure currents and water quality parameters at several key locations in the Florida Bay during dry and wet seasons. They will gauge estimates of nutrients and organic export from the Florida Bay to the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and the Florida Keys Reef Tract.

Jiang and Chérubin will release neutrally-buoyant (artificial) drifters from designated locations and track their trajectories to observe the movements of waters and associated pollutants. Using these drifters, they will investigate the transport and dispersion of freshwater through the Florida Bay, particularly in the northeast region. These drifters have been successfully used for studying transport and dispersion of waters in shallow waters such as Florida’s Indian River Lagoon.  

Fieldwork also will include moorings of three small benthic landers each equipped with one acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP) and a water quality sampling and monitoring meter. Deployed at strategic locations, the researchers will measure exchanges of waters between the northeastern basin, which receives high freshwater nutrients and inputs, the southeastern basin, and water exchanges between the Florida Bay and the southwest Florida shelf where fluxes remain highly uncertain.

A new biogeochemical model will be developed to simulate nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus) cycles, phytoplankton blooms including Karenia brevis (red tide) and cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) blooms, zooplankton, and dissolved oxygen. This model will be coupled with an existing hydrodynamic model to synthesize the observations and empirical theories. In particular, using new and historical measurements along with the new model, researchers will quantify the Florida Bay export of nutrients and organic matter and evaluate the impacts of these exports on nutrients, phytoplankton blooms and water clarity.

“New and historical data combined with our modeling will allow us to construct a full picture of connectivity of waters and associated pollutants such as nutrients, organics, and other emerging pollutants such as microplastics in this region under various conditions including wet and dry seasons as well as storms,” said Chérubin. “Results from our project will help water management agencies develop better plans for minimizing the environmental, ecological and human impacts of discharges from the Everglades as well as potentially improving habitat restoration efforts for seagrass and corals.”

Collaborators on the project include the South Florida Water Management District, Florida International University, University of South Florida, Fish and Wildlife Research Institute and NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory.  

- FAU -

About Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute:
Founded in 1971, Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute at Florida Atlantic University is a research community of marine scientists, engineers, educators and other professionals focused on Ocean Science for a Better World. The institute drives innovation in ocean engineering, at-sea operations, drug discovery and biotechnology from the oceans, coastal ecology and conservation, marine mammal research and conservation, aquaculture, ocean observing systems and marine education. For more information, visit www.fau.edu/hboi.

 

About Florida Atlantic University:
Florida Atlantic University, established in 1961, officially opened its doors in 1964 as the fifth public university in Florida. Today, the University serves more than 30,000 undergraduate and graduate students across six campuses located along the southeast Florida coast. In recent years, the University has doubled its research expenditures and outpaced its peers in student achievement rates. Through the coexistence of access and excellence, FAU embodies an innovative model where traditional achievement gaps vanish. FAU is designated a Hispanic-serving institution, ranked as a top public university by U.S. News & World Report and a High Research Activity institution by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. For more information, visit www.fau.edu.

Despite claims, there is "no quantifiable evidence" that in-game NHL fighting deters more undesirable violence, per analysis of a decade of hockey penalties

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

 

IMAGE: HOCKEY SKATES, PUCK, GLOVES AND STICK NEXT TO A GOAL. view more 

CREDIT: MARIAH HEWINES, UNSPLASH, CC0 (HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/PUBLICDOMAIN/ZERO/1.0/)

Despite claims, there is "no quantifiable evidence" that in-game NHL fighting deters more undesirable violence, per analysis of a decade of hockey penalties

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Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0269889

Article Title: Tooth for a tooth: Does fighting serve as a deterrent to greater violence in the modern NHL

Author Countries: U.S.A.

Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.

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JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0269889 

ARTICLE TITLE

Tooth for a tooth: Does fighting serve as a deterrent to greater violence in the modern NHL

Fights in pro hockey don’t deter greater violence, study finds

If anything, clashes between players lead to more penalties

Peer-Reviewed Publication

OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Allowing fights among players in the National Hockey Leagues does not deter greater violence in the modern game, according to a new study.

In fact, teams and players that fight more often are also responsible for a disproportionate number of violent penalties across the league.

The results refute the arguments by league officials for keeping fighting in the game, said Michael Betz, author of the study and associate professor of human sciences at The Ohio State University.

“The issue of fighting is polarizing within the hockey community and for casual fans. As a former hockey player and a researcher, I wanted to see if the arguments in support of fighting held up,” said Betz, who played goalie as a collegian at Ohio State and briefly as a professional in the ECHL (East Coast Hockey League).

“What I found was that not a single approach I tried yielded any evidence that fighting or even the threat of fighting deters more violent play in the NHL.”

The study was published today (June 22, 2022) in the journal PLOS ONE.

The issue is especially important now with the increased understanding of the consequences of traumatic brain injuries, Betz said.

“Fighting increases the risk of TBIs but isn’t essential to hockey and removing it wouldn’t fundamentally alter the sport,” he said.

For the study, Betz examined data on all regular season penalties from 2010 to 2019. He separated penalties into those that are tactical – meant to give a player a strategic advantage – and those that are violent, which are aimed at intimidating or injuring an opponent.

Violent penalties included boarding, charging, elbowing, roughing and major interference penalties.  If fighting did act as a deterrent, it should lower the number of these violent penalties that could injure a player, Betz said.

Overall, fighting in the NHL declined dramatically during the time of the study – the 2018-19 season had 65% fewer fights per game than the 2010-11 season. Much of that decline has been attributed to the league having access to more fast, skilled players and not needing as many players who rely on intimidation.

But if fighting is necessary as a deterrent, there should have been an increase in violent penalties as the number of fights decreased.  But just the opposite happened.  While all types of penalties declined during the period of the study, violent penalties have fallen more than twice as fast as tactical penalties (25% versus 12%), the study found.

Another analysis at the team level also showed that fighting didn’t protect a team’s players from more violent play: In fact, each additional fight a team was engaged in was associated with more violent penalties taken against them.

“If anything, fighting seemed to encourage more violence against teams that were involved in brawls,” Betz said.

Even within games, results showed similar patterns. Betz found that the number of violent penalties increased in a game after a fight as opposed to decreasing.

The study also found that a fight between two teams early in a season did not significantly reduce the number of violent penalties in a second game between the teams later that same season.

One possible explanation is that having a top fighter on your team who could take on any opposing player in a fight is what reduced violence against the fighting player’s team.  Betz examined that by looking at the three players who were tied for the most fights (6) in the 2018-19 season and a player who had one fewer (5) fights that year.

Whether these top fighters were in the lineup or not did not have any statistically significant effect on the number of violent penalties that their opponents had called against their teams, results showed.

If fighting ever did deter more egregious violence against players, this study shows it no longer does in the modern NHL, Betz said.

“The league may have other reasons why they want to keep fighting in the game – there is some evidence that more fights increase fan attendance at games,” he said.

“But they should just come out and say that and not hide behind the deterrent effect, because there is no evidence for it.”

Betz said he is especially concerned for junior hockey leagues in the United States and Canada, which serve as the main training ground for players aged 16 to 19 who aspire to play in college and the professional ranks. These junior leagues follow the lead of the NHL and, unlike colleges, allow fighting.

“These younger players aren’t getting paid, and their developing brains are more vulnerable to traumatic brain injuries. The evidence shows fights are not protecting them from other violence, so there is a real ethical issue here in allowing fighting to continue,” he said.

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JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0269889 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Tooth for a tooth: Does fighting serve as a deterrent to greater violence in the modern NHL

ADDING INSULT TO INJURY

Women in science receive less credit for their contributions

Study first to use new dataset to show gender differences in scientific attribution

Peer-Reviewed Publication

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

Women in science are less likely than their male counterparts to receive authorship credit for the work they do, an innovative new study finds.

Researchers for the first time used a large set of administrative data from universities that revealed exactly who was involved with and paid on various research projects.

The data were linked to authorship information on patents and articles published in scientific journals – to see which people who worked on individual projects received credit in the patents and journals and who did not.

“There is a clear gap between the rate at which women and men are named as coauthors on publications” said Julia Lane, a co-author on the study and a professor at New York University. “The gap is strong, persistent, and independent of the research field.”

And there was another, even larger, gap.

Women are not nearly as likely as men to be named on patents related to projects that they both worked on – even controlling for all factors, the gap was 59%.

The administrative data that was key to this study came from the UMETRICS dataset available through the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science, which contained detailed information on sponsored research projects for 52 colleges and universities from 2013 to 2016.

It included information on 128,859 people who worked on 9,778 research teams, including faculty members, graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, research staff and undergraduates.

“We have known for a long time that women publish and patent at a lower rate than men,” said Lane, a professor at NYU Wagner and the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress. “But because previous data never showed who participated in research, no-one knew why. There were anecdotes—like that of Rosalind Franklin, who was denied authorship in a famous nature article by James Watson and Francis Crick despite correctly demonstrating the double helix structure of DNA—but there was no evidence”.

This study showed that at every position level, women were less likely than men to get credit.  The gap was particularly evident at earlier stages of their careers. For example, only 15 out of 100 female graduate students were ever named as an author on a document, compared with 21 out of 100 male graduate students.

In addition, in all scientific fields, women were less likely to get credit: from ones where they are the majority (such as health) to those where they are the minority (such as engineering).

Results showed that women were even less likely to be listed as an author on what scientists consider “high-impact” articles.

“This is consistent with the Rosalind Franklin anecdote” Lane said. “The gap in attribution will have clear negative affects on the career prospects for women in science.  I fear that it will deter young women from pursuing science as a career”

A complementary source of data for the study reinforced the results.  A survey of over 2,400 scientists revealed that women and other historically marginalized groups must often put in significantly more effort for their scientific contributions to be recognized.  Respondents to the survey noted that “Being a woman [means] that quite often you contribute in one way or another to science but unless you shout or make a strong point, our contributions are often underestimated.” Multiple respondents mentioned that lack of voice could disproportionately affect women, minorities, and foreign-born scientists.

The survey results showed that 43% of women said they had been excluded from a scientific paper to which they had contributed—compared to 38% of men. Women were also more likely than men to report that others underestimated their contributions and that they faced discrimination, stereotyping, and bias.

The new research based on the administrative data from UMETRICS and the survey results goes beyond providing new insights into the causes of the long-observed gender gap in research output.  The paper showcases a new and rich data infrastructure that can provide insights into the organization of science and could inform evidence-based policies to increase diversity in science.         

The infrastructure developed by the team of collaborators enable new insights into the organization of science by capturing the contributions of those who are often unseen—particularly more junior researchers. The work is in the scientific tradition of the study of survivorship bias—made famous by a statistician’s outside-the-box realization that military analysts should use the unseen data—planes that did not return from combat, rather than those that did, to fully understand why planes crashed. Lane and her colleagues have shown how new data on hitherto unseen contributors can be used to identify the scientists who are not visible on published works to document systematic differences in attribution.

Other co-authors on the study were Matthew Ross of Northeastern University; Britta Glennon of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania; Raviv Murciano-Goroff of the Questrom School of Business at Boston University; and Bruce Weinberg and Enrico Berkes at Ohio State University.

The NYU work on the study was supported principally from funding from National Sciences Foundation grants to New York University (grants 1932689, 1761008, 1760544), the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Schmidt Futures and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation.

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JOURNAL

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-022-04966-w 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

ARTICLE TITLE

Women are Credited Less in Science than Their Male Counterparts

Oregon State research reveals how key diabetes drug is made in nature

Peer-Reviewed Publication

OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Research by Oregon State University has explained how an important type 2 diabetes drug is made in nature, opening the door to improvements in manufacturing through biotechnology.

The findings are particularly important because global demand for the drug, acarbose, is rising along with incidence of type 2 diabetes – according to the International Diabetes Federation, the disease affects nearly 500 million adults worldwide.

Developed by Bayer, the drug has been on the market under the brand name Precose since 1996. Acarbose comes from soil bacteria but until now the biosynthetic pathway underlying its production – the sequence of steps taken by enzymes to catalyze the chemical reactions responsible for making it – was not known.

Findings of the study, led by Taifo Mahmud of the OSU College of Pharmacy, were published in Nature Communications.

Frequently associated with obesity and low physical activity, type 2 diabetes is a serious metabolic disease that affects roughly one in 10 Americans. Formerly known as adult-onset diabetes, it is a chronic condition affecting the way the body metabolizes glucose, a sugar that’s a key source of energy.

For some patients, that means their body does not properly respond to insulin – it resists the effects of insulin, the hormone produced by the pancreas that opens the door for sugar to enter cells. In the later disease stages, when the pancreas is exhausted, patients don’t produce enough insulin to maintain normal glucose levels.

In either case, sugar builds up in the bloodstream and, if left untreated, impairs many major organs, sometimes to disabling or life-threatening degrees.

Acarbose normalizes blood glucose levels by inhibiting alpha-glucosidase enzymes – it helps keep blood sugar from rising too quickly after someone eats by blocking the breakdown of starchy foods like bread, potatoes and pasta and slowing down the intestinal absorption of some sugars.

Acarbose derives from Actinoplanes bacteria and several other strains of soil bacteria. It was the first alpha-glucosidase inhibitor approved for use in the United States and Europe

“Despite its significant therapeutic importance, how acarbose is made in nature had not been completely understood,” Mahmud said. “Our research not only sheds light on how this high-value pharmaceutical is made in nature but also provides a platform for further improvements of industrial acarbose production – for example, by modifying the DNA of the producing bacteria or through other biotechnological approaches. That means knowing its complete biosynthetic pathway is important from both scientific and industrial points of view.”

What remains unknown, Mahmud added, is why soil bacteria produce acarbose – what purpose does the compound serve for them? Some hypothesize that it plays a role in shuttling sugars between bacteria’s intra- and extracellular spaces or that it protects against the carbohydrate-degrading enzymes of other organisms.

“What exactly the function is for the producing organisms in their natural environment remains an exciting topic for future studies,” he said.

Takeshi Tsunoda, Arash Samadi and Sachin Burade of the OSU College of Pharmacy also participated in this research, which was funded in part by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and by the College of Pharmacy.

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JOURNAL

Nature Communications

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Cells

ARTICLE TITLE

Complete biosynthetic pathway to the antidiabetic drug acarbose

UTSW scientists identify protein key to inhibiting flu virus

Down-regulating TAO2 prevents influenza from replicating in cells and could provide new target for antiviral therapies

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UT SOUTHWESTERN MEDICAL CENTER

 

IMAGE: NUCLEAR SPECKLES (GREEN) SHOWN INSIDE A HOST CELL NUCLEUS. PROTEIN COMPLEXES (RED/PINK) REGULATE ITS ASSEMBLY AND FUNCTION. view more 

CREDIT: UT SOUTHWESTERN MEDICAL CENTER

A collaborative study from UT Southwestern scientists has identified a new function for a protein called TAO2 that appears to be key to inhibiting replication of the influenza virus, which sickens millions of individuals worldwide each year and kills hundreds of thousands. The findings were published in PNAS.

“These results uncover new strategies for interfering with influenza virus replication, providing a potential avenue for the development of new antivirals against influenza,” said Beatriz Fontoura, Ph.D., Professor of Cell Biology at UT Southwestern, whose lab studies the interplay between RNA viruses, such as influenza A virus, with their hosts. The study was led by Dr. Fontoura, together with first author and postdoctoral fellow Shengyan Gao, Ph.D., and Melanie H. Cobb, Ph.D., Professor of Pharmacology.

To replicate, influenza virus takes over parts of the host cell nucleus known as nuclear speckles, which then provide the virus an environment to express its genes. Dr. Fontoura and her colleagues, including experts in cell biology, molecular biology, and pharmacology, identified a novel role in regulating nuclear speckle assembly and function for the TAO2 kinase – a protein involved in transferring phosphate groups to other proteins.

“We found that TAO2 is needed to maintain the physical integrity and function of nuclear speckles. Among the functions of nuclear speckles is regulation of key steps in gene expression, which are usurped by influenza virus at these compartments to support viral replication. Consequently, by down-regulating TAO2 levels – or its kinase activity – we were able to inhibit influenza virus replication without causing major toxic effects to the host cell,” said Dr. Fontoura.

Other UTSW researchers who contributed to this study include Matthew Esparza, Ishmael Dehghan, Ke Zhang, Kimberly Batten, Tolga Cagatay, Jerry W. Shay, Elizabeth J. Goldsmith, and Zhijian “James” Chen.

Dr. Goldsmith holds the Patti Bell Brown Professorship in Biochemistry. Dr. Shay is a Distinguished Teaching Professor and holds the Southland Financial Corporation Distinguished Chair in Geriatrics. Dr. Chen is Professor of Molecular Biology and Director of the Center for Inflammation Research at UTSW, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and winner of the 2019 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences as well as holder of the George L. MacGregor Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Science. Dr. Cobb holds the Jane and Bill Browning, Jr. Chair in Medical Science. Drs. Chen and Cobb are members of the National Academy of Sciences.

This work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (R01 AI154635, NIH R01 AI125524), The Welch Foundation (I1243), the Center for Research of Influenza Pathogenesis and Transmission, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Center of Excellence for Influenza Q:40 Research and Response (Contract No. 75N93021C00014), and NIAID (Grant U19AI135972), National Cancer Institute (U54 CA260560 Project 2), and a Mary Kay Foundation International Postdoctoral Scholar Fellowship.

About UT Southwestern Medical Center

UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty has received six Nobel Prizes, and includes 26 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 17 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 14 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 2,900 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 100,000 hospitalized patients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 4 million outpatient visits a year.

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences