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kathleenseiber · 2 years

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‘Tobacco-free’ nicotine claims may lure young adults

Young adults who don’t use tobacco products report higher intentions of using Puff Bar, an e-cigarette brand that claims “tobacco-free nicotine,” than products with the regular claim of containing nicotine, a new study shows.

The study, published in the journal Tobacco Control, also finds that the claim may reduce young adults’ perception that the products might cause health risks and may prompt the use of the Puff Bar brand over other e-cigarette brands and types.

E-cigarettes that contain nicotine derived from tobacco are subject to FDA regulation and many local tobacco control policies as tobacco products, but products made with synthetic nicotine currently fall into a regulatory gap.

“Many e-cigarette brands now are marketed with ‘tobacco-free nicotine’ or ‘synthetic nicotine’ claims to circumvent local and federal tobacco control measures, such as flavored e-cigarette sales restrictions and the minimum tobacco purchasing age of 21,” says coauthor Julia Chen-Sankey, a researcher at the Center for Tobacco Studies at Rutgers University and an assistant professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health.

The online study asked 1,822 people aged 18 to 29 who either never used tobacco or who only had experimented with it to view depictions of Puff Bar e-cigarettes with either the claim that the product contains “tobacco-free nicotine,” as it is marketed, or simply “contains nicotine.”

The researchers then asked the participants if they would use these products if they had the opportunity, how harmful they think they are to health, whether they felt positive or negative if they used these products, and if they would be more or less likely to use the Puff Bar product versus another e-cigarette brand.

“The results are concerning given that little is known about the health effects of using tobacco-free nicotine products and regulations are not immediately clear,” says Chen-Sankey.

“An increasing number of e-cigarette brands and products are marketed with ‘tobacco-free nicotine’ or similar claims like ‘non-tobacco nicotine’ or ‘synthetic nicotine.’

“If such claims increase the likelihood of e-cigarette use among young people who may not otherwise use e-cigarettes as we found, regulatory actions need to be taken immediately to prevent increased use of e-cigarettes among young people.”

Source: Rutgers University

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kathleenseiber · 2 years

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Biden’s COP26 speech shows real climate ambition. Can he deliver?

He even apologized for the US leaving the Paris Agreement. Biden’s COP26 speech shows real climate ambition. Can he deliver? published first on https://triviaqaweb.weebly.com/

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kathleenseiber · 2 years

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Marie Antoinette Syndrome — or why some people’s hair can turn white overnight

Yes, it's very rare, but it does seem to happen. Marie Antoinette Syndrome — or why some people’s hair can turn white overnight published first on https://triviaqaweb.weebly.com/

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kathleenseiber · 2 years

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Can we predict the next supervolcano eruption?

Beneath the calm waters of Lake Toba on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, a massive supervolcano is lurking. This geological monster is one of only a handful of volcanoes capable of producing a super-eruption that could catastrophically change the global climate system for decades. So how can we predict the next supervolcano eruption?

An international team of geologists has investigated the potential early warning signs of such a world-shaking eruption, focusing on the volcano beneath Lake Toba.

This volcano has produced two of the most massive eruptions the Earth has ever seen, occurring 840,000 years ago and 75,000 years ago. Each produced enough ash to blanket the whole of Switzerland with seven centimetres of ash.

Lake Toba in Sumatra and its island created by the accumulation of magma in the volcano’s magma reservoir. Credit: UNIGE

There has been no equivalent-sized eruption in recorded human history, so this research is crucial to informing how we might be affected – and how we might respond.

The new study, published in PNAS, measures how long it took for the Toba volcano to build up its magma reservoir in the lead up to these two past super-eruptions. Magma is what makes super-volcanoes so dangerous: the molten rock builds up and up in the mantle below the crust, unable to break through, until the pressures become so great that the whole system explodes.

The good news? The researchers think that Toba’s next major super-eruption is still 600,000 years away.

The bad news? The eruption won’t be heralded by weird geological signs. In fact, we won’t know when it’s coming: the build-up will be slow and silent.

To come to these conclusions, the team analysed the levels of uranium and lead in zircons, a tiny crystal found in volcanic rocks. Previous research has shown that zircons can be used to estimate the volume of magma stored below volcanoes.

“One of [zircon’s] characteristics is that it takes uranium within its structure,” says lead author Ping-Ping Liu, from Peking University in China.

She explains that over time the uranium decays into lead, “so by measuring the amount of uranium and lead in zircon with a mass spectrometer, we can determine its age”.

The team dated zircons from a number of different Toba eruptions, where the youngest zircon indicates the date of the eruption and older ones indicate how magma has built up.

“The first super-eruption occurred around 840,000 years ago, after 1.4 million years of magma input, whereas magma fed the second super-eruption at 75,000 years accumulated only in 600,000 years,” says Luca Caricchi, co-author from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland.

The eruptions were the same size; the researchers say that the second eruption built up its magma more quickly because over time, magma heats up the continental crust around the volcano, which keeps the magma hot for longer.

“This is a ‘vicious circle’ of eruptions: the more the magma heats the crust, the slower the magma cools and the faster the rate of magma accumulation becomes,” says Ping-Ping Liu – meaning that super-eruptions can become more frequent as time goes on.

This zircon-dating technique allowed the team to estimate how much magma is simmering below the surface of the Toba volcano.

“Today, we estimate that about 320 cubic kilometres of magma could be ready to erupt within the reservoir of Toba volcano,” says Caricchi.

Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park. Credit: David Mencin via Imaggeo

This wouldn’t be classed as a super-eruption (which needs to be greater than 1000 cubic kilometres) and would definitely be smaller than the 2800 cubic kilometres spewed out in Toba’s two big eruptions, but it’s still enough to create global disturbance.

The researchers say that an extra four cubic kilometres of magma builds up in Toba every thousand years. This means that next equivalent super-eruption would occur in 600,000 years – though smaller ones could happen in the meantime.

This method could also be applied to other supervolcanoes around the globe, like Yellowstone in the US.

“Our study also shows that no extreme events occur before a super-eruption,” adds Caricchi. “This suggests that signs of an impending super-eruption, such as a significant increase in earthquakes or rapid ground uplift, might not be as obvious as pictured in disaster movies by the film industry.

“At Toba volcano, everything is happening silently underground, and the analysis of the zircons now gives us an idea of what is to come.”

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kathleenseiber · 2 years

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The great carbon capture and storage debate: can Santos make it work?

This article on Santos’ carbon capture and storage project first appeared in Cosmos Weekly on 22 October 2021.

When Sylvia Little fried her eggs at her Adelaide home one November morning in 1969, she became Santos’s first customer for natural gas from Moomba, 800 kilometres north in the Strzelecki Desert. Today, in subterranean reservoirs depleted by millions like Mrs Little since, the company plans to bury millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide.

It is doubtful Mrs Little would have known or cared that the natural gas originally contained CO2 when it emerged from the ground – or that Santos stripped it out before piping methane to customers. Over the years the company has vented millions of tonnes of this greenhouse gas into the air, these days at a rate of about 1.7 million tonnes annually.

Now, in a world desperate to hit net zero greenhouse emissions by 2050, Santos is betting its future on being able to inject that CO2 underground to reduce its carbon footprint through a technology known as carbon capture and storage (CCS).

But with critics claiming CCS is unreliable, and the recent failure of some of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies to make it work as promised, can Santos get it right?

Santos chief executive Kevin Gallagher is convinced, and keen to begin the $210 million operation at Moomba, planning a 2024 start, arguing that it can drive a lucrative global CO2 business storing up to 20 million tonnes a year – and set Santos up to make “blue” hydrogen in future.

The world will be watching. CCS is one of the big hopes for achieving net zero emissions, with the International Energy Agency (IEA) pushing for a massive increase between now and 2050 – going from 40 million tonnes of CO2 stored annually to 5.6 billion tonnes by 2050. That’s 70–100 new CCS projects a year.

Before injection underground, it’s transformed into supercritical CO2, which is dense like a liquid but moves like a gas and totals just 0.0036% of the original volume.

IEA executive director Fatih Birol says CCS is “critical” and “without it, our energy and climate goals will become virtually impossible to reach”.

So far, Australia has just one commercial project – the world’s biggest – and it underlines the challenge. The massive Gorgon liquid natural gas (LNG) plant on WA’s Barrow Island conceded in July it had substantially failed to reach required targets. Run by Chevron, with partners ExxonMobil and Shell, the $US55 billion (about $73 billion) project is on a Class A nature reserve. It’s supposed to bury the carbon dioxide it separates from natural gas – up to 14% of the volume – into a siltstone and sandstone formation 2.3km under the island.

Before injection underground, it’s transformed into supercritical CO2, which is dense like a liquid but moves like a gas and totals just 0.0036% of the original volume. It stays in this form in its destination due to the pressure and temperature below 800m.

Chevron claims it hit a “milestone” with 5 million tonnes of this CO2 injected – but that amount was only half what it was required to do and followed a range of system failures.

CO2 is also in natural gas extracted by Santos from its Cooper Basin wells. Why can Santos bury it better than Chevron? Santos declined to answer questions from Cosmos, but Dr Alan Finkel, Australia’s former chief scientist and now the federal government’s special adviser for low emission technologies, is positive.

While he says it won’t be easy, he believes the geological conditions for the Moomba project are “far superior” to those Chevron faces on Barrow Island. “They’re in a good position at Moomba,” he says. “The carbon dioxide is already there, and they’ve got sites to bury it in.”

Map of the Moomba gas plant and surrounding area. Credit: Santos.

Unlike Chevron, which had to use CCS to win permission to extract the gas, Santos is driven by shareholder pressure for a greener profile, new access to federal government subsidies in the form of tradeable carbon credit units for every tonne of CO2 it buries, and a plan to pivot its fossil gas into touted future fuel hydrogen. Methane mixed with steam, under intense heat and pressure, “reforms” into hydrogen – along with carbon monoxide and CO2. With those gasses buried, Santos would have “blue” hydrogen, a very low-emission fuel.

But billionaire miner and philanthropist Andrew Forrest claims CCS is a dud. He’s targeted Gorgon, without naming it.

“You know, in my own home state of Western Australia, we have some of the biggest gas developments in the world who’ve been granted permission to develop on carbon sequestration,” Forrest told the Good Will Hunters podcast this month.

“And it failed. And that’s quite normal around the world. So, to suddenly say, well, carbon sequestration, we’re going to wave a wand, it’s going to work reliably. Well, you know that, actually – if you’re a realist – is a bridge way too far. It’s good in a soundbite, but it doesn’t work in reality.”

Forrest, now backing several big “green” hydrogen projects, from which hydrogen is produced using only renewable energy, claimed CCS had failed “19 out of 20 times”. (He later told the ABC he’d revised that failure down to “nine out of 10 times”, after speaking with energy minister Angus Taylor.)

Finkel says it may have failed when applied to coal-fired power stations, because catching and separating CO2 from flue gasses is difficult and expensive. But he says it has worked reliably for enhanced oil recovery in North America, where CO2 is pumped underground to help release oil that is hard to access. It has also worked for decades at the Sleipner North Sea gas field off Norway, where Statoil (now Equinor) has been injecting CO2 beneath the ocean floor since 1996.

Finkel says CCS is important, necessary, and not a nasty coal industry idea.

“Everybody recognises that we’re going to need carbon capture and storage,” he says, adding that net zero won’t mean no emissions – Australia might have 100 million tonnes it cannot avoid, and will need ways to mitigate that.

“It’s hard, it’s difficult, but we can do it,” Finkel says. He rejects “fear mongering” that CO2 could leak. “It’s bullshit; it is going to be buried essentially for ever,” he says.

Santos has plans for three CCS projects, with another at the depleted Bayu-Undun gas field in the Timor Sea, using CO2 from its Barossa gas project off Darwin, and a third in Western Australia. It is also developing direct airborne capture, or DAC – sucking CO2 out of the air. That would give it another source of carbon to inject underground for credits.

Gallagher says Moomba would be the world’s second biggest CCS project, and the cheapest at under $30 a tonne over the life of the operation – which, balanced against carbon credit units selling for upwards of $26, may mean the company could make a profit if the unit price continues to rise.

He insists Forrest is wrong about CCS. “I don’t know of any true CCS project in a gas project that I’d describe as a failure,” he told an Australian Financial Review business conference last week. “We’ve been injecting gas and CO2 into reservoirs for decades. Historically, that was used in the industry for… enhanced oil production. But the process of injecting into a reservoir is exactly the same. If it can flow out of a reservoir […] it can flow back into a reservoir.”

Santos says with all three hubs it could store 30 million tonnes a year, equal to 6% of Australia’s emissions of just under 500 million tonnes. The repository is big, it claims, and it could attract companies from across Asia – although it is not clear how their CO2 would be transported and Finkel, for one, is dubious about this claim.

Dr Matthias Raab, chief executive of Victorian-based CO2CRC, a research organisation into CCS supported by government, oil and gas companies and universities, says the technology is proven and that critics of Gorgon have been “nit-picking” on teething problems. It is one of the world’s largest-ever infrastructure developments, he says, and deserves credit for already sequestering millions of tonnes of CO2.

The CO2CRC has been investigating and testing capture, separation, and storage technology at its Otway test centre since 2006 and its test field holds 100,000 tonnes of CO2. Raab says there’s no question CCS works.

While Chevron hasn’t detailed its problems publicly, one reported issue was with the injection of CO2. To make room for the gas between the grains in the sandstone, the salty water had to be extracted. But a lot of sand came up as well, damaging equipment. Raab argues that “sanding” is a common and fixable problem in the oil and gas industry. While there had been a delay, “the functionality of the CCS is working fine”.

But he says Santos has “definitely an easier proposition” at Moomba, with ready access to the CO2 and storage in depleted oil and gas reservoirs. Given predicted low costs, and the rising price of the carbon credit units, “it’s almost at the sweet spot where not sequestering carbon is more expensive than actually doing it”.

He is hopeful Santos can now “really show the world” how CCS can be done, with best practice as an economic proposition and a benefit for society. That, he says could “accelerate the uptake of CCS” in Australia and globally.

Raab says CCS’s big selling point is that it can tackle CO2 at speed and with scale. Billions of tonnes can be sequestered, allowing time to transition out of current energy sources over coming decades. And unlike planting trees, which can take decades to grow and absorb carbon, CCS can remove huge amounts quickly and permanently.

The Australian Government’s decision to grant CCS projects access to carbon credit units should also spur development, he says. America’s recent Section 45Q tax incentive provided companies with up to $US50 a ton return for direct geological carbon sequestration “and that has stimulated an enormous amount of activity in the US”.

But success by Santos would still only reduce a part of the emissions it creates. After all, the methane it sells, once burnt, creates more CO2 in the atmosphere. Raab says any new gas-fired power stations can and should be fitted with carbon-capture technology. “So the next step needs to be decarbonising combustion,” he says. “That gives you the 95% capture rate at the electricity generation stage.”

Billions of tonnes can be sequestered, allowing time to transition out of current energy sources over coming decades.

Federal Energy and Emissions Reduction minister Angus Taylor recently gave $250 million in grants to design CCS hubs and support research and commercialisation of CCS technology, including identifying geological storage sites. Hubs are important, Raab says, because they can provide a central CCS repository to be shared by multiple industries, thus reducing individual company costs wanting to bury their emissions.

Dr John Kaldi, University of Adelaide emeritus professor and state chair of CCS, says the technology can work for many industries, but costs will generally be higher than for gas producers. “We are not only talking about oil and gas, coal or the power sector,” he says. “We are looking at industries like steel, aluminium, and cement.”

The biggest cost for companies is in capturing the CO2, Kaldi says. Gas companies already do that to refine the methane as a fuel. But extracting flue gasses from coal-fired power stations is comparatively very expensive and not economic in Australia – although he thinks costs will go down.

CCS is not the silver bullet to fix climate change, Kaldi says, but “we will have to use the full portfolio of technical measures if we’re serious about reducing our emissions”.

This article first appeared in Cosmos Weekly on 22 October 2021. To see more in-depth stories like this, subscribe today and get access to our weekly e-publication, plus access to all back issues of Cosmos Weekly.

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kathleenseiber · 2 years

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Good news for travellers: TGA recognises two more vaccines

The Therapeutic Goods Administration has “recognised” a further two COVID-19 vaccines: Covaxin, made by Indian company Bharat Biotech, and BBIBP-CorV, which is made by Chinese company Sinopharm.

While there aren’t any deals to roll these vaccines out in Australia, this recognition means that people who have received these vaccines overseas will be considered fully vaccinated, according to Australian regulations.

The two vaccines join two others in this category: India’s Covishield, made by AstraZeneca and the Serum Instiute of India, and China’s Coronavac, made by Sinovac.

In a statement, the TGA said that a combination of data from the vaccine sponsors and the World Health Organisation had shown the two jabs to be effective.

“In recent weeks, the TGA has obtained additional information demonstrating these vaccines provide protection and potentially reduce the likelihood that an incoming traveller would transmit COVID-19,” reads the statement.

Both BBIBP-CorV and Covaxin are inactivated virus vaccines, and both require two doses for a full course.

This type of vaccine differs from the three COVID vaccines currently being rolled out in Australia, but it’s the same method as many vaccines used here for other diseases, including influenza and polio.

Inactivated vaccines contain copies of a pathogen (in this case, SARS-CoV-2 viral particles) that is almost identical to the original, but has been prevented from replicating in one way or another. The recipient builds an immune response without making more of the pathogen. The technique is around 120 years old.

The TGA has also assessed the Chinese Convidecia vaccine, made by Cansino, and the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, made by Gamaleya Research Institute, but has not yet recognised either of them, stating that further data is required.

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kathleenseiber · 2 years

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Killer asteroids and stargazing

Fred Watson’s been a fixture of Australian astronomy for decades, perhaps best known for his work promoting and explaining science and astronomy on television, radio and through publications.

In addition to a long career at the Australian Astronomical Observatory and now as astronomer-at-large for the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science, he is the author of several popular books, a regular radio presenter, and keen musician.

Cosmos caught up with Fred to talk about his work as an astronomer-at-large and about his new book, Spacewarp: Colliding Comets and other Cosmic Catastrophes, released on 1 November 2021. In this video, Fred takes us through topics including the tale of what got him interested in astronomy, the James Webb Space Telescope, the Dark Sky Alliance, and how we can improve our skies for professional and amateur astronomers alike.

To learn more about the calendar mentioned in the video, see here.

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kathleenseiber · 2 years

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‘Surge buyers’ of guns more likely to think of suicide

People who purchased firearms during the 2020–2021 purchasing surge–particularly first-time buyers—were more likely to have thoughts of suicide, according to a new study.

Researchers surveyed 6,404 adults from New Jersey, Minnesota, and Mississippi and found that surge purchasers were more likely than other firearm owners and non-firearm owners to report suicidal thoughts during their lifetime, the previous year, and previous month.

Although firearm access is associated with a risk for suicide, the study found that first-time firearm owners who purchased a gun during this period were more likely than established firearm owners to report lifetime and past-year suicidal ideation.

According to the study, about 6% of US residents purchased a firearm between March 2020 and mid-July 2020. Of these, 34% were first-time buyers, a rate higher than typical. The states in the study were chosen due to their difference in geography, demographics, political climate, firearm ownership rates, firearm purchasing laws, gun violence rates, and culture.

The COVID-19 pandemic as well as the contentious election season and the racial justice movement after the death of George Floyd fueled this unprecedented surge in firearm sales over the last year throughout the United States, researchers say.

The study’s findings include:

Of surge purchasers, 56 have experienced lifetime suicidal thoughts compared to 32% of non-firearm owners and 28% of other firearm owners.

Over the past year, 42% of surge purchasers reported suicidal thoughts versus 23% of non-firearm owners and 18% of other firearm owners.

Also, 20% of surge purchasers reported suicidal thoughts in the past month compared to 11% of non-firearm owners and 7% of other firearm owners. Almost 40% of these buyers store at least one firearm unlocked.

Surge purchasers were more likely than other firearm owners to use locking devices (36% vs. 26%), but less likely to store firearms unloaded in a closet or drawer (22% vs. 30%).

Among surge purchasers, first-time firearm owners were less likely than established firearm owners to use gun safes (39% vs. 52%) or store loaded firearms hidden in a closet or drawer (11% vs. 18%). In contrast, first-time firearm owners were more likely to use locking devices (42% vs. 29%).

“These findings highlight that individuals who made the decision to become firearm owners during the purchasing surge exhibit a higher risk for suicidal thoughts than typical firearm owners,” says Michael Anestis, associate professor at the Rutgers University School of Public Health, executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center, and lead author of the study in JAMA Network Open.

“The fact that suicidal thoughts were particularly common among surge purchasers who became first time firearm owners is an important consideration given data demonstrating an elevated suicide rate in the months following the first acquisition of a firearm.”

The study illustrates the need to implement policies and interventions that increase safety among firearm purchasers, such as safe firearm storage and temporary storage of firearms away from home during times of stress, as well as policies that promote different forms of protection, such as home alarm systems.

“This approach needs to be supplemented with practical tools such as information on different options for safe firearm storage, incentives for both retailer and consumer to purchase safe storage equipment, and information on where firearm owners can legally and temporarily store firearms outside the home,” Anestis says.

He also called for better legislation on safe storage, waiting periods, and mandating of suicide risk screening questions during firearm purchases.

Source: Rutgers University

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kathleenseiber · 2 years

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6 ways to deal with alcoholism stigma in recovery

Researchers have identified six strategies that recovering alcoholics use to negotiate social situations and remain sober, depending on how they feel about stigmas associated with drinking and alcoholism.

“There is a stigma in the United States associated with not drinking socially,” says Lynsey Romo, an associate professor of communication at North Carolina State University and corresponding author of the study in Health Communication.

“There is also a stigma associated with problem drinking. We did this study because we wanted to understand how people negotiate this double-stigma socially in order to stay sober.

“There really is no clear guidance for people in recovery on how to deal with stigmas associated with drinking and alcohol abuse, and a lot of people in recovery grapple with shame and other issues associated with these stigmas. We’re optimistic that outlining these strategies can serve as something of a tool kit for helping people in recovery navigate these issues.”

For the study, researchers conducted in-depth interviews with 22 US adults who have been sober for at least 10 years. The researchers identified six strategies for managing stigma. Specifically, the researchers found that the strategies study participants chose depended both on whether they believed there was a societal stigma against alcoholism and whether they felt such a stigma applied to them.

In other words, did they feel society was judging them? And did they feel ashamed about being alcoholics, even though they were in recovery?

The six strategies are:

1. Accept the stigma: In this strategy, participants felt there was a societal stigma and that it applied to them, essentially incorporating the stigma into their identity. Coping behaviors here might include using self-deprecating humor about the subject.

2. Evade responsibility for the stigma: This strategy involved participants accepting that the stigma applied to them, but minimizing their personal responsibility. That means, for example, blaming it on hereditary factors or other factors beyond their control.

3. Reduce offensiveness of stigma: This involved accepting that a stigma applied to them, but focusing on the value and importance of recovery, as well as how they have changed for the better since entering recovery.

4. Avoid the stigma: In this strategy, participants accepted that the public stigmatizes alcoholism, but did not think the stigma applied to them. This distances the individual from the stigma because they don’t identify with the label of alcoholism.

5. Deny the stigma: This strategy challenges both the public understanding of stigma and whether it applies to them. Essentially, participants utilizing this strategy believe that nobody is perfect and other people don’t have the right to judge them. They also focus on the fact that they’re in recovery, which is an accomplishment in itself.

6. Ignore/display the stigma: This strategy also challenges both the public understanding of stigma and whether it applies to them. Participants using this strategy are open about their experiences and engage in advocacy to educate others and combat stereotypes about alcoholism and recovery.

This study is part of a larger body of work that makes clear alcoholism is still stigmatized in society. And other research suggests that the more people buy into these stigmas, the more likely they are to struggle with relapses.

“We think our study is important because understanding and outlining these strategies for managing stigmas can help recovering alcoholics identify techniques for maintaining their sobriety and moving forward with their recovery,” Romo says.

“It also important to note that the way recovering alcoholics view themselves and the stigmas related to drinking and alcoholism are not fixed—they will shift over time as people go through the process of recovery. That means that the strategies are also not fixed. In fact, people often adopt more than one strategy at a time.”

Source: NC State

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kathleenseiber · 2 years

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Women Earn 2 Percent Less Than Men - And The Reason Why May Be The Myth Of Lack Of Female Confidence

Everyone says they have impostor syndrome about something, so perhaps many people just mask it and appear confident. Do men mask it better than women?

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kathleenseiber · 2 years

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New Paper Says Global Warming May Be the Reason For Violence In Somalia

A few decades ago there were claims we'd fight wars over dwindling coal supplies and 20 years there were models claiming the "virtual" water cost of products like coffee would become such a problem there'd be wars over water. Those both got a lot of media traction from sympathetic journalists even if the science was lacking. A new paper uses computer simulations to allege a new reason - climate change.

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kathleenseiber · 2 years

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Gun Deaths Rose 30% During The Pandemic

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, 28 states experienced higher gun deaths, including suicides. New York, Minnesota, and Michigan saw numbers go up more than 100 percent, according to a recent paper. Only Alaska, which often leads the US, had significantly lower rates of gun deaths during that period.

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Men are just more competitive? Science says it’s not that simple

When trying to understand America’s persistent gender wage gap, researchers have in the past decade suggested that women are less competitive than men, and are therefore passed over for higher-ranking roles.

But a new study from the University of Arizona shows it’s probably not that simple; in fact, women are just as likely to enter into a competition as men – but only when there’s the option to share their winnings with the losers.

The study, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was led by Mary Rigdon from the University of Arizona’s Center for the Philosophy of Freedom, in cooperation with Alessandra Cassar, a professor of economics at the University of San Francisco.

Gender wage gap persists

In 2021, women will earn 82 cents for every dollar earned by men, says Rigdon. This means women work nearly three months more to receive the same amount of pay as men. When these results are adjusted to cover age, experience, and level of education, women still earn about 98 cents on the male dollar – in other words, an equally qualified woman is paid 2% less than her male counterparts.

Economists have considered a few possible explanations for this, Rigdon says. One theory, known as the “human capital explanation”, suggests that there are gender differences in certain skills, leading women to careers that pay less. Another theory – perhaps the most widely considered – is patent discrimination.

The researchers decided to test the other prevailing theory – the competitiveness theory – because they reasoned that if women were so reluctant to compete, they would occupy fewer high-ranking positions at the top of major companies, a trend that is not represented in the growing presence of women in leadership roles.

“We thought it must be the case that women are as competitive as men, but they just exhibit it differently, so we wanted to try to get at that story and demonstrate that that is the case,” Rigdon says. “Because that’s then a very different story about the gender wage gap.”

Testing a troublesome theory

Rigdon and Cassar randomly assigned 238 participants – split nearly evenly by gender – to two different groups for the study. Participants in each of the two groups were then assigned to four-person subgroups.

For all participants, the first round of the study was the same: each was asked to look at tables of 12 three-digit numbers with two decimal places and find the two numbers that add to 10. Participants were asked to solve as many tables as possible – up to 20 – in two minutes. Each participant was paid $2 for every table they solved in the first round.

In round two, participants were asked to do the same task, but the two groups were incentivized differently. In the first group, the two participants in each four-person team who solved the most tables earned $4 per table solved, while their other two team members were given nothing. In the other group, the top two performers of each four-person team also earned $4 per table, but they had the right to decide how much of the prize money to share with one of the lower performing participants.

In the third round, all participants were allowed to choose which payment scheme they preferred from the two previous rounds. For half the study participants, this meant a choice between a guaranteed $2 per correct table, or potentially $4 per correct table if they became one of the top two performers in their four-person subgroup. For the other half of the participants, the choice was $2 per correct table, or $4 per correct table for the top-two performers with the option to share the winnings with one of the losing participants.

The number of women who chose the competitive option nearly doubled when given the option to share their winnings; about 60% chose to compete under that option, while only about 35% chose to compete in the winner-take-all version of the tournament.

About 51% of men in the study chose the winner-take-all option, and 52.5% chose the format that allowed for sharing with the losers.

While the sample size is relatively small, the results deserve attention.

Rigdon and Cassar have a few theories about why women might be more inclined to compete when the winnings are shared. One suggests that female participants are interested in controlling the way winnings are divvied up; another, popular among evolutionary psychologists, is that female participants may be inclined to smooth over bad feelings in a group setting. Yet the answer may lie less in biology and more in socialisation, perhaps that women are encouraged from a young age to be “nice=”: at this point, the jury’s still out.

“We really have to ask what it is about this social incentive that drives women to compete,” Rigdon says. “We think it’s recognising the different costs and benefits that come from your different biological and cultural constraints. But at the end of the day, I think we still have this question.”

Rigdon and Cassar are now designing a study to drive to the heart of that question.

“If we’re finally going to close the gender pay gap, then we have to understand the sources of it – and also solutions and remedies for it,” Rigdon says.

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kathleenseiber · 2 years

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How plants survive in the Atacama

In the harsh, arid conditions of Chile’s vast Atacama Desert – the driest non-polar desert on the planet – only the most resilient plant life can cling on among the water-parched rocks and sand.

How these plants came to thrive in such a hostile place is of particular interest to scientists hoping to understand how plant life might adapt to changing ecosystems in a warming world. Now, in a new study published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an international team of researchers has identified the smoking gun: key genes that have helped Atacama’s hardy shrubs adapt to their desiccated homelands.

The study was an international collaboration between botanists, microbiologists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists and genomic scientists, headed up by a team of Chilean researchers who established a pioneering “natural laboratory” in the Atacama, where they conducted experiments over a decade to understand how the unforgiving landscape was able to nourish life. They measured climate, soil and plant life at 22 sites across varying elevations and types of vegetation.

The research area is home to a surprising variety of plant species, including grasses, annuals and perennial shrubs, all of which are adapted to manage the region’s aridity, altitude, nutrient-poor soil, and the Sun’s harsh radiation.

Gabriela Carrasco is identifying, labelling, collecting, and freezing plant samples in the Atacama Desert. These samples then travelled 1600km, kept under dry ice to be processed for RNA extractions in Santiago de Chile. The species Carrasco is collecting here are Jarava frigida and Lupinus oreophilus. Credit: Melissa Aguilar

The team brought samples 1000 miles (1600km) to their laboratory, where they sequenced the genes expressed in the 32 dominant plant species of the region, as well as the genomes of the microbes living in the Atacama soil that co-exist with the plants.

Critically, they found some plant species developed growth-promoting bacteria near their roots to optimise their uptake of nitrogen – a nutrient they need in order to grow, but which is notoriously sparse in the Atacama.

Then, researchers at New York University (NYU) used an approach called phylogenomics to identify which genes had adapted protein sequences, comparing the 32 Atacama species with 32 genetically similar ‘sister’ species.

“The goal was to use this evolutionary tree based on genome sequences to identify the changes in amino acid sequences encoded in the genes that support the evolution of the Atacama plant adaptation to desert conditions,” says Gloria Coruzzi, co-author of the study and a professor at NYU’s Department of Biology and Center for Genomics and Systems Biology.

“This computationally intense genomic analysis involved comparing 1,686,950 protein sequences across more than 70 species,” adds Gil Eshel, who conducted the analysis using the High Performance Computing Cluster at NYU. “We used the resulting super-matrix of 8,599,764 amino acids for phylogenomic reconstruction of the evolutionary history of the Atacama species.”

The studied found 265 candidate genes whose protein sequences were found across multiple Atacama species. Some of these genes adapted the plants’ ability to respond to light and manage photosynthesis, which may have helped them adapt to the extreme irradiation of these high desert plains. Other genes found are involved in the regulation of stress responses and the management of salt intake and detoxification, which could have adapted the plants to Atacama’s high-stress, low-nutrient environment.

A ‘genetic goldmine’ of precious information

The research is timely, as this week the world’s leaders attempt to negotiate a global approach to climate change at COP26.

“Our study of plants in the Atacama Desert is directly relevant to regions around the world that are becoming increasingly arid, with factors such as drought, extreme temperatures, and salt in water and soil posing a significant threat to global food production,” says Rodrigo Gutiérrez, co-author of the study and a professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

“Most of the plant species we characterised in this research have not been studied before,” he says. “As some Atacama plants are closely related to staple crops, including grains, legumes, and potatoes, the candidate genes we identified represent a genetic goldmine to engineer more resilient crops, a necessity given the increased desertification of our planet.”

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