ETHYLENE IS A HYDROCARBON

A breakthrough discovery in carbon capture conversion for ethylene production

New method converts carbon dioxide into chemical

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS CHICAGO

 

IMAGE: ABSTRACT ILLUSTRATION OF ATOMS PASSING THROUGH WATER AND AN ELECTRIFIED MEMBRANE UNDER A SHINING SUN. view more 

CREDIT: MEENESH SINGH

A team of researchers led by Meenesh Singh at University of Illinois Chicago has discovered a way to convert 100% of carbon dioxide captured from industrial exhaust into ethylene, a key building block for plastic products.  

Their findings are published in Cell Reports Physical Science.   

While researchers have been exploring the possibility of converting carbon dioxide to ethylene for more than a decade, the UIC team’s approach is the first to achieve nearly 100% utilization of carbon dioxide to produce hydrocarbons. Their system uses electrolysis to transform captured carbon dioxide gas into high purity ethylene, with other carbon-based fuels and oxygen as byproducts.  

The process can convert up to 6 metric tons of carbon dioxide into 1 metric ton of ethylene, recycling almost all carbon dioxide captured. Because the system runs on electricity, the use of renewable energy can make the process carbon negative.  

According to Singh, his team’s approach surpasses the net-zero carbon goal of other carbon capture and conversion technologies by actually reducing the total carbon dioxide output from industry. “It’s a net negative,” he said. “For every 1 ton of ethylene produced, you’re taking 6 tons of CO2 from point sources that otherwise would be released to the atmosphere.” 

Previous attempts at converting carbon dioxide into ethylene have relied on reactors that produce ethylene within the source carbon dioxide emission stream. In these cases, as little as 10% of CO2 emissions typically converts to ethylene. The ethylene must later be separated from the carbon dioxide in an energy-intensive process often involving fossil fuels.   

In UIC’s approach, an electric current is passed through a cell, half of which is filled with captured carbon dioxide, the other half with a water-based solution. An electrified catalyst draws charged hydrogen atoms from the water molecules into the other half of the unit separated by a membrane, where they combine with charged carbon atoms from the carbon dioxide molecules to form ethylene. 

Among manufactured chemicals worldwide, ethylene ranks third for carbon emissions after ammonia and cement. Ethylene is used not only to create plastic products for the packaging, agricultural and automotive industries, but also to produce chemicals used in antifreeze, medical sterilizers and vinyl siding for houses. 

Ethylene is usually made in a process called steam cracking that requires enormous amounts of heat. Cracking generates about 1.5 metric tons of carbon emissions per ton of ethylene created. On average, manufacturers produce around 160 million tons of ethylene each year, which results in more than 260 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide. 

In addition to ethylene, the UIC scientists were able to produce other carbon-rich products useful to industry with their electrolysis approach. They also achieved a very high solar energy conversion efficiency, converting 10% of energy from the solar panels directly to carbon product output. This is well above the state-of-the-art standard of 2%. For all the ethylene they produced, the solar energy conversion efficiency was around 4%, approximately the same rate as photosynthesis.  

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JOURNAL

Cell Reports Physical Science

DOI

10.1016/j.xcrp.2022.101053 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

ARTICLE TITLE

CO2-free high-purity ethylene from electroreduction of CO2 with 4% solar-to-ethylene and 10% solar-to-carbon efficiencies

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

9-Sep-2022

Surprising discovery shows a slowing of continental plate movement controlled the timing of Earth’s largest volcanic events

Peer-Reviewed Publication

TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN

Scientists have shed new light on the timing and likely cause of major volcanic events that occurred millions of years ago and caused such climatic and biological upheaval that they drove some of the most devastating extinction events in Earth’s history.

Surprisingly the new research, published today in leading international journal Science Advances, suggests a slowing of continental plate movement was the critical event that enabled magma to rise to the Earth’s surface and deliver the devastating knock-on impacts.

Earth’s history has been marked by major volcanic events, called Large Igneous Provinces (LIPs) – the largest of which have caused major increases in atmospheric carbon emissions that warmed Earth’s climate, drove unprecedented changes to ecosystems, and resulted in mass extinctions on land and in the oceans. 

Using chemical data from ancient mudstone deposits obtained from a 1.5 km-deep borehole in Wales, an international team led by scientists from Trinity College Dublin’s School of Natural Sciences was able to link two key events from around 183 million years ago (the Toarcian period). 

The team discovered that this time period, which was characterised by some of the most severe climatic and environmental changes ever, directly coincided with the occurrence of major volcanic activity and associated greenhouse gas release on the southern hemisphere, in what is nowadays known as southern Africa, Antarctica and Australia.

On further investigation – and more importantly – the team’s plate reconstruction models helped them discover the key fundamental geological process that seemed to control the timing and onset of this volcanic event and others of great magnitude. 

Micha Ruhl, Assistant Professor in Trinity’s School of Natural Sciences, led the team. He said: 

“Scientists have long thought that the onset of upwelling of molten volcanic rock, or magma, from deep in Earth’s interior, as mantle plumes, was the instigator of such volcanic activity but the new evidence shows that the normal rate of continental plate movement of several centimetres per year effectively prevents magma from penetrating Earth’s continental crust. 

“It seems it is only when the speed of continental plate movement slows down to near zero that magmas from mantle plumes can effectively make their way to the surface, causing major large igneous province volcanic eruptions and their associated climatic perturbations and mass extinctions.

“Crucially, further assessment shows that a reduction in continental plate movement likely controlled the onset and duration of many of the major volcanic events throughout Earth’s history, making it a fundamental process in controlling the evolution of climate and life at Earth’s surface throughout the history of this planet.”

The study of past global change events, such as in the Toarcian, allows scientists to disentangle the different processes that control the causes and consequences of global carbon cycle change and constrain fundamental Earth system processes that control tipping points in Earth’s climate system.

The research was conducted as part of the International Continental Drilling Programme (ICDP) Early Jurassic Earth System and Timescale (JET) project, and financially supported by the SFI Research Centre in Applied Geosciences (iCRAG), the Natural Environment Research Council UK (NERC), the National Science Foundation China, and the EU Horizon 2020 programme.

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JOURNAL

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.abo0866 

ARTICLE TITLE

Reduced plate motion controlled timing of Early Jurassic Karoo-Ferrar large igneous province volcanism

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

9-Sep-2022

Earliest land animals had fewer skull bones than fish – restricting their evolution, scientists find

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL

 

IMAGE: EARLY TETRAPOD view more 

CREDIT: SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO IMAGE ID (2G70HK2) ORIGINAL ARTIST: MARK GARLICK

The skulls of tetrapods had fewer bones than extinct and living fish, limiting their evolution for millions of years, according to a latest study.

By analysing fossil skulls of animals across the transition from an aquatic to terrestrial environment, researchers from the University of Bristol, Barcelona’s Universitat Pompeu Fabra and University College London discovered that tetrapods had more complex connections between their skull bones than fish. And, rather than promoting the diversification of life on land, these changes to skull anatomy actually restricted the evolution of tetrapod skulls.

Tetrapods evolved from fish and were the earliest land animals with limbs and digits; the ancestors of everything from amphibians to humans.

The research, published this week in Science Advances, quantified the organisation of skull bones in over 100 living and fossil animals to better understand how skulls changed as tetrapods evolved.

Lead author James Rawson of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences said: “Tetrapod skulls generally have fewer skull bones than their fish ancestors, but simply counting the number of bones misses some important data. We used a technique called network analysis, where the arrangement of skull bones - which bones connect to which - is recorded in addition to bone number.”

Author Dr Borja Esteve-Altava, an expert in this technique, said: “Traditionally, anatomy research has been mostly descriptive or qualitative. Network analysis provides a sound mathematical framework to quantify anatomical relations among bones: a kind of data often overlooked in most studies on morphological evolution.”

The authors found that tetrapods having fewer skull bones than fish made the organisation of their skulls more complex.

Mr Rawson added: “It might seem strange, but having fewer bones means each of those bones must connect with more of its neighbours, resulting in a more complex arrangement. Modern frogs and salamanders had the most complex skulls of all the animals we studied.” The skulls of the earliest tetrapods also became more consolidated into a single unit, whereas their fish ancestors had skulls made of several distinct sections.

By looking at the variety of skull bone arrangements over time, the authors also discovered that the origin of tetrapods coincides with a drop in the variety of skull bone arrangements. Professor Emily Rayfield, senior author of the study, said: “We were surprised to find these changes to the skull seemed to limit tetrapod evolution, rather than promoting radiation to new habitats on land. We think that the evolution of a neck, extinction events or a bottleneck in skull development may be responsible.” 

Mr Rawson concluded: “We also see a similar drop in structural variability for the limb bones in early tetrapods, but the drop in the limbs happens 10 million years earlier. It seems that different factors were affecting skull and limb evolution in early tetrapods, and we have so much more to learn about this crucial time in our own evolutionary history.”

Paper:

‘Early tetrapod cranial evolution is characterised by increased complexity, constraint and an offset from fin-limb evolution’ by James Rawson, Dr Borja Esteve-Altava, Dr Laura Porro, Dr Hugo Dutel and Professor Emily Rayfield in Science Advances.

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JOURNAL

Science Advances

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Early tetrapod cranial evolution is characterised by increased complexity, constraint and an offset from fin-limb evolution

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

9-Sep-2022

The roots of biodiversity: how proteins differ across species

Peer-Reviewed Publication

YALE UNIVERSITY

New Haven, Conn. — To better understand what drives biological diversity on Earth, scientists have historically looked at genetic differences between species. But this only provides part of the picture. The traits of a particular species are not merely the result of its genes but also the proteins those genes code for. Understanding the differences between species’ proteomes — or all of the proteins that can be expressed — is, therefore, as important as understanding differences between genomes. 

In a new study, Yale researchers have compared the proteomes of skin cells from 11 mammals, which, they say, will help scientists understand the molecular drivers of biodiversity and how these factors have evolved over time. 

They found that while many proteins are similarly variable both across and within species, some are more variable between species, providing clues about which proteins might be more important in mammalian evolution. The work may also help researchers understand why some species are more resistant to cancer. 

Their findings were published Sept. 9 in Science Advances. 

“In order to understand biological diversity, along with knowing how the DNA is different across species, you may also want to know how species behave, develop, and look differently,” said Günter Wagner, the Alison Richard Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. 

And these attributes — how a species looks, behaves, and develops — are believed to be more closely related to protein levels than to DNA, explained Yansheng Liu, an assistant professor of pharmacology at Yale School of Medicine. 

Comparing protein quantities across species has been difficult, however, as the technology to do large-scale analyses hasn’t existed. But Liu has applied a method called data-independent acquisition mass spectrometry that now allows researchers to do this type of work. 

“It’s a conceptual and technical breakthrough that lets us work at this higher, more functionally relevant level,” said Wagner. 

Liu is a member of the Yale Cancer Biology Institute and Wagner is a member of the Systems Biology Institute, both located at Yale’s West Campus. It was there, during a cancer systems biology symposium they both attended, that their collaboration began. 

For the study, the researchers quantified all of the proteins expressed in skin cells of 11 mammalian species: rabbits, rats, monkeys, humans, sheep, cows, pigs, dogs, cats, horses, and opossums. 

The analysis, they found, provided information that couldn’t be obtained through other techniques. For instance, while previous research has looked at differences in mRNA — the genetic material used for creating proteins — they found that measuring proteins provided additional information that couldn’t be captured by analyzing mRNA alone, as mRNA is only an indirect measure of protein abundance. 

A strand of mRNA carries the code for creating a protein. And while single proteins can have a particular function, proteins can also interact with each other and act as groups, explained Liu. Just looking at mRNA won’t provide that information.  

“We found that, particularly for certain protein classes, the protein relationship to mRNA is very low,” said Liu. “That means the mRNA profile alone would be misleading.” 

The team then looked at protein variation both across species and across individuals within the same species, finding that, for most proteins, levels that were more variable between individuals were also more variable between species. But there were some proteins that didn’t fit that trend. For example, proteins related to cell division and RNA metabolism were more variable between species than between individuals of one species (humans, in this case). This suggests those functions play a particularly important role in mammalian evolution, said the researchers.  

“Inter-species versus inter-individual differences is very interesting from an evolutionary point of view,” said Wagner. “Comparing the two gives us an idea about how much variation is tolerated within a species and we can use that information to predict the capacity for evolution.” 

Lastly, the researchers compared protein-removal systems across species. There are two main systems responsible for removing proteins in cells, and they found that one was similar across species while the other exhibited quite a bit of variation among the different mammals. 

This protein turnover determines how quickly a cell can change its state, added Wagner. “If a new signal comes in, the cell needs to throw out the proteins that were necessary for its previous state and create new ones,” he said.  

And how quickly a cell changes state could be relevant to cancer. 

“Healthy cells can be influenced by nearby cancer cells,” said Wagner. “It will be important to understand whether protein turnover rates are related to how reactive cells are to the influences of tumor cells. Maybe species that are more resistant to cancer, such as hoofed animals like cows and pigs, have cells that are less able to change state and less susceptible to the signals from cancer cells.” 

And understanding cancer vulnerability is just one potential application of this work, researchers said. For instance, they can begin correlating protein differences with any other traits that differ across species, says Liu. 

Proteins are subject to chemical modifications, which occur when other molecules attach to a protein and activate or deactivate it. And these modifications contribute to traits that differ between and within species as they play a major role influencing protein function. The researchers assessed one type of modification in this study, phosphorylation, finding variations in phosphorylation levels were, for the most part, not related to variations in protein abundance, providing another layer of understanding about what drives biodiversity. The researchers will continue to assess other modifications in future work. 

“It will provide a more complete picture,” said Liu, adding that biological variabilities between species and individuals are what shape biological diversity on Earth. “Measuring the differences in both proteins and modified proteins across species will advance our understanding of biodiversity at the molecular level.” 

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JOURNAL

Science Advances

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

9-Sep-2022

Hip fractures will nearly double worldwide by 2050; researchers cite urgent need for better prevention and care, especially for men and the very old

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Austin, Texas, USA (September 9, 2022) —  Osteoporotic hip fracture, already a dangerous and debilitating problem for older men and women worldwide, is poised to become a far more severe global public-health issue as the population grows older and frailer, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of Hong Kong. The risk — and thus the need for far better study, prevention and treatment of osteoporosis and fractures — is especially great among men and those over 85 years old, the study reported.

Ching-lung Cheung, Associate Professor, in the University of Hong Kong’s Department of Pharmacology and Pharmacy, presented the findings today at the annual meeting of the American Society of Bone and Mineral Research in Austin, Texas.

The study analyzed data in 19 countries for patients 50 and older who had fractured their hips between 2005 and 2018. It found that total hip fracture counts were expected to increase over time in 18 of the 19 countries. Hip fracture counts were projected by 2030 and 2050 using predicted population size provided by the World Bank. By 2050, the worldwide hip fracture counts will have likely doubled compared with 2018, with a larger proportional increase in men than women.

The study noted some possible reasons for the sex discrepancy. Although the incidence of hip fractures declined in most countries during the study period, the magnitude of decline was smaller for men. Men's life expectancy, meanwhile, has been increasing, a result of better medical care, hygiene, diet, and other factors. The United Nations projects that the life expectancy of men globally will likely reach over 75 years by 2050, the age after which this study showed a high risk of hip fracture. Thus, researchers expect that the proportion of men with a high risk of hip fracture will grow.

At the same time, osteoporosis in men has been underdiagnosed and undertreated for years, Dr. Cheung reported. "Our study also showed that the use of anti-osteoporosis medications following a hip fracture is lower in men than in women by 30% to 67%," he said. "Thus, more attention should be paid to preventing and treating hip fractures in men."

Previous reports on hip fracture incidence are based on outdated data with heterogeneity in methods and study periods. This study examined the most currently available secular trends of hip fracture incidence, mortality, and use of post‐fracture pharmacological treatment across 19 countries.

A common protocol and a common data model were applied across all sites to provide comparable data. Age‐ and sex‐standardized annual incidence of hip fracture, mortality, and pharmacological treatment rates within 12 months were calculated.

Using descriptive analyses of patient-level healthcare data, the researchers found wide variability among the 19 countries studied. The overall age‐ and sex‐standardized incidence of hip fracture was estimated to be 180 per 100,000 individuals (Women 236; Men 118). But the average change in hip fracture incidence varied from -2.8% to +2.1% per year. The most pronounced declines in fractures were seen in Denmark (‐2.8%), Singapore (‐2.8%), and Hong Kong (‐2.4%). The biggest increases were in the Netherlands (+2.1%), and South Korea (+1.2%). One-year all-cause mortality ranged from 14.4% to 28.3%, while mortality trends varied from ‐5.3% to +18.4% per year, with the largest decreases in Australia (‐5.3%), the Netherlands (‐4.6%), and Singapore (‐ 4.3%). Use of anti-osteoporosis medications within 12 months of hip fracture ranged from 11.5% to 50.3%, with trends varying from ‐9.6% to +12.7% per year and declining in 6 out of 15 sites.

The reasons for the observed variability among countries would require further in-depth research, co-author Chor‐Wing Sing, a research assistant professor said. "One potential reason that some countries have seen relatively large declines in hip fractures is better osteoporosis management and post-fracture care," she said. "Better fall-prevention programs and clearer guidelines for clinical care have likely made a difference." Dr. Sing also noted people's greater awareness of bone health, resulting in an increase in bone mineral density, or BMD, may also have helped. She cited a study in Hong Kong, which had one of the largest declines in hip fractures, which showed that women 50 and older had become more physically active and started doing more weight-bearing exercise, resulting in a significant long-term increase of BMD.

The new study's key message, the authors said, is that the decline in hip fractures in many countries in recent years is not enough to offset the effect of the growing aging population. The burden of hip fracture is going to grow. But post-fracture treatment remains inadequate in many countries. Meanwhile, the incidence of hip fracture in people over 85 (the “oldest old”) remains more than double that of other age groups, while post-fracture treatment in this population is generally conservative.  A larger and more collaborative effort among healthcare providers, patients, and caregivers will be needed to prevent hip fractures and improve the treatment gap and post-fracture care, especially in men and the oldest old. This need is urgent, and growing, worldwide.

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The American Society for Bone and Mineral Research (ASBMR) is the leading professional, scientific and medical society established to bring together clinical and experimental scientists involved in the study of bone, mineral and musculoskeletal research. ASBMR encourages and promotes the study of this expanding field through annual scientific meetings, an official journal (Journal of Bone and Mineral Research®), the Primer on Metabolic Bone Diseases and Disorders of Mineral Metabolism, advocacy and interaction with government agencies and related societies. To learn more about upcoming meetings and publications, please visit www.asbmr.org.

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SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

9-Sep-2022

THIRD WORLD U$A

Pandemic federal programs helped kids in need get access to 1.5 billion meals every month

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON 

When schools closed during the first year of the pandemic, an immediate and potentially devastating problem surfaced: How would millions of children in struggling families get the school meals many of them depended on?

The U.S. Congress responded by authorizing the Department of Agriculture to roll out two major programs. It launched the “grab and go school meals,” which helped schools provide prepared meals for off-site consumption and distributed funding for the state-operated Pandemic EBT (P-EBT) program, which gave parents debit cards so they could purchase groceries from food retailers.

A new study led by the Harvard and University of Washington schools of public health found that the programs reached more than 30 million children and either directly provided meals or, through the P-EBT program, cash for nearly 1.5 billion meals a month in 2020. 

In the new study published Aug. 31 in JAMA Network Open, the researchers found:  

• The P-EBT program reached 26.9 million of the 30 million children whose families qualified because of low income at a cost of $6.46 per meal, providing access to 1.1 billion meals a month. 
• The grab-and-go program reached 8 million children not eligible for P-EBT at a cost of $8.07 per meal, providing 429 million meals a month.   

“When schools had to close across the country during the spring of 2020 due to COVID-19, kids all of a sudden lost access to school lunches and breakfasts. From a public health and nutrition security perspective, this was an urgent concern, given that these meals are critical for students at risk of food insecurity and are also an essential source of nutrition for millions of children,” said Erica Kenney, study lead author and assistant professor of public health nutrition at Harvard.

Kenney said when these programs began, no one really knew how effectively they would reach kids who needed them and at what cost per meal. So the researchers set out to try to answer how these two major policy responses to the loss of regular school meal access worked.

“This study suggests that, in many states, P-EBT can reach the most eligible children at relatively low cost to the government, while a meal distribution model such as grab-and-go school meals can also ensure families directly receive meals and reach children beyond those who are P-EBT-eligible,” said James Krieger, senior author and clinical professor of health systems and population health in the UW School of Public Health. 

Now, Krieger said, extensions of these two key projects are being debated in Congress. On July 27, the House Education and Labor Committee sent its 2022 Child Nutrition Reauthorization bill (H.R. 8450), the “Healthy Meals, Healthy Kids Act" to the House floor.

In the following Q&A, Krieger and Kenney discuss what their findings mean for this or similar policy.

What would the new “kids act” do?

Krieger: The act proposes a comprehensive, science-driven reauthorization of federal child nutrition programs that meets the needs of children and families. It includes many familiar and essential programs, such as school meals and the WIC program. It would address food insecurity among children during the summer, when schools are closed, by significantly expanding access to summer meals and creating a nationwide Summer-EBT program. The Summer-EBT program would operate similarly to P-EBT in many ways and provide $75 per month per household on an electronic debit card. It supports school efforts to increase access to summer meals using methods that worked in the grab-and-go school meals program during COVID school closures.

Based on your findings, what should Congress do for kids?

Krieger: Our study offers evidence that these components of the proposed act — an EBT program to distribute the value of school meals, similar to the proposed summer-EBT program, combined with expanded distribution of meals in the community, similar to the expanded summer meals program— were effective in feeding millions of children when schools were closed due to COVID and suggests that they will also likely be effective in delivering food to children during school summer recess. Including both programs in the act would help to assure food access when schools are closed during summer breaks.

Kenney: An important takeaway from our study that may be relevant for the conversation about the Healthy Meals, Healthy Kids Act is that these should be considered together, as a two-pronged strategy. The two approaches complement one another: P-EBT can help make sure that at least the cash value of those missed meals can get out to low-income families efficiently, and grab-and-go meals can ensure that families who may be struggling but may not have a low-enough income to qualify for P-EBT can still get meals. They can also ensure that families who may have more difficulty preparing food — like families experiencing homelessness or with limited kitchen facilities, or even just with limited time — can access nutritionally adequate meals. 

What else should Congress consider?

Krieger: The federal government should be investigating strategies for optimizing the cost-effectiveness of grab-and-go school meals. It should also expand the P-EBT program or its equivalent to cover 60 meals per month instead of 40 to match the grab-and-go school meals benefit level. And, it should work to optimize the nutritional quality of the foods provided.

Co-authors include Lina Pinero Walkinshaw and Jessica Jones-Smith, UW Department of Health Systems and Population Health; Ye Shen and Sara Bleich, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; and Sheila E. Fleischhacker of the Georgetown University Law Center. This research was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

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For more information, contact Kenney at ekenney@hsph.harvard.edu or Krieger at jkrieger@hfamerica.org. 

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JOURNAL

JAMA Network Open

DOI

10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.29514 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Costs, Reach, and Benefits of COVID-19 Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer and Grab-and-Go School Meals for Ensuring Youths’ Access to Food During School Closures

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

31-Aug-2022

COI STATEMENT

Dr Kenney reported receiving grants from Healthy Eating Research, a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases during the conduct of the study. Dr Jones-Smith reported receiving grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation during the conduct of the study. Dr Bleich reported receiving grants from Healthy Eating Research, a program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, during the conduct of the study. Dr Krieger reported receiving grants from Healthy Eating Research, a program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. No other disclosures were reported.

Fungal infections increase mortality among hospitalized COVID-19 patients worldwide

An international group of scientists presents this conclusion in an article in Nature Microbiology, warning that novel antifungal medications are urgently needed

Peer-Reviewed Publication

FUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULO

Every day we inhale thousands of potentially pathogenic fungal spores, but our immune system simply eliminates them. However, in people with compromised immunity, such as transplant and cancer patients, as well as hospitalized patients in intensive care, the interaction between pathogen and host may be quite different.

Fungal infections that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, reinforcing the action of SARS-CoV-2 around the world, are a case in point. Mortality reached 80% among severe COVID-19 patients infected with the fungus Aspergillus fumigatus, for example. 

A review article by an international group of researchers analyzing SARS-CoV-2/fungus co-infections during the pandemic is published in Nature Microbiology, with warnings relevant to the present and to future pandemics.

“The key issue with fungi is that they’re an extremely neglected public health problem with few treatment options. We're currently seeing more deaths caused by fungal diseases than malaria and tuberculosis together, so it’s hardly surprising that fungal diseases have taken advantage of the fact that so many people have been hospitalized because of COVID-19,” said Gustavo Henrique Goldman, a professor at the University of São Paulo’s Ribeirão Preto School of Pharmaceutical Sciences (FCFRP-USP) in Brazil and one of the principal investigators for the study, which was supported by FAPESP. 

Besides aspergillosis, the disease caused by fungi of the genus Aspergillus, co-infections concurrently with COVID-19 are caused by two other groups. Fungi of the order Mucorales are responsible for mucormycosis, which occurs mainly in India and Pakistan, while yeasts of the genus Candida cause candidiasis and are present practically the world over.

“COVID-19-associated pulmonary aspergillosis [CAPA] affects on average 10% of patients with acute respiratory insufficiency admitted to intensive care units. Patients with this co-infection are twice as likely to die as patients infected only by SARS-CoV-2,” Martin Hoenigl, first author of the study, told Agência FAPESP. Hoenigl is a professor at the University of California San Diego in La Jolla (USA) and at the University of Graz (Austria).

Gains and losses

According to the article, aspergillosis can remain confined to the upper airways for many days and can be contained with antifungals. Once it has invaded blood vessels in the lungs, however, mortality exceeds 80% even if a systemic antifungal therapy is administered.

Candidiasis occurs almost exclusively in patients in intensive care units and is not more frequent in COVID-19 patients than those hospitalized for other reasons. However, Candida auris, an emerging fungus, is a concern because it can colonize the skin. In addition, it appears to be the only fungus transmitted between people. The species is resistant to all known antifungals and, being present in a wide array of environments, can easily infect patients on mechanical ventilators or with catheters and other invasive life support equipment present in hospitals (more at: agencia.fapesp.br/36111). 

COVID-19-associated mucormycosis (CAM) is a severe problem, especially in India, where the number of cases doubled during the pandemic. News of this mycosis drew international attention in 2021 when more than 47,500 cases were notified in India in the period May-August alone. Classed as an epidemic by the Indian government at the time, it was mistakenly called “black fungus” because of the color of the tissue necrotized by the disease. Actual black fungi are part of a different group that is relatively distant from Mucorales and does not cause disease in humans.

In COVID-19 patients, mucormycosis often occurs in the region of the eyes and nose, and can reach the brain. The mortality rate is 14% in these cases, in which the two diseases occur together. Because mucormycosis causes necrosis, it may require surgery and end up disfiguring the patient. Patients who survive it may lose parts of their face and suffer from problems for the rest of their lives. If the lungs are affected, or the fungus spreads throughout the organism, mortality reaches 80%.

“The prevalence of this mycosis in India was 0.27% in patients hospitalized with COVID-19, although it frequently occurs in people outside hospitals, such as those treated at home with very high doses of systemic steroids, which are easily obtained by most Indians,” Hoenigl said.

The use of steroids and other drugs that reduce immune system activity is one of the causes of the global rise in fungal infections. While the strategy was successful during the pandemic and the benefits surpassed the risks, the researchers warn that it is important to avoid abusive administration of immunosuppressant drugs. 

As an alternative, some centers at high risk for aspergillosis successfully implemented antifungal prophylaxis during the pandemic by administering drugs before infection by these agents. However, because fungi are often resistant to most available medications and there are insufficient clinical studies to evaluate the strategy, it is not recommended at present.

“Immunosuppressants are a major advance in medicine. They prevent many deaths from cancer and autoimmune diseases, as well as playing a key role in organ transplants. However, a side-effect of their use has been a significant rise in the incidence of fungal infections,” Goldman said. “Except for some heat-tolerant species, such as A. fumigatus, fungi normally can’t tolerate mammalian body temperatures and are easily combated by our innate immunity. But when our immune system is too weak to fight off highly inflammatory diseases like COVID-19, they take the opportunity to attack us.”

Novel medications

In addition, many fungi are adapting to higher temperatures as the global climate warms up, and this also makes humans more vulnerable. As a result, novel antifungal medications are urgently needed, experts agree. Currently there are only four classes of antifungals, compared with dozens of classes of antibacterials (antibiotics), for example.

Another problem is the difficulty of diagnosing fungal infections. Diagnostic tests are too expensive for most people in low- and middle-income countries, and test results may take too long to become available for the right treatment to be prescribed.

For example, a 100% certain diagnosis of aspergillosis requires a bronchoscopy, a type of exam considered highly risky during the COVID-19 pandemic and hence avoided as much as possible. The amount of fluid expelled from the patient during the procedure is more than sufficient to transmit SARS-CoV-2 to the medical team. Cases of aspergillosis are probably underestimated as a result.

“The good news is that several novel classes of antifungals have been developed and are currently in phase 2 and 3 clinical trials,” Hoenigl said.

However, the researchers fear these novel drugs will not reach all those who need them. Cutting-edge treatments could remain confined to the rich countries, as the inequality of their availability is likely to continue. 

“Against the backdrop of global warming with few available drugs, and diseases that weaken immunity while causing epidemics and pandemics, outbreaks of fungal infections are highly likely. We need more tools to control them and more scientists to study the different fungi and their action mechanisms,” Goldman said.

About São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP)

The São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) is a public institution with the mission of supporting scientific research in all fields of knowledge by awarding scholarships, fellowships and grants to investigators linked with higher education and research institutions in the State of São Paulo, Brazil. FAPESP is aware that the very best research can only be done by working with the best researchers internationally. Therefore, it has established partnerships with funding agencies, higher education, private companies, and research organizations in other countries known for the quality of their research and has been encouraging scientists funded by its grants to further develop their international collaboration. You can learn more about FAPESP at www.fapesp.br/en and visit FAPESP news agency at www.agencia.fapesp.br/en to keep updated with the latest scientific breakthroughs FAPESP helps achieve through its many programs, awards and research centers. You may also subscribe to FAPESP news agency at http://agencia.fapesp.br/subscribe

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JOURNAL

Nature Microbiology

DOI

10.1038/s41564-022-01172-2 

ARTICLE TITLE

COVID-19-associated fungal infections

Study examines the impact of fake online reviews on sales

New research exposes the pervasive practice of fake online product reviews

INSTITUTE FOR OPERATIONS RESEARCH AND THE MANAGEMENT SCIENCES

Key Takeaways:

• There’s a large online marketplace for the selling and buying of fake online reviews.
• Fake online reviews do contribute to better ratings and sales for product sellers.
• Most major brands do not engage in the practice of buying fake reviews.
• Online marketplaces work to regulate online fake reviews, but there is lag time in enforcement.

 

BALTIMORE, MD, September 9, 2022 – Can you really trust that online product review before you make a purchase decision? New research has found that the practice of faking online product reviews may be more pervasive than you think.

According to researchers, a wide array of product marketers actually purchases fake online reviews through an online marketplace found through social media. As a result, marketers receive many reviews and high-average ratings on e-commerce sites that include Amazon, Walmart and Wayfair, among others.

The study, published in the current issue of the INFORMS journal Marketing Science, “The Market for Fake Reviews,” is authored by Sherry He and Brett Hollenbeck of the UCLA Anderson School of Management, and Davide Proserpio of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California (USC).

“We set out to study the economics and rating manipulation and their effect on seller outcomes, consumer welfare and platform value,” says He. “Despite the fact that the practice of buying online reviews is illegal, we were able to document the existence of large and active online markets for fake reviews.”

Here’s how it works: Sellers post in private online groups to promote their products. They then pay customers to purchase certain products and leave positive reviews. These social media groups exist for a number of online retailers.

“For our research, we decided to focus on Amazon because it is the largest and most developed market,” says Hollenbeck. “We collected data from this market by sending research assistants into these social media groups to document which product marketers were buying fake reviews and when. We then tracked these products’ outcomes on Amazon.com. This included reviews, ratings, prices and sales rank.”

The researchers found that the buying of fake reviews is associated with a significant but short-term increase in average rating and the total number of reviews. They found that there is a certain rating manipulation that also has a causal effect on sales. They also found that after firms stopped buying fake reviews, their products’ average ratings fell and the share of one-star reviews tended to increase. This, they concluded, indicates that rating manipulation mostly centers on low-quality products.

To conduct their research, the study authors built a sample of approximately 1,500 products that were observed soliciting fake reviews over a nine-month period. The researchers found that the types of products involved represented many categories. They then tracked the outcomes of these products before and after the buying of fake reviews, and were able to document how the platform, in this case Amazon, regulates fake reviews. 

“For the products in our research observed buying fake reviews, roughly half of their reviews were eventually deleted, but the deletions occurred with an average lag of over 100 days, allowing sellers to benefit from the short-term boost in ratings, reviews and sales,” says Proserpio. “Almost none of the sellers purchasing fake reviews were well-known brands. This is consistent with other research that has shown online reviews are more effective and more critical to smaller, lesser-known brands.”

 

Link to Study

 

About INFORMS and Marketing Science

Marketing Science is a premier peer-reviewed scholarly marketing journal focused on research using quantitative approaches to study all aspects of the interface between consumers and firms. It is published by INFORMS, the leading international association for operations research and analytics professionals. More information is available at www.informs.org or @informs.

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New study on financial management in higher ed shows that budgeting flexibility is the key to security

Peer-Reviewed Publication

STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT SOCIETY

The decades-long decline in U.S. college enrollment experienced its largest two-year decrease in more than 50 years this spring. Universities increasingly face stiffer competition with less money from state budgets, which does not bode well for their financial security. A new study from the Strategic Management Journal (SMJ) finds that the universities thriving in this environment are doing more with less simply by adopting more flexible budgeting. The problem is, many universities face internal and external pressures that inhibit financial flexibility.

“Universities that reallocate resources more regularly are more likely to run larger budget surpluses,” says Sohvi Heaton, a visiting assistant professor at Santa Clara University. “However, this is far more likely to be true at universities where external governance arrangements allow greater executive discretion.”

Heaton teamed with David Teece, a noted economist and professor at UC Berkley, and Eugene Agronin, a data scientist and economist, to study more than two decades of longitudinal data on the financial performance of U.S. public universities. The study digs into the concept of dynamic capabilities and uses ‘deviation of expense ratio’ (DER), or the change in expense ratio across all budget segments from one year to the next, to measure how easily universities can reallocate funds. They compare DER to the university’s annual surpluses or deficits to determine its effect on financial performance.

“In absolute terms over the period we studied, a typical annual change in DER could have added $10.02 million to the average university's income,” says Agronin. “The effect is not insignificant given that a public university typically spends about $5 million for scholarships.”

The authors then segmented universities into low, medium, or high, levels of regulation based on their state governing board structures, finding 239, 328, and 1,136 respectively. Using a complicated linear regression model of university financial performance in light of DER and governance — while controlling for variables like funding structure, endowments, and university size —they found that low governance more than doubles resource allocation flexibility’s affect, while high governance weakens it. 

“In many of these cases, a budget deficit would become a surplus if a university increased DER by just one standard deviation,” says Teece. “In that context, governance arrangements that are too prescriptive have a large effect on financial performance of universities by making it difficult to allow necessary financial flexibility and associated resource reallocations.”

Multiple corporate studies have established that resources allocation flexibility can improve performance under good leadership, but this study is the first to apply those dynamics to higher education. Academic budgets often sublimate financial performance and market considerations to internal politics—or external politics if subject to heavy government oversight. The authors warn that their results clearly indicate a change to the traditional university budget model is necessary to survive in the current higher education climate.

“A university must be able to not only conduct research and teaching, but also learn how to manage itself well,” says Heaton. “In the age of international competition for resources and talent, ‘organized anarchies’ are no longer an acceptable model for college and university management.”

The Strategic Management Journal (SMJ), founded in 1980, is the world’s leading mass impact journal for research in strategic management. The SMJ seeks to publish papers that ask and help to answer important and interesting questions in strategic management, develop and/or test theory, replicate prior studies, explore interesting phenomena, review and synthesize existing research, and evaluate the many methodologies used in the strategic management field.

SMJ is published by the Strategic Management Society (SMS), an association comprised of 3,000 academics, business practitioners, and consultants from 80 countries that focuses on the development and dissemination of insights on the strategic management process, as well as on fostering contacts and interchanges around the world. To find out more about SMS’s scientific and educational programs in strategic management, please visit www.strategicmanagement.net.

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JOURNAL

Strategic Management Journal

DOI

10.1002/smj.3444 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Case study

ARTICLE TITLE

Dynamic capabilities and governance: An empirical investigation of financial performance of the higher education sector