Poor air quality linked to cognitive problems in babies

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA

 

IMAGE: THE TEAM USED AIR QUALITY MONITORS IN THE CHILDREN’S HOMES TO MEASURE EMISSION LEVELS AND AIR QUALITY. view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA

Poor air quality linked to cognitive problems in babies

Poor air quality could be causing cognitive deficits in babies and toddlers, according to new research from the University of East Anglia.

A new study published today reveals an association between poor air quality in India and impaired cognition in infants under two.

Without action, the negative impact on children’s long-term brain development could have consequences for life.

Lead researcher Prof John Spencer, from UEA’s School of Psychology, said: “Prior work has shown that poor air quality is linked to cognitive deficits in children, as well as to emotional and behavioural problems, which can have a severe impact on families.

“Very small particulate fragments in the air are a major concern as they can move from the respiratory tract into the brain.

“Until now, studies had failed to show a link between poor air quality and cognitive problems in babies, when brain growth is at its peak and the brain may be particularly sensitive to toxins. Our study is the first to show this association.

“We worked with families in rural India to see how in-home air quality affects infants’ cognition.”

The team collaborated with the Community Empowerment Lab in Lucknow, India – a global health research and innovation organization that works with rural communities to engage in science collaboratively.

They worked with families from a range of socio-economic backgrounds in Shivgarh, a rural community in Uttar Pradesh – one of the states in India that has been most strongly impacted by poor air quality.

They assessed the visual working memory and visual processing speed of 215 infants using a specially-designed cognition task from October 2017 to June 2019.

On one display, the tots were shown flashing coloured squares that were always the same after each ‘blink’. On a second display, one coloured square changed after each blink.

Prof Spencer said: “This task capitalises on infant’s tendency to look away from something that’s visually familiar and towards something new. We were interested in whether infants could detect the changing side and how well they did as we made the task harder by including more squares on each display.”

The team used air quality monitors in the children’s homes to measure emission levels and air quality. They also took into account and controlled for family socio-economic status.

“This research shows for the first time that there is an association between poor air quality and impaired visual cognition in the first two years of life, when brain growth is at its peak,” said Prof Spencer.

“Such impacts could carry forward across years, negatively impacting long-term development.

“Reversely, our research indicates that global efforts to improve air quality could have benefits to infants’ emerging cognitive abilities.

“This, in turn, could have a cascade of positive impacts because improved cognition can lead to improved economic productivity in the long term and reduce the burden on healthcare and mental health systems.

One key factor the team measured was the cooking fuel commonly used at home.

“We found that air quality was poorer in homes that used solid cooking materials like cow dung cake,” he added. “Therefore, efforts to reduce cooking emissions in homes should be a key target for intervention.”

Consistent with this aim and with the goal of improving maternal and child health, the Government of India has launched a national-level flagship program called the “Ujjwala Yojana” – a scheme that brings LPG fuel to women below the poverty line across the entire country.

This research was led by the University of East Anglia in collaboration with Durham University, the Community Empowerment Lab in Lucknow (India) and Brown University (US).

‘Poor air quality is associated with impaired visual cognition in the first two years of life: a longitudinal investigation’ is published in the journal eLife.

This publication is based on research funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The findings and conclusions contained within are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect positions or policies of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The team used air quality monitors in the children’s homes to measure emission levels and air quality.

The team used air quality monitors in the children’s homes to measure emission levels and air quality.

The research team assessed the visual working memory and visual processing speed of 215 infants using a specially-designed cognition task.

The research team worked with families from a range of socio-economic backgrounds in Shivgarh, a rural community in Uttar Pradesh – one of the states in India that has been most strongly impacted by poor air quality.

CREDIT

University of East Anglia

JOURNAL

eLife

DOI

10.7554/eLife.83876 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Poor air quality is associated with impaired visual cognition in the first two years of life: a longitudinal investigation

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

25-Apr-2023

For eco-friendly ammonia, just add water

Peer-Reviewed Publication

STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Stanford researchers have discovered a simple and environmentally sound way to make ammonia with tiny droplets of water and nitrogen from the air.

Ammonia (NH3) is the starting point for producing chemical fertilizers for farm crops. For over a century, the world has relied on the Haber-Bosch process to yield ammonia in bulk, a breakthrough that helped revolutionize agriculture and feed a booming human population. But the industrial procedure is energy intensive. To break nitrogen’s strong bonds, the Haber-Bosch process requires roughly 80-300 atmospheres of pressure and temperatures around 572-1000 F (300-500 C). The steam-treating of natural gas involved in the process also releases ample amounts of climate-changing carbon dioxide.

All told, to satisfy the current annual worldwide demand for 150 million metric tons of ammonia, the Haber-Bosch process gobbles up more than 2% of global energy and accounts for about 1% of the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere.

In contrast, the innovative method debuted by the Stanford researchers requires less specialized circumstances.

“We were shocked to see that we could generate ammonia in benign, everyday temperature-and-pressure environments with just air and water and using something as basic as a sprayer,” said study senior author Richard Zare, the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Science and a professor of chemistry in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. “If this process can be scaled up, it would represent an eco-friendly new way of making ammonia, which is one of the most important chemical processes that takes place in the world.”

The new method also uses little energy and at low cost, thus pointing a way forward to potentially producing the valuable chemical in a sustainable manner. Xiaowei Song, a postdoctoral scholar in chemistry at Stanford, is the lead author of the study, published April 10 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

New chemistry from blue-sky study

The new chemistry discovered follows in the footsteps of pioneering work by Zare’s lab in recent years examining the long-overlooked and surprisingly high reactivity of water microdroplets. In a 2019 study, Zare and colleagues novelly demonstrated that caustic hydrogen peroxide spontaneously forms in microdroplets in contact with surfaces. Experiments since have borne out a mechanism of electric charge jumping between the liquid and solid materials and generating molecular fragments, known as reactive oxygen species.

Taking those findings further, Song and Zare began a collaboration with study co-author Basheer Chanbasha, a professor of chemistry at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Saudi Arabia. Chanbasha specializes in nanomaterials for energy, petrochemical and environment applications and came to Stanford as a visiting scholar last summer.

The research team zeroed in on a catalyst – the term for any substance that boosts the rate of a chemical reaction but is not itself degraded or changed by the reaction – that they suspected could help blaze a chemical pathway toward ammonia. The catalyst consists of an iron oxide, called magnetite, and a synthetic membrane invented in the 1960s that is composed of repeating chains of two large molecules.

The researchers applied the catalyst to a Graphite mesh that Song incorporated into a gas-powered sprayer. The sprayer blasted out microdroplets in which pumped water (H2O) and compressed molecular nitrogen (N2) reacted together in the presence of the catalyst. Using a device called a mass spectrometer, Song analyzed the microdroplets’ characteristics and saw the signature of ammonia in the collected data.

Low-tech, low-energy ammonia synthesis

Zare and colleagues were very pleased with this result, especially in light of the relatively low-tech approach. “Our method does not require the application of any electrical voltage or form of radiation,” said Zare.

From a broader chemistry perspective, the method is remarkable in that it uses three phases of matter: nitrogen as gas, water as liquid, and catalyst as solid. “To our knowledge, the idea of using gas, liquid, and solid all at the same time to cause a chemical transformation is a first of its kind and has a huge potential for advancing other chemical transformations,” said Zare.

While promising, the ammonia production method revealed by Zare, Song, and Chanbasha for now is only at the demonstration stage. The researchers plan to explore how to concentrate the produced ammonia as well as gauge how the process could potentially be scaled up to commercially viable levels. While Haber-Bosch is only efficient when pursued at huge facilities, the new ammonia-making method could be portable and done on-site or even on-demand at farms. That, in turn, would slash the greenhouse gas emissions related to the transportation of ammonia from far-off factories.

“With further development, we’re hoping our ammonia generation method could help address the two major looming problems of continuing to feed Earth’s growing population of billions of people, while still mitigating climate change,” said Zare. “We are hopeful and excited to continue this line of research.”

Zare is also a member of Stanford Bio-X, the Cardiovascular Institute, the Stanford Cancer Institute, Stanford ChEM-H, the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.

The research was funded in part by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research through the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative.

To read all stories about Stanford science, subscribe to the biweekly Stanford Science Digest.

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2301206120 

ARTICLE TITLE

Making ammonia from nitrogen and water microdroplets

Debunking false beliefs requires tackling belief systems

Study finds biased prior beliefs affected how people from across both political parties updated their fraud beliefs regarding the 2020 U.S. presidential election

Peer-Reviewed Publication

DARTMOUTH COLLEGE

Understanding how beliefs are formed and why they can be resistant to counter evidence is important in today’s polarized world, as views sharply diverge on issues ranging from vaccines to climate change.

To debunk a false belief, it may be better to target a person’s system of beliefs rather than trying to change the false belief itself, according to a new Dartmouth-led study published in Nature Human Behaviour analyzing how people update their beliefs about fraud following the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

“People don’t just have one single belief but a system of interrelated beliefs that depend on each other,” says lead author Rotem Botvinik-Nezer, a postdoctoral researcher in the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab at Dartmouth.

“This helps explain why it’s really hard to change people’s beliefs about election fraud, just by showing them evidence against fraud, as you may need to convince them that the majority did not prefer their candidate and address the other beliefs anchoring their system,” says Botvinik-Nezer.

For a long time, members of the research team had been studying placebo effects—treatments that can lead to healing outcomes due to the power of the mind even though they have no therapeutic benefits—and they became interested in the broader view of how beliefs are formed and updated in high-stakes situations.

The researchers decided to analyze fraud beliefs during the 2020 U.S. presidential election. They surveyed more than 1,600 Americans on November 4, 2020, while the votes were still being counted for six key states.

Respondents reported their partisan preferences and were tested on fraud beliefs based on hypothetical outcomes of the election. They were asked to indicate: which presidential candidate, Joe Biden v. Donald Trump, they wanted to win and how much they preferred their candidate; how likely their candidate would win the true vote in the absence of fraud; and how likely they thought fraud would affect the actual outcome.

The respondents were then randomly assigned and shown one of two U.S. maps with hypothetical winners in the remaining states depicting either a Biden or Trump win for president and were asked again about their fraud beliefs. This provided the researchers with an opportunity to examine how respondents updated their beliefs in election fraud after new information was provided.

Approximately three months after the initial survey, a subset of respondents completed a follow-up survey reporting their beliefs about the true vote winner and who had benefited from purported election fraud.

The results showed that both Democrats and Republicans increased their beliefs in election fraud when their candidate lost but decreased them when their candidate won.  In addition, the stronger the preference for a candidate, the stronger the bias or “desirability effects,” as dubbed by the researchers.

To better understand the cognitive mechanisms of such desirability effects and predict them quantitatively, the researchers developed a probability-based computational model. “We wanted to determine if this phenomenon was irrational, where people just believe what they want to believe, or if the process of updating beliefs may be rational,” says Botvinik-Nezer.

The team created a Bayesian model, which is commonly used to model how people make rational inferences. Using the survey data, they based their model on a system of three key beliefs: whether or not respondents thought there was fraud in the election before the outcome; who they thought was going to win the true vote; and who they thought benefits from fraud.

The model contained no information on people’s preferences as to whether they wanted a Biden or Trump win; however, the team found that it was able to accurately predict how people would update their beliefs given their system of prior beliefs.

The team then compared their model to other models of irrational belief updating (believing what you want to believe) and found that their rational model best explained the patterns of updating beliefs. The key was that Democrats and Republicans tended to believe that their candidate was supposed to win and that if there was any fraud, it was committed by the opposing partisan group.

The psychological idea in the model is that as people get new information, they update their beliefs based on their existing belief system, which is a rational process involving causal attribution of new evidence across competing explanations. “For respondents who strongly believed that Trump was supposed to win the 2020 election, it didn’t make sense to them that not enough people voted for him, so for some people, it might have been rational to infer that people from the other partisan group must have either cheated or committed fraud,” says Botvinik-Nezer.

The results demonstrated that about one-third of the sample attributed a hypothetical loss in the election almost entirely to fraud and not to the true vote.

“Our results show that if you have this other explanation for an election outcome, where fraud is a potential reality, then it becomes more plausible that fraud gets credit for the election,” says Tor Wager, the Diana L. Taylor Distinguished Professor in Neuroscience and director of the Dartmouth Brain Imaging Center. “When election fraud is considered plausible, this short circuits the link between the belief in the true election winner and the evidence,” says Wager. “So, to change the false belief, you have to focus on the auxiliary beliefs that are supporting that short circuit.”

The study was co-authored by Botvinik-Nezer, Wager, and Matt Jones at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Botvinik-Nezer (rotem.botvinik.nezer@dartmouth.edu) and Wager (tor.d.wager@dartmouth.edu) are available for comment.

###

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JOURNAL

Nature Human Behaviour

DOI

10.1038/s41562-023-01570-4 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Survey

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

A belief systems analysis of fraud beliefs following the 2020 US election

Searching for ancient bears in an Alaskan cave led to an important human discovery

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO

BUFFALO, N.Y. — The first people to live in the Americas migrated from Siberia across the Bering land bridge more than 20,000 years ago. Some made their way as far south as Tierra del Fuego, at the tip of South America. Others settled in areas much closer to their place of origin where their descendants still thrive today.

In “A paleogenome from a Holocene individual supports genetic continuity in Southeast Alaska,” published Friday in the journal iScience, University at Buffalo evolutionary biologist Charlotte Lindqvist and collaborators show, using ancient genetic data analyses, that some modern Alaska Natives still live almost exactly where their ancestors did some 3,000 years ago.

Lindqvist, PhD, associate professor of biological sciences in the UB College of Arts and Sciences, is senior author of the paper. In the course of her extensive studies in Alaska, she explored mammal remains that had been found in a cave in the state’s southeast coast. One bone was initially identified as coming from a bear. However, genetic analysis showed it to be the remains of a human female.

“We realized that modern Indigenous peoples in Alaska, should they have remained in the region since the earliest migrations, could be related to this prehistoric individual,” says Alber Aqil, a UB PhD student in biological sciences and the first author of the paper. This discovery led to efforts to solve this mystery, which DNA analyses are well suited to address when archeological remains are as sparse as these were.

Learning from an ancestor

The earliest peoples had already started moving south along the Pacific Northwest Coast before an inland route between ice sheets became viable. Some, including the female individual from the cave, made their home in the area that surrounds the Gulf of Alaska. That area is now home to the Tlingit Nation and three other groups: Haida, Tsimshian, and Nisga’a.

As Aqil and colleagues analyzed the genome from this 3,000-year-old individual — “research that was not possible just 20 years ago,” Lindqvist noted — they determined that she is most closely related to Alaska Natives living in the area today. This fact showed it was necessary to carefully document as clearly as possible any genetic connections of the ancient female to present-day Native Americans.

In such endeavors, it is important to collaborate closely with people living in lands where archeological remains are found. Therefore, cooperation between Alaska Native peoples and the scientific community has been a significant component of the cave explorations that have taken place in the region. The Wrangell Cooperative Association named the ancient individual analyzed in this study as “Tatóok yík yées sháawat” (Young lady in cave).

Genetic continuity in Southeast Alaska persists for thousands of years

Indeed, Aqil and Lindqvist’s research demonstrated that Tatóok yík yées sháawat is in fact closest related to present-day Tlingit peoples and those of nearby tribes along the coast. Their research therefore strengthens the idea that genetic continuity in Southeast Alaska has continued for thousands of years.

Human migration into North America, although it began some 24,000 years ago, came in waves — one of which, about 6,000 years ago — included the Paleo-Inuit, formerly known as Paleo-Eskimos. Importantly for understanding Indigenous peoples’ migrations from Asia, Tatóok yík yées sháawat’s DNA did not reveal ancestry from the second wave of settlers, the Paleo-Inuit. Indeed, the analyses performed by Aqil and Lindqvist helped shed light on the continuing discussion of migration routes, mixtures among people from these different waves, as well as modern territorial patterns of inland and coastal people of the Pacific Northwest in the pre-colonial era.

Oral history links an ancient woman to people living in Southeast Alaska today

The oral origin narratives of the Tlingit people include the story of the most recent eruption of Mount Edgecumbe, which would place them exactly in the region by 4,500 years ago. Tatóok yík yées sháawat, their relative, therefore informs not just modern-day anthropological researchers but also the Tlingit people themselves.

Out of respect for the right of the Tlingit people to control and protect their cultural heritage and their genetic resources, data from the study of Tatóok yík yées sháawat will be available only after review of its use by the Wrangell Cooperative Association Tribal Council.

“It’s very exciting to contribute to our knowledge of the prehistory of Southeast Alaska,” said Aqil.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation. In addition to Lindqvist and Aqil, authors of the new paper in iScience include Stephanie Gill, Omer Gokcumen, Ripan S. Malhi, Esther Aaltséen Reese, Jane L. Smith, and Timothy T. Heaton.

---

JOURNAL

iScience

DOI

10.1016/j.isci.2023.106581 

ARTICLE TITLE

A paleogenome from a Holocene individual supports genetic continuity in Southeast Alaska

Protecting big trees for wildlife also benefits climate

Study highlights the importance of protecting mature and old growth forest

Peer-Reviewed Publication

CONSERVATION BIOLOGY INSTITUTE

Earth Day: April 22, 2023
 David Mildrexler, Ph.D., davidm@eorlegacylands.org
Bev Law, Ph.D., bev.e.law@gmail.com
Bill Moomaw, Ph.D., William.Moomaw@tufts.edu

Large trees offer major solutions to the climate and biodiversity crisis that are needed now. As
President Biden calls for protecting mature and old growth trees on Federal lands, the study
describes synergies between protecting these disproportionately valuable large trees and forest
resilience goals, providing common solutions for these urgent challenges.
An earlier analysis found that large trees protected by the “21-inch rule” account for just 3% of total
stems in the affected forests but hold 42% of the total aboveground carbon.
Rather than continuing to protect these inherited carbon and biodiversity treasures, the United States
Forest Service recently relaxed the 21-inch rule opening the door to large tree logging across
millions of acres of National Forest lands east of the Cascades Crest in Oregon and Washington.
The justification for weakening the screens- competition between large trees, is not supported by the
new analysis.

Large-scale cutting of even some of the existing big trees would eliminate these carbon stores while
releasing vast amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere when we need to have greater
sequestration by natural systems to stabilize Earth’s climate.
Interest is growing in policy opportunities that align biodiversity conservation and recovery with
climate change mitigation and adaptation priorities. The authors conclude that “21-inch rule”
provides an excellent example of such a policy initiated for wildlife and habitat protection that has
also provided significant climate mitigation values across extensive forests of the PNW Region.
“These are public lands that are providing a natural climate solution and performing multiple
additional services at no cost. We suggest policy to keep existing forest carbon stores out of the
atmosphere and accumulate additional amounts while protecting habitat and biodiversity.” David
Mildrexler

“There is no action required from us but to leave these large trees standing so they can continue to
store and accumulate carbon for climate mitigation and provide critical habitat.” Bev Law

---

JOURNAL

Conservation Science and Practice

DOI

10.1111/csp2.12944 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Meta-analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Protect large trees for climate mitigation, biodiversity, and forest resilience

Joseph Bologne Could Have Been As Big As Beethoven — In Chevalier, He Finally Gets His Due

Story by Ineye Komonibo • Friday

Refinery29

In 2020, an old theory resurfaced on the internet hypothesizing that world famous composer Ludwig van Beethoven may have actually been Black, sparking controversy as well as a long overdue conversation about the well-documented whiteness of the classical music landscape. The claims about Beethoven’s race have been heavily debated by classical music scholars for centuries, but ultimately, we don’t need to spend our time trying to figure out if the German virtuoso would have been invited to the cookout. Other Black composers existed — their contributions to the genre and to culture as a whole were just disregarded and hidden in the shadows. Until now.


Joseph Bologne  Provided by Refinery29

Chevalier, a biopic that hit theaters today (April 21), follows the lost story of Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges (played by Kelvin Harrison, Jr.), a French composer and musician who rose to prominence in the 18th century during the reign of Marie Antoinette. Born in the then-colony of Guadeloupe to a white plantation owner and an enslaved Senegalese woman, Bologne was raised and professionally trained in France, flourishing in music and fencing to the point that his excellence earned him the covetous throne-appointed title of Chevalier de Saint-Georges (a position equivalent to that of a knight). Although Bologne lives and works among the elites as a chevalier, he begins to realize that in France, he will always be seen as inferior because of the color of his skin. He may not be surrounded by other Black people, but in the eyes of the world, Bologne will always be more Black — more other — than he is French.

As he becomes cognizant of his true place in French society as a Black man, we see him struggle to reconcile his Blackness with his Frenchness and his high status in society. Here, the concept of “double consciousness” comes into play. Scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois coined the term specifically to describe the double but often contrary minds that Black Americans have to possess while facing anti-Blackness in white space, but it’s applicable to every Black person, certainly for Bologne. He was taught to be excellent in order to make up for the fact that he was Black, but when a painful rejection from the highest musical prestige in the land solely on the basis of his race firmly illuminates his reality, Bologne quickly comes to understand that within a white supremacist framework, being ten times better will just never be enough. In his crisis, the sudden reappearance of Bologne’s mother Nanon (Ronke Adekoluejo) provides him with the stability and connection to his roots that he’s always needed but was denied. Patiently but with a firm hand, Nanon reminds her son that he is Black first and foremost, and her unshakeable security in her identity as a Black woman helps Bologne find confidence in his own as a Black man.

The more comfortable he becomes with his roots, the more discontent and disgusted he becomes with France’s racist and classist hierarchy. After ignoring the class war raging outside of his swanky villa’s window, Bologne finally decides to join the efforts of the proletariat against the iron fist of the crown and her bourgeoisie. The film shows Bologne leveraging his talent and network as a composer to create the soundtrack for the revolution, but in real life, he actually stopped making music to fight as a colonel in a volunteer brigade composed of soldiers of color until his death in 1799.

“I learned about Joseph Bologne when I was 16 years old, and the thing that really stood out to me was that he was just a rockstar,” says Chevalier writer Stefani Robinson in a Zoom interview with Unbothered. “Joseph was at the forefront of a cultural movement, like a Prince or a Jimi Hendrix. When you’re a kid, history feels so far away, but that rockstar quality of his made him seem so much more than just a guy in a book. This person was special. He was singular. And that fascinated me.”

Robinson didn’t have a lot to work with while penning Chevalier years ago besides Gabriel Banat’s 1840 book, The Chevalier de Saint-Georges: Virtuoso of the Sword and the Bow. Bologne’s life wasn’t well-documented in history, and that erasure was intentional. Following the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte’s hostile takeover of the country was marked by violent nationalist and racist international policy, and as a result of government-mandated anti-Blackness, much of Bologne’s work was intentionally buried. But as she began to look deeper into what she could find about the life of the chevalier, Robinson felt a personal obligation to bring Bologne’s story to the silver screen. If he was that important to the culture, it was only right that he take center stage once more.

Though building upon the bare bones subject material of the film was a daunting task, Chevalier’s talented cast easily fills in the gaps of Bologne’s life, painting a convincing picture of what trying to navigate 18th century France might have been like for him. The ever-talented Kelvin Harrison, Jr. (Waves, Cyrano) is a perfect fit as the chevalier, balancing Bologne’s abundance of pride and swagger — some of the few aspects of the composer’s life that were well-documented in history — with the deep wound he’s nursing as a Black man fighting for his place and his acknowledgment in a white world. That constant mental toil of double consciousness is something that Harrison Jr. can deeply relate to — after all, he’s a Black actor working in Hollywood. The pressure of trying to be “more” than a Black actor is always there.

“I came into Hollywood at the right moment,” Harrison Jr. explains over Zoom, pointing out how the industry had just started to tell nuanced Black stories when he first made his acting debut in 2013. “At the same time, there have been so many roles that I’ve had to come in and help reimagine it from my perspective. I feel like I’ve often been asked to exist in a space that isn’t necessarily mine. It becomes a non-negotiable — if I didn’t do it, I wouldn’t work. There’s some choice in it, of course, and I’ve tried to keep my individuality and hold on to a sense of my culture and where I come from. But it’s definitely been a struggle at times.”

“I want to expand how we can be seen [in Hollywood], and that’s part of the negotiation as well,” he continues. “How do we expand our understanding of who we are?”



Provided by Refinery29

His co-star Ronke Adekoluejo took a similarly introspective approach to her storytelling process as well, using the lack of information about Nanon to get creative in building the character from the ground up. Joseph was able to evolve because his mother paved the path for him and as a key player in her son’s radicalization, Nanon is central to this plot. (Art imitates life — aren’t Black women always the catalyst behind change?) Ronke Adekoluejo found inspiration for the role in the journeys of other Black women in history who weren’t afraid to antagonize the system.

“I needed to understand what gave Nanon resolve, what made her so resilient, so I started to research,” says Adekoluejo. “Yaa Asantewa, Harriet Tubman, Stagecoach Mary — all of these women valiantly fought back against oppression because they wanted to create a different narrative for themselves, and I felt like it was important for Nanon to have that same righteous indignation of by any means necessary, to not fear violence as an instigator of change.”

Chevalier may be a biopic about a man who walked this earth over 200 years ago, but his story is timely because it speaks to the unfortunate phenomenon of Black erasure. Throughout history, Black people’s work and contributions to society have been downplayed, overlooked, and even appropriated because of racism. We see it in Napolean’s intentional concealment of Bologne’s work, but we can also see it today — in Black TikTok creators not being fairly compensated for the success of their content, in Beyoncé repeatedly losing Album of the Year at the Grammys, in luxury fashion brands stealing aesthetics from traditional Africans design, in conservative lawmakers fighting to rewrite history to minimize the dire circumstances that led to the necessary work of Black activists. Unfortunately, Black people from every corner of the diaspora have demonstrably not been given their due in the mainstream.

“We’re seeing it in real time, these efforts to erase our history — any sort of marginalized community’s history — in schools,” Robinson shakes her head. “It’s so insidious, but I feel like the only way to stand up against that is to keep doing what I’m doing: making the conscious effort to amplify what people are trying to hide.”

Harrison Jr. wants us to take cues from Bologne’s trajectory; he only found true peace and security in himself once he turned his gaze away from the people who othered him and towards his own community. “Joseph made art for those who wanted to recognize it, for those who wanted to appreciate it — for people who saw him,” says the Chevalier star. “That preservation only really happens in community. It’s important to branch out, but you have to sing to the choir that wants to listen. If you feed it to the wolves, the wolves are going to eat it, but not in the way you want them to.”

Chevalier is proof that we can’t be blotted out of the timeline. No matter how much they try to bury them, our stories will be told.

Chevalier is now playing in theaters.


Refinery29

Walt Disney Co to begin second wave of layoffs, cutting several thousand jobs - sources

Story by By Dawn Chmielewski • 





: A rain spout stylized with the outline of Disney character Mickey Mouse is seen on a building at The Walt Disney Co. studios in Burbank© Thomson Reuters

(Reuters) - Walt Disney Co will begin a second wave of layoffs on Monday, as it works toward eliminating 7,000 jobs to help save $5.5 billion in costs, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The company is expected to cut "several thousand" jobs in layoffs that begin Monday and continue through Thursday. With the latest round of reductions, Disney officials say the company will have culled a total of 4,000 jobs.

The cuts will occur across the company's business segments, including Disney Entertainment, ESPN and Disney Parks, Experiences and Products, according to the sources, but are not expected to affect the hourly frontline workers employed at the parks and resorts.

Disney announced its layoff plan in February, together with a sweeping reorganization that restructured the company and returned decision-making to Disney's creative executives. Its goal is to create a more streamlined approach to its business.

The entertainment industry has retrenched since its early euphoric embrace of video streaming, when established media companies lost billions as they launched competitors to Netflix Inc.

Media companies started to rein in spending when Netflix posted its first loss of subscribers in a decade in early 2022, and Wall Street began prioritizing profitability over subscriber growth.

On March 27, Disney began notifying employees who were affected by the workforce reductions, and said a second, larger round would occur in April. A third round is anticipated before the start of summer.

(Reporting by Dawn Chmielewski in Los Angeles; Editing by Sonali Paul)

China to test out 3D printing technology on moon to build habitats

BEIJING (Reuters) - China will explore using 3D printing technology to construct buildings on the moon, the official China Daily reported on Monday, as Beijing solidifies plans for long-term lunar habitation.


FILE PHOTO: A full moon is seen over Mexico City© Thomson Reuters

In the 2020 Chinese lunar mission, the Chang'e 5, named after the mythical Chinese goddess of the moon, an uncrewed probe took back to Earth China's first lunar soil samples. China, which made its first lunar landing in 2013, plans to land an astronaut on the moon by 2030.

Between now and then, China will launch the Chang'e 6, 7 and 8 missions, with the latter tasked to look for reusable resources on the moon for long-term human habitation.

The Chang'e 8 probe will conduct on-site investigations of the environment and mineral composition, and also determine whether technologies such as 3D printing can be deployed on the lunar surface, China Daily reported, quoting Wu Weiren, a scientist at the China National Space Administration.

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"If we wish to stay on the moon for a long time, we need to set up stations by using the moon's own materials," Wu said.

China wants to start building a lunar base using soil from the moon in five years, Chinese media reported earlier this month.

A robot tasked with making "lunar soil bricks" will be launched during the Chang'e 8 mission around 2028, according to an expert from the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

The race to set foot on the moon has intensified in recent years, particularly with the United States.

This month, NASA and Canada's space agency named four astronauts for the Artemis II mission planned for late 2024, in what would be the first human fly-by of the moon in decades.

(This story has been refiled to add a dropped word in paragraph 2)

(Reporting by Ryan Woo. Editing by Gerry Doyle)

UAE spacecraft takes close-up photos of Mars' little moon

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A spacecraft around Mars has sent back the most detailed photos yet of the red planet’s little moon.


UAE spacecraft takes close-up photos of Mars' little moon

The United Arab Emirates' Amal spacecraft flew within 62 miles (100 kilometers) of Deimos last month and the close-up shots were released Monday. Amal — Arabic for Hope — got a two-for-one when Mars photobombed some of the images. It was the closest a spacecraft has been to Deimos in almost a half-century.

The spacecraft also observed the little explored far side of the odd-shaped, cratered moon, just 9 miles by 7 miles by 7 miles (15 kilometers by 12 kilometers by 12 kilometers).

Mars’ other moon, Phobos, is almost double that size and better understood since it orbits much closer to Mars — just 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) away, the closest of any planet’s moon in our solar system.

Deimos' orbit around Mars stretches 14,000 miles (23,000 kilometers) out. That's close to the inner part of the spacecraft's orbit — “which is what made observing Deimos such a compelling idea,” said the mission's lead scientist Hessa al-Matroushi.

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"Phobos has got most of the attention up until now — now it’s Deimos’ turn!" she added in an email.

Al-Matroushi and other scientists with the UAE Space Agency said these new images indicate Deimos is not an asteroid that got captured in Mars’ orbit eons ago, the leading theory until now. Instead, they say the the moon appears to be of Martian origin — perhaps from the bigger Martian moon or from Mars itself.

The findings were presented Monday at the European Geosciences Union's general assembly in Vienna.

Amal will continue to sweep past Deimos this year, but not as closely as the March 10 encounter, according to al-Matroushi.

NASA's Viking 2 came within 19 miles (30 kilometers) of Deimos in 1977. Since then, other spacecraft have photographed Deimos but from much farther away.

Amal rocketed to Mars on July 19, 2020, one day shy of the 50th anniversary of humanity’s first moon landing — Earth’s moon, that is — by Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

___ The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press