Culture

Women's fishing activities around the world amount to an estimated 3 million tonnes of marine fish and other seafood per year, contributing significantly to food and livelihood security in all regions of the world. However, these contributions often go unnoticed.

A new study by researchers at the University of British Columbia aims to address this oversight by assembling and presenting the first quantitative estimates of catch by women and the associated value of what is brought to shore, on a global scale.

"We used a variety of sources, from national databases to local experts, to peer-reviewed and newspaper articles, in order to estimate how much women are catching in all countries and regions," said Sarah Harper, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow with the OceanCanada Partnership and the Fisheries Economics Research Unit at UBC's Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries. "We calculated the value of those 3 million tonnes of seafood that women are catching to be around $5.6 billion per year or the equivalent of 12% of the landed value of all small-scale fisheries catches globally."

The fish and invertebrates that women catch go towards feeding themselves and their families with some also sold in local markets. This means that the economic impact of these catches goes beyond the initial sale in the market, adding up to some $17 billion per year.

"And if we adjust these values to account for the variation between countries in purchasing power, the economic impact of women's catches is closer to $26 billion," Harper said. "Although there is increasing attention worldwide to the role of women and gender in fisheries, these numbers further emphasize the significance of the contributions by women in a sector where their work continues to be overlooked and undervalued."

Women in Asia, Africa, and Oceania were found to have the highest rates of participation in fishing activities. Overall, 2 million women participate in nearshore coastal fisheries worldwide using low-technology fishing gear.

"For many people, the numbers may come as a surprise. Fishing has long been considered a strictly male sphere. There has been such a lack of attention to the role of women in fisheries that some fisherwomen prefer to call themselves 'fishermen' so that their contributions count as much as those of their male counterparts," said Daniel Pauly, co-author of the study and principal investigator of the Sea Around Us initiative at UBC. "What happens, then, is that when you search for participation statistics, they show that there are no women in fisheries, which is not true".

For Rashid Sumaila, co-author of the paper and head of the Fisheries Economics Research Unit, the numbers highlighted in the study are especially significant in contexts where women's income goes disproportionately towards household provisioning and children's health and education.

"This study translates the important work of researchers who have been working on this topic for decades into the language of policymakers, where dollar amounts are often the currency for evaluating policy priorities," Sumaila said. "Thus, our hope is that these findings are used to design policies that promote women's participation in and contributions to the fisheries sector."

More than half of the planet's fresh water is in Antarctica. While most of it is frozen in the ice sheets, underneath the ice pools and streams of water flow into one another and into the Southern Ocean surrounding the continent. Understanding the movement of this water, and what is dissolved in it as solutes, reveals how carbon and nutrients from the land may support life in the coastal ocean.

Gathering data on the biogeochemistry of these systems is an undertaking of Antarctic proportions. Trista Vick-Majors, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences at Michigan Technological University, is part of a team that gathered samples from the Whillans Subglacial Lake in West Antarctica and is lead author on a paper about the lake, recently published in Global Biogeochemical Cycles.

"Life is tough -- it can handle a lot," Vick-Majors said. "This paper is putting together what we know about the biology and how active it is under Antarctic ice with information about the composition of organic carbon in the lake."

Life beneath the ice puts up with a lot -- there is no sunlight and pressure from the ice above in combination with heat radiating up from the Earth's core is what melts the water to form the lake, so the temperature hovers just below freezing. Organic carbon, an important food source for microorganisms, is present in relatively high concentrations in Whillans Subglacial Lake, even if it lacks the verdant mess of a Midwest pond in late August. Instead, as cameras dropped down the borehole of Mercer Subglacial Lake (a neighbor of Whillans) reveal, the subglacial lake is dark, cold, full of soft and fluffy sediment, and lined with bubble-filled ice.

The lake bed looks more alien than earth, and studying extreme environments like this does provide insight into what extraterrestrial life could be like or how earthly life might survive in similar conditions. Not that humans, penguins or fish could handle it; life in the waters beneath Antarctica's ice is mostly microbial. They still show signs of life -- organic carbon and other chemical byproducts of living, eating, excreting and dying -- that Vick-Majors and her team can measure and budget.

Using mass balance calculations, the team's research shows that a pool of dissolved organic carbon in the Whillans Subglacial Lake can be produced in 4.8 to 11.9 years. As the lake fills and drains, which takes about the same amount of time, all those nutrients slip and slide their way to the ice-covered coast of the Southern Ocean. Based on the team's calculations, the subglacial lakes in the region provide 5,400% more organic carbon than what microbial life in the ice-covered ocean downstream needs to survive.

"There's no photosynthesis under the ice in the ocean downstream of this lake - this limits the available food and energy sources in a way that you wouldn't find in a surface lake or the open ocean," Vick-Majors said. "The idea is that these subglacial lakes that are upstream could provide important sources of energy and nutrients for things living in the ice-covered regions of the Southern Ocean."

While the Whillans Subglacial Lake on its own indicates that upstream nutrients may be an important factor, it is only a single source of data in an ice-covered complex of underground lakes, streams and estuary-like mixing zones that undergo seasonal and sporadic fluxes.

To expand their view, Vick-Majors and the rest of the team have been gathering data at other sites (Mercer Subglacial Lake was sampled by the SALSA team in early 2019), and doing so is no small feat. They make it happen with a hot water drill, a specially designed hose, a 10-liter water sampling bottle, some sediment coring devices, and a week of summery polar weather that can plunge to 20 below. The crew wears Tyvek suits and all equipment is thoroughly cleaned. They also filter the drilling water, run it past several banks of ultra-violet lights to knock down microbial contamination, and then heat it up to use the hot water to open an approximately 1000-meter borehole down to the lake.

"Some of that melted ice water, which has now circulated through the drill, is removed from the hole so that when the lake is punctured, water from the lake moves up into the borehole," Vick-Majors said, explaining that the crew has to keep the hot water from the drill separate from the lake water to keep their samples and the lake clean. "It takes about 24 hours to drill the borehole and we keep it open for a few days; gathering a single sample or letting down the cameras can take two hours or more, depending on the equipment."

And the hole keeps trying to refreeze. Plus, Vick-Majors is not a lone scientist; she is embedded in an interdisciplinary team and everyone needs access to the borehole for different experiments. But for all the tight logistics and cold toes, she says it's worth it.

"There is water and there is life under the ice," Vick-Majors said. "These can teach us a lot about our planet because this is a great place to look at somewhat simplified ecosystems, without higher levels of organisms. So we can answer questions about life that can be really hard to answer in other places."

The flip side is that physical-biological interactions can be still be complicated in these environments; the paper is step towards understanding them. The subglacial lakes of West Antarctica are almost otherworldly and simultaneously grant insight into the possibilities for exoplanet environments while revealing the deep, water-kept secrets of our own world.

March 4, 2020 -- The U.S. is witnessing a dramatic rise in nontraditional 'gig economy' labor markets where workers are hired for single projects often on a short-term basis. An estimated 0.4% of U.S. adults are currently receiving income from such platforms each month. Research conducted based on collaboration between Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and CloudResearch.com examined the work of over 20,000 men and women completing over 5 million tasks online, and found a gender pay gap not accounted for by demographics, task preferences, or experience. On average, women's hourly earnings were 10.5% lower than men's. This is the first study to provide evidence that pay gaps can arise despite the absence of overt discrimination, labor segregation, and inflexible work arrangements. The findings are published online in PLOS ONE.

"Our goal was to examine a highly unique labor environment, characterized by factors that should make this labor market relatively immune to the emergence of a gender pay gap. Nevertheless, our results showed evidence of a gender wage gap not fully accounted for by such factors as task heterogeneity, experience, and task completion speed," said Lisa Bates, ScD, assistant professor of Epidemiology at Columbia Mailman School.

The researchers collected data from the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform, an online platform that connects employers ('requesters') to employees ('workers') who perform jobs called "Human Intelligence Tasks" (HITs). "Due to factors that are unique to the Mechanical Turk online marketplace - such as anonymity, self-selection into tasks, relative homogeneity of the tasks performed, and flexible work scheduling - we did not expect earnings to differ by gender on this platform. However, contrary to our expectations, a robust and persistent gender pay gap was observed," said Zohn Rosen, PhD, in the Department of Health Policy and Management, Mailman School.

The analysis of nearly 5 million tasks completed during an 18-month period between January 2016 and June 2017 by 12,312 female and 9,959 male workers from 2014 show that men and women completed comparable numbers of tasks during the study period; 2,396,978 (49%) for men and 2,539,229 (51%) for women.

Although task completion speed appeared to account for some of the gap, a significant portion of it seems to result from women selecting tasks that have a lower advertised hourly pay. The authors hypothesize, "Women may select lower paying tasks because cumulative experiences of pervasive discrimination lead women to undervalue their labor. In turn, women's experiences with earning lower pay compared to men on traditional labor markets may lower women's pay expectations on gig economy markets. Therefore, consistent with these lowered expectations, women may be more likely than men to settle for lower paying tasks," said Leib Litman, PhD, co-author and associate professor, Touro College, and co-founder, CloudResearch.com.

An examination of the advertised gender pay gap among individuals who differed in their marital and parental status also showed women's hourly pay is consistently lower than men's within both single and married subgroups of workers, and among workers who do and do not have children.

"This study represents an important and novel contribution to the literature on the gender pay gap," said Bates. "Future research should explore the observed gender pay gap in this niche of the gig economy and seek to understand how it may both reflect broader gender inequalities and point to opportunities for structural remedies."

ADELPHI, Md. -- Researchers at the Army's corporate laboratory in collaboration with the University of California, Riverside have identified an approach to network security that will enhance the effectiveness and timeliness of protection against adversarial intrusion and evasion strategies.

Networked devices and infrastructure are becoming increasingly complex, making it nearly impossible to verify an entire system, and new attacks are continuously being developed.

To rapidly protect Army systems from attack in ways that don't require massive amounts of manual intervention, the researchers have developed and approach called SymTCP.

SymTCP is a proposed approach that can be used to identify previously unknown ways to bypass deep packet inspection, or DPI, checks in networked appliances, often what internet service providers use to prevent malicious attacks from being launched or to censor certain content.

"Identifying strategies that attackers use to evade DPI in networked systems has been generally a manual process," said Dr. Kevin Chan, researcher at the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory. "This research provides an automated method to identify potential vulnerabilities in the Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, state machines of DPI implementation."

Chan stated that this research has found previously undiscovered vulnerabilities in TCP, which is what the internet is built on; most of internet traffic is TCP. However, it is very difficult to find vulnerabilities in the implementation of TCP, as some of these vulnerabilities are found in obscure parts of the code and require a specific sequence of packets to be sent in order to trigger the vulnerability.

"Our approach uses symbolic execution to explore the state of TCP implementation of an endhost to identify ways to reach critical points in the code," Chan said. "If such a point is found, then packets can be inserted and be undetected by DPI. This method is evaluated against several state-of-the-art DPI systems such as Zeek and Snort and identifies previously known evasion strategies in addition to new ones that were not previously documented."

The search space is enormous, and being able to make sense of the state and explore it efficiently is a great achievement, Chan said.

"This research will improve the security of Army networks in terms of being able to protect against future intrusion and evasion strategies," Chan said. "It has developed an efficient way to find and patch vulnerabilities in future Army network infrastructure."

According to the researchers, information must be securely transmitted between domains (i.e. air and land) and within domains (i.e. cyber domains) for various Army functions, making this research crucial to each of the Army Modernization Priorities in support of enabling Multi-Domain Operations, with direct applicability to the Army's Network Modernization Priority.

"This type of research helps focus cyber defense resources," said Dr. Tracy Braun, computer scientist at CCDC ARL. "It can reveal weaknesses and suggest more efficient deployments of network defenses. This helps protect networks against advanced attacks. It can also help guide the design of future Army network infrastructure and cyber defense strategies."

This collaborative research endeavor was made possible by ARL's Cyber Security Collaborative Research Alliance, which has the objective to develop a fundamental understanding of cyber phenomena, including aspects of human attackers, cyber defenders and end users, so that fundamental laws, theories, and theoretically grounded and empirically validated models can be applied to a broad range of Army domains, applications and environments.

CRAs are partnerships between Army laboratories and centers, private industry and academia that are focusing on the rapid transition of innovative science and technology for Army modernization.

"Collaboration by the teams of academic, industry and government researchers in the CRA, including students, builds enduring relationships and maintains a focus on cross-cutting foundational research addressing important Army challenges," said Dr. Michael Frame, Cyber Security CRA collaborative alliance manager.

The team's research was accepted to be presented at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium 2020, which took place Feb. 23-26 in San Diego, California.

The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy and advance the state of available security technologies.

According to Dr. Zhiyun Qian, Everett and Imogene Ross associate professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of California Riverside, future research includes the continuous analysis of future generation of DPI boxes, as well as better designs of DPIs that can be made robust against evasion attempts.

Physicists have unraveled a mystery behind the strange behavior of electrons in a ferromagnet, a finding that could eventually help develop high temperature superconductivity.
A Rutgers co-authored study of the unusual ferromagnetic material appears in the journal Nature.

The Rutgers Center for Materials Theory, a world leader in the field, studies “quantum phase transitions.” Phase transitions, such as when ice melts, usually require heat to jiggle atoms and melt ice crystals. Quantum phase transitions are driven by the jiggling of atoms and electrons that result from fluctuations that never cease even at low temperatures.
A quantum phase transition can be achieved by tuning a material to enhance quantum fluctuations, either by applying a magnetic field or exposing it to intense pressure when the temperature is near absolute zero. In certain quantum phase transitions, the quantum fluctuations become infinitely intense, forming a “quantum critical point.” These unusual states of matter are of great interest because of their propensity to form superconductors. Think of it as like an electronic stem cell, a form of matter that can transform itself in many ways.
Meanwhile, in the weird world of quantum mechanics, “entanglement” allows something to be in two different states or places at the same time. The Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment, which features a cat that is simultaneously dead and alive, is an example of entanglement.
Inside materials with electrons moving through them, entanglement often involves the spin of electrons, which can be simultaneously up and down. Typically, only electrons near each other are entangled in quantum materials, but at a quantum critical point, the entanglement patterns can change abruptly, spreading out across the material and transforming it. Electrons, even distant ones, become entangled.

Ferromagnets are an unlikely setting for studying quantum entanglement because the electrons moving through them align in one direction instead of spinning up and down. But physicists found that the ferromagnetism in “Cerge,” (CeRh6Ge4) a ferromagnet, must have a large amount of entanglement with electrons that spin up and down and are connected with each other. That had never been seen in ferromagnets.
“We believe our work, connecting entanglement with the strange metal and ferromagnets, provides important clues for our efforts to understand superconductors that work at room temperature,” said co-author Piers Coleman, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. “As we learn to understand how nature controls entanglement in matter, we hope we’ll develop the skills to control quantum entanglement inside quantum computers and to design and develop new kinds of quantum matter useful for technology.”
Rutgers scientists have used some of their findings to propose a new theory for a family of iron-based superconductors that were discovered about 10 years ago. “If we are right, these systems, like ferromagnets, are driven by forces that like to align electrons,” Coleman said.
Yashar Komijani, a Rutgers post-doctoral associate, is one of three co-lead authors. Scientists at Zhejiang University in China, Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Germany and Nanjing University in China contributed to the study.

Journal

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-020-2052-z

Entomologists at UC Riverside have documented that a species of native sweat bee widespread throughout North and South America has a daily routine that makes it a promising pollinator.

Because the bee can thrive in environments that have been highly modified by humans, such as cities and agricultural areas, it could become a suitable supplement to honeybees, which are expensive for farmers to rent and threatened by pesticides and climate change.

Sweat bees are not as famous as their prolific cousin, the European honeybee, but are common in natural, urban, and agricultural areas in North America. Sweat bees, along with other native bees like bumble bees, are valuable pollinators of many wildflowers and cultivated crop plants, yet often do not receive the level of public attention that honeybees do.

In a paper published in the journal Ecology, Ph.D. candidate Jacob Cecala, and Erin Wilson Rankin, an associate professor of entomology, describe in-depth for the first time a foraging behavior of a small, common, and often-overlooked species of sweat bee, Halictus ligatus. The species is classified as a "generalist," meaning it is known to feed on many kinds of flowers. But no one knew how flexible individuals are in their flower selection, and whether an individual's floral choices varied day-to-day.

To explore this species' daily routine, Cecala captured sweat bees while feeding on flowers in several commercial plant nurseries across Southern California. Nurseries grow many different species of plants in close proximity to one another, so they are useful for studying bees' foraging choices. He marked the bees with different colored dots of non-toxic paint to track which plants they were visiting.

He returned the next day and caught almost 52% of the marked bees again. Cecala repeated this experiment four times in summer and four times in autumn and recaptured around 50% each time. Virtually all--96%--were found on the same plant species as on the first day, indicating that most individual bees fed on the same plant species day-to-day. The findings suggest it is common for individual bees to make consistent choices about what to forage on across days.

"These results are encouraging given that plant nurseries are, relatively speaking, artificial man-made habitats. You would expect really intense agricultural and urban areas to be pretty devoid of biodiversity but these native bees are flying around and visiting the plants and using them as pollen and nectar resources," Cecala said.

The study also documented a 45% higher probability of recapturing the bees on California native plant species than on plant species exotic to California. This varied somewhat by season. Recapture rates were higher on the native plants in the summer, suggesting seasonal differences in how the bees forage. While this suggests native plants are more valuable to these bees, many individuals still showed fidelity to non-native plants.

Much remains to be learned about Halictus ligatus feeding behaviors, but the high plant fidelity reported in the study probably indicates a smaller foraging range, which would be consistent with their small body size, and useful for commercial pollination.

Even though the study took place inside plant nurseries, its findings have implications for commercial crop pollination on farms. While farmers must pay to rent commercial honeybee hives, native bees like sweat bees provide pollination services free of charge.

"Honeybees, which are larger, forage much farther," Rankin added. "Even if you put honeybees in your field there's nothing to say they're not actually going two farms over, whereas these sweat bees forage repeatedly on plants right around the area where they live."

"These wild bees are pretty good, consistent pollinators," Cecala said. "If you have these sweat bees in the area, it's in your best interest to conserve them in whatever way you can, because they are probably visiting crops each day, not just passing through."

This study reinforces that certain plants publicly available at nurseries can serve as dependable resources for native bees. By planting a variety of different flowers around their homes, and ensuring they are free of insecticides, anyone can help these native bees.

ITHACA, N.Y. - Cells depend on signaling to regulate most life processes, including cell growth and differentiation, immune response and reactions to various stresses.

And while scientists have identified enzymes that remove a chemical modification known as lysine myristoylation - a "code" used for cell signaling - the enzymes that add such modifications have proved elusive. Knowledge of such modifications would allow scientists to chemically regulate cell signaling, leading to practical applications in treating human diseases such as slowing the growth of cancerous cells and inhibiting viral infections.

New research, published Feb. 26 in Nature Communications, identifies an enzyme - N-terminal glycine myristoyltransferases (NMT) 1 and 2 - which adds lysine myristoylation to a key protein.

Hening Lin, professor of chemistry and chemical biology in the College of Arts and Sciences, is senior author of "NMT1 and NMT2 are Lysine Myristoyltransferases Regulating the ARF6 GTPase Cycle."

Lin and his lab report the mechanism of adding and removing the lysine myristoylation code to the signaling protein ADP-ribosylation factor 6 (ARF6).

"The modification we discovered occurs to many proteins that are important for cell signaling," Lin said. "This is also the first time this kind of enzymatic activity has been identified in mammals."

Just like a set of flight instructions directs a pilot to fly a correct route, biochemical mechanisms ordered by these enzymes give proteins directions for moving through different subcellular locations in the most efficient way, Lin said. Without the proper chemical code, a protein might travel through the cell inefficiently or incorrectly.

"In our cells, there are certain proteins, such as ARF6, which need to go from A to B to C, then back to A, because that's what's required for transporting other proteins in a cycle," Lin said. "That's what we found - the mechanism that makes sure the protein ARF6 follows that path."

The researchers found that this mechanism takes place in human cells of many kinds. They believe that all mammalian cells operate in a similar way.

In addition to telling ARF6 where to go, NMT1 and NMT2 also help to activate the protein. This provides a new way to regulate the protein, which will in turn allow scientists to control it, leading to possible medical applications, said Tatsiana Kosciuk, doctoral student in biochemistry and lead author of the study. Since some cancer cells cycle at a high rate, slowing that cycle through drug inhibitors may slow cancer cell growth.

"This could be a potential therapeutic strategy," said Kosciuk, a member of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow Program. "If we target one of these enzymes, we can control the activity of this very important protein that is implicated in a variety of diseases."

There is also evidence that NMT could modify other proteins in a similar way, hinting at other potential applications of targeting this chemical modification. "There are numerous disease implications in this finding," Kosciuk said. "We're still working on it, but it looks promising."

A lithium-ion battery that is safe, has high power and can last for 1 million miles has been developed by a team in Penn State's Battery and Energy Storage Technology (BEST) Center.

Electric vehicle batteries typically require a tradeoff between safety and energy density. If the battery has high energy and power density, which is required for uphill driving or merging on the freeway, then there is a chance the battery can catch fire or explode in the wrong conditions. But materials that have low energy/power density, and therefore high safety, tend to have poor performance. There is no material that satisfies both. For that reason, battery engineers opt for performance over safety.

"In this work we decided we were going to take a totally different approach," said Chao-Yang Wang, professor of mechanical, chemical and materials science and engineering, and William E. Diefenderfer Chair in Mechanical Engineering, Penn State. "We divided our strategy into two steps. First we wanted to build a highly stable battery with highly stable materials."

Their second step was to introduce instant heating. About four years ago, Wang developed a self-heating battery to overcome the problem of poor performance in cold climates. The battery uses an electric current to heat up in seconds compared to the hours an external heater required. By heating the battery from room temperature to around 140 degrees Fahrenheit -- 60 degrees Celsius -- the battery gets an instant boost in reactivity because the law of kinetics is that reactivity increases exponentially with temperature.

"With these two steps I can get high safety when the battery is not being used and high power when it is," he said.

The self-heating battery, called the All Climate battery, has been adopted by several car companies, including BMW, and was chosen to power a fleet of 10,000 vehicles that will be used to ferry people between venues at the next Winter Olympics in Beijing.

The BEST Center tests the safety of the battery using nail penetration equipment. They drive the nail into the cell causing short circuiting. They then monitor the cell for temperature and voltage. The difference in temperature for the passivated cell was 212 degrees F -- 100 degrees C --compared to a standard battery cell which was 1,832 degrees F -- 1000 degrees C, an enormous improvement.

Because their batteries are built using stable materials, they have a long cycle life. Even at 140 degrees F, their cycle number is over 4000, which translates to over a million miles.

The team's next project will be to develop a solid-state battery, which will likely require heating as well.

The current work appears in the journal Science Advances and is titled "A new approach to both safety and high performance of lithium-ion batteries." Wang's coauthors are research assistant professors Shanhai Ge, Yongjun Leng and Xiao-Guang Yang, and doctoral students Teng Liu, Ryan Longchamps, Yue Gao and Daiwei Wang. Donghai Wang, professor of mechanical and of chemical engineering, Penn State, also participated in this work.

The Department of Energy funded this work.

In a recent study, scientists at Baycrest's Rotman Research Institute (RRI) found that research participants moved their eyes to determine whether they had seen an image before, and that their eye movement patterns could predict mistakes in memory. They obtained these results using an innovative new eye tracking technique they developed.

"Our findings indicate that eye movements play a functional role in memory retrieval," says Dr. Jennifer Ryan, senior scientist at the RRI and Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory. "They can tell us a lot about someone's memory."

This study builds on previous Baycrest research examining the link between eye movements and memory, including the role of our eye movements in memorization and the weakening connection between our eye movements and our brain activity as we age.

"When we see a picture, a face or something else that we have already seen, our eyes tend to look at the same locations as they did the first time. The brain compares important characteristics of what we are seeing to a mental picture in our memory, and it identifies the two as the same," says Dr. Bradley Buchsbaum, senior scientist at the RRI. "The brain is pretty good at this, even in conditions of lower visibility."

"If we see someone in the distance, or if their face is partially hidden by branches, our brain will compare the features that are visible to a mental picture to determine whether we know that person," says Jordana Wynn, lead researcher on this study, former PhD student at the RRI and current fellow at Harvard University.

This phenomenon is called "pattern completion." When it goes wrong, we may end up mistakenly waving to a stranger if he or she has similar hair or a similar nose to someone we know.

In this study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), participants were first asked to memorize a series of 30 new images on a screen. Next, they viewed another series, this time containing both some of the previously seen images and some new-but-similar images. They were then asked to indicate whether they had seen each one before. Their eye movements were tracked during both stages. Each image was shown briefly, ranging from 250 milliseconds to 750 milliseconds, before the participants were instructed to visualize it while looking at a blank screen.

Participants were highly accurate in identifying previously seen images as old, scoring almost 90%. They were more likely to be correct if their eye movements were the same as when they initially saw the image. On the other hand, they performed less well, at 70%, when faced with a new-but-similar image. In the latter case, the more participants repeated their initial viewing pattern instead of focusing on the different aspects of the image, the more likely they were to incorrectly identify the image as old.

To emulate real-world situations where we don't have full information, the researchers also used incomplete, or "degraded," versions of images. This ranged from 0 to 80% degradation, in the form of grey squares covering parts of the image. Remarkably, even when the image was 80% degraded, performance was much better than pure guessing, reflecting the strength of pattern completion.

"Using our eye tracking technique, we were able to map the participants' eye movements and observe that they were mentally picturing an image that they could not see," says Wynn. "They were using pattern completion."

Many studies have examined pattern completion over the past decades, but with one critical weakness. "These studies have all been based on the untested assumption that we can infer pattern completion is happening when participants mistakenly 'recognize' images that they have not seen before," says Wynn. "Our study is the first to use eye movement analysis, rather than behaviour, to show that people are in fact retrieving a memory of an old image when they make this mistake."

This study's findings have important implications in terms of assessing memory. "Some of the traditional tests used to diagnose memory impairments are quite verbal," says Dr. Ryan. "They often require good command of the English language, which can be a problem in a multicultural city like Toronto."

"With eye tracking, you don't have to ask people what they remember. You can just look at their eyes. This gives us a lot more information about their memory than we thought," says Dr. Buchsbaum.

This work was made possible with support from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

With additional funding, the researchers could further examine the role of eye movements in memory retrieval. "This could lead to the development of better screening tools for dementia, which is the ultimate hope," says Dr. Ryan.

A new study links being overweight in middle age and later adulthood to a greater risk of advanced prostate cancer. Jeanine Genkinger, PhD, an epidemiologist at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, and colleagues published the study in Annals of Oncology, the journal of the European Society for Medical Oncology and Japanese Society of Medical Oncology.

Prostate cancer is the second most common cause of cancer in men in the United States. Fewer than one in three men with advanced prostate cancer live five years beyond diagnosis.

Before this study, only a few studies examined contributing factors to advanced prostate cancer. There was an especially noticeable lack of research on the linkage between factors like weight in early adulthood, changes in weight during adulthood, and waist circumference, specifically with advanced prostate cancer risk.

Using data from 15 large studies combined together, Genkinger examined associations between body fat, height, and prostate cancer risk in 830,772 men, 51,734 of whom had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Her study took a life-course-based approach, examining survey data collected across respondents' lifespans to determine whether and at what age during adulthood excess body fat increased risk for advanced prostate cancer. The researchers found that a BMI elevated above a healthy weight during middle to late adulthood--median age range from 50 to 64--was linked to the greatest risk for developing advanced prostate cancer. A "healthy" weight is defined as a BMI between 21 and 25 kg/m2.

They also found that greater waist circumference was linked with increased risk of advanced prostate cancer and death. Although other studies have linked higher BMI with increased prostate cancer, this is the first study to find a positive association with waist circumference.

"These study results show that risk for advanced prostate cancer can be decreased by maintaining a 'healthy' weight, which is in line with guidelines by the American Cancer Society and World Cancer Research Fund. Adopting healthy eating and exercising are factors that can help maintain a healthy weight," says Genkinger, associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia Mailman School. "This study shows that adopting and maintaining healthy weight in middle to late adulthood can especially reduce risk of advanced prostate cancer."

EAST LANSING, Mich. - Nearly 30% of the $3.6 trillion spent on health care costs in the United States is wasted. New research from Michigan State University and Rutgers University reveals the amount of money washed away in hospital operating rooms, offering solutions to save hospitals - and the country - millions of dollars each year.

The paper, published in the Journal of Operations Management, found that five to 10 minutes were added to each surgery due to unplanned supplies. Additionally, an average $1,800 per surgery - nearly $28 million annually - could be saved by more frequently planning the supplies needed for a surgery.

"This problem is due to the fact that quality of care has always taken precedence over cost -- and rightly so," said Anand Nair, professor of operations and supply chain management. "However, with increasing pressure on health care organizations, they are trying to find ways to jointly increase quality and reduce costs."

Nair - along with co-authors David Dreyfus, assistant professor at Rutgers Business School and alumnus of MSU's doctoral program, and Claudia Rosales, assistant professor of supply chain management at MSU - found that not only do unplanned costs affect a hospital's bottom line, but they can also endanger patients under anesthesia with potentially harmful complications.

The team spent more than 250 hours observing hospital operating rooms, taking note of processes, preparation and performance of 92 surgeries. Ultimately, they found that the greatest issue stems from a lack of standardization for the planning processes.

"In most hospitals, every surgeon is allowed to make their own decisions in terms of equipment and supplies," Nair said. "Surgeons are comfortable using certain supplies due to their past experiences; this increases the variance among items and the number of items that hospitals need to carry in inventory."

Surgeons request equipment and supplies they need on what's called a physician preference card, or PPC.

With different surgeons requesting preferred equipment for procedures, hospitals end up fulfilling multiple personalized requests, Nair explained. Additionally, without a standardized planning process, teams must address supply shortages during surgery, which can reduce quality, increase costs and present possibilities of potential security lapses.

"If a doctor doesn't have what they immediately need, a surgical team member must find it, which becomes an unplanned cost - and potentially a health risk if they leave the area," Nair said. "On the other hand, if a surgeon requests something that isn't necessary for the surgery, it's simply a waste of money."

Nair explained that some surgeons err on the side of caution and carry supplies in case they might be needed. While this is important given the critical nature of surgeries, a more standardized use of PPCs - along with audits of what supplies are on them - will allow hospitals to reduce redundancies.

Nair explained that minor changes in processes can add up to big savings.

"Managing medical supplies is a critical aspect of the health care supply chain," Nair said.

"Mechanisms need to be put in place to provide more learning opportunities from such operational failures for long-term benefits to happen."

Another complication in hospital rooms is that surgical teams change often, which makes it difficult to communicate which supplies on the PPC aren't consistently used. Open communication among surgical teams helps anticipate needs and reduces unplanned costs in a surgery.

The researchers acknowledge that savings aren't always immediate, but that progress happens along the way during any procedure.

"Our research should encourage hospitals to embrace systems that can better track unplanned costs and plan ahead," Nair said. "Hospitals should explore methods to incentivize surgeons to plan more often. This may be achieved by providing visibility about unplanned costs and workarounds, offering greater control on administering supplies and rewarding for unplanned cost reduction."

ITHACA, N.Y. - "Scooter clutter" has been a concern amplified by media reports in urban areas where micromobility has entered the landscape, with large numbers of dockless scooters and shared e-bikes on city streets and sidewalks. But a recent study finds that motor vehicles are still the main offender by far when it comes to blocking access by other travelers.

Research co-authored by Nicholas Klein, assistant professor of city and regional planning at Cornell University, offers data on the impacts of scooters and bikeshare vehicles in five American cities.

The research is translatable and replicable, to help inform cities' efforts in reimagining public streets and sidewalks. Some cities are considering new parking regulations and seeking other planning and policy solutions for these shared scooters and bikes, which have been introduced to more than 100 cities since 2018.

A paper, published in Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, investigated scooter, bike and car parking behavior in Austin, Texas; Portland, Oregon; San Francisco and Santa Monica, California; and Washington, D.C. The research was led by Anne Brown of the University of Oregon School of Planning, Public Policy and Management.

Researchers collected 3,666 observations of e-scooters, bikes, motor vehicles and "sidewalk objects" such as sandwich boards. Research assistants recorded parking behavior on both sides of a busy commercial corridor for three days, eight hours each day. They observed parked cars, scooters and bicycles, as well as sidewalk furniture including advertising, construction materials and sidewalk-mounted elevator or stair-access doors.

The study found that parking noncompliance rates across the five cities were far higher for motor vehicles (24.7% of 2,631 motor vehicles observed) than for micromobility vehicles (0.8% of 865 scooter and bike observations).

Food delivery and ride-hailing vehicles accounted for a disproportionate number of improper parking incidents impeding access or mobility for other travelers, Klein said. Most of these violations occurred while dropping off or picking up people or food, including double parking, occupying "No Parking" or restricted areas and blocking driveways.

The findings suggest that the presence of micromobility companies and other technology-enabled transportation services should motivate cities to rethink their parking policies, the researchers said.

LAWRENCE -- Some children in the U.S. grow up under severe disadvantage in terms of the amount and quality of language they are exposed to in their earliest years. Researchers have documented that some children are exposed to roughly 30 million fewer words than other children during years that are critical for learning language. Researchers call this the "word gap" and say it portends lifelong consequences.

"The word gap represents inequities in early experience with language that can place children at a disadvantage in terms of not only their early language and vocabulary development, but also literacy and school readiness," said Dale Walker, associate research professor and scientist at Juniper Gardens Children's Project and the Life Span Institute at the University of Kansas.

"When young children do not have sufficient opportunities to hear and practice language, they are less likely to develop vocabulary by age 3," Walker said. "That can lead not only to decreased language and social outcomes, but children are less likely to be ready to succeed in school. They begin school already at a disadvantage in terms of the vocabulary that they've been exposed to and can continue to fall behind in reading and in school achievement. And as noted by economists, that inequity can follow a child into adulthood in terms of educational opportunities and their earning potential."

Walker and Judith Carta, professor of special education at KU, recently guest-edited a special issue of the peer-reviewed Early Childhood Research Quarterly that brings together 18 language-intervention research and empirical studies that address the word gap.

"Understanding research evidence is necessary to inform education and intervention efforts to improve the language-learning experiences for young children and prevent the word gap," Walker said.

The research in the special issue covers interventions conducted with parents, educators and health care providers. Further, it includes cultural and linguistic diversity of study participants, as well as training and implementation practices, and the methodological factors informing intervention research.

Walker, who recently earned KU's Steven F. Warren Research Achievement Award, said she hoped research gathered in the special edition could be used by academics, early childhood educators, health care professionals and policymakers.

"We are encouraged about the potential of efforts to address the word gap and hope that our special issue on this topic can be used as a resource that can help inform future research, practice and prevention to close the word gap," she said.

COLUMBIA, Mo. - Self-inflicted injury, aggression toward others and yelling are common problem behaviors associated with young children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. These actions can result from the child being denied attention or access to items they enjoy, as well as from internal discomfort or environmental stressors such as noise or large crowds.

Now, a researcher at the University of Missouri has adjusted an existing treatment procedure aimed at reducing problem behaviors for children with autism spectrum disorder. Instead of traditional techniques, which require constant monitoring of the child, the new approach, which emphasizes momentary check-ins, provides more flexibility for parents and caregivers.

Kyle Hamilton, a behavior analyst at the Thompson Center for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders, said that while existing intervention methods can be effective in controlled environments, they can be harder for busy parents, teachers and caregivers to implement in everyday situations.

Currently, experts advise parents to watch their children for long periods of time (up to several minutes) and give a reward only if the child's behavior is appropriate the entire time. However, a parent that is cooking dinner in the kitchen may not be able to simultaneously supervise children playing in a nearby room for long periods of time. With Hamilton's new approach, parents would only check their children periodically for a few seconds. If the child was behaving appropriately at the moment of the check, a small reward could be given.

"Rather than constantly monitoring the child, this new technique allows for periodic check-ins to see if the child is engaging in problem behaviors and reward them if we are seeing improvements," Hamilton said. "Through positive reinforcement, we can help reduce problem behaviors for kids with autism, which will allow them to be around their typically developing peers more often in society."

Given the broadness of the autism spectrum, these findings can lead to additional studies into which treatment options are most effective for reducing various problem behaviors. In addition to minimizing self-inflicted harm that can damage children's long-term health, reducing problem behaviors can help remove the social stigma that many kids with autism face.

"By reducing problem behaviors, we can help these kids spend more time in natural environments, whether that is at the grocery store, pool, restaurants or school," Hamilton said. "We want them to have every opportunity to live the most normal life possible and provide them more exposure to the natural world."

A "decoy" mechanism has been found in human and animal cells to protect them from potentially dangerous toxins released by foreign invaders, such as bacteria.

Scientists at NYU Grossman School of Medicine have found that cells exposed to bacteria release tiny, protein-coated packages called exosomes, which act like decoys to bind to bacterial toxins, including those produced by MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), a bacterium that has become resistant to many antibiotics, or Corynebacterium diphtheriae (the bacterium responsible for highly contagious diphtheria).

Researchers say this "soaking up" of toxins neutralizes their action and helps keep cells safe. If left to move around freely, the toxins would normally bind to the cells' outer membranes, creating holes in those membranes and killing the cells.

Publishing in the journal Nature online March 4, the new study showed that bacteria-exposed cells died on their own but lived only when toxin-absorbing exosomes were present.

Researchers say their latest findings show that this cell defense system is common among mammals, including humans, and may help explain why as many as one-fifth of Americans have community-based MRSA bacteria on their body yet very few, no more than 1 in 10,000, die from infection by it.

"Exosomes act much like a sponge, preventing the toxins for a time from attacking the cell, while toxins that are not corralled are left to burrow through cell membranes," says study co-senior investigator Ken Cadwell, PhD. "This defense mechanism also buys some time for other widely recognized immune defenses, such as bacteria-attacking T cells, or antibodies, to kick in and fight the infection directly," adds Cadwell, an associate professor at NYU Langone Health and its Skirball Institute for Biomolecular Medicine.

Cadwell says many disease-carrying pathogens, such as bacteria and viruses, initially target cells' outer membranes, so the NYU team plans to investigate whether similar, generic "sponge-like" exosomes exist and take defensive action in other infections.

According to study co-senior investigator Victor J. Torres, PhD, the C.V. Starr Associate Professor of Microbiology at NYU Langone, the team's results not only add knowledge of mammalian defenses against infection, but also suggest new strategies for strengthening the immune system, either by injecting artificial, exosome-like vesicles into the body to soak up toxins or by boosting exosome production to ramp up the body's defenses.

The NYU researchers based their latest experiments on their previous work showing how bacterial toxins bind to cells during an infection. One earlier finding was that a specific protein called ATG16L1 was always present in cells that lived longer or survived infection. However, cells that lacked ATG16L1 all died from infection. ATG16L1, they say, is a known autophagy protein, acting as a key component in molecules involved in enveloping cellular waste so it can be broken down and disposed of. The researchers say the action of exosomes outside of cells "mirrors" this autophagy/ATG16L1 waste removal pathway observed inside cells.

For the new study, researchers injected MRSA into healthy mice and doubled how long and how many mice lived by fortifying the animals with injections of exosomes extracted from mice infected with the same bacterium. Normal mice injected with MRSA all died.

In other experiments in mice and human cells, when exosome production was chemically and/or genetically blocked, the cells all died, demonstrating to researchers the critical role played by these exosomes in cell survival.