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In a new study that could turn what we know about birth order upside down, a University of Houston researcher has found that the role of birth order on career types, occupational creativity and status attainment might have been overestimated in previous research. The only finding that replicated previous research was a small effect of birth order on educational attainment, reports Rodica Damian in the European Journal of Personality. Damian is assistant professor of psychology and director of the Personality Development and Success Lab at UH.

"The little evidence there is for a possible link between birth order, education, and status attainment points more to unexplained causal mechanisms rather than traits and abilities attributed - but not necessarily scientifically supported- to specific birth orders," said Damian. "Thus, rather than assuming that firstborns are destined for success due to their birth order and presumed associated qualities, it might be better to direct our attention to the social expectations, practices, or even parenting books that may be biasing our investments into the future of children based on their birth order as opposed to their observed individual characteristics."

Damian used data from Project TALENT, a longitudinal study conducted on a representative sample of U.S. high school students in 1960 and then again from the same participants 50 years after the original assessment. She examined the data to test birth order effects on career types (scientific vs. artistic), occupational creativity and status attainment (including educational attainment, job prestige and income).

In the study of birth order, two models dominate. Based on these models, firstborns should be more likely to pursue scientific careers, attain higher levels of education, more prestigious careers, and a higher income, whereas later-born individuals should be more likely to pursue artistic and more creative careers.

The niche-finding model proposes that siblings develop competing strategies to maximize parental investment by filling different family niches. Firstborns fill the more "traditional" niche being more achievement-oriented, responsible, self-confident and dominating. Later-borns fill the more "rebellious" niche being more risk-taking, creative, easy-going and sociable. Also, according to niche-finding, personality traits should explain links between birth order and careers, whereas according to the confluence model, intelligence should explain such links. The confluence model proposes that firstborns have slightly higher levels of intelligence, because, with each child subsequently added to the family, the intellectual environment of the family becomes diluted, leaving those born later with less intellectual stimulation.

According to the niche-finding model, Damian found modest support for the confluence model, but no support for the niche-finding model.

Birth order effects on occupational prestige and educational attainment were aligned with the confluence model, although the lack of a statistically significant effect on income was not. Birth order effects on career types (scientific vs. artistic) and occupational creativity did not support the niche-finding model, and the effect on creativity was in the opposite direction than predicted, with firstborns selecting slightly more creative careers.

"Our findings suggest that the role of birth order on career types, occupational creativity and status attainment might have been overestimated in previous research, and the only finding that replicated previous research was a small effect of birth order on educational attainment," said Damian. "We found that firstborns selected into more creative careers and attained higher job prestige and education."

"In practical terms, there is little-to-no evidence here to suggest that first- vs. later-borns are destined for specific careers, so parents should not be surprised if their firstborn wants to become an artist," said Damian.

ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. -- It's no secret the U.S. Army wants its small unmanned aerial systems to operate quietly in densely-populated regions, but tests to achieve this can be expensive, time-consuming and labor-intensive according to researchers.

Miranda Costenoble, a graduate student researcher with the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, now known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory, presented work at the Vertical Flight Society's 76th Annual Forum demonstrating how aviation experts can obtain information about airfoil boundary layers using computational fluid dynamics, or CFD, to enable the development of quieter air vehicles.

Smaller vehicles, like package delivery drones, for example, don't typically fly as high as larger ones because they need to be able to land in virtually anyone's front yard, she said. They also need to be quieter.

"Imagine a whole fleet of these delivery drones as loud; people aren't going to want them in their neighborhoods," Costenoble said. "So even though a small drone would produce less noise than a full-size rotorcraft in the first place just by virtue of being smaller and slower, there are more stringent requirements in terms of what's expected from it."

Researchers imagine any number of applications where the Army might like to deploy a small, stable, terrain-independent platform.

"Surveillance particularly gets talked about a lot as a sUAS application; however, if the adversary is aware that they're being surveilled, they might shoot the sUAS down or hide from it," she said.

If the sUAS sounds like 1,000 angry bees, then the adversary is going to notice it that much sooner and more easily, she said.

"So, this is a sound-sensitive application where the acoustic performance is going to be important to the overall design," she said.

Costenoble, a doctoral candidate at University of Maryland College Park, works with other researchers on high-fidelity computational fluid dynamic codes, which small UAS designers can use to take acoustics into account just as easily as they would normally account for vehicle performance. This way, acoustics can be something, which is fundamental to sUAS design instead of being an afterthought, she said.

Costenoble is one of nine UMD students to earn Vertical Flight Foundation Scholarships this year.

It is not as simple as applying existing noise models for full-size rotorcraft to smaller ones, she said. Full-size rotorcraft, with large rotors moving at high speeds, operate in aerodynamic conditions where their acoustics are dominated by the sound of the rotor blades passing the observer; however, the smaller and slower rotors used on small UAS operate in a different aerodynamic regime, where acoustics are dominated by the noise created by the blades passing through and disturbing the air around them. Because this noise occurs across a range of medium and high frequencies, it is referred to as broadband noise.

"To take broadband noise into account during the small UAS design process, we use semi-empirical models," she said. "Those models were developed over 30 years ago for a particular airfoil, and so may need to be updated to account for the physics of different airfoil shapes."

Using these models requires some knowledge of the rotor blade airfoil's boundary layer flow - that is, the airflow near the surface of the rotor blade's airfoils - she said, since the disturbance of the air within the boundary layer is the source of the broadband noise.

"The parameters of the boundary layer flow are not available in prior literature for most airfoils, and cannot necessarily be obtained from simplified aerodynamics methods," Costenoble said. "The goal of this work is to develop a method of obtaining the parameters of the airfoil boundary layer from an existing high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics code, without requiring any more effort from the code's end-user than was required previously."

The goal of her work is to develop a method of obtaining the parameters of the airfoil boundary layer from an existing high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics code, without requiring any more effort from the code's end-user than was required previously, she said.

Without this methodology, researchers would obtain this kind of information from wind tunnel tests, "but those are expensive and time-consuming. It would also have been possible to use existing CFD codes, but would have required labor-intensive post-processing of the code's output," Costenoble said.

This project is part of a research program at the laboratory to address UAS platform design and control challenges. Researchers said they are looking for enabling capabilities to advance Army missions in the multi-domain operations.

"Interdependence of various research areas requires a comprehensive approach to develop solutions that improve a number of desired attributes in UAS' such performance, maneuverability and noise simultaneously," said Dr. Rajneesh Singh, lead for Vehicle Integrated Analysis at the laboratory.

Reducing noise emission without compromising on the UAS flight range or endurance has been "a hard problem for the S&T community," Singh said, but this collaborative project gets the Army closer to addressing it.

Singh also credits ARL's open campus business model, which allows the Army to expand the research network required for comprehensive approaches.

New research has found that Chicago neighborhoods with barriers to social distancing, including limited access to broadband internet and low rates of health insurance, had more COVID-19 deaths in spring 2020. The study, led by researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago, is published in the Annals of Epidemiology.

"We wanted to look at neighborhood characteristics that may contribute to higher death rates in certain neighborhoods in Chicago," said Molly Scannell Bryan, a research assistant professor at the UIC Institute for Minority Health Research and corresponding author on the paper. "We originally expected that air quality and use of public transportation would be drivers, but we found that heightened barriers to being able to social distance, such as low or lack of internet access, was a more significant driver of COVID-19-related deaths, possibly through a higher risk of infection in those without internet access."

COVID-19 is the illness caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which emerged in fall 2019 and declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020. In the United States, over 270,000 Americans have died of the disease.

The researchers sought to identify patterns in the census tracts with high rates of COVID-19 mortality in Chicago during the spring and early summer of 2020.

They looked at 33 neighborhood characteristics for each census-tract. Chicago has almost 1,000 census tracts, each with approximately 4,000 people.

Neighborhood descriptors were obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey and information on COVID-19 deaths was obtained from the Office of the Medical Examiner of Cook County. Highly localized estimates of air quality, including nitrogen dioxide, ozone and very fine particulate matter, were obtained from colleagues at Northwestern University.

Between March 16 and July 22, 2,514 COVID-19 deaths were recorded in Chicago.

The data revealed that COVID-19 death rates in Chicago showed similar racial disparities to those seen nationwide. Although non-Hispanic Black residents comprise 31% of Chicago's population, they accounted for 42% of the COVID-19 deaths. Deaths among Hispanic/Latino residents occurred at a younger age -- 63 years, compared with 71 for white residents.

After focusing on deaths that occurred outside of nursing homes, the researchers found that higher COVID-19 mortality was seen in neighborhoods with heightened barriers to social distancing and low health insurance coverage. Neighborhoods with a higher percentage of white and Asian residents had lower COVID-19 mortality. Mortality among white residents was highest in neighborhoods with lower educational attainment and a higher percentage of Hispanic/Latino residents. Among whites, mortality was lower in neighborhoods with a higher percentage of white or Asian residents.

"Barriers to social distancing really jumped out as a major driver of mortality, likely through increased risk of infection," Scannell Bryan said. "Neighborhoods where residents do not have internet at home means residents are more likely to need to leave the house more often and come into contact with more people outside the home. In the spring, when there were such high levels of community spread, this would have put those people at higher risk."

The researchers also found that while the overall death rate was higher among Black residents, no neighborhood characteristics were associated with COVID-19 death rates among Black residents specifically. In contrast, among white residents, neighborhood characteristics seemed to matter.

"We saw that white residents who died clustered in neighborhoods with higher levels of social vulnerability, whereas Black and Hispanic/Latino residents who died lived in neighborhoods with both high and low levels of social vulnerability.

"Our study revealed several neighborhood characteristics that are linked to higher COVID-19 death rates and these are the places that might benefit from additional testing and resources to connect residents to health care," Scannell Bryan said.

CLEVELAND--Some of the most affected by domestic violence are also the youngest. Each year, more than 6% of all children in the United States are exposed to domestic violence and require intervention services from various agencies, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

A team of researchers at Case Western Reserve University surveyed 105 agencies throughout Ohio to better understand service, policy and research needs--and get feedback about potential strategies to protect children from intimate partner violence.

The study's key findings yielded recommendations to include emotional and coping skills as vital parts of childhood education--not unlike how math and reading are incorporated into school curricula, according to the study's co-author Kristen Berg, a postdoctoral researcher at the university's School of Medicine and graduate of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences.

"Kids should be provided appropriate education from very early ages about healthy relationships, with both the self and others, and all of their ingredients," she said. "Things like understanding how to identify their own emotions, how to cope with those emotions, learning how to attune to others' emotions, safe dating behaviors, consent-based communication--from school curricula that explicitly emphasize social and emotional intelligence."

A rapidly growing body of research nationally--including at the Mandel School--has revealed that children who have been exposed to domestic violence are more likely than their peers to experience a wide range of difficulties, from fear and low self-esteem, to anger and oppositional behavior and feeling isolated in social relationships.

Berg said there's also evidence that those exposed to domestic violence tend to have higher rates of depression and anxiety, over-activated stress responses, and both victimization by and perpetration of dating violence during adolescence. Families affected by domestic violence also often experience housing instability or substance misuse, and children's education and peer relationships may be disrupted due to moves in and out of the family home.

None of this comes as a surprise to researchers or the social service professionals they surveyed.

"But that's notable in and of itself," Berg said. "By now, there have been decades of calls by clinicians and researchers to reduce fragmentation among service systems in order to best care for trauma-exposed kids and families. Our participants' responses suggest that we haven't quite figured out how to remove barriers that are thwarting that collaborative approach."

In addition, the research showed that service providers highlighted needs for increased trauma-informed care and better collaboration among service providers.

"While there might not be a one-size-fits-all solution, there are places we can start," said Megan Holmes, founding director of the Center on Trauma and Adversity and an associate professor at the Mandel School, who co-authored the study.

SALT LAKE CITY - Researchers at Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI) at the University of Utah (U of U) have identified a potential drug combination to treat uveal melanoma, a type of eye cancer. Lead author Amanda Truong, trainee in the McMahon Lab at HCI and student at the U of U, explains uveal melanoma patients frequently have changes in genes called GNAQ and GNA11, which are key targets for these drugs. This study was published in the journal Clinical Cancer Research.

"Uveal melanoma is a relatively rare cancer in general, but the most common cancer of the eye," says Martin McMahon, PhD, senior director of preclinical translation at HCI and professor of dermatology at the U of U. "Tumors arise from the pigment cells, called melanocytes, which reside within the uvea and give color to the eye." Although uveal melanoma can be cured when it hasn't spread beyond the eye, this form of melanoma has a propensity for lethal metastasis to the liver.

In 2019, the McMahon lab found that two drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration called trametinib and hydroxychloroquine worked together to stop tumor growth in pancreatic and other cancers with mutations in the RAS gene. Truong says, "Because GNAQ and GNA11 mutations activate similar pathways as RAS mutations, we wanted to see whether this combination would work in uveal melanoma as well."

Trametinib is a targeted therapy that blocks MEK proteins, which control cell growth and survival. Hydroxychloroquine is a drug that inhibits autophagy. Autophagy is a cellular recycling process that breaks down and destroys old, damaged, or abnormal cell organelles or proteins, and reuses them for other cell functions. Results of this study showed that using both trametinib and hydroxychloroquine led to more uveal melanoma cell deaths than using the drugs alone.

"Targeted therapies and immunotherapies have worked quite well and improved overall survival for patients with metastatic melanomas arising from the skin. However, these therapies don't typically work for metastatic melanoma of the eye. There is an urgent need to identify treatments that work for patients with metastatic uveal melanoma," says Truong.

Researchers are working to find more preclinical evidence needed to begin an uveal melanoma clinical trial.

Skoltech researchers and their colleagues from Russia and Israel have come up with a new, simple and inexpensive method of testing liquid biological samples that can be further developed to work in clinical settings, including real-time testing during surgery. The paper was published in the journal Light: Science & Applications.

The most common method of real-time diagnostic testing for biological samples (such as urine or saliva) that is used in the healthcare system, optical label-free sensors, are highly sensitive, but that sensitivity comes at a cost in terms of time and resources. Looking for a more efficient alternative, the research team, coordinated by Prof. Dmitry Gorin from the Center for Photonics and Quantum Materials at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) and Dr. Roman Noskov from Tel Aviv University, turned to the data that these sensors normally disregard: optical dispersion of the refractive index of a sample that can act as a fingerprint of sorts for tracking the changes in its composition.

They introduced the concept of in-fiber multispectral optical sensing (IMOS) for liquid biological samples in both static and real-time modes. According to the team, this sensing method is precise, reliable and very sensitive to impurities in the sample, which can make it useful both for diagnostic purposes and for real-time simulations of various biological processes.

Hollow-core microstructured optical fiber (HC-MOF), a particular kind of optical fibers which confine light inside a hollow core surrounded by microstructured cladding, is at the heart of the new sensing approach. Liquid goes through chambers in the fiber, and spectral shifts of maxima and minima in the transmission spectrum of HC-MOF are interpreted as signals about the chemical composition of the sample. With no need for an external cavity or interferometer, the sensing system is easy and inexpensive to produce.

The researchers tested its performance on the concentration of bovine serum albumin (BSA), which is commonly used in such experiments, dissolved in water and in a phosphate-buffered saline solution. The resolution they were able to show consistently in several experiments was equivalent to 1 gram of BSA in a liter of liquid, close to the accuracy of standard albumin tests and potentially meets clinical needs.

"Our concept can be considered a platform for intraoperative analysis of biomarkers of different types. For that, we need to test it on other bioanalytes and further modify the hollow core fiber to increase specificity. Future trials of these point-of-care devices will serve as the first step for realization of the true 'bench-to-bedside' approach," Gorin notes.

"In-fiber multispectral optical sensing opens new horizons in fast, cheap, and reliable analysis of blood and other bodily liquids in real time that is important for timely diagnostics of various diseases and abnormal conditions," Noskov adds.

The team plans to continue their research in increasing specificity as well as sensitivity of this approach. They are going to file a patent application and look for industrial partners and investors interested in developing clinical devices based on this type of sensors.

Chestnut Hill, Mass. (12/03/2020) - Ocean pollution is widespread and getting worse, and when toxins in the oceans make landfall they imperil the health and well-being of more than 3 billion people, according to a new report by an international coalition of scientists led by Boston College's Global Observatory on Pollution on Health and the Centre Scientifique de Monaco, supported by the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation.

Atop the proposals to remediate ocean pollution, the researchers recommend: banning coal combustion and the production of single-use plastics, controlling coastal pollution, and expanding marine protected areas.

The study is the first comprehensive examination of the impacts of ocean pollution on human health. It was published in today's online edition of the Annals of Global Health and released at the Monaco International Symposium on Human Health & the Ocean in a Changing World, convened in Monaco and online by the Prince Albert II de Monaco Foundation, the Centre Scientifique de Monaco and Boston College.

"Simply put: Ocean pollution is a major global problem, it is growing, and it directly affects human health," said Professor Philip Landrigan, MD, the Director of the Observatory and of BC's Global Public Health and the Common Good Program. "People have heard about plastic pollution in the oceans, but that is only part of it. Research shows the oceans are being fouled by a complex stew of toxins including mercury, pesticides, industrial chemicals, petroleum wastes, agricultural runoff, and manufactured chemicals embedded in plastic. These toxic materials in the ocean get into people, mainly by eating contaminated seafood."

Landrigan noted that, "We are all at risk, but the people most seriously affected are people in coastal fishing communities, people on small island nations, indigenous populations and people in the high Arctic. The very survival of these vulnerable populations depends on the health of the seas."

The oceans cover more than 70 percent of the earth's surface. Despite their vast size, the seas are under threat, primarily as a result of human activity, according to the findings, drawn from 584 scientific reports, which detail:

Pollution of the oceans by plastics, toxic metals, manufactured chemicals, pesticides, sewage, and agricultural runoff is killing and contaminating the fish that feed 3 billion people.

Coastal pollution spreads life-threatening infections.

Oil spills and chemical wastes threaten the microorganisms in the seas that provide much of the world's oxygen supply.

Prince Albert of Monaco said that the analysis can be used to mobilize global resolve to curb ocean pollution.

"The link between ocean pollution and human health has, for a long time, given rise to very few studies," Prince Albert wrote in an introduction to the report. "Taking into account the effects of ocean pollution - due to plastic, water and industrial waste, chemicals, hydrocarbons, to name a few - on human health should mean that this threat must be permanently included in the international scientific activity.

"This document on Human Health and the Ocean, prepared with the contributions of the Monaco Science Centre and Boston College, substantiates that pollution of the Ocean is not inevitable," he added.

Among the key findings:

Mercury pollution has become widespread in the oceans, accumulating to high levels in predator fish and once in the food chain poses documented risks to infants, children and adults.

Coal is the major source of mercury pollution, its toxins vaporizing into the air as it burns and eventually washing into the oceans.

Pollution along the coasts by industrial waste, agricultural runoff, pesticides, and human sewage has increased the frequency of Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) producing toxins associated with dementia, amnesia, neurological damage, and rapid death.

Plastic waste - entering the oceans at a rate of more than 10 million tons each year - kills seabirds and fish and is consumed by humans in the form of toxic microscopic particles, now found in all humans.

The waters most seriously impacted by ocean pollution are the Mediterranean Sea, the Baltic Sea, and Asian rivers.

"The key thing to realize about ocean pollution is that, like all forms of pollution, it can be prevented using laws, policies, technology, and enforcement actions that target the most important pollution sources," said Landrigan. "Many countries have used these tools and have successfully cleaned fouled harbors, rejuvenated estuaries, and restored coral reefs. The results have been increased tourism, restored fisheries, improved human health, and economic growth. These benefits will last for centuries."

The report is being released in tandem with the Declaration of Monaco: Advancing Human Health & Well-Being by Preventing Ocean Pollution, which was read at the symposium's closing session.

Endorsed by the scientists, physicians and global stakeholders who participated in the symposium in-person in Monaco and virtually, the declaration summarizes the key findings and conclusions of the Monaco Commission on Human Health and Ocean Pollution. Based on the recognition that all life on Earth depends on the health of the seas, the authors call on leaders and citizens of all nations to "safeguard human health and preserve our Common Home by acting now to end pollution of the ocean."

They recommended the following actions:

Transition rapidly from fossil fuels to renewable energy - wind, solar, tidal and geothermal power

Prevent mercury pollution of the oceans by eliminating coal combustion and controlling all industrial uses of mercury.

End plastic pollution of the oceans by reducing plastic production and imposing a global ban on production of single-use plastic.

Promote effective waste management and recycling

Reduce agricultural releases of nitrogen, phosphorus and animal waste; industrial discharges; and releases of human sewage into coastal waters.

Support robust monitoring of ocean pollution.

Extend regional and international marine pollution control programs to all countries.

Support research programs that increase knowledge of the extent, severity and human health impacts of ocean pollution.

Create, expand and safeguard Marine Protected Areas.

Additional partners in the symposium include the Government of the Principality of Monaco, the World Health Organization (WHO), UN Environment (UNEP), the International Agency for Atomic Energy (IAEA) , the Monaco Oceanographic Institute, the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), the Mediterranean Science Commission (CIESM), the European Marine Board, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, under the High Patronage of HSH Prince Albert II of Monaco.

Co-author and marine toxicologist John Stegeman is a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and director of the NSF- and NIH-funded Woods Hole Center for Oceans and Human Health. Stegeman was joined by a team of colleagues at WHOI that included toxicologist Mark Hahn, biologist Donald Anderson, and marine chemist Chris Reddy.

Boston College researchers also contributing to the report include Samantha Fisher, Jenna Mu, Hariharan Shanmugam, and Gabriella Taghian.

"Our Global Observatory on Pollution and Health at Boston College is extremely proud to have been able to partner with the Centre Scientifique de Monaco and the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation to produce this report and develop the Declaration of Monaco," said Landrigan. "This work advances the mission of the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society at Boston College to use scientific research to benefit society, and it fulfills Pope Francis' call in Laudato Si' to care for our Common Home and to protect the poor and the vulnerable among us."

Rusted iron pipes can react with residual disinfectants in drinking water distribution systems to produce carcinogenic hexavalent chromium in drinking water, reports a study by engineers at UC Riverside.

Chromium is a metal that occurs naturally in the soil and groundwater. Trace amounts of trivalent chromium eventually appear in the drinking water and food supply and are thought to have neutral effects on health. Chromium is often added to iron to make it more resistant to corrosion.

Certain chemical reactions can change chromium atoms into a hexavalent form that creates cancer-causing genetic mutations in cells. This carcinogenic form of chromium was at the heart of a lawsuit in California's Central Valley by Erin Brockovich, which became the subject of an Oscar-winning movie.

Haizhou Liu, a professor of chemical and environmental engineering at the Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering who studies water treatment chemistry, had an inkling that some of the chromium found in drinking water might come from chemical reactions between water disinfectants and the chromium in cast iron corrosion scales.

Along with doctoral student Cheng Tan and postdoctoral scholar Sumant Avasarala, Liu obtained segments of two pipes that had been in service for about five and 70 years respectively and induced corrosion on portions. After scraping the rust off, grinding it to a powder, and measuring the amount and types of chromium present, the researchers put the samples in hypochlorous acid, the form of chlorine typically used in municipal drinking water treatment plants and drinking water distribution systems.

Previous experiments had shown that water disinfectants could transform trivalent chromium into toxic hexavalent chromium, but the group was surprised when zerovalent chromium that was detected in the rusted iron pipes transformed more quickly to the toxic form. They followed up with modeling experiments that showed a range of possibilities for how much hexavalent chromium could come out of the tap under real-world conditions. The worst-case scenario occurred in drinking water with high bromide levels.

"These new findings change our traditional wisdom on hexavalent chromium control in drinking water and shine light on the importance of managing the drinking water distribution infrastructure to control toxic substances in tap water," Liu said.

The paper cautions that as the world's water crisis intensifies, recycled and desalinated water-- both of which tend to contain higher bromide levels--will become more important, highlighting the need to understand and prevent chromium contamination. The paper recommends reduced use of pipes with high levels of chromium alloy and use of a disinfectant less reactive with chromium, such as monochloramine.

Hypersonic flight is conventionally referred to as the ability to fly at speeds significantly faster than the speed of sound and presents an extraordinary set of technical challenges. As an example, when a space capsule re-enters Earth's atmosphere, it reaches hypersonic speeds--more than five times the speed of sound--and generates temperatures over 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit on its exterior surface. Designing a thermal protection system to keep astronauts and cargo safe requires an understanding at the molecular level of the complicated physics going on in the gas that flows around the vehicle.

Recent research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign added new knowledge about the physical phenomena that occur as atoms vibrate, rotate, and collide in this extreme environment.

"Due to the relative velocity of the flow surrounding the vehicle, a shock is formed in front of the capsule. When the gas molecules cross the shock, some of their properties change almost instantaneously. Instead, others don't have enough time to adjust to the abrupt changes, and they don't reach their equilibrium values before arriving at the surface of the vehicle. The layer between the shock and heat shield is then found in nonequilibrium. There is a lot that we don't understand yet about the reactions that happen in this type of flow," said Simone Venturi. He is a graduate student studying with Marco Panesi in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at UIUC.

Venturi explained that they cannot describe the flow in the same way as a compressible flow in lower speed aerodynamics, which looks at the flow's bulk properties. Hypersonic flows are studied at the microscopic level to understand how the molecules and atoms interact and, ultimately, how to model these interactions.

"The problem is complicated even further by the number of phenomena that occur simultaneously--nonequilibrium is only one of them," Venturi said. "Radiation, for example, is a consequence of the excited electronic states. At the same time, the flow interacts with the gases resulting from the ablation of the capsule surface."

The research looked at nonequilibrium from the perspective of vibration and rotation of the molecules in the flow around the vehicle, or rovibrations, a word commonly used in the study of hypersonics and quantum physics.

"The input to our simulations comes from the first principles of Quantum physics. We consider the atoms at a set of relative distances, and we compute the resulting interaction energies by solving the Schrödinger equation," Venturi said. "The solution comes only at a discrete set of points. Machine learning helps us in fitting and producing a continuous surface--what we call the potential energy surface."

In the past years, researchers started to look at neural networks for generating surface between these points.

"We added a further level of complexity by extending the neural networks via probabilistic machine learning," Venturi said. "This not only allows us to describe the atomic interactions more accurately, but it also quantifies the uncertainty that affects these objects. We created a distribution of surfaces, instead of just one surface, because the prediction that comes out from these models is not just a single value, but a distribution of values. So, it's prediction with uncertainty around the value. The result is not an exact answer, but a distribution of answers."

Venturi said after they represented the interaction energy between molecules and atoms, they simulated billions of collisions.

"We know what happens at a small set of spatial points, and then we use the equation of classical mechanics. The equations are the same that govern billiard balls colliding. The difference is that we use these interactions, these quantum interactions, as driving forces. This complication is required by the atomic scale of the problem, as the particles can feel each other even when they are distant. With a huge number of collisions, we can obtain the probability that certain reactions will happen. We use these probabilities of reaction in computational fluid dynamics with the ultimate goal of predicting the fluxes and designing safer heat shields," he said.

Although they weren't the first to use machine learning to construct potential energy surfaces, Venturi said, "we were the first to obtain uncertainties on these quantities. It's a way to validate the accuracy of machine learning applied to the construction of these potentials."

In the second research project, Venturi said they now know more about the disassociation dynamics in hypersonic flows, that is, how the molecules break their bonds and become two separate atoms as a consequence of strong collisions.

"The extreme temperatures of hypersonic regimes generate very peculiar physics," Venturi said. "The make it impossible to distinguish between vibrations and rotations of the molecules. You cannot split them because they are highly coupled together. We found that this effect has important consequences of the dissociation mechanisms.

"It is interesting, not just from a chemistry perspective, but also from an engineering point of view. The chemical reactions that take place after the gas molecules and atoms collide either release energy into the flow or subtract energy from it," Venturi said. "So, if we want to quantify the heat flux that impinges the heat shield, we need to predict how much energy is stored in the flow around the vehicle. The dissociation of the molecules in the atmosphere isn't something we commonly observe at room temperature. It starts to be relevant only at temperatures over 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit for oxygen and 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit for nitrogen. It's an interesting phenomenon, and now we understand more about it."

In the journal Applied Physics Reviews (DOI: 10.1063/5.0020755), an international research team from the University of Barcelona, the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), and TU Darmstadt report on possibilities for implementing more efficient and environmentally friendly refrigeration processes. For this purpose, they investigated the effects of simultaneously exposing certain alloys to magnetic fields and mechanical stress.

In the past, researchers were mainly concerned with the well-known "magnetocaloric effect", which can be observed when certain metals and alloys are exposed to a magnetic field: The materials spontaneously change their magnetic order as well as their temperature, which makes them promising candidates for magnetic cooling circuits. "It has recently been found that we can boost this effect considerably in certain materials by simultaneously adding other stimuli, such as a force field, or more specifically, a mechanical load," says Dr. Tino Gottschall from the High Magnetic Field Laboratory (HLD) at HZDR, describing the team's approach. A small range of such "multicaloric" materials is already known.

The research team selected a special nickel-manganese-indium alloy as one of the most promising materials for their experiments. It is one of the magnetic "shape memory" alloys, whose memory is a result of the transformation of two different crystal lattices: If there is an external stimulus, such as a magnetic field, these structures morph into each other, resulting in noticeable alterations in the material - for instance, clearly perceptible shape changes are not uncommon. The special feature of the selected compound is, however, that at a certain temperature at which the crystal structures change, the magnetic properties of the compound also change abruptly: structure and magnetism are strongly coupled.

A custom-made measuring device

In order to determine the material properties that are necessary for an efficient cooling process, the team in Barcelona first had to develop a unique, specially designed calorimeter to measure heat and that enables the simultaneous application of a magnetic field and pressure to the sample. To do this, the scientists harnessed a familiar method from materials testing and adapted it for their purposes, subjecting the sample to uniaxial mechanical stress.

While the magnetic flux densities ranged up to 6 Tesla, which is 120,000 times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field, the peak compressive stress applied was a moderate 50 megapascals. For the given sample size, that force roughly corresponds to a mass of 20 kilograms. "One can apply this kind of pressure by hand. And that is the decisive aspect for future applications, because such manageable mechanical loads are relatively easy to implement," explains Prof. Lluís Mañosa from the University of Barcelona, adding: "The challenge for us was to integrate accurate measurements of both compressive stress and strain into our calorimeter without distorting the measurement conditions."

Wanted: process control for practical application

Evaluating the obtained results was quite complex. The researchers recorded various parameters simultaneously, such as temperature change, magnetic flux density, compressive stress, and the alloy's entropy during programmed cooling and heating phases near a specific temperature at which the given material experiences transformations in the crystal lattice that lead to a change in magnetization. In the alloy used, this process occurs at room temperature, which is also advantageous for later practical application.

The measurements chart the sample's behavior in a four-dimensional space. Mapping this space in a meaningful way requires a raft of experiments, resulting in large-scale measurement campaigns. For Prof. Oliver Gutfleisch of TU Darmstadt, the effort is worthwhile: "The interaction of the different stimuli in multicaloric materials has hardly been investigated so far. Our nickel-manganese-indium alloy is the best-researched prototype compound in this class of materials to date. Our work has filled in some blank spots on its property map."

Now the scientists can pragmatically assess the benefit of additional pressure load - a central research objective of the ERC Advanced Grant Project Cool Innov. In a cooling cycle with commercially available neodymium permanent magnets, the cooling efficiency could be doubled by simultaneously applying a force field. The team assumes that the new process will also be of great value when searching for other promising cooling materials for the future.

There are around 40 million blind people in the world. Many of them would not benefit from a treatment of the eyes, e.g. in cases with damage to the optical nerve, where the connection between eye and brain is lost. For these patients, direct stimulation of the visual areas in the back of the brain could be the answer.

The idea of stimulating the brain via an implant to generate artificial visual percepts is not new and dates back to the 1970s. However, existing systems are only able to generate a small number of artificial 'pixels' at a time. At the NIN, researchers from a team led by Pieter Roelfsema are now using new implant production and implantation technologies, cutting-edge materials engineering, microchip fabrication, and microelectronics, to develop devices that are more stable and durable than previous implants.

Electrical stimulation

When electrical stimulation is delivered to the brain via an implanted electrode, it generates the percept of a dot of light at a particular location in visual space, known as a 'phosphene.'

The team developed high-resolution implants consisting of 1024 electrodes and implanted them in the visual cortex of two sighted monkeys. Their goal was to create interpretable images by delivering electrical stimulation simultaneously via multiple electrodes, to generate a percept that was composed of multiple phosphenes. "The number of electrodes that we have implanted in the visual cortex, and the number of artificial pixels that we can generate to produce high-resolution artificial images, is unprecedented," says Roelfsema.

Recognizing dots, lines and letters

The monkeys first had to perform a simple behavioral task in which they made eye movements to report the location of a phosphene that was elicited during electrical stimulation via an individual electrode. They were also tested on more complex tasks such as a direction-of-motion task, in which micro-stimulation was delivered on a sequence of electrodes, and a letter discrimination task, in which micro-stimulation was delivered on 8-15 electrodes simultaneously, creating a percept in the form of a letter. The monkeys successfully recognized shapes and percepts, including lines, moving dots, and letters, using their artificial vision.

"Our implant interfaces directly with the brain, bypassing prior stages of visual processing via the eye or the optic nerve. Hence, in the future, such technology could be used for the restoration of low vision in blind people who have suffered injury or degeneration of the retina, eye, or optic nerve, but whose visual cortex remains intact," explains Xing Chen, postdoctoral researcher in Roelfsema's team.

This research lays the foundations for a neuroprosthetic device that could allow profoundly blind people to regain functional vision and to recognize objects, navigate in unfamiliar surroundings, and interact more easily in social settings, significantly improving their independence and quality of life.

"Not only was part of this work funded by Human Brain Project, the future implant design for humans will also benefit from the EBRAINS brain atlases", says Roelfsema. "If you want to interface with the cortex in this highly precise way, you need a very detailed map."

"It's always our goal to help bring life-changing innovations from brain research to patients. Research like this bridges the gap from basic research to life-changing brain-based technology", says Katrin Amunts, Scientific Research Director of the Human Brain Project.

"This is a great example of progress in the amazing field of brain computer interfaces, and we aim to make EBRAINS a major hub and accelerator for such research in Europe", says EBRAINS CEO Pawel Swieboda.

It's a peanut-filled world--or at least it can feel that way for kids with peanut allergies. But a new study by researchers at the University of British Columbia and BC Children's Hospital gives hope to parents and kids who face real danger from exposure to peanuts.

"There's a common misperception about peanut allergies--that it's not a serious health issue. Although the risk of a fatal reaction to peanuts is low in patients with peanut allergy, it has a major impact on quality of life and many families feel hopeless in dealing with what can seem like an unmanageable problem," said the study's senior author Dr. Edmond Chan, head of the division of pediatric allergy and immunology at UBC's faculty of medicine and clinical investigator at BC Children's Hospital Research Institute.

The study, recently published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice, is the first to demonstrate that exposing children to a small, regular dose of an allergen (in this case, peanuts) in a real-world setting (outside of a clinical trial) is effective in reducing the risk of allergic reactions.

The treatment method, known as oral immunotherapy, involves gradually increasing the amount peanuts (or peanut products) given to the child. One treatment aim is to reach desensitization, whereby the child can ingest a full serving of peanuts without triggering a dangerous reaction. Another goal is protection in the event of an accidental exposure, and lessening or eliminating the need for epinephrine injections in response to reactions. To sustain their level of immunity, the child must continue to eat peanut products on a regular basis.

Over the course of this study, 117 preschool-age children--between the ages of 9 months and five years--with peanut allergies from across Canada received a daily maintenance dose of 300mg of peanut protein--equivalent to about one peanut or a quarter teaspoon of peanut butter.

After one year, the researchers found that nearly 80 per cent of the preschoolers were able to eat 15 peanuts (equivalent to 4000mg of peanut protein) without reaction during an allergist-supervised oral challenge. And almost every child (more than 98 per cent) who participated in the study could eat three to four peanuts without reaction, which is enough to protect from 99 per cent of accidental exposures.

Although some children in the study (21.4 percent) experienced an allergic reaction during the allergist-supervised oral challenge, the reactions were mild (14.5 per cent) or moderate (six per cent). Two children received epinephrine for moderate reactions. There were no severe reactions.

This study follows another analysis by the same researchers last year that was the first to demonstrate the safety of peanut oral immunotherapy for a large group of preschool-aged children when offered as a routine treatment in a hospital or clinic rather than within a clinical trial.

"Now, thanks to oral immunotherapy, these kids can accidentally eat something with peanut butter in it--like a cookie or cake--and not suffer a reaction, which is wonderful news for the families," said the study's lead author Dr. Lianne Soller, UBC allergy research manager based at BC Children's Hospital.

For Ravinder Dhaliwal, oral immunotherapy has been a game changer for her family and six-year old daughter, Saiya, who was diagnosed with a peanut allergy when she was still an infant.

"Before starting therapy, our lives were filled with anxiety because every outing revolved around her food allergies," said Ravinder. "Now, we can go to a restaurant or a birthday party without being in constant fear."

As one of the participants in the study, Saiya started receiving maintenance therapy in the spring of 2018, eating a small amount of peanut product every day. One year later, she was able to eat 20 peanuts in a sitting without having a reaction.

Today, Saiya is not only eating peanut butter sandwiches three times a week--she is enjoying the flavour of peanut products for the first time in her life and asking for them as a treat.

"Having gone through oral immunotherapy, I don't feel scared anymore--it's like having a shield to protect my child. The experience has been empowering for all of us," said Ravinder.

According to Chan and Soller, the earlier children undergo oral immunotherapy, the better. If left unchecked, peanut allergies most often become life-long and reactions can become more severe, which can result in social isolation, bullying, and anxiety.

The crystalline solid BaTiS3 (barium titanium sulfide) is terrible at conducting heat, and it turns out that a wayward titanium atom that exists in two places at the same time is to blame.

The discovery, made by researchers from Caltech, USC, and the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), was published on November 27 in the journal Nature Communications. It provides a fundamental atomic-level insight into an unusual thermal property that has been observed in several materials. The work is of particular interest to researchers who are exploring the potential use of crystalline solids with poor thermal conductivity in thermoelectric applications, in which heat is directly converted into electric energy and vice versa.

"We have found that quantum mechanical effects can play a huge role in setting the thermal transport properties of materials even under familiar conditions like room temperature," says Austin Minnich, professor of mechanical engineering and applied physics at Caltech and co-corresponding author of the Nature Communications paper.

Crystals are usually good at conducting heat. By definition, their atomic structure is highly organized, which allows atomic vibrations--heat--to flow through them as a wave. Glasses, on the other hand, are terrible at conducting heat. Their internal structure is disordered and random, which means that vibrations instead hop from atom to atom as they pass through.

BaTiS3 belongs to a class of materials called Perovskite-related chalcogenides. Jayakanth Ravichandran, an assistant professor in USC Viterbi's Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, and his team have been investigating them for their optical properties and recently started studying their thermoelectric applications.

"We had a hunch that BaTiS3 will have low thermal conductivity, but the value was unexpectedly low. Our study shows a new mechanism to achieve low thermal conductivity, so the next question is whether the electrons in the system flow seamlessly unlike heat to achieve good thermoelectric properties," says Ravichandran.

The team discovered that BaTiS3, along with several other crystalline solids, possessed "glass-like" thermal conductivity. Not only is its thermal conductivity comparable to those of disordered glasses, it actually gets worse as temperature goes down, which is the opposite of most materials. In fact, its thermal conductivity at cryogenic temperatures is among the worst ever observed in any fully dense (nonporous) solid.

The team found that the titanium atom in each BaTiS3 crystal exists in what is known as a double-well potential--that is, there are two spatial locations in the atomic structure where the atom wants to be. The titanium atom existing in two places at the same time gives rise to what is known as a "two-level system." In this case, the titanium atom has two states: a ground state and an excited state. Passing atomic vibrations are absorbed by the titanium atom, which goes from the ground to the excited state, then quickly decays back to ground state. The absorbed energy is emitted in the form of a vibration and in a random direction.

The overall effect of this absorption and emission of vibrations is that energy is scattered rather than cleanly transferred. An analogy would be shining a light through a frosted glass, with the titanium atoms as the frost; incoming waves deflect off of the titanium, and only a portion make their way through the material.

Two-level systems have long been known to exist, but this is the first direct observation of one that was sufficient to disrupt thermal conduction in a single crystal material over an extended temperature range, measured here between 50 and 500 Kelvin.

The researchers observed the effect by bombarding BaTiS3 crystals with neutrons in a process known as inelastic scattering using the Spallation Neutron Source at ORNL. When they pass through the crystals, the neutrons gain or lose energy. This indicates that energy is absorbed from a two-level system in some cases and imparted to them in others.

"It took real detective work to solve this mystery about the structure and dynamics of the titanium atoms. At first it seemed that the atoms were just positionally disordered, but the shallowness of the potential well meant that they couldn't stay in their positions for very long," says Michael Manley, senior researcher at ORNL and co-corresponding author of the Nature Communications paper. That's when Raphael Hermann, researcher at ORNL, suggested doing quantum calculations for the double well. "That atoms can tunnel is well known, of course, but we did not expect to see it at such a high frequency with such a large atom in a crystal. But the quantum mechanics is clear: if the barrier between the wells is small enough, then such high-frequency tunneling is indeed possible and should result in strong phonon scattering and thus glass-like thermal conductivity," Manley says.

The conventional approach to creating crystalline solids with low thermal conductivity is to create a lot of defects in those solids, which is detrimental to other properties such as electrical conductivity. So, a method to design low-thermal-conductivity crystalline materials without any detriment to electrical and optical properties is highly desirable for thermoelectric applications. A small handful of crystalline solids exhibit the same poor thermal conductivity, so the team next plans to explore whether this phenomenon is to blame in those materials as well.

Analysis from a University of Texas at Arlington assistant professor of public policy suggests that nationalistic governments around the globe are more likely to copy other nationalistic governments in responding to the current pandemic.

Evan Mistur, a UT Arlington assistant professor in the College of Architecture, Planning and Public Affairs, outlined his findings in "The Sincerest Form of Flattery: Nationalist Emulation During the COVID-19 Pandemic," published in the Journal of Chinese Political Science. He collaborated on the paper with John Wagner Givens, assistant professor at Kennesaw State (Ga.) University.

"While leaders often claim responses are based on the best available advice from scientists and public health experts, recent policy diffusion research suggests that countries are emulating the COVID-19 policies of their neighbors and political peers instead of responding to domestic conditions," Mistur said.

Nationalism is an ideology that values national identity over belonging to other groups and seeks distinction and preservation of that identity "by the nation, for the nation." At its most extreme, it rejects the status quo and seeks to reassert the will of an imagined national community over a political or cultural space.

Despite being geographically distant and featuring extremely varied political systems, development levels, and governance capacity, many countries with nationalistic tendencies duplicate each other's changing policies during the pandemic.

"We determined that leaders in those nationalistic countries are not necessarily letting scientific data drive their decision-making during the pandemic," Mistur said. "We looked at countries like France and Italy, both of which had total lockdowns. We also looked at the U.S. and Brazil, which represented that nationalistic turn.

"Nationalist regimes seem to favor certain approaches toward the pandemic. They emulate each other."
Givens said these results show "not only new mechanisms of policy diffusion, but also growing international cooperation among nationalist regimes and leaders."

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- Instead of inserting a card or scanning a smartphone to make a payment, what if you could simply touch the machine with your finger?

A prototype developed by Purdue University engineers would essentially let your body act as the link between your card or smartphone and the reader or scanner, making it possible for you to transmit information just by touching a surface.

The prototype doesn't transfer money yet, but it's the first technology that can send any information through the direct touch of a fingertip. While wearing the prototype as a watch, a user's body can be used to send information such as a photo or password when touching a sensor on a laptop, the researchers show in a new study.

"We're used to unlocking devices using our fingerprints, but this technology wouldn't rely on biometrics - it would rely on digital signals. Imagine logging into an app on someone else's phone just by touch," said Shreyas Sen, a Purdue associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.

"Whatever you touch would become more powerful because digital information is going through it."

The study is published in Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, a journal by the Association for Computing Machinery. Shovan Maity, a Purdue alum, led the study as a Ph.D. student in Sen's lab. The researchers also will present their findings at the Association for Computing Machinery's Computer Human Interaction (ACM CHI) conference in May. A video about the research is available on YouTube at https://youtu.be/-2oscW5i5DQ.

The technology works by establishing an "internet" within the body that smartphones, smartwatches, pacemakers, insulin pumps and other wearable or implantable devices can use to send information. These devices typically communicate using Bluetooth signals that tend to radiate out from the body. A hacker could intercept those signals from 30 feet away, Sen said.

Sen's technology instead keeps signals confined within the body by coupling them in a so-called "Electro-Quasistatic range" that is much lower on the electromagnetic spectrum than typical Bluetooth communication. This mechanism is what enables information transfer by only touching a surface.

Even if your finger hovered just one centimeter above a surface, information wouldn't transfer through this technology without a direct touch. This would prevent a hacker from stealing private information such as credit card credentials by intercepting the signals.

The researchers demonstrated this capability in the lab by having a person interact with two adjacent surfaces. Each surface was equipped with an electrode to touch, a receiver to get data from the finger and a light to indicate that data had transferred. If the finger directly touched an electrode, only the light of that surface turned on. The fact that the light of the other surface stayed off indicated that the data didn't leak out.

Similarly, if a finger hovered as close as possible over a laptop sensor, a photo wouldn't transfer. But a direct touch could transfer a photo.

Credit card machines and apps such as Apple Pay use a more secure alternative to Bluetooth signals - called near-field communication - to receive a payment from tapping a card or scanning a phone. Sen's technology would add the convenience of making a secure payment in a single gesture.

"You wouldn't have to bring a device out of your pocket. You could leave it in your pocket or on your body and just touch," Sen said.

The technology could also replace key fobs or cards that currently use Bluetooth communication to grant access into a building. Instead, a person might just touch a door handle to enter.

Like machines today that scan coupons, gift cards and other information from a phone, using this technology in real life would require surfaces everywhere to have the right hardware for recognizing your finger.

The software on the device that a person is wearing would also need to be configured to send signals through the body to the fingertip - and have a way to turn off so that information, such as a payment, wouldn't be transferred to every surface equipped to receive it.

The researchers believe that the applications of this technology would go beyond how we interact with devices today.

"Anytime you are enabling a new hardware channel, it gives you more possibilities. Think of big touch screens that we have today - the only information that the computer receives is the location of your touch. But the ability to transfer information through your touch would change the applications of that big touch screen," Sen said.