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, December 02, 2025
Rising heat leads to minimal losses for California processing tomatoes
Researchers analyzed traffic, temperatures and 1.4 million tomato truckloads
California’s $1 billion processing tomato industry is highly efficient and likely will be able to withstand higher temperatures and traffic congestion with minimal postharvest losses, according to research conducted at the University of California, Davis.
“It’s rare that we find an example where climate change is expected to have a negligible effect,” said Sarah Whitnell, who led the research as a postdoctoral scholar at UC Davis and is now at University of Western Australia, Perth. “Ultimately, the supply chain is a well-oiled machine. The losses are relatively small, and while temperature does increase them, it’s not by a huge amount.”
Researchers matched each truckload to California state highway traffic data and hourly temperatures, which ranged from 48 degrees to 108 degrees Fahrenheit. They compared truckloads of tomatoes from the same field and same growing season: for example, one travelling at 5 a.m. when temperatures are cooler and traffic is light with one travelling at 5 p.m. when the opposite is true.
Optimal conditions: Cool weather and traffic
The best-case scenario was when cool temperatures coincided with heavy traffic. The worst-case scenario was hot temperatures combined with heavy traffic. When it’s hot, slow traffic speeds cause trucks to spend more time at damaging temperatures.
“If you have this magic scenario where temperatures are cool but there is traffic, you actually have the lowest losses,” Whitnall said. “This is because faster speeds cause vibrations that can increase damage in fresh produce.”
Comparing best- and worst-case scenarios, the share of soft, split or squished tomatoes doubles from about 1% to 2%. This equates to modest losses, the researchers also found.
The findings show that California’s processing tomato industry is highly efficient and could be a model for others, said senior author Tim Beatty, who is chair of the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Davis.
“Most supply chains aren’t nearly as efficient as the California supply chain, so what this says is if you’re a very efficient supply chain, you can mitigate the losses associated with climate change,” Beatty said. “It says that adaptation is possible to really reduce loss past the farm gate.”
Industry relationships made research possible
Eighty-four cents of every farm dollar is generated after the product leaves a farm, but most climate change research has focused on how growing is affected. This research looks at that second stage and was possible because of comprehensive public data and detailed transport, tonnage and quality data supplied by industry, Beatty said.
“We know very little about the effects of climate change once product leaves the farm gate,” he said. “I think this paper is one of the very first to actually tackle that.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agriculture and Food Research Initiative supported this research.
Credit: Penn Nursing's NewCourtland Center for Health and Transitions
PHILADELPHIA (December 2, 2025) – In an editorial published in JAMA Health Forum, three prominent nursing researchers have strongly defended the necessity of the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) and its enduring impact on public health. Titled "The Enduring Impact of the National Institute of Nursing Research and Why We Still Need It," the viewpoint addresses the Institute's future as it approaches its 40th anniversary.
Naylor, Curley, and Ulrich argue that the need for the NINR’s distinctive research strengths is greater now than ever before. They point to the Institute’s unique approach, which includes a life course perspective that promotes health across the entire lifespan. Ultimately, they conclude that science grounded in the core of nursing—which considers the whole person and their caregivers, engages the patient and family in care, and promotes people's strengths—must remain a federal funding priority.
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About the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing
The University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing (Penn Nursing) is one of the world’s leading nursing schools. It has been ranked the #1 nursing school in the U.S. by QS University for a decade. Our Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) is among the top-ranked programs in the nation, according to the 2026 U.S. News & World Report’s Best Colleges rankings. Penn Nursing also consistently earns high rankings in U.S. News & World Report’s annual list of best graduate schools and is a top recipient of National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for nursing research. Penn Nursing prepares nurse scientists and nurse leaders to meet the health needs of a global society through innovation in research, education, and practice. Follow Penn Nursing on: Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, & Instagram.
Alamgir Karim, University of Houston Dow Chair and Welch Foundation Professor at the William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, developed a revolutionary new thin-film material that promises to make AI devices significantly faster while dramatically cutting energy consumption.
Addressing the staggering power and energy demands of artificial intelligence, engineers at the University of Houston have developed a revolutionary new thin-film material that promises to make AI devices significantly faster while dramatically cutting energy consumption.
The breakthrough, detailed in the journal ACS Nano, introduces a specialized two-dimensional (2D) thin film dielectric - or an electric insulator - designed to replace traditional, heat generating components in integrated circuit chips. This new thin film material, which does not store electricity, will help reduce the significant energy cost and heat produced by the high-performance computing necessary for AI.
“AI has made our energy needs explode,” said Alamgir Karim, Dow Chair and Welch Foundation Professor at the William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UH. “Many AI data centers employ vast cooling systems that consume large amounts of electricity to keep the thousands of servers with integrated circuit chips running optimally at low temperatures to maintain high data processing speed, have shorter response time and extend chip lifetime.”
The solution: “Low-k” electronic material
To keep a lid on power usage while improving performance, Karim and his former doctoral student, Maninderjeet Singh, used Nobel winning organic framework materials to develop these dielectric films.
“These next-generation materials are expected to boost the performance of AI and conventional electronics devices significantly,” said Singh, a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University who developed these materials during his doctoral training at UH, in collaboration with Devin Shaffer, a UH professor of civil engineering and doctoral student, Erin Schroeder.
Not all dielectrics are created equally. Those with high permittivity, or high-k, store more electrical energy and dissipate more of it as heat than those with low-k materials. So, Karim focused on low-k materials made from light elements like carbon, known as lightweight covalent organic frameworks, which speed up signals and reduce delays.
“Low-k materials are base insulators that support integrated circuit conductors carrying high speed and high frequency electrical signals with low power consumption (i.e. high-efficiency because chips can run cooler and faster!) and also low interference (signal cross talk),” said Karim.
The team created the new material with carbon and other light elements forming covalently bonded sheetlike films with highly porous crystalline structures. Then, along with another student, Saurabh Tiwary, they studied their electronic properties for next generation low-k applications in devices.
“Incorporation of low-k materials into integrated circuit devices has the tremendous potential to greatly lower power consumption by the booming AI data centers growth. We discovered that the 2D sheets had an ultralow dielectric constant and ultrahigh electrical breakdown strength needed for high-voltage operation for high power devices, with good thermal stability even at elevated device operating temperatures,” reported Karim and Singh.
To create the films, Shaffer and Schroeder used a method called synthetic interfacial polymerization, where molecules are dissolved into two liquids that don’t mix and end up stitching molecular building blocks to form the strong crystalline layered sheets. It is a method discovered by 2025 Chemistry Nobel Prize winners Omar M. Yaghi, UC Berkeley professor of chemistry, and other Nobel colleagues.
The research was funded by the American Chemical Society’s Petroleum Research Foundation New Direction program.
Journal
ACS Nano
Article Title
Two-Dimensional Covalent Organic Framework Films for High Dielectric Strength Electrically and Thermo-Mechanically Stable Low Permittivity Dielectrics
Striped bass are struggling; UMass Amherst biologists know how to help
Reducing air exposure, fight times, water temps, as well as increasing angler education, are key to a sustainable fishery
Principal author Grace Casselberry tests the body flex reflex prior to releasing a striped bass with an accelerometer data logger to monitor post-release swimming behavior.
Amherst, Mass. — While there are only four official seasons in the year, anglers in the Northeast recognize a fifth: striper season, the months from May to November when striped bass, which can grow up to 100 pounds and are renowned for their fight once hooked, migrate along the coastal waters between the Chesapeake and Canadian Maritimes within range of thousands of fishing lures. But the fishery, which generated approximately $13 billion in economic activity along the Eastern seaboard in 2016, is crashing, despite the fact that the vast majority of bass caught by recreational anglers are released back into the ocean.
A pair of recent papers, led by biologists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and published in Fisheries Research and Marine and Coastal Fisheries, sought to comprehensively pinpoint which catch-and-release fishing practices pose a considerable risk to striped bass, and to show that there’s a mismatch between what anglers know about catch-and-release best practices and how this knowledge translates into action once on the water.
“Striped bass are one of, if not the most sought-after species of fish in New England and the Eastern seaboard,” says Grace Casselberry, a postdoctoral researcher at UMass Amherst and one of the principal authors of the two recent studies. “Especially in Cape Cod, where we conducted the majority of our research, stripers are an integral part of the local industry and culture.”
Despite their popularity, “many orders of magnitude more stripers are caught by recreational anglers than commercial fishers,” says Andy Danylchuk, professor of fish conservation at UMass Amherst and the paper’s senior author. And because of conservation and management measures meant to maintain or even rebuild striper stocks, not all that are caught are kept.
Although a growing proportion of stripers are thrown back by anglers, the fishery is in danger of collapse. To determine the reasons, the UMass team sought to examine not only the effect of catch-and-release fishing on the stripers, but also get a detailed look at how anglers handle the fish.
Teaming up with guides, fishing clubs and fishing tournament contestants—“research anglers,” Danylchuk calls these rod-toting community scientists—lead author Olivia Dinkelacker, who completed this research as part of her Master’s research at UMass Amherst, Casselberry, Danylchuk and their coauthors caught 521 striped bass over two years using a variety of conventional equipment and lures, from flies and flyrods to surfcasting rigs and long, fishlike lures dangling with three-pronged treble hooks.
The team measured how long it took to reel the striper in once it was hooked. Once landed, they gave it a quick set of reflex tests—a good prediction of fish stress and potential mortality—which would be repeated just before release. The stripers were divided into groups that remained out of the water for 0, 10, 30, 60 and 120 seconds before being thrown back.
This was the first time that air exposure was scientifically and systematically tested to see its effects on striped bass.
A subset of 37 fish were fitted with a “triaxial accelerometer biologger” velcroed to them and attached to fishing line. They were allowed to swim free for 20 minutes, then the team would retrieve the loggers and record the data, such as the fish’s acceleration and distance it swam.
They discovered that air exposure was the most significant factor influencing striped bass stress and post-release swimming activity. Higher water temperatures, fighting for longer periods of time and getting hooked somewhere other than in the jaw all increased their recovery time.
Fish released immediately or after only 10 seconds retained most of their reflexes and recovered quickly, Casselberry said, adding that “stripers that had been out of the water for 60 seconds took 8–10 minutes to swim similarly to the low air exposure group.”
In addition to finding fish out of water for 120 never fully recovered during the 20 minute monitoring time, they also found that the bigger the fish, the greater toll of being hooked, landed and released. Reducing angler impacts on big fish, particularly females, is critical to the future of the population.
The team’s findings suggest what many anglers already suspected: using lures or flies with single hooks, reducing fight and handling times, limiting air exposure and avoiding fishing during periods of high water temperatures are all key to preserving striped bass.
But how well is this knowledge being applied on the water?
Dinkelacker, Casselberry, Danylchuk and colleagues devised and distributed a comprehensive survey to wide swath of striper anglers, garnering 1,651 participants who mostly fished in Massachusetts. The fishermen were grouped according to fishing method: conventional rod and tackle (57.4%) or fly fishing gear (42.6%).
Anglers ranked what they thought were most harmful to striped bass, from air exposure to fish size, and how often they engaged in catch-and-release best practices, among other questions.
The results revealed a consistent pattern showing that fly anglers were generally more conservation minded, showed a greater engagement in conservation practices, were more concerned about threats to the striped bass and voiced more support for stricter management practices. This was particularly true for air exposure, where a greater proportion of conventional anglers reported removing fish from the water than fly anglers.
Still, researchers say that anglers are some of the striper’s best stewards, and that better, science-driven education is key to a healthy fishery.
“Thanks to the participation of so many research anglers throughout the Northeast, we now know the best scientifically backed practices to help conserve the stripers,” says Danylchuk. “Grassroots conservation efforts and fisheries management and policy has to be squarely informed by sound science, otherwise the striper stocks will remain in peril.”
Funding for this research was provided by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute Sea Grant.
A media kit with photos and full caption and credit information is available here.
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.
