Earth

In parts of Africa, where the rate of HIV is high, researchers found that using mobile vans to dispense antiretroviral treatment and other care greatly increased viral suppression.

Researchers enrolled 1,315 people living with HIV and not on antiretroviral treatment in a nearly three-year study in South Africa and Uganda using mobile vans to dispense treatment.

The randomized controlled trial, conducted between May 2016 and March 2019, found that viral suppression was 74 percent, compared to 63 percent for those seen in a clinic. The results were presented March 9 at the virtual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI).

"With millions needing treatment and not getting it, this community-based intervention could do a lot to help stop the spread of HIV," said lead author Ruanne Barnabas, associate professor of global health at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

Barnabas said the convenience of the vans in the community made getting care much easier. People who needed ART could start in an hour and get treatment for a year without ever needing to go to a clinic. The vans, paid for by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, operated daily from 11 a.m.-8 p.m. in five locations.

The study was conducted in rural and peri-urban areas of high and medium HIV prevalence in South Africa and Uganda. In South Africa, the study was conducted in 11 communities in uMgungundlovu District, KwaZulu-Natal - with a population HIV rate of 36 percent.

Overall, an estimated 7.7 million South Africans are living with HIV and about 3 million are not getting treatment, according to data from UNAIDS in 2019.

In Uganda, the study was conducted in six communities in the Sheema District, with a population HIV rate of 11 percent. Overall, an estimated 1.4 people are living with HIV in Uganda and about 380,000 are not receiving treatment, according to UNAIDS 2019 data.

Both communities in South Africa and Uganda have public clinics that offered access to ART and no cost but are characterized by high unemployment and low per-capita income (below US $2 a day.)

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- Flocks of starlings that produce dazzling patterns across the sky are natural examples of active matter -- groups of individual agents coming together to create collective dynamics. In a study featured on the cover of the March 6 issue of the journal Science, a team of researchers that includes Brown University physicists reveals new insights into what happens inside active matter systems.

The research describes experiments using a three-dimensional active nematic. Nematic describes a state of matter that emerges in the kind of liquid crystals widely used in smartphone and television displays. The cigar-shaped molecules in liquid crystals are able to move as in a liquid, but tend to stay ordered more or less in the same direction, a little like a crystal.

In a normal liquid crystal, the molecules are passive, meaning they don't have the ability to self-propel. But the system involved in this new study replaces those passive molecules with tiny bundles of microtubules, each with the ability to consume fuel and propel themselves. The goal of the research was to study how those active elements affect the order of the system.

"These microtubules tend to align, but also continually destroy their own aligning order with their movement," said study co-author Daniel Beller, an assistant professor of physics at University of California, Merced, who began work on the research while he was a postdoctoral researcher at Brown. "So there are collective motions that create defects in the alignment, and that's what we study here."

As the system evolves, the defects appear to come to life in some sense, creating lines, loops and other structures that meander through the system. The researchers studied the structures using topology, a branch of math concerned with how things deform without breaking.

"If your goal is to understand the dynamics of these systems, then one way to do that is to focus on these emerging topological structures as a way to characterize the dynamics," said Robert Pelcovits, a professor of physics at Brown and a study coauthor. "If we can get guiding principles from this simple system, that might help guide us in understanding more complicated ones."

Beller, Pelcovits and Thomas Powers, a professor of engineering and physics at Brown, led the theoretical work for the study. The experimental work was performed by researchers from Brandeis University and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, the University of Chicago, Brandeis and Eindhoven University of Technology contributed computer modeling expertise.

This kind of work had been done in two-dimensional systems, but this is the first time a 3D system had been studied in this way. The research showed that the dominant topological structures in the system were loop structures that emerge spontaneously, expand and then self-annihilate.

The loops are related to the kinds of defects that emerge in better-studied 2D systems, but they differ in a key way, the researchers say. In 2D, defects arise in pairs of points that have opposing characteristics or "charges," a bit like particles and antiparticles. Once they form, they exist until they eventually run into a defect with the opposite charge, which causes them to annihilate.

The loops that form in 3D, in contrast, have no charge. As a result, they form and annihilate all on their own. They're still related to the 2D defects structures, however. In fact, the 3D loops can be thought of as extensions of 2D point defects. Imagine two point defects sitting on a 2D surface. Now connect those two points with an arc that rises up out of the 2D surface, and a second arc on the underside of the surface. The result is a loop that has both charges of the points, but is itself charge neutral. That enables nucleation and annihilation all on their own.

The researchers are hopeful that this new understanding of this system's dynamics will be applicable in real-world systems like bacterial colonies, structures and systems in the human body, or other systems.

"What we found here is a quite general set of behaviors that we think will be fully present in similar systems that have this tendency to align, but that are also turning stored energy into motion," Beller said.

When Stanford University neuroscientist Brian Knutson tracked his smartphone usage, he was shocked to learn that he spent twice as much time on his phone as he had anticipated.

"In many of our lives, every day, there is often a gap between what we actually do and what we intend to do," said Knutson, who is a professor of psychology in the School of Humanities and Sciences, reflecting on his smartphone habits. "We want to understand how and why people's choices lead to unintended consequences - like wasting money or even time - and also whether processes that generate individual choice can tell us something about choices made by large groups of people."

Toward that end, Knutson and colleagues are investigating an approach he calls "neuroforecasting" - in which they use brain data from individuals who are in the process of making decisions to forecast how larger groups of unrelated people will respond to the same choices. His lab's latest neuroforecasting work in collaboration with researchers at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, published Mar. 9 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focused on how people spend time watching videos online.

By scanning people's brains as they selected and watched videos, the researchers discovered that both neural and behavioral responses to a video could forecast how long other people will watch that same video on the internet. When forecasting video popularity on the internet, however, brain responses were the only measure that mattered.

"Here, we have a case where there is information contained in subjects' brain activity that allows us to forecast the behavior of other, unrelated, people - but it's not necessarily reflected in their self-reports or behavior," explained Lester Tong, a graduate student in the Knutson lab. "One of the key takeaways here is that brain activity matters, and can even reveal hidden information."

Cerebral secrets

The researchers analyzed data from 36 participants, who watched videos while being scanned with a brain imaging technique known as fMRI. The researchers also monitored participants' behavior - like whether they chose to skip a video - and asked them questions about each video, like how it made them feel and whether they thought it would be popular. Then, they examined how those same videos performed on the internet in terms of daily views and average duration of viewings.

Because videos are complex and change over time, the researchers specifically examined brain responses to the start and end of videos, as well as average responses to each video. They focused on activity in brain regions previously shown to predict peoples' willingness to spend money.

The researchers found that longer video views were associated with activity in reward-sensitive regions of the brain, while shorter video views were associated with activity in regions sensitive to arousal or punishment. The subjects' answers to questions about the videos also predicted their own behavior.

When it came to forecasting the behavior of others online, however, the data told a different story. Both the group's behavior and brain activity forecasted how long people would watch the videos online. However, only group brain activity forecasted the popularity (or views per day) of each video online. During just the first four seconds of watching each video, more activity in the brain region associated with anticipating reward forecasted a video's popularity online, whereas heightened activity in the region associated with anticipating punishment forecasted decreased popularity.

"If we examine our subjects' choices to watch the video or even their reported responses to the videos, they don't tell us about the general response online. Only brain activity seems to forecast a video's popularity on the internet," explained Knutson, who co-leads the NeuroChoice Initiative of the Stanford Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.

This and related research indicate that some steps of the choice process may prove more useful for broad neuroforecasting than others. By teasing out the specifics of which steps matter, the researchers think neuroforecasting might even apply across groups of different ages, genders, races or cultures when they show similar early neural responses.

Valuable choices

These findings suggest similarities between neuroforecasting how people spend time and how they spend money online, which the team has previously studied in non-traditional markets, including online markets for micro-loans and crowdfunding.

Knutson and his NeuroChoice colleagues have also been investigating neural mechanisms of choice in the context of drug addiction. In the future, they aim to continue exploring when brain data can complement behavioral data, and in which situations.

Whether the topic is giving money or spending time, the researchers hope that a better understanding of how the brain promotes choice will eventually help people eventually align what they actually do with what they want to do.

ANN ARBOR--A clump of grass grows on an outcrop of shale 33,000 years ago. An ostrich pecks at the grass, and atoms taken up from the shale and into the grass become part of the eggshell the ostrich lays.

A member of a hunter-gatherer group living in southern Africa's Karoo Desert finds the egg. She eats it, and cracks the shell into dozens of pieces. Drilling a hole, she strings the fragments onto a piece of sinew and files them into a string of beads.

She gifts the ornaments to friends who live to the east, where rainfall is higher, to reaffirm those important relationships. They, in turn, do the same, until the beads eventually end up with distant groups living high in the eastern mountains.

Thirty-three thousand years later, a University of Michigan researcher finds the beads in what is now Lesotho, and by measuring atoms in the beads, provides new evidence for where these beads were made, and just how long hunter-gatherers used them as a kind of social currency.

In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, U-M paleolithic archeologist Brian Stewart and colleagues establish that the practice of exchanging these ornaments over long distances spans a much longer period of time than previously thought.

"Humans are just outlandishly social animals, and that goes back to these deep forces that selected for maximizing information, information that would have been useful for living in a hunter-gatherer society 30,000 years ago and earlier," said Stewart, assistant professor of anthropology and assistant curator of the U-M Museum of Anthropological Archaeology.

"Ostrich eggshell beads and the jewelry made from them basically acted like Stone Age versions of Facebook or Twitter 'likes,' simultaneously affirming connections to exchange partners while alerting others to the status of those relationships."

Lesotho is a small country of mountain ranges and rivers. It has the highest average of elevation in the continent and would have been a formidable place for hunter-gatherers to live, Stewart says. But the fresh water coursing through the country and belts of resources, stratified by the region's elevation, provided protection against swings in climate for those who lived there, as early as 85,000 years ago.

Anthropologists have long known that contemporary hunter-gatherers use ostrich eggshell beads to establish relationships with others. In Lesotho, archeologists began finding small ornaments made of ostrich eggshell. But ostriches don't typically live in that environment, and the archeologists didn't find evidence of those ornaments being made in that region--no fragments of unworked eggshell, or beads in various stages of production.

So when archeologists began discovering eggshell beads without evidence of production, they suspected the beads arrived in Lesotho through these exchange networks. Testing the beads using strontium isotope analysis would allow the archeologists to pinpoint where they were made.

Strontium-87 is the daughter isotope of the radioactive element rubidium-87. When rubidium-87 decays it produces strontium-87. Older rocks such as granite and gneiss have more strontium than younger rocks such as basalt. When animals forage from a landscape, these strontium isotopes are incorporated into their tissues.

Lesotho is roughly at the center of a bullseye-shaped geologic formation called the Karoo Supergroup. The supergroup's mountainous center is basalt, from relatively recent volcanic eruptions that formed the highlands of Lesotho. Encircling Lesotho are bands of much older sedimentary rocks. The outermost ring of the formation ranges between 325 and 1,000 kilometers away from the Lesotho sites.

To assess where the ostrich eggshell beads were made, the research team established a baseline of strontium isotope ratios--that is, how much strontium is available in a given location--using vegetation and soil samples as well samples from modern rodent tooth enamel from museum specimens collected from across Lesotho and surrounding areas.

According to their analysis, nearly 80% of the beads the researchers found in Lesotho could not have originated from ostriches living near where the beads were found in highland Lesotho.

"These ornaments were consistently coming from very long distances," Stewart said. "The oldest bead in our sample had the third highest strontium isotope value, so it is also one of the most exotic."

Stewart found that some beads could not have come from closer than 325 kilometers from Lesotho, and may have been made as far as 1,000 kilometers away. His findings also establish that these beads were exchanged during a time of climactic upheaval, about 59 to 25 thousand years ago. Using these beads to establish relationships between hunter-gatherer groups ensured one group access to others' resources when a region's weather took a turn for the worse.

"What happened 50,000 years ago was that the climate was going through enormous swings, so it might be no coincidence that that's exactly when you get this technology coming in," Stewart said. "These exchange networks could be used for information on resources, the condition of landscapes, of animals, plant foods, other people and perhaps marriage partners."

Stewart says while archeologists have long accepted that these exchange items bond people over landscapes in the ethnographic Kalahari, they now have firm evidence that these beads were exchanged over huge distances not only in the past, but for over a long period of time. This study places another piece in the puzzle of how we persisted longer than all other humans, and why we became the globe's dominant species.

New international research has found a worrying change in the Indian Ocean's surface temperatures that puts southeast Australia on course for increasingly hot and dry conditions.

The work led by The Australian National University (ANU) and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes has a silver lining, helping to improve our understanding of climate variations and the management of risk caused by Indian Ocean variability.

Lead researcher Professor Nerilie Abram said the phenomenon her team studied, known as the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), was a big player in the severe drought and record hot temperatures last year.

"The 2019 event, known as a positive Indian Ocean Dipole, was a big one. It cut off one of the major sources for southern Australia's winter and spring rainfall, and set up the extremely hot and dry conditions for the terrible fires that ravaged Australia this summer," said Professor Abram from the Research School of Earth Sciences and the Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes at ANU.

The new research published in Nature reveals that these historically rare events have become much more frequent and intense during the 20th Century, and this situation is expected to worsen if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.

The research team, which involved scientists from institutions in Australia, the United States, Indonesia, Taiwan and China, used coral records from the eastern equatorial Indian Ocean to reconstruct Indian Ocean Dipole variability over the last millennium with unprecedented precision.

"Historically, strong events like the one we saw in 2019 have been very rare. Over the reconstruction beginning in the year 1240, we see only 10 of these events, but four of those have occurred in just the last 60 years," Professor Abram said.

Co-researcher Dr Nicky Wright said the research highlighted that the Indian Ocean can harbour events that are even stronger than the extreme conditions seen in 2019.

"In 1675, an event occurred that was up to 42 per cent stronger than the strongest event we have observed so far during the instrumental record, which was in 1997. The terrible impacts of this older severe event can be seen in historical documents from Asia," said Dr Wright from the Research School of Earth Sciences and the Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes at ANU. 

"The 1675 event shows the type of extremes that are possible, even without human-caused climate change. By causing positive Indian Ocean Dipole events to become stronger and more common, we are now upping the odds that an extreme event like this one could happen again."

Co-researcher Professor Matthew England said the research also showed that a persistent, "tight coupling" has existed between the variability of the Indian Ocean Dipole and the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in the Pacific Ocean during the last millennium.

"Our research indicates that while Indian Ocean Dipole and El Niño events can occur independently, periods of large year-to-year swings in Indian Ocean variability also had heightened ENSO variability in the Pacific," said Professor England from the Climate Change Research Centre and the Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes at the University of New South Wales.

"Looking at the tropical oceans in this interconnected way improves our understanding of seasonal to decadal climate variations in regions that profoundly impact Australia, helping us to be better prepared for future climate risks caused by the Indian Ocean Dipole."

Spring is coming, and with it comes the promise of warmer weather, longer days and renewed life.

For residents of the Pacific Northwest, one of the most idyllic scenes of this renewed life is the wildflowers that light up Mount Rainier's subalpine meadows once the winter snowpack finally melts. These floral ecosystems, which typically arrive in summer, are an iconic feature of Mount Rainier, and a major draw for the more than 1 million tourists, hikers and nature-lovers who visit the national park each spring and summer.

But without cuts to our carbon emissions, by the end of this century, scientists expect that snow in the subalpine meadows will melt months earlier due to climate change. New research led by the University of Washington shows that, under those conditions, many visitors would miss the flowers altogether.

The research team made this discovery using crowd-sourced photos of Mount Rainier's subalpine meadows taken from 2009 to 2015 and uploaded to the photo-sharing site Flickr. As they report in a paper published Dec. 9 in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 2015 was an unusually warm, dry year when snow melted and disappeared from the meadows about two months earlier than usual. As a result, wildflower season was shorter and arrived earlier. But Flickr photos showed that visits by people to Mount Rainier in 2015 peaked later than the flowers, after the height of wildflower season.

"We know from park surveys that the wildflowers are a major reason people visit Mt. Rainier National Park," said lead author Ian Breckheimer, a researcher at Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory and Harvard University who conducted this study as a UW doctoral student in biology. "They're an iconic resource, drawing people from around the world."

The team, led by UW biology professor and senior author Janneke Hille Ris Lambers, downloaded and analyzed more than 17,000 photos on Flickr taken in the subalpine region of Mount Rainier National Park from 2009 to 2015. The team used publicly accessible images that contained embedded GPS data, which allowed the team to know where in the park the photos were taken. They scored the images for the presence or absence of blooms from 10 species of wildflowers common to the subalpine meadows.

"These are a very nontraditional source of data, but they proved to be very informative," said Hille Ris Lambers. "It allowed us to see when the flowers were blooming at a lot of different locations around the park."

The team combined the data on wildflower blooms from the photos with snowmelt data -- taken from 190 sensors placed across Mount Rainier -- as well as park visitor data to model the wildflower seasons and peak visitor times from 2009 to 2015. They discovered that the earlier the snowmelt, the higher the "mismatch" between peak wildflower season and peak visitor times.

According to their model, for every 10 days of earlier snowmelt compared to today's average, peak bloom in the subalpine meadows comes 7.1 days earlier and the total bloom season shortened by 0.36 days. People come earlier, too: Peak visits occurred about 5.5 days earlier. But that doesn't keep pace with the flowers. In 2015, when snow melt was about two months earlier, the researchers discovered a 35% decrease in match between peak wildflower season and peak visits to the park compared to a late-melt year like 2011.

The study is among the first to examine the relationships in timing between people and a changing ecosystem, which raises questions for management of parks and preserves -- and how to communicate with the public. The team only measured "mismatch" between wildflowers and visitors after the fact. With additional research, scientists may be able to predict outlying years early, alerting the public to visit sooner than normal to view the meadows.

This isn't just about missed connections between wildflowers and people. Conditions in 2015 were an outlier by today's standards; by the end of this century, scientist predict that 2015-style early snowmelts could be a regular occurrence. Beyond changes in peak bloom times, Hille Ris Lambers' group has shown that in 2015 species bloomed in a different order, creating "reassembled" communities with unknown consequences. The meadows also are facing other stressors as the climate warms.

"These subalpine ecosystems are in real trouble," said Breckheimer. "For example, climate change is allowing trees to encroach into the meadows at Mount Rainier and other sites across the West, and the meadows are not moving uphill as fast as the trees."

It's critical to retain public support for these precious natural resources, Breckheimer added.

"There's a real question whether -- or how much -- we should intervene to protect meadows, by clearing trees through active management, for example, as we keep pushing ecosystems with climate change, and those systems keep getting further out of equilibrium," said Breckheimer. "If visitor peak and flower peaks are at different times, it might affect public support for some of these measures for how public lands are managed in the face of climate change."

Scientists at the University of Southampton have discovered a new way to create one hand of a chiral molecule by using a mechanical bond as a catalyst.

Chiral molecules are two molecules that are mirror images of each other but not identical - much like the left and right human hands. When such molecules are used in pharmaceutical drugs, each "hand" reacts differently in the human body. In some cases whilst one hand treats the illness, the other side can be toxic so being able to make only one hand is extremely important.

Rotaxanes consist of a ring shaped molecule wrapped around a dumbbell shaped axle (like a washer on a bolt). The ring and axle are held together by what we call a mechanical bond, as opposed to chemical bonds that usually connect atoms to form molecules.

In a new study, published in the journal Chem, Professor Steve Goldup from the University of Southampton's School of Chemistry made use of these mechanical bonds to create chiral molecules. Professor Goldup and his team synthesised a chiral rotaxane that could bind to gold atoms; the gold atoms were then used to catalyse a simple chemical reaction.

Professor Goldup said: "Chiral molecules, and how to make a single hand of them have been investigated since the birth of chemistry. Chiral rotaxanes have not been used in these studies to any extent as until recently they were very hard to make in one mirror image form. My group developed a very simple, general concept to make chiral rotaxanes as a single hand. This means we can now start investigating what problems they can help us solve in chemistry, biology and materials science."

Chiral rotaxanes are an ideal environment for catalysts as the structure of a ring wrapped around the axle creates a tightly packed space for a reaction to take place in. The Southampton team were able to use one hand of the mechanical bond to selectively produce the target molecule and the opposite hand to produce the mirror image of the target.

Professor Goldup concluded, "We think the future is very bright for chiral rotaxanes now we can make them. As well as looking into further possibilities for catalysis and broader studies of molecules, we are investigating the how they can be used to potentially produce brighter, longer lasting, low computer power displays."

The research was funded by the European Research Council.

One week is all it takes for a piece of plastic floating in the ocean to begin to smell like turtle food.

New research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill shows that plastics floating in the ocean build a coating of algae and microorganisms that smells edible to turtles. The study, "Odors from marine plastic debris elicit foraging behavior in sea turtles," was published March 9 in the journal Current Biology. The Carolina team worked on the study with lead author Joe Pfaller from the Caretta Research Project in Savannah, Georgia.

"This finding is important because it's the first demonstration that the odor of ocean plastics causes animals to eat them," said Kenneth J. Lohmann, Charles P. Postelle, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Biology at Carolina. "It's common to find loggerhead turtles with their digestive systems fully or partially blocked because they've eaten plastic materials. There also are increasing reports of sea turtles that have become ill and stranded on the beach due to their ingestion of plastic."

The most important thing people can do to help is to prevent plastics from going into the ocean in the first place. Some practical steps include recycling, properly disposing of trash and recyclables after a trip to the beach or after a boat trip, using reusable or paper shopping bags, and buying larger containers of drinks instead of numerous small drink containers held together with plastic rings.

To understand sea turtle behavior around ocean plastics, the research team compared how sea turtles in a lab setting reacted to smelling odors of turtle food, ocean-soaked plastic, clean plastic and water. The turtles ignored the scents of clean plastic and water, but responded to the odors of food and ocean-soaked plastics by showing foraging behavior. This included poking their noses out of the water repeatedly as they tried to smell the food source, and increasing their activity as they searched. The turtles did not ingest plastics during the experiments and were released into the ocean after the study.

"Very young turtles feed at the surface, and plastics that float on the surface of the ocean affect them," said Kayla M. Goforth, a Carolina biology doctoral student who worked on the study. "Older turtles feed further down in the water column, sometimes on the ocean bottom. Regardless of where plastics are distributed in the ocean, turtles are likely to eat them."

The study raises questions about a number of long-term impacts plastics may have on all ocean species, the researchers said.

"In parts of the Pacific Ocean there are huge areas covered with floating plastic debris," Lohmann said. "One concern this study raises is that dense concentrations of plastics may make turtles - or other species - think the area is an abundant source of food. These areas may draw in marine mammals, fish and birds because the area smells like a good foraging ground. Once these plastics are in the ocean, we don't have a good way to remove them or prevent them from smelling like food. The best thing we can do is to keep plastic from getting into the ocean at all."

Uranium is not always the same: depending on whether this chemical element is released by the civil nuclear industry or as fallout from nuclear weapon tests, the ratio of the two anthropogenic, i.e. man-made, uranium isotopes 233U and 236U varies. These results were lately found by an international team grouped around physicists from the University of Vienna and provides a promising new "fingerprint" for the identification of radioactive emission sources. As a consequence, it is also an excellent environmental tracer for ocean currents, as it is shown in Nature Communications.

The oceans naturally contain concentrations of the element uranium (U) in the range of several micrograms per kilogram of water. Due to its dissolved chemical form, uranium is not removed from water by sedimentation, but is transported and mixed together with the corresponding water masses. These chemical properties allow to trace water transport processes in ocean currents, which have a strong influence on our climate.

Uranium as an oceanographic indicator

This also applies to so-called anthropogenic uranium isotopes released by human activities, such as nuclear reprocessing plants, reactor accidents or atmospheric nuclear weapon tests. An advantage of using anthropogenic uranium isotopes for tracking ocean currents is their high sensitivity to small, recent uranium inputs into the large reservoir of natural uranium. By observing the dispersion of trace nuclides from the source of their emission, scientists can deduce the water transport in the neighbouring seas.

The Isotope Physics group at the University of Vienna initiated the analysis of the anthropogenic trace isotope 236U several years ago, which has now increasingly been accepted as an oceanographic tracer by the respective scientific community. However, in systems affected by multiple sources of contamination, such as the Arctic Ocean, a single isotope is not sufficient for tracing ocean currents because too little is known about the emission history of the various sources.

233U/236U - the new isotopic fingerprint

"So we were looking for a second anthropogenic uranium isotope, which is produced during the explosion of nuclear weapons but hardly in conventional nuclear power plants. In terms of nuclear physics, 233U appeared to be a promising candidate," explains Peter Steier, one of the initiators of the study.

The scientists succeeded in analysing smallest quantities of 233U and 236U using accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) at the Vienna Environmental Research Accelerator (VERA). The samples provided by international cooperation partners included a coral core from the Pacific Ocean, a peat bog core from the Black Forest and samples from the Irish and the Baltic Sea. The detection of the extremely low concentrations of 233U, for instance 1 femtogram per gram of coral, was only possible after a major upgrade of the VERA facility.

The hypothesis of the physicists was confirmed, as they found a 233U/236U ratio in samples from the Irish Sea, which is known to be heavily affected by discharges from the Sellafield reprocessing plant, ten times lower than in the samples from the German peat bog where the global fallout of weapons tests had accumulated. The data from the coral and the peat bog core can even be attributed to different phases of the atmospheric nuclear weapons testing programs.

New insights into nuclear weapons fallout

The authors argue that significant amounts of 233U were released either by thermonuclear weapons, in which the isotope is produced by rapid neutron capture in highly enriched uranium, or by the explosion of low efficiency weapons in which 233U was used directly as fuel. "Our experimental data show that the contributions to global weapon fallout as of today's knowledge cannot explain the 233U uranium balance in the bog. This suggests a contribution from the only known 233U bomb tested at the Nevada test site," says first author Karin Hain of the University of Vienna.

A new Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) study is the first-ever population-based study of cancer prevalence in transgender people, estimating 62,530 of the nearly 17 million cancer survivors in the U.S. are transgender.

Published in the journal Cancer, the study found that transgender men were twice as likely as cisgender (that is, not transgender) men to have gotten a cancer diagnosis.

Among cancer survivors, trans men were also nine times more likely to have diabetes and heart disease than cisgender women, seven times more likely to have diabetes than cisgender men, and four times more likely to have cardiovascular disease than cis men--although they were also the least likely to smoke.

Trans women were also much more likely to have diabetes and cardiovascular disease than cis men or cis women. Nonbinary cancer survivors had a particularly high rate of depression, and (possibly as a result) reported much less physical activity and much more heavy drinking.

"We hope these findings are a wake-up call for health care providers that transgender cancer survivors have complex medical needs," says study lead author Dr. Ulrike Boehmer, associate professor of community health sciences at BUSPH.

"Furthermore, in light of recent efforts to legalize discrimination against this population, any health care agency that is not publicly, visibly welcoming transgender individuals is worsening transgender survivors' health care experiences, and possibly augmenting their poor cancer survivorship," she says.

Boehmer and colleagues used 2014-2018 data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System for the 37 states and one territory (Guam) that include gender identity questions on their surveys. The researchers identified 954,908 people who had ever received a cancer diagnosis other than melanoma, including 1,877 transgender women, 1,344 transgender men, 876 nonbinary people, 410,422 cisgender men, and 540,389 cisgender women.

The researchers also found that trans and nonbinary people overall had less education, were less likely to have health insurance, and were more likely to be low-income and have unmet medical needs because of the cost of care. The trans/nonbinary respondents were also less likely to have a personal physician than cisgender women, but not cisgender men.

"The health care system is absolutely failing transgender cancer survivors, primarily because, in the face of such overwhelming evidence of discrimination against this population, there is still no routine data collection about trans status on surveillance or electronic medical records," says study co-author Dr. Scout, adjunct clinical assistant professor of community health sciences at BUSPH and deputy director of the National LGBT Cancer Network, himself a trans man.

"Until these data are collected, we will always be trying to look at this population with our hands tied behind our backs," he says.

Awareness of climate change and its impacts is not enough to move people to action. New research on how people's worldviews affect their perceptions and actions could help policymakers and activists reframe the discussion around climate change mitigation.

Despite a very high level of awareness of climate change and its impacts, people are often hesitant to take action to change their behavior, according to a new study published in the journal Energy and Environment.

In 2015, nations agreed to limit climate change to "well below 2°C" to avoid the worst impacts. However, in order to achieve this climate change mitigation goal, current national targets must be significantly strengthened. This requires support from the public for policy changes, which includes not only acceptance of an energy transition but also willingness to use and to pay for renewable energy sources as well as to actively engage in an energy transition. It also requires individual behavior changes in personal consumption of energy, food, and transportation.

"The major aim of this paper was to understand how awareness about the need for climate change mitigation could be turned into action," says IIASA researcher Nadejda Komendantova, who led the study.

To understand how people's worldviews affect their actions, Nadejda Komendantova and Sonata Neumueller used social science methodology including surveys and interviews of people in three regions of Austria, ranging from rural to semi-rural and suburban.

As a country with a high level of awareness of climate change impacts both nationally and globally, the researchers expected to find broad support for climate change mitigation efforts, and they did. But despite a high, almost universal, level of awareness about the need for climate change mitigation, there was a great heterogeneity in opinions about whose responsibility it is to implement climate change mitigation efforts and how they should be implemented.

"People have different ways of looking at the world, and these views influence their perceptions of risks, benefits and costs of various policy interventions and shape how people act," says Komendantova. Using a social science rubric known as cultural theory, Komendantova and Neumueller translated their interview and survey data into four different worldviews, to categorize the types of opinions into an analyzable framework.

"Cultural theory says that there are four major worldview and discourses: hierarchical, egalitarian, individualistic, or anarchical," explains Komendantova. "For example, representatives of the hierarchical views would prefer the government taking responsibility for the energy transition. The egalitarian would say that everybody should be responsible for energy transition with the major arguments of fair and equal distribution of risks and responsibilities. The representatives of individual discourse would say that it is a matter of personal responsibility and that such things as technology, innovation, and compensation are important."

These differences in worldviews mean that although people may agree on the fundamental truth that climate change is a problem and something should be done, they may differ in how and what policies should be implemented, as well as in their willingness to change their own behavior.

This understanding could help policymakers develop compromise solutions that reflect these various worldviews.

Komendantova notes that the study was small and restricted to one country, but similar methods could provide insight across a broader European or international landscape.

"There are a variety of views on energy policy, and conflicts among these views also exist," says Komendantova. "In order to move from awareness about climate change mitigation to action we must understand the existing variety of worldviews."

March 9, 2020 - Paid maternity leave has major mental and physical health benefits for mothers and children - including reduced rates of postpartum depression and infant mortality, according to a report in the March/April issue of Harvard Review of Psychiatry. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.

"Given the substantial mental and physical health benefits associated with paid leave, as well as favorable results from studies on its economic impact, the United States is facing a clear, evidence-based mandate to create a national paid maternity leave policy," comments lead author Maureen Sayres Van Niel, MD, a reproductive psychiatrist in Cambridge, Mass. "We recommend a national paid maternity leave policy of at least 12 weeks for all mothers."

Studies Show Range of Public Health Benefits of Paid Maternity Leave

The authors analyzed recent national and international studies on the effects of paid maternity leave on the health of mothers and children. "For decades, national paid maternity leave policies of 12 weeks or more have existed in every industrialized country except the United States," according to Dr. Van Niel. "In this review, we show that serious health consequences can occur for women and children in this country without such a policy."

Focusing on 26 experimental or quasi-experimental studies, the review highlights the public health benefits of paid maternity leave in several areas:

Mothers' Mental Health. Paid maternity leave has been linked to significantly lower rates of postpartum maternal depression, a common disorder with serious repercussions for both the mother and child. Other reported benefits include reduced psychological distress, improved mood, and in one study a sharply reduced risk of intimate partner violence.

Children's Mental Health. Maternity leave has positive effects on infant mental health and development - including reducing the risk of postpartum depression and its inherent adverse effects on maternal-infant bonding. Duration of maternity leave has also been linked to the quality of mother-child interactions, which affects the development of attachment, empathy, and later academic performance in the child.

Physical Health. Paid maternity leave is "directly correlated with decreased infant and child mortality." It is also associated with improved attendance at pediatric well-baby visits, more timely immunizations, and a markedly reduced risk of infant rehospitalizations in the first year of life. In addition, paid leave is associated with improved measures of physical health in postpartum women.

Breast-Feeding. Strong evidence has shown that paid maternity leave increases the likelihood of both breastfeeding initiation and duration among mothers who choose to and are able to breastfeed. Paid leave also provides women with a greater opportunity to breastfeed exclusively for six months, consistent with current recommendations.

The authors also cite economic impact studies showing "no substantial negative economic or employment consequences of paid maternal leave." Paid leave also has individual and societal benefits, including labor force attachment, wage stability, and decreased use of public assistance.

The review also highlights a "troubling" disparity: "The United States has a two-tiered system of paid maternity leave: women with moderate-to-high family incomes can more often afford to stay at home with their infants for 12 or more weeks, whereas women with low family incomes cannot afford to do so and must often return to work shortly after giving birth."

"In light of the increasing data that paid leave offers substantial benefits to the health of mothers and children, we recommend that the United States develop a national paid maternity leave policy that would allow all mothers sufficient time to be home with their infants after the birth or arrival of the child, regardless of their employer or socioeconomic status," states Dr. Van Niel. The authors hope the evidence in their review will support ongoing efforts to enact a national paid family leave policy, such as the proposed Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act currently in Congress.

"Many businesses recognize that paid family leave helps to retain talent," says Dr. Christina Mangurian, senior author and Professor and Vice Chair for Diversity and Equity at the UCSF Department of Psychiatry. "Available data now also shows that paid maternity leave is good for the physical and mental health of mothers and their children. So now we know it's not just good for business, it's also good for the health of working families."

A new approach to direct the body to make a specific antibody against HIV led to sustained production of that antibody for more than a year among participants in a National Institutes of Health clinical trial. This drug-delivery technology uses a harmless virus to deliver an antibody gene into human cells, enabling the body to generate the antibody over an extended time. With further development, such a strategy could be applied to prevent and treat a wide variety of infectious diseases, according to the study investigators.

Researchers from NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) reported the findings on March 9 in an oral presentation at the 2020 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI).

Antibodies are immune system proteins that help prevent or clear infections. Traditional vaccines induce the immune system to generate protective antibodies. Another approach to preventing infections is to deliver monoclonal antibodies--preparations of a specific antibody designed to bind to a single target--directly into people. Monoclonal antibodies also are used therapeutically, with many already approved for treating cancer, autoimmune diseases and other conditions and others being evaluated for treatment of infectious diseases, such as Ebola virus disease.

Administering proteins to people requires periodic injections or infusions to retain protective or therapeutic levels, which can be challenging, particularly in resource-limited settings. Delivery of antibody genes using a virus as a carrier, or vector, offers a potential alternative.

"Monoclonal antibodies hold enormous promise for preventing and treating both established and emerging infectious diseases," said NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. "Novel delivery platforms such as viral vectors could facilitate the future development and deployment of antibody-based prophylaxis and therapy, and these findings are a promising first step in that direction."

The drug-delivery system developed by scientists at NIAID's Vaccine Research Center (VRC) uses adeno-associated virus serotype 8 (AAV8) to deliver an antibody gene. AAVs--small viruses that do not cause disease in humans--have proven to be safe, well-tolerated vectors for gene therapy. In a previous study in animal models, VRC researchers found that using AAV8 to deliver genes for antibodies against simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), the monkey equivalent of HIV, led monkeys to safely produce high levels of anti-SIV antibodies and protected them from acquiring SIV.

Building on this preclinical work, researchers designed a Phase 1 clinical trial known as VRC 603. It aims to assess the safety and tolerability of an AAV8 vector carrying an anti-HIV antibody gene in adults living with well-controlled HIV, and to evaluate whether it could cause human cells to produce the antibody. The vector carries the gene for an anti-HIV monoclonal antibody called VRC07, which was originally isolated from the blood of a person with HIV.

VRC07 is a broadly neutralizing antibody (bNAb), meaning it can stop a wide range of HIV strains from infecting human cells in the laboratory. Other clinical studies are underway to determine whether bNAb infusions can protect humans from acquiring HIV. Scientists also are evaluating whether combinations of HIV bNAbs can suppress the virus in people living with HIV.

The CROI presentation by Joseph P. Casazza, M.D., Ph.D., principal investigator of VRC 603, described initial results from the first eight participants in the ongoing trial, which is being conducted at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Each of these individuals, aged 30 to 60 years, received a single dose by intramuscular injection of one of three different dose levels of AAV8-VRC07. They continued taking daily antiretroviral therapy.

Following injection with AAV8-VRC07, all eight participants produced VRC07 at levels detectable in the blood. VRC07 production reached an early peak four to six weeks after injection, then decreased, and slowly began to increase again roughly 16 weeks after the injection. The researchers have monitored the five participants who received low or intermediate AAV8-VRC07 doses for one and a half to two years. For three of these five individuals, antibody levels one year after injection were higher than those observed at four to six weeks. The three volunteers who received the highest AAV8-VRC07 dose have so far been monitored for five months to one year. Two produced VRC07 at concentrations higher than those seen in the low and intermediate dose groups.

Study participants have not experienced any major side effects due to AAV8-VRC07. Some volunteers experienced transient mild tenderness at the injection site or mild muscle pain.

"To the best of our knowledge, this marks the first time that an AAV-based technology to deliver an antibody gene has resulted in safe and sustained levels of that antibody in blood," said NIAID VRC Director John Mascola, M.D. "We hope that further development of this technology will yield a drug-delivery strategy applicable to a broad range of infectious diseases."

Administration of monoclonal antibody-based therapies sometimes results in a person's immune system developing antibodies against the therapy. Only three of the eight VRC 603 participants developed antibodies against VRC07; it is not yet clear whether these anti-drug antibodies could reduce VRC07's ability to neutralize HIV. The VRC 603 participants' HIV was kept under control with continued antiretroviral therapy during the trial.

The concentrations of VRC07 observed in the study participants were lower than the antibody concentrations observed in animal studies of the AAV8-based technology. The VRC researchers are analyzing data from VRC 603 to better understand the factors that determine how much bNAb is produced by human cells. They also are continuing to monitor the VRC 603 participants and to enroll new volunteers into the trial.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. (March 9, 2020) - A new policy report, Electronic Registration Systems for Cooling Towers - Improving Public Health and Sustainability Outcomes, published by the Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN) proposes a standardized yet flexible template for cooling tower registries that are designed to improve health outcomes, address disparity in affected populations, and increase water and energy efficiency.

NSF Health Sciences LLC, an NSF International company, and GroveWare Technologies developed the report for USDN with workshop input from more than 20 federal, state, provincial, city health, environmental, sustainability, water and/or building agencies.

Cooling towers are the point where heat extracted from a building is dissipated to the atmosphere through an evaporative process. As such, they are a critical component of many cooling systems in commercial, industrial, health care, hospitality and residential facilities. There are more than 2 million cooling towers in the United States, making them more common than elevators, yet much less regulated, according to the report.

Poorly maintained cooling towers can disperse Legionella through contaminated water droplets that are created as part of the cooling process. Once inhaled, the bacteria can cause Legionnaires' disease, an acute form of pneumonia, and the less severe Pontiac fever. According to a study published in April 2018 in Current Environmental Health Reports, cooling towers were implicated or suspected in the majority of Legionnaires' disease outbreak-associated deaths examined during the study period between 2006-2017.

With Legionnaires' disease at a record high, the report argues that cities, states and water utilities should create electronic cooling tower registration systems to improve surveillance and response to cases, as well as to prevent exposure to Legionella bacteria by encouraging proper maintenance of cooling towers.

Additionally, since poor energy conservation practices increase water demand on buildings, registries are an important sustainability tool that can help evaluate the effectiveness of maintenance plans and identify areas for improved efficiency, the report highlights.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported a record number of 9,933 Legionnaires' cases in 2018, a more than eightfold increase since 2000. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) in a 2019 report estimated as many as 70,000 people per year in the United States alone may suffer from the disease, and recommended adoption of cooling tower registries to help prevent or to rapidly respond to outbreaks. Response time is critical in an outbreak and proactively knowing the locations of cooling towers can help public health investigators pinpoint the source for remediation.

According to the CDC, one in 10 cases is fatal, and 90% of the outbreaks are preventable.

"Establishing a cooling tower registry is the crucial first step to dramatically improve the ability to meet public health and sustainability goals. This touch-stone document provides the scientific basis for creating cooling tower registries and the road map to ensure their successful implementation," said Chris Boyd, General Manager of Building Water Health at NSF Health Sciences.

Most North American cities do not track the location of cooling towers and are "forced to rely on imprecise methodologies during public health emergencies," the report says, adding that there is a "continued tolerance of widely divergent maintenance practices by building owners."

"Cooling tower registries are a demonstrably effective and proactive tool for improving public health and fulfilling water efficiency goals," said Patrick Ryan, M.Sc., P.Eng., Chief Building Official from Vancouver (Canada), a key participant city in the new report.

According to the report, registries provide municipalities with a management tool for maintenance record-keeping and support to building owners to meet regulations.

"The City of Vancouver is a true leader in North America in advancing public health measures in urban water systems. The uptake of this work is incredible to watch, proving the need for resources to support city inventory of cooling towers to prevent Legionella outbreaks. USDN is pleased to have been able to provide support for such an important effort," said Nils Moe, USDN Executive Director.

New York City was the first U.S. city to create an electronic cooling tower registry system after a large outbreak in 2015 that sickened 138 people and led to 16 deaths. A handful of other cities and states, including Austin, Texas; Hamilton, Canada; Vancouver, Canada; the State of New York; Quebec, Canada; and Victoria, Australia, now require cooling towers to be registered. National registries also exist in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Hong Kong and Singapore.

The report details IT specifications to create and rapidly implement an electronic cooling tower registration system.

"Technology plays a key role in nurturing a healthy urban living environment. The USDN workshop provided us the opportunity to share our experience deploying the New York City Registration Portal with participating governments and provided attendees with a roadmap for a successful program implementation," said Hrair Achkarian, President and CEO of GroveWare Technologies Inc., the software firm that developed New York City's cooling tower registration system.

Registries can also be a crucial tool to measure key sustainability performance indicators, aiding jurisdictions in evaluating the effectiveness of a building's water conservation plans and identifying areas for improved energy efficiency.

Cooling towers can be a significant source of water demand for a building, representing 20-50% of total water usage, according to the report, which added that poor management practices result in millions of wasted gallons of water per year in a single cooling tower. In Los Angeles alone, for example, it is estimated that more than two billion gallons of water per year are wasted, according to the report.

The report reflects information collected from participants in webinars on April 15, May 17 and July 16, 2019; as well as a two-day workshop conducted Sept. 9-10, 2019, at the annual Legionella Conference in Los Angeles co-hosted by NSF Health Sciences and the National Environmental Health Association. NSF and GroveWare also conducted interviews with several agencies participating in the USDN project to gain insight into what criteria and factors were critical to their public health and sustainability missions.

NSF Health Sciences is presenting the findings of the report at upcoming events, including the AWWA Sustainability Conference in March 2020 in Minneapolis, AWWA ACE in June 2020 in Orlando and the National Environmental Health Association annual meeting in July 2020 in New York City. Public agencies interested in receiving a training/workshop on cooling tower registration systems, Legionnaires' disease outbreak response investigations and/or sustainability strategies for cooling tower systems should contact NSF Health Sciences LLC's building water health team at +1.734.769.8010. Read the report with a full list of participant cities at USDN and NSF.

The European Union is currently deciding on funding guidelines for its common agricultural policy for the next seven years. There is a lot of money at stake: in 2019, the EU spent 58 billion euros, a good third of its annual budget, on funding agriculture and rural development. These public funds are primarily used to guarantee farmers' incomes, including intensive agriculture.

According to the World Biodiversity Council (IPBES), intensive agriculture is the number one cause of biodiversity loss and associated ecosystem services that are essential for human well-being. For example, the decline in numbers of insects leads to decreased pollination of food plants or a lack of plant pest control through natural enemies. Intensive farming also promotes emission of climate gases and contributes to soil and water pollution.

Public awareness of the value of biological diversity is growing, and, at the same time, so is public rejection of the EU's common agricultural policy (CAP). According to a 2016 survey carried out on behalf of the EU Commission, 92 percent of the citizens surveyed and 64 percent of the farmers considered the CAP funding for environmental and climate protection to be insufficient.

Many scientists from across Europe share these public concerns. "The post-2020 CAP, as proposed by the European Commission, is an inadequate response to environmental and sustainability challenges, and makes a business-as-usual scenario very likely," write the authors of the position paper. Twenty-one ecologists, economists and agricultural scientists drafted the position paper and posted it in the form of a petition on the Internet in autumn last year. Over 3,600 scientists, from all 27 EU countries and 36 others, have signed the petition, some of them well-known people from society and public authorities. The petition has now been closed and the position paper with the list of signatories published. A more in-depth version of the text, with specific proposals for implementation, appears in the latest issue of the journal People and Nature. [The statements in this press release refer to the signed position paper.]

The action was coordinated by researchers from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) and the University of Rostock.

The scientists are concerned that the already inadequate environmental requirements within the current reform proposals could be even further restricted. This is apparent from the amendments tabled by the European Parliament Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development and the EU Council - as representatives of the Member States - according to which a number of environmental constraints are to be reduced or lifted altogether.

"The EU is contradicting itself by asserting that the next CAP will be better for the environment and rural areas, while at the same time, cutting the budget for doing just that," says co-initiator and first author of the position paper Dr Guy Pe'er, ecologist at the iDiv research centre and at the UFZ.

The researchers and signatories are urging that scientific data be taken into account in the current revision of the CAP. "The knowledge necessary for a transition to sustainable European agriculture is available," they write in the position paper. This knowledge should now be used "... to meet citizens' demands for sustainable agriculture and to remedy systemic weaknesses in the CAP."

Back in 2017, Pe'er and other authors of the new position paper carried out a 'fitness check' to check the currently expiring CAP for effectiveness and efficiency, and identified major shortcomings. In a subsequent analysis, published in the scientific journal Science in August 2019, the scientists examined the current EU Commission reform proposals for possible improvements and drew the conclusion that the next CAP may likely perform even worse than the current one. The current position paper is based on workshops with experts including representatives from society and public authorities. Based on these, the authors come up with a list of recommendations for the EU and its Member States. The authors are now getting great support from many other European scientists and CAP experts.

With their position paper, the authors present ten measures for an improved CAP. Their recommendations include, among others, a demand for adequate funds for reducing agricultural greenhouse gas emissions (which are currently increasing), for effective protection of natural habitats and biological diversity, more efficient assessment of the performance of implemented measures, and a more transparent EU agricultural policy that should involve all stakeholders rather than protect narrow interests.

A top priority, the authors say, is to transfer the so-called direct payments to farmers into payments for activities that serve public goods and societal expectations. "These direct payments are primarily used to guarantee farmers' incomes," says agricultural economist and last author of the position paper Prof Dr Sebastian Lakner from the University of Rostock. "This prevents these resources being spent more wisely. Direct payments do little to help achieve environmental goals." More appropriate measures could include the conservation and restoration of small-scale landscape structures with elements such as flower strips, hedges and grassland. Many birds, insects and mammals benefit from this, which in turn also benefits agriculture.

With 40 billion euros annually, direct payments to farmers take up 70 percent of the EU's agricultural budget. The money is distributed based on the size of the area being cultivated without any significant relationship to sustainability or social standards - the bigger the area, the higher the funding. In their 'fitness test', the researchers assessed the direct payments as inefficient, harmful to the climate and environment, and socially unjust.

"Currently, there is a gap between the green aspirations of these payments and reality of the CAP," says agricultural economist Lakner. "Although the EU claims that 40 percent of payments (including direct payments) are climate-friendly, only 18 percent of the EU budget can be linked to any environmental actions at all, and not all environmental instruments are efficient. Instead, direct payments drive up land prices and create a difficult business environment particularly for the less competitive operators."

The position paper also refers to the 'European Green Deal' announced last December by EU Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen promising a "... climate-neutral Europe and the protection of our natural habitat ..." by 2050. The authors write that "A restructuring of the CAP to effectively support farmers in adapting to the challenges of sustainability would demonstrate the new Commission's commitment, but such a change requires political courage." They call on the Commission, Parliament and Council to step up and fulfil their responsibility to protect European agricultural systems, landscapes and people.