Culture

Chronic psychosocial stress--which involves a pathway called the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA axis)--may contribute to the development of Alzheimer's disease. A new review published in Biological Reviews describes how environmental and genetic factors can impact individuals' HPA axis, and ultimately their risk of Alzheimer's disease.

The review also proposes a mechanism by which genetic factors that influence the HPA axis may also affect inflammation, a key driver of neurodegeneration.

"What we know is that chronic stress does affect many biological pathways within our body. There is an intimate interplay between exposure to chronic stress and pathways influencing the body's reaction to such stress," said senior author David Groth, PhD, of Curtin University, in Australia. "Genetic variations within these pathways can influence the way the brain's immune system behaves leading to a dysfunctional response. In the brain, this leads to a chronic disruption of normal brain processes, increasing the risk of subsequent neurodegeneration and ultimately dementia."

June is Alzheimer's & Brain Awareness Month.

In a study published in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research, investigators developed and validated a genetic risk score for predicting the onset and severity of the most common type of scoliosis in adolescents--called adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS). AIS causes spinal deformities in as many as 3% of youth, and because its heritability is high, genetic data could help improve detection.

Use of the score may help clinicians identify children at risk of developing AIS who could benefit from preventive therapies.

"We found that a risk score based on genome-wide association study data could predict not only susceptibility to AIS, but also its severity. We hope our findings will be useful for personalized medicine," said senior author Chikashi Terao, MD, PhD, of the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences, in Japan.

June is Scoliosis Awareness Month.

Viral mutations during the COVID-19 pandemic could cause the SARS-CoV-2 virus to become more dangerous. A new study published in Genetic Epidemiology has examined the genetic code of SARS-CoV-2 viruses that have infected patients, looking for links between different mutations and patient deaths.

For the study, investigators analyzed 7,548 SARS-CoV-2 genomes of COVID-19 patients worldwide and looked for an association between genomic variants and mortality. In total, 29,891 locations in the viral genome were assessed.

One location was significantly linked with patient mortality. Mutations at this location cause changes in part of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which plays a key role in viral entry into host cells.

"When, in the fall of 2020, we applied methodology from genome-wide association studies to COVID-19 genomes, we noticed one locus in the COVID-19 genomes from Brazil that was associated with mortality and that later became part of the definition of the P.1 strain from Brazil," said co-lead author Georg Hahn, PhD, of Harvard University. The P1. strain was behind a deadly COVID-19 surge in the Latin American country. It's more contagious and more resistant to antibodies than the original strain.

New research published in the Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine indicates that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, produces microRNAs that can have impacts on infected cells. MicroRNAs are genetic molecules that prevent the production of particular proteins by binding to and destroying messenger RNAs that code for those proteins.

Investigators found that the virus' microRNAs affect individuals' respiratory system, immune response, and vitamin D pathways. Understanding these impacts could provide new insights related to SARS-CoV-2 infection, pathogenesis, and treatment.

"Our finding highlighted genes' involvement in three crucial molecular pathways and may help develop new therapeutic targets related to SARS-CoV-2," the authors wrote.

An article published in the Journal of School Health stresses that food literacy--understanding the impact of food choices on our health, environment, and economy--should be a priority for K-12 schools during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

The authors note that it is essential for a person to be food literate to achieve healthy eating. They stress that the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated and highlighted pre-existing health inequalities that are largely driven by socioeconomic and environmental factors. Also, addressing the learning gap between children from lower-income and higher-income families, which has been widened by COVID-19, must include efforts to enhance health and food literacy in schools. The researchers offer a model that can serve as a reference for schools as they strive to advance their health and food literacy agendas.

"Similar to health literacy, food literacy involves many skills and is connected to other literacies that help us make health decisions and take actions," said lead author Sandra D. Vamos, EdD, EdS, MSc, of Western Michigan University. "Our conceptual model as a visual tool draws connections between relevant theories and constructs, which can help guide school-wide thinking and inter-related health and food literacy efforts, whether it be through practice opportunities, research, policy, or interventions."

Boston, MA - Using genome-wide association studies (GWAS) methodology to analyze whole-genome sequencing data of SARS-CoV-2 mutations and COVID-19 mortality data can identify highly pathogenic variants of the virus that should be flagged for containment, according to Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and MIT researchers.

Using this biostatistical methodology, the researchers pinpointed a mutation in the variant known as P.1, or Gamma, as being linked to increased mortality and, potentially, greater transmissibility, higher infection rates, and increased pathogenicity before the P.1 variant had been identified.

The team's methodology is described online on June 23, 2021 in the journal Genetic Epidemiology.

"Based on our experience, GWAS methodology might provide suitable tools that could be used to analyze potential links between mutations at specific locations in viral genomes and disease outcome," said Christoph Lange, professor of biostatistics at Harvard Chan School and senior author of the paper. "This could enable better real-time detection of novel, deleterious variants/new viral strains in pandemics."

The first patients in Brazil with the P.1 variant were documented in January 2021 and within a few weeks the variant caused a spike in cases in Manaus, Brazil. The city had already been hard hit by the pandemic in May 2020, and researchers thought that the city's residents had achieved population immunity because so many people in the area had developed antibodies for the virus during that initial wave. Instead, P.1, which has several mutations in the spike protein the virus uses to attach to and invade a host cell, caused a second wave of infections and seemed to have higher transmissibility and be more likely to cause death than the earlier variants seen in the area.

In September 2020, several months before the first P.1 patient was documented, the Harvard Chan School and MIT team repurposed methodology used in GWAS, which are widely used to link certain genetic variations with specific diseases, to tease apart the relative pathogenicity of various SARS-CoV-2 mutations. The team looked for links between each mutation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus's single-stranded RNA and mortality in 7,548 COVID-19 patients. Data for the study came from the global initiative on sharing avian influenza data (GISAID) database, which contains the genetic sequence and related clinical and epidemiological data associated with SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses.

The researchers found one mutation--at locus 25,088bp in the virus's genome--that alters the spike protein and was linked to a significant increase in mortality in COVID-19 patients. The team flagged the variant with this mutation, which was later identified as part of P.1.

The team's biostatistical methodology should have broader applications beyond the P.1 variant and SARS-CoV-2, according to the researchers.

"We expect that this approach would work in similar scenarios involving other diseases, provided the quality of the data collected in public databases is sufficiently high," said Georg Hahn, research associate and instructor of biostatistics at Harvard Chan School and co-first author of the paper.

A new United Nations report calls for an urgent change in the way the world's oceans are managed.

The report from the International Resource Panel, hosted by the UN Environment Programme, raises concerns that if changes are not made quickly, the consequences will be dire.

The Governing Coastal Resources Report was launched today at an event addressed by Ambassador Peter Thomson, UN Secretary-General's Special Envoy for the Ocean. It outlines the effect land-based human activities have on the marine environment.

Put into context - 80 per cent of marine and coastal pollution originates on land, but there are very few, if any, truly effective governance mechanisms that manage land-ocean interactions. The report provides policy makers with options to help reduce the effect of land-based activities on coastal resources and support a transition to a sustainable ocean-based economy.

"The report draws together an evidence base that demonstrates beyond question the need for enhanced governance coordination between terrestrial activities and marine resources," said Izabella Teixeira and Janez Potočnik, Co-Chairs of the International Resource Panel.

Lead author of the report - Steve Fletcher, Professor of Ocean Policy and Economy and Director of the Sustainability and the Environment research theme at the University of Portsmouth, said: "There is no doubt that the future of our oceans are at risk, and so is the critical role they play in supporting life on Earth and human wellbeing, as well as regulating the climate. This is a global issue in which isolated interventions will have minimal impact. Systemic change is the key to success by bringing together countries, governments, business and communities to take collective action."

Professor Fletcher, who is also Director of the University's Revolution Plastics initiative, added: "We've got to stop looking at the problem in a fragmented way - land-based activities in one country may contribute to degradation of coastal resources in another region. This should now be a global priority where the most impactful land-based activities are prioritised for urgent action and so generating the most benefit most quickly."

The report sends five key messages to world policy makers:

Living coastal resources are most threatened by land-based activities. Agriculture, ports and harbours and aquaculture are particularly impactful activities.

All parts of the blue economy are vulnerable to changes in coastal resources arising from land-based activities, particularly fishing, aquaculture and tourism.

Existing land-sea governance approaches cannot cope with the impacts on coastal resources created by land-based activities.

Land-sea governance urgently needs to be strengthened to protect coastal resources from the impacts of land-based activities and to support the transition to a sustainable blue economy.

Tackling the impacts of land-based activities on coastal resources is a global priority.

The report also provides policy makers with five options for strengthening existing land-sea governance structures:

Ecosystem-based management should be a guiding principle of coastal resource governance as it provides a holistic approach to the consideration of all influences on coastal resources.

Existing area-based management tools, with enhancement and adaptation, should be used to counteract the impacts of land-based activities on coastal resources.

Improved coordinating mechanisms are needed to overcome fragmented governance between sectors and between terrestrial and marine governance arrangements.

Implementation-focused capacity development programmes should be formulated and disseminated to target land-sea governance practitioners.

Filling evidence gaps, particularly related to the impacts of land-based activities on abiotic coastal resources, should be prioritised and their implications for effective governance determined.

Using data for more than 500 young stars observed with the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA), scientists have uncovered a direct link between protoplanetary disk structures--the planet-forming disks that surround stars--and planet demographics. The survey proves that higher mass stars are more likely to be surrounded by disks with "gaps" in them and that these gaps directly correlate to the high occurrence of observed giant exoplanets around such stars. These results provide scientists with a window back through time, allowing them to predict what exoplanetary systems looked like through each stage of their formation.

"We found a strong correlation between gaps in protoplanetary disks and stellar mass, which can be linked to the presence of large, gaseous exoplanets," said Nienke van der Marel, a Banting fellow in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, and the primary author on the research. "Higher mass stars have relatively more disks with gaps than lower mass stars, consistent with the already known correlations in exoplanets, where higher mass stars more often host gas-giant exoplanets. These correlations directly tell us that gaps in planet-forming disks are most likely caused by giant planets of Neptune mass and above."

Gaps in protoplanetary disks have long been considered as overall evidence of planet formation. However, there has been some skepticism due to the observed orbital distance between exoplanets and their stars. "One of the primary reasons that scientists have been skeptical about the link between gaps and planets before is that exoplanets at wide orbits of tens of astronomical units are rare. However, exoplanets at smaller orbits, between one and ten astronomical units, are much more common," said Gijs Mulders, assistant professor of astronomy at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Santiago, Chile, and co-author on the research. "We believe that planets that clear the gaps will migrate inwards later on."

The new study is the first to show that the number of gapped disks in these regions matches the number of giant exoplanets in a star system. "Previous studies indicated that there were many more gapped disks than detected giant exoplanets," said Mulders. "Our study shows that there are enough exoplanets to explain the observed frequency of the gapped disks at different stellar masses."

The correlation also applies to star systems with low-mass stars, where scientists are more likely to find massive rocky exoplanets, also known as Super-Earths. Van der Marel, who will become an assistant professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands beginning September 2021 said, "Lower mass stars have more rocky Super-Earths--between an Earth mass and a Neptune mass. Disks without gaps, which are more compact, lead to the formation of Super-Earths."

 This link between stellar mass and planetary demographics could help scientists identify which stars to target in the search for rocky planets throughout the Milky Way. "This new understanding of stellar mass dependencies will help to guide the search for small, rocky planets like Earth in the solar neighborhood," said Mulders, who is also a part of the NASA-funded Alien Earths team. "We can use the stellar mass to connect the planet-forming disks around young stars to exoplanets around mature stars. When an exoplanet is detected, the planet-forming material is usually gone. So the stellar mass is a 'tag' that tells us what the planet-forming environment might have looked like for these exoplanets."

And what it all comes down to is dust. "An important element of planet formation is the influence of dust evolution," said van der Marel. "Without giant planets, dust will always drift inwards, creating the optimal conditions for the formation of smaller, rocky planets close to the star."

The current research was conducted using data for more than 500 objects observed in prior studies using ALMA's high-resolution Band 6 and Band 7 antennas. At present, ALMA is the only telescope that can image the distribution of millimeter-dust at high enough angular resolution to resolve the dust disks and reveal its substructure, or lack thereof. "Over the past five years, ALMA has produced many snapshot surveys of nearby star-forming regions resulting in hundreds of measurements of disk dust mass, size, and morphology," said van der Marel. "The large number of observed disk properties has allowed us to make a statistical comparison of protoplanetary disks to the thousands of discovered exoplanets. This is the first time that a stellar mass dependency of gapped disks and compact disks has been successfully demonstrated using the ALMA telescope."

"Our new findings link the beautiful gap structures in disks observed with ALMA directly to the properties of the thousands of exoplanets detected by the NASA Kepler mission and other exoplanet surveys," said Mulders. "Exoplanets and their formation help us place the origins of the Earth and the Solar System in the context of what we see happening around other stars." 

A new UC Riverside study finds geckos are fierce hunters whether or not their tails are attached to their bodies.

Geckos and other lizards can distract predators by quickly dropping their tails. The tail vertebrae are perforated, making it easier to disconnect them without any formation of scar tissue or loss of blood. Though this ability can keep lizards from being eaten, the maneuver is performed at a cost.

"Other studies have documented the negative effects of tail loss on lizards' ability to run, jump, mate, and reproduce," said UCR biologist Marina Vollin, lead author of the study. "However, few have examined their ability to capture food when they lose their tails, which is critical for regenerating the tail and for overall survival."

To help fill this gap in understanding, Vollin and Tim Higham, an associate professor in UCR's Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology, observed intact and newly tailless geckos on the hunt. Their work is published in a recent Integrative and Comparative Biology journal article.

The researchers found that geckos successfully captured crickets about 77% of the time both before and after losing tails -- a surprising retention of accuracy since tails appear to help stabilize gecko body positions during and after a strike.

"The geckos were much slower without tails, and their attack strikes much more awkward," Vollin said.

Western banded geckos, native to the southwestern U.S. and Mexico, are one of the few reptiles that help control scorpion populations.

In this study, the geckos were observed hunting crickets in artificial enclosures. Vollin and Higham are planning future studies in which they hope to observe geckos hunting in the wild and feeding on other small insects.

"It is very possible that geckos suffer a loss in feeding performance and success following autotomy in nature given the complexity of the habitat and more room for the prey to escape," Higham said.

They'll also study whether geckos are able to fully regain their agility once their tails have regenerated, which can take up to a month.

"It's important to get a sense of how they operate in nature, where additional elements could affect whether they have more difficulty capturing prey," Vollin said.

Understanding how lizards like the Western banded gecko are able to survive carries a significance beyond the lizards themselves. Though they eat a variety of small insects, they also serve as a key food source for birds, snakes, and other predatory mammals.

"I've heard them referred to as 'nature's popcorn,' because other animals can eat a bunch of them at once, they're abundant, and easy to acquire," Vollin said. "They're a big part of the base of the food chain."

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Americans consistently believe that poor African Americans are more likely to move up the economic ladder than they actually are, a new study shows.

People also overestimate how likely poor white people are to get ahead economically, but to a much lesser extent than they do for Black people.

"It's no surprise that most people in our society believe in the American Dream of working hard and succeeding economically," said Jesse Walker, co-author of the study and assistant professor of marketing at The Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business.

"But many people don't know how much harder it is for African Americans to achieve that dream than it is for white people."

The good news in the study was that making people aware of economic racial disparities, or merely having them reflect on the unique challenges that Black Americans face in the United States, helped people calibrate their beliefs about economic mobility.

Walker conducted the study with Shai Davidai, assistant professor of management at Columbia Business School at Columbia University. Their findings were published this week in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

The researchers conducted six studies with a total of 1,761 U.S. adults, who participated online.

In one study, they asked participants to estimate the chances that a randomly selected child born to a family in the lowest income quintile (0 to 20%) would rise to one of the four higher income quintiles. They made two predictions, one for a white child and one for a Black child.

Results showed that participants overestimated upward mobility for the white child by about 5%, but overestimated mobility for the Black child by about 16%. white Americans' actual likelihood of moving up from the bottom quintile is 69%, compared to 52% for Black Americans.

The researchers also measured how likely the participants thought the randomly selected poor child would be able to rise to the top of the economic heap - one of the two highest income quintiles (those in the top 40% in terms of income). Here participants again overestimated the odds of the Black child reaching those heights, but actually underestimated the chances of the white child doing so.

It wasn't just white Americans who held these misperceptions. A separate study found that Black participants were similarly inaccurate in their estimation of a Black child's probability of moving out of poverty.

While the results cannot say why this happened, Davidai said it may be that Black Americans - particularly those in the lower economic groups themselves - want to believe in their chance at economic success.

"No one wants to believe there is no American Dream out there for them," Davidai said.

Results from other studies in the series suggested that people can more accurately assess the chances of poor Black people moving up if they are reminded of economic racial disparities or even just think about the problems Black people face in the United States.

In one study, participants were shown one of two graphs before they estimated the probability of poor white or Black Americans moving up economically. One showed the distribution of wealth by income quintiles, revealing that the richest 20% of Americans own 81% of private wealth.

The remaining participants were shown a graph of the distribution of wealth in the United States by ethnicity, revealing that white people own 89% of private wealth, compared to Black people, who own 1.3%.

In this study, those who were shown the graph highlighting general economic inequality overestimated a poor Black person's chances of moving up the economic ladder by about 20%. But those who were shown the graph revealing racial economic inequality were quite accurate in their beliefs about economic mobility.

"Making people think about the racial economic disparities in this country made them much better able to estimate the real chances of Black Americans getting ahead economically," Davidai said.

Another study showed that considering the general social challenges that Black Americans face in the United States - without any reference to economics - made people more accurate in their mobility estimates.

But it wasn't just information about the current situation of African Americans that influenced how participants viewed the possibility that a Black child could get ahead economically.

In one study, participants read one of two short articles: one discussing the amount of progress Black people have made in the United States in the past century, or one about how much progress still needs to be made toward racial equality. Both focused on social rather than economic progress.

People who read the positive story about racial progress believed that a Black child born to a family in the poorest 20% of Americans was more than twice as likely to move up the economic ladder than those who read about the lack of progress.

Still, people who read either article overestimated the chances of the Black child from a poor family achieving more economic success. Reading either article didn't change what people thought about the white child's chance of moving up.

"Because people think Black people have made progress toward social equality, they assume that there must have been positive changes in economic mobility, too," Davidai said.

In this study, participants who were Black showed the same tendencies to overestimate the Black child's chances of success as did white participants, no matter which article they read - but they were much more accurate than the white people.

Overall, the results of the six studies have important implications, Walker said.

"If you think someone is more likely to move up the economic ladder than they actually are, it is a lot easier to blame them for not being successful," he said.

"These misperceptions may make people less likely to support policies that may actually help African Americans move up and address the large racial wealth gap that exists in America."

A research team led by Professor Jang-Sik Lee of Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) has successfully developed the halide perovskite-based memory with ultra-fast switching speed. The findings from this study were published in Nature Communications on June 10, 2021.

Resistive switching memory is a promising contender for next-generation memory device due to its advantages of simple structure and low power consumption. Various materials have been previously studied for resistive switching memory. Among them, halide perovskites are receiving much attention for use in the memory because of low operation voltage and high on/off ratio. However, halide perovskite-based memory devices have limitations of slow switching speed which hinder their practical application in memory devices.

To this, the researchers at POSTECH (Prof. Jang-Sik Lee, Prof. Donghwa Lee, Youngjun Park, and Seong Hun Kim) have successfully developed ultra-fast switching memory devices using halide perovskites by using a combined method of first-principles calculations and experimental verification. From a total of 696 compounds of halide perovskites candidates, Cs3Sb2I9 with a dimer structure was selected as the best candidate for memory application. To verify the calculation results, memory devices using the dimer-structured Cs3Sb2I9 were fabricated. They were then operated with an ultra-fast switching speed of 20 ns, which was more than 100 times faster than the memory devices that used the layer-structured Cs3Sb2I9. In addition, many of the perovskites contain lead (Pb) in the materials which has been raised as an issue. In this work, however, the use of lead-free perovskite eliminates such environmental problems.

"This study provides an important step toward the development of resistive switching memory that can be operated at an ultra-fast switching speed," remarked Professor Lee on the significance of the research. He added, "this work offers an opportunity to design new materials for memory devices based on calculations and experimental verification."

People who have contact with other social groups are more likely to be committed to social justice. However, an international study led by the University of Zurich has shown that for this to be the case, power relations and discrimination must be actively addressed and group-specific needs must be met. It is important that disadvantaged group members, such as racial minorities and LGBTIQ+ individuals, are given a voice, and that those who belong to advantaged groups do not feel labeled as biased.

People who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against because they belong to a particular group often join forces with other disadvantaged people to fight together for better rights. Prominent examples of such political engagement are the women's rights movement, Black Lives Matter, or LGBTIQ+ activism. In a newly published study, Tabea Hässler and Johannes Ullrich of the University of Zurich, together with 41 other researchers from 23 countries, conducted a survey with more than 11,000 individuals to better understand the relations between intergroup contact and advantaged and disadvantaged group members' support for social change.

Chatting about the weather is not enough

The results show that people are more committed to tackling inequality when they are in contact with each other across group boundaries. However, it matters how the interactions are experienced and how the injustices are perceived: If members of socially disadvantaged groups simply have pleasant, positive exchanges with people who are not themselves discriminated against, they tend to be even less committed to fighting for social justice and improving their own situation. "They get the deceptive impression that their own group no longer suffers so much discrimination," says study first author Tabea Hässler, explaining the phenomenon. "It is therefore important that social inequalities and discrimination between different social groups are actively addressed and named."

Empowerment thanks to active listening

This was confirmed in the study: If disadvantaged minorities felt they were given a voice by the advantaged majority, they were more likely to advocate for social justice. "In our research field we call this empowerment," says Johannes Ullrich, professor of social psychology at UZH. "By that, we mean that disadvantaged people are actually actively listened to when they talk about discrimination and disadvantage."

At the same time, the study showed that majority group members were more committed to social justice when, during intergroup contact, they felt accepted by minorities and were not assumed to be biased.

Diverse group constellations examined

In their study, the researchers surveyed more than 11,000 respondents and examined a variety of group constellations, including, for example, heterosexual individuals and members of sexual or gender minorities, migrants and their respective host societies, as well as indigenous groups and religious minorities. In all cases, empowerment of the members of minority groups was positively related to their willingness to advocate for their own group.

"Overall, our findings suggest that contact across group boundaries fosters social change when it meets the targeted needs of disadvantaged and advantaged groups," Ulrich says.

Rather than levelling inequality, as the Great Depression did, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated inequalities around the world allowing some wealthy investors to benefit from the crisis and make a fortune on the misfortune of others.

During March to December last year, U.S. billionaires increased their wealth by over one-third, to one trillion dollars, while millions of Americans faced deep financial hardship.

New research from Copenhagen Business School has examined how American "shadow banks"- which are less regulated and include private credit intermediaries such as private equity, venture capital, and hedge fund firms - have invested in ways that extract profit from the misfortunes of frontline workers, struggling companies, and distressed sectors.

The research focused on industry reports and news media coverage of the industry to track investments made by shadow banks during the crisis as well as their investments leading up to the crisis that affected the safety and security of frontline workers when the coronavirus hit.

"We found that while the most economically vulnerable have suffered the brunt of the pandemic's hardship, those with financial capital have profited from struggling and booming sectors alike. The work of shadow banks has contributed to growing economic and social inequality during the crisis," says lead author Megan Tobias Neely, and assistant professor in the Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School.

The research is published in the American Behavioral Scientist journal.

Influence of shadow banks

While the general public is mostly unaware of shadow banking, this sector has been one of the fastest growing areas of finance since deregulation in the early 1980s. The research states that shadow banks have since played a central role in shaping how executives manage companies, often placing pressure on companies to downsize their workforces and cut wages and benefits for the sake of the shareholders.

"Private equity invests in private companies and often proactively influences how executives run the company," says co-author Donna Carmichael, PhD Researcher in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. "Venture capital, a type of private equity, invests in start up companies and provides guidance to entrepreneurs. Hedge funds invest in both public stock markets and private companies."

Healthcare, grocery, and distribution drivers have been some of the industries hardest hit even before this crisis. The authors cite Eileen Applebaum and Rosemary Batt's pivotal research to show how private equity has helped to create the conditions that made frontline workers vulnerable in the first place. These investors have targeted the U.S. healthcare industry with negative impact on hospitals, urgent care, and ambulances.

"Private equity firms often try to quickly turnover companies and invest less, or not at all, in new technology, workers' skills, quality improvements, and emergency equipment stockpiles like personal protective equipment. This has had the effect of increasing healthcare costs and overburdening underpaid healthcare staff," says Donna Carmichael.

"Women, especially women of colour, are disproportionately the workers who have been put at greatest risk during the pandemic. One-third of jobs held by women are 'essential,' and women compose 52% of frontline workers, including nine out of ten nurses and two-thirds of grocery store and pharmacy clerks. And so, the pandemic has made women 'essential and expendable' at the same time," adds Megan Tobias Neely.

COVID-19 crisis

The research underlines how, during the pandemic, shadow banks profited by investing in both booming sectors (such as health technologies and delivery services) and those that have struggled (including the airline, energy, and hospitality sectors). "Many companies in the latter sectors have seen their share prices sharply drop as their revenue plummets and investors sell off shares," says Donna Carmichael.

Short-selling occurs when an investor borrows a security and then sells it on the open market. If the price drops, they can then buy back the stock at the lower price and make a profit on the difference.

This is where shadow banks come in, to invest in turning those companies around or to short-sell (that is, bet against) the stock. "This is what hedge funds did that sparked the recent 'GameStop Rebellion. An example of short-selling during the crisis is how one hedge fund manager made a $1.3 billion profit by shorting shopping mall stocks, knowing they'd be hit hard by covid shutdowns," says Megan Tobias Neely.

"It can be seen as a riskier investment, and you can also lose money, but it is less regulated than other investment firms because the US Securities and Exchange Commission views these wealthy and institutional investors as less in need of protection. The climate of laissez-fair economics, the notion that markets will self-regulate and should be deregulated, has allowed shadow banks to thrive," adds Neely.

Moving forward

The research hopes to raise awareness of how the everyday work being done in financial services can have adverse consequences for working conditions and inequality. The ramifications are often unintentional.

"The people working in these industries understand their work as making companies more efficient and providing savings for people to retire and for institutions like university endowments and sovereign wealth funds (the investments of governments)," adds Megan Tobias Neely.

This research has important takeaways for public policy to address hardship and inequality among average workers during and after the crisis. Tax and regulatory reforms are a possible avenue for change to address these pressing social issues.

"Another way forward is democratising corporate decision-making among workers and improving representation of workers, consumers, and communities on corporate boards. Even though many have called to ´Build Back Better´, the prospects for a more equal and equitable future is still far away,"concludes Donna Carmichael.

Skoltech researchers and their colleagues from Russia and Serbia have reviewed almost a thousand patents held by some two hundred organizations involved in the New Space economy. The analysis helped draw a comprehensive picture of technology trends in the field. The paper was published in the journal Progress in Aerospace Sciences.

"New Space" is a loosely defined term that encompasses the recent flurry of space-related activities coming from smaller actors rather than a handful of space-faring nations. Put somewhat simply, while the Apollo missions were more traditional, SpaceX, Rocket Lab (launching small satellites from New Zealand) or LeoLabs (a space junk tracking company) are undeniably parts of a new and different space economy. In a 2020 paper, Skoltech Associate Professor Alessandro Golkar and Alejandro Salado of Virginia Tech found three distinguishing traits of New Space companies: explicit customer focus, new product development approaches, and new business models.

"In a nutshell, the main difference relates to how New Space organizations develop their products and how they approach the business. New Space organizations tend to embrace innovative development processes such as agile, have a risk-taker attitude, and focus on profit. This new attitude allows New Space companies to reduce time-to-market and lower the cost of entry to the space business," Skoltech PhD student Nicola Garzaniti says.

Golkar, Garzaniti and their colleagues decided to map New Space to analyze this paradigm shift in the industry. They used the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a topic modeling algorithm, to analyze patents' data and the global intellectual property landscape, identifying the most prominent technological trends.

"For this project, we employed a data-based approach to analyze the New Space ecosystem. To do so, we employed a topic modeling technique known as Latent Dirichlet Allocation, or LDA. LDA is a generative statistical model used in the natural language processing domain. Put simply, the model "reads" the patents and identifies patterns of words in the collection of patents, allowing to connect documents that exhibit similar patterns," Garzaniti explains.

He notes that startup companies and large system integrators as key stakeholders of New Space do not typically publish academic papers but rather prefer filing for patents to protect their intellectual property.

Having looked at 122 organizations that own 933 active patents and patent applications, the team identified ten topics, from remote sensing and image acquisition and launch systems to antenna systems and space platforms. 62% of the portfolio had to do with data related products and services, making data "the most valuable asset of the New Space ecosystem," the authors note.

"Our society is increasingly hungry for data, and for useful insights deriving from data. New Space ventures are contributing to this need by exploiting space infrastructure to generate, process and distribute a huge amount of data, and making available to end users a set of information possible to get only through space systems," Garzaniti notes.

An analysis of trends over time revealed sharp exponential growth from 2007 onward, making that year a tentative cutoff line for the start of the New Space era. The paper also describes the ecosystem of New Space companies, providing a useful overview of the markets and major players based on the existing academic literature.

"As a direct consequence of this work, we identified key topics in space systems development that represent significant opportunities for research and innovation in the short- and mid-term. For instance, we are now actively looking into the topic of active constellation management, and new paradigms for designing and operating satellite systems. From an innovation perspective, we are increasingly interested in looking at the implications and opportunities that arise from the increasing rate of consolidation of the space value chain through vertical integration," Nicola Garzaniti concludes.

In 2020, as many states of emergency were declared around the world during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic as there were in the entire previous decade. The influence of neighbouring countries on each other, weak democracies and poor pandemic preparedness are some of the explanations, according to research from the University of Gothenburg and Stockholm University.

A state of emergency is a situation in which a country's ordinary laws and rights are suspended and authorities are given increased powers. A state of emergency is declared by the government of a country, often as a result of war, civil unrest or natural disasters. The introduction of a curfew is a common measure in a state of emergency.

Previous research has explained why countries declare a state of emergency. However, for the first time, researchers have now focused on the states of emergency declared in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic that swept the world in the spring and summer of 2020.

Approximately half of the world's countries declared some form of state of emergency for brief or extended periods.

"The total number of states of emergency in the first half of 2020 is comparable to the total number of states of emergency declared between 2010 and 2019, so it is a big number. The areas that stand out are Latin America, Southern Europe and parts of Africa, which had a particularly large share of these states of emergency," says Magnus Lundgren, senior lecturer in political science.

Together with his research colleagues at Stockholm University, he has studied which factors made it more or less likely for a country to declare a state of emergency during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The results are based on a statistical survey of 180 countries in the period from January to June 2020.

"We identified three main patterns relating to the influence of neighbouring countries, the degree of democracy and pandemic preparedness."

Firstly, it was more likely for countries to declare a state of emergency if other countries in the same region had already done so. Secondly, states of emergency were more common among countries with weak democratic systems, compared with countries with strong democratic systems and countries with non-democratic systems. Finally, countries with stronger pandemic preparedness were less prone to declaring a state of emergency.

The pandemic has put considerable pressure on society and governments have opted for various measures. A state of emergency can provide governments with greater opportunities to fight a pandemic, however, they often lead to significant curtailment of civil liberties.

"Our research can help us to understand how different countries have tried to stop the pandemic. Although not the subject of direct analysis in our study, the results can potentially help us understand whether and to what extent a state of emergency has been abused by governments to promote political goals that have nothing to do with the pandemic," says Mark Klamberg, professor of international law at Stockholm University.