Electric space heating, appliances reduce US residential energy consumption

SO AI DATA CENTERS CAN CONSUME THE SURPLUS

Penn State

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Electric space heating systems and appliances like water heaters can help American homeowners reduce their energy use, and possibly their utility bills, according to a team led by researchers at Penn State.

The researchers set out to identify the most important factors driving U.S. on-site residential energy consumption, which the team said accounts for approximately 21% of primary energy consumption in the country and is more complex than commercial energy use. They found that electric heating systems like heat pumps, compared to systems that rely on natural gas and oil, had the largest impact on reducing on-site energy usage at the national and state levels. Switching to energy-efficient electric appliances could also help homeowners reduce their energy consumption, the team reported in the journal Energy Policy.

“The most surprising finding was that homes relying on natural gas for space heating were using more on-site energy compared to electric homes,” said co-author Rahman Azari, associate professor of architecture at Penn State. “But it makes sense because it’s an issue of heating system efficiency as well as the efficiency of appliances, and electric appliances tend to be more efficient than natural gas appliances.”

Electric and gas systems have different transmission losses, but the bigger driver is equipment efficiency, said lead author Sepideh Korsavi, assistant professor of architecture at Mississippi State University who completed the work as a postdoctoral scholar at Penn State.

“Modern heat pumps often deliver two to three times more heat per unit of energy than typical gas furnaces,” she said. “When you account for delivery and efficiency together, electrified systems can lower household energy use and emissions in many regions.”

The researchers used the 2020 Residential Energy Consumption Survey from the U.S. Energy Information Administration to examine more than 300 determinants affecting household energy use. Published in 2023 and based on the responses of nearly 18,500 households, the survey represents the energy profiles of about 123.5 million individual homes, according to the researchers.

The team used a machine learning model, a form of artificial intelligence, to examine how the presence or absence of each determinant changed the model’s performance. They removed the determinants with the least impact on the model until they had a list of 41 factors that had the greatest impact on the model and, in turn, residential energy consumption.

They found that using electricity for space heating had the largest impact on decreasing on-site household energy consumption. Other factors that decreased energy consumption included the use of electric water heaters and other energy-efficient electric appliances; the construction of multi-family buildings, like apartment complexes and row homes, whose shared walls reduce heat loss in winter and heat gain in summer; and a set thermostat temperature in winter when no one is home.

“We found that by reducing the set point temperature in winter, we can reduce energy consumption significantly,” Korsavi said.

People assume that it’s costly to bring down household energy usage, said co-author Lisa Iulo, professor of architecture and director of the Hamer Center for Community Design in the Penn State Stuckeman School.

“People often jump to expensive solutions like replacing windows or adding solar power to address home energy demands,” she said. “That is not the place to start. Many interventions, like air sealing, changing out incandescent lightbulbs with LEDs or replacing an outdated water heater with an electric water heater — especially a hybrid one with a heat-pump boost, are lower-hanging fruit. Those incremental differences can add up to big overall energy savings and lower utility bills. Long-term affordability is important to homeowners and in the work we’re doing.”

Mehrdad Mahdavi, the Dorothy Quiggle Career Development Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Penn State, also contributed to this work. The Penn State Hamer Center for Community Design and its Resource and Energy Efficiency Lab, the College of Art & Architecture’s Stuckeman Center for Design Computing and Penn State’s Institute of Energy and the Environment supported this research.

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Journal

Energy Policy

DOI

10.1016/j.enpol.2025.114594 

Article Title

Determinants of U.S. residential energy consumption at national and state levels: Policy implications

 

Could your next job interview be with a chatbot? New study seeks to help bring fairness into AI-powered hiring

Rice University

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Landing a job traditionally meant polishing a resume, printing extra copies and sitting across from a hiring manager. Today, the first “person” to evaluate you might not be a person at all — it could be a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence. These automated systems can ask questions, score responses and even recommend who gets hired.

Rice University’s Tianjun Sun has received a National Science Foundation award to lead a two-year collaborative project with the University of Florida examining how AI interview systems work — and how to make them more fair.

For employers, chatbot interviews promise consistency and efficiency. For applicants, though, the stakes are high. What if AI interprets the same answer differently depending on whether it comes from a man or a woman or from someone with a different cultural background? Those questions are at the heart of Sun’s project.

“Two candidates may give essentially the same answer,” said Sun, assistant professor of psychological sciences. “But the algorithm might process them differently. That can lead to unfair or inaccurate hiring decisions.”

The risks aren’t hypothetical. Studies show that a growing share of companies already use AI tools in hiring with many relying on chatbots to screen candidates. At the same time, research has found that these systems can reflect or even amplify human bias, sometimes favoring certain groups over others.

Sun’s project, titled “A Process-Driven Approach to Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Interviews,” will study bias at three levels: the predictors, or the language features AI extracts; the outcomes, or the interview scores and recommendations it produces; and the perceptions of job seekers themselves, particularly whether they view the process as fair and transparent. Her lab has already created a prototype chatbot that conducts short interviews and generates a Big Five personality profile, which she uses as a demonstration of how these systems might evolve.

Sun describes her approach as “psychometric AI” — the application of psychological measurement principles to modern algorithms. “Computer scientists often focus on whether an algorithm predicts well,” Sun said. “But psychologists ask a different question: Are we really predicting what we think we’re predicting, and is the process fair?”

Patricia DeLucia, associate dean for research in Rice’s School of Social Sciences, said Sun’s study exemplifies the kind of research that anticipates real-world needs. “Sun’s work is at the cutting edge and will have significant societal impacts as AI becomes more prevalent,” DeLucia said.

If successful, Sun’s research will help establish benchmarks for more ethical AI hiring tools and offer employers ways to design systems that better serve human purposes.

After schools instituted universal free meals, fewer students had high blood pressure, UW study finds

University of Washington

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image: 

Participation in universal free meals was associated with an 11% net decrease in the proportion of patients with high blood pressure over a five-year period. The above chart shows the annual difference in the percentage of students with high blood pressure in participating schools and non-participating schools.

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Credit: University of Washington

In the 10 years since the federal government established the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), which enabled universal free meal programs for schools in low-income communities, studies have suggested the policy has wide-ranging benefits. Students in participating schools choose lunches with higher nutritional quality, are suspended less frequently and may perform better academically.

Now, as cuts to food assistance programs threaten to slash access to universal school meals, a new study led by the University of Washington finds another potential benefit to the programs: Students in participating schools were less likely to have high blood pressure, suggesting that universal free meals might be a powerful tool for improving public health. 

“High blood pressure is an important public health problem that isn’t studied as much on a population level as obesity,” said Anna Localio, a UW postdoctoral researcher of health systems and population health and lead author of the study. “We have evidence that CEP increases participation in school meals, and we also have evidence that school meals are more nutritious than meals that kids obtain elsewhere. This is a public health policy that is delivering nutritious meals to children who may not have previously had access.”

For the study, published Sept. 25 in JAMA Network Open, researchers linked two datasets that rarely interact. They obtained medical records of patients ages 4-18 from community health organizations, and used patients’ addresses to identify the school they attended. The data encompassed 155,778 young people attending 1,052 schools, mostly in California and Oregon.

Researchers estimated the percentage of students with high blood pressure before and after schools opted into universal free meals, and compared those results against eligible schools that had not yet participated in the program. They also tracked students’ average systolic and diastolic blood pressure readings. All data were aggregated at the school level. 

They found that school participation in the CEP was associated with a 2.71% decrease in the proportion of students with high blood pressure, corresponding to a 10.8% net drop over five years. School participation in CEP was also associated with a decrease in students’ average diastolic blood pressure. 

“In previous work on the health impacts of universal free school meals, our team found that adoption of free meals is associated with decreases in average body mass index scores and childhood obesity prevalence, which are closely linked to risk of high blood pressure,” said Jessica Jones-Smith, a professor of health, society and behavior at the University of California Irvine’s Joe C. Wen School of Population & Public Health and senior author of the study. Jones-Smith conducted much of this research while on faculty at the UW School of Public Health. “So in addition to directly affecting blood pressure through provision of healthier meals, a second pathway by which providing universal free meals might impact blood pressure is through their impact on lowering risk for high BMI.” 

Improved nutrition of school meals may have helped drive the decrease, researchers said. The 2010 law that established the CEP also created stronger nutritional requirements for school meals. As a result, those meals now more closely resemble the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet, which studies have shown to be an effective tool for managing hypertension. 

Despite the evidence supporting the DASH diet’s effectiveness, public health officials previously lacked an effective mechanism to encourage people with high blood pressure to follow its recommendations. “We know there are a lot of barriers to people eating this diet,” Localio said, but the combination of universal free meals and increased nutritional standards likely helped students overcome those barriers.

The study also contradicts the common misperception that universal free meals mostly benefit wealthier students, because students from low-income families would already receive free meals. The study sample consists primarily of low-income patients, with 85% of included students enrolled in public health insurance such as Medicaid.

“There is a perception that providing universally free school meals will only improve outcomes for students of relatively higher-income families, but our findings suggest that there are benefits for lower-income children as well,” Jones-Smith said. “Potential mechanisms for this include decreasing the income-related stigma around eating school lunch by providing it free to all students and eliminating the time and paperwork burden of individually applying, thus decreasing barriers to participation in school meals.”

These findings come at an uncertain time for universal free meals. A school is eligible to participate in the CEP if at least 25% of its students are identified as eligible for free meals via participation in a means-tested safety net program. In this way, recent cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the nation’s largest food assistance program, may affect schools’ access to the program.

“We’re in a contentious time for public health, but it seems like there’s bipartisan support for healthy school meals,” Localio said. “There’s legislation being considered in a number of states to expand universal free meals, and these findings could inform that decision-making. Cutting funding to school meals would not promote children’s health.” 

Co-authors on the study include Paul Hebert, research professor emeritus of health systems and population health at the UW; Melissa Knox, teaching professor of economics at the UW; Wyatt Benksen and Aileen Ochoa of OCHIN; and Jennifer Sonney, associate professor of nursing at the UW. This study was funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development. 

For more information or to contact the researchers, email Alden Woods at acwoods@uw.edu.

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Journal

JAMA Network Open

DOI

10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.33186 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

School Provision of Universal Free Meals and Blood Pressure Outcomes Among Youths

Article Publication Date

25-Sep-2025

 

New clues in how plant microbiomes protect against bacterial speck disease

Penn State

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Bacterial speck is a common disease affecting tomatoes that can result in lower yields for growers. A new study led by researchers at Penn State gives new clues on how a plant’s microbiome can be used to combat the pathogen.

The research — published in the journal Environmental Microbiome — examined how disease suppressive microbiomes of a tomato plant’s phyllosphere, the portion of the plant above ground, differed from the microbiomes of plants that were conducive to bacterial speck.

The team found that a number of populations of Xanthomonas and Pseudomonas bacteria were present on the plants that had developed a resistance against bacterial speck, suggesting they play a role in suppressing the disease.

Kevin Hockett, associate professor of microbial ecology in the College of Agricultural Sciences and lead author on the paper, said the findings could eventually help lead to new treatments for plants, as well as open up opportunities for further research.

“If we can learn more about which microbes are driving down the disease, it’s possible that we could isolate and combine them in the future for growers to use as a treatment,” he said. “Additionally, some of the most important crop diseases are fungal, so if we can show that this process works for fungi, that could open up even more research and possible applications.”

The study was inspired by the way some soil microbiomes can develop season over season to eventually suppress plant disease. Hockett explained that if a crop is sensitive to a particular disease and a grower plants the crop in the same spot year after year, in some cases microbes in the soil will eventually shift to suppress that pathogen and the disease will go down.

He said that while this process has been observed, its exact mechanisms aren’t well known, and it’s not clear if this could happen above ground, too.

“We've seen this with soils, which makes sense because the same soil is there year after year,” Hockett said. “In the case of the above ground portions of plants — leaves, flowers, fruits — all of that gets harvested and removed from the field or tilled under. So, we were curious about whether we could replicate this process on the plant’s leaves.”

In a previous paper, the researchers found that yes, a plant’s microbiome can changel to suppress the bacteria that causes bacterial speck. But because microbiomes are made up of many types of microorganisms — including bacteria, fungi and viruses — the researchers were interested in learning precisely which microbes were driving this disease suppression. 

For the current study, the researchers started by spraying tomato plants with the bacteria that causes bacterial speck. After a few days, they “passaged” the microbiome by choosing the plants that had the least amount of disease, washing the leaves into a solution to collect the microbiome, and then spraying the solution onto a new plant.

The team also included a control group, in which they performed the passaging protocol on different plants that did not have a pathogen applied. Because there was no disease, they chose the leaves to passage at random. They did this process nine times before collecting and analyzing the microbiome of the final passage.

Now that they know more about the composition of the disease-suppressive microbiome, Hockett said they have better clues about which microbes to target for possible future treatments.

“It may be that the whole microbial community is necessary to be effective, but the first thing we want to do is go in and start pulling this community apart to identify who are really the important players for disease suppression,” he said. “Because it may be that there are some members that got selected during the passaging but they don't really contribute anything to disease suppression.”

Hanareia Ehau-Taumaunu, postdoctoral scientist at the Bioprotection Aotearoa and Bioeconomy Science Institute; Terrence Bell, assistant professor at the University of Toronto; and Javad Sadeghi, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, also co-authored this study.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Fulbright New Zealand Science and Innovation Graduate Award, Indigo Agriculture Phytobiomes Fellowship, Penn State One Health Microbiome Center, Northeast SARE Graduate Award, and Ngārimu VC and 28th (Māori) Battalion Memorial Doctoral Scholarship, and PA Vegetable Growers Association helped support this research.

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Journal

Environmental Microbiome

DOI

10.1186/s40793-025-00734-1 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Rapid and sustained differentiation of disease-suppressive phyllosphere microbiomes in tomato following experimental microbiome selection