WORKING At The Amazon Warehouse Was Always Painful. Now It's Terrifying.

In the best of times, the work I did at the Amazon warehouse left me aching and numb. Now, going to work is just terrifying.

Rina CummingsBuzzFeed Contributor Posted on May 5, 2020

Chris Radburn / PA Wire/PA Photo An Amazon warehouse in the UK

Even before the coronavirus hit, going to work at an Amazon warehouse already felt like I was risking my health. Standing on your feet for 12 hours at a time and performing repetitive motions while sorting boxes takes a toll on your body. By the middle of my shift, my joints throb with pain and sometimes my fingers become numb. I know my body is asking me to take a breather. But the clock doesn’t stop ticking, and I can’t make rate if I take a break.

In the first few weeks after COVID-19 came to New York City, the warehouse operated as usual. People started getting sick, and we knew it, but Amazon wasn’t giving us any information. The company said it sent people who were confirmed to have had contact with the virus home with pay, but most people who were sick weren’t able to get tested. And we know many people who were sent home still haven’t received pay. We kept working, standing next to each other on the floor of the sorting department, in the break room, and on the crowded buses taking us to the warehouse.

I have been out on medical leave for a few weeks, choosing not to go into work to protect myself and my family. Amazon let us have unlimited unpaid time off (UPT) last month, but that’s not an option anymore. We either have to go to work or quit, which would risk eligibility for unemployment.

I worry about catching the coronavirus when I go back to work. The company has now staggered our shifts, so there are fewer people. But there’s no real social distancing in the warehouse. We get gloves and masks, but we have to keep wearing them over and over again because the supply is nowhere near enough. When I get home from work, I jump in the shower right away, even before hugging my kids, because I don't want to spread the virus. Amazon doesn’t pay me for the extra time it takes for me to sanitize everything that went to work with me, or the extra loads of laundry I am running to keep everything clean.



I am a single mom with two beautiful children. Right now, my kids are home from school. When I can afford to, I’ll pay for a babysitter — but mostly my 15-year-old takes care of my 2-year-old when I go to work. My shift is 12 hours, overnight Thursday through Sunday.

From my coworkers I organize with, I’ve heard that things are busier than ever in the warehouse. Every day during COVID-19 feels like the week before Christmas. Amazon is making a killing from this crisis. Almost literally. Jeff Bezos’s net worth has grown by more than $24 billion since the crisis started since everyone is at home trying to avoid going to the store and ordering everything online. But none of that money is going to workers. I have more expenses now than before, buying masks, gloves, and cleaning supplies; doing more laundry; paying for childcare; and trying to do everything I can to keep life as normal and happy as possible for my kids. And I don't know what I’ll do if I get sick.



Stephanie Keith / Getty Images
Immigrant and labor activists rally outside an Amazon distribution center in New York City.

When Amazon workers, including some of my coworkers, have spoken out about unsafe conditions and demanded the facility be shut down and sanitized after positive COVID-19 cases were identified, some have been fired in apparent retaliation.

We just learned yesterday that an Amazon executive resigned over the unfair firing of whistleblowers who are trying to keep themselves and their workers safe. Amazon doesn’t need much of an excuse to fire us; it happens all the time. Anyone can be fired without any notice or reason — being a few minutes late, getting written up for not making rate, demanding more gloves or masks. My elderly coworker was fired over voicemail for leaning on a stopped belt on a break. Management said he was sitting while he should have been working.

I can’t afford to get fired, so I’m on my toes all the time to make sure that Amazon doesn’t have an excuse. I live just 20 minutes from the warehouse in Staten Island, and I usually take the bus to work. My commute should be easy, but it easily turns bad. The buses coming from the ferry often skip my stop because they are jam-packed with Amazon workers. When that has happened in the past, I take a $50 Uber to work to avoid being late and having an hour deducted from my UPT. There is a lot of fear from workers that Amazon will terminate you if you use too much UPT, which makes everyone stressed about getting to work on time.

Time is everything at Amazon. I’ve developed digestive issues since I’ve been working there because I have to shove food down my throat and then run back to my station. A robot will write me up if I am late. It doesn’t care whether I had my lunch or not. It doesn’t care if I am coughing, or if I faint at my station, or if someone else sneezes on me. They just count the rate of how many packages I sort.

I am a human. Not a machine.

I learned that the New York City Council is considering legislation that would require big corporations like Amazon to pay extra during this crisis to compensate us for the increased risks we are taking on and make it harder for them to fire us on a whim. Going to work is a health hazard during this crisis, but we need the money, and people need to get the supplies we are sorting. A bit more pay and some job security would ease a lot of stress. They say we are essential, but Amazon treats us like we’re expendable.

Rina Cummings works at the Amazon JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island and is a member of Make the Road New York. She testified before the New York City Council in support of the proposed Essential Workers Bill of Rights.

TOPICS IN THIS ARTICLE
Amazon

Essence Nash, Amazon warehouse worker, Etna, Ohio

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-voices-of-may-day-usa-2020-amazon.html

I am striking because of Amazon's work environment is hard mentally, physically and emotionally. It's sad we had to wait for a pandemic to get to this point, but I'm hoping this changes the work environment and labor as a whole for the future. Two things I wish the public knew about work conditions are that we get cases of COVID-19 daily and that there are no extra steps they're taking besides the ones we have been doing since the pandemic started. We’re also being micromanaged all day everyday no matter what you do while we’re at work.

A Worker in Amazon's New York Warehouse Has Died of the Coronavirus

Amazon had fired a worker who organized a walkout to demand the company sanitize the Staten Island warehouse after someone there tested positive.

By Alex Lubben May 5 2020


A worker at Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse has died of COVID-19, the company confirmed to VICE News.

Since March, workers at that fulfillment center in New York have been protesting, calling for additional safety precautions to protect them from the coronavirus. The company has instituted some additional safety precautions; it also fired a worker for protesting, and then tried to smear him.

The company said the employee who died hadn’t been at the warehouse since April 5, and he tested positive for the coronavirus on April 11. “We are deeply saddened by the loss of an associate at our site in Staten Island, NY,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “His family and loved ones are in our thoughts, and we are supporting his fellow colleagues.”


The death was first reported by The Verge.

Amazon fired one of the workers at the Staten Island warehouse, Christian Smalls, who organized a walkout to demand the company sanitize the warehouse after someone who worked in the facility tested positive for the coronavirus. An internal memo previously obtained by VICE News laid out a plan to smear Smalls, calling him “not smart or articulate.”

Another Amazon employee, who worked at the company’s warehouse in Hawthorne, California, died in mid-April.

New York’s attorney general has taken notice: A letter from the AG’s office dated April 22, obtained by NPR, noted that the company may be providing “inadequate” protections to its workers under state law. That letter also noted that the company may have violated labor law by firing Smalls.

READ MORE: Leaked Amazon Memo Details Plan to Smear Fired Warehouse Organizer: ‘He’s Not Smart or Articulate’

And on Monday, one of the company’s top engineers and a vice president, Tim Bray, announced his resignation from Amazon and called the company “chickenshit” for firing protesting workers.

It’s not known how many workers at Amazon facilities have died of coronavirus, but an unofficial tally by the workers themselves and reviewed by The Verge indicates that at least 130 workers have fallen ill.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the date the deceased worker was last at the Staten Island warehouse.


Cover: In this March 30, 2020 file photo, workers at Amazon's fulfillment center in Staten Island, N.Y., gather outside to protest work conditions in the company's warehouse in New York. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File )

The Gig Economy Is a Public Health Risk

The gig economy's plan for workers: Keep working until you get the deadly pandemic with an unknown death rate. Then self-isolate and hope you don't die.

As Christian Perea, a driver for Uber and Lyft 

"it seems kind of obvious that transporting millions of people via super non-regulated Uber/Lyfts that don't have sick pay or any ability to self-isolate to proactively prevent spread is an obvious way this will spread."

By Edward Ongweso Jr and Jason Koebler

Mar 16 2020
MATTHEW HORWOOD / CONTRIBUTOR

The coronavirus pandemic has crystallized this important fact: Gig economy companies are a public health risk.

By their very design, regulation-ignoring companies that treat their workers as independent contractors rather than employees have created a class of people who are uninsured or underinsured and are incentivized to work long hours, even if it puts them or customers at risk. Even now, as gig economy companies are rolling out the bare minimum in terms of sick leave, we are seeing how vulnerable gig workers really are and how these services have created an underclass of people who serve the rich.

While most of Silicon Valley’s white-collar workers are working from home and the masses are being asked to self-isolate, Uber and Lyft drivers, Grubhub and Seamless delivery drivers, and Instacart shoppers continue to work. After weeks of silence and rolling out policies designed to convince customers to continue using their platforms (“contactless deliveries!”), several companies including Uber, have just rolled out two-weeks of paid sick leave, but even these policies feel dystopian, their subtext being: Keep working until you get the deadly pandemic with an unknown death rate. Then you can self-isolate (without health insurance) and hope you don’t die.

It’s easy to focus on the gig economy’s lackluster response during the pandemic, but this problem has been years in the making.

Uber’s gig economy business model is one that prioritizes private profits above public health. Each of Uber’s ride-hail options feature subsidies to incentivize higher use: some offer low prices to increase passenger demand, while others use higher or lower pay to motivate more drivers. The outcome here is the same for every other gig company seeking monopoly profits whether or not there is a pandemic: a two-tiered system of customers who can stay inside, and workers who are forced to consistently risk their health and well-being.



Gig companies are fundamentally unprofitable, their business model subsidized by venture capital that is focused on loss-leading, destroying competition, and monopolizing the industry. Uber and Lyft, in particular, have conditioned people to use their services as a replacement for ambulances. This phenomenon is not just informal: Lyft has worked with cities to study specifically using Lyfts as emergency vehicles.

Now, during a pandemic, there is little reason to expect that people will stop using these services, and surely coronavirus patients will at least consider taking an Uber or Lyft to the hospital should their symptoms become severe.

Uber and Lyft are perfectly primed to be a vector for outbreaks as drivers are incentivized by sub-minimum-wages insufficient to last any period of self-quarantine, let alone to seek treatment, and as passengers are incentivized by cheap trips and fears of exposure in public transit. This is incompatible with what should be our prime objective: “flattening the curve” to minimize community transmission through social distance.

We could have a different discussion if Uber were taking steps beyond advising drivers to essentially stay safe out there. In China, DiDi—the ride-hailing company that beat back Uber’s attempt to enter the country—not only suspended service across the country but created special fleets to both mitigate transmission while still meeting community transit needs. One fleet had protectively uniformed drivers in regularly disinfected cars to transport medical workers in Wuhan—for free. Another fleet was a volunteer "community service fleet" that allowed local authorities to try and meet demand despite the suspension of private and public transit.


In the United States, Uber has not even been able to guarantee reliable access to clean bathrooms for its drivers, let alone provide protective gear, regular disinfectant services. It does not seem like Uber is imminently going to start providing special training for drivers on how to specifically transport those who might be sick; its latest suggestion to drivers was an email containing general advice such as “CLEAN AND DISINFECT YOUR VEHICLE—Pay special attention to surfaces that you and passengers frequently come in contact with,” without giving any guidance about how to do that, or how often to do it.

As Christian Perea, a driver for Uber and Lyft who recently wrote an article asking drivers to stop working, told Motherboard, "it seems kind of obvious that transporting millions of people via super non-regulated Uber/Lyfts that don't have sick pay or any ability to self-isolate to proactively prevent spread is an obvious way this will spread."

THE VOICES OF MAY DAY USA 2020

Amazon, Instacart, Target, and FedEx Workers Explain Why They're Striking

As part of a historic May Day strike, frontline workers tell the public about their working conditions and why they believe there's strength in numbers.
By Lauren Kaori Gurley

May 1 2020,

Today, May Day, thousands of frontline workers at Amazon, Instacart, Whole Foods, Target, and FedEx have organized a historic strike to protest working conditions and demand worker protections at these companies, which have all seen revenues skyrocket during the coronavirus pandemic.

Striking workers say they have formed an "alliance" to help save the lives of workers and communities who have faced increased workloads and unprecedented dangers in the wake of the pandemic. They are asking customers to boycott these companies during the strike. Almost uniformly, the companies they work for have retaliated against workers or refused to meet their demands, which include guaranteed paid sick leave, personal protective equipment such as masks and hand sanitizer, and hazard pay.

Motherboard asked some workers who are participating in the strike to take the brave step of explaining why they are striking, and what they want the public to know about their working conditions

Tim Billado, Whole Foods worker, Portland, Oregon

One would think that with the economic resources it would take to put together a union organizing tracking system that Whole Foods would listen to their team members’ concerns and make good on providing things like a livable wage and paid sick time for all workers. No need for fancy (and probably expensive) technology to tell you what could be known by actually listening to your workers. It’s almost like they feel threatened by their workers advocating for autonomy. Public support is what helps workers have the confidence to organize.

Willy Solis, Shipt shopper, Dallas, Texas


There are two things I would like to tell the general public about Shipt. The first one is that they will do anything in their power to silence our voices. They will go as far as defaming us, smearing us, and outright intimidation. They will release our personal information to the media in an effort to discredit us, so that we are not used as reliable sources. Even if we’re not being utilized as a source for a particular story. Our information is being given freely in an effort to keep us from speaking out. The second thing I would like the general public to know is that we will not be silenced. We are a collective of several thousand people. Singularly, we are weak, collectively we are strong. We will continue to speak out the truth. In regards to our demands, PPE for all, for example. Shipt tells the general public that they have procured enough PPE for all shoppers. The reality is that all shoppers have not received PPE, only a select few have. I myself have ordered masks and have yet to receive them. And here we are at the end of April. The reality on the ground is totally different than the PR spin being given by the company. I ask that customers and shoppers support us by calling Shipt and voicing their concerns. Let them know that we deserve to be heard, we have a right to speak out, we have a right to ask for basic protections.


An anonymous Shipt shopper

I have been working as a Shipt Shopper since December of last year. When I started this job, I thought it would be perfect for my situation. I've had two failed spinal fusions, so being able to work a schedule of my own making and choose what I pick up was ideal. However, this job is creating a major issue in my life because Shipt doesn't see me as a person. I'm a number on a body bag. They don't care if I live or die working this job. There are more people who can replace me. I loved this job. Being able to help people, shop at Target, and be paid. Yes, please. Now it's a constant fight to get orders. They are lying left and right in their PR scheme. It's hurtful to be treated with such little disrespect. I'm striking for hazard pay and for a more transparent pay scale. I need to know how much I'm going to make so I can continue to see my doctor, get my prescriptions, pay my rent, and all my other bills.


Essence Nash, Amazon warehouse worker, Etna, Ohio

I am striking because of Amazon's work environment is hard mentally, physically and emotionally. It's sad we had to wait for a pandemic to get to this point, but I'm hoping this changes the work environment and labor as a whole for the future. Two things I wish the public knew about work conditions are that we get cases of COVID-19 daily and that there are no extra steps they're taking besides the ones we have been doing since the pandemic started. We’re also being micromanaged all day everyday no matter what you do while we’re at work.

Cassidy Melczak, Target worker, specialty sales in tech, Matthews, North Carolina

I'd like the public to know that most Target team members they come into contact with every day do not have health insurance. That means they can't actually get the testing they need to know whether or not they are carriers for the virus, because many carriers don't have symptoms.

I'd also like the public to understand that this is a natural disaster. It's slow and invisible, but people are dying. We don't keep stores open during a wildfire so that people can buy a TV or a new video game console. We send in front line experts and protect the people who are in harm's way. We should be treating this the same.

Minnie Val, Shipt shopper

I am striking on May 1st because Shipt has cut my pay while saying they are paying their shoppers 30 percent more. This is a horrible thing to do during these COVID-19 times. They also haven't provided everyone with PPE while stating in the press that they have.

Bill, Instacart full service shopper, Houston, Texas

I think it’s ironic we’re talking about a strike because basically I’ve been made unemployed by Instacart. Being a full-service shopper for Instacart for two years, I averaged between $500-$800 a week, but because of certain elements of Instacart being hacked by third party bots or an overhiring, I have basically been rendered unemployed. The last two weeks I made $130 and $60.

Tom, FedEx Ground packaging handler, Grove City, Ohio

I am striking in solidarity with Amazon and other workers all over the United States, because I believe a better world is truly possible. If we all come together and stop the machinery of the system, we can democratically make demands and make a world where men like Jeff Bezos and Fred Smith can’t profit billions off the deaths and misery of their workers, especially during a pandemic.

One thing I wish people knew is that we die moving packages for FedEx, and it’s been happening before COVID-19. In late January of 2019, a FedEx worker died after being exposed to temperatures exceeding -20 degrees in East Moline, Illinois. An unknown number of FedEx employees have died so far from COVID-19.

The second thing I wish people knew was that they are not protecting us, drivers and other hubs aren’t getting PPE, drivers and multiple hubs aren’t being compensated properly at FedEx Ground and Express, they’re not temperature checking people, they have us working on top of each other and aren’t following social distancing guidelines, they have drivers coming in for things that could be emailed. FedEx isn’t taking this seriously and Fred Smith and the corporate executives, and shareholders do not care about us, they care about money.

Jurassic Park got it wrong: UW Oshkosh research indicates raptors don't hunt in packs 

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN OSHKOSH
NEWS RELEASE 6-MAY-2020

A new University of Wisconsin Oshkosh analysis of raptor teeth published in the peer-reviewed journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology shows that Velociraptors and their kin likely did not hunt in big, coordinated packs like dogs.

The raptors (Deinonychus antirrhopus) with their sickle-shaped talons were made famous in the 1993 blockbuster movie Jurassic Park, which portrayed them as highly intelligent, apex predators that worked in groups to hunt large prey.

"Raptorial dinosaurs often are shown as hunting in packs similar to wolves," said Joseph Frederickson, a vertebrate paleontologist and director of the Weis Earth Science Museum on the UWO Fox Cities campus. "The evidence for this behavior, however, is not altogether convincing. Since we can't watch these dinosaurs hunt in person, we must use indirect methods to determine their behavior in life."

Frederickson led the study in partnership with two colleagues at the University of Oklahoma and Sam Noble Museum, Michael Engel and Richard Cifell.

Though widely accepted, evidence for the pack-hunting dinosaur proposed by the late famed Yale University paleontologist John Ostrom is relatively weak, Frederickson said.

"The problem with this idea is that living dinosaurs (birds) and their relatives (crocodilians) do not usually hunt in groups and rarely ever hunt prey larger than themselves," he explained.

"Further, behavior like pack hunting does not fossilize so we can't directly test whether the animals actually worked together to hunt prey."

Recently, scientists have proposed a different model for behavior in raptors that is thought to be more like Komodo dragons or crocodiles, in which individuals may attack the same animal but cooperation is limited.

            WE'RE A PAIR NOT A PACK

"We proposed in this study that there is a correlation between pack hunting and the diet of animals as they grow," Frederickson said.

In Komodo dragons, babies are at risk of being eaten by adults, so they take refuge in trees, where they find a wealth of food unavailable to their larger ground-dwelling parents. Animals that hunt in packs do not generally show this dietary diversity.

"If we can look at the diet of young raptors versus old raptors, we can come up with a hypothesis for whether they hunted in groups," Frederickson said.
To do this, the scientists considered the chemistry of teeth from the raptor Deinonychus, which lived in North America during the Cretaceous Period about 115 to 108 million years ago.


"Stable isotopes of carbon and oxygen were used to get an idea of diet and water sources for these animals. We also looked at a crocodilian and an herbivorous dinosaur from the same geologic formation," he said.


The scientists found that the Cretaceous crocodilians, like modern species, show a difference in diet between the smallest and largest teeth, indicating a distinct transition in diet as they grew.

"This is what we would expect for an animal where the parents do not provide food for their young," Frederickson said. "We also see the same pattern in the raptors, where the smallest teeth and the large teeth do not have the same average carbon isotope values, indicating they were eating different foods. This means the young were not being fed by the adults, which is why we believe Jurassic Park was wrong about raptor behavior."

Frederickson added that the method used in this study to analyze carbon in teeth could be applied to see whether other extinct creatures may have hunted in packs.

DDT, other banned pesticides found in Detroit-area black women: BU study

Over half of a cohort of 23-35-year-old black women from Detroit had detectable levels of organochlorine pesticides in their blood, possibly from tobacco, alcohol, and water.

BOSTON UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

Over half of a cohort of 23-35-year-old black women from Detroit had detectable levels of organochlorine pesticides in their blood, possibly from tobacco, alcohol, and water.

A new Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) study published in the journal Environmental Research finds detectable levels of DDE (what DDT becomes when metabolized in the body) and other banned organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) in the blood of over 60 percent of a cohort of black women of reproductive age in the Detroit area, with higher levels in women who smoked cigarettes daily, drank more alcohol, and drank more water.

Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and other OCPs were banned decades ago. But they can dissolve into a person's body fat, and remain there for years, causing hormonal and metabolic issues, and even brain development issues from in-utero exposure.

"If cigarettes, alcohol, and drinking water are in fact exposing black women to pesticides, this matters!" says study lead author Dr. Olivia Orta, a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Epidemiology at BUSPH.

"The sources that we identified as potential OCP correlates should be tested for pesticide contamination," she says, "especially drinking water."

However, Orta cautions that the study was not able to distinguish between bottled and tap water, or test participants' tap water for these chemicals, so "we do not want to suggest that black women in Detroit reduce their water consumption in response to our study findings," she says. Instead, the study points to the importance of water monitoring--which has been notoriously inequitable, as seen in nearby Flint--and the need to test for OCPs in tap and bottled water as well as in alcohol and tobacco, she says.

Orta and colleagues used data from the Study of Environment, Lifestyle, and Fibroids (SELF), a prospective cohort study of reproductive-age black women recruited from the Detroit metropolitan area from 2010 to 2012. For the current study, the researchers analyzed blood samples from 742 fibroid-free participants, given when they entered the study, and their responses to questionnaires about health histories, demographics, behaviors, and other factors.

The researchers found detectable levels of four OCPs--dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDE), hexachlorobenzene (HCB), oxychlordane, and trans-nonachlor--in over 60 percent of the participants.

Adjusting for the other factors, the researchers found that heavy alcohol use was associated with 7-9 percent higher concentrations of DDE, oxychlordane, and trans-nonachlor in the women's blood plasma. Current smoking was associated with 10-19 percent higher concentrations of all four OCPs, and was highest for women who smoked ten or more cigarettes a day. Women who drank five or more glasses of water per day had 8-15 percent higher concentrations of all four OCPs, but especially trans-nonachlor, compared to women who drank two glasses of water or fewer per day.

The researchers also found evidence of exposure when the women were infants in the late 1970s and early-to-mid 1980s, the period when these pesticides were being banned. Study participants who were older had higher OCP concentrations, with each five-year age increment associated with 24 percent higher oxychlordane and 26 percent higher trans-nonachlor concentrations. Women who had been breastfed had 15 percent higher concentrations of DDE, 14 percent higher oxychlordane, and 15 percent higher trans-nonachlor than women who hadn't been breastfed.

###

About the Boston University School of Public Health

Founded in 1976, the Boston University School of Public Health is one of the top five ranked private schools of public health in the world. It offers master's- and doctoral-level education in public health. The faculty in six departments conduct policy-changing public health research around the world, with the mission of improving the health of populations--especially the disadvantaged, underserved, and vulnerable--locally and globally.

SEE  RACHEL CARSON SILENT SPRING 1958

Lyin' eyes: Butterfly, moth eyespots may look the same, but likely evolved separately

FLORIDA MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

IMAGE: DOSES OF THE BLOOD THINNER HEPARIN ALTERED THE EYESPOT PATTERNS IN IO AND POLYPHEMUS MOTHS. THE FACT THAT THE TWO SPECIES RESPONDED DIFFERENTLY TO HEPARIN SUGGESTS THAT WING PATTERN DEVELOPS... view more 

CREDIT: ANDREI SOURAKOV/FLORIDA MUSEUM

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- The iconic eyespots that some moths and butterflies use to ward off predators likely evolved in distinct ways, providing insights into how these insects became so diverse.

A new study manipulated early eyespot development in moth pupae to test whether this wing pattern develops similarly in butterflies and moths. The results suggest that the underlying development of eyespots differs even among moth species in same family, hinting that moths and butterflies evolved these patterns independently.

Influencing how eyespots form can lead to a better understanding of the respective roles genetics and the environment play in moth and butterfly wing patterns, said lead author Andrei Sourakov.

"Moths stumbled on a very successful evolutionary design over 200 million years ago," said Sourakov, collections coordinator of the Florida Museum's McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity. "That's a long time for evolution to take place. It's easy to assume that things that look the same are the same. But nature constantly finds a way of answering the same question with a different approach."

Sourakov and co-author Leila Shirai, a biologist at the University of Campinas in Brazil, analyzed eyespot development in io and polyphemus moths, two species in the Saturniidae family. The eyespots in the two species responded differently to the study's treatments, though the findings suggest the same signaling pathways were active. The researchers also found moths' wing pattern development, which begins when they are caterpillars, slows just after they enter their pupal stage, a finding that echoes previous butterfly research.

Honing in on the signaling pathways involved in eyespot development - the molecular cascade that produces pigmentation and pattern in moths and butterflies - is central to determining the similarities and differences between moth and butterfly development, Sourakov said. Looking at DNA isn't enough. Instead, scientists need to determine what happens after a gene is expressed to see if seemingly identical wing patterns truly are the same.

"Genetically controlled variation can look identical to environmentally induced variation," Sourakov said. "Variation isn't really produced by genes themselves, but by the intermediate product of the gene - in this case, molecular pathways."

Sourakov and Shirai's research expands on a 2017 study by Sourakov that showed molecules in the blood thinner heparin influenced eyespot development in moths.

In the new study, heparin triggered various changes in moth eyespots, including smudging and a shift in proportion. Despite similar molecular interactions, however, the changes were inconsistent between the io and polyphemus moths, potentially due to the different ways their wing patterns are mapped out by genes.

Sourakov and Shirai were able to detect wing development was likely paused just after pupation by delivering varying doses of heparin to caterpillars and pupae at different developmental stages. They also found eyespot tissue transplanted to a different region of the wing during pupation could induce patterning.

Natural history collections are key resources in revealing which wing patterns took hold genetically and became visible in populations, Sourakov said.

"Collections are where it all starts and where it all ends, frankly," he said. "We can generally look at collections as a window into evolution, helping us understand which changes are just lab results and which ones can actually be observed in nature. Variation in genetics and physical characteristics is the toolbox for the evolution of diversity, and diversity is what we study at the museum. Collections help us understand that."

Sustainable recovery of nutrients from urine

Columbia engineers use a membrane-based technique and a closed-loop system to recover ammonia as a valuable fertilizer product while simultaneously removing it as a pollutant from waste streams

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCE

 

IMAGE: URINE, WHICH CONTAINS MOST THE NITROGEN EXCRETED BY HUMANS, CAN BE ISOLATED AT THE SOURCE VIA DRY URINALS AND URINE-DIVERSION TOILETS. THROUGH ISOTHERMAL MD, VOLATILE AMMONIA IN HYDROLYZED URINE IS... view more 

CREDIT: NGAI YIN YIP AND CHANHEE BOO/COLUMBIA ENGINEERING

New York, NY--May 6, 2019--Ammonia is a key component of fertilizer and vital in supporting plant growth and ultimately providing food for populations around the world. It is also a major pollutant that, after it is used in the food chain, enters municipal wastewater treatment plants where it is often not adequately removed. It is then released into the environment where it pollutes aquatic settings and damages ecosystems, triggering destructive algal blooms, dead zones, and fish kills.

Ammonia capture is now a critical challenge for the 21st century, especially as city populations are expected to increase dramatically, with a projected urban growth of 2.5 billion people by 2050. At the same time, providing improved sanitation to the 2.3 billion people who are currently unserved globally will entail the installation of new toilets, wastewater facilities, and sanitation infrastructure, putting even more stress on the environment.

To date, most ammonia capture is done through an extremely energy-intensive technique, the Haber-Bosch process, which is used by industry across the globe to produce fertilizer and accounts for 1-2% of the world's annual energy consumption. A Columbia Engineering team, led by Ngai Yin Yip, assistant professor of earth and environmental engineering, reports today that they have recovered ammonia through a new method that uses a very low level of energy, approximately a fifth of the energy used by the Haber-Bosch process. In addition, because the technique recycles ammonia in a closed loop, the ammonia can be recaptured for reuse in fertilizer, household cleaners, and other industrial products. The findings are published today by ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering.

The management of nitrogen, an essential nutrient for life, has been recognized by the National Academy of Engineering as one of the Grand Challenges of the 21st century. Yip's group, which focuses on advancing sustainable production of both energy and water, wanted to invent a better, more ecological way to produce nitrogen, of which ammonia is a bioavailable form.

"It was clear that we needed a paradigm shift to transition to a circular economy model, where nitrogen is recovered and recycled, instead of the current unsustainable linear approach of costly production, utilization, and then discarding pollutants to the environment," Yip says.

Yip's team has expertise in membrane distillation, a technique that drives the permeation of volatile species, in this case, ammonia, from a feed stream to a collector stream, while the non-volatile species remain in the feed stream. The volatile species are driven across the membrane by a difference in vapor pressure, which is dependent on temperature and concentration. The researchers developed a technique, which they call "isothermal membrane distillation with acidic collector," or IMD-AC, that uses low-temperature heat, and applied it to selectively separate and capture ammonia from the ammonia-rich waste stream of urine (simulated for this project).

"Because our process is driven by moderate temperatures as low as 20-60 degrees Celsius, the energy can be supplied by cheap or even free waste heat from, for instance, cooling tower water, bath water, or solar thermal collectors," Yip says.

Next steps for the team include exploring ways to recover phosphorus, another key ingredient of fertilizer, sustainably and cheaply from urine.

"Now that we've demonstrated the sustainable recovery of nitrogen from urine," Yip adds, "we think that the growing population and sanitation trends present ideal opportunities for the introduction of decentralized urine diversion facilities for nutrient recovery, without costly retrofits or overhauls of the existing system, shifting wastewater management to a more sustainable and efficient paradigm."

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About the Study

The study is titled "Novel Isothermal Membrane Distillation with Acidic Collector for Selective and Energy-Efficient Recovery of Ammonia from Urine."

Authors are: Stephanie N. McCartney, Natalie Williams, Chanhee Boo, Xi Chen, and Ngai Yin Yip, (Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering, Columbia University; Yip is also a member of the Columbia Water Center).

The study was supported by the National Science Foundation INFEWS Award (#1903705).

The authors declare no financial or other conflicts of interest.

LINKS:

Paper: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acssuschemeng.0c00643

DOI: 10.1021/acssuschemeng.0c00643

http://engineering.columbia.edu/

https://engineering.columbia.edu/faculty/ngai-yin-yip

https://eee.columbia.edu/

http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/challenges/nitrogen.aspx

Columbia Engineering

Columbia Engineering, based in New York City, is one of the top engineering schools in the U.S. and one of the oldest in the nation. Also known as The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, the School expands knowledge and advances technology through the pioneering research of its more than 220 faculty, while educating undergraduate and graduate students in a collaborative environment to become leaders informed by a firm foundation in engineering. The School's faculty are at the center of the University's cross-disciplinary research, contributing to the Data Science Institute, Earth Institute, Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Precision Medicine Initiative, and the Columbia Nano Initiative. Guided by its strategic vision, "Columbia Engineering for Humanity," the School aims to translate ideas into innovations that foster a sustainable, healthy, secure, connected, and creative humanity.

Workers happy despite crisis and uncertainty

UNIVERSITY OF ZURICH

 

In general, workers in Switzerland and Germany are coping well with the Covid-19 crisis and the associated social disruption. They are feeling happier and finding it easier to unwind and balance work and private life. They are also more engaged at work than last year, a survey among 600 participants carried out by researchers of the University of Zurich shows.

Workers are currently having to be very flexible: They must come to terms with a new situation at work and changes in their workload, they may have to take on additional childcare duties, and they are facing an uncertain future. Occupational health researchers at the Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute of the University of Zurich have examined the effects these challenges have had on the workers' well-being and health.

Pre- and post-outbreak comparison

The researchers conducted a survey in April 2020 among almost 600 workers who had already participated in a survey in June 2019 about their work conditions, well-being and strategies to improve their situation at work and leisure. This enabled the researchers to compare the situation of the survey participants before and after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. "We had anticipated that workers would feel more stressed during the crisis than before," says study leader Rebecca Brauchli. The study, however, suggests that the opposite is true, "which once again shows how remarkably adaptable people are."

When asked to give a general assessment of their situation, 29 percent of survey participants said that their work situation had deteriorated after the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis, and only 11 percent said that it had improved. These figures were also reflected in the workers' assessment of their private lives. However, this retrospective general assessment did not coincide with the survey findings gained from comparing specific answers before and after the outbreak of the pandemic.

Work and life in balance

When it comes to specific answers, the researchers found that workers are happier with their professional and private lives than one year ago, and that both spheres of life are perceived as more enriching. According to the survey, the workers are now able to expand their professional skills and learn new things. They feel more supported by their colleagues in their private life and, above all, are better able to control how and when they work. This autonomy in carrying out their work is likely also a reason why workers are currently better at maintaining a balance between work and private life. "There are fewer conflicts between work and private life," says Brauchli. "Significantly so, when it comes to people working from home." They are more actively shaping their free time and work-life balance than a year ago. The same goes for workers affected by short-time working.

More engaged, more relaxed, but less optimistic

In general, survey participants said they were better able to unwind from work. The general workload has decreased slightly, as have signs of burnout. "However, this doesn't mean that workers have been less engaged at work," emphasizes Brauchli. Quite the opposite, in fact: Across all groups, workers have been significantly more engaged at work.

The survey shows a slight deterioration when it comes to the workers' assessment of their own psychological and physical health. According to Brauchli, it is worth taking a closer look at the specific questions here. In terms of their own optimism and feeling of being close to others, respondents gave significantly lower ratings than in the previous survey. Physical exercise also decreased somewhat, in frequency and especially in intensity. At the same time, the survey respondents felt more relaxed and reported being able to think more clearly.

Greater burden for workers looking after children

Despite the generally positive developments in the professional and private lives of workers, the researchers found some exceptions in subgroups, especially among workers who also take care of small children. In contrast to other groups, these workers feel a slightly increased burden at home. Unlike the other survey respondents, they are not benefiting from the recreational effects and reduced workload, and generally feel less supported by their colleagues than a year ago. The latter, with slight variation, also applies to people working from home: They are more likely to be overwhelmed in terms of work content, "probably because they lack the support of their line managers or colleagues when facing a problem," suspects Rebecca Brauchli.

Favorable effects of flexibility and autonomy

Workers report feeling unsettled and steamrollered by recent events, which according to Brauchli could be a reason for their slightly downbeat overall retrospective assessment: "As the world has gone awry, they probably don't really trust their own positive feelings." A comparison of their answers to specific questions from one year ago and now, however, shows that many workers are significantly happier with their professional and private lives, and are mostly benefiting from the slower pace of life and resulting calm. "Increased flexibility and autonomy in particular appear to have a positive effect on the worker's well-being," says Brauchli. "This could also be something we can learn from for the future of work."

Composition of sample

The survey was conducted among 597 workers (54% men and 46% women) in Switzerland and Germany, with an average age of 49. 4% of survey respondents hold an executive role, and 24% are line managers. 29% live alone, 68% with a partner or their family, and 3% in a shared flat or house. 44% do not have to take care of children or other people, while almost 25% have at least one child under the age of 20. Around one quarter of survey participants were affected by short-time working. Workload has increased for 11% and decreased for 34% of respondents since the beginning of the crisis. While 24% worked from home to at least some extent before the crisis, this figure rose to 45% after the outbreak of the pandemic. For 17% of respondents, childcare duties have increased since the beginning of the crisis.

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TRANSHUMANISM 

Controlling your home by the power of thought

DEUTSCHES PRIMATENZENTRUM (DPZ)/GERMAN PRIMATE CENTER

Walking across the room to switch on a light - such a simple everyday activity involves enormously complex computations by the brain as it requires interpretation of the scene, control of the gait and planning upcoming movements such as the arm movement to the light switch. Neuroscientists at the German Primate Center (DPZ) - Leibniz Institute for Primate Research have now investigated in which brain areas the movements are coded for reaching distant targets that require both arm and walking movements, and how the movements are planned in the brain before execution. For this purpose, they have created a novel experimental environment, the "Reach Cage". First results with rhesus monkeys show that distant movement targets, which the animals have to walk to, are encoded in the same areas of the brain as close targets, even before the animal starts walking. This means that movement goals, near and far from the body, can be obtained from the same brain areas no matter if the goal requires walking or not. These findings could be harnessed to develop brain-machine interfaces that control smart homes (eLife).

Our highly developed nervous system enables versatile and coordinated movement sequences in complex environments. We only notice the impact on our daily life when we are no longer able to perform certain actions, for example, as a result of a paralysis caused by a stroke. A novel approach to put the patient back in control would be brain-computer interfaces that are able to read signals from the brain. Such signals can be used as control signals not only for neuroprosthetic devices, which aim at directly replacing the lost motor function, but also for any computerized devices such as smartphones, tablets or a smart home.

The development of brain-computer interfaces builds on decades of basic research on the planning and control of movements in the cerebral cortex of humans and animals, especially non-human primates. Up to now, scientists performed such experiments mostly to investigate the planning of controlled hand and arm movements to nearby targets within immediate reach. However, those experiments are too constrained to study action planning in large realistic environments, such as a one's home. For example, turning on the light switch on the opposite wall involves different types of overlapping movements with coordination of multiple parts of the body.

Experimental constraints so far prevented scientists from studying neural circuits involved in action planning during whole-body movements, since animals must be able to move freely during the brain recordings. Observing a combination of walking and reaching movements, such as in the case of distant targets, required a completely new experimental environment that was not available yet. The so-called "Reach Cage" provides a test environment that allows to register and interpret the movement behavior, and to link it to the related brain activity while the animals are able to move freely under highly controlled conditions.

For the experiment, two rhesus monkeys were trained to touch targets close to or distant from their body. For distant targets, a walking movement was required to bring the target within reach. Illumination of individual targets instructed the animals which target they should touch. Using multiple video cameras, the movements were observed in 3D with high temporal and spatial precision. So called deep-learning algorithms were used to automatically extract the movements of their head, shoulder, elbow and wrist in 3D from the video images. Simultaneously, brain activity was recorded wirelessly so that the animals were not restricted in their movements at any time. By measuring the activity of hundreds of neurons from 192 electrodes in three different brain regions, it is now possible to draw conclusions about how movements are planned and executed in parallel.

Over the course of the training the monkeys performed reaching and walking movements with increasing confidence and optimized their behavior to reach high precision even when the targets were at a greater distance. "In the video analysis we can track the movements very accurately. The wirelessly recorded brain signals are so precise and clear that the activity of individual neurons can be studied and linked to behavior", says Michael Berger.

The results show that motor planning areas of the brain process information about the goal of specific movements even if the goal is at the other end of the room and a whole-body movement is first required to get there. Alexander Gail, head of the Sensorimotor Group, adds: "Such knowledge is not only important to understand the deficits of patients who have difficulty in planning and coordinating actions. The new insights also might turn out particularly useful when developing brain-computer interfaces for controlling smart homes for which goals, such as doors, windows or lights, are distributed throughout a complex environment."

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This research is part of "Plan4Act", an EU-funded project to develop brain-machine interfaces for smart homes with project partners in Germany, Spain and Denmark.