Friday, August 21, 2026

Preschool teachers overwhelmingly support play-based learning, study finds

While play-based curricula is linked to academic success, urban teachers report lower perceived support from families

Ohio State University

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Thinkers from Plato to Maria Montessori have championed play as one of the most powerful ways that young children learn and grow. American preschool teachers overwhelmingly agree — but a new study finds that teachers in urban settings feel less family support for play-based learning than their suburban counterparts.

The study, published in the Early Childhood Education Journal, drew on survey data from 110 preschool teachers in two Midwestern states to examine how classroom play is supported across urban, suburban and rural settings. Researchers looked at three key factors: teachers’ own knowledge and beliefs about learning and play, their perception of family support for play and their perception of curricular support for it.

While teachers’ beliefs about play and curricular support didn’t differ by region — 96.9% agreed or strongly agreed that play supports academic learning — urban teachers were significantly less likely than suburban teachers to say families in their classrooms viewed play as essential to learning.

According to Erin Fox, lead author of the study and a recent graduate with a doctorate in human development and family science from The Ohio State University, both research and anecdotal stories from teachers and parents point to growing pressure in preschool settings to prioritize direct academic instruction, which can limit children’s time for play.

Fox was curious about how this tension was taking shape across communities and set out to explore equity in access to high-quality, play-based preschool.

“One of the biggest misconceptions is that play doesn’t support learning,” Fox said. “In general, I think most people would agree that play supports social emotional development, but may be less likely to understand how play can also support early literacy or math skills.”

Far from being just a “break” or a way for kids to burn off energy, playful learning is an evidence-based teaching strategy: The researchers define it as an active learning approach that combines child-directed, engaging elements with intentional adult guidance.

“From the outside, it might just look like kids are playing, but when you actually talk to the teachers, it’s very intentional and there are clear learning goals behind it,” said Kelly Purtell, a co-author of the study and associate professor of human sciences at Ohio State. The paper is part of a larger study focused on understanding how teachers use and think about play experiences in preschool and early elementary school classrooms.

Purtell notes a broader cultural shift in the way conversations about school readiness have come to dominate how families view preschool.

“When talking to teachers, both formally and informally, they’ve expressed that when some families send their kids to preschool, they really expect them to be there to learn and to be ready for kindergarten,” Purtell said. An increased focus on formal academic preparation, she added, shapes broader expectations of what preschool should look like.

As to why teachers in urban areas reported feeling less support from families around playful learning, the researchers speculate that parents in urban areas might be more exposed to narratives around the importance of school readiness, Purtell said, and there is a growing need to better educate parents and families about the important role of play-based learning in ensuring school readiness.

Parental concerns about kindergarten preparation are well-placed and understandable, Purtell said, and she hopes to help broaden how people think about school readiness.

“Play-based learning is a developmentally appropriate learning strategy,” she said, “and it’s something parents should feel comfortable talking to their children’s teachers about — to better understand how and why teachers are using play in the classroom — and how that’s helping kids develop and get ready for the transition to school.”

Additional co-authors were Maria Abdul-Masih of Ohio State, Rachel E. Schachter of the University of Illinois Chicago, Amy R. Napoli of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and Yuenjung Joo of the University of North Carolina Greensboro.

Contact: Kelly Purtell, purtell.15@osu.edu

Written by Elizabeth Weinstein, weinstein.137@osu.edu

Journal

Early Childhood Education Journal

DOI

10.1007/s10643-026-02276-8

Method of Research

Survey

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Examining Differences in Teachers’ Beliefs About Play in Rural, Suburban, and Urban Settings

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PLAY THEORY

RESEARCH: Wearable fans could keep workers cool while reducing office energy use

Targeted cooling of the face and neck delivers nearly the same comfort as desk fans without creating drafts for nearby coworkers, new study shows

Concordia University

Small wearable fans that cool the face and neck can keep people almost as comfortable as conventional desk fans, according to a new study from Concordia researchers. Aside from taking up less space, these lightweight alternatives also use less power and avoid unwanted drafts that can bother nearby coworkers.

“These fans provide a way to still operate a centralized HVAC system while using less energy,” says Mohamed Ouf, study co-author associate professor in the Department of Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering. “Targeted cooling is especially useful in cases where you have a few people occupying a large space, such as in places that emphasize hybrid work arrangements.”

While the face and neck make up only about 5.5 per cent of the body's surface, they are especially sensitive to temperature. Researchers compared two types of wearable personal cooling devices — a face fan and a neck fan — with both bladed and bladeless desk fans. The team found that directing airflow to this region produced nearly the same improvement in overall thermal comfort as desktop fans.

The researchers tested the four devices in a controlled office environment set to 25 degrees Celsius using a sophisticated anatomical model (manikin) that simulates how the human body regulates heat. The 23-segment model measured changes in skin temperature, heat loss and overall thermal comfort while each fan operated at different speeds.

As expected, the bladed desk fan provided the strongest cooling. But the wearable face and neck fans closely matched the performance of the bladeless desk fan, delivering comfort comparable to a low-speed bladed fan.

The face fan produced the greatest localized cooling, increasing heat loss from the face by as much as seven watts, while both wearable devices cooled users enough to bring thermal comfort back into the neutral range.

The findings suggest that wearable fans could become a practical tool for reducing energy use related to air conditioning in offices, especially in cases where a few people are occupying a large space, such as hybrid workplaces.

This study was presented at the 12th International Conference on Indoor Air Quality, Ventilation & Energy Conservation in Buildings, held in May at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, USA. The corresponding author is Tazia Rahman, MEng 2025. Additional research by Joyce Kim and Kehinde Bayode at the University of Waterloo.

Read the paper: “Comparative cooling efficiency of wearable and non-wearable personal comfort systems in office settings

Journal

E3S Web of Conferences

DOI

10.1051/e3sconf/202671603010

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Comparative cooling efficiency of wearable and non-wearable personal comfort systems in office settings

New computational tool finds hidden asthma genes missed by traditional methods

University of Chicago

One of the most important goals of studying genetics is to find genes that are involved with diseases. The problem is that most diseases aren’t caused by a single gene or mutation. They’re the result of complex interactions among dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of genes, plus environmental factors, lifestyle, and a host of other variables. That flood of genes creates a needle-in-a-haystack problem.

A growing view among geneticists holds that nearly every gene active in the relevant tissue plays some part in a disease, but the vast majority act only indirectly and from a distance, nudging a much smaller set of "central" genes that sit at the heart of the disease. Those central genes are the ones that directly drive the biology and therefore are the ones most worth targeting with drugs. Until now, though, scientists had no reliable way to pick them out of the crowd and experimentally test them.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers at UChicago and Columbia University developed a new computational tool that could make the challenge of finding genes most directly related to disease much easier. In a paper published in Cell, they showed how this tool was able to identify 21 genes related to asthma, most of which hadn’t been discovered by other methods. The researchers also used both CRISPR gene-editing screens and mouse models to validate that these genes lead to asthma phenotypes and demonstrated that two of the genes are in the same pathway involved in fatty acid metabolism and protein palmitoylation, which hasn’t yet been studied for asthma.

A flowering network of genetic effects

The new tool, called DANDELION, focuses on a process known as trans-gene regulation. In complex diseases like asthma, many genetic variants may contribute to disease by changing the expression of other genes. This has a cascading effect where one variant changes the expression of a nearby gene, and then that gene changes the expression of another, and so on. This creates what’s called a gene regulatory network that ultimately drives the development of disease.

Existing approaches like genome-wide association studies (GWAS) instead focus on genes that are often in the periphery of the gene regulatory network, however, and only indirectly affect disease.

“All these existing tools assume that the actual disease genes are always going to be very close to the disease variants, but when you search for clues around that variant, you don’t always find much,” said co-senior author Xuanyao Liu, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medicine and Human Genetics, who developed DANDELION.

“What's unique about our method is that we believe the disease genes are not just next to the genetic variants. They're embedded in this gene regulatory network, and the actual disease-driving gene is downstream of those associated variants, maybe on different chromosomes. So, they're on the receiving end of a genetic effect that is very far away,” Liu said.

Liu named the tool DANDELION in reference to the puffy heads of dandelion flowers once they go to seed. The puffball resembles an interconnected, branching network of genes, ultimately pointing to the center of the core disease genes (called disease-proximal genes, or DPGs).

Liu analyzed a large set of data from the human transcriptome and the UK Biobank, a repository of health and genetic data from more than 500,000 volunteers. She used DANDELION to search for DPGs for asthma and found 21 candidates, 19 of which have not been discovered before using tools like GWAS. She showed the data to Marcelo Nóbrega, MD, PhD, Chair of the Department of Human Genetics at UChicago, who has developed experimental platforms to manipulate the expression of genes in human cell types that are relevant to asthma, such as epithelial cells from the lining of the airways, inflammatory cells, and immune T cells.

At first, he was skeptical. “Xuanyao showed me a list of genes, and we didn't recognize almost any of them. I thought that either this is going to be really cool and groundbreaking or it's going to be wrong. But we had the experimental validation system running, so I thought, ‘Let's test them all,’” he said.

Direct, measurable impacts

Nóbrega’s team, led by postdoctoral scholar Isabella Salamone, PhD, conducted a series of experiments to test the effects of the genes predicted by DANDELION. Surprisingly, most of the genes Liu identified had a direct, measurable impact on the function of asthma-related cell types, producing phenotypes that model those seen in asthma at a much higher rate than the distal genes, or any other genes in the genome that they also tested.

When Salamone looked more closely, she saw that two genes had opposite effects. Knocking out one gene called SLC27A3 protected against the effects of asthma in both epithelial and T cells, while knocking out another gene, SCD, contributed to disease. Looking at the effects of mutations of these genes in a large human cohort of almost half a million people, they found that mutations in SLC27A3 are protective of asthma, supporting their findings in their cellular phenotyping screens.

“We saw this really striking pattern. Knocking out SLC27A3 had the strongest protective effect of all the genes we tested, and knocking out SCD was very detrimental to whatever cellular function we assayed,” Salamone said. “When we dug into patient data that had been collected by other labs, we saw the same pattern repeat itself—expression of SLC27A3 is increased in lung cells of patients with severe asthma, and SCD expression is decreased.”

Intriguingly, both SLC27A3 and SCD are involved in the same biochemical pathway for fatty acid metabolism. To understand how this might be linked to asthma, they turned to chemical biologist Hening Lin, PhD, the James and Karen Frank Family Professor of Medicine and Professor of Chemistry at UChicago, who is a world-leading expert on the process, especially its role in protein palmitoylation, the addition of a long-chain fatty acyl group to proteins that regulate protein activity. Lin helped them confirm that both genes are involved in palmitoylation, and that reducing palmitoylation by knocking out SLC27A3 causes lung epithelial cells to dampen several immune-related and inflammatory processes.

“My lab has been working on the role of protein palmitoylation in immune signaling. We know many immune signaling pathways are regulated by palmitoylation, but I am still amazed by the finding that disrupting a lipid metabolic protein, SLC27A3, could offer protection in asthma models at least in part via affecting protein palmitoylation,” Lin said.

Finally, to test whether these genetic, biochemical, and cellular findings ultimately translate into asthma susceptibility, Salamone developed mice in which SLC27A3 or SCD were inactivated. They found that SLC27A3 knock-out mice are protected against allergy-induced lung inflammation, while SCD knock-out mice are more prone to lung inflammation compared to control mice, demonstrating that the new pathway the team uncovered is indeed capable of changing susceptibility to asthma.

A powerful, interdisciplinary collaboration

Liu said she is encouraged by this initial success and looks forward to testing it with other diseases like inflammatory bowel disease or Type 2 diabetes. Historically, one of the limitations of drug development has been finding the true protein targets for treatment. DANDELION has the potential to overcome this challenge by identifying new and more effective drug targets.

“We're really excited about this direction because for these diseases, GWAS has identified tons of signal, but we still don't know the actual disease-driving genes that we can target for therapies,” Liu said. “I think our collaboration has been really powerful because we closed the gap at both the computational level and the experimental level.”

Nóbrega emphasized the importance of this collaboration as well, especially the advantage of being able to confirm their findings with a leading expert like Lin. “None of this would have come to fruition if any one of us were working on this alone,” he said. “We would have three papers buried in separate journals and virtually nobody would know how to put these stories back together. So, the power of having this complementary expertise across the division is really important.”

The study, “Trans-regulatory gene mapping prioritizes disease drivers in asthma,” was primarily supported by the National Institutes of Health. Additional authors include Peixin Tian from the First Affiliated Hospital of Kunming Medical University, China; Zining Qi, Jiaqi Zhao, Li Zhang, Qilong Tan, Jinghui Li, Alexis G. Thornburg, Noboru J. Sakabe, Mark Minogue, Zachary T. Weber, Bohao Chen, Cezary Ciszewski, Xin He, Hardik Shah, and Carole Ober from UChicago; Ashley N. Michael and Donata Vercelli from the University of Arizona; and co-senior author Zhonghua Liu from Columbia University.

Journal

Cell

DOI

10.1016/j.cell.2026.07.034

Article Title

Trans-regulatory gene mapping prioritizes disease drivers in asthma

Article Publication Date

20-Aug-2026

Seeing the Unseen: A new tool for exploring complex biological data

University of Basel

New tool for large data sets — image:
Bonsai accurately reconstructs cell relationships from simulated single-cell RNA sequencing data (right), closely matching the ground-truth tree (left).
view more
Credit: Daan de Groot, Biozentrum, University of Basel

Modern biology research can now generate valuable data on an unprecedented scale. But there is one major obstacle: making sense of these complex high-dimensional datasets. A team at the University of Basel, Switzerland, has developed a new tool that can provide accurate pictures of the structures hiding within highly complex datasets. By helping scientists uncover hidden patterns in the data, the software will help to make new scientific discoveries.

Over the past decade, biology has entered the era of "big data". Today’s high-throughput technologies generate vast datasets that capture the identities and multi-dimensional characteristics of cells. Using single-cell RNA sequencing, for example, researchers can measure the activity of tens of thousands of genes in hundreds of thousands or even millions of individual cells. Similar large-scale datasets are now produced in many fields of biology, from genetics and cancer research to neuroscience.

These data promise to provide fundamental new insights into how cells develop, communicate, and change during disease. However, analyzing and interpreting such complex datasets remains a big challenge that researchers continue to struggle with. "People are good at recognizing patterns in two or three dimensions," says Professor Erik van Nimwegen. "But we simply can’t make a picture of a dataset that exists in 10,000 dimensions, and lack intuition for what kind of structures can even exist in such high-dimensional spaces."

In Nature Biotechnology, the researchers present their newly developed software tool “Bonsai”, which visualizes high-dimensional data on a tree. They demonstrate that this visualization provides a faithful picture of the structure in the data, including how cells are related and how they may have developed from precursor cells.

A tree instead of a flat map
Most popular tools force data with thousands of dimensions into a two-dimensional map. Although these methods are used in virtually every study, researchers appreciate that such pictures invariably distort the data, making it impossible to tell whether the displayed relationships between cells are true or artefacts created by forcing the data into a two-dimensional visualization. Bonsai overcomes this problem.

“Instead of creating a flat map, our tool builds a branching tree, with individual cells at the leaves of the branches,” says first author Dr. Daan de Groot. “Crucially, the distances along the branches accurately reflect how closely cells are related in the high-dimensional space.” The team tested the software on both simulated and real single-cell RNA sequencing datasets. Compared to existing methods, Bonsai reconstructs developmental pathways vastly more accurately, preserves the true relationships between cells, and identifies similar cells much more reliably.”

From better pictures to new discoveries
When the researchers analyzed human blood cells, Bonsai not only automatically recovered the known relationships between different blood cell types but also uncovered a novel subtype of a type of immune cells, known as natural killer (NK) cells. The molecular signature of this new subtype of NK cells revealed that they originate from a lineage (called the myeloid lineage) that is different from the so-called lymphoid lineage that all NK cells were thought to derive from.

"This example shows why faithful representation and visualization of complex data matters," says van Nimwegen. "When you can trust the picture, you have a much better chance of making new discoveries."

Because Bonsai can be applied to any type of high-dimensional data, including not only gene expression and chromatin state data but also medical data, data from microbiology (i.e. species composition), or data from neuroscience (i.e. neural firing patterns), the researchers believe Bonsai can be a valuable tool for scientists across the life sciences. The Bonsai software is freely available to the research community at: https://bonsai.unibas.ch/

Journal

Nature Biotechnology

DOI

10.1038/s41587-026-03220-2

Colorectal cancer screening could reduce mortality by over 40%

Karolinska Institutet

People who take part in screening for colorectal cancer may have as much as 43 per cent lower risk of dying from the disease, according to new estimates published in JAMA Network Open by researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Umeå University in Sweden. These findings are based on up to 14 years of follow-up data from the Stockholm–Gotland screening programme.

Colorectal cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer, with a favourable prognosis if detected early. Universal screening has been introduced throughout Sweden, meaning testing is offered to people aged 60–74 every two years. Participants are sent a screening kit to their home address and asked to provide a stool sample, which is analysed for small amounts of blood that are not visible to the naked eye. If blood is detected, further investigation is offered, usually in the form of a colonoscopy.

New study shows greater effectiveness

Stockholm and Gotland were early adopters, introducing routine screening as early as 2008. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Umeå University have now followed these individuals for up to 14 years to investigate the impact of screening on mortality rates.

“A previous evaluation of the programme showed that those who received an invitation to screening had a 14 per cent lower risk of dying from the disease,” says Johannes Blom, senior consultant and associate professor at the Department of Clinical Science and Education, Södersjukhuset, Karolinska Institutet, and the study’s corresponding author. “We have now been able to show that the mortality is significantly lower than that among those who actually take part in the screening.”

One-third do not take part in screening

The researchers compared those who were invited to screening between 2008 and 2012 with a control group who were either invited later or not at all. They used a statistical method to account for factors that could distort the results, such as some people in the control group being given the opportunity to participate later on, and some invited individuals not participating.

When these factors were taken into account, an invitation to screening was associated with a 26 per cent lower risk of dying from colorectal cancer, while active participation was associated with a 43 per cent lower risk.

“Although screening is offered free of charge and the test is simple to carry out, around a third of people do not submit a sample,” says Johannes Blom. “Our study highlights the importance of taking part in colorectal cancer screening, and shows that it can actually save lives.”

Over 376,000 study participants

The study included 376,511 people, and during the follow-up period, 1,668 deaths from colorectal cancer were recorded. Some of the study’s strengths include the large study population, the long follow-up period and the use of Swedish health registers. However, the researchers emphasise that the results are based on statistical adjustments for various types of bias, meaning that some uncertainties remain.

The study was funded by the Swedish Cancer Society, the Swedish Research Council and Region Stockholm. The researchers state that they have no conflicts of interest.

Publication: “Fecal Occult Blood Screening Outcomes Adjusted for Contamination Bias and Nonadherence”, Johannes Blom, Lennarth Nyström, Håkan Jonsson, JAMA Network Open, online 20 August 2026, doi: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2026.29856.

Journal

JAMA Network Open

DOI

10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2026.29856

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Fecal Occult Blood Screening Outcomes Adjusted for Contamination Bias and Nonadherence

Article Publication Date

20-Aug-2026

In cancer clinical trials, federal and industry sponsors play complementary roles

New research details the vital, unique role federal support plays in cancer clinical research

SWOG Cancer Research Network

A comparative study of the cancer clinical trial portfolios supported by federal funding versus industry funding reveals they have distinct, interdependent roles in cancer research.

The work, “Federal and Industry Sponsorship in US Cancer Clinical Trials,” is published online August 20thby JAMA Oncology.

The analysis found that, whereas industry trials were more likely to examine single-agent treatments, federally supported trials were more likely to focus on non-treatment interventions, diagnostics, health services research, cancer prevention, screening, or supportive care.

Federally funded trials were also more likely to study multimodality treatment regimens or treatment de-escalation strategies, or to address the needs of patients with rare or pediatric cancers.

Further, federally sponsored trials were more commonly phase II trials, whereas industry trials were more often very early phase I trials or later stage phase III trials.

The authors say their findings are consistent with a model in which federal and industry funders contribute complementary and essential functions to the cancer research ecosystem.

“Federally sponsored research brings much of the basic science discovery, trial infrastructure and early efficacy studies, while industry leads in late-stage determinative trials resulting in regulatory approvals,” said lead author Joseph M. Unger, PhD, a biostatistician and health services researcher with SWOG Cancer Research Network and professor in the Public Health Sciences Division at Fred Hutch Cancer Center. “Federally sponsored trials may then test combinations of newly approved drugs with each other or with different treatment approaches such as surgery or radiation, extending therapeutic discovery.”

Unger led a team that analyzed data from thousands of cancer trials registered in the ClinicalTrials.gov database from 2008 through 2024. The team identified interventional studies that had opened at one or more U.S. sites.

Trials were classified as federally sponsored if their lead sponsor was a federal agency, such as the National Institutes of Health. Trials with a pharmaceutical or biotech company as lead sponsor were coded as industry trials.

Among 11,681 trials that met the researchers’ criteria, 9,569 (81.9 percent) were industry sponsored. Overall, about 90 percent of all trials had cancer treatment as their primary purpose.

Among the most marked differences between the two trial portfolios, federally supported trials were much more likely than industry trials to investigate

dose de-escalation approaches, which ask whether a drug or other intervention can be taken less frequently, for less time, or at a lower dose without compromising patient outcomes;
regimens combining multiple modes of treatment – drug treatment followed by surgery followed by radiation therapy, for example;
non-drug interventions, such as surgery, transplant, or behavioral interventions.

Federal trials were also considerably more likely than industry trials to study childhood cancers or rare cancers (cancers with fewer than 40,000 U.S. diagnoses per year), although the distance between federal and industry sponsors on rare cancer trials has shrunk over the time period studied.

Although they serve a unique and vital role, federally sponsored trials represent a much smaller share of the overall U.S. trial portfolio than industry-sponsored trials; compared to federally supported trials, about 9 out of 10 participants enroll in industry-sponsored trials.

Given the increasing dominance of industry in cancer clinical research and its core interest in conducting single-agent drug trials, the authors express concern that many research questions important for improving patient care but not commercially attractive may go unanswered.

The work was supported by the Public Health Sciences Division of Fred Hutch Cancer Center and The Hope Foundation for Cancer Research.

In addition to Dr. Unger, contributors to the work include Hong Xiao, PhD, and Michael L. LeBlanc, Ph.D. – both at the SWOG Statistics and Data Management Center and the Fred Hutch Cancer Center – and Dawn L. Hershman, MD, MS, of Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

SWOG Cancer Research Network is part of the National Cancer Institute's National Clinical Trials Network and the NCI Community Oncology Research Program. SWOG has more than 20,000 members in 46 states and seven other countries who design and conduct clinical trials and translational research to improve the lives of people with cancer. SWOG trials have directly led to FDA approval of 15 cancer drug regimens, changed more than 100 standards of cancer care, and saved more than 5 million years of human life. Learn more at swog.org.

“Federal and Industry Sponsorship in US Cancer Clinical Trials.” Unger JM, et al. JAMA Oncol, published online Aug 20, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamaoncol.2026.3026.

Journal

JAMA Oncology

DOI

10.1001/jamaoncol.2026.3026

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Federal and Industry Sponsorship in US Cancer Clinical Trials

Article Publication Date

20-Aug-2026