Tech

Counterfeiters who sell knockoffs of popular shoes, handbags and other items are becoming increasingly sophisticated, forcing manufacturers to find new technologies to stay one step ahead. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Nano have developed tiny "Janus balls" that show their colored side under a magnetic field. These microparticles could be useful in inks for anti-counterfeiting tags, which could be verified with an ordinary magnet, the researchers say. Watch a video of the Janus balls here.

In ancient Roman mythology, Janus was the two-faced god of transitions. Similarly, so-called Janus balls are microspheres that have two sides with distinct properties. Shin-Hyun Kim and colleagues wanted to make Janus balls out of two unmixable resins: one that contained magnetic nanoparticles, and another that contained silica particles. The magnetic side of the ball would also contain carbon black, causing that hemisphere to appear dark, whereas the silica particles on the other side of the ball would self-assemble into a crystalline lattice, producing structural colors. The result would be tiny balls that normally have their black sides facing up, except when a magnetic field causes them to flip to their colorful sides.

To make Janus balls, the researchers used a microfluidic device to unite drops of the two resins, with a surfactant added to stabilize the joined drops into a spherical shape. Because the silica-containing colored side of the drops was heavier than the black magnetic side, the force of gravity caused the black side to spontaneously face upward, like a roly-poly toy, when the balls were placed in water. Then, the researchers permanently aligned the magnetic nanoparticles in the balls in the same direction. By applying a magnetic field in the opposite direction, they could flip the balls to their colored sides. The researchers made red and green Janus balls by using different sizes of silica particles, with their magnetic nanoparticles aligned in opposite directions. By changing the direction of the applied magnetic field, they could change the colors of 3D-printed chameleon and butterfly shapes. Using different colors and orientations of Janus balls in inks could produce sophisticated, user-interactive anti-counterfeiting tags, the researchers say.

ITHACA, N.Y. - By monitoring the cosmos with a radio telescope array, a Cornell University-led international team of scientists has detected radio bursts emanating from the constellation Boötes. The signal could be the first radio emission collected from a planet beyond our solar system.

The team, led by Cornell postdoctoral researcher Jake D. Turner, Philippe Zarka of the Observatoire de Paris - Paris Sciences et Lettres University and Jean-Mathias Griessmeier of the Université d'Orléans published their findings in the forthcoming research section of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, on Dec. 16.

"We present one of the first hints of detecting an exoplanet in the radio realm," Turner said. "The signal is from the Tau Boötes system, which contains a binary star and an exoplanet. We make the case for an emission by the planet itself. From the strength and polarization of the radio signal and the planet's magnetic field, it is compatible with theoretical predictions."

Among the co-authors is Turner's postdoctoral advisor Ray Jayawardhana, the Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell, and a professor of astronomy.

"If confirmed through follow-up observations," Jayawardhana said, "this radio detection opens up a new window on exoplanets, giving us a novel way to examine alien worlds that are tens of light-years away."

Using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), a radio telescope in the Netherlands, Turner and his colleagues uncovered emission bursts from a star-system hosting a so-called hot Jupiter, a gaseous giant planet that is very close to its own sun. The group also observed other potential exoplanetary radio-emission candidates in the 55 Cancri (in the constellation Cancer) and Upsilon Andromedae systems. Only the Tau Boötes exoplanet system - about 51 light-years away - exhibited a significant radio signature, a unique potential window on the planet's magnetic field.

Observing an exoplanet's magnetic field helps astronomers decipher a planet's interior and atmospheric properties, as well as the physics of star-planet interactions, said Turner, a member of Cornell's Carl Sagan Institute.

Earth's magnetic field protects it from solar wind dangers, keeping the planet habitable. "The magnetic field of Earth-like exoplanets may contribute to their possible habitability," Turner said, "by shielding their own atmospheres from solar wind and cosmic rays, and protecting the planet from atmospheric loss."

Two years ago, Turner and his colleagues examined the radio emission signature of Jupiter and scaled those emissions to mimic the possible signatures from a distant Jupiter-like exoplanet. Those results became the template for searching radio emission from exoplanets 40 to 100 light-years away.

After poring over nearly 100-hours of radio observations, the researchers were able to find the expected hot Jupiter signature in Tau Boötes. "We learned from our own Jupiter what this kind of detection looks like. We went searching for it and we found it," Turner said.

The signature, though, is weak. "There remains some uncertainty that the detected radio signal is from the planet. The need for follow-up observations is critical," he said.

Turner and his team have already begun a campaign using multiple radio telescopes to follow up on the signal from Tau Boötes.

ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. -- Researchers believe a new hinge is the key to get load-bearing, large, Army quadrotors to climb a few dozen feet in seconds.

Dr. Jean-Paul Reddinger, a research aerospace engineer with the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, now known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory, is studying how quickly a quadrotor the size of a king-sized mattress can ascend from the ground to the rooftop of a two-story building, particularly with large payloads such as the weight of a Soldier.

Reddinger invented a hinge at the root of the quadrotor blade next to the hub. He situated it so that the blade pitch changes with rotor speed.

As quadrotors and similar aircraft are scaled up, the extra inertia of the rotor blade slows them down, he said.

It can take a long time for lightweight electric motors to change the rotor speed and thrust, which ultimately impacts the vehicle's speed, range and flight stability, but with this coupling the thrust becomes more sensitive to changes in rotation per minute, or RPM.

Reddinger said the difference is large quadrotors carrying these loads that could climb roughly 25 feet in as little as two seconds with the hinge instead of three or four seconds without it.

"Every second less that it takes a quadrotor to get where it's going is a second less that an enemy can target it, and a second less that a Soldier has to wait for it to deliver supplies and intelligence," Reddinger said. "When a pilot, or flight controller asks for more thrust to climb, it takes much more time for the aircraft to move."

Reddinger said if they can increase the thrust sensitivity to changes in the RPM, it will allow for greater control authority and more agility.

Helicopters with four rotors, commonly referred to as quadrotors or quadcopters, are part of a family of unmanned aircraft systems that have two pairs of counter-rotating rotors and propellers. These vehicles can hover, fly forward and perform vertical take-off and landings, similar to helicopters.

Common Army UAS requirements include speed, flexibility, adaptability and the ability to provide real-time surveillance and carry payloads.

This invention will likely improve agility without fully committing to a swashplate and the weight penalties associated with it, he said.

According to Reddinger, people usually design around the issues of responsiveness in one of two ways. They add a swashplate to actively control the blade pitch, or just put smaller rotors on the aircraft like an octacopter, he said.

"The problem is that both of these solutions weigh more, which means the air craft can't carry as much gear, or cameras, or batteries," he said.

Reddinger discussed the hinge's 30-percent reduction in thrust response in the paper Coupled Pitch-Lag Hinge for High Inertia Electric Rotors. He recently presented these findings at the Vertical Flight Society's 76th Annual Forum and Technology Display.

Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute have found a new way to prevent some tumours from repairing their own DNA, a function that is essential for cancer cell survival. This discovery could lead to much needed new treatments for certain types of the disease.

In their study, published in Molecular Cell today [16th December], the researchers showed that blocking an enzyme called ALC1 in certain human cancer cells in the lab caused the cells to die.

It has emerged that many cancers lose specific DNA repair processes. As a consequence, these cancers become critically dependent on backup DNA repair pathways, which present an 'Achilles heel' that can be targeted to kill cancer cells.

Cancers that lack homologous recombination (HR), a key pathway involved in DNA repair, including some breast and ovarian cancers, can be selectively killed by PARP inhibitors. However, in about half of cases, people do not respond to these drugs and of those who do, many will eventually develop resistance.

In the search for urgently needed new drug targets to exploit DNA repair deficiencies, the team studied the effect of removing ALC1, an enzyme which plays an important role in repair of damaged DNA bases. Unexpectedly, cells lacking ALC1 were found to be exquisitely sensitive to PARP inhibitor treatment. Removing ALC1 also conferred synthetic lethality in HR deficient cancers.* The researchers also found that HRD cancer patients with higher levels of ALC1 in their tumours were predicted to be less likely to survive.

Simon Boulton, senior author and group leader of the DSB Repair Metabolism Laboratory at the Crick says, "This work provides strong evidence for developing new drugs that block the ALC1 enzyme. If shown to be effective in further studies, these drugs could be used alone or in combination with existing PARP inhibitors to target HRD cancers."

To understand why this enzyme has this particular effect, the team also analysed the genomes of human cancer cells where ALC1 had been removed. They observed that without this enzyme, DNA gaps accumulated in the cancer cells, which are normally repaired by HR.

Graeme Hewitt, author and postdoc in the DSB Repair Metabolism Laboratory at the Crick says, "Many different types of cancer have weaknesses in their ability to repair DNA that could be targeted with new treatments."

"Not only have we shown that inhibiting ALC1 effectively leads to cancer cell death, we have also found out the detailed mechanism behind this. Our increased understanding of this enzyme could help in the development of drugs which stop it working."

A team of researchers from the Technical University of Munich, the Walther-Meissner-Institute of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim has discovered an exciting method for controlling spin carried by quantized spin wave excitations in antiferromagnetic insulators.

Elementary particles carry an intrinsic angular momentum known as their spin. For an electron, the spin can take only two particular values relative to a quantization axis, letting us denote them as spin-up and spin-down electrons. This intrinsic two-valuedness of the electron spin is at the core of many fascinating effects in physics.

In today's information technology, the spin of an electron and the associated magnetic momentum are exploited in applications of information storage and readout of magnetic media, like hard disks and magnetic tapes.

Antiferromagnets: future stars in magnetic data storage?

Both, the storage media and the readout sensors utilize ferromagnetically ordered materials, where all magnetic moments align parallel. However, the moments may orient in a more complex way. In antiferromagnets, the "antagonist to a ferromagnet", neighboring moments align in an anti-parallel fashion. While these systems look "non-magnetic" from outside, they have attracted broad attention as they promise robustness against external magnetic fields and faster control. Thus, they are considered as the new kids on the block for applications in magnetic storage and unconventional computing.

One important question in this context is, whether and how information can be transported and detected in antiferromagnets. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich, the Walther-Meissner-Institute and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim studied the antiferromagnetic insulator hematite in this respect.

In this system, charge carriers are absent and therefore it is a particularly interesting testbed for the investigation of novel applications, where one aims at avoiding dissipation by a finite electrical resistance. The scientists discovered a new effect unique to the transport of antiferromagnetic excitations, which opens up new possibilities for information processing with antiferromagnets.

Unleashing the pseudospin in antiferromagnets

Dr Matthias Althammer, the lead researcher on the project describes the effect as follows: "In the antiferromagnetic phase, neighboring spins are aligned in an anti-parallel fashion. However, there are quantized excitations called magnons. Those carry information encoded in their spin and can propagate in the system. Due to the two antiparallel-coupled spin species in the antiferromagnet the excitation is of a complex nature, however, its properties can be cast in an effective spin, a pseudospin. We could experimentally demonstrate that we can manipulate this pseudospin, and its propagation with a magnetic field."

Dr Akashdeep Kamra, the lead theoretician from NTNU in Trondheim adds that "this mapping of the excitations of an antiferromagnet onto a pseudospin enables an understanding and a powerful approach which has been the crucial foundation for treating transport phenomena in electronic systems. In our case, this enables us to describe the dynamics of the system in a much easier manner, but still maintain a full quantitative description of the system. Most importantly, the experiments provide a proof-of-concept for the pseudospin, a concept which is closely related to fundamental quantum mechanics."

Unlocking the full potential of antiferromagnetic magnons

This first experimental demonstration of magnon pseudospin dynamics in an antiferromagnetic insulator not only confirms the theoretical conjectures on magnon transport in antiferromagnets, but also provides an experimental platform for expanding towards rich electronics inspired phenomena.

"We may be able to realize fascinating new stuff such as the magnon analogue of a topological insulator in antiferromagnetic materials" points out Rudolf Gross, director of the Walther-Meissner-Institute, Professor for Technical Physics (E23) at the Technical University of Munich and co-speaker for the cluster of excellence Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology (MCQST). "Our work provides an exciting perspective for quantum applications based on magnons in antiferromagnets"

Scientists, policymakers and healthcare workers are eager to discern to what extent COVID-19 may be seasonal. Understanding this aspect of the disease could guide our response to the pandemic.

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara have found evidence that the spread of COVID-19 is sensitive to UV exposure. While this suggests that COVID-19 may vary with the seasons, there are other seasonal factors -- such as temperature, specific humidity and precipitation -- whose effects are uncertain given the available data. The results appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Related species of coronavirus -- like SARS from 2003 and MERS from 2012 -- turned out to have weak relationships with temperature and humidity, but were sensitive to UV radiation," said coauthor Kyle Meng, an environmental economist in UC Santa Barbara's economics department and at the campus's Bren School of Environmental Science & Management.

Meng, together with Tamma Carleton, also at the Bren School, Peter Huybers and Jonathan Proctor from Harvard, and Jules Cornetet at France's École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay, sought to explore the relationship between UV radiation and the spread of COVID-19 by constructing a high-resolution global dataset of daily COVID-19 cases.

Many papers compare different locations to get a sense of how the disease reacts to various environmental conditions. But this approach introduces a host of potentially confounding factors into statistical models, such as health care quality, income and cultural norms.

Meng offers the more temperate United States and more tropical Brazil as examples. "The U.S. and Brazil are different for all kinds of reasons," he said. "They have different economic conditions and institutions in addition to different environmental conditions." These distinctions, he said, prevent a clean comparison of the spread of COVID-19 based solely on environmental conditions.

To circumvent this issue, the team conducted a longitudinal study, essentially comparing many populations to themselves over time. So, rather than compare Brazil to the U.S., they would compare communities within Brazil to themselves at a different time, when local environmental conditions changed. "We basically ask whether daily fluctuations in environmental conditions experienced by a population affect new COVID-19 cases up to two weeks later," Meng explained.

To accomplish this, the researchers needed a lot of data. Unfortunately, when the team began their work, international COVID-19 datasets, like that of John's Hopkins, provided data only at the country level. Records with finer resolution were scattered across different agencies and institutions in a variety of languages and formats.

"We took many disparate datasets from different countries' statistical agencies and harmonized them to create a global dataset composed of over 3,000 spatial units," Carleton said. The authors then used a dataset of meteorological conditions with daily resolution to match local environmental conditions to daily COVID-19 case counts.

The researchers applied a suite of statistical techniques to analyze how four variables -- UV radiation, temperature, humidity and precipitation -- correlated with the daily growth rate of COVID-19 cases, a measure for how rapidly the disease was spreading in a region. They also estimated the lag time between changes in environmental conditions and possible effects on recorded COVID cases, which could be significant given the virus's four to seven-day incubation period along with additional delays due to testing.

The team found evidence that a location's UV exposure significantly affects COVID-19 transmission. A change in UV exposure by 1 standard deviation (roughly equal to the difference in UV between May and June in Los Angeles) reduced the growth rate of new cases by around 1 percentage point over the following two weeks. That could bring down COVID-19 growth rates from an average daily increase at the beginning of the epidemic of 13% to a 12% increase per day.

Based on the expected seasonal changes in UV radiation, the model predicted growth rates would increase by 7.3 percentage points for southern temperate locations between January and June. Meanwhile, northern temperate regions would see a UV-driven decrease of 7.4 percentage points during that same period, as longer days increased UV exposure.

This pattern switches as the seasons flip. By December, the researchers predicted COVID-19 growth rates could decrease by 7.7 percentage points in southern temperate regions, compared with July numbers, while cooler northern areas could see a jump of 7.8 percentage points over this period.

Importantly, the seasonal influence of UV on transmission of the disease is small relative to that of social distancing policies such as travel bans, school closures or home isolation, the authors noted. Regardless of the weather, social distancing measures appear to be necessary to substantially slow the spread.

Conforming with these findings, infection rates appear to have decreased in the northern hemisphere during the summer, possibly due to increased UV exposure. However, much of the northern hemisphere also relaxed their COVID stay-at-home orders at the same time, Meng said. As a result, there's a conflation between UV effects and the loosening restrictions during the summer months. "This is a big reason why our study uses daily fluctuations in UV exposure, in part to avoid conflating influences when looking at long-term, varying fluctuations."

These findings are consistent with concerns about the surge of COVID-19 infections currently being experienced in the U.S. with the arrival of winter; however, to get the full seasonality picture, researchers will need more precise estimates of how the disease responds to other seasonally varying environmental conditions, such as temperature and specific humidity. "We are confident of the UV effect, but this is only one piece of the full seasonality picture," Carleton said.

Lab studies will ultimately be critical in determining the mechanisms at work, though the authors suspect multiple factors may be behind the effect of UV on COVID-19 transmission, some of which cannot be studied in the lab. The first is biological. UV can damage the nucleic acids that the virus uses to encode its genetic information. Coauthor Jonathan Proctor, a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, posited that UV radiation may inactivate the virus as it is being transmitted, such as when it's suspended in the air or resting on an exposed surface. "Just as UV can destroy our own DNA if we don't use sunscreen, UV can damage the COVID-19 virus," Proctor said.

Another component is behavioral. For example, people may go out more often when it is sunnier, which could alter the risk of transmission. While laboratory studies can help determine the biological mechanisms, population-level studies like this one are able to also capture social factors.

"In the context of all this, our study suggests that seasonal changes in UV may influence COVID-19 transmission in the coming months," Meng said. "And if that's true, we need to think carefully about how to modulate COVID-19 containment policies in a seasonal manner."

Boulder, Colo., USA: Between 1997 and 2017, central Italy was struck by several seismic sequences that cumulatively claimed more than 600 victims, besides producing widespread destruction in historical towns and damage to vital infrastructures. Based on the integration of geological and seismological datasets, this new study published in the Geological Society of America Bulletin provides a 4D, high-resolution image of a crustal volume hosting an active linkage zone between two major seismogenic faults.

This, in turn, furnishes new insights into the behavior of interacting faults in the incipient stages of connection. In fact, this study proposes an innovative interpretation for a key area--that of Campotosto--believed to represent a seismic gap located between the seismogenic fault responsible for the 2009 L'Aquila earthquake (of magnitude 6.3) and that activated during the 2016 Amatrice-Visso-Norcia earthquakes (of maximum magnitude 6.5).

The Campotosto area is characterized at the surface by a major geological structure; i.e. the Mount Gorzano fault. Mainly due to its geomorphological expression, this fault has been considered as an active and silent structure--able to generate an earthquake of maximum magnitude of 6.5-7.0. However, the geological evidence provided by this study indicates that this fault accumulated most of its displacement between about seven million and five million years ago, and it does not represent a direct surface expression of a major seismogenic fault.

The results of this study bear major implications for seismic hazard assessment in the study area, also taking into account that the issue of temporarily "silent" seismogenic sources are receiving much attention in the earthquake faulting debate following the deadly 2016 earthquakes in central Italy.

Land use and land-use change are thought to be responsible for about 23% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. But nailing down this number with certainty has been hampered by a lack of data in many key regions of the tropics where forests are being replaced by agriculture and where other activities are degrading forests.

A large part of our uncertainty is related to what is happening in soils as a result of forest conversion to agriculture. Soils store about twice as much carbon as the atmosphere and they are responsible for regulating concentrations of two other important greenhouse gases - nitrous oxide, which is a greenhouse gas about 265 times more potent than carbon dioxide, and methane, which is the second most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide.

Improving the quantification of greenhouse gas emissions is needed for the implementation of climate change mitigation actions under the Paris Agreement. Many countries across the tropics have committed to reducing emissions in their agriculture and forestry sectors. Some of this will be done unilaterally, but some will be done through international cooperation, including through carbon markets.

The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT has been working with partners across the CGIAR to increase emissions data availability. In recent months, we published three papers with new primary data from sites across the humid tropics. Two studies looked at the conversion of forests to different types of agriculture on upland soils in Cameroon and on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia; the third study examined forest degradation in a tropical peatland from the unsustainable harvesting of palm fruits in Peru.

The consistent finding across these papers is that the conversion of forest to agriculture and forest degradation slows down the carbon and nitrogen cycles in these landscapes, which affects the flows of greenhouse gases between the biosphere and the atmosphere.

One of the gases we looked at was methane, and this is important because soil removes this greenhouse gas from the atmosphere and limits its climate impact. Our study in Cameroon found that conversion of humid forest to cropland reduced this removal by 47%, but conversion to a cacao plantation did not reduce removal. Our study in Sumatra found lower, but still important, removal rates compared to the forest that we observed in Cameroon.

Conversion of forest to rubber and oil palm plantations decreased greenhouse gas removal by soil to near zero.

Solving the missing methane mystery?

Methane is increasing in the atmosphere at an accelerated rate. The orders of magnitude of the reduction of the tropical forest methane removals that we observed suggest that deforestation may be contributing between 4% and 9% of this increase. This effect of land-use change is not integrated into global modeling studies and may account for some of the year-to-year variability in atmospheric methane accumulation.

In Peru, we looked at a contrasting situation in forested wetlands, which are a natural source of methane to the atmosphere because of the combination of high organic matter content of wetland soils and flooding conditions that limit oxygen levels in these soils.

We looked at forest degradation in a swamp area on peat soils (soils with very high organic matter content) and found that changes in forest structure and soil disturbance from unsustainable harvesting of Mauritia flexuosa palms was decreasing the natural source of methane from the region. Given the large-scale loss and degradation of wetlands across the tropics, this natural source may be decreasing, which means that the increase of methane in the atmosphere due to anthropogenic activities may be underestimated.

Nitrous oxide reductions - at first

For nitrous oxide, we also found that emissions were lower in the areas converted to agriculture, primarily because these soils were not being fertilized. In Cameroon, emissions decreased by 52% in recently converted cropland and by 35% in the agroforestry plantation. We published the results from Sumatra previously and showed a 40% reduction when forest was converted to oil palm and rubber plantations.

Continued removal of crops from these sites without nutrient replenishment will exacerbate nitrogen deficiencies and at some point and fertilization will be required to boost productivity. This will increase emissions and typically, emissions from fertilized systems exceed those of native vegetation.

We found equivocal results for nitrous oxide emissions in response to forest degradation in the Peruvian peatlands, with one degraded site showing much lower emissions than the intact forest and another showing similar emissions.

Agroforestry may maintain soil carbon levels

The third gas that we looked at was carbon dioxide and we looked in particular at soil respiration. Soil respiration is the efflux of carbon dioxide from soils and this comes from two sources: degradation of soil organic matter and root respiration. Soil respiration is the second most important carbon flux in ecosystems after photosynthesis and it indicates ecosystem productivity.

In Cameroon, conversion of forest to cropland resulted in a 43% reduction in soil respiration, and only a 20% reduction in the cacao plantation. In Sumatra, we saw no change in soil respiration with the conversion of forest to plantation crops, and oil palm had higher soil respiration rates than the forest site. Data on soil respiration in the Peruvian peatland degradation experiment are forthcoming.

In Sumatra, there was little loss in soil organic matter following conversion, which helped bolster soil respiration. We noted significant soil organic matter declines in Cameroon associated with lower soil respiration. These results suggest that maintenance of highly productive agroforestry systems may be a key to maintaining soil carbon stocks and reducing emissions from land-use change.

These studies and other papers that will be or have been produced from these sites will add three well-characterized sites to the body of knowledge across the humid tropics to support better modeling and better implementation of the Paris Agreement.

One of the important functions of applied science organizations like the Alliance is to provide data to support sound decision-making. We recognize that good data does not ensure good decisions, but lack of data guarantees that good decisions are hit-or-miss.

Stress related to the coronavirus pandemic and the uncertainty of what the future holds is motivating people to purchase firearms, a trend that may be more prevalent in those who already own firearms, according to a Rutgers study.

The study, published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, found that people intending to acquire a firearm in the next 12 months are less tolerant of uncertainty, have exaggerated threat expectancies and are experiencing more severe COVID-19 specific fears. They also were more likely to have experienced suicidal ideation in the past year, to have worked in law enforcement, and to have been considered essential workers during COVID-19.

"Essential workers are serving on the front lines of the pandemic and many are already facing systemic inequities that leave them experiencing chronic stress. The pandemic may be making that worse and leaving them considering options such as firearms in hopes that they will grant a sense of safety," said lead author Michael Anestis, executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center based at Rutgers and an associate professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health.

"Law enforcement officers already own firearms at a high rate and, in addition to COVID stress, may be experiencing concerns about their place in society as the racial justice movement has shifted public opinion about police," he said. "The thought of purchasing a firearm in the coming year may bring a sense of normalcy."

Researchers tracked the firearm purchasing intentions of 3,500 Americans in the coming 12 months: 2,364 who reported not planning to purchase a firearm, 516 who were planning a purchase and 596 who were undecided.

The researchers found that 26.4 percent of individuals who planned to purchase a firearm in the coming 12 months had already purchased a firearm in 2020 as compared to 3.6 percent of those undecided about purchasing and 1.7 percent of those planning not to purchase a firearm. Those planning the purchase firearms also reported owning more handguns, shotguns and rifles than any other group.

These findings point to a group of individuals stockpiling firearms during a particularly chaotic time in the nation. Although those planning to purchase firearms were more anxious than others, they did not report living in more dangerous neighborhoods.

"The drive to purchase firearms during the 2020 purchasing surge seems to be prompted by a sense that times are stressful and the world is unsafe," Anestis said. "It may be that, for some individuals, acquiring a firearm brings a feeling of control and safety, which would explain the drive to continually acquire more during stressful moments. This fear does not seem to be driven by actual tangible threats in their surrounding environment, though, so the issue here is not that their lives are marked by a spike in violence, but rather that their fears are driving their perception of the world to come."

The 2020 firearm purchase surge does not guarantee a subsequent epidemic of suicide deaths, he noted, but increases risk. The findings represent an important step in understanding the dynamics underlying the trends in purchasing behavior.

The spread of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus responsible for the current pandemic outbreak, has been speculated to be linked to short-term and long-term atmospheric pollutants exposure, mainly particulate matters (PMs). It is in fact possible for people living in highly industrialized areas, therefore exposed to higher pollution levels, to show more severe symptoms. Further studies have pointed out that atmospheric pollutants can act as virus carriers and boost pandemic diffusion.

A study recently published on Environmental Pollution searched for any potential short-term correlation between these two phenomena.

The research led by the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC) Foundation and carried out in collaboration with the University of Salento and the Italian National Institute of Health (ISS) focused on the analysis of atmospheric pollutants concentrations (PM10, PM2.5, NO2) along with the spatio-temporal distribution of cases and deaths (specifically incidence, mortality and lethality rates) across the whole Italian country, down to the level of individual territorial areas, including four of the most affected regions, i.e. Lombardy, Piedmont, Emilia-Romagna and Veneto.

"The data analysis has been limited to the first quarter of 2020 to reduce the lockdown-dependent biased effects on the atmospheric pollutant levels as much as possible", explains Prof. Giovanni Aloisio, corresponding author of the study and also member of the CMCC Strategic Board, Director of the CMCC Supercomputing Center and Full Professor at the University of Salento, Dept. of Innovation Engineering. "Our results suggest the hypothesis of a moderate-to-strong correlation between the number of days exceeding the annual regulatory limits of PM10, PM2.5 and NO2 atmospheric pollutants and COVID-19 incidence, mortality and lethality rates for all the 107 Italian territorial areas under investigation, whereas weak-to-moderate correlations where found when the analysis was limited to four of the most affected regions in Northern Italy (Lombardy, Piedmont, Emilia-Romagna and Veneto)."

Overall, PM10 and PM2.5 showed a higher correlation than NO2 with COVID-19 incidence, mortality and lethality rates.

Finally, PM10 profiles have been further analyzed along with the COVID-19 incidence rate variation for three of the most affected territorial areas in Northern Italy (i.e., Milan, Brescia, and Bergamo) in March 2020. All areas showed a similar PM10 time trend but a different COVID-19 incidence rate variation, that was less severe in Milan compared with Brescia and Bergamo.

The investigation will be extended in the future to account for confounding factors and outbreak dynamics, such as for example population size, ethnicity, hospital beds, number of individuals tested for COVID-19, weather, socioeconomic and behavioral variables (e.g. income, obesity, smoking habits), days since the first reported case of COVID-19, population age distribution, and days since the issuance of the stay-at-home order, etc.

The results of this study suggest in fact that confounding factors should be considered to justify why the almost identical PM10 profiles observed in Milan, Brescia, and Bergamo during the first quarter of 2020 did not produce similar COVID-19 incidence rate variations. In addition, confounders might justify the differences in the statistical significance of correlations found when comparing a 4-region subset with the whole Italian country. Finally, climate change negatively affects human health and its potential role in the pandemic spread deserves further investigation.

When it comes to introducing new products to the market, crowdfunding has become a hugely popular way for sellers to attract customers.

A new study from the UBC Sauder School of Business shows that people will pay far more for social good items when they're crowdfunded.

Hundreds of thousands of start-ups have successfully pitched their offerings to millions of prospective buyers on sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo; in fact, according to data from the Pew Research Center, by 2016, 25 per cent of Americans had contributed to a crowdfunded project.

But according to a new study from the UBC Sauder School of Business, crowdfunding not only draws attention to new ventures: it can influence what people buy and how much they'll pay -- in particular, for items that offer an element of social good.

For the study, titled Making the World a Better Place: How Crowdfunding Increases Consumer Demand for Social-Good Products, researchers recruited an associate to sit outside a university coffee shop and invited passersby to try a new line of pens made from reclaimed, sustainable materials, then fill out a short survey in exchange for $2.

Each hour, the research associate switched the type of transaction: one hour they told passersby the pen was available for traditional purchase; the next hour they said it was part of a crowdfunding effort. Either way, the customer got to determine whether they would buy the pen and how much they would pay.

Surprisingly, even though it was the exact same pen, buyers who thought it was a crowdfunding effort were more likely to buy and were willing to pay significantly more for the pen ($1.49) than those who were offered a traditional purchase ($1.05).

Published in the Journal of Marketing Research, the paper also shows it isn't only the act of crowdfunding that's drawing consumers in. The researchers performed the same exercise, but also alternated the merits of the pen: some people were told about its performance quality, while others were told about how it contributed to the social good - namely, that it was made from reclaimed, sustainable materials.

In a separate experiment, online customers were offered sunglasses: some were told they were made from recycled fishing nets (a social good benefit), while others were told they adjusted to sunlight (a performance benefit). Notably, people paid substantially more for the crowdfunded product when it was combined with the social good element.

According to UBC Sauder professor Katherine White, study co-author and academic director of the Peter P. Dhillon Centre for Business Ethics, participating in crowdfunding spurs people's interest in the collective good -- and those buyers are especially drawn to products that have a broader social benefit.

"Crowdfunding activates feelings of working towards a goal with other people, and what we find is that it activates an interdependent mindset. So, it makes you feel more interconnected with other people," says White. Because of that, she adds, people prefer products that give back in some way.

"When you're in the that state of mind, you're going to be more responsive to the goals of others -- and goals that help others. So, if you're being offered this product that helps people or the planet, it has this matching effect--people prefer social good options when they are in an interdependent state of mind."

The effect was so strong, in fact, that the research assistant who was performing the experiments -- and was not told what the researchers were studying -- felt the need to speak up.

"She said, 'I don't know what's going on. They're all responding a certain way. I swear I'm not doing anything to influence them,'" says White with a laugh. "It's just a very consistent effect."

There is one key exception, however. If the crowdfunded project has already been funded and the product released, the effect is significantly diminished -- even if buyers can still contribute. "People think, 'I want to be part of this process,'" says White, who co-authored the study with Bonnie Simpson at Western University and Martin Schreier and Sally Bitterl at WU Vienna--"'And I want to make something come to fruition with other people.'"

In the future, White hopes to examine whether there are other notable outcomes of crowdfunding. Crowdfunding might also activate thoughts of innovativeness, for example. Because of this, crowdfunding might work particularly well when promoting products in categories where innovation is valued.

But for now, she says people who are developing products that have a social good side may want to launch their wares on a crowdfunding site before hitting the shelves -- and emphasize their collective benefits.

"If you have a product or service that has this kind of social good element to it, a good strategy might be to do some kind of crowdfunding as a promotional activity that gets attention and buy-in from customers," she says.

"And even if it is being offered for purchase, perhaps you could word promotions in ways that activate that collective or interdependent mindset."

In the transition toward clean, renewable energy, there will still be a need for conventional power sources, like coal and natural gas, to ensure steady power to the grid. Researchers across the world are using unique materials and methods that will make those conventional power sources cleaner through carbon capture technology.

Creating accurate, detailed models is key to scaling up this important work. A recent paper led by the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering examines and compares the various modeling approaches for hollow fiber membrane contactors (HFMCs), a type of carbon capture technology. The group analyzed over 150 cited studies of multiple modeling approaches to help researchers choose the technique best suited to their research.

"HFMCs are one of the leading technologies for post-combustion carbon capture, but we need modeling to better understand them," said Katherine Hornbostel, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, whose lab led the analysis. "Our analysis can guide researchers whose work is integral to meeting our climate goals and help them scale up the technology for commercial use."

A hollow fiber membrane contactor (HFMC) is a group of fibers in a bundle, with exhaust flowing on one side and a liquid solvent on the other to trap the carbon dioxide. The paper reviews state-of-the-art methods for modeling carbon capture HFMCs in one, two and three dimensions, comparing them in-depth and suggesting directions for future research.

"The ideal modeling technique varies depending on the project, but we found that 3D models are qualitatively different in the nature of information they can reveal," said Joanna Rivero, graduate student working in the Hornbostel Lab and lead author. "Though cost limits their wide use, we identify 3D modeling and scale-up modeling as areas that will greatly accelerate the progress of this technology."

Grigorios Panagakos, research engineer and teaching faculty in Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Chemical Engineering, brought his expertise in analyzing the modeling of transport phenomena to the review paper, as well.

DALLAS, Dec. 16, 2020 -- Significant racial disparities exist in heart-related problems among pregnant and postpartum women in the United States, with Black women having the highest risk of several serious complications, according to research published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association, an open access journal of the American Heart Association.

"Clinicians should be aware of the cardiovascular risks associated with pregnancy that, although not common, can result in serious illness and death. Women at increased risk for heart disease should be closely monitored during and even after pregnancy," said Samir R. Kapadia, M.D., senior author of the study and chair of the department of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio.

Heart disease, stroke and pregnancy-related complications are among the top-10 causes of death in women ages 20-44 in the United States, based on the most recent official data available. To evaluate the extent of racial disparities in the risk of heart problems during pregnancy or after delivery, Kapadia and colleagues reviewed health records for more than 46 million hospitalizations of pregnant or postpartum women included in the National Inpatient Sample, the largest U.S. database detailing inpatient hospital care in 47 states, between 2007 and 2017.

Even after adjusting for socioeconomic status, access to health care and other medical conditions, researchers found that compared to white women, pregnant Black women were:

45% more likely to die in the hospital;

23% more likely to have a heart attack;

57% more likely to have a stroke;

42% more likely to develop a blood clot in the lungs; and

71% more likely to develop heart muscle weakness.

"The magnitude of disparity was most alarming," said Kapadia. "We were very surprised by the persistent disparities irrespective of socioeconomic status. Attributing worse outcomes in Black women to socio-economic status or differences in health care delivery may be an oversimplification."

Also discovered in the analysis, women who are Asian/Pacific Islander were more likely to die in the hospital or develop heart muscle weakness compared to white women, however, they were not more likely to have a heart attack, stroke or blood clot in the lungs. Hispanic women had a higher risk of death or stroke compared to white women, but they were not more likely to have a heart attack, blood clot in the lungs or heart muscle weakness. Cardiovascular disease risks among these groups are showing little improvement.

In addition to the immediate medical concerns of pregnancy-related heart complications, their occurrence can also signal the need for heart health monitoring.

"Cardiovascular health in women should not be taken for granted and pregnancy provides a reasonable mirror for the future," Kapadia said. "When women have problems during pregnancy, they should be followed carefully after pregnancy and actions should be taken to prevent heart problems."

The study results are limited and not definitive because the NIS is an administrative database based on diagnostic and billing codes. These may not characterize medical problems in detail, nor offer clinical or demographic data to identify specific underlying causes among the different groups.

"We need a better understanding of the root causes of these disparities in order to mitigate them. The aim is to deliver equitable cardio-obstetric care to all pregnant women," Kapadia said.

Emissions from the operation of buildings hit their highest-ever level in 2019, moving the sector further away from fulfilling its huge potential to slow climate change and contribute significantly to the goals of the Paris Agreement, according to a new report released today.

However, pandemic recovery packages provide an opportunity to push deep building renovation and performance standards for newly constructed buildings, and rapidly cut emissions. The forthcoming updating of climate pledges under the Paris Agreement – known as nationally determined contributions or NDCs – also offer an opportunity to sharpen existing measures and include new commitments on the buildings and construction sector.

The 2020 Global Status Report for Buildings and Construction, from the Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction (GlobalABC), found that while global building energy consumption remained steady year-on-year, energy-related CO2 emissions increased to 9.95 GtCO2 in 2019. This increase was due to a shift away from the direct use of coal, oil and traditional biomass towards electricity, which had a higher carbon content due to the high proportion of fossil fuels used in generation.

When adding emissions from the building construction industry on top of operational emissions, the sector accounted for 38 per cent of total global energy-related CO2 emissions.

“Rising emissions in the buildings and construction sector emphasize the urgent need for a triple strategy to aggressively reduce energy demand in the built environment, decarbonize the power sector and implement materials strategies that reduce lifecycle carbon emissions,” said Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

“Green recovery packages can provide the spark that will get us moving rapidly in the right direction,” she added. “Moving the buildings and construction sector onto a low-carbon pathway will slow climate change and deliver strong economic recovery benefits, so it should be a clear priority for all governments.”

To get on track to net-zero carbon building stock by 2050, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that direct building CO2 emissions need, by 2030, to fall by 50 per cent and indirect building sector emissions by 60 per cent. This equates to building sector emissions falling by around 6 per cent per year until 2030, close to the 7 per cent decrease in 2020 global energy sector CO2 emissions due to the pandemic.

Worryingly, the GlobalABC’s new Buildings Climate Tracker – which considers measures such as incremental energy efficiency investment in buildings and the share of renewable energy in global buildings – finds that the rate of annual improvement is decreasing. It in fact halved between 2016 and 2019. To get the buildings sector on track to achieving net-zero carbon by 2050, all actors across the buildings value chain need to increase decarbonization actions and their impact by a factor of five.

Even though progress in efficiency efforts has not kept up with an increase in sectoral growth, there are positive signs and opportunities to catch up on climate action, the report finds.

Green recovery potential

The recent Emissions Gap Report 2020 from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) found that a green pandemic recovery could cut up to 25 per cent off predicted 2030 greenhouse gas emissions and bring the world closer to meeting the 2°C goal of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Much more needs to be done to get to the 1.5°C goal.

Governments can help achieve these gains by systematically including building decarbonization measures into recovery packages – increasing renovation rates, channelling investment into low-carbon buildings, providing jobs, and increasing real estate value.

While construction activities have dropped by 20 to 30 per cent in 2020 compared to 2019 as a result of the pandemic and around ten per cent of overall jobs have been lost or are at risk across the building construction sector, stimulus programmes for the building and construction sector can create jobs, boost economic activity, and activate local value chains. Under its Sustainable Recovery Plan, the IEA estimates that up to 30 jobs in manufacturing and construction would be created for every million dollars invested in retrofits or efficiency measures in new builds.

‘Buildings are a strategic sector to simultaneously address various global challenges such as climate change, the economic crisis resulting from the COVID 19 pandemic, improve living conditions and the resilience of our cities. For Mexico, the implementation of mitigation measures that improve the thermal and energy performance of buildings is a key ingredient for sustainability.’ Said Sergio Israel Mendoza, General Director of Environmental, Urban and Tourism Promotion, Mexico’s Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT)

NDC updates open window for faster action

Most countries have yet to submit their second NDCs. Buildings remain a major area that lacks specific mitigation policies, despite its importance to global CO2 emissions. Of those who have submitted an NDC, 136 countries mention buildings, 53 countries mention building energy efficiency, and only 38 specifically call out building energy codes.

National governments must step up commitments in NDCs, longer-term climate strategies and support for regulation to spur uptake of net-zero emissions buildings. This means prioritizing performance-based, mandatory building energy codes alongside wide-spread certification measures and working closely with sub-national governments to facilitate adoption and implementation.

We urgently need to address carbon emissions from buildings and construction, which constitute almost 40% of global carbon emissions.

We must give governments visibility of this at COP26 to inspire policies and decisions that result in the significant decarbonisation of this sector’, Nigel Topping, United Kingdom High-Level Climate Champion said.

‘We need to challenge the incumbency of steel and concrete. Whether or not zero carbon steel and concrete become the materials of the future will depend on how fast those industries innovate in the face of new and disruptive technologies. We have some far-reaching commitments under the Science-Based Targets Initiative by leading materials companies which can serve as examples pushing the industry to go further, together.’

Energy-efficient building investment rising

In 2019, spending on energy-efficient buildings increased for the first time in three years, with building energy efficiency across global markets increasing to USD 152 billion in 2019, 3 per cent more than the previous year.

This is only a small proportion of the USD 5.8 trillion spent in total in the building and construction sector, but there are positive signs across the investment sector that building decarbonization and energy efficiency are taking hold in investment strategies.

For example, of the 1,005 real estate companies, developers, REITS, and funds representing more than USD 4.1 trillion in assets under management that reported to The Global ESG Benchmark for Real Assets in 2019, 90 per cent aligned their projects with green building rating standards for construction and operations.

Green buildings represent one of the biggest global investment opportunities of the next decade, estimated by the IFC to be USD 24.7 trillion by 2030.

Further recommendations

Aside from calling for a green recover post-pandemic and updated NDCs, the report also recommends that owners and businesses should use science-based targets to guide actions and engage with stakeholders across the building design, construction, operation and users to develop partnerships and build capacity.

Investors should reevaluate all real estate investment through an energy-efficiency and carbon reduction lens.

Other actors across the value chain should adopt circular economy concepts to reduce the demand for construction materials and lower embodied carbon and adopting nature-based solutions that enhance building resilience.

Animals can fall into an "ecological trap" by altering their behaviour in the "wrong direction" in response to climate change, researchers say.

The so-called "rescue hypothesis" suggests many species might successfully adapt to changing conditions, especially those that are flexible in their behaviour.

But a new study, by the University of Exeter, found that chestnut-crowned babbler birds responded to rising temperatures by changing their behaviour in ways that could actually reduce successful breeding.

This occurred because they reacted to warm peak temperatures in early spring by breeding earlier - but average temperatures at this time are still colder than later in spring, which is bad for incubating eggs.

Instead of spending more time incubating, females responded to the cold by incubating less - which might improve their own survival chances but exposes their developing eggs to harmful, low temperatures.

"We hope that animals that are more responsive to changes in their environment can cope better with climate change, but unfortunately they can make mistakes that make their situation even worse," said Alex Cones, who worked on this research during her masters at the University of Exeter.

Professor Andy Russell, of the Centre for Ecology and Conservation on Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall, said: "Many animals breed as early as they can in spring, and climate change is causing this to happen earlier and earlier.

"Paradoxically, our study shows that earlier breeding in response to warming means babbler eggs and offspring are more exposed to the cold.

"Babblers should respond by incubating their eggs more, but they don't.

"Incubating eggs is more costly for the mother in terms of energy in low temperatures, so they focus on their own survival and reduce incubation."

Professor Russell added: "Parental care is adaptable, not fixed, but in this case the birds adapt in the wrong direction for their chicks' survival - falling into an ecological 'trap'."

Chestnut-crowned babblers live in desert habitats in south-east Australia.

Their eggs must be kept at more than 25°C (77°F) to survive, and development happens best and fastest at about 38°C (100°F).

The researchers say more studies are required to discover whether "plastic" (adaptable) parenting could provide an "evolutionary rescue package" to protect species from environmental change.

But they conclude that the evidence from this study is "not encouraging".