Water wars: causes and possible solutions

Study by the Politecnico di Milano in Nature Sustainability

Peer-Reviewed Publication

POLITECNICO DI MILANO

Milan, 23 November 2022 - Will today's wars  over oil be over water in the future? For years this question has been at the heart of a scientific debate on the causes of these wars and how they should be studied.

A study published in the prestigious Nature Sustainability by a group of researchers from the Politecnico di Milano has investigated the phenomenon, also in light of ‘new’ types of conflict in which paramilitary groups seem to capitalise on environmental stress.

In order to define the relationship between water and conflict, speaking only of water availability - or lack thereof - is not enough: in fact, conflicts tend to be associated with specific and complex socio-hydrological conditions, which in turn deal with the socio-economic value of water as a form of livelihood, especially in agriculture, and with the effects that human use of water has on the accessibility of this resource.

According to the authors, the research strategies that could contribute towards creating new types of scientific evidence on the interconnections between environment, society and conflict are: creating water availability measures that take into account the importance of water for human sustenance, focusing on mechanisms that arise when a resource is used unequally, and avoiding oversimplifications when considering environmental factors in social analyses. 

The work is based on the fusion of hydrological modelling and statistical analysis, combined with a specific focus on socio-environmental, cultural and political mechanisms which is used for studying the socio-hydrological characteristics of conflicts in the Lake Chad region in Central Africa.

This region has been affected by several conflicts in the last 20 years, such as the Boko Haram insurgency, the civil war in Darfur, and the coups in the Central African Republic. In addition to analysing data on the level of human development, urbanisation of the region and ethnic composition of the population, the researchers used a model to create water and soil availability indicators for agriculture and human sustenance in general. 

These data were related to the conflicts in the region between 2000 and 2015 and a method was developed that, through a multidimensional approach, manages to explore more secondary, indirect and complex relationships within the water-conflict nexus.

On the one hand, conflicts tend to persist in the same places and expand to the closest areas. Most conflicts occur in highly ‘anomalous’ locations (in terms of water availability) compared to the rest of the region, and the type of anomaly tends to be correlated with the dynamics of the conflict.

 ‘Working in this way it’s possible to produce quantitative and qualitative descriptions of particular environmental “patterns” associated with specific conflict dynamics.’ - explains Nikolas Galli, a researcher in the Glob3ScienCE (Global Studies on Sustainable Security in a Changing Environment) group at the Politecnico di Milano, coordinated by Maria Cristina Rulli, who added: ‘Socio-environmental, socio-hydrological and hydro-social research is pushing academic boundaries towards integrating natural and social sciences in order to produce more accurate representations of socio-ecological systems. Our study provides a new methodological approach and new information for understanding natural resources conflicts in a case study with a long history of (un)scientific representations by both natural and social scientists and policy makers’.

 

The study Socio-hydrological features of armed conflicts in the Lake Chad Basin is authored by Nikolas Galli, Ilenia Epifani, Davide Danilo Chiarelli and Maria Cristina Rulli of the Politecnico di Milano and Jampel Dell'Angelo of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.

Article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-022-00936-2 

---

JOURNAL

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41893-022-00936-2 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Socio-hydrological features of armed conflicts in the Lake Chad Basin

New technology maps movement of microscopic algae, crucial to ocean health

The movement patterns of microscopic algae can be mapped in greater detail than ever before, giving new insights into ocean health, thanks to new technology developed at the University of Exeter

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF EXETER

The movement patterns of microscopic algae can be mapped in greater detail than ever before, giving new insights into ocean health, thanks to new technology developed at the University of Exeter.

The new platform allows scientists to study in unprecedented detail the patterns of movement of microscopic algae. The insight could have implications for understanding and preventing harmful algal blooms, and for the development of algal biofuels, which could one day provide an alternative to fossil fuels.

Microscopic algae play a key role in ocean ecosystems, forming the bases of aquatic food webs, and sequestering most of the world’s carbon. The health of oceans therefore depends on maintaining stable algal communities. There is increasing concern that changes in ocean composition such as acidification may disrupt algae spread and community make-up. Many species move and swim around to locate sources of light or nutrients, in order to maximise photosynthesis.

The new microfluidic technology, now published in eLife, will allow scientists to trap and image single microalgae swimming inside microdroplets, for the first time. The cutting-edge development has enabled the team to study how microscopic algae explore their micro-environment, and tracked and quantified their behaviours long-term. Importantly, they characterised how individuals differ from one another and respond to sudden changes in the make-up of their habitat such as the presence of light or certain chemicals.

Lead author Dr Kirsty Wan, from the University of Exeter’s Living Systems Institute, said: “This technology means we can now probe and advance our understanding of swimming behaviours for any microscopic organism, in detail that has not been possible previously. This will help us understand how they control their swimming patterns and potential for adaptability to future climate change, and other challenges.”

In particular, the team has discovered that the presence of interfaces with strong curvature, in combination with the microscopic corkscrewing swimming of the organisms, induce macroscopic chiral movement (always clockwise or counter-clockwise) seen in the average trajectory of cells.

The technology has a wide range of potential uses, and could represent a new way of classifying and quantifying not only the environmental intelligence of cells, but of complex patterns of behaviour in any organism, including animals.

Dr Wan added: “Ultimately, we aim to develop predictive models for swimming and culturing of microbial and microalgae communities in any relevant habitat leading to deeper understanding of present and future marine ecology. Knowledge of detailed behaviour occurring at the individual-cell level is therefore an essential first step.”

The paper is entitled ‘Phenotyping single-cell motility in microfluidic confinement’, and is published in eLife. This study was conducted in collaboration with microfluidics expert Dr Fabrice Gielen (also of the University of Exeter’s Living Systems Institute) and Dr Marco Mazza (Loughborough University).

ENDS

About the University of Exeter    

The University of Exeter is a Russell Group university that combines world-class research with high levels of student satisfaction. Exeter has over 30,000 students and sits within the Top 15 universities in The Guardian University Guide 2023, and in the top 150 globally in both the QS World Rankings 2022 and THE World University Rankings 2023. In the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF), more than 99% of our research were rated as being of international quality, and our world-leading research impact has grown by 72% since 2014, more than any other Russell Group university.  

https://www.exeter.ac.uk/ 

---

DOI

10.7554/elife.76519 

ARTICLE TITLE

Phenotyping single-cell motility in microfluidic confinement

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

23-Nov-2022

Quarter of former Olympians suffer from osteoarthritis, study says

Competing at elite level in sport is linked with an increased risk of developing osteoarthritis and joint pain in later life, a study suggests

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

One in four retired Olympians reported a diagnosis of osteoarthritis, the form of arthritis that causes changes in the joint and can lead to discomfort, pain and disability, the research found.

Elite retired sportspeople who had experienced a sports-related injury had a higher chance of knee and hip osteoarthritis when compared with the general population.

The athletes – who had competed at an Olympic level in 57 sports including athletics, rowing and skiing – also had an increased risk of lower back pain overall, and shoulder osteoarthritis after a shoulder injury.

Researchers hope the findings will help develop new approaches in injury prevention for the benefit of athletes now and in retirement.

The study – led by a University of Edinburgh based researcher – is the largest international survey of its kind, and the first to observe the consequences of osteoarthritis and pain in different joints from retired elite athletes across different summer and winter Olympic sports.

Researchers quizzed 3,357 retired Olympians aged around 45 on injuries and the health of their bones, joints, muscles and spine. They were also asked if they were currently experiencing joint pain, and if they had an osteoarthritis diagnosis.

For comparison, 1,735 people aged around 41 from the general population completed the same survey.

Researchers used statistical models to compare the prevalence of spine, upper limb and lower limb osteoarthritis and pain in retired Olympians with the general population.  

The team considered factors that could influence the risk of pain and osteoarthritis such as injury, recurrent injury, age, sex and obesity.

They found that the knee, lumbar spine and shoulder were the most injury prone areas for Olympians. These were also among the most common locations for osteoarthritis and pain.

After a joint injury the Olympians were more likely to develop osteoarthritis than someone sustaining a similar injury in the general population, the research found

The sportspeople also had an increased risk of shoulder, knee, hip and ankle and upper and lower spine pain after injury, although this did not differ with the general population.

Dr Debbie Palmer, of the University of Edinburgh’s Moray House School of Education and Sport, said: “High performance sport is associated with an increased risk of sport-related injury and there is emerging evidence suggesting retired elite athletes have high rates of post-traumatic osteoarthritis.

“This study provides new evidence for specific factors associated with pain and osteoarthritis in retired elite athletes across the knee, hip, ankle, lumbar and cervical spine, and shoulder, and identifies differences in their occurrence that are specific to Olympians.”

Researchers say the study may help people make decisions about recovery and rehabilitation from injuries in order to prevent recurrences, and to inform prevention strategies to reduce the risk and progression of pain and OA in retirement.

Two linked studies are published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

Open access version of the paper are available here: Part 1 -https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/prevalence-of-and-factors-associated-with-osteoarthritis-and-pain

 Part 2 - https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/prevalence-of-and-factors-associated-with-osteoarthritis-and-pain-2

The World Olympians Association funded the Retired Olympian Musculoskeletal Health Study with a research grant from the International Olympic Committee.

For further information, please contact: Joanne Morrison, Press and PR Office, tel +44 131 651 4266, joanne.morrison@ed.ac.uk

 

---

JOURNAL

British Journal of Sports Medicine

DOI

10.1136/bjsports-2021-104762 

ARTICLE TITLE

Prevalence of and factors associated with osteoarthritis and pain in retired Olympians compared with the general population: part 1 – the lower l

Do acquisitions harm the acquired brand? Identifying conditions that reduce the negative effect

News from the Journal of Marketing

Peer-Reviewed Publication

AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

Researchers from University of Leeds, University of Vienna, and University of Pennsylvania published a new Journal of Marketing article that examines why consumers develop negative reactions towards acquired brands and explains conditions that attenuate that negative effect.

The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled “When and Why Consumers React Negatively to Brand Acquisitions: A Values Authenticity Account” and is authored by Alessandro Biraglia, Christoph Fuchs, Elisa Maira, and Stefano Puntoni.

When Unilever acquired GROM, an Italian gelato company, 83% of consumers polled by a newspaper described the acquisition as “bad news.” This reduced consumer interest led to the closure of several GROM retail outlets, including the ice cream maker’s first store, four years after the acquisition. Similarly, consumer ratings for The Body Shop, a cosmetic brand, plummeted after L’Oréal acquired it.

Companies often engage in mergers and acquisitions to expand their portfolio and generate growth – the global value of acquisitions amounted to $2.3 trillion in 2019, according to JP Morgan – but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting that brand acquisitions can potentially generate negative reactions among consumers. Yet little is known about when and why brand acquisitions might trigger these negative reactions.

This new study explains why consumers develop negative reactions towards acquired brands in terms of lower brand choice and reduced purchase likelihood. As Biraglia explains, “We find that, across product categories, consumers often see an acquired brand as having compromised the authentic values upon which it was founded. This perception is triggered not only when a big company acquires a smaller one, but also when the sizes of the acquirer and acquired brand are comparable. Furthermore, the negative effect appears even in the case of partial acquisition such as 15% of ownership.”

Conditions that Attenuate the Negative Effect of Acquisitions

Across ten studies using different methods, research designs, product categories, and brands, the researchers demonstrate that negative brand reactions can be explained by the perceived loss of a brand’s unique values. “Building on this values authenticity account, we find that the negative effect of acquisitions depends on the acquired brand’s values, brand age, leadership continuity, and the alignment between acquiring and acquired brands,” says Fuchs. The conditions that attenuate the negative effect of acquisitions are as follows:

• Consumers develop a lower purchase intention when a previously acquired brand is acquired again by another company, as the original values may have already been diluted during the first takeover.
• Consumers seem less concerned when the original leadership team remains in charge after the acquisition because this may act as a reassurance that the authentic values are retained.
• Consumers react less negatively if the values of the acquirer brand align with those of the acquired brand. The negative effect is mitigated if a brand that produces sustainable products is acquired by a brand with sustainability as a core value.
• Consumers react less negatively when the acquired brand has been established with a strategic orientation towards growth. In these cases, they don’t see the takeover as a loss of the brand’s authentic values. For instance, many start-ups are founded with the desire to get bigger and many communicate this in their statements (e.g., Bill Gates often mentioned his vision to have a “PC on every desk in every home”). Sometimes founders even invoke growth values as the reason for selling the company (e.g., the founder of Dot’s Pretzels explained the acquisition by Hershey’s in November 2021 by saying she had “built the business with the idea of sharing them with everyone.”)
• Consumers react less negatively if a young brand is acquired. Consumers consider the acquisition of a younger company less disruptive of values authenticity. Conversely, for older companies with a set of values crystallized over decades – or even centuries – we find a more severe negative effect.

Managerial Implications

Before the acquisition:

• “Managers should examine the target brand’s communications and identify whether the vision statement, advertising, social media accounts, and other forms of branding contain any references to growth or reaching a broader range of customers. Such cues may make the acquisition process more favorable in the eyes of consumers,” explains Maira. Targeting brands aligned with the acquiring company’s core values and making this alignment salient can benefit the acquisition process.
• Similarly, scouting for young, promising brands could prove beneficial, potentially giving the acquirer an aura of patronage and a reputation for investing in nascent businesses.

After the acquisition:

• “Managers should carefully plan how to effectively frame acquisition announcements. If the founders/original owners will not be involved after the acquisition, managers may want to consider retaining long-term employees and highlighting this in communications,” suggests Puntoni.
• When the acquirer has values that align with those of the acquired brand, highlighting this can boost perceptions of the acquisition and nurture the acquired brand.
• If there is no strong alignment of values between the acquirer and the acquired brand, the research team suggests that managers focus on other aspects that can benefit from the acquisition. For example, an acquirer could highlight an increase in R&D facilities or a potential increase in product quality.

Full article and author contact information available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429221137817

About the Journal of Marketing 

The Journal of Marketing develops and disseminates knowledge about real-world marketing questions useful to scholars, educators, managers, policy makers, consumers, and other societal stakeholders around the world. Published by the American Marketing Association since its founding in 1936, JM has played a significant role in shaping the content and boundaries of the marketing discipline. Shrihari Sridhar (Joe Foster ’56 Chair in Business Leadership, Professor of Marketing at Mays Business School, Texas A&M University) serves as the current Editor in Chief.
https://www.ama.org/jm

About the American Marketing Association (AMA) 

As the largest chapter-based marketing association in the world, the AMA is trusted by marketing and sales professionals to help them discover what is coming next in the industry. The AMA has a community of local chapters in more than 70 cities and 350 college campuses throughout North America. The AMA is home to award-winning content, PCM® professional certification, premiere academic journals, and industry-leading training events and conferences.
https://www.ama.org

---

JOURNAL

Journal of Marketing

DOI

10.1177/00222429221137817 

ARTICLE TITLE

When and Why Consumers React Negatively to Brand Acquisitions: A Values Authenticity Account

Insilico Medicine awarded over $700,000 to design new contraceptive options with AI

Grant and Award Announcement

INSILICO MEDICINE

Insilico Medicine, a clinical stage, end-to-end artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company, is designing new non-hormonal contraceptive options for women using its AI platform with support from a grant of over $700,000 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Petrina Kamya, PhD, Head of AI Platforms at Insilico Medicine, participated in the foundation’s Fall 2022 Non-hormonal Contraceptive Discovery Convening and Grand Challenges Annual Meeting Oct. 22-27 in Brussels.

“We’re thrilled to have the opportunity to use our AI drug discovery and design platform to help design new birth control options for women across the world, which represents a major unmet need,” says Dr. Kamya. 

Using its Pharma.AI platform, Insilico will develop completely new small molecules to further interrogate and evaluate targets that could possibly lead to a contraceptive effect. The platform will optimize molecules with desirable properties such as potency, synthetic accessibility, specificity, and metabolic stability in order to have the highest likelihood of success. 

More than 200 million women and girls in low- and middle-income countries who want to avoid pregnancy aren’t using a modern method of contraception, according to the World Health Organization, and nearly 40 percent of women who begin using shorter-acting contraception stop within the first year because they are not comfortable with the methods available. The foundation notes that efforts to develop new contraceptive technologies have been chronically underfunded. 

 

About Insilico Medicine

Insilico Medicine, a clinical stage end-to-end artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company, is connecting biology, chemistry, and clinical trials analysis using next-generation AI systems. The company has developed AI platforms that utilize deep generative models, reinforcement learning, transformers, and other modern machine learning techniques for novel target discovery and the generation of novel molecular structures with desired properties. Insilico Medicine is developing breakthrough solutions to discover and develop innovative drugs for cancer, fibrosis, immunity, central nervous system diseases, infectious diseases, autoimmune diseases, and aging-related diseases. 

Website: www.insilico.com  

Contact: media@insilico.com 

Old World flycatchers’ family tree mapped

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UPPSALA UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: THE EUROPEAN ROBIN IS MORE CLOSELY RELATED TO THE AFROTROPICAL WHITE-BROWED ROBIN-CHAT THAN TO THE EAST ASIAN JAPANESE ROBIN, DESPITE THE CLOSE SIMILARITY IN APPEARANCE BETWEEN THE EUROPEAN AND JAPANESE ROBINS AND THE STRONGLY DIFFERENT PLUMAGES OF THE EUROPEAN ROBIN AND THE WHITE-BROWED ROBIN-CHAT. THE SIMILARITY BETWEEN THE TWO ROBINS IS AN EXAMPLE OF CONVERGENT EVOLUTION, WHICH MEANS THAT SPECIES CAN INDEPENDENTLY EVOLVE SIMILAR APPEARANCES, FOR EXAMPLE DUE TO SIMILAR LIFE STYLES. THE THRUSH NIGHTINGALE AND BLUETHROAT ARE CLOSE RELATIVES AND ALSO MORE CLOSELY RELATED TO THE JAPANESE ROBIN THAN TO THE EUROPEAN ROBIN. HOWEVER, THE NEAREST RELATIVE OF THE BLUETHROAT OCCURS IN THE HIMALAYAS AND CHINESE MOUNTAINS. view more 

CREDIT: TOMAS CARLBERG, HANS BISTER AND CRAIG BRELSFORD/SHANGHAIBIRDING.COM.

The European robin’s closest relatives are found in tropical Africa. The European robin is therefore not closely related to the Japanese robin, despite their close similarity in appearance. This is confirmed by a new study of the Old World flycatcher family, to which these birds belong. The study comprises 92 per cent of the more than 300 species in this family.

“The fact that the European and Japanese robins are so similar-looking despite not being closely related is one of many examples of so-called convergent evolution in this group of birds. Similarities in appearance can evolve in distant relatives, e.g., as a result of similarities in lifestyle,” says Per Alström from Uppsala University, who is one of the researchers behind the study published in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution.

The Old World flycatcher family comprises birds belonging to more than 300 species that are distributed across Europe, Asia and Africa. The family includes not only flycatchers, but also nightingales, chats, wheatears, redstarts, whistling-thrushes, forktails and other exotic groups. Twelve species breed in Sweden, of which the European robin, the pied flycatcher and the thrush nightingale are the most well-known. All except three of these species winter in sub-Saharan Africa or southern Asia.

Researchers from Uppsala University, the University of Gothenburg and the University of Florida have used DNA to reconstruct the family tree of 92 per cent of the species in the Old World flycatcher family. This study confirms previous findings regarding relationships as well as revealing new, unexpected relationships.

“Species that are named flycatchers are placed on many different branches in the family tree, and hence belong to groups that are not closely related. With respect to the Swedish flycatchers, the pied, collared and red-breasted flycatchers are closely related to each other, while the spotted flycatcher is a more distant relative.”

Uppsala University has a long tradition of research on flycatchers, especially on pied and collared flycatchers. The present study supports the hypothesis that the bluethroat, which is colloquially called “the nightingale of the Swedish mountains”, has its closest relative in the Himalayas and the mountains of China.

“I never cease to be surprised by the many unexpected relationships that are revealed by DNA analyses,” says Per Alström

Zhao, M., Burleigh, J.G., Olsson, U., Alström, P. & Kimball, R.T. 2022. A near-complete and time-calibrated phylogeny of the Old World flycatchers, robins and chats (Aves, Muscicapidae). Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution in press (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2022.107646)

European robin in snow. One of the species the Old World flycatcher family. A new study comprises 92 per cent of the more than 300 species in this family.

CREDIT

Tomas Carlberg

Japanese robin. One of the species the Old World flycatcher family. A new study comprises 92 per cent of the more than 300 species in this family.

CREDIT

Craig Brelsford/shanghaibirding.com

---

DOI

10.1016/j.ympev.2022.107646 

ARTICLE TITLE

A near-complete and time-calibrated phylogeny of the Old World flycatchers, robins and chats (Aves, Muscicapidae)

New project to serve biodiversity science to decision-makers

Business Announcement

PENSOFT PUBLISHERS

 

IMAGE: BIOAGORA KICK-OFF MEETING IN HELSINKI, FINLAND, NOVEMBER 2022. view more 

CREDIT: OWNED CONTENT. BIOAGORA PROJECT.

Scientific knowledge is essential for the correct formulation, implementation, and evaluation of policies and legislation. Within the scope of the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, scientific research helps not only generate new knowledge, but also to process and make available existing knowledge to decision-makers who often highlight the complexity of biodiversity as a major challenge. 

Developing a dynamic, inclusive, and functional Science Service for Biodiversity (SSBD) is the primary objective of BioAgora. By contrast to existing biodiversity science-policy interfaces, the SSBD will be anchored in the Joint Research Centre (JRC) to serve as the scientific pillar of the EU Knowledge Centre for Biodiversity (KCBD). It aims to support the societal transformation required by the European Green Deal and the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 and will be a long-term, stable, and sustainable service bridging biodiversity knowledge with policymaking. 

We will create an ’agora’, or gathering place, where current and future research actors can each bring in their expertise, experience, and products to share and exchange with the purpose of advancing more effective decision-making for biodiversity in the European Union. 

BioAgora held its first consortium meeting on 9-10 November in Helsinki, Finland with 60 representatives of 22 organisations from 13 European countries. The official Launch was streamed online where the new BioAgora video was presented and key members of the consortium discussed the project’s objectives and the specifics of setting up the SSBD. Representatives of the European Commission and long-standing European partner initiatives Biodiversa+ and Eklipse acknowledged the strategic importance of the project for biodiversity in Europe.

“Biodiversity and natural capital have to be integrated into public and business decision-making at all levels”, comments project coordinator Kati Vierikko from the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE). “Collective actions and pluralistic principles have to be at the core of biodiversity policy-making efforts, which is why the Science Service for Biodiversity is envisioned as a bridge between science, policy, and society.”

Juliette Young from the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE) says that “the Science Service for Biodiversity will be underpinned by an infrastructure featuring a set of guiding principles and an ethical framework that will ensure its independence, transparency, and effective implementation.”

“The new governance of the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 ensures that research is at the core of policymaking, which presents an opportunity to connect policy with knowledge production and ensure the flow of information moves bilaterally,” shares Jessika Giraldi from the Directorate-General for the Environment of the European Commission.

To learn more about BioAgora visit the project’s website at www.bioagora.eu 

#################################

This project receives funding from the ЕU Horizon Europe Coordination and Support Actions. Grant agreement No. 101059438

Views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Commission. Neither the EU nor the EC can be held responsible for them.

What was the true human cost of the pandemic in Russia?

Peer-Reviewed Publication

INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR APPLIED SYSTEMS ANALYSIS

A new study assesses the number of lives lost to the COVID-19 pandemic in Russia and introduces a novel methodology that will help to get a clearer view of pandemics in the future.

Calculating how many lives have been lost in the COVID-19 pandemic is crucial for future epidemiological and policy decisions. Getting a reliable estimate is however easier said than done due to incomplete or inadequate registration data, difficulties in determining the primary cause of death, or challenges in tracking down indirect effects.

This is especially the case in Russia, where mortality estimates from COVID-19 showed a high degree of uncertainty, with varying estimates reported by different studies within and outside of Russia. The country has also received international attention due to the especially high reported mortality compared to other parts of the world. To improve estimates on the human cost of the pandemic in Russia, in a study published recently in PLOS ONE, an international team of researchers led by IIASA conducted the most detailed analysis on pandemic mortality in the country to date.

“While national figures show that excess mortality in Russia is perhaps among the highest in the world, there is a wide degree of regional variation that deserves further analysis,” says Stuart Gietel-Basten, a researcher at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and a coauthor of the study. “Such variation is key to devising better public health strategies to mitigate both the ongoing impact of COVID-19, and to rebuild and reshape health systems after the pandemic is over.”

The researchers used the concept of ‘excess mortality’ that looks at the difference between the actual number of deaths and what would have been expected if there was no pandemic. Unlike other measures, excess mortality includes deaths that may have stemmed from lockdowns, restriction on movement, postponed operations, and so on, giving a much more comprehensive and reliable estimate.

The team used the latest data released from the Russian Federal State Statistics Service and calculated excess mortality for Russia and its regions for 2020 and 2021, and for 2020 also assessing mortality by age, sex, and rural-urban residence. During the two years, the researchers estimated that the pandemic has cost over one million Russian lives.

“A number of researchers within Russia and outside had more or less similar estimates,” says Sergei Scherbov, lead author of the study and a researcher in the IIASA Population and Just Societies Program. “However, due to the advanced population projection methodology and software that we have developed at IIASA, we were able to make population projections for all regions, subdividing urban and rural populations, as well as gender and age groups. This allowed us to produce a very detailed estimate of excess mortality from Covid-19 in Russia and its regions.”

One of the study’s main findings was that different regions within the country differed greatly in mortality. In 2021, excess deaths expressed as a percentage of expected deaths at the regional level ranged from 27% to 52%, with urban regions generally faring worse. The researchers suggested that apart from population density, socio-cultural, economic and, perhaps, geographic differentials could have contributed to the differences.

 “Regions of the Northern Caucasus reporting high excess mortality are known for their tradition of elderly living in larger households of extended families together with their children and descendants,” explains Dalkhat Ediev, study coauthor and researcher in the IIASA Population and Just Societies Program. Such a tradition might have contributed to higher social exposure and, hence, higher losses.”

The study also introduced a new measure called the Mean Remaining Life Expectancy of the Deceased, showing how many years on average those whose death was among the excess deaths lost. They found that for Russia as a whole, an average person who died due to the pandemic in 2020 would have otherwise lived on average for a further 14 years. 

“This finding disproves the widely held view that excess mortality during the pandemic period was concentrated among those with few years of life remaining – especially for females,” notes Scherbov.

The new and improved estimates will not only help policymakers in case of future decisions on mitigation strategies, but also take a major methodological step forward, helping us get a clearer view of pandemics in the future.

Reference

Scherbov, S., Gietel-Basten, S., Ediev, D., Shulgin, S., & Sanderson, W. (2022). COVID-19 and excess mortality in Russia: Regional estimates of life expectancy losses in 2020 and excess deaths in 2021. PLOS ONE, 17(11), e0275967. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275967

About IIASA:

The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) is an international scientific institute that conducts research into the critical issues of global environmental, economic, technological, and social change that we face in the twenty-first century. Our findings provide valuable options to policymakers to shape the future of our changing world. IIASA is independent and funded by prestigious research funding agencies in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. www.iiasa.ac.at

---

JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0275967 

ARTICLE TITLE

COVID-19 and excess mortality in Russia: Regional estimates of life expectancy losses in 2020 and excess deaths in 2021

A far-sighted approach to machine learning

New system can teach a group of cooperative or competitive AI agents to find an optimal long-term solution

Reports and Proceedings

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Picture two teams squaring off on a football field. The players can cooperate to achieve an objective, and compete against other players with conflicting interests. That’s how the game works.

Creating artificial intelligence agents that can learn to compete and cooperate as effectively as humans remains a thorny problem. A key challenge is enabling AI agents to anticipate future behaviors of other agents when they are all learning simultaneously.

Because of the complexity of this problem, current approaches tend to be myopic; the agents can only guess the next few moves of their teammates or competitors, which leads to poor performance in the long run. 

Researchers from MIT, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and elsewhere have developed a new approach that gives AI agents a farsighted perspective. Their machine-learning framework enables cooperative or competitive AI agents to consider what other agents will do as time approaches infinity, not just over a few next steps. The agents then adapt their behaviors accordingly to influence other agents’ future behaviors and arrive at an optimal, long-term solution.

This framework could be used by a group of autonomous drones working together to find a lost hiker in a thick forest, or by self-driving cars that strive to keep passengers safe by anticipating future moves of other vehicles driving on a busy highway.

“When AI agents are cooperating or competing, what matters most is when their behaviors converge at some point in the future. There are a lot of transient behaviors along the way that don’t matter very much in the long run. Reaching this converged behavior is what we really care about, and we now have a mathematical way to enable that,” says Dong-Ki Kim, a graduate student in the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and lead author of a paper describing this framework.

The senior author is Jonathan P. How, the Richard C. Maclaurin Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a member of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. Co-authors include others at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, IBM Research, Mila-Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, and Oxford University. The research will be presented at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.

More agents, more problems

The researchers focused on a problem known as multiagent reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning is a form of machine learning in which an AI agent learns by trial and error. Researchers give the agent a reward for “good” behaviors that help it achieve a goal. The agent adapts its behavior to maximize that reward until it eventually becomes an expert at a task.

But when many cooperative or competing agents are simultaneously learning, things become increasingly complex. As agents consider more future steps of their fellow agents, and how their own behavior influences others, the problem soon requires far too much computational power to solve efficiently. This is why other approaches only focus on the short term.

“The AIs really want to think about the end of the game, but they don’t know when the game will end. They need to think about how to keep adapting their behavior into infinity so they can win at some far time in the future. Our paper essentially proposes a new objective that enables an AI to think about infinity,” says Kim.

But since it is impossible to plug infinity into an algorithm, the researchers designed their system so agents focus on a future point where their behavior will converge with that of other agents, known as equilibrium. An equilibrium point determines the long-term performance of agents, and multiple equilibria can exist in a multiagent scenario. Therefore, an effective agent actively influences the future behaviors of other agents in such a way that they reach a desirable equilibrium from the agent’s perspective. If all agents influence each other, they converge to a general concept that the researchers call an “active equilibrium.”

The machine-learning framework they developed, known as FURTHER (which stands for FUlly Reinforcing acTive influence witH averagE Reward), enables agents to learn how to adapt their behaviors as they interact with other agents to achieve this active equilibrium.

FURTHER does this using two machine-learning modules. The first, an inference module, enables an agent to guess the future behaviors of other agents and the learning algorithms they use, based solely on their prior actions.

This information is fed into the reinforcement learning module, which the agent uses to adapt its behavior and influence other agents in a way that maximizes its reward.

“The challenge was thinking about infinity. We had to use a lot of different mathematical tools to enable that, and make some assumptions to get it to work in practice,” Kim says.

Winning in the long run

They tested their approach against other multiagent reinforcement learning frameworks in several different scenarios, including a pair of robots fighting sumo-style and a battle pitting two 25-agent teams against one another. In both instances, the AI agents using FURTHER won the games more often.

Since their approach is decentralized, which means the agents learn to win the games independently, it is also more scalable than other methods that require a central computer to control the agents, Kim explains.

The researchers used games to test their approach, but FURTHER could be used to tackle any kind of multiagent problem. For instance, it could be applied by economists seeking to develop sound policy in situations where many interacting entitles have behaviors and interests that change over time.

Economics is one application Kim is particularly excited about studying. He also wants to dig deeper into the concept of an active equilibrium and continue enhancing the FURTHER framework.

This research is funded, in part, by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.

###

Written by Adam Zewe, MIT News Office

Additional background

Paper: Influencing Long-term Behavior in Multiagent Reinforcement Learning”

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.03535.pdf  

---

ARTICLE TITLE

"Influencing Long-term Behavior in Multiagent Reinforcement Learning”

Earth might be experiencing 7th mass extinction, not 6th

550-million-year-old creatures’ message to the present

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - RIVERSIDE

 

IMAGE: DIORAMA OF THE EDIACARAN SEA FLOOR. view more 

CREDIT: SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

Earth is currently in the midst of a mass extinction, losing thousands of species each year. New research suggests environmental changes caused the first such event in history, which occurred millions of years earlier than scientists previously realized.   

Most dinosaurs famously disappeared 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period. Prior to that, a majority of Earth’s creatures were snuffed out between the Permian and Triassic periods, roughly 252 million years ago. 

Thanks to the efforts of researchers at UC Riverside and Virginia Tech, it’s now known that a similar extinction occurred 550 million years ago, during the Ediacaran period. This discovery is documented in a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper. 

Although unclear whether this represents a true “mass extinction,” the percentage of organisms lost is similar to these other events, including the current, ongoing one. 

The researchers believe environmental changes are to blame for the loss of approximately 80% of all Ediacaran creatures, which were the first complex, multicellular life forms on the planet. 

“Geological records show that the world’s oceans lost a lot of oxygen during that time, and the few species that did survive had bodies adapted for lower oxygen environments,” said Chenyi Tu, UCR paleoecologist and study co-author. 

Unlike later events, this earliest one was more difficult to document because the creatures that perished were soft bodied and did not preserve well in the fossil record. 

“We suspected such an event, but to prove it we had to assemble a massive database of evidence,” said Rachel Surprenant, UCR paleoecologist and study co-author. The team documented nearly every known Ediacaran animal’s environment, body size, diet, ability to move, and habits.

With this project, the researchers sought to disprove the charge that the major loss of animal life at the end of the Ediacaran period was something other than an extinction. Some previously believed the event could be explained by the right data not being collected, or a change in animal behavior, like the arrival of predators.

“We can see the animals’ spatial distribution over time, so we know they didn’t just move elsewhere or get eaten — they died out,” said Chenyi. “We’ve shown a true decrease in the abundance of organisms.”

They also tracked creatures’ surface area to volume ratios, a measurement that suggests declining oxygen levels were to blame for the deaths. “If an organism has a higher ratio, it can get more nutrients, and the bodies of the animals that did live into the next era were adapted in this way,” said UCR paleoecologist Heather McCandless, study co-author.

This project came from a graduate class led by UCR paleoecologist Mary Droser and her former graduate student, now at Virginia Tech, Scott Evans. For the next class, the students will investigate the origin of these animals, rather than their extinction. 

Ediacaran creatures would be considered strange by today’s standards. Many of the animals could move, but they were unlike anything now living. Among them were Obamus coronatus, a disc-shaped creature named for the former president, and Attenborites janeae, a tiny ovoid resembling a raisin named for English naturalist Sir David Attenborough.

“These animals were the first evolutionary experiment on Earth, but they only lasted about 10 million years. Not long at all, in evolutionary terms,” Droser said. 

Though it’s not clear why oxygen levels declined so precipitously at the end of the era, it is clear that environmental change can destabilize and destroy life on Earth at any time. Such changes have driven all mass extinctions including the one currently occurring. 

“There’s a strong correlation between the success of organisms and, to quote Carl Sagan, our ‘pale blue dot,’” said Phillip Boan, UC Riverside geologist and study co-author.

“Nothing is immune to extinction. We can see the impact of climate change on ecosystems and should note the devastating effects as we plan for the future,” Boan said. 
 

---

JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2207475119 

ARTICLE TITLE

Environmental drivers of the first major animal extinction across the Ediacaran White Sea-Nama transition