Does support from administrative leadership help keep teachers in their jobs by making them feel safer and less stressed? And when teachers experience violence from students in their classrooms, does it weaken the impact of that protective relationship?

To find out, researchers analyzed 2020–21 national survey data on school violence from 5,550 pre-K through 12th-grade teachers. Conducted in collaboration with the American Psychological Association (APA)’s Task Force on Violence Against Teachers and School Personnel, the study was published recently in Educational Researcher.

Andrew Perry, a senior lecturer in educational studies at The Ohio State University, led the project alongside a research team that included co-author Eric Anderman, a professor of educational psychology and vice provost for regional campuses. They focused specifically on teachers’ intentions to transfer or quit, noting that about one-third of educators who express a desire to leave actually follow through within the year.

The researchers’ definition of support centers on transparency and communication — such as teachers feeling safe and comfortable talking to principals about matters of discipline — and a general belief that school administrators will back up teachers when a disciplinary incident occurs.

They found that while supportive leadership is widely recognized as protective against teacher burnout, student-directed violence is a critical tipping point. In a sample where 44% of educators reported experiencing student victimization and up to 80% faced verbal or threatening aggression, high levels of violence systematically weakened the protective benefits of principal support.

These results did not surprise Perry. “Our hypotheses were largely supported by the study. What we expected to find, we found,” he said. “Support is beneficial and necessary, but not sufficient. You have to have it, but in the face of victimization, support alone is not enough.”

Prior research shows that teachers who are on the front lines in our schools are most susceptible to non-physical violence from students — including verbal threats, obscene remarks and slurs. It’s “a demoralizing, sobering day-to-day reality,” Perry said. “If a teacher feels they are in an environment where this stuff is ignored, and they have nobody to turn to, it becomes toxic to their well-being, and they want to get away.”

Notably, elementary school teachers reported being victimized more often than their peers. Perry suspects this is due to elementary students having a lower capacity for self-regulation, making them more likely to lash out through hitting, biting, throwing objects or screaming.

“Teachers sign up for the job, but dealing with young children presenting these behaviors is challenging. School principals being present and showing support is a necessary component, but systematic strategies are required alongside it,” he said.

In a 2024 School Psychology paper co-authored by Perry, researchers evaluated strategies schools use to prevent violence and found that zero-tolerance policies and school hardening practices, like upgrading physical security and surveillance systems, do not work. “The most effective strategies are restorative, prevention-based approaches that build a climate of mutual respect, safety and integrity,” he said.

Beyond institutional policies, Perry emphasized that addressing teacher retention requires a fundamental shift in how schools and communities handle classroom safety.

“Violence against teachers is real, pervasive and impactful. When teachers are victimized, they want to leave. Teacher attrition leads to cascading consequences: schools lose experienced veteran teachers and replacing them is expensive and leads to inexperienced instruction,” Perry said.

Administrators can influence teachers’ perceptions of school safety, anxiety and stress, and retention intentions, the researchers noted, but administrator support needs to be combined with positive and clear discipline policies, and effective violence prevention initiatives that include all stakeholders and systemic improvements in school culture and climate.

“Teachers are human beings who need support not only from principals, but from parents and the public as well,” Perry said.

This work was supported by the American Psychological Association. Additional co-authors include Linda A. Reddy of Rutgers University; Andrew Martinez of Hunter College; Susan D. McMahon of DePaul University; Ron A. Astor of the University of California, Los Angeles; Frank C. Worrell of the University of California, Berkeley; and Dorothy L. Espelage of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Using computational modeling to simulate how electrons interact with manganese ions — an element produced during stellar explosions called supernovae — researchers predicted how different environmental conditions could produce types of observable light called emission lines.

They found that certain emission lines were extremely sensitive to changes in the temperature and density of the surrounding nebula, meaning they could be useful tools for analyzing rapidly expanding objects like supernova remnants and other large gas clouds, said Anil Pradhan, co-author of the study and a professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University.

“If we understand the chemical composition of galaxies, we can learn more about the chemistry of stars and their elements,” said Pradhan. “That will eventually lead to understanding the evolution of the universe and the composition of everything within it.”

The study was recently published in The Monthly Notices of The Royal Astronomical Society.

Stellar explosions play a crucial role in the formation of heavy elements like iron and other metals, which are essential to the evolution of stars, planets and other cosmic objects. Manganese is a key element because its abundance increases over time, meaning that researchers can use it as a cosmological clock to learn more about how galaxies evolve.

“Space and time are related, so measuring manganese abundances can grant us insight into the ever-expanding nature of the universe,” said Pradhan. “By combining this emission line data with other known facts on important elements like oxygen and sulfur, we may be able to view some of the earliest observable epochs in the history of the universe.”

Still, depending on their strength, faint emission lines can be extremely difficult and time-consuming to detect. To overcome these limitations, Pradhan and his colleagues employed powerful computing systems to model the behavior of more than 700 potential emission lines using atomic physics calculations that would otherwise have taken years to complete.

Though their work is still theoretical, the findings suggest that once paired with real-life astronomical observations, these conclusions could even be used to predict the conditions of other types of complex space environments, said Pradhan. Moreover, understanding manganese’s role in the cosmos could help scientists predict the universe’s chemical future.

“We’re getting better and better at capturing energy that reveals the shape of the universe,” said Pradhan. “This work joins astrophysics, atomic physics and plasma physics together, and we’re on the cusp of discovering many brand new processes.”

The team plans to verify their data using the James Webb Space Telescope and other ground-based observatories specialized in detecting chemical variations across time and space. The results from this work will also be made publicly available so that researchers can compare their datasets with novel atomic analyses, laying the foundation for similar chemical discoveries.

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation and partially carried out at the Ohio Supercomputer Center. Co-authors include Sultana Nahar from Ohio State and first author Zher Samak from Al-Aqsa University in Gaza, Palestine.

The study in cell cultures and rabbits found that a hormone that naturally becomes elevated during pregnancy produces specific fatty compounds, creating conditions favoring the virus’s ability to make copies of itself.    

The study helps explain why pregnancy, especially the third trimester, is associated with severe HEV outcomes, including liver failure, fetal complications and maternal death.

“This work demonstrates that the same biological processes that support fetal growth may also be co-opted by the virus,” said first author Kush Yadav, assistant professor of animal sciences at Ohio State.

Yadav also said the findings extend beyond hepatitis E, highlighting how metabolic changes during pregnancy may influence the severity of other viral infections.

The study, a collaboration between Ohio State and the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine at Virginia Tech, was published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Hepatitis E (HEV) is a leading cause of viral hepatitis worldwide and is known to disproportionately affect pregnant women, particularly in late stages of pregnancy. The risk of death in infected pregnant people can be dramatically higher than in the general population, but the biological reasons behind this heightened risk have remained unclear.

HEV is also the leading cause of acute viral liver infection in humans worldwide, mostly in developing regions where sanitation is poor.

In this new study, the research team discovered that placental lactogen, a hormone that increases significantly during pregnancy, plays a central role in fueling viral replication. The hormone increase triggers the production of higher levels of fatty acids and lipids – compounds that store energy, form cell membranes and perform other important functions in the body.

In cases of pregnant people infected with HEV, the presence of those fatty compounds provides the virus with an environment conducive to replicating more efficiently.

Experiments showed that elevated levels of oleic acid, a common fatty acid, directly enhance HEV replication, and increased production of phosphatidylethanolamine, or PE, a membrane-forming lipid, is essential for viral replication.

“This collaborative research reveals an important role of host lipid reprogramming in the pathogenesis of hepatitis E virus. Our findings that certain lipids, such as phosphatidylethanolamine and oleic acid, are elevated in hepatitis E virus-infected pregnant animals and enhance virus replication provide mechanistic insights into how hepatitis E virus causes disease, particularly pregnancy-associated adverse clinical outcomes,” said senior author X.J. Meng, University Distinguished Professor of molecular virology at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine.

Disrupting these lipid production pathways significantly reduced viral replication, results showed.

“Cutting-edge lipidomic analyses allowed us to precisely narrow down the key lipid drivers of HEV replication, identifying specific fatty acids and PE as strong candidates,” said second author Menuka Bhandari, a research senior associate in the Research and Analytical Service Core of Ohio State’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences.

While additional research is needed, particularly in human populations, the study provides a foundation for developing targeted treatments to reduce pregnancy-related complications from HEV, the researchers say.

“By identifying lipid metabolism as a critical driver of HEV replication, the research opens new avenues for interventions,” Yadav said.

Potential future strategies may include therapies that target lipid production pathways, approaches that regulate hormone-driven metabolic changes, and development of broad antiviral strategies that disrupt virus–lipid interactions.

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and Ohio State startup funds and Alumni Grants for Graduate Research and Scholarship.

Additional co-authors include Hassan Mahsoub and Hannah Brown of Virginia Tech; Young Bin Park, Huong Van Lee and Jay Mun Choi of Calico Co. Ltd.; and Gireesh Rajashekara of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The analysis also shows the risk of a nonfatal overdose is up to three-fold higher in illicit users compared to patients exposed to fentanyl in a medical setting or through a prescription.

Overall, the study found that illicit-source fentanyl exposure is linked to a significantly higher risk of opioid-related harmful outcomes than medical-source exposure.

Almost 300,000 people from a dataset of 300 million patients were divided into two groups based primarily on urine drug test results, with illicit-source users constituting 71.1% of the study cohort, compared to 28.9% medical-source users.

“Fentanyl is a big problem, but we don’t actually know how serious illicit drug use is compared to medical use,” said co-lead author Ping Zhang, professor of computer science and engineering and biomedical informatics at The Ohio State University. “Finding that illicit use has reached 70% among all fentanyl users is a surprise. And this is also a contribution of this paper. To make something that’s been a black hole visible to the healthcare system is significant.”

The analysis also showed that among all states, illicit fentanyl use is most common in Ohio.

The study was published Aug. 14, 2026, in eClinicalMedicine.

Data on patients screened for fentanyl exposure from 2015 to 2023 came from Epic Cosmos, a large U.S. electronic health record dataset. First author Seungyeon Lee, a PhD student in Zhang’s lab, conducted the analysis linking urine drug test results with medication records to group patients by medical or illicit use.

“Inferring or characterizing individual-level illicit fentanyl exposure poses significant challenges because illicit use often occurs outside the clinical setting and therefore is not directly observed in clinical data, so it’s difficult to measure the scale and impact,” Lee said. “This study focused on identifying illicit-source fentanyl use and its risk for opioid-related harmful outcomes.”

Among patients in the Epic dataset who met study criteria, people who tested positive for fentanyl and had received a prescription for the drug within 72 hours before the urine test were categorized as medical-source patients (85,535), and people who tested positive but had no recent fentanyl prescription composed the illicit-source use cohort (210,193).

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that’s up to 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. Its main clinical use is to treat severe pain, especially after surgery and for advanced cancers. Fentanyl is among the synthetic opioids that contribute to nearly 70% of overdose deaths, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In addition to categorizing fentanyl users, Lee conducted analyses to examine patterns of adverse outcomes in both illicit and medical-source users that emerged over time from 2015 to 2023 and to estimate short-term risks within 30 days of fentanyl initiation.

The negative outcomes linked to fentanyl use included nonfatal overdose, abuse or misuse, and dependence that leads to withdrawal symptoms when use stops. Fatal overdoses were not included in this work because causes of death were not part of the Epic dataset.

The temporal analysis showed illicit fentanyl users had a higher prevalence of all three negative outcomes compared to medical users, and by 2023, the prevalence of nonfatal overdose was four-fold higher for illicit users than for medical-source fentanyl patients, at 18.6% of illicit users compared to 4.3% of medical users.

In the short-term risk analysis, after adjusting for a variety of health conditions and demographics, results showed that illicit-source fentanyl initiation was associated with a two- to three-fold higher risk of nonfatal overdose, abuse and dependence within 30 days compared to medical-source initiation.

“These patterns indicate that illicit-source fentanyl remains a significant and growing threat to public health nationwide,” the authors wrote.

The analysis also showed that, compared to medical exposure to fentanyl, illicit fentanyl users were younger and less likely to be married, had a higher concentration of fentanyl detected in their urine drug test, and were more likely to have a mental health or substance use disorder.

Medical-source users were more likely than illicit-source users to have a chronic condition, and patients with chronic conditions were more likely to have more frequent healthcare utilization and greater exposure to opioid medications.

Geographically, Ohio had the highest proportion of illicit-source fentanyl users – 12.2% – followed by Massachusetts (10.5%) and California (8.8%). Medical-source exposure was most common in North Carolina (10.6%), Ohio (10.5%) and California (10.3%).

Opioid regulations have been focused on medical-source opioid drugs, including fentanyl, but the researchers say the availability of new data on the widespread illicit use of fentanyl and related health dangers highlights a need for additional policy action.

For example, the examination of patient data revealed a transition from medical-source fentanyl use to illicit-source use among some patients. The Zhang lab’s next step will be analyzing patterns related to this transition, with hopes that the findings could assist with policymaking strategies.

This work was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Zhang is also a core faculty member in the Translational Data Analytics Institute at Ohio State. Additional co-authors were Richard Urman of Ohio State and Wenyu Song and David Bates of Harvard Medical School.

Once NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches this week, the mission is expected to explore the cosmos by surveying hundreds of millions of galaxies, capturing the sky in detail hundreds of times faster than even the Hubble Space Telescope.

“This enormous field of view will allow us to map astronomical objects in a way that we previously couldn’t,” said David Weinberg, a Distinguished University Professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University. “These better measurements may end up teaching us something extremely revolutionary about all kinds of matter in the cosmos.”

More than two dozen Ohio State faculty, students and postdoctoral scholars have played a role in designing Roman’s surveys, including the High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey, a portion of the mission aimed at probing the structure and expansion of the universe as it evolved through cosmic time. Anthony Harbo Torres, a senior graduate student in physics at Ohio State who helped calibrate Roman’s image detectors, said that mission success can be attributed to decades of human ingenuity and perseverance.

“With Roman, we'll be seeing some things for the first time, as well as revisiting places we've seen before but with an increased level of resolution,” said Harbo Torres. “It takes so many people to tackle a monumental undertaking like this and make it possible, so I hope that our images inspire a sense of wonder when people see the scale and detail of the things we find.”

The High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey aspect of the program plans to utilize the telescope to peer past the plane of the Milky Way to map about 12% of the sky in just under two years. In all, Roman's surveys will detect about a billion galaxies and 20 billion stars, more astronomical objects than have ever been detected by all of humanity’s telescopes put together, said Weinberg.

“For just one single point, displaying an image from this telescope would be like looking at a wall full of 4K televisions,” he said. “These will have an extraordinary image quality as it scans the sky for objects more than 100 million times too faint to see with the human eye.”

This preciseness is one that typically eludes scientists when trying to look through our planet’s blurring atmosphere, Weinberg said. Over the course of several months, Roman will settle into orbit at Lagrange point two (L2), a gravitationally stable point about a million miles away from Earth.

The Roman mission revolves around three core science themes — measuring dark energy, investigating exoplanets, and expanding the study of astrophysics and planetary science. Astronomers will use the data Roman sends back to study dark matter, an invisible substance that can only be perceived by its gravitational effect on other objects, as well as dark energy, a force that seems to have a hand in speeding up the universe’s expansion. Understanding these aspects can also offer insights into local galactic history and evolution.

“Mapping clusters of dark matter will help us figure out why gravity on the scale of the universe is so radically different from gravity on the scale of a solar system or galaxy,” said Weinberg. “Ohio State is part of the teams that are building the tools to actually do that advanced analysis.”

But just getting a better lay of the land isn’t Roman’s end goal. Creating a more detailed sketch of the cosmos will help scientists answer critical questions about the inner workings of the universe, such as whether stellar systems like ours are rare and how many black holes there may be in the Milky Way, and extend the search for potentially habitable exoplanets.

“Roman is going to allow us to find extremely rare things and things that don’t happen very often,” said Scott Gaudi, the principal investigator of the Roman Galactic Exoplanet Survey Project Infrastructure Team and a professor of astronomy at Ohio State. “It’s going to be those things that are likely going to surprise us and lead to new avenues of research.”

Compared to legacy instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope, Roman will map the sky about 1,000 times faster than its predecessor, a process made more efficient by its wide field-of-view, said Gaudi. Using a planet-hunting method called microlensing in tandem with the traditional transiting technique, researchers expect Roman will detect around 100,000 worlds, ideally expanding NASA’s exoplanet catalog to new heights.

Although Roman is currently slated as a five-year mission, researchers hope the data it uncovers, along with the lifespan of its sturdy science instruments, allows the mission to continue operating for decades to come. “Even though Ohio State has a large footprint on the mission, we don’t even begin to cover a fraction of the kind of science that can and will be done with Roman,” said Gaudi. “Our job so far has been to make sure it’s successful.”

The telescope’s first science findings are expected in mid-2027, but in the meantime, groups like the Roman Science Collaboration, of which Weinberg is a leading member, are looking forward to seeing how returns from this mission inform the next generation of astronomical priorities.

“The value of producing really big, vital datasets is that you then enable anyone in the world to go and make discoveries with it,” said Weinberg. “That’s a really powerful way of doing science, and I think bringing that to space-based astronomy is very inspiring.”

To celebrate their role in the achievement, as many as 20 members of the Ohio State cohort plan to be present on the beach when Roman lifts off aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

This includes Christopher Hirata, another key member of Ohio State’s Roman science team and a professor of physics at Ohio State, who notes that as large data sets and machine learning algorithms become indispensable for studying the universe’s most fundamental parts, this mission is primed to reshape how future researchers interact with exciting new science tools.

“Roman’s technology will have a huge influence on the future of space science,” said Hirata. “From launch onward, it’s going to be spectacular.”

For generations, these familiar idioms have illustrated what Rin Reczek and Emma Bosley-Smith, co-authors of the 2022 book “Families We Keep: LGBTQ People and Their Enduring Bonds with Parents” (NYU Press), term compulsory kinship: the social expectation that biological and legal family ties must be preserved at all costs.

In their book, Reczek, a professor of sociology at The Ohio State University, and then-Ohio State doctoral student Emma Bosley-Smith (now an assistant professor at Alma College) examined the great effort adult children often make to maintain strained or painful ties with their families of origin. Now, in Reczek’s follow-up book, “Families We Lose: A New Explanation for Family Estrangement,” published this week by NYU Press, Reczek explores what happens when adult children decide that family obligation is no longer reason enough to stay.

Overall, her research has found that adult children who go “no contact” with one or both parents elect estrangement as a last resort, and to free themselves to create a chosen family environment that meets their needs.

Reczek has studied complex family dynamics for about 20 years, and she said that changing family structures often shoulder the blame for the social problems of our time. While researching “Families We Keep,” she was surprised by the lack of scholarly literature available on the topic of family estrangement. And when she looked at the current cultural conversations happening around adult children going “no contact” with family members — in the news, on podcasts, on social media, etc. — the dominant narrative was one of panic and stigmatization.

Family estrangement is the latest in a long history of what Reczek calls “family panics.” Take, for example, rising divorce rates. “When divorce rates were rising and we saw increases in states allowing no-fault divorce, we also saw a lot of panic around the fall, or decline, of the family,” she said.

According to prior research cited in the book, about 6% of U.S. adults are estranged from a mother, while roughly 23% are estranged from a father at some point in adulthood. Reczek notes there is no empirical evidence showing estrangement rates are surging.

As shifts in American family life stream across our 24/7 content feeds, historically private decisions become public conversations — and people can mistake them for the end of family life as we know it.

“To frame estrangement as just bad for society is inappropriate,” Reczek said. “When we see that kind of panic around it, it’s a signal that it’s touching on a change in how people think about family. Estrangement has been happening throughout history; maybe the publicness of it has become really scary to people.”

There’s an unspoken societal expectation that parents will take care of kids when they are little, and when those kids grow up, eventually the roles will reverse, with the kids caring for their aging parents. “Estrangement really cuts to the heart of that agreement, which never really was agreed upon by the child who was brought into the world,” Reczek said. “That is why it’s so painful for a lot of parents, understandably. They thought that their life would look a certain way, and now it doesn’t.”

In “Families We Lose” and a related article in the Journal of Marriage and Family, Reczek sought out the real-life stories behind the current estrangement panic. She conducted in-depth interviews with 68 estranged adults across the U.S. in 2023, tracing their family histories from childhood to the present day. Each participant was actively “no contact” with at least one family member, and their periods of estrangement ranged from short-term to decades-long, sometimes repeating in cyclical patterns.

The data shows that estrangement is rarely the direct result of a single childhood event, a social media trend or “therapy speak.” Instead, Reczek found it is driven by an unresolvable culture clash between those holding onto compulsory kinship and those embracing a different way of doing family: democratized kinship.

“If compulsory kinship creates the burns of inequality, then democratized kinship and its values of quality and equality are the balm,” she writes in “Families We Lose.” Familial relationships created under democratized kinship — with friends, co-workers, neighbors and others — are guided by shared values like accountability and growth, deep connection, mutual respect and safety. Estrangement, she argues, is caused by “the conflict that arises when one family member changes from compulsory to democratized kinship but the others fail to make the same transition.”

Reczek also debunks the myth that adult children who experience or initiate estrangement do so because they don’t care about family — that they’re selfish and individualistic. “That couldn’t be further from the truth,” she said. “They care so much about family. They want to have healthy families, and they have very high standards for what a healthy family is.”

Going no contact is rarely a spontaneous or easy decision. More often, it’s the final straw after years of mistreatment, miscommunication or boundary violations. Pundits have blamed mental health professionals for driving estrangement trends, but Reczek found nothing to validate that claim.

The people she spoke with described therapy as a space where they were able to work through some of the pain of their family relationships, and, through that process, learn more about the kinds of values that they had for their relationships. “It wasn't that the therapist was encouraging them to do anything,” Reczek said. “It was more that the therapist was teaching them about what healthy relationships could look like.”

Another powerful catalyst for adult children, Reczek found, is becoming a parent. Raising children brings memories of their upbringing into sharp relief, prompting them to set firm boundaries, or sever ties entirely, to protect the next generation from experiencing similar harm.

Ultimately, Reczek hopes the public conversation around estrangement moves toward a broader acceptance of modern family life — one that honors personal choice and agency in adult relationships.

“Maybe family doesn’t look like the way we thought it would, but it hardly ever does,” she said. “Being open to those possibilities is a really important thing for all of us.”

The study, published in the Early Childhood Education Journal, drew on survey data from 110 preschool teachers in two Midwestern states to examine how classroom play is supported across urban, suburban and rural settings. Researchers looked at three key factors: teachers’ own knowledge and beliefs about learning and play, their perception of family support for play and their perception of curricular support for it.

While teachers’ beliefs about play and curricular support didn’t differ by region — 96.9% agreed or strongly agreed that play supports academic learning — urban teachers were significantly less likely than suburban teachers to say families in their classrooms viewed play as essential to learning.

According to Erin Fox, lead author of the study and a recent graduate with a doctorate in human development and family science from The Ohio State University, both research and anecdotal stories from teachers and parents point to growing pressure in preschool settings to prioritize direct academic instruction, which can limit children’s time for play.

Fox was curious about how this tension was taking shape across communities and set out to explore equity in access to high-quality, play-based preschool.

“One of the biggest misconceptions is that play doesn’t support learning,” Fox said. “In general, I think most people would agree that play supports social emotional development, but may be less likely to understand how play can also support early literacy or math skills.”

Far from being just a “break” or a way for kids to burn off energy, playful learning is an evidence-based teaching strategy: The researchers define it as an active learning approach that combines child-directed, engaging elements with intentional adult guidance.

“From the outside, it might just look like kids are playing, but when you actually talk to the teachers, it’s very intentional and there are clear learning goals behind it,” said Kelly Purtell, a co-author of the study and associate professor of human sciences at Ohio State. The paper is part of a larger study focused on understanding how teachers use and think about play experiences in preschool and early elementary school classrooms.

Purtell notes a broader cultural shift in the way conversations about school readiness have come to dominate how families view preschool.

“When talking to teachers, both formally and informally, they’ve expressed that when some families send their kids to preschool, they really expect them to be there to learn and to be ready for kindergarten,” Purtell said. An increased focus on formal academic preparation, she added, shapes broader expectations of what preschool should look like.

As to why teachers in urban areas reported feeling less support from families around playful learning, the researchers speculate that parents in urban areas might be more exposed to narratives around the importance of school readiness, Purtell said, and there is a growing need to better educate parents and families about the important role of play-based learning in ensuring school readiness.

Parental concerns about kindergarten preparation are well-placed and understandable, Purtell said, and she hopes to help broaden how people think about school readiness.

“Play-based learning is a developmentally appropriate learning strategy,” she said, “and it’s something parents should feel comfortable talking to their children’s teachers about — to better understand how and why teachers are using play in the classroom — and how that’s helping kids develop and get ready for the transition to school.”

Purtell is also a faculty affiliate of the Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy, and Fox was a graduate research associate with the Crane Center. Additional co-authors were Maria Abdul-Masih of Ohio State, Rachel E. Schachter of the University of Illinois Chicago, Amy R. Napoli of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and Yuenjung Joo of the University of North Carolina Greensboro.

People who have experienced a traumatic brain injury (TBI) are susceptible to many types of infections, especially in the lungs. Yet previous studies have shown that bladder infections in this population are not uncommon: 15% of adult brain injury patients experience a urinary tract infection (UTI) within a year, and UTIs are responsible for up to 20% of hospital readmissions that occur within a year after a TBI. In addition, UTIs are known to cause delirium-like symptoms in medically vulnerable people.

This new study, led by researchers at The Ohio State University and published recently in the Journal of Neurotrauma, is the first publication to examine neuroimmune and cognitive effects of a post-brain injury bladder infection in an animal model.

“This very common infection is happening in TBI survivors and probably those who don’t even report it and go to the hospital, and it’s associated with observed and perceived cognitive changes. We thought UTI could be something that’s having a much bigger impact on recovery after brain injury than we currently appreciate,” said senior author Olga Kokiko-Cochran, an investigator in the Chronic Brain Injury Program and the Institute of Brain, Behavior, and Immunology (IBBI) at Ohio State and associate professor of neuroscience in the College of Medicine.

“Let’s not overlook UTI,” she said. “Sometimes these common experiences that are overlooked are important, and I think we can’t presume that an infection of any sort is no big deal.”

Injuries in this work are moderate in severity and resemble the type of TBI that could result from a fall – the most common cause of traumatic brain injury.

The experiments involved four groups of female mice: those with a TBI (performed surgically under anesthesia) and “sham” mice, which had surgery but no brain injury. Three days later (again, under anesthesia), either uropathogenic E. coli bacteria, the main cause of UTIs, or a control treatment was injected into their urethras.

Results from behavioral tests six days after injury showed that the TBI impaired the animals’ spatial memory, and UTI following the injury “greatly exaggerated those cognitive impairments,” said first author Zachary Zimomra, a neuroscience research associate and manager of Kokiko-Cochran’s lab.

That UTI-induced cognitive impairment was associated with delayed increases of two inflammation-related proteins in two different cell types in several regions of the injured brains compared to controls. This finding suggested that brain immune cells were responding to not just the TBI, but to the bladder infection as well. And bladder immune cells changed after brain injury alone – an intriguing clue that could help explain why infections follow a TBI.

“Maybe there’s some susceptibility we don’t even appreciate,” Kokiko-Cochran said. “Because we do see, post-TBI, a higher immune cell presence in the bladder.”

The team looked further into changes in inflammatory protein signaling linked to the injury and infection, finding one cytokine, IL-6, elevated in the blood after TBI and then muted by the UTI – suggesting that clearance of the infection prompted anti-inflammatory activity.

Cellular changes seen in the bladder and brain also offer hints at the biology behind post-injury infection that researchers plan to investigate further. A better understanding of how the brain and bladder communicate – beyond their known neural connection related to urination – could lead to infection prevention strategies that improve long-term TBI outcomes, the researchers say.

“Clinically, there is something about UTI that causes a behavioral change in cognition that you don’t necessarily see from influenza or a cold or some other infection. It may be something with the bladder itself,” Zimomra said. “We want to learn what happens within the brain, but also how bladder change following TBI exaggerates or enhances these behavioral effects.”

UTIs affect 400 million people worldwide each year, and females are 30 times more likely than males to experience a bladder infection – which is why this initial study was done in female mice. But UTI after a brain injury is not restricted to females, meaning future research will include animals of both sexes, Kokiko-Cochran said.

“This has been an opportunity for our lab to contribute something new that has, we think, important translational relevance and could raise awareness and help us think about how this type of infection was layered on top of a brain injury,” she said. “There’s a lot more we can do to understand the brain-bladder connection.”

This work was supported by pilot funding from the Chronic Brain Injury Program and IBBI at Ohio State. Co-authors included Christina Lepak, Rebecca Boland, Morgan Taylor, Amber McCraw, Irene Crescenze and Dana McTigue of Ohio State, and Henry Schreiber of Washington University School of Medicine.

By examining small air bubbles trapped in ancient ice, scientists studied a 2,000-year-old record of how atmospheric methane evolved over time. They discovered that the concentrations found in Nevado Huascarán, the world’s highest tropical mountain, broadly agree with global fluctuations recorded in polar regions – but are slightly higher.

These results support the longstanding hypothesis that methane emissions from tropical sources like the Amazon rainforest likely dominated the Earth during the pre-industrial period, while a rise in human-driven agricultural and industrial emissions contributed to methane increases in later periods.

“Huascarán is a Goldilocks spot for capturing global methane, partly because of its high elevation to capture gases and location close to the equator,” said Kara Lamantia, lead author of the study and a former graduate student at the Byrd Polar and Research Climate Center at The Ohio State University. “While past studies hypothesized the tropical dominance of past methane sources, with this new core we can confidently confirm that the region was likely responsible for more of these emissions than we assumed before.”

The study was published today (Aug. 19, 2026) in Nature.

The second-most abundant greenhouse gas after carbon-dioxide, methane traps about 28 times more heat, meaning it contributes greatly to the planet’s warming. This study was the first to sample ice cores from Huascaran to identify the historic sources of these powerful gases.

After collection, five ice core samples were selected from different depths in the core to correspond to key periods in time. Lamantia’s colleagues then tested it for the presence of specific isotopes, chemical signatures that are used to determine the origins of the greenhouse gases.

“Depending on the source signature, it is possible to differentiate where the methane originated, letting us separate natural sources from fossil fuels,” said Lamantia, now a Royal Society Newton International Fellow at the University of Bristol. “Our sample revealed a globally well-mixed signature, but methane emissions lean slightly towards a more biogenic source, potentially from the wetlands in South America or Asia.”

Researchers also found that more recent measurements from the ice matched well with observations from the Mauna Loa base station in Hawaii, the global center for monitoring greenhouse gases.

According to the study, previous reconstructions of historical methane records point to the same trends shown in this paper, but because those were built solely around polar ice cores — collected from Greenland and Antarctica — they may have underestimated the importance of tropical emissions.

The researchers noticed spikes in their tropical methane record that could be attributed to events like the rise and fall of the Inca Empire, as well as the Little Ice Age, which could be helpful markers for assessing their data against other models.

Overall, the data from this work strengthens historical climate records and further solidifies the significant role the tropics play in both monitoring and understanding the distribution of global greenhouse gas emissions, said Lamantia.

Learning more about global sources of greenhouse gases can help researchers propose steps to mitigate increased warming, but opportunities to extend the analysis to more targeted ice core sampling in the tropics are rare due to rapid glacier melt. Still, these findings open up new pathways to help resolve other pressing environmental uncertainties, said Lamantia.

“My hope is that this data will be integrated into future climate models,” she said. “Because if we can understand Earth’s past, we can better understand the present and plan for our future.”

This study was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Volo Foundation.

Other co-authors include Lonnie Thompson, Mary Davis, Emilie Beaudon, and Ellen Mosley-Thompson from Ohio State, as well as Ben Riddell-Young from the University of Colorado Boulder, Newton Nguyen from Stanford University, and Ivo Strawson and Edward J. Brook from Oregon State University.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scientists at The Ohio State University showed that the engineered extracellular vesicles could evade immune cells and target cancer cells, two capabilities that could improve the delivery of future therapies.  

The technology offers exceptional flexibility: By assembling the vesicles from red blood cell lipids using microfluidics, researchers were able to package cargo ranging from genetic material and proteins to whole viruses used in gene therapy.

In mice, the engineered vesicles remained in circulation and were distributed to multiple organs in patterns similar to those of naturally occurring extracellular vesicles, with notable accumulation in the lungs.

Though researchers started with the idea of making delivery devices out of natural extracellular vesicles generated by red blood cells, they encountered limitations in efforts to scale up production and cargo loading flexibility – so they turned to engineering techniques to improve upon what nature had to offer.

“In terms of lipid composition, they basically match very closely with what the natural extracellular vesicles from red blood cells would have,” said senior author Eduardo Reátegui, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State. “We are keeping some of the great biological advantages that these particles have by themselves because they are very biocompatible.”

The source cells for the lipids are expired red blood cells – or RBCs – obtained from the lab of co-author Andre Palmer, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and an Ohio Eminent Scholar at Ohio State.

“We’re always purifying hemoglobin from expired red blood cells,” said Palmer, whose lab uses the hemoglobin as a building block for making red blood cell substitutes. “The approach here is very sustainable because these expired red blood cells otherwise would be thrown out since they cannot be transfused into patients.”

Reátegui, Palmer and colleagues described the platform in a study published recently in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials.

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are tiny cargo-containing particles that emerge from cells to transport signals to other cells. EVs are known to contribute to both health and disease, and the Ohio State team has been investigating how engineered EVs can be used in a variety of medical applications.

Beyond the biocompatibility provided by red blood cell lipids, microfluidics enables therapeutic cargo to be incorporated as the vesicles form, eliminating the need for separate cargo-loading steps afterward.

“We’re not saying our process is better. We’re claiming that we have a lot more controllability in terms of what we want the composition of this engineered vesicle to look like,” said Reátegui, also a member of the Cancer Biology Program in The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Experiments showed that attaching a CD47 peptide to the carriers’ outer surface protected them from being mistaken for pathogens and eaten by macrophages.

The team also showed that the vesicles could be engineered for tumor targeting by adding PD-L1-recognition molecules, including anti-PD-L1 nanobodies developed in the lab of co-author Blaise Kimmel, and by demonstrating preferential uptake of anti-PD-L1-tagged vesicles in PD-L1-positive breast cancer tumors that are often targeted by immunotherapy.

In fact, researchers said these engineered EVs could function similarly to cancer CAR T-cell therapies that are made from a patient’s own immune system T cells.

“It could be a unique way of using a person’s own red blood cell lipids to then encapsulate therapeutic materials that could be delivered back to that patient to potentially cure a disease,” Palmer said.

The microfluidics method also enables inclusion of comparatively large molecules, such as whole proteins or even an adeno-associated virus (AAV) – the established delivery system for many gene therapies. Encasing a therapeutic AAV inside an engineered red blood cell extracellular vesicle tagged with the CD47 peptide could reduce the chances of triggering an immune response, Reátegui said.

“Our thought was to take these AAV particles and encapsulate them inside engineered RBC extracellular vesicles. We tested if the gene therapy would still work and be delivered into cells, and we show that it would. And we also demonstrated that the AAVs would be protected from neutralizing antibodies,” he said.

With the platform in place, the researchers aim to narrow their focus to gene therapy and delivery of select therapeutics, particularly those that capitalize on the EVs’ affinity for the lungs.

This research was supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, and Ohio State’s William G. Lowrie Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Co-authors include Chiranth Nagaraj, Xilal Rima, Kim Nguyen, Courtney Culkins, Nana Boateng, Jacob Doon-Ralls, Alejandro Bresolin, Xin Huang, Vahedi Amid, Ajeet Pal Singh, Dharti Shantaram, Anastasiia Amari, Nicholas Merriam, Zachary Schultz, Willa Hsueh, Rachel Kopec of Ohio State; and Hong Li, Scott Harper, Nizar Saad and Setty Magaña of Nationwide Children’s Hospital.

Green hydrogen, produced when water is split into hydrogen and oxygen using a process called electrolysis, is a promising tool for decarbonizing the planet: Unlike power created by burning fossil fuels, when run on renewable electricity, it has no negative impact on the environment.

Accordingly, as reliable energy sources become increasingly vital for ensuring a consistent and enduring global energy supply, many industries are pivoting to embrace next-generation zero-emission technologies, said Tomaz Neves-Garcia, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in chemistry and biochemistry at The Ohio State University.

“Carbon dioxide is an abundant resource that we need to make an effort to capture and utilize,” he said. “When paired with industrial waste, it can be transformed into valuable products, so we came up with a process where instead of releasing its energy, we actually harvest it from the capturing process to produce green hydrogen and valuable calcite.”

In the first demonstration of their technology, the team successfully captured carbon dioxide (CO₂) using industrial by-products such as steel slag and coal ash. The gas reacted with those materials to permanently form high-purity calcite, a widely used industrial mineral with applications ranging from construction materials to pharmaceuticals and agriculture.

The team’s results showed that the chemical reactions their process created reduced the energy required for water electrolysis and green hydrogen production. This also meant the team was able to produce hydrogen with negative emissions by employing widely available grid electricity, paving the way for hydrogen to be produced in a much more effective and cheaper way than traditional methods of generation, which require significant amounts of electricity.

“Our technology does not treat CO₂ as a burden that must be managed,” said Neves-Garcia. “Instead of wasting energy, we are actually creating value and creating energy. This is what makes the potential of this process really impactful.”

The study was published July 8 in the journal ACS Energy Letters.

While utilizing green hydrogen offers many environmental benefits, researchers have also noted that widespread adoption would greatly benefit the global economy.

For instance, because the team’s new chemical process doesn’t rely on specialized materials to capture carbon dioxide, their findings introduce a sustainable way for steel and coal industries to transform unwanted waste into valuable calcite products, said Robert Baker, senior author of the study and a professor in chemistry and biochemistry at Ohio State.

“This technology is exciting because it takes two abundant waste streams and converts them to valuable products, which are in high demand for fuels and manufacturing,” said Baker. “It also has the potential to make a significant economic impact without relying on carbon credits, government subsidies or environmental mandates.”

According to the study, when combined with the value of the calcite co-product, the projected cost of production is less than $1 per kilogram, making their green hydrogen scalable and readily competitive with the cost of producing conventional fossil-fuel-derived hydrogen.

While both methods have limitations and advantages, if this team’s process is widely implemented across interconnected sectors, researchers estimate the study’s technology could prevent about 500 million metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution annually. Beyond helping to protect the environment, their solution to mitigate these greenhouse gases represents an abundant and inexpensive carbon source that could be utilized for sustainable manufacturing of many other much-needed complex materials and chemicals.

As investment in green technologies grows worldwide, researchers say, this work emphasizes the importance of major chemical leaps in expanding energy systems and reducing our carbon footprint.

“Climate solutions do not only not have to be more expensive, they can also be simpler, scalable and economically attractive,” said Neves-Garcia. “We have the ability now to implement them.”

Corrado Masciocchi, an undergraduate research fellow at Ohio State, was also a co-author. This work was supported by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation.

But the preliminary clinical results exceeded researchers’ expectations: In the pilot trial with 12 veterans, 75% of participants were in remission one month after the study’s end. Their symptoms no longer met the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder.

“For a population with severe treatment-resistant PTSD, these results are striking,” said Stacey Armstrong, first author of the new study, published today (July 30, 2026) in Communications Medicine.

“While treatments do work for some veterans with PTSD, they’re falling short for many, leaving veterans to continue to search for solutions, which can lead to treatment dropout, long-term disability and elevated suicide risk,” said Armstrong, senior researcher and associate director of the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education (CPDRE) in The Ohio State University College of Social Work.

“It’s this unmet need that inspires us.”

The 11-week trial period combined eight hours of psychotherapy followed by two doses, 15 milligrams and 25 milligrams, of synthetic psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. Six to eight more hours of integrative therapy followed the drug treatment.

From baseline to one month after treatment was finished, there was an overall average drop of 27.5 points in clinician-rated PTSD symptoms among the group. Nine participants had a clinical response to treatment and were in remission. No severe adverse events occurred, with the most common side effect being a mild headache after taking psilocybin. Suicidal ideation scores did not significantly change from baseline to one month post-treatment.

Future papers from this study will assess the treatment’s effectiveness up to six months after the trial, as well as biological changes and effects on other PTSD-related problems like sleep disorders and substance use, said Alan Davis, senior author of the study, director of the CPDRE and associate professor of social work at Ohio State.

Anecdotal observations, and previous research showing that depression remission endured for five years after an earlier psilocybin trial that Davis co-led, suggest the combined therapies could have staying power for many people whose symptoms are not eased by traditional therapies.

“It’s been an incredible honor to work with veterans in this study, many of whom have been suffering with PTSD for decades or longer,” said Davis, who also holds faculty appointments in psychology and internal medicine at Ohio State.

“Some experiences we’ve seen in actual treatment sessions are extremely profound and meaningful. The ability for them to go back and to revisit really difficult events that happened to them and to find a new way of understanding them and a new way of moving forward in their life has really been exciting.”

One participant’s experience

To be eligible for the trial, veterans had to have severe PTSD that was considered treatment-resistant. The need for help in this population became quite evident as participant recruitment began: Over 3,600 applicants reached out to partake in online prescreening and 668 were assessed for eligibility. Though the initial goal was 15 participants, the final number was 12 – nine men and three women.

Zachariah Collett, a U.S. Army veteran from Washington Court House, Ohio, considers himself one of the lucky ones who was selected to participate.

Collett joined the Army in 2002 as an enlisted soldier and later became a military police corps paratrooper, serving a 28-month combat tour in Iraq. By age 25 he was medically retired. Among the diagnoses and service-connected disabilities that led to retirement was post-traumatic stress disorder.  

His symptoms included nightmares, a short temper, feeling constantly on guard and being angry virtually all the time – leading to behavior that had a negative effect on his family.

“I was just absolutely tortured by the internal struggle, the internal dialogue, the noise inside my head and the inability even to just be still,” Collett said. Years of trying counseling and medications didn’t help.

It was an intensive 41-day self-discovery experience combining a healthful diet with a series of integrative therapies that first put Collett on the path to healing. When he later learned about the psilocybin trial, he saw it as the perfect opportunity – and medicine – to take a “deeper dive.”

Now three years out from the treatment, he said the psilocybin-assisted therapy had a profound effect on him, his family and his marriage.

“For the first six months to a year, I felt like I had this fantastic set of training wheels while I’m relearning the way to act in situations,” he said. “That’s the great thing about this medicine. It’s gentle and it allowed me the space to rediscover, or discover, things I didn’t know I was capable of doing.

“It allowed me the opportunity to create peace, and stillness, and acceptance, and forgiveness and grace – all those things opposite of resentment and anger and hatred. It’s rather beautiful.”

Where the magic happens

A rigorous psychotherapy schedule is a key part of the process, with evidence from the trial suggesting that PTSD symptoms were lowered even before the drug was administered.

“There is this big question in the psychedelic therapy field right now about how much of this is a drug effect, how much of this is a therapy effect, and how much is a combination of the two,” Davis said.

This study, the first to try to answer the question, found a drop in PTSD symptoms from baseline to the end of preparation therapy, with a much larger reduction after the psilocybin doses.

“This treatment is more than just a drug,” Davis said. “The drug itself is a catalyst for the deep work that opens a window for people to perhaps access things they wouldn’t be able to access emotionally otherwise, and what that does is catalyze the therapeutic process after.

“That’s where the magic actually happens. It happens in the therapy, and in the changes that people start to make in their lives after the treatment’s concluded.”

The research team acknowledges that pilot studies with no control group tend to produce larger effect sizes than standard clinical trials. They hope to secure funding to follow up with a larger randomized, controlled clinical trial.

“Recognizing the tools that we have don’t work so well and recognizing the significant burden of PTSD in the United States carried by our servicemen and women and veterans, this seemed like the right direction to go,” Armstrong said. “Too many veterans right now are suffering despite the treatments that we have, and that’s why we feel that this research is important.”

Davis, who has been studying psychedelics as a component of mental health treatment for the past 16 years, said, “This is a very exciting time for psychedelic-assisted therapy research. These treatments are generally safe, well tolerated and showing a strong signal of efficacy.”

This research was supported by Ohio State’s College of Social Work, The Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education, the Clinical Research Center/Center for Clinical Research Management of The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and Ohio State’s College of Medicine.

Additional co-authors were Adam Levin, Nathan Sepeda, Hillary Shaub, Taweh Hunter, Angela Douglas and Rafaelle Lancelotta, all of Ohio State.

In environments where it is vital for customers to be aware of service information, such as in restaurants, amusement parks or for transportation routes, accurate congestion information can provide real-time data about aspects like service availability and queue length.

Yet because congestion information can quickly become outdated, interruptions in queuing systems often cause users to seek other options. While such choices may serve them better individually, this behavior can make the entire system inefficient, said Ness Shroff, senior author of the study and a professor of computer science and engineering at The Ohio State University.

“If information is outdated and thus everybody’s joining what appears to be the shortest path, you’re going to create congestion over that path,” said Shroff. This bottleneck can lead to gaps in fresh information for future customers to access and use, and impede overall service progress over time.

To better regulate this information learning, researchers have developed a way to incentivize people to choose less popular service alternatives. The proposed method is a side-payment mechanism that would periodically charge customers who contribute to overcrowding by making “selfish” choices and reward others for exploring alternative avenues.

In experiments using real-world datasets, the team found that this system was adept at balancing congestion with addressing user needs via alternative routes, resulting in steady performance. According to Shroff, adding incentivized settings to mobile queuing platforms goes a long way to making these complex systems work more sensibly for everyone.

“We calculate when the public value of fresh information is worth the congestion it takes to get it, and then build incentives that steer individual choices towards that balance,” he said. “Giving incentives for people to try out different routes might in fact create better opportunities for all.”

The study was published in the journal IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

According to the study, this team’s work is the first to examine how human choice can impact system outcomes. Hongbo Li, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral scholar at the AI-EDGE Institute at Ohio State, calls this phenomenon human-in-loop learning (HILL), noting that leveraging it can provide researchers with new insights into the growing class of service systems that rely on decentralized, customer-driven data.

“Designing a mechanism to change a user’s decision to be both consistent with social welfare and long-term utility can be difficult,” he said. “It has to be done in a way that doesn’t directly hurt their service benefit.”

A promising use-case scenario could look like this: A user visiting a car-charging station might be rewarded for choosing a less crowded location farther away, but penalized for visiting a closer station that is already at risk of becoming overloaded. Although both visits generate useful information for the operating system, the former is more valuable because curbing congestion helps reduce system inefficiencies, said Li.

“In testing, we saw that even average use saves costs and energy,” he said. “This means our approach is amazingly good for the social optimum.”

Besides keeping these systems more accurate, this team’s mechanism would also limit expenses by using the money earned from those penalized to pay out rewards. With millions of people relying on queuing systems to navigate their day-to-day lives, these meaningful findings could inform future network design for a wide number of technologies and industries, the researchers say.

To advance the work, the team next aims to test how well their system works when people make different, unexpected choices regarding prices, risks and personal convenience.

“Our next step may be to develop mechanisms that are more robust to heterogeneous users and to test them experimentally in different scenarios,” said Li. “It’s important to consider human behavior in engineering, and our goal was to show that.”

Other co-authors include Lingjie Duan from the Singapore University of Technology and Design.

Quasars, distant cores of galaxies powered by supermassive black holes, are among the most luminous objects in the universe. While not uncommon, their brightness can make it difficult to accurately measure the galaxy they reside in. This means scientists must use gravitational lensing to assist in analyzing these bright objects, a method that relies on studying how an object’s strong gravity bends light around its host galaxy. Yet despite their own powerful gravity, finding quasars that can act as lenses is uncommon.

Moreover, while nearly every galaxy is home to a black hole, research suggests those that form quasars may act as “missing links” into the formation and evolution of the early universe. Young ones, especially, could be key to unlocking vast cosmic secrets.

Now, to identify more quasars as gravitational lenses, researchers analyzed a list of 800,000 quasars from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey. Then, using an AI model trained on a small sample of mock lenses, or fake examples of quasar lens systems, to automatically search for these rare events, researchers found seven new candidates.

“Quasars are like the baby pictures of a supermassive black hole,” said Everett McArthur, lead author of the study and a graduate student in astronomy at The Ohio State University. “So exploring how we get from quasars to those black holes is really important.”

These new candidates double the number of quasars scientists have found by surveys in years past, and with more data, the discovery offers an opportunity to expand our knowledge of how their systems work as well as how the galaxy they reside in grows and evolves.

For instance, while the seven candidates in this study are located at least 5 to 6 billion light-years away from Earth, uncovering new insights about these faraway objects could also reveal valuable information about our own galaxy, said McArthur.

“By studying the tight correlation between galaxies and black holes, we could understand why our galaxy is the way that it is and perhaps why our own black hole is sometimes dormant,” he said.

The study was published July 22 in The Astrophysical Journal.

Outside of the team’s observations, what is unique about its work is the use of neural networks to achieve its result. Since there aren’t enough real-life examples of quasars acting as lenses, researchers had to teach their AI to identify the emission lines of potential quasars as gravitational lenses using a mixture of real quasar and background galaxy spectra.

This method created a simulation so impressive that the AI was able to recognize the subtle differences between normal and abnormal quasars with unique features, said McArthur.

“What this proves is our architecture was able to parse through a diverse array of quasar spectra in a really significant way,” said McArthur.

After whittling DESI’s list of 800,000 potential quasars to 200, the team hand-reviewed the shortened list before narrowing down the candidates to a final seven.

Going forward, the researchers will seek to directly confirm their observations using powerful space-based instruments like the Hubble Telescope. Once those deeper studies are completed, with more data, they expect to use their AI model to help future scientists search for and validate other kinds of strange cosmic phenomena.

“You can very well expand this type of study to find many rare anomalies in a spectrum,” said McArthur. “We’re in an era when science has suddenly become more accessible than ever, and applying AI to astronomy and machine learning methods to big data sets is part of that.”

Other co-authors from Ohio State are Klaus Honscheid and Claire Lamman. This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program.

The findings have practical implications for conservation and climate policy.

“The takeaway for policymakers is that small-scale rural communities have the ability to manage community forests in sustainable ways, and they need to be supported to solve problems using their own customary practices,” said lead author Sean Downey, associate professor of anthropology at The Ohio State University. “It’s going to look different in Belize than it does in Africa or Indonesia.”

Swidden is one of humanity’s oldest farming systems, practiced in tropical and subtropical forests for around 10,000 years. In Belize, where much of Downey’s fieldwork has taken place, it involves several steps: Farmers clear a patch of forest and leave the fallen trees to dry out. Then the dried trees are burned, which releases the carbon stored in the wood back into the soil where it serves as fertilizer. When the rainy season begins, crops (often corn) are planted and harvested once or twice before the soil’s nutrients start to run low. Then the field is fallowed, essentially given time to rest while the forest regrows.

Downey has spent much of his career studying how small communities balance the demands of farming against the long-term health of the forests they depend on for their livelihood: “It’s a cyclical pattern of reciprocal exchanges of agricultural labor, social norms that help regulate land use, and fire and ecosystem services that regenerate the fertility of cleared forest patches.”He first became interested in Belize’s swidden agriculture in the early 2000s, and later discovered that satellite imagery revealed a stark contrast at the Guatemalan border: The forest had been cleared into pasture on the Guatemalan side, and there were intricate, patchwork mosaics of tropical forest on the Belizean side where Mayan communities were clustered.

A new study, published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the mosaics could originate from something as commonplace as neighbors deciding whether to help each other plant corn.

When a farmer asks neighbors to help clear and plant a new field, the scale of the request makes a difference. If it’s a reasonably sized plot, most will show up to help. But “if a farmer asks for too much — say, a 20-acre field instead of a two-acre field — fewer people show up to help,” Downey said. And if fewer people show up, the farmer can’t clear the larger plot of land. “Over time, this guides people to ask for the right amount of land, reducing overall land use,” he added.

This process, where shared expectations of right and wrong guide people’s behavior, is known as normative reasoning. It is connected to the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom, who showed that small communities can protect shared local resources through social sanctions — in this case withholding cooperation — rather than formal rules or government enforcement.

Downey’s interdisciplinary research team – which included experts in anthropology, physics, applied mathematics and remote sensing – built a computer model and analyzed remote sensing images from real-world farming communities in Central and South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South and Southeast Asia to study how people share labor, use land and select sites for swidden agriculture. They found that when farmers naturally coordinate their land clearing efforts, the result is a mosaic of swidden fields with fractal, self-repeating patterns. At the same time, cultural and social norms help reduce the total amount of land cleared.

Together, these things help communities balance their farming needs with long-term environmental sustainability. “Until now, there haven’t been many formal models that can show how small-scale swidden communities regulate land without top-down rules,” Downey said.

Importantly, the researchers also found that while clearing too much forest will turn it into grassland, the biodiversity of a forest increases when it experiences intermediate levels of disturbance.

“When you create swidden patches, you create new ecosystem niches during the fallow stage where different species thrive,” Downey explained, and “you end up with higher levels of biodiversity across the landscape than you do in a mature forest alone.”

In other words, the study found that swidden doesn't automatically lead to degradation. On the contrary, when used in moderation, it can enhance the ecosystem — a benefit, Downey said, that hasn't yet been incorporated into policy.

Co-authors include Shane A. Scaggs, Jensan Lebowitz, Rongjun Qin, Denis Tverskoi, Xinyi Wu and Zaarah Syed from the Ohio State University; and Stefan Thurner from the Complexity Science Hub, the Medical University of Vienna and the Santa Fe Institute. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation, including an NSF CAREER Award Downey received at Ohio State in 2017.

Those natural enzymes are called ATPases, and their activity’s reliance on ATP makes these catalysts a desirable model for drug discovery. For example, a naturally derived ATPase that’s smaller and more malleable than a protein could be delivered to cancer cells to direct ATP’s energy toward killing those cells, or targeted to block the release of energy that stimulates harmful cellular processes.

Researchers at The Ohio State University have gotten one step closer to that possibility by identifying the first noncoding RNA derived from human cells that can bind to ATP. The team is looking now at that RNA’s function, with hopes that its affinity to ATP resembles an ATPase function that could form the basis of a therapeutic nanoparticle.

“The concept of having a noncoding RNA function as an ATPase is still really new. No one has been able to find ATPase activity in an RNA yet,” said senior study author Peixuan Guo, professor in the Division of Pharmaceutics and Pharmacology at Ohio State.

“Many scientists think human proteins handle all ATP activity in the body, but I think there’s no way it’s limited to only a protein function,” he said.

The study was published recently in the journal Non-coding RNA Research.

Guo is a pioneer in the discovery of functional noncoding RNAs – tiny RNA molecules lacking instructions for building proteins – that constitute over 98% of the human genome. His lab has spent years refining nanoparticle technology with versatile RNA molecules that cooperate with the body, most recently designing molecular clusters called RNA micelles that deplete metastatic colorectal cancer tumors in mice.

He is optimistic that there is a noncoding RNA to be found in the genome that functions as an ATPase, and foresees making use of such a molecule for a new class of therapeutic nanomaterials. 

This new work builds on previous work in Guo’s lab that led to the identification of a viral RNA that could bind to ATP. 

“I was essentially doing a continuation of that study, looking to see if there’s anything in human RNAs that can bind to ATP,” said first author Margaret Bohmer, a PhD student in Guo’s lab. 

Bohmer ran multiple rounds of screening total RNA extracted from human cells, looking for segments that could connect with ATP. She removed non-binders between rounds and amplified the presence of ATP until she had an enriched pool of RNAs that bound only to ATP. She then sequenced what was left, confirming identification of a single noncoding RNA that made a strong attachment to ATP. 

The structure of this RNA is called a G-quadruplex, which has an advantage of being very compact and highly stable, Bohmer said. 

The team is following up by investigating the mechanism of exactly how this noncoding RNA binds to ATP. 

There’s a decent chance, she said, that this noncoding RNA could be part of an ATPase motor that assists in decomposing ATP – a prediction based on the lab’s previous finding that the viral RNA they found years ago that bound to ATP had a functional role in the motor. 

In another recent Non-coding RNA Research paper, Guo’s team also found evidence that viral molecules called packaging RNAs that bind ATP structurally remained very similar or the same while changing their coding sequences over the course of evolution to perform motor-related biological functions – a sign that they, like enzyme proteins, could trigger similar catalytic reactions in cells. 

“We are curious to see if this G-quadruplex RNA is an RNA that functions in a similar way,” Bohmer said. 

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, an Ohio State President’s Research Excellence Catalyst Award and an Ohio State Center for RNA Biology Fellowship.

Kai Jin, a PhD student in Guo’s lab, was also a co-author of the paper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new study tells a different story. These two proteins, myosin and actin, always work together to activate a muscle, but tiny variations in how they interact change the speed, frequency and energy consumption associated with myosin’s movement – and, as a result, define the nature of a given animal’s related muscle function. An analysis of historic genomic data across species revealed about 50 previously unidentified gene subfamilies that drive those subtle but meaningful differences.

The findings suggest that the evolution of animals as disparate as salmon, snakes, eagles and elephants isn’t explained only by their external appearance. Instead, diversity and adaptation may be prompted at least in part by factors nestled deep under the surface as a response to species-specific muscular needs. 

“A lot of the story of vertebrate evolution has to do with these incredibly different body forms and different physiologies, while the core machinery has been treated as a constant,” said James Pease, senior author of the study and associate professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology at The Ohio State University. 

“What we found is that the core machinery is actually quite variable. Musculoskeletal innovations may be a rather large and underappreciated component of the story of vertebrate evolution.” 

The work was led by first author Christina Harvey, a 2026 biology PhD graduate of Wake Forest University, where Pease was a faculty member until 2024. Harvey is now an assistant professor at High Point University.

The research was published recently in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 

Pease and colleagues pursued the myosin mystery after studying a different musculoskeletal protein in birds that perform dramatic overhead wing snaps. First comparing the mammalian myosin gene profile to the chicken genome, they saw a huge difference in the number of genes in the respective region of each genome relevant to muscle movement. Further investigation showed this was not an isolated phenomenon. 

“Everything we’ve assumed for how a mammal’s muscles work, we’ve applied outside of mammals to these other groups. But when we pulled in more and more genes over time, we found that the story was more complex than that,” Harvey said. 

Accessing hundreds of samples from publicly available genomic data, the team modeled 500 million years of evolutionary history of the genes for 1,201 myosins, showing that each vertebrate group is equipped with its own set of core skeletal muscle myosin proteins. 

“With the advent of molecular biology and being able to explore things at the protein and gene level, we’ve untangled that while the traits that we see on the surface seem very similar, the routes that they’ve taken to get there through molecular processes have been very distinct and very different,” Harvey said. “Every major group of vertebrates exhibits its own distinct gene turnover.” 

Even within a species, these proteins can be highly specialized: In the rattlesnake, different myosin molecules govern muscle activity in the head and middle segments, and muscles surrounding the rattle on the tail have a high concentration of one type of myosin that had never been documented before, Pease said. 

Overall, the researchers proposed new names for at least 50 previously unknown subfamilies of myosin genes, adding to the 15 existing sub-types. 

“There are many, many more genes that have yet to be identified individually. I like to think that these 50 new subfamilies represent diversity across vertebrates that was previously unrecognized,” Harvey said. 

Myosin expression patterns have traditionally been studied in mammals in the context of whether muscles belong in the slow-twitch or fast-twitch category, with slow-twitch enabling, for example, humans to hold up their necks all day. 

“The new subtypes are a window into a new paradigm: The molecular basis of what makes a fast-twitch or slow-twitch muscle in mammals doesn’t translate to birds or to lizards or to fish. It’s a different molecular basis,” Pease said. 

The findings can’t explain what drove these molecular changes, and diversification is usually explained by an organism’s need to respond to changes in the external environment – like an emerging pathogen. The bar for proving adaptation has occurred is high, so the team can only make inferences based on the evidence at hand. 

“What we would say in a conservative way is that if this diversity of all of these molecular subtypes weren’t important, there would probably be only one type of myosin,” Pease said. “These different molecules that are new had specific roles, and this process is overturning and changing, but these molecules are not identical copies. They’re diversifying. And that’s really unlikely to happen over and over and over again if these aren’t being driven by some kind of selective or adaptive process.” 

This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. 

Additional co-authors were Eric Schuppe and Michael Brainard of the University of California, San Francisco, and Matthew Fuxjager of Brown University.

There are no cellphones or tablets in the world of Llama Llama, but if there were, who would blame Mama Llama if instead she handed her overwhelmed toddler a video to watch so she could carry on shopping in peace?

In real life, plenty of parents do reach for a screen to soothe a distressed child — a pattern of technology use researchers call “media emotion regulation.” A new study from The Ohio State University looked at how using technology to regulate young children’s emotions affects their cognitive development, and found it isn’t a one-size-fits-all story.

“It’s not just that the effects are larger or smaller for some kids — the underlying pattern is different for different kids,” said Jane Shawcroft, an assistant professor of communication at Ohio State who led the study, published recently in the Journal of Communication.

The study focused on the relationship between media emotion regulation and executive functions — a set of interrelated cognitive skills necessary for goal-directed behavior and social functioning. Two of these skills — cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control — are thought to be especially sensitive to a child’s environment during their formative years.

Cognitive flexibility enables children to respond to changing demands, understand different perspectives and problem-solve. Inhibitory control allows them to suppress impulsive responses, which is important for making conscious choices and pausing before acting. Ultimately, these skills build the foundation for behavioral health, school success and healthy social relationships across a person’s lifespan.

To investigate, Shawcroft analyzed data from Project M.E.D.I.A., a long-term Brigham Young University study tracking how media shapes children’s development, with six waves following children from age 2½ to 7½. She tested three possibilities: that using screens to calm children affects the development of these cognitive skills; that a child’s own cognitive development drives parents to offer screens more or less often; or that the two feed into each other in a loop over time.

Most children showed that reinforcing loop: the harder or easier a child was to settle, the more or less a parent hit play to calm them down — and that screen use, in turn, shaped the child's developing executive functions, which again shaped how often screens were used for calming. That was expected, Shawcroft said, because “children influence parenting, and parenting influences children’s development.”

For that majority, she noted, this means there’s more than one way to intervene and support both healthy development and healthy relationships with technology: Parents can change how, when and why they use technology to support cognitive development, but they can also support a child’s cognitive development through other means, which can in turn lead to a healthier relationship with technology for young children.

But two smaller groups of children broke from the overall pattern. In one group — about 6% of children — the two cognitive skills were related to media emotion regulation in different ways, which researchers couldn’t fully explain. Shawcroft said a later wave of the ongoing study is collecting more information about these children.

For the other outlier group (roughly 7% of children), screen use appeared to shape how cognitive skills developed, but the reverse wasn’t true: A child’s cognitive skills didn’t predict how often parents reached for a screen to manage their child’s difficult emotions. What stood out about these families, the study found, was that the parents of children in this group were more likely to report higher levels of depression.

“We found that parent mental health is a strong predictor of the way parents use technology with their young kids, because technology is a lever parents can pull when parents don’t have the resources to cope with their own poor mental health,” Shawcroft said.

Parenting a small child is hard, she added, and a screen is sometimes one of the few tools a struggling parent has within reach, especially when their child is struggling with their own feelings. Cultural conversations around technology and child development often focus on whether parents are doing the right thing for their kids. But a takeaway of this study, she said, isn’t that these struggling parents are necessarily doing something wrong, rather: “Supporting parents’ mental health is a way to help them parent with technology better.”

What this study tells us, Shawcroft said, is that parents need more resources at their disposal — including access to other ways to help their children regulate, like places for children to spend time outdoors, or tools to help practice mindfulness, etc. — especially when parents are struggling with their own mental health concerns. This means helping children experience healthy development in the context of technology isn’t just on parents’ shoulders. The children at most risk of problematic media use, she said, would benefit from broader community support and increased resources, including check-ins from family members, neighbors and friends who can help make parenting less isolating and difficult for struggling parents.

“I really wish the narrative around children and tech would be less about ‘it’s just a parents’ job,’ and more about this shared responsibility we have as a society to support children in this context we’ve built for them,” Shawcroft said. “If we want kids to be OK, part of that is helping their parents to be OK.”

Co-authors include McCall A. Booth from Georgetown University; Chris L. Porter, Megan Van Alfen, Lara A. Maximiano, Elena K. Holmes, Sarah M. Coyne, Hailey G. Holmgren and Blake L. Jones from Brigham Young University; Megan Gale from Utah State University; and Andrew Martinez from Hunter College. The research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health.

In a study published this week in Psychology of Violence, researchers surveyed school personnel prior to the onset of COVID-19, during the height of COVID restrictions and after most restrictions had been lifted, and their findings surprised them: Administrators were more likely than teachers or school mental health professionals to experience verbal and threatening aggression from parents. After restrictions lifted, 77% of administrators reported such experiences, nearly 3.5 times the rate reported by teachers.

The research was led by Eric Anderman, a professor of educational psychology and vice provost for regional campuses at The Ohio State University. He and colleagues have conducted a number of related studies as members of the American Psychological Association (APA)’s Task Force on Violence Against Teachers and School Personnel.

“We didn't fully expect such a pattern to emerge,” Anderman said. “A lot of us went in with an assumption, including me, that it would be mostly the teachers — they’re the ones who have the most direct contact with students every day.”

The data show that parental aggression against school personnel never went away, even during the height of COVID restrictions. When most schools switched to remote learning, 42% of administrators still reported experiencing verbal or threatening aggression from parents, and rates climbed even higher after schools reopened.

For Anderman, the issue is personal. As a high school teacher early in his career, he experienced a verbal threat from a student and didn’t feel supported by his school’s administration. “That always stuck with me,” he said. “Whenever I write about it, it resurfaces.”

Anderman’s research focuses primarily on academic motivation, which is how he became involved with the APA Task Force nearly two decades ago. Past research from the group found that 49% of teachers nationwide considered quitting or transferring jobs as the result of violence and threats made against them, and that violence against teachers is higher in schools that focus on grades and test scores than in schools that emphasize student learning. 

Although school personnel experience physical assaults, the new study focused on verbal aggression and threats, which a 2022 meta-analysis found to be more commonplace in schools. The researchers measured eight specific types, including obscene remarks or gestures, intimidation, identity-based slurs, verbal threats, bullying, public humiliation, cyberbullying and sexual harassment.

After pandemic restrictions were lifted, more than 1 in 4 teachers said a parent had publicly humiliated them, and more than 1 in 4 reported being cyberbullied. For administrators, more than 4 in 10 were verbally threatened, and around 1 in 5 reported being publicly humiliated or cyberbullied.

The scope of the problem becomes clearer when educators are given the opportunity to describe their experiences anonymously. In earlier research, the task force collected around 3,000 written accounts from teachers describing the worst incidents they had experienced.

“The stuff they told us — you can’t make this stuff up,” Anderman said. “People said things like, ‘Thank you for asking. Nobody ever asked.’ It was therapeutic for some of them.”

Despite how common these experiences are, Anderman describes them as a “silent epidemic” because there is currently no national system for tracking or reporting aggression against school personnel, and it receives little media attention. In addition, many educators don’t report incidents for fear of looking weak or incapable of managing their classrooms. This silence has consequences for the quality of education students receive and for the ongoing national teacher shortage.

There’s good news, though. The study found that maintaining positive relationships between parents and school personnel and providing support for teachers, administrators and mental health professionals at the school and community levels all help reduce parental aggression. School level factors, such as strong administrative support and effective disciplinary policies, were associated with less aggression at all three time points, and community-level factors, such as perceived district investment in education, also made a difference.

The researchers recommend implementing tiered systems of support for all school personnel — including classroom, school and community training — to foster a healthier, safer climate for everyone. The study also noted the importance of proactive and positive communication from school employees to parents. This resonated with Anderman, who still remembers the time his ninth-grade Spanish teacher called his mother — not to report a problem, but to say he was doing well in class. “It made my day,” he said. “But it’s the only time I ever remember it happening.”

Co-authors include Andrew Perry, Hyun Ji Lee and Adriana Martinez-Calvit from Ohio State; Susan D. McMahon from DePaul University; Frank C. Worrell from the University of California, Berkeley; Linda A. Reddy from Rutgers University; Andrew Martinez from Hunter College; Dorothy L. Espelage from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; and Ron A. Astor from the University of California, Los Angeles. The research was supported by the American Psychological Association.

A second study showed that greater support from all members of a household – parents, kids, siblings, unrelated roommates – predicted eventual adoption of solar, but greater disagreement was also linked to a higher likelihood of installing rooftop panels. 

Overall, the research suggests a champion for solar adoption in the house gets the family over the finish line. The champion is most positive about the technology, does the most work to plan the project and prompts ongoing discussion. 

“This introduces an opportunity for policy and interventions because if we’re targeting incentives or communication campaigns to a household or one member of a household, that’s probably not enough. We need to figure out how to support these champions,” said senior author Nicole Sintov, associate professor of behavior, decision making and sustainability at The Ohio State University. 

“They’re already shouldering the burden of trying to convince other people in their household to come along, and maybe it’s generating conflict. What can we equip them with to help them with the process?” 

Understanding these dynamics could help the planet by improving the adoption rate of residential solar by U.S. households, which currently stands at about 8%, Sintov said. 

“There are all of these decarbonization technologies available, including rooftop solar and heat pumps, but if people don’t adopt them, then what good are they?” she said. “So we focus on what motivates households to adopt these technologies and how we can design communications and programming to support that.” 

Sintov completed the work with Naseem Dillman-Hasso, a doctoral candidate in the School of Environment and Natural Resources at Ohio State, and former Ohio State postdoctoral research associate Kristin Hurst, now an assistant professor at Southern Illinois University. The research is published today (July 9, 2026) in Nature Energy. 

It’s not necessarily surprising that a disruptive, expensive home project requires lots of conversation. There’s plenty to consider, with primary barriers identified in the study including high upfront costs versus long-term payments, fear of structural damage, uncertainty about the effects on home value and resale opportunities, and distrust of solar companies. 

What is surprising is that little thought has been given to the family dynamics underpinning these household discussions, Sintov said. 

“Research to date tends to characterize these decisions as this monolithic household choice, but three-quarters of U.S. households have more than one person living in them. In this study, the lens was a large investment like solar panels – and they’re not one-time decisions made by a single person in a multi-occupant household,” she said. 

The first study involved qualitative interviews with 39 couples. Seven had adopted solar, seven had considered solar but opted out, and 25 were still in the deliberation stage at the time of the interview. 

While couples who were in sync were strongly associated with installing solar panels, that alone wasn’t always enough. Interview results revealed that a time-sensitive catalyst event increased their sense of urgency to adopt. Catalysts ranged from skyrocketing energy bills and fears of frequent power loss to the looming reduction of a federal tax incentive. 

The second study was an online survey of 394 household representatives, 268 who had begun lining up solar but ultimately didn’t see it through, and 126 who had adopted rooftop solar. 

In both adopter and lost customer households, the survey respondents described themselves as the most positive and active participants in the process – in other words, the champion. In adopter households, romantic partners and parents played larger roles in the conversations than in lost customer households. 

The champion role was consistently linked with adoption, suggesting that coordination, active participation and deliberation by all household members can improve chances for installing solar. And even greater disagreement predicted adoption – indicating that any form of communication, even if it’s negative, could be at play when a household makes movement toward the decision to adopt solar. 

“That was surprising,” Sintov said. “We don’t know for sure why, but one hypothesis is that among adopters, there may be more to disagree about once you proceed with the adoption process – there’s a lot going on, it’s stressful, it’s conflictual. Or it could just be that engaging in these conversations and being more engaged led to more disagreements.” 

Sintov is already applying some of the findings to her work with nonprofit organizations, building in-sync coordination skills in couples interested in adopting solar and developing worksheets that define goals and divvy the workload for families making changes after an energy efficiency audit. 

Other options are workshops with household members to see if in-sync dynamics can be cultivated, and structured discussion guides that introduce unanticipated stumbling blocks and coax people toward an in-sync approach to addressing concerns. 

“Targeting marketing messages and engagement and outreach to one member of a household or just a general household is liable to result in failure,” Sintov said. “This is a relational process. At minimum, policy and other interventions can help facilitate the coordination process.” 

And though it wasn’t a research goal, there is a decent chance that these dynamics influence lots of household decisions. 

“I think what we’ve uncovered might be just a core dynamic of how households make decisions – this in-sync versus oppositional dynamic and the fact that sometimes there’s a champion for a cause and the other person has to be dragged along,” she said. “There’s very real potential that this applies to a whole bunch of different household decision making, from installing a heat pump to getting a new couch to adopting a dog.”

A scenario-based framework researchers developed to model how counties across the Midwest might respond to several grid expansion strategies revealed that even the most expensive policies that take community health concerns and employment needs into account are only 0.7% more costly than typical, cost-minimizing approaches. 

Researchers determined this by examining five different policies that could guide the evolution of the energy grid, comparing factors like resulting costs, job creation and fossil fuel emissions. 

While each policy had important trade-offs, the analysis widely showed that supporting the development of renewable energy technologies, like wind and solar, can make it easier to address future  socioeconomic impacts for little to no cost. 

This discovery adds to a growing body of work debunking the idea that improving communities through clean energy projects is a task too expensive for taxpayers to support, said Daniel Gingerich, co-author of the study and an assistant professor in civil, environmental, and geodetic engineering and integrated systems engineering at The Ohio State University.

“We can create a power sector that addresses the goals that we have as a society, while keeping the cost to us as ratepayers negligible,” said Gingerich. “In actuality, it’s less than a 1% increase in the overall cost of the system.”

The study was recently published in the journal Energy Policy. 

As the U.S. experiences record-breaking electricity demand, which is projected to rise dramatically over the next few decades, many scientists have urged policymakers to modernize and decarbonize our current energy systems by shifting away from fossil fuel infrastructure. The issue is, according to the study, doing so could make some regions more vulnerable to economic shocks because even minimizing costs doesn’t always incentivize new infrastructure to move into those communities.   

Ohio, specifically its Appalachian regions, would benefit from minimizing power sources that release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, said Gingerich. 

“We need a transitional electricity grid to better meet not just the amount of power that we will require in the future, but also the needs of the people that rely on energy as the lifeblood of their community,” he said. Without those considerations, many communities may be left behind or become much more resistant to next-generation grid changes, especially if people can’t envision how those advances will help create a better future for themselves and their families. 

Still, depending on the chosen policy, there are significant trade-offs communities must navigate, given that decisions that prioritize economic benefits may not be the best option to protect the environment, or vice versa. Although this can make it difficult to create a more just energy sector, policymakers can overcome these challenges by designing transition strategies that target a region’s past struggles, said Gingerich. 

For instance, one proposed energy transition pathway to expanding the electricity grid from 2022 to 2050 assumes that only counties with historic negative health effects would be prioritized for clean electricity-generating infrastructure. 

Alternatively, the most expensive of these options — only 0.6% costlier than it would be to expand the grid using the cheapest method possible — suggests that wind and solar only be added in counties with a large percentage of lost energy industry jobs. Over time, this would likely lead to about 233,500 more jobs in the clean energy sector, said Gingerich. 

“The decisions that we make now will have decades of consequences,” he said. “So to prevent wasted economic investments, we have to pick the right technologies to use in the right places.” 

Gingerich also notes that it isn’t only hotter temperatures that are driving changes in how we generate power. As large-scale electricity users like data centers and EV chargers come online, the grid will also need to evolve to accommodate their increased needs. Alternative renewable energy sources like wind and solar power could be the solution to that. 

More sophisticated iterations of the team’s model could also be useful in evaluating both the economic burden and environmental impacts of these additions to the grid and eventually help promote policies that champion a more equitable future for the energy sector. 

”While we don’t know what the future looks like or how costs for certain technologies may change over the years, we can plan for how communities should start thinking about new sources of economic activity,” said Gingerich.

The study was supported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and is based on work developed under a U.S. National Science Foundation Traineeship program. Other Ohio State co-authors include Diego Hincapié-Ossa, Aashma Upreti, Jeffrey Bielicki and Kelsea Best.

The program, called Retailers Creating a Responsible Environment (Retailers CARE), launched in Montgomery County, Ohio, and may be the first effort in the nation to incentivize retailers to voluntarily reduce promotion of tobacco, alcohol and lottery products, said lead researcher Megan Roberts, associate professor at Ohio State’s College of Public Health.

Rather than focusing only on enforcement and penalties, Retailers CARE treats store owners as community partners. Participating retailers can earn financial incentives by meeting progressively stricter standards aimed at reducing youth access and limiting aggressive advertising.

A new paper outlining the program’s successful implementation appears in the American Journal of Public Health.

“It’s really a novel approach and it could inspire other communities to get creative about ways to incentivize compliance,” said Roberts, who is a member of Ohio State’s Center for Tobacco Research and The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Public health experts have long viewed convenience stores and carryouts as a major source of exposure to unhealthy products, especially in historically marginalized neighborhoods where stores that sell tobacco products, alcohol and lottery tickets are often concentrated.

“The tobacco industry alone spends about $6 billion annually on point-of-sale advertising and promotions designed to drive sales,” Roberts said.

“Historically, most enforcement, especially around underage sales, has used the ‘stick’ method, punishing retailers for breaking the law. This community-driven project is based on a ‘carrot’ approach, encouraging the retailers to be partners in public health efforts.”

The program includes four levels — bronze, silver, gold and platinum — with rewards ranging from $2,700 to $7,200 for store improvements. To qualify, retailers adopt measures such as removing storefront advertisements, locking tobacco products behind counters, restricting alcohol sales hours, implementing drug-free workplace policies and keeping naloxone kits on site.

The pilot phase ran from fall 2023 through fall 2024 and identified 28 retailers in Montgomery County neighborhoods with poor health outcomes and high levels of tobacco, alcohol and lottery advertising. Seven stores agreed to participate.

After one year, five stores achieved bronze status, one reached silver and one earned gold certification. Among their commitments: Six participating retailers removed storefront window signage and six posted gambling helpline information. Incentive funds were used for practical upgrades including roof repairs, new lighting and redesigned sales counters.

The early results suggest retailers can be motivated to reduce harmful marketing when given financial support and practical resources, Roberts said.

The study also identified challenges, particularly recruiting businesses into the program. Independently owned stores appeared more willing to participate than chain retailers, likely because local owners have greater control over store policies and displays, Roberts said.

The researchers caution that the program still needs long-term evaluation to determine whether it improves community health outcomes. Sustaining funding may also be difficult, although new support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Drug Free Communities Support Program will allow the initiative to continue.

Taniayah O’Quinn-Sims with the Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services Board of Montgomery County, Ohio, is a co-author on the study.

Although they are some of the most widespread substances on Earth, not much is known about eumelanin, or natural organic matter (NOM) — a dark-colored substance formed by the decomposition of biological material. In humans, eumelanin is a vital pigment in skin and other tissues that protects cells from damage by ultraviolet radiation. In nature, NOM gives rivers and soils their color and affects light-driven reactions like photosynthesis. 

Although these compounds have been studied individually for decades, researchers in a new study, by scrutinizing them alongside each other, have shown that eumelanin and NOM have common properties beyond their dark colors. 

“Synthesizing the molecular building blocks in eumelanin and NOM is akin to two very different approaches for creating a diverse set of words," said Bern Kohler, one of the senior authors of the study and professor of chemistry and biochemistry at The Ohio State University. “Melanin synthesis is like giving someone multiple copies of the alphabet and asking them to make words, while NOM synthesis is like using scissors to cut words out of books from a library.” 

Now, using advanced spectroscopy and imaging to study disassembled eumelanin nanoparticles, Kohler and his colleagues were able to observe few-layered stacks only a few nanometers in size that closely resemble nanostructures seen in NOM samples. These common structures were revealed to be responsible for their similar optical properties. 

Even though the starting materials and chemical pathways that lead to underlying molecules in eumelanin and NOM are remarkably different, these tiny structures show that they can assemble to form common nanostructures. These results reveal how common photoproperties can emerge in both natural and lab-made carbon-based nanomaterials despite notable differences in their chemical structures, said Kohler. 

The study was recently published in ACS Central Science.

What’s more, understanding eumelanin and NOM could help scientists create a swath of sustainable technologies, from more efficient solar power cells to longer-lasting batteries and electronics, said Meera Madhu, co-author of the study and a PhD student in chemistry and biochemistry at Ohio State. 

“Eumelanin can absorb the entire solar spectrum, so by finding a way to convert that into energy that can be stored or used in viable ways, it’s going to become one avenue to overcome the energy issues that we have,” she said.

Looking ahead, the study concludes that this research serves as a valuable template for studying and designing other carbon-based nanomaterials, paving the way for new discoveries in fields like light harvesting, energy storage and bioelectronics. 

“This fundamental understanding of how eumelanin and NOM absorb and respond to light could ultimately help guide rational design of carbon-based materials,” said Madhu. “By bringing together two materials that have so far been studied separately, this work gives researchers a framework they can build on to understand related carbon materials.”

Other co-authors include Aleksandra Ilina from Ohio State, as well as Hang Li and Garrett McKay from Texas A&M University. This work was supported by the Ohio Eminent Scholars program, the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office.

As emerging threats such as warming temperatures, pollution and other cumulative stressors put pressure on freshwater populations and contribute to global biodiversity crises, experts have sought to assess how effective environmental protections are at curbing this decline. 

Now, researchers have revealed that long-term improvements in water quality, as well as the increased occurrence of certain aquatic species, are likely associated with the implementation of broad environmental regulations such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.

“Rivers provide a lot of cultural, recreational and ecosystem services, and we also depend on fresh and clean water to survive,” said Casey Pennock, senior author of the study and an assistant professor in the aquatic ecology laboratory at The Ohio State University. “That’s really the motivation behind these conservation policies, to ensure that the natural environment is usable for both wildlife and all other things we care about.”

Aside from negatively impacting local biodiversity, contaminated water can destroy fishing industries and damage human health. It’s thanks to widespread environmental protections that water quality in the U.S. is better today than it was only a few decades ago, said Pennock. His team’s newfound evidence for this claim stems from water quality and aquatic species data collected between 1970 and 2023 across seven major river basins in Ohio. 

By using that data to analyze how fish, insects and freshwater mussel communities changed over time, the team’s findings showed that lower levels of pollutants in rivers — such as zinc, ammonia and lead — corresponded to increases in range for many aquatic species. These findings suggest the affected groups were those with heightened sensitivity to poor water quality.

Their observations indicated that as water quality improved, 71 fish species and 171 insect groups became more common across the state of Ohio, large river basins, with only a few species decreasing. Freshwater mussels, however, experienced mixed responses over time, with nine species increasing and 10 decreasing in occurrence. The composition of fish, aquatic insects and freshwater mussels also changed significantly over time in all seven river basins researchers studied.  

“Ecological communities are not static; they’re dynamic systems,” said Pennock. “Monitoring them is important to assessing how their trajectories change as new contaminants come online.” 

The study was recently published in the journal Ecological Indicators.

Despite how critical freshwater diversity is to the health of all of Earth’s ecosystems, it can be difficult for people to link the issue of conservation to the benefits they reap from it – such as protection from infectious diseases and a safe drinking water supply – in their everyday lives, said Lindsey Bruckerhoff, a co-author of the study and an assistant professor in the aquatic ecology laboratory at Ohio State.

“Our work revolves around trying to prevent further declines of imperiled species and keep diversity on the landscape,” she said. “So extensive research like this that highlights the positive effects of those systems on humans is incredibly rare.”

Additionally, as a lack of broad-scale monitoring efforts has made it difficult for researchers to document species-specific responses to prolonged environmental changes, this study, which compiles observations from numerous archives, is a vital addition to future conservation efforts.  

“We now have a dataset where we can actually analyze long-term biodiversity trends,” said Bruckerhoff. “It’s really exciting to be able to chart success in that way.”

According to the study, implementing nationwide policies also motivates municipalities to upgrade their own conservation initiatives. In response to the Clean Water Act, for example, Columbus instituted a $200 million municipal wastewater upgrade initiative for the Scioto River, leading to significant declines in levels of ammonia and heavy metals that continue to decrease today.

Overall, their results suggest that policies that promote conservation gains for animals like fish and insects and, by extension, protect human health, should remain in place, the researchers say. These outcomes also provide evidence of the benefits derived from environmental regulations. 

“This work shows there’s still more work to do,” said Pennock. “It tells us that if we deregulate or allow more pollution to happen, then those gains could reverse themselves, to our detriment.” 

This study was supported by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Ohio Biodiversity Conservation Partnership. Other Ohio State co-authors include Seth Drake and Nathaniel Shoobs, as well as Robert Miltner from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.

The study, published online recently in the Sociology of Sport Journal, found that while most survey respondents — including those who played youth sports — never engaged in violence, 17% did report they had committed acts of violence. Ever playing heavy-contact sports regularly and dropping out after initially playing organized youth sports were particularly associated with committing acts of violence over the life course.

“Our findings challenge the common notion that sports are inherently good — that you just put kids in sports after school and it’s going to be okay,” said lead author Emily Nothnagle, a PhD student in The Ohio State University College of Social Work and a former captain of Ohio State’s national championship varsity pistol team. “There is more to the story.”

Nothnagle and Chris Knoester, co-author of the study and professor of sociology at Ohio State, found that the type of sport, level of engagement, length of engagement, and positive peer influences all matter when it comes to associations between organized youth sports and violence.

In society, sports are largely beloved. “Not only is sport thought to lead to a host of positive things, but the Great Sport Myth suggests that it’s automatic,” said Knoester. “You just roll the ball out, throw a few kids on the field, and good things happen. They learn self-control, perseverance, discipline, how to get along with one another, and how to become healthier — without any intervention or direction.”

Nothnagle wanted to test those assumptions — specifically any links between sport participation and acts of physical violence.

The study used survey data on 3,849 adults who participated in the National Sports and Society Survey (NSASS), sponsored by Ohio State’s Sports and Society Initiative (SSI). Those surveyed volunteered to participate through the American Population Panel, run by Ohio State’s Center for Human Resource Research (CHRR). Participants, who came from all 50 states, answered the survey online between the fall of 2018 and spring of 2019.

Data for this study focused on participants’ sport participation patterns, both growing up and in adulthood, and their experiences with violent behaviors over their lives.

About two-thirds of survey participants played organized sports growing up, with most playing and eventually dropping out. Nearly 30% of participants reported playing heavy-contact sports regularly. While most survey participants reported never engaging in violent behavior, about 17% said they had, with 3% engaging in violence in the past year. Among violent acts cited, the most common were physical fights and hurting someone badly enough to require medical care.

The study found that people who participated in organized youth sports were 7 percentage points more likely to have ever committed a violent act than those who never played. This was carried by people who played and dropped out of organized sports, who were 5 percentage points more likely to commit acts of violence than those who never played organized sports. Additionally, respondents who played a heavy-contact sport regularly while growing up were 8 percentage points more likely to commit an act of violence than those who did not.

The researchers found no significant difference between those who played organized sports continually and those who never played.

A take-home message of this research, Knoester explained, is that there’s “evidence that sport participation is not associated with reductions in the risk of committing violence. In fact, we find consistent evidence that sport is more likely to increase the risk of ever committing violence, and this is especially the case when people are playing more violent sports. This suggests that it’s important to rethink how we are conducting sports in society and the types of programs and messaging that we’re introducing children into, if we want more positive outcomes.”

One example of organized sports focused on positive youth development, he noted, is Ohio State’s LiFEsports program, which teaches young athletes social and leadership skills and provides coach education, all backed by research that shows the program is getting results.

Nothnagle, who has been an active leader and scholar associated with LiFEsports and its Coach Beyond program, said she hopes that as we learn more about what conditions are leading to more positive or negative outcomes for people who participate in sports, it can lead to more systemic change.

“Life skills are taught, not caught. So, it’s about trying to create those environments that shape the behaviors and outcomes you want to see,” she said.

The National Sports and Society Survey was funded and supported by the College of Arts & Sciences, SSI and CHRR at Ohio State. Nothnagle received a graduate student research grant from SSI to help fund the project.

Experts from NOAA and their government and academic partners discussed the 2026 Seasonal Forecast of Harmful Algal Blooms for Lake Erie during a free public webinar today hosted by Ohio Sea Grant and Stone Laboratory. 

“Toxic algae affect not only the health of people and Great Lakes ecosystems, but they can negatively impact local and regional economies by preventing people from fishing, swimming, boating and visiting the shoreline,” said Nicole LeBoeuf, assistant administrator for NOAA’s National Ocean Service. “NOAA’s Lake Erie harmful algal bloom forecast is designed to provide timely, science-based information to water managers and public health officials as they make decisions to protect their communities and visitors.” 

The HAB severity index is based on the bloom’s biomass (the amount of algae) during the peak 30 days of the bloom. Moderate blooms have an index of 3 to 5, while an index above 5 indicates more severe HABs. Blooms over 7 are particularly severe, with extensive scum formation and persistent bloom coverage affecting the lake. 

NOAA expects to see a visible bloom by mid-July. The bloom’s timeline will depend on the frequency of high winds in September, which cannot be predicted this far in advance. Most of the bloom will remain in areas of the lake’s western basin. The central basin of the lake is usually unaffected until later in the season, although localized blooms may occur around some of the rivers after summer rainstorms. 

Lake Erie HABs consisting of cyanobacteria (i.e. blue-green algae) are capable of producing microcystin, a known liver toxin that poses a risk to human and wildlife health. Such blooms can sometimes require cities and local governments to add more treatment to drinking water and close beaches. 

The size of a HAB is not necessarily an indication of how toxic it is. Each algal bloom is unique in terms of size, toxicity and ultimately its impact on local communities. NOAA continues to develop new tools to detect and predict how toxic blooms will be. 

NOAA will issue a seasonal forecast update in late July based on observed nutrient loads from the Maumee River watershed into the western basin.

NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science’s (NCCOS) Lake Erie HAB Forecast website provides predictions and visualizations of the bloom’s location and movement on the lake’s surface, as well as where the bloom is located within the water column. This information is especially helpful to water treatment plant operators because intake structures are usually located below the surface, so the risk of toxins in their source water may be greater when these cells sink.

In addition to the early season projections, NOAA issues HAB forecasts during the bloom season. These forecasts provide the current extent and 5-day outlooks, which include predictions of where the bloom will travel and the concentrations of blue-green algae which are likely to be seen, allowing local authorities to make informed management decisions.

Additionally, NOAA forecasts hypoxia in Lake Erie’s central basin.

Nutrient load estimates for the forecasts came from Heidelberg University in Ohio, and the various forecast models are run by NCCOS, the University of Michigan, and North Carolina State University. The field observations used for monitoring and forecasting are collected in partnership with a number of NOAA offices, including its Ohio River Forecast Center, NCCOS, Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory and Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research, as well as Ohio Sea Grant, The Ohio State University’s Stone Laboratory, The University of Toledo, Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Geological Survey.

Researchers analyzed about 18,000 star-forming regions in nearby spiral galaxies using data from powerful instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, whose observations were made as part of the PHANGS survey — a collaboration aimed at better understanding galactic evolution. 

They found that in normal galaxies, pressure from ionized gas drives the expansion of young star-forming regions. However, whether these zones continue to grow or remain stagnant is strongly dependent on their surrounding environment, said Debosmita Pathak, lead author of the study and a graduate student in astronomy at The Ohio State University.

“When young massive stars are born, they’re very energetic and pump out a ton of photons into their surroundings,” said Pathak. “In that process, they disrupt their local environments and start to drive interstellar material out of the area.”

This mechanism, called stellar feedback, can influence galactic activity across many scales.   Altering the evolution of dusty, cold gas in areas that are ripe for stellar birth can either trigger star formation or lead to the destruction of these star-forming regions. 

Such changes can also drive the chemical evolution of a galaxy, as chemical properties play a crucial role in both planet formation and in recording galactic history, said Pathak. 

“The Milky Way, for example, forms roughly one star per year, while more luminous infrared galaxies can produce stars at 100 times that rate,” said Pathak. “But galaxies that have an abnormally high amount of stars typically underwent a more violent process to form, such as a major merger, where two galaxies collide.”

The research was presented today (June 17, 2026) in a press conference at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Pasadena, California. The AAS selected the findings to be featured in a press conference. 

To learn more about how young stars behave in these extremely dusty and turbulent environments, researchers compared the young stellar feedback pressures they found in normal star-forming galaxies against that of the incredibly bright starburst system NGC 3256, a pair of massive galaxies located about 100 million light-years from Earth. 

Their results showed that the stellar feedback pressures there are about 100 times stronger than in other Milky Way-like spiral galaxies, meaning that while young, massive star clusters in the densest regions of the galaxy are confined by this intense pressure, most are likely super-powered enough to continue expanding.

Additionally, the high levels of turbulence researchers found in NGC 3256 are an indication that the gas within it is not settled in a simple flat disk, suggesting that the interplay between star formation and the usual conditions that precede it may be more unpredictable than in its normal, relatively stable galactic counterparts.

“These are pressure measurements that we haven’t been able to make before, and they are quite different from what we’ve seen in galaxies similar to the Milky Way,” said Pathak. “This will allow us to benchmark the physical processes driving galactic evolution.” 

The study’s results have direct implications for understanding how star-forming regions evolve across many different cosmic settings, as well as how young stars help regulate and shape galactic evolution, even before high-powered blasts like supernovae can occur.

“It’s important to study environments in normal parts of the universe, but also how things deviate in the extremes,” said Pathak. “Without this type of research, we wouldn’t know if the physics that we’re working with and the models that we’re building actually hold true in such extreme places.”

This summer, alongside the GOALS collaboration, Pathak plans to continue their work measuring star formation in dusty environments as a visiting graduate student at IPAC at Caltech in Pasadena. In advancing this work, Pathak expects their bright findings to inspire other insights in the scientific community. 

“Events like AAS are great places to get interdisciplinary collaboration work started,” said Pathak. “It’s also nice to see folks who are still interested in learning more about natural sciences, and get the word out that discovery is a very cool and fun thing to do.”

The research also hints at why the outbreaks have confounded scientists, farmers and livestock handlers hoping to contain and prevent the disease – an effort likely complicated by the fact that the virus has an affinity for cow mammary glands rather than airways.

Tests for transmission among cows through milk machinery or through feeding of calves, and between birds and cattle through shared indoor air, didn’t show results of disease spread.

Researchers are continuing to pursue more answers, but for now the transmission mystery endures, meaning scientists can’t yet provide evidence-based recommendations for practices that would stop the spread.

“How it spreads from cow to cow becomes a very important question. We need to understand if there’s a way to change milking practices or farming practices, whatever it is, to limit cow-to-cow transmission because we think spillover is going to happen again. It’s just a matter of time,” said senior author Andrew Bowman, professor of veterinary preventive medicine at The Ohio State University.

“And right now we don’t have a great way to prevent either that spillover or cow-to-cow transmission once it happens.”

The study was published recently in Nature Communications.

Highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza A viruses are associated with wild birds and poultry, but since 2021 a group of these viruses of clade 2.3.4.4b have circulated globally in mammals and were first reported in U.S. dairy cattle in March 2024.

To date, 1,053 outbreaks of the originally detected virus genotype (B3.13) have been confirmed in dairy herds in 17 states, which have been brought under control through a national milk testing strategy that halted movement of herds producing milk in which the virus was detected. Current federal data suggests small numbers of infections in cows are confirmed in Idaho, Utah and Texas.

“This work has all been done in response to the unprecedented spillover of avian influenza into dairy cattle,” Bowman said. “Initially, we had no idea that cows could even be infected with influenza, let alone that the mammary gland was involved. That in and of itself was a major paradigm shift: It’s not respiratory.”

Bowman and colleagues have been following the disease since its emergence on dairy farms, reporting early this year on detection of the virus in retail milk supplies – at that time, 36.3% of samples tested were positive for H5N1 particles.

“Pasteurization is inactivating it. But once a cow’s infected, they produce high-viral-titer milk for a week-plus,” Bowman said.

Those high virus titers, or concentrations, in milk were among the results of the current work, which involved testing the effects of varied levels of viral particle inoculations into individual cow teats, where mammary glands are located.

Results showed that the smallest dose of 10 particles resulted in productive infection but fewer clinical signs compared to higher doses, as well as shedding of milk containing high concentrations of viral particles.

“They are four separate mammary glands that have a common blood supply, but in these small numbers of animals, we’re not seeing a lot of viral movement between those glands,” Bowman said. “I think that may become important to how sick a cow does or doesn’t get because if one of four glands is infected, that’s different from a severe infection in all four.”

Several experiments aimed to identify potential disease transmission routes.

Researchers transferred contaminated milking equipment directly from an infected cow to a healthy cow twice daily for 14 days. Even though infected cows had clinical signs and their milk was high in viral particles, the healthy cows exposed to contaminated equipment remained unaffected and their milk was virus-free.

Bottle-feeding calves high-viral-titer milk collected from infected cows led to minimal virus detection and inflammatory signs in the calves, suggesting transmission through feeding doesn’t spread enough material to establish an infection.

Lactating cows given an intranasal dose of the H5N1 virus did not get sick and the presence of viral RNA was minimal in nasal swabs and absent in milk, but some of their respiratory tissues showed signs of an immune response compared to uninfected cows. These cows were also co-housed with chickens that remained healthy after 17 days. The combined findings suggest airborne transmission may be minimal if it’s happening at all.

Experiments were conducted in one of only six Biosafety Level 3 facilities in the country that can accommodate large animals. There is a chance, Bowman said, that the biocontainment conditions were too sterile and airflow-controlled to resemble daily farm life, especially when it comes to airborne transmission.

And performing a limited number of tests on actual cows, rather than surrogate models, could be a “numbers game,” he said. “We see about 20% of cows on farms become clinically ill. Two transmission experiments just may not be enough.

“I think the milking equipment is something we still have to consider. The virus replicates in the mammary gland to a really high titer. It comes out in milk at a really high titer. We have common contact equipment that goes from cow to cow with high-risk material to the high-risk tissue. I think the straight line between two points would say the milking equipment still seems to be the likely route of transmission between cows,” Bowman said.

“There is still the bigger question of spillover from wild birds into cows. In waterfowl, it’s a pathogen replicating in their gut. How in the world does it go from a duck’s intestine into a cow’s mammary gland? That’s a head scratcher.”

This work was supported by the Centers of Excellence for Influenza Research and Response funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Cody Warren and Scott Kenney of Ohio State were co-lead authors. Additional co-authors were Carolyn Lee, Natalie Tarbuck, Hannah Cochran, Bryant Foreman, Patricia Boley, Saroj Khatiwada, Alok Dhakal, Khadijat Adefaye, Jennifer Schrock, Mohammad Jawad Jahid, Thamonpan Laocharoensuk, Raksha Suresh, Olaitan Shekoni, Erika Stevens, Sara Dolatyabi, Christina Sanders, Elizabeth Ohl, Devra Huey, Juliette Hanson, Kara Corps and Renukaradhya Gourapura, all of Ohio State, and Richard Webby of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

The Plant and Animal Agrosecurity Research Facility is located at Ohio State’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences Wooster Campus.  

Researchers found that higher-drafted players did not perform significantly better than lower-drafted ones, especially those chosen during the same round. 

These findings were revealed by analyzing NFL draft data over a 10-year period and comparing information such as player draft position, value chart rating and rookie salaries with real-life performance statistics from their first four years in the league. 

Results showed that predictors of player performance based on order of draft selection in early rounds had no relationship to actual performance and career length for players chosen in the 4th and 5th rounds. Researchers also saw a distinct advantage in player performance for teams trading down for draft picks compared to those trading up for draft picks, contrary to the way the NFL currently values draft positions. 

The NFL draft consists of seven rounds, with the team with the worst regular season record picking first and the Super Bowl winner picking last. While this method initially appears favorable, with prevailing wisdom suggesting that higher picks should be valued more than lower picks, these findings weaken that argument, said Dennis Shaffer, lead author of the study and a professor of psychology at The Ohio State University. 

“In a draft, it’s not like everybody agrees that player X is always number one, so you’re going to have teams coming at it from different perspectives and based on their own positional needs,” said Shaffer. “That kind of thing will always play a role in their choices.”

Shaffer’s research often investigates how intuitive beliefs govern our behavior. In this case, the work shows how subjective, and imperfect, NFL draft value predictions can be in the long term. 

The study was recently published in The Sport Journal.

Although previous studies have ventured down several avenues to determine what other characteristics may affect NFL draft value, none has been definitive – though some have emphasized that draft value matters little to the probability of a team making the playoffs. 

In this work, researchers used the Pro Football Reference site to gather data for every player drafted from 2011 to 2020. They then used the Pro Football Focus (PFF) site to gather overall season grades for each player across their first four years in the NFL, resulting in a sample of 2,544 drafted players across 10 years.  

Importantly, the study’s results don’t imply that draft position is completely irrelevant when it comes to picking good players. Instead, it indicates that the connection between these factors  is just weaker than people think, said Shaffer. 

“For what the NFL is currently doing, performance doesn’t bear out according to draft values or rookie contracts,” said Shaffer. “It doesn’t matter how you look at it in terms of valuation, in trade values or rookie salaries, which are greater for higher picks.”

Yet there is one silver lining, at least for individual players. Despite initial wage differences attached to a player’s draft position, someone drafted at the bottom of the second round will likely last as long as someone chosen in the top of the second round – meaning wages over the lifetime of a player’s career could rise to be the same as or better than their peers’ earnings. 

“At least right off the bat, while higher draft position equals a greater salary, draft position has little bearing on how much you earn over the course of your contract,” said Shaffer. “You could equal or exceed that of a higher-drafted peer because your performance is better over more time in the league.” 

Still, to improve the process as a whole, the study concludes that subtly altering the NFL’s grading system may provide a better framework to achieve greater long-term success for teams as well as inform better strategies on which prospective football players to draft. 

“Executives may want to start basing trade value charts on something other than previous trades made,” said Shaffer. “It’ll ensure their sports intuition better aligns with eventual outcomes.” 

Ryanne E. Shaffer, an incoming undergraduate student at Ohio State, co-authored the study. 

The researcher who led development of the vaccine is the senior author of a New England Journal of Medicine review article published last week describing the difficulties of treating most forms of the disease and reporting that the live vaccine, found to be safe in animals, is expected to be tested in humans later this year. 

Up to 1 million new cases of cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL), caused by many species of Leishmania and transmitted through the bite of infected sand flies, are diagnosed worldwide each year. At any given time, approximately 6 million people are infected – yet up to 1 billion people in 99 territories and countries where leishmaniasis is endemic, including the U.S., are at risk of contracting the disease, the authors wrote. 

Lead researcher Abhay Satoskar, professor of pathology at The Ohio State University College of Medicine, has been working on development of a leishmaniasis vaccine for over 20 years. In 2020, he and colleagues reported strong results in mice with a vaccine developed using CRISPR gene-editing technology to mutate the parasite that causes the skin disease. Late last year, the vaccine cleared a key U.S. Food and Drug Administration hurdle: approval of an investigational new drug (IND). 

“This means the FDA has seen the product and our preclinical data and has deemed that this product can be tested in people now,” Satoskar said. “It’s a big milestone in terms of product development, especially when the product was conceived in academia.

“This helps everywhere in the world because once the U.S. FDA gives its approval, it means other regulators know that it has gone through a very thorough review.”

To develop the vaccine, the researchers used CRISPR technology to edit the genome of Leishmania major by deleting centrin, the gene for a protein that supports the parasite’s physical structure.

The team applied the new technology to the century-old Middle Eastern practice of leishmanization – deliberately introducing the live parasite to the skin to create a small infection that, once healed, leads to life-long immunity against further disease.

These parasites cause infection by hijacking immune cells and using those host cells to replicate indefinitely. Studies of the vaccine in mice showed that the mutant parasite lacking centrin could still find its way into cells and make copies of itself, but for only a limited amount of time and not at a pace that leads to clinical disease. Immunization with the mutated parasites induced immunity against vector-transmitted infections.

“Live vaccines like that are the best vaccines, but there’s a potential risk of causing serious disease in some people,” said Satoskar, also a professor of microbiology at Ohio State. “We refined the concept using modern technology, making a parasite that does not cause clinical disease but allows for induction of immunity.”

Satoskar and his collaborators will be responsible for conducting the initial trials in Kenya and Brazil, two countries in which leishmaniasis is endemic and among the countries targeted for eventual vaccine deployment. A site in Cincinnati, Ohio, may also be added to the trial. Between about 75 and 100 people will participate.

This initial trial is focused on testing the safety of the vaccine in healthy people, but the team will also collect blood samples to investigate whether the vaccine provokes an immune response. Testing in endemic regions is an important step in gauging whether people who may have already been exposed to the parasite, and therefore have antibodies in their blood, experience an allergic reaction or other adverse effect.

In a parallel project, the team is developing a leishmaniasis skin test similar to a tuberculosis skin test.

“Testing positive with the skin test means that a person has been exposed to the disease and is now immune to the disease,” Satoskar said. “It is a test for immunosurveillance but also for immunogenicity of our vaccine. Without this kind of test, you cannot do surveillance. You cannot know the level of immunity in the community.”

After interim analysis of the Phase 1 results, the team is aiming to conduct a Phase 2 trial in at least 3,000 people with the purpose of understanding the effectiveness of the vaccine and any side effects.

“An effective prophylactic vaccine is indispensable for elimination or eradication of leishmaniasis,” Satoskar said. “This is true for almost all infectious diseases.”  

A vaccine would also provide an affordable way to prevent a disease that can lead to disfigurement, disability, social stigma and poverty, he said. Researchers estimate that a vaccine would likely cost less than $5, compared to the $100 to $200 cost for treatment in the hardest-hit countries – treatment that requires weeks of daily drug injections with unpleasant side effects, leading to poor patient compliance that allows parasites to develop resistance to the drugs. 

A much more severe form of the disease, visceral leishmaniasis, affects organs and is fatal if left untreated. While the L. major vaccine may also protect against the visceral form, Satoskar and colleagues have used the CRISPR technique to work on a vaccine with the Leishmania donovani parasite that causes visceral leishmaniasis.

The Phase 1 trial and leishmaniasis skin test production is supported by $10 million in grants from the Japan-based Global Health Innovative Technology Fund, which also supported the vaccine’s development along with the Wellcome Trust UK.

Additional partners on the trial include Nagasaki University in Japan; Gennova Biopharmaceuticals Ltd., which manufactures the vaccine; Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil; HJF Medical Research International in Kenya; the FDA; the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; and Johns Hopkins University.

Co-authors of the review article were Naomi Aronson of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Maryland and Ahmed Musa of the University of Khartoum in Sudan.

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

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

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

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

The study was published recently in the journal Molecular Ecology. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The findings hint at the juice’s promise as a functional food that may help curb the unchecked inflammation that characterizes a range of chronic conditions, researchers say. 

The tomato-soy juice contained high levels of the plant-based compounds lycopene and soy isoflavones, both believed to have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties based on previous research. Compared to a control tomato juice lacking these compounds, the tomato-soy juice significantly lowered blood levels of three proteins that are markers of systemic inflammation. 

“The idea is, can we use food-based interventions to modulate inflammation?” said lead author Jessica Cooperstone, associate professor of horticulture and crop science at The Ohio State University. “And can we test this in a rigorous way so that we can really see this is affecting inflammation, versus just saying something is anti-inflammatory?” 

Based on these results and additional data, Cooperstone and colleagues have received National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases funding for a pilot clinical trial testing whether consuming the same tomato-soy juice reduces inflammation in patients with pancreatitis. 

The study was published recently in the journal Molecular Nutrition & Food Research. 

Lycopene is a carotenoid that gives tomatoes and other vegetables their colors, and soy isoflavones are flavonoids that mimic the action of the hormone estrogen. Both are phytochemicals that help plants thrive. 

Years ago, based on studies showing an association between diets high in either tomato products or soy and a lowered risk for prostate cancer, Ohio State researchers developed the tomato-soy juice made with tomatoes containing a high concentration of lycopene – also developed and grown at Ohio State – and enriched with soy isoflavone extract. 

Later research at the university linked higher intake of the tomato-soy juice to reduced prostate-specific antigen levels in some men with prostate cancer, and studies elsewhere have suggested that tomatoes and soy, consumed separately or combined, can affect inflammatory and metabolic pathways related to obesity and other chronic illnesses. 

“There’s been enough compelling evidence that compounds from tomatoes and soy might be modulating inflammation that we decided to test this in people,” Cooperstone said. 

In the new study, 12 healthy adults with obesity consumed two 6-ounce cans of tomato-soy juice every day for four weeks. After a washout period, they consumed the low-carotenoid control tomato juice for four weeks. 

“The hypothesis is that it’s the lycopene from the tomatoes and the isoflavones from the soy that’s inducing the effect, so we didn’t want to have a control that’s just water,” Cooperstone said. 

Researchers took blood samples testing for cytokines – pro-inflammatory proteins produced by the immune system – before and after each four-week trial period. Only the tomato-soy juice resulted in significant reductions in three cytokines: Interleukin (IL)-5, IL-12p70 and granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF), as well as showing a downward trend in tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-a) that was not statistically significant. 

The team also analyzed participants’ urine before and after each trial period for changes in metabolites, the molecular products of biochemical reactions that break down nutrients to produce energy and perform other essential functions. 

The findings showed that both the tomato-soy and control tomato juice led to some shared changes in the metabolite profiles, meaning some tomato-driven effects occurred in the absence of lycopene. Soy isoflavone metabolite shifts stood out among the changes induced by the tomato-soy juice. While further investigation is warranted, the changes provide additional evidence that this food-based intervention is affecting human biology. 

“This is probably a function of the fact that there’s more to our intervention agents than just these two compounds,” Cooperstone said. “Ultimately, we want to have a better understanding of how the foods that we eat are relating to our health. And when we really want to be sure, we need to test them in clinical trials. And that’s what we’re doing here.”

She and colleagues have also found evidence in an animal model that the soy-tomato juice can reduce inflammation and the severity of chronic pancreatitis – data supporting the prediction in the current clinical trial that the intervention could improve outcomes for patients with pancreatitis. 

“Care for patients with pancreatitis is palliative, focused on controlling pain and GI symptoms. Our hypothesis is that the tomato-soy juice may serve as an intervention to decrease inflammation and hopefully increase patients’ quality of life,” Cooperstone said. 

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Institutes of Health, the Lisa and Dan Wampler Endowed Fellowship for Foods and Health Research, and the Foods for Health Initiative at Ohio State. 

Co-authors include first author Maria Sholola, Jenna Miller, Emma Bilbrey, David Francis and Thomas Mace of Ohio State, and Janet Navotny of the USDA. Mace is the lead principal investigator on the pancreatitis trial. Cooperstone, Philip Hart and Kristen Roberts of Ohio State are also PIs on the trial.

After collecting nearly 30 vacuumed dust samples from places like schools, university residence halls and office buildings, researchers simultaneously identified the presence of 54 distinct viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, influenza, norovirus, Epstein-Barr virus, and others. 

Indoor dust tends to accumulate biological material shed by occupants and also integrates signatures from the air, surfaces and human activity over time, which means using these particles to monitor viral pathogen trends could aid early detection efforts against future outbreaks. 

“It’s really important that we understand broadly how to track disease in our community,” 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. “Similar to wastewater monitoring, which tracks disease clusters on a large-scale level, we’ve created an intermediate tool that has those same benefits for a smaller population.” 

Compared to traditional sampling methods, dust-based techniques are advantageous because the particles are easily collected during routine cleaning, it requires no specialized plumbing access, and dust can remain stable at room temperature for extended periods. These simple but critical aspects can lead to quick, high-resolution insights into what is happening within a specific space and help researchers take appropriate measures to address it, said Dannemiller. 

“This is groundbreaking work,” she said. “While people have sequenced viruses out of dust before, it’s been on a pretty limited basis and was not proposed as a surveillance tool.”

The study was recently published in the journal Building and Environment.

To take a targeted look at these pathogens, researchers utilized both PCR analysis and a novel sequencing technique that detects the RNA molecules that viruses leave behind after they decay. By comparing the findings in their sample to a library panel of 200 potential pathogens, the team measured and categorized many viruses at once, a capability that, on the ground, would increase both the efficiency and utility of future viral investigations. 

“Research like this is useful for monitoring a range of buildings where there’s a variety of things that you're concerned about,” said Dannemiller. “By using that information to help pinpoint those issues, it’s possible to improve our decisions about where to direct limited mitigation resources.”

Significantly, building dust could also be used to capture data from both symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals, a noninvasive aspect that would allow researchers and decision-makers to infer viral patterns without the need for direct clinical testing. 

While researchers in this study did not measure the viability of the sampled viruses, it’s unlikely that leftover viral particles in dust would still be infectious – depending on the bug. Given the minimal risk, establishing a robust and easily scalable dust-based monitoring tool would provide the public with a much broader understanding of community transmission. 

For instance, three of the viruses the team found were shown to be more prevalent in child-associated settings, like daycares, rather than in buildings primarily occupied by adults, and a total of 85% of all collected samples contained at least one rhinovirus. Such results signify that dust can even capture public health trends by occupant demographic, like age. 

Overall, findings suggest that dust-based surveillance may be a powerful complement to wastewater surveillance, particularly for early warning of threats in enclosed environments. Future work may include exploring the use of this sampling in military and healthcare settings and determining if the team’s new viral sampling technique could help automate detection pipelines. 

“This is an initial step to understanding how we can use technology to better monitor at the building level for different infectious diseases,” said Dannemiller. “Ultimately, that leads to a more informed use of precautions and better targeting for the use of resources.”

Other Ohio State co-authors include Austin Shamblin, Calissa Carlisle, Nicholas Nastasi, Seth Faith, Michael Sovic and Vanessa Varaljay, as well as Genny Cook, Anthony Fries, Richard Agans from the United States Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine. This study was supported by the United States Air Force Research Laboratory, the National Institutes of Health and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paleontologists uncovered this finding by studying wear on the fossilized teeth of Maiasaura peeblesorum, a duck-billed dinosaur species that lived about 75 to 80 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous. First discovered in Montana, these large, herbivorous dinosaurs lived in herds and were thought to have been highly social creatures, especially in contrast to those that may have had different reproductive strategies. 

Extensive fossil findings of preserved Maiasaura nests have since made them a key species for understanding the reproductive behaviors and ecology of many other types of duck-billed dinosaurs. Now, closer analysis of their dental wear patterns has revealed that while juvenile Maiasaura teeth had significantly more crushing wear, adults exhibited more shearing wear, suggesting parents could have been bringing softer, higher-protein food to their children than they themselves ate. 

Today, this behavior is typical of birds whose young are confined to the nest for a time after hatching, said John Hunter, lead author of the study and an associate professor in evolution, ecology and organismal biology at The Ohio State University, meaning that these dinosaurs could have exhibited a level of parental care unusual for most species on Earth at the time.  

“The urge for a bird to feed a youngster is a very old behavior,” said Hunter. “What we’re providing is that evidence for that behavior probably goes much further than the origin of birds, perhaps to the origin of dinosaurs.”

Learning more about which social behaviors may have endured throughout evolutionary history can give scientists a better glimpse into how organisms made a living tens of millions of years ago, as well as help predict traits modern animals might pass on to their descendants. 

The study was recently published in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.

Researchers specifically detail that juvenile Maiasaura likely ate more nutritious low-fiber foods like fruit while their caretakers consumed a greater proportion of tougher, nutritionally poor high-fiber plant parts. In mammals today, the same patterns of shearing wear would likely be present in grazers like horses, antelopes and cows, while low-fiber diet eaters like tapirs would have dental patterns similar to the young dinosaurs. 

In comparing the types of wear on dinosaur teeth, researchers also suggested that shifts in diet may have also performed an important role in early growth and development. In this instance, their results show that the diet of juvenile Maiasaura may have caused them to grow particularly fast in their first year.

The study also considers other interpretations of their results. Instead of consuming completely different fare, dinosaur parents could have been feeding their young partially regurgitated food, yet another behavior now common in birds. Alternatively, juveniles could also have left the nest to forage for themselves, an activity now seen in modern herbivorous lizards.  

While that solution is less likely as juveniles were helpless, and probably dependent on their parents to feed them during the first weeks after hatching, learning more about their remains can widen scientists’ perspectives of what sophisticated biological and social systems dinosaurs may have had, said Hunter.

“The further back in time you go, the less of a fossil record you have, so paleontologists have to draw from different sources of inspiration from different parts of the living,” he said. “So even among closely related dinosaurs, there is probably still quite a bit to learn about them.”

If possible, future studies could examine other fossils of the very youngest dinosaurs for dental microwear to test other hypotheses regarding dinosaur embryos and hatchlings.

Christine Janis from the University of Bristol and the University of Brown was a co-author. This work was supported by Brown University.

In a large-scale field experiment, researchers planted 640 tree saplings across 20 parks in Dayton, Ohio, and implemented varying irrigation methods. After monitoring sapling survival, growth and health in response to their irrigation methods and nearby temperatures, the team found that the effects of both water treatment and surrounding heat varied among tree species. 

An analysis of saplings at season’s end revealed an overall survival rate of about 48%, indicating that irrigation approaches impacted species’ health differently: Certain species, such as red maple, northern catalpa and honey locust, consistently thrived over others, particularly the white oak, black gum and sassafras saplings. 

Understanding the causes behind these environmental disparities could make urban forests both a lucrative and sustainable option for preventive climate action, said Erika Wright, first author of the study and a graduate student in entomology at The Ohio State University.

“People don’t necessarily think of how their yard connects to the surrounding environment, but we all contribute to the urban forest by planting in our own space,” said Wright. 

Urban forests — essentially functioning as citywide ecosystems because they include all the green spaces in a community — also provide valuable benefits to the health and well-being of local residents. Besides beautifying the environment and supporting biodiversity and wildlife, increased shade offers natural cooling that can reduce consumers’ summer electricity usage.  

Yet obstacles to expanding urban forests often include limited financial and labor resources to care for and maintain them, said Wright. To better consider these challenges, researchers sought to partner on a planting project with a legacy city, an urban area that once had a booming economy but whose shrinking population now lacks the means to manage long-term reforestation projects. 

“It’s going to keep getting hotter in the future,” said Wright. “So we need to know if we should be trying to create environments that are more resilient to those changes.”

The study was recently published in the journal Urban Forestry & Urban Greening. 

The study goal was to test the efficacy of different irrigation strategies on tree development, but with the saplings scattered throughout the city, researchers did not have access to public water sources and had to rely on water transported from nearby fire hydrants. 

Nonetheless, the team predicted that irrigation investments with higher input costs would lead to higher sapling survival, increased growth and improved health compared to less costly irrigation investments, outcomes expected to be partly related to lower water stress in regularly watered saplings.  

Actual sapling survival rates turned out to be slightly lower than the five-year post planting survival rates recorded in previous studies, but the researchers did find that the best watering tactic involved using gator bags – plastic bags that are typically applied for slow-release watering. 

While filling them once per month was not labor-intensive, researchers did note that the up-front and replacement cost of gator bags was high, illustrating the challenging nature of even securing the right supplies to successfully establish and expand urban forests, said Mary Gardiner, senior author of the study and a professor of entomology at Ohio State.

“When a city invests in reforestation of a park, you have to plant more trees than you want to last long term because there will be some percentage that dies off,” said Gardiner. “But even small differences in management can mean huge variations in survivorship.”

According to the study, of the 640 trees seeded, a large portion either went missing or were destroyed by outside factors, likely due to environmental or human interference. “Even after the trees were pretty well established, we saw losses, which was surprising,” said Wright.   

For legacy cities, such threats make gator bags a low- to mid-cost irrigation option as long as precautions like protective fencing are taken to ensure that the bags are not damaged. These investments, combined with having volunteers ensure sapling stock is of high quality before planting, could lead to impressive strides in future forest growth, said Gardiner. 

Overall, while the study’s results indicate that certain species performed better under heat and water stress, researchers don’t recommend limiting planting to only those few species, as urban forests with a mix of trees tend to be more resilient to pest and disease outbreaks.   

Instead, researchers recommend a tailored approach that takes elements like tree species, irrigation resources and surrounding infrastructure into consideration. It may also be worth exploring whether urban forest resilience could be bolstered by non-native tree species.

“Looking for cost-effective strategies for cities to be resilient in the face of a warming climate is an important tactic,” said Gardiner. “Conservation like this leads to a great payoff in the long term.”

Other co-authors include Ellen Danford and Samuel Ward from Ohio State and Christopher Riley with the Bartlett Tree Research Laboratories.

Reporting today (April 29, 2026) in Nature, the researchers describe building upon a technique called prime editing by inserting DNA that attaches to the genome through a series of overlapping flaps. This method, which they call a prime assembly approach, avoids a bottleneck in the gene therapy field – a double-strand break to the donor DNA that can cause toxicity and kill cells.

“Using this method, we are doing genome assembly rather than making a small edit in a gene,” said Bin Liu, a co-lead author of the study and assistant professor of biological chemistry and pharmacology at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. “If we think of the genome as a book, we can remove one paragraph and replace it with a new one – or even rewrite a chapter.” 

This distinction is important: Because some diseases involve hundreds of mutations, pursuit of a gene therapy treatment would require hundreds of gene edits that would be subject to individual federal approval, Liu said. 

“The biggest impact of this technology is we can correct 1,000 heterogeneous mutations at once,” he said. 

In the study using mammalian cells, Liu and co-lead authors from the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School show the technique can allow for efficient insertion of a DNA segment containing up to 11,000 base pairs – compared to a maximum of about 800 base pairs successfully inserted with other methods. 

“We tried to hit the upper limit of the technology to see how large we can go,” he said. “Using our method, we envision setting up a universal platform and incorporating a healthy copy of a gene directly into a patient, no matter what mutation they have.” 

Achieving the insertion of a large DNA segment involved a combination of techniques. 

Any healthy “donor” DNA used for this type of therapy can be manufactured in a lab. The researchers used a twin prime editing method to generate programmable flaps on the target DNA that introduces the DNA insertion to the genome. The flaps complement the ends of the donor DNA, avoiding a double-strand break. This insertion does induce a single-strand DNA break, which is considered less likely than a double-strand break to be toxic to a cell, Liu said. 

Assays evaluating and visualizing the efficiency of the insertion in mammalian cell cultures demonstrated the method’s promise, he said. 

The editing steps removed the need for reliance on a repair mechanism, called homology directed repair, that has been a key part of gene-editing techniques that involved cuts to DNA. By ruling out that repair step, which occurs in actively dividing cells, the prime assembly technique can incorporate both single- and double-stranded DNA donors and be used as therapy in non-dividing cells such as neurons and heart cells. 

“Previous applications that relied on homology-directed repair have worked well in cells, but in animal models, its efficiency is often very low,” Liu said. “That’s why our method provides a big advantage by harnessing prime editing.” 

The team calls the technology “prime assembly” in a nod to the common lab technique “Gibson assembly cloning,” which joins DNA in a test tube. 

There is more work to do, including determining the best delivery vehicle for the donor DNA segment and delivering editor – likely a lipid nanoparticle or adeno-associated virus. Additionally, testing the effectiveness of in vivo editing is planned in Liu’s lab and with collaborators in Ohio State’s Gene Therapy Institute, including ophthalmologist Tom Mendel. 

The work was co-led by Erik Sontheimer, professor, and Wen Xue, associate professor, in the RNA Therapeutics Institute at UMass Chan Medical School. Additional co-authors include Yanjun Zhang of Ohio State; Andrew Petti, Xuntao Zhou, Haoyang Cheng, Jenny Gao, Matthew Yee, Youwei Qiao, Lin Zhou and Scot Wolfe of UMass Chan Medical School; and Tingting Jiang of Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. 

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Leducq Foundation Translatlantic Network of Excellence Program and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Previous research has shown that a protein in humans called RAD52 performs DNA repair in cancer cells lacking the tumor-suppression function of normal BRCA genes, enabling the cells to survive and replicate – an indication that blocking RAD52 would kill these cells. 

But blocking RAD52 requires fully understanding its repair activities, which have been difficult to capture with even the most sophisticated techniques. So the research team turned to its ancestral protein Mgm101 in yeast mitochondria and observed several key steps in its DNA repair process, called single-strand DNA annealing. 

A clearer understanding of how this family of proteins binds to DNA strands and coaxes them back together after a break provides insights for drug targets that could halt the process in cancer cells empowered by mutated BRCA genes. 

“It’s still a proposed mechanism: Just because we see these snapshots of the process doesn’t mean we know all the details, but we do have the best snapshots for any protein that does this single-strand annealing,” said senior author Charles Bell, professor of biological chemistry and pharmacology at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. “This focuses our strategies for drug development.” 

The study is published today (April 27, 2026) in the journal Nucleic Acids Research, which designated the paper as a Breakthrough Article. 

DNA strands break every day in every cell, which is why proteins exist to fix the breaks and otherwise keep cellular processes running smoothly. But because repairs must happen quickly and human proteins are often more complex than their ancestral counterparts, even the most advanced imaging equipment can’t capture every step in the process. 

Bell’s lab partnered on this research with the lab led by co-author Vicki Wysocki, professor emerita at Ohio State and chair of the School of Chemistry & Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Wysocki’s lab specializes in native mass spectrometry and mass photometry, using light to measure masses of protein-DNA complexes. 

These techniques showed that Mgm101 assembled from a monomer, or single copy of itself, into a large multi-unit molecular complex called a 19-mer – essentially, a ring composed of 19 copies of the protein. 

“This ring is sitting there as a template so that the first strand of the DNA can come down, and then the second strand comes on and starts being annealed to the first strand,” Wysocki said. 

These findings were supported by what Bell’s lab determined using cryogenic electron microscopy, observing structures floating in solution and frozen in a thin layer of ice. 

The high-resolution structures showed multiple phases of the process: the 19-mer ring with a single strand of DNA attached (substrate), with the second strand in place for annealing (duplex intermediate), and after release of the repaired DNA, visible as the classic double helix DNA formation (B-form product). 

“RAD52 high-resolution structures have been determined with single-stranded DNA, but not with the two DNAs that it’s trying to anneal,” Bell said. “Its job is to bind single stranded DNA and anneal it to its complement sequence. It’s been captured structurally, but only in a few states relevant to the reaction. 

“Here, we have more of the states along the full pathway from substrate, to intermediate and product. And the duplex intermediate is a conformation that’s never been seen before – when the protein binds the first DNA around the ring, it’s bound only by its sugar-phosphate backbone, with the nucleotide bases pointing up and fully exposed and separated, so that they can be searched. It’s extended, it’s completely unwound, and it’s circular.” 

Bell said the field has been uncertain about whether this mechanism is carried out with one or two participating protein rings, but that these findings show the process is managed by a single molecular complex – and, therefore, single-strand annealing is likely to be a conserved cis mechanism. 

The team plans to try to capture the same phases of the DNA repair process with RAD52 from humans, placing particular emphasis on the duplex intermediate, and to expand the role of mass spectrometry in determining how the DNA is bound to the protein. 

This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. The cryo-EM data were collected at Ohio State’s Center for Electron Microscopy and Analysis and processed using the Ohio Supercomputer Center. 

Carter Wheat of Ohio State and Zihao Qi, formerly of Ohio State and now at Georgia Tech, are co-first authors of the study. Additional co-authors include Metro High School student Miqdad Hussain and Katerina Zakharova, formerly of Ohio State and now at CAS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The findings suggest influenza D has strong potential to spill over to humans, the scientists say. Some people who work with cattle, considered the primary host for this virus, have been found to have influenza D antibodies in their blood, but no active human infection has been discovered to date. 

Results showed that several genetically different strains of influenza D that were isolated from cattle and pigs, another animal host, were as effective at replicating in cells from the human respiratory tract as influenza A viruses – the types of flu linked to both modern seasonal illness and historic pandemics. 

“All of the viruses, despite their genetic distance from each other, had similar replicative capacity in these human cells and human tissues,” said lead author Cody Warren, assistant professor of veterinary biosciences at The Ohio State University. 

“It seems like there are many animal species that are susceptible to influenza D viruses, suggesting that maybe they can evolve differently in different hosts. What’s obvious is that zoonotic infections are happening. 

“This is an opportunity, if we are indeed in front of it, to invest in surveillance and basic understanding of its biology such that we could be prepared if it were to emerge in the future.” 

The study was published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

The influenza D viruses from pigs used in the study were collected as part of long-term surveillance for swine flu – a type A influenza virus – at county and state fairs led by Andrew Bowman, professor of veterinary preventive medicine at Ohio State. 

“Flu D popped up in our samples and that led us to question what the risk is at the human-animal interface,” said Bowman, a co-author of the study. 

“The currently held belief is that bovines are the natural host for flu D. So pigs may be a secondary host, or not. The fact that it was in pigs is something we were trying to understand: Is that a potential pathway for the virus to adapt into a more transmissible virus in humans? So the pig component is trying to understand what the role of the pig is with influenza D.” 

Warren’s lab began by testing influenza D’s replication in cells that mimic the human airway by differentiating patient-derived lung epithelial cells at the air-liquid interface – cellular conditions the virus would encounter naturally. 

“When the virus started growing in those just as well as influenza A, we decided to leverage another physiologically relevant system to evaluate the breadth of cell types targeted by this virus: tissues,” Warren said. 

The team compared influenza types D and A growth in both human and swine lung tissues, finding that both virus types replicated efficiently in lung tissues from both species. 

The experiments in cells and tissue also showed a key difference between the two flu types: Influenza D, despite growing well, did not stimulate a robust antiviral immune response in infected cells, while the influenza A virus did. 

Separate tests in cell cultures showed influenza D growth was restricted if the cells were first primed by the protein interferon – suggesting that human cells have potent mechanisms to restrict viral infection. 

In infected animals, influenza D generates respiratory symptoms that cattle and pigs recover from, suggesting their immune systems are at work fending off the infection. In humans, most viral infections trigger the release of interferon, which produces inflammation and raises body temperature – leading to the symptoms that make us feel sick. 

These initial findings prompt important questions: Could humans have been infected but not felt sick, meaning influenza D is not a serious health risk? Or is it so stealthy that it can hide from the immune system, leaving us unable to put up a fight? 

“Those are gaps that we don’t quite understand,” Warren said. “The virus replicates to really high levels but doesn’t elicit a robust interferon response. Would it behave differently in the body of a person versus in these cell or tissue-based systems? That’s up for debate. 

“It seems the only smoking gun we’re missing is a virus isolated from a person. There’s been evidence of a history of exposure, but not necessarily any demonstration of active infection.” 

Bowman has collected many more influenza D viruses from pigs through ongoing swine flu surveillance, and plans to analyze the samples to assess whether the viruses are changing, and how. 

“What’s giving influenza D attention now is that it’s recognized as a cause of respiratory disease in cattle, and we’ve certainly seen it cause disease outbreaks in pigs,” he said. “Causing disease in some host species makes us somewhat concerned about what it might do in humans. It may not cause disease in this particular form, but in an evolved form, there may be that potential.” 

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the National Institutes of Health and the Ohio State Enterprise for Research, Innovation and Knowledge. 

Additional co-authors include Christina Sanders, Min Liu, Jovanna Fusco, Elizabeth Ohl, Natalie Tarbuck, Emily King, Devra Huey and Amanda Panfil of Ohio State; Thomas Fabrizio and Richard Webby of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital; and Phylip Chen and Mark Peeples of Nationwide Children’s Hospital.

The journey to outer space is incredibly dangerous, but crews must also face day-to-day hazards, such as exposure to cancer-causing radiation, microgravity and extreme isolation. Understanding and mitigating these risks may allow astronauts to stay in these environments for extended periods, especially as agencies race to build permanent habitats on the Moon.

This quest was the highlight of this year’s National Academy of Engineering regional meeting, as students, scientists and industry experts gathered to discuss and shape solutions to the logistical challenges of living and working in outer space. The three-day event was held at the Blackwell Inn and Pfahl Conference Center at The Ohio State University. 

One of the conference’s keynote speakers was Scott Parazynski, a physician and former NASA astronaut who once flew with John Glenn, who spoke about anticipating and preparing for health issues in space. Such concerns range from how astronauts will treat medical emergencies and mental health conditions to ensuring long-term pharmaceutical availability. 

“Space is actually harder on the body than you might think,” said Parazynski.

Despite the extensive health checks astronauts must undergo before liftoff, instances of illness and injury in space are still common occurrences. Prolonged stays in space can cause long-term issues like cardiovascular strain, sleeplessness, hypoxia (low oxygen) and reduced musculoskeletal fitness. Earlier this year, one astronaut even experienced a health scare that led to the first-ever medical evacuation from the International Space Station. 

But in situations where it isn’t possible to return to Earth quickly, crews will need to be able to handle emergency situations on their own, including having to perform space surgeries or provide care for other spaceflight-induced traumas. 

This means that advanced tools and systems will be vital to overcoming the challenges astronauts will face once off-world. “In exploration, when we challenge ourselves to go to extreme environments, we inevitably have to invent technologies not only to make it safe to go do that,” said Parazynski, “but also to extract science and do meaningful work.”

Polishing up novel technologies for future space missions could also lead to big improvements in medical systems here on Earth. “Investments in space health help us in remote parts of our world, in disaster recovery, and so many other facets of health care,” said Parazynski. 

Other topics addressed during the meeting revealed insights regarding Earth observation – or how scientists are monitoring our planet from above, what drives materials and manufacturing in space, and how researchers are finding new pathways to lunar exploration.

In another panel, Karen Dannemiller, an associate professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering and environmental health sciences at Ohio State, detailed some of the engineering challenges behind preserving astronaut health, and spoke about the importance of identifying issues like microbial threats in the environment as quickly as possible. 

“None of us thinks too much about indoor environmental quality until it’s an emergency,” said Dannemiller. “But traveling to the moon or to Mars, we don’t have the luxury to wait until then.” Instead, early detection and addressing issues before they become unmanageable are staples of sustainable innovations that can collectively support human health, she said. 

She and other panelists also shared advice on how next-generation scientists and academic leaders ought to seek out new research solutions to modern-era spaceflight obstacles.

“Follow your passions wherever that may lead,” said Dannemiller. “Don’t be afraid of failure.”

In a small study in rural northwestern Ohio, researchers found that men who had a “country” identity – for example, a love of hunting and guns, pickup trucks and country music – showed different vowel patterns in their pronunciations than did their neighbors who showed more interest in pursuits like theater, golf and rock music.

“We are used to language patterns like accents being regionally based – you talk like the people who live around you,” said Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, co-author of the study and associate professor of linguistics at The Ohio State University.

“But here we found that aspects of language may be tied to identity rather than just where you happen to live.”

The setting of the study – Defiance County – is key.

Defiance County is in a “transition zone” between the Inland North accent, which is spoken around the lower Great Lakes including Chicago, Detroit and Toledo, and the Midland accent, which includes parts of western and southern Ohio through the Midwest. The western part of Ohio has a gradual transition while the east, with European settlement shaped by the Western Reserve, has a much sharper border.

The result is that the area is a linguistic melting pot where speakers use a mix of features from both the North and the Midland, Campbell-Kibler said. So, in this study, the researchers investigated whether two factors other than the county’s location might influence accents of the residents: travel patterns and country identity.

The study, published recently in the journal American Speech, involved recorded interviews with 22 men in the county. The researchers looked specifically at five vowel patterns and how they differed based on travel patterns and country identity.

One hypothesis was that people who traveled a lot for work or other reasons might pick up accents tied to where they visit.  The researchers compared those who traveled to Toledo or Michigan – firmly in the Inland North – with those who traveled to Fort Wayne, an Indiana city also in the transition zone, and those who didn’t travel much.

But travel affected only one of the vowels studied, the LOT vowel, with those traveling to Toledo more likely to use the Inland North pronunciation (where “hot” may sound more like “hat”).  And this finding was not very robust, Campbell-Kibler said.

Much more robust were the findings about the country identity.  Through the course of the interviews, the researchers asked participants about their hobbies, music choices and vehicle choices.  Each participant was given a score for whether they mentioned connections to things like hunting, fishing, gardening, 4H and livestock (country identity) or hiking, biking, golf or video games (not country.)  They were also asked about their high-school identity.  Those who said “rednecks” or “ag kids” were given points for a country identity while those who said “band geeks” or “nerds” were not.

The researchers also asked each participant if they felt they had more in common with someone living in Fort Wayne, the nearest city, or with someone living in a similarly rural community in Idaho.  Those who scored high on country identity were much more likely to say they had more in common with a person in rural Idaho.

Findings showed that those who identified more strongly with country practices were more likely to use two vowel patterns often associated with the South or Appalachia, even though Defiance County is hundreds of miles from those regions.  For example, they may pronounce “my” like “ma.”

Although there was some Appalachian migration to Defiance County in the 20th century, participants didn’t maintain connections to family in Appalachia or connect their country identity to roots there. Instead, they defined being country as being about what someone does — especially having gardens and livestock.

Campbell-Kibler said she suspects that the results found in this study probably would be found in other parts of the United States.

“People today are influenced not just by the people they live near, but by all they read and see on the internet and television,” she said.  “The way people talk can be affected by who they want to be, not just where they live.”

Co-authors on the study were Martha Austen and Shontael Elward, who did the work as graduate students at Ohio State, and both now have PhDs in linguistics from the university.

Now, using a novel technique that enables researchers to directly analyze millions of individual particles at once, a new study has revealed that specks of dust trapped in Antarctic ice likely originated from a common source during the last Ice Age, between about 120,000 and 11,500 years ago. 

To determine this, a team led by Stanislav Kutuzov, lead author of the study and a researcher in earth sciences at The Ohio State University, examined more than 2 million particles from ice core samples taken from Taylor Glacier in coastal East Antarctica. The researchers found that major shifts in the number and concentration of dust grains that settled during this time period were likely linked to large-scale environmental shifts in Earth’s southern hemisphere. 

“This result implies that atmospheric circulation changed when we transitioned to a warmer period, and sources like Australia and New Zealand began to contribute to local dust deposition,” said Kutuzov.

Gaining a better understanding of these sources can offer clues into ancient climate systems, as well as improve  predictions about how those systems may behave in the future. 

Overall, the breadth of compositional data gathered in this work is consistent with results from past ice core investigations. However, this team’s more precise measurement method – identifying and analyzing thousands of distinct particles with a specific type of mass spectrometry – offers substantially more insight about the mineralogy of the dust particles, confirming that this new technique can act as a powerful tool for environmental nanoscience. 

“Normally, we are limited with analysis due to our sample volume,” said Kutuzov. “But the way this new technique works, it only requires a tiny amount of water to detect a huge amount of information about each particle.”

The study was recently published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Ice cores, precious scientific tools for studying Earth’s past environmental memories, are increasingly endangered as global temperatures rise. Before they are lost to glacier melt, scientists are racing to survey and preserve them from as many global areas as they can. 

Tropical glaciers such as the Quelccaya Ice Cap or Nevado Huascarán, for instance, have dust records that reflect regional signals, whereas dust found in more environmentally pristine areas such as Greenland and Antarctica tends to capture global changes to Earth’s atmosphere. 

What’s more, unlike traditional ice cores that are drilled vertically from the glacier’s surface down to bedrock, the Taylor Glacier ice core samples were collected horizontally, a method that can give researchers a more detailed look into a single specific time period. 

This ability allowed the team to observe that the type and amount of dust in the atmosphere changed during this period, as well as note an uptick of iron in the air, a critical nutrient associated with ocean bioactivity. 

“We went from a much colder, drier, dustier world to transitioning toward a more humid world leading up to the Holocene,” said Kutuzov. “We see a relative enrichment in iron oxide at this time and with so much soluble iron available, theories suggest these conditions could have supported a lot more life.”

Their analysis also identified the presence of thousands of volcanic particles in the ice core, likely as a result of occasional Victoria Land volcano eruptions nearly 14,800 years ago. Kutuzov said scientists could use these findings to develop a much-needed reference database for various minerals such as volcanic glass and dust from well-known source regions, especially as next-generation technologies inspire new ways to study ice cores. 

“Using this new method to confirm what was known before with more certainty shows that it could be applied to different places and events where we don’t know what happened,” he said. Other such places could even include other planets, as researchers prepare for future glacial explorations on those that also have water-ice, like Mars or Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. 

“There’s so much excitement for these instruments that more and more researchers are applying them to look at their data from a completely different angle,” said Kutuzov. “There are still unknowns, but discoveries like this are what push science.”

Co-authors include John Olesik, Madeleine Lomax-Vogt and Lucas Carter from Ohio State; Gregory Lowry, Garret Bland, Jonas Wielinski and Ryan Sullivan from Carnegie Mellon University; and Paolo Gabrielli from the University of Turin in Italy. This study was supported by the U.S. Ice Drilling Program. 

Finished ahead of schedule and armed with vastly more data than expected, researchers plan to use DESI’s map, which is the largest high-resolution 3D construct of the universe ever made, to explore dark energy, the fundamental ingredient that makes up about 70% of the cosmos.

In the five years since DESI began collecting data, the survey has observed more than 47 million galaxies and quasars and 20 million stars, and its results have already revealed much about the structure and evolution of the universe, said Paul Martini, the instrument scientist during DESI construction and commissioning and a professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University.

“DESI has been a superb international collaboration, and its incredibly fruitful scientific results are a leading example of its impact on the broader scientific community,” he said. 

DESI’s quest to understand dark energy is a global endeavor. The international experiment brings together the expertise of more than 900 researchers (including 300 PhD students) from over 70 institutions and is managed by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Researchers at Ohio State have been crucial partners to some of DESI’s most significant discoveries, from helping analyze the promising first-year results to learning how dark energy continues to evolve in unexpected ways.

“Ohio State made the largest contributions to the instrumentation, operations and analysis infrastructure of any university group in DESI,” said Klaus Honscheid, lead scientist of DESI instrument operations and a physics professor at Ohio State. “We are proud of our collaboration’s world-leading results on dark energy, as well as pleased with the substantial, international media attention they have received.”

Amidst the program’s ambitious schedule, the DESI team’s ability to complete the survey in five years was challenged more than once, most notably by the Contras wildfire in 2022, which interrupted power and internet infrastructure in the observatory for months. Fortunately, these disruptions were isolated and fixed quickly, said Ashley Ross, lead scientist for the DESI large-scale structure catalogs and an assistant research professor of physics at Ohio State. 

“By coming up with creative solutions to address unforeseen problems, the high-quality data we collected each night was carefully and confidently used to obtain the exciting cosmological constraints that DESI is now known for,” said Ross. 

Now, with this new completed set of data, scientists will have significantly more information to test long-held hypotheses about the balance between dark energy and matter, and their answers may mark a major shift in how we think about our universe and its potential fate. 

Having measured cosmological data for six times as many galaxies and quasars as all previous measurements combined, the collaboration plans to immediately begin processing their completed dataset in the coming months, with the first dark energy results from DESI’s full five-year survey expected in 2027. 

After completing the original five-year mission, DESI plans to continue observations through 2028. This will include expanding its survey to include parts of the sky that are more challenging to observe: Constructing a more detailed map of the cosmos may also make it easier for scientists to study nearby objects like dwarf galaxies and stellar streams, and grant them the ability to paint a much clearer picture of the universe’s formation and history, said Honscheid. 

But in the meantime, the Ohio State team will continue refining their dark energy measurements by analyzing data gathered during the first three years, and optimize their telescope time and its capabilities to help make exciting new observations. 

“A larger survey footprint will greatly improve our constraints on cosmological parameters and improve our dark matter program,” said Honscheid. “But these achievements are only possible because the operations team worked incredibly hard to keep the survey progressing.”

Other Ohio State contributors to DESI include Matthew Berno, Mikel Charles, Carl Coker, Rebecca Coles, Andrei Cuceu, Xinyi Chen, Mark Derwent, Ann Elliott, Jack Elvin-Poole, Lauren Ennesser, Kevin Fanning, Simon Filbert, Meagan Herbold, Jennifer Johnson, Naim Karacayli, Hui Kong, Claire Lamman, Thomas O’Brien, Daniel Pappalardo, Richard Pogge, Anna Porredon, Michael Rashkovetskyi, Jon Shover, Peter Taylor, Wynne Turner, David Weinberg, Molly Wolfson and Erik Zaborowski. 

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 Secretariat of Science, Humanities, Technology and Innovation (SECIHTI) of Mexico; the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain; and by the DESI member institutions.

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.

Superconductivity, or the ability of certain materials to conduct electric currents without any energy loss when cooled below a critical temperature, is a property still not very well understood. While a major challenge, understanding more about its formation mechanisms could lead to better, more long-lasting materials as well as more powerful quantum devices. 

Led by Chun Ning (Jeanie) Lau, senior author of the study and a professor of physics at The Ohio State University, the research team constructed a special material called twisted bilayer graphene — a layer of carbon stacked onto another and rotated at a small angle. 

By attaching the material to a man-made synthetic diamond called strontium titanate, Lau and colleagues were able to see and control how strongly electrons — tiny subatomic particles — in the system interacted with each other. Electron interactions that control properties like magnetic states and chemical bonding come in pairs, and by adjusting the “settings” of these pairs, the team was able to switch the material’s superconductivity on and off. 

“Electrons normally repel each other, but in superconductors they form pairs; this pair formation is the key to a superconductor’s ability to conduct electricity without dissipation,” said Lau. “Our evidence suggests that electrons themselves, depending on their sensitivity to their nearby environment, are unexpectedly important for material changes.”

The researchers were surprised to find that when they increased their adjustments, superconductivity had decreased. This result is different from conventional superconductors, where, if repelling forces between electrons are suppressed, the pairing gets stronger, highlighting the unusual nature of new materials like twisted bilayer graphene to successfully direct electricity. 

“If you could transmit electricity without energy loss, that would be hugely important for technologies used in our everyday life,” said Lau. “Despite the fundamental questions that still need answers, this work basically provides a path toward a new type of physics mechanism.”

Such a discovery could help scientists develop materials that superconduct at higher temperatures – even room temperature, a “holy grail” in the field that, if achieved, could transform their current understanding of electronics, power transmission, and communications.

The study was published April 7 in the journal Nature Physics.

Overall, these results reveal a simpler way to control the conditions needed to create and control the atomic power behind superconductivity. For instance, because many high-temperature superconductors have limitations that cap their productivity, using the environment to drive their abilities could boost their power as well as allow scientists to build more efficient electronics. 

These potential applications are not far off, according to Xueshi Gao, lead author of the study and a current PhD student in physics at Ohio State: He believes his team’s findings will soon be useful to many different types of systems and experiments across the field. 

“The mechanism of superconductivity in the twisted bilayer graphene system we used is still not well understood,” said Gao. “But our result can shed light on and help people to better understand the concept when applying it to future work.”

Still, the team emphasizes that the model is only an initial step toward understanding unexplored electronic interactions, and next steps will involve testing other types of interactions and investigating the various complex physics questions that their work opens up. 

“We’re showing capabilities that we haven’t shown before, so many people in the field are getting really excited about this result,” said Lau. 

Other Ohio State co-authors include Aatmaj Rajesh, Emilio Codecido, Daria Sharifi, Zheneng Zhang, Youwei Liu and Marc Bockrath, as well as Alejandro Jimeno-Pozo, Pierre Pantaleon and Paco Guinea from Imdea Nanoscience in Spain, and Kenji Watanabe and Takashi Taniguchi from the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan. This work was supported by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. 

Using satellite data from NASA’s GRACE missions, results show that these extensive glacier systems, often called the “water towers of Asia,” experienced significant losses in mass between 2002 and 2023. These findings reveal that if the extreme conditions that led to this decline continue, enhanced glacier melt could intensify short-term flood risks and substantially reduce long-term meltwater availability. The researchers say the findings underscore the need for reduced greenhouse gas emissions to stave off glacier melt and preserve a larger fraction of the region’s cryospheric water storage. 

Because communities in the area often rely on the glacier’s large meltwater stores for hydropower generation, renewable energy and large-scale irrigation systems, any changes in glacier size will have direct implications for local water security, agriculture and natural hazard management, said Jaydeo Dharpure, lead author of the study and a former postdoctoral research associate at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at The Ohio State University. 

“Decreasing glacial mass change can threaten infrastructure and increase the risk of loss of life,” he said. “While some ice losses and major disturbances are inevitable, glaciers play an important role for people living beside them, so learning to better monitor their evolutions is a must.”

The study was recently published in the journal Scientific Reports.

There are currently more than 95,000 glaciers located in High Mountain Asia, most of which are spread across about 15 sub-regions, or smaller ecological areas. 

To better grasp the extent of mass loss from these critical glaciers, researchers examined changes in Earth’s gravity field to determine how much frozen water was lost or added to the glaciers each year. Machine learning models were also used to address mission gaps in long-term glacier monitoring. In all, the team found that while water and ice loss steadily went up throughout the years, there was pronounced melt variability across certain subregions. 

Eastern Kunlun, for example, a mountain system that lies between the Tibetan Plateau and the Tarim Basin in western China, gained ice over the last few decades, but West Tien Shan, a mountain range that stretches in the opposite direction, did experience rapid mass losses. 

According to the study, the differences in outcomes for these subregions could have been caused by rising global temperatures, altered precipitation patterns, or even radiation emitted by the sun. But while challenging to study, because the glacier system in High Mountain Asia significantly influences global climate regulation, using new techniques to understand how the region reacts to these drivers as a whole is potentially one of the best ways future scientists can create more accurate global climate models, said Dharpure. 

“This is important work, because if these glaciers vanish in the future, downstream communities won’t just experience drinking or agricultural water shortages,” he said. 

Instead, melting glaciers would form new, uncharted lakes and rivers that continue to accumulate water, putting nearby communities in jeopardy, he said. “So scientists should be prepared to monitor how dangerous the many issues that disappearing glaciers cause will be for the billions of people they touch,” said Dharpure. 

Co-authors include Ohio State’s Ian Howat and Akansha Patel from Texas A&M University AgriLife. This work was supported by Ohio State’s Byrd Postdoctoral Fellowship.