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)
Tuesday, August 26, 2025
‘Peak water security’ crisis, Texas A&M researcher warns
New research warns of declining access to safe, reliable and affordable water in the U.S., urging for better water tracking tools and immediate policy reforms.
Credit: Dr. Wendy Jepson/Texas A&M University College of Arts and Sciences.
As the United States passes a tipping point in water security, new research reveals that millions of Americans now face a growing crisis in accessing clean, affordable water.
The findings, published inPLOS Waterand PLOS One, were produced by a multi-university team co-led by Dr. Wendy Jepson, professor of geography and director of Environmental Programs at Texas A&M University.
“Our research shows water insecurity in the U.S. is not just a problem of pipes and infrastructure — it’s a human issue that affects health, daily life and dignity,” Jepson said. “Even in the wealthiest country, millions face challenges getting safe and affordable water, often without anyone realizing it.”
A Call For Immediate Water Reform
The research team calls on utility industries, public agencies and policymakers to recognize the scope of the crisis, and reform water management approaches.
"Our goal was to bring water insecurity out of the shadows so decision-makers could build equitable, sustainable water systems for all Americans," Jepson said.
The team emphasizes that addressing the water crisis requires more than fixing pipes; it demands that policies treat water as a basic human need and that they prioritize the needs of those most affected.
The Triple Threat Behind the Water Crisis
The studies outline how a “triple threat” of degrading infrastructure, accelerating climate change and sluggish or inadequate policy responses have pushed the U.S. past a critical point of clean and clear access to water — what the researchers call “peak water security.”
This triple threat disproportionately impacts low-income households and historically marginalized communities, which face higher rates of water contamination, shutoffs and exclusion from infrastructure improvements.
“We know water insecurity exists in the U.S.,” said Dr. Amber Pearson, co-author and associate professor at Michigan State University. “But we’ve lacked the right tools to measure it.”
A New Tool To Track America’s Water Crisis
To measure and track the crisis, the researchers introduced a new tool: the Household Water Insecurity Experiences (HWISE), a survey-based measurement originally created for lower-income countries but scaled to the U.S. context.
The tool uses data from more than 1,000 households in over 15 at-risk communities across 2,770 Americans. Using the tool, the researchers are evaluating how well it predicts real-world outcomes and metrics like reliance bottled water and stress related to water access.
While the study is ongoing, the researchers believe the tool will have major implications for targeted infrastructural investments, integrated public health efforts and strategies aimed at closing the water equity gap.
“This scale will help us understand the real, everyday struggles families face and guide more fair policies and investments,” Pearson said.
For more information about Jepson, visit her faculty page.
Logic model depicting water insecurity at the individual and household levels, and how they can be integrated into clean water infrastructure projects.
Credit
Dr. Wendy Jepson/Texas A&M University College of Arts and Sciences.
Move over gym rats. Bumble bees are now the true masters of macros.
In the first long-term, community-level field study of wild bumble bee nutrition, a team of ecologists led by Northwestern University and the Chicago Botanic Garden discovered that wild bees aren’t just flitting from flower to flower, collecting pollen at random. Instead, they are strategically targeting flowers that enable them to carefully balance their protein, fat and carbs.
Focusing on pollen consumption, the study revealed that coexisting bee species occupy two distinct nutrient niches. Larger bodied bees with longer tongues prefer pollen that’s high in protein but lower in sugars and fats. Bees with shorter tongues, however, tend to gather pollen that’s richer in carbs and fats. The scientists also found individual bees adjust their diets as their colonies grow and develop, reflecting changing nutritional needs throughout the season.
By dividing up nutritional resources, wild bumble bees can avoid competition, thrive together and keep their colonies buzzing strong all season long.
The study will be published on Tuesday (Aug. 26) in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
“Despite the general importance of wild pollinators, especially bees, we know very little about their nutritional needs,” said Northwestern’s Paul CaraDonna, the study’s senior author. “Given widespread pollinator declines that have been observed around the globe, this knowledge gap is surprising and concerning. Our research provides some of the best information yet on the availability of nutritional resources found in wildflowers and how pollinators use these resources. We can incorporate this work into our thinking about garden design, so we can select the right flowers that best support the nutritional needs of wild pollinators.”
In the wild, bumble bees mainly consume two floral-based foods: sweet, syrupy nectar and fat- and protein-packed pollen. While adult bees sip nectar for a quick burst of energy, they also collect pollen for their babies, or larvae, to help them grow. Worker bees gather pollen from various flowers, pack it into special “baskets” on their hind legs and ferry it home to feed their young.
“We know that bees forage exclusively from flowers for pollen and nectar,” CaraDonna said. “Beyond that, we are in the dark. That is like humans shopping at a grocery store and assuming that all food items in the entire store have similar nutritional value. Clearly, that is a bad assumption.”
While other researchers have conducted short-term, lab-based studies on nutrition for single species of bees, the Northwestern and Chicago Botanic Garden team aimed to develop a more comprehensive nutritional map for how things play out in the wild. Instead of focusing on one bee species in isolation, the team examined a collection of bumble bee species in the wild to determine how species divide nutritional resources.
From steak to salad
To do this, the researchers observed eight different species of wild bumble bees at a field site in the Colorado Rockies. Across the span of eight years, the team meticulously tracked which flowers each bee species visited for pollen and then collected pollen samples from these plant species to understand their nutrient content.
The team took the pollen samples back into the lab, where they measured the macronutrient content of each pollen sample, specifically calculating the concentrations of protein, fat and carbohydrates. The full dataset included nutritional profiles for 35 different plant species.
“All pollen contains protein, fats and carbs,” Bain said. “But each type of pollen has a different mixture of these macronutrients. Some are very high protein like a steak. Others are more like a salad. So, the nutritional profiles are very, very different.”
Who eats what and why
After determining the macros for each pollen sample, the researchers compared each bee species’ diet with their physical traits (like tongue length) and with seasonal shifts in flower availability. Immediately, clear patterns emerged.
Not only did pollen’s nutrient content vary substantially among plants, but it also changed throughout the season. Spring flowers, for example, have more protein-rich pollen, while late-summer flowers are richer in fats and carbs. Interestingly, this shift in protein aligned with bees’ nutritional preferences across the season.
“Queen bees emerge in the spring to establish their colonies,” Bain said. “They forage when the snow first melts, collecting protein-rich pollen for themselves and their first brood. Later in the summer, worker bees take over foraging, and half of the species shifted toward pollen with less protein and more fats. Seeing these clear transitions between queens and workers was especially striking, and it highlighted how differently species meet their nutritional needs across the colony life cycle.”
The researchers also noticed the eight bumble bee species naturally divided into two diet groups. Long-tongued species collected pollen with higher protein and lower fat and sugar. Shorter-tongued species collected pollen with lower protein and higher sugar and fat. These differences seem to be associated with how tongue length influences which flowers bees can access.
Planning the perfect menu
In another surprise, the protein differences from flower to flower are larger than expected. In some flowers, protein only made up 17% of the pollen. In other flowers, however, protein comprised as much as 86% of the total pollen.
As global pollinator populations face threats from habitat loss, climate change and poor nutrition, these findings highlight the need for conservation efforts that focus on nutritional diversity — not just floral diversity. Providing a mix of plants with nutrition could help support the specific dietary needs of different wild bumble bee species.
“We now have a better idea of what bees are bringing home in their ‘grocery bags,’” CaraDonna said. “Although this work is from one ecosystem in the Rocky Mountains, it paints a very important picture for scientists to build upon. We found that not only is there a huge amount of variation in macronutrients available in natural ecosystems to wild pollinators, but our wild bees use those nutrients in distinct ways. The nutrient needs of bees are not ‘one-size-fits-all.’ But we also see that two distinct ‘nutritional niches’ emerge, suggesting that there may be some general hot spots in terms of what the pollinators are seeking out nutritionally.”
The study, “Nutrient niche dynamics among wild pollinators,” was supported by the Chicago Botanic Garden, the National Science Foundation, the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, the American Society of Plant Taxonomists and the Colorado Native Plant Society.
Justin Bain, the study's lead author, looking for wild bumble bees at a field site in the Colorado Rockies.
Credit
Paul CaraDonna
A meadow near the field site with many different flowering plants, illustrating an example of a nutritional landscape for wild bees.
Credit
Jane Ogilvie
Journal
Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences
Article Title
Nutrient niche dynamics among wild pollinators
Article Publication Date
26-Aug-2025
Busy bees can build the right hive from tricky foundations
Merging, tilting, and layering honeycombs allow bees to adapt to available space
There’s more than one way to build a honeybee hive, depending on the needs of the bees, according to a study published August 26th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Golnar Gharooni-Fard of the University of Colorado Boulder, USA, and colleagues.
Honeybees are renowned for their ability to build intricate hives where they can store their food and raise their larvae. Hive construction is the collaborative effort of thousands of hard-working bees, which also demonstrate a knack for adjusting their honeycomb structures to account for available space and resources. In this study, Gharooni-Fard and colleagues investigated the specific strategies that honeybees use to adapt to different building conditions.
The authors presented honeybee colonies with varying sizes of 3D-printed plastic honeycomb foundations upon which to build up their own wax-crafted combs. Using X-ray microscopy, the team was able to visualize and quantify the bees’ building strategies. When the foundation honeycombs were too small to accommodate worker bees, the insects would merge multiple cells to create overlying spaces of adequate size. If the foundation cells were too large, the bees built their honeycombs with slanted borders, effectively shrinking the opening of each cell while preserving depth for storage. And if the foundation cells were extra large, the bees simply built a new layer of regular-sized honeycombs on top, using the borders of the plastic foundation as support.
These results demonstrate that honeybee hive-building does not follow a fixed blueprint, but instead is a flexible process wherein a colony can apply a variety of strategies to adapt to different starting conditions. This study not only provides some preliminary insights into the complex behavior of bees, but also has implications for the design of bio-inspired engineering systems.
Co-corresponding author Orit Peleg notes, “These tiny builders seem to have an intuitive understanding of the physics behind collective construction. We're just beginning to understand the rich set of strategies they use - tilting, merging, layering - to shape structures that meet their needs in remarkably adaptable ways.”
Funding: This work is supported by a grant from the CU Boulder Research and Innovation Office Seed Grant Program to O.P. and F.L.J., by NSF grant 2210628, both to O.P. and F.L.J., and by BioFrontiers Institute internal funds to O.P. The funders played no role in study design, data collection or analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Pattern used when the bees are provided with a foundation of 0.75 times their preferred size, showing how they block some of the cells to convert to their preferred size.
Pattern used when the bees are provided with a foundation of three times their preferred size, showing how they build smaller cells on the vertices of the provided pattern.
Pesticides have been linked to the deaths of bees around the world
- Copyright AFP Roslan RAHMAN
A new bee superfood developed by the University of Oxford, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, the University of Greenwich, and the Technical University of Denmark might just be the key to rebooting global environments. The superfood produces 15 times more bees. That’s good news all round.
You need to see how this works. Bear with some “explanations of the obvious” to clarify some major issues.
The world’s leading pollinators have been very much on the wrong side of the news for a long time now. Bee populations have been under attack from parasites, diseases, pesticides, and chronic environmental mismanagement.
The main reason for this unholy global mess is human activity. Agriculture promotes vast unnatural monocultures, which generate pests, parasites, and diseases on a huge scale.
Monocultures are, by definition, extra vulnerable to massive population crashes. They create their own problems and never fix them. Add to this the totally unnecessary, wasteful, and useless destruction of natural habitats which provide reliable counterbalances to risks, and it’s that much worse.
This collateral damage environmental disaster is largely responsible for what’s happened to the bees. Declining bee populations worldwide are a serious overall threat to food and natural ecologies worldwide.
Let’s spell it out:
The net environmental effect of the “bee deficit” in both natural and manmade environments is to reduce the biomass for future survival.
All populations of organisms are totally interdependent down to the soil biota levels in both human and natural environments.
All of the organic chemistry in an environment can be derailed by the loss of any component group.
Plants support the entire global macroenvironment, including the critical recycling of biomass by fungi, etc. The loss of nitrates alone can cripple an ecosystem almost overnight.
The bees, therefore, don’t just support the pollination cycle. They also support most of the world’s organic chemistry directly or indirectly.
Bees to the rescue? Yes, and you can prove it.
Given the pathetic state of most human-afflicted environments, adding bees and biomass generation potential is a good, safe option.
Bees can kickstart a lot of organic chemistry in the volumes required to generate positive outcomes. It’s not just honeybees, either. Many other types of native bees and pollinators could be used for local and macro-level regeneration and preservation.
You could generate some good, useful metrics, too. Adding bees is roughly the equivalent of adding energy to a power system. The metrics should show multiple increases in biomass elements, biota, etc.
In comparison to a biologically impoverished environment, you should generate an encyclopaedia’s worth of new phenomena.
Disclaimer The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
How a malaria-fighting breakthrough provides lasting protection
WHO has recommended the first new class of vector control products in more than 40 years.
A relatively new class of insecticide that can be disseminated on something the size of a sheet of paper offers protection for up to a year against mosquitoes that spread malaria, as well as dengue, West Nile, yellow fever, and Zika, UC San Francisco researchers have found.
In a systematic review of more than 25 years of data on some 1.7 million mosquitoes, researchers concluded that this form of repellent — called a “spatial emanator” because it distributes chemicals through the air — can prevent more than 1 out of every 2 mosquito bites.
The analysis comes just as the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a new recommendation in August supporting the use of spatial emanators, the first new vector control product class available in more than 40 years.
Spatial emanators can be used day and night and do not require heating or electricity, making them easy to use in remote areas in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia, where malaria is prevalent.
“We finally have a new way to protect against mosquito bites, especially one that fills in some of the gaps of our existing methods,” said Ingrid Chen, PhD, MS, an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at UCSF and the first author of the paper. “It’s lightweight, affordable, and easy to use, so it can be used to help save lives in all parts of the world.”
The study was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It appears Aug. 26 in eBioMedicine, which is published by The Lancet. The NIH is not accepting applications for future research on this topic, which relies on foreign subawards to study the products in countries where people still die from mosquito-borne diseases.
Malaria’s devastating impact
Malaria killed 597,000 people in 2023, the vast majority of whom were children under 5 years old in sub-Saharan Africa. Malaria has not been endemic to the U.S. since the 1950s, although locally transmitted cases occasionally occur in places like Florida and Texas.
WHO aims to reduce malaria mortality rates by at least 90% from where they were in 2015 and eliminate malaria in at least 35 countries by 2030. But progress toward this goal has slowed in recent years, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, insufficient funding, and insecticide resistance.
More than 40 species of mosquitoes transmit malaria, and they all have different biting and resting habits. Some, like the Anopheles mosquito, which carries the malaria parasite, bite mostly at night. Others, like the Aedes mosquito, which carries viruses like dengue and Zika, bite during the day.
This makes it hard for one method to work against them all.
Insecticide-treated nets generally only protect people indoors and at night, and there are other limitations. Topical repellents are expensive and need to be regularly reapplied. Insecticide-treated coils create smoke and last only a few hours.
The new class of spatial repellent overcomes these coverage gaps. It uses chemicals that are similar to those in treated bed nets — which are considered safe — but in a more volatile form.
Effective against all types of mosquitoes
The researchers looked at years of research, analyzing each mosquito that has been collected and characterized, and put the data together into one big database.
They determined that these spatial repellents provide an average protectiveness of 56%, meaning they prevented more than half the bites that would have occurred without the device. The tool also protects against all types of mosquitoes that carry disease, although with varying levels of efficacy.
Three products, BiteBarrier, Mosquito Shield, and Guardian, are already being produced. BiteBarrier is the first to be sold in the U.S., and it works for up to 21 days. Mosquito Shield is effective for about 30 days, while Guardian can last up to one year.
The Aug. 13 WHO recommendation enables major donors to subsidize this intervention in malaria-endemic countries, specifically using Mosquito Shield and Guardian.
Authors: Additional UCSF co-authors include Isabel Elaine Allen, PhD, and Sarah L. Miller, MS. Nearly 50 researchers from 15 countries also contributed to this work including senior author Sarah J. Moore, who leads mosquito product testing research in the Vector Biology Unit of the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute at the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania.
Funding: This work was supported by a grant through the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) (K01AI156182). Moore, the senior author, received salary support through a program funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (7200AA23CA000025).
About UCSF: The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is exclusively focused on the health sciences and is dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. UCSF Health, which serves as UCSF's primary academic medical center, includes top-ranked specialty hospitals and other clinical programs, and has affiliations throughout the Bay Area. UCSF School of Medicine also has a regional campus in Fresno. Learn more at ucsf.edu, or see our Fact Sheet.
