Scientists studying the ancient ruins of Çatalhöyük, in modern Turkey, found that its inhabitants – 3,500 to 8,000 people at its peak – experienced overcrowding, infectious diseases, violence and environmental problems.

In a paper published June 17, 2019 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an international team of bioarchaeologists report new findings built on 25 years of study of human remains unearthed at Çatalhöyük.

The results paint a picture of what it was like for humans to move from a nomadic hunting and gathering lifestyle to a more sedentary life built around agriculture, said Clark Spencer Larsen, lead author of the study, and professor of anthropology at The Ohio State University.

“Çatalhöyük was one of the first proto-urban communities in the world and the residents experienced what happens when you put many people together in a small area for an extended time,” Larsen said.

“It set the stage for where we are today and the challenges we face in urban living.”

Çatalhöyük, in what is now south-central Turkey, was inhabited from about 7100 to 5950 B.C. First excavated in 1958, the site measures 13 hectares (about 32 acres) with nearly 21 meters of deposits spanning 1,150 years of continuous occupation.

Larsen, who began fieldwork at the site in 2004, was one of the leaders of the team that studied human remains as part of the larger Çatalhöyük Research Project, directed by Ian Hodder of Stanford University. A co-author of the PNAS paper, Christopher Knüsel of Université de Bordeaux in France, was co-leader of the bioarchaeology team with Larsen.

Fieldwork at Çatalhöyük ended in 2017 and the PNAS paper represents the culmination of the bioarchaeology work at the site, Larsen said.

Çatalhöyük began as a small settlement about 7100 B.C., likely consisting of a few mud-brick houses in what researchers call the Early period. It grew to its peak in the Middle period of 6700 to 6500 B.C., before the population declined rapidly in the Late period. Çatalhöyük was abandoned about 5950 BC.

Farming was always a major part of life in the community. The researchers analyzed a chemical signature in the bones – called stable carbon isotope ratios – to determine that residents ate a diet heavy on wheat, barley and rye, along with a range of non-domesticated plants.

Stable nitrogen isotope ratios were used to document protein in their diets, which came from sheep, goats and non-domesticated animals. Domesticated cattle were introduced in the Late period, but sheep were always the most important domesticated animal in their diets.

“They were farming and keeping animals as soon as they set up the community, but they were intensifying their efforts as the population expanded,” Larsen said.

The grain-heavy diet meant that some residents soon developed tooth decay – one of the so-called “diseases of civilization,” Larsen said. Results showed that about 10 to 13 percent of teeth of adults found at the site showed evidence of dental cavities.

Changes over time in the shape of leg bone cross-sections showed that community members in the Late period of Çatalhöyük walked significantly more than early residents. That suggests residents had to move farming and grazing further from the community as time went on, Larsen said.

“We believe that environmental degradation and climate change forced community members to move further away from the settlement to farm and to find supplies like firewood,” he said. “That contributed to the ultimate demise of Çatalhöyük.”

Other research suggests that the climate in the Middle East became drier during the course of Çatalhöyük’s history, which made farming more difficult.

Findings from the new study suggest that residents suffered from a high infection rate, most likely due to crowding and poor hygiene. Up to one-third of remains from the Early period show evidence of infections on their bones.

During its peak in population, houses were built like apartments with no space between them – residents came and left through ladders to the roofs of the houses.

Excavations showed that interior walls and floors were re-plastered many times with clay. And while the residents kept their floors mostly debris-free, analysis of house walls and floors showed traces of animal and human fecal matter.

“They are living in very crowded conditions, with trash pits and animal pens right next to some of their homes. So there is a whole host of sanitation issues that could contribute to the spread of infectious diseases,” Larsen said.

The crowded conditions in Çatalhöyük may have also contributed to high levels of violence between residents, according to the researchers.

In a sample of 93 skulls from Çatalhöyük, more than one-fourth – 25 individuals – showed evidence of healed fractures. And 12 of them had been victimized more than once, with two to five injuries over a period of time. The shape of the lesions suggested that blows to the head from hard, round objects caused them – and clay balls of the right size and shape were also found at the site.

More than half of the victims were women (13 women, 10 men). And most of the injuries were on the top or back of their heads, suggesting the victims were not facing their assailants when struck.

“We found an increase in cranial injuries during the Middle period, when the population was largest and most dense,” Larsen said.

“An argument could be made that overcrowding led to elevated stress and conflict within the community.”

Most people were buried in pits that had been dug into the floors of houses, and researchers believe they were interred under the homes in which they lived. That led to an unexpected finding: Most members of a household were not biologically related.

Researchers discovered this when they found that the teeth of individuals buried under the same house weren’t as similar as would be expected if they were kin.

“The morphology of teeth are highly genetically controlled,” Larsen said. “People who are related show similar variations in the crowns of their teeth and we didn’t find that in people buried in the same houses.”

More research is needed to determine the relations of people who lived together in Çatalhöyük, he said. “It is still kind of a mystery.”

Overall, Larsen said the significance of Çatalhöyük is that it was one of the first Neolithic “mega-sites” in the world built around agriculture.

“We can learn about the immediate origins of our lives today, how we are organized into communities. Many of the challenges we have today are the same ones they had in Çatalhöyük – only magnified.”

Other co-authors on the PNAS paper came from Université de Bordeaux, Koç University in Turkey, University of Nevada Reno, University of Zürich-Irchel, University of Liverpool, Johns Hopkins University, University of Arizona, University of Kent and Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada.

Among the funders supporting the project were the John Templeton Foundation, National Geographic Society and the National Science Foundation.

Researchers found that a first-time father tended to feel closer to the mother both as a co-parent and as a romantic partner when he believed he had her confidence when he was involved in child care.

“Fathers are more involved than they have ever been in parenting, but moms are still seen in our society as the expert caregivers,” said Anna Olsavsky, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in human sciences at The Ohio State University.

“So how mothers react to their partners’ parenting matters a lot. It affects how new dads feel about their whole family situation, including his relationship with his wife or partner.”

The study – done with relatively affluent, highly educated dual-earner couples – was published recently online in the journal Family Process and will appear in a future print edition.

This study is one of few to focus on the transition to parenthood from the perspective of fathers, said Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, study co-author and professor of psychology at Ohio State.

“It’s still rare to examine the father’s view on family processes,” Schoppe-Sullivan said.

The researchers used data from the New Parents Project, a long-term study co-led by Schoppe-Sullivan that is investigating how dual-earner couples adjust to becoming parents for the first time. In all, 182 couples, most of whom were married, participated in this study.

The parents were assessed four times: when the mother was in her third trimester of pregnancy and when the baby was 3, 6 and 9 months old.

When the baby was 3 months old, fathers answered questions about what researchers call “maternal gatekeeping,” or how much the mother inhibits or welcomes the father’s involvement in child care.

Fathers reported how much they felt their partner “opened” or “closed” the gate on them when it came to interacting with the baby.

For example, each dad reported on gate-closing behaviors, such as how often his partner took over baby-related tasks because the mom thought he wasn’t doing them properly or how often she gave him irritated looks about his parenting.

Examples of gate opening include encouraging the father to help bathe the baby or mom letting him know she appreciates his contributions to parenting.

When the baby was 6 months old, the fathers were asked about their co-parenting closeness with their partner. For example, they rated how much they felt they were “growing and maturing together through experiences as parents.”

Finally, when the baby was 9 months old, the fathers rated how good they felt about their romantic relationship with their partner.

Results showed that whether the mother “opened” or “closed” the gate on the father had a significant impact on how he felt about their relationship as a couple.

“If mothers are critical and less supportive of their partners’ parenting, it could have ramifications for the whole family dynamic,” Schoppe-Sullivan said.

“Fathers may not only do less child care, they may have more negative views on their relationship with their wife or partner.”

But the flip side was also true: Gate opening had a positive effect on how the new dad viewed the couple’s relationship.

“There has been some work suggesting that gate opening may be viewed by fathers negatively as demands for them to be more involved in child rearing, but that’s not what we found,” Olsavsky said.

“Gate opening was perceived positively by fathers. They felt it improved their relationship as a couple.”

The researchers emphasized that it is important for both new parents to support each other. But, because of societal norms, fathers may need extra support.

“There is this underlying assumption that mothers are the experts when it comes to parenting. And they have more sources of support in society when it comes to how to be a good parent,” Olsavsky said.

“But fathers don’t generally get that support from society. The only support they often get as parents is from their partner. That’s why it is so important.”

The researchers noted that this study was done with couples who were primarily married, white, and middle-class or affluent. All were dual-earner couples. Results may be different in couples with other situations.

Other co-authors of the study were Jia Yan, doctoral student, and Claire Kamp Dush, associate professor, both in human sciences at Ohio State.

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Researchers found that informal leaders were better liked and more sought after for advice when they hit a middle “sweet spot” on levels of assertiveness and warmth, two facets of extroversion.

Team members reacted less favorably to leaders who were high on assertiveness or warmth.

“Overly extroverted leaders can come across as too pushy or too annoying,” said Jia (Jasmine) Hu, lead author of the study and associate professor of management and human resources at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

“A moderate amount of assertiveness and warmth may be optimal.”

The study did find one factor that helped highly extroverted leaders receive better marks from their peers: prosocial motivation, or the desire to look out for others’ welfare.

The study appears online in the Journal of Applied Psychology and will be published in a future print edition.

The researchers did two related studies. The first involved 260 business undergraduate students who were randomly assigned to 78 self-managed teams. The students worked in their teams on a variety of projects through a full semester.

At the beginning of the semester, students rated themselves on two facets of extroversion. One was assertiveness, which is the desire to be dominant and forceful. The second was warmth, which is how friendly and outgoing they were.

The students’ prosocial motivation was measured by asking them how much they agreed with statements like “I care about benefiting others through my work.”

Later in the semester, students rated each member of their team on how much they showed leadership in their group activities. Based on these ratings, the researchers chose the person on each team who was seen by most of their peers as the leader.

Team members also rated how much they liked each of their team members and how much they went to him or her for advice in solving problems related to their tasks.

A second, nearly identical study involved 337 employees on work teams in a large retail company in China. Like with the students, these were self-managed teams without formal leaders.

Both studies had very similar results.

Leaders who were extroverted tended to be better liked and more sought after for advice by their team members – but only up to a point.

Leaders who rated themselves as very assertive or very warm tended to see a drop-off in how much their fellow team members liked them and sought their advice.

Hu said it was a case of too much of a good thing.

“If you’re too assertive as a team member, people think you’re pushy and they don’t like that,” she said.

“And if you’re too warm and friendly, that can be overwhelming for others who feel pressured to respond in the same enthusiastic way.”

But fellow employees can put up with more extroversion if they think you’re doing it for others.

“If you’re prosocially motivated, people see more benefits to your assertiveness and warmth. They know you’re not doing it just to promote yourself, but have a genuine interest in the whole team. That means a lot,” Hu said.

While this study was done with informal leaders, Hu said she believes the results could also apply to formally chosen supervisors. And she noted that even in teams with formal bosses, informal leaders like those in this study often emerge and play a key role in a team’s success.

Co-authors on the study were Kaifeng Jiang, associate professor of management and human resources at Ohio State’s Fisher College; Zhen Zhang of Arizona State University; and Wansi Chen of East China University of Science and Technology.

But a new study suggests that the benefits don’t go to people who may really need it – those with low self-esteem.

Results showed that perceived social support didn’t help people with low self-esteem when it came to one measure of physical health: inflammation. But it did assist those with a more positive attitude about themselves.

“People with high self-esteem already have advantages compared to those with low self-esteem, and social support only helps them more,” said David Lee, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at The Ohio State University.

“It’s a case of the rich getting richer.”

Lee conducted the study with Baldwin Way, professor of psychology at Ohio State. Their research appears online in the journal Health Psychology and will be published in a future print edition.

Previous research has shown that chronic inflammation is a potent driver of diseases, including cancer and heart disease. This research examined one marker of inflammation – a protein in the blood called C-Reactive Protein (CRP) – to determine how it was related to levels of self-esteem and perceived social support. Higher levels of CRP indicate higher levels of dangerous inflammation.

Data from the study came from the Survey of Midlife Development in the United States and included 1,054 healthy adults.

Participants rated how much support they felt from those closest to them, including family, friends and spouse. They also completed a 7-item questionnaire that measured their levels of self-esteem.

About two years after the survey, the same participants gave a blood sample in which they were measured for levels of CRP, the marker of inflammation.

Results showed that increased levels of perceived social support were linked to lower levels of CRP, an indicator of harmful inflammation – but only in people with higher self-esteem.

People with low self-esteem did not get the expected health boost from more perceived social support.

Way said that social support may not work in the same positive way for people with low self-esteem as it does in those with a healthy view of themselves.

“People with a negative self-view may actually feel more stress when people try to help them,” Way said.

“They may feel they don’t deserve the help or they worry that they’re asking for too much from their friends and family. The result is that they may not get the benefits of social support.”

These findings could contribute to developing more effective intervention strategies to reduce stress-related inflammation in those who have low self-esteem, the researchers said.

Lee will be an assistant professor of communication at the University of Buffalo, State University of New York, beginning this fall.

The Ohio State-led project was among 12 inaugural recipients of the Social Media and Democracy Research grants from the Social Science Research Council and its partner, Social Science One.

The research team, which also includes scholars from three other U.S. universities, will have unprecedented access to anonymous data from Facebook on the sharing of online content. The team will use these data to examine a variety of behaviors that may pose harmful influences on what people learn about science, politics and their community.

“We know that rumors and misinformation spread on social media platforms like Facebook can undermine citizens’ ability to make thoughtful decisions that affect their lives,” said Kelly Garrett, associate professor of communication at Ohio State and principal investigator of the project.

“But we can’t stem these problematic behaviors if we don’t understand them. That’s what this study is all about.”

Garrett will lead the study with colleagues from Ohio State, Stony Brook University, the University of Michigan and Cornell University.

More than 60 researchers from 30 academic institutions around the country were chosen to receive grants through a competitive peer review process organized by SSRC. Facebook, SSRC and Social Science One have built a first-of-its-kind privacy-protecting research infrastructure for the scientists to use for their work.

While the sharing of news that fact-checkers have labelled as false will be one focus of the study, the researchers will also be examining other sharing behaviors that may pose issues.

For example, some people share headlines to stories they haven’t read, and some content is only shared among a highly partisan network of Facebook users.

“That doesn’t mean that information shared by strong partisans is always necessarily harmful. But it is a behavior that is prone to being abused and can have harmful consequences,” Garrett said.

“So it is important to understand when it happens, how often it happens and whether we can explain its emergence.”

One question the researchers will examine is whether people share problematic posts more often at specific times of day, or times of the year, and whether they are more likely to come from specific parts of the country.

The study will explore how changes that Facebook makes in its platform – such as how messages with questionable content are flagged – affect sharing behavior.

In addition, the researchers will examine how real-world events, like terrorist attacks or candidate debates, influence what people are sharing.

Garrett said he hopes the results of the study will lead to ways to reduce the posting of fake news and other kinds of problematic sharing.

“We believe our findings could help system designers create early warning systems that predict when people are likely to share problematic posts,” he said.

“That could help Facebook design changes to help keep problematic sharing in check.”

Garrett’s colleagues on the study are Robert Bond, assistant professor of communication and political science at Ohio State; Jason Jones, assistant professor of sociology at Stony Brook University; Ceren Budak, assistant professor of information at the University of Michigan; and Drew Margolin, assistant professor of communication at Cornell University.

A new study of winners of the Nobel Prize in economics finds that there are two different life cycles of creativity, one that hits some people early in their career and another that more often strikes later in life.

In this study, the early peak was found for laureates in their mid-20s and the later peak for those in their mid-50s.

The research supports previous work by the authors that found similar patterns in the arts and other sciences.

“We believe what we found in this study isn’t limited to economics, but could apply to creativity more generally,” said Bruce Weinberg, lead author of the study and professor of economics at The Ohio State University.

“Many people believe that creativity is exclusively associated with youth, but it really depends on what kind of creativity you’re talking about.”

Weinberg did the study with David Galenson, professor of economics at the University of Chicago. Their study appears in a special issue of the journal De Economist.

In the study, the Nobel Prize winners who did their most groundbreaking work early in their career tended to be “conceptual” innovators.

These type of innovators “think outside the box,” challenging conventional wisdom and tend to come up with new ideas suddenly. Conceptual innovators tend to peak early in their careers, before they become immersed in the already accepted theories of the field, Weinberg said.

But there is another kind of creativity, he said, which is found among “experimental” innovators. These innovators accumulate knowledge through their careers and find groundbreaking ways to analyze, interpret and synthesize that information into new ways of understanding.

The long periods of trial and error required for important experimental innovations make them tend to occur late in a Nobel laureate’s career.

“Whether you hit your creative peak early or late in your career depends on whether you have a conceptual or experimental approach,” Weinberg said.

The researchers took a novel, empirical approach to the study, which involved 31 laureates. They arranged the laureates on a list from the most experimental to most conceptual.

This ranking was based on specific, objective characteristics of the laureates’ single most important work that are indicative of a conceptual or experimental approach.

For example, conceptual economists tend to use assumptions, proofs and equations and have a mathematical appendix or introduction to their papers.

Experimental economists rely on direct inference from facts, so their papers tended to have more references to specific items, such as places, time periods and industries or commodities.

After classifying the laureates, the researchers determined the age at which each laureate made his most important contribution to economics and could be considered at his creative peak.

They did this through a convention of how academics rate the value and influence of a research paper. A paper is more influential in the field when other scientists mention – or cite – the paper in their own work. So the more citations a paper accumulates, the more influential it is.

Weinberg and Galenson used two different methods to calculate at which age the laureates were cited most often and thus were at the height of their creativity.

The two methods found that conceptual laureates peaked at about either 29 or 25 years of age. Experimental laureates peaked when they were roughly twice as old – at about 57 in one method or the mid-50s in the other.

Most other research in this area has studied differences in peak ages of creativity between disciplines, such as physics versus medical sciences. These studies generally find small variations across disciplines, with creativity peaking in the mid-30s to early 40s in most scientific fields.

“These studies attribute differences in creative peaks to the nature of the scientific fields themselves, not to the scientists doing the work,” Weinberg said.

“Our research suggests than when you’re most creative is less a product of the scientific field that you’re in and is more about how you approach the work you do.”

The researchers were supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute on Aging, the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research and the Ewing Marion Kauffman and Alfred P. Sloan foundations.

The special issue of De Economist that includes this study commemorates the first Nobel Prize in economics given in 1969. One of the recipients was the Dutch economist Jan Tinbergen.

“This new understanding of viruses from the northern pole to the southern pole and from the surface to 4,000 meters deep may help scientists better understand how the oceans will behave under the pressures of climate change,” said Ahmed Zayed, co-lead author of the study and microbiology doctoral student at The Ohio State University.

Researchers analyzed marine samples far and deep in an effort to understand the complexities of viruses, which are increasingly being recognized as important players in the oceans’ role in tempering the effects of climate change.

This new study brings the total known marine viral populations within the ocean close to 200,000 – work that will help scientists better understand their influence throughout the world, including their part in delivering carbon deep into the sea, protecting the atmosphere from further damage. The study, led by researchers at Ohio State, appears online today (April 25) in the journal Cell.

“This is a massively expanded ‘catalog’ of ocean viruses, which we used to draw the first global map of viral diversity,” Zayed said.

Added Ann Gregory, co-lead author of the study, “What was really exciting was now being able to study these viruses at two important levels – the population level and by looking at genetic variation within each population, which tells us about evolution.

“We have expanded the number of known viral populations more than tenfold and this new map will help us understand the impact of ocean viruses on a global level,” said Gregory, formerly of Ohio State and now a postdoctoral trainee in Belgium at KU Leuven.

The samples were collected during the unprecedented three-year Tara Oceans Expedition, in which a team of more than 200 experts took to the sea to catalog and better understand the unseen inhabitants of the ocean, from tiny animals to viruses and bacteria.

In addition to the prior research in the temperate and tropical oceans, this new work includes samples from the schooner’s circumnavigation of the Arctic Ocean – the area most significantly impacted by climate change.

The researchers involved in the new study were able to document the viruses by analyzing their genetics, and by using advanced computational algorithms.

The study was the first to systematically sample the Arctic for viruses and it included deeper samples from other oceans than previously studied, Zayed said. A detailed accounting of these viruses is important because of their broad influence on other marine microbes, including bacteria, archaea, protozoa and fungi.

The new study was co-led by Zayed, Gregory and Matthew Sullivan, Ohio State professor of microbiology and civil, environmental and geodetic engineering.

“Marine microbes have a profound impact on our earth. They produce more than half of the oxygen we breathe, they move carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to the sea floor and they make up about 60 percent of the ocean’s biomass, acting as the foundation of the food web in the oceans,” Sullivan said.

“Without microbes, the Earth, its oceans, and even our human bodies come to a halt. Our lab is helping researchers finally ‘see’ the hidden viruses that infect these microbes.”

When viruses infect microbes, it can change the structure of the microbial communities, boost their metabolism and impact their evolution. In the oceans, that is linked to the oceans’ ability to improve the environment by taking up human-produced carbon dioxide.

The researchers explored the genetic variation between individuals within each viral population, the level of variation between populations within each community, the level of variation between communities across multiple environments in the global ocean and the driving forces of all these variations.

“After ‘drawing’ these multilevel global maps of viral diversity, we found some surprises. First, almost all of the viral communities fell into just five groups based on their location and depth. When we examined the genes of the viruses in each of those communities, we found evidence of genetic adaptation to the different zones of the ocean,” Gregory said.

The second surprise was that viral diversity was high in the Arctic Ocean. Most studies of larger organisms have concluded that diversity is highest at the equator and decreases as you move toward the poles.

“This suggests that the Arctic could be an unrecognized ‘cradle’ of viral biodiversity beyond the tropics and emphasizes the importance of these drastically climate-impacted Arctic regions for global biodiversity,” Zayed said.

Other Ohio State scientists who worked on the study were Ben Bolduc, Guillermo Dominguez-Huerta, Yunxiao Liu, Simon Roux and Dean Vik.

The study was supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the National Science Foundation.

Policymakers and diplomats need to focus more on the psychology behind why citizens are so vulnerable to disinformation campaigns, said Erik Nisbet and Olga Kamenchuk of The Ohio State University.

“There is so much attention on how social media companies can adjust their algorithms and ban bots to stop the flood of false information,” said Nisbet, an associate professor of communication.

“But the human dimension is being left out. Why do people believe these inaccurate stories?”

Russia targeted American citizens during the 2016 election with posts on every major social media platform, according to reports produced for U.S. Senate investigators.

This is just one example of how some countries have distributed “fake news” to influence the citizens of rival nations, according to the researchers.

In an invited paper just released in The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, Nisbet and Kamenchuk, a research associate at Ohio State’s Mershon Center for International Security Studies, discussed how to use psychology to battle these disinformation campaigns.

“Technology is only the tool to spread the disinformation,” Kamenchuk said.

“It is important to understand how Facebook and Twitter can improve what they do, but it may be even more important to understand how consumers react to disinformation and what we can do to protect them.”

The researchers, who are co-directors of the Mershon Center’s Eurasian Security and Governance Program, discussed three types of disinformation campaigns: identity-grievance, information gaslighting and incidental exposure.

Identity-grievance campaigns focus on exploiting real or perceived divisions within a country.

“The Russian Facebook advertisements during the 2016 election in the United States are a perfect example,” Nisbet said. “Many of these ads tried to inflame racial resentment in the country.”

Another disinformation strategy is information gaslighting, in which a country is flooded with false or misleading information through social media, blogs, fake news, online comments and advertising.

A recent Ohio State study showed that social media has only a small influence on how much people believe fake news. But the goal of information gaslighting is not so much to persuade the audience as it is to distract and sow uncertainty, Nisbet said.

A third kind of disinformation campaign simply aims to increase a foreign audience’s everyday, incidental exposure to “fake news.”

State-controlled news portals, like Russia’s Sputnik, may spread false information that sometimes is even picked up by legitimate news outlets.

“The more people are exposed to some piece of false information, the more familiar it becomes, and the more willing they are to accept it,” Kamenchuk said. “If citizens can’t tell fact from fiction, at some point they give up trying.”

These three types of disinformation campaigns can be difficult to combat, Nisbet said.

“It sometimes seems easier to point to the technology and criticize Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, rather than take on the larger issues, like our psychological vulnerabilities or societal polarization,” he said.

But there are ways to use psychology to battle disinformation campaigns, Kamemchuk and Nisbet said.

One way is to turn the tables and use technology for good. Online or social-media games such as Post-Facto, Bad News and The News Hero teach online fact-checking skills or the basic design principles of disinformation campaigns.

Because campaigns to spread false information often depend on stoking negative emotions, one tactic is to deploy “emotional dampening” tools. Such tools could include apps and online platforms that push for constructive and civil conversations about controversial topics.

More generally, diplomats and policymakers must work to address the political and social conditions that allow disinformation to succeed, such as the loss of confidence in democratic institutions.

“We can’t let the public believe that things are so bad that nothing can be done,” Kamenchuk said.

“We have to give citizens faith that what they think matters and that they can help change the system for the better.”

It’d be easy to use the word “simple” when considering this relative of coral and jellyfish. But wait – not so fast.

New research on tube anemones is challenging everything that evolutionary biologists thought they knew about sea animal genetics. The mitochondrial DNA of the tube anemone, or Ceriantharia, is a real head scratcher, from its unexpected arrangement to its previously unimagined magnitude.

Researchers, including a team from The Ohio State University, have published new findings showing that the DNA of the tube anemone does what few other species’ mitochondrial genomes have been shown to do. It defies the classic doughnut shape it “should” be in and is arranged in several fragmented pieces, the number of which vary depending on the species.

On top of that, the animal now holds the record for the largest mitochondrial genome reported to date. It contains almost 81,000 base pairs, or pieces of genetic information, according to the new study, published online in the journal Scientific Reports. Human mitochondrial DNA contains fewer than 17,000 base pairs.

“These ancient animals have simple behavior and simple anatomy, and so we’ve thought of them as fairly simple creatures until now. But their biology is quite complicated. The genomes of these tube anemones may be more dynamic than those of more-complex and more-recent animals like snails, insects and vertebrates,” said Meg Daly, a professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology at Ohio State.

About the mitochondrial DNA that is central to this study: This isn’t the DNA most of us remember learning about in school – the instructions found within the nucleus of each cell of an organism and organized in the linear double-helix.

Rather, mitochondrial DNA is usually circular in shape and contains much less information than nuclear DNA. And it lives inside the mitochondria – double-membraned structures found in multitudes within the cell, outside the nucleus. Mitochondria are responsible for energy production, and are sometimes called the “cellular powerhouses” of living beings.

While scientists have been able to sequence the mitochondrial DNA of other similar animals, they’ve hit a roadblock with these tube anemones until now, Daly said. About two decades ago, a researcher tried to create a blueprint of the mitochondrial genome based on the theory that it would be circular.

“It was impossible and no one really knew why until now,” said Daly, who has made a career of studying sea anemones and their biodiversity.

Using advanced supercomputer technology, researchers examined two species of tube anemone and found that one has five linear fragments of mitochondrial DNA and the other has eight. Previously, scientists had found a linear genome in the mitochondria of the jellyfish, but the linear structure combined with the variation in size and number of fragments seen in the tube anemone is unprecedented.

“We think that the typical loop arrangement we find makes sense, because one of the advantages of the mitochondria having a circular genome is that that it replicates easily,” she said.

“We’ve thought of this loop-shaped design as something that helps the mitochondria do its job quickly and efficiently.”

Now, it is left to Daly and others who study these creatures to figure out why this might have happened from an evolutionary perspective.

“So far, there’s no rhyme or reason to the anemones having this unusual mitochondrial genome,” Daly said.

Sergio Stampar, the Brazilian researcher who led the study, said the two species examined in this research represent the largest groups of Ceriantharia.

“These results present a considerable ‘photograph’ of the group. Besides the large size of genomes, the most surprising thing that we found is the significant difference between the two species,” said Stampar, who works at the Universidade Estadual Paulista in São Paulo.

Stampar said the work raises many questions, since the presumable change from circular to linear genomes in anemones should not be a simple process. A broad discussion about the evolution of several groups of related animals called Cnidaria – which includes jellyfish, corals and sea-anemones – is imperative, he said.

It would be tempting to expect similarities in evolutionary pressures among sea animals that are all old and relatively simple in terms of appearance and function, but this new evidence is calling that into question, Daly said.

“Maybe they all started at the same place but have been subject to different evolutionary schemes and opportunities.”

Michael Broe of Ohio State and Jason Macrander, formerly of Ohio State and now with Florida Southern College, also worked on the study, along with researches from the University of North Carolina, City University of New York and the American Museum of Natural History.

The study was supported by the National Science Foundation, the São Paulo Research Foundation, the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development and UNC Charlotte.

A study of 32 Florida restaurants found that customers left more negative remarks on comment cards on days when it was raining than on days when it was dry.

Results showed the odds of patrons leaving very negative comments versus very positive comments were 2.9 times greater on rainy days.

In two other online studies done in other parts of the country, results suggested that unpleasant weather left people in bad moods, which was then linked to them having less positive views about the restaurants they visited.

“Restaurant managers may see more than the usual bad reviews on certain days, and it may have nothing to do with the service or the quality of the food,” said Milos Bujisic, co-author of the study and assistant professor of hospitality management at The Ohio State University.

“Restaurants can’t control the weather, but it may affect how customers review them.”

The research appears online in the Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research and will be published in a future print edition.

While weather was not the most important factor in how customers reviewed their dining experience, it can’t be ignored, said study co-author Vanja Bogicevic, a visiting assistant professor of hospitality management at Ohio State.

“It may be a smaller factor, but it is something that managers should pay attention to,” Bogicevic said.

In the first study, researchers examined the comments cards left at the Florida restaurants, all part of the same national fast-casual chain.

The researchers rated the comments on a five-point scale from 1 (very negative) to 5 (very positive). They also examined weather data from the National Climatic Data Center for each restaurant’s location on the days comment cards were left.

They examined 14 different weather variables, but only three were related to customer comments – rain, temperature and barometric pressure.

Higher temperatures – which in Florida, can often mean it is uncomfortably hot - were linked to more negative comments.

Higher barometric pressure was also connected to negative comments in Florida, which is also probably different from much of the country, the researchers said, because rising pressure is often associated with fair weather. In warmer climates, high barometric pressure is often linked to higher daytime temperatures.

Two other studies conducted online offered more insight into exactly how weather affected customer evaluations.

In one study, 158 people from around the country who visited a restaurant within the last 24 hours were asked to rate and describe the weather conditions right before their restaurant visit. They also rated their own mood and what kind of “word-of-mouth” review they would give the restaurant – in other words, whether they would recommend the restaurant and tell others positive things about their experience.

Results showed that people who described the weather as more pleasant also rated their mood more positively. Better moods – and not the weather itself – were related to more positive word-of-mouth.

A third study specifically targeted people living in the Midwest, Northeast and Northwest regions of the United States, where the weather is variable over the year.

This study involved 107 people. Some were asked whether they visited a restaurant in the last seven days during pleasant weather, and some were asked if they had visited a restaurant in unpleasant conditions (very cold, raining or snowing).

Participants who reported eligible conditions for the study then answered questions about their mood that day, their dining experience and whether they would give good word-of-mouth to the restaurant.

Similar to the previous study, pleasant weather elevated consumers’ moods, which was linked to a better rating of their restaurant experience and better word-of-mouth compared to those who visited in unpleasant weather.

Bujisic noted that bad weather may affect not only the mood of customers, but also the wait staff and others who serve the customers.

“A rainy day may put employees in a bad mood and that will affect their service,” he said. “Managers need to explain that to their employees and work to keep them motivated.”

In addition, managers may want to find ways to boost customers’ moods during unpleasant weather, Bogicevic said.

“Think about creative strategies to make customers happy. Maybe offer a free drink or play more upbeat music,” she said.

Other co-authors on the study were H.G. Parsa of the University of Denver, Verka Jovanovic of Singidunum University in Serbia and Anupama Sukhu of the University of New Hampshire.

In a perspective article in the April 18, 2019, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, the experts call for an effort similar to what led to the Belmont Report in 1979, which laid the foundation for bioethics standards in the United States to protect human participants in research.

“Data scandals are occurring on a regular basis, with no end in sight,” said Efthimios Parasidis, a co-author of the NEJM article and a professor at The Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law and College of Public Health.

“Data privacy laws for health information don’t go far enough to protect individuals. We must rethink the ethical principles underlying collection and use of health data to help frame amendments to the law.”

Parasidis wrote the article with Elizabeth Pike, director of privacy policy in the Office of the Chief Information Officer at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; and Deven McGraw, chief regulatory officer at Citizen, a company that helps people collect, organize and share their medical records digitally. Previously, McGraw was deputy director for health information privacy at the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and acting chief privacy officer at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

Parasidis said a process analogous to the Belmont Report would be a good blueprint to follow today.

The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research produced the 1979 report, which resulted in Congress passing laws to protect people who participated in medical research.

“Indignities in human subjects research compelled the government to create a commission to propose ethical guidance for new laws. We are experiencing a rerun of what was happening then, with the scandals involving use of health data now rather than the use of human subjects,” Parasidis said. “We need an equivalent response.”

Currently, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is the main law protecting the data of patients. But it doesn’t apply to many of the new companies and products that regularly store and handle customer health information, including social-media platforms, health and wellness apps, smartphones, credit card companies and other devices and companies.

“All of this data held by digital health companies raises a lot of ethical concerns about how it is being used,” Parasidis said.

For example, some life insurers are offering contracts that have policyholders wear products that continuously monitor their health, and the information can be used to increase a customer’s premiums.

Most regulations require only that consumers be notified about how their information is used and give their consent.

“That system doesn’t work. Very few people read the notice and most people just click agree without knowing what they’re agreeing to,” he said.

So how can health data privacy be fixed?

One idea would be to establish data ethics review boards, which would review projects in which health data are collected, analyzed, shared or sold, according to the authors of the NEJM article.

Parasidis said such boards could function as safeguards required in both public and private settings, from university medical centers to private life insurance companies.

These boards could consider the benefits and risks of the proposed data use and consider policies governing data access, privacy and security. Members could include project developers, data analysts and ethicists, as well as people whose data would be collected.

“Right now, everything is about compliance. Companies and institutions check the boxes, fill out the forms and don’t really think about whether they’re doing the right thing,” Parasidis said.

“Deliberations about use of health data should take the ethical obligations to individuals and society into account. The law should mandate that this occurs.”

In a new study, researchers found that about half of these children and teens use “abuse” or a similar word in their first text, while the other half did not.

Abuse was often disclosed in the texts along with other issues, including hating their family or some mental health issue. Some teens also used language related to suicidal behaviors.

The results suggest one reason why text-based services for reporting child maltreatment may be so valuable, said Scottye Cash, co-author of the study and associate professor of social work at The Ohio State University.

“When it comes to abuse, teens often don’t want to talk about it or other sensitive topics out loud. Given how often teens text and use social media, a text-based crisis service provides teens with a safe way to begin the process of disclosure,” Cash said.

This was the first study of children disclosing maltreatment via texts. She conducted the research with Laura Schwab-Reese of Purdue University and Nitya Kanuri of Yale University. Their results appear online in JMIR mHealth and uHealth.

The researchers did a full content analysis of all 244 conversations to a text-based national crisis service that resulted in a mandatory report of child maltreatment between October 2015 and July 2017.

Mandatory reporters – which include the volunteers at this crisis service – are required by law to notify proper authorities when they learn of cases of child abuse and neglect.

Because this crisis service is anonymous, the children who contacted it had to agree to let the volunteers make such a report. Children who did not agree to disclose their contact information are not included in this study.

The 244 conversations included 24,730 individual text messages – about 101 total for each conversation. The average age of texters was 14.

Results of the content analysis showed that 44 percent of the children disclosed abuse in the first text (“My dads abusing me and I have no escape”). About 13 percent discussed family issues (“I hate my dad”), 10 percent said they were considering suicide or self harm (“I feel extremely alone and I honestly want to die”), and 6 percent were seeking general support (“I need someone to talk to”).

“I give a lot of credit to the volunteers who were able to get these kids to disclose the maltreatment they were experiencing, even when the conversation started somewhere else,” Cash said.

“Maltreatment is related to many negative outcomes, including mental and physical health, so it is important to identify it as soon as possible and try to find ways to address it.”

When the texters first disclosed maltreatment, about 49 percent described an abusive event (“touched me in a place I didn’t want to be touched”), and about 40 percent indicated in general terms that they were being abused (“My parents are abusive”).

Parents were the most common abuser disclosed by texters, followed by stepfathers or mothers’ partners. Physical abuse was the most common form of abuse discussed in the initial abuse disclosure (43 percent), followed by emotional or psychological abuse (34 percent), sexual abuse (15 percent) and neglect (6 percent).

Many texters discussed multiple types of abuse. Most reports of abuse were chronic. In the conversations that discussed how often abuse occurred, about 93 percent of the children said it was recurrent.

Cash noted that the crisis service in this study was available for any kind of mental health issue, not just children suffering abuse or other maltreatment.

“I think if we had a text-based crisis line aimed just for kids and let them know about this resource, there would a huge demand for it,” she said.

“Reading these texts, you really get the sense that these kids are looking for a way to talk about issues that they probably have a hard time verbalizing. This may be the only way they would talk about what is happening to them.”

The study was supported by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

A biodegradable replacement for petroleum-based products has to meet all sorts of standards and, so far, attempts at viable replacements from renewable sources have faced limited success due to processing and economic constraints. Among the obstacles, products to date have been too brittle for food packaging.

But new research from The Ohio State University has shown that combining natural rubber with bioplastic in a novel way results in a much stronger replacement for plastic, one that is already capturing the interest of companies looking to shrink their environmental footprints.

Almost all plastics – about 90 percent – are petroleum-based and are not biodegradable, a major environmental concern.

In a new study published in the journal Polymers, the research team reports success with a rubber-toughened product derived from microbial fermentation that they say could perform like conventional plastic. This new study highlights the greatest success in this area so far, according to the scientists.

“Previous attempts at this combination were unsuccessful because the softness of the rubber meant the product lost a lot of strength in the process,” said lead author Xiaoying Zhao, a postdoctoral researcher in Ohio State’s Department of Food Science and Technology.

The new study involved melting rubber into a plant-based thermoplastic called PHBV along with organic peroxide and another additive called trimethylolpropane triacrylate (TMPTA).

The end product was 75 percent tougher and 100 percent more flexible than PHBV on its own – meaning it is far easier to shape into food packaging.

Other research teams have combined rubber and PHBV, but the products have been too weak to withstand all the demands of a food package – from processing, to shipping, to handling in stores and homes, especially containers that are used for freezing and then microwaving, said the study’s senior author, Yael Vodovotz, a professor of food science and technology at Ohio State.

Increased flexibility, without a significant loss of strength, is particularly important when it comes to plastic films commonly used to package everything from fresh produce to frozen foods, she said.

While other attempts at making this type of rubber-enhanced bioplastic have reduced the strength of the PHBV by as much as 80 percent, only 30 percent of the strength was lost in this study – a much more manageable amount, Zhao said.

Toughness, which was improved, is different from strength, explained study co-author Katrina Cornish, an expert in natural rubber and professor of horticulture and crop science at Ohio State.

“Imagine trying to pull a block of concrete apart with your hands. That’s testing its strength. But karate chopping it with your hand or foot is testing its toughness – how easily it breaks,” Cornish said.

“You can never pull it apart, but if you’re strong enough you can break it.”

Much of the researchers’ current focus is on the potential use of various biodegradable – and otherwise environmentally conscious – materials they might use as fillers to further strengthen the mix. They’ve discussed using the “cake” left behind after a fellow researcher extracts oil from spent coffee grounds. Tomato skins are under consideration, as are eggshells.

“We want something that would otherwise go to waste that is sustainable and also relatively cheap,” Vodovotz said.

They’re even looking at the potential to attack two environmental problems at once, by seeing how invasive grasses that environmentalists are yanking out of waterways might play with the rubber-infused mix.

“We could dry them, grind them up and potentially use these grasses as a fibrous filler,” Vodovotz said.

Beyond packaged foods, a bioplastic could potentially be used in other food-related applications such as utensils and cutting boards.

And the researchers are looking to collaborate with colleagues outside of food science to consider other applications for their product, such as to create building materials, gloves for those working in food service, or parts for cars and airplanes.

As the team works to move its technology out of the lab and into the food industry, there will be many details to work out depending on a company’s individual priorities and concerns, Vodovotz said, and that may mean tinkering with the mix.

“As we get closer and closer to working with food manufacturers, there are specific questions our potential partners are asking,” Vodovotz said. “We have to be very careful about what we use in this process in order to meet their needs, and they have very specific parameters.”

The Center for Advanced Processing and Packaging Studies provided funding for the study.

In a study that appears in the journal Science of the Total Environment, a multidisciplinary group of researchers set about evaluating turtle health, water quality and other factors in the aftermath of a catastrophic mass death of green turtles in Australia.

“We found evidence of heavy metals – particularly cobalt – in sea turtle populations where we also saw signs of illness,” said lead author Mark Flint, program head of Zoo and Wildlife Conservation Medicine and Ecosystem Health in the College of Veterinary Medicine at The Ohio State University.

“Though we can’t be sure what caused this, there were cyclones and major flooding in this part of Australia two years prior to the start of our study, and that could have drawn out sediment rich in heavy metals that had been lying in rivers and streams benign for the past 50 years,” Flint said.

Green turtles, Chelonia mydas, are an endangered species, and one of the largest sea turtles, weighing in at as much as 400 pounds in adulthood. Green turtles are named for the greenish color of their fat, not their shells, and are found mainly in tropical and subtropical waters, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature-Australia (WWF). The WWF provided funding for this research, and led the Rivers to Reef to Turtles project under which it was conducted.

Large populations live, feed and nest on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, favoring the bays and protected shores near the coast and around islands.

The Rivers to Reef to Turtles project, which ran from 2014 to 2017, examined green turtles at two northern Queensland bays – Cleveland and Upstart – known to be impacted by urban and agricultural human activities and at a third remote “pristine” area, the Howick Group of islands.

Following up on a high number of turtle deaths in 2012 and 2013 that conservationists were attributing to a “whole kit and caboodle of reasons” including runoff from agriculture, industrial toxins and climate change, the team conducted physical exams and tested the turtles’ blood over time, looking for signs of contaminants and illness, Flint said.

They also counted barnacles on the turtles. Flint’s previous work has shown that high barnacle counts on turtles’ undersides correspond to poor health. The theory behind that? When healthy and feeding normally, a turtle’s trips to the sea floor for seagrass meals effectively scrape away barnacles. When the green turtles aren’t eating well, the barnacles build up.

“An unhealthy turtle often has trapped air in its shell and is buoyant, meaning it can’t dive down for food. It’s almost like a balloon,” Flint said. “Also, a turtle that can’t dive sits on the surface of the water where algae and barnacles can grow better.”

In cases where the researchers found dead turtles, they conducted in-depth necropsies.

The research team found elevated levels of an enzyme called creatinine kinase in turtles at Cleveland Bay. That enzyme typically increases after muscle injury or illness. And they found elevated white cell counts in turtles at Upstart Bay. White cells proliferate when an animal is fighting infection.

One in five of the juveniles examined at Cleveland Bay had high barnacle levels (16 or more) and one in 10 of the young turtles at Upstart Bay had excessive barnacle growth. This level of barnacle growth was not seen in any of the turtles at the “pristine” control site.

By the end of the study, the researchers saw some evidence that the population in Cleveland Bay was returning to normal, but the problem still remains for turtles in Upstart Bay.

This multidisciplinary approach is the first effort to look with this depth at this population of turtles and the potential links between environmental toxins and their well-being, Flint said.

The researchers suspect that the unhealthy measures seen in the turtles that live in areas affected by urbanization, farming and industry are connected to contaminants in their ecosystem. In particular, the study team found evidence of heavy metals, primarily cobalt, in the turtles’ blood.

Green turtles migrate long distances between feeding grounds and from the beaches on which they hatched. The reptiles are threatened by overharvesting of their eggs, hunting of adults, being caught in fishing gear and loss of nesting beach sites, according to the WWF.

The green turtle is the only “vegetarian” sea turtle, eating mostly seagrass and algae, which relates to its ecological importance. When green turtles graze on seagrass beds, that vegetation remains productive – something the WWF compares to mowing the lawn. The turtles also recycle nutrients they digest, making them available to other animals and plants, which ultimately is important for the survival of invertebrates and fish, some of which people eat.

The monitoring of sea turtle health also is important because with their long lifespans and tendency to stay in one place, they can potentially serve as proxies for the broader environment, Flint said. The trouble is, their physical responses to environmental assaults and disease are slow-moving, complicating conservationists’ ability to draw connections between the environment and sickness and death.

This research gives conservationists and marine biologists a baseline understanding of sea turtle health and response to environmental stressors, he said, which will better enable them to assess turtle health after an insult and over time. It will also provide tools to help decision makers develop environmental mitigation strategies, Flint said.

Other researchers who worked on the study were Ian Bell of the Queensland Department of Environment and Heritage Protection, Anne-Fleur Brand of Utrecht University and the University of Queensland and Christine Madden Hof of the WWF.

This “million word gap” could be one key in explaining differences in vocabulary and reading development, said Jessica Logan, lead author of the study and assistant professor of educational studies at The Ohio State University.

Even kids who are read only one book a day will hear about 290,000 more words by age 5 than those who don’t regularly read books with a parent or caregiver.

“Kids who hear more vocabulary words are going to be better prepared to see those words in print when they enter school,” said Logan, a member of Ohio State’s Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy.

“They are likely to pick up reading skills more quickly and easily.”

The study appears online in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics and will be published in a future print edition.

Logan said the idea for this research came from one of her earlier studies, which found that about one-fourth of children in a national sample were never read to and another fourth were seldom read to (once or twice weekly).

“The fact that we had so many parents who said they never or seldom read to their kids was pretty shocking to us. We wanted to figure out what that might mean for their kids,” Logan said.

The researchers collaborated with the Columbus Metropolitan Library, which identified the 100 most circulated books for both board books (targeting infants and toddlers) and picture books (targeting preschoolers).

Logan and her colleagues randomly selected 30 books from both lists and counted how many words were in each book. They found that board books contained an average of 140 words, while picture books contained an average of 228 words.

With that information, the researchers calculated how many words a child would hear from birth through his or her 5^th birthday at different levels of reading. They assumed that kids would be read board books through their 3^rd birthday and picture books the next two years, and that every reading session (except for one category) would include one book.

They also assumed that parents who reported never reading to their kids actually read one book to their children every other month.

Based on these calculations, here’s how many words kids would have heard by the time they were 5 years old: Never read to, 4,662 words; 1-2 times per week, 63,570 words; 3-5 times per week, 169,520 words; daily, 296,660 words; and five books a day, 1,483,300 words.

“The word gap of more than 1 million words between children raised in a literacy-rich environment and those who were never read to is striking,” Logan said.

The word gap examined in this research isn’t the only type kids may face.

A controversial 1992 study suggested that children growing up in poverty hear about 30 million fewer words in conversation by age 3 than those from more privileged backgrounds. Other studies since then suggest this 30 million word gap may be much smaller or even non-existent, Logan said.

The vocabulary word gap in this study is different from the conversational word gap and may have different implications for children, she said.

“This isn’t about everyday communication. The words kids hear in books are going to be much more complex, difficult words than they hear just talking to their parents and others in the home,” she said.

For instance, a children’s book may be about penguins in Antarctica – introducing words and concepts that are unlikely to come up in everyday conversation.

“The words kids hear from books may have special importance in learning to read,” she said.

Logan said the million word gap found in this study is likely to be conservative. Parents will often talk about the book they’re reading with their children or add elements if they have read the story many times.

This “extra-textual” talk will reinforce new vocabulary words that kids are hearing and may introduce even more words.

The results of this study highlight the importance of reading to children.

“Exposure to vocabulary is good for all kids. Parents can get access to books that are appropriate for their children at the local library,” Logan said.

Logan’s co-authors on the study were Laura Justice, professor of educational studies and director of the Crane Center at Ohio State; Leydi Johana Chaparro-Moreno, graduate student in educational studies at Ohio State; and Melike Yumuş of Başkent University in Turkey.

Some were just regular girls with a bit of attitude and names like Little Iodine, Little Lulu and, yes, Nancy. And at least one – Li’l Tomboy – pushed the boundary of what girls could do in comics even further.

In her new book Funny Girls: Guffaws, Guts and Gender in Classic American Comics (University Press of Mississippi, 2019), author Michelle Ann Abate examines the groundbreaking and overlooked role that young girl protagonists played in classic comics during the first half of the 20^th century.

“Girls like Li’l Tomboy were not superheroes in the conventional sense, like Wonder Woman, but they did have heroic qualities,” said Abate, professor of literature for children and young adults at The Ohio State University.

“They were spirited, outspoken and strong. They affirm the existence of strong female protagonists during the Golden Age of comic books.”

Some of the classic girl characters, like Nancy and Little Orphan Annie, are still well known today. But it is easy to overlook how groundbreaking these comics were at the time, Abate said.

“We tend to frame the current explosion of female characters in the comics as a new thing, but it is part of a longer tradition,” she said.

“There have been strong female protagonists in comics from the beginning.”

The earliest girls in comics, like Little Orphan Annie, which debuted in 1924, did show some spunkiness that challenged the gender roles of the time. But they also didn’t stray too far from societal norms, according to Abate.

Little Orphan Annie stood up for herself, fought when necessary and talked back to adults on occasion. However, she also relied on Daddy Warbucks to rescue her when things got out of hand.

“She was independent and capable and resilient, to a point. But Daddy Warbucks was still there as a backup,” Abate said.

“The same was true for other girls in the comics, like Nancy. She was sassy, but was still within the confines and structures of white, middle-class suburban families.”

One theme in many of the early comics featuring girls was the names: Li’l and Little were often added, from Little Orphan Annie to Little Lulu, Little Audrey and Little Iodine.

“Her name might be Iodine, but she was still little, cute and adorable. The diminutive added to the name made them less threatening,” she said.

But if there was one girl in the comics of the time who added at least the hint of threat, that may have been Li’l Tomboy, according to Abate.

“People remember Nancy and Little Orphan Annie. I think Li’l Tomboy was that gem that most people haven’t heard of, but maybe was the most interesting one of the whole group,” she said.

Released in October 1956, Li’l Tomboy was published for three years, featuring a character who didn’t act like an average white, middle-class girl in this postwar period. She had a conventionally feminine appearance, but her behavior did not match her frilly clothes.

As her name implies, 5-year-old Li’l Tomboy wasn’t doing what girls in the 1950s generally did. She didn’t like dolls, got into frequent fistfights and enjoyed playing football with the boys.

Li’l Tomboy’s unconventional behavior went beyond just acting “like a boy.”

“She was a juvenile delinquent, to be honest. She trespasses, commits petty theft, throws a rock through a window and talks back to police officers. It goes beyond being naughty,” Abate said.

Li’l Tomboy used being a cute, white, feminine, middle-class girl to her advantage. She was with a boy when she threw a rock through a window – noting that he would be blamed and not her.

Most remarkably, Li’l Tomboy was published during the time of the Comics Code Authority, which governed what was appropriate content for young children to read.

The authority was established by the comics industry in 1954 in response to widespread public concern over what was thought to be inappropriate content presented in comics.

The comics code was so strict that authorities once censored a comic that showed beads of sweat on a character’s head. But, somehow, Li’l Tomboy got away with a lot that even boys couldn’t do in the comics.

“I think the writers exploited the ‘little girl’ loophole,” Abate said.

“Li’l Tomboy looks stereotypically cute and innocent and the people with the comic code must have thought she couldn’t do anything really bad. But her behavior certainly seemed bad.”

Abate said the female characters in comics of this time sent a message to the boys and girls who read them.

“They said that girls can be just as feisty and strong and fun and mischievous as boys can,” she said.

And Facebook – which came under fire for spreading misinformation in the 2016 campaign – actually reduced misperceptions by users in that election compared to those who consumed only other social media.

The results suggest that we need to put the dangers of social media spreading misinformation in perspective, said R. Kelly Garrett, author of the study and professor of communication at The Ohio State University.

“Given the amount of attention given to the issue, it may seem surprising that social media doesn’t have a larger impact on Americans’ belief in falsehoods,” Garrett said.

“It is an issue that we should be concerned about, but it is not the main driver of why so many people believe false information about issues and candidates.”

The study was published today (March 27, 2019) in the journal PLOS ONE.

In previous research, Garrett found evidence suggesting that email contributed to the spread of false information in the 2008 election, before social media was as popular as it is today. Garrett specifically designed these studies to gauge the role of social media in what Americans believed in the last two election campaigns.

Reliance on social media for political news has increased rapidly. In 2012, about two in five Americans reported using social media for political purposes, according to the Pew Research Center.

In 2016, more Americans named Facebook as the source they used for pre-election political information than any other site, including those of major news organizations, this new research found.

“This study began long before ‘fake news’ became as popular a topic as it is today. But the questions that drive this study are very much in keeping with our concerns about how disinformation is spread online,” Garrett said.

During both the 2012 and 2016 election seasons, groups of more than 600 Americans filled out surveys online three times, indicating their social media use at each point as well as their beliefs in confirmed falsehoods.

The 2012 study involved misperceptions about the two presidential candidates, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Participants rated on a five-point scale how much they agreed with eight falsehoods, including “Barack Obama is Muslim, not Christian” and “As governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney signed a health care law providing taxpayer-funded abortions.”

Overall, Republicans tended to hold less accurate beliefs about President Obama than Democrats did, while Democrats held less accurate beliefs about Romney than did Republicans.

Results showed that increasing social media use reduced participants’ belief accuracy about Obama falsehoods, although the effect was small.

In the most extreme case, someone using social media to get political information could have an accuracy score concerning Obama falsehoods almost half a point lower on the five-point scale than someone who did not use social media at all.

Social media use did not influence belief in the Romney falsehoods, Garrett said. One important reason may be that the rumors about Romney were much less known than those about Obama.

The 2016 study focused on false beliefs about four campaign issues. The misperceptions studied were: Repealing the Affordable Care Act would reduce the national debt; Most Muslims support violence against Western countries, including the U.S.; Immigrants are more likely to commit violent crimes than individuals born in the U.S.; and Human activity has no influence on global climate.

After considering more than a dozen potential issues, Garrett selected these four because they were referenced most frequently on the campaign trail and received extensive media coverage, and because of evidence that Americans were at least occasionally mistaken about them.

Results showed that, overall, Republicans beliefs tended to be less accurate than those of Democrats, which made sense because the falsehoods were a prominent part of the Republican campaign strategy, Garrett said.

Participants with higher levels of education held more accurate beliefs.

Unlike in 2012, participants in 2016 were asked which social media platforms they used during each of the three waves of the study.

Facebook was the most popular social media platform for following news among study participants, followed by YouTube and Twitter.

Overall, social media use was not related to participants’ belief accuracy on the four issues.

But the influence of using social media was different for people who used Facebook than for people who only used other platforms. Among the heaviest social media users, those who used Facebook were about a half point more accurate on the five-point scale, on average, than those who didn’t.

“It is not a huge difference, but it does call into question the conventional wisdom that Facebook had an especially harmful influence on campaign issue beliefs,” Garrett said.

He said the small effects found in this study don’t mean we should ignore the problem of fake news shared on social media – but we should reevaluate its role in Americans’ belief in falsehoods.

“We have evidence that foreign powers have tried to sway American elections by sharing falsehoods on social media and that is profoundly troubling. If it has an effect, even a small one, we should be deeply concerned,” he said.

“But we need to have a broader perspective on the problem. We know that Americans hold beliefs that are not accurate, with frightening regularity. And if social media aren’t the primary driver of this, we really should invest more energy into finding out what else is going on.”

The study was based on work supported by the National Science Foundation.

The American Heart Association journal Circulation published the findings today (March 26, 2019.)

Before any physical signs or symptoms of heart failure are present, the first maladaptive changes occur in cardiac cell metabolism – how the heart fuels itself to pump blood through the body constantly.

“Our hearts burn fuel, much like combustion engines in cars. Instead of gasoline, our heart cells burn fats and a small amount of glucose,” said Doug Lewandowski, director of translational research at Ohio State’s Dorothy M. Davis Heart and Lung Research Institute. “When our hearts become chronically stressed, they try to adapt, but some of those changes make things worse.”

For their research, Lewandowski’s team examined both mouse models of heart failure and human heart tissue obtained from heart failure patients before and after heart assist devices were surgically implanted. They found that the amount of a reactive fat compound, called acyl-CoA, is nearly 60 percent lower in failing hearts compared to normal hearts. This disruption in the heart’s normal metabolism creates toxic fats that impair the heart’s ability to function and pump properly.

Then the team tested mice that overexpressed a gene for a protein called ACSL1, that’s known to make acyl-CoA. When exposed to conditions that cause heart failure, the mice kept making normal amounts of acyl-CoA and the extent of heart failure was reduced and delayed.

“By maintaining this fat compound, acyl-CoA, the hearts retained their ability to burn fat and generate energy. Importantly, overexpression of ACSL1 also reduced toxic fats, normalized cell function and reduced the progressive loss of function in the enlarged mouse hearts,” said Lewandowski, who is also a professor of internal medicine at Ohio State’s College of Medicine.

When the team examined failing human hearts that had the help of a left ventricular assist device (LVAD), they found similar effects – the levels of acyl-CoA had restored to normal when the sick hearts didn’t have to work beyond their capacity.

“This tells us there’s an important relationship between fat metabolism in the heart and the inability to pump well, and we need to learn more. We believe targeting the normalization of acyl-CoA through gene or drug therapy or, potentially, dietary protocols, is a new approach to explore,” Lewandowski said.

“Heart failure is the only form of heart disease that hasn’t dropped in 35 years. As findings like these help identify the metabolic underpinnings of the disease, it gives hope for promising new therapies for patients,” said Dr. K. Craig Kent, dean of the College of Medicine.

Next, Lewandowski’s team wants to explore how normalizing acyl-CoA helps reduce toxic fats and increase protective fats inside the heart. Soon, they hope to use advanced imaging to track fat metabolism and function in patients’ hearts.

“We need to understand how we’re manipulating the chemical reactions and what exactly is leading to the improvement. Then we can look at whether we can supply the heart with fats, supplements or medications that assist with creating acyl-CoA. Ultimately, it’s about trying to prevent or slow the progression toward heart failure,” Lewandowski said.

Funding from the National Institutes of Health helped to support this research. Additional scientists involved in the study include Andrew Carley and Matt Fasano from Ohio State, Dr. Joseph Goldenberg from the University of Illinois, Dr. Christian Schulze from the University of Jena and Columbia University Medical Center, and Dr. Ruiping Ji and Xiaokan Zhang from Columbia University Medical Center.

Female rats born to mothers exposed to an allergen during pregnancy acted more characteristically “male” – mounting other female rodents, for instance – and had brains and nervous systems that looked more like those seen in typical male animals.

The male offspring also showed a tendency toward more female characteristics and behaviors, though the changes were not as significant.

“The study shows for the first time that an allergic reaction in a mother could alter the sexual development of its offspring,” said Kathryn Lenz, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of psychology at The Ohio State University. The research appears online in the journal Scientific Reports.

“This allergic response is enough to make the female brain look like a male’s brain, and that’s something that endures throughout its entire life.”

Previous research has shown that insults to the immune system, including stress, infection and malnutrition, can change brain development. This new research highlights the important role allergies could play, Lenz said.

She compared the allergic reaction in the study to an asthma attack – something that prompts a more-robust immune response than low-grade seasonal allergies but less severe than an allergic attack that would require a person to use an EpiPen or go to the emergency department.

Sexual development occurs on a spectrum and, in and of themselves, these shifts in sexual behavior after allergy exposure are not particularly troubling, Lenz said. They do help researchers understand the interplay between allergens and brain development, however, and highlight that early life immune activation could be a source of normal variations in female behavior, which haven’t been as well-studied.

And these types of brain changes as a response to an allergen could mean changes in other areas of concern, such as cognitive development.

“It’s possible these changes could also contribute to things like impaired decision-making, attention and hyperactivity,” she said.

The study builds on Lenz’s previous work, which found changes in immune cells called microglia and mast cells in an area of the brain called the preoptic area, a region of the hypothalamus involved in sexual behavior.

“We wanted to see if an allergic exposure that activated these cells would also change typical development,” said Lenz.

Mother animals in the study were either exposed once to an allergen derived from eggs or unexposed.

Then, the research team studied their pups into adulthood. Females born to mothers that had an allergic reaction during pregnancy exhibited higher levels of behavior normally attributed to males. They mounted other females more often and were as quick to mount another female as typical male rats. They also were drawn to bedding that smelled like other females.

Furthermore, they had increases in brain cells called mast cells and microglia and evidence of more synapses in the brain – changes that looked more like what the researchers would expect in a male rat.

Males born to the allergy-exposed mothers behaved less like typical male rats. They had less interest in mounting and less interest in female bedding. The researchers also saw less activation of microglia and fewer synapses – both of which point to a change in the rats as a result of the allergen exposure that made them more like females, Lenz said.

“Most of the scientific literature on immune activation during pregnancy and outcomes in offspring has focused on autism and schizophrenia. This is the first time we’re seeing this kind of connection with altered sexual development,” Lenz said.

“Interestingly, there’s some research out there to show an increase in gender variance and gender-identity differences in people with autism. It suggests that something about sexual development is different in people with autism.”

Lenz said she was especially interested in the profound changes seen in female brain development, because that’s an area that hasn’t been as well-studied in neuroscience.

“Oftentimes, we are focused on male animals because they appear to be more sensitive to environment changes and also have a higher incidence of conditions such as ADHD and autism. We often frame what we understand about the female brain and female behavior in relation to males. We need to move past that,” Lenz said.

“Study of female sexual development has just really been neglected. Even though we know there’s wide variety in girls’ and women’s behavior, we don’t really understand what contributes to those variations.”

Though it’s too soon to draw connections between what has been seen in the rats and human development, it may be worthwhile to explore further how medications and other factors during pregnancy may contribute to developmental changes in the fetus, Lenz said.

Other researchers who worked on the study were Anabel Galan of Ohio State and Margaret McCarthy, Lindsay Pickett and Christopher Wright of the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

Mice fed a diet of 2 percent green tea extract fared far better than those that ate a diet without it, a finding that has prompted an upcoming study of green tea’s potential benefits in people at high risk of diabetes and heart disease.

The benefits seen in the new study, published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry, appear to stem from improved gut health, including more beneficial microbes in the intestines of the mice and less permeability in the intestinal wall – a condition typically called “leaky gut” in people.

“This study provides evidence that green tea encourages the growth of good gut bacteria, and that leads to a series of benefits that significantly lower the risk of obesity,” said Richard Bruno, the study’s lead author and a professor of human nutrition at The Ohio State University.

Negative changes in the gut microbiome have been previously linked to obesity, and green tea has been shown to promote healthy bacteria. The Ohio State team wanted to explore whether there was an argument for green tea preventing obesity, inflammation and other factors connected to poor metabolic health, said Bruno, who is also a member of the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center.

“The results of studies looking at obesity management so far have been a real mixed bag. Some seem to support green tea for weight loss, but a lot of other research has shown no effect, likely due to the complexity of the diet relative to a number of lifestyle factors. Our goal is to figure out how it prevents weight gain,” he said. “This will lead to better health recommendations.”

Green tea has a rich history in Asian countries and has been increasingly embraced in the West, in part for its potential health benefits. Catechins, anti-inflammatory polyphenols found in green tea, have been linked to anti-cancer activity and lower risk of heart and liver disease.

Bruno and his colleagues suspected that green tea might prevent obesity and protect against inflammation in the gut based on previous studies, so they devised an experiment that examined green tea’s effects in male mice fed a normal diet and a high-fat diet designed to cause obesity. (Female mice are resistant to diet-induced obesity and insulin resistance, a precursor to diabetes, so they weren’t included.)

For eight weeks, half of the animals ate a high-fat diet designed to lead to obesity and half were fed a regular diet. In each of those groups, half ate green tea extract mixed in with their food.

Then the researchers measured body and fat tissue weight, insulin resistance and other factors that included:

• Gut permeability, or how ‘leaky’ the gut was
• Endotoxin translocation, or the movement of a gut bacteria-derived component to the bloodstream, where it provokes inflammation and insulin resistance
• Inflammation in the fat tissue and intestines
• The composition of the gut microbes, which are known to contribute to a variety of health factors

The mice fed a high-fat diet supplemented with green tea gained about 20 percent less weight and had lower insulin resistance than mice fed an otherwise identical diet without tea.

Those mice also had less inflammation within fat tissue and the intestine. Furthermore, the green tea appeared to protect against the movement of endotoxin, the toxic bacterial component, out of their guts and into the bloodstream.

Plus, the researchers found evidence of stronger – less “leaky” – guts in these mice. Leaky gut is a problem in humans that contributes to widespread low-grade inflammation and has been implicated in a number of health problems.

The researchers also found that the green tea appeared to contribute to a healthier microbial community in the guts of the mice fed a high-fat diet. Mice fed the normal, or low-fat, diet supplemented with green tea also had benefits including reduced weight gain and lower endotoxin levels and markers of leaky gut, but these were relatively modest compared with the effects seen in mice fed the high-fat diet.

Green tea consumption in the experiment would be equivalent to about 10 cups of green tea throughout the day for a person, Bruno said.

“It might seem like a lot of tea, but it’s not highly unusual in certain parts of the world,” he said.

Bruno is currently working on a human study that will explore the effects of green tea on leaky gut in people with metabolic syndrome – a condition that predisposes people to Type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

For now, he said, it’s too soon to extrapolate the findings in animals to people. He also cautioned that – should the benefits prove true in humans – green tea supplements would not be an obvious substitute for drinking the beverage over the course of a day, because of how the body metabolizes the catechins in the tea.

“Consuming a little throughout the course of a day with food – like the mice did in this study – might be better,” Bruno said.

He said he’s hopeful that future research will determine whether drinking green tea might be a good strategy for those looking to reduce their chances of becoming obese.

“Two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese, and we know that just telling people to eat less and exercise more isn’t working. It’s important to establish complementary health-promoting approaches that can prevent obesity and related problems,” Bruno said.

The study was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Other Ohio State researchers involved in the study were Priyankar Dey, Geoffrey Sasaki, Ping Wei, Jinhui Li, Lingling Wang, Jiangjiang Zhu, Dana McTigue and Zhongtang Yu.

The first-of-its-kind study shows the influence of countries in treaty ratification can extend beyond their close allies and could even help persuade rivals to join agreements.

“The simple act of a single country ratifying a treaty can have dramatic ramifications for what other countries do in ways that haven’t always been apparent,” said Skyler Cranmer, co-author of the study and the Carter Phillips and Sue Henry associate professor of political science at The Ohio State University.

In an article published today (March 7, 2019) in PLOS ONE, the researchers debuted a model that could predict how other countries would react when an individual country ratified one of 198 international environmental agreements between 1972 and 2000.

For example, the study found that the United States’ signing of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992 may have influenced Russia to ratify the treaty. Without action by the U.S., Russia would have had only a 40 percent probability of signing the treaty, according to the model.

“Superpowers can influence each other even if they’re rivals and their interests aren’t always aligned,” Cranmer said.

Russia wasn’t the only unexpected country that signed the UNFCCC as a result of American ratification. U.S. support of the UNFCCC also influenced Nigeria, Thailand and Uruguay to sign, all of which have lacked significant, direct relationships with the United States.

Cranmer worked to develop the model with colleagues Benjamin Campbell, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Ohio State; Frank Marrs, a Ph.D. candidate in statistics, and Bailey Fosdick, an assistant professor of statistics, both at Colorado State University; and Tobias Böhmelt, a professor of government at the University of Essex.

The model that the researchers developed allowed them to analyze the complex interactions between countries and treaties, relationships between the countries themselves, and other factors in ways that have never been done, Cranmer said.

“We didn’t have a good way of measuring country-to-country influence before, but now we do,” Cranmer said.

Most other research that has examined why countries did or did not ratify a particular treaty examined attributes of the country, such as its type of government and level of economic development.

“But this is missing the whole dynamic of international leadership. You’re not seeing how states influence each other,” he said.

This study found that countries can be both positive and negative influencers on how other nations respond to international agreements. An example of negative influence is one country’s ratification of a treaty making it less likely that another will do the same.

One reason may be that some countries are looking for a “free ride,” Cranmer said. Countries get a free ride when they don’t ratify a treaty, but still benefit from its environmental protections when nearby countries ratify.

The study showed that countries are less likely to ratify treaties when countries within their continent have ratified it. Countries near others that ratify may benefit the most from a free ride.

Still, one country acting as a negative influence on another country’s ratification was relatively uncommon.

Positive influence – when ratifying a treaty makes another country more likely to join – was much more common.

“To us, this demonstrates that, on average, international institutions, such as the United Nations, have worked in facilitating global environmental protection. This isn’t something that we would always expect given the criticism of these institutions and global governance efforts,” Cranmer said.

Cranmer said it was significant that the United States’ ratification of the UNFCCC had a positive influence on distant countries like Nigeria and Thailand also signing.

“These indirect effects are something we have not been able to document before in international politics,” he said.

The effects go beyond even the single treaty itself. The study found that the United States’ ratification of UNFCCC not only influenced other countries’ probability of ratifying that treaty – it also influenced Mexico and Russia’s probability of joining a different treaty: the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.

“The actions of the United States have indirect influence on a lot of other countries that we could not quantify before,” Cranmer said.

The new model developed by the researchers is a powerful tool to study international relations in a variety of ways.

“Environmental treaties are not the only application. We now are using the same tool to examine how countries influence each other on human rights treaties,” he said.

The study was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Research led by Shan-Lu Liu of The Ohio State University demonstrates the important role of one protein in allowing HIV to flourish within human cells despite the immune system’s efforts to beat it back.

The study, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides more information than previously understood about the role of a protein called Nef in HIV infection.

“We have identified new modulators of HIV, which is notoriously ‘smart’ and well-equipped at evolving to fight its adversaries in the human body,” said Liu, professor of virology in the university’s Center for Retrovirus Research and departments of Veterinary Biosciences, Microbial Infection and Immunity and Microbiology.

“HIV and the human immune system have been at war for so many years. Work such as this could advance efforts to give people an edge in that battle.”

By examining the cellular-level activity in the laboratory, the research team showed that the protein Nef antagonizes another protein called TIM, effectively reducing its power to protect human cells and making it easier for the HIV virus to thrive. TIM stands for T cell immunoglobulin and mucin domain.

“Nef changes the rules so that the TIM protein is no longer working as well – it lowers its presence on the cell surface, and prevents it from getting out of the cell. We show for the first time that this promotes the release of the virus by antagonizing TIM,” said Liu, who is a co-director of Ohio State’s Viruses and Emerging Pathogens Program within the university’s Infectious Diseases Institute.

Study co-author Eric Freed of the National Cancer Institute said that scientists traditionally thought of cells as passive vessels that are taken over by viruses and altered to the viruses’ benefit.

“However, in recent years, virologists have been increasingly appreciating that cells have evolved complex defense mechanisms to combat viral infection. In turn, viruses have evolved mechanisms to counteract the cells’ innate immune system,” said Freed, director of the NCI’s HIV Dynamics and Replication Program.

In a previous study, the research team discovered that members of the TIM family of proteins are able to trap virus particles at the cell surface, preventing them from leaving the cell and going on to infect new cells, he said.

“The new study advances that finding, showing that Nef can counteract the activity of the TIM proteins by increasing their removal from the cell surface and trapping them within the cell. There is also a fascinating interplay between the TIM family of proteins and another group of antiviral factors known as the SERINC proteins,” Freed said.

Liu said it is critical that scientists understand these interactions “because HIV is really good at evolving to fight against its host and we want to find potential new approaches to fighting back. And it is important to not only look for ways to potentially change the virus, but to change the host’s response to it.”

“Can we someday use this information to make HIV less pathogenic to humans? I think it’s possible,” he said.

Though antiretroviral medications have been largely successful at keeping HIV from advancing to AIDS, researchers continue to search for potential therapeutic targets that could improve treatment. Many, including Liu, have worked for decades in hopes of developing a viable vaccine. But that day may never come, largely because of the rapidly evolving nature of HIV, Liu said.

Perhaps a more attainable goal would be to create some sort of “super restriction factor” that would anticipate the evolution of the virus and adequately fight it, he said, adding that at least one research team is exploring that possibility.

“Understanding this evolutionary battle may provide novel antiviral mechanisms that either harness the cell’s defense mechanisms or prevent the virus from counteracting these defenses,” Freed said.

Other Ohio State researchers who worked on the study were Minghua Li, Jingyou Yu, Cong Zeng and Yi-Min Zheng. Abdul Waheed of the National Cancer Institute was a co-author, as were Boston University researchers Amin Feizpour, Bjoern Reinhard and Suryaram Gummuluru and Academia Sinica researchers Hui-Yu Chen and Steven Lin. The work is funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

And patients who went through a psychological intervention program designed for them reported even more positive life changes than others.

The results show the resiliency of most people who have had cancer, said Barbara Andersen, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at The Ohio State University.

“Some people want to label cancer survivors as being traumatized for life. That’s just not accurate. Instead, individuals are resilient,” Andersen said.

“We found that most patients in our study found a way to make lemonade out of lemons, especially those who participated in our intervention program.”

Andersen conducted the study with Claire Conley, a former Ohio State graduate student now at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa. Their results appear in the March 2019 issue of the journal Health Psychology.

The study involved 160 women who were diagnosed with Stage II or III breast cancer and were being treated at Ohio State’s Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital or by other physicians in the Columbus area.

All participants were part of the Stress and Immunity Breast Cancer Project that examined the effectiveness of a psychological intervention program designed at Ohio State to help breast cancer patients better cope with the challenges of the disease and test if the intervention reduced the risk for recurrence.

Previously published research by Andersen and her colleagues showed that the intervention did indeed reduce the risk for cancer reccurence.

In this study, 85 women who had received the psychological intervention were studied, along with 75 women in the control group who were followed and assessed.

Data for this study were collected two years after the patients were diagnosed and about one year after they completed cancer treatment. Most had received chemotherapy, with or without radiation therapy and hormonal therapy.

The researchers had the survivors do something that had never been used before in a cancer study. Participants completed a “thought list” in which they wrote down ways their life had changed as a result of their cancer diagnosis and treatment. They wrote down changes in seven categories, including “close relationships” and “balance in life.” They then labeled each change as positive, negative or neutral.

For example, under the “close relationships” category, they could say that a positive change was that their relationship with their husband was closer as a result of going through cancer diagnosis and treatment. Or they could say a negative change was that some individuals they anticipated would be supportive were not.

Overall, the 160 participants listed 998 life changes, and four times as many of those changes were labeled as positive than negative, findings showed.

Cancer survivors who went through the intervention program were especially positive: On average, they listed 13 positive changes that occurred to them, compared to 10 positive changes for women in the control group.

There were no significant differences between the two groups in the number of negative or neutral changes that they listed.

Why did intervention patients have greater positivity in their thinking than others?

Andersen said many of the positive changes listed by cancer patients in this study lined up with what participants learned in the program.

“The intervention included components on improving stress management, getting social support from friends and family and making behavioral changes in their diet or activity levels,” Andersen said.

“These components are closely related to the most frequent and most positive thoughts about change reported by the patients.”

The survivors who had the most negative thoughts were generally those who reported the highest levels of stress and depressive symptoms when they were first diagnosed.

The finding underscores the importance of identifying and treating people with depression early, Andersen said.

“Some may have a very low mood because of their cancer diagnosis. Others may have a vulnerability to experience stress with depression. For them, cancer may be a more toxic experience,” she said.

Data for this study were collected between 1996 and 2002. Andersen said she believes the results would be the same today, because many treatments and challenges faced by these cancer patients were similar to those of patients today.

In fact, the data reveal one of the biggest issues of cancer patients back then is one that hadn’t been recognized until recently. Financial and job concerns was one of the few categories of changes listed by the patients that had more negative than positive responses.

“Financial concerns received relatively little attention in the 1990s. Only within the last ten years has the financial burden of cancer received the attention it needs,” Andersen said.

The study was supported by the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of Mental Health, the American Cancer Society, the U.S. Army Medical Research Acquisition Activity Breast Cancer Research Program and the Walther Cancer Institute.

In a small study in Columbus, anthropology professors Jeffrey Cohen, Douglas Crews and their student Alexandra Tuggle, all from The Ohio State University, found that many migrants celebrated living in Columbus. However, they also experienced discrimination and exhibited physical signs of stress, such as high blood pressure, high blood sugar and obesity.

“There was a real disconnect between the positive narratives they told and the discrimination they felt and the stress revealed by their health measures,” Tuggle said.

The researchers believe the positive narratives were a coping mechanism.

“These migrants are creating their own mental constructs so they can be happy and survive in what can be a difficult, stressful environment,” Crews said.

The study was published online recently in the Journal of Physiological Anthropology.

The study involved 34 Mexican migrants who had lived in Columbus between five and 30 years. Several were undocumented. Nearly all said they moved to the United States for economic reasons.

The participants were interviewed about their experiences of migration and settlement in the United States, their life in Columbus and discrimination they faced.

In addition, 28 of the participants underwent a variety of health tests and completed self-assessments of their health.

The narratives and the health measures didn’t match up, Cohen said.

Most participants focused on the positives of living in Columbus. Some mentioned the ability to buy a house and to live near schools for their children among the reasons they were happy.

“Although the narratives were overwhelmingly positive, discrimination showed up in a lot of them. Some people reported physical attacks, there were cases of participants and their children being harassed for speaking Spanish, and there were cases where doctors refused to treat them,” Cohen said.

In addition, the health measures for many migrants suggested they were under a lot of stress.

Nearly 80 percent were overweight or obese, according to their body mass index scores. Findings showed 21 percent had hypertension and 25 percent were hyperglycemic.

Nearly half of the sample (46 percent) rated their health as only fair or poor.

“Many of the migrants attributed their poor health to economic changes in the U.S., living in the cold Midwest, job loss and limited access to health services,” Tuggle said.

With the challenges that migrants face in the United States, the positive outlook found in the narratives might be necessary to survive and thrive, according to Crews.

“There’s been plenty of research that suggests that our attitudes have an influence on physical health. Migrants may be constructing these positive narratives to deal with their elevated stress and help themselves cope,” Crews said.

The researchers noted that this was a small study done only with Mexican migrants in Columbus. The experiences of other migrant groups in other places may be different.

To get a better understanding of the Mexican migrant experience in the United States, the Ohio State research team is going to Mexico to learn more about the context for future U.S. immigrants. They will interview people there who are planning to migrate, those who have no intention of migrating and those who left Mexico but then returned.

“We hope to learn more about what led to the findings we had in this study, about where it all started,” Crews said.

On the other hand, fans of the losing team won’t necessarily suffer a loss in their self-esteem following the game, the results suggested – although they may see a decrease in their mood.

The key for fans of both teams may be the positive effects of watching the game with friends.

“Just feeling connected to others while watching the game helped sustain self-esteem,” said Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, co-author of the study and professor of communication at The Ohio State University.

“So for fans of the winning team, the social aspect of sharing the victory with each other led to a self-esteem boost. For fans of the losing team, sharing the pain may have protected them from losing self-esteem. Those who didn’t watch at all experienced a self-esteem drop – they felt completely left out,” she said.

The study appears online in the journal Communication & Sport and will be published in a future print edition. Co-authors were J.C. Abdallah and Andrew Billings of the University of Alabama.

The study involved 174 students from Ohio State and Michigan State universities, who participated right before and after a key football game between their schools on Nov. 21, 2015.

Michigan State, ranked ninth in the nation, defeated third-ranked Ohio State on a field goal as time expired, winning 17-14.

The student participants were questioned about their self-esteem, mood and other issues right before the Saturday game, and then again the next day and the following Monday. Students were told the study was about their “well-being and leisure activities” and were asked unrelated questions so that they wouldn’t suspect the real reason for the study.

Before the game, students from both universities had similar levels of self-esteem when they rated how positive they felt about their body, appearance, academic ability and other measures.

But on the Sunday after the game, the happy Michigan State students had significantly higher levels of self-esteem, which went up even higher on Monday. In contrast, self-esteem levels didn’t change much for the sad Ohio State students.

How – and if – the students watched the game was critical, results showed. Examining students from both schools, those who watched the game socially had the highest average self-esteem on Sunday, followed by those who didn’t watch the game, with those who watched by themselves scoring lowest.

However, on Monday, when students returned to classes, both those who watched socially and those who watched alone saw self-esteem go up.

“The game was probably an important topic of conversation on campus the following Monday, and that boosted the self-esteem of those who watched it and could talk about it and share the joy or pain,” Knobloch-Westerwick said.

Those who didn’t watch had a drop in self-esteem on Monday – to even lower than for those who watched alone.

“People who didn’t watch couldn’t participate in the conversations, which probably led to a loss of self-esteem.”

As far as mood, the Michigan State students showed a slight increase in mood on Sunday, and then a drop on Monday. Gloomy Ohio State students saw a significant drop on Saturday and a small further dip on Monday.

But on both Sunday and Monday, Michigan State students scored well above their Ohio State counterparts in terms of mood.

Why didn’t Michigan State students see more of a boost in their mood after the big win?

Knobloch-Westerwick suspects it was because they were already flying high on Saturday before the game.

“The weekend had started and they were probably excited about the game. There may be a ceiling effect where they couldn’t feel a whole lot better than they already did,” she said.

Overall, the results showed one key reason why sports fans enjoy watching the games: the boost they get in their self-esteem from supporting the winning team, Knobloch-Westerwick said.

But it also showed that the game is most rewarding when you share it with your friends.

“You want to be in this with other people. Winning or losing, it is better to be a fan with your friends.”

The study is one of the first to look at how a romantic partner’s behavior might be linked to the likelihood of a woman experiencing or engaging in such things as extreme guilt about eating, preoccupation with body fat, binging or purging.

In addition to finding an association between a partner’s porn habits and eating disorder symptoms, the research also found a higher incidence of those symptoms in women who said they feel pressure from their boyfriends or husbands to be thin.

The study, led by researchers at The Ohio State University, appears in the International Journal of Eating Disorders.

“We often talk about the influences of media, family and friends on eating disorders, but little has been done to determine how a partner’s influence might contribute to a woman’s disordered eating,” said Tracy Tylka, a professor of psychology at Ohio State’s Columbus and Marion campuses. “It’s a gap in the research and if certain partner variables are risk factors we should be giving them more attention.”

The study is also the first research of its kind to address these partner influences in women who are older and more likely to be in long-term relationships.

“The women who were part of this study had an average age of almost 34, and were from a broader demographic than the stereotypical white adolescent girl with anorexia,” Tylka said.

“Disordered eating affects many people who do not fit this description – as many as 20 to 25 percent of women – and this study helps us better understand the influences on these women.”

The participants, 409 U.S. women in relationships with men, answered a questionnaire designed to identify symptoms of eating disorders and answered questions about perceived pressure from the media and others (partners, friends and family) in their lives to lose weight and have a thin body. They also reported how many hours of pornography their current partner viewed per week, ranging from none to more than eight hours, and estimated how often their previous partners had viewed pornography on a scale ranging from never to almost always.

The researchers then analyzed the relationships between those responses and found a clear association between eating disorder symptoms and both perceived partner pressure to be thin and pornography use.

“In many categories of eating disorder symptoms, perceived pressure from a romantic partner to be thin appeared to be more detrimental than pressure from friends or family, or even the media,” Tylka said.

And both partner pornography viewing and pressure to be thin appeared to be associated with a woman’s disordered eating behavior even if she didn’t idealize thinness, according to the study.

That’s important to note, Tylka said, because women may be responding solely to what they think their partner values, even if they don’t value that “thin body ideal” for themselves.

Tylka said she was interested in the potential relationship between partner pornography use and eating disorders because it could prompt women to feel pressured to aspire to unrealistic body types, or to “feel sexless because their partners are spending time with porn instead of connecting with them.”

“The relationship between partner pornography use and disordered eating was stronger for this group of women than for college women we’ve previously studied. That could be because these women have had more relationship experiences, and these experiences have shaped their relationships with food and their perceptions of their bodies,” Tylka said.

The study did not examine potential differences between women who watch pornography with their partners and those whose partners view pornography alone.

Tylka said further study is warranted in the area of partner influences on disordered eating among older women. Understanding these factors could help improve eating disorder prevention and treatment, she said.

“Some professionals are already advocating for integrating partners in eating disorder prevention and treatment, and these findings support this argument.”

Rachel Calogero of Western University in Canada also worked on the study.

The first-of-its-kind research reveals significant venom variation within populations of Florida pygmy rattlesnakes, showing that effectiveness against one type of prey differs widely among individuals and opening up questions about why this variation exists. The study, led by evolutionary biologists at The Ohio State University, appears online today (Feb. 6, 2019) in the journal Biology Letters.

Scientists have long understood that these types of differences existed between different populations of snakes of the same species – and that made good intuitive sense, because they were living in different environments, with different dietary options at the ready.

But to find widespread variability between individual members of a group of snakes born and bred in the same area is perplexing – and also exciting – from a scientific perspective, said H. Lisle Gibbs, the study’s senior author and an Ohio State professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology.

“We found differences within the same population that were almost four times greater than differences in toxicity between snakes from different regions. To my knowledge, nobody has ever documented anything like this before – we’ve all been focused on the snakes from different populations living in different habitats,” Gibbs said.

To study potential venom toxicity differences, the researchers first sampled venom from 32 pygmy rattlesnakes (Sistrurus miliarius), most of which were found within about 60 miles of one another in Florida. Then, they compared the effects of each snake’s venom on lizards collected in the same area.

Lizards represent about a quarter of the diet of these snakes in Florida. They also favor frogs and some small mammals. The researchers intentionally chose brown anole lizards (Anolis sagrei) as their model prey because they are an invasive species in Florida, meaning they are not native to the area. They are, however, comparable to one of the snakes’ common native prey species, the green anole (Anolis carolinensis).

In some cases, an individual rattler’s venom would prove deadly to most lizards. But venom from other snakes from the same area was lethal to only a few – or not lethal at all.

One big question the researchers are left with is how the toxicity of the snakes’ venom would vary on another prey species.

“It could be that the snakes that aren’t good at killing these lizards are great at killing other prey, such as frogs. We just don’t know,” Gibbs said.

“Another big question from an evolutionary perspective is ‘Why aren’t they good at killing everything all the time?’”

Gibbs said that producing the proteins found within venom takes a lot of energy, and it could be that different snakes’ energy has been devoted to toxicity against different types of prey.

“This is a whole new way of looking at how evolution operates on venom that we haven’t considered. There’s a new act in this evolutionary play that we didn’t know about until now.”

Aside from broadening scientific understanding of evolution, this work could one day help inform efforts to develop drugs based on venom – an area of pharmaceutical research that has already shown benefit in cardiovascular disease and could prove important in the treatment of pain and neurological disorders, as well as other human diseases, Gibbs said.

Other researchers who worked on the study were Ohio State graduate student Sarah Smiley-Walters and Terence Farrell of Stetson University in Florida.

Researchers analyzed data on children in Israel who lost a parent through death or divorce.

They found that when it came to one measure of a child’s academic success, the educational attainment of the surviving or custodial parent had more impact than the educational level of the parent who died or left the home.

And the longer the absence of a parent, the less impact his or her education had on the child’s success and the greater the impact of the remaining parent.

“In the ongoing debate over what helps children succeed academically, we show that genetics is not the only major factor,” said Bruce Weinberg, co-author of the study and professor of economics at The Ohio State University.

“It is also about the time that parents spend with their children.”

The research was conducted by Eric Gould and Avi Simhon of Hebrew University in Israel, as well as Weinberg. The study has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Labor Economics and will be published Feb. 4, 2019 on the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The study involved more than 22,000 children in Israel who lost a parent before age 18, more than 77,000 whose parents divorced and more than 600,000 who did not experience parental death or divorce.

The researchers looked at whether these children passed the “matriculation exam,” a high-stakes test required to attend college. About 57 percent of high-school students in the country pass the test.

The researchers started the study by looking at children who experienced the death of one parent, Weinberg said.

“We found that if a mother dies, her education becomes less important for whether her child passes the test, while at the same time the father’s education becomes more important. If a father dies, the reverse happens,” he said.

“These relationships are stronger when the parent dies when the child is younger.”

In other words, Gould said, parenting matters.

“Student success is not coming just from smart parents having smart kids,” he said.

Study results rejected the argument that the parents’ income is really what helps the children of the highly educated succeed academically.

If that were so, then losing a father should hurt children academically more than losing a mother because fathers tend to earn more.

“That’s not what we found. The loss of a mother – who tends to spend more time than the father with her children – had a bigger effect than loss of a father in our study,” Weinberg said.

But what about parents who remarry after losing a spouse? The study found that the negative effect on academic success of losing a mother can at least be partially minimized if the child gains a stepmother. If the father does not remarry, the effect of the loss is more acute: No one can compensate for the loss of the mother except for the father.

The study didn’t find any differences in academic success for children whose mothers remarried after their father died, versus those who did not. That may be because mothers’ education levels generally had more impact on their children’s success than that of fathers because of the more time moms spend with their kids.

Results also showed that mothers’ education was more closely linked to children’s academic success in larger families. The researchers believe that was because women with more children spent more time with their kids and less time working outside the home, according to findings.

Overall, the effects of losing a parent were stronger on girls than on boys, the study showed.

Similar results were also found with children whose parents had divorced. The educational level of the mother – whom the child typically lived with – had a larger effect on academic success than did the education of the other parent, Weinberg said.

“We found similar results in those children who experienced parental death and parental divorce. That provides strong evidence that our results are more general than just for children who suffered a parental death,” Weinberg said.

“Other studies show that highly educated parents tend to spend more time with their children. Our results may suggest one reason why they do: It has a strong impact on academic success.”

An international team of scientists performed the first systematic assessment of dental growth and development in an East Asian archaic hominin fossil that is known as the Xujiayao juvenile.

The fossil is of a 6 1/2-year-old who lived between 104,000 and 248,000 years ago found at the Xujiayao site in northern China.

The researchers were surprised to find that in most ways, this child’s dental development was very similar to what you would find in a child today, said Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg, co-author of the study and professor of anthropology at The Ohio State University.

“The Xujiayao juvenile is the oldest fossil found in east Asia that has dental development comparable to modern humans,” Guatelli-Steinberg said.

“It may suggest that these archaic humans had a slow life history like modern humans, with a prolonged period of childhood dependency.”

The study was published today (1-16-19) in the journal Science Advances.

Teeth provide some of the best data anthropologists have about the growth and development of our ancient ancestors, she said. That’s because growth lines in teeth retain a record of dental development.

Compared to our primate cousins, modern humans – including their teeth – take a long time to form and develop. Anthropologists believe this characteristic is associated with humans’ longer periods of child dependency – how long a juvenile relies on support from a caregiver.

Among other techniques, the researchers used synchrotron X-ray imaging to look inside the fossil to see the internal structure of the teeth, including growth lines that revealed the rate of tooth development.

The results were surprising in part because so many other features of this hominin are not modern, such as the shape and thickness of the skull and the large size of the teeth, according to the researchers.

“We don’t know exactly where this enigmatic East Asian hominin fits in human evolution,” said Song Xing, lead author of the study, who is at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

“It has some affinities to archaic human relatives like the Denisovans and Neanderthals with, as we found, some more modern features. It is a strange mosaic.”

Using the growth lines in the teeth, the researchers estimated the death of the Xujiayao juvenile at about 6 1/2 years of age, said study co-author Mackie O’Hara, a graduate student in anthropology at Ohio State.

The first molar of this juvenile – what we call the 6-year-molar today – had erupted a few months before death and had started to wear a bit. The root was about three-quarters complete, similar to humans today.

“We found that this juvenile was growing up – at least dentally – according to a schedule similar to that of modern people,” O’Hara said.

Another aspect that was similar to modern humans was the perikymata, which are the incremental growth lines that appear on the surface of the tooth.

“We found that the way these perikymata were distributed on the Xujiayao juvenile teeth was close to what we see in modern humans, and not to Neanderthals,” Guatelli-Steinberg said.

Another interesting finding related to the long-period growth line, which is laid down about every eight days in modern humans.

“This juvenile had a 10-day rhythm, which you don’t see very often in early hominins,” she said. “Most of the early hominins had a shorter rhythm, closer to seven days. This is another aspect that is much more modern.”

The one aspect of dental development in the Xujiayao juvenile that was not modern was the rate of growth in the roots of the teeth. Here, the juvenile showed relatively fast growth, compared to a slower growth in modern humans.

While the dental development of this juvenile suggested it had a slow life course similar to modern humans, Guatelli-Steinberg cautioned that we don’t know what happens in later childhood in hominins like this one.

“It would be interesting to see if dental development in later childhood, such as the growth and development of third molars, was also similar to modern humans,” she said.

The research team included scientists from China, the United States, Spain, France, the United Kingdom and South Africa.

“African-American women faced additional burdens at every step along the risk-management journey,” researchers from The Ohio State University wrote in a newly published study in the journal Ethnicity & Health.

The study included in-depth interviews with 50 women – 30 white, 20 black – deemed at high risk of breast cancer based on family history and other factors.

They found that high-risk black women were less likely than white women to have genetic testing, take medications to protect them against cancer and to have or consider having their breasts or ovaries removed as a preventive measure, disparities that have been seen in previous studies. For example, 67 percent of white study participants said they or a relevant family member had undergone genetic testing, while just 20 percent of black women reported a history of genetic testing.

This study broke new ground as the first to help explain the reasons behind the racial differences. It showed that black women were less aware of their options and at a disadvantage when it came to getting access to information about prevention. Only three of the black women in the study, or 15 percent, had seen a specialist for their breast health. Meanwhile, 70 percent of the white women had consulted with a provider with special training.

Lead author Tasleem Padamsee said she expected differences by race. After all, health disparities between blacks and whites are common in various cancers and in other diseases. But this was the first study to look at differences in proactive prevention decision-making, and to drill down beyond those differences in an effort to explain why high-risk black women might make different choices than white women with the same risk.

After analyzing the feedback they received from study interviews and comparing it with preventive actions taken (or not taken) by those women, the researchers found that African-American women on the whole experienced differences in three separate “layers of information” that contribute to their decisions about managing cancer risk.

Those layers include receiving specific information about preventive care options, including genetic testing and prophylactic treatment; general information about managing breast cancer risk; and basic perceptions of breast cancer risk and prevention.

“We wanted to understand what women’s experiences are like, how they make choices, and what influences those choices,” said Padamsee, an assistant professor of health services management and policy and a member of Ohio State’s Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Interviews were wide-ranging and revealed trends, such as a higher likelihood that African-American participants were burdened with other health care concerns, both their own and their family members’, Padamsee said. These trends could help inform care provided to women in the future, prompting providers to acknowledge and look for ways to clear obstacles to lowering breast-cancer risk for patients. That might mean helping a woman with care for an elderly family member or for her children, assisting with transportation or working to find a way to get her in to see a specialist, she said.

“These groups of women are not just making different choices. They’re having different experiences,” she said. “Preventing cancer and lowering risk of death from cancer requires that all high-risk women receive the information they need.”

The results of the study reveal the nuances of racial inequalities in health – the ways that structural, social and interpersonal inequalities combine to influence patients’ choices.

Disparities are deeply rooted in social factors including poverty, education and racism that contribute to health outcomes, Padamsee said, adding that those obstacles aren’t insurmountable, but solutions are complex and slow-moving.

A more immediate response to these inequities could be a focus on educating health care providers about the importance of providing risk-management information to all patients and referring high-risk women for genetic testing and specialist care.

“All health care providers could be educated about the relevance of risk information and risk-management options for African-American women, and the current disparities in provision of this information across race,” wrote Padamsee and her co-authors.

The disparities seen in this study might be even more profound in the general population, Padamsee said, noting that the women who were part of her research were actively engaged in health care and willing and able to participate in research.

Ohio State graduate students Rachel Meadows and Megan Hils, who is now with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also worked on the study.

The study was supported by the National Cancer Institute.

In a study published in the journal Forest Pathology, researchers and naturalists from The Ohio State University and metroparks in northeastern Ohio report on the emerging “beech leaf disease” epidemic, calling for speedy work to find a culprit so that work can begin to stop its spread.

Already, the disease has been found in 11 Ohio counties, eight Pennsylvania counties and five counties in Ontario, Canada. It’s characterized by dark-green “bands” that appear between the veins of the trees’ leaves and provide the first hint that the tree is diseased. In later stages, leaves become uniformly darker, shrunken, crinkly and leathery. Affected limbs stop forming buds and, over time, the tree dies. Young trees seem to be particularly vulnerable.

“It’s hard at this point to say where this disease will go, but it has all the hallmarks of something like emerald ash borer or sudden oak death, threats to trees that start slowly and quickly pick up speed. We seem to be in that rapid expansion phase right now,” said senior researcher Pierluigi “Enrico” Bonello, an Ohio State professor of plant pathology.

From 2012 to 2016, the disease spread in one Ohio county at almost 1,250 acres a year. The threat is significant in Ohio and throughout more than 30 states in the eastern U.S., where beech trees are common and serve as habitats for a variety of animal species and as food for woodland birds and mammals, including squirrels and bears.

If just half of American beech trees in Ohio were lost, it would come at environmental costs of approximately $225 million, according to an estimate in the new paper that takes into account various factors, including the trees’ role in removing carbon from the atmosphere, maintaining biodiversity, furnishing habitat for wildlife, aiding in water purification, providing aesthetic and recreational value as well as other ecosystem services.

Scientists can’t be sure yet what is causing beech leaf disease, but researchers at Ohio State think that the symptoms point to a microbe rather than an insect. Based on that theory, work is underway to look for an explanation by comparing DNA and RNA found on diseased tree leaves to that found on healthy trees.

Bonello and graduate student Carrie Ewing, lead author of the new paper on the disease, are employing molecular techniques that can identify tiny microbial differences between trees with beech leaf disease and those without.

“The hope is to find a needle in one haystack – the diseased trees – by comparing it with other haystacks, or non-symptomatic trees,” Bonello said. “It’s all about subtracting out all the things they have in common and finding what doesn’t match up.”

In particular, they’re looking for evidence showing whether the disease is bacterial, fungal, viral or possibly caused by a phytoplasma.

“We’re really not 100 percent sure that it’s a microbe causing this, but the symptoms resemble those of other plant diseases caused by microorganisms,” Ewing said. “There are no infestations or boreholes, or chewing of the leaves like you’d typically see if the disease was caused by an insect.”

That said, some other research has pointed to a microscopic worm, or nematode, as a possible culprit.

In addition to American beech trees, or Fagus grandifolia, the disease has been reported in European (F. sylvatica) and Oriental (F. orientalis) species in nurseries and at Holden Arboretum in northeastern Ohio.

This is worrisome because it appears to mean that the risk of disease extends beyond a single species, putting more trees in more areas of the world under threat, Bonello said.

Until scientists determine what is causing beech leaf disease, there’s little they can offer in the way of specific recommendations to stop its spread. Bonello and Ewing are hopeful their work might produce some answers by this summer.

“In general, we know it’s not a good idea to move symptomatic plant material, but beyond that we can’t give any recommendations in terms of what might inhibit this disease,” Bonello said.

Constance Hausman, an ecologist with Cleveland Metroparks and one of the authors of the paper, said it was first discovered in that park system in northeast Cuyahoga County in 2014 and has since spread throughout the entire park district. Thus far, there is no documented evidence of trees developing resistance or recovering from the disease, she said.

“Beech trees are a significant food and habitat resource for wildlife. We can’t treat or manage our beech forests effectively if we don’t know what is causing the decline,” Hausman said.

Other study authors were John Pogacnik of Lake Metroparks in Ohio, who first spotted beech leaf disease in 2012, and Jason Slot, an Ohio State assistant professor of fungal evolutionary genomics.

The first-of-its-kind discovery could one day enable the development of protein nanomachines to help diagnose and treat disease, allow for more exact engineering of cells and perform a wide variety of other tasks.

“This technique makes it possible for you to design proteins so they come together exactly how you want them to,” said Zibo Chen, a graduate student at the University of Washington and lead author of the paper, which was published Dec. 19 in the journal Nature.

The research relied on the technical expertise of the Resource for Native Mass Spectrometry Guided Structural Biology, a center at The Ohio State University led by Vicki Wysocki, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, Ohio Eminent Scholar and director of the Campus Chemical Instrument Center.

“Our contribution was the analysis of protein designs to confirm they were pairing correctly,” said Florian Busch, an Ohio State biochemist and study co-author. “We also came up with methods to analyze the designs faster and in mixtures that allowed proteins to find their correct partners even in the presence of other similar proteins.”

Typically, researchers interested in designing biomolecular nanomachines use DNA as the primary component, because complementary DNA strands come together in a highly predictable manner. The research team on the new study developed protein designs that produce complementary proteins that precisely pair with each other by a similar approach, Busch said.

“It’s like you have two pieces of a zipper. … You can find the pairs in the zipper, zip them together, combine more pieces into a large complex and then finally assemble some functional proteins,” said Mengxuan Jia, an Ohio State graduate student and collaborator on the study.

The University of Washington side of the team designed the new proteins computationally.

“Engineering cells to do new tasks is the future of medicine and biotechnology, whether that’s engineering bacteria to make energy or clean up toxic waste or creating immune cells that attack cancers,” said Scott Boyken, a co-author of the paper and postdoctoral researcher at UW Medicine’s Institute for Protein Design. “We have opened a major door to protein nanomaterial design.”

“Almost all biological processes depend on protein-protein interaction,” Busch said. “Our next steps will be working with bigger, more dynamic protein assemblies.”

The researchers said the ability to test and confirm the new designs and their interactions is a testament to the unique power of native mass spectrometry, which can provide detailed information about protein complexes while keeping them intact and as close to their native state as possible.

Zachary L. VanAernum and Aniruddha Sahasrabuddhe, current and former Ohio State graduate students, respectively, were also involved in this study.

Information from a University of Washington press release was included in this story.

But it is not as easy as saying we simply choose what we look at the most, the research found. Instead, our gaze amplifies our desire for choices we already like.

“We don’t necessarily choose something just because we look at it more, as some researchers have suggested. If we look at something we feel neutral about, our attention will have little effect,” said Ian Krajbich, co-author of the study and assistant professor of psychology and economics at The Ohio State University.

“But if we look at something we already like, our attention makes us like it even more in that moment.”

Say you’re looking at two candy bars in a vending machine. You like both of them, but prefer the one with peanut butter slightly more than the one with just chocolate. You’ll usually choose the one with peanut butter, but not always.

“We can use eye tracking to predict when people are going to go against their usual preference,” Krajbich said. “When someone spends more time looking at their less-valued but still liked item, it amplifies how appealing it is.”

Krajbich conducted the study with Stephanie Smith, a graduate student in psychology at Ohio State. Their results appear online in the journal Psychological Science and will appear in a future print edition.

Another interesting finding was that people tended to make their decisions more quickly when they liked both of their two choices, Krajbich said.

“That is surprising to some scientists. The thought is that the quick decision should come when you’re choosing between two items you feel neutral about, because why would you care?” he said.

Instead, people struggle more with the decisions about neutral items and choose quickly between two liked items.

“When both items are good, your attention plays a larger role in your decision and you choose more quickly.”

The researchers used data from six eye-tracking studies involving a total of 228 people, some from their lab and some from other researchers.

In the Krajbich lab, most of the eye-tracking studies involved food choices. Participants start these studies by rating how much they would like to eat over 100 different foods. Then the researchers present participants with pairs of the foods on a computer screen and ask them which one they prefer at that moment. Eye-trackers measure what they look at before they make their choice. At the end of the study, participants actually receive one of the foods they chose.

“What we find is that how long they look at items is not correlated with their ratings – so it is not the case that they are simply looking more at items they rated higher,” Krajbich said.

“But we found that the amount of attention participants give does predict which food they are going to choose, above and beyond their ratings.”

These results suggest that product marketing will have the biggest effect on items you already like, he said. If you’re looking at two brands of an item you like at a store, the package that grabs and holds your attention will probably have an edge when you’re deciding which to buy.

Marketing can actually backfire when you’re forced to buy a product you don’t like.

“An older paper shows that if you have to choose from two disliked items, the item that gets more attention is less likely to be chosen,” Krajbich said.

Overall, this new study shows that the link between attention and choice is more complex than previously believed, he said.

“More attention doesn’t always translate into us choosing a particular item.”

The study was supported by the National Science Foundation.

When the critters that live in and around streams and wetlands are settling into their nighttime routines, streetlights and other sources of illumination filter down through the trees and into their habitat, monkeying with the normal state of affairs, according to new research from The Ohio State University.

“This is among the first studies to show that light at night has detrimental effects not just on individual organisms in the environment, but also on communities and ecosystems,” said Mažeika Sullivan, lead author of the study, which appears today (Dec. 19, 2018) in the journal Ecological Applications.

“Nighttime light is having profound impacts that extend to the entire ecosystem,” said Sullivan, director of Ohio State’s Schiermeier Olentangy River Wetland Research Park and associate professor of environment and natural resources.

Though many people might not consider it, artificial light is a pollutant, changing the natural course of life for people, animals and plants, he said, adding that urbanization is rapidly increasing both in the United States and around the globe.

“We are experiencing this pollution that we don’t think about, but it’s all around us and it’s chronic and it’s happening everywhere – from newly lit villages in rural Africa to streams alongside the highway in Columbus, Ohio,” he said. “It’s also unprecedented in Earth’s history.”

The new study explored the role of light on streams and wetlands in and around Columbus. Moonlight under a clear sky can give an illuminance of 0.1 to 0.3 lux, Sullivan said. The streams in the study were headwater streams draining into the Scioto and Olentangy rivers, with light ranging from 0.01 to 4.0 lux. Wetlands of the Olentangy River Wetland Research Park had lighting from 0 to 20 lux.

The research team examined the effect of existing artificial light in streams, and they manipulated the light in wetlands. In all cases, there was a canopy of trees and other vegetation overhead, buffering the light.

From those areas, they collected a variety of ubiquitous water-dwelling and land-dwelling invertebrate species, including mayflies, water bugs, ants and spiders.

They found that species composition changed with increases in light intensity.

They also discovered that the food chain length of the invertebrate communities – a measure that tells researchers about the complexity of a food web – shortened with more light.

“Decreases in food chain length are a pretty big deal, as it reflects not just changes in the architecture of an ecosystem – the numbers of various species – but also shifts in ecosystem stability and nutrient flows,” Sullivan said.

“Artificial light decreased food chain length in this study, which means the ecosystem is less complex.”

The researchers also saw detrimental changes in energy flow – how nutrients are cycled between aquatic and nearby ecosystems. In particular, invertebrates became less reliant on food sources that originate in the water when they were exposed to moderate light levels.

The reasons for the changes are complex, and could include such factors as an increase in predators attracted to a lit area at night, which decreases the population of their prey, or even shifts in plant growth, Sullivan said.

Previous studies have clearly shown that individual species are impacted by artificial light.

“The classic example is hatchling sea turtles that became disoriented and instead of going toward the moonlit ocean at night, they were headed inland, toward coastal lighting,” Sullivan said. “In that case, light-management tactics have helped address the problem.”

But until now, scientists haven’t fully detailed the broader implications – how light might affect species interactions, communities and important ecosystem functions.

“One of the neatest parts about this research is that we scaled up and said, ‘What does it mean for the entire community and ecosystem?’” Sullivan said.

Going forward, Sullivan would like to explore larger ecosystem-level questions, such as how light’s effects contribute to fish and bird populations and to water quality.

“I think we’re going to start to find that that light has cascading consequences that are linked to other environmental problems we’re seeing, possibly including harmful algal blooms.”

Work in this area will continue with a new $600,000 grant from the Ohio Department of Transportation, which is looking for ways to better understand how roadway lighting interacts with the environment, Sullivan said.

A particular focus will be the role of LED lights, which are replacing many halogen lights in the interest of energy conservation.

Interventions such as carefully directing light, using motion sensors to activate lights only when they’re needed and dimming lighting during times when human activity is minimal could all have the potential to buffer the effects of lighting near wildlife, Sullivan said. Thinking about what types of lights are being used could also be important, he said.

Lars Meyer of Ohio State and Katie Hossler, now at Wright State University, also worked on the study.

The finalized Columbus Climate Adaptation Plan will be presented to Columbus City Council and Mayor Andrew Ginther on Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018.

BPCRC researchers collaborated with more than 75 local stakeholders and technical experts to develop the action plan, which outlines recommendations for adapting to extreme heat, deteriorating air and water quality, flooding, and other changes that are already occurring and likely to intensify with climate change. The report also addresses considerations for emergency preparedness and protecting vulnerable populations.

The recommendations are broken into two categories: necessary and aspirational.

“The ‘necessary’ recommendations are the bare minimum the city should do,” said Jason Cervenec, education and outreach director for BPCRC and chair of the task force. “They are the highest priority actions with the fewest barriers to implementation and the biggest return on investment.”

Those necessary recommendations include establishing a better network of centers where people can find refuge from extreme heat, modernizing the electric grid, and improving education around minimizing activities that contribute to some of climate change’s most pressing side effects – extreme heat, decreased air and water quality and increased flooding. The task force also recommends the city assess its stormwater infrastructure, regulations and technical documents, and make changes to decrease the risk of localized flooding and basement backups.

“Our goal has been to cast a wide net to provide the city with a comprehensive document that can best inform its operations and planning,” Cervenec said in early 2018, when the task force started collecting public comments. “While the city will need to decide how to address each of the actions recommended in the document, we believe it’s important to empower citizens, while there is time to act, with knowledge of the climate change impacts that experts agree are likely to occur.”

The report primarily focuses on public policy changes that could help central Ohioans adapt to new weather patterns caused by climate change, but it also “includes something for everybody,” Cervenec said.

“How does climate change affect my business, my nonprofit, my home, how I garden, how I make updates to my home or how I travel throughout our city?” he said. “It’s really about determining where climate change intersects your job, your interests and your life, and then making changes to reduce your risk and increase your resilience.”

The recommendations build upon a prior report, Climate Change in Columbus, Ohio, developed in 2016 through a collaboration among the university, the City of Columbus and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessment team.

The 2016 report that informed this action plan showed that average annual temperatures in Columbus rose by 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit from 1951 through 2012—higher than both national and global averages. At the same time, Columbus precipitation totals have risen nearly 20 percent and heavy storms are happening more than 30 percent more frequently.

Central Ohio is likely to see increasing temperatures—especially at night—along with flash-flooding and bouts of deteriorated water quality over the coming decades, according to the task force. The biggest risks come from warmer, wetter conditions for most of the year, with increased likelihood of flash-flooding and potentially more property damage in Columbus during the spring through fall.

Taken together, the projections suggest that young and elderly residents of central Ohio will be especially vulnerable to heat stress in summer. Homes and businesses will need to consume more electricity for air conditioning. And while Columbus is one of the fastest growing cities in the nation—with an expected influx of at least half a million people by 2035—construction companies will have to contend with workers laboring in extreme heat as they build new infrastructure.

Other cities around the country, including Chicago and Baltimore, have developed similar action plans. So have Toledo, Dayton, Cleveland and Cincinnati.

“Many cities are developing action plans, but I would argue that ours is one of the most comprehensive in the Midwest,” Cervenec said. “We first explored the climate impacts, risks and vulnerabilities facing Columbus and built the document to directly address those concerns.”

To answer that question, Stephen Gavazzi and E. Gordon Gee interviewed 27 presidents and chancellors of land-grant universities. Their findings appear in the new book Land-Grant Universities for the Future.

Gee, a former president at The Ohio State University, is now president at West Virginia University. Gavazzi is a professor of human development and family science at Ohio State.

Ohio State News sat down with Gavazzi to discuss some of the major themes of the book. The conversation has been edited for space and clarity.

You talk about the need for land-grant universities to get back to their roots. What does that mean to you?

Land-grant universities were created to serve the communities they were built in. We need to get back to a focus on community needs. We talk in the book about being land-grant fierce, and to us that means in part finding what it is that connects the university to the community and not being afraid to meet the needs of the people from where you live. That’s especially important in an era where it seems many large research universities are starting to act more like one another, rather than emphasizing what’s distinct.

We have to say what our research, our teaching and our engagement is doing to help the citizens of the state, because we’re the “people’s university.” We have to respect the fact that the needs of the state of Ohio are different than the needs of the state of New Mexico and different than the needs of the state of Oregon. So what that means is that there is not only a diversity of universities in general, with the land-grants being one kind of university, but there’s also a diversity of land-grants themselves.

The rural-urban divide is a big topic in your book. Given that the United States is increasingly an urban nation, how should land-grant colleges approach the needs and concerns of rural America?

There were no presidents or chancellors who told us we have to focus less on rural issues and more on urban issues. They want to do both of these things. A great example of that is the opioid crisis. There are overdose deaths happening in rural areas and in urban areas. So it’s not a rural or an urban issue. We have to transcend the rural-urban distinction by saying there are some things that we just need to do for all communities.

That doesn’t mean that we also shouldn’t be called upon to help with issues that are primarily rural or primarily urban in scope. I think, though, that land-grants need to be known for what they’re doing for communities that transcends that distinction.

How should land-grant universities balance the demands of an increasingly connected global economy with the needs of the citizens who live near their campuses?

I think most Americans know they are a part of a global economy. Even if you just casually watch the news, you know that trade fights with China are going to affect soybean farmers in the heartland. But we lose our base when we fail to adequately articulate how what we’re doing has some meaning back at home. And I think that’s a problem. If there’s any place that I’m most critical of land-grant universities, it’s that we don’t spend enough time working on that narrative.

One of the huge advantages that we have as a land-grant institution, especially a land-grant in a state like Ohio, is the cooperative extension specialists in nearly every county. I think they do a great job. But we need to support these extension agents so they can serve as that front door to the university for community members. They should serve as the eyes and ears of the university, finding out what problems their communities need the universities to help solve.

The other part that we talk about in the book is that extension needs to be seen as more than just agriculture. The humanities professor, the English professor, the historian, the arts specialist – they all have just as much responsibility at a land-grant university to figure out how they’re going to engage constituencies as someone from agriculture or a related field.

Academics often tout the necessity of basic research, the kind that doesn’t have an immediate real-world application. But you push for an emphasis on applied research. Why is that?

We don’t have innovation if we’re not doing basic research. There’s no question about that. But the presidents we talked to believe in the necessity of both basic and applied research. The constituencies that are paying our bills want research that actually solves problems that society has right now. Land-grant universities need to brag more about the work they’re doing in this area.

And land-grant universities need to be purposeful in their reward system. If there are inequities in how we are rewarding basic research versus applied research than we certainly have a problem there.

What role should teaching and engagement play at a land-grant university? Are they in conflict with research as a goal?

The promotion and tenure process for faculty demands excellence in research, teaching and engagement, what we used to call service. Now, is everyone internationally known in all three areas? No. But all faculty have to have some level of excellence in all of them. You can’t merely be adequate.

However, saying that, one of the things that we heard from many university presidents was research has become the coin of the realm. And that that puts people who are really interested in teaching, and really interested in community engagement, in a bind. Because there are only so many hours in a day.

The bottom line for most of the presidents and chancellors that we interviewed was that what really matters is what you reward. So if you’re only rewarding people for their research expertise, then you do have a conflict, and then you do have a problem.

President Michael Drake at Ohio State has shown how you can reward teaching, through the program he instituted, the University Institute for Teaching and Learning. Ohio State is not only demonstrating that teaching excellence is important with the UITL program, but it is also putting cash behind it. The fact that Ohio State is rewarding people for teaching excellence is exactly the counter to this idea that somehow they’re in conflict. Now, to push that idea forward even further, I’d want to see the same thing done for community engagement. There should be ways for faculty to be rewarded for what they do in the community.

In the conclusion to your book, you suggest teaching a course on land-grant universities, and even provide a sample syllabus. Why do you think that is important?

We heard many university presidents and chancellors lament the fact that no one understands us as a land-grant university. We heard that all the time. And yet, we graduate 1.1 million students every year from land-grants. About 40 percent of our governors have received at least one degree from a land-grant institution. How can people not know more about us? Our idea is that, in the general education curriculum, we should teach students about land-grant universities and why they are important.

It is not a self-serving idea. We believe one of the key values of land-grant institutions is the idea of servant leadership, that students should be involved in activities to benefit their communities. We should be teaching that a major part of what you should be doing, whether you’re a chemist or a social worker, is giving back. Students should understand that part of the land-grant orientation towards the community is not just training students well in their vocation, but also training them to be good citizens. That’s a part of the land-grant mission and part of what students should learn when they attend such a school.

Researchers found that excitatory neurons – those that are more likely to trigger an action (as opposed to inhibitory neurons, which are less likely to prompt neural activity) – are more vulnerable to accumulations of abnormal tau protein, which is increasingly being implicated in Alzheimer’s disease.

The study also uncovered some possible genetic explanations for the vulnerability of those cells, work that has the potential to one day lead to targeted treatment. The study, co-led by Hongjun “Harry” Fu of The Ohio State University, appears today (Dec. 17, 2018) in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Fu, who recently came to Ohio State from Columbia University, co-led the research with Karen Duff of Columbia and Michele Vendruscolo of the University of Cambridge.

Much of the research on Alzheimer’s disease in the past focused on the buildup of amyloid beta proteins in the brain. But work by Fu and his collaborators is focused on another protein linked to the disease, called tau.

Tau plays an important role in normal, healthy neurological activity. But when it builds up within neurons early on in the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, it clogs and then kills those cells. Excessive accumulation of the abnormal tau protein also has been linked to other neurological diseases, including dementia and traumatic brain injury, said Fu, an assistant professor of neuroscience, who is also a member of the Neurological Institute at Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center and part of the university’s Chronic Brain Injury program.

The researchers studied the brains of patients who had Alzheimer’s disease and also a mouse model and found that the abnormal tau protein accumulated predominantly in excitatory neurons, rather than inhibitory neurons.

Then, using genetic analysis from the brains of donors who did not have Alzheimer’s disease or other neurological disorders, they found significant genetic differences between the excitatory neurons and other cells that seemed to explain the excitatory neurons’ susceptibility.

Furthermore, the researchers confirmed that one of the “master regulator” genes, BAG3, is responsible for the clearance of abnormal tau protein.

“We think there’s a really early, intrinsic difference in the brain cells that are prone to the accumulation of tau protein, which may explain why only certain neurons and brain regions are vulnerable to this problem in early Alzheimer’s,” Fu said.

“If we can figure out the molecular determinants underlying vulnerability to this disease, it will help us better understand the development of Alzheimer’s disease and potentially could lead to techniques for early detection and targeted treatment.”

Fu said future research will focus on understanding how genes interact with each other and contribute to vulnerability in Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological diseases associated with tau accumulation.

“Other brain cells, including microglia, astrocytes and oligodendrocytes, have also been found to play important roles in the development of Alzheimer’s disease. We are very interested to understand how those cells communicate with each other and affect the vulnerability of certain neurons,” Fu said.

“Environmental factors, brain injury, diabetes, sleep deprivation, depression and other outside factors also have been linked to increased vulnerability to Alzheimer’s. We want to understand how intrinsic differences interact with these outside influences.”

The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Alzheimer’s Association, The BrightFocus Foundation, the Tau Consortium and the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund.

This week at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) fall meeting in Washington, D.C, a team of scientists from The Ohio State University shared early results from a trio of studies that aim to improve models designed to guide agricultural practices for reducing the risk of nitrogen and phosphorous farm runoff. Such runoff leads to the growth of toxic algae in waterways.

Basic models for predicting the consequences of various decisions, such as when to apply fertilizer, are available but they must be refined in order to ensure reliability and gain the trust of interested parties, including farmers and environmental protection organizations, said Jay Martin, a professor of ecological engineering at Ohio State.

Asmita Murumkar, a postdoctoral researcher at Ohio State, said her work is beginning to illuminate how the timing of fertilizer application intersects with heavy rains to contribute to nutrient runoff. She’s working with the Ohio Applicator Forecast, a tool that uses National Weather Service data to assign risk estimates to applying fertilizer at various times.

Murumkar is hopeful that her research will help quantify what impact the tool would have on the environment under different scenarios – say if a quarter of farmers in the Maumee River watershed used it, or half.

“We want to better understand how much phosphorous runoff it would reduce in the region,” Martin said, adding that there’s plenty of evidence that individual farm practices impact runoff from those farms, but less evidence in terms of larger-scale estimates.

“We know from our previous work that fertilizer timing is important, but we want to be able to look across the whole Lake Erie Basin and know best-case and worst-case scenarios and this modeling will help address that,” he said.

Margaret Kalcic, assistant professor in Ohio State’s Food, Agricultural and Biological Engineering Department, said farmers are encouraged to follow the “Four Rs” for right time, source, amount and place when applying fertilizer.

“But ‘right’ is not clearly defined, and our team is working to provide our partners in Ohio, including farmers, advocates and policymakers, with better answers,” Kalcic said.

Added Martin, “There’s more subtlety here than just watching the weather and the ground moisture and we’re trying to determine the best solutions that support agricultural production and environmental protection.”

Grey Evenson, a postdoctoral researcher at Ohio State, will present initial findings on his work to identify the best data to use in modeling, so that it offers a more accurate picture of what is happening in fields and adjacent waterways.

“We don’t want to underestimate – or overestimate – the value of these best management practices. For instance, some practices may produce greater benefits than we give them credit for in the model – such as improving soil health, which leads to better water retention,” Evenson said.

Added Kalcic, “A lot of this work is about tuning existing models. By improving the quality of information we put into them we have greater confidence in the information that comes out of them.” She said that there are many questions about the larger environmental impacts of practices such as no-till farming, which is generally thought of as environmentally friendly.

“We know that no-till is good for preventing soil erosion, but there are still uncertainties about its effects on water quality in the region,” Kalcic said.

Graduate student Anna Apostel discussed a third project, in which she’s manipulating various parameters in one model to try to determine how reliable – or not – the model is. The long-term goal is to move toward more-robust estimates of how practices contribute to water quality.

Martin said adjusting parameters so that magnitudes of processes better match reality and data from observations in the field is a critical part of improving model performance.

“We want to adjust our equations to better represent reality,” Apostel said.

The overarching goal of all the work, the researchers said, is to have models that better align with what the researchers have observed in field experiments but that can look at the issues on a broad, regional level.

“We know that if you build a bad model it’s not going to help anybody make any decisions,” Kalcic said.

“We really want to build trust in truly useful models that will help policymakers, farmers and others. The worst thing would be that people trust models that are telling them the entirely wrong message,” she said.

Funding for the new research came from the Ohio Department of Higher Education Harmful Algal Bloom Research Initiative, NOAA National Weather Service and the National Science Foundation.

Addressing water quality challenges is among Ohio State’s top research priorities. In addition to studies such as the those being presented at the fall AGU meeting, faculty and staff are working with policymakers, farmers, advocacy groups and others to find solutions. Among those efforts is the Ohio Water Quality Initiative, led by the College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, which aims to ensure grassroots support, strategic investments of time and money, and increased impact and relevance of its work.

And as astrophysicists and astronomers have searched for the answer, they’ve traditionally looked for a world that has water.

But Wendy Panero, professor of earth sciences at The Ohio State University, has developed a new way of thinking about a planet’s habitability. What if, she wondered, the answer to habitability lies within the way rocks and water interact?

Panero presented her theory Dec. 12 at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington, D.C.

“We have traditionally looked for ‘water worlds’—places where one-half to one-quarter of the weight of the planet is water,” Panero said. “That seems like an optimal thing, to go looking for water.”

Instead of just looking for water, Panero thinks, scientists should also look to the planet’s atmosphere.

The Earth’s atmosphere is stable and habitable in part because of carbon dioxide released when large tectonic plates under the Earth’s crust shift and because of the weathering of rocks at the surface.

“You need something that allows volcanic rock to come back to the surface,” Panero said. “It’s a cycle.”

Panero thinks the Earth’s near-constant sea level over geologic time is based on the way water at the planet’s surface interacts with shifting plates. The Earth’s interior provides energy that powers the dynamics of plate tectonics, which in turn has kept the amount of water cycling between the surface and its atmosphere stable for eons. The weathering and erosion of silicate rock helps regulate carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, and is a key part of the process.

And though astrophysicists have traditionally searched for a world with water in the hopes of finding a world that can support life, Panero thinks there might be a way to evaluate the stuff of which a planet is made to determine if it could be habitable. The theory she presented Wednesday includes evaluating a planet’s mass and radius, along with the composition of its star, which can be used to make predictions about the planet’s interior and structure. In a universe of seemingly infinite planets, the theory could help narrow the field of planets that scientists look to for signs of life.

That could help save both time and money in the search for extraterrestrial life.

“It’s a way of cutting down your sample set of where you’re going to spend your expensive space telescope time,” Panero said.

Panero led the presentation Wednesday along with Ohio State researchers Scott David Hull, Nicole E. Wahlstrom and Joseph Schulze, and Arizona State University researcher Cayman T. Unterborn.

No, we’re not talking about your emotional tipping point.

A new study examined how far people thought they could lean over backwards before they would actually fall to the ground. When study participants were put into a device that slowly and safely tilted them, most thought they reached their tipping point when they were tilted somewhere near 14 degrees from vertical (straight up and down).

But research suggests the actual tipping point for most people is nearer to 8 or 9 degrees, said Dennis Shaffer, lead author of the study and associate professor of psychology at The Ohio State University, Mansfield.

Study participants were even worse at estimating when they watched models being tilted backwards – in that case, they projected the tipping point would be nearly 45 degrees.

“That’s about 35 degrees off from reality,” Shaffer said.

As if that weren’t bad enough, the study found we can’t tell when we are standing straight up. And the miscalculations don’t end there.

“This study fits with other research we’ve done that shows people don’t do well estimating other kinds of angles, like the steepness of hills,” he said.

The study appears online in the journal Attention, Perception & Psychophysics and will be published in a future print edition.

A person’s tipping point can be calculated by knowing his or her height, weight and foot size. For nearly everybody, that point turns out to be less than 10 degrees, said study co-author Kirsten Greer, who works in Shaffer’s lab at Ohio State.

In this study, researchers conducted four experiments, each involving 42 to 60 college students, to see how well they could predict their own tipping point. In most cases, the researchers used a device called an inversion table.

Participants stood with their back against a flat board, were strapped in and then slowly tilted backward at their waist.

“They were instructed to tell us to stop when they felt they were at the point where they would no longer be able to stay upright and would fall over backward if they weren’t in this device,” Greer said.

For the average participant, that was near 14 degrees backward.

But an inversion table may not be the best way to measure our perceived tipping point. That’s because in most falls, people start falling from their feet and not their waist. So the researchers developed a different tilting apparatus, based on a hand truck, that would tilt people at their feet.

Even with this device, most people thought their tipping point was near 14 degrees, Greer said.

“Overall, people seem to have far less understanding about their body in space than they believe,” she said.

That point was shown again in one of the studies when people, after being tilted backward, were slowly brought back up to a standing position. They were asked to tell the researcher when they were perfectly vertical. Participants were asked to look straight ahead and not glance down during the experiment.

Average participants said they were straight up and down when they were still tilted backward about 6 degrees.

“People were shocked when they found out they weren’t standing straight up,” Greer said. “We didn’t have anyone who got to 0 degrees before telling us they were vertical.”

Ummm ... what, @KyrieIrving? 🧐🧐🧐 pic.twitter.com/b290xT4Jch

— ESPN (@espn) November 24, 2018

Kirsten Greer and Dennis Shaffer agree with others who say that this video of Kyrie Irving probably involves some technological wizardry.

It’s not just issues involving the angle of human bodies that seem to perplex us, Shaffer said. In other research, he found that people overestimate the steepness of slopes, including staircases and escalators.

This new work could help inform research on preventing falls, which are a leading cause of injury and death in older Americans.

“It may be that as we age our perceived vertical becomes further away from true vertical, or we can no longer correct for the discrepancy between true vertical and what we perceive as vertical,” Shaffer said.

The perception of being vertical while actually tilted slightly backward also has implications for design of furniture and various types of seats, he said.

Other co-authors on the study, all from Ohio State, were Erica Bishop, Mara Hernandez, Cage Cramer, Jackson Schaffer, Brandon Short, Ky Mattingly, Meghan Burkhardt and Echoe Smith.

Wondering about the possible health risks for children of people routinely exposed to highly polluted air, including soldiers and residents of some of the world’s largest cities, researchers from The Ohio State University studied the effects of dirty air on mice.

And they found an abundance of evidence of harm to the offspring of parents that routinely breathed dirty air prior to mating.

“We found that these offspring had a variety of heart problems during the prime of their lives and the effects were so robust that it was somewhat shocking,” said study senior author Loren Wold, director of biomedical research at Ohio State’s College of Nursing.

Heart function was impaired. Inflammatory markers linked to increased heart disease risk were high. They had markers of oxidative stress, a condition in which levels of beneficial antioxidants are low. Calcium regulatory proteins, which are critical to the function of the beating heart, were altered. And these mice were young and otherwise healthy – comparable to 20-year-old humans.

The first-of-its-kind study appears online today (Dec. 5, 2018) in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

“This suggests that heart problems related to pollution exposure could start even before conception, and if that’s true it has implications worldwide,” said Wold, a professor of nursing and medicine at Ohio State.

Wold and his team also uncovered evidence of gene-related differences that might explain the cardiovascular changes they saw. They examined epigenetic regulators, which play an important role in the expression of genes – meaning that they have influence over predisposition to health problems, including cardiovascular disease.

“I looked at important epigenetic regulators in the offspring, and some were activated, which could explain the differences we saw. The next step will be a more-detailed analysis,” said study lead author Vineeta Tanwar, a research scientist at Ohio State.

To conduct the study, researchers concentrated air from Columbus, Ohio, until the level of harmful particulate matter – particles suspended in the air – reached a level on par with large cities such as Los Angeles and Beijing. The research focused on the presence of PM_2.5, particles that are small enough to pass from the lungs into the bloodstream.

The test mice breathed this air for about 30 hours a week.

“They were, on average, exposed to less particulate matter than what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has set for daily air quality standards,” Tanwar said.

Then, the mice were kept in normal air during mating and the researchers compared their offspring to the offspring of mice that were not exposed to the polluted air.

“The first thing we did was to do a basic echocardiograph and we could see profound heart dysfunction in the offspring of particulate-matter-exposed mice,” Tanwar said. “Then, we began to look at single cells and at typical markers of heart disease and found a lot more evidence that preconception pollution could harm the offspring.”

The study focused only on male offspring because the research team wanted to narrow its focus on this first experiment. Going forward, they plan to compare male and female offspring, try to determine which parent’s exposure might matter more to offspring, evaluate heart health later in the lifespan of the mice and explore potential changes in the eggs and sperm of mice exposed to dirty air.

“A key question here is how are changes in the sperm and eggs passing on the information to the offspring to cause this heart dysfunction?” Wold said.

Though more animal research is needed, this study also opens the door to exploring the role of air pollution on the health of future generations, he said. For instance, it might make sense to begin by working with adults with high levels of exposure to particulate matter, such as residents of New Delhi and Beijing, Wold said.

“We already know that humans have dramatic cardiovascular effects from exposure to dirty air, high blood pressure in particular. And we know that babies can be harmed by pollution both before and after birth,” Wold said.

“Understanding whether the damage may begin even before conception is critical.”

Other Ohio State researchers who worked on the study were Jeremy Adelstein, Jacob Grimmer, Dane Youtz, Aashish Katapadi, Benjamin Sugar, Lisa Baer and Kristin Stanford.

The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Researchers found that 4- to 9-year-old kids knew more about how animals are classified after a four-day camp at a zoo.

It wasn’t that children who attended just knew more facts about animals, the researchers noted. The camp actually improved how they organized what they knew – a key component of learning.

“This suggests organization of knowledge doesn’t require years to happen. It can occur with a short, naturalistic learning experience,” said Layla Unger, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in psychology at The Ohio State University.

“It highlights the enriching potential of real-world programs like summer camps. They aren’t just recreation.”

Unger conducted the study with Anna Fisher, associate professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. Their study appears online in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology and will be published in the March 2019 edition.

This study is one of the first to show how quickly knowledge organization changes can occur in children.

“We didn’t know if it would take months or years for children to accomplish this. Now we have evidence that it can happen in days,” Unger said.

The study involved 28 children who took part in a four-day summer zoo camp in Pittsburgh. They were compared to 32 children who participated in a different summer camp in a nearby neighborhood of Pittsburgh, which was not at the zoo and didn’t involve animals.

At the beginning and end of each camp, all children completed two different tests that measured how well they understood the differences between mammals, birds and reptiles.

The zoo camp consisted of lessons, interactions with preserved and live animals, tours of the zoo, games and craft sessions.

“Most of the themes at the zoo camp were not oriented toward explicitly teaching children biological taxonomic groups,” Unger said. “So the children were not spending every day talking about the differences between mammals, birds and reptiles.”

At the beginning of the camps, children in both groups had equivalent knowledge about the relationships between the three types of animals. But the children in the zoo camp knew significantly more by the end of their four-day camp, while the others did not.

Kids who had been at the zoo had a 64 percent increase in test scores on one assessment from the beginning to the end of camp, and a 35 percent increase in the other. Not surprisingly, there was no change in test scores for children in the other camp.

This study was not designed to test whether a four-day classroom lesson about animals could produce the same results as the four-day zoo experience, Unger said.

But other research suggests a class may not have the same positive effect, partly because it might not engage students as much as the real-world experience.

Unger said it was significant that the zoo camp improved knowledge organization, and not just facts about animals.

“Children didn’t just learn piecemeal facts like ‘ostriches are birds.’ They learned how different birds such as ostriches and ducks are related to each other even when they may look very different or live in different habitats, and how birds are different from mammals and reptiles,” she said.

“This kind of knowledge organization helps children retrieve what they have learned from memory, it helps them reason on the basis of what they learned and helps them integrate new information. It is a key part of learning.”

Unger noted that both camps in the study charged parents for their children to attend and attracted mostly kids from middle-class families and above. That could be an issue for families who can’t afford to send their children to camps.

“Our study showed that the zoo camp really did enrich the children who attended. It may help explain at least a part of the learning opportunity gap between children who have access to camps like this and those who don’t.”

The study was supported by grants from the Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences and by the James S. McDonnell Foundation 21st Century Science Initiative in Understanding Human Cognition – Scholar Award.

A new study from The Ohio State University found that mailing at-home HPV tests to hard-to-reach women may be a viable approach, one that could be especially helpful in regions such as Appalachia, where access to women’s health care can be limited.

The study, which appears in the journal Sexually Transmitted Diseases, found that almost 80 percent of women who received the kits used them and sent them back to the researchers for testing. About a quarter of them tested positive for a cancer-causing type of HPV.

Women were first contacted to gauge their interest in participating in the study, then sent a screening kit to return by U.S. mail. The kit included a device called an Evalyn Brush that has a small brush on its end that a woman inserts like a tampon to collect cells from the cervix and/or vagina. Participants received up to $85 in gift cards for their participation, though they did not receive gift cards for returning their screening kit.

“The return rate was so much higher than we expected – we thought maybe 30 or 40 percent of the women would send the tests back, based on experiences in other countries,” said Paul Reiter, an associate professor of health behavior and health promotion at Ohio State.

“There’s a lot of interest in exploring more widespread use of these tests in the U.S., particularly to increase screening rates among women who aren’t getting regular care,” said Reiter, who is part of the cancer control research program at Ohio State’s Comprehensive Cancer Center (OSUCCC).

HPV is a very common virus; about one in four adults in the U.S. are infected with a cancer-causing type of HPV, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which collaborated on this study. Most infections clear without causing health problems, but in some cases they lead to cancer of the cervix, vulva, vagina, penis, anus or throat. Almost all cervical cancers are caused by persistent HPV infection.

About half of the 103 women in this study, called the Health Outcomes through Motivation and Education Project, had not been screened for cervical cancer through Pap testing in more than five years. Current U.S. screening guidelines call for a combination of Pap testing and HPV testing every five years for women 30 to 65 years old and for Pap testing alone every three years for women 21 to 29 years old.

Rates of cervical cancer screening are lower than average in Appalachian Ohio communities in the southeastern part of the state where the women in this study lived, and rates of cervical cancer deaths are higher.

Many people do not know what HPV is, or how common it is, Reiter said, adding that HPV testing in conjunction with Pap smears is a powerful tool because it can alert a woman and her health care provider to health problems and help prevent cervical cancer. Women who have infections can be monitored more closely.

The researchers partnered with federally qualified health centers in southeast Ohio to identify the women in the study, which was co-led by Mira Katz, a professor of health behavior and health promotion and a researcher with the OSUCCC.

Initially, some providers at the Ohio clinics that participated in the study were concerned about at-home HPV testing, fearing that women might forgo other health services, Reiter said.

“But the reality is that many of these women are not coming in regularly anyway. We think these at-home tests can help open the door to follow-up visits to a health care provider,” he said.

Women who sent in an HPV test were notified that their results were available and advised to make an appointment with their local health center to receive their results. In the study, only 11 percent had a follow-up Pap test to screen for cervical cancer, and Pap testing was most common among those women with high-risk HPV types detected in their sample.

“We appreciate the importance of figuring out how to get these women to come to the clinic. One of the things that we would need to think about moving forward with our research is minimizing the drop-off we saw,” Reiter said.

“Ideally, this testing should be a springboard for getting women into the health care system.”

One limitation of the research is that the women who received test kits knew they were coming in advance, and had already agreed to participate in the study. Because of that, the researchers do not have a clear picture of how a broader program outside of a research protocol would be received, Reiter said. He and Katz are hoping to conduct a larger study designed to more closely mimic how a home screening program would work in a real-world setting.

“We’re really interested in seeing if we’d see the same level of enthusiasm if we did this among a much larger number of women without contacting them prior to sending the home test,” Reiter said.

Previous surveys had found that some women were apprehensive about the at-home tests, worrying that they’d use them incorrectly or that the sample wouldn’t be good enough for HPV testing, so the Ohio State researchers also tested a set of instructions they developed that was designed to be more user-friendly, using fewer clinical terms, and written in more of a story format with several pictures.

But they found no difference between the group of women who received the manufacturer’s instructions and those who used the experimental Ohio State materials.

The at-home HPV tests are widely used in other countries, including Australia and the Netherlands, but they are not yet an approved or recommended screening approach in the U.S.

Other Ohio State researchers who worked on the study were Abigail Shoben and Electra Paskett.

Funding came from National Cancer Institute and from Pelotonia, a grassroots cycling event that has raised more than $184 million for cancer research conducted at Ohio State.

Scientists have long believed that when there is open access to a shared resource, people will inevitably overuse it, leading to ruin for everyone – an idea known as the “tragedy of the commons.”

But in an analysis of eight case studies from around the world – from foragers in Australia to mangrove fishers in Ecuador – researchers found that people can successfully share and sustainably use resources, under certain conditions.

“We’ve been told that if there is open access, then there must be tragedy, but that’s simply not true,” said Mark Moritz, lead author of the paper and associate professor of anthropology at The Ohio State University.

“We’ve been blinded by the theoretical models. Using a new approach has helped us see from a different perspective.”

The paper was published today (11-26-18) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The classic example of the tragedy of the commons is shepherds who share an open pasture. Each shepherd adds to the number of animals he has, because use of the grazing land is free. But the result is that the land is overgrazed, leaving it ruined for everyone.

But Moritz knew from his own research that this tragedy is not inevitable. He studies pastoralists in Cameroon for whom “keeping livestock is a way of life for them, as well as a way to make a living,” he said.

They live nomadically, seasonally moving cattle from place to place, sharing the grazing land but not depleting the resources.

In the PNAS paper, Moritz and his colleagues compared the cases they knew, which have been studied ethnographically for decades and for which they had long-term social and ecological data.

They found that the successful case studies worked as complex adaptive systems, where interactions between social and ecological processes lead to sustainable outcomes.

Successful systems were self-organizing, resulting in efficient, equitable and sustainable resource use.

“There is no central decision making or collective decision making about resource use. Individual users decide when and where to move or harvest resources. The system self-organizes so that the distribution of resources matches the distribution of the users,” Moritz said.

While open access implies no rules, Moritz said there actually are rules. People usually need to ask permission from current users to use a resource, such as grazing land. But permission is almost always granted.

The researchers found that to avoid the tragedy of the commons, people have to use the environmental resources appropriately. In Cameroon, that means pastoralists move their cattle in response to seasonal rains that bring the grasses on which their animals feed.

“The inappropriate way to use the resources would be to put up a fence and keep the animals there throughout the year, even during periods when there is no rain and the grass isn’t growing,” Moritz said.

That’s why freedom of movement is one of the key conditions necessary to successfully share resources. Other necessary conditions include low population densities, low market value of the resources, variability in resource distribution and an ethos of sharing.

The researchers say that where the conditions are right for successful and sustainable use, there is no need to “manage” the resources, Moritz said.

“The standard approach is to protect the resource. But you can’t see the resource in isolation. We have to look at the social-ecological system as a whole,” he said.

“People are part of the ecosystem. They are not managing the ecosystem, they are using it. You can’t separate people from resources they are use.”

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the National Geographic Society, the Rust Family Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, and EU Inco-Copernicus.

Ohio State co-authors were Ian Hamilton, associate professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology, as well as mathematics; Sui Phang, post-doctoral researcher in evolution, ecology and organismal biology; and Sean Downey, associate professor of anthropology.

Other co-authors came from the Odessa Centre, University of Maine, Pennsylvania State University, Instituo de Pesquisas Ecológicas (IPE), American Center for Mongolian Studies and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ).

While the rest of Buckeye Nation was busy crossing out the letter “M,” a planet discovered by a team co-led by Ohio State University astronomers spent last week crushing other planets in an international, intergalactic competition known as the ExoCup. The ExoCup, hosted by a trio of scientists who host a podcast devoted to exoplanets, is a friendly March Madness-style competition that lands the winner the right to claim “best planet outside our solar system.”

“I did not think we were going to make it out of the first round,” said Scott Gaudi, professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University and a leader of the study that identified the planet. “It’s been fun.”

The planet Gaudi and his team discovered is a gas giant nearly twice the size of Jupiter that is almost as hot as our own sun. Planet KELT-9b orbits a star more than 600 light years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus, sometimes also called The Swan, which is visible during summer and fall in the northern sky.

To win the ExoCup finals, KELT-9b had to prevail over four rounds against other planets, including a finals win against PDS 70b, a very young planet that researchers witnessed being “born” earlier this year. Voters cast ballots on Twitter – KELT-9b ended the competition on Friday with 51 percent of the vote.

“May the hottest planet win – and that planet is without a doubt KELT-9b,” Gaudi quipped before the finals.

KELT-9b’s daytime temperature is a balmy 4,600 Kelvin (about 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit) and only 1,700 degrees cooler than our solar system’s sun. It is so hot that astronomers believe there are no solids on KELT-9b – only gases such as hydrogen and helium. In addition to hydrogen and helium, KELT-9b’s atmosphere likely contains gaseous titanium and iron.

“It is literally hotter than most stars,” Gaudi said.

And, because it is latched to its star – a star christened KELT-9, a star twice as large and nearly twice as hot as our own – KELT-9b, with an orbital period of only about 1.5 days, is under constant threat of evaporation.

Gaudi and his co-authors, who include astronomers from Vanderbilt and Lehigh Universities, first reported the new planet in a June 2017 issue of the journal Nature and at a presentation at the American Astronomical Society’s spring meeting.

“It’s a planet by any of the typical definitions based on mass, but its atmosphere is almost certainly unlike any other planet we’ve ever seen just because of the temperature of its day side,” Gaudi said at the time.

As the finals votes came in last week, planet hunters on Twitter debated the merits of each planet, and the telescopes used to find each. KELT-9b was discovered with the equivalent of camera lens; PDS 70b was found through the Gemini telescope in Chile.

In the end, the Buckeye planet was victorious.

"Hats off to a worthy finals adversary: PDS 70b,” Gaudi said. “Thanks to the KELT team and our family of professional and amateur scientists who helped discover KELT-9b. Finally, thanks to everyone out there for voting in the 2018 ExoCup, and reminding us all how exciting exoplanets are!"

This story was updated from a previous version.

Researchers at The Ohio State University studied 705 tobacco users and found no differences in quit rates for “dual users” of both traditional and electronic cigarettes.

This research adds important information to the conversation as public health and medical professionals grapple with the role vaping might play in reducing cigarette smoking, said study senior author Mary Ellen Wewers, a professor emeritus of health behavior and health promotion, and a member of Ohio State’s Center of Excellence in Tobacco Regulatory Science.

Participants in the study were part of a larger group of about 1,200 rural and urban Ohioans whose habits are being followed by researchers. All of them are considered heavy tobacco users – those who smoke every day or at least some days every week.

The study appears in the journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research.

The researchers sat down with participants every six months for 18 months to ask them about tobacco use, interest in quitting and quit attempts they’d made. They also documented what type of tobacco products the participants used.

At the first check-in, six months into the study, the dual users were more likely to have stopped using tobacco, but that difference disappeared by the 1-year and 18-month interviews. By the end of the study, most dual users were back to smoking cigarettes exclusively.

“The initial difference we saw might be due to a higher interest in quitting among the dual users, but that higher quit rate vanished with time,” said lead author Laura Sweet, a graduate student in Ohio State’s College of Public Health.

“Tobacco is such a huge killer, and if these products help people quit, that could be really significant for public health. But in this study it looks like they don’t, and we need to know that as well,” Sweet said.

Though electronic products still deliver nicotine and much remains unknown about their long-term health effects,there’s general agreement that they are less harmful than cigarettes in adults.

“The hope would be that adult cigarette smokers are trying e-cigarettes because they want to stop cigarettes and are looking for alternatives to help them,” Wewers said, adding that she and others who work on tobacco prevention are concerned that younger people who vape will start there and transition to cigarettes down the road.

The researchers can’t be sure what factors contributed to their findings, but the results prompted Sweet to wonder if many adults who smoke and vape are doing so because vaping is more accepted in certain environments, rather than because vaping might help them drop nicotine altogether, she said.

Wewers, a member of the Cancer Control Research Program at Ohio State’s Comprehensive Cancer Center, said she wasn’t surprised to see a higher likelihood of quitting cigarettes at six months in the dual users, because that group expressed greater interest in quitting overall.

“It makes sense that during the first few months they may do better at quitting, but given that cigarette smoking is such a cyclical thing – people quit and resume all the time – it’s not surprising that they went back to smoking after a year,” she said.

Because this study didn’t assess light smokers or those who consider themselves “social” smokers, it’s hard to say what role vaping might play in quitting, Wewers said.

But for health care providers trying how best to help heavy smokers quit, this study could help inform those doctor-patient conversations, she said.

“Providers get questions about trying e-cigarettes all the time from people who want to quit. Our paper would suggest that it’s not a promising approach – the majority don’t quit, and most of them go back to combustible products exclusively,” Wewers said.

“This reinforces the recommendation that there are good, approved medications and nicotine-replacement products out there now and that those should be the first-line approach to helping smokers quit.”

The study findings are limited in that the researchers relied on self-reported information from the smokers and did not conduct tests to confirm whether someone had quit. But the study is stronger than some other similar work, because it used a randomly selected sample of smokers in both an urban Ohio county and in six Appalachian counties in the state, Wewers said.

Next, Wewers said she’s interested in exploring the role of flavored products for those who vape, and wants to know more about what motivates smokers to pick up e-cigarettes.

“Is it because e-cigarettes haven’t been banned to the same extent as cigarettes? Is it that there’s so much advertising? We’d really like some answers to these questions.”

Theodore Brasky, Sarah Cooper, Nathan Doogan, Alice Hinton, Elizabeth Klein, Haikady Nagaraja, Amanda Quisenberry and Wenna Xi – all of Ohio State – also worked on the study.

The National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration supported the research.