Early childhood education centers can boost parents' engagement at home

UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

 

COVID-19 has temporarily shuttered many early childhood education centers across the country, shifting full-time child care and teaching responsibilities largely to parents.

As some of those centers look toward reopening, they can play an important part in ensuring that parents continue to be engaged in their children's education at home, says University of Arizona researcher Melissa Barnett.

In a study conducted before the pandemic began, Barnett and her colleagues looked at the role that early childhood education centers play in encouraging parents to engage in educational activities with their children both at the centers and at home. The researchers also explored how parental engagement can help better prepare young children for kindergarten.

Their findings were recently published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly.

"There's been some research evidence that when parents of preschoolers are more engaged in early childhood education centers, their children may be more prepared for kindergarten. But it's not entirely clear why that's the case," said Barnett, lead study author and an associate professor of family studies and human development in the UArizona Norton School of Family and Consumer Sciences, housed in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

"One of the goals of our study was to understand the extent to which parents perceive that early childhood educators are working with them and engaging them, and whether that is linked to school readiness," said Barnett, who also is director of the Norton School's Frances McClelland Institute for Children, Youth and Families.

Among the researchers' key findings:

When parents perceive that early childhood education centers do a good job of communicating with them and providing information about how their children are doing, they are more likely to engage in educational activities such as reading and singing with their children - both at the center and at home. And the more parents engage in educational activities at home, the better prepared their children are for kindergarten, in terms of language and early reading skills.

The more involved parents are in center activities - such as volunteering in classrooms, attending meetings or chaperoning field trips - the more educational activities they do with their children at home.

Although early childhood education centers appear to influence the quantity of at-home educational activities, they do not influence the quality of those activities. And the quality of at-home educational activities is one of the strongest predictors of a child's school readiness, influencing not only language and early reading skills but also early math skills.

The research is based on data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study - Birth Cohort, a nationally representative sample of 10,700 children who were born in the United States in 2001 were followed from birth to kindergarten. The researchers homed in on the 17% of those children who were enrolled in early childhood education centers at age 4.

Those children's parents rated a series of statements designed to measure how well they thought their early childhood education centers did at keeping them informed and involved. The parents also answered questions about how often they engaged in educational activities with their children, both at the center and at home.

The children completed assessments to measure their language, reading and early math skills prior to entering kindergarten.

"For children who are enrolled in early childhood education centers, what parents did at home was a good predictor of how well children were prepared for school, in terms of the quantity of what parents were doing and the quality of what they were doing," Barnett said. "We found that more engagement in the early childhood education centers was related to doing more at home, and that seemed to be especially true for lower-income households."

The researchers also observed parents and children engaging in learning activities and assessed the quality of those interactions based on how much cognitive stimulation they provided. They found that quality matters even more than quantity for school readiness.

"It's important that parents read with their kids and sing to their kids. But the quality of what parents are doing also is really critical and perhaps harder to change," Barnett said.

That's an area where early childhood education centers could make a difference in the future, she said.

"Parents who are able to engage and volunteer at those centers are getting the message that they need to read with their kids and sing songs with their kids, but they may not be getting messages about how best to do that," Barnett said.

Some best practices, she said, include thinking about ways to build activities around a child's unique interests and abilities, and making activities such as reading more meaningful by stopping to ask questions that help children relate stories to their own experiences.

Pandemic Could Impact Access

Unfortunately, Barnett said, many families don't have access to early childhood education centers and the support they provide, especially in lower-income areas, where, according to her findings, they might have the most impact. The problem could be made even worse by COVID-19, she said, as some centers hit hard financially may be forced to close permanently.

"We know that many families in many communities didn't have access to high-quality early childhood education, even before the pandemic, and it's become an increasingly significant problem as centers have closed and may need to remain closed," she said. "In part, our findings point to the value of those opportunities for lower-income parents to be involved in early childhood education centers, so this potentially could even further increase what we see as a socioeconomic gap in school readiness."

For now, with many parents of all socioeconomic backgrounds at home with their kids, Barnett stresses the importance of focusing on quality activities as much as possible.

"This may be an especially challenging time to do that, as parents are juggling multiple potential stressors and time crunches," she said, "but those home learning activities really are important to prepare children for school."

###

The complex relationship between deforestation and diet diversity in the Amazon

As increasing areas of the Amazonian rainforest are converted into agricultural land, scientists are examining how this is linked with local communities' food access

INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR TROPICAL AGRICULTURE (CIAT)

 

IMAGE: COMMERCIAL AGRICULTURE, SUCH AS PALM OIL AND COCOA PLANTATIONS, IS EXPANDING ALONG THE AMAZONIAN FOREST FRONTIER. view more 

CREDIT: © CIAT

Ten years ago, non-indigenous households from three communities in the Ucayali region in Peru regularly ate fish, wild fruits and other products collected from the Amazon forest. Combined with whatever they grew and harvested on their lands, this contributed to a relatively diverse diet. Today, the same households have changed their production strategy and how they get food on the table. Agricultural production, complemented by hunter-gatherer activities, aimed to satisfy both household consumption and income generation. However, this has been largely replaced by commercial agriculture such as palm oil and cocoa. This shift in agricultural production objectives has affected the sources of food for local communities and appears to be associated with relatively less diverse diets, according to a new study authored, among others, by CIAT (now the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT) scientists.

"Our objective was to test the hypothesis that the economic transformations linked to the expansion of cash crops in mestizo communities, especially oil palm, were associated with deforestation and reduced agricultural biodiversity and that this was likely to be associated with changes in food access," says Genowefa Blundo Canto, co-author and Post Doc researcher at CIAT at the time of the study.

The study represents one of rather few attempts to trace changes in food access, livelihood strategies, deforestation and agricultural biodiversity over time. The scientists collected data on livelihood strategies and nutritional health among 53 families in the Ucayali region in Peru and compared the results with data gathered from the same families in the early 2000s. Despite the small sample, caused by significant outmigration from these communities, the results were remarkable.

"We found that in the 15-year study period, farming households shifted from diets based on limited consumption of meat and dairy items and high consumption of plant-based foods from their own production, towards diets with high protein and fat content, with food items increasingly purchased in the market. In parallel, production systems became less diversified, more market-orientated and specialised toward commercial crops, oil palm and cacao in particular," says Blundo Canto.

The scientific team concluded that the expansion of commercial agriculture, such as palm oil and cocoa plantations at the Amazonian forest frontier, appears to be associated with simplified food production systems, reduced agricultural diversity and less access to food, measured in terms of the household dietary diversity score.

"This study is crucial to understand how deforestation not only affects the climate, but also has profound socio-economic and nutritional impacts on the communities living on the forest frontier. Even though Peru and other Latin American countries have progressed in economic terms, there are high malnutrition percentages especially among children. Something tells us that even though farmers might now make more money from, for example, oil palm farming, this might not improve other life quality aspects such as nutrition for children," explains another co-author Marcela Quintero, Multifunctional Landscapes Research Area Director at the Alliance.

The marked rise in obesity in rural areas of Peru reflects a worldwide trend. While the study only looked at the diversity of household diets and not the nutritional value, the increased consumption of foods high in saturated fats and ultra-processed foods demands the attention of local policy makers.

"These results, which are consistent with emerging evidence for a dietary transition in the Amazon, have major implications for land use and food policies in the region as well as for health policies, since it has recently been highlighted that unhealthy diets are the main cause of disease worldwide. We therefore recommend that future development actions at the Amazonian forest-agriculture interface should address deforestation and promote agrobiodiversity for more diverse diets and local markets over the expansion of cash crops, in order to ensure long-term food and nutritional security among farmers and the rural communities that they supply," concludes Blundo Canto.

The research team wants to complement the research with a specific study on how the nutritional quality of the diets might have changed to further argue for focused research and policy development that will work for the benefit and well-being of communities living on the borders of forests around the world. Likewise, the team is seeking opportunities to replicate this study with indigenous communities. Meanwhile, the Alliance is working with oil palm producers and the regional government of Ucayali to re-design their business models in a way that are deforestation-free.

###

Boron nitride destroys PFAS 'forever' chemicals PFOA, GenX

Pollutant-destroying properties surprise Rice engineer: 'It's not supposed to work'

RICE UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE BORON NITRIDE PHOTOCATALYSIS THAT DESTROYS THE POLLUTANT PFOA IN WATER. view more 

CREDIT: IMAGE COURTESY OF M. WONG/RICE UNIVERSITY

HOUSTON -- (July 7, 2020) -- Rice University chemical engineers found an efficient catalyst for destroying PFAS "forever" chemicals where they least expected.

"It was the control," said Rice Professor Michael Wong, referring to the part of a scientific experiment where researchers don't expect surprises. The control group is the yardstick of experimental science, the baseline by which variables are measured.

"We haven't yet tested this at a full scale, but in our benchtop tests in the lab, we could get rid of 99% of PFOA in four hours," Wong said of boron nitride, the light-activated catalyst he and his students stumbled upon and spent more than a year testing.

Their study, which is available online in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters, found boron nitride destroyed PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid) at a faster clip than any previously reported photocatalyst. PFOA is one of the most prevalent PFAS (perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances), a family of more than 4,000 compounds developed in the 20th century to make coatings for waterproof clothing, food packaging, nonstick pans and countless other uses. PFAS have been dubbed forever chemicals for their tendency to linger in the environment, and scientists have found them in the blood of virtually all Americans, including newborns.

Catalysts are Wong's specialty. They are compounds that bring about chemical reactions without taking part or being consumed in those reactions. His lab has created catalysts for destroying a number of pollutants, including TCE and nitrates, and he said he tasked his team with finding new catalysts to address PFAS about 18 months ago.

"We tried a lot of things," said Wong, chair of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in Rice's Brown School of Engineering. "We tried several materials that I thought were going to work. None of them did. This wasn't supposed to work, and it did."

The catalyst, boron nitride powder, or BN, is a commercially available synthetic mineral that's widely used in makeup, skin care products, thermal pastes that cool computer chips and other consumer and industrial products.

The discovery began with dozens of failed experiments on more likely PFAS catalysts. Wong said he asked two members of his lab, visiting graduate student Lijie Duan of China's Tsinghua University and Rice graduate student Bo Wang, to do final experiments on one set of candidate compounds before moving on to others.

"There was literature that suggested one of them might be a photocatalyst, meaning it would be activated by light of a particular wavelength," Wong said. "We don't use light very often in our group, but I said, 'Let's go ahead and doodle around with it.' The sun is free energy. Let's see what we can do with light."

As before, none of the experimental groups performed well, but Duan noticed something unusual with the boron nitride control. She and Wang repeated the experiments numerous times to rule out unexpected errors, problems with sample preparation and other explanations for the strange result. They kept seeing the same thing.

"Here's the observation," Wong said. "You take a flask of water that contains some PFOA, you throw in your BN powder, and you seal it up. That's it. You don't need to add any hydrogen or purge it with oxygen. It's just the air we breathe, the contaminated water and the BN powder. You expose that to ultraviolet light, specifically to UV-C light with a wavelength of 254 nanometers, come back in four hours, and 99% of the PFOA has been transformed into fluoride, carbon dioxide and hydrogen."

The problem was the light. The 254-nanometer wavelength, which is commonly used in germicidal lamps, is too small to activate the bandgap in boron nitride. While that was unquestionably true, the experiments suggested it could not be.

"If you take away the light, you don't get catalysis," Wong said. "If you leave out the BN powder and only use the light, you don't get a reaction."

So boron nitride was clearly absorbing the light and catalyzing a reaction that destroyed PFOA, despite that fact that it should have been optically impossible for boron nitride to absorb 254-nanometer UV-C light.

"It's not supposed to work," Wong said. "That's why no one ever thought to look for this, and that's why it took so long for us to publish the results. We needed some sort of explanation for this contradiction."

Wong said he, Duan, Wang and co-authors offered a plausible explanation in the study.

"We concluded that our material does absorb the 254-nanometer light, and it's because of atomic defects in our powder," he said. "The defects change the bandgap. They shrink it enough for the powder to absorb just enough light to create the reactive oxidizing species that chew up the PFOA."

Wong said more experimental evidence will be needed to confirm the explanation. But in light of the results with PFOA, he wondered if the boron nitride catalyst might also work on other PFAS compounds.

"So I asked my students to do one more thing," Wong said. "I had them replace PFOA in the tests with GenX."

GenX is also a forever chemical. When PFOA was banned, GenX was one of the most widely used chemicals to replace it. And a growing body of evidence suggests that GenX could be just as big an environmental problem as its predecessor.

"It's a similar story to PFOA," Wong said. "They're finding GenX everywhere now. But one difference between the two is that people have previously reported some success with catalysts for degrading PFOA. They haven't for GenX."

Wong and colleagues found that boron nitride powder also destroys GenX. The results weren't as good as with PFOA: With two hours exposure to 254-nanometer light, BN destroyed about 20% of the GenX in water samples. But Wong said the team has ideas about how to improve the catalyst for GenX.

He said the project has already attracted the attention of several industrial partners in the Rice-based Nanosystems Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT). NEWT is an interdisciplinary engineering research center funded by the National Science Foundation to develop off-grid water treatment systems that both protect human lives and support sustainable economic development.

"The research has been fun, a true team effort," Wong said. "We've filed patents on this, and NEWT's interest in further testing and development of the technology is a big vote of confidence."

###

Additional study co-authors include Kimberly Heck, Sujin Guo, Chelsea Clark, Jacob Arredondo and Thomas Senftle, all of Rice; Minghao Wang, Xianghua Wen and Yonghui Song, all of Tsinghua University; and Paul Westerhoff of Arizona State University.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation (EEC-1449500) and the China Scholarship Council.

Links and resources:

The DOI of the study is: 10.1021/acs.estlett.0c00434

A copy of the Environmental Science and Technology Letters study is available at: https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.estlett.0c00434

IMAGES available for download:

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2020/07/0706_PHOTOCAT-fig2-lg.jpg

CAPTION: An illustration of the boron nitride photocatalysis that destroys the pollutant PFOA in water. (Image courtesy of M. Wong/Rice University)

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2020/07/0706_PHOTOCAT-mw1-lg.jpg

CAPTION: Michael Wong

This release can be found online at news.rice.edu.

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,962 undergraduates and 3,027 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 4 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance.

PSYCHEDELIC BREW

Study reveals science behind traditional mezcal-making technique

BROWN UNIVERSITY

    SHARE

 PRINT  E-MAIL

Volume 0%

 

VIDEO: ARTISANS WHO MAKE MEZCAL, A TRADITIONAL MEXICAN SPIRIT, HAVE KNOWN FOR CENTURIES THAT LONG-LASTING BUBBLES ON THE SURFACE OF THE BEVERAGE IS AN INDICATOR THAT IT HAS BEEN DISTILLED TO... view more 

CREDIT: ZENIT LAB / BROWN UNIVERSITY

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- Artisanal makers of mezcal have a tried and true way to tell when the drink has been distilled to the right alcohol level. They squirt some into a small container and look for little bubbles, known as pearls. If the alcohol content is too high or too low, the bubbles burst quickly. But if they linger for 30 seconds or so, the alcohol level is perfect and the mezcal is ready to drink.

Now, a new study by a team of fluid dynamics researchers reveals the physics behind the trick. Using laboratory experiments and computer models, the researchers show that a phenomenon known as the Marangoni effect helps mezcal bubbles linger a little longer when the alcohol content is around the sweet spot of 50%. In addition to showing the scientific underpinnings of something artisans have known for centuries, the researchers say the findings reveal new fundamental details about the lifetimes of bubbles on liquid surfaces.

The study, a collaboration between researchers at Brown University, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Université de Toulouse and elsewhere, was published on July 3 in the journal Scientific Reports.

When Roberto Zenit, a professor in Brown's School of Engineering and the study's senior author, first heard about the bubble trick, he said he was instantly intrigued.

"One of my main research interests is bubbles and how they behave," Zenit said. "So when one of my students told me that bubbles were important in making mezcal, which is a drink that I really enjoy with my friends, it was impossible for me not to investigate how it works."

The researchers started by doing experiments to see how changing the alcohol level of mezcal changed bubble lifetimes. They watered down some samples of mezcal and added pure ethyl alcohol to others. They then reproduced the squirting trick in the lab while carefully timing the bubbles. They found that, sure enough, alcohol level dramatically affected bubble lifetimes. In unaltered samples, bubbles lasted from 10 to 30 seconds. In both the fortified and watered-down samples, the bubbles burst instantly.

Having shown that bubbles really can be a gauge of alcohol content, the next step was to figure out why.

To do that, the Zenit and his students started by simplifying the fluid -- performing experiments with mixtures of just pure water and alcohol. Those experiments showed that, as with mezcal, bubbles tended to last longer when the mixture was near 50% water and 50% alcohol. The researchers determined that the extra bubble life was due largely to viscosity. Bubbles tend to last longer in more viscous fluids, and the viscosity of alcohol-water mixtures peaks right around 50%.

However, the bubbles in the 50-50 water and alcohol mixtures still didn't last as long as those in mezcal. Zenit and his students realized there must be something about mezcal that amplifies the viscosity effect. To figure out what it was, they used high-speed video cameras to carefully watch the bubbles through their lifetimes.

The video revealed something surprising, Zenit said. It showed an upward convection of liquid from the surface of mezcal into the bubble membranes.

"Normally, gravity is causing the liquid in a bubble film to drain away, which eventually causes the bubble to burst," Zenit said. "But in the mezcal bubbles, there's this upward convection that's replenishing the fluid and extending the life of the bubble."

With the help of some computer modeling, the researchers determined that a phenomenon known as the Marangoni convection was responsible for this upward motion. The Marangoni effect occurs when fluids flow between areas of differing surface tension, which is the attractive force between molecules that forms a film surface of a fluid. Mezcal contains a variety of chemicals that act as surfactants -- molecules that change the surface tension. As a result, bubbles that form on the surface of mezcal tend to have higher surface tension than the surfactant-filled fluid below. That differing surface tension draws fluid up into the bubble, increasing its lifespan.

By amplifying the existing tendency for longer-lasting bubbles in 50% alcohol mixtures, the surfactant-driven Marangoni effect makes bubbles a reliable gauge of alcohol content in mezcal.

Zenit, who hails from Mexico, said it was gratifying to shed new light on this artisanal technique.

"It's fun to work on something that has both scientific value and cultural value that's part of my background," he said. "These artisans are experts in what they do. It's great to be able to corroborate what they already know and to demonstrate that it has scientific value beyond just mezcal making."

The insights generated from the work could be useful in a variety of industrial processes that involve bubbles, the researchers said. It could also be useful in environmental research.

"For example," the researchers write, "the lifetime of surface bubbles could be used as a diagnostic tool to infer the presence of surfactants in a liquid: If the lifetime is larger than that expected of a pure/clean liquid, then the liquid is most likely contaminated."

###

Researchers create air filter that can kill the coronavirus

Nickel foam filter catches, heats and kills the virus and other pathogens

THIS IS THE REAL DEAL NOT LIKE THE FAKE UNIT USED BY THE MEGACHURCH THAT TRUMP SPOKE AT 

UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON NEWS RELEASE 7-JUL-2020

IMAGE: PERFORMANCE OF PROTOTYPE DEVICE ON AEROSOLIZED SARS-COV-2 AND BACILLUS ANTHRACIS. view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON

Researchers from the University of Houston, in collaboration with others, have designed a "catch and kill" air filter that can trap the virus responsible for COVID-19, killing it instantly.

Zhifeng Ren, director of the Texas Center for Superconductivity at UH, collaborated with Monzer Hourani, CEO of Medistar, a Houston-based medical real estate development firm, and other researchers to design the filter, which is described in a paper published in Materials Today Physics.

The researchers reported that virus tests at the Galveston National Laboratory found 99.8% of the novel SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was killed in a single pass through a filter made from commercially available nickel foam heated to 200 degrees Centigrade, or about 392 degrees Fahrenheit. It also killed 99.9% of the anthrax spores in testing at the national lab, which is run by the University of Texas Medical Branch.

"This filter could be useful in airports and in airplanes, in office buildings, schools and cruise ships to stop the spread of COVID-19," said Ren, MD Anderson Chair Professor of Physics at UH and co-corresponding author for the paper. "Its ability to help control the spread of the virus could be very useful for society." Medistar executives are is also proposing a desk-top model, capable of purifying the air in an office worker's immediate surroundings, he said.

Ren said the Texas Center for Superconductivity at the University of Houston (TcSUH) was approached by Medistar on March 31, as the pandemic was spreading throughout the United States, for help in developing the concept of a virus-trapping air filter.

Luo Yu of the UH Department of Physics and TcSUH along with Dr. Garrett K. Peel of Medistar and Dr. Faisal Cheema at the UH College of Medicine are co-first authors on the paper.

The researchers knew the virus can remain in the air for about three hours, meaning a filter that could remove it quickly was a viable plan. With businesses reopening, controlling the spread in air conditioned spaces was urgent.

And Medistar knew the virus can't survive temperatures above 70 degrees Centigrade, about 158 degrees Fahrenheit, so the researchers decided to use a heated filter. By making the filter temperature far hotter - about 200 C - they were able to kill the virus almost instantly.

Ren suggested using nickel foam, saying it met several key requirements: It is porous, allowing the flow of air, and electrically conductive, which allowed it to be heated. It is also flexible.

But nickel foam has low resistivity, making it difficult to raise the temperature high enough to quickly kill the virus. The researchers solved that problem by folding the foam, connecting multiple compartments with electrical wires to increase the resistance high enough to raise the temperature as high as 250 degrees C.

By making the filter electrically heated, rather than heating it from an external source, the researchers said they minimized the amount of heat that escaped from the filter, allowing air conditioning to function with minimal strain.

A prototype was built by a local workshop and first tested at Ren's lab for the relationship between voltage/current and temperature; it then went to the Galveston lab to be tested for its ability to kill the virus. Ren said it satisfies the requirements for conventional heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems.

"This novel biodefense indoor air protection technology offers the first-in-line prevention against environmentally mediated transmission of airborne SARS-CoV-2 and will be on the forefront of technologies available to combat the current pandemic and any future airborne biothreats in indoor environments," Cheema said.

Hourani and Peel have called for a phased roll-out of the device, "beginning with high-priority venues, where essential workers are at elevated risk of exposure (particularly schools, hospitals and health care facilities, as well as public transit environs such as airplanes)."

That will both improve safety for frontline workers in essential industries and allow nonessential workers to return to public work spaces, they said.

###

Consumers prefer round numbers even when the specific number is better news

Surprising findings have implications for public health and economic marketing

RENSSELAER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE

 

TROY, N.Y. -- Consider this scenario: A vaccine for the novel coronavirus has been developed that is 91.27% effective. If public health officials present this information using the specific number, people are likely to think the vaccine is actually less effective than if it is presented as being 90% effective.

This concept is a real-life application of recent findings from Gaurav Jain, an assistant professor of marketing in the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, published recently in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Process.

The paper, titled "Revisiting Attribute Framing: The Impact of Number Roundedness on Framing," explores an area of behavioral economics research pertaining to attribute framing, which evaluates how people make decisions based on the manner in which information is presented.

Watch this video to learn more.

For decades, researchers in this field have been focused on the attributes, the adjectives, and other words that describe what is being measured. In this paper, Jain looked at the numbers that are used in the frames themselves.

Using six sets of data with more than 1,500 participants, Jain and his co-authors considered what would happen to peoples' perception of information when specific, or non-round, numbers were used instead of round numbers.

The research showed that people find non-round numbers unique and jarring. Jain and his team determined that people pause to think about the specific number due to its uniqueness. Because it isn't easy to comprehend, people tend to compare the non-round number to an easily understood ideal standard -- like 100%. Then, because the specific number doesn't live up to the ideal, people perceive it negatively.

"Numbers have a language and give non-numerical perceptions," Jain said. "When we use specific numbers, the evaluations decrease. There was no apparent reason for this kind of behavior, and this was incredibly surprising."

While Jain and his team explored this question using standard behavioral economic research scenarios and not a specific question, such as communications regarding a potential coronavirus vaccine, this research has direct and critical impact in marketing and public health messaging.

"The extensive use of attribute framing in marketing, organizational behavior, and public policy communication and the robustness of the effects in experimental settings make it one of the most important and frequently studied phenomena in the field," Jain said. "Managers and public health officials should be careful when using non-round numbers, because the use of this approach in communication messages may decrease the subjective evaluations of the target on the associated attributes."

According to Jain, the paper also helps to add to the theoretical understanding of attribute framing. "Our studies lend support and offer an elaborated process account for the attention-association-based reasoning for framing effects in general, which adds to the scarce literature on processes underlying framing effects," Jain said.

###

Jain's co-authors on this paper were Gary J. Gaeth and Dhananjay Nayakankuppam, both of the Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa, and Irwin P. Levin, in the Department of Psychology at the University of Iowa.

About Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Founded in 1824, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is America's first technological research university. Rensselaer encompasses five schools, 32 research centers, more than 145 academic programs, and a dynamic community made up of more than 7,900 students and over 100,000 living alumni. Rensselaer faculty and alumni include more than 145 National Academy members, six members of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, six National Medal of Technology winners, five National Medal of Science winners, and a Nobel Prize winner in Physics. With nearly 200 years of experience advancing scientific and technological knowledge, Rensselaer remains focused on addressing global challenges with a spirit of ingenuity and collaboration. To learn more, please visit http://www.rpi.edu.

Making a list of all creatures, great and small

PLOS

 

IMAGE: RETICULATED GIRAFFE GIRAFFA (CAMELOPARDALIS) RETICULATA, PHOTOGRAPHED IN KENYA IN 2013. GIRAFFE TAXONOMY IS BEING DEBATED, WITH THE TRADITIONAL CLASSIFICATION RECOGNIZING A SINGLE SPECIES AND OTHER CLASSIFICATIONS RECOGNIZING UP TO EIGHT... view more 

CREDIT: FRANK E. ZACHOS

A paper published July 7, 2020 in the open access journal PLOS Biology outlines a roadmap for creating, for the first time, an agreed list of all the world's species, from mammals and birds to plants, fungi and microbes.

"Listing all species may sound routine, but is a difficult and complex task," says Prof. Stephen Garnett of Charles Darwin University, the paper's lead author. "Currently no single, agreed list of species is available." Instead, some iconic groups of organisms such as mammals and birds have several competing lists, while other less well-known groups have none.

This causes problems for organizations and governments that need reliable, agreed, scientifically defensible and accurate lists for the purposes of conservation, international treaties, biosecurity, and regulation of trade in endangered species. The lack of an agreed list of all species also hampers researchers studying Earth's biodiversity.

The new paper outlines a potential solution - a set of ten principles for creating and governing lists of the world's species, and a proposed governance mechanism for ensuring that the lists are well-managed and broadly acceptable.

"Importantly, it clearly defines the roles of taxonomists - the scientists who discover, name and classify species - and stakeholders such as conservationists and government and international agencies," says Dr Kevin Thiele, Director of Taxonomy Australia and a co-author on the paper. "While taxonomists would have the final say on how to recognize and name species, the process ensures that stakeholders' needs are considered when deciding between differing taxonomic opinions."

The Earth's species are facing unprecedented threats, from global heating, pollution, land clearing, disease and overutilization, which together are driving an unprecedented and accelerating extinction crisis. "Developing a single, agreed list of species won't halt extinction," says Garnett, "but it's an important step in managing and conserving all the world's species, great and small, for this and future generations."

###

Peer reviewed; Opinion Piece; Animals

In your coverage please use these URLs to provide access to the freely available articles in PLOS Biology: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000736

Citation: Garnett ST, Christidis L, Conix S, Costello MJ, Zachos FE, Bánki OS, et al. (2020) Principles for creating a single authoritative list of the world's species. PLoS Biol 18(7): e3000736. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000736

Funding: Authors SG, LC, SC, MC, KT, FZ received funding from the International Union for Biological Sciences (http://www.iubs.org) to run a workshop reviewing the principles described in the paper as part of the IUBS programme "Governance of Global Taxonomic Lists." SC's involvement was funded by the Flemish Research Council Grant 3H200026. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. All other authors received no specific funding for this work.

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

More ecosystem engineers create stability, preventing extinctions

SANTA FE INSTITUTE

 NEWS RELEASE 3-JUL-2020

 

IMAGE: ELEPHANTS ENGINEER THEIR ECOSYSTEMS -- THEY ROOT OUT SAPLINGS AND SMALL TREES, CREATING HABITATS FOR SMALLER VERTEBRATES, WHICH HELPS MAINTAIN THE GRASSLAND. view more 

CREDIT: JUSTIN YEAKEL

When we think of engineering in nature, we tend to think of beavers -- the tree-felling, dam-building rodents whose machinations can shape the landscape by creating lakes and changing the path of rivers. But beavers are far from the only organisms to reshape their environment. A squirrel who inadvertently plants oak trees is also an "ecosystem engineer" -- roughly speaking, any organism whose impact on the environment outlasts its own lifetime. The coolest of these biological builders, according to Justin Yeakel, might be the shipworm, which eats through rocks in streams, creating cozy abodes for future invertebrate inhabitants.

Yeakel, an ecologist at the University of California, Merced, and a former Santa Fe Institute Omidyar Fellow is the lead author of a new paper that models the long term impact of ecosystem engineers. Researchers have long considered the role of ecosystem engineers in natural histories, but this study is among the first to quantitatively assess them in an ecological network model.

"We wanted to understand how food webs and interaction networks were established from a mechanistic perspective," he says. "To do that, you have to include things like engineering because species influence their environment and there's this feedback between the environment to the species."

In particular, the model uses simple rules to show how food webs can be assembled, how species interactions can change over time, and when species go extinct. One striking result: Few ecosystem engineers led to many extinctions and instability while many ecosystem engineers led to stability and few extinctions.

"As you increase the number of engineers, that also increases the redundancy of the engineers and this tends to stabilize the system," Yeakel says.

So, how do you create an ecological network model? It's highly abstracted -- there are no specific species like beavers or concrete environmental features like rivers. Everything is reduced to interactions: species can eat, need, or make. In this sense, nature becomes a network of interactions. For example, bees eat nectar from flowers; flowers need bees to be pollinated; trees make shade which flowers need.

The researchers gave the model a small number of rules, the main one being: Species have to eat only one thing to survive but they have to obtain all of the things they need. In less abstract terms, even if one flower species goes extinct, bees could survive on nectar from other flowers. But if either bees or trees fail to provide pollination or shade, which flowers need, then the flowers will go extinct.

Using these rules, the models were able to produce ecological networks similar to those in the real world, with a characteristic hourglass shape in species diversity -- more diversity at the top and the bottom of the web, less in the middle. To expand the model for future research, Yeakel plans on incorporating evolutionary dynamics so that species can change what they eat and need and make.

Two and a half billion years before humans showed up, cyanobacteria were a planetary-scale engineer that slowly changed the composition of the entire atmosphere by oxygenating it. But unlike our photosynthetic predecessors, "we're making changes on ecological timescales rather than evolutionary timescales," Yeakel says. "Is an organism that becomes a planetary-scale engineer doomed to extinction if it changes the environment too quickly?"

###