Earth

Infrared satellite imagery provides temperature data, and when NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Storm Wukong, the coldest cloud tops circling the center resembled a strawberry and leaf.

Cloud top temperatures determine strength of the thunderstorms that make up a tropical cyclone. The colder the cloud top, the stronger the uplift in the storm that helps thunderstorm development. Basically, infrared data helps determine where the most powerful storms are within a tropical cyclone.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard Aqua provided that infrared data on July 23 at 11:05 a.m. EDT (1505 UTC). MODIS data showed the strongest thunderstorms were as cold, or colder than minus 70 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 56.6 degrees Celsius). NASA research has found that storms with very cold cloud tops have the potential to generate very heavy rainfall. Those storms circled the low-level center and extended into the beginning of a fragmented band of thunderstorms to the northeast, which made it resemble a leaf attached to a strawberry.

The strawberry-like shape suggests that the storm is being affected somewhat by low westerly vertical wind shear.

At 5 a.m. EDT (0900 UTC) the center of Wukong was found near latitude 30.9 degrees north and longitude 158.8 degrees east. That's about 437 nautical miles northeast of Minami Tori Shima Island, Japan. The tropical storm was moving toward the north near 9.2 mph (8 knots/14.8 kph). Maximum sustained winds are near 51.7 mph (45 knots/81.3 kph) with higher gusts.

The Joint Typhoon Warning Center noted that Wukong will move north-northwest and turn extra-tropical far to the east of Japan.

Using an advanced, new microscopy technique that can visualize chemical reactions occurring in liquid environments, researchers have discovered a new reason lithium-oxygen batteries -- which promise up to five times more energy than the lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles and cell phones -- tend to slow down and die after just a few charge/discharge cycles. They report their findings in the journal Nano Energy.

"What we were able to see for the first time is that lithium peroxide develops in the liquid electrolyte of lithium-oxygen batteries, and is a contributor to the slow down and ultimate death of these batteries," said Reza Shahbazian-Yassar, associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering in the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Engineering and lead author of the paper. "This is a newly discovered reason why these promising batteries have such a steep drop off in efficiency and yield after relatively few charge/discharge cycles."

Lithium-oxygen batteries have been tantalizing to battery researchers for years because of their potential high energy density. But they tend to slow down and stop working relatively quickly compared to other batteries. One of the reasons for this loss of power is that a byproduct of the chemical reactions that take place inside the battery - lithium peroxide -- builds up on the electrodes of the battery. The coated electrodes can no longer function efficiently and chemical reactions that produce energy ultimately stop.

But now, Shahbazian-Yassar and his colleagues, using a new transmission electron microscopy technique developed by UIC engineering graduate students Kun He and Yifei Yuan, have demonstrated at the nanometer level, that lithium peroxide also forms in the battery's liquid electrolyte component, further slowing chemical reactions.

"Knowing that lithium peroxide is building up in the electrolyte itself is a very important finding," Shahbazian-Yassar said. "Now, we can start to come up with ideas and designs that either prevent this from happening or do something to maintain the proper functioning of the electrolyte so it doesn't interfere with the battery's operation, and we can use the new liquid microscopy technique to see if we are moving in the right direction."

So far, lithium-oxygen batteries have only existed as lab-based prototypes, with mass-produced lithium-oxygen batteries for public or commercial use still a long way off, Shahbazian-Yassar said. "There are many problems that need to be overcome with lithium-air batteries before they can get into mainstream use, but knowing exactly what the issues are is a big first step towards the commercialization of these extremely high energy density batteries."

The bad news: Dust from the Sahara Desert in Africa - totaling a staggering 2 to 9 trillion pounds worldwide - has been almost a biblical plague on Texas and much of the Southern United States in recent weeks. The good news: the same dust appears to be a severe storm killer.

Research from a team of scientists led by Texas A&M University has studied Saharan dust and their work is published in the current issue of the Journal of Climate of AMS (American Meteorological Society).

Texas A&M's Bowen Pan, Tim Logan, and Renyi Zhang in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences analyzed recent NASA satellite images and computer models and said the Saharan dust is composed of sand and other mineral particles that are swept up in air currents and pushed over the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico and other nearby regions.

As the dust-laden air moves, it creates a temperature inversion which in turn tends to prevent cloud - and eventually - storm formation.

It means fewer storms and even hurricanes are less likely to strike when the dust is present.

"The Saharan dust will reflect and absorb sunlight, therefore reduce the sunlight at the Earth's surface," said Pan.

"If we have more frequent and severe dust storms, it's likely that we have a cooler sea surface temperature and land surface temperature. The storms have less energy supply from the colder surface therefore will be less severe."

The study goes on to show that dust and storm formation don't mix.

"Our results show significant impacts of dust on the radiative budget, hydrological cycle, and large-scale environments relevant to tropical cyclone activity over the Atlantic," said Zhang.

"Dust may decrease the sea surface temperature, leading to suppression of hurricanes. For the dust intrusion over the past few days, it was obvious that dust suppressed cloud formation in our area. Basically, we saw few cumulus clouds over the last few days. Dust particles reduce the radiation at the ground, but heats up in the atmosphere, both leading to more stable atmosphere. Such conditions are unfavorable for cloud formation."

Zhang said that the chances of a hurricane forming tended to be much less and "our results show that dust may reduce the occurrence of hurricanes over the Gulf of Mexico region."

Logan said that recent satellite images clearly show the Saharan dust moving into much of the Gulf of Mexico and southern Texas.

"The movement of the dust is there," Zhang said, "but predictions of dust storms can be very challenging."

Sometimes, knowing who wins and who loses is more important than how the game is played.

In a paper published this week in Science Advances, researchers from the Santa Fe Institute describe a new algorithm called SpringRank that uses wins and losses to quickly find rankings lurking in large networks. When tested on a wide range of synthetic and real-world datasets, ranging from teams in an NCAA college basketball tournament to the social behavior of animals, SpringRank outperformed other ranking algorithms in predicting outcomes and in efficiency.

Physicist Caterina De Bacco, a former postdoctoral fellow at Santa Fe Institute, now at Columbia University, says SpringRank uses information that's already built into the network. It analyzes the outcomes of one-on-one, or pairwise, interactions between individuals. To rank NCAA basketball teams, for example, the algorithm would treat each team as an individual node, and represent each game as an edge that leads from the winner to the loser. SpringRank analyzes those edges, and which direction they travel, to determine a hierarchy. But it's more complicated than simply assigning the highest ranking to the team that won the most games; after all, a team that exclusively plays low-ranked teams may not deserve to be at the top.

"It's not just a matter of wins and losses, but which teams you beat and which you lost to," says mathematician Dan Larremore, a former postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, now at the University of Colorado Boulder. Larremore and De Bacco collaborated with computer scientist Cris Moore, also at the Santa Fe Institute, on the paper.

As its name suggests, SpringRank treats the connections between nodes like physical springs that can contract and expand. Because physicists have long known the equations that describe the motions of springs, says De Bacco, the algorithm is easy to implement. And unlike other ranking algorithms which assign ordinal numbers to nodes -- first, second, third, etc., -- SpringRank assigns each node a real-valued number. As a result, nodes may be close together, spread apart, or arranged in more complicated and revealing patterns, like clusters of similarly ranked nodes.

"Ideas from physics often give us elegant and effective algorithms," says Moore. "This is another win for that approach."

In the paper, the researchers tested the predictive power of SpringRank on a variety of datasets and situations, including sports tournaments, animal dominance behaviors among captive parakeets and free-ranging Asian elephants, and faculty hiring practices among universities.

The researchers uploaded the code for SpringRank to GitHub, an online code repository, and say they hope other researchers, especially in the social sciences, will use it. "It can be applied to any dataset," says De Bacco.

The next dataset she and her coauthors plan to analyze with SpringRank is unlike any of those featured in the Science Advances paper. They'll be working with Elizabeth Bruch, an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, to analyze patterns of messaging in online dating markets.

Bottom Line: Analysis of cancer death data from 2008-2014 in New York state revealed high cancer mortality rates among U.S.-born blacks and Puerto Ricans and relatively low cancer mortality rates among Hispanic South Americans and Asians.

Journal in Which the Study was Published: Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Author: Paulo Pinheiro, MD, cancer epidemiologist at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

Background: "We continue to aggregate minority groups into large umbrella populations, when in fact large disparities between different minority subpopulations exist," said Pinheiro. "These differences can have an impact on how we address cancer treatment, prevention, and control in these diverse groups."

Few studies have analyzed cancer mortality disparities between different racial subpopulations, noted Pinheiro. Furthermore, many non-Mexican Hispanics as well as Caribbean-born blacks reside in Florida and New York, two states which are not incorporated into the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) registry; studies on cancer patterns for these populations are therefore lacking.

How the Study Was Conducted: Pinheiro and colleagues analyzed 244,238 cancer deaths that occurred in New York state between 2008 and 2014, as provided by the New York State Department of Health. After stratifying for race, the researchers further delineated the aggregated non-Hispanic blacks into two categories (U.S.-born blacks and Caribbean-born blacks) and the aggregated Hispanics into five categories (Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Central Americans, South Americans, and others, including Cubans and Mexicans, whose numbers were too small to treat as a stand-alone group). Asian decedents were included in the study, but Native American/Alaskan Native decedents were excluded due to small sample sizes.

Results: Overall, the lowest cancer mortality rates were seen in South American Hispanics, while the highest cancer mortality rates were observed in U.S.-born blacks. Compared to Caribbean-born blacks, U.S.-born blacks had nearly five times higher mortality rates for lung cancer, three times higher mortality rates for liver cancer (in males), and twice higher mortality rates for colorectal (in males), pancreatic, kidney, and bladder cancers. Similar results were seen in a previous study conducted by Pinheiro investigating disparities in cancer mortality in Florida.

"If we can begin to understand the factors that make U.S.-born blacks so much more prone to dying of cancer compared to Caribbean blacks, then we can intervene on those differences," noted Pinheiro.

The researchers also compared liver cancer mortality between the minority populations and non-Hispanic whites (NHWs). Each of the aggregated minority groups had roughly two-fold higher liver cancer mortality rates than NHWs. However, after disaggregating the minority populations, Puerto Rican and U.S.-born blacks born between 1945-1965 had about three- to four-fold increased liver cancer mortality rates compared to NHWs of the same age and birth cohort.

Author's Comments: "When we combine the minority subpopulations into large groups, we don't see any stark differences in liver cancer mortality," noted Pinheiro. "But by disaggregating these minority cohorts, we see a huge risk for liver cancer mortality among Puerto Ricans and U.S.-born blacks, and this may reflect a higher rate of HCV [hepatitis C virus] infection among these subpopulations.

We need to increase the awareness of patients and clinicians to the higher risk of liver cancer among these groups, so they can get screened for HCV infection as a measure to decrease liver cancer incidence," Pinheiro said. "There's a disconnect between the target populations in our national programs and the reality of liver cancer risk, especially among Puerto Ricans."

Study Limitations: Limitations of the study include lack of access to specific risk factor and comorbidity profiles for the decedents within the database and lack of additional data, such as socioeconomic factors, language dominance, and year of immigration.

Funding & Disclosures: This study was sponsored by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. Pinheiro declares no conflict of interest.

A new study from the University of Waterloo has found that in some ways, the older you get the worse your decision making becomes.

The study established that younger children seem to make slightly better decisions than older children. The older children get, the more they tend to ignore some of the information available to them when making judgements, which though efficient can also lead to mistakes.

"It is good for us to know that kids at different ages don't necessarily treat all information similarly when we set out to teach them new things," said Stephanie Denison, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology, who co-authored the study with PhD student Samantha Gualtieri. "Children maybe aren't taking all the information we are giving them at face value. They may be thinking about it in their own way and using the data in the way they think makes the most sense, which is important for parents and teachers to understand," says Gualtieri.

"Our research shows that children around four-years-old are starting to use these shortcuts, but by six-years of age they're using them at levels as high as adults."

In two experiments, 288 children were assessed to determine whether they used numerical, social, or both types of information when making judgments. Ninety-five per cent of the six-year-olds depended on only the social information to make a judgement compared to 70 per cent of five-year-olds and 45 per cent of four-year-olds. The younger children were more likely to take both pieces of information into account.

The researchers do not deem older children's overuse of social as negative, it simply shows how children weigh information when making decisions. Adults also tend to not use all the information at their disposal when making judgments, possibly because it is time-consuming and requires lots of mental energy.

"So, while using these shortcuts is actually very efficient, we need to be aware that they can introduce errors," said Denison. "Therefore, sometimes we should be thinking harder and taking the time to put together all of the information.

"How much time you spend on processing information might depend on the importance of the judgement or the decision you're making. So, thinking about where you want to spend the time is really important."

Highlights

Among individuals with autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease, those who were treated with tolvaptan for up to 11 years had a slower rate of kidney function decline compared with historical controls.

Annualized kidney function decline rates of tolvaptan-treated patients did not change during follow-up.

Washington, DC (July 19, 2018) -- New research provides support for the long-term efficacy of a drug used to treat in patients with autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD), a common cause of kidney failure. The findings appear in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN).

The hormone vasopressin promotes the progression of ADPKD, the fourth leading cause of end stage kidney disease. In the three-year TEMPO 3:4 and in the one-year REPRISE phase 3 clinical trials, tolvaptan (a vasopressin receptor antagonist) slowed the decline of kidney function in patients with ADPKD at early and later stages of chronic kidney disease, respectively. The results suggest that tolvaptan might delay the need for dialysis or kidney transplantation, provided that its effect on kidney function decline is sustained and cumulative over time, beyond the relatively short duration of TEMPO 3:4 and REPRISE. Because all patients participating in these clinical trials were given the opportunity of continuing tolvaptan in an open-label extension study, investigators have now gathered information on the long-term efficacy of tolvaptan.

A team led by Vicente Torres, MD, PhD (Mayo Clinic) retrospectively analyzed information on 97 ADPKD patients treated with tolvaptan for up to 11 years at the Mayo Clinic. Kidney function was measured as estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR).

The investigators found that patients treated with tolvaptan had lower eGFR slopes compared with controls (-1.97 vs -3.50 ml/min per 1.73 m2 per year) and a lower risk of a 33% reduction in eGFR from baseline. Also, the annualized eGFR slopes of patients treated with tolvaptan did not change with the duration of follow-up. The team also compared the eGFR values observed at the last follow-up in the tolvaptan treated patients to the anticipated last follow-up eGFR values, estimated using a previously validated predictive equation. Differences between observed and predicted eGFRs at last follow-up increased with duration of treatment, suggesting that the beneficial effect of tolvaptan on the eGFR accumulates over time.

"The results of the study suggest that the effect of tolvaptan on eGFR in patients with ADPKD is sustained, cumulative, and consistent with potentially delaying the need of kidney replacement," said Dr. Torres.

Imagine adapting to life in the U.S. after emigrating from Mexico. With so many confusing new processes and systems to navigate, how would you begin to understand something as complex as local and national politics? According to San Francisco State University Associate Professor of Political Science Marcela García-Castañon, who studies political socialization, you'd likely turn to your spouse. In a recent study in the journal New Political Science, García-Castañon shows that spousal relationships often determine how newcomers from Mexico come to understand American politics and develop a sense of community.

García-Castañon says she's one of only a few academics studying spousal political socialization in immigrants. She notes that most of the research into political socialization focuses on native-born citizens whose values start forming in adolescence. By the time they're married, their political beliefs are formed. Adult immigrants are a different story, and the limited research on immigrant political behavior doesn't account for the role that spouses play in shaping political values, García-Castañon said.

"Assuming immigrants are here on an individual basis is an inaccurate portrayal of how citizenship develops," she said. "If immigrants don't understand something they're going to turn to the person they trust the most, which is often their partner or spouse. They're engaging with their families, and those pathways shape how they see citizenship."

According to García-Castañon, most studies on political behavior simply focus on whether people are voting or not. That's too limiting, in her view.

"Immigrants don't feel like members of the community because they vote," she said. "They feel like members of communities because they can have offhand conversations about politics with their neighbors. If they feel safe enough to have these conversations they will, but they have to feel like their neighbor isn't going to call ICE or profile them."

Such concerns aren't unfounded, of course. America's attitudes on immigration have shifted in recent years, and that directly impacts conversations between spouses and shapes how couples view citizenship.

"If a government targets a person's family, family becomes a weapon against the immigrant community," García-Castañon said. "You see this in policies like DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] where immigrants are hesitant to register because they're afraid of giving out personal information that could be turned against them, or their families. If they have other family members who are undocumented, but ineligible for DACA or similar protections, there is a fear that seeking out this aid or benefit could result in their family or community being targeted.""

The anti-immigrant climate has other repercussions. Immigrants also won't feel like they belong, and that mindset can leave a lasting imprint on future generations, García-Castañon adds. "They start to see citizenship as something that should be avoided, because the message they're getting is that nobody wants them here," she said.

To conduct her study, García-Castañon used qualitative and quantitative data from surveys she conducted with Mexican-origin households in Arizona and Washington. She asked respondents to talk about their experiences with politics in their home country and in their new country. She found that not only do spouses share information and help each other grasp nuances, they can also pave the way for taking action.

"The way spouses engage with each other isn't just, 'Hey, honey -- how are you doing?' but rather, 'Hey, honey -- do you want to go protest?'" she said.

Cities can serve as useful proxies to study and predict the effects of climate change, according to a North Carolina State University research review that tracks urbanization's effects on plant and insect species.

Cities often display many of the predicted effects of climate change, including higher temperatures, higher carbon dioxide concentration and higher drought rates. Some of those effects are due to impermeable building materials like concrete and glass, which help create "urban heat islands" and prevent water from soaking into soil.

Experiments in cities also have advantages over experiments performed in labs or in specially designed "growth chambers" that attempt to mimic higher temperature or drier soil conditions. Cities are larger than experimental chambers and organisms like trees have lived at higher temperatures their entire lives in cities, whereas other experimental methods can only increase temperature for short periods. Thus, urban areas can show how plants and animals respond to changes in climate over long stretches of time, which lab and growth chamber studies can't quite match.

"Our review synthesized existing studies that used cities as proxies for climate change, particularly higher temperatures," said Steve Frank, a professor in the Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology at NC State and a co-author of a paper describing the research.

In cities like Raleigh, N.C., Frank says the effects of urban heat islands on trees and bees are clear and in some cases match effects of climate warming in natural areas. Higher temperatures mean that trees are more susceptible to pests; Frank's work with insects on red maple trees highlights these results. City bees unaccustomed to high temperatures may leave heat islands to live in cooler city zones or in rural areas. That means some city plants may not be pollinated efficiently.

"However, we still need to figure out in which instances cities are good proxies for climate change and in which instances they are not," Frank said. "Cities have unique features like buildings and cars that could be confounding variables and need to be accounted for. Likewise, effects on small or immobile organisms like insects and plants may be different from effects on birds, for instance, that could leave a city if it gets too hot."

Most of the reviewed research took place in North America and Europe. Frank said that more research is needed in African and Asian cities, where biodiversity hotspots may see large climate effects.

"Cities could provide a fruitful avenue for climate studies and help predict which species may expand their range or become pests as the climate warms, and which species may be in trouble," Frank said. "This information will help people involved in conservation and land management plan for the future."

Training teachers to focus their attention on positive conduct and to avoid jumping to correct minor disruption improves child behaviour, concentration and mental health.

A study led by the University of Exeter Medical School, published in Psychological Medicine, analysed the success of a training programme called the Incredible Years® Teacher Classroom Management Programme. Its core principles include building strong social relationship between teachers and children, and ignoring low-level bad behaviour that often disrupts classrooms.

Instead, teachers are encouraged to focus on relationship building, age appropriate motivation, proactive management of unwanted behaviour and acknowledging good behaviour.

The Supporting Teachers and Children in Schools (STARS) study was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care South West Peninsula, and aimed to promote social and emotional wellbeing, against a backdrop of Government figures that show 10% of children have a mental health condition. The commonest and most persistent mental health condition is severe behaviour problems, and children with "conduct disorder" are at risk of all adult mental health conditions as well as poor educational and social outcomes.

Professor Tamsin Ford, of the University of Exeter Medical School, said: "Our findings suggest that this training potentially improves all children's mental health but it's particularly exciting to see the larger benefit on the children who were initially struggling. These effects might be larger were this training offered to all teachers and teaching assistants. Let's remember that training one teacher potentially benefits every child that they subsequently teach. Our study offers evidence that we should explore this training further as a whole school approach."

The project's outcomes were measured via a combination of questionnaires filled in by teachers and parents and children to fill in themselves. Researchers also considered academic attainment, and use of NHS and social services. Independent observers sat in on lessons in a quarter of schools who took part, without knowing whether the teachers had undertaken the training.

As well as the improvements in mental health, behaviour and concentration, teachers liked the training and thought it useful. Observations suggest that it changed their behaviour and improved child compliance in the classroom.

Teacher Sam Scudder, at Withycombe Raleigh School in Exmouth, East Devon, undertook the training as part of the trial. He said: "I've found the training has made a real difference and it's definitely improved my teaching practice. Praise is an essential aspect of the training and 'proximity praise' has been a really effective tool. By finding and describing the sort of behaviour you desire, you can bring a change in those who are off-task while simultaneously ignoring them. Of course there are some behaviours you can't ignore, but the focus is around really celebrating the kids who exhibit the behaviour you want: those who are quietly listening, yet are often overlooked in classrooms. It has a ripple-effect as more children copy that conduct."

Teacher Kate Holden, at Ipplepen Primary School, also took part in the study, and said: "This training helped us to use techniques to raise the profile of positive behaviour and diminish the emphasis placed on low level disruptive behaviour. Consistent clear rewards and sanctions highlighted expectations in a manageable and positive framework and preserved the high-quality relationships which underpin the whole ethos. This is far from woolly or accepting of poor behaviour. it is actually proactive and highly effective when used correctly in conjunction with a model to support behaviour across the whole school."

The paper is entitled The effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of the Incredible Years® Teacher Classroom Management programme in primary school children: results of the STARS cluster randomised controlled trial. It is published in the journal Psychological Medicine.

Even when people have well-connected social networks beyond their home cities and across state lines, they are still most frequently interacting with people who are very geographically near.

That is one of the major outcomes of an expansive, 16-month study of more than 51 million geo-tagged tweets generated by more than 1.7 million Twitter users across the U.S. The study was funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation.

San Diego State University professor Ming-Hsiang Tsou and alumnae Su Yeon Han led the collaborative study, also adopt mapping techniques which allowed for visual analysis of the information.

This type of foundational research is part of a growing body of literature and computational modeling efforts using social media and big data to improve measurements and predictions of human behavior.

"You can Skype and Zoom with anyone. People can buy anything they want from Amazon. It doesn't matter the location," said Tsou, founding director of SDSU's Center for Human Dynamics in the Mobile Age.

With the rise of the Internet and the new era of globalization, some have argued that the world is flat - geography is dead.

"But we disagree with that," Tsou said, noting that even with shipments, regional supply still influences availability and expedience of a delivery. "The concept of distance is not dissolved, but it has shifted. Now it is more about probability: What is the likelihood, because of distance, that your followers will be your friends in real life?"

If they do not live very close, highly unlikely, Tsou said.

Collaborating with Keith C. Clarke, a geography professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Han and Tsou published their findings in an article, "Revisiting the Death of Geography in the Era of Big Data: The Friction of Distance in Cyberspace and Real Space." The article recently appeared in the online issue of the International Journal of Digital Earth.

The team collected tweets via the Twitter Streaming API (application programming interface) between November 2015 and January 2016. Identifiable data, such as a person's user name, age, gender and occupation, were not included in the dataset.

The team focused on the online and real space interactions of users in four major cities: Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and New York. Spatial interactions generally include trips, telephone calls and emails, and the team broadened the definition to include any type of connection between places, including people viewing social media messages of those living in other places and "following" others online.

"When we are analyzing social media, or big data, while also handling the geospatial information, we can more precisely analyze data from a regional perspective," Tsou said.

Studying geo-tagged tweets was essential, as social media data became a proxy for human connection and mobility, said Han, the lead author, now a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California, Riverside (UCR). Han was involved in the study during her time as a post-doctoral researcher at SDSU.

With the massive database of tweets prepared for analysis, the team considered three main issues: how people followed one another, the awareness they had of the cities of their followers and whether they traveled to cities where their followers were located. To compare interactions online versus those in real space, the team studied origins and travel destinations of Twitter users, producing detailed data maps to easily visualize findings.

Of note, the team found that Twitter users averaged 90 percent of their tweets in a single city during the 16-month study period -- most often their home city.

In real space, and despite some variation, the team also found that users in all states tended to follow others and have followers well beyond their immediate geographic region - often nationwide. However, according to the study, people are far less likely to have strong awareness of or even give mention to the cities of their faraway followers.

Regional Interaction

A sizable number of New York, Chicago and Houston users had online connections that were densely consolidated in regions just beyond their own cities, but seldom had real space interactions with people who lived beyond 5 or 6 hours away. For users in those cities, very immediate geographic proximity determined real space interactions with followers; making an hours-long drive to maintain a connection less likely.

"We know that people are communicating much more frequently with nearby people than those who are far away," Han said. "Even in cyberspace, the same thing is very likely to happen because, in many cases, people get to know each other in real space and also communicate with the same people online."

Los Angeles: The Exception

Users in Los Angeles generally had an expanded network of friends nearby while being well-traveled regionally and nationally. However, they did not enjoy the same level of real life interactions with followers in their very immediate vicinity. The researchers attribute that partially to the entertainment industry, where individuals generally follow well-known celebrities and organizations that never follow them in return.

Based on the findings, the team offered an addendum to the Tobler's First Law of Geography advanced by UCSB Professor Emeritus Waldo R. Tobler, who passed in February 2018. Tobler explained that everything is relational, but nearer things are more closely related. The team noted instead: "In both real space and cyberspace, everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related in real space than in cyberspace."

The team's research, Han said, could more readily help determine ways to use social media to identify and address social issues and concerns.

"If you are a public health official who wants to spread information about disease prevention, you will be interested in looking at how far and quickly the information spread among people through social media," Han said. "Also, if you are a political campaigner who wants to spread an election pledge through social media, you will want to see how far and quickly the information spread through people in the social media."

A long-term plan to preserve the Rimatara lorikeet by restoring an extirpated population of the species on a neighboring island that is free of predatory ship rats is demonstrating the importance of this kind of protective program for the sustainability of endangered bird species. A case study published in the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) report Global Reintroduction Perspectives: 2018--Case Studies from Around the Globe sums up the results of an effort that began in 2000.

"The important thing about any conservation program is the ability to demonstrate that a species can be saved over the long term," said Alan Lieberman, retired director of field conservation programs for the Institute for Conservation Research, San Diego Zoo Global. "It is easy to get excited during the initial steps, but you don't know if you have succeeded until a decade or so later. In this case, we started with 27 birds captured on Rimatara and then translocated to Atiu Island, and we now have a population of well over 300."

The Rimatara lorikeet is considered to be an endangered species by BirdLife International and IUCN. Although originally distributed over the Cook and French Polynesia islands, its numbers were severely reduced and it disappeared in prehistoric times from most islands due to hunting for its bright red feathers.

Blue and ultramarine lories have been extirpated, as ship rats have invaded more islands in French Polynesia. The last natural population of the Rimatara lorikeet could easily be destroyed if ship rats invaded Rimatara, via cargo or a shipwreck. Nearby Atiu had similar habitats to Rimatara and was still free of ship rats, so it was an obvious choice for the establishment of a reserve population.

The complex negotiations required for a transboundary reintroduction were undertaken over several years by the Cook Islands Natural Heritage Trust and the Ornithological Society of French Polynesia (MANU). An important part of the effort to create a backup population on the island of Atiu was a veterinary survey of the birds selected for introduction onto the new island.

"Any time you are catching a wild animal, you create some level of stress that can complicate any existing health issues an animal may have," said Bruce Rideout, DVM, Ph.D., wildlife disease specialist for San Diego Zoo Global. "To ensure the newly translocated population had the best chance for survival, we gave each bird a comprehensive health check, working to ensure that the population would be free of diseases and other medical challenges."

The project, which also included educational outreach to residents of both Atiu and Rimatara, hopes to build understanding and respect for the species and gives conservationists a road map for similar programs in the future. The paper details the actions that the authors believe were particularly valuable in establishing a successful reserve population. Included in this list was dedicated funding (provided by BirdLife International, Air Rarotonga, San Diego Zoo Global and the governments of French Polynesia and the Cook Islands, as well as private donations), a diverse and experienced field team and the support of the Atiu community in taking steps to help protect this species on their island.

Bringing species back from the brink of extinction is the goal of San Diego Zoo Global. As a leader in conservation, the work of San Diego Zoo Global includes on-site wildlife conservation efforts (representing both plants and animals) at the San Diego Zoo, San Diego Zoo Safari Park, and San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research, as well as international field programs on six continents. The work of these entities is made accessible to children through the San Diego Zoo Kids network, reaching out through the internet and in children's hospitals nationwide. The work of San Diego Zoo Global is made possible by the San Diego Zoo Global Wildlife Conservancy and is supported in part by the Foundation of San Diego Zoo Global.

Death rates from heart failure are higher for women than men, and hospitalization rates have increased in women while declining in men, found a study from the University of Ottawa Heart Institute published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) http://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.180177.

"This is the first of a series of studies to examine the sex differences in heart failure incidence, outcomes, care delivery and access in Ontario," says Dr. Louise Sun, University of Ottawa Heart Institute, Ottawa, Ontario.

Heart failure is a major cause of illness and death and accounts for 35% of total female cardiovascular deaths. Recent research indicates heart failure rates have declined, although information on sex differences in outcomes for men and women is lacking.

To understand sex differences in heart failure outcomes, researchers looked at data on more than 90 000 patients diagnosed with heart failure in Ontario over 5 years (2009 to 2014). Of the total cases, 47% were female and were more likely to be older and frailer, to have lower income and to have multiple chronic illnesses. The number of new heart failure cases was lowest in 2011 and 2012, then began to rise the following year. Within one year of follow-up after diagnosis, 16.8% (7156) women died compared with 14.9% (7138) men. During the study period, hospitalization rates for women surpassed rates for men, with 98 women per 1000 hospitalized in 2013 compared with 91 per 1000 men.

"We found that mortality from heart failure remains high, especially in women; that hospital admissions for heart failure decreased in men but increased in women; and that women and men had different associated comorbidities.," write the authors. "Further studies should focus on sex differences in health-seeking behaviour, medical therapy and response to therapy to improve outcomes in women."