It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, May 28, 2025
Refugees in Sweden who lived in institutional housing during the asylum process are prescribed more anti-anxiety and anti-depressant medication and visit hospital more than those who lived in self-organized housing
Article Title: Housing during the asylum process and its association with healthcare utilization for common mental disorders among refugees in Sweden: A nationwide cohort study
Author Countries: Sweden
Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.
Housing during the asylum process and its association with healthcare utilization for common mental disorders among refugees in Sweden: A nationwide cohort study
Article Publication Date
28-May-2025
COI Statement
Cats recognize their owner’s scent
Domestic cats respond differently to the odor of their owner than that of an unfamiliar human
Cats spend longer sniffing the odor of a stranger than that of their owner, suggesting that they can identify familiar humans based on smell alone, according to a study publishing May 28, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Yutaro Miyairi and colleagues at Tokyo University of Agriculture, Japan.
Cats use their sense of smell to identify other cats and communicate with each other, but whether they can also use smell to distinguish between different humans has not previously been studied. The researchers investigated whether cats are able to distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar humans based on smell alone. They tested thirty domestic cats by presenting them with plastic tubes containing swabs that had been rubbed under the armpit, behind the ear, and between the toes of either their owner or a human they had never met.
The cats spent significantly longer sniffing unknown odors than those of their owner or an empty tube. The researchers also found that cats were initially more likely to sniff unknown odors with their right nostril but later switched to their left nostril as they became more familiar with the smell.
Participating cat owners were also asked to complete an online questionnaire to assess the cat’s personality and their relationship with their owner. Male cats with neurotic personalities tended to sniff each tube repetitively, whereas males with more agreeable personalities sniffed the tubes more calmly. However, there was no effect of personality on the behavior of female cats during the experiment.
The results suggest that domestic cats can discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar humans based on their odor, but it remains unclear whether they can identify specific humans based on smell alone. The finding that cats preferred to investigate new smells with their right nostril suggests that they may favor different hemispheres of their brain for different tasks — a phenomenon that has previously been demonstrated in other animals including dogs, fish and birds.
The authors add: “We suggest that cats use their olfaction for the recognition of humans. Also, we record characteristic rubbing (marking) behavior occurring after sniffing, indicating that sniffing may be an exploratory behavior preceding the rubbing of odor (marking) in cats. This relationship warrants further investigation along with the theory of whether cats are able to recognize a specific person from olfactory cues.”
In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS One: https://plos.io/3SCUGDq
Citation: Miyairi Y, Kimura Y, Masuda K, Uchiyama H (2025) Behavioral responses of domestic cats to human odor. PLoS One 20(5): e0324016. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0324016
Author countries: Japan
Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.
Researchers look over the remains of a platform monument, the largest type of monument studied. They were generally created in a single session, by multiple individuals.
COLUMBUS, Ohio – New research brings together 7,000 years of history in South Arabia to show how ancient pastoralists changed placement and construction of monuments over time in the face of environmental and cultural forces.
In a study published today (May 28, 2025) in PLOS One, an international team of archaeologists documents how monuments changed as the climate transitioned from a humid environment to, eventually, an arid desert.
Early monuments were built by larger groups at one time. But as people dispersed with the increasingly drier climate, smaller groups began constructing monuments and eventually built many of them in several visits.
“The findings show that monuments are a flexible technology that reflect the resilience of desert pastoralists in the face of a changing climate,” said Joy McCorriston, lead author of the study and professor of anthropology at The Ohio State University.
But the key role that these monuments played in people’s lives remained a constant.
“These monuments are touchstones for human social belonging,” McCorriston said.
“As these groups became smaller and more spread out in the desert, people’s interactions with the monuments consolidates a sense of being part of a larger society.”
The research team analyzed 371 archaeological monuments in the arid Dhofar region of Oman. The earliest monuments studied were created from 7500 to 6200 BP (years Before Present) in the Holocene Humid Period. This period was characterized by higher-than-modern rainfall in southern Arabia.
The most recent monuments studied were created from 1100-750 BP, during the Late Antiquity when the area had become a desert.
While examples of most of the monuments and archaeological sites had previously been studied and classified, that research was generally very time- and place-specific, McCorriston said.
“What we’ve done is take a holistic look and show how all these individual monuments were part of a larger story of how the monuments changed as the lives of the people changed over thousands of years,” she said.
The researchers did this by looking at a standard set of observations for all the monuments and developing a model that could be used in other contexts and places around the world.
For example, the model may be applicable and adaptable to assess social resilience in regions such as Saharan, Mongolian, or the high Andes.
One of the key measurements the researchers made was the volume and size of stones used in construction of the monuments. The earliest-built monuments in the study were Neolithic platforms, which contained larger stones. They were the largest monuments studied and were built at one time.
“The significance of the larger stones is that it takes more people to lift them. We know that it took at least seven strong men to lift the largest stones,” McCorriston said.
“These large monuments that were built in one episode could only be built early on, before the region became arid. This is when large groups of people could still come together at one time.”
Some of these larger monuments could serve large gatherings of people, where they could converge with multiple herds of cattle, and have animal sacrifices and feasts.
As the region became more arid and could no longer support large numbers of people nor their coming together, small groups traveled widely, going to where they could find water and places for their animals to graze.
They still had to build monuments in one episode, such as for burials, but by this time they tended to be smaller and use smaller stones, the researchers found.
What became more common were what are called accretive monuments, which people built over time – sometimes many years – rather than in one episode, like the earlier platform monuments.
One example of such monuments is accretive triliths. The higher number of triliths, along with the smaller stone volumes with few heavy stones, are consistent with monuments built over time by smaller, dispersed groups in an era of hyper-aridity.
These accretive monuments functioned as touchstones, allowing pastoralists to maintain connections and social resilience even as their movements and populations became more dispersed.
“In many cases, they were building a memory. They come to a monument and add their piece, which was a replicated element of the whole. It helped people maintain a community, even with those they may rarely see,” she said.
It is impossible to say what were the precise messages the monuments were meant to convey, according to McCorriston. “What we can say is that the monuments conveyed readable meanings to others who shared the same cultural context.”
It is possible, though, that some monuments were built to assure others in a social network access to important environmental information as they came by later.
“People would need to know, did it rain here last year? Did the goats eat all the grass? Pastoralists used this technology to help absorb the risk of being in an inherently variable and risky environment,” she said. And they would need to depend on social networks for livestock exchanges, marriage partners, and rare materials, like sea shells, carnelian and agate and metal.
“That is one of the key points of what we found. Our model highlights a reliance on monuments to preserve connections and adapt socially in a changing world.”
In 2022, after U.S. troops withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban regained power, Afghans reported an average life satisfaction of 1.28 on a scale from 0 to 10—or from the worst possible life to the best possible life—a global, all-time low, according to a new study published today in Science Advances.
That is lower than life satisfaction scores recorded in more than 170 countries since 1946, when global ratings were first tallied. In 2022, the global mean life satisfaction rating recorded in the Gallup World Poll was 5.48.
Afghans also showed little hope for the future. When asked to imagine what their lives would be like in five years on the same scale, hope among Afghans fell even lower than their life satisfaction, at 1.02.
“Afghanistan is quite different as Afghans have reported low life satisfaction and even lower hope, which likely reflects profound distress and despair within the country."
The study was conducted alongside assistant professor Felix Cheung, Department of Psychology postdoctoral fellow Phyllis Lun and researchers from Cheung’s Population Well-Being Lab, Mei Yang and Kenith Chan. It draws on data collected in the Gallup World Poll and the World Database of Happiness.
“This research shines a light on the wellbeing, the life satisfaction, of a people who have been left behind. They’ve been left behind by the U.S., they’ve been left behind by the international community, and they’ve been left behind by international news organizations,” Stutzman says.
Their research also underlines the impacts that life circumstances and structural factors—like war and political unrest—can have on subjective well-being. Life circumstances have previously been downplayed in leading well-being theories and models, which prioritized genetic factors and intentional activities like exercise and practicing gratitude.
“Our own sense of wellbeing, our own happiness, isn’t solely up to us. A lot of it is structural,” Stutzman explains.
Researchers analyzed face-to-face interview data collected in Afghanistan over three periods: before the U.S. withdrawal in 2018 and 2019, during the U.S. withdrawal and first month of Taliban rule in 2021, and after the U.S. withdrawal in 2022.
In 2018, Afghans rated their life satisfaction at 2.69. That measure did not significantly decline in 2021, during the early stages of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the first month of renewed Taliban rule. But after the U.S. withdrawal and the consolidation of Taliban rule in 2022, life satisfaction in Afghanistan dropped to previously unseen levels.
In 2022, nearly all Afghans reported a life satisfaction score below 5, and two in three Afghans reported a life satisfaction score of either 0 or 1.
Life satisfaction may be understood differently in varying contexts, so more work is needed to define the cross-cultural comparability of subjective well-being. As such, these findings do not necessarily mean that Afghans experienced the lowest subjective well-being of all time.
They do highlight the structural challenges and deep suffering that Afghan people have and continue to face. A deeper analysis shows that women and people living in rural areas have been disproportionately affected, due to the Taliban placing increased restrictions on women’s rights and rural communities lacking resources to help combat food insecurity.
For the study’s authors, it is critical that the plight of Afghans is not forgotten, especially in the West, and that the international community can be spurred into action. They point out that the struggles facing Afghans have not been widely reported on since 2022, when thousands of Afghans descended on the airport in Kabul desperately trying to flee the country—some clinging to the outside of moving planes.
“Just because the war has ended, it doesn’t mean that every problem has been solved,” Cheung explains. “That is the first step of a very long recovery process — a process that requires investments in necessities like healthcare, food and water, and infrastructure, and is informed by evidence.
Looking ahead, researchers from the Population Well-Being Lab will be examining the life satisfaction and hope of civilians embroiled in other ongoing wars and conflict, such as people in Ukraine during the 2022 Russian invasion.
Background Information
The War in Afghanistan began in 2001, triggered by the U.S. and its allies after al-Qaeda's September 11 attacks and the Taliban government’s refusal to surrender al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
The U.S. and its allies removed the Taliban from power within the first three months of the war and established a new government, the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Despite this initial success, the U.S.-led conflict against the Taliban continued for nearly two decades, ultimately resulting in the violent death of more than 165,000 Afghans.
In 2018 and 2019, the first period examined in this study, the U.S. and its allies killed more civilians than at any point in the war since at least 2006. During this time, the U.S. and its allies increased the frequency of airstrikes in an attempt to pressure the Taliban to negotiate. Hundreds of civilians were killed in these strikes—40% of them children.
The Taliban regained control of Afghanistan in August 2021, after President Biden announced that the U.S. troops would withdraw from the country by the end of August 2022. A period of significant uncertainty followed, only growing when then President Ashraf Ghani fled Afghanistan and thousands of Afghans attempted to flee at the Kabul airport.
As U.S. troops withdrew in 2022, Afghanistan also suffered devastating earthquakes and drought, cuts to humanitarian aid from the international community, public health crises and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, increased food insecurity, economic collapse, and controversial policies imposed by the Taliban government.
The 120-mile Tijuana River flows from Baja California into the United States and discharges millions of gallons of wastewater — including sewage, industrial waste and runoff — into the Pacific Ocean every day, making it the dominant source of coastal pollution in the region. Wastewater pollution has been an ongoing problem for decades and is so severe that the nonprofit environmental group American Rivers recently named the Tijuana River America’s second most endangered river.
A new study from the University of California San Diego examines how pollutants in wastewater travel and are transmitted in the atmosphere through coastal aerosols. In the study, researchers found that a mixture of illicit drugs, drug metabolites, and chemicals from tires and personal care products aerosolize from wastewater and are detectable in both air and water. The results appear in Science Advances.
For this study, the paper’s lead author, Adam Cooper, collected samples from the air and water at various points along the coast of San Diego County, including the U.S.-Mexico border, Imperial Beach and Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla.
Cooper, who graduated last spring with a doctorate in chemistry, was a member of Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Jonathan Slade’s group, and collected the samples as part of a field study with Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry Kimberly Prather’s lab.
Prather, who holds a joint appointment at Scripps Oceanography and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UC San Diego, had been studying the air pollution impacts of the Tijuana River for several years. Cooper was able to join her team’s comprehensive sampling campaign across multiple sites from January to March of 2020.
Even though the samples were taken in 2020, the findings are still relevant because little has changed in how sewage release from the river is processed. In fact, pollution from the river has been an ongoing problem for more than 50 years.
“The Tijuana River region is a very dynamic environment with implications for public health, environmental policy and international relations between the United States and Mexico,” stated Cooper. “Ours is one of the most comprehensive studies to date investigating water-to-air transfer of these pollutants.”The study looked at two aspects of wastewater pollution: the source and the concentration of pollutants along the San Diego County coastline.
To determine the origin of the pollutants, Slade’s lab used a compound they knew came from sewage: benzoylecgonine (BZG), a stable metabolite of cocaine, primarily produced when people use cocaine and then excrete it in urine.
They found that after rainfall, BZG levels in Imperial Beach ocean water spiked in correlation with increased Tijuana River flows, while BZG levels in aerosols spiked in correlation with enhanced sea spray aerosol emissions.
Correlating 11 other pollutants to BZG in aerosols allowed the team to determine which ones behaved similarly in the environment and likely originated from the same wastewater source. The results showed a high correlation between BZG; methamphetamine; octinoxate, a UV filter used in sunscreen; and dibenzylamine, a compound used in tire manufacturing.
The second part of the study measured pollutant concentrations along the coastline in the water and air. Overwhelmingly, they found that these pollutants were higher in the Tijuana River water than in the ocean, and higher in the water and aerosols in the Imperial Beach region than in La Jolla.
Although the amounts of some pollutants, like cocaine, were minuscule, others were more prominent, like octinoxate, which can break down into more toxic components.
In some cases, the octinoxate levels were comparable to measurements made directly above wastewater treatment plant vats, meaning that in some ambient conditions at the coast, the concentrations of pollutants that people are inhaling can be comparable to a worker at a wastewater treatment plant.
“It’s been shown that octinoxate can degrade DNA when exposed to light,” stated Slade. “And if it’s in these tiny aerosols we’re breathing in, it can get deep into our lungs and pass into our bloodstream. That’s very concerning, especially considering the high levels at which we found it in the air.”
The study shows that the closer you are to the Tijuana River, the more likely you are to be exposed to the pollutants it carries, even though the amounts are still relatively small — on the scale of tens of nanograms per hour. This may not seem like much if your exposure is limited to a few hours, but residents living close to the border are inhaling these chemicals over years, even decades.
Many residents have complained of respiratory illness, insomnia and headaches, and several San Diego beaches have been closed almost continuously for the last three years because of high levels of bacteria from wastewater runoff.
Although the paper doesn’t draw any conclusions about the detrimental effects on the environment or human health, Slade and Cooper emphasize the need for more research, better infrastructure and cross-border collaboration.
“Often the sewage crisis is considered a water issue — and it is — but we show that it’s in the air too. Truthfully, we don’t yet know the acute health effects,” stated Slade. “But the numbers we report can be incorporated into models to help us better understand what we're breathing in and how much we’re exposed to.”
Cooper was so influenced by his work at UC San Diego that he is now a Science and Policy Technology Fellow with the California Council on Science and Technology, working with State Senator Ben Allen.
“The solutions to the cross-border sewage crisis aren't constrained by technical challenges,” stated Cooper. “They’re constrained by political challenges and policy issues. We have to motivate decision-makers to make the right investments.”
In addition to better infrastructure, more public awareness is crucial to improving the region’s water and air quality, including understanding the downstream effects of the products we use, such as sunscreens and tires.
“Although our study focuses on the Tijuana River, there are other notable sources of wastewater and pollution run-off in Southern California, including wastewater treatment outfalls, the San Diego River and the Los Angeles River,” said Slade, who also noted that “turbulence in rivers and streams may aerosolize wastewater, requiring further study.”
Coastal port environments are extremely dynamic and complex, but these pollution issues are not relegated just to the San Diego-Tijuana region. They pose a global hazard.
An estimated 80% of all global wastewater is untreated. Of the portion that is treated, many plants remove bacteria, but not chemical pollutants. These chemicals remain in the water, which is released into rivers, lakes and oceans, traveling around the world through waterways and in the atmosphere.
"The global surge of untreated wastewater entering lakes, rivers and oceans poses a growing health threat. Aerosolization of this polluted water exposes billions of people through airborne transmission, reaching far beyond those in direct contact and impacting countless others who inhale contaminated air that can travel for many miles,” stated Prather. “We are continuing our studies in this region to better understand the short and long-term health impacts of inhaling this newly identified source of airborne pollution."
Full list of authors: Adam Cooper, Lucia Cancelada, Ralph Torres, Kathryn Belcher, Mallory Small, Pedro Belda-Ferre, Clare Morris, Brock Mitts, Julie Dinasquet, Eva Ternon, Rob Knight, Jonathan Slade and Kimberly Prather (all UC San Diego and/or Scripps Institution of Oceanography).
This work was supported, in part, by funding from the UC San Diego Understanding and Protecting the Planet initiative, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (DGE-2038238), and the Environmental Protection Agency (RD-84042401). This paper has not been formally reviewed by the EPA. The views expressed in this document are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the EPA. The EPA does not endorse any products or commercial services mentioned in this publication.
