Humans and chimpanzees began their separate evolutionary paths between 6 and 7 million years ago when they split from the last common ancestor (LCA) they shared. Debate about the LCA hinges in part on the tree-dwelling environment from which humans emerged – which involved living among the high-up horizontal branches or being able to get there from the ground, or, more likely, both.

Chimpanzees have ankle flexion that makes them skilled tree trunk climbers, but monkeys have been thought to navigate trees with their arms – which would influence what kind of ancestor we’re looking for, one that climbed up trunks or lived in treetops full time.

Video evidence from West Africa suggests there may be no such distinction, at least based on foot structure: Researchers from The Ohio State University observed and confirmed with measurements that wild sooty mangabey monkeys, known to have feet that lack chimps’ versatile ankles, display foot bone flexibility that facilitates vertical climbing up skinny tree trunks to hide, forage or sleep.

“People are making behavioral inferences from fossils, and some say a monkey can’t vertically climb as well as an ape can,” said first study author Luke Fannin, assistant professor of anthropology at Ohio State. “We’re saying there’s a functional equivalence here. So you can’t rule out vertical climbing just because something doesn’t have a chimpanzee-like foot.”

The research appears this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Identifying the last common ancestor is considered key to helping us understand what led to bipedalism, which is done habitually only by humans. We know we’re apes, but this study makes the point that even if the ancestor had a more monkey-like foot morphology, it could still climb like an ape.

“Part of paleoanthropology is understanding how our evolution happened, and it’s often through the hallmark of how we move because modern humans move quite differently than our cousins, the chimpanzees, do, and they’re the living primate we’re most closely related to,” Fannin said. “And we’re trying to understand why that is.”

Fannin recorded the videos of mangabeys in the wild at the Taï Forest Monkey Project field station in Ivory Coast that is co-directed by W. Scott McGraw, professor and chair of anthropology at Ohio State and senior author of the paper.

“The great thing about having the video is that it allows us to capture exactly what the monkey is doing in a high-resolution manner. So we can actually say how the joint is loaded. Before, we had hunches, but in this way, it’s far more precise,” McGraw said.

The chimpanzee ankle can flex upward at a 45-degree angle during a tree climb, compared to most human ankles’ capacity to flex about 20 degrees. Fannin found that the mangabey foot achieves a 46-degree flex in its midfoot during a vertical climb.

This poses a challenge to differing schools of thought about how the LCA moved and the kind of foot it needed to get around a forest environment – theories differ on whether the foot structure was required to be more like a chimp’s or a monkey’s.

“What’s neat about this paper is it adds clarity, but it also makes the broader picture more fuzzy,” McGraw said. “Because this notion that you have to have a foot like an advanced ape to vertically climb, which is a difficult task, is not true. You’ve got a bunch of monkeys that aren’t extinct – and which can be filmed – that are very competent at performing a biomechanically challenging behavior right now in a forest in West Africa.

“The videos that Luke made in Taï are particularly important because they provide some of the first kinematic documentation of a locomotor behavior in a monkey that has largely been unrecognized or underappreciated.”

There are modern hunter-gatherers and human foragers who are competent vertical climbers as well, a skill believed to be associated with flexibility in their ligaments, tendons and muscles rather than their foot bones.

But Fannin and McGraw note that though modern humans may be defined by walking on two feet, we are focused on ascent, on reaching new heights in a literal sense – a sign that our arboreality, that ancestral connection to trees, is not just anatomical but also a behavioral hallmark.

“Arboreality is fundamental to understanding primates – including ourselves – because it has shaped our body to a large degree: hands and feet, wrists and ankles, nails instead of claws, etc.,” McGraw said.

Added Fannin, “Regardless of where you’re starting from, which we don’t know yet, vertical climbing is universal and the anatomy is going to perform that behavior. So I think that to get at the question of a monkey-like or ape-like last common ancestor, we need more fossils.”

This work was supported by Dartmouth College, the Explorer’s Club, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Emory National Primate Research Center, the Primate Society of Great Britain and a Schmidt Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Former Ohio State undergraduate Carmen Pape was also a co-author.

And though sensors indicated the horses’ heart rates increased when they were looking at wolves on the screen, they otherwise kept a poker face. They didn’t bob their heads or swish their tails, and their gaze wasn’t fixed in a way that would indicate their brain was processing a threat, results showed.

“Rather than just spooking, horses show remarkable cognitive restraint when evaluating a potential threat,” said lead author Zeynep Benderlioglu, a senior lecturer in evolution, ecology and organismal biology at The Ohio State University. “And not all fear or stress will result in overt behavior. They’re not in fight-or-flight mode, but they’re assessing, and they’re doing it in a remarkably fast way. But their hearts are racing at the same time.”

The findings are relevant to horse and human welfare, Benderlioglu said: Riders and handlers may not be able to tell when a horse is agitated.

“This visual recognition means horses may be experiencing an internal state of agitation while remaining physically still,” she said. “Understanding this disconnect is vital for ensuring both rider safety and the welfare of a horse that is processing a threat, especially if that threat is a canid – any dog.”

The research was published today (July 15, 2026) in the journal PLOS One.

Eighteen horses of both sexes and a range of ages were involved in the study. The animals watched a brief silent video in a standard stall while wearing an equine heart monitor and being recorded on a video camera.

Benderlioglu said that to the best of her knowledge, this research represents a novel approach in testing equine predator recognition by isolating visual cues from other sensory inputs like scent or sound.

The video showed three scenes for 20 seconds each: A control stimulus featuring free-ranging wombats grazing, followed by videos of groups of wolves either interacting aggressively or grooming. Half of the horses saw wolves fighting first and then grooming, and the wolf sequence was reversed for the other half.

Separately, researchers collected data from handlers on the animals’ age, sex, social status in the herd, social dependency and temperament – such as social anxiety or fearfulness.

Heart rates remained at baseline when the horses were viewing the wombats, but significantly increased when they were viewing the wolves, no matter which behavior the predators were engaged in, fighting or grooming – a surprising finding.

“I expected the horses would differentiate the fighting videos from the grooming videos, but they didn’t. They had high alertness and a higher heart rate, compared to baseline and wombats, when looking at both grooming and fighting wolves,” said Benderlioglu, also director of the Undergraduate Research Lab in Ohio State’s Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology.

Heart rate increases were more pronounced in male horses and in horses with higher social status.

“Males had the same baseline heart rates compared to females, but males reacted more. They had heightened heart rate responses, higher arousal,” she said. “High-status horses showed heightened heart rate responses during predator stimuli, likely because they play an important role in collective decision-making and leading the herd. High-status horses are often followed by others because the herd places increased trust in them to make collective decisions, especially when it comes to safety.”

The gaze-related findings were of particular interest to the team, and could help explain why the horses didn’t show their hypervigilance cards by displaying any physical behavior.

Previous research has suggested that horses and most vertebrates use left-eye gazing to assess a threat because that function is based in the right side of the brain. A right-eye gaze suggests animals are engaged in a cognitive assessment, more of a left-brain task.

In this study, the horses showed no gaze preference while viewing the wolves, and when they were viewing wombats, they watched intently with binocular vision – both eyes, straight on.

“They were investigating, it seems, the point being they’re immediately, within 20 seconds, they’re assessing,” Benderlioglu said. “You cannot be in the head of the horse, but the gaze and their hearts, those are giving something away. It’s like the horse thinks, ‘Here is a wolf.’ Wait a minute, the horse thinks again, ‘What is that fluffy thing?’”

Horses evolved as prey animals, which is why this level of discernment was unexpected, she said.

“People don’t necessarily attribute a high level of cognition to prey animals,” she said. “But the horses are engaging in a really unexpectedly high level of cognitive processing. They are on high alert, and then the threat didn’t materialize, so behavioral manifestations are not occurring because they’re cognitively assessing.

“So if they’re not showing any overt stress signs, you don’t realize they might be in a high-alert state.”

The study took place at the Ohio State Equine Center operated by the Department of Animal Sciences.

Co-authors, all from Ohio State, were Rachel Hofacker, Natalie Sebunia (now at Cornell University) and Jessica Pihlblad (now at the University of Arizona).

An estimated 10 of these European common wall lizards arrived in southwest Ohio in the 1950s, brought home by a boy who smuggled them in his luggage after a vacation in northern Italy. Now, hundreds of thousands – and maybe even millions – of them scamper through urban parks and neighborhoods across Cincinnati. They’re called “Lazarus lizards” in a nod to the boy’s family, founders of the Lazarus retail chain. 

Researchers sequenced genomes from four different populations of the lizards, looking for genetic clues to explain how this tiny army could complete such a successful invasion. And though the analysis showed evidence of some loss of genetic variation and a dip in population size, the findings led the team to propose that rapid population growth was a major key to their survival, along with the likelihood that living conditions in Ohio resembled what they were used to back home. 

“They just grew so fast. If you think you have a bottleneck, but it doesn’t last very long, then you don’t have a bottleneck,” said senior study author H. Lisle Gibbs, professor emeritus of evolution, ecology and organismal biology at The Ohio State University. “The hypothesis that we argue is they just grew their way out of their potential genetic problem. 

“In some ways, we’re disproving the importance of genetic factors to the system, because it doesn’t really explain a lot about the tremendous success of these lizards in Cincinnati,” he said. 

The study was published recently in the journal Molecular Ecology. 

Genomes from four sets of samples were sequenced and analyzed for the study: a group collected in 2009 from the source location in northern Italy; samples from two Cincinnati populations collected in 2007 and 2022; and samples from a population that existed briefly in 2021 in Columbus, Ohio, which served as a surrogate for the original lizards introduced to Cincinnati in 1951 – in that it was a recent introduction likely founded by just a few individuals. 

Results showed that the lizards experienced reduced genetic variation after their arrival in Cincinnati, but the loss didn’t seem to have an effect on population health. 

Based on what was seen in the Columbus population – lots of inbreeding, evidence of homozygosity that would increase the risk for harmful gene variants that could lower survival, and a big drop in numbers followed by rapid growth – the researchers concluded a similar scenario played out in Cincinnati decades ago. 

“But all of the inbreeding with one another didn’t seem to matter. They were able to get over that hump and grow like crazy,” Gibbs said. 

Eric Gangloff, associate professor of biological sciences at Ohio Wesleyan University and a co-author of the study, has been studying European common wall lizard ecology since 2017 in France and Ohio. The lizards are a great example of a species that can do well in nature despite the damaging effects human activity can have on biodiversity, he said. 

“By and large, it seems like they were plopped into an environment that was very conducive to their spread and not that different from what they experienced in Europe originally,” Gangloff said. “Milan and Cincinnati are very different. But from a lizard’s point of view, they have a very similar climate and very similar structural habitat. And in their case in Cincinnati, they just didn’t have any other competitors. And they were able to take off.” 

There were a few genomic differences between the Italian source lizards and the Cincinnati populations that hinted at adaptation to the new environment, including genes related to neural function – suggesting behavioral flexibility – and a pathway involving learning and memory that, in humans, helps lessen the effects of lead toxicity. 

This second finding is of interest because European common wall lizards have astronomically high levels of lead in their blood, but show no signs of suffering from lead poisoning. Gangloff’s lab is exploring this unusual characteristic. 

“It is an interesting part of the story that of all the regions of the genome, we happened to find one that suggests they’re responding to levels of lead in the environment,” he said. 

For these lizards, urban living may be a requirement rather than an environment they settle for. 

“There are so many of them that you’d think they would just spill into the countryside, but they don’t. So something is constraining them to urban areas,” Gibbs said. “The world is full of invasive species, and we still don’t really understand why one group does really well and another doesn’t. This gives us a hint about that. 

“But it’s also a story about urban adaptation. We recognize that urban environments exert a lot of selective influences on species, and this is another example of that.” 

This work was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and Ohio State, and was performed using resources provided by the Ohio Supercomputer Center. 

The collaboration between the Gibbs and Gangloff labs created valuable opportunities for others at both institutions. First author Emily Bode led this research while studying as an undergraduate at Ohio Wesleyan and a master’s student at Ohio State. Co-author Andrew Mason, an Ohio State postdoctoral scholar, received experience in undergraduate supervision at a small liberal arts college as a mentor to Bode on the project, a partnership that continued between Bode and both Mason and postdoctoral scholar Peri Bolton, a study co-author, when she came to Ohio State for her graduate work. Ken Petren of the University of Cincinnati was also a co-author of the paper.

Among the surprising findings: The messenger RNA (mRNA) that is targeted for interference – suppression of the protein whose instructions are carried by this same mRNA – also helps with completion of the final step of assembling the complex that inhibits gene expression. 

Overall, the study shows that the managing protein undergoes a four-step process to convert a precursor complex into a mature RNA-induced silencing complex, or RISC.  

“This mechanism has been a black box for a quarter century, since the discovery of RNA interference,” said senior author Kotaro Nakanishi, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at The Ohio State University. 

“Visualizing the mechanism is very important – pharmaceutical companies may appreciate our 3D structures because they can optimize or design a new drug based on them.” 

The study is published today (May 26, 2026) in the journal Molecular Cell. 

Nakanishi outlined in a 2022 paper how the “superfamily” of four Argonaute proteins is involved in RNA interference, explaining that microRNAs and small interfering RNAs (siRNAs), both small segments of RNA that inhibit genes’ protein-building functions, must be loaded into Argonaute proteins to carry out that job – they cannot perform the task on their own. 

In this new work, Nakanishi and colleagues conducted biochemical assays and cryogenic-electron microscopy using Argonaute2 as a model, “but based on the biochemical data, we believe that all of the Argonaute proteins behave the same way,” he said. 

The starting point of the study involved incubating a human Argonaute2 protein with a specific siRNA duplex. 

The results identified a series of steps that followed: Argonaute2 loads the double-stranded RNA and selects one strand over another to serve as a guide. The protein then unwinds the duplex and ejects the “passenger” strand that’s no longer of use. 

The ejection revealed the surprising role for the target mRNA – helping cast off the passenger strand – which led the team to call the final step TAPE, for target-assisted passenger ejection.

Though mRNAs have been viewed primarily as targets of microRNA and siRNA in most instances of RNA interference, “our results instead suggest that mRNAs can also bind precursor RISCs and facilitate passenger removal during RISC maturation,” the authors wrote.

“It’s complicated, but it also makes sense to me that if the cell is targeting predominant mRNAs, these targeted mRNAs also facilitate formation of the RISC,” Nakanishi said. 

He said the findings should help advance development of therapeutic siRNAs and cityRNAs (cleavage-inducing tiny RNAs) that could be designed to override natural cellular processes and prompt a specific RNA interference process to silence problematic genes linked to diseases. 

“Researchers and pharmaceutical companies have been using siRNAs as a potential therapy to shut down gene expression and study the role of the protein of interest. However, nobody knows how RISCs are formed,” Nakanishi said. “So now we can provide a robust structural basis or foundation to design or optimize siRNAs.” 

His lab is now using the same techniques to confirm how the other three Argonaute proteins assemble RISCs. 

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health and fellowships from Ohio State’s Center for RNA Biology. 

Co-authors included Huaqun Zhang, Vishal Annasaheb Adhav, Audrey Kehling, Andrew Savidge and Zhangfei Shen, all of Ohio State, and Tianmin Fu of the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. Giovanna Grandinetti and Yohie Narui of Ohio State’s Center for Electron Microscopy and Analysis helped with collection of high-quality cryo-EM micrographs. 

Nakanishi is a co-founder and scientific advisor of and reports a financial interest in City Therapeutics, Inc.

In current practice, patients answer a series of questionnaires – subjective self-reported data – that’s combined with objective lung function and exercise test results to help clinicians gauge patients’ mental outlook on living with a difficult illness. 

For the study, researchers added a visual element, providing patients a simple outline of the human lungs and asking them to color in the proportion of their own lungs that they perceived to be diseased. 

Statistical analysis showed that patients’ visual perceptions of illness were equally effective as standard questionnaires and test results in conveying the symptom-related quality of patients’ lives – and provided additional predictive value when combined with both verbal assessments and test results. 

“What has always been fascinating to me about working with medical patients is that the objective numbers absolutely do not tell the whole story,” said lead study author Charles Emery, professor emeritus of psychology at The Ohio State University. 

“The broad construct here is illness perception, which becomes especially important for people who have terminal illnesses or chronic illness. If you have less control over quantity of life because of the terminal nature of your illness, then quality of life becomes that much more important. And one important factor linked to quality of life is illness perceptions – essentially, the broad cognitive mental model of your illness,” he said. 

“Illness perception is an avenue through which patients can talk about how they view their illness and consider alternate perspectives that enhance quality of life, even in the face of a terminal illness.” 

The study is published in the May issue of the Journal of Cardiopulmonary Rehabilitation and Prevention. 

The 40 patients between ages 32 and 85 who participated in the study had been diagnosed with interstitial lung disease, which encompasses over 200 pulmonary diseases characterized by shortness of breath, low blood oxygen, chronic coughing, and varying degrees of inflammation and lung tissue stiffening. The average survival among patients with a new diagnosis ranges from about four to seven years. 

Emery witnessed the effect of lung disease on quality of life early in his faculty career when a physician colleague described two patients with the same pulmonary function very differently: “One was waltzing into the office seeming fine, and the other was dragging themselves in,” he recalled. 

“That is linked to quality of life, and it’s linked to perception,” said Emery, also professor emeritus of internal medicine in Ohio State’s College of Medicine. “Perception has so many consequences in terms of how you approach an illness and whether you see it as a problem to be solved that you take on as a challenge or you think, ‘life is out to get me, so why bother?’” 

While earlier studies of visualized illness perception have asked patients to draw free-form pictures of the affected part of their body, Emery and colleagues used a standardized image of the lung to allow them to quantify each patient’s perception of the lung disease. 

On average, participants perceived about a fifth of their overall lung volume to be affected by disease, with depictions of disease involvement ranging from zero to 73%. 

Questionnaires that these patients routinely answer assess symptoms, especially cough and shortness of breath; symptom impact on the ability to carry out daily activities; and perceptions of how long the illness will last and treatment effectiveness. They are combined with results of spirometric testing of pulmonary function and a six-minute walk test of exercise capacity. 

Statistical analysis and modeling of the data showed that lung function test results and self-reported illness perception – whether described verbally or visually – were equally predictive of illness-related quality of life.

“If you’re seeing a patient and want to assess this person’s quality of life, you can get an idea by looking at pulmonary function, but the data show you’re getting important additional information by asking them questions about illness perception,” Emery said. “Self-report is probably the most reliable way of understanding a patient’s quality of life because, ultimately, they’re the ones who are determining it.”

Emery noted that the questionnaires are reliable and effective, but that they may not capture the full picture from people who have limited language abilities or don’t want to tell anyone, even a doctor or family member, how they feel about being sick. 

Incorporating a visual measure of illness perception into medical exams could serve patients with a range of language limitations and help identify those who may benefit from psychological counseling, he said. 

He also said this technique could apply to a wide range of diseases that affect specific organs, and that using computer graphics and machine-learning for data analysis could speed up computation of a visual illness perception measure during exams. 

“One of our responsibilities in working with patients is to get as clear a read of that patient’s experience as we can,” Emery said. “And so you want a measure that you can give to a patient, and they can completely do it on their own, with no input from anyone else.” 

Co-authors of the study, all from Ohio State, included Ihsan Rodriguez, Nitin Bhatt, Vincent Esguerra and Alice Staaby.

Results showed that people who infrequently attend religious services are more likely to gamble on sports than people who attend services at least weekly or who never worship publicly. 

Catholics – and especially Catholic men – stood out in the data as a group most likely to engage in sports gambling. 

Overall, researchers found that religious identity can be both a protective factor and a lubricant for sports gambling and that women, particularly women with religious affiliations, are less likely than men to place sports bets. 

“Our findings suggest that sports gambling behaviors seem to be a function of religious identities, affiliations, cultures and practices, but in pretty nuanced ways,” said Chris Knoester, co-author of the study and professor of sociology at The Ohio State University. “For most people, sports gambling seems to be an occasional and low-stakes hobby or leisure activity.” 

Knoester conducted the study with first author Laura Upenieks, associate professor of sociology at Baylor University. 

“There has been this longstanding assumption that religion discourages gambling. And we wanted to test that core assumption,” Upenieks said. “One of the things you’ll find in our results is that different religious traditions treat gambling very differently, and that religion doesn’t uniformly suppress sports gambling in the United States.” 

The research was published today (April 28, 2026) in the Sociology of Sport Journal. 

The study used survey data on 3,701 adults who participated in the National Sports and Society Survey (NSASS), sponsored by Ohio State’s Sports and Society Initiative. Those surveyed volunteered to participate through the American Population Panel, run by Ohio State’s Center for Human Resource Research. 

Participants between the ages of 21 and 65, who came from all 50 states, answered the survey online between the fall of 2018 and the spring of 2019 – not too long after the May 2018 U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned a federal ban on sports betting that had prohibited sports gambling in most states for 25 years. 

With legal U.S. sportsbooks now taking in over $150 billion in bets annually and in light of pervasive marketing of sports betting opportunities, the researchers sought to better understand where religion fits into patterns and predictors of adult sports gambling behavior. 

For this analysis, Upenieks and Knoester looked at the likelihood that U.S. adults ever gambled on sports over the previous year, how much money they reported gambling on sports, and how much money they won or lost on those bets. Methods of gambling ranged from traditional betting on game winners and point spreads to participation in fantasy leagues and entering March Madness bracket pools. 

The survey asked respondents about religious affiliation and frequency of attending religious services in addition to collecting data on education, race/ethnicity, social class and sexuality. The sample is disproportionately made up of women and people who are white and college educated. 

Overall, 17% of respondents (616 people) reported betting on sports in the previous year, which broke down by sex to about 20% of men and 15% of women who took the survey. On average, respondents invested $57 in sports bets – an average of $46 for women and $91 for men – and, among those who gambled, reported winning $165. 

“The average person is not gambling thousands of dollars. The average hardcore gambler very well may be, but the average U.S. adult is not,” Knoester said. “The study suggests that sports gambling is not overwhelmingly common, nor do most people allocate a great deal of money to sports gambling. In fact, people actually reported winning money from doing so, on average – although we are suspicious of that having actually been the case.” 

While he and Upenieks expected to see a negative association between frequent religious service attendance and sports gambling, they found instead that respondents who attended worship services once or twice a year were most likely to gamble on sports and to report investing more money than people who did not attend services. 

“This result complicates the assertion that any exposure to religion is necessarily protective against morally risky or deviant behavior,” they wrote in the paper. 

And while Protestants were predicted to be the least likely to gamble on sports, the analysis specifically singled out Catholics as more likely to bet on sports than people who identified as atheist, agnostic or with no religious affiliation and Protestants. Catholics also reported the largest sports gambling expenses. 

Here, gender differences were apparent, as well. Catholic women had a 19% probability of betting on sports in the past year compared to a 45% probability for Catholic men. 

“If we think about Catholic teachings and what’s gone on in parishes, gambling has been seen as more morally permissible, within limits. And we see that carrying over into sports betting here,” Upenieks said. 

Though the results can’t clarify the means of influence religious affiliation and participation may have on gambling, she said people who are “halfway in and halfway out” are likely to experience different outcomes. 

“In the context of gambling, people who are infrequently attending religious services could be thought of as being in a moral gray zone: Religion isn’t strong enough to discourage gambling, but the cultural approval of sports betting could potentially fill that gap,” Upenieks said. 

The findings have public health and policy implications and could help inform efforts to reduce harms associated with gambling, she said. 

“People have been gambling on sports forever,” Knoester said. “This research matters because, especially in these times, with the proliferation of sports gambling, we need to have more information and continued conversations about the extent to which people engage in sports gambling, why, and to what effect.”

The findings suggest that these separate but related ways of processing complex concepts, both uniquely human skills, do not originate from overlapping brain areas and grow more distinct as the mind matures, which challenges prior theories. Instead, our brains appear to have evolved with discrete architecture and wiring enabling these different kinds of thinking. 

Using fMRI to scan the brains of children while they listened to spoken language and watched a short movie, the researchers found that parts of the brain responsible for language and mentalizing, known as theory of mind, are separate and do not overlap. Additional analysis of how these regions communicate with other brain areas at rest reinforced the imaging data. 

“It seems that these processors that help us mentalize and that help us speak and understand were dissociated very, very early in the evolutionary process, such that we can’t even see traces of overlap right now in human development,” said Zeynep Saygin, senior author of the study and an associate professor of psychology at The Ohio State University. 

“It’s a fundamental question humans ask themselves: ‘What is it that makes us human? How does human cognition emerge?’ I think this sheds some light on that.” 

Kelly Hiersche, a doctoral student in Saygin’s lab, led the study, published April 23 in Communications Biology. David Osher, assistant professor of psychology, was also a co-author and collaborator. 

The two communication skills of focus originate from a region of the brain called the superior temporal lobe, located near each temple – with language based in the left hemisphere and theory of mind based in the right. 

The researchers first confirmed with fMRI scans of the brain in 28 adults what has been found before – that separate and distinct regions associated with language and theory of mind did, indeed, respond strongly to stimuli intended to activate those areas. 

The team then worked with 42 children between ages 3 and 9, scanning their brains with 2 fMRI scans, one while they listened to sentences and another while they watched a silent cartoon, observing which brain regions were activated for each task. Control conditions included nonsense words for the language assessment and, for the mentalization evaluation, signs of pain in cartoon characters – which elicits a pain response rather than theory of mind. 

Results of the scans and additional analysis – imaging at the 2-3 millimeter, or 3D voxel, level of the brain across both hemispheres – showed that the regions responding to language stimuli and theory of mind stimuli were separate, with no overlap. 

“That was our first question: Are these skills distinct in both their function and location? And we see really broadly, yes,” Hiersche said. “We demonstrate this for the first time in kids, extending an adult finding to development. They’re really distinct there, which is pretty cool.” 

To tap further into the evolutionary question, the researchers took fMRI scans of the adults’ and children’s brains at rest – when the brain is still busy, but not being asked to respond to specific stimuli – to observe what other brain regions these separate language and mentalization regions were connecting with. 

“If you observe a voxel’s connectivity, or how it talks to the rest of the brain, that’s going to give you an idea about how that voxel is going to function,” Hiersche said. This is the idea of a connectivity fingerprint: a unique connectivity pattern that determines the unique function of a brain region. 

Using predictive modeling to characterize these connectivity fingerprints, the researchers found that there was more to the language and theory of mind distinctions than their locations on separate sides of the brain. 

“Regions of the brain that are functionally specific should be communicating in a unique way,” Saygin said. “We knew these regions were localized in different parts of the brain, but also showed that there’s nothing in how they communicate with the rest of the brain that indicates that they were at any point overlapping.”

Looking for changes in the kids’ connectivity fingerprints over time further drove home the point that the regional and functional distinctions don’t change during childhood brain development. 

“We were able to not just look across different kids, but look within the same child to see what happened over time,” Hiersche said. “And we showed that it’s not the case that when you’re 3 years old, you see a lot of overlap in these functions, but then when you get to 5 years old, they pull apart and become more separate. 

“The connections we’re seeing that support these tasks – and that also separate them – are stable within the same person over time.” 

In fact, comparing the differences in connectivity fingerprints between children and adults showed that while these functions and connectivity patterns are quite clearly separate and distinct in kids, there is some overlap across brain networks in adults – a sign of change in how we make use of the complementary skills. 

“In adults, the mentalizing theory of mind network starts to talk to slightly similar regions as the language areas. In children, as those skills keep developing, maybe those networks are talking to each other more,” Saygin said.   

These results challenge the idea that language and mentalizing have similar origins and instead support distinct mechanisms for these communicative skills, she said. 

This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and Ohio State’s College of Arts and Sciences, Center for Brain Injury Recovery and Discovery, and Women in Philanthropy award.

It turns out the viruses most busy at night were not infecting bacteria that perform photosynthesis, which are among the types of bacteria known to be infected by viruses. Instead, these overnight viral hosts were microbes that focus on consumption of other organic matter because they can’t produce their own food. 

The findings reveal another level of complexity of viral interactions with marine bacteria, opening the door to new questions about how these dances in the dark influence ecological services provided by the world’s oceans. 

“We still don’t know most of the genes that viruses have and what they do. So it’s elucidating to know that these patterns exist for these viruses and their predicted hosts,” said first study author Alfonso Carrillo, a PhD student in microbiology at The Ohio State University. 

The rare look at microbial changes over a short time frame can also be used to inform future models designed to predict how the oceans will respond to warmer, more acidic water – the current conditions in the Sargasso Sea near Bermuda in the Atlantic Ocean. 

“To understand how the ocean works as a whole, you can’t exclude the viruses,” Carrillo said. “It’s important to understand how these viruses are behaving, how they’re interacting with host bacteria, and how those interactions change over time. You can’t really make models of how oceans will change unless you know all of these different frameworks.” 

The research was published recently in PLOS Biology. 

Water samples for the study were taken as part of a long-term initiative called the Bermuda Atlantic Time Series.   

The team sampled water from the surface and in an area called the deep chlorophyll maximum, or DCM, where a lot of microbes that perform photosynthesis are expected to be found. Over the course of 112 hours, they collected surface water every four hours and DCM water every 12 hours. 

“We wanted to ask the question, do the viruses change between the depths and do we see any changes with regard to time? We expect it to change because the DCM has higher chlorophyll and there are differences in light, temperature and oxygen compared to surface levels,” Carrillo said. 

The composition of the viral communities present in each setting did differ, as expected, and the team then examined viruses that engaged in diel behavior – that is, cyclical changes in abundance within a 24-hour block of time. 

Of the over 48,000 virus species collected, almost 3,100 showed diel behavior – and for about 90%, abundance peaked at night instead of during the day. 

“This was unexpected because we thought the majority of the viruses that would have this kind of behavior may be performing photosynthesis or targeting bacteria that perform photosynthesis, but that wasn’t the case,” Carrillo said. 

Instead, these viruses more active in the dark infected heterotrophic host microbes: those that eat other organisms because they can’t produce their own food. 

“That’s interesting to us because it’s something we hadn’t seen before, and it’s something that we can incorporate into future models about how viruses and their hosts might be behaving in the oceans,” he said. 

Carrillo works in the lab of Matthew Sullivan, professor of microbiology and civil, environmental and geodetic engineering and director of the Center of Microbiome Science at Ohio State, whose research program focuses on how viruses impact microbiomes in complex ocean, soil and human systems, including pioneering many experimental and bioinformatic approaches to “see” these impacts. Within that context, his lab is investigating how carbon cycling works in the oceans and the role viruses play.  

Better, faster classification of viruses 

Though the study of viruses and their functions in the sea, soil and our guts is advancing every day, the extent of what remains unknown about viruses far exceeds what scientists do know. A new analytical tool developed in Sullivan’s lab is helping narrow that gap, using machine learning to establish a rapid classifier of virus samples. 

“This tool allows researchers to organize the virosphere, which basically represents all the viruses that we know about,” said first author Benjamin Bolduc, a computational scientist in microbiology. “And that’s actually really important because if you don’t know what viruses are related to other viruses, then it really impacts the kind of knowledge you can glean from whatever area of science that you’re studying.” 

The paper was published recently in Nature Biotechnology. 

Compared to its earlier versions, the updated tool, called vConTACT3, expands the breadth and depth to which the organization of the virosphere extends in the biological classification of living organisms. 

“For decades we’ve been looking at just the species, or just the genera, and that’s important and relevant, but it doesn’t give you any other information,” Bolduc said. The new tool assists researchers in determining relationships at more general levels, such as family, order, class and phylum. 

Previous versions of vConTACT also focused only on prokaryotes – archaea and bacteria that lack a nucleus – while vConTACT3 includes viruses that infect eukaryotes, organisms with a membrane-bound nucleus that include all animals, plants and fungi. 

Because virus samples collected by researchers are often snippets of these organisms, their genomes are fragmented, and the lack of whole genomes has been a limiting factor in identifying viruses and, by extension, what they do in the environment. 

Bolduc applied machine learning techniques at various stages of the development pipeline to identify patterns among genome fragments, which “helps overcome the fact you don’t necessarily need the whole genome anymore in order to accurately classify a virus,” he said. 

The team assessed vConTACT3’s performance against reference datasets and large databases of viral genome sequences. 

“The tool is a big deal, increasing what virologists use to understand what new virus was discovered, and does so using knowledge-guided AI with some 60 million sensitivity analyses evaluated to fine tune it,” Sullivan said. “It’s also orders of magnitude faster than its predecessors at processing large datasets.” 

Both studies were supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation. Carrillo’s work was also supported by the National Institutes of Health; Montgomery County, Maryland; and the University of Maryland. Bolduc’s work was also supported by the German Research Foundation, the Alexander Humboldt Foundation and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. 

Sullivan was the senior author of both studies. Co-authors of the PLOS Biology paper included Emily Hageman, Anna Mackey, Kimberley Ndlovu, Funing Tian, Dean Vik, Christine Sun and Richard Pavan of Ohio State; Lauren Chittick of Midwestern University; Naomi Gilbert of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Daniel Muratore of Georgia Institute of Technology; Gary LeCleir and Steven Wilhelm of the University of Tennessee Knoxville; Ho Jang of Korea Virus Research Institute; and Joshua Weitz of the University of Maryland. Co-authors of the Nature Microbiology paper were Olivier Zablocki and Jiarong Guo of Ohio State; Dann Turner of University of the West of England; Ho Jang of Korea Virus Research Institute; Evelien Adriaenssens of the Quadrum Institute; and Bas Dutilh of Freidrich Schiller University.

The AAAS Fellowship, recognizing scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications, is one of the most prestigious honors a U.S. scientist can receive. Fellows are elected by their academic peers. The 2025 class consists of 449 scientists, engineers and innovators across 24 AAAS disciplinary sections.

“The American Association for the Advancement of Science has a long history of honoring researchers whose exceptional work is expanding the impact of their respective disciplines,” said John M. Horack, vice president for research. “The contributions and achievements of Ohio State’s newly elected Fellows exemplify this standard of excellence and service.”

Ohio State’s newest Fellows represent the colleges of Arts and Sciences and Engineering. This year’s class, joining over 550 Ohio State scholars who have been granted this lifetime recognition since 1874, are:    

Tanya Berger-Wolf, director of the Translational Data Analytics Institute and professor of computer science and engineering; evolution, ecology and organismal biology; and electrical and computer engineering. For distinguished contributions to the field of computer science, particularly for interdisciplinary, cutting-edge research in the area of computational ecology and Artificial Intelligence for science.

Stuart Ludsin, professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology. For distinguished contributions to interdisciplinary science at the nexus of limnology, fisheries ecology, global change biology and ecosystem management.

Steven MacEachern, professor of statistics. For distinguished contributions in Bayesian methodology and computation, and for outstanding leadership and service in advancing statistical education, research and professional engagement. 

Michael Poirier, professor of physics. For distinguished contributions to the fields of gene regulation and chromatin biology, particularly for biophysical studies of pioneer transcription factors and chromatin dynamics. 

AAAS is one of the world’s largest general scientific societies and publisher of the Science family of journals. Fellows are recognized for their achievements across disciplines, from research, teaching and technology to administration in academia, industry and government, to excellence in communicating and interpreting science to the public. 

The 2025 class of Fellows will be honored at a forum on May 29 in Washington, D.C.

But by talking to the people who lived in these communities, scientists are filling in historic gaps that technology can’t fill, adding trees, cars, people, photographs and life stories to the digitized infrastructure that was an initial focus of the work.

The research team from The Ohio State University has published an update on the Ghost Neighborhoods of Columbus project in the International Journal of Digital Humanities, reporting on the technology workflow, including solutions to bottlenecks they’ve encountered, and acknowledging a slow start to community engagement that hums along nicely these days. The team aims to put both the digital work and story collection on a faster track. 

Launched in early 2021, the project has digitally reconstructed three historically Black communities that were fragmented or demolished to make way for new freeways under the 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. Prompted by a Columbus Dispatch article describing the heartbreak of highways being built through neighborhoods, the researchers set out to recount the human impact of urban renewal decisions of the past, hoping that these historic insights could have a positive impact on any future development. 

“Doing this in a community-engaged way is not trivial,” said senior study author Harvey Miller, professor of geography and director of Ohio State’s Center for Urban and Regional Analysis (CURA). “What we’re trying to do is show how we went about making sure that these models not only have validity, but that they actually reflect what people remember, what these neighborhoods used to look like – and also add value to the community.” 

While the project started as a purely scientific pursuit, the digital models and accompanying stories have found a future permanent home. The Poindexter Village African American Museum, set to open in 2028, will have a room dedicated to the Ghost Neighborhoods, said Shelbi Toone, project director for the museum, which will be the newest site within the Ohio History Connection system. 

Poindexter Village, an early U.S. public housing project and the only one dedicated to African American residents, is one area recaptured in 3D models by CURA researchers. Only two of the 35 original apartment buildings still stand, and those structures, connected by an atrium to be built between them, will house the new museum. 

The other communities modeled in the project are Hanford Village as it looked in 1961 and Mount Vernon Avenue in 1951. Much of Hanford Village, established in the early 1900s and expanded during World War II to house Black veterans, was razed for construction of I-70 in the 1960s. Mount Vernon Avenue was a busy commercial corridor in the mid-20th century before its connection to Downtown was severed by construction of I-71. 

Miller and colleagues reported in 2023 on using machine learning to extract data from Sanborn fire insurance maps to create digital models. Since then, the researchers have focused on efforts to automate the generation of 3D models that are historically accurate, which has been a taller order. 

Graduate student Tshui Mum (Summer) Ha has been working on ways to streamline and accelerate the 3D modeling process. This includes finding similar groups of buildings based on their shapes and semantic attributes – such as the number of stories, building use and construction materials – identifying their architectural elements, and developing templates for 3D modeling. 

“Many existing studies have been using just the exterior walls of the buildings for clustering. We realized that including semantic attributes of those building footprints is a huge improvement compared to just looking at the exterior walls. We also found that having interior lines of the buildings may hold additional value to further improve the clustering results, and this will be our next step,” Ha said.

“The better we can cluster these buildings, the better we can understand their distinctive architectural styles and the more accurately we can generate plausible 3D models at scale. We are benchmarking these methods that, hopefully, we would be able to identify the most effective approach to help us speed up the modeling process.” 

The goal to speed things up is, in part, related to making community engagement as productive as possible. 

To date, the team has been building historically accurate models and then asking for elder feedback in a variety of ways, often attending community meetings with stickers and storyboards that attendees use to add finishing touches that bring the models to life. 

“For all three neighborhoods, we’re adding more realistic backgrounds like brick streets and grass so it’s not just a map,” Miller said. “What we’d like to do is generate a first approximation of a neighborhood using accelerated techniques, engage people in the process early on, and come back later with a more polished product. Not too far in the future, we expect to be able to take a laptop with 3D models, ask people, ‘What do you think about this building?’ and make adjustments on the spot.” 

Toone, the museum project director, connected the CURA team with James Preston Poindexter Foundation historians and elders to record oral histories related to landmarks and neighborhoods in the models, which will also be featured in the museum. 

“I thought this was something that people need to see and experience. It needs to be tangible to the public,” said Toone, also a co-author of the paper. “There’s a lot of narrative to tell when you pull back to 1940 and really talk about the thriving neighborhood that used to be there. And I think it gives people a true sense of preservation and understanding of what was here through the technology since so many of these buildings have turned over, been demolished or changed.” 

Soon, the team plans to ask elders for suggestions for other lost-city themes – ideas for churches and the funk music scene have been floated so far – that should be similarly digitally re-created with accompanying stories. 

“One important thing is that we’re trying to establish a platform for people in the community to tell their stories,” Miller said. “They’re not our stories – they’re theirs.” 

This work was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Battelle Engineering, Technology and Human Affairs endowment at Ohio State. 

Additional Ohio State co-authors include Ningchuan Xiao, Matthew Lewis, Mostahidul Alam, Oliver Gwynn, Michelle Hooper, Karyn Kerdolff, Gavin Levine, Yuantai Li, Mahnoush Mostafavisabet, Joshua Sadvari, Josie Stiver, Jordan Swaim-Fox, Shubh Thakkar, Ahmad Ilderim Tokey and Di Wang.

After these hotspots of accelerated bird decline were revealed, researchers looked for factors that could explain the difference in the rates of decline, examining climate measures and human activity-related data.

A top predictor of where the accelerated abundance loss occurred became clear, overlapping with locations of agriculture intensity as indicated by the extent of cropland and the use of fertilizer and pesticides.

“Agriculture intensity is the main driver associated with accelerated loss of abundance, but we cannot disentangle which of these three metrics is most important because this is a correlative analysis,” said lead author François Leroy, a postdoctoral scholar in evolution, ecology and organismal biology at The Ohio State University.

“But the impact is not only on a few species with the same traits or only on farmland bird species. Twice as many species showed accelerating decline compared to decelerating decline, and the same pattern was seen at the family level. That means it is occurring at a very large taxonomic scale – a lot of different species with different functional traits are affected, and it’s systemic.”

The study is published today (Feb. 26, 2026) in Science.

Data for the primary analysis came from the North American Breeding Bird Survey, an annual multinational monitoring program tracking North American bird populations.

Using 1,033 routes from the survey data, the researchers analyzed abundance change and the rate of that change, both acceleration and deceleration, for 261 bird species, 54 avian families and 10 habitats from 1987 to 2021 – a date range providing the best combination of records covering both space and time.

Overall, the results showed a continent-wide decline in the abundance of all birds, with 122 species – 47% of those tracked – showing significant declines. Among those, accelerated decline was detected in 63 species. There was only one small region, just north of the U.S.-Canadian border, where total bird abundance had increased.

Leroy and colleagues did not focus on extrapolating figures to quantify the number of birds lost, instead estimating a 15% total loss of abundance of birds per route across North America over 35 years.

“We worked at the local scale in order to be as conservative and reliable as possible,” he said. “With this kind of change at the global scale, when you find that there is a 15% loss all across the U.S., that means something statistically. It represents a strong message.

“Basically, the decline is everywhere, and then there is a spatial variation of this acceleration – these three hotspots. And the Midwest hotspot is quite big.”

In an effort to explain the acceleration, the team turned to datasets on a range of factors with potential to affect bird abundance: mean temperature and temperature change, precipitation, land cover (grassland, tree, shrub, water), cropland cover change, fertilizer use, pesticide usage change, vegetation change and the human footprint – a metric of human impacts taking into account population density, infrastructure and energy usage.

“What we found was that agriculture intensity was the main predictor of those hotspots of accelerated decline, and that was the case for the map that was smoothed to detect patterns and even for the raw output of the model,” Leroy said.

This widespread loss of birds – through both deaths and lower birth rates – has consequences. Among birds’ most significant ecosystem services are regulating insect populations and spreading plant seeds in ways that can promote genetic diversity and increase plant resilience. They are also an important element of the food chain on which many large birds and other wildlife rely.  

That human factors are at play in bird loss is not entirely surprising: Leroy first took on the investigation of the accelerated decline in bird abundance based on metrics that show an acceleration of humans’ influence on the global environment since the 1950s.

“We know there is a relationship between human activities and biodiversity because we know that humans, like any other species, have an impact on the environment,” he said.

Even so, Leroy said he has hope for better days ahead for birds.

“Biodiversity is very dynamic,” he said. “If you let life come back, if you leave space and take the right measures, you will see results on biodiversity quickly – let’s say, in a matter of decades. If we act, we will see the impact in our lifetime.”

Co-authors of the paper were Marta Jarzyna, associate professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology at Ohio State, and Petr Keil of the Czech University of Life Sciences.

This work was supported by the European Union, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Czech Science Foundation.

Researchers found that compared to people born in earlier decades, youths born in the 1990s spent more of their recreational time playing formal sports – coached by adults and wearing uniforms – than with friends and neighbors playing informal matchups organized by kids. 

“Overall, there’s been a pretty healthy mix across generations and among our respondents in playing both informal and formally organized sports, both in general and in the sport one played the most,” said Chris Knoester, lead author of the study and professor of sociology at The Ohio State University. 

“But the data clearly showed a shift toward playing more formal sports across generations. And we found evidence of socioeconomic status differences primarily emerging among those born in the 1990s: People who came from higher social class backgrounds and whose parents were college educated were more likely to play formal sports disproportionately.”

Knoester conducted the study with Chris Bjork, professor of education at Vassar College. The research was published online recently in the journal Leisure Sciences. 

Considering that private coaching and travel teams are widely seen as necessary to develop elite athletes, the researchers note there is some irony to this shift away from playing for the love of the game. Take Norway’s medal dominance in the 2026 Winter Olympics, attributed at least in part to a lifestyle that revolves around public participation. 

“If you keep people playing sports for longer, then you have a broader base. If you nurture informal activity where people grow to love it, and persist in it, over and beyond whatever formal training you get, then you end up flourishing, being more creative, and essentially developing a greater passion for the activities,” Knoester said. 

“Formal sports are supposed to be these rational ways of improving performance, but informal sports activities seem to be at least as important for success.” 

The study used survey data on 3,845 adults who participated in the National Sports and Society Survey (NSASS), sponsored by Ohio State’s Sports and Society Initiative. Those surveyed volunteered to participate through the American Population Panel, run by Ohio State’s Center for Human Resource Research. Participants between age 21 and 65, who came from all 50 states, answered the survey online between the fall of 2018 and spring of 2019. 

Knoester and Bjork focused the analysis on the extent to which respondents born in the 1950s through the 1990s reported playing backyard sports with friends versus organized sports with adults in charge, and whether social class and parent education levels influenced the patterns. 

These national survey results showing a shift from informal to formal sports offer the best historical evidence at the individual level of what people familiar with the youth sports landscape have been talking about for quite a while, Knoester said. The findings also line up with data from the Aspen Institute’s Project Play initiative, showing that in recent years, youths who are regularly playing sports are now spending less than 25% of their sports participation time in informal, versus formal, sports settings.

And why does it matter? There are costs and benefits to both approaches, the researchers say – and the presumed advantages for kids from wealthier families who have more access to organized sports may not result in elite athletic status despite the heavy investment.

Knoester and Bjork found in a separate study that parents are spending more time, resources and money on kids’ sports. Project Play estimates parents pay about $1,500 per year per child participating in sports, and Bjork has found from interviewing parents that they tend to underestimate investments in travel time and costs for gas, hotels and babysitters.

“A common argument people make in favor of commercialization and increased specialization is that kids have to commit at a really young age if they’re going to make it to elite levels and, for example, get selected for an Olympic team. But it is less clear that that’s actually going to produce the outcome that people think it will have,” said Bjork, who is co-author of the book “More Than Just a Game: How the Youth Sports Industry Is Changing the Way We Parent and What to Do About It.”

“There has been this steady increase not only in sports, but across all extracurricular activities, toward intensive parenting and parents taking a much more active role in managing their children’s sporting careers,” he said. “Related to that is this desire to provide their kids with an advantage over other kids as opposed to just letting them have fun and socialize with kids in the neighborhood.”

And therein lies part of the rub – the loss of life lessons learned from informal play and less time experiencing the pure enjoyment of an activity with friends, Knoester said.

“Informal sports typically, by definition, are more focused on and organized by children themselves. Consequently, they tend to emphasize fun and relationships to a greater extent. They generally offer more opportunities for children to make arrangements, to make decisions, to negotiate with one another and otherwise take ownership of the activities,” he said. 

“In contrast, formal sports tend to focus more upon listening to expert adults, working hard, being obedient, learning the so-called ‘right’ way to play, improving performance, developing elite skills and winning games.” 

One way to expand opportunity for kids without imposing so much performance pressure would be supporting local community-based organizations that have lost funding and participants over the years, Bjork said. 

“I’d also encourage parents to be cognizant of these trends and to think about their long-term goals for their kids and if a specialization path fits into those goals or not,” he said, “because a lot of parents are following what their neighbors are doing without considering what’s best for their own kids.”

By Bruce Weinberg
Professor of Economics, The Ohio State University
Enrico Berkes
Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Monica Marion
PhD Candidate in Folklore and Complex Networks and Systems, Indiana University
Staša Milojević
Professor of Informatics, Indiana University

The resulting evolutionary arms race between bacteria modifying themselves and viruses fighting back raises questions: What does it cost a cell to resist infections, and how does that alter how ecosystems function? 

In a new study, researchers have explored the mechanisms of phage resistance and its effects on the ecological jobs done by ocean bacteria. The team found that some of the mutations studied don’t interfere with – and may even enhance – the bacteria’s ability to carry out their job of capturing and sinking carbon to the ocean floor, thanks to giving the cells a “sticky” quality. 

The study also revealed two kinds of mutations: the more standard surface mutations that don’t let phages in at all, and another type of metabolic mutations found inside the bacteria. These are much less studied, and would indicate a virus could enter the cell but couldn’t successfully make more viruses. 

“We found that both metabolic and surface mutations caused the bacteria to get stickier, but only in surface mutants did those changes cause the cells to sink much more readily. That was very, very obvious,” said Marion Urvoy, co-first author of the study and a postdoctoral research associate in microbiology at The Ohio State University. 

“And that’s kind of cool when you think about it, because carbon export in the ocean is important. From past papers, we know that virus abundance is the best predictor of carbon export, more so than any other organism, but we don’t know all the mechanisms behind this. It’s possible that the selection of surface mutants through infection, which promotes the sinking of bacteria, is one explanation.” 

The research was published recently in Nature Microbiology. 

The study focused on 13 phage-resistant mutants evolved from Cellulophaga baltica bacteria against two types of phages, representing ecologically relevant model systems. 

After infecting the bacteria with these phages and isolating the phage-resistant mutated cells, researchers ran experiments and created computational models to see how the mutants behaved. Results showed the classic surface mutations that blocked phage entry were completely resistant to several phages, but the internal metabolic mutations provided specific resistance to only one phage at a time. 

The team was able to tease out the effects of one of the two intracellular changes they observed. This mutation altered the process behind the production of a single amino acid that helps in synthesizing several lipids – fatty molecules inside the cell that store energy, form membranes and send signals, among other functions. 

“The mutation impacted the pool of lipids, which prevented phage replication,” Urvoy said. “Our working theory is that because the phage needs these lipids to assemble new virus particles, it is not able to assemble at the end of the replication cycle because one of the key parts is missing.” 

Turning to the ecological aspects of phage resistance mutations, the study showed mutations came with a cost to the bacteria and, potentially, to the microbial community. 

“We showed for all of these mutations, whether they affect the cell surface or its metabolism, there’s a cost in terms of growth rates. That is to say the cells are growing slower, and if you affect the growth rate of an organism, you’re bound to affect other members of the community,” Urvoy said. “We found this decreasing growth was more pronounced for the surface mutants – so they’re more resistant to more phages, but it comes at the cost of growing slower in general.” 

But the stickiness and sinking activity of surface mutants stood out as a critical finding when it comes to the marine biological pump that helps sink carbon to the deep sea. 

The finding builds upon earlier work led by co-first author Cristina Howard-Varona, a research scientist in microbiology at Ohio State, showing that cyanobacteria that perform photosynthesis in the ocean, when simultaneously infected by phages and stressed by nearby hungry predator microbes, might take in more carbon. 

Howard-Varona plans to pursue further study of the mechanisms underlying metabolic mutations against phages. 

“This really opens the gate to wanting to examine more intracellular resistance because it’s so understudied,” she said. “If we add more types of phages, do you get more mutations and more types of mechanisms that we don’t know about? This is really just the tip of the iceberg.” 

Urvoy and Howard-Varona work in the lab of senior study author Matthew Sullivan, professor of microbiology and civil, environmental and geodetic engineering and director of the Center of Microbiome Science at Ohio State, whose research program focuses on how viruses impact microbiomes in complex ocean, soil and human systems, including pioneering many experimental and bioinformatic approaches to “see” these impacts. Within that context, his lab is investigating how carbon cycling works in the oceans and the role viruses play. 

“It’s important to understand what happens in the ocean because it affects climate globally. For microorganisms, we need to understand their impacts on carbon because they dictate whether carbon sinks or gets released into the atmosphere, and that outcome impacts our lives,” said Urvoy, who was recruited to Ohio State as a President’s Postdoctoral Scholar. “Our work and other work is now showing that viruses, as a component of the marine microbiome, also play roles, perhaps quite centrally, and we need to understand how they affect bacteria and how that fits into the whole picture.” 

This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy and the Swedish Research Council. 

Additional co-authors are Carlos Osusu-Ansah, Marie Burris, Natalie Solonenko and Karna Gowda of Ohio State; Andrew Stai and Robert Hettich of Oak Ridge National Laboratory; John Bouranis and Malak Tfaily of the University of Arizona; and Karin Holmfeldt of Linnaeus University in Sweden.

Overall, the analysis of nearly 3,000 species showed more diversity of body types among the pelagic fishes, those that swim in open water, than among the benthic species spending their life on the ocean floor. Pelagic fish body types span from the round anglerfish to skinny eels, while benthic fishes generally share a common elongated, tapered shape. 

“We found that evolution pushes and pulls fish body shape in different directions depending on whether they’re benthic or pelagic,” said lead study author Elizabeth Santos, assistant professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology at The Ohio State University. 

“We talk about the deep sea as if it is sort of all one thing, when really it is not – it is actually quite diverse,” she said. “There are very different types of environments in the deep sea that have their own different effects on evolution.” 

The study was published recently in the journal Evolution.

Santos and colleagues analyzed shape characteristics among ray-finned fishes living 200 or more meters below the surface, the portion of the world’s oceans constituting almost 90% of their volume. 

Using previously published datasets of fish body shape measurements, evolutionary relationships and habitats, the researchers included 2,882 deep-sea species in this study. 

They found that increasing ocean depth promoted diversification in body shape, and that evolution occurred more rapidly at deeper depths than in shallower waters. 

The faster rate of evolution – essentially, a lot of change in a relatively short period of time – was most common in bottom-dwellers, suggesting their similar body shapes resulted from more closely related species adapting in place. In contrast, the higher diversity of body shapes in open-water fishes hinted at the possibility that colonization by invading species has resulted in a community of more distantly related species. 

“Colonization of the deep pelagic seems to be a more typical route for achieving diversity than the benthic,” Santos said. “In the water column, you see more lineages that are very distantly related from each other that probably colonized that habitat at all different times. And that’s why you get a lot of diversity. 

“Whereas in the benthic environments, that’s true to some extent but not to the same level. You get fewer lineages that have been in that habitat a little longer – and that’s potentially why you see less variety in body shape.” 

The findings also shed light on how living in the dark affects the evolution of marine life. Only trace amounts of sunlight can reach the 200-meter depth, but it’s not enough to enable photosynthesis – making the deep sea a dividing line that has an impact on how fishes spend their time hunting for food, one driver of evolutionary change. 

For example, Santos said, compare with a well known shallow-water pelagic fish like the tuna, a very active species. 

“In the deep water column, you don’t see a lot of big, powerful swimmers because it’s a very different kind of environment. It’s dark,” she said. “And so you tend to see fishes that sit in the water and wait for food to find them. Being pelagic in the deep sea seems to be fine for many different types of body shapes, from the blobby all the away to the skinny.” 

The lack of sunlight and photosynthesis in the deep sea also affects the ocean floor environment. 

“In shallow water, oftentimes you’ll be in an environment like a coral reef or a kelp forest, which has organisms undergoing photosynthesis. There are a lot of things to interact with, and that creates a diversity of body shapes because fish are designed to interact with different things,” Santos said. 

“The deeper bottom tends to be more plain and boring and muddy, so the fishes that live there don’t tend to be shaped in different ways.” 

Overall, the study’s rare look at life in Earth’s largest habitat shows that the different body types of deep-sea fishes are products of multiple evolutionary pathways defined largely by location. 

“The one place that humans have not dominated on this planet is the deep sea – and there is still so much to learn about the mystery of what all is there,” Santos said. “This paper moves us forward with a recognition that evolution can work really differently depending on where exactly in the deep sea the fishes are.” 

Co-authors of the paper include Sarah Friedman of the NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center and Christopher Martinez of the University of California, Irvine.

By Ryan Kennedy

Timashev Chair of Data Analytics and Professor of Political Science, 
The Ohio State University

The study is the first genome-scale analysis of any African acacias and focuses on the umbrella acacia, an iconic feature of the African savanna. 

Researchers compared the genetic response to drought stress of the umbrella acacia (Vachellia tortilis) and one of its hundreds of relatives, the splendid thorn acacia (Vachellia robusta) more commonly found in wetter regions of East Africa. 

Results showed that once water becomes scarce, the umbrella acacia continues its conversion of carbon dioxide and water from sunlight into nutrients through photosynthesis and uses up all the water it can access. 

“You would expect most plants, if they’re being water stressed, will shut down, but at the early stage of drought stress, umbrella acacias ramp up – they go for broke,” said senior author James Pease, associate professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology at The Ohio State University. 

“The splendid thorn acacia tends to be more of a water saver – holding on to water, not growing a lot. Umbrella acacia does the opposite – it tries to grow more and do more photosynthesis and capture more carbon that it’s going to stockpile,” he said. “Once water’s not going to come for a while, it lets the above-ground biomass die and waits for water to try again the next season.” 

The research was published recently in The Plant Journal. 

Umbrella acacias provide a staple food for giraffes, are sources of a global wood economy and the common food additive gum arabic, and are part of the legume family – all reasons to understand how genetics shape their drought tolerance at the cellular level, researchers say.

“They have to grow in these hyper-arid conditions that are really difficult for a large woody plant to grow in. They’re being eaten by giraffes, they’re being knocked over by elephants. They have to compete with the grasses. The grasses catch fire. So there’s this whole set of pressures on them,” Pease said. 

“Drought stress and climate habitat shifts are not a unique problem to African acacias. But there are very few genomic studies of tropical trees and how water stress impacts them.” 

Seedlings of umbrella and splendid thorn acacias were grown in the lab and watered for three months, after which they were divided into two conditions: continued normal watering or complete shutoff of water – the onset of drought. Researchers collected leaves on a weekly basis and selected samples for genomic analysis representing an early drought phase, the middle of a downward slope in tree health, and severe drought. 

To compare each species’ response to the drought stress, the team sequenced their transcriptomes – the collection of RNA readouts of DNA instructions that indicate gene activity, and related protein changes, across the genome. 

The model system represents the time of life when the trees are most at risk of dying. 

“This early seedling establishment phase is when a lot of them either make it or don’t based on their habits of how well they can acquire energy and water,” Pease said. 

The researchers believe that umbrella acacias maintain their pattern of intense nutrient collection and above-ground biomass decline for years, developing a huge root mass in the process. 

“If you dig up a little acacia seedling, it has a tree’s worth of roots. And once it gets the right combination of water and nutrients, it has the rootstock to support a full tree and it will transition to that,” he said. 

“This is the same strategy of grasses. They keep maintaining that root and will wait for water and try again – you can see that in lawns that dry out. It’s really interesting to us because that’s what grasses do, as opposed to most herbaceous plants and other trees.” 

In contrast, the study showed that the splendid thorn acacia behaved in a more expected way for a tree under drought stress: investing in water conservation and cellular function maintenance while riding out the drought. 

The transcriptome analysis showed the trees used similar genetic systems to regulate photosynthesis and maintain biological stability during drought stress – but the two species activated these systems with different sets of genes and on differing time scales, said first author Ellen Weinheimer, who worked on the study as a biology graduate student at Wake Forest University, where Pease was a faculty member until 2024. 

The analytical method also revealed these genetic differences in drought response were not driven by genetic mutations, the sequence changes occurring over time that evolutionary scientists have historically tracked. 

“You don’t necessarily see gene sequences and gene expression changing together,” said Weinheimer, now a postdoctoral associate at the Yale School of Medicine. “The genes that are differentially expressed in response to drought don’t necessarily have sequence changes, which shows that those two mechanisms are largely independent of each other.” 

Tracking gene expression alongside sequence changes in plants, animals and other systems is a focus of Pease’s lab. 

“We’re layering how gene expression levels are changing among different species,” he said. “And over evolutionary time, we’re finding expression as important as the mutations, in that a mutation in one gene could affect the expression of another gene. We’re learning very different things than we would if we just looked at the mutations.” 

This research was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation. 

Additional co-authors were Scott Cory, Nicholas Kortessis and T. Michael Anderson of Wake Forest.

In insects that mated, the females’ investment in reproductive organs was even greater, but minimal change was seen in males – a sign that males’ reproductive success is related more strongly to winning the competition for mates, the research suggests. 

Ensuring survival while distributing finite resources is a trade-off faced by all living creatures, said first author Madison Von Deylen, a PhD candidate in the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology at The Ohio State University. 

“Any organism is going to face these trade-offs between allocating limited resources: Should I invest in growth? Should I build up fat stores? Or should I transition energy into some kind of reproductive output?” Von Deylen said.  

“Female crickets demonstrate these trade-offs when they invest directly in reproductive success. They are putting resources into the creation of eggs instead of their own growth. Males, on the other hand, are indirectly investing in their reproductive success by trying to grow bigger and build up energy stores. This could allow them greater access to mating opportunities.” 

Von Deylen completed the study with Susan Gershman of Ohio State Marion and Agustí Muñoz-Garcia of Ohio State Mansfield, both associate professors in evolution, ecology and organismal biology. The study was published recently in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Half of the 75 crickets reared for the study were randomly selected to be offered mating opportunities. Once they reached adulthood, crickets in the mating group were paired with a potential partner and monitored to ensure mating occurred. 

The study was designed to test whether mating made a difference in resource allocation – with the understanding that in the lab setting, unlike in the wild, the males didn’t have to compete with each other to win over the females.

The researchers measured the crickets’ metabolic rate and total evaporative water loss during the living portion of the study to determine the rate at which they converted food to energy. Later in the study, the insects’ digestive tube, reproductive organs, body fat and carcass (all remaining components) were dissected and measured. 

Statistical analysis of the data helped explain how varied metabolic rates, body mass, organ mass and fat reserves were impacted by sex and mating. These patterns revealed how reproductive effort and physiological processes geared toward storing energy differed across mated and virgin males and females. 

“The predictions that we posed, that females would show different patterns of resource allocations than the males, were teased apart by the modeling,” Von Deylen said. 

“We specifically predicted that because females tend to have higher direct investments in reproduction, we would probably see a big difference between mated and unmated females,” she said. “Whereas for males, a lot of the traits that affect their reproductive success – like growth – are things that are developed before sexual maturity, so we’re not going to see the same difference between mated and unmated males as we would see in females.” 

The analysis also showed the specific ways in which mated and unmated females’ allocation of resources differed. 

“We found a trade-off between the amount of fat that individuals had and the gonad size in mated females, which made a lot of sense because mated females will start taking that fat and using it for egg development,” she said. 

The study’s findings align with previous research in this species of field crickets, Gryllus vocalis, that has shown females tend to select males as mates that have specific calling characteristics or that call more often. The calls are produced by males rubbing sections of their wings together – an energetically demanding task.   

Similarly, earlier studies found males that have larger body sizes or larger weaponry tend to be more successful at accessing mates. Growing to a larger size will also be more energetically expensive, Von Deylen said. 

Because this study took place in captive crickets, environmental influences on resource allocation were not a factor – food was plentiful and there were no threats from predators. While the environment can be an important factor in influencing life history strategies and patterns of resource allocation, this study clarifies sex differences in those strategies and the significant role mating plays in the female trade-offs when individuals are offered an even playing field. 

“This gives us a lot of good information about what kind of pressures that these different life history strategies are evolving under,” Von Deylen said. “If you are alive, you are going to have to go through the same process of considering how to divvy up resources.”

This work was supported by Engie-AXIUM fellowship funds provided by Ohio State’s Graduate School.

Analysis of genomes of Eastern massasauga rattlesnakes showed that, by the numbers, more deleterious than adaptation-enabling mutations were present in the more genetically diverse donor animals selected in a hypothetical scenario to join a small, isolated population. 

Because donor relocation, known as assisted gene flow, has a good track record of stabilizing recipient populations, the researchers say this finding suggests there must be more at play in rescue efforts than purely genetics that help species survive – namely, environmental characteristics that support long-term persistence. 

“We have a little bit of a paradox here. The genetic analysis says genetic rescue is maybe not good, or at best, it’s a wash,” said H. Lisle Gibbs, professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology at The Ohio State University and senior author of the study.  

“But when you look at other studies of assisted gene flow activity for other rare organisms, the small population usually grows. Genetics suggests even though rescue works by increasing the numbers of individuals in the first few generations by reducing inbreeding effects, it could be risky long-term. And so, we should look more closely at other factors, especially ecological factors, that may allow the species breathing room for the evolutionary factors to work.” 

Samarth Mathur, a former postdoctoral research scientist in Gibbs’ lab, was the first author of the study. The research was published recently in the journal Molecular Ecology. 

Decades of previous research has linked the lack of genetic diversity and related limitation on adaptation in endangered species to population decline and extinction in plants, insects, birds and mammals. 

In a 2023 study identifying about 150 species considered good candidates for assisted gene flow, the authors cited numerous studies showing the effectiveness of relocating genetically diverse species and urged wider adoption of the strategy. 

“Taking a small number of individuals from a larger population and moving them to a smaller population is traditionally justified by the idea that because of low numbers, a small population has lost a lot of the good copies of many genes that led to adaptation,” Gibbs said. “Further, the idea is that you can replenish this with individuals from a larger population, which is more genetically diverse, and they bring the good copies of those genes with them. 

“The point of this paper is to show our ability to identify these categories of good and bad copies for every gene, and to actually ask, are these hypothetical donors genetically good enough for long-term success?” 

In other words, Gibbs and Mathur are the first to put the genetics of the practice to the test on a gene-by-gene basis. 

“When you move individuals from a big population to a small population, you bring both kinds of variation – not just the good kind alone. There is bad stuff that’s also part of the package,” Gibbs said. “This is the first time anyone has put this together and asked how important the good variation is, and how to measure it against the burden of bad variation that it also brings.” 

The analysis involved whole genome sequences from 152 Eastern massasauga rattlesnakes being studied in 14 sites in the United States and Canada. Zeroing in on circumstances for this species in Ohio, researchers compared possible scenarios involving two donor populations and three recipient populations to identify the best donor-recipient fit for assisted gene flow. 

The analysis involved studying single-nucleotide polymorphisms (or SNPs, pronounced “snips”) in genes that carry instructions for functional proteins. Each gene contains two copies (called alleles) which could be functionally different in some cases because it carries a mutation, or SNP. These mutations can change the function or the expression of that gene, and this study compared these differences by measuring the numbers of deleterious and adaptive mutations carried by different populations. 

Overall, the analysis showed minimal differences between the two donor populations’ suitability for relocation but suggested all donor groups would have substantial effects on functional genetic variation in recipient populations. 

In one example scenario, donor snakes would contribute to a recipient population a 34% increase in positive variants, a 36% increase in moderately damaging mutations, and a 32% increase in the most severe loss-of-function mutations that knock out a gene. 

“The numbers suggest you get a little bump in terms of good mutations and a little bump in terms of masking bad mutations which reduce inbreeding effects, but then you get a whole bunch of bad mutations, too. We’re estimating good and bad mutations using a purely computational approach to quantify the net effect, which is to introduce lots of small-effect bad mutations,” Gibbs said. 

There is another school of thought when it comes to assisted gene flow – that a species’ ability to adapt to its local environment is the whole ballgame and, therefore, outsiders’ genes could disrupt that adaptability. 

In this study, only 7% of the identified adaptive mutations in donor snakes were connected to their adaptation to another region of Ohio. 

“So, there are a few, but not very many maladapted genes, which suggests concern about local adaptation is probably not a major risk,” Gibbs said. “So maybe the ecological effects of rescue are overwhelmingly positive, and the increase in numbers may compensate for any risk of long-term negative genetic effects.” 

The statistical techniques Mathur and Gibbs developed for this study could be used for any proposed assisted gene flow strategy for which genome sequences are available. 

“This isn’t just about snakes. It’s about big populations and small populations, and so we think the result is general,” Gibbs said. “Our key contribution is actually measuring the risk involved with genetic rescue in a real-world situation. It will be of interest to use our statistical techniques to see if the risk of potential increase in mutation load for Eastern massasaugas holds for other endangered species.” 

This work was supported by the State Wildlife Grants Program, administered jointly by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Ohio Division of Wildlife, and the Ohio Biodiversity Conservation Partnership, with which Gibbs and Mathur are affiliated.

An analysis led by Kate Stewart, a PhD student in communication at The Ohio State University, found that films that feature teen protagonists tend to depict experiences incongruent to those that real-life adolescents face. Unlike a typical high school student, protagonists in movies, for example, are rarely shown to struggle with the physical aspects of puberty, and typically excel at initiating romantic relationships. 

These findings contribute to the idea that while on-screen representations of youth are vital touchstones, they emphasize largely unfamiliar and unattainable narratives, so that when young viewers compare their lives to what they see in media, they find they don’t measure up. 

Repeated exposure in the movies to idealized portrayals of romantic interaction and body image impacts how teens interact with the world around them, said Stewart.  

“In a perfect world we would see comforting, reassuring, informative depictions of these types of things,” she said. “But if you’re seeing certain depictions over and over again, then it’s going to start to affect how you view things and especially what you may come to expect.”

The study was recently published in the Journal of Children and Media. 

The researchers analyzed 53 popular films released between 2012 to 2021 such as Lady Bird, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters or The Fault in Our Stars, in which the main character was high school-aged. They coded key elements of puberty found in the movies. 

The main result was that these coming-of-age movies didn’t really include narratives about how real adolescents experience puberty. The large majority of movies exhibited a marked absence of physical puberty traits for both male and female characters, said Stewart.

Of the 53 main characters, both male and female, only two (3.8%) of them dealt with body hair. There were two characters (3.8%) dealing with acne. Among the 28 female leads, two characters dealt with breast development (7.1%) and four characters (14.3%) dealt with menstruation on screen. There were no characters who were depicted navigating growth spurts, changes in muscle development or voice changes. 

The study found that the actors portraying the main characters were typically older than high school students. The ages of the actors playing the lead roles ranged from 16 to 28 years old. Only 10 lead actors were actually high school-aged (14 to 18 years old) at the time of filming. 

And there is a lot of romance in these movies – much more than typically experienced by most adolescents, Stewart said. In most movies (88.7%), the main character had a clear love interest. Across all movies, there were 1,467 shared scenes between the main character and love interest. Of the 47 movies that had a love interest, 78.7% of them showed the main character having a successful romantic pursuit of their love interest.

Despite these choices, normalizing inauthentic experiences like easy romances and false body image expectations certainly isn’t something the movie industry is doing maliciously, said Stewart. 

“It’s kind of a weird disconnect and misalignment between those two big features of adolescence,” she said. 

This study suggests that movies don’t typically provide a realistic view of adolescence, instead offering an aspirational view. That’s not what young viewers want, according to a 2024 report by the Center for Scholars and Storytellers.

It found that many teens are steering away from romance in the movies, as 63.5% of adolescents expressed a preference for stories focused on friendships and platonic relationships, rather than romance unnecessary to advancing the plot. 

In other words, movies dealing with real-world issues with models whose lives are more relatable would be powerful tools for teens navigating extreme developmental changes.

Researchers add that the work serves as a stepping stone to understanding how other types of social norms impact young people’s feelings toward relationships and body image. 

“Our hope is that the industry will begin to weigh those pros and cons of allowing teen audiences to see puberty and more realistic changes,” said Stewart. “By shining a spotlight on this, we’re hoping to move forward and build on what we know about what teens learn from media.” 

Nicole Martins of Indiana University was a co-author. 

Deceptively simple in appearance, the devices facilitate chemical reactions between a drop of blood and molecules embedded into paper layers and rely on sophisticated, but portable, instrumentation to make the diagnosis: a mass spectrometry measurement of the final product – in positive cases, a malaria-specific antigen that triggers the immune system. 

“Typically you would take the sample to the lab, but now we are taking the lab to the sample – I’m taking it to Africa, one of the remotest parts of the world, and doing the analysis right there,” said Abraham Badu-Tawiah, lead author of the field study report and professor of chemistry and biochemistry at The Ohio State University. 

“The question was, can we have a sensitive tool that can be delivered to people no matter where they are. Statistical analysis showed that our method is 90% accurate, comparable to a PCR test. It’s very good and we can deliver these results to people who need it the most.” 

The research was published recently in Analytical Chemistry. 

Malaria is caused by the bite of mosquitoes that spread infectious parasites. The World Health Organization estimates that in 2022, 249 million people globally had malaria, and about 608,000 died of the disease. A preventive vaccine is now available to children in Ghana, where over a quarter of the population was infected in 2011 compared to 8.6% by 2022. 

Badu-Tawiah first reported on this invention in 2016, describing a device for at-home or remote-location testing using lightweight structures that could keep biological samples stable for months at a time. 

Though the technology is already being refined for the detection of other diseases, malaria has been Badu-Tawiah’s chief concern – especially as increased uptake of the vaccine lowers natural immunity among the population, creating the need for widespread surveillance for potential infections in sub-Saharan Africa. 

Since 2016, Badu-Tawiah’s lab has created a 3D automation process of storing antibodies and ions in the device and added a multipronged molecule to amplify the compound signal for detection by mass spectrometry, but the device fabrication process is still manual. Sheets of paper composing the device’s layers – coated with waxy sections that keep blood from seeping through – are printed individually and pressed together with double-sided tape. Twenty-five devices fit onto the 8x12-inch sheets. 

Once applied, the blood is separated into four chambers – two acting as positive and negative controls – and induces chemical reactions as it passes through the layers. The chemists designed ionic probes to tag antibodies that extract the antigen from the blood and place it permanently onto the paper within about 10 minutes. Following a buffer wash, the strips are peeled apart and waved in front of a handheld mass spectrometer. 

“The spectrometer measures the mass of the compound of interest. The molecular weight tells us if we see a specific mass, that means the malaria antigen is in your blood. That’s a yes. If it’s not there, that’s a no,” Badu-Tawiah said. 

Results are available in about 30 minutes, but used devices can also be stored indefinitely without refrigeration for later analysis. The high stability means that after the washing phase, the devices can be transferred in ordinary envelops – a capability connecting people with asymptomatic infection in the remotest regions of Africa to resource-rich centers anywhere else in the world, without traditional cold-chain restrictions. 

Over five weeks in 2022 in Ghana, Badu-Tawiah tested the device’s effectiveness in 266 asymptomatic volunteers and compared its results to three other common testing methods in current use for malaria diagnosis: microscopic examination of blood cells, commercially available rapid diagnostic tests and PCR (polymerase chain reaction). 

A key factor in testing people without symptoms, Badu-Tawiah noted, is that if they are infected, the density of parasites in their blood is likely low – meaning a highly sensitive test is needed to detect their presence. 

The comparison showed that microscopy, the gold standard in African hospitals, had the least accurate results, indicating only 24 positive cases, and rapid diagnostic tests identified 63 infections. PCR identified 142 positive cases, and the paper-based devices identified 184 positives. 

“Microscopy works well when the person is sick and in the hospital. Here, we were in communities, where only 24 were shown as positive with microscopy – this test is telling us the majority are negative. That’s a big problem,” Badu-Tawiah said. “But when using a more sophisticated method like PCR, almost 50% of the people are sick, and yet microscopy can’t tell us that. And in people with very low parasite density, rapid diagnostic tests failed miserably – they can only detect higher parasite density.” 

Calculation of each method’s sensitivity – the number of true positives divided by true positives plus false negatives – showed that the paper-based devices reached 96.5% sensitivity, compared to 17% for microscopy and 43% for rapid diagnostic tests. 

Forty-seven out of 266 samples gave a false-positive result – and all were confirmed by microscopy to be negative. PCR, which is considered to be the most accurate test, also diagnosed these people as negative. 

Badu-Tawiah said the false positives could have been caused by differing viscosity of the blood samples, leading to redistribution of blood channels during the washing phase. The team modified the device to account for that possibility. 

Badu-Tawiah has begun conversations with the Ghana government about implementation of a testing program. 

“We told people this was possible in 2016, and we’ve actually gone to the field and tested it. It’s very promising,” he said. “Technology will go hand-in-hand with vaccination, and you need a sensitive tool that is deliverable.” 

He is also partnering with clinicians at Ohio State on adapting the devices to detect risks for, among other conditions, colorectal cancer and acute pancreatitis. 

“I have the hammer now and I could hit different nails,” he said. “All we have to do is change the antibody to make it applicable to other diseases.” 

This work was supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Co-authors include Ayesha Seth, Suji Lee, Girish Muralikrishnan, Edgar Garcia and James Odei of Ohio State, and Abdul-Hakim Mutala and Kingsley Badu of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana.

“All of the music I’ve ever made… now belongs… to me,” she said in a statement on her website.

In 2019, Swift’s then-label Big Machine Records sold her entire catalog, six albums at the time. She maintained that she was not provided the opportunity to purchase them herself, under acceptable conditions. In an effort to regain control of her work, and dilute the value of her original albums, she re-recorded four of the six.

But now, she owns everything: the originals and the new versions.

Two Ohio State professors offer their thoughts on what this means for the record industry and for musical artists.  

What is a master recording?

When an artist signs a contract with a record label, the label typically covers recording fees, marketing fees and other costs upfront. This provides the artist a better chance of having a successful album. The record label also owns these original, or master, recordings.

Jesse Walker, assistant professor of marketing and logistics at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business, played bass for the group Flobots for nine years. While this initial monetary support can be helpful, he said, it can also present a challenge to a band.

“You basically pay back that advanced cash through your royalty percentage,” he said. “Essentially the record company is giving you a massive loan. Only once you pay it back do you start receiving your portion of the royalties.”

Walker, who was in the band from 2005-2014, said they still do not own the masters for the three records they released while signed to labels.

While Swift no longer needs to worry about the royalties – her estimated net worth is $1.6 billion – she has talked about the sentimental and creative attachment she has to her work. Jason Rawls, assistant professor of hip-hop in the School of Music, echoed this sentiment.

“There’s something to be said for owning your own music, your own product,” said Rawls, who is both a producer and recording artist, going by J Rawls professionally. “When you create music, it’s part of you. It’s who you are. It’s almost like having a baby.”

Will this change the record industry?

Neither Walker nor Rawls thought Swift’s announcement would change much in the record industry.

“There may be changes here and there,” Rawls said, “but I don’t see sweeping changes. The industry is the way it is for a reason. The record companies aren’t going to give up that much power. Still, it’s a step in the right direction.”

Walker agreed. Swift’s ability to craft a narrative around the sale of her masters, including the re-recordings, made this a unique situation.

“The re-recordings, from a business perspective, that’s brilliant,” he said. “She was able to do that because she’s a highly effective storyteller. I don’t know if another artist out there would be able to spin that narrative as successfully as she did.”

Getting people to listen to the re-recordings, dubbed “Taylor’s Versions”, is impressive on its own, Walker said. In fact, many of Swift’s fans refused to listen to the masters out of loyalty to the performer.

“Replications of art are not valued nearly as much as the original,” he said. “What she’s done is a kind of replication. It may have worked because she built this amazing story around it. I don’t think most artists would be able to do that.”

What does the future look like?

While Walker doesn’t anticipate a cascade of change in the record industry, he does believe that the conversation around Swift’s music has raised other concerns.

“What does it mean to monetize art?” he said. “I don’t think most people like the idea of a faceless corporation owning the music that they’re listening to. They want to support the artist, right? But the labels could argue that they add a lot of value, that they do things artists can’t do themselves. So, how valuable is that?”

Rawls is happy that Swift’s campaign is calling attention to the complexities of record deals.

“Most artists assigned to major record labels never own their masters,” he said. “To be able to own them must be one of the best feelings in the world. What she’s accomplished is magnificent. It’s a win for all of us.”

Researchers found that two parts of the brain work together to ensure that more brain resources are given to remember a priority item when a person is juggling more than one item in memory.

The study involved people remembering spatial locations. Imagine seeing two books on different shelves of a cluttered bookcase that was not arranged in any order. How could you remember where they were if you came back a few seconds later?

That’s the job of working memory, which temporarily stores information in your brain for a short period of time, while you process and decide what to do with it, said Hsin-Hung Li, lead author of the study and assistant professor of psychology at The Ohio State University.

In this study, published recently in the journal Science Advances, Li and his colleagues observed activity in the brain while people tried to remember the location of two items.

“Very often when you try to remember multiple things, one item might be more important than another,” Li said.

“What we found is that the more important item is represented in the brain more precisely, while the less important item is given much lower resolution.”

In the bookshelf example, you may remember exactly where on a specific shelf the more important book was located.  But you may only know that the less vital book was somewhere in the upper left corner of the bookshelf.

The study involved participants whose brains were scanned in an fMRI machine while they looked at a screen. They were shown two dots, and their goal was to memorize their positions on the screen. Participants were told it was more important to remember the location of the dot that appeared in one area of the screen – this was the high-priority item.

The two dots appeared on the screen simultaneously for just a half-second.  Twelve seconds later the participants were asked where one of the dots had appeared.  Usually, they were asked where the high-priority dot had appeared.  But about 30% of the time, they were asked to indicate where the low-priority dot had shown up.

Researchers found that they could see activity in the visual cortex of the brain as the participants tried to memorize the location of the dots, Li said. The high-priority dot was represented more precisely, while the low-priority dot was represented more coarsely, with less resolution.

This tactic by the brain worked. Later, when participants indicated where they had seen the dots on the screen, they placed the high-priority dot closer to its actual location than they did with the low-priority dot.

The researchers found something else when they analyzed the fMRI scans – the frontal cortex of the brain was communicating with the visual cortex, telling it the level of resources it should allocate to remembering the location of each dot.

“With limited memory resources, the frontal cortex was deciding which dot would get more resources, so it would be remembered more precisely,” Li said.

This finding was important because neuroscientists had debated which part of the brain – the frontal cortex or the visual cortex – is responsible for working memory involving visual objects, like the dots in this study. 

“We found that they both had a role. The visual cortex creates the visual representation of the two dots that people were trying to remember,” he said.

“But the frontal cortex is making this allocation decision about which one should get more working memory resources and which one should get less.”

Another unique part of this study was the fact the researchers decoded brain activity of people looking at two different things at once for each single trial, something that has rarely been done.

“It is a very useful technique, and I think scientists will use this more in the future. There are so many situations in which people are trying to hold multiple thoughts in their minds and it is very useful to be able decode more than one,” Li said.

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, UCSB Academic Senate Research Grant, and Swartz Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Li did the research at New York University, where he received his PhD and was a postdoctoral researcher. Other co-authors on the study were Thomas Sprague, a former NYU postdoctoral fellow now at the University of California, Santa Barbara; and Aspen Yoo, Wei Ji Ma and Clayton Curtis of NYU.

The AAAS Fellowship, recognizing scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications, is one of the most prestigious honors a U.S. scientist can receive. Fellows are elected by their academic peers.  

“Ohio State’s newly elected Fellows have devoted their professional lives to protecting health, investigating complex principles of physics, and analyzing social behavior and labor economics,” said Peter Mohler, executive vice president for research, innovation and knowledge. “The American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellowship is an important acknowledgment of the key role scientists play in solving critical problems and improving lives.”   

The 2024 class consists of 471 scientists, engineers and innovators spanning 24 scientific disciplines.   

Ohio State’s newest Fellows represent the colleges of Arts and Sciences; Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences; Medicine; and Veterinary Medicine. This year’s class, joining over 540 Ohio State scholars who have been granted this lifetime recognition since 1874, are:   

John Beacom, professor of physics and astronomy. For distinguished contributions to the fields of nuclear and particle astrophysics, particularly regarding neutrinos. 

Pierluigi (Enrico) Bonello, professor of molecular and chemical ecology of trees in the Department of Plant Pathology. For distinguished contributions to the fields of forest pathology, chemical ecology, tree disease resistance and early detection of tree infections. 

Prosper Boyaka, professor and chair of veterinary biosciences. For distinguished contributions to the field of mucosal immunology, particularly in the field of vaccinology to develop alternative novel strategies to optimize protective immunity to pathogens at mucosal surfaces. 

David Robert Cole, professor of earth sciences and Ohio Research Scholar. For distinguished contributions to the field of subsurface mineralogy and geochemistry from the molecular to the geological formation scale. 

Ian Hamilton, professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology and mathematics. For distinguished contributions to the fields of behavioral ecology and complexity science in both theory and empirical studies. 

Chun Ning Jeanie Lau, professor of physics. For distinguished experimental contributions to the field of 2D van der Waals materials, leading to new insights into the thermal, mechanical and electronic properties, and emergent phases in few-layer graphene. 

Roland Kenji Kawakami, professor of physics. For seminal contributions to spintronics and magnetism in two-dimensional materials, and for the investigation of epitaxial magnetic films and heterostructures using molecular beam epitaxy and surface-sensitive characterizations. 

Abhay Satoskar, professor of pathology and microbiology. For distinguished contributions to the field of parasitology, particularly mechanisms of immunity and immune evasion in leishmaniasis and development of novel therapies and vaccines for this disease. 

Bruce Weinberg, professor of economics. For distinguished contributions to the field of labor economics, particularly for a multidisciplinary approach to studying creativity and innovation, socioeconomic determinants of youth outcomes and technological impact on wage structure. 

Fellows are recognized for their achievements across disciplines, from research, teaching and technology to administration in academia, industry and government, to excellence in communicating and interpreting science to the public. 

The 2024 class of Fellows will be honored at a forum in Washington, D.C., in June.

This discovery stems from studies in mice, in which researchers observed memory formation using advanced imaging techniques, including miniature microscopes that captured single-cell resolution in live animals.

The study shows that memories are stored in dendritic compartments: When one memory forms, the affected dendrites are primed to capture new information arriving within the next few hours, linking memories formed close in time.

“If you think of a neuron as a computer, dendrites are like tiny computers inside it, each performing its own calculations,” said lead author Megha Sehgal, assistant professor of psychology at The Ohio State University. “This discovery shows that our brains can link information arriving close in time to the same dendritic location, expanding our understanding of how memories are organized.”

The research was published recently in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Though most learning and memory studies have focused on how a single memory is formed in the brain, Sehgal’s lab aims to determine how we organize multiple memories.

“The idea is that we don’t form memories in isolation. You don’t form a single memory. You use that memory, make a framework of memories, and then pull from that framework when you need to make adaptive decisions,” she said.

Neurons, the principal brain cells, are known to encode and relay information. Dendrites – the branch-like projections extending from neurons – serve a critical role in how information is processed, receiving incoming information and passing it to the neuronal cell body.

But dendrites are not just passive conduits – each dendritic branch can act as an independent computational unit. While dendrites have been thought to play an important role in the brain’s function, how they shape learning and memory has been unclear until now, Sehgal said.

When mice were exposed in experiments to two different environments within a short period of time, the team found that memories of these spaces became linked. If mice received a mild shock in one of these spaces, the animals ended up freezing out of fear in both environments, associating the shock from one room with the other.

The study focused on the retrosplenial cortex (RSC), a brain region crucial for spatial and contextual memory. The researchers observed that linked memories consistently engaged the same groups of RSC neurons and their dendritic branches.

The team tracked these changes at the dendritic level by visualizing dendritic spines, tiny protrusions on dendrites where neurons communicate. The formation of new memories triggered the addition of clustered dendritic spines, a process critical for strengthening communication between neurons and facilitating learning.

Dendritic spine clusters formed after the first memory were more likely to attract new spines during a second closely timed memory, physically linking those experiences in the brain.

To confirm the role of dendrites in linking memories, the team used optogenetics, a technique that allows researchers to control neurons with light. By reactivating specific dendritic segments that had been active during memory formation, they were able to link otherwise unrelated memories, further demonstrating the importance of dendritic changes in shaping memory networks.

In addition to illuminating a previously unknown role for dendrites in linking memories, the findings open new avenues for understanding memory-related disorders, Sehgal said.

“Our work not only expands our understanding of how memories are formed but also suggests exciting new possibilities for manipulating higher order memory processes,” she said. “This could have implications for developing therapies for memory-related conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease.”

Sehgal co-led the study with Alcino Silva, director of the Integrative Center for Learning and Memory at UCLA, and Panayiota Poirazi, research director of the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas in Greece.

This work was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Aging, the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Medical Research Foundation, the European Commission, the National Institutes of Health and the Einstein Foundation Berlin.

The segments in question are introns, short sequences of a subset of transfer RNAs, the RNA molecules that help guide assembly of amino acid chains during protein construction. These introns have historically been thought to be useless to cells because they must be clipped off before tRNA can do its job. 

In a new study, researchers at The Ohio State University showed that some introns attach to key sections of molecules that translate genetic information into proteins, causing them to degrade – which cancels the protein’s production. In experiments exposing cells to oxidative stress, one type of intron remained highly stable in those conditions rather than disintegrating, hinting that some introns might be part of cells’ evolutionary survival toolkit. 

Unexpected observations over the years led the scientists to investigate a functional role for what they call “fitRNAs,” short for free introns of tRNAs: improbable sequencing relationships with other RNA molecules, varied methods used by cells to discard them, and overexpression of some, but not all, introns in stressful conditions. 

“Nobody was anticipating a function for introns. But it just didn’t make sense to me that they’d have no function and yet the cell thought there should be six or more different ways to destroy them,” said senior author Anita Hopper, professor molecular genetics at Ohio State. 

“Why would the cell want to treat them preferentially if they were just junk? We were onto this idea that there must be some function. And for the last five years, our team devised some really smart experiments to prove it.” 

The research is published today (Feb. 11, 2025) in Molecular Cell. 

Transfer RNA (tRNA) works with messenger RNA (mRNA) to construct proteins by way of complementarity, meaning that a tRNA sequence pairs with its complementary sequence on the mRNA molecule to make sure the correct amino acid is added to the chain as a protein is being built. 

Using yeast as a study model, Hopper’s team saw several years ago that some lopped-off intron sequences were complementary to mRNA sequences, signaling the introns might have importance to translating the genetic code. There are 10 tRNA families that contain introns, and each intron family is destroyed in a distinct way. This study focused on two of those families. 

The researchers found that once freed from the tRNA, these floating introns with complementary sequences bind to specific mRNAs, which causes the mRNAs to fall apart so protein production can’t occur. Experiments confirmed a clear inverse relationship: Deleting or inducing overexpression of fitRNAs led to corresponding increases or decreases in target mRNA, respectively. 

The fitRNA function appears similar to that of microRNAs, small segments of RNA (also once considered junk) that inhibit genes’ protein-building functions – but there’s a significant difference, said first author Regina Nostramo, a postdoctoral researcher in Hopper’s lab. 

MicroRNAs interact with proteins from the Argonaute family to degrade messenger RNA, “but because there are no Argonaute proteins in this yeast species, something else is happening and the messenger RNA is still getting degraded. So it’s a similar mechanism, but the details of what’s happening are different,” Nostramo said. 

There is another distinction, Hopper noted: MicroRNAs consistently attach to the same non-coding “seed” area of their target messenger RNAs, but the freed introns bind to a section of mRNA that contains protein-building instructions. 

“So it’s not only a newly discovered small non-coding RNA, but it operates in a novel way,” she said. 

Having the power to inhibit protein production suggests introns give cells an advantage, the researchers said. Co-author Paolo Sinopoli, a third-year molecular genetics student in Hopper’s lab, identified at least 33 mRNAs targeted by one intron family selected for focus in this study. Though they don’t belong to a single category, the affected proteins tend to relate to cell division and reproduction. 

“The question we had is, ‘Why does the intron exist to begin with?’” Sinopoli said. “We see from tRNA that they exist in humans, in mice, in flies, in yeast. So they’re present in all of these organisms despite appearing to be inefficient – but inefficient things in biology tend not to stick around.” 

The abundance and stability of one fitRNA in cells experiencing oxidative stress provides a clue to their importance that the team will continue to pursue by exposing cells to heat stress, starvation and other challenging circumstances. 

“Maybe cells use these little introns as negative regulators of gene expression – because they don’t get destroyed under certain conditions,” Hopper said. “Maybe they have a very minor role under healthy conditions for cells, but under stress, when some of them stabilize, then maybe that’s a really important role.” 

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, Pelotonia undergraduate fellowships and Ohio State undergraduate research scholarships. 

Additional co-authors, all from Ohio State, were Alicia Bao (now at Thomas Jefferson University), Sara Metcalf and Lauren Peltier (now at the University of Toledo).

The newest NAI fellows from Ohio State are Joseph Heremans, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and an Ohio Eminent Scholar in Nanotechnology, and two retired professors: 2023 Nobel Laureate Pierre Agostini, professor emeritus of physics, and Longya Xu, who recently retired as professor of electrical and computer engineering after more than 30 years on the faculty.

The NAI Fellowship is the highest professional distinction awarded solely to inventors. The 2024 class comprises 170 researchers from 135 research universities, governmental and nonprofit research institutions worldwide. This year’s selection of Heremans, Agostini and Xu brings the number of Ohio State NAI fellows to 21. 

“The work done by Ohio State’s newest NAI fellows demonstrates the breadth and depth of research and innovation expertise that can be found at Ohio State,” said Peter Mohler, executive vice president, enterprise for research, innovation and knowledge. “Their research continues to positively impact people’s lives, and I’m pleased that the National Academy of Inventors is recognizing their efforts.” 

Heremans joined the Ohio State faculty in 2005 after spending over 20 years as an industry scientist, primarily at the General Motors Research Labs. He holds more than 40 U.S. patents, many dating to his work with GM. 

Two families of patents led to commercialization: highly sensitive and tunable infrared lasers initially designed to analyze car exhaust gases that were manufactured by a German company and used to analyze isotope separation, and a set of magnetic sensors used in car engines for crankshaft and camshaft position sensing. 

“This was a highly successful product that was in production for 10 years at a rate up to 2.6 million per year,” said Heremans, also a professor of materials science and engineering and physics. “All GM V6 and V8 engines had them at one time. They were gradually replaced by other sensors – technology eventually becomes obsolete.” 

Heremans also has had a role in two startup companies. The first, focused on thermoelectric materials for waste heat recovery from car exhaust, was purchased by a company that manufactures automotive heating and cooling systems. He is also secretary and co-founder of Goniotech LLC, founded in 2019 to make devices for military applications. 

More recently, he has applied for U.S. patents related to his work on thermoelectric materials; heat switches based on two distinct technologies, magnetic fields and electrical fields; and heat sensors, many of which are of interest to the U.S. Department of Defense. 

Heremans was one of 11 university scientists named to the 2024 class of the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, the DOD’s flagship single-investigator award for basic research. He is the first Ohio State faculty member to be selected for the fellowship. 

He is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Physical Society. 

“Here at Ohio State, the goal is to graduate students and do research and contribute to knowledge. I try in an academic setting to emphasize the fundamentals – but the applications are always there,” he said. “There’s a clear split between the fundamental part and the applied part, and it is nice to be recognized from the applied side.” 

Agostini and two of his colleagues were recognized in 2023 by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences “for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter.” The scientists created techniques to capture electrons using pulses of light that last just an attosecond – one quintillionth of a second. 

The Nobel Prize committee said Agostini and his fellow winners “have given humanity new tools for exploring the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules … (and) have demonstrated a way to create extremely short pulses of light that can be used to measure the rapid processes in which electrons move or change energy.” 

Agostini joined the Ohio State physics faculty in 2005 after he retired from French institutions. He visited the Columbus campus in March, meeting with students and delivering a lecture. 

Xu was the founding director of Ohio State’s Center for High Performance Power Electronics, established in 2010 to focus on the commercialization of semiconductors for electrical power handling in the military and civil aircraft industry.

His research and teaching interests included the dynamics and optimized design of special electrical machines and power converters for variable-speed systems, the application of advanced control theory and digital signal processors for motion control, and distributed power systems in super-high-speed operations. He has served as a consultant to industry leaders including Raytheon, Boeing, Honeywell, GE Aviation, U.S. Wind Power, General Motors and Ford, among others. 

An IEEE Fellow and recipient of IEEE’s Nikola Tesla Award in 2018, Xu also was named to the National Academy of Engineers in 2023.

The 2024 class of fellows will be honored at the NAI Annual Meeting on June 26, 2025, in Atlanta, Georgia.

Researchers combined a series of models to demonstrate the importance of monitoring multiple components of an ecosystem simultaneously, especially as climate change leads to higher temperatures and more precipitation. In the process, the team identified an unforeseen trade-off for fisheries as nutrient inputs are reduced to improve water quality – in particular, a lower harvest of the popular yellow perch species as dead zones were diminished. 

“What we’re finding is that as you clean up the lake by reducing nutrients, the ability to support important contemporary fisheries might also decline,” said Stuart Ludsin, professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology at The Ohio State University and a co-author of the study. 

The modeling also suggests that projected warming will increase the extent of the dead zone related to an excess of nutrients – so there is no interest in easing up on restrictions, and the study provides estimates of nutrient reduction targets for the future. But the nuanced findings highlight the need for nutrient management decision-makers to give fisheries more consideration when setting targets, researchers say. 

Don Scavia, professor emeritus at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability, was the lead author of the paper. The study was published recently in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

Current federal water-quality guidelines aim to reduce nutrients – primarily phosphorous – in Lake Erie by 40% compared to 2008 levels through strategies such as improving wastewater treatment processes, restoring wetlands, and adopting agricultural and urban practices to reduce runoff. Excess nutrients can lead to hypoxia, or a loss of dissolved oxygen, causing aquatic life to die or leave the resulting dead zones. 

Ludsin’s lab led a 2023 study that set the stage for this paper, showing that historic fishery harvests for lake whitefish, yellow perch and walleye had peaked at differing levels of water quality in Lake Erie. The team labeled the scenario a “wicked” management problem with inevitable trade-offs. 

In the new study, researchers linked predictive modeling of nutrient- and temperature-driven Lake Erie bottom hypoxia with commercial fishery harvest data over the past century and climate projections for 2030-2099. 

The analysis suggested that nutrients and warmer air combine to drive up hypoxic conditions – an indication that climate change-related temperature increases need to be a factor in water quality management. And while nutrient loads have not been decreased to the goal of 40%, good progress has been made over the past 10 years, said Ludsin, also co-director of the Aquatic Ecology Laboratory at Ohio State. 

And then there is the dead zone’s effect on fish, which historically has not been a major factor in water quality management decision-making. 

Results showed that more extensive dead zones in the 1960s and 1970s depressed harvests of lake whitefish and walleye at the same time yellow perch catches were at their highest. Lake whitefish appear to be the most in need of cleaner water. Walleye benefit from lower nutrient loads but have some food flexibility, and yellow perch do best when the nutrient load is high. 

“When you clean up the lake, you might get rid of zones of low dissolved oxygen, but the loss in food production that comes from reduced nutrients seems to have a more negative impact on yellow perch,” Ludsin said. “So whatever nutrient loading target we move to, there are going to be potential winners, such as lake whitefish, and there could be potential losers, especially for yellow perch and even walleye to some degree. 

“The punchline of our research is that there didn’t seem to be any single level of nutrient loading that is going to maximize the production of all three species.” 

The paper’s authors push for adoption of ecosystem-based management that uses simple predictive models that can identify the trade-offs between water quality and fishery sectors and that gets managers from both sectors to interact more – they just don’t have a history of working together. 

“When you manage water quality, you should be considering more than just water quality. You need to consider impacts on fisheries, too,” Ludsin said. “Likewise, when you manage for fisheries, it’s not sufficient just to measure catch statistics. You need to be considering the state of the ecosystem and the broader environment.” 

Ludsin has received new long-term funding that will support his work to help agencies identify targets to control water quality while considering impacts on fisheries. 

This work was supported by the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Ohio Department of Agriculture, The Andersons Charitable Foundation, the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, and the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy. 

Additional co-authors were Anna Michalak of Stanford University, Daniel Obenour of North Carolina State University, Mingyu Han and Yuntao Zhou of Shanghai Jiao Ton University, Laura Johnson of Heidelberg University, independent consultant Yu-Chen Wang and Gang Zhao of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Researchers from The Ohio State University and Ithaca College found that more than 9 out of 10 Americans agreed that sports build character and improved one’s health, while 84% agreed playing sports makes one popular in school and 85% said it makes one more well-known in the community.

According to 67% of those surveyed, playing sports even leads to better grades in school.

While these beliefs may seem harmless, they suggest that most Americans endorse what is called the “Great Sport Myth,” said Evan Davis, lead author of the study and assistant professor of sport management at Ithaca College.

“There are a lot of issues and problems in sports, but the Great Sport Myth glosses over them and says that sports are inherently good and pure,” Davis said.

Some youth who play sports face mistreatment including abuse and bullying, while even more experience burnout, unequal access to some sports and facilities, and other issues, said study co-author Chris Knoester, professor of sociology at Ohio State.

“The Great Sport Myth says that the positive results from sports are automatic – you just have to roll out the ball and good things are going to happen,” Knoester said. “That’s not true, but a large majority of Americans appear to buy into that.”

The study was published recently in the Journal of Sport and Social Issues.

It is true that sports can have many benefits for those who participate, the researchers said. The issue is to make sure that people don’t get so blinded by the good things about sports that they ignore the problems.

For example, previously published Ohio State research links youth sports participation with better mental health in adulthood. But the benefits were only apparent for those who continued to play sports throughout childhood. Most youth sports participants reported dropping out of sports and commonly said they did so because it was not fun, they were not a good enough player, they did not get along with the coach or teammates, they became injured, or they did not have enough money.

These findings underline that the benefits of sports depend on the situational contexts of them, including the presence of positive, healthy interactions and inclusive cultures, Knoester said.

The Great Sport Myth is a concept developed and introduced in 2015 by influential sport sociologist Jay Coakley, a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs.

The purpose of this new study was to use a large national survey to assess and analyze the extent to which U.S. adults endorse two essential components of the myth: the assumed personal development and social capital benefits of playing sports.

Survey data came from the National Sports and Society Survey (NSASS), sponsored by Ohio State’s Sports and Society Initiative.

The survey was completed by 3,993 adults who volunteered to participate through the American Population Panel, run by Ohio State’s Center for Human Resource Research. Participants, who came from all 50 states, answered the survey online between the fall of 2018 and spring of 2019.

Because NSASS participants are disproportionately female, white and college graduates, the researchers weighted the survey results to reflect the U.S. population more accurately.

The results showed that the majority of Americans thought sports helped people’s character, health, grades, popularity in school and recognition in the community.

But the findings also showed that various groups that people belonged to, their position in society and experiences with sports all played a role in how much they agreed with these key components of the Great Sport Myth.

The researchers found that Black Americans were more likely than white Americans to embrace aspects of the myth.  That makes sense, Davis said.

“It seems as if, in the Black community, sports are often viewed in a positive light and have historically been seen as a unique way to get ahead in society,” he said.

Knoester said one particularly intriguing finding was that the more children a study participant had, the more likely he or she endorsed the elements of the Great Sport Myth.

“This might have to do with the extent that children really immerse parents in sports cultures, as they take their kids to soccer practices or other sports activities,” Knoester said.

“It seems to really encourage parents to believe in how good sports are for their children.”

Christians and conservatives were more likely to embrace the benefits of sports participation for personal development and gaining popularity in the community. Heterosexuals were more positive than those who identified as sexual minorities, and men were more positive than women and those who are nonbinary.

Not surprisingly, people who said they grew up in communities high in passion for sports and who became bigger sports fans and participants were also more likely to believe in aspects of the Great Sport Myth. But people who reported being mistreated in their sports interactions, such as being subject to cruel comments or more extreme forms of abuse, were less enthusiastic about the benefits of sports.

The researchers also analyzed how combinations of these different factors were linked to feelings about the value of sports.

Based on their answers to questions about family and community exposure to sport, immersions in sport cultures, and beliefs about the values of sports, Davis and Knoester compared those who had more negative involvement and low involvement in sports compared to those who had more positive and high involvement in sports.

Results showed an enormous difference – more than 70 percentage points – in the probability between these two groups that respondents would strongly agree that sports build character.

“It is the people who are most immersed in these sports cultures that have the greatest belief in elements of this myth,” Knoester said. “But they may also be less likely to be critical of the problems that are going on.”

Davis added: “What makes the Great Sport Myth a myth is that it’s become the preferred story about sport. If you ask people how they feel about sports, they immediately go to the positives but rarely consider the negatives.

The focus should be on the context of how sports are operating in each situation, Knoester added.

“Sports often do good things, but it is important to be critical and take the time to assess our sports environments to make sure we are really getting the best outcomes that sports can produce.”

“With Halloween, there is a tension between fun and fear that makes the holiday special,” said Merrill Kaplan, director of the Center for Folklore Studies at The Ohio State University. 

“It’s the season for not being entirely sure whether you believe in ghosts but walking up to that glass behind which lies the supernatural, behind which lies death, really, and tapping on the glass and running away,” she said.

Kaplan enjoys the folklore surrounding Halloween. 

“Almost anything you associate with Halloween is kind of folklore, it’s some kind of custom, or it’s some kind of story, or it’s a belief that we entertain, or it’s a costume that you make,” she said. 

Halloween folklore goes back centuries. Some believe it originated in ancient pagan culture, Kaplan said. Or perhaps it originated with Samhain, an old Irish festival where one might encounter the supernatural.

Halloween today draws some of its customs from medieval Christianity, she said.  

“Visiting graveyards, candlelit processions, people in long robes, death visiting you, ghosts, unquiet souls, those are all things that are really from medieval Christianity.”

Folklore is central to the holiday. In addition to stories, folklore can also refer to many other aspects of everyday life.   

“Folklore is a huge category that is made up of things that we say, not just folktales, but also rumors and jokes and nursery rhymes, and some forms of gossip, things that we do. Anything that is customary is probably folklore,” she said.

By Dorian Rhea Debussy

Lecturer of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, The Ohio State University

A new study gets scientists closer to more fully understanding where viruses fit into the global ocean picture of cycling nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorous and, of particular interest, carbon. The research broadly expands on a 20-year-old finding that genes can be exchanged between viruses and the photosynthetic cells they infect and consolidates data resulting from more than 100 papers on viruses and metabolism that followed. 

The research team, led by The Ohio State University, reports in the journal Microbiome on its creation of a catalog of genes that viruses “stole” from the marine microbes they infected across all of the world’s oceans. Scientists identified and organized almost 23,000 genes known as auxiliary metabolic genes (AMGs), including over 7,000 never previously documented. The analysis suggests that about 1 in 5 ocean virus populations carries at least one AMG. 

Adding even more context to the viruses’ role, the researchers mapped 340 metabolic pathways attributed to microbes in the oceans – changes to the nutrient balance resulting from organisms consuming and generating molecules based on their survival needs. Of those, the scientists found that viral AMGs mapped to 128 pathways – meaning viruses affected over 37% of those processes. 

“We still don’t know the extent of viruses’ impact. But now that we know the pathways that viruses target via AMGs, we could use metabolic modeling approaches to quantitatively estimate the viral impact on the host communities and ocean functioning,” said first study author Funing Tian, who completed the work as a PhD student in microbiology at Ohio State. 

“Future modeling work could involve increasing or decreasing metabolic fluxes occurring through these pathways and seeing how the impact of viruses would change.” 

Tian and her co-lead author, former Ohio State microbiology postdoctoral scholar James Wainaina, focused on DNA viruses that infect prokaryotes: bacteria and other single-celled organisms floating throughout the world’s oceans.

Wainaina and Tian were members of the lab led by the study’s senior author, Matthew Sullivan, professor of microbiology and founding director of the Center of Microbiome Science at Ohio State. 

Sullivan was the virus coordinator for the Tara Oceans Consortium, a three-year global study of the impact of climate change on the world’s oceans. As part of that international collaboration, he has led previous work to catalog close to 200,000 DNA and 5,500 RNA virus species in the oceans, and to ascertain viruses’ potential to mitigate climate change. 

Tian and Wainaina analyzed 7.6 terabytes of Tara Oceans metagenomic sequence data for this study, increasing the known ocean DNA virus populations to 579,904. From these populations, the team took many computational steps to identify the auxiliary metabolic genes located in virus genomes. 

They conservatively identified a total of 86,913 AMGs that grouped into 22,779 sequence-based gene clusters. Of those, 7,248 were identified for the first time. Viruses lift these genes from the microbial cells they infect and incorporate the genes into their own genome – giving them the power to reprogram a host cell’s function in a way that ensures viral survival. 

“The challenge with auxiliary metabolic genes is that people know they’re there, but the gene is similar to the cellular copy – that makes it important to differentiate between the viral copy and the microbial copy,” Wainaina said. 

“To minimize false positives, we undertook curation steps to make sure we focused only on AMGs that were on viral genome segments,” Tian said. 

They then further analyzed the genomic data to determine metabolic pathways – each one a series of related actions that alter a cell’s function – that could be traced to specific microbial species, revealing 340 such pathways. With their new catalog of “stolen” genes, the researchers found that 128 of these pathways were targeted by viral AMGs.

“That’s our big finding,” Tian said. “Before this paper, it was unknown how many metabolic pathways were encoded in microbes throughout the global oceans, and even less understood among those how many were targeted by viruses via AMGs.” 

Added Wainaina, “It’s not only about the number, but also which specific pathways viruses are involved in – that informs the biogeochemical cycles viruses are reprogramming and manipulating in the ocean.” 

The AMG catalog and metabolic pathway mapping provide a foundation for microbiome engineering experimentation and modeling that will help researchers make more accurate predictions about viruses’ roles in ocean biogeochemical processes, Sullivan said. 

“Most current models don’t include viruses at all, and only some include microbes,” he said. “It’s exciting that we’ve generated these data that are critical for bringing viruses and their impacts into new predictive models.” 

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the G. Unger Vetlese and Ambrose Monell Foundations, and the Ohio Supercomputer Center.

Tian is now a bioinformatician at the University of Chicago, and Wainaina is an assistant scientist in the Biology Department at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Additional co-authors include Cristina Howard-Varona, Guillermo Domínguez-Huerta, Benjamin Bolduc, Garrett Smith, Marissa Gittrich, Olivier Zablocki and Dylan Cronin of Ohio State; Maria Consuelo Gazitúa of Viromica Consulting; Damien Eveillard of Nantes Université; and Steven Hallam of the University of British Columbia.

This new collaborative space features a peer-led tutoring center aiming to engage first- and second-year students enrolled in gateway STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) courses. The Oct. 2 ribbon cutting marked the completion of the first phase of space renovation in Ramseyer Hall.

The Amgen STEM Learning Center is the result of a $2 million investment supporting Ohio State’s colleges of Arts and Sciences and Engineering. The new learning center is an important milestone in the university’s partnership with Amgen, a leading biotechnology company with a growing presence in central Ohio. The gift bolsters Amgen’s significant commitment to workforce development in the university’s STEM fields, while also advancing the shared goal of building a talent pipeline for the state of Ohio.

“Amgen is proud to support The Ohio State University’s STEM Learning Center, which will play a crucial role in strengthening the educational foundations of students enrolled in gateway STEM courses. This initiative aligns with our commitment to fostering innovation and diversity in the STEM fields, and we are excited to see the positive impact it will have on the students and the broader community,” said Sandra Rodriguez-Toledo, vice president of site operations for Amgen Ohio.

Nearly 100 guests, including Mike Duffey, chancellor of the Ohio Department of Higher Education, attended the ribbon cutting. During the ceremony, Peter Mohler, executive vice president for research, innovation and knowledge at Ohio State, offered his thoughts on the partnership that has made this new interdisciplinary center possible.

“The continued strengthening of Amgen’s relationship with Ohio State is inspiring. Through interdisciplinary research and education, we are bringing together our collective knowledge and expertise to invest in the futures of our bright students and the biomanufacturing sector,” he said.

David Horn, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, also praised the partnership. “We are grateful for Amgen’s support. Together we will transform teaching in STEM disciplines and create new learning and engagement opportunities for students,” he said. “The new collaborative space and peer-led tutoring model will benefit students of all backgrounds who enter these fields and help create a diverse workforce to address tomorrow’s challenges in the Midwest and beyond.”

Amgen’s investment has helped fuel other impactful developments, serving as a catalyst for additional gifts that will fortify excellence in STEM education and workforce development within the college.

“This center will help our students not only succeed but prosper. We thank Amgen for their support and continued collaboration,” said Susan Olesik, dean of the division of natural and mathematical sciences, who led the effort to create the center. “We will work alongside Amgen to contribute to Ohio’s spectacular future in STEM innovation.”

Their findings revealed that due to frequent disturbances like wildfires that raze down vegetation and persistent drought and deforestation that starve both the land and wildlife, the resilience of many plant communities in southern boreal forests — or their ability to recover after these events — significantly decreased over time. This may affect the Arctic carbon budget, foreshadowing a future where the region is likely to become a carbon source instead of remaining a carbon sink due to its limited capacity to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide in the coming decades.  

This is because Arctic and boreal regions have warmed several times faster than other places around the globe and further warming is expected in the near future, said Yue Zhang, lead author of the study and a graduate student in earth sciences at The Ohio State University.

“When we talk about the response of forests to climate change, most of the time we’re thinking about the tropical rainforest,” said Zhang. “But remote boreal forests are really important in terms of their vast extent, large carbon storage and potential to mitigate climate change.”

The study was recently published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

To better understand how the region’s ecosystem changed because of increased warming, researchers used historical data from NASA’s Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) program to remotely sense subtle changes in greenness in Alaska and western Canada between 2000 and 2019. They were able to estimate the time-varying speed of vegetation recovery from small fluctuations or large losses, even in areas where large losses have not happened yet. 

The study found that while plant resilience in the southern boreal forests notably decreased, even in regions with greening trends, resilience was thought to have increased in most of the Arctic tundra. Besides fires, other factors like heat and drought could have contributed to declines in plant resilience in the south, and changes in nutrient availability could have helped vegetation thrive in the rest of the Arctic.

While the release of food may benefit plant growth and resilience, the reality is that the rising temperatures that make this possible could also cause Arctic permafrost to melt more quickly than it already is, releasing from the ground as much carbon as 35 million cars emit in a year and hastening the arrival of climate tipping points.

It is uncertain now how much of the carbon will be absorbed by plants and how much will contribute to further warming, said Zhang. 

“That’s pretty concerning, because while greening may indicate that productivity and carbon uptake in these regions is increasing now, resilience decline indicates that it may not be sustainable in the longer term,” she said. 

According to the study, these shifts are indications that the entire ecosystem is in danger, as a large fraction of southern boreal forests is losing its stability, potentially leading to widespread forest loss and biome shifts.

Greening regions that experience resilience decline at the same time might also signal that the region is struggling to take a few last deep breaths before significant forest loss, said Yanlan Liu, senior author of the study and an assistant professor of earth sciences at Ohio State. This means that while the region could absorb significant amounts of carbon in the short term, scientists expect that if resilience continues to decline, the Arctic boreal ecosystem may not be as effective in mitigating climate in the long term as previously thought.

“Temperature records show this region is warming up to two to four times faster than the global average,” said Liu. “This is a hot spot of vegetation change where studying it can tell us about the ecosystem stability and what it’s capable of tolerating before it transitions into an alternative state through pervasive forest loss.”

The study further revealed that warm and dry areas with high elevation and dense vegetation cover were among the hotspots of resilience decline. Yet because many climate models currently lack consensus on how vegetation change and carbon dynamics contribute to the other, this team’s work will help enhance such models by informing scientists of where vegetation changes are likely to occur.

Ultimately, said Zhang, their method revealed more nuanced changes in the health of the region’s vegetation, beyond previously reported greening and browning trends. This method also provides researchers a tool to identify potential vegetation loss in other regions in the coming decades. 

With plans to continue trying to accurately predict ecosystem changes, researchers note their results warrant more field investigations aimed at better characterizing and understanding the resilience of the region. 

“Scientists need to learn to quantify climate-induced risks through diverse lenses,” said Liu. “On top of satellite remote sensing, we need more ground observations to help us identify ways to leverage these findings to inform future resources and risk management strategies.”

The study was supported by NASA and the Ohio Supercomputer Center. Co-authors include Kaiguang Zhao from Ohio State, Jonathan Wang from the University of Utah, and Logan T. Berner and Scott J. Goetz from Northern Arizona University. 

A phenomenon that typically occurs every two to seven years, El Niño causes much warmer than average ocean temperatures in the eastern Pacific, significantly affecting weather around the globe.  

The Quelccaya Ice Cap (QIC) in the Peruvian Andes has been shown to be sensitive to these climate shifts, but the extent to which El Niño contributes to its continued shrinkage has, to date, been unclear. 

Now, using images captured by NASA Landsat satellites over the past four decades, researchers have confirmed that the regional warming periodically caused by El Niño has indeed resulted in a drastic reduction of its snow-covered area. The study, led by Kara Lamantia, a graduate student at the Byrd Polar and Research Climate Center at The Ohio State University, found that between 1985 and 2022, the QIC lost about 58% of its snow cover and about 37% of its total area. 

“Our research gives us a look into a glacier’s health,” said Lamantia. “The Quelccaya glacier becomes greatly out of equilibrium during these short-term climate anomalies.”

The study, published today (October 8, 2024) in the journal The Cryosphere, is the first to automate the process of snow-covered area detection on the QIC. Normally, this detection is only possible through extensive field measurements or manually hand-tracing satellite images that are clear enough to detail the visual boundary between snow and ice. 

Yet an algorithm this team developed processes images using near-infrared imagery, a method that utilizes wavelengths outside our visible spectrum. “By creating a threshold for the different reflectance between snow and ice cover, we can gather a consistent and much more reliable measurement,” said Lamantia. 

Glaciers and ice caps gain mass by accumulating ice and snow and lose it when none is received, or more ice is lost than gained. By measuring the ratio of snow-covered area to the total area, researchers can quantify whether the QIC is gaining mass, losing it, or maintaining a steady state. 

The study revealed that during El Niños, the ratio drops significantly away from the average, indicating a drastic reduction in the snow-covered area. 

This extreme change in its ratio may be attributed to the wide differences between the dry and wet seasons in southern Peru, said Lamantia.

“All of the snowfall happens during the wet season, but during an El Niño, southern Peru experiences warmer and drier conditions than average so it stays dry throughout the wet season,” she said. “That means that the snow cover will continue to decline and there might be quite a bit less snowfall to replace it.”

As climate change rapidly alters the Earth’s environment, it’s expected that El Niños are likely to be longer-lived and stronger, a factor that will accelerate ice loss. This raises the possibility of the QIC’s snow cover failing to recover during La Niñas, or periods when the oceans should be cool.

“The ice cap as a whole is on a very consistent linear decline from anthropogenic warming,” said Lamantia. “It may not matter how strong future La Niñas are, as the freezing line continues to rise and snow cover shrinks, Quelccaya will likely continue to decline.”

If this carries on, some projections suggest that snow cover on the QIC could disappear by 2080, relegating it to a wasting ice field, much like Kilimanjaro. By the end of the century, the study notes, the ice cap could be no more.

It’s difficult to discern how other short-term weather events might impact glacier vulnerability, which is something similar studies may aim to model in the future. What scientists do know is that ice loss puts high-mountain communities that depend on them in jeopardy, as snow loss can quickly diminish key water supplies. 

The damage already done to the oceans and atmosphere is not something we can reverse tomorrow, Lamantia said. Using the data collected about their complex interactions, researchers may have a better chance at monitoring and mitigating the planet’s climate woes.

“The general consensus is we can expect that the likely increased intensity and duration of El Niños will cause more complications for the QIC,” said Lamantia. “We need to start being clever about how we use and conserve our water resources.”

This study was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation and the Volo Foundation. Other co-authors were Lonnie Thompson and Bryan Mark from Ohio State and Laura J. Larocca of Arizona State University. 

The study identified a secure way to attach chemical additives to polyvinyl chloride (PVC). 

Found in everything from toys, construction supplies and medical packaging, PVC plastics currently rank third among the most used plastics worldwide. Despite its widespread use, pure PVC is brittle and sensitive to heat, and manufacturers can only utilize it after stabilizing its properties with other chemicals. 

However, these additives, or plasticizers, are only a short-term fix for stabilizing PVC. Over time, plasticizers leach from the plastics, which allows the material to deteriorate into potentially hazardous organics and microplastics. Now, a team led by Christo Sevov, the principal investigator of the study and an associate professor in chemistry and biochemistry at The Ohio State University, found that using electricity to permanently affix those chemical additives can prevent such unwanted reactions.

“Instead of mixing in those chemicals, our method involves chemically bonding the plasticizer compound directly to PVC by grafting them onto the backbone of the polymer,” said Sevov.

Altering PVC molecules in this way allows for them to become more durable and resistant to chemical changes, eventually leading to materials with more robust properties. 

“This is really one of the few examples that we have where there’s this much control over changing the properties of PVC,” said Sevov. “So this is the first step in controllably modifying PVC to give it properties you’re interested in, whether it’s hard, stretchy or soft.”

The team did run into some challenges; synthetic polymer modifications often fail because the reactions were originally developed for small-molecule analogs, not big-molecule analogs such as pure PVC. To solve this, researchers optimized the catalyst they used in their process, and through trial and error, were able to overcome the issues that arise when editing big molecules. 

The study was recently published in the journal Chem. 

Outside of making leaps in organic chemistry, the team’s work also has implications for the environment, as putting a cap on how quickly plastics degrade can do much to curb the release of microplastics — tiny pieces of plastic debris — into our surroundings. 

Today, scientists know that these particles, which have been found to pollute the air, water and our food supply, are harmful both to humans and wildlife. The average person likely ingests between 78,000 and 211,000 of these particles every year. 

But as experts are beginning to understand the long-term impact microplastics have on Earth, organic chemists are racing to find ways to phase them out of everyday life, said Sevov. 

“Many chemists are shifting their efforts to studying big molecules and developing new chemistries for upcycling, recycling and modifying well-known polymers,” he said. For example, trying to recycle PVC products can cause further degradation to the material due to the high temperatures it takes to convert plastic into something else, so the process isn’t very efficient. 

But using Sevov’s method, “You can potentially reuse the material many, many more times before it really begins to fall apart, improving its lifetime and reusability,” he said. 

In the future, more control over which materials will be safe for consumers will come once efforts to fix PVC leakage can be reliably scaled up, something that the study emphasizes that, at the moment, is possible with their method alone. 

“There’s no better way to do this on the scale you would need for commercial PVC modification because it is an immense process,” said Sevov. “There’s still a lot to play around with before we solve the microplastic situation, though now we’ve laid the groundwork for how to do it.”

Other Ohio State co-authors include Jordan L.S. Zackasee, Valmuri Srivardhan, Blaise L. Truesdell and Elizabeth J. Vrana. This work was supported by the Department of Energy’s Early Career Research Program.

The jobs done by microbes – bacteria, viruses, fungi and other single-cell organisms – enable all other species living by land, sea and air, and in our guts, to survive. Boosted by fast-paced technological advances in recent decades, scientists are learning more every day about microbial functions and how they can be put to use in protecting human health and the global environment. 

And yet, microbial research remains underrepresented in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals – something the scientists say should change to accelerate progress toward meeting the objectives. 

Four faculty researchers at The Ohio State University are among the co-authors:

• Justin North, assistant professor of microbiology and the Ohio State lead of the Department of Energy’s Energy Earthshots Initiative aimed at achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050
• Devin Peterson, professor of food science and technology and faculty director of the Foods for Health research initiative investigating the effects of food and nutrition on human health
• Virginia Rich, associate professor of microbiology and co-director of the National Science Foundation-funded EMERGE Biology Integration Institute based at Ohio State, which organizes microbiome science conducted at the permafrost in northern Sweden
• Matthew Sullivan, professor of microbiology and civil, environmental and geodetic engineering and the founding director of Ohio State’s Center of Microbiome Science, which was established in 2020 and currently has over 130 investigators from 10 colleges 

The U.N. has outlined 17 Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, to be addressed globally by developed and developing countries. Broadly, the U.N. describes the set of goals as an effort to end poverty and other deprivations while improving health and education, reducing inequality and spurring economic growth – all while tackling climate change and working to preserve oceans and forests.

Although microbial activity is fundamental to sustaining all life (by producing oxygen, as one example), the authors wrote, any mention of their role is largely absent across the hundreds of multilateral treaties and intergovernmental policy agreements of the U.N. 

In the review, the authors detail seven key pathways through which microbial research and technology can be used to reach the goals: nurturing health and addressing disease; food production and nutrition; clean energy production; synthesizing and recycling products; bioremediation; facilitating health ecosystems; and global biogeochemical cycles and climate change. 

“An ever-expanding field of research shows how different microbial groups perform different functions, and the effective management of microbial communities can provide solutions for improving various aspects of life, from human health to energy or food production,” they wrote. 

Part of microbes’ exclusion from the global goals could be a lack of public and political awareness of how important microoorganisms are, researchers say. While we are most familiar with the bacteria and viruses that make us sick, there are 1 trillion more species of microbes functioning in highly interconnected communities to process nutrients, initiate chemical reactions, consume gases and clean up waste – all functions that can be harnessed for an ever-growing list of practical uses that benefit the planet. 

Among the many examples outlined in the paper, the authors report on such microbe-based innovations as designing bacteria that can deliver toxins to tumors and employing living organisms to extract contaminants from soils, sediment and water. 

“Microbiomes impact everything,” Sullivan said. “And by its very nature, microbiome science is highly interdisciplinary – which gives us a head start in exploring the ways in which this research can be scaled up to the levels necessary to make a big impact. 

“We see improved understanding of microbial roles in an ecosystem context as critical to unleashing the power of microbes toward making sustainable bioproducts and protecting the planet. The scientific community is prepared to do the work, but the complexity of microbial lives, and the interdisciplinarity needed to solve those mysteries, challenges traditional disciplinary funding and academic structures. This broad scientific communication seeks to bring awareness to the opportunities.” 

The lead authors of the article are Laura van Galen and Thomas Crowther of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and Rino Rappuoli of the Fondazione Biotecnopolo di Siena in Italy.

In a new study, researchers have determined through both statistical analysis and in experiments that soil pH is a driver of microbial community composition – but that the need to address toxicity released during nitrogen cycling ultimately shapes the final microbial community. 

“The physical environment is affecting the nature of microbial interactions, and that affects the assembly of the community,” said co-lead author Karna Gowda, assistant professor of microbiology at The Ohio State University. “People in the field understood these two things must be important at some level, but there wasn’t a lot of evidence for it. We’re adding some specificity and mechanisms to this idea.” 

The work helps clarify the microbial underpinnings of global nitrogen cycling and may provide a new way to think about emissions of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas, Gowda said. 

The research was published recently in Nature Microbiology. 

Microbes keep soil healthy and productive by recycling nutrients, and are particularly important for converting nitrogen into forms that plants can use. Underground organisms living in the same environment are also highly interconnected, preying on each other, participating in chemical exchanges and providing community benefits. 

For this work, Gowda and colleagues used a dataset from a worldwide collection of topsoil samples, sequencing the genomes of microbes present in the samples and analyzing important characteristics of the soil – such as nitrogen and carbon content and pH, a measure of soil’s acidity. 

“We wanted to look at trends that were widespread and that would manifest around the planet across very different environments,” Gowda said.

With billions of bacteria present in a sample of soil, the researchers relied on the genetic makeup of microbial communities to determine their functional roles. 

The team zeroed in on genes that identified which bacteria were involved in denitrification – converting nitrogen compounds from bioavailable forms into nitrous oxide and dinitrogen gas that’s released in the atmosphere. A bioinformatics analysis showed that soil pH was the most important environmental factor associated with the abundance of these organisms. 

To test the statistical finding, the researchers conducted lab enrichment experiments, running a natural microbial community through different conditions of growth. 

During denitrification, specific enzymes have roles in the conversion of nitrate into various nitrogen-containing compounds. One of these forms, nitrite, is more toxic in acidic soil (low pH) than it is under neutral conditions with higher pH. 

The experiments showed that strains with enzymes called Nar, linked to creating toxic nitrite, and strains with enzymes called Nap, linked to consuming nitrite, fluctuated based on the acidity of the soil. 

“We found more of Nar at low pH and less of Nap, and vice versa as the soil pH moved toward neutral,” Gowda said. “So we see two different types of organisms prevalent at acidic versus neutral pH, but we also find that that’s actually not explaining what’s going on. It’s not just the environment that’s determining who’s there – it’s actually the environment plus interactions between more organisms in the community. 

“This means that pH is affecting the interaction between organisms in the community in a more or less consistent way – it’s always about the toxicity of nitrite. And this highlights how different bacteria work together to thrive in varying soil pH levels.” 

That finding was novel and important, Gowda said. Bacteria and other microorganisms are known to be driven by a will to survive, but they also rely on each other to stay safe – and that cooperation has implications for environmental health, the research suggests. 

“While individual fitness effects clearly play a role in defining patterns in many contexts, interactions are likely essential to explaining patterns in a variety of other contexts,” the authors wrote. 

Understanding how interactions and the environment affect nitrous oxide emissions could provide new insights into reducing this potent greenhouse gas, Gowda said: Denitrifying bacteria are key sources and sinks of nitrous oxide in agricultural soils. While past studies have focused on the behavior of these nitrous oxide-emitting organisms in different pH conditions, considering their ecological interactions may offer new strategies to lower emissions. 

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the University of Chicago, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, a James S. McDonnell Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship Award, and a Fannie and John Hertz Fellowship Award.

Co-authors include Seppe Kuehn, Kyle Crocker, Kiseok Keith Lee, Milena Chakraverti-Wuerthwein and Zeqian Li of the University of Chicago; Mikhail Tikhonov of Washington University in St. Louis; and Madhav Mani of Northwestern University.

A new consensus study report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) offers recommendations for developing tools that can help answer that question.

“Our job was to create methods to identify disadvantaged communities that most need federal resources to address environmental justice issues,” said Harvey Miller, professor of geography at The Ohio State University and co-chair of the NASEM committee that wrote the report.

“This will shape where billions of federal dollars go to address these problems.”

The new report, Constructing Valid Geospatial Tools for Environmental Justice, is the result of hundreds of hours of work over two years by the 11-member committee, Miller said. NASEM selected Miller to co-chair the committee along with Eric Tate, professor of public affairs at Princeton University.

“We are at a hinge point in history, and the choices we make now will reverberate for generations,” Miller said in a personal note that was published as part of the final report.

“I sincerely hope that this report helps to move our nation forward toward a future with environmental justice for all.”

Geospatial tools – the focus of the report – are designed to integrate different kinds of health, social, environmental and economic data to come up with a composite score – a single number that can tell policymakers whether a community should receive special consideration for environmental funding.

One such tool is the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST) developed by the White House Council on Environmental Quality in 2022 in response to the Justice 40 initiative from the Biden administration.

 Justice 40 requires that at least 40% of the overall benefits from federal climate and infrastructure investments go to disadvantaged communities.

The committee didn’t review only CEJST, but also considered a variety of existing environmental justice tools to identify what kinds of data were needed to build the best possible versions, Miller said.

“We summarized the state of the science on this and came up with what we believe is the best scientific approach for making these decisions,” he said.

For the report, census tracts were used to define communities. Committee members discussed the facets of disadvantage and data sources and how they could be brought together to create tools that will calculate a composite index score for each census tract. That score would determine whether a particular tract is eligible for Justice 40 funding.

The report includes a list of recommendations for developing the best possible tool, including creating and sustaining community partnerships that provide opportunities to identify local environmental justice issues.  The authors also recommended how to identify the indicators and datasets for measuring environmental issues, and determining whether tools that are developed reflect community lived experiences.

Another key recommendation is to choose economic measures that go beyond the federal poverty level to reflect wealth and variations in the cost of living.

“The wealth gap between high-income and low-income households is larger than the income gap, and that has an important impact on environmental justice issues,” Miller said.

The report also recommends using indicators that measure the impact of racism in policies and practices that have led to the disparities seen today.

“There are big variations in who is exposed to stressors in the environment like pollution, noise and toxic waste sites,” Miller said.

“And it is generally lower-income and minority populations that bear the brunt of environmental justice issues. Part of it is that they often can’t move away from the problem, like higher-income people can.”

While this report focuses on environmental justice, Miller said the committee’s approach could be used to develop tools in a variety of contexts.  The problem of deciding where to spend federal dollars to get the most impact is common to many different issues, and having a method to develop the right tools is important.

“We wanted to create a framework where when the government creates a tool to help decide where to make investments, people can look at it and know it is legitimate, it measures what it says it is measuring in the real world, and it is transparent how it was constructed,” he said.

The report was created under the sponsorship of the Bezos Earth Fund.

To measure these tiny high-speed events, known as attoseconds, researchers used a laser to generate intense X-ray flashes that allowed them to map the inner workings of an atom. 

Their findings revealed that when electrons are ejected by X-rays, they interact with another type of particle called the Auger-Meitner electron, causing a secondary pause that’s never been detected before. These results have implications for a wide range of research fields, as learning more about these interactions can reveal novel ideas about complex molecular dynamics, said Lou DiMauro, co-author of the study and a professor of physics at The Ohio State University.

“X-rays are interesting probes of matter,” DiMauro said. “You could use them to take a series of stop-action snapshots of a molecule as it evolves before or during a chemical reaction.” 

The study was recently published in Nature.

While there have been many noteworthy leaps in scientists’ ability to study attosecond delays using ultraviolet light over the past two decades, for years it was a task made all the more challenging due to the scarcity of advanced tools needed to produce them. 

It was so difficult that Pierre Agostini, an emeritus professor of physics at Ohio State, was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for his past work developing techniques to study electron dynamics using pulses of light that lasts for hundreds of attoseconds, a unit of time equivalent to one quintillionth of a second.

It wasn’t until relatively recently that new technologies such as the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), a massive free electron laser device at Stanford University’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, made these pulses much easier to create and visualize in the lab, said DiMauro. 

Using the LCLS, the team studied how electrons inhabit a nitric oxide molecule, focusing on the electron particles that reside near the atom’s oxygen core. They found that there were unexpectedly large delays that ranged up to 700 attoseconds, a pattern that suggests more complicated factors could be at play when determining what causes them, said Alexandra Landsman, a co-author of the study and professor of physics at Ohio State. 

“We looked at what happens when you take out the electron from deep inside an atom, and what surprised me was how complex the dynamics of those deeply bound electrons were,” said Landsman. “This means that behavior is much more complex than scientists thought, and we need better theoretical descriptions to fully describe the light-matter interaction.”

Yet despite more research being needed to further understand the structure of these interactions, uncovering formerly hidden details about them also gives scientists new insights to consider, said DiMauro.

For example, if scientists can get a better grasp on intra-particle behavior, some experts speculate that their discoveries could be vital to breakthroughs for early cancer detection technologies, such as being able to use molecular markers to diagnose blood cancers or detect malignant tumors.

Furthermore, this paper suggests that, combined with theoretical models, researchers could use advances in attosecond science to glimpse matter on some of the smallest scales imaginable, as well as study in greater detail many broader mysteries of the physical universe. 

“I’m looking forward to seeing how we use attosecond pulses to learn more about science, engineering or nature in general,” said DiMauro. “Because what’s described in this paper is an indication of a field that’s really going to blossom.”

This study was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science and Office of Basic Energy Sciences. James Cryan, senior scientist at Stanford’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and an Ohio State alum, was the lead author of the study. Lisa Ortmann of Ohio State was also a co-author. 

“Looking at 18th-century manuscripts isn’t easy,” she said.

Despite some unfamiliarity with script handwriting, Newell’s students persevered and gained valuable research experience during the four-week lab. In its second year, the lab is funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. Over three years, Newell’s team, including faculty from Case Western Reserve University and the University of Victoria, who earned their PhDs at Ohio State, will receive $493,000 to research African and Native American citizenship.

“The grant is under a rubric of civic engagement and higher learning,” Newell said. “So, I think Mellon expected applications about the modern Civil Rights Movement, but we surprised them by pitching and asking questions about this instead.”

Newell’s research focuses on the years between 1780 and 1920.

“We’re seeking ways to get at these questions: What’s going on with Native Americans and African Americans in terms of voting, in terms of citizenship, in terms of other expressions of community and belonging – the founding of schools and land ownership rights advocacy, access to public ‘goods’ like parks and streetcars, and the creation of independent political organizations?” she said. “Native Americans had to decide at different times and places whether the benefits of U.S. citizenship outweighed the loss of sovereignty and citizenship within their tribal nation.”

In the first year, Newell’s team worked locally and primarily with digital resources. For the second year, she and co-researchers Noël Voltz, John Bickers and Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles wanted the students to experience more fieldwork. The lab has traveled to different parts of Ohio, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and met with descendants of people who were removed from land they owned, as well as the descendants of people who were able to stay.

“We’re interested in both: the communities that persist and the communities that don’t,” she said. “What are some of the factors that cause these communities to disappear? Do people move voluntarily, were they subject to the race massacres we know were happening in different parts of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois before and after the Civil War?”

Interviewing subjects in person, sometimes on their original land, was a first for many of Newell’s students.

“Talking to these descendant communities has been particularly moving,” she said. “The idea that we can assist in telling their stories is interesting to students.”

Students leave the lab with extensive research skills that are useful not only in academic settings but professional ones, Newell said.

“It’s an employable skill,” she said. “I have this question; how do I answer it? What sorts of things can I look at? … It’s being a detective. It’s being creative. It’s thinking about what might help me answer these questions.”

In fact, Newell’s lab has become a model for research practices.

“The National Park Service is interested in what we’re doing,” she said. “They want to send their scholars and researchers to the lab. They’re interested in helping smaller historical sites get recognition. … We’re talking about workshops and not just for higher ed but for people in this profession, broadly, of researching, interpreting and sharing American history.”

This kind of lab-based research is just as valuable to the humanities as it is to STEM fields, Newell said.

“Labs are where research occurs,” she said. “And history is a research-based discipline. We’re not making things up. We’re not going over the same ground. We’re trying to ask questions that haven’t been asked before or answer questions that people may think can’t be answered.” 

For Newell, the question she and her students circle back to is “What is the purpose of the humanities?”

“Is it to reaffirm what we already know or is it to break new ground?” she said. “We think there’s plenty of new ground to be broken and stories to incorporate into the larger history of the United States.”

Researchers found that lower-income residents of states with more generous benefits were significantly less likely than those living in less-generous states to take out new credit cards, personal finance loans and payday loans or other alternative financial service offerings.

The study, published recently in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, was led by Rachel Dwyer, professor of sociology at The Ohio State University, and Stephanie Moulton, professor in Ohio State’s John Glenn College of Public Affairs.

The findings provide evidence that programs like unemployment insurance can play a powerful role in keeping low-income Americans from falling further behind financially, said Moulton.

“Providing more generous unemployment benefits helps people avoid these really expensive types of debt that are costly not only for individuals, but eventually for society,” Moulton said.

A key strength of the study was its large sample of 2.3 million Americans, who were studied from the end of 2019 through the end of 2021.  The researchers used data from the consumer credit bureau Experian to determine if those in the study took out a credit card, personal finance loan or an alternative financial service (AFS) loan during the time of the research.

The researchers took advantage of the fact that some states were more generous in how much unemployment insurance benefits they provided to residents than others as well as differences in the timing of benefit expansion and contraction within a state. This variation allowed them to see if the level of benefit generosity had an impact on whether Americans avoided costly debt.

“Unemployment insurance is a key part of the safety net in the United States, and it affects a lot of people,” Dwyer said. “We were able to test how it affected people of various income levels during the COVID recession.”

Results showed that more generous unemployment insurance benefits did indeed result in less use of costly credit use, mostly among those in the lowest-income households.

There was a 9.7% lower probability of the lowest-income consumers taking out a new credit card when unemployment insurance benefits in a state were the most generous compared to when benefits in a state were the least generous, the study found.

The difference was even more stark when the researchers examined AFS loans.  These are loans outside the traditional banking institutions, such as payday loans, where interest rates may be significantly higher than traditional forms of borrowing.

“A lot of these are online loans, and they’re quite accessible because of that, but they are not regulated in the same way as traditional financial institutions,” Dwyer said. “And they have very high interest rates.”

The study found that the lowest-income consumers were 24% more likely to take out AFS loans when state unemployment benefits were the least generous compared to when state unemployment benefits were the most generous.

When high and middle-income households lost their jobs because of the pandemic, they were able to rely on savings, or they could use credit cards, to help them get through for a few weeks or months of unemployment, Moulton said.  But the lowest-income consumers often don’t have savings and aren’t eligible for credit cards, or have already maxed out their credit limit.

“For low-income consumers, AFS loans may be the only place they can go as their last resort, so they turn to these very expensive ways to make ends meet,” Moulton said.

“We found that more generous benefits really seemed to save at least some low-income consumers from having to make that choice.”

In addition to their main analysis, the researchers also examined alternative measures of how consumers may have been coping with the COVID recession, such as spending on existing credit cards or applying for loans regardless of whether or not they were approved, Dwyer said.

“Our results were quite consistent, with lower-income consumers faring better in states when benefits were generous,” she said.

One question that taxpayers often ask is whether government programs like unemployment insurance provide society with a good return on investment.  These findings suggest another benefit that should be considered, Moulton said.

“If we are preventing some share of this really high-cost borrowing from happening, we are preventing a cost that might ultimately be borne by society,” she said.

“There are domino effects where consumers might end up in bankruptcy if they have to use high-interest loans to make ends meet, which isn’t just bad for their own credit, it can raise the cost of credit for others as well.”

Other co-authors of the study were Lawrence Berger, J. Michael Collins and Alec Rhodes from the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Meta Brown from Ohio State; Jason Houle from Dartmouth College; and Davon Norris from the University of Michigan.

Support for the study came from the Russell Sage Foundation, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (including through a seed grant from the Ohio State Institute for Population Research), the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the U.S. Social Security Administration’s Retirement and Disability Research Consortium.

The findings surprised the scientists, who expected recent temperatures and food availability to have the highest impact on walleye growth. 

Cold winters and more sizable mothers were associated with faster growth in 3- to 5-year-old walleye offspring, the analysis showed, suggesting that warmer winters that come with climate change might lead to future generations of smaller fish. 

The findings also may mean ecological research in other species should take parental experiences into account to better understand animals’ present health, researchers say. 

“We really did think that the recent environment would have the strongest effects,” said lead author Zoe Almeida, who completed the work as a PhD student in evolution, ecology and organismal biology at The Ohio State University. “When you’re thinking about factors that affect growth, you think you have to account for temperature and prey. And in reality, those signals were so small themselves that they weren’t the strongest in any way. It was very surprising.” 

The study was published Aug. 13 in the Journal of Animal Ecology. 

The pace of growth is used in research as an indicator of overall health in many species – and is influenced not only by experiences, but also genetics. By any measure, the current status of the Lake Erie walleye population is considered quite robust, according to the 2024 status report from the Ohio Division of Wildlife (ODNR-DOW). 

“The Lake Erie walleye population is doing fantastic right now,” said Almeida, now a senior research associate in natural resources and the environment at Cornell University. “But is there something going on behind the scenes we’re not noticing, or that we won’t notice until much later because we don’t realize its effects?” 

In pursuit of an answer, Almeida and colleagues made use of the wealth of walleye data generated by ODNR-DOW through its longtime monitoring of the Lake Erie population. 

The team analyzed five factors that can affect growth: recent environmental conditions, such as food supply and temperature; previous year traits, including growth; population density that could indicate the extent of competition early in life; early-life body size; and parental conditions and environmental experiences. 

The analysis was done on annual cohorts using data of walleye populations that were 3 to 5 years old in each year between 1982 and 2015, an age when they’re reaching maturity, but still growing rapidly. ODNR-DOW data also indicated the proportion of walleye that were spawning each year. Researchers explored relationships between these factors and cohort growth using statistical modeling. 

“We parsed all that out and what was affecting the growth on a cohort level was really what happened to the parents,” Almeida said. “The size composition and winters they experienced determined whether or not the cohort was faster growing or slower growing than typical in the year before in individuals 3 to 5 years old.” 

Meanwhile, no big impact on growth could be traced to the expected factors: recent prey, temperature and fishing pressure (anglers are the walleye’s main predator). This is not to say they had no effect – their effects were just not the most influential, she said. 

The findings have implications for wildlife management and ecology research. 

“It helps us set our expectations and understand the mechanisms behind things going on out there. When managers are thinking about what this population is going to look like in three to five years, they ideally will acknowledge the fact that what happened in the past is affecting them and keep that in mind when they’re making their management decisions,” Almeida said.   

“And I do think that it has implications for other animals because what happens in early life or what happened to parents might be more influential than what is happening currently in their environment. And we’re not accounting for that.” 

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, a Distinguished University Fellowship from Ohio State, the American Fisheries Society, the International Association of Great Lakes Research, and the Federal Aid in Sport Fish Restoration Program administered jointly by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and ODNR Division of Wildlife. 

Co-authors were Stuart Ludsin and Elizabeth Marschall of Ohio State, and Matthew Faust of ODNR.

That’s the conclusion of historian Randolph Roth, author of the 2009 book American Homicide, in a new report he wrote for the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

Roth, who is a professor of history at The Ohio State University, provides evidence that homicide rates are linked to how citizens feel about the legitimacy of government and their sense of connectedness with their fellow citizens.

Right now, the United States is at a key point, Roth said.

“Over the past 450 years in the Western world, political stability has been the most powerful correlate of high homicide rates. The return of political stability could, if it continues over the next few years, lower our nation’s homicide rate,” Roth wrote in the Guggenheim report.

“What may matter most, however, is the behavior of America’s political and economic elites. They have the power, for good or ill, over the homicide rate.”

These elites include the wealthiest Americans, leaders of top corporations and institutions, and national and state political leaders of both parties, Roth said.

The new report is titled “Government Legitimacy, Social Solidarity, and American Homicide in Historical Perspective.”

The theory that homicide rates are driven by feelings and beliefs that people have toward the government and their fellow citizens may seem strange at first, Roth said. But as he details in his book and new report, that theory fits the evidence much better than the usual theories revolving around guns, poverty, drugs, race or a permissive justice system.

The key is to ensure that people feel empowered, included in their community, believe they matter to the people around them, and feel the government will protect them and their family.

“Small slights and disagreements don’t bother me as much as they might if I felt powerless in society, if I felt I couldn’t get a fair shake from my government, and if I felt alienated from my neighbors,” Roth writes in the report.

“Small disagreements and indignities that I might otherwise brush off as insignificant might enrage me and could even lead to violence.”

Roth’s research shows that the key to low homicide rates is successful nation building. And nation building is a continuous process – it is not something that can be declared complete at any point in time, he said.

There are four factors related to successful nation building, Roth explained.  There is political stability, the belief that government will protect lives and property; legitimate social hierarchy, the belief that one can be respected in society without resorting to violence and that there is the promise of upward mobility for oneself and one’s children; fellow feeling, which is patriotism, empathy and sympathy arising from solidarity with others; and legitimate government, a feeling of trust in government and the officials who run it.

The Guggenheim report includes analysis of how these factors have related to homicide rates since American Homicide was published. Roth said this recent evidence continues to support his theory.

The homicide rate in the United States rose by 60% between 2014 and 2021, from 4.9 to 7.8 persons per 100,000 per year. This was a period when all four of the factors related to nation building were under stress in the face of partisan division and conflict in the United States, Roth said.

One key example was political instability. Roth said his research over the course of American history shows that the number of protests and riots that end in lethal violence – a significant measure of political instability – “correlates almost perfectly with the ups and downs of the rate of everyday homicides of unrelated adults.”

The recent rise in homicides coincided with a spate of deadly protests around the country, from the 2014 protests surrounding the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, through the 2016 Malheur Wildlife Refuge uprising in eastern Oregon; the 2017 white supremacist protest and counterprotest in Charlottesville, Virginia; the riots that followed the death of George Floyd in 2020; and the January 6, 2021, insurrection in Washington, D.C.

“Deadly riots and protests are symptoms of lost faith in the ability of government to protect our lives, property and basic rights, however we might define them,” Roth said.

Another example is the growing loss of faith in America’s social hierarchy, including the ability of our children to get ahead in society.

In the period 1999-2015, among families with parents in the bottom half of the U.S. income distribution, homicide rates increase threefold based on a comparison of counties with the highest rates of intergenerational mobility to those with the lowest rates of intergenerational mobility, Roth found.

When Americans feel they can’t get ahead in society, that leaves them feeling resentful, frustrated and powerless, which can lead to hostile and defensive emotions that result in violence and murder, he said.

Most recently, there have been reports that homicide rates dropped sharply last year.  According to provisional data from the CDC, the homicide rate fell from 7.8 per 100,000 in 2021 to 7.3 in 2022 and 6.7 in 2023: still more than a third higher than in 2014, but declining. Roth said that lines up with the fact that there haven’t been significant deadly protests or riots in the United States since the insurrection in Washington, D.C., in 2021. The fact that many of the rioters have been brought to justice may have restored some sense that the government is working to protect Americans, Roth said.

But these short-term improvements are not guaranteed to last. In the Guggenheim report, Roth said there are forces and factions in our society today – especially among elites – that are driving us toward political instability.

Some of the negative forces include “the flood of dark money bent on vilifying and sowing hatred against political leaders; radical gerrymandering; voter suppression; the spread of disinformation through social media; and cynical efforts to discredit the electoral process and overturn the results of free and fair elections,” he wrote.

But elites still hold the power to change things, Roth concluded.

“If they were to band together to confront the opportunity crisis for America’s poorer citizens and communities, unite in defending the country’s institutions and their legitimacy, and turn away from divisive rhetoric that vilifies their fellow Americans, it would go a long way toward forging a stronger nation and reducing the homicide rate in the United States.”

But a new study finds that the young scientists who most embrace interdisciplinary research face “career impediments” not seen in their peers who focus their work only within their own disciplines.

The results are troublesome and pose a “grave challenge” to efforts to increase interdisciplinary research, the authors of the new study write.

“As an economist, you would think that the most interdisciplinary young researchers would get the most rewards, because that is the type of research that is seen as most valuable. But that doesn’t appear to be the case,” said Bruce Weinberg, co-author of the study and professor of economics at The Ohio State University.

The study was published today (July 29, 2024) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Interdisciplinary research in biomedicine involves integrating knowledge from different subfields of biology, and brings in expertise from other disciplines, including physics, chemistry, computer science, engineering and social science.

For example, one recent study on how people’s thoughts can harm their neck and back during lifting tasks included researchers from engineering, anesthesiology and orthopedics.

In this new study, Weinberg and his colleagues analyzed data on 154,021 researchers who received a PhD in a biomedical field between 1970 and 2013. A second sample included data on more than 2.6 million research papers published between 1970 and 2018.

One goal was to compare the careers of researchers who focused on interdisciplinary research while they were graduate students and early in their careers with those who mostly stuck to research within their discipline.

Researchers who were initially the most interdisciplinary tended to stop publishing new research earlier in their careers. While half of the most interdisciplinary researchers (top 1%) stopped publishing by the eighth year of their careers, it took more than 20 years for moderately interdisciplinary researchers (in the 10-75% range) to do the same.

Perhaps in response to career pressures, initially interdisciplinary researchers on average decreased their research that spanned different fields over time, findings showed.

This study can’t say why these concerning trends are happening, Weinberg said. Universities know the importance of interdisciplinarity and indeed encourage it in many ways, including creating centers that revolve around research in many disciplines. But long-standing academic structures that are built around individual disciplines may hold back early-career researchers with more wide-ranging interests, he said.

It is an issue that is solvable and that universities are interested in fixing, he said.  It is a matter of redesigning systems that have been in place for many years.

Still, there were some encouraging findings in this study.

“We found that interdisciplinarity does increase over time despite these challenges,” Weinberg said.

“It turns out that researchers who were originally focused mostly on research just in their disciplines do become more interdisciplinary as their careers progress.”

It may be that once researchers’ careers are established, they have the freedom to explore other fields and begin to work more outside their discipline.

“But we are missing an opportunity by not encouraging the bright young minds who are already interested in working with scientists in other fields to solve society’s most difficult problems,” Weinberg said.

“We need to provide more incentives for these young researchers.”

Co-authors on the study were Enrico Berkes, a former postdoctoral researcher at Ohio State, now an assistant professor of economics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; and Monica Marion and Stasa Miljevic of Indiana University.

In their study, recently published in Nature Catalysis, researchers demonstrated that carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, can be converted into a type of liquid fuel called methanol in a highly efficient manner. 

This process happened by taking cobalt phthalocyanine (CoPc) molecules and spreading them evenly on carbon nanotubes, graphene-like tubes that have unique electrical properties. On their surface was an electrolyte solution, which, by running an electrical current through it, allowed CoPc molecules to take electrons and use them to turn carbon dioxide into methanol. 

Using a special method based on in-situ spectroscopy to visualize the chemical reaction, researchers for the first time saw those molecules convert themselves into either methanol or carbon monoxide, which is not the desired product. They found that which path the reaction takes is decided by the environment where the carbon dioxide molecule reacts.

Tuning this environment by controlling how the CoPc catalyst was distributed on the carbon nanotube surface allowed carbon dioxide to be as much as eight times more likely to produce methanol, a discovery that could increase the efficiency of other catalytic processes and have a widespread impact on other fields, said Robert Baker, co-author of the study and a professor in chemistry and biochemistry at The Ohio State University.  

“When you take carbon dioxide and convert it to another product, there are many different molecules you can make,” he said. “Methanol is definitely one of the most desirable because it has such a high energy density and can be used directly as an alternative fuel.” 

While transforming waste molecules into useful products isn’t a new phenomenon, until now, researchers have often been unable to watch how the reaction actually takes place, a crucial insight into being able to optimize and improve the process. 

“We might empirically optimize how something works, but we don’t really have an understanding of what makes it work, or what makes one catalyst work better than another catalyst,” said Baker, who specializes in surface chemistry, the study of how chemical reactions change when they occur on the face of different objects. “These are very difficult things to answer.”

But with the help of special techniques and computer modeling, the team has come significantly closer to grasping the complex process. In this study, researchers used a new type of vibrational spectroscopy, which allowed them to see how molecules behave on the surface, said Quansong Zhu, the lead author of the study and former Ohio State Presidential Scholar whose challenging measurements were vital to the discovery.

“We could tell by their vibrational signatures that it was the same molecule sitting in two different reaction environments,” said Zhu. “We were able to correlate that one of those reaction environments was responsible for producing methanol, which is valuable liquid fuel.” 

According to the study, deeper analysis also found these molecules were directly interacting with supercharged particles called cations that enhanced the process of methanol formation. 

More research is needed to learn more about what else these cations enable, but such a finding is key to achieving a more efficient way to create methanol, said Baker. 

“We’re seeing systems that are very important and learning things about them that have been wondered about for a long time,” said Baker. “Understanding the unique chemistry that happens at a molecular level is really important to enabling these applications.”

Besides being a low-cost fuel for vehicles like planes, cars and shipping boats, methanol produced from renewable electricity could also be utilized for heating and power generation, and to advance future chemical discoveries.

“There’s a lot of exciting things that can come next based on what we’ve learned here, and some of that we’re already starting to do together,” said Baker. “The work is ongoing.”

Co-authors include Conor L. Rooney and Hailiang Wang from Yale University, Hadar Shema and Elad Gross from Hebrew University, and Christina Zeng and Julien A. Panetier from Binghamton University. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation and the United States–Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF) International Collaboration. 

The study, recently published in the journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, suggests that the genetic variation of two species, the Brazilian sibilator frog and the granular toad, both amphibians native to northeastern Brazil, were shaped by different processes.  

Results showed that the genetic variation in the sibilator frog was shaped mostly by population demographic events in response to habitat changes that occurred over the last 100,000 years.   In contrast, genetic diversity in the granular toad was mostly shaped by contemporary landscape factors – toads that are relatively more isolated, either by geographic distance or inhospitable habitat, were more likely to be genetically different.

While previous investigations have explored the effects of historical demographic and landscape factors on genetic diversity of these amphibians, they were conducted with separate sets of data for these factors, making it difficult to discern which was the most important. Now, researchers involved with this paper are the first to use artificial intelligence to consider how both processes shape genetic diversity equally, rather than making manual assumptions about which may have been more vital. 

“Prior to this work, we had to ask questions independently because you couldn't investigate both influences in the same framework,” said Bryan Carstens, co-author of the study and a professor in evolution, ecology and organismal biology at The Ohio State University. “What AI allows us to do is to simulate processes that are both happening ecologically in the present and during deep-time evolutionary events and compare those findings to the actual data that we collect from these frogs.”   

Due to the sheer amount of data that’s become available to geneticists and other wildlife biologists over the past few decades, it can be challenging for researchers to identify specific factors that might be important in certain experiments, said Carstens. But by integrating large swaths of information into simulations that can account for those elements in a single analysis, it’s possible to get a much more complete chronicle of a species’ development. 

“It takes a long time to build and train our AI models, but we wanted one l that could capture the range of potential variation in the species’ histories in a way that was as faithful as we could be to what we knew about the biology of the system,” said Carstens. 

For example, while the species this study investigated dwell in the same region, there are many differences in their natural histories. Despite both their eggs and larvae being fully aquatic, the sibulator frog reproduces continuously throughout the wet season and in underground chambers, while the granular toad’s reproductive events happen explosively because they are dependent on heavy rainfall. 

Combined with their machine learning approach, the researchers’ simulation determined their model scenarios were 100% supported regarding historical explanations for the sibilator frog’s expansion, and over 99% supported for those of the granular toad. 

One of the reasons their model is so accurate is due to its ability to account for recent demographic events, including measuring how events like human development or habitat change may have affected animal genetic diversity over a long period of time. 

But even when using AI, researchers have to be careful to avoid deceptive patterns in their results, said Carstens. 

“No analysis that we do is going to capture every single factor that has been important to these species over millions of years,” he said. “So we have to allow for a range of possibilities without making it so broad that essentially any model would be able to fit the data.”

That said, as technological strides allow researchers to answer niche ecological questions and test new hypotheses, their work is a precursor to creating an upgraded machine learning framework that could be applied to unique investigations of other species, said Carstens. 

“We’re likely to continue using different combinations of these AI tools in different ways to try to understand evolutionary history,” said Carstens. “And as we keep learning, the tools we’re using will change, and they’ll evolve to be even better.”

Emanuel M. Fonseca, who earned his doctorate from Ohio State in 2022, was a co-author. The study was supported by the Ohio Supercomputer Center, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior in Brazil.

By combining local weather data with complex astrophysics simulations, researchers explored whether a device that typically detects high-energy particles called muons could be used to remotely measure tornado-producing supercell thunderstorms. 

Conventional tornado-tracking instrumentation relies on measurements made by technologies like drones or weather balloons, but those methods often require humans to get dangerously close to the path of an oncoming storm. 

Yet through studying how these storms affect muons, which are heavier than electrons and travel through matter at nearly the speed of light, these findings can act as another tool for scientists to gain a more accurate picture of underlying weather conditions. 

“The thing about atmospheric muons is that they’re sensitive to the properties of the atmosphere that they travel through,” said William Luszczak, lead author of the study and a fellow at the Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics at The Ohio State University. “If you have a group of muons that traveled through a thunderstorm, the amount you’re going to measure on the other side is different from a bundle of muons that traveled through a pretty day.”

The study was published on the open-access preprint server arXiv.

Compared to other cosmic particles, muons have many unique real-world applications, including helping scientists to peer inside large, dense objects like the pyramids or detecting hazardous nuclear material. Now, Luszczak’s simulations in this paper imply that supercell thunderstorms cause very slight changes in the number, direction and intensity of these particles. 

To determine this, the researchers applied a three-dimensional cloud model that could account for multiple variables, including wind, potential temperature, rain, snow and hail. Then, using atmospheric observations gathered from the 2011 supercell that passed through El Reno, Oklahoma, and spawned a tornado outbreak, Luszczak applied that information to measure variations in air pressure in the region around a simulated storm over the span of an hour. 

Overall, their results found that muons are indeed affected by the pressure field inside tornadoes, though more research is needed to learn more about the process.

In terms of how well it could work in the field, the concept is especially appealing, as utilizing muons to predict and analyze future weather patterns would also mean scientists wouldn’t necessarily have to try to place instruments very near a tornado to gain these pressure measurements, said Luszczak. 

Still, the type of muon particle detector that Luszczak’s paper considers is much smaller than other more well-known cosmic ray projects, such as the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina and the University of Utah’s Telescope Array. 

Unfortunately, these detectors don’t reside in places where they can study tornadoes, said Luszczak, but if placed in a region like Tornado Alley in the United States, researchers imagine that the device could easily complement typical meteorological and barometric measurements for tornadic activity. 

That said, the device’s size also influences how precise its measurements are, as scaling it up enhances the number of particles it can detect, said Luszczak. 

The smallest detector researchers describe in this paper is 50 meters across, or about the size of five buses. But while such a tool would be portable enough to ensure scientists could place it near many different types of storm systems, being so small would likely cause it to face some errors in its data-gathering, said Luszczak. 

Despite these potential setbacks, as supercell thunderstorms typically form and disappear in short periods, the paper emphasizes it may be well worth future scientists’ time to consider implementing a large detector in some regions – one that would likely be a permanent stationary establishment to catch as many muons as possible during severe weather events. 

More importantly, because current weather modeling systems are directly linked to when and where severe weather alerts are issued, using cosmic rays to strengthen those models would give the public a more detailed sense of a storm’s various twists and turns as well as more time to prepare for the phenomenon.  

“By having better measurements of the atmosphere surrounding a tornado, our modeling improves, which then improves the accuracy of our warnings,” said Luszczak. “This concept has a lot of promise, and it’s a really exciting idea to try to put into action.”

Leigh Orf of the University of Wisconsin-Madison was a co-author.  

But a new study suggests, surprisingly, that ambivalence can actually lead some people – especially those with polarized views – to be more supportive of extreme actions, such as violence.

The reason? Researchers found that ambivalence creates discomfort in those with extreme views by making them feel weak or insecure about their beliefs – and that can lead them to compensate for that weakness by supporting extreme actions to signal strength.

“When people have these polarized views on a political topic, but also feel some conflict about that belief – that is really a potent combination,” said study lead author Joseph Siev, who did the work as a doctoral student in psychology at The Ohio State University.

“That’s when they are most likely to support extreme actions in support of their view.”

Siev, who is now a postdoctoral fellow in consumer behavior at the University of Virginia, conducted the research with Richard Petty, professor of psychology at Ohio State.  Their study was published today (June 12, 2024) in the journal Science Advances.

Previous research has shown – and this study confirmed – that ambivalence about a political issue typically leads people to avoid taking moderate actions such as voting or donating money in support of that issue. It makes sense that people would be less likely to act on an issue if they have mixed feelings, Petty said.

And that’s why these findings for extreme behaviors surprised the researchers, he said.

“We thought that people with extreme views who were the most one-sided about their beliefs would be the ones who would most support extreme actions, but that didn’t turn out to be the case.”

The researchers did a series of studies on various political issues including abortion and COVID-19 mask mandates, which all had similar results. Those with strong but conflicted views were more likely than others to support extreme actions like getting opponents to their views fired from their jobs, even if they wouldn’t bother to take more moderate actions, like voting in support of their opinions.

One study showed this phenomenon could induce real support for extreme political groups. The researchers asked 250 online participants their views on environmentalism and how ambivalent they felt about those beliefs.

Participants were told that, after the study, that they would be offered the opportunity to win a $10 prize that they could share with real-life environmental organizations, some of which were radical (e.g., “Just Stop Oil”) and others more moderate (e.g., “The Sierra Club”).

Participants read statements adapted from the groups’ actual mission statements that made clear that they were either well outside or inside of the mainstream. For instance, one radical organization’s statement said its mission was “to use extreme tactics when necessary to defend Mother Earth.” Another’s said it would use “civil resistance and disobedience, direct action, vandalism, and traffic obstruction” to meet its goals. The mainstream groups were described in moderate terms.

Results showed that those who were most conflicted about their polarized environmental beliefs pledged to give more of their prize money to the extreme organizations. For the moderate organizations, those with extreme beliefs and ambivalent feelings were not any more likely than others to give money.

“This shows that the effect can have real-life consequences – those who are conflicted are more willing to give their money to extreme organizations,” Siev said.

Another study showed that the willingness to support extreme actions was the result of people feeling especially uncomfortable if they were ambivalent about their extreme views.

“Those who have these extreme views, but still feel conflicted about them, feel a need to prove themselves, to show that their beliefs are real and strong,” Petty said.

It is similar to people who have fragile self-esteem, Petty said. Those who think they’re great but feel conflicted about that belief have a desire to prove their worth.  A boss who has fragile self-esteem is more likely than one with secure self-esteem to take an extreme action to show his or her strength, like firing an employee who makes a challenge.

The study didn’t examine the cause of ambivalence among some with radical beliefs, but Petty said there are several possibilities. Some people may have extreme views on an issue, but feel conflicted because many of their friends or family have opposite views.  Or they may strongly support a politician, but feel negatively about some of his views or public actions.

These findings are especially important now in the United States, with political polarization at such high levels, Siev said.

“This research contributes to our understanding of how psychological factors can make political extremism attractive,” Siev said.

“Our hope is that this understanding can help us develop anti-extremism interventions.”