Lake Michigan study shows increase in structures to combat rising water levels

Michigan State University

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Why this matters:

• In the last decade, Lake Michigan’s water level rose significantly. As erosion occurred, many landowners turned to synthetic structures to protect their properties. In total, there was a fivefold increase in shoreline protection barriers along Lake Michigan.
• This increase in what is known as shoreline armoring raises concerns about its long-term effects on coastal ecosystems and studies of landforms. It highlights the necessity of further research and informed policy decisions to balance protection needs with ecosystem function.

EAST LANSING, Mich. – As summer comes to an end, and if you enjoyed Lake Michigan this summer, you might have noticed lower water levels. While you may wonder about lower water levels, the higher water levels in the past decade continue to have a major impact.

In response to higher water levels, many property owners resorted to protecting their properties against erosion and water damage. This process is known as shoreline armoring, which refers to the construction of synthetic structures to slow or stop erosion and wave damage along the coast. But how effective are these structures and do they pose threats to the environment?

New research from Michigan State University Assistant Professor Ethan Theuerkauf, a coastal geomorphologist with the Department of Geography, Environment and Spatial Sciences, decided to document the increase of shoreline armoring in response to rising lake levels and its associated effects on coastal erosion.

The study, published in the Journal of Great Lakes Research, is the first to track the changes in the percentage of armoring, despite the prevalence of armoring throughout the Great Lakes region.

Shoreline armoring

Starting in 2014, Lake Michigan, like the other Great Lakes, experienced increasingly high-water levels, peaking in 2020. As water levels and wave energy increased during this time period, so did beach, dune and bluff erosion.

For home and business owners, as well as lakefront communities, the desire to protect their properties increased. In many instances, coastal property owners responded to these hazards by using a variety of hard structures, such as seawalls, revetments and groins.

Seawalls are concrete, steel or wood walls that are built along the shoreline to stop erosion of the beach or bluff. Revetments are like seawalls in that they are built along the shoreline to slow or stop erosion but are built to mimic the slope of the coast rather than being a vertical wall. The aim of this is to disperse the wave energy rather than deflecting it down to the lakebed, which can cause more problems. Groins are shore-perpendicular structures that are built to trap sand that is moving along the coast and slow beach erosion.

While these structures can successfully prevent water damage, there are other unintended consequences, such as disrupted sediment transport or harm to the environment.

Study background

Theuerkauf focused his study on the entire open-coast shoreline of Michigan’s Lake Michigan coast, extending from the Indiana state line north to the Straits of Mackinac, a distance of nearly 370 miles.

The extent of shoreline armoring prior to the high-water period beginning in 2014 was determined using datasets through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s, or NOAA’s, Office for Coastal Management and digitized coastal imagery from 2014. These datasets were then compared to a 2021 map of armored shoreline Theuerkauf created using Google Earth Pro.

After analyzing the data, Theuerkauf determined that shoreline armoring had increased fivefold during the period of high-water levels. The southern section saw the most armoring with an increase of 351% between 2014 and 2021. The middle section had the next highest increase, with 5,195 meters (around 3 miles) of shoreline armoring in 2014 before increasing to 28,268 meters (just under 18 miles) by 2021. The northern section had 1,754 meters (around 1 mile) of shoreline armoring in 2014, which increased to 8,945 meters (around 6 miles) in 2021.

In total, the amount of armored shoreline increased 376% from 23,421 meters (around 15 miles and 4% of the coast) in 2014 to 111,458 meters (around 69 miles and 19% of the coast) in 2021.  

“Despite the protective intent, this widespread armoring raises concerns about its long-term effects on coastal ecosystems and geomorphology, highlighting the need for further research and informed policy decisions to balance protection needs with ecosystem function and integrity,” Theuerkauf said.

Theuerkauf’s study found that the increase in shoreline armoring can lead to negative impacts on the coast, making it important to understand the extent of armoring in response to higher lake levels to inform policy management actions.

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Journal

Journal of Great Lakes Research

Article Title

Response of a sand-limited urban pocket beach to repeat decadal lake-level rise events, Southwestern Lake Michigan

 

Puppy power: Parents see quality of life improvements in children with impaired walking thanks to mobility assistance dogs

Trinity College Dublin

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Parents of children with variable levels of walking impairment perceive significant quality of life improvements in their children after six months of living with a mobility assistance dog, according to the first qualitative assessment of its type that provides important evidence in an area of growing therapeutic interest.

Specifically, the parents of 10 children aged 6-12 with neurological and/or physical impairments in their walking perceived improvements in most of the childrens’ physical activity levels, as well as in their social engagement and family life.

The findings are reported in the journal Physical Therapy Reviews.

The six-month study was led by researchers from Trinity College Dublin, who were interested in the qualitative impacts of this novel therapy where children lived with specially trained mobility assistance dogs, provided by the national charity Dogs for Disabled. 

Regarding physical activity, parents said their children walked for longer periods, had improved quality of walking, and had greater endurance. In addition, all parents said their children had increased steadiness and balance and most said they were able to negotiate difference surfaces better, such as walking on a beach.

Socially, parents felt the dogs facilitated interactions with other children and the public. They helped their children engage with others, with the dogs providing a topic of conversation.

In family life, parents noted the dogs had brought a positive energy and happiness to their homes, and families walked more together. And while all families reported extra work in the responsibility of caring for the dogs they felt the overall benefits outweighed any challenges and they were happy to take these on.

First author of the research, Dr Heather Kennedy, Trinity’s School of Engineering, said: “Children with physical impairments often participate in significantly lower levels of habitual physical activity than their peers – below recommended guidelines – which state that therapies to improve function, participation and quality of life in children with additional needs should be fun, involve family, encourage fitness, improve function and develop future goals.”

Michelle Spirtos, Head of Discipline of Occupational Therapy at Trinity, and senior author, added:  “This research provides cause for optimism that mobility assistance dogs can improve the quality of life for children with walking impairments, as well as their families, in a number of different ways. Longer-term studies involving more participants will be helpful for us to learn more, but the early signs are very encouraging.”

Ciaran Simms, Professor in Trinity’s School of Engineering, is the principal investigator of the research. He said: “Related research from this group recently showed that physical improvements were greater in children whose walking impairments were less severe than those with more pronounced mobility issues, so this new research underlining parents’ perceived improvement in quality of life for all the children in our cohort is particularly noteworthy.”

“In addition to the perceived improvements in physical activity, social engagement and family life, some of the parents noted the dogs helped to motivate their children to be more active, while all of them said their children had greater confidence and self-belief, as well as linking the dogs to reducing anxiety.”

Jennifer Dowler, CEO and Founder of Irish Dogs for Disabled, said: “It is a profound privilege for Dogs for the Disabled to embark on this first-of-its-kind research, a milestone made possible through the unwavering support of Trinity College Dublin, the CRC – Central Remedial Clinic – and the generosity of our valued funders. Their commitment empowers us to push the boundaries of knowledge, ensuring pioneering ideas flourish with lasting impacts for our children.”

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Journal

Physical Therapy Reviews

DOI

10.1080/10833196.2025.2546686 

Benchmark study tracks trends in dog behavior

Virginia Tech

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A new study that seeks to understand the link between dog behavior and health compiles four years of owner-reported data from over 47,000 dogs.

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Credit: Photo courtesy of Courtney Sexton.

A new Virginia Tech study published in PLOS One establishes a crucial baseline for understanding dog behavior on a large scale. 

The research, led by Courtney Sexton, a postdoctoral associate in the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, and her colleague Yuhuan Li from the University of Washington, utilized four years of owner-reported data from over 47,000 dogs in the Dog Aging Project, a large-scale initiative involving over 40 institutions. 

"Most importantly, with these data, we're excited to now have a starting point from which we can continue to follow changes in the behaviors of tens of thousands of dogs as they age, which will ultimately help us understand how behavior and health are linked," Sexton said.

This study's power lies in its sheer size. 

Sexton said, "When you have a data set this big, you really do have power in numbers. While we can't understand all the factors, when we find statistical significance, there is likely something there worth thinking about in its real-world context."

The original motivation: Find out how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the well-being of our canine companions. The researchers analyzed four years of owner-reported data from 2020-23, specifically examining trends in fear, attention/excitability, aggression, and trainability.

It turns out, dogs are adaptable.

"We saw that certain factors, such as a dog's life stage, sex, and size had some influence on their behavior," said Sexton. "Interestingly, we found that throughout the COVID-19 pandemic time period, there were not substantial changes in dogs' overall behavioral profiles from year to year despite what we might have expected given the changes in environment and routines that many were experiencing at that time."

The study did, however, reveal one small but notable exception: trainability. Dogs enrolled in the study after 2020 had lower average trainability scores. This was in contrast to dogs already enrolled in 2020 as adults that likely benefited from pre-pandemic training experience. 

While the data doesn't offer a definitive cause, researchers speculate that the pandemic's unique circumstances — such as more dogs being adopted from shelters or owners being more stressed and less able to dedicate time to training — could be contributing factors. 

“What was interesting was that the difference in reported trainability between the first year and the last year was the smallest of any in the averages,” said Sexton. “It’s a small statistical significance but could show that dogs, or their owners, are bouncing back.”

Future work will explore how factors such as a dog's location or their health status might influence behavior over time. The goal is to better prepare dogs and their owners for whatever life throws at them, whether it's a pandemic or just the challenges of everyday life.

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Journal

PLOS One

Article Title

An analysis of behavioral characteristics and enrollment year variability in 47,444 dogs entering the Dog Aging Project from 2020 to 2023

Article Publication Date

10-Sep-2025

 

Acupuncture treatment improves disabling effects of chronic low back pain in older adults

NIH-funded study supports acupuncture needling as a safe and effective pain treatment for this group

NIH/Office of the Director

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According to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), older Americans with chronic low back pain who received acupuncture had greater improvement in physical function and reduced pain than those who received usual medical care only, generally prescribed medications or physical therapy. Chronic low back pain is the leading cause of disability worldwide and affects over one-third of older adults in the United States. Treatment options range from pain-relieving drugs to complementary therapies, including acupuncture. There is an urgent need for safe, effective, and non-addictive pain management approaches.  

 

“Of the different treatments we have for chronic low back pain, most have a somewhat modest effect. They often reduce pain by about a third at best and can help people function better,” said lead author Lynn L. DeBar, Ph.D., Kaiser Permanente distinguished investigator. “Our clinical results suggests that acupuncture is working as well as many things that are more familiar to people. We found that the size of this effect, while modest, was positive and sustained.” 

 

The clinical trial, known as BackInAction, enrolled 800 participants, with results based upon self-reported pain-related disability assessments following treatment that either included or omitted acupuncture. Researchers looked at whether manual acupuncture needling, which is eligible for Medicare coverage, could improve function and reduce pain for older adults who have chronic or persistent low back pain.  

 

Acupuncture, with its origins in traditional East Asian medicine, has gained in popularity in the United States since the 1970s. The manual acupuncture needling technique entails inserting fine needles into the skin at points that follow a prescribed anatomical grid. The practice provides various benefits, including reduced discomfort from back, joint or neck pain. While acupuncture has been found to be safe and effective for chronic low back pain in adults overall, few acupuncture studies have focused on adults 65 years of age and older. 

 

Participants in BackInAction included men and women aged 65 and older with a medical history of low back pain for at least three months. All participants had health coverage and were not restricted from receiving usual medical care for their back pain. A third of those received up to 15 acupuncture treatments over three months (standard acupuncture treatment), and another third received an additional six acupuncture treatments (maintenance sessions) over the following three months.  

 

At three study milestones — after three, six and 12 months from enrollment — participants provided self-assessment of their pain and physical limitations. Their agreement with any of 24 statements that describe everyday activities made difficult because of back pain contributed to the participant’s disability score. The researchers used additional tools for insights into pain levels, degree of physical functioning, depression and anxiety.  

 

At the six-month and 12-month assessment, both groups who received acupuncture had greater reductions in pain disability than those who received usual medical care alone. The acupuncture-treated groups also had reduced pain intensity and greater physical function after six months as compared to participants who did not receive acupuncture. The researchers also reported that acupuncture treatment was associated with fewer anxiety symptoms as compared to usual medical care alone at the six and 12-month assessments.  

 

“What sets the BackInAction study apart is that it focused specifically on adults 65 years of age and older, and it was pragmatically designed,” DeBar said. “We worked hard to involve adults in multiple regions of the country so that participant demographics were consistent with the U.S. census for older adults—and we worked with licensed acupuncturists in the community, who are most likely to deliver these services.” 

 

The study authors suggest that access to acupuncture is important for older adults with chronic back pain and that if acupuncture practitioners could bill Medicare directly it could greatly improve access to such services.  

 

“We saw very little in the way of adverse effects during the clinical trial,” said co-lead researcher Andrea J. Cook, Ph.D., Kaiser Permanente senior biostatistics investigator. “Older adults often are dealing with other medical problems in addition to back pain. Acupuncture offers a less invasive option that has a better safety profile than a lot of the common treatments for back pain in older adults.” 

 

Reference: “Acupuncture for Chronic Low Back Pain in Older Adults: A Randomized Pragmatic Clinical Trial” 2025. JAMA Network Open. DOI: 1E0.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.31348 

 

This work was supported by NIH’s Helping to End Addiction Long-term® Initiative, or NIH HEAL Initiative®, under award number UG3AT010739/UH3AT010739 administered by the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) with additional scientific support from the National Institute of Aging (NIA). The NIH HEAL Initiative seeks to speed scientific solutions to the overdose epidemic, including opioid and stimulant use disorders, and the crisis of chronic pain.  

 

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About the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH): NCCIH’s mission is to define, through rigorous scientific investigation, the usefulness and safety of complementary and integrative health approaches and their roles in improving health and health care. Visit https://www.nccih.nih.gov.  

 

About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit https://www.nih.gov/. 

 

NIH...Turning Discovery into Health®  

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Journal

JAMA Network Open

DOI

10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.31348 

Article Title

Acupuncture for Chronic Low Back Pain in Older Adults: A Randomized Pragmatic Clinical Trial

Article Publication Date

12-Sep-2025

 

Hundreds of new bacteria, and two potential antibiotics, found in soil

Newly identified compounds appear effective against drug-resistant bacteria. The technique used to reveal them could uncover many more antibiotics, as well as help illuminate a previously hidden microbial world.

Rockefeller University

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To find bioactive molecules with the potential to become new drugs less prone to antibiotic resistance, the researchers sequenced bacterial DNA extracted from soils from Rockefeller's field center in upstate New York.

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Credit: Laboratory of Genetically Encoded Small Molecules at The Rockefeller University

Most bacteria cannot be cultured in the lab—and that’s been bad news for medicine. Many of our frontline antibiotics originated from microbes, yet as antibiotic resistance spreads and drug pipelines run dry, the soil beneath our feet has a vast hidden reservoir of untapped lifesaving compounds.

Now, researchers have developed a way to access this microbial goldmine. Their approach, published in Nature Biotechnology, circumvents the need to grow bacteria in the lab by extracting very large DNA fragments directly from soil to piece together the genomes of previously hidden microbes, and then mines resulting genomes for bioactive molecules.

From a single forest sample, the team generated hundreds of complete bacterial genomes never seen before, as well as two new antibiotic leads. The findings offer a scalable way to scour unculturable bacteria for new drug leads—and expose the vast, uncharted microbial frontier that shapes our environment.

"We finally have the technology to see the microbial world that have been previously inaccessible to humans," says Sean F. Brady, head of the Laboratory of Genetically Encoded Small Molecules at Rockefeller. "And we're not just seeing this information; we're already turning it into potentially useful antibiotics. This is just the tip of the spear."

Microbial dark matter

When hunting for bacteria, soil is an obvious choice. It's the largest, most biodiverse reservoir of bacteria on the planet—a single teaspoon of it may contain thousands of different species. Many important therapeutics, including most of our antibiotic arsenal, were discovered in the tiny fraction of soil bacteria that can be grown in the laboratory. And soil is dirt cheap.

Yet we know very little about the millions of microbes packed into the earth. Scientists suspect that these hidden bacteria hold not only an untapped reservoir of new therapeutics, but clues as to how microbes shape climate, agriculture, and the larger environment that we live in. "All over the world there's this hidden ecosystem of microbes that could have dramatic effects on our lives," Brady adds. "We wanted to finally see them."

Getting that glimpse involved weaving together several approaches. First, the team optimized a method for isolating large, high-quality DNA fragments directly from soil. Pairing this advance with emerging long-read nanopore sequencing allowed Jan Burian, a postdoctoral associate in the Brady lab, to produce continuous stretches of DNA that were tens of thousands of base pairs long—200 times longer than any previously existing technology could manage. Soil DNA contains a huge number of different bacteria; without such large DNA sequences to work with, resolving that complex genetic puzzle into complete and contiguous genomes for disparate bacteria proved exceedingly difficult.

"It's easier to assemble a whole genome out of bigger pieces of DNA, rather than the millions of tiny snippets that were available before," Brady says. "And that makes a dramatic difference in your confidence in your results."

Unique small molecules, like antibiotics, that bacteria produce are called “natural products”. To convert the newly uncovered sequences into bioactive molecules, the team applied a synthetic bioinformatic natural products (synBNP) approach. They bioinformatically predicted the chemical structures of natural products directly from the genome data and then chemically synthesized them in the lab. With the synBNP approach, Brady and colleagues managed to turn the genetic blueprints from uncultured bacteria into actual molecules—including two potent antibiotics.

Brady describes the method, which is scalable and can be adapted to virtually any metagenomic space beyond soil, as a three-step strategy that could kick off a new era of microbiology: "Isolate big DNA, sequence it, and computationally convert it into something useful."

Two new drug candidates, and counting

Applied to their single forest soil sample, the team's approach produced 2.5 terabase-pairs of sequence data—the deepest long-read exploration of a single soil sample to date. Their analysis uncovered hundreds of complete contiguous bacterial genomes, more than 99 percent of which were entirely new to science and identified members from 16 major branches of the bacterial family tree.

The two lead compounds discovered could translate into potent antibiotics. One, called erutacidin, disrupts bacterial membranes through an uncommon interaction with the lipid cardiolipin and is effective against even the most challenging drug-resistant bacteria. The other, trigintamicin, acts on a protein-unfolding motor known as ClpX, a rare antibacterial target.

Brady emphasizes that these discoveries are only the beginning. The study demonstrates that previously inaccessible microbial genomes can now be decoded and mined for bioactive molecules at scale without culturing the organisms. Unlocking the genetic potential of microbial dark matter may also provide new insights into the hidden microbial networks that sustain ecosystems.

"We're mainly interested in small molecules as therapeutics, but there are applications beyond medicine," Burian says. "Studying culturable bacteria led to advances that helped shape the modern world and finally seeing and accessing the uncultured majority will drive a new generation of discovery."

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Journal

Nature Biotechnology

DOI

10.1038/s41587-025-02810-w \

Smells deceive the brain – are interpreted as taste

Karolinska Institutet

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Flavoured drinks without sugar can be perceived as sweet – and now researchers know why. A new study from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, published in the journal Nature Communications, reveals that the brain interprets certain aromas as taste.

When we eat or drink, we don’t just experience taste, but rather a ‘flavour’. This taste experience arises from a combination of taste and smell, where aromas from food reach the nose via the oral cavity, known as retronasal odour. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have now shown that the brain integrates these signals earlier than previously thought – already in the insula, a brain region known as the taste cortex – before the signals reach the frontal cortex, which controls our emotions and behaviour.

“We saw that the taste cortex reacts to taste-associated aromas as if they were real tastes,” explains lead author Putu Agus Khorisantono, researcher at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet. “The finding provides a possible explanation for why we sometimes experience taste from smell alone, for example in flavoured waters. This underscores how strongly odours and tastes work together to make food pleasurable, potentially inducing craving and encouraging overeating of certain foods.”

The study involved 25 healthy adults who were first taught to recognise both a sweet taste and a savoury taste through combinations of taste and smell. This was followed by two brain imaging sessions using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), in which the participants were given either a tasteless aroma or a taste without smell. The researchers trained an algorithm to recognise patterns in brain activity for sweet and savoury tastes, and then tested whether the same patterns could be identified when the participants were only given aromas.

May be relevant for our eating habits

The results showed that aromas that are perceived as sweet or savoury not only activated the same parts of the brain’s taste cortex as the actual tastes but that they evoke similar patterns of activation. This overlap was particularly evident in the parts of the taste cortex that are linked to the integration of sensory impressions.

“This shows that the brain does not process taste and smell separately, but rather creates a joint representation of the flavour experience in the taste cortex,” says the study’s last author, Janina Seubert, senior researcher at the same department at Karolinska Institutet. “This mechanism may be relevant for how our taste preferences and eating habits are formed and influenced.”

The researchers now plan to investigate whether the same mechanism applies to external smells, known as orthonasal odours.

“We want to find out whether the activation pattern in the brain’s taste cortex changes from salty to sweet when we walk from the cheese aisle to the pastries in the supermarket,” says Putu Agus Khorisantono. “If so, this could have a significant impact on the foods we choose to consume.”

The study was conducted in collaboration with researchers in Turkey and was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and the Swedish Research Council. The researchers declare no conflicts of interest.

Publication: “Tastes and retronasal odours evoke a shared flavour-specific neural code in the human insula”, Putu Agus Khorisantono, Maria G. Veldhuizen, Janina Seubert, Nature Communications, online 12 September 2025, doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-63803-6.

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Journal

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-025-63803-6 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Tastes and retronasal odours evoke a shared flavour-specific neural code in the human insula

Article Publication Date

12-Sep-2025