Saturday, December 16, 2023

SCI-FI-TEK

Newly developed material gulps down hydrogen, spits it out, protects fusion reactor walls

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON

Tantalum fusion researchers with WHAM — IMAGE:
FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: ENGINEER JEREMIAH KIRCH, POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCHER MYKOLA IALOVEGA AND ASSISTANT SCIENTIST MARCOS XAVIER NAVARRO-GONZALEZ, WHO WORK ON THE IMPLEMENTATION OF TANTALUM COATINGS AS A PLASMA-FACING MATERIAL FOR THE WHAM DEVICE, WHICH IS PICTURED IN THE BACKGROUND.
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CREDIT: PHOTO COURTESY OF MYKOLA IALOVEGA

MADISON – University of Wisconsin–Madison engineers have used a spray coating technology to produce a new workhorse material that can withstand the harsh conditions inside a fusion reactor.

The advance, detailed in a paper published recently in the journal Physica Scripta, could enable more efficient compact fusion reactors that are easier to repair and maintain.

“The fusion community is urgently looking for new manufacturing approaches to economically produce large plasma-facing components in fusion reactors,” says Mykola Ialovega, a postdoctoral researcher in nuclear engineering and engineering physics at UW–Madison and lead author on the paper. “Our technology shows considerable improvements over current approaches. With this research, we are the first to demonstrate the benefits of using cold spray coating technology for fusion applications.”

The researchers used a cold spray process to deposit a coating of tantalum, a metal that can withstand high temperatures, on stainless steel. They tested their cold spray tantalum coating in the extreme conditions relevant to a fusion reactor and found that it performed very well. Importantly, they discovered the material is exceptionally good at trapping hydrogen particles, which is beneficial for compact fusion devices.

“We discovered that the cold spray tantalum coating absorbs much more hydrogen than bulk tantalum because of the unique microstructure of the coating,” says Kumar Sridharan, a professor of nuclear engineering and engineering physics and materials science and engineering. Over the last decade, Sridharan’s research group has introduced cold spray technology to the nuclear energy community by implementing it for multiple applications related to fission reactors.

“The simplicity of the cold spray process makes it very practical for applications,” Sridharan says.

In fusion devices, plasma — an ionized hydrogen gas — is heated to extremely high temperatures, and atomic nuclei in the plasma collide and fuse. That fusion process produces energy. However, some hydrogen ions may get neutralized and escape from the plasma.

“These hydrogen neutral particles cause power losses in the plasma, which makes it very challenging to sustain a hot plasma and have an effective small fusion reactor,” says Ialovega, who works in the research group of Oliver Schmitz, a professor of nuclear engineering and engineering physics.

That’s why the researchers set out to create a new surface for plasma-facing reactor walls that could trap hydrogen particles as they collide with the walls.

Tantalum is inherently good at absorbing hydrogen — and the researchers suspected that creating a tantalum coating using a cold spray process would boost its hydrogen-trapping abilities even more.

Creating a cold sprayed coating is somewhat like using a can of spray paint. It consists of propelling particles of the coating material at supersonic velocities onto a surface. Upon impact, the particles flatten like pancakes and coat the entire surface, while preserving nanoscale boundaries between the coating particles. The researchers discovered that those tiny boundaries facilitate trapping of hydrogen particles.

Ialovega conducted experiments on the coated material at facilities at Aix Marseille University in France and Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH in Germany. During these experiments, he found that when he heated the material to a higher temperature, it expelled the trapped hydrogen particles without modifying the coatings — a process that essentially regenerates the material so it can be used again.

“Another big benefit of the cold spray method is that it allows us to repair reactor components on site by applying a new coating,” Ialovega says. “Currently, damaged reactor components often need to be removed and replaced with a completely new part, which is costly and time consuming.”

The researchers plan to use their new material in the Wisconsin HTS Axisymmetric Mirror (WHAM). The experimental device is under construction near Madison, Wis., and will serve as a prototype for a future next-generation fusion power plant that UW–Madison spinoff Realta Fusion aims to develop. Housed in the Physical Sciences Laboratory, the WHAM experiment is a partnership between UW–Madison, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

“Creating a refractory metal composite with these features of well-controlled hydrogen handling combined with erosion resistance and general material resilience is a breakthrough for the design of plasma devices and fusion energy systems,” Schmitz says. “The prospect of changing the alloy and including other refractory metals to enhance the composite for nuclear applications is particularly exciting.”

The researchers are patenting their technology through the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

Oliver Schmitz is the Thomas and Suzanne Werner Professor, associate dean for research innovation in the UW–Madison College of Engineering, and director of the Grainger Institute of Engineering. Sridharan is a Grainger Professor.

Additional co-authors on the paper from UW–Madison include: Tyler Dabney, Marcos Navarro Gonzalez, Hwasung Yeom, Danah Velez, Evan Willing, Jay Anderson, and Cary Forest. Thierry Angot and Régis Bisson from Aix Marseille University in France, and Arkadi Kreter from Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH in Germany are also co-authors on the paper.

Seed funding for this research came in part from UW–Madison’s Research Forward program. This research was also supported by grants from the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) and the U.S. Department of Energy.

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--Adam Malecek, acmalecek@wisc.edu

JOURNAL

Physica Scripta

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

How the immune system fights to keep herpes at bay

New study findings could inform the design of treatments for a range of viruses that replicate in the cell nucleus

Peer-Reviewed Publication

HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL

Herpes simplex virus (HSV) is extremely common, affecting nearly two-thirds of the world’s population, according to the World Health Organization.

Once inside the body, HSV establishes a latent infection that periodically awakens, causing painful blisters on the skin, typically around the nose and mouth. While a mere nuisance for most people, HSV can also lead to dangerous eye infections and brain inflammation in some people and cause life-threatening infections in newborns.

Researchers have long known that the virus and the host immune system are in a perpetual competition, but why does this battle reach a stasis in most people while causing serious infections in others?

More important, precisely how does the battle unfold at the level of cells and molecules? This question has continued to bedevil scientists and hamper the quest for treatments that prevent or cure infections.

A recent study by researchers at Harvard Medical School, conducted using lab-engineered cells and published in PNAS, unveils the precise maneuvers used by host and pathogen in the fight for dominance of the cell.

Furthermore, the research shows how the immune system keeps the virus at bay in a battle taking place at the control center of the cell — its nucleus.

Immune signaling proteins issue a call to arms

The research reveals a key role for a group of signaling proteins called interferons, which recruit other protective molecules and block the virus from establishing infection.

Once inside the host, HSV multiplies by making copies of itself inside the nuclei of cells, using the host’s genetic machinery. For that to happen, the virus must outcompete the host’s immune system. But many of the tactics the virus and the immune system use in this contest have remained a mystery, making it challenging to design medicines to help patients defeat the virus.

Interferons — named for their ability to interfere with pathogens’ attempts to infect cells — are signaling molecules released when the immune system detects the presence of microbes, such as viruses. The distress signals sent by interferons activate genes in that cell and other cells that produce proteins, which in turn block viruses from establishing infection in the first place.

Several different mechanisms that interferons use to thwart viruses within the cytoplasm, the gelatinous liquid that fills cells, are well known. But how interferons work against DNA viruses — those launching their attack within the cell nucleus — has remained elusive.

“We know a lot about how interferon and immune stimulants work against viruses in the cytoplasmic body of the cell, but up until now, we knew very little about how the immune system blocks viral infection in the cell’s nucleus,” said study senior author David Knipe, the Higgins Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS. “Our findings define the mechanisms of action of any treatment that induces interferons and how they can prevent and treat infections from HSV, as well as other herpesviruses and nuclear DNA viruses.”

Knipe said the insights from this work could also help researchers understand — and perhaps eventually develop treatments for — other nuclear DNA viruses, including well-known troublemakers like the Epstein-Barr virus, which causes mononucleosis; human papillomavirus; hepatitis B; and smallpox.

These results define the mechanisms of action of interferon treatments for herpesvirus diseases and other treatments such as toll-like receptor ligands that have been tested for herpes, the researchers said. Other new activators of interferons such as cGAS agonists could also be used to induce herpes resistance through the newly defined mechanisms, the researchers added.

The researchers caution that any new potential therapies for HSV and other DNA viruses are purely conceptual at this point. Any such approaches should be first tested in small animals such as mice, then in larger animals and, finally, in humans.

Mapping the steps of a viral arms race

In the new study, Knipe and co-author Catherine Sodroski, an HMS PhD graduate now at the National Institutes of Health, discovered that a host protein called IFI16 is recruited by interferon to help block the virus from reproducing in several ways.

One of the strategies used by IFI16 to fend off HSV involves building and maintaining a shell of molecules around the viral DNA genome. This molecular “bubble wrap” prevents the virus from unfurling. With the virus wrapped up, it can’t activate its DNA to express its genes and make copies of itself.

To counter these protective maneuvers, however, the virus produces molecules called VP16 and ICP0 that can remove the wrapping, deactivate the host cell’s protective molecules, and enable the virus to reproduce.

Another mechanism used by IFI16 to fight HSV infection is to neutralize VP16 and ICP016. Under normal circumstances, when the cell is not preparing to repel a viral invader, there is some IFI16 present within the nucleus. But this background level of IFI16 isn’t enough to fight off the viral helper proteins and keep the virus wrapped and restrained.

Without interferon’s call to the cell to send in more IFI16, the virus wins the arms race and infects the cell. However, the experiments showed, when interferon signals recruit higher levels of IFI16, the immune system wins.

This current study echoes similar findings that found elevated levels of IFI16 in clinical samples of tissues where the immune system appeared to be successfully controlling symptoms of the closely related HSV-2 virus, providing crucial insights about the molecular machinery at work in staving off outbreaks of symptoms.

Using insights from the lab to improve human health

Knipe says he became interested in the biology of herpesviruses as an undergraduate while recovering from a bout of mononucleosis. He turned that curiosity into a career.

The Knipe lab studies what happens at the level of molecules and cells when HSV causes symptomatic and dormant infections. He is particularly interested in how the host immune system responds to HSV. Knipe has applied the insights gained by studying HSV to explore the possibilities of using genetic material from HSV to deliver vaccines for HIV, SARS, West Nile, and anthrax.

“Solving the puzzles that underlie the basic biology of how these viruses interact with the host cell nucleus and immune system is endlessly fascinating, and finding new ways to apply that knowledge to fighting diseases is endlessly rewarding,” Knipe said. “The most exciting part is that we’re just scratching the surface of the deep knowledge we can tap into for this fight.”

Authorship, funding, disclosures

This research was supported by National Institutes of Health predoctoral fellowship F31 AI145062 and National Institutes of Health grant AI106934.

JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2310996120

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Cells

ARTICLE TITLE

Nuclear interferon-stimulated gene product maintains heterochromatin on the herpes simplex viral genome to limit lytic infection

‘Long flu’ has emerged as a consequence similar to long COVID

Study shows patients hospitalized for flu or COVID-19 face increased risk of long-term health problems, death

Peer-Reviewed Publication

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, extensive research has emerged detailing the virus’s ability to attack multiple organ systems, potentially resulting in a set of enduring and often disabling health problems known as long COVID. Now, new research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System indicates that people hospitalized with seasonal influenza also can suffer long-term, negative health effects, especially involving their lungs and airways.

The new study comparing the viruses that cause COVID-19 and the flu also revealed that in the 18 months after infection, patients hospitalized for either COVID-19 or seasonal influenza faced an increased risk of death, hospital readmission, and health problems in many organ systems. Further, the time of highest risk was 30 days or later after initial infection.

“The study illustrates the high toll of death and loss of health following hospitalization with either COVID-19 or seasonal influenza,” said senior author Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University. “It’s critical to note that the health risks were higher after the first 30 days of infection. Many people think they’re over COVID-19 or the flu after being discharged from the hospital. That may be true for some people. But our research shows that both viruses can cause long-haul illness.”

The findings are published Dec. 14 in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

The statistical analysis spanned up to 18 months post-infection and included a comparative evaluation of risks of death, hospital admissions and 94 adverse health outcomes involving the body’s major organ systems.

“A review of past studies on COVID-19 versus the flu focused on a short-term and narrow set of health outcomes,” said Al-Aly, who treats patients within the VA St. Louis Health Care System and is an assistant professor of medicine at Washington University. “Our novel approach compared the long-term health effects of a vast array of conditions. Five years ago, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to examine the possibility of a ‘long flu.’ A major lesson we learned from SARS-CoV-2 is that an infection that initially was thought to only cause brief illness also can lead to chronic disease. This revelation motivated us to look at long-term outcomes of COVID-19 versus flu.

“We wanted to know whether and to what degree people with flu also experience long-term health effects,” Al-Aly said. “The big answer is that both COVID-19 and the flu led to long-term health problems, and the big aha moment was the realization that the magnitude of long-term health loss eclipsed the problems that these patients endured in the early phase of the infection. Long COVID is much more of a health problem than COVID, and long flu is much more of a health problem than the flu.”

However, the overall risk and occurrence of death, hospital admissions, and loss of health in many organ systems are substantially higher among COVID-19 patients than among those who have had seasonal influenza, Al-Aly said. “The one notable exception is that the flu poses higher risks to the pulmonary system than COVID-19,” he said. “This tells us the flu is truly more of a respiratory virus, like we’ve all thought for the past 100 years. By comparison, COVID-19 is more aggressive and indiscriminate in that it can attack the pulmonary system, but it can also strike any organ system and is more likely to cause fatal or severe conditions involving the heart, brain, kidneys and other organs.”

The researchers analyzed de-identified medical records in a database maintained by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the nation’s largest integrated health-care delivery system. They evaluated information involving 81,280 patients hospitalized for COVID-19 at some point from March 1, 2020, through June 30, 2022, as well as 10,985 patients hospitalized for seasonal influenza at some point from Oct. 1, 2015, through Feb. 28, 2019.

Patients represented multiple ages, races and sexes.

Regarding both viruses, patient vaccination status did not affect results. Those in the COVID-19 cohort were hospitalized during the pre-delta, delta and omicron eras.

During the overall 18-month study period, patients who had COVID-19 faced a 50% higher risk of death than those with seasonal influenza. This corresponded to about eight more deaths per 100 persons in the COVID-19 group than among those with the flu.

Although COVID-19 showed a greater risk of health loss than seasonal influenza, infection with either virus carried significant risk of disability and disease. The researchers found COVID-19 exhibited increased risk of 68% of health conditions examined across all organ systems (64 of the 94 adverse health outcomes studied), while the flu was associated with elevated risk of 6% of health conditions (six of the 94) – mostly in the respiratory system.

Also, over 18 months, COVID-19 patients experienced an increased risk of hospital readmission as well as admission to an intensive care unit (ICU). For every 100 persons in each group, there were 20 more hospital admissions and nine more ICU admissions in COVID-19 than flu.

“Our findings highlight the continued need to reduce the risk of hospitalization for these two viruses as a way to alleviate the overall burden of health loss in populations,” Al-Aly said. “For both COVID-19 and seasonal influenza, vaccinations can help prevent severe disease and reduce the risk of hospitalizations and death. Optimizing vaccination uptake must remain a priority for governments and health systems everywhere. This is especially important for vulnerable populations such as the elderly and people who are immunocompromised.”

In both COVID-19 and the flu, more than half of death and disability occurred in the months after infection as opposed to the first 30 days, the latter of which is known as the acute phase.

“The idea that COVID-19 or flu are just acute illnesses overlooks their larger long-term effects on human health,” Al-Aly said. “Before the pandemic, we tended to belittle most viral infections by regarding them as somewhat inconsequential: ‘You’ll get sick and get over it in a few days.’ But we’re discovering that is not everyone’s experience. Some people are ending up with serious long-term health issues. We need to wake up to this reality and stop trivializing viral infections and understand that they are major drivers of chronic diseases.”

JOURNAL

The Lancet Infectious Diseases

DOI

10.1016/S1473-3099(23)00684-9

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Long-term outcomes following hospital admission for COVID-19 versus seasonal influenza: a cohort study

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

14-Dec-2023

UChicago Medicine among the first in the country to offer newly approved sickle cell gene therapies

Business Announcement

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICAL CENTER

The University of Chicago Medicine Comer Children’s Hospital will be among the first in the country to offer gene therapy for sickle cell disease in patients 12 years and older, after federal regulators approved two new treatments on December 8, 2023.

Thousands of patients with sickle cell disease experience vaso-occlusive crises (VOCs), which are often painful and frequently require hospitalization. The two new potentially curative treatments show promise for eliminating VOCs and offer an alternative to bone marrow transplants, which can be arduous and carry risk of rejection even if a matching donor is found.

People with sickle cell disease have a gene mutation that causes their blood cells to produce faulty hemoglobin — a protein that carries oxygen throughout the body — and function incorrectly. Gene therapy uses gene-editing technology to fix or compensate for this mutation.

Both of the newly approved gene therapies involve removing a patient’s own stem cells and modifying them before infusing them back into the patient.

One therapy adds a new copy of a gene to the patient’s stem cells so they produce a functional form of hemoglobin.

The other therapy is the first FDA-approved product to use CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology. This therapy changes existing DNA in the patient’s stem cells to “switch on” a gene that will make the cells revert to producing fetal hemoglobin instead of non-functional adult hemoglobin affected by the sickle cell mutations.

Comer Children’s is one of just nine authorized treatment centers immediately activated for this CRISPR-based therapy.

Comer Children’s Hospital participated in a clinical trial of a sickle cell gene therapy, giving UChicago physicians additional cell and gene therapy experience as well as specific experience administering it to sickle cell patients.

UVA biomedical engineer unveils the dynamics of maternal immune responses

Grant and Award Announcement

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCE

Sepideh Dolatshahi, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Virginia, is spearheading an exploration of systems immunology in its crucial development phase — during pregnancy.

Systems immunology is about unraveling concealed patterns within the human immune system, said Dolatshahi, whose approaches to her research span computational modeling, systems serology and cutting-edge spatial analysis techniques to investigate immune interactions between mother and fetus during pregnancy that could later support early childhood immunity.

Designing Tailored and Effective Vaccine Plans

Babies are immunocompromised and rely on antibodies from their mothers to protection against infections. Mothers are vaccinated during pregnancy to help increase and customize the antibodies passed on to the baby. While early vaccines such as tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis (TDAP), and recently respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), have shown astounding success, the number of vaccines available to mothers is limited and babies remain vulnerable to many pathogens.

The Dolatshahi lab is working to shed light on how vaccines given to pregnant women interact with both their changing immune system and the developing placenta to confer immune protection in the baby. The team’s goal is to design personalized vaccination strategies that can be especially beneficial to vulnerable patients, for example, those who have genetic complications or compromised immune systems.

To accomplish this, Dolatshahi and her colleagues developed the first computer-based predictive model of maternal vaccination and placental antibody transfer. This model now serves as a tool to help doctors and pre-clinical researchers test different vaccination strategies in silico before embarking on costly, tedious clinical trials, and to shorten the timeline for when patients might benefit from the resulting immunization protocols.

The Importance of Placental Development

The placenta is a protective gatekeeper that safeguards the fetus, governing which substances can reach the growing baby. Shockingly, little is known about the specifics of how the placenta regulates the passage of antibodies from mother to baby.

To shed light on this process and understand which interactions are responsible for conferring transfer of protective antibodies to the baby, Dolatshahi’s team is taking a closer look at the important molecules expressed by placental cells and how they work together to transport antibodies.

By examining this specific process using spatial analysis tools, they hope to uncover information that will identify new targets of maternal vaccines that will maximize the benefit to the baby.

Uncovering Variability Across the Population

During pregnancy the mother’s immune system is in constant flux, so there is no reason to believe that vaccination during pregnancy should be a one-size-fits-all approach. Dolatshahi and her team hope to uncover key variables affecting placental antibody transfer that might contribute to differences across the population.

By defining what causes some babies to receive more maternal antibodies than others, Dolatshahi’s work will help doctors identify patients who may benefit from specially designed vaccines to best support their baby’s immune system. More broadly, this investigation will shed light on the biological and socioeconomic factors which make some women more prone to immune-related pregnancy complications.

This research stands as a milestone to understanding the nuances of how maternal antibodies traverse the placenta and confer protection in newborn babies, and to uncovering specific immune-related mechanisms of pregnancy complications such as preterm birth and preeclampsia. Dolatshahi's research sets the stage for a more profound comprehension of the immune system’s behavior during pregnancy, offering a promising trajectory for further advancements in this critical domain.

The team's publication about this research, Quantitative mechanistic model reveals key determinants of placental IgG transfer and informs prenatal immunization strategies, has been accepted for publication by PLOS Computational Biology.

DOI

10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011109

ABOLISH THE DEATH PENALTY

Jurors recommend death penalty based on looks, but new training can correct the bias

FUCK THAT END CAPITAL PUNISHMENT PERIOD

Peer-Reviewed Publication

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

Certain facial features—like downturned lips and a heavy brow—are known to make someone appear untrustworthy to others, even though these do not indicate a person’s actual character. Such facial biases influence our everyday social interactions as well as high-stakes decisions, including who we hire, or elect to political office.

But a new study by Columbia researchers shows that the effects of these judgments can be mitigated. The study outlines the results of four experiments that the authors conducted with 1,400 volunteers. Through those experiments, the researchers found that when real-world defendants have facial features that appear untrustworthy, they are more likely to be sentenced to death than life in prison. They also found that mock jurors were more likely to recommend a ruling against hypothetical defendants with an untrustworthy facial appearance. To get people to overcome these biases, the researchers developed a training intervention. Participants who underwent the training stopped relying on facial stereotypes, while participants in a control group who never received training remained strongly biased.

The findings are reported by a group led by Jon Freeman, an associate professor of psychology, in the journal Psychological Science. The other authors were Youngki Hong and Kao-Wei Chua, who were postdoctoral researchers at Columbia.

The researchers asked the participants to decide whose mugshots they felt were trustworthy or untrustworthy among 400 inmates in Florida who were convicted of murder. The inmates whose facial features were judged to be less trustworthy were far more likely to be sentenced to death than their counterparts without those features. This was even so in cases when participants’ conscious decisions showed no bias against certain facial types. Using a test known as a sequential priming paradigm, the researchers could show that these participants did, in fact, harbor unconscious biases that predicted who was ultimately sentenced to death.

The intervention trained participants to dismantle their unconscious associations between specific facial features and an untrustworthy reaction using a computer task. Unlike educating or “nudging” participants not to rely on facial appearance in a conscious and deliberate way, Freeman and his colleagues’ training works by making the implicit link in people’s minds between certain facial features and an untrustworthy reaction as no longer stable or reliable. They did this by having participants associate untrustworthy-looking facial features with trustworthy behaviors, severing the implicit link between these features and untrustworthiness.

While prior research testing interventions that raise people’s awareness of their facial bias and ask them to stop have failed to achieve success in reducing that bias, this new intervention operating on more unconscious principles was able to eliminate facial biases very successfully. The researchers were able to eliminate bias not only in participants’ conscious decisions but also in their unconscious reactions. This is important because unconscious reactions can still wreak havoc on people’s behavior, even when conscious decisions appear to be unbiased.

Racial and gender biases also strongly affect how trustworthy or untrustworthy another person is judged, biases that co-exist with the facial stereotypes the researchers studied, like downward-turned lips and a heavy brow. The researchers therefore conducted their studies only with white male faces to control for racial and gender biases. With the effects established, they are currently following up by testing the intervention with racially and gender diverse faces.

“These findings bolster prior work that facial stereotypes may have disastrous effects in the real world, but, more importantly, provide a potential inroad toward combating these sorts of biases,” Freeman said. “By exposing a cognitive pathway toward eradicating facial stereotypes, future research must investigate whether this training could be broadly applied and how to ensure the bias reduction persists over time.”

“If there are consequential judgments that are biased by facial stereotypes, our findings suggest that they have the potential to be flexibly remapped and dismantled,” the paper concludes.

JOURNAL

Psychological Science

DOI

10.1177/09567976231215238

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Reducing facial stereotype bias in consequential social judgments

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

14-Dec-2023

Stalled progress toward eliminating child marriage in India

Peer-Reviewed Publication

HARVARD T.H. CHAN SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH

Friday, December 15, 6:30 PM ET

Key points:

Using national data between 1993 and 2021, researchers observed that India’s national prevalence of child marriage—defined by the study as marriage before age 18—declined throughout the study period.

The decade between 2006 and 2016 saw the largest magnitude of reduction in child marriage, while the years between 2016 and 2021 saw the smallest. During these latter years, six Indian states/union territories saw increases in the prevalence of girl child marriage and eight saw increases in boy child marriage.

The study is among the first to examine how the prevalence of child marriage has changed over time at a state/union territory level.

Boston, MA—Child marriage has declined in India—but across the country, one in five girls and nearly one in six boys are still married as children, and in recent years the practice has become more prevalent in some states/union territories, according to a new study led by researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Child marriage is a human rights violation and a recognized form of gender- and sexual-based violence. India’s success in reaching zero child marriage is critical to achieving United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 5.3.

The study will be published on December 15, 2023, in The Lancet Global Health.

“This study is among the first to estimate how rates of girl and boy child marriage have changed over time at a state/union territory level. Boy child marriage in particular is often overlooked; to date, there’s been almost no research estimating its prevalence,” said lead author S. V. Subramanian, professor of population health and geography. “Our findings offer a big step forward in understanding the burden of child marriage in India—one that will be critical to effective policymaking.”

Though India legally defines child marriage as marriage before age 18 for girls and before age 21 for boys, for the purposes of the study the researchers defined it as marriage before age 18 for both sexes. Using data from all five waves of India’s National Family Health Survey, from 1993, 1999, 2006, 2016, and 2021, they estimated the number of men and women ages 20-24 who met that definition across state/union territories.

The study found that between 1993 and 2021, child marriage declined nationally. The prevalence of girl child marriage decreased from 49% in 1993 to 22% in 2021, while boy child marriage decreased from 7% in 2006 to 2% in 2021. (Using the Indian legal definition of boy child marriage, the prevalence was much higher: 29% in 2006 and 15% in 2022.) However, progress towards stopping the practice of child marriage has stalled in recent years: The largest reductions in child marriage prevalence occurred between 2006 and 2016, with the lowest magnitude of reduction occurring between 2016 and 2021. In fact, during these later years, six states/union territories (including Manipur, Punjab, Tripura, and West Bengal) saw an increase in girl child marriage and eight (including Chhattisgarh, Goa, Manipur, and Punjab) saw an increase in boy child marriage.

By 2021, the researchers counted more than 13.4 million women and more than 1.4 million men ages 20-24 who were married as children. The results showed that one in five girls and nearly one in six boys are still married below India’s legal age of marriage.

“Child marriage is a human rights violation,” said first author Jewel Gausman, research associate in the Department of Global Health and Population. “It is both a cause and a consequence of social and economic vulnerability that leads to a range of poor health outcomes. The state/union territory stagnation in reaching zero child marriage that we observed is a significant concern—and is a call for India to reignite progress.”

Rockli Kim, visiting scientist at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, was also a co-author.

Funding for the study came from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (INV-002992).

“Prevalence of Girl and Boy Child Marriage: A Repeated Cross-sectional Study Examining the Subnational Variation across States and Union Territories in India, 1993-2021,” Jewel Gausman, Rockli Kim, Akhil Kumar, Shamika Ravi, S.V. Subramanian, The Lancet Global Health, December 15, 2023, doi: 10.1016/S2214-109X(23)00470-9

Visit the Harvard Chan School website for the latest news, press releases, and multimedia offerings.

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Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health brings together dedicated experts from many disciplines to educate new generations of global health leaders and produce powerful ideas that improve the lives and health of people everywhere. As a community of leading scientists, educators, and students, we work together to take innovative ideas from the laboratory to people’s lives—not only making scientific breakthroughs, but also working to change individual behaviors, public policies, and health care practices. Each year, more than 400 faculty members at Harvard Chan School teach 1,000-plus full-time students from around the world and train thousands more through online and executive education courses. Founded in 1913 as the Harvard-MIT School of Health Officers, the School is recognized as America’s oldest professional training program in public health.

JOURNAL

The Lancet Global Health

DOI

10.1016/S2214-109X(23)00470-9

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Prevalence of Girl and Boy Child Marriage: A Repeated Cross-sectional Study Examining the Subnational Variation across States and Union Territories in India, 1993-2021

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

15-Dec-2023

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for CHILD BRIDE

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for BOY BRIDES

Basic monthly income trial at USC shows promise with significant reduction in homelessness

Participants in the Miracle Money study of a guaranteed monthly income reported a decrease in time spent unsheltered from 30% to under 12% after six months, USC researchers find

Reports and Proceedings

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

Researchers at the Center for Homelessness, Housing, and Health Equity Research at the University of Southern California released an interim report on the first six months of a randomized controlled trial to study the impact of a basic income and social support intervention for 103 individuals experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles County and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Two key findings so far are that participants in the Miracle Money study who received $750 per month were less likely to remain unsheltered and closer to being able to meet all of their basic needs, compared with those who access usual services available to the homeless population.

Delivered through the nonprofit organization Miracle Messages, which helps people experiencing homelessness rebuild their social support systems and financial security, the Miracle Money study is an expansion of a previous informal pilot program conducted by Miracle Messages that successfully helped participants exit homelessness and meet their basic needs.

Led by Ben Henwood, the Frances L. and Albert G. Feldman Professor of Social Policy and Health at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work and director of the Center for Homelessness, Housing, and Health Equity Research, the one-year Miracle Money study was designed to determine if the results from the previous pilot program would hold for a significantly larger sample size measured against a control group.

“One of the aims is to scientifically examine the impact that reducing financial and relational poverty can have on creating long-term solutions to homelessness,” Henwood said. “People have different needs, and we’re empowering them to focus on what is going to help them individually.”

The report provides a breakdown of findings at the six-month follow-up with the initial 69 Miracle Money participants who received monthly income, including how they spent the money received, and a statistically significant change in the proportion of time spent unsheltered in the past month, decreasing from 30% at the start of the trial to under 12% at the halfway point of the trial. It also compares how participants who have received at least six monthly payments are doing versus 86 people in the control group who are accessing other homeless services.

“Poverty is poverty, but relational poverty is also poverty,” said Kevin F. Adler, founder and CEO of Miracle Messages. “A unique aspect of Miracle Money is that in addition to addressing financial insecurity through the monthly payments, it also focuses on the lack of connection and ‘otherizing’ that people experiencing homelessness often face, which makes exiting homelessness all the more difficult.”

Miracle Money participants who receive guaranteed income payments are paired with a community volunteer “phone buddy” who provides social support through weekly phone calls and text messages. This component of the study allows for the examination of a variety of physical and social factors related to experiencing homelessness in addition to housing insecurity.

The Miracle Money study is funded by Google.org, the USC Homeless Policy Research Institute, Scott Layne and Kimberly Lynch, and many other generous individuals and foundations. Learn more about the Miracle Money program.

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Randomized controlled/clinical trial

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People