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)
Monday, October 27, 2025
Scientists can now explore mechanisms behind attachment issues
When mouse pups experience early life adversity from lack of resources and unstable maternal care, increased stress hormone signaling leads to health and behavioral issues
Children can sometimes develop health, behavioral, and attachment issues that persist when their needs are not met by their caregiver. New from eNeuro, Arie Kaffman and colleagues at Yale University School of Medicine explored whether mouse pups also experience these issues from early life adversity. Their discoveries provide an opportunity for researchers to explore the mechanisms of health and behavioral deficits from early life adversity.
When the researchers limited bedding for making nests, this impaired maternal care and increased stress hormone signaling in pups after just 1 week. Offspring also experienced long-term stunted growth trajectories. Behaviorally, while some attachment behaviors remained unchanged, many were affected: Pups vocalized less when they were separated from their mothers after 1 week, did not approach their mothers after about 2 weeks, and had anxiety-like behavior by week 3. Says Kaffman, “Giving credit where credit is due, work in rats relates an increased stress response from impaired maternal care to attachment deficits. But this work was only done in one age group. We used thorough, 24/7 videotape footage of moms and their pups to show how impaired maternal care leads to attachment deficits at different timepoints.” Kaffman emphasizes that this isn’t a linear relationship. “It seems that there is a threshold for how bad maternal care must be to disrupt the offspring’s behavior. This supports an existing hypothesis that you don’t have to be a perfect parent, you just need to provide adequate care.”
eNeuro is an online, open-access journal published by the Society for Neuroscience. Established in 2014, eNeuro publishes a wide variety of content, including research articles, short reports, reviews, commentaries and opinions.
About The Society for Neuroscience
The Society for Neuroscience is the world's largest organization of scientists and physicians devoted to understanding the brain and nervous system. The nonprofit organization, founded in 1969, now has nearly 35,000 members in more than 95 countries.
A University of Massachusetts Amherst public health researcher has received four grants totaling $17.9 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to continue groundbreaking research that implemented and assessed medical treatment programs for incarcerated people with opioid use disorder, as well as develop a new program for HIV prevention and treatment.
The research—initiated by the NIH in 2019 and dubbed JCOIN (Justice Community Overdose Innovation Network)—serves as the first evidence-based model for jail-based treatment for a vulnerable group of people in a nation still grappling with a costly and deadly opioid epidemic.
In phase one of the Massachusetts JCOIN Hub research, Elizabeth Evans, professor of community health education and associate chair of health promotion and policy in the UMass Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences, and team worked with partners at seven rural and urban jails to assess the outcomes, implementation and costs of a pilot program designed to offer medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) during incarceration and facilitate continuation of MOUD treatment after release. Evans will receive a $1.4 million grant to fund the final year of Phase 1 and a five-year, $8.2 million grant for Phase 2.
“We found that the people in jail getting MOUD treatment for opioid use disorder have better outcomes later than people who don’t get that treatment,” Evans says. “But we also found that when they leave jail and go back to the community, quite a few people are not continuing with the treatment they were receiving in jail.”
Evans’ new research will develop an intervention with incarcerated people at four jails in Massachusetts to address the challenge of engaging with MOUD treatment after release.
The research will begin by addressing a traditional barrier to healthcare for many incarcerated individuals. “Historically, when people get incarcerated, their access to Medicaid can get paused or suspended,” Evans explains. “And Massachusetts recognized that as a real challenge, especially for incarcerated people with addiction.”
In 2024, Massachusetts received federal approval for a Section 1115 waiver to provide Medicaid benefits to incarcerated individuals up to 90 days before their release, with the aim of improving access to healthcare, especially for substance use disorders, and support services for people transitioning back into the community. This will allow incarcerated people without health insurance to apply for Medicaid, and those with paused coverage to have Medicaid reinstated.
“In the first year of our study, we are going to look at that—does this waiver expand access to healthcare for incarcerated people and lead to better outcomes,” says Evans, who will collaborate with UMass Amherst colleague Michal Horný, assistant professor of health policy and management, and Ekaterina “Kate” Pivovarova, associate professor of family medicine and community health at UMass Chan Medical School. “At the same time, we’ll be developing an intervention that we want to test in the jails to support the continuation of MOUD once people transition back to the community—with the idea that if it is promising it also could be sustained with supports from Medicaid.”
As with the first phase of JCOIN, Massachusetts is a testing ground. “If this works in Massachusetts, then other states can learn from this very innovative program and try to do something similar in their state,” Evans says.
Several of the jails that were the test sites for JCOIN’s first phase—in Western Massachusetts and in the Boston area—will also be the pilot sites for the new research.
In a related project with $3.6 million in NIH funding, Pivovarova, Evans and team will work to develop an alliance between the courts and MOUD treatment providers to better route people with opioid use disorder into treatment rather than jail.
In the another new NIH project, funded with a $4.7 million grant, Evans and Dr. Alysse Wurcel, a physician-scientist at Boston Medical Center, will develop an HIV testing, prevention and treatment program for people incarcerated in a Boston-area jail that experienced an HIV outbreak a few years ago.
“Jail settings offer opportunities for testing, prevention and treatment of both infectious disease and also opioid and other substance use disorders,” Evans says, “making jails a critical part of our public health system.”
About the University of Massachusetts Amherst
The flagship of the commonwealth, the University of Massachusetts Amherst is a nationally ranked public land-grant research university that seeks to expand educational access, fuel innovation and creativity, and share and use its knowledge for the common good. Founded in 1863, UMass Amherst sits on nearly 1,450-acres in scenic Western Massachusetts and boasts state-of-the-art facilities for teaching, research, scholarship, and creative activity. The institution advances a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community where everyone feels connected and valued—and thrives, and offers a full range of undergraduate, graduate and professional degrees across 10 schools and colleges, and 100 undergraduate majors.
Understanding water-soluble polymers in wastewater
Lehigh University researchers collaborate with Dow on NSF-funded project to study how microbes break down various modified polysaccharides, a common additive in consumer products.
Xuanhong Cheng, professor of bioengineering and materials science and engineering, Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science, Lehigh University
When we pump shampoo from the dispenser into our hands, we expect just the right consistency—not so runny that it slips through our fingers, yet not so thick that it feels like massaging mayonnaise into our scalp.
The polymers behind this pleasant texture are called viscosifiers. They’re used in consumer products like shampoos, detergents, and cosmetics, keeping ingredients suspended and stable in solution. But what happens when those same polymers wash down the drain is less well understood.
“Wastewater usually goes to a treatment plant, where the solids are filtered out, and the rest is either broken down by microbes, or precipitated as sludge before being tested then released into streams,” says Xuanhong Cheng, a professor of bioengineering and materials science and engineering in Lehigh University’s P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science.
Cheng and her team are collaborating with materials science company Dow Inc. to study how microbes—microscopic organisms that digest sewage—interact with and potentially biodegrade these polymers. Their proposal recently received a three-year GOALI award from the National Science Foundation. The program funds projects that support university-industry collaborations.
Her lab will first map how microbes break down the polymers—mixing them together and tracking microbe growth, as well as the effects of the resulting degradation products.
The team will also test whether mixed communities of microbes can break down polymers more effectively than any single strain.
“If a consortium of microbes works better, we could design strategies to mix them selectively, targeting different parts of the polymer for complete degradation,” she says.
The goals are twofold, says Cheng. First, to better understand the chemistry behind full degradation—knowledge that could influence product design. Second, to pinpoint microbial mixtures that could be deployed in treatment plants, reducing polymers in discharge from wastewater treatment plants.
The project isn’t just about biodegradation of polymers—it also gives Cheng the chance to mentor future engineers and scientists, an aspect of her work she finds especially fulfilling. She spent the summer working with four undergraduates who took ownership of the research and will help carry it forward this fall.
“It’s motivating to work with students with a clear passion for this problem, and to teach them the skills to help address it,” she says. “That’s very rewarding for me.”
Top: Gray circles show the survey-based polarization measure over time; the red crosses represent the model prediction. Bottom: Estimated average number of close friends by country and survey. The dashed line shows a logistic regression across all data points. The transition from low to high connectivity occurs shortly after Facebook became publicly accessible (vertical line I – 2006) and overtook other websites in U.S. traffic (vertical line II – 2010).
Between 2008 and 2010, polarization in society increased dramatically alongside a significant shift in social behavior: the number of close social contacts rose from an average of two to four or five people. The connection between these two developments could provide a fundamental explanation for why societies around the world are increasingly fragmenting into ideological bubbles.
[Vienna, 23.10.2025]—"The big question that not only we, but many countries are currently grappling with, is why polarization has increased so dramatically in recent years," says Stefan Thurner from the Complexity Science Hub (CSH), explaining the study's motivation. The research was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The researchers' findings confirmed that increasing polarization is not merely perceived—it is measurable and objectively occurring. "And this increase happened suddenly, between 2008 and 2010," says Thurner. The question remained: what caused it?
The Friendship Shift: From Two to Five Close Contacts
To investigate, Thurner and his team examined whether social networks had changed—specifically, whether people's close friendships had shifted. "For decades, sociological studies showed that people maintained an average of about two close friends—people who could influence their opinions on important issues," explains Thurner.
Here too, the researchers identified a striking change: "Around 2008, there was a sharp increase from an average of two close friends to four or five," explains CSH scientist Jan Korbel.
The Paradox: More Connection, More Division
Are these two developments related? Do more close friends—and thus denser social networks—lead to network fragmentation and ultimately societal polarization?
Using a model based on real data, the researchers discovered this could indeed be the case: "When network density increases with more connections, polarization within the collective inevitably rises sharply," says Markus Hofer from CSH.
"This finding impressed us greatly because it could provide a fundamental explanation for the peculiar form of polarization we're currently observing simultaneously across many parts of the world—one that definitely threatens democracy," Thurner continues. "When people are more connected with each other, they encounter different opinions more frequently. This inevitably leads to more conflict and thus greater societal polarization," adds Korbel.
Polarization has always existed, but what is happening now goes far beyond historical patterns. Greater connectivity has led to the formation of fewer but more tightly-knit groups with strongly differing opinions, between which there is hardly any exchange. "There are few bridges between these 'bubbles,' and when they exist, they are often negative or even hostile," says Korbel. "This is called fragmentation, and it represents a new social phenomenon," adds Thurner.
Behind the Numbers: Tracking Polarization Through Decades of Data
For their study, the researchers analyzed extensive existing survey data on both polarization and social networks.
"To measure political polarization, we used over 27,000 surveys from the Pew Research Center, which regularly records political attitudes of people in the US," explains Hofer. "The key advantage of this data is that the questions have remained virtually unchanged over time, enabling reliable long-term comparisons." The researchers found that political attitudes became significantly more one-sided between 1999 and 2017. For example, only 14% of respondents consistently expressed liberal views in 1999, but by 2017, this had risen to 31%. Conversely, only 6% of respondents consistently held conservative views in 1999, compared to 16% in 2017. "More and more people are clearly aligning themselves with one political camp rather than holding a mixture of liberal and conservative views," explains Hofer.
To analyze friendship networks, the researchers combined 30 different surveys totaling over 57,000 respondents from Europe and the US, including the General Social Survey (US) and the European Social Survey. "Despite minor differences between individual surveys, the data consistently show that the average number of close friendships rose from 2.2 in 2000 to 4.1 in 2024," says Hofer.
"The decisive contribution of this study is that it reconciled both phenomena using a mathematical social model," explains Thurner. "This enabled us to show that increasing connectivity must lead to sudden polarization once a critical connectivity density is exceeded—just like a phase transition in physics, such as water turning to ice," adds Hofer. "It is fascinating that these phase transitions also exist in societies. The exact location of these critical thresholds still needs clarification. According to our results, for close relationships, it lies somewhere between three and four people," the researchers note.
The Smartphone Era: When Connection May Have Become Fragmentation
The sharp rise in both polarization and the number of close friends occurred between 2008 and 2010—precisely when social media platforms and smartphones first achieved widespread adoption. This technological shift may have fundamentally changed how people connect with each other, indirectly promoting polarization.
"Democracy depends on all parts of society being involved in decision-making, which requires that everyone be able to communicate with each other. But when groups can no longer talk to each other, this democratic process breaks down," emphasizes Stefan Thurner.
Tolerance plays a central role. "If I have two friends, I do everything I can to keep them—I am very tolerant toward them. But if I have five and things become difficult with one of them, it's easier to end that friendship because I still have 'backups.' I no longer need to be as tolerant," explains Thurner.
What disappears as a result is a societal baseline of tolerance—a development that could contribute to the long-term erosion of democratic structures. To prevent societies from increasingly fragmenting, Thurner emphasizes the importance of learning early how to engage with different opinions and actively cultivating tolerance.
About the Study
The study “Why more social interactions lead to more polarization in societies” by S. Thurner, M. Hofer, and J. Korbel was recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) (doi: 10.1073/pnas.2517530122).
The research was made possible by the ReMass project funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF and the CSH Postdoc Program funded by the Federal Ministry for Innovation, Mobility, and Infrastructure (BMIMI).
About CSH
The Complexity Science Hub (CSH) is Europe’s research center for the study of complex systems. We derive meaning from data from a range of disciplines – economics, medicine, ecology, and the social sciences – as a basis for actionable solutions for a better world. CSH members are Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT), BOKU University, Central European University (CEU), Graz University of Technology, Interdisciplinary Transformation University Austria (IT:U), Medical University of Vienna, TU Wien, University of Continuing Education Krems, Vetmeduni Vienna, Vienna University of Economics and Business, and Austrian Economic Chambers (WKO).
