Researcher Adam Levin combined his experience in therapeutic psychedelics research and psychiatric training with a review of imaging, numerous studies and previous models to support his proposal, published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. 

In this context, Levin emphasizes not what the two brain hemispheres do, but how they approach a topic or task – working in parallel, with left-brain dominance, during typical modes of consciousness. 

When we’re solving a problem, or, evolutionarily speaking, hunting for food, for example, the scope of attention differs: The left hemisphere focuses on manipulation of individual parts while the right hemisphere maintains a big-picture frame of reference. 

“In the psychedelic state, there’s a unique combination of the hemispheres coming together in a way that doesn’t usually happen in normal states of consciousness,” said Levin, a postdoctoral scholar and psychiatrist in the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education in The Ohio State University College of Social Work. “It’s almost a new encounter between the left and the right hemispheres’ way of thinking and perceiving the world.” 

He calls this model of psychedelic action HEALS: Hemispheric Annealing and Lateralization Under Psychedelics. In effect, he suggests, psychedelics reverse the hierarchical relationship between the two hemispheres of the brain, releasing the right hemisphere from inhibition by the left. 

Levin was initially inspired in part by the writings of Iain McGilchrist, author of “The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.” But his own clinical experience as a medical student and psychiatry resident gave Levin an up-close look at how disorders affecting one side of the brain or the other affected patients’ world view. 

“In people who lose the right hemisphere to stroke, the attentional window gets so narrow and they don’t even recognize a whole half of the world. Whereas people with an intact right hemisphere, who lose their left hemisphere, still have a broader general picture of things,” he said. “A lot of these people’s experiences seem, to me, to be similar to what I’m seeing in my psychedelic research.” 

Previous hypotheses about psychedelics’ effects on the brain have suggested “unrestrained cognition” occurs through the weakening of control exerted by frontal lobes and the top of the brain. 

While that is likely true, Levin said, patterns observed in people’s reports of their psychedelic experiences suggest there’s more going on: There are increases in psychological flexibility, creativity, and social and emotional intelligence; greater empathy, harmony and connection; a broader attentional window toward novelty and “aliveness”; and clarity and insight about one’s basic existence and, in some cases, need for healing. 

“Those general patterns are awfully similar to the pattern of the right hemisphere,” he said. “And I think psychedelics provide access to this whole picture, this whole view, that could have been operating in the background – and that’s this right hemisphere view. Restoration of this natural balance is an interesting way of explaining some of what’s happening.” 

Neuroimaging studies of lateral changes to brain blood flow and metabolism – brain regions’ use of glucose – that Levin analyzed showed signs of heavy activity in the frontal lobes in the right hemisphere as well as an overall rightward shift in metabolic activity under psychedelics, he said. 

The growing evidence that mindfulness meditation practice is linked to building new networks in the brain and increasing brain thickness in the right hemisphere is relevant to the HEALS theory, as well. 

“Psychedelics have been linked to improvements in mindfulness with just one or two uses. And sometimes these capacities are almost at levels consistent with practiced meditators,” Levin said. “That makes it likely, to me, that many core right-sided networks that are enhanced with practicing meditation might be enhanced briefly, or maybe longer, through psychedelics. 

“I think there’s an opportunity after the use of psychedelics to increase and sustain mindfulness capacities in these areas of the right hemisphere.” 

The field of psychedelic research is focused on therapeutic applications at Ohio State and elsewhere, but Levin expects that expansion of the field will stimulate pursuit of other research questions – including testing theories about how these substances act on the brain. 

He considers HEALS a complement to earlier theories about psychedelic action, and expects the growth in research to produce more hypotheses. 

“I think to explain something as complex as the brain, especially in the human being, you need a variety of theories to more closely approximate what’s actually happening,” he said. “If we get too fixated on one explanation or the other, we’re going to lose track of reality.”

In mouse experiments, scientists introduced a specific type of recombinant protein to the site of a spinal cord injury where these cells, called pericytes, had flooded the lesion zone. Once exposed to this protein, results showed, pericytes change shape and inhibit the production of some molecules while secreting others, creating “cellular bridges” that support regeneration of axons – the long, slender extensions of nerve cell bodies that transmit messages. 

Researchers observed axon regrowth in injured mice that received a single treatment injection of the growth-factor protein, and the animals also regained movement in their hind limbs. An experiment involving human cells suggests the results are not restricted to mice. 

“There’s a lot more that can be learned and a lot that can be expanded, but the more we worked on this, the more stunned we really were by the potency of this single treatment and how effective it was,” said senior study author Andrea Tedeschi, associate professor of neuroscience in The Ohio State University College of Medicine. “This finding goes beyond spinal cord injury – it has implications in brain injury and stroke, and neurodegenerative diseases as well.” 

The work underscores how important blood vessel restoration is to recovery of neurological function after a spinal cord injury, researchers said. 

“Spinal cord injuries are severe not only because they prevent transmission of information across the site of the injury, but because all of the vasculature structure and function is also compromised,” said first study author Wenjing Sun, assistant professor of neuroscience at Ohio State. “Even if you are able to reestablish neuronal connectivity from one end to the other, the overall effect will still not be maximized unless you take care of everything else that falls apart.” 

The study was published April 18 in the journal Molecular Therapy. 

Previous research suggesting pericytes interfere with spinal cord injury recovery had led some scientists to recommend clearing them from the lesion site to aid repair. But cancer research has indicated pericytes’ properties change when they’re exposed to a protein called platelet-derived growth factor BB (PDGF-BB) – which is one way tumors generate their own blood supply. In cancer, the aim is to block PDGF-BB signaling. 

Earlier neuroscience research also indicated that pericytes are highly “plastic,” meaning they are very responsive to changes in the microenvironment – including the presence of PDGF-BB. Tedeschi and colleagues saw potential to harness that cell-protein relationship to stabilize the vasculature surrounding a spinal cord injury. In the process, they found the newly sprouted blood vessels established a pathway for regenerated axons to follow. 

Starting with imaging studies, the team showed that when a spinal cord is severed, pericytes migrate into the injury site over time but don’t promote growth of functional blood vessels that are needed to support axon regeneration. 

In cell-culture experiments, the researchers established a “carpet” of pericytes, added PDGF-BB, and then placed a layer of adult mouse sensory neurons on top and evaluated how much axons grew in 24 hours. The treated axons grew nearly as much as healthy axons extend under normal conditions. 

PDGF-BB alone did not produce this result. Instead, experiments showed that pericytes combined with the growth factor rearranged fibronectin, a multifunctional adhesive glycoprotein that plays a critical role in tissue repair, cell attachment and motility. The cells themselves also change shape, becoming more elongated. 

“We know these cells are going to infiltrate and deposit at the lesion epicenter. These elongated fiber structures that they become are far more permissive in promoting axons to regenerate from one end to the other and bypass the injury,” Tedeschi said. 

“To extend the clinical relevance of our findings, we cultured mouse neurons on top of human pericytes that were exposed to PDGF-BB, and that was sufficient to trigger a growth-promoting effect, suggesting that this might really be a generalized phenomenon that is not restricted to mice.” 

Turning to experiments in animals with spinal cord injury, researchers waited for seven days after the injury – the equivalent of about nine months in a human adult – before injecting a single dose of PDGF-BB at the injury site. Analysis of tissue four weeks after the injury showed that the PDGF-BB injection produced robust axon regenerative growth compared to the axon response in injured control mice. 

“When we looked at formation of these pericyte structures that crossed the injury site, we saw the treatment promoted the growth of these bridges. And most if not all of these regenerating axons were able to escape the injury site by riding these cellular bridges that have formed in response to PDGF-BB administration,” Sun said. 

Electrophysiological and movement assessments of injured animals treated with PDGF-BB detected sensory activity beyond the lesion site and showed the mice regained better control of their hind limbs compared to control mice. The animals also were less sensitive to a non-painful stimulus, suggesting they did not experience the neuropathic pain that is often triggered by a spinal cord injury. 

Analysis of the presence of inflammatory proteins during the repair process suggested that PDGF-BB administration not only promotes axon regeneration, but also reduces inflammation. RNA sequencing showed that spinal cord injury led to decreased gene expression by pericytes, but that the cells retained their core properties and did not convert into a different kind of cell – for example, a cell type that could end up being destructive to the injury environment. 

“There was a decrease in some classical pericyte markers, but a gain of some additional function linked to the attempt to rebuild cellular bridges and functional vessels,” Sun said. “From the overall gene signature in our data, they’re still classified as a pericyte.” 

Because Tedeschi, Sun and colleagues have previously shown in mice that gabapentin promotes regeneration of neural circuits after spinal cord injury, there’s potential to consider a multipronged approach to therapy, Sun said. 

“We could combine both – modulating intrinsic properties of adult neurons with a drug, and what we are doing here, modulating the non-neuronal environment to produce cellular interactions that provide a more permissive substrate for the neuron to grow on,” she said. 

More work is planned to determine the precise timing for administration of PDGF-BB – with the presumption that pericytes take some time to migrate to the injury – as well as the ideal concentration of the treatment and a potential time-released delivery system. 

This research was supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and Ohio State’s Chronic Brain Injury Program. 

Additional co-authors were Elliot Dion, Fabio Laredo, Allyson Okonak, Jesse Sepeda, Esraa Haykal, Min Zhou, Heithem El-Hodiri, Andy Fischer, Juan Peng and Andrew Sas, all of Ohio State, and Jerry Silver of Case Western Reserve University.

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.

Researchers at The Ohio State University conducted a study of how different life insurance product types were related to whether households had adequate financial resources if an income earner died.

They didn’t compare permanent and term life insurance directly, but they calculated how likely households with different life insurance products were financially prepared compared to those with no insurance.

The result? Households with both term and permanent life insurance policies were most likely to be ready for income loss after an unexpected death, when compared to those with no insurance.

“There’s a lot of debate in the financial adviser community on whether permanent life insurance or term life insurance is the best tool to protect consumers,” said study co-author Eric Olsen, who did the work while earning his PhD in family resource management at Ohio State.

“Our study suggests having both of them might be ideal for many people.”

Co-author Cäzilia Loibl, professor and chair of consumer sciences at Ohio State, said the results show the value of each type of life insurance product.

“The discussion is often one versus the other, but they have some different purposes and can work well together,” Loibl said.

The most concerning finding was that 56% of the sample did not have adequate financial resources – from insurance or other sources – to deal with the loss of an income earner, Olsen said.

“We need to examine how we can motivate families to build the resources they need to protect themselves in case of the death of an income earner,” he said. “Way too many people aren’t prepared.”

The study was published online recently in the journal Financial Planning Review. The research was led by Youngwon Nam, who did the work while earning her PhD at Ohio State, and who is now an associate professor of consumer science at Seoul National University in Korea. Robert Scharff, professor of consumer sciences at Ohio State, was also a co-author.

Consumers are often confused about differences between term and permanent life insurance, the researchers said. Term life insurance is often cheaper and covers people for a set period of time. Permanent life insurance (also known as cash value life insurance), which includes whole life, universal life and variable life, among others, is more expensive, but lasts for a whole lifetime and includes an investment component.

The researchers used data from the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances, conducted by the Federal Reserve Board. This study only included households with more than one person, with at least one being employed full-time. The final sample was 1,818 households.

In this sample, 54% had term life insurance, 8% had permanent life insurance, and 10% had both.

The study was designed to examine financial adequacy: the ability of households to replace the income lost if an income earner died.  Researchers measured financial adequacy three different ways.

Households had life insurance adequacy if their life insurance payout alone could replace lost income; net financial assets adequacy meant assets like savings, stocks, and retirement accounts (minus liabilities) plus life insurance payout could replace income; and net worth adequacy included financial assets and non-financial assets, such as houses and property, (minus liabilities) plus life insurance payout.

The findings showed 11% of the sample had financial adequacy with life insurance alone, 17% had net financial asset adequacy and 16% had net worth adequacy.

So how did the different types of life insurance products compare in helping achieve financial adequacy?

In one analysis, the researchers examined the financial adequacy of households under the net financial asset adequacy scenario.

In this case, households that had both term and permanent life insurance had a 5.58 times higher likelihood of being financially prepared for the death of an income earner than a household with no life insurance.

A household with only term life insurance had a 3.95 times higher likelihood of financial adequacy, and a household with only permanent life insurance had a 3.01 times higher likelihood of financial adequacy.

The results were similar when the researchers looked at how prepared households were under the life insurance adequacy and net worth adequacy scenarios.

Overall, the findings make clear that people need to check to make sure that they have enough life insurance coverage, because most don’t, Loibl said.

And while any kind of insurance is better than none, this study suggests having both term and permanent life insurance may be a strong option for many.

“What kind of life insurance you have does matter in the long term and people need to determine what is best for their situation,” she said.

A new study suggests that perceived stress and depression factor into the relationship between the two conditions – perhaps not a surprise. But because the relationship between insomnia and heavy drinking goes in both directions, the influence of stress or depression depends on which condition came first, the analysis found. 

“We were most interested in how insomnia leads to drinking, and we found that seems to occur primarily through stress. But when we switched pathways, it appeared that drinking primarily led to insomnia through depression,” said Jessica Weafer, senior author of the study and associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral health in The Ohio State University College of Medicine. 

“Identifying these types of mediating factors can have important treatment implications,” she said. “If people who have insomnia are experiencing a lot of stress, then if we can target the stress, that might reduce the likelihood that their insomnia would lead to heavy drinking. That’s the long-term ideal, or hope, that this work could have an impact on treatment.” 

The study was published recently in the journal Alcohol. 

Insomnia and hazardous drinking can cause upheaval in one’s life: Both are associated with missed work and lower productivity on the job. Chronic insomnia can increase the risk for cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s and other chronic illnesses. A defining characteristic of alcohol use disorder (AUD) is continuing to drink even when encountering interpersonal problems, getting sick or hurt, or driving while intoxicated. 

Weafer has expanded her research focus on risks for problem drinking to address the fact that poor sleep can lead to increased drinking and those with AUD commonly have difficulty with sleep. 

“The number of people with AUD who also have insomnia is very, very high. It’s striking, and important,” she said. 

Participants in this study were part of a larger project testing the effectiveness of a digital insomnia intervention for people with poor sleep who are heavy drinkers. A total of 405 volunteers completed questionnaires assessing insomnia severity, current and historic drinking behaviors, perceived stress and depression symptoms. 

Stress and depression often overlap, but are distinct – the stress scale measures the degree to which situations in life are perceived as stressful, and the depression scale measures behaviors and feelings related to hope, fear, happiness and loneliness. 

Previous research has suggested that stress or depression, or both, contribute to troubled sleep or heavy drinking, said first study author Justin Verlinden, a cognitive neuroscience PhD student at the University of Kentucky. 

“There are so many different pathways that could explain insomnia and alcohol use. We wanted to connect the dots and see if there’s anything there,” he said. 

Analyzing the data with a range of statistical models revealed the many ways stress and depression influence the relationship between insomnia and hazardous drinking. 

“If you look at stress and depression separately, we find there is an indirect relationship between insomnia and drinking as well as drinking and insomnia – meaning a good chunk of the relationship between insomnia and drinking can be explained through perceived stress or depression,” Verlinden said. 

“When you put both stress and depression in the same models, that’s where we get unique findings, even though there are a lot of shared characteristics between stress and depression.” 

A model of insomnia predicting heavy use of alcohol showed that the characteristics of stress – beyond any symptoms shared with depression – better described this relationship. In a model reversing the order, where drinking predicts the onset of insomnia, symptoms of depression that aren’t shared with stress better explain the link. 

“That finding was very surprising, but showed the benefit of looking at both stress and depression in the same model, to see how those pathways might differ depending on what the directionality is,” Weafer said. 

Both stress and depression are described as partial indirect paths – meaning there are any number of other factors that could help explain the connection between bad sleep and problem drinking, the researchers said. 

The findings represent a snapshot rather than explaining the progression of how insomnia and heavy drinking become linked over time, and where depression and stress fit into that evolving relationship, Weafer said. The team is collecting a final dataset that will enable the researchers to trace insomnia, stress and depression over the course of 12 months to get a better idea of the connected pathways. 

The researchers are also testing the effectiveness of a digital version of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia called SHUTi (Sleep Healthy Using the internet) in heavy drinkers. Their December 2023 pilot study showed that SHUTi was effective at reducing insomnia in heavy drinkers – even without an emphasis on curbing alcohol use. 

This research was supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the University of Kentucky. 

Additional co-authors include Mairead Moloney of the University of Miami and Olga Vsevolozhskaya and Lauren Whitehurst of the University of Kentucky.

A federally funded project aims to help pin down the process by using mathematical models to analyze how factors like temperature, light pollution, and bird and mosquito abundance affect West Nile virus transmission. The ultimate goal is to advise health departments of the best time of year to kill the bugs. 

“I’m hopeful that what we will uncover in this grant will help us to better understand what’s driving West Nile virus transmission, and seasonal cycles of transmission, so we can determine when and where to direct control interventions to limit transmission and keep people healthy,” said Megan Meuti, principal investigator (PI) on the grant and associate professor of entomology at The Ohio State University. 

The project, based on Ohio data but structured to develop models adaptable to other U.S. regions, is funded by a $3 million grant from the Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Disease program through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. 

Co-PIs on the grant are Laura Pomeroy, assistant professor of environmental health sciences at Ohio State, who is building the mathematical models; Jaqueline Nolting, assistant professor of veterinary preventive medicine at Ohio State, who is analyzing biological samples from captured birds; and Brendan Shirkey, research coordinator for the Winous Point Marsh Conservancy, who is overseeing collection of birds and mosquitoes. Andrew Bowman, professor of veterinary preventive medicine, serves as senior personnel, designing experiments and assisting with data analysis. 

West Nile virus (WNV) is the most common insect-borne virus in the U.S. Most infected people have minimal or mild flu-like symptoms, but about 1% can become seriously ill – especially those over 60 or people with chronic health problems – if the virus enters the brain. 

Previous research gives us a general idea of how and when viral transmission occurs: As days get shorter, female mosquitoes from the Culex genus, known carriers of WNV, prepare for the winter dormancy period called diapause by fattening up on nectar from flowers – though they may take a viral infection they caught from birds with them into their winter downtime. After mosquitoes emerge from diapause in warmer months, more of them may become infected by taking blood meals from infected birds, and then transmit the virus when they feed on people, horses and other mammals. 

Among the questions asked by Meuti’s team: How does viral transmission re-initiate each spring, and how does the virus’s presence persist in the environment during fall and winter? 

The dormancy period appears to be delayed – or even prevented – by artificial light at night and heat in urban areas, according to previous studies in Meuti’s lab in the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences. That disruption may mean the mosquitoes in cities are biting humans and animals longer into the fall, and also suggests urban and rural transmission patterns may differ. 

“We know humans tend to get infected in the late summer and early fall, and other studies have shown that birds are infected before then, but we don’t really know where West Nile virus is going in the winter,” Meuti said. 

The grant team started collecting mosquitoes and birds last fall and will continuously collect specimens for three years. Urban collection sites are located in Franklin and Lucas counties, and rural sites are in Union and Ottawa counties. 

Bird trapping focuses on nine species known to be bitten by Culex mosquitoes: American robins, mourning doves, Northern cardinals, house sparrows, common grackles, European starlings, gray catbirds, Swainson’s thrushes and red-winged blackbirds. Researchers tag and release captured birds after collecting blood samples that will show their infection status – never infected, active WNV infection, or antibodies indicating they’ve been infected and recovered. 

During the winter, researchers are collecting mosquitoes spending diapause in culverts to see if they’re already infected with the virus. Analysis of the blood contents in mosquitoes’ bellies will tell researchers what animals they’ve been biting – birds, horses or humans. Researchers will also sequence the RNA of the virus detected in mosquitoes. 

The data and modeling will enable the team to test their hypotheses about how the transmission process plays out in rural and urban settings. In general, researchers predict mosquitoes are more likely to be infected with WNV over the winter in urban areas than in rural areas, suggesting that in rural areas, migratory birds are infecting mosquitoes, or the virus is spilling over from urban settings – or both. 

“If RNA sequences are very similar from fall to spring, that would suggest the virus is staying local and, most likely, the way it’s staying local would be in the overwintering mosquitoes. But if we see differences in sequences from fall to spring, that would be more suggestive that it is a new WNV strain or a slightly different strain coming from migratory birds,” Meuti said. 

“Once we have the models in place, we can predict what West Nile virus transmission might look like in a given year. And in partnership with local health departments and mosquito control districts, our ultimate goal is to understand what’s driving West Nile virus transmission and use this information to better predict when and where we can direct specific interventions.”

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.

Created through a combination of soft chemistry gels and electrospinning — a technique where electrical force is applied to liquid to craft small fibers — the team constructed thin fiber-like strips of titanium dioxide (TiO₂), a compound often utilized in solar cells, gas sensors and various self-cleaning technologies. 

Despite being a great alternative energy source, solar fuel systems that utilize TiO₂ nanoparticles are often power-limited because they can only undergo photocatalysis, or create chemical reactions, by absorbing non-visible UV light. This can cause significant challenges to implementation, including low efficiency and the need for complex filtration systems. 

Yet when researchers added copper to the material to improve this process, their new structures, called nanomats, were able to absorb enough light energy to break down harmful pollutants in air and water, said Pelagia-Iren Gouma, lead author of the study and a professor of materials science and engineering at The Ohio State University.

“There hasn’t been an easy way to create something like a blanket that you can lay on water and start creating energy,” she said. “But we are the only ones who have made these structures and the only ones to demonstrate that they actually work.”

The study was recently published in the journal Advanced Science.

When titanium dioxide absorbs light, electrons are formed that oxidize water and attack pollutants, slowly destroying them until they become benign. When copper is added, that process is supercharged, making it even more effective. 

To determine this, researchers worked to characterize the nanomat’s updated properties to understand how it behaved and what made it different from other self-cleaning nanoparticles, said Gouma. Surprisingly, researchers found that compared to traditional solar cells, these nanomats can be more successful at power generation when placed under natural sunlight, she said.

“These nanomats can be used as a power generator, or as water remediation tools,” she said. “In both ways, you have a catalyst with the highest efficiency reported to date.”

These lightweight, easy-to-remove fiber mats can float and operate atop any body of water and are even reusable through multiple cleaning cycles. Because nanomats are so effective, researchers envision that they could be used to rid water of industrial pollutants in developing countries, turning otherwise contaminated rivers and lakes into sources of clean drinking water. 

Additionally, because this technology doesn’t generate any toxic byproducts like some solar cell systems, nanomats are extremely environmentally friendly. “It’s a safe material, it won’t hurt anything, and it’s as clean as it can be,” said Gouma. 

Still, although this team’s technology is incredibly efficient, how long it will take to scale up commercially depends on how quickly industries take notice of the product. “We have the tools to make them in large quantities and translate them to various industries,” said Gouma. “The only limitation is that it needs someone to take advantage of these abundant resources.”

Overall, the study’s findings suggest that nanomats could be a promising tool in many future photocatalytic applications, including long-term sustainability efforts like environmental remediation as well as solar-driven hydrogen production. 

In the meantime, the team plans to examine ways to optimize the material further. 

“This material is completely novel in terms of a new form of nanotechnology,” said Gouma. “It’s really impressive and something that we are very excited about.”

Other Ohio State co-authors include Fateh Mikaeilia and Mohammad Mahafuzur Rahaman. This study was supported by the National Science Foundation. 

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.

New results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration, one of the most extensive surveys of the cosmos ever conducted, reveal that the impact of dark energy may be weakening over time — and the standard model of how the universe works may need an update. 

This recent finding uses data from the first three years of observations and includes nearly 15 million galaxies and quasars, more than doubling the dataset used in DESI’s first analysis, which was presented less than one year ago. It’s a major leap forward, improving the experiment’s precision with a dataset that is more than double what was used in DESI’s first analysis which also hinted at an evolving dark energy.

“Our results are truly remarkable,” said Klaus Honscheid, lead scientist of DESI instrument operations and a physics professor at The Ohio State University. “We are seeing even stronger evidence for a fundamental shift in how we think about dark energy.” 

DESI is an international experiment with more than 900 researchers from over 70 institutions around the world and is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Ohio State has been a core member of the DESI collaboration for over a decade and includes 12 researchers actively working on the collection and analysis of DESI data. 

The collaboration shared their findings today in multiple papers that will be posted online and later in a presentation at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, California. 

Taken alone, DESI’s data is consistent with our standard model of the universe. However, when paired with other measurements, there are mounting indications that the impact of dark energy may be weakening over time and other models may be a better fit. Those other measurements include the light left over from the dawn of the universe; supernovae, or exploding stars; and how light from distant galaxies is warped by gravity.

“These measurements show some evidence that the standard model of cosmology is not the best explanation,” said Ashley Ross, lead scientist for the DESI large-scale structure catalogs and a research professor of physics at Ohio State. “We now have multiple datasets that are pointing in this direction, which strengthens our confidence in our results.”    

While DESI’s previous release initially showed a preference for dynamical dark energy, many researchers thought a statistical fluke was a more likely explanation than a major discovery, said Paul Martini, one of the coordinators of the current analysis and a professor of astronomy at Ohio State. “Yet the evidence for dynamical dark energy has gotten stronger with more data, and it has passed new and tougher tests, so we are more confident and more excited.” 

In parallel to the DESI analysis, work is going on to plan the next phases of DESI that will follow at the end of the decade as well as for even more powerful instruments that will be built in the future. Besides DESI, other experiments coming online over the next several years will also provide complementary datasets for future analyses. 

The DESI collaboration also recently announced that its Data Release 1 (DR1) is now available for anyone to explore. With information on millions of celestial objects, the dataset will support a wide range of astrophysical research by others, in addition to DESI’s cosmology goals.

The discovery of dark energy, nearly 30 years ago, was already the biggest surprise of my scientific lifetime,” said David Weinberg, a professor of astronomy at Ohio State who also contributed to the DESI analysis. “These new measurements offer the strongest evidence so far that dark energy evolves, which would be another mind-blowing change to our understanding of how the universe works.” 

DESI is supported by the DOE Office of Science and by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science national user facility. Additional support for DESI is provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation; the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom; the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; the Heising-Simons Foundation; the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA); the National Council of Humanities, Sciences, and Technologies of Mexico; the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain; and by the DESI member institutions. 

Other Ohio State members of the collaboration include Mikel Charles, Xinyi Chen, Meagan Herbold, Naim Karacayli, Peter Taylor, Wynne Turner, Molly Wolfson and Erik Zaborowski. The DESI collaboration is honored to be permitted to conduct scientific research on I’oligam Du’ag (Kitt Peak), a mountain with particular significance to the Tohono O’odham Nation. 

Researchers fed separate groups of young and old rats the high-fat diet for three days or for three months to compare how quickly changes happen in the brain versus the rest of the body when eating an unhealthy diet. 

As expected based on previous diabetes and obesity research, eating fatty foods for three months led to metabolic problems, gut inflammation and dramatic shifts in gut bacteria in all rats compared to those that ate normal chow, while just three days of high fat caused no major metabolic or gut changes.

When it came to changes in the brain, however, researchers found that only older rats – whether they were on the high-fat diet for three months or only three days – performed poorly on memory tests and showed negative inflammatory changes in the brain. 

The results dispel the idea that diet-related inflammation in the aging brain is driven by obesity, said senior study author Ruth Barrientos, an investigator in the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research at The Ohio State University. Most research on the effects of fatty and processed foods on the brain has focused on obesity, yet the impact of unhealthy eating, independent of obesity, remains largely unexplored. 

“Unhealthy diets and obesity are linked, but they are not inseparable. We’re really looking for the effects of the diet directly on the brain. And we showed that within three days, long before obesity sets in, tremendous neuroinflammatory shifts are occurring,” said Barrientos, also an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral health and neuroscience in Ohio State’s College of Medicine.  

“Changes in the body in all animals are happening more slowly and aren’t actually necessary to cause the memory impairments and changes in the brain. We never would have known that brain inflammation is the primary cause of high-fat diet-induced memory impairments without comparing the two timelines.” 

The research was published recently in the journal Immunity & Ageing. 

Years of research in Barrientos’ lab has suggested that aging brings on long-term “priming” of the brain’s inflammatory profile coupled with a loss of brain-cell reserve to bounce back, and that an unhealthy diet can make matters worse for the brain in older adults. 

Fat constitutes 60% of calories in the high-fat diet used in the study, which could equate to a range of common fast-food options: For example, nutrition data shows that fat makes up about 60% of calories in a McDonald’s double smoky BLT quarter pounder with cheese or a Burger King double whopper with cheese. 

After the animals were on high-fat diets for three days or three months, researchers ran tests assessing two types of memory problems common in older people with dementia that are based in separate regions of the brain: contextual memory mediated by the hippocampus (the primary memory center of the brain), and cued-fear memory that originates in the amygdala (the fear and danger center of the brain). 

Compared to control animals eating chow and young rats on the high-fat diet, aged rats showed behaviors indicating both types of memory were impaired after only three days of fatty food – and the behaviors persisted as they continued on the high-fat diet for three months. 

Researchers also saw changes in levels of a range of proteins called cytokines in the brains of aged rats after three days of fatty food, which signaled a dysregulated inflammatory response. Three months after being on the high-fat diet, some of the cytokine levels had shifted but remained dysregulated, and the cognitive problems persisted in behavior tests. 

“A departure from baseline inflammatory markers is a negative response and has been shown to impair learning and memory functions,” Barrientos said. 

Compared to rats eating normal chow, young and old animals gained more weight and showed signs of metabolic dysfunction – poor insulin and blood sugar control, inflammatory proteins in fat (adipose) tissue, and gut microbiome alterations – after three months on the high-fat diet. Young rats’ memory and behavior and brain tissue remained unaffected by the fatty food. 

“These diets lead to obesity-related changes in both young and old animals, yet young animals appear more resilient to the high-fat diet’s effects on memory. We think it is likely due to their ability to activate compensatory anti-inflammatory responses, which the aged animals lack,” Barrientos said. 

“Also, with glucose, insulin and adipose inflammation all increased in both young and old animals, there’s no way to distinguish what is causing memory impairment in only old animals if you look only at what’s happening in the body. It’s what is happening in the brain that’s important for the memory response.” 

This work was supported by grants from the National Institute on Aging. 

Co-authors include Michael Butler, Stephanie Muscat, Brigitte González Olmo, Sabrina Mackey-Alfonso, Nashali Massa, Bryan Alvarez, Jade Blackwell, Menaz Bettes and James DeMarsh of Ohio State; and Maria Elisa Caetano-Silva, Akriti Shrestha, Robert McCusker and Jacob Allen of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The Ohio State University study’s results provide new information about the timing of accretion – the process of accumulating a large amount of gas as well as solid particles that are rich in carbon and oxygen to make large planets, like Jupiter.

Planets are formed from protoplanetary disks, spinning clouds of dust and gas that are the perfect ingredients for planet formation. This new study suggests the accretion takes place early, when disks are massive and much younger than researchers previously believed.

While the number of newly confirmed exoplanets has continued to grow, the origins of these worlds and the factors that impact their formation is a puzzle scientists are still aiming to solve. Jupiter-like exoplanets, for instance, were initially thought to take nearly 3 to 5 million years to fully form; recent observations now suggest that for a gas giant like Jupiter, this process is likely closer to about 1 to 2 million years. 

This discovery challenges researchers’ existing theories regarding at what “age” of the protoplanetary disks these planets were formed, said Ji Wang, author of the study and an assistant professor in astronomy at Ohio State. The results could lead scientists to re-evaluate and revamp their theories of planet formation for the solar system and elsewhere. 

“Everything we know about exoplanets can be put in the context of the solar system and vice versa,” said Wang. “Usually planet formation is a bottom-up scheme, meaning it starts with small objects that build up to form a bigger planet, but that way takes time.”

Though exoplanets refer to planetary objects that orbit far beyond the confines of our solar system, understanding more about how they form could help researchers gain more insight into the evolution of the solar system and early Earth, whose formation was much later than Jupiter’s, but was still greatly impacted by it.

The “‘bottom-up” interpretation of planetary formation is called the “core accretion theory,” but another possible formation mechanism is when planets are formed through gravitational instability – when the clumps in a disk around a star are too massive to support themselves and collapse to form planets. Because a planet’s accretion history could be closely linked to these two compelling yet complementary formation mechanisms of evolution, Wang said, it’s important to determine which process is more often the case. 

The study was recently published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The study analyzed a sample of seven gas giant exoplanets whose stellar and planetary chemical properties had already been directly measured by previous studies and compared them to data on the gas giants in our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn.

Wang showed that the early formation of these exoplanets is consistent with recent evidence that Jupiter formed much earlier than previously thought. This finding is based on the surprisingly high amount of solids these exoplanets accreted.  

All the materials accreted at the beginning of a planet’s formation increase the metallicity of its atmosphere, and by observing the traces they leave behind, researchers are able to measure the amount of solids the planet once gathered. 

The higher the metallicity, the more solids and metals – anything on the periodic table more massive than hydrogen and helium – scientists can assume were accreted during the formation process, said Wang. 

“We can infer that on average, every one of the five planets sampled accreted the equivalent of 50 Earth masses worth of solids,” he said. “Such a large amount of solids can only be found when a system is younger than 2 million years, but in our solar system, the total solids available is only on the order of 30 to 50 Earth masses worth.” 

This new data implies that the building blocks used to form the exoplanets were available at an earlier stage of the protoplanetary disk’s evolution than once expected and their availability of these building blocks greatly decreased over a span of millions of years. Because scientists usually don’t expect to find proof that planets formed that early, it’s a finding that current theories will likely struggle to reconcile, Wang said. 

“These exoplanets formed so early that there was still a large reservoir of metals available,” said Wang. “This is something that the scientific community was not fully prepared for so now they’ll have to scramble to come up with new theories to explain it.” 

Because gas giants pull in huge amounts of matter during accretion, their formation and migration through space also affects the development of rocky planets elsewhere in a protoplanetary disk. In the solar system, this phenomenon is believed to have caused Jupiter and Saturn to push Mercury out of its original orbit, and caused Mars to become much smaller than the Earth or Venus. 

That said, to aid astronomers looking to do similar planetary formation analyses in the future, the work also provides a statistical framework for inferring the total mass of solid accretion for any other exoplanet, which the study notes can be an ideal tool for investigating other kinds of complex elemental data as well. 

And while this research relied purely on archival data, Wang expects his work to be further complemented with new high-resolution data collected by better instruments, such as more powerful ground-based astronomical observatories or next-generation technologies like the James Webb Space Telescope. 

“By expanding this work with a larger sample of exoplanets, we hope to see the trend of evidence found in this paper continue to hold,” said Wang. 

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation.

Researchers at The Ohio State University found success in a social studies curriculum for fourth graders based on teaching what they called “civic competencies.”

Over the course of a school year, findings showed that the students participating in the curriculum significantly improved their argumentation skills and disciplinary thinking.

“This will give them the ability to collaborate, communicate effectively and consider multiple perspectives,” said Tzu-Jung Lin, co-author of the study and professor of educational psychology at The Ohio State University.

“We aim to help cultivate a new generation of responsible community members and citizens who can work together to help solve complex issues,” Lin said.

The study was published recently in the Journal of Social Studies Research.

The research involved 106 fourth-grade students and six social studies teachers from two public school districts in the Columbus area. They participated in a social studies curriculum called Digital Civic Learning (DCL), which was developed at Ohio State.

“Students as young as elementary school start to encounter important issues in the world around them that don’t have a right or wrong answer,” Lin said.

“What we are trying to do with the DCL curriculum is to teach children the process to be a better thinker about these issues and learn how to resolve conflicts around them.”

One part of the curriculum involved what is called disciplinary thinking. This means teaching students how to read, write and think differently depending on the subject matter. In the DCL, students were taught four ways of thinking: geographic, economic, historical and civic.

“When students learn disciplinary thinking, they learn how professionals in each of these four disciplines approach a problem,” said co-author Haeun Park, a doctoral student in educational psychology at Ohio State.

“And later in the curriculum, students learn how to use all of those types of thinking in an interdisciplinary way. For example, students may learn to think about a specific problem from an economics point of view, but also from the view of an historian.”

This interdisciplinary approach can help students with their argumentation skills, which was the other focus of the curriculum. Students were taught how to develop an argument and counterargument about different positions using their disciplinary thinking skills.

In the classes, students honed their disciplinary thinking and argumentation skills through stories. The children were given a story about characters facing some sort of challenge, such as living in a food desert where healthy, affordable food options are limited.

“These stories are designed to be real-life problems that don’t have a set answer,” said study co-author Kevin Fulton, a doctoral student in educational psychology at Ohio State.

“The students can bring their own perspectives to the conversation, and they can agree on all the facts and disagree on what a good solution looks like.”

In order to measure how much the students learned from the DCL curriculum, the researchers had the students write essays at the beginning of the school year and at the end on meaningful problems that were relevant to their lives.

For example, one writing prompt had to do with a school lunch system that used AI to scan faces to see if the student owed money for their meals.

Students had to grapple with the negative ethical and privacy issues of the system as well as the positive user-friendly advantages and come to a decision about whether the AI system should be implemented.

Trained coders rated how well the students did on using disciplinary thinking and argumentation skills in their essays at the beginning of the year, and then again at the end.

The goal was to see if the students improved after taking the DCL curriculum. Results showed they did.

For example, about 27% of students scored 3 out of 4 or above on claim-evidence integration (one of the argumentation skills) in their essays at the beginning of the course. But that increased to 43% at the end of the course.

Use of disciplinary thinking also showed an increase from 27% to 48% after the DCL curriculum was completed.

The researchers said they are hopeful that a curriculum like this could help long-term in healing some of the fractures in our society.

“We believe that if we can embrace these civic competencies, we can find common ground, even with our different beliefs and different backgrounds,” Lin said.

“We can still work together as a group to solve our problems.”

The research was supported by a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences.

Other Ohio State co-authors were Adriana Martinez Calvit, Ziye Wen, Yue Sheng, Michael Glassman and Eric Anderman. Saetbyul Kim from the Korean Educational Development Institute was also a co-author.

The analysis of health insurance claims data from almost 3 million U.S. patients investigated prescribed stimulants’ impact on prescription opioid use over 10 years, looking for origins of the so-called “twin epidemic” of combining the two classes of drugs, which can increase the risk for overdose deaths. 

“Combining the two drugs is associated with an increase in overdose deaths. This is something we know. But we didn’t know whether stimulant use has a causal role in high use of opioids, so we conducted a big data analysis of how these two patterns interacted over a long period of time,” said senior study author Ping Zhang, associate professor of computer science and engineering and biomedical informatics at The Ohio State University.

“What we found is that if someone is taking a stimulant and an opioid at the same time, they’re generally taking a high dose of the opioid,” he said. “And if the patient in this study population takes the stimulant before beginning opioid use, they are more likely to have higher doses of subsequent opioids.” 

The study was published Feb. 17 in The Lancet Regional Health – Americas.     

The research team obtained data on 22 million patients with 96 million opioid prescriptions from MarketScan Commercial Claims and Encounters, a large U.S. health insurance database. Researchers established a cohort for this study of 2.9 million patients with an average age of 44 who had at least two independent opioid prescriptions between 2012 and 2021. 

Because these prescriptions included a range of oral formulas – codeine, hydrocodone, methadone, oxycodone, morphine and others – researchers standardized every prescription to morphine milligram equivalents (MME) and calculated each patient’s monthly intake of opioids. The MME computation from electronic health records was previously co-developed by co-senior author Wenyu Song, an instructor at Harvard Medical School. 

First author Seungyeon Lee, a PhD student in Zhang’s lab, used statistical modeling and classified patients into five baseline groups of opioid dosage trajectory over the 10-year study period: very low-dose, low-dose decreasing, low-dose increasing, moderate-dose increasing and high-dose sustained use. 

“Some patients had stable low-dose opioid use, while others had increasing or high dose patterns over time,” Lee said. 

Of the total cohort, 160,243 patients (5.5%) also were prescribed stimulants. The addition of a monthly calculated cumulative number of stimulant prescriptions to the model and statistical analysis showed a shift in the trajectory groups. Characteristics that could serve as risk factors for increasing opioid use also emerged in the data, Lee said. 

Moderate-dose increasing and high-dose groups had an overall higher average MME and a higher proportion of patients with diagnoses of depression, anxiety and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder compared to other groups. The low-dose increasing group also had a higher proportion of patients with ADHD compared to the low-dose decreasing group. 

The most common diagnoses linked to co-prescription of stimulants and opioids were depression and ADHD or ADHD and chronic pain. 

“This was an important finding, that many patients with ADHD and depression, also experiencing chronic pain, have an opioid prescription,” said Zhang, also a core faculty member in the Translational Data Analytics Institute at Ohio State. “This cohort represents a very realistic health care problem.” 

Even taking those factors into account, the model showed that stimulant use was key to driving up the odds that patients who took both stimulants and opioids would belong to a group of people who increased their doses of opioids. 

“Stimulant use before initiating opioids and stimulant co-prescription with opioids are both positively associated with escalating opioid doses compared to other factors,” Lee said. 

Analysis of geographic and gender data also offered some clues to opioid use patterns in the United States. Patients in the South and West regions had higher total opioid intakes over the 10-year study period compared to the Northeast and North Central regions, with the highest frequency of opioid prescriptions in the South and higher MMEs per prescription in the West. Males also had higher average daily opioid intakes than females. 

The results linking high opioid doses and stimulant use suggest stimulants may be a driving force behind the emergence of the twin epidemic and offer evidence that regulation of stimulant prescribing may be needed for patients already taking prescription opioids, the researchers said. In addition to the increased risk of overdose death, co-using prescription stimulants and opioids can increase the risk for cardiovascular events and mental health problems, previous research has shown. 

Zhang’s Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Lab focuses primarily on using AI to aid in clinician decision making, and these findings are part of a larger project aimed at development of safer personalized treatment recommendations for people who are prescribed both opioids and stimulants. 

“We want to reduce the risk of opioid- or stimulant-related adverse drug events in real-world practice,” Zhang said. 

This work was funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Science Foundation. 

Additional co-authors were David Bates of Harvard Medical School and Richard Urman, chair of anesthesiology in Ohio State’s College of Medicine.

The study is a follow-up to a clinical trial published in 2020 showing that soft multifocal contact lenses with a heavy dose of added reading power dramatically slowed further progression of myopia in kids as young as 7 years old. Researchers wondered if discontinuing that treatment might cause a rebound of faster-than-normal eye growth that wipes out the benefit. 

In the new trial, nearsighted kids wore high-add bifocal lenses for two years followed by one year with single-vision contact lenses. Results showed no evidence that the treatment effect declined, and myopia progression then continued at age-expected rates. 

“We want doctors to understand that you don’t lose the benefits that you gain with this treatment,” said senior author Jeffrey Walline, professor of optometry at The Ohio State University and chair of the project, known as the BLINK (Bifocal Lenses in Nearsighted Kids) Study. 

“But more importantly, what we want to do with this research is give patients healthier eyes at a lower cost with more options. And then in adulthood, we want them to be able to function fully and with clear vision.” 

The new follow-up study, known as BLINK2, is published today (Jan. 16, 2025) in JAMA Ophthalmology. Both trials were conducted at Ohio State and the University of Houston. 

In nearsightedness, or myopia, the eye grows and is stretched into an elongated shape. This abnormality increases the risk for cataracts, detached retina, glaucoma and myopic macular degeneration, all of which can lead to loss of vision, even when wearing glasses or contact lenses. 

Myopia is also common, affecting at least one-third of adults in the United States, and is becoming more prevalent – because, the scientific community believes, children are spending less time outdoors now than in the past. Nearsightedness tends to begin between the ages of 8 and 10 and progresses up to about age 18, when the eye might continue to grow but not become more myopic in most people. 

Multifocal contact lenses for nearsighted patients correct for clear distance vision and include focal power that allows middle-aged eyes to read near work clearly. 

In the original study, 294 nearsighted children aged 7-11 years were randomized into one of three groups of contact-lens wearers. Those who wore the lenses with the highest added power, 2.50 diopters, had shorter eyes and slower rates of myopia progression than the kids in the other two groups after three years. 

Of the original participants, 248 continued in BLINK2, during which all – then aged 11 to 17 years – wore the high-add lenses for two years followed by single-vision contact lenses for the third year, a method used to see if the benefit remained after discontinuing the bifocal treatment. 

At the end of BLINK2, eye growth returned to age-expected rates and there were no signs of faster-than-normal eye growth. Participants who had been in the original BLINK high-add group continued to have shorter eyes and less myopia at the end of BLINK2, meaning those who started high-add bifocal lenses in BLINK2 did not catch up to those who received the treatment when they were younger. 

“After the children discontinue using the contact lenses, their myopia progression increases, but just to normal standards you would expect if you hadn’t treated them. And that happens no matter what age they are when they stop wearing the bifocal lenses,” said Walline, also acting dean in Ohio State’s College of Optometry. 

This research and other studies have led to advances in the treatment landscape for nearsighted children: Options include multifocal contact lenses, contact lenses that reshape the cornea during sleep called orthokeratology, and atropine eye drops. 

“This is a burgeoning area,” Walline said. “The standard of care has switched from providing kids with single-vision glasses or contact lenses to things that slow down the progression of myopia, or the growth of the eye.” 

Walline and his colleagues are now pursuing funding for a clinical trial to see if it’s possible to delay the onset of myopia in young children by administering atropine eye drops before nearsightedness is detectable. 

“What we know is that the earlier you become myopic, the more myopia you’re expected to have as an adult. So if we can delay the onset, then we can make a big difference,” he said. 

BLINK was funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Eye Institute and supported by Bausch + Lomb, which provided contact lens solutions. 

David Berntsen, Golden-Golden Professor and chair of clinical sciences at the University of Houston College of Optometry, was the first author of this study. Additional co-authors were Anita Tićak and Amber Gaume Giannoni of the University of Houston, and Danielle Orr, Loraine Sinnott, Donald Mutti and Lisa Jones-Jordan of Ohio State.

The national survey found that discarded frozen items make up about 6% of wasted household food in the United States. Based on frozen food’s relatively small contribution to food waste and other findings in the study, researchers say urging consumers to stock their freezers might be one way to prevent premature disposal of food. 

Results showed that though overall food waste remained high, there was a bright spot: Freezing food was associated with less food landing in the trash. 

“We found that households with home freezing behaviors are more likely to have less food waste than other households,” said Lei Xu, first author of the paper and a postdoctoral scholar specializing in agricultural and food economics at The Ohio State University. 

“Food waste is not just an economic loss – it also causes environmental damage because more than 90% of wasted food goes to the landfill, and this can produce greenhouse gas emissions,” Xu said. “The findings suggest that in the future, if we can encourage households to have home freezing behaviors, this small change in food storage habits can have a large environmental impact.” 

Xu completed the study with graduate student Ran Li and senior author Brian Roe, professor in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics at Ohio State. The research was published recently in the British Food Journal. 

Roe has been studying household food waste for years, but this is the first study to tease out where frozen food fits into the food waste picture. Recent estimates have suggested about 30% of food in the United States is wasted, but other research led by Roe suggests consumer food waste is trending upward. 

“The fact that food waste is still increasing may suggest to policymakers that campaigns could be useful to educate households about balancing purchasing behavior and making the most of the food they buy,” Xu said. 

The current study data comes from frozen food-related questions added to the summer 2022 wave of the U.S. National Household Food Waste Tracking Survey in which 1,067 households participated. Respondents were asked to estimate the percentage of all discarded food in the previous seven days that had been frozen and whether it was bought frozen or was unfrozen and placed in the freezer later. They also reported the typical frequency of buying frozen foods. 

The responses indicated that 85% of U.S. households buy frozen foods and among those, 55% of participants reported they purchased frozen food to reduce waste. Frozen food purchasers were more likely to shop infrequently – two to three times per month – and were more likely to be living in households with annual income of under $50,000. The most common categories of discarded frozen foods were meat (20% of total frozen food waste), vegetables (22%) and potatoes and grains (15% each). 

“Based on what we’re seeing among households, we still have space to increase awareness to save food by using freezing behavior,” Xu said. 

Data showed a link between frequent home freezing and significantly less total food waste. Respondents most likely to freeze fresh items or extra food were aged 45 years and older and living in households of three or more people – a possible sign, the authors said, that consumers with a home freezing routine may be more experienced at managing meals for a group and motivated to avoid food waste. 

What the team considered somewhat surprising – and enlightening – was the finding that about 30% more of wasted frozen food was discarded from the refrigerator than from the freezer. 

“Thinking about why that happens, it might mean they don’t understand food storage techniques and don’t understand how long they should keep certain foods and where they should put it,” Xu said. “This suggests more explicit food storage instructions on food labels could educate consumers about how to correctly store foods to reduce waste.” 

Trends in the data suggest that consumer education about the freezer’s role in saving food could make a difference economically and environmentally, Xu said, and also help address the societal problem of food insecurity experienced by 10% of U.S. households. 

“Half of consumers buy frozen food to reduce waste. What about the other half?” she said. “We want to increase social awareness of how to save food, and explain how people use frozen food and home freezing techniques to save food. And freezing is one of the most accessible techniques because essentially all households have a refrigerator and freezer.” 

This work was supported by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the National Science Foundation and a gift from the Frozen Food Foundation that facilitated collection of a larger survey sample size. 

Researchers found that 72% of the most popular type of retail electricity offers over the past decade have been significantly above the default price consumers would pay if they didn’t shop around.

The results suggest that there are persistent market failures in the deregulated market, said Noah Dormady, lead author of the study and associate professor at The Ohio State University’s John Glenn College of Public Affairs.

“The bulk of the offers provided to Ohio consumers are way above what those consumers would pay if they did nothing,” Dormady said.

“Historically, consumers would be better off if they just stayed with their electrical utility’s default price, rather than switching service to the median retail choice offer.”

Dormady noted that these markets have offered many Ohio households and businesses with cost-saving supply offers over the years, and those suppliers that have offered competitive pricing based on market fundamentals have delivered value to Ohio. “It’s unfortunate that cost-saving offers have been so few and far between,” he added.

The study was published recently in the Journal of Critical Infrastructure Policy.

The study was done in Ohio, but it has relevance throughout the United States and even internationally where similar retail choice marketplaces have existed for years.

“The problems we document here exist in other states and in parts of Canada and Australia, too,” he said. “We are continuing the work we did here in other states to learn more.”

Dormady and his colleagues built the largest and most detailed database of retail electricity choice offers ever in a published study.  They examined every electricity offer made to Ohio consumers by retail marketers over a nine-year period from 2014 to 2023 – more than 2 million records.

Households that cannot or choose not to shop for retail electricity generation service stay with their utility’s default service. This excludes areas where default service is provided through municipal aggregation. Customers who choose to shop can purchase service from among competing supply offers from one of about fifty different suppliers in each of the six major utility service territories in the state. All customers, whether they purchase their generation from a competing supplier or stay on the utility’s default service, continue to receive their distribution service from their local utility.

Consumers are overwhelmed with choices, Dormady said. Every day, between 90 and 150 different supply offers are filed by about 45 different suppliers with the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO), which is the state agency overseeing the market.

Offers vary widely, some offering a fixed rate for a defined period and others offering variable rates. And some offer “gimmicky” deals, he said, with deceptively low initial costs combined with high monthly fees and consumption caps of how much electricity can be used before rates jump or financial penalties.

The study found that with the most commonly sought-after rate by residential customers – a 12-month fixed rate – competing electric companies offered rates above the default utility standard offer 72.1% of the time.

What’s more, the study found that competing companies historically made offers that averaged 25% to 30% above the standard offer. But when they offered cost savings, they were only 5% to 10% below the standard offer.

“The savings are considerably smaller than the price increases they offer,” Dormady said.

Dormady noted that all the competing companies buy their electricity from the same wholesale markets.  Under standard economic theory, the retail prices would be set based on the wholesale prices. Instead, it appears that companies are competing based on the standard price, which is already marked up about 73% over the price on the wholesale market.

The median retail choice offer by competing companies is 98% above the wholesale cost of electricity, the study found.

Another issue is that the best prices are not always available to consumers. The researchers found that cost-savings offers were available between 43% and 59% of the days of the year, depending on the year studied.

“Even if consumers shopped for the best prices on electricity every day – which most people are not going to do – they would only find savings about half the time,” he said.

Dormady said future studies will examine more thoroughly the issues consumers face in shopping for retail electricity.  But it appears that the markets as they are currently set up are too complex for most households and make it too difficult to identify the deals that are best for them.

Despite the problems with the current market, Dormady said he and his colleagues don’t believe the answer is to move back to a regulated system. That will not create the best situation for consumers.

Instead, there is a need for more efficient markets and greater transparency. One suggestion the researchers have is creating an Office of the Independent Market Monitor to ensure that the markets operate efficiently.  While existing offices such as PUCO and the Consumers’ Counsel play key roles, they have multiple functions and can’t be considered a replacement for a dedicated independent market monitor. Independence and market expertise are key, Dormady said.

Another suggestion is to establish a “supplier scorecard” that rates the quality and competitiveness of competing electric suppliers. This scorecard would function similarly to a Better Business Bureau, Fitch or Moody’s rating, he said.

“We need to make it easier for consumers to identify the electricity offers that will save them money and that are right for them,” Dormady said. “Unfortunately, it is too easy to confuse consumers in a complex market like this.”

The study was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Other Ohio State co-authors were Yufan Ji, Stephanie Pedron and Abdollah Shafieezadeh. Additional co-authors were William Welch of Welch and Associates Consulting; Alberto Lamadrid and Samatha Fox of Lehigh University; and Matthew Hoyt of Exeter Associates.

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.

Made using a material called a liquid crystalline elastomer (LCE), a soft rubber-like material that can be stimulated by external forces like light or heat, the polymer is so versatile that it can move in several directions. 

Its behavior, which resembles the movements of animals in nature, includes being able to twist, tilt left and right, shrink and expand, said Xiaoguang Wang, co-author of the study and an assistant professor in chemical and biomolecular engineering at The Ohio State University.

“Liquid crystals are materials that have very unique characteristics and properties that other materials cannot normally achieve,” said Wang. “They’re fascinating to work with.”

This new polymer’s ability to change shapes could make it useful for creating soft robots or artificial muscles, among other high-tech devices in medicine and other fields.

Today, liquid crystals are most often used in TVs and cell phone displays, but these materials often degrade over time. But with the expansion of LEDs, many researchers are focused on developing new applications for liquid crystals.

Unlike conventional materials that can only bend in one direction or require multiple components to create intricate shapes, this team’s polymer is a single component that can twist in two directions. This property is tied to how the material is exposed to temperature changes to control the molecular phases of the polymer, said Wang.  

“Liquid crystals have orientational order, meaning they can self-align,” he said. “When we heat the LCE, they transition into different phases causing a shift in their structure and properties.”   

This means that molecules, tiny building blocks of matter, that were once fixed in place can be directed to rearrange in ways that allow for greater flexibility. This aspect may also make the material easier to manufacture, said Wang. 

The study was recently published in the journal Science.

If scaled up, the polymer in this study could potentially advance several scientific fields and technologies, including controlled drug delivery systems, biosensor devices and as an aid in complex locomotion maneuvers for next-generation soft robots.  

One of the study’s most important findings reveals the three phases that the material goes through as its temperature changes, said Alan Weible, co-author of the study and a graduate fellow in chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State. Throughout these phases, molecules shift and self-assemble into different configurations.   

“These phases are one of the key factors we optimized to allow the material ambidirectional shape deformability,” he said. In terms of size, the study further suggests that the material can be scaled up or down to adapt to nearly any need.

“Our paper opens a new direction for people to start synthesizing other multiphase materials,” said Wang. 

Researchers note that with future computational advances, their polymer could eventually be a useful tool for dealing with delicate situations, like those that require the precise design of artificial muscles and joints or upgrading soft nanorobots needed for complex surgeries. 

“In the next few years, we plan to develop new applications and hopefully break into the biomedical field,” said Weible. “There’s a lot more we can explore based on these results.”

This work was supported by the Department of Energy and the Harvard University Materials Research Science and Engineering Center. 

Other co-authors include Yuxing Yao, Shucong Li, Atalaya Milan Wilborn, Friedrich Stricker, Joanna Aizenberg, Baptiste Lemaire, Robert K. A. Bennett, Tung Chun Cheung and Alison Grinthal from Harvard University; Foteini Trigka and Michael M. Lerch from the University of Groningen; Guillaume Freychet, Mikhail Zhernenkov and Patryk Wasik from Brookhaven National Laboratory; and Boris Kozinsky from Bosch Research. 

This rare supernova, called 2023ufx, originated from the core collapse of a red supergiant star, exploded on the outskirts of a nearby dwarf galaxy. Results of the study showed that observations of both this supernova and the galaxy it was discovered in are of low metallicity, meaning they lack an abundance of elements heavier than hydrogen or helium.

Since the metals produced within supernovae inform their properties, including how stars evolve and die, learning more about their formation can tell astronomers much about the state of the universe when it began, especially since there were essentially no metals around during the time of its birth, said Michael Tucker, lead author of the study and a fellow at the Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics at The Ohio State University.

“If you’re someone who wants to predict how the Milky Way came to be, you want to have a good idea of how the first exploding stars seeded the next generation,” said Tucker. “Understanding that gives scientists a great example of how those first objects affected their surroundings.”

Dwarf galaxies in particular are useful local analogs to conditions scientists might expect to see in the early universe. Because of them, astronomers know that while the first galaxies were metal-poor, all the big, bright galaxies near the Milky Way had plenty of time for stars to explode and increase the amount of metal content, said Tucker.  

The amount of metals a supernova has also influences aspects like the number of nuclear reactions it may have or how long its explosion remains bright. It’s also one of the reasons that many low-mass stars also occasionally run the risk of collapsing into black holes. 

The study was published recently in The Astrophysical Journal.

While the event observed by Tucker’s team is only the second supernova to be found with low metallicity, what’s most unusual about it is its location relative to the Milky Way, said Tucker. 

Typically, any metal-poor supernova that astronomers would expect to find would likely be too faint to see from our galaxy because of how far away they are. Now, due to the advent of more powerful instruments like NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, detecting distant metal-poor galaxies has been made exponentially easier. 

“There are not that many metal-poor locations in the nearby universe and before JWST, it was difficult to find them,” said Tucker. 

But the sighting of 2023ufx turned out to be a happy accident for researchers. New-found observations of this particular supernova revealed that many of its properties and behaviors are distinctly different from other supernovae in nearby galaxies. 

For example, this supernova had a period of brightness that stayed steady for about 20 days before declining, whereas the brightness of its metal-rich counterparts usually lasted for about 100 days. The study also showed that a large amount of fast-moving material was ejected during the explosion, suggesting that it must have been spinning very quickly when it exploded. 

This result implies that rapidly spinning metal-poor stars must have been relatively common during the early days of the universe, said Tucker. His team’s theory is that the supernova likely had weak stellar winds – streams of particles emitted from the atmosphere of the star – which led it to cultivate and release so much energy. 

Overall, their observations lay the groundwork for astronomers to better investigate how metal-poor stars survive in different cosmic environments, and may even help some theorists more accurately model how supernovae behaved in the early universe. 

“If you’re someone who wants to predict how galaxies form and evolve, the first thing you want is a good idea of how the first exploding stars influenced their local area,” said Tucker. 

Future research may aim to determine if the supernova was larger at one point, whether just by being a super-massive star or if its materials were stripped away by a still undiscovered binary companion. 

Until then, researchers will have to wait for more data to become available. 

“We’re so early in the JWST era that we’re still finding so many things we don’t understand about galaxies,” said Tucker. “The long-term hope is that this study acts as a benchmark for similar discoveries.”

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the European Research Council (ERC), the Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), and NASA. Christopher S. Kochanek from Ohio State was also a co-author. 

In a survey of people currently on GLP-1 medications such as Ozempic, 25% of respondents agreed they had wasted more food since taking the drugs, compared to 61% who disagreed. People who were nauseated by the drugs were more likely to report increased food waste. Being on the medications for a longer period of time and eating more vegetables were associated with less food waste. 

Scientists at The Ohio State University see this study of consumer behavior as an initial effort to consider the effects of these increasingly popular anti-obesity drugs on food production and waste nationally and globally.

“This was a pilot study to start looking at implications of these medications and get in the ballpark of understanding which broad categories of food are more or less preferred after starting the medication,” said senior author Brian Roe, professor in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics at The Ohio State University.

“The fact that food waste appears to decrease as patients acclimate to the medication suggests there may be a fairly simple remedy – advising patients new to these medications about the possibility of discarding food as their diets change, which could reduce food waste and lower their spending.”   

The research was published recently in the journal Nutrients. 

About one-third of food in the United States is wasted, and about half of that is attributable to consumers who waste an average of 1 pound of food per person per day, according to National Academies estimates. 

As of spring of this year, 6% of U.S. adults reported taking GLP-1 agonists, which treat type 2 diabetes and obesity by acting on a hormone in the small intestine to lower blood sugar, slow emptying of the stomach and signal fullness to the brain. In the study, almost 70% of respondents were taking semaglutide (Ozempic, Rybelsus, Wegovy) and nearly a quarter were taking terzepatide (Mounjaro). 

The researchers surveyed 505 U.S. adults currently on anti-obesity medications through an online questionnaire focused on sociodemographic factors, personal characteristics, and questions concerning changes in eating habits, weight and food waste since starting on the medications. The data analysis looked for various influences on how much participants agreed with one key statement: “Since beginning this medication I have found I waste more of the food that I purchase.” 

Participants represented a range of ages, household incomes and education levels, and most had insurance. On average, the group had lost 20% of their body weight if they had been on the medications for at least one year. 

The one-fourth of participants who had been on the drugs for a year or longer were less likely to report wasting food than people who had taken the medication for 90 days or fewer – about 30% of the respondents. 

Though nausea was the main driver of food waste, the results hinted at another possible influence: changes in preferences and habits that led people to toss foods that had fallen out of favor. Overall, participants reported adding produce, protein, fish and healthy fats to their diets and consuming less alcohol, pasta and other carbohydrates, fried foods, sweets and dairy. 

“Meat is neutral in terms of eating more or less after starting this medication,” Roe said. 

The addition of vegetables to the diet – the most commonly wasted food group in the United States – was linked to a lower likelihood of wasting food, another sign of changing habits that, in this case, involved eating more veggie-dense meals. 

Roe is planning another paper examining changes to household finances linked to taking anti-obesity medicines – in terms of both pharmacy and food costs. Given the steady rise in GLP-1 agonist prescribing, there are broad local and global economic and environmental impacts at play, he said. 

“People taking these medications in all likelihood will be spending less on food, but whether there is a chance to offset the cost of the drug through reduction in food spending remains to be seen,” he said. 

Other research labs have used simulations to show that reducing population-level food consumption can lower energy costs, preserve land and water resources, and reduce greenhouse gas creation by keeping discarded food out of landfills. But considering how relatively new anti-obesity medications are, there isn’t enough data to make predictions about the extent of their societal effects just yet. 

“I think it’s clear that novel anti-obesity medications have a chance to impact global public health, and research suggests changes in intake of food can affect indicators of environmental impacts,” Roe said. “There are lots of compelling questions as we think about sustainability of the food system and health care.” 

First author Jamil Mansouri, a Purdue University agricultural economics student, completed this work as a summer intern at Ohio State as part of the Big Ten Academic Alliance Summer Research Opportunities Program. 

This research was supported by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture and Ohio State’s Van Buren Fund, which supports the professorship held by Roe in the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental 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.”

Comics like “The Family Circus,” “Ziggy” and “Little Lulu” are often seen as simplistic and not worthy of critical attention, argues Michelle Ann Abate, author of the new book Singular Sensations: A Cultural History of One-Panel Comics in the United States.

“There tends to be a belief there isn’t much to analyze there. You don’t need a lot of critical thinking skills to see ‘Little Lulu’ slipping on banana peels and get the joke,” said Abate, who is a professor of literature for children and young adults at The Ohio State University’s College of Education and Human Ecology.

And while some one-panel comics do rely on slapstick gags, wordplay, and simple puns, Abate said she found while researching Singular Sensations that there’s much more to many of the one-panels.

Even comics like “Ziggy” that don’t have a lot of cultural cachet have something to offer when read critically. 

“‘Ziggy’ was often about the hassles of ‘adulting’ before adulting was even a word. ‘Ziggy’ has a lot of clever humor about the everyday setbacks that most people can relate to,” she remarked.  “There’s a lot that resonates even now, decades later.”

As Abate notes, perhaps no other single-panel comic has been more acclaimed and loved than “The Far Side” by Gary Larson.

“It was among the first places in our culture that really celebrated and showcased nerdiness.”

While “The Far Side” doesn’t have a recurring cast of characters, it did have recurring types of characters: mainly nerds of all kinds, from geeky middle-aged scientists to dorky adolescent schoolchildren.

At the time when Larson started “The Far Side” in 1980, nerdiness was not at the center of popular culture and valued in the way it is now, according to Abate.

Even though Larson’s series relied on wordplay and puns, “it was the kind of puns and wordplay that nerds in particular would enjoy and that you don’t see in other single-panel comics before it.”

But it wasn’t just the nerdiness that made “The Far Side” stand out, she said: It was the aesthetics, the way Larson drew the characters, particularly the humans. As one critic said, “his people are grotesque.”

The very first “Far Side” comic showed the combination of nerdy subject matter and awkward, gangly, and even sometimes “ugly” humans that made Larson famous. The foreground showed two crabs talking to one another, while two human youngsters build a sandcastle in the background.

The two crabs were drawn to look friendly and adorable, Abate said. But the kids were distorted and didn’t look cute like the children depicted in most comics. And the caption was true nerdiness: One crab was telling the other, “Yes … they are quite strange during the larval stage.”

The way humans were drawn in “The Far Side” was novel at the time.

“In Larson’s series, no child was cute, no man was handsome, and no woman was beautiful by conventional standards,” Abate wrote.

“The odd, unusual and even unsightly appearance of ‘The Far Side’s’ human characters did not distract readers from the content of the panel. On the contrary, such depictions echoed and even amplified the theme, topic or message.”

Abate said Larson’s aesthetic style defied a longstanding trend in American newspaper comics. Much of the emphasis has been on making the case for comics as fine art. And indeed, many cartoonists, especially graphic novelists, are known for the beauty and skill behind their incredible artwork. But Larson’s drawing is intentionally unflattering and awkward.

“It just really went against the grain of what was happening in comics,” she said.

“It gets readers to think about the aesthetics of ugliness and — paradoxically — what might be called the beauty of ugliness.  Moreover, it also invites us to ponder what we deem ugly and why. It may even get us to learn to value what we thought of as ugly, rather than denigrate it.”

While many people have rightly focused on Larson’s impact on nerd culture, Abate hopes to call more attention to his contribution in the realm of comics aesthetics.  The awkward, unflattering, and gangly way that Larson rendered his nerdy characters, Abate argues, is just as important as the nerdiness of their personalities.  Many online comics — such as “The Oatmeal” and “Hyperbole and a Half” — render their human figures in ways can be seen as echoing and even extending Larson’s style.

Beyond just “The Far Side,” Abate said that single-panel comics deserve more recognition as an important type of cartoon art. Many of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed titles over the years — from “The Far Side,” “Ziggy,” and “The Family Circus” to “Heathcliff,” “Marmaduke,” and cartoons in The New Yorker — have been single-panel.  Comics as we know them and especially as we love them in the United States would not be the same without the single-panel form. 

Singular Sensations examines an array of popular one-panel comics from the 1890s through the present day.  In addition to her discussion of “The Far Side,” she has chapters on political cartoons, comics from The New Yorker, “The Family Circus,” “The Yellow Kid,” “Little Lulu,” the groundbreaking series “Patty-Jo ‘n’ Ginger” by Jackie Ormes, “Ziggy,” and “Bizarro.”

“Single-panel comics are not only comics,” Abate’s book asserts, “they are examples of the medium at its most concentrated, compact and concise.”

Gary Larson — and his nerdy characters — would likely agree.

The protein also helps prevent unfamiliar viruses from mutating after they infect a new host, the study found – meaning its absence during an immune response could enable an animal virus spilled over to people to adapt rapidly to human hosts. 

The combined findings by scientists at The Ohio State University add up to potential trouble for people deficient in the protein, called IFITM3 – especially if an avian or swine flu were to gain hold in humans and cause widespread disease. 

IFITM3 deficiency is not rare: About 20% of Chinese people and 4% of people of European ancestry have genetic mutations that disable the immune system’s production of the protein. 

“An IFITM3 deficiency makes it easier for a low dose of virus to be infectious,” said senior study author Jacob Yount, professor of microbial infection and immunity in Ohio State’s College of Medicine. 

Currently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is tracking the H5N1 avian flu that is widespread in wild birds worldwide and causing outbreaks in poultry and U.S. dairy cows. To date, 45 human cases have been reported. 

“It’s these emergent viruses that we’ve never encountered before where IFITM3 is really the most important,” Yount said. “Our study supports the idea that not only would you get a more severe infection, but you’re more likely to get infected in the first place and more likely to help the virus adapt if you are IFITM3 deficient.” 

The research was published Oct. 30 in Nature Communications.

IFITM3 (pronounced I-fit-M-3, for interferon-induced transmembrane protein 3) is key to the innate immune system’s clearance of viruses. It is produced in large quantities after flu is present and lowers the severity of infection by sequestering the virus so that it can’t make copies of itself, or replicate. 

Yount has studied flu and this protein for years, and his lab developed a mouse model lacking the gene that codes for IFITM3 – making the animals highly susceptible to flu. 

In this new work, his team sought to extend what is known about IFITM3 to risks related to interspecies infection – specifically the spillover of avian or swine flu to humans, which caused the 1918 influenza pandemic and three others since. 

The researchers compared the infectiousness of two strains of avian flu, including H5N1, at different viral particle levels in mice lacking the IFITM3 gene and normal mice. At levels roughly equivalent to 10 and 50 particles, viral loads could be detected in all mice, but in the protein-deficient mice, the equivalent of a single viral particle was able to cause infection and inflammation – while normal mice could not be infected by the low dose. 

“IFITM3 has been known to prevent severity of infection, but we’re newly showing that it’s also controlling how much virus it takes initially to cause infection,” Yount said. “And I think that’s one of the most fundamental textbook-level findings ever to come out of my lab.” 

Additional experiments in cultures of human cells that line the lung and immune cells showed that cells in which the gene for IFITM3 was silenced were more susceptible to infection by 11 avian, three swine and two human influenza viruses. 

“Every single one of those viruses infected at a higher rate when IFITM3 was deficient. So this really seems to be a universal property where IFITM3 needs to be there to inhibit flu infections,” Yount said. 

The team then used lab techniques to mimic repeated transmission of a human-origin virus in mice, testing the protein’s role in the pace of mutations that lead to interspecies adaptation. Experiments showed that flu viruses were able to replicate more rapidly and induce higher levels of inflammation in mice deficient in IFITM3 compared to normal mice. 

“So a virus from a different species adapts faster when IFITM3 is not there. This was a proof of principle, because we’re testing it in a mouse,” Yount said. 

“Overall, our study is a demonstration that IFITM3 is broadly important for zoonotic virus defense against a whole range of different influenza viruses that could potentially infect humans. And our research suggests that people with hereditary deficiency in IFITM3 are a uniquely vulnerable population for new viruses from animals entering humans.” 

The research suggests that individuals with IFITM3 deficiency should be considered in pandemic prevention efforts, he said. 

This work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health. 

Co-authors are Parker Denz, Samuel Speaks, Adam Kenney, Adrian Eddy, Jonathan Papa, Jack Roettger, Sydney Scace, Emily Hemann, Adriana Forero and Andrew Bowman of Ohio State, and Adam Rubrum and Richard Webby of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

The survey also indicated many of the veterans would be more likely to seek mental health care, or return to care, at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) if psychedelic-assisted therapy were offered. 

Findings from this comprehensive examination of veterans’ experiences with psychedelics can give clinicians a clearer understanding of the veteran community’s expectations and specific needs for mental health care, researchers say. 

“Because of all of the complexity that veterans are experiencing and the higher risk they’re at for experiencing not just one, but several mental health and physical health-related challenges, it makes sense that they would be searching for opportunities to address those challenges, especially when they feel like they’re not being met with the current system here in the U.S.,” said lead author Alan Davis, associate professor and director of the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education at The Ohio State University College of Social Work.

The study was published recently in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs. 

The VA estimates that more than 17 U.S. veterans die by suicide each day, according to 2021 data. And studies suggest between 44% and 72% of veterans are highly stressed during the transition from military to civilian life. 

The research team, which included veterans, consulted with other past military service members to design a survey examining patterns of psychedelic use, perspectives of those who did and did not report use, and what kinds of benefits and adverse outcomes were associated with veterans’ use of the drugs. Veterans were referred to the survey through online advertisements and communities, email invitations and word of mouth. 

“Understanding military veteran culture is crucial for civilian therapists working with this population,” said co-author Mark Bates, a retired U.S. Air Force pilot and clinical psychologist at Sunstone Therapies, a Maryland treatment center researching psychedelic-assisted therapies. 

“It’s about avoiding inadvertently undermining the therapeutic relationship and knowing how to use military culture as an effective frame of reference. This is also part of the reason of why we carefully consulted with a team of veteran advisers in the development and validation of the survey questions.” 

With veteran advocacy for access to psychedelic-assisted therapy increasing in recent years, Bates said, “There is a really pressing need to explore anything that’s promising for mental health treatment.” 

The survey sample consisted of 426 participants categorized into two groups – those who had (217) and had not (209) used psychedelics. Drugs used by veterans included psilocybin (magic mushrooms), LSD, ketamine, MDMA (ecstasy), ayahuasca, ibogaine, 5-MeO-DMT (toad) and peyote/mescaline. The most commonly reported reasons for use were healing or treatment (69%), spiritual exploration (47.5%) or recreation (38.7%). 

Compared to veterans who had not used psychedelics, the veterans who had taken the drugs were more likely to be older and had spent more time deployed during their service, and a larger proportion of them reported PTSD, depression and anxiety. 

While some participants were alone when they used psychedelics, many reported taking them in spiritual locations or outdoors, with friends, or in medical clinics or retreat centers – both in the United States and abroad. 

Overall, participants rated the psychedelic experiences as beneficial whether they considered the experience uniformly positive (88.6%) or endured one or more adverse outcomes (81.3%). The most common adverse outcomes were flashbacks and craving or trying to reduce use of psychedelics. Fewer participants reported being arrested or seeking medical treatment in relation to using the drugs. 

Statistical analysis identified a number of factors that lowered the likelihood of having negative outcomes: being older, using psilocybin, having depression or anxiety, obtaining psychedelics from a safe source, being prepared, comfortable and confident during the treatment, and being able to trust, let go and be open to the experience.

“This finding highlights the importance of people in the veteran community knowing that keeping these things in mind prior to use can help set them up for the best possible outcome,” Davis said. 

With most psychedelic substances classified as Schedule I drugs under the Controlled Substances Act, the only legal way for most people to access them in the United States currently is in a clinical trial setting. Davis is leading a current psilocybin-assisted therapy study at Ohio State for the treatment of PTSD among military veterans, and Bates and colleagues at Sunstone Therapies have treated many veterans to date. 

Finding that surveyed veterans would welcome a chance to access psychedelic-assisted therapy at the VA is an important highlight of the study, the researchers said. 

“What’s really exciting about this study and understanding veterans’ interest in psychedelic-assisted therapy is it’s potentially opening up an opportunity to address some of their core challenges head-on,” Davis said. “Veterans are dying by suicide and fleeing the country to find these opportunities in other places, so the message is clear. This needs to be available.” 

Additional co-authors were Nathan Sepeda, Adam Levin and Stacey Armstrong of Ohio State; independent researcher Erik Lund; Robert Koffman of Sunstone Therapies; Katinka Hooyer of the Medical College of Wisconsin; and Rachel Yehuda of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. 

This work was supported by private donors, the Cammack Family Gift Fund, the Center for Psychedelic Psychotherapy and Trauma Research at the Icahn Medical School, the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, and the CPDRE at Ohio State.

In a new study, researchers identified a protein in mammals that welcomes arteriviruses into host cells to start an infection. The team also found that an existing monoclonal antibody that binds to this protein protects cells from viral infection. 

Arteriviruses circulate broadly in many types of mammals around the world that serve as natural hosts – such as nonhuman primates, pigs and horses – but so far have not been detected in humans. 

The researchers’ aim is to better understand mechanisms of arterivirus infection to get a handle on how high the infection risk is for humans and what preparation may be needed should a spillover occur in the future. 

“It’s important to consider that since we have no known arteriviruses infecting people that we’re essentially immunologically naïve, so we can’t rely on preexisting immunity to help us,” said co-lead author Cody Warren, assistant professor of veterinary biosciences at The Ohio State University. 

Warren co-led the work with Adam Bailey, assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The study was published recently in Nature Communications. 

Many natural hosts of arteriviruses have no signs of disease, but the virus that infects swine can cause pneumonia, as well as abortions in pregnant pigs, and other strains can cause hemorrhagic fever or encephalitis when they switch animal hosts. 

These viruses also have the unusual ability to maintain long-term infections and become more virulent when they find new hosts – which gives them time to evolve and improve their chances of transmission. 

The research team set out to find proteins in mammals that arteriviruses use as receptors to gain entry to host cells and make copies of themselves. Bailey used genome-wide CRISPR-knockout screening technology to identify specific genes that, when disrupted, rendered cells resistant to viral infection. Such genes would then be considered essential to the viral infection process. The unbiased screen identified two genes, FCGRT and B2M, whose protein products come together to form the FcRn receptor (neonatal Fc receptor) that is expressed on the surface of cells. 

The FcRn receptor molecule has a specific role in shuttling antibodies across the placenta to a fetus, but is also present in immune cells and cells that line blood vessel walls – both of which are targeted by arteriviruses. 

Results from this study demonstrated that FcRn is used for host cell entry by at least five arteriviruses that infect monkeys, pigs and horses, respectively: three diverse strains of simian arteriviruses, porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus 2 (PRRSV-2), and equine arteritis virus (EAV). 

Knocking out the major component of the FcRn complex – the FCGRT gene – from host cells blocked viral infection, and pre-treating cells with a monoclonal antibody against FcRn protected against infection. 

There was also a genetic twist to this story: Some mammal hosts were less susceptible to arterivirus infection based on differences in their species-specific FcRn’s sequence, meaning that in some cases, this protein will function as a barrier to cross-species infections. 

“Chimpanzees and humans have pretty much all the same genes, but the sequence of those genes is slightly different,” Bailey said. “All mammals have the FcRn receptor, but their ability to support infection with a given arterivirus may vary.” 

The CRISPR screen also identified a gene encoding another surface protein, CD163, which Warren and colleagues previously found to be a gatekeeper for an arterivirus called simian hemorrhagic fever virus (SHFV) to infect a cell. 

A series of experiments in different cell types and using multiple viral strains in the new study showed that CD163 does have a role in infection by most arteriviruses, but it cannot act alone – interaction with FcRn is also key to facilitating arteriviral infection of host cells. 

Spelling out these arterivirus infection steps is an important milestone, the researchers said. 

“If we’re looking at virus biology, one of the most important things we can understand is entry mechanisms. Because if you can stop the ability of a virus to infect a cell through disrupting that initial virus-receptor contact, now you have a potential therapeutic strategy,” Warren said. 

One of those “disruptors” could be blocking the receptor – so showing that an existing monoclonal antibody can stop viral infection in cells is also a plus for scientists examining viruses through a lens of pre-pandemic preparedness. 

“If one of these viruses emerged in humans, I believe we’d be in big trouble,” Bailey said. “So that is the motivator for me.” 

This work was supported by National Institutes of Health grants, University of Wisconsin-Madison startup funds, the G. Harold and Leila Y. Mathers Foundation, and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease Program. 

Co-authors included Teressa Shaw, Kylie Nennig, Xueer Qiu, Devon Klipsic and Igor Slukvin of UW-Madison; Devra Huey, Makky Mousa-Makky, Jared Compaleo, Fei Jiang and Haichang Li of Ohio State; Aadit Shah of Stanford University; Raymond Rowland of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; and Meagan Sullender and Megan Baldridge of Washington University in St. Louis.

In a study comparing weight loss results on low-fat and ketogenic diets with and without the addition of ketone supplements, 11 of 13 pre-menopausal participants who achieved nutritional ketosis reported at least one change in menstrual frequency, intensity – or both – during the intervention.

Women on low-fat diets did not report any change to their periods. All women had lost the same relative percentage of weight. Their average age was 34, and all were healthy but overweight.

“There were six women who hadn’t had a period in over a year – who felt like their typical cycles were over. And their periods actually restarted on the diet,” said Madison Kackley, lead author of the study and a research scientist and lecturer in human sciences at The Ohio State University.

“Our hypothesis after seeing these results is that the presence of ketones may help regulate women’s health in regard to endocrine, cognitive and metabolic influences.”

The study was published recently in PLOS ONE.

As a PhD student, Kackley worked in the lab led by Jeff Volek, senior author of the paper and professor of human sciences at Ohio State, who has been studying the health effects of the very-low-carbohydrate/high-fat ketogenic diet for 25 years.

The keto diet converts fat into ketones used by cells in the body and brain as an alternative to glucose. Supplements also elevate blood ketones without a change in eating habits. All are designed to put the body in nutritional ketosis – the human body’s state when it has greater access to ketones as both fuel and a signaling molecule. 

Nineteen women participated in the weight-loss diet trial – seven on a ketogenic diet alone, six on a keto diet combined with ketone salt supplements, and six on a low-fat diet. Researchers provided all of the food for the six-week study.

Both interventions resulted in clinically significant weight loss, less body fat, healthier cholesterol levels and better insulin sensitivity.

Menstrual history was one of dozens of lifestyle questions researchers asked about in biweekly assessments. Participants’ self-reports about their cycles took Kackley and colleagues by surprise.

“It’s not a validated survey, but when we were reviewing responses, we realized we were changing the majority of these women’s cycles. Even for women who had normal menstrual cycles, their frequency changed,” Kackley said. “One of our participants was 33 years old and had never had a period in her life. She had her period for the first time after being in nutritional ketosis for five days.”

The two women who reported no change to their cycles were taking oral contraceptives. Women who reported menstrual changes were not using birth control.

Digging deeper into findings related to ketone supplementation is one goal of Kackley’s research program going forward. While the addition of keto salts to the diet did not contribute to improved weight or health markers, ketone levels were high in all of the women on the keto diet – including the two whose menstruation didn’t change. The finding hints at an individualized effect of added ketones in the blood.

“It was just the presence of ketones that essentially changed the menstrual cycle,” she said. “So if we’re looking for that signaling effect as opposed to a weight loss effect, then I think ketone supplementation could actually play a role in the grand scheme of hormonal regulation.”

Kackley is now working to pin down the mechanisms that explain this association. She has established a new lab at Ohio State dedicated to studying links between nutrition, exercise and women’s health.

As part of evaluating and selecting a tool to standardize tracking of research participants’ menstrual cycles in future studies, her team is currently monitoring a pilot group of women for the range of changes that occur between and during periods: muscle strength, fat composition, water retention, energy expenditure, hormone levels, body temperature and more. As far as Kackley is aware, this comprehensive data has never been collected before for the purposes of addressing cyclical changes with nutrition and/or exercise.

She envisions identifying interventions that not only help resolve women’s health concerns – such as polycystic ovary syndrome, perimenopause and postpartum depression, which her lab is currently studying – but also take some of the mystery out of menstruation, especially when it’s irregular or stops. An estimated 5 to 7% of women of reproductive age in the United States experience three months without a period each year.

“This research is incredibly important because there are so many unanswered questions for women,” Kackley said. “We’re trying to change things for women and give them some control – something we historically haven’t had over our reproductive status.”

The Department of Human Sciences in Ohio State’s College of Education and Human Ecology provided seed funds for Kackley’s lab. Metagenics Inc. provided the study supplements.

Additional co-authors include Alex Buga, Teryn Sapper, Christopher Crabtree, Bradley Robinson, Justen Stoner, Drew Decker and Loriana Soma of Ohio State, and Milene Brownlow and Annalouise O’Connor of Metagenics.

The officials surveyed ranked product quality as the area of their businesses that received the most value from implementing responsible AI management (RAIM) practices – even above more obvious choices, such as reducing regulatory and legal risk.

That answer was surprising, said one of the leaders of the survey, Dennis Hirsch, faculty director of The Ohio State University’s Program on Data Governance.

“We did not expect that the primary response for how AI governance would create value would be by improving product quality,” Hirsch said. “That’s very interesting and encouraging.”

That result was one of several important findings from the survey, which were revealed in the report Responsible AI Management: Evolving Practice, Growing Value.

The report was produced by the Program on Data and Governance, which is part of Ohio State’s Moritz College of Law and Translational Data Analytics Institute.

The corporate rush to use AI has raised alarm about potential harm and misuse, such as privacy violations, discrimination and misinformation.

The survey, sent out in early 2023, probed RAIM practices at businesses that develop and use AI. The survey was emailed to individuals identified as data governance officials at U.S. companies. Completed surveys came back from 75 people, most of whom worked at large companies with more than 1,000 employees and $10 million or more in annual revenue.

Many business sectors were represented among survey respondents, such as information technology, financial, health care and consumer goods.

Hirsch said the relatively low response rate to the survey, and the fact that most responses came from large companies, suggests that few companies today have meaningful RAIM programs in place.

“We think the largest companies have the most resources and are most engaged in AI governance,” Hirsch said.

So what exactly are the responsible AI management practices that companies are using?

The study found the most commonly reported RAIM activities included evaluating regulatory risk, identifying risk to stakeholders, building a RAIM management structure and adopting standards such as AI ethics principles and RAIM policies.

Results showed that 68% of respondents said that RAIM was either important or extremely important to their company. However, even among the large companies that responded, implementation of RAIM programs significantly lagged enthusiasm. Most respondents said that their RAIM programs were still at an early stage.

This survey was done just before the explosion of generative AI and the broad use of tools like ChatGPT, so the situation may be changing, according to Hirsch. More companies now probably understand that they need to govern the use of AI, but it is still not as widespread as it probably should be, he said.

More companies might be invested in RAIM if they knew of the experience of these larger companies and the value that they thought it brought to their businesses, he said.

Nearly 40% of those surveyed reported that their company gets “a lot” or “a great deal” of value from their responsible AI management programs. Another 38% said it produced “a moderate amount” of value. None said they got no value.

What may be most striking, though, was the fact that survey participants thought product quality was the area where RAIM brought the most value. This survey didn’t ask how RAIM improved product quality, and this finding will need more study, Hirsch said.

“Our preliminary take is that it improves product quality by promoting AI innovation and better meeting customer expectations,” he said.

A 2018 study by the Program on Data and Governance, which involved interviews with officials involved in corporate AI governance, may explain how this works.

People think of data governance as inhibiting innovation, because it restricts what people can do. But it may be the opposite, according to those interviewed in the 2018 study.

“If employees have standards and policies and guidelines about how they can use AI, they can innovate with a lot more confidence. It can actually unleash innovation, rather than dampen it,” Hirsch said.

The new report says, “These results suggest an important, new way of thinking about AI management – as a source of value and competitiveness, and not just a way of mitigating risks and costs.”

While that’s good news for companies that are instituting responsible AI management practices, Hirsch emphasized that this survey included mostly very large firms.

“I think if we looked more broadly at businesses around the country that use AI, you wouldn’t see such an optimistic picture of the view of the importance of AI governance,” he said.

AI management is still in its infancy in most businesses.

According to Hirsch, more companies need to be undertaking algorithmic impact assessments to determine whether their use of AI could harm customers or others. They also need to build a management structure and substantive policies that can help their employees determine how they can use AI.

“We need to do a lot more with companies to help them understand how to responsibly use AI,” Hirsch said.

The finding came from a planned study of secondary outcomes of the HEALing (Helping to End Addiction Long-Term) Communities Study (HCS), which tested an intervention encompassing data-driven adoption of evidence-based practices for reducing overdose deaths in Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York and Ohio. 

Death rates from specific combinations of opioids with stimulants other than cocaine, most commonly fentanyl mixed with methamphetamine, were 8.9 per 100,000 adults in intervention communities compared to 14.1 per 100,000 adults in comparison communities that did not receive the intervention – a statistically significant difference.

The findings were published today (Oct. 21, 2024) in JAMA Network Open. 

With the prescription medications that started the opioid crisis harder to obtain by the time the trial began, fentanyl was rapidly entering the illicit drug market in combination with methamphetamine, cocaine, counterfeit pills and other stimulants, said Bridget Freisthler, lead author of the new study and a professor at The Ohio State University. 

“Now we have a whole new group of people developing addiction to opioids,” said Freisthler, Ohio’s principal investigator for the HEALing Communities Study. “It was nice to see that we were able to achieve reductions in overdose deaths involving this combination of opioids, primarily fentanyl and psychostimulants, not including cocaine, because that’s the most recent wave in the epidemic that we’re seeing.” 

Analysis of other drug combinations showed that intervention communities had lower rates of overdose deaths from an opioid mixed with cocaine (6%) and an opioid mixed with benzodiazepine (1%), but that these differences did not reach statistical significance. 

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched the HEALing Communities Study in 2019. Participating community coalitions implemented 615 strategies to address opioid-related overdose deaths across health care, justice and behavioral health settings. Based on data indicating which interventions were best suited to areas they served, agencies selected from three “menus” of evidence-based practices focused on overdose education and naloxone distribution, increasing exposure to medication for opioid use disorder, and safer opioid prescribing.  

Researchers reported in June on the main outcome of HCS – that the intervention did not result in a statistically significant reduction in opioid overdose death rates during the evaluation period. In this study, the authors found that intervention communities had an 8% lower rate of all drug overdoses compared to control communities, which was estimated to represent 525 fewer drug overdose deaths. 

In the new paper, researchers reported that more than 40% of overdose deaths in the study involved the combination of at least one opioid and a stimulant. 

The evidence of higher prevalence of fentanyl in the illicit drug market led coalition agencies to adjust communication efforts accordingly, said Freisthler, also the Cooper-Herron Professor in Mental Health at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. 

“We were already shifting to where psychostimulants had fentanyl in them and messages weren’t reaching the right folks because people who use psychostimulants think of themselves as using meth or cocaine, not opioids,” she said. “So we had to make it clear that fentanyl could be in every drug and that nobody was really immune from the possibility of an overdose. Communities emphasized that this is a multiple-drug issue, not just a fentanyl issue or an opioid issue. 

“In many ways, the fact we’re looking at this particular outcome is because communities were so invested in it and so concerned, and wanted it to be a focus of the study.” 

The potential for naloxone to prevent overdose deaths in people who use multiple drugs was also incorporated into communication campaigns implemented by all intervention communities, which may have helped prevent deaths, researchers said. 

Participating agencies were very good at advocating for themselves, Freisthler said, and the front-end work ideally will leave communities even better prepared to address overdoses going forward. 

“The HCS was beneficial to Brown County in numerous ways,” said Deanna Vietze, executive director of the Brown County Board of Mental Health and Addiction Services in southwest Ohio. “It affirmed the work already underway, allowed for expansion of best practices, helped engage new partners, strengthened existing partnerships, and allowed innovative purchases that forged outreach opportunities that will continue to positively impact Brown County citizens for years to come.” 

Ohio study leaders are intent on making sure lessons and success stories from the study are widely available through a website providing a range of materials, and are meeting with groups interested in implementing the evidence-based practices in their own communities. 

“The drug overdose crisis is pervasive in our communities, and we’ve got multigenerational and intergenerational trauma affecting families. That’s not going to change overnight,” Freisthler said. “That means we need to continue to improve understanding of this crisis, and reduce overdose deaths so we don’t have another generation experiencing the same sort of trauma.” 

The HEALing Communities Study was supported and carried out in partnership between the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration through the NIH HEAL Initiative.  

A $65.9 million NIH award funding Ohio State’s leadership of the Ohio portion of the study was housed in the university’s College of Medicine. Co-authors of the paper included study site principal investigators Sharon Walsh of the University of Kentucky, Nabila El-Bassel of Columbia University, T. John Winhusen of the University of Cincinnati, Jeffrey Samet of Boston Medical Center and Emmanuel Oga of RTI International.

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.

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 Rocahepevirus ratti strain is called “rat HEV” because rats are the primary reservoir of the virus. Since the first human case was reported in a person with a suppressed immune system in Hong Kong in 2018, at least 20 total human cases have been reported – including in people with normal immune function. 

People infected with rat HEV did not report exposure to rats, leaving the cause of infection undefined. The suspected cause during other human HEV infections, in many cases, is consumption of raw pork – making it a potential route for rat HEV as well. 

Researchers at The Ohio State University found that a strain of rat HEV isolated from humans could infect pigs and was transmitted among co-housed animals in farm-like conditions. Rats are common pests in swine barns – suggesting that the pork production industry may be a setting in which rat HEV could make its way to humans. 

“We always want to know which viruses might be up and coming, so we need to know the genetics behind this virus in the unlikely event something happens in the United States that would enable rat HEV to expand,” said senior author Scott Kenney, an associate professor of animal sciences and veterinary preventive medicine at Ohio State based in the Center for Food Animal Health at the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences’ Wooster campus.  

The study was published recently in PNAS Nexus. 

Hepatitis E is the leading cause of the acute viral liver infection in humans worldwide, mostly in developing regions where sanitation is poor. The virus is also endemic in pigs in the United States – though it is present mostly in liver rather than muscle, and is killed when the meat is cooked.  

Past studies testing the cross-species infectiousness of rat HEV showed the strain used in experiments did not infect non-human primates. 

“It dropped off the radar for six or seven years because it was thought not to be a human pathogen. And now it’s infecting humans, so we need to figure out why,” Kenney said. 

One strain linked to human disease is known as LCK-3110. First author Kush Yadav, who completed this work as a PhD student in the Center for Food Animal Health, used the viral genomic sequence to construct an infectious clone of LCK-3110. 

The team first showed the cloned virus could replicate in multiple types of human and mammal cell cultures and in pigs. Researchers then injected pigs with an infectious solution containing the LCK-3110 strain or another HEV strain present in pigs in the U.S., as well as saline as a control condition. 

Viral particles in the blood and feces were detected one week later in both groups receiving HEV strains, but levels were higher in pigs infected with rat HEV. Two weeks later, co-housed pigs that received no inoculations also began to shed rat HEV virus in their feces – an indication the virus had spread through the fecal-oral route. 

Though infected pigs’ organs and bodily fluids were also positive for viral RNA, the animals did not show signs of feeling sick. Previous research suggests rats don’t have clinical symptoms, either. 

Even so, the rat HEV virus was detected in cerebrospinal fluid of infected pigs – a finding that aligns with growing concern that various strains of HEV that infect humans can harm the brain. One human death linked to rat HEV was caused by meningoencephalitis. 

“HEV is gaining importance for neurological disorders, and a lot of the research now points toward how neuropathology is caused by the hepatitis E virus,” Yadav said. “And even though we have a small number of known human cases, a high percentage of them are immunosuppressed. That means transplant recipients in the United States could be at risk of infection by general HEV as well as rat HEV. 

“Research could now focus on whether pork liver products contain rat HEV and explore food safety procedures to block the disease.”

Yadav is now a postdoctoral researcher in the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine at Virginia Tech. Co-authors of the study, all from Ohio State, were Patricia Boley, Carolyn Lee, Saroj Khatiwada, Kwonil Jung, Thamonpan Laocharoensuk, Jake Hofstetter, Ronna Wood and Juliette Hanson.

In a new study, using a ventilator-on-a-chip model developed at The Ohio State University, researchers found that shear stress from the collapse and reopening of the air sacs is the most injurious type of damage.

This miniature “organ-on-a-chip” model simulates not only lung injury during mechanical ventilation, but also repair and recovery, in human-derived cells in real time, said co-lead author Samir Ghadiali, PhD, professor and chair of biomedical engineering at Ohio State.

“The initial damage is purely physical, but the processes after that are biological in nature – and what we’re doing with this device is coupling the two,” Ghadiali said.

The team hopes the device will also help in the hunt for therapies to address ventilator-induced lung injury.

“This is an important advance in the field that will hopefully allow for a better understanding of how lung injury develops in mechanically ventilated patients and identification of therapeutic targets so that we can give drugs to prevent that kind of injury or treat it when it happens,” said co-lead author Joshua Englert, MD, associate professor of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.

The research was published recently in the journal Lab on a Chip.

Ventilators save the lives of patients with severe respiratory problems related to disease or trauma, but it has been known for a long time that the mechanical forces exerted on the lungs also cause injury. The damage at the cellular level can make the barrier between tiny air sacs and capillaries carrying blood become leaky, leading to fluid buildup that interferes with oxygen getting to the lungs.

Of particular value is the ventilator-on-a chip’s measurement of real-time changes to cells that affect the integrity of that barrier, enabled by an innovative approach: growing human lung cells on a synthetic nanofiber membrane mimicking the complex lung matrix. It’s closer to the authentic ventilated lung microenvironment than any similar lung chip systems to date, the researchers say.

The device measures the effects of three types of mechanical stress on the integrity of the barrier: lung cell stretch from overinflation, increased pressure on lung cells, and cyclical collapse and reopening of air sacs.

Experiments showed that overinflation with a high volume of air and cyclic collapse and reopening of air sacs both led the barrier to become leaky, but the cells could recover more quickly from overinflation than from the repetitive opening and closing of air sacs.

Englert said the collapse and reopening may be more problematic because it makes fluid in the lungs move, exposing cells to high amounts of shear stress.

“There really hasn’t been a lot of data that could allow for the comparison of those two injurious forces in the same system,” he said. “But now for the first time, we can use the same device with the same cells and induce both types of injury and see what happens. Our data suggests neither one of them is good, they’re both injurious, but that the collapse and reopening seems to be more severe and makes recovery harder.”

This finding was a demonstration of the model’s sophistication, Ghadiali said.

“We knew for a long time that collapse and reopening is a pretty injurious force, but we never could measure it in real time,” he said. “Now that we know that collapse and reopening injury happens much quicker and takes a long time to recover, we plan to use the ventilator on a chip to figure out how to prevent this injury and/or enhance the repair.”

Next steps involve modeling diseases such as pneumonia and traumatic injuries experienced by ICU patients in combination with mechanical action.

“We’re in the early stages of developing some of those models, diving a little bit deeper into the complexity of lung injury in ICU patients,” Englert said. “This model is a platform we can build upon.”

Ghadiali and Englert, also investigators in Ohio State’s Davis Heart and Lung Research Institute, credited first author Basia Gabela-Zuniga, who recently received her PhD in biomedical engineering, with getting the project over the finish line, and acknowledged the contributions of College of Engineering co-authors Heather Powell and Natalia Higuita-Castro. Additional co-authors were Vasudha Shukla and Christopher Bobba of Ohio State.

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Defense.

The study, published in the journal Insects, found that hemp leaf extract – which contains the active ingredient cannabidiol, or CBD – kills mosquito larvae from two different strains of the yellow fever mosquito within 48 hours, one that was resistant to typical insecticides and another that was not.

“Mosquitoes are one of the deadliest animals in the world, mainly because as adults they serve as vectors of disease,” said Erick Martinez Rodriguez, lead author of the study and a graduate student in entomology at The Ohio State University. “It’s very important to be able to control these pests at an early stage, when they are at the most vulnerable.”

Unlike adult mosquitoes that can fly across great distances and transmit disease by biting, mosquito larvae are aquatic organisms often found in standing water. Conventional synthetic insecticides are critical chemical tools for killing mosquito larvae populations, but their rampant overuse has led to both insecticide resistance and other detrimental effects on the environment. 

Inspired by previous Ohio State research that discovered that the bark properties of a plant native to Madagascar worked as a natural mosquito insecticide and repellent, Martinez Rodriguez sought to determine if hemp could act as a viable and safe alternative to current biopesticides.

The hemp plant is related to marijuana, but does not contain its levels of the ingredient that  makes people feel “high.” CBD from hemp is used in a variety of products from gummies and oils to treat anxiety, pain, insomnia and other conditions.

To test hemp’s toxic effects against mosquito larvae, the team took air-dried hemp leaves, pulverized them into a fine powder and soaked the material in methanol for a few weeks to reach the desired CBD concentrations. 

The methanol was later removed from the solution to make it easier to chemically analyze, resulting in an extract that was eventually given to the larvae with their food. 

Depending on the concentration of hemp extract used, the team discovered that the hemp leaf was potent enough to be equally toxic to both strains of mosquito larvae. What was surprising, though, said Martinez Rodriguez, was the small amount needed to be so deadly. 

“If you compare the amount of hemp extract needed to kill 50% of the population to other synthetic conventional insecticides, it is on the high side, but when you compare it side-by-side to other natural extracts we have tested in our lab, only a relatively low amount is required to produce high mortality values in larvae,” said Martinez Rodriguez. While CBD eventually led to 100% mortality for the larvae, different concentrations of the hemp extract caused different mortality rates in the hours leading up to that time. 

The mosquito larvae were considered dead if no movement was recorded after scientists gently touched their abdomen with a needle or pipette tip. Although it’s still unclear how the extract affects them biologically, the team’s findings showed that CBD was the primary active ingredient in the extract and that it can successfully bypass the larvae’s metabolic resistance to other insecticides, which aligns with past work that found CBD has notable growth-inhibiting properties against other insects. 

Since hemp is also a more sustainable crop than many other plant alternatives, insecticide products that use it could potentially be produced relatively cheaply, said Martinez Rodriguez. 

While this discovery bodes well for developing future natural-based mosquito control products, said Peter Piermarini, co-author of the study and a professor of entomology at Ohio State, further research would have to be done to investigate how safe hemp and CBD would be for non-target organisms, like honey bees or other pollinating insects that scientists don’t want to kill or disrupt by introducing potentially harmful additives to the environment. 

“CBD is a compound that appears to be safe for people and our companion animals to ingest,” said Piermarini. “It’ll be interesting to learn more about how CBD interacts with various proteins in mammals and insects to understand why it’s safe for people but not insects.”

This work was supported by the Infectious Diseases Institute and the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences at Ohio State. Other Ohio State co-authors include Larry Phelan, Luis Canas, Nuris Acosta and Harinantenaina L. Rakotondraibe. 

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.

Researchers created a predictive approach for modeling unintended microbial growth in critical spaces and applied it to life on the International Space Station.  

An analysis of dust samples obtained from the space station found that repeated elevated humidity exposures for even a short time can lead to rapid microbial growth and composition changes in dust that make it easier for microbes, such as fungi, to thrive.  

The study provides important insight into how healthy environments might be maintained during future missions, especially as the commercial space industry begins to prompt more people to live and work above Earth, said Karen Dannemiller, senior author of the study and an associate professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering and environmental health sciences at The Ohio State University.  

“It’s really important to understand the exposures that happen in the space environment in part because we see immune system changes in astronauts,” she said. “People who are normally healthy individuals may be especially vulnerable to microbes in space,  more so than on Earth.” 

The study was published today in the journal Microbiome.  

Historically, many spacecraft have had issues with unintended microbial growth because, much like a typical home on Earth, they, too, are environments that tend to trap the moisture humans emit. On the ISS, dust is usually produced by people as they go about their daily activities, but left unchecked, these floating particles can cause a range of negative health issues for the crew, such as asthma or allergies, and degrade building materials and equipment.  

To ensure that dust levels aboard the ISS are carefully controlled, every week astronauts must clean the protective screens that cover the filters of the space station’s air ventilation system. In this study, four separate vacuum bag samples of the dust collected from these housekeeping chores were sent down to Dannemiller’s team to be tested.  

After incubating the samples for two weeks at different relative humidities to simulate a scenario where an unexpected event, such as a temporary air ventilation system failure, could cause bursts of moisture, analysis revealed that fungi and bacteria can grow in the same concentrated amounts as dust collected from residential homes on the ground.  

“Spacecraft actually aren’t that different from what we see on Earth in terms of having a unique indoor microbiome,” said Nicholas Nastasi, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at Ohio State’s Indoor Environmental Quality Laboratory. “If you put people in a space, there will always be microbes there, so it’s important to prevent their spread because once it starts, it’s often not too easy to get rid of.”  

Spacecraft are especially prone to microbial growth because they are enclosed environments where humans constantly exhale moisture. If that moisture builds up, mold can begin to grow, as seen in past space stations such as Mir. Although the ISS has much improved controls for moisture, unexpected situations can still easily occur, said Nastasi.  

Additionally, while Earth and space environments are complex in their own unique ways, the two more often than not contain similar core microbial communities, Nastasi said. Moreover, staying knowledgeable about the evolution of these communities will make certain that vulnerable individuals both on- and off-world have the information needed to maintain a healthy indoor microbiome on the space station.  

“In designing some of our current space station systems, we’ve already learned a lot of really important lessons in terms of how to keep moisture under control,” said Dannemiller. “Now we’re learning even more that we can use to advance these systems in the future.” 

In general, the study also suggests that the team’s research could later aid the development of planetary protection protocols aimed at preventing contamination of Earth or any other celestial bodies humans may visit.  

Next, the team will likely work to discover what effect other untested spaceflight variables, such as microgravity, radiation and elevated carbon dioxide levels, have on microbial growth in similar working space stations, like NASA’s lunar station Gateway or other imminent commercial projects. Many of their upcoming projects will also benefit from Ohio State’s terrestrial analog of the George Washington Carver Science Park, a replica of Starlab space station science park that will allow researchers to conduct parallel missions on the ground.  

“There’s a lot of other unique spaceflight factors we can potentially add to these microbial models to make them more accurate and useful,” said Nastasi. “We’ll keep refining what we do to maintain those healthy space environments and having unprecedented access to a platform such as Starlab will help immensely.” 

This study was supported by NASA. Other Ohio State co-authors were Ashleigh Bope, Marit E. Meyer and John M. Horack. 

The middle of the United States, meanwhile, can expect bigger swings between wetter wet periods – high-rainfall years known as pluvials – and drier summers through the rest of this century, the study predicts. 

Researchers at The Ohio State University say the findings, based on modern precipitation data, historical tree rings and climate models spanning the years 850 to 2100, suggest climate change has shifted precipitation patterns across North America to extremes that were not experienced before industrialization began around the mid-1800s. 

“It’s very much a tale of Southwest versus the Northeast for most of the seasons,” said senior author James Stagge, assistant professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at Ohio State. “Mexico and the American Southwest tends to get drier across more or less all seasons, whereas we’re seeing in the Northeast – and Ohio is included in that – a trend toward wetter, particularly in the winter and early spring.” 

The combination of drier droughts and wetter pluvials in much of the nation’s midsection won’t necessarily occur in a predictable way. 

“So you might be going from, say, this year our drought is really bad, and in five years or so we might see the wettest pluvial we’ve had in a while,” Stagge said. “That variability is concerning because it changes how we might need to manage water to prepare for more extremes in both ways. Trying to plan for that is a real challenge. 

“This is all part of the same pattern moving into the future. It’s only going to get worse.” 

Former Ohio State graduate student Kyungmin Sung, now a research fellow at the Korea Environment Institute, is first author of the paper. The research is published today (Sept. 6, 2024) in Geophysical Research Letters. 

In contrast to attribution studies that examine whether or how human-associated climate change has influenced extreme weather events, this work focused on documenting centuries-long trends in pre- and post-industrial drought and pluvial extremes across North America.  

The researchers compared changing climate patterns observed in the past 20 years to the pre-industrial era and then predicted how periods of low and high precipitation will trend through the year 2100. 

“What we can say is, ‘here is the scale of change we’ve seen in the past 100 years under an increase in greenhouse gas concentration, and here’s what we saw in the previous 700 years,’” Sung said. “And the scale of the change we’re seeing now and into the future is dramatically larger in many areas than any natural climate variability we saw prior.” 

The researchers merged data from five sources: two modern compilations of precipitation observations, tree ring reconstructions from the distant past, and two climate models – each covering the same historical period as the tree ring analyses and continuing to predict future extreme dry and wet trends with increasing greenhouse gases.  

The integration of different data types lends credibility to the findings, Stagge said: “A benefit of having very different types of data is they can fill in each other’s gaps. We consider trends to be significant only when they’re showing up across multiple data sets – so that increases our confidence.”

Maps of the changing climate patterns show the method produced smooth spatial transitions and obvious boundaries, suggesting that “what we’re seeing is real,” he said. 

While the drying of the West is a well-known phenomenon, the team was surprised to see how extensive the precipitation increase has been and will be in the Northeast and how dramatic the heightened variability from droughts to pluvials is going to be in the center of the country. 

These patterns of water shortages and gluts could affect industries ranging from farming to construction and city planning, and are likely to strain management efforts to maintain household water-source reservoirs at optimum levels. 

“Planners, government agencies and engineers want to do the right thing and plan for a potentially changing climate, but oftentimes they don’t necessarily have the numbers or the broader picture of what’s going to be happening where,” Stagge said. “This puts regions on notice. In the Southwest, you’re going to have less water to deal with, and if you’re managing a farm in the middle of the country you might be seeing wider swings between droughts and pluvials. 

“Certainly, we’d like to arrest further climate change, but it takes a long time to turn that ship,” he said. “In the meantime, we should be planning on where we’re headed to decrease impacts on people, the economy and the environment.” 

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at Ohio State, and the Ohio Supercomputer Center. Gil Bohrer of Ohio State was also a co-author of the paper.

Traditionally, most drugs are assembled using molecular fragments called alkyl building blocks, organic compounds that have a wide variety of applications. However, because of how difficult it can be to combine different types of these compounds into something new, this method of creation is limited, especially for complex medicines.  

To help solve this issue, a team of chemists report the discovery of a particular type of stable nickel complex, a chemical compound that contains a nickel atom.

Since this compound can be made directly from classic chemical building blocks and is easily isolated, scientists can blend them with other building blocks in a manner that promises access to a new chemical space, said Christo Sevov, the principal investigator of the study and an associate professor in chemistry and biochemistry at The Ohio State University.

“There are really no reactions that can very reliably and selectively construct the bonds that we are now constructing with these alkyl fragments,” Sevov said. “By attaching the nickel complexes to them as temporary caps, we found that we can then stitch on all sorts of other alkyl fragments to now make new alkyl-alkyl bonds.”

The study was published in Nature.

On average, it can take a decade of research and development before a drug can successfully be brought to market. During this time, scientists also create thousands of failed drug candidates, further complicating an already extremely expensive and time-intensive process. 

Despite how elusive nickel alkyl complexes have been for chemists, by relying on a unique merger of organic synthesis, inorganic chemistry and battery science, Sevov’s team found a way to unlock their astonishing capabilities. “Using our tool, you can get much more selective molecules for targets that might have fewer side effects for the end user,” said Sevov. 

According to the study, while typical methods to construct a new molecule from a single chemical reaction can take much time and effort, their tool could easily allow researchers to make upwards of 96 new drug derivatives in the time it would normally take to make just one. 

Essentially, this ability will reduce the time to market for life-saving medicines, increase drug efficacy while lowering the risk of side effects, and reduce research costs so chemists can work to target severe diseases that impact smaller groups, the researchers say. Such advances also pave the way for scientists to study the bonds that make up the fundamentals of basic chemistry and discover more about why these challenging bonds work, said Sevov. 

The team is also already collaborating with scientists at numerous pharmaceutical companies who hope to use their tool to see how it impacts their workflow. “They’re interested in making thousands of derivatives to fine-tune a molecule’s structure and performance, so we teamed up with the pharmaceutical companies to really explore the power of it,” Sevov said. 

Ultimately, the team hopes to keep building on their tool by eventually turning their chemical reaction into a catalytic process, a method that would allow scientists to speed up other chemical reactions by providing an energy-saving way to do so.

“We’re working on making it so much more efficient,” Sevov said. 

Other co-authors include Samir Al Zubaydi, Shivam Waske, Hunter Starbuck, Mayukh Majumder and Curtis E. Moore from Ohio State, as well as Volkan Akyildiz from Ataturk University and Dipannita Kalyani from Merck & Co., Inc. This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award. 

The system involves two proteins that team up to disable plasmids, small DNA molecules that exchange genetic information among different bacterial strains. While plasmids provide evolutionary benefits, they can also be seen by host bacteria as threats.

The research team determined that one protein uses a short piece of DNA – known as a DNA guide – to set off events that recruit another protein to chop up the plasmid.

Beyond revealing a secret to bacterial survival, the research has uncovered components that could be applied to gene editing: guide DNA, which is more stable and cheaper to synthesize than guide RNA, and a functional protein small enough to deliver into mammalian cells for DNA sensing and gene-editing purposes.

“This system has great potential to be developed into a genome-editing tool,” said Tianmin Fu, assistant professor of biological chemistry and pharmacology in The Ohio State University College of Medicine. “We’re now trying to test whether it can be reprogrammed into a useful technology.”

The paper was published on Aug. 21 in the journal Cell.

The presence of plasmids in bacteria is well-known – some bacteria secrete plasmids, and the molecules can also move from one cell to another to share genetic information.

“It’s why bacteria evolve so rapidly,” Fu said. “Sometimes, plasmids can integrate into genomic DNA, but this happens quite randomly. They might cause difficulty for individual bacterial survival, but plasmids benefit the community in the long run because genetic information allows bacteria to acquire new features.”

Still, bacteria tend to want to eliminate plasmids to prevent any random threatening actions they might take.

Fu and colleagues used Vibrio cholerae bacteria as a model for studying the plasmid defense system known as DdmDE, consisting of proteins called DdmD and DdmE, using cryo-electron microscopy to observe their functions.

The process begins with DdmE binding to a very short DNA fragment, known as guide DNA, which enables the protein to recognize a target plasmid and snag it by creating a bubble formation using one of the plasmid’s double strands. The bubble complex recruits the DdmD protein, which can bind only to the plasmid’s free remaining strand. Once bound, DdmD dissociates into two separate molecules that both function as clippers to cut the plasmid into pieces.

Preliminary data from the team’s experiments suggested that a plasmid fragment remaining after DdmD chops it up could function as a segment of guide DNA to which DdmE could bind to repeat the process.

“There appears to be a feedback loop,” Fu said. “Once you create plasmid fragments, then more DdmE can acquire the fragments as guides to target more plasmids in the cell.”

However, he added, “How the first guide was created in the cell is unclear to us at the moment. It’s a ‘chicken and egg’ situation.”

The finding was unexpected because DdmE has similar qualities to a superfamily of Argonaute proteins that trigger their host bacteria’s death to avoid plasmid invasion. Argonautes, however, are aided by guide RNA, not guide DNA – and the guide DNA is a major reason the DdmDE system is attractive as a platform for genome editing aimed at disease prevention.

“Because DdmE needs guide DNA, we can synthesize guide DNA to target a very specific area in a genome,” Fu said. “We are testing this now in mammalian cells to see whether it will work, and we do see some potential there.”

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Co-authors, all from Ohio State, include Xiao-Yuan Yang, Zhangfei Shen, Chen Wang and Kotaro Nakanishi.

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.

The system, called SepsisLab, was developed based on feedback from doctors and nurses who treat patients in the emergency departments and ICUs where sepsis, the body’s overwhelming response to an infection, is most commonly seen. They reported dissatisfaction with an existing AI-assisted tool that generates a patient risk prediction score using only electronic health records, but no input data from clinicians. 

Scientists at The Ohio State University designed SepsisLab to be able to predict a patient’s sepsis risk within four hours – but while the clock ticks, the system identifies missing patient information, quantifies how essential it is, and gives a visual picture to clinicians of how specific information will affect the final risk prediction. Experiments using a combination of publicly available and proprietary patient data showed that adding 8% of the recommended data improved the system’s sepsis prediction accuracy by 11%.

“The existing model represents a more a traditional human-AI competition paradigm, generating numerous annoying false alarms in ICUs and emergency rooms without listening to clinicians,” said senior study author Ping Zhang, associate professor of computer science and engineering and biomedical informatics at Ohio State.  

“The idea is we need to involve AI in every intermediate step of decision-making by adopting the ‘AI-in-the-human-loop’ concept. We’re not just developing a tool – we also recruited physicians into the project. This is a real collaboration between computer scientists and clinicians to develop a human-centered system that puts the physician in the driver’s seat.” 

The research was published Aug. 24 in KDD ’24: Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining and will be presented orally Wednesday (Aug. 28) at SIGKDD 2024 in Barcelona, Spain.

Sepsis is a life-threatening medical emergency – it can rapidly lead to organ failure – but it’s not easy to diagnose because its symptoms of fever, low blood pressure, increasing heart rate and breathing problems can look like a lot of other conditions. This work builds upon a previous machine learning model developed by Zhang and colleagues that estimated the optimal time to give antibiotics to patients with a suspected case of sepsis. 

SepsisLab is designed to come up with a risk prediction quickly, but produces a new prediction every hour after new patient data has been added to the system. 

“When a patient first comes in, there are many missing values, especially for lab tests,” said first author Changchang Yin, a computer science and engineering PhD student in Zhang’s Artificial Intelligence in Medicine lab. 

In most AI models, missing data points are accounted for with a single assigned value – a process called imputation – “but the imputation model could suffer from uncertainty that can be propagated to the downstream prediction model,” Yin said. 

“If the imputation model cannot accurately impute the missing value and it’s a very important value, the variable should be observed. Our active sensing algorithm aims to find such missing values and tell clinicians what additional variables they might need to observe – variables that can make the prediction model more accurate.” 

Equally important to removing uncertainty from the system over the passage of time is providing clinicians with actionable recommendations. These include lab tests rank-ordered based on their value to the diagnostic process and estimates of how a patient’s sepsis risk would change depending on specific clinical treatments. 

Experiments showed adding 8% of the new data from lab tests, vital signs and other high-value variables reduced the propagated uncertainty in the model by 70% – contributing to its 11% improvement in sepsis risk accuracy. 

“The algorithm can select the most important variables, and the physician’s action reduces the uncertainty,” said Zhang, also a core faculty member in Ohio State’s Translational Data Analytics Institute. “This fundamental mathematics work is the most important technical innovation – the backbone of the research.” 

Zhang sees human-centered AI as part of the future of medicine – but only if AI interacts with clinicians in a way that makes them trust the system. 

“This is not about building an AI system that can conquer the world,” he said. “The center of medicine is hypothesis testing and making decisions minute after minute that are not just ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ We envision a person at the center of the interaction using AI to help that human feel superhuman.”

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and an Ohio State President’s Research Excellence Accelerator Grant. Zhang has received additional NIH funding to continue collaborating with clinicians on this work. 

Additional co-authors include Jeffrey Caterino of The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Bingsheng Yao and Dakuo Wang of Northeastern University, and Pin-Yu Chen of IBM Research.

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. 

With a new federal fellowship that funds tenured faculty members’ “blue sky” research pursuits, Heremans, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at The Ohio State University and an Ohio Eminent Scholar in Nanotechnology, will set out once again to prove something revolutionary about heat, spin and electricity.

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

“I’m thrilled Professor Heremans is leading this ambitious work at Ohio State,” said Ohio State President Walter “Ted” Carter Jr. “Buckeyes are on the front lines of research and innovation that create meaningful impact in the world, and this Department of Defense fellowship presents an exciting opportunity to contribute to the United States’ global leadership in security technology.”

With about $3 million in funding over five years, Heremans will focus almost exclusively on the topic of polarization caloritronics, substituting ferroelectric materials for ferromagnets in potential spintronic-like applications.

“It’s like starting anew,” said Heremans, also a professor of materials science and engineering and physics. “It’s fantastic to have an established career in research, and then suddenly be given the opportunity to start a completely new direction. It is rejuvenating.

“Bindu Nair, director of the Basic Research Office for the U.S. Department of Defense, explicitly told me to take big risks in the research funded by this program.”

The DOD Basic Research Office that sponsors the fellowship received 170 white papers for this year’s competition. Expert panels invited 27 proposals as finalists, from which the 11 fellows were recommended.

“The idea has to be extremely ambitious, and yet the proposal has to provide enough preliminary data to prove that it’s possible,” Heremans said. “It doesn’t have to build on what you’ve done before – it’s based on the fact you’ve delivered in the past, but you’re now not bound by your past. You can come up with new ideas and try them.”

In early 2023, Heremans and a graduate student in his lab, Brandi Wooten, led the work behind a paper in which they predicted and confirmed theoretical properties of solid materials known as ferroelectrics – which hinted at the possibilities Heremans will pursue during the fellowship.

Spintronics makes use of the spin of electrons in materials known as ferromagnets. In these materials, the atoms behave like tiny magnets that all align with each other to form a big magnet with an overall magnetic “moment” that generates a magnetic field around it. Magnons, or spin waves, are how these tiny magnets move in relation to each other, much like a crowd doing “the wave” at a football game.

The Heremans team worked for over a decade on the propagation of spin waves under the influence of temperature differences. Heremans is now turning to another class of materials known as ferroelectrics – materials that contain positively and negatively charged atoms (ions). 

At the atomic level, strong local electric fields develop between these ions. Similar to how the tiny magnets align in ferromagnets, these local electric fields align with each other to form a ferroelectric material, with a net polarization moment.

The team hypothesized that the quasi-particles moving in wave-like patterns in ferroelectrics are the vibrations of the atoms themselves, called phonons. Preliminary data show that these phonons carry enough heat to change the heat conduction of the materials when an electrical field is applied externally, leading the team to propose that, since spin waves carry a spin current, the new quasi-particle in ferroelectric materials should carry a polarization current – an entirely new concept.

In this new work, Heremans will explore the theory that the flow of electric polarization – no magnetic field required – can be demonstrated experimentally and can be used for engineering functions similar to spin currents: controlling the flow of heat, generating electricity from heat, and transporting information about a thousand times faster than magnetic spins can.

Multiple classes of applications could follow.

“In principle, you can make polarization currents work as a heat engine. Second, you can modulate the heat conduction through a solid with an electric field, allowing you to make the thermal equivalent of a transistor,” Heremans said. “Third, and the most ambitious, would be devices that have logical memory, not based on magnetic spin waves but on polarization currents. They would consume less power, heat up less and wouldn’t require big power plants to run data centers.”

One advantage for the military would be the ability to minimize electromagnetic interference – specifically, enemy attempts to jam communication signals, he added.

Heremans has received U.S. Defense funding since 2010, but this opportunity feels special and, he said, places him among the “who’s who in experts doing work relevant to the DOD.”

“It’s really a chance to let the imagination run free.”

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.

Beyond the biggest sources of each dietary category – cheese for saturated fat and soft drinks for added sugar – the study identifies a longer list of popular sources that helps explain why it’s so hard to limit fat and sugar to the recommended 10% of daily calories. With that overconsumption of unexpected sources like chicken and ketchup, for example, comes a risk for a variety of ailments, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer. 

The analysis of data on over 35,000 U.S. adults is part of a project aimed at developing a research tool that can streamline assessment of these dietary downsides. But the work also may open consumers’ eyes to the unexpected sources of fat and sugar that add up over the course of a day – and perhaps convince shoppers to read labels to see where these hidden sources are, researchers say. 

“Chicken breast is promoted as a lower saturated fat food, but it still has a little bit of saturated fat. But it is helpful to know how foods with smaller amounts also slowly add saturated fat in a stealthy way into the diet,” said first author Christopher Taylor, professor and director of medical dietetics in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at The Ohio State University. 

“Being able to meet less than 10% is to identify the big contributors, but also to be able to see where saturated fat and added sugar may still exist in other food choices. It doesn’t make them poor choices – it’s about being aware of how the morning latte may be contributing.” 

And then there’s the abundance of added sugar, which raises a public health policy concern, said lead author Susan Schembre, associate professor of oncology at Georgetown University’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. 

“It’s everywhere. It’s in so many unexpected foods, and often in surprising amounts,” she said. 

The study was published recently in the journal Nutrients. 

Researchers analyzed data from 36,378 U.S. adults aged 19 and older who had participated from 2005 to 2018 in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The survey collects 24-hour dietary recalls from each participant – detailing not just what, but when, all food and drinks were consumed over the previous two days.  

Overall, the top sources of saturated fat were cheese, pizza, ice cream and eggs. Leading sources of added sugar were soft drinks, tea, fruit drinks, and cakes and pies. Based on the USDA “What We Eat in America” food list, other categories contributing to saturated fat intake include cold cuts, cream substitutes, fried potatoes and whole milk. Categories with added sugar include tomato-based condiments, cereal bars, energy drinks and yeast breads. 

The research team also examined differences in the top sources of saturated fat and added sugar in a range of race/ethnicity subpopulations and age groups, an important detail when assessing diets to develop more personalized health interventions, Schembre said. 

“Before you understand what you can intervene on, you have to know what people are consuming,” she said. 

The team is creating an app for targeted assessment of “nutrients of concern,” and demonstrated that this analytic method produced a representative list of foods behind most saturated fat and added sugar intake. NHANES data is key to understanding nutrition in the United States, but for disease interventions, getting at the problem food and drink sources of fat, added sugar and, still to come, sodium, is more efficient and effective. 

Unsurprisingly, the results of this analysis showed that overall, saturated fat constituted at least 12% of a day’s calories, and added sugar consumption ranged from 14% to 16% of calories. Generally, dietary recommendations focus on avoiding the major contributors, like pizza and ice cream – which is what makes this longer list valuable and, for some, eye-opening, Taylor said. 

“There are the foods that are higher in saturated fat and added sugar that are consumed frequently, and they get targeted, but there’s also that smaller cumulative effect of things that are generally perceived as healthy, but they’re all contributing just a little bit,” he said. “And then when you top it off with some of those higher sources, it ends up taking you over the threshold for that 10% of the day’s calories. 

“We’re trying to hit the sweet spot of capturing the big front-seat items, but also understanding those things that are stealthy contributors.” 

This research was supported by the National Cancer Institute.

Additional co-authors were Peter Madril of Ohio State; Cynthia Thompson, Kelli Richardson and Edward Bedrick of the University of Arizona; Genevieve Dunton of the University of Southern California; Michelle Jospe of Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center; and Rick Weiss of Viocare Inc.

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.