It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
IMAGE: AI RENDERING OF BEES AND ELECTRICITYview more
CREDIT: ELLARD HUNTING
By measuring the electrical fields near swarming honeybees, researchers have discovered that insects can produce as much atmospheric electric charge as a thunderstorm cloud. This type of electricity helps shape weather events, aids insects in finding food, and lifts spiders up in the air to migrate over large distances. The research, appearing on October 24 in the journal iScience, demonstrates that living things can have an impact on atmospheric electricity.
“We always looked at how physics influenced biology, but at some point, we realized that biology might also be influencing physics,” says first author Ellard Hunting, a biologist at the University of Bristol. “We’re interested in how different organisms use the static electric fields that are virtually everywhere in the environment.”
As with most living creatures, bees carry an innate electric charge. Having found that honeybee hive swarms change the atmospheric electricity by 100 to 1,000 volts per meter, increasing the electric field force normally experienced at ground level, the team developed a model that can predict the influence of other species of insects.
“How insect swarms influence atmospheric electricity depends on their density and size,” says co-author Liam O’Reilly, a biologist at the University of Bristol. “We also calculated the influence of locusts on atmospheric electricity, as locusts swarm on biblical scales, sizing 460 square miles with 80 million locusts in less than a square mile; their influence is likely much greater than honeybees.”
“We only recently discovered that biology and static electric fields are intimately linked and that there are many unsuspected links that can exist over different spatial scales, ranging from microbes in the soil and plant-pollinator interactions to insect swarms and perhaps the global electric circuit,” says Ellard.
“Interdisciplinarity is valuable here—electric charge can seem like it lives solely in physics, but it is important to know how aware the whole natural world is of electricity in the atmosphere,” says co-author Giles Harrison, an atmospheric physicist from the University of Reading.
CAPTION
AI rendering bees and electricity
CREDIT
Ellard Hunting
Financial support provided by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the European Research Council.
iScience (@iScience_CP) is an open-access journal from Cell Press that provides a platform for original research and interdisciplinary thinking in the life, physical, and earth sciences. The primary criterion for publication in iScience is a significant contribution to a relevant field combined with robust results and underlying methodology. Visit: http://www.cell.com/iscience. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Taking advantage of a phenomenon known as emergent behavior in the microscale, MIT engineers have designed simple microparticles that can collectively generate complex behavior, much the same way that a colony of ants can dig tunnels or collect food.
Working together, the microparticles can generate a beating clock that oscillates at a very low frequency. These oscillations can then be harnessed to power tiny robotic devices, the researchers showed.
“In addition to being interesting from a physics point of view, this behavior can also be translated into an on-board oscillatory electrical signal, which can be very powerful in microrobotic autonomy. There are a lot of electrical components that require such an oscillatory input,” says Jingfan Yang, a recent MIT PhD recipient and one of the lead authors of the new study.
The particles used to create the new oscillator perform a simple chemical reaction that allows the particles to interact with each other through the formation and bursting of tiny gas bubbles. Under the right conditions, these interactions create an oscillator that behaves similar to a ticking clock, beating at intervals of a few seconds.
“We're trying to look for very simple rules or features that you can encode into relatively simple microrobotic machines, to get them to collectively do very sophisticated tasks,” says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT.
Strano is the senior author of the new paper, which appears today in Nature Communications. Along with Yang, Thomas Berrueta, a Northwestern University graduate student advised by Professor Todd Murphey, is a lead author of the study.
Collective behavior
Demonstrations of emergent behavior can be seen throughout the natural world, where colonies of insects such as ants and bees accomplish feats that a single member of the group would never be able to achieve.
“Ants have minuscule brains and they do very simple cognitive tasks, but collectively they can do amazing things. They can forage for food and build these elaborate tunnel structures,” Strano says. “Physicists and engineers like myself want to understand these rules because it means we can make tiny things that collectively do complex tasks.”
In this study, the researchers wanted to design particles that could generate rhythmic movements, or oscillations, with a very low frequency. Until now, building low-frequency micro-oscillators has required sophisticated electronics that are expensive and difficult to design, or specialized materials with complex chemistries.
The simple particles that the researchers designed for this study are discs as small as 100 microns in diameter. The discs, made from a polymer called SU-8, have a platinum patch that can catalyze the breakdown of hydrogen peroxide into water and oxygen.
When the particles are placed at the surface of a droplet of hydrogen peroxide on a flat surface, they tend to travel to the top of the droplet. At this liquid-air interface, they interact with any other particles found there. Each particle produces its own tiny bubble of oxygen, and when two particles come close enough that their bubbles interact, the bubbles pop, propelling the particles away from each other. Then, they begin forming new bubbles, and the cycle repeats over and over.
“One particle by itself stays still and doesn’t do anything interesting, but through teamwork, they can do something pretty amazing and useful, which is actually a difficult thing to achieve at the microscale,” Yang says.
The researchers found that two particles could make a very reliable oscillator, but as more particles were added, the rhythm would get thrown off. However, if they added one particle that was slightly different from the others, that particle could act as a “leader” that reorganized the other particles back into a rhythmic oscillator.
This leader particle is the same size as the other particles but has a slightly larger platinum patch, which enables it to create a larger oxygen bubble. This allows this particle to move to the center of the group, where it coordinates the oscillations of all of the other particles. Using this approach, the researchers found they could create oscillators containing up to at least 11 particles.
Depending on the number of particles, this oscillator beats at a frequency of about 0.1 to 0.3 hertz, which is on the order of the low-frequency oscillators that govern biological functions such as walking and the beating of the heart.
Oscillating current
The researchers also showed that they could use the rhythmic beating of these particles to generate an oscillating electric current. To do that, they swapped out the platinum catalyst for a fuel cell made of platinum and ruthenium or gold. The mechanical oscillation of the particles rhythmically alters the resistance from one end of the fuel cell to the other, which converts the voltage generated by the fuel cell to an oscillating current.
Generating an oscillating current instead of a constant one could be useful for applications such as powering tiny robots that can walk. The MIT researchers used this approach to show that they could power a microactuator, which was previously used as legs on a tiny walking robot developed by researchers at Cornell University. The original version was powered by a laser that had to be alternately pointed at each set of legs, to manually oscillate the current. The MIT team showed that the on-board oscillating current generated by their particles could drive the cyclic actuation of the microrobotic leg, using a wire to transfer the current from the particles to the actuator.
“It shows that this mechanical oscillation can become an electrical oscillation, and then that electrical oscillation can actually power activities that a robot would do,” Strano says.
One possible application for this kind of system would be to control swarms of tiny autonomous robots that could be used as sensors to monitor water pollution.
###
The research was funded in part by the U.S. Army Research Office, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation.
In 1977, Ralph Juergens referred to “an electric universe in the Velikovskian mode”, referring to Velikovsky's views in his unpublished monograph Cosmos ...
Researchers have a responsibility to communicate results of science accurately says BU professor
Investigators, Institutions, journals and industry likely contribute to misinformation
(Boston)—Many groups participate in the communication of science, including investigators and researchers, professional organizations, federal agencies, foundations, industry, editors and science writers. The challenge of how best to communicate science has been a focus of much attention especially since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now a researcher from Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine stresses that researchers must report the results of their studies accurately and not spin or hype their results. “At a time when evidence is increasingly challenged by misinformation and disinformation on social media platforms, scientists need to responsibly report the results of their work,” says corresponding author Howard Bauchner, MD, professor of pediatrics.
According to Bauchner, most investigators want the results of their studies to be communicated accurately, but they too have their biases. He points to a study of more than 900 abstracts of grants funded by the National Institutes of Health from 1985 to 2020, which found the use of hype adjectives, such as “novel”, “innovative”, and “transformative”, increased by 1,378 percent over those 35 years.
While guidance exists for how members of the media should communicate science, few guides are available for researchers. Among Baucher’s recommendations, he suggests investigators choose their words carefully. “Statements and adjectives that reflect extremes should be avoided. Few studies are the first of their kind, transformative, critically important, or provide definitive evidence that a treatment cures a disease,” he says. Secondly, Bauchner urges investigators to ensure that the language in press releases accords with that in their paper and that the appropriate findings are emphasized.
When investigators present the results of their studies at meetings, or in other venues, Bauchner recommends they should use language similar to that used in the article if it has already been published or is in preparation. “Given the ubiquity of the lay press at large scientific meetings and the propensity for meeting organizers to issue press releases, the potential impact on the public must be recognized.”
While researchers cannot always influence how industry, journals or the media communicate the results of their studies, what they say to the media is their responsibility. “Since communication is fundamental to public health it is crucial that investigators avoid hype and spin, acknowledge limitations, and be circumspect, perhaps even understating the impact their study will have on individual clinical care or public health recommendations,” he adds.
This opinion appears online in the journal Lancet.
JOURNAL
The Lancet
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Commentary/editorial
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
Not applicable
ARTICLE TITLE
The scientific communication ecosystem: the responsibility of investigators
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
13-Oct-2022
COI STATEMENT
HB was the 16th Editor in Chief of JAMA and the JAMA Network between 2011 and 2021. FPR is the Editor in Chief of JAMA Network Open and receives a stipend from the American Medical Association for this.
Researchers studying climate futures shouldn’t jump to extremes
CU Boulder scientists call for greater emphasis on middle-of-the-road climate scenarios
We’ve seen it splashed across news headlines: future sea-level rise that could consume the state of Florida, predicted global temperature spikes of 9 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100—threats of catastrophic climate scenarios leading to societal collapse. But now, a University of Colorado Boulder-led team is pushing for climate scientists to put the more likely and plausible middle-range scenarios to the research forefront, instead of solely the worst-case futures.
“We shouldn’t overstate or understate our climate future,” said Matt Burgess, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) fellow, assistant professor at CU Boulder and lead on a letter published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). “People need to think in terms of gradations, not absolutes. Yes, we need to be aware of the extremes, like climate solutions that get us to net zero before mid century, or on the flipside, global catastrophes. But it’s what’s in the middle that is more likely. And that deserves more research.”
The letter, coauthored by CU Boulder’s Roger Pielke Jr. and University of British Columbia’s Justin Ritchie, is a reply to a PNAS perspectives paper entitled, “Climate Endgame,” led by University of Cambridge's Luke Kemp, that argues catastrophic climate futures, including human extinction, should be a main emphasis in climate research.
The CU Boulder team argues overemphasizing worst-case climate scenarios, like RCP 8.5, turns attention away from the most likely future. “Right now, not as many climate models focus enough attention on middle scenarios,” said Burgess. “The SSP2-3.4 scenario, which might be one of most plausible emissions scenarios, wasn’t featured at all in the IPCC’s latest impacts and physical science reports. That should probably change.”
According to Burgess, we shouldn’t ignore the RCP 8.5 and SSP5-8.5 climate scenarios completely. “We want to know what might happen in extreme scenarios, and physical climate cycle feedbacks might make warming worse than emissions would suggest. But for the emissions in that scenario to happen, all the regions in the world in 2100 would need to have over $100k GDP per capita, with no climate policy the whole century, all-in on coal, despite facing unlivable heat in tropical regions with the warming that scenario produces. That’s just not realistic,” Burgess added.
And on the other side of the spectrum, we also are unlikely to hit the low-end climate warming scenarios that limit warming to 1.5 degree C by 2100. “That would be a daunting task to keep us that low—we are almost there now,” said Burgess.
Many experts agree that what's much more likely is something more in the range of 2 to 3 degrees C (3.6 to 5.4 degrees F) of warming by 2100, Burgess said. By studying these middle-ground scenarios, scientists can focus on understanding those climate impacts that may be harmful and locally severe, but probably not catastrophic to humanity as a whole: more severe heat waves, places like California continuing to get drier and less-than-ideal ski seasons here in Colorado.
Climate catastrophism may also be contributing to the youth mental health crisis, the letter states. Over 40 percent of young adults reported thoughts of climate change negatively affecting their daily lives and functioning or making them hesitant to have children.
“We don’t want to ignore the possibility of catastrophic societal collapse or human extinction, but it shouldn't be our main focus right now,” said Burgess.
Catastrophic climate risks should be neither understated nor overstated
Wastewater alert: research highlights antimicrobial resistance risk
As the dumping of untreated wastewater into the sea sparks pollution warnings, new research has identified a “significant risk” of increasing antibiotic resistance associated with wastewater systems across the UK
A research team, led by the University of Exeter, has carried out the most comprehensive assessment of risks posed by antibiotics in the environment in the UK to date, now published in the journal Environment International.
The team discovered that the levels of the antibiotic ciprofloxacin are likely to result in increased antibiotic resistance in wastewater and, in some cases, potentially in rivers. Ciprofloxacin is commonly used to treat respiratory, skin, and urinary tract infections, amongst other conditions.
Crucially, the research shows that antibiotic pollution from human waste poses a risk in the environment in higher income countries like the UK, despite having longstanding sanitation infrastructures.
Antibiotic resistance is recognised by the World Health Organisation as one of the greatest health threats of our time. By 2050, up to 10 million deaths each year could be caused by antibiotics and other antimicrobial drugs no longer working to treat common diseases, including respiratory tract, sexually transmitted, and urinary tract infections. The threat of resistance could also increase the risk of contracting infection after basic surgical procedures.
Around 70 per cent of the antibiotics taken as medicines end up in the natural environment, through trace residues excreted by patients and inappropriate disposal of medicines, among other sources.
Bacteria are also present in these wastewaters, and when they are exposed to antibiotics, they can evolve resistance within these environments. This could mean an increased threat to human health, if resistant bacteria enter and colonise the gut, for example through swallowing water while swimming.
A recent survey by UK Water Industry Research (UKWIR) measured the concentrations of several antibiotics in untreated wastewater entering treatment plants, and the treated wastewater that is released into rivers and streams.
The survey, conducted at 67 treatment plants across the UK, was carried out across all four seasons, over multiple years.
The research team at the University of Exeter Medical School compared this data to results from their previous studies, which determined the lowest antibiotic concentrations that increase antibiotic resistance. They found that there is a significant risk that the antibiotic ciprofloxacin could result in increased antibiotic resistant bacteria in wastewater and the environment.
Dr Aimee Murray, of the University of Exeter, who led the research, said: “We need more awareness of the fact that antibiotics are environmental pollutants. When we take antibiotics, they aren’t fully broken down by our bodies, but end up being excreted into our wastewater treatment system, and then released into the environment. This research shows that antibiotic pollution could increase antibiotic resistance in sewage and in some cases, our rivers. Elevated levels of antibiotic resistance pose a greater threat to human health.
“This is the first evidence of risks posed by antibiotics in the UK in terms of driving increased antibiotic resistance in the environment, and it’s very timely considering current public concern over sewage pollution. Release of antibiotics into the environment isn’t currently regulated, but this paper and other emerging research suggests this may be required in future.”
April Hayes, PhD student at the University of Exeter and joint first author, said: “Concern is increasing about pollution in our surface waters in the UK, and this research demonstrates that pharmaceutical pollution is also a threat to our waters in England and Wales. Additionally, this research shows that this risk can vary by region, likely due to a number of different factors. Further understanding of the differences between these regions, such as antibiotic prescribing rates, or types of wastewater treatment used, may help in addressing this pressing issue.”
Laura Murray, PhD student at the University of Exeter and joint-first author, said: “Antibiotics can persist in UK wastewater effluent despite the sewage being treated. Some, such as ciprofloxacin, can be present in UK surface waters, including rivers, at levels that may drive evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria. A particular concern is that storms and heavy rainfall can cause untreated sewage overflows. On one hand, discharge of raw sewage could result in higher antibiotic resistance risks as the sewage hasn't been treated; on the other hand, the raw sewage may be heavily diluted with rainwater, which will decrease risks. Certainly, more research on combined sewer overflows is needed to fully appreciate how raw sewage discharges impact antibiotic resistance risk."
The research found that the East of England had the highest risks of antibiotic resistance development in untreated sewage. The East Midlands saw the highest risks in treated sewage overall, with the West Midlands and the South West close behind. This also translated into highest predicted risks for these three regions in the rivers and streams receiving the treated sewage.
Professor Will Gaze, who leads the wider environmental dimension of antibiotic resistance research programme at the University of Exeter, said: “It’s important to translate our data on evolution of antibiotic resistance into risk assessments that can be used to inform policy and practice. This research is a great example of this approach”
The paper is entitled ‘Predicting selection for antimicrobial resistance in UK wastewater and aquatic environments: ciprofloxacin poses a significant risk’.
JOURNAL
Environment International
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Experimental study
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
Cells
ARTICLE TITLE
Predicting selection for antimicrobial resistance in UK wastewater and aquatic environments: Ciprofloxacin poses a significant risk
Engineering more race-inclusive AI in medicine
Pitt’s Jingtong Hu leads $1.7M NIH project to ensure AI medical screening works for everyone
IMAGE: JINGTONG HU, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGHview more
CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
Artificial intelligence (AI) can help get crucial medical screening into the hands of people across the world. University of Pittsburgh engineering researcher Jingtong Hu is working to make sure the screening is effective and fair, no matter whose hand is holding it.
AI has been deployed across a broad range of health applications, like detecting skin or cancer, recognizing emotions, monitoring vital signs, and other medical imaging and diagnostics. However, neural networks are only as good as the data set on which they are trained, and minorities are generally underrepresented in these datasets, which leads to a particularly insidious form of technological inequality.
Hu and his team at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering are building a distributed, inclusive data collection and learning framework that relies on smartphone apps, making it easy to participate in while protecting user privacy. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) have recently awarded Hu $1,744,696 for this work.
“Existing and easily accessible data sets are inherently biased. It’s not always easy for people in marginalized communities to participate in data collection and research, and these communities might also lack medical professionals,” said Hu, associate professor and William Kepler Whiteford Faculty Fellow of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “AI could make critical healthcare more accessible for these communities; but without a dataset that accurately reflects the diversity of the population, AI could misdiagnose people that are under-represented during the data collection stage, thereby increasing healthcare disparities.”
Hu’s project would help prevent these disparities by developing an on-device learning framework that continuously learns from new users’ data when using a mobile application. It will take advantage of federated learning (FL), which uses multiple devices to collaboratively train a shared model while keeping the data on the devices. In FL the models, instead of user data, are shared with the Cloud, protecting user privacy.
“By using this method, not only can we improve the global model to be fairer by incorporating more equally represented data, but we can personalize the model for each individual. After all, the most important metrics for each user is the accuracy for him or herself,” said Hu. “A user could use our app to diagnose their skin condition, for example, to see if a skin issues is skin cancer or just normal eczema. Meanwhile, our algorithm will learn from the new images locally. Patients' images will not be uploaded to the server; they will be analyzed on their own cell phones.”
Unlike existing frameworks, this framework would rely on unsupervised learning with data coming from a variety of smartphone models and other devices, allowing more people to participate in the study. The framework would also have to consider the fairness of different machine learning models. The team will develop a machine learning framework that will automatically search existing learning models and use the best architectures for datasets with diverse data.
The project, “Achieve Fairness in AI-Assisted Mobile Healthcare Apps through Unsupervised Federated Learning,” is funded for four years in collaboration with Dr. Alaina James from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine’s Department of Dermatology, Dr. Yiyu Shi from the University of Notre Dame, and Dr. Lei Yang from George Mason University.
Yes, we can!
Physicist Fariba Karimi and her team at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna revisited and analyzed the claims made by a ‘sexist’ senior scientist – who said, among other things, that women were less able at physics than men
IMAGE: PHOTO FROM THE SOLVAY CONFERENCE ON QUANTUM MECHANICS IN 1927 IN WHICH MARIE CURIE -- SITTING IN THE FRONT ROW, THIRD FROM THE LEFT -- WAS THE ONLY WOMAN INVITED.view more
CREDIT: PHOTOGRAPH BY BENJAMIN COUPRIE, INSTITUT INTERNATIONAL DE PHYSIQUE SOLVAY, BRUSSELS, BELGIUM
[Vienna, October 10 2022] -- The year was 2018 and physicist Fariba Karimi remembers feeling appalled and disgusted by the remarks made by a prominent male scientist during a presentation at Cern, the European nuclear research center in Geneva. “It was just unbelievable,” recalls Karimi, who leads a team in computational social science at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna (CSH).
During a Cern workshop on gender equality, a professor of Pisa University said physics was “invented and built by men” and claimed that male scientists produced better research than female researchers.
The controversy spurred Karimi, who has long been intrigued with the origins of gender disparities in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields, to design a study to discover why women are discriminated against in physics.
Her findings are published in the new issue of the journal Communications Physics.
First-mover advantage
The study, which drew on a unique dataset provided by the American Physical Society, confirmed that women are still largely underrepresented in this field. However, the results indicate that, although papers written by women tend to have lower visibility, the gender gap is the result of men enjoying a first-mover advantage in physics.
“This means that the participation of men in physics has historically been disproportionately higher than that of women. It also means that the entry barrier for women into physics was higher – due to sexism and societal expectations of women – and therefore they could not enter the physics community as early as men,” explains Karimi.
“At a macro level, this structural barrier resulted in a physics community with more senior privileged white men, thus creating an illusion that physics is not for women,” adds the CSH researcher.
Recognition for similar work
The dataset was composed of more than 541,000 scholarly articles published between 1893 to 2010, and included article metadata, author information, and citations. Using a technique that combines name and image recognition, the researchers inferred the gender of the primary authors of papers: 9,947 women and 60,886 men.
“In the study, rather than just comparing men and women in physics in terms of publications and citations, I wanted to see whether they receive different recognition for similar work published around the same time,” points out the CSH’s team leader.
Consequently, the team selected pairs of papers on similar topics written by men and women primary authors. Then, they computed the difference in the number of citations each paper received. “The main goal was to compare pairs of similar papers in an unbiased fashion,” explains Hyunsik Kong, co-author of the study.
By comparing “apples to apples,” the researchers came upon a disparity in citations. “It’s not huge, but it’s definitely there”, observes Samuel Martin-Gutierrez, co-author of the paper and a postdoc at CSH. “And we found that the temporal aspect of scientific production was very important to explain this citation disparity.”
Men still have the edge over women
According to the analysis, whoever published first, regardless of gender, tended to get most of the attention of the scientific community. “This explains part of this disparity, but not all. There are differences in how men and women get the first-mover advantage and men still have the edge over women,” says Martin-Gutierrez.
In other words, this means that men tended to publish first more often than women. Furthermore, when men published first, they still gained an advantage over women. “A male author gets more citations when he publishes first compared to a female author,” points out Martin-Gutierrez.
When the CSH team adjusted the time of publication, there were no statistically significant differences in citations of men and women. “The results combined suggest that the overall disparity in the citation network is a result of cumulative advantages and the first-mover effect that men have in physics,” conclude the scientists.
“From a broader perspective, the entry barriers for women due to historical disadvantages and sexism create a so-called ‘structural inequality’ or what sociologists call ‘racism without racists’. As a result, structural inequality continues to affect women's participation for generations to come, and it should be addressed through appropriate interventions,” highlights Karimi.
The study "Influence of the first-mover advantage on the gender disparities in physics citations," by Hyunsik Kong, Samuel Martin-Gutierrez, and Fariba Karimi, was published in Communications Physics (2022) 5:243.
About CSH
The mission of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna is to host, educate, and inspire complex systems scientists dedicated to making sense of Big Data to boost science and society. Scientists at the Hub develop methods for the scientific, quantitative, and predictive understanding of complex systems.
The CSH is a joint initiative of AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, Central European University CEU, Danube University Krems, Graz University of Technology, IIASA, Medical University of Vienna, TU Wien, VetMedUni Vienna, Vienna University of Economics and Business, and Austrian Economic Chambers (WKO). https://www.csh.ac.at
“Women are better. The female advantage is consistent across time and life span, but it is also relatively small”, says Marco Hirnstein, professor at The University of Bergen, Norway.
Hirnstein is interested in how biological, psychological, and social factors contribute to sex/gender differences in cognitive abilities and what the underlying brain mechanisms are.
Will the results finally settle pub debates on who’s better?
"So far, the focus has mostly been on abilities, in which men excel. However, in recent years the focus has shifted more towards women", says Hirnstein.
We thought Women were better – and they are!
The origin of these sex/gender differences; nature versus nurture - and the potential consequences of these differences have been the subject of big societal debates. As in do men and women have different talents for different professions?
Textbooks and popular science books take it for granted that women are better at finding words. For example, when naming words that begin with the letter “F”, or words that belong to a certain category like animals or fruits. It has also been considered “fact” that women are better at remembering words.
Yet, the actual findings are much more inconsistent than textbooks imply: Some studies find a female advantage, some find a male advantage, some do not find any advantage.
“Most intellectual skills show no or negligible differences in average performance between men and women. However, women excel in some tasks, while men excel in others on average”.
This might sound like stating the obvious, but Hirnstein and his colleagues point out how their findings can be useful in diagnosis and in health care.
Critical relevance for the diagnosis of dementia
The results are relevant in at least two ways. First, they help to clarify whether the female advantage is real. Second, knowing about this sex/gender difference is important for interpreting the results of diagnostic assessments, in which those abilities are frequently tested.
For example, to determine whether somebody has dementia. Knowing that women are generally better in those tasks is critical to prevent that women are under-diagnosed, due to their better average, baseline performance. And for men: That they are over-diagnosed, due to their lower average baseline performance.
Currently, many but not all assessments take sex/gender into account.
The Method is Meta
Hirnstein and his colleagues conducted a so-called “meta-analysis”, where they analyzed the combined data of all PhD theses, master theses, and studies published in scientific journals they could find. This meta-analysis encompassed more than 500 measures from more than 350.000 participants.
The researchers found that women are indeed better. The advantage is small but consistent across the last 50 years and across an individual’s lifespan.
Moreover, they found that the female advantage depends on the sex/gender of the leading scientist: Female scientists report a larger female advantage, male scientists report a smaller female advantage.
Human—Animal Interactions – an open access interdisciplinary journal devoted to the dissemination of research in fields related to interactions between non-human animals and their human counterparts – has joined CABI’s publishing portfolio
Human—Animal Interactions– an open access interdisciplinary journal devoted to the dissemination of research in fields related to interactions between non-human animals and their human counterparts – has joined CABI’s publishing portfolio.
The expanded journal is created from the Human Animal Interaction Bulletin (HAIB) which was launched in 2013 as the research in the field of human—animal interactions was beginning its exponential growth.
It provides an inviting publication outlet for researchers, clinicians, practitioners and students working in different disciplines, across the globe, who are interested in advancing the field of human—animal interactions through scholarly research.
The journal will invite a broad range of article types to report new research, synthesise knowledge, and provide a platform for discussion.
To ensure that Human-Animal Interactions is pertinent and relevant to both practitioners and scientific researchers, contributions are encouraged from a broad spectrum of topics and investigative techniques utilized by those in social sciences and humanities as well as animal-related fields.
The journal is welcoming article submissions across topics pertaining to animal health, human health, and a broad range of disciplines (such as counselling, economics and animal science) and settings and activities (for instance, hospital, disaster, war and crisis).
Professor Lori Kogan, Editor-in-Chief of Human-Animal Interactions, said, “I envision Human—Animal Interactions as the cutting-edge resource for the advancement of the studies of human animal interactions and a catalyst for the expansion of dialogue and collaboration amongst researchers, practitioners and students across disciplines and geographical borders.
“In order to make the journal pertinent and relevant to both practitioners and scientific researchers, contributions will be encouraged from a broad spectrum of topics and investigative techniques utilized by those in the social sciences and humanities.”
Notes to editors
Main image: Human—Animal Interactions is an open access interdisciplinary journal devoted to the dissemination of research in all fields related to interactions between non-human animals and their human counterparts (Credit: CABI).
Media enquiries
For more information contact Wayne Coles, Communications Manager, CABI – email: w.coles@cabi.org
About CABI
CABI is an international not-for-profit organization that improves people’s lives by providing information and applying scientific expertise to solve problems in agriculture and the environment.
Through knowledge sharing and science, CABI helps address issues of global concern such as improving global food security and safeguarding the environment. We do this by helping farmers grow more and lose less of what they produce, combating threats to agriculture and the environment from pests and diseases, protecting biodiversity from invasive species, and improving access to agricultural and environmental scientific knowledge. Our 49 member countries guide and influence our core areas of work, which include development and research projects, scientific publishing and microbial services.
We gratefully acknowledge the core financial support from our member countries (and lead agencies) including the United Kingdom (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office), China (Chinese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs), Australia (Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research), Canada (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada), Netherlands (Directorate-General for International Cooperation, and Switzerland (Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation). Other sources of funding include programme/project funding from development agencies, the fees paid by our member countries and profits from our publishing activities which enable CABI to support rural development and scientific research around the world.
