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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The findings have practical implications for conservation and climate policy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The study was recently published in the journal Energy Policy. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The study was recently published in the journal Ecological Indicators.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s really important that we understand broadly how to track disease in our community,” said Karen Dannemiller, senior author of the study and an associate professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering and environmental health sciences at The Ohio State University. “Similar to wastewater monitoring, which tracks disease clusters on a large-scale level, we’ve created an intermediate tool that has those same benefits for a smaller population.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The study was recently published in the journal Scientific Reports.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“By coming up with creative solutions to address unforeseen problems, the high-quality data we collected each night was carefully and confidently used to obtain the exciting cosmological constraints that DESI is now known for,” said Ross. 

Now, with this new completed set of data, scientists will have significantly more information to test long-held hypotheses about the balance between dark energy and matter, and their answers may mark a major shift in how we think about our universe and its potential fate. 

Having measured cosmological data for six times as many galaxies and quasars as all previous measurements combined, the collaboration plans to immediately begin processing their completed dataset in the coming months, with the first dark energy results from DESI’s full five-year survey expected in 2027. 

After completing the original five-year mission, DESI plans to continue observations through 2028. This will include expanding its survey to include parts of the sky that are more challenging to observe: Constructing a more detailed map of the cosmos may also make it easier for scientists to study nearby objects like dwarf galaxies and stellar streams, and grant them the ability to paint a much clearer picture of the universe’s formation and history, said Honscheid. 

But in the meantime, the Ohio State team will continue refining their dark energy measurements by analyzing data gathered during the first three years, and optimize their telescope time and its capabilities to help make exciting new observations. 

“A larger survey footprint will greatly improve our constraints on cosmological parameters and improve our dark matter program,” said Honscheid. “But these achievements are only possible because the operations team worked incredibly hard to keep the survey progressing.”

Other Ohio State contributors to DESI include Matthew Berno, Mikel Charles, Carl Coker, Rebecca Coles, Andrei Cuceu, Xinyi Chen, Mark Derwent, Ann Elliott, Jack Elvin-Poole, Lauren Ennesser, Kevin Fanning, Simon Filbert, Meagan Herbold, Jennifer Johnson, Naim Karacayli, Hui Kong, Claire Lamman, Thomas O’Brien, Daniel Pappalardo, Richard Pogge, Anna Porredon, Michael Rashkovetskyi, Jon Shover, Peter Taylor, Wynne Turner, David Weinberg, Molly Wolfson and Erik Zaborowski. 

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

The DESI collaboration is honored to be permitted to conduct scientific research on I’oligam Du’ag (Kitt Peak), a mountain with particular significance to the Tohono O’odham Nation.

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

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

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

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

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

The research was published recently in PLOS Biology. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Better, faster classification of viruses 

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

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

The paper was published recently in Nature Biotechnology. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Using a special laser 3D printing method, researchers melted fake lunar soil – a synthetic version of the fine dusty material on the moon surface, called regolith simulant – into layers and fused it with a base surface to manufacture small, heat-resistant objects. 

If utilized on the lunar surface, the material may help build sturdy, nontoxic habitats and tools for future astronauts, capabilities that would be vital to the NASA Artemis missions that aim to establish a long-term human presence on the moon by the end of the decade.

But to assess how well this new construction material may work in space, the team tested their fabrication process under a range of different environmental conditions, revealing that the overall quality of the material depends greatly on the surface onto which the soil is printed.  

“By combining different feedstocks, like metal and ceramics, in the printing process, we found that the final material is really sensitive to the environment,” said Sizhe Xu, lead author of the study and a graduate research associate in industrial systems engineering at The Ohio State University. “Different environments lead to different properties, which directly affect the mechanical strength and the thermal shock resistance of certain components.”

The study was recently published in the journal Acta Astronautica.

There are two types of lunar regolith simulants that scientists use to study the surface of the moon. The one this team used, called LHS-1, is designed to replicate soil found in the lunar highlands, a heavily cratered area rife with dark-colored basaltic rock. 

In this case, researchers discovered that while trying to print LHS-1 on stainless steel and glass surfaces was challenging, it adhered well to alumina-silicate ceramic, likely because the two compounds form crystals that enhance thermal stability and mechanical strength. 

Other environmental factors, such as the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, the strength of the laser and even the speed of the printing process, were also shown to impact the stability of the structure, said Sarah Wolff, senior author of the study and an assistant professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State.

“There are conditions that happen in space that are really hard to emulate in a simulant,” she said. “It may work in the lab, but in a resource-scarce environment, you have to try everything to maximize the flexibility of a machine for different scenarios.”

Unsurprisingly, developing special systems for prolonged space travel is one of the most challenging aspects of successful human exploration, as technologies created for In-Situ Resource Utilization, or the harnessing of local natural resources at mission destinations, must be engineered to survive extreme vacuum, dust and thermal environmental conditions.

To accomplish this, scientists are rapidly evolving additive manufacturing systems, which would help reduce the need to transport large quantities of materials and heavy equipment from Earth and enable astronauts to create an array of structures, tools and habitats. 

The promise of these technologies would not only save essential mission time but also allow for extended independence as crews travel into deep space. 

Still, more data is needed to overcome any potential limitations future travelers might face as they lift off for other worlds. This study, for example, suggests that instead of being powered by electricity as their printing system is on Earth, future designs of the system could likely be scaled up using solar-driven or other hybrid power architectures. 

“There are so many applications that we’re working toward that with new information, the possibilities are endless,” said Xu. 

This team’s work also extends beyond supporting humanity’s push to the stars, as gaining a better sense of how manufacturing might work in space could help researchers discover new ways to address critical material shortages back home, said Wolff. 

“If we can successfully manufacture things in space using very few resources, that means we can also achieve better sustainability on Earth,” she said. “To that end, improving the machine’s flexibility for different scenarios is a goal we’re working really hard toward.”

Other Ohio State co-authors include Marwan Haddad, Aslan Bafahm Alamdari, Annabel Shim and Alan Luo. 

The study was supported by Ohio State’s Institute for Materials and Manufacturing Research and the Center for Electron Microscopy and Analysis. 

As one of the most mysterious of our planet’s natural disasters, earthquakes’ location and timing have been impossible to precisely predict. But scientists do know that the most destructive of these events occur in subduction zones, regions where tectonic plates often collide and shift past one another. 

These zones of immense activity make them ideal places to search for phenomena that could herald future quakes. To that end, previous studies have suggested that satellite data could be the key to early warnings months ahead of big earthquakes, challenging the belief that large earthquakes are immune to precision forecasting in time. 

Now, by analyzing measurements made by NASA’s GRACE and GRACE-FO satellites, researchers found that relying on precursors formed from single data points is largely invalid, said Lei Wang, author of the study and an associate professor in civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at The Ohio State University. 

“Earthquake risk can be affected by a lot of different factors,” said Wang. “Many also happen over hundreds and tens of hundreds of years apart, so a few decades of modern data isn’t sufficient enough to accurately predict them.” The research was recently presented at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

While scientists have gained insights into the processes that trigger earthquakes, being able to offer advance notice of these volatile events is still a challenge they haven’t overcome. Instead, such programs work by detecting fast-moving seismic waves quickly enough that those nearby can be alerted, usually only seconds to minutes before shaking arrives.

In contrast to earthquake data gathered by sensor instruments on the ground, the twin GRACE satellites monitor changes in Earth’s gravity and track mass water redistribution in reservoirs over land, ice and in the oceans. In this study, the team used their data to determine if large-scale gravity changes had been detected several hundred miles below ground in the months before the 2010 8.8 Maule earthquake in Chile and the 2011 9.0 Tohoku megathrust earthquake in Japan. 

After comprehensively analyzing and comparing multiple gravity data solutions with other anomalous GPS statistics around the globe, the team concluded that satellites are no better at predicting changes under the earth than any other conventional geodetic techniques. 

“If satellites actually could detect anomalous changes to Earth’s uniform gravity, it would revolutionize our understanding of earthquake mechanisms and shed new light on prediction and mitigation science,” said Wang. “But there’s no solid evidence for it.”

Even if satellites could reveal signs of future earthquakes, it’s likely this method wouldn’t be useful on a global scale, especially in areas that show distinct earthquake mechanisms, said Dhamsith Weerasinghe, co-author of the study and a PhD student in civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at Ohio State. 

“Even if we modeled a known place, we couldn’t apply those findings to another because of the different geometry and different material in that environment,” said Weerasinghe. “It’d take too long to discover and understand certain changes.”

To keep refining the method, the team plans to examine if there were any notable gravity precursors to the 8.8 earthquake that took place this year in Kamchatka, Russia. In the meantime, Wang hopes this work will help future scientists learn how to combine historical data with new advances in geodesy and environmental monitoring. 

“To accurately predict an earthquake that is days or hours away, the technology we have now is a little premature,” said Wang. “That’s why we need some young people with passion to jump in and make promising strides in the field.”

These particles, called extracellular vesicles, are known to safely carry signaling cargo as a communication method between cells in bodily fluids and within tissue, and to influence health and disease. Understanding how the properties of these vesicles differ in normal versus diseased tissue could make them outstanding biomarkers for early disease detection, researchers say. 

Scientists at The Ohio State University have made inroads into understanding one side of that equation, finding that extracellular vesicles’ range of travel in a cancer tumor environment is limited almost entirely to nearby recipient cells – which is related to how densely packed cells are in a tumor. 

“This is the first assessment of how far a vesicle can move in physiological conditions. We didn’t perturb the system. We just measured on a single-cell basis how far a vesicle can go,” said senior study author Emanuele Cocucci, associate professor of pharmaceutics and pharmacology at Ohio State, who is studying these particles – and how physiological conditions affect them – to weigh their potential as biomarkers for pancreatic cancer. 

“There are no clear biomarkers for pancreatic cancer at the moment. Our goal is to define a novel biomarker,” said Cocucci, also a member of the Leukemia and Hematologic Malignancies Program at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center. “But until we know how extracellular vesicle exchange occurs in tissue before and during cancer onset, it’s impossible to understand whether extracellular vesicles could be the next answer for early diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.” 

The study was published recently in the Journal of Extracellular Vesicles. 

This work involved a series of cell culture experiments in two cancer cell types, first showing that increasing the density of cells in a petri dish led to a decrease in the number of vesicles released per cell – suggesting either the cell-to-cell interface inhibits release of vesicles, or that neighboring cells are gobbling the particles up. 

Researchers then used a technique that tagged donor cells – those releasing extracellular vesicles – with one color of dye and all other surrounding cells with a different color, and observed the vesicle activity at a single-cell level using flow cytometry. Results showed that the surrounding cells engulfed many of the vesicles and, in some cases, degraded them. Though any signal exchange was not measured, the results clearly showed that the vesicles didn’t stray very far from their donor cells. 

“I was expecting we would see a huge exchange over a distance, and that no matter what, the vesicles would diffuse away, so the chance for being taken up nearby or far away should have been the same,” Cocucci said. “Instead, that seems not to be the case. When cells are close together, they share more vesicles with each other.” 

To analyze what would happen in living tissue, tumors were developed in mice and then injected with one vesicle donor cell for every 3,000 acceptor cells, all dyed so they could be identified through confocal microscopy imaging. After introducing a chemical to prevent any degradation of the particles, the researchers measured how far extracellular vesicles dispersed from the donor cells. 

The findings showed that 80% of the vesicles stayed within 40 microns – or 40 thousandths of a meter – of the donor cell, and 95% of these carriers traveled no farther than 70 microns away, a distance roughly equal to the thickness of a human hair. 

Computational modeling predicted the same result.

“If we interpret this in a tissue situation, then donor cells will release vesicles, and the cells most affected by vesicle release are the surrounding cells,” Cocucci said. “When you go two to three cells away, these cells will affect the neighboring cells – suggesting that the majority of the effect of vesicles is constrained within 70 microns from the cell of origin.” 

Cocucci’s lab is now developing tools for use in animal models that would allow the team to investigate and define the contribution of each tissue to the circulating pool of extracellular vesicles. 

“If the release of the vesicle changes according to the physiological state of the tissue, this means the contribution of each tissue to the circulating extracellular vesicle pool changes according to the status of the tissue itself,” he said. “If you are able to define the contribution of each tissue in normal or disease conditions to the circulating pool of vesicles, then when we analyze vesicles from a patient, we may be able to suggest, without bias, a diagnosis without further analysis.” 

This research was supported by the National Cancer Institute, the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center, Ohio Cancer Research via the McCurdy/Kimball Midwest Research Fund, the American-Italian Cancer Foundation and a Pelotonia Postdoctoral Fellowship. 

Additional co-authors were Federico Colombo, Kartik Nimkar, Erienne Grace Norton and Francesca Lovat, all of Ohio State.

This was recently demonstrated by researchers investigating how a total solar eclipse might affect the soundscape of Midwestern United States prairie communities. Their objective was to discover how soundscapes — combinations of natural and artificial sounds that shape an environment — are influenced by ambient light, as light level helps cue annual biological events such as sexual reproduction and migration. 

Using novel acoustic capture devices to record animal vocalizations in the days before, during and after the April 2024 eclipse, researchers measured changes in soundscape diversity, complexity, and intensity at three different sites in Ohio: Larry R. Yoder Prairie Learning Laboratory, the Tecumseh Nature Preserve and Highbanks Metro Park. Their findings showed that while the eclipse was associated with both changes in sound activity and diversity, it was not associated with major changes in acoustic complexity.

“Solar eclipses are wonderful events that let us experiment in natural settings what sudden losses of light could be doing to animals,” said Madison Von Deylen, lead author of the study and a PhD student in evolution, ecology and organismal biology at The Ohio State University. 

“Both overexposure and underexposure to light can have negative consequences on animal physiology, and only a handful of studies have experimentally assessed how eclipses influence animal behavior.”

The study was recently published in the journal Ethology Ecology & Evolution. 

While similar soundscape research has been used to detect cryptic species and even identify members of those once thought extinct, Von Deylen said this study is one of the few to have used passive acoustic monitoring to quantify the effects of a solar eclipse on the animal soundscape. 

“We used a fairly novel technique to accomplish this,” she said. “Acoustic monitoring and soundscape analysis has a lot of promise for being able to track changes in ecosystem composition over time.”

Analyzing these subtle ecosystem changes allowed the team to dig deeper into the circumstances behind their results. For example, the time of year was important in this work. Any number of environmental differences would have altered the natural soundscape, but since  the eclipse coincided with the breeding season for many prairie birds, many unique calling patterns were able to be detected. 

Initially, researchers expected that a sudden decrease in ambient light would cause the prairie soundscape to mimic that of dusk. Their results suggest that overall sound activity was highest on the day of the eclipse, suggesting that even temporary environmental changes, such as lowered temperatures and moon phases, can inspire unexpected behavioral responses.

These new insights will not only aid scientists in understanding animal adaptability in the wild, but could spark new ideas on how to quantitatively measure environmental change, said Von Deylen, 

“The conclusions that we were able to draw from this study were extremely context-specific,” said Von Deylen. “But it lays the groundwork for more complex, larger-scale studies.” 

Future work will likely aim to sharpen the novel quantitative methods used in this paper so that soundscape analysis can become a vital research tool for other areas of study as well. 

“I’m really excited to see where soundscape work goes in the next couple of decades,” said Von Deylen. ““It will be of great help in answering new conservation questions.”

The study was supported by Ohio State’s Summer Research Opportunities Program. Other Ohio State co-authors include Sabeel Haddad and Susan Gershman. 

Researchers followed up on a 2014 study finding that Ohio’s first established population of blacklegged ticks, carriers of the bacteria that cause Lyme disease, had been detected in 2010 in Coshocton County.

At that time, the infectious bacteria were detected in 2.4% of collected blacklegged ticks and antibodies indicating prior exposure to the pathogen were detected in 20% of white-footed mice, one of the most common of several small mammal sources of wildlife infections to ticks in their nymph and larval stages. 

In the new study, the research team from The Ohio State University found that the prevalence of infection in captured ticks had increased to as much as 47.6% and in infected small mammals, up to 60.4%. 

“Our suspicion was that 10 years later, when we have robust populations of the right hosts in this ecological community in Ohio, that this pathogen vector system could really establish and take off. And that’s what this study essentially shows – that that is what happened,” said senior author Risa Pesapane, associate professor of veterinary preventive medicine at Ohio State.  

“And now Ohio has the same risk as those endemic regions in the Northeast. I think that is surprising to a lot of people because we think, sure, we have the tick and we have some of the hosts, but we’re not Connecticut. But for some parts of Ohio, we are Connecticut at this point.”

Pesapane noted that the risk for infection varies across Ohio and is highest in forested areas in the eastern and southern regions of the state. That said, the presence of blacklegged ticks has been reported in all 88 counties. 

“I think it’s really important to convey, when it comes to both personal protection and to the medical community’s awareness, that you have the same chance of getting Lyme disease in Coshocton, Ohio, and other Ohio areas with the right habitat, that you do in Lyme, Connecticut.” 

The study was published recently in the Journal of Medical Entomology.

Blacklegged ticks, also known as deer ticks, are widely distributed in the eastern United States and are a known carrier of the Borrelia burgdorferi strains of bacteria that cause most North American Lyme disease cases in people and dogs. The ticks also carry Anaplasma phagocytophilum, the pathogen that causes anaplasmosis. 

Ningzhu Bai, a PhD student in the Environment and Natural Resources Graduate Program at Ohio State, led this study for her master’s thesis. The team collected 654 ticks demonstrating questing behavior and trapped 106 small mammals. Ticks pick up the infectious bacteria from small mammals that are reservoir hosts, which infect the ticks that bite them for a blood meal. 

Deer, by the way, are not involved in the cycle of infection that occurs in ticks’ earliest life stages, but are strongly linked to blacklegged ticks because white-tailed deer are the main hosts of adult ticks that are looking for blood meals and mates. 

The researchers extracted genomic DNA from 368 ticks and from mammal tissue and blood samples to test for Borrelia burgdorferi and Anaplasma phagocytophilum. 

“It was shocking to find that infection prevalence increased from 2.4% for Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato to almost 50% in 10 years,” Bai said. “And it was also really high for Borrelia burgdorferi sensu stricto – over 40% carried that pathogen.” 

The infection prevalence in ticks for the anaplasmosis pathogen was 15.5%. Six of the eight mammal species tested positive for infectious bacteria with prevalence of 60.4%, 19.8% and 11.9% for the same pathogens, respectively. White-footed mice and eastern chipmunks were the most frequently infected hosts. 

“When I talk to people, I like to stress this means one out of every two ticks that you might encounter in Ohio could possibly be infected,” said Pesapane, who also has a faculty appointment in Ohio State’s School of Environment and Natural Resources. 

The study provides the ecological data needed to guide where interventions could have the most impact – evaluating the effectiveness of tick-killing acaricides on small mammal reservoirs is an upcoming research plan for the Coshocton properties visited in this study. 

“Ecological interventions are challenging. That’s why we keep promoting personal protective actions, which work extremely well,” Pesapane said. Steps include wearing tick repellent and long sleeves and pants, and tucking pants into socks while outdoors; performing a thorough tick check once inside, and showering; and using preventives for companion animals. 

In Ohio, these protective tasks are worth it, she said: “If we look from 2010 all the way to 2025, there’s been a 48-fold increase in the number of Lyme disease cases in Ohio, and we are going to be considered a high-incidence state moving forward.” 

In addition to frequently collecting and studying ticks of medical concern across Ohio, Pesapane invites the public to mail ticks to her lab. She is also the faculty director of the Buckeye Tick Test, an Ohio State service that tests submitted ticks for pathogens that cause disease, including Lyme disease, for a fee. 

These submissions, and her own research, have made it clear that tick bites are not only a warm-weather threat. 

“Even on days that have snow, as long as the ambient temperature is above freezing, blacklegged ticks will be seeking hosts and biting rather indiscriminately whomever they encounter,” she said. “So year-round, there’s a tick exposure risk.” 

Andreas Eleftheriou of Ohio State was also a co-author of the study. This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

The result of a global buildup in plastic pollution, microplastics and nanoplastics are small synthetic particles produced when plastic products are used or degrade. These plastic fragments are found nearly everywhere in the environment, including the nation’s waterways. 

To better understand the concentration levels in a segment of the U.S. water supply, scientists analyzed water samples from four treatment plants near Lake Erie and six different brands of bottled water. Their results showed that bottled water contained three times as many nanoplastic particles as the treated drinking water, said Megan Jamison Hart, lead author of the study and a PhD candidate in environmental sciences at The Ohio State University.

“We can make educated choices to try and reduce our daily exposure to these harmful chemicals,” said Hart. “For the average person who is thirsty and wants a drink, the best way to do that would be drinking it straight out of the tap rather than grabbing pre-bottled water.”

While previous research evaluated the presence of microplastics in different drinking water sources few have centered on nanoplastics, likely because their extremely small size makes them a challenge to study, said Hart. Using a combination of imaging (scanning electron microscopy) and chemical identification (optical photothermal infrared spectroscopy) techniques allowed the team to detect and identify particles down to their smallest parts.

The study was recently published in the journal Science of The Total Environment. 

Although the extent of microplastics’ effect on human health is still unclear, many experts suggest their presence may be detrimental to our well-being in the long term, as smaller plastic pieces, called nanoplastics, are more likely to cross vital biological barriers in the body. 

“While we don’t really fully understand the human health risks associated with nanoplastic exposure, it’s still better to try and mitigate that risk because evidence indicates that they do cause problems, even if we’re not fully aware of what those are yet,” said Hart. 

During their experiments, researchers found that the most common plastics in the bottled water came from the bottled water packaging, which they expected, but the source of the plastics in the drinking water is still unclear. Over 50% of all the particles detected were nanoplastics, demonstrating how pervasive these tiny chemicals can be, even in drinking water.

These details confirm that nanoplastics are a significant component of the world’s overall amount of microplastic contamination and scientists likely underestimate the true scope of their environmental threat, said John Lenhart, senior author of the study and a professor of environmental engineering at Ohio State.

“The concentrations we saw were higher than anticipated, which, unlike prior studies, we were able to attribute to the inclusion of the nanoplastics,” said Lenhart. “That emphasis validates a lot of the information we’ve learned.”

Incorporating nanoplastics into this study’s measurements may lead to additional insights down the line, including whether the team’s analytical techniques could also be utilized to evaluate which treatment processes work best at removing these silent invaders from the environment. 

“By understanding the basic composition of the materials in water and the reactions important for controlling that composition, we can make better design decisions for future treatment or for remediation,” said Lenhart. “That’s why analyses like these are so promising.”

The study was supported by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration through its Ohio Sea Grant College Program and the National Science Foundation.  

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

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

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

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

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

The research was published recently in Nature Microbiology. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trees are the planet’s living lungs; they remove carbon from the atmosphere to clean the air, and filter our water. Yet depending on their species, not all record long-term environmental changes, such as fires, floods and droughts, in the same way. 

By analyzing how various types of tree rings grow in response to these distinct weather-related events, researchers discovered that some can act as useful tools in managing local watersheds, that drain water into nearby streams and rivers. 

Specifically, they found that trees in the Midwest are extremely apt at recalling past wet and dry conditions, noting that using more than one type of tree’s rings to reconstruct previous environmental periods can paint a much more accurate picture of the region’s current water ecosystem.

“One human lifespan is not going to show us the big picture,” said Alessandra Bertucci, lead author of the study and a graduate student in food, agricultural and biological engineering at The Ohio State University. “So using trees to address these gaps of understanding is really important for managing water resources, even in intensively managed watersheds.“ 

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, healthy watersheds serve nature by helping to ensure water quality, connecting aquatic habitats and ecosystems, and shaping diverse biological communities. But when left unprotected, they eventually degrade, leading to issues like less productive fisheries and polluted drinking water.

Consequently, as the planet continues to warm and water resources are impacted, learning new ways to manage altered watersheds is an urgent priority, said Bertucci. The research was presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

While tree ring chronologies are often used to understand long-term climate changes in the western United States, the tool is often left out of similar studies of the Midwest, where large-scale agricultural production relies heavily on the health of local watersheds. Additionally, already scarce instrumental data in some areas can make it difficult for researchers to grasp historical trends in the region, resulting in misleading estimates about past events, said Bertucci. 

These hurdles motivated Bertucci’s team to retrieve tree cores from places where watershed data reporting is sorely lacking, such the Old Woman Creek State Nature Preserve near Lake Erie in northern Ohio. There, they took samples from three species of common riparian trees and will plan to compare aspects like ring width and density to real recorded climate data.

Now, with updated measurements, the team expects to be able to build models that could predict how weather and local water flow will change over the next few decades. 

“If we can round out that historical data and understand what to expect, we can better plan for how to manage our water resources in the future,” said Bertucci. These improved solutions might include helping local resource managers determine which environmental conditions to focus on accounting for when coming up with smart water-saving strategies. 

In the future, the team will work to increase the range of tree species they sample and utilize the expanded data they gather to create better reconstruction models of other important watersheds. These models may be especially helpful to farmers in the Midwest, and later on, the United States as a whole. 

“Water is life,” said Bertucci. “We literally cannot live without it, so it’s important to protect and make sure that we are taking care of it, because that is our lifeline.”

Bertucci conducted the research with Lorrayne Miralha, assistant professor of food, agricultural and biological engineering at Ohio State. 

From transportation and telecommunications to finance and public infrastructure, nearly all sectors depend on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) such as GPS for critical positioning, navigation and timing information. Yet as these signals are highly susceptible to interference like intentional jamming and spoofing, new technologies are needed to counter this dependence. 

Now, by exploiting signals from the Starlink and OneWeb constellations — satellites primarily used to deliver secure internet connectivity — researchers found they could be used to improve ship navigation accuracy in the Arctic, an area where GPS coverage and signals are typically degraded. Results showed that exploiting Starlink and OneWeb LEO signals with height data from a ship sailing off the west coast of Greenland significantly increased navigation accuracy, effectively reducing errors from more than a kilometer (without GPS) to 27 meters.

Being able to yield more precise navigation data in such a challenging region like the Arctic means that safe and effective satellite “eavesdropping” may be feasible from nearly anywhere on Earth, said Zak Kassas, co-author of the study and TRC Endowed Chair in Intelligent Transportation Systems and professor of electrical and computer engineering at The Ohio State University. 

“When you lose GPS on a plane or a ship there is no solution at the time being,” said Kassas, who is also director of Ohio State’s Department of Transportation Center for Automated Vehicles Research with Multimodal AssurEd Navigation (CARMEN). “What we showed is that there are solutions ready to be deployed in the field with existing systems.”

The study was recently presented at the 43rd IEEE Military Communications Conference in Los Angeles. It won the IEEE Frederick W. Ellersick Award for the Best Paper in the Unclassified Technical Program. 

This work builds off previous work from Kassas’ ASPIN lab that was the first to exploit Starlink for positioning. Efforts to scale up that research led the team to seek ways to improve their system using ground receivers that can passively listen to frequencies emitted from multiple LEO satellite constellations. Since then, Kassas’ team has demonstrated navigation with LEO satellites across the U.S., from St. Louis on a stationary receiver, to Pittsburgh on a ground vehicle, to Albuquerque on an extremely high-altitude balloon, to Columbus on a ground vehicle and a drone. In their latest experiment, they decided to leave the heartland.

In this experiment, they decided to test their work in the Arctic, as OneWeb’s 600 satellites are plentiful near the north and south poles, while Starlink’s more than 7,000 satellites are present across all other latitudes. 

“We can be smart about what we have already in the environment and use it to navigate,” said Kassas. “Ambient signals, whether they are terrestrial or non-terrestrial (such as LEO), are extremely useful for navigation if you know how to use them.”

According to Kassas, the researchers did not need assistance from the satellite operators (SpaceX and Eutelsat) to use the signals, and they emphasized that they had no access to the actual data being sent through the satellites – only to publicly available information related to the satellites’ downlink transmission frequency and a rough estimate of the satellites’ location.

This discovery, that even satellites that were not intended for navigation can be repurposed and tailored for location services, means that substantially advancing next-gen GNSS systems may be closer and more affordable than researchers thought. According to the study, these results have vital implications for aerospace and defense, and more importantly, because signals from LEO satellites are thousands of times more powerful than GNSS, they would be more secure and much harder to interrupt by bad actors. 

“If someone wants to interfere with LEO signals, they would have to put more effort into it,” said Kassas. The study also suggests that better navigation signal security might lower the risk of international incidents, as many officials suspect escalating cyberattacks caused both the Strait of Hormuz ship collision and the downing of the Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243. 

“Those cyberattacks on GPS are becoming the bread and butter of electronic warfare, and it’s spilling over to civilian systems,” said Kassas. Unsurprisingly, these issues mean that scientists and policymakers can’t afford to wait years to engineer new GNSS workarounds. Instead, the team feels that implementing the systems they’ve presented may be where optimization lies. 

“Our approach is economical, alleviating the need to build and operate new dedicated navigation systems, and sustainable, preserving the scarce spectrum and our space environment, so we believe it will be integrated into future navigation systems,” said Kassas. “We are showing that this dream can be a reality.”

Other co-authors include Will Barrett and Sharbel Kozhaya from Ohio State and David Marsh from The Wilson Center. 

Following up on previous work showing a connection between negative changes to gut bacteria after a traumatic brain injury (TBI) and poor decision making, researchers at The Ohio State University are now exploring whether the gut problems may actually cause some long-term symptoms. 

They found that adding the prebiotic galacto-oligosaccharide (GOS) to rat diets before and after a TBI lowered their impulsivity in a decision-making gambling test in which they are rewarded with sweets. 

“We found in this study that their impulse control has improved,” said senior author Cole Vonder Haar, assistant professor of neuroscience in the Ohio State College of Medicine. 

“In our task, we basically ask them to make a decision, but they have to wait for the cue light to come on. And that’s hard to do if you’re a hungry rat, right? So it sets up a measure of impulsivity, and that’s where we saw one of the most robust effects.” 

The poster was presented Nov. 17 at Neuroscience 2025, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. 

Almost 3 million TBI-related emergency department visits are reported in the United States each year, and over 11 million Americans over 40 who lost consciousness with a TBI are living with a disability, according to the Brain Injury Association of America. 

“There’s no FDA-approved treatment for TBI. People are stuck with their symptoms and do whatever they can to manage those symptoms, whether it’s rehabilitation or pharmacological help for specific symptoms like depression,” Vonder Haar said. 

His lab is studying several interventions to see if a gut-based treatment could provide some relief. “We’re trying to improve the quality of life for people who are suffering and struggling with brain injury-related problems,” he said. 

The work focuses on symptoms that follow a moderate TBI – an injury in rats (occurring under anesthesia) intended to mimic what might happen to a person in a car accident or a fall from a ladder. 

Within the past decade, researchers in the field have determined that gut dysbiosis – a negative change to the collection of bacteria in the digestive tract – occurs in patients after they suffer a moderate brain injury. 

“The core question we’re trying to understand now is whether this is a causal force,” Vonder Haar said. “We’ve previously published data showing that there’s a very strong predictive correlation: If you measure the gut microbiome acutely after the brain injury, it can predict very long-term deficits in decision making. So it seems something is going on, but this earlier work was all correlative.” 

In the new study, rats were fed a control diet or a diet supplemented with 2% GOS beginning six weeks before the injury and continuing for another 60 days after injury. The animals were then tested for anxiety-like and depressive-like behavior, learning and memory, and impulsivity and decision making. 

During the rodent gambling task, which assesses decision making and impulsivity, rats are offered four choices resulting in rewards of varying amounts of sugar pellets, and they learn over time what each option provides. 

“And one of the key things we see is that brain injuries really suppress the ability to do this well,” Vonder Haar said. “Our rat models really show this long-term chronic impairment, which patients also struggle with.” 

Rats on the GOS diet had better outcomes in impulsivity after TBI than injured rats that ate a non-supplemented diet. 

“It’s a modest effect. They’re still more impulsive than control animals without injury, but it’s reduced compared to their counterparts,” Vonder Haar said. “Most of the studies we’ve done to try to treat impulsivity haven’t worked out. This is one of the few times where it looks like a treatment has some beneficial effects.” 

Vonder Haar also chaired a Nov. 16 Neuroscience 2025 minisymposium on the gut microbiome in traumatic brain injury and is the lead author of a new Journal of Neuroscience article reviewing the evidence establishing the gut as a modulator of TBI and potential underlying mechanisms. 

“We know what the behavioral outcome from TBI looks like, but the mechanism, why and how this is happening, is the other big question,” he said. 

The prebiotic study was supported by the U.S. Department of Defense. 

Co-authors of the study include Alexandra Dorinsky, Katie Koontz, Berkin Bilgin, Lizza O’Connell, Jenna McCloskey, Michael Bailey and Kris Martens, all of Ohio State, and Miranda Hilt of Nationwide Children’s Hospital.

In new research, experiments showed that robots trained with this dataset, called RoboSpatial, outperformed those trained with baseline models at the same robotic task, demonstrating a complex understanding of both spatial relationships and physical object manipulation. 

For humans, visual perception shapes how we interact with the environment, from recognizing different people to maintaining an awareness of our body’s movements and position. Despite previous attempts to imbue robots with these skills, efforts have fallen short as most are trained on data that lacks sophisticated spatial understanding.  

Because deep spatial comprehension is necessary for intuitive interactions, if left unaddressed, these spatial reasoning challenges could hinder future AI systems’ ability to comprehend complex instructions and operate in dynamic environments, said Luke Song, lead author of the study and a current PhD student in engineering at The Ohio State University.

“To have true general-purpose foundation models, a robot needs to understand the 3D world around it," he said. “So spatial understanding is one of the most crucial capabilities for it.”

The study was recently given as an oral presentation at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. 

To teach robots how to better interpret perspective, RoboSpatial includes more than a million real-world indoor and tabletop images, thousands of detailed 3D scans, and 3 million labels describing rich spatial information relevant to robotics. Using these vast resources, the framework pairs 2D egocentric images with full 3D scans of the same scene so the model learns to pinpoint objects using either flat-image recognition or 3D geometry. 

According to the study, it’s a process that closely mimics visual cues in the real world. 

For instance, while current training datasets might allow a robot to accurately describe a “bowl on the table,” the model would lack the ability to discern where on the table it actually is, where it should be placed to remain accessible, or how it might fit in with other objects. In contrast, RoboSpatial could rigorously test these spatial reasoning skills in practical robotic tasks, first by demonstrating object rearrangement and then by examining the models’ capacity to generalize to new spatial reasoning scenarios beyond their original training data.

“Not only does this mean improvements on individual actions like picking up and placing things, but also leads to robots interacting more naturally with humans,” said Song. 

One of the systems the team tested this framework on was a Kinova Jaco robot, an assistive arm that helps people with disabilities connect with their environment. 

During training, it was able to answer simple close-ended spatial questions like “can the chair be placed in front of the table?” or “is the mug to the left of the laptop?” correctly. 

These promising results reveal that normalizing spatial context by improving robotic perception could lead to safer and more reliable AI systems, said Song. 

While there are still many unanswered questions about AI development and training, the work concludes that RoboSpatial has the potential to serve as a foundation for broader applications in robotics, noting that more exciting spatial advancements will likely branch from it. 

“I think we will see a lot of big improvements and cool capabilities for robots in the next five to ten years,” said Song. 

Co-authors include Yu Su from Ohio State and Valts Blukis, Jonathan Tremblay, Stephen Tyree and Stan Birchfield from NVIDIA. This work was supported by the Ohio Supercomputer Center.

Findings showed that children’s trust only declined when the villains in a video they watched were explicitly labeled as scientists or talked about them “doing science” in the show.

“Our findings revealed some harmful effects of superhero television, yet those effects appeared weak and limited in scope,” said Blue Lerner, co-author of the study and a doctoral student in communication at The Ohio State University.

“Even then, it is easy to mitigate that harm by removing associations between villainy and science. That’s good news.”

The findings also suggest that the “mad scientist” stereotype may not be as commonly believed by children as previous studies have suggested, said study co-author James Alex Bonus, associate professor of communication at Ohio State.

The study, published this week in the Journal of Media Psychology, involved 256 children aged 8 to 12 and their parents.

At the beginning, participating children completed measures that examined whether they thought scientists were best described as “smart” or “dumb.” They also answered questions that measured three dimensions of trust in scientists: expertise, integrity and benevolence.

“Almost every child rated scientists as smart and gave them high marks for expertise, integrity and benevolence, although their ratings for expertise were higher than integrity and benevolence,” Bonus said.

Participating children watched one of two five-minute segments of the animated Disney program “Marvel’s Spiderman.” One of the videos featured a villainous female scientist character and one featured a heroic female scientist character.

The researchers decided to use female scientist characters for several reasons, one being that previous work has shown that most kids think of scientists as males. It is possible that exposure to female scientists may lead kids to have stronger reactions to villainous or heroic actions because they don’t have ingrained attitudes about female scientists.

One key finding was that children have very positive views of scientists overall. This is inconsistent with a lot of other research that suggests kids have a conception of “mad scientists” doing experiments for evil reasons.

Many of these earlier studies asked kids to draw their view of what a scientist looks like, and the researchers inferred what the children thought about scientists based on their drawings.

These studies found that many children depict scientists in their drawings as evil, crazy and supernatural, Bonus said.

But asking for drawings may get children to think about memorable characters from popular media rather than an average scientist.
 

“When you ask children directly, as we did in this study, it may allow them to evaluate scientists as a broader group,” Bonus said.

“In other words, children may rely on stereotypical imagery when drawing scientists, but also recognize that such portrayals do not reflect all scientists.”

Findings also showed that for impacts on trust, how the villainous scientist was referenced in the video clip was an important factor.

In one version of the video, the researchers edited out all references to the woman being a scientist or doing science as she committed her evil deeds. Children who saw this version of the villainous scientist didn’t show any decreases in trust after viewing the clip.

“Kids may not be identifying the villainous actions of the character as science unless it is explicitly labeled that way,” Lerner said.

Even when the videos of villainous characters included the science label, the decline in children’s trust was relatively modest.

“It is not that kids who saw the villains thought scientists are wicked and evil. They were just not as often saying they were good,” she said.

The children who watched the heroic scientist character did not, on average, show an increase in trust of scientists. However, the researchers noted that kids already showed a high level of trust, so there wasn’t much room for it to increase.

As part of the study, parents were asked how much television featuring superheroes their children watched. Those who watched the most of these TV shows did show less belief that scientists were benevolent, the researchers said, but the effect was relatively small.

Overall, the findings suggest that children have more trust in the expertise, integrity and benevolence of scientists than was documented in studies that analyzed children’s drawings of scientists, Bonus said.

And that trust was not easily shaken by watching villainous scientists in superhero TV shows.

To the extent that it did lower trust, there was an easy fix available to content creators: Just don’t label the villainous characters as scientists.

“This minor change might reduce any negative influence on children’s perceptions of real-life scientists,” Bonus said.

This stickiness, known as carbon monoxide (CO) adsorption energy, is a property that can often decide the final product of a chemical reaction. Using a widely accessible advanced electroanalytical technique, researchers found that the strength of this energy actually relies on a mix of reaction factors, including the type of catalyst material, applied voltage, and the surface’s structure.

This is a major step for the field, as gaining a better understanding of how CO adsorption works in real-time can help scientists search for innovative ways to recycle its counterpart, carbon dioxide, into useful fuel products, like methanol and ethanol. By designing better catalysts, these new insights could be used to accelerate the development of cleaner technologies that support a more sustainable future, said Zhihao Cui, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral student in chemistry at The Ohio State University.

“Our approach provides a vital bridge between theory and experiment by helping guide the design of catalysts that can convert CO₂ into useful liquid fuels more efficiently,” said Cui. 

The study was recently published in Nature Catalysis.

Until now, researchers lacked an experimental method to measure carbon monoxide’s binding strength under real reaction conditions, meaning scientists’ theoretical predictions about reaction results were limited in their ability to capture the complexities of electrocatalytic environments. Yet with this study’s method, the team was able to validate their theories by viewing how carbon monoxide interacts with materials like gold and copper, insights that could guide the design of more efficient catalysts for carbon conversion. 

Researchers found that while carbon monoxide can bond with gold and copper with similar strengths, only copper is capable of generating multi-carbon products from CO₂. These relatively surprising results reveal that the CO adsorption process is actually more complex than researchers previously thought, said Anne Co, co-author of the study and a professor in chemistry and biochemistry at Ohio State. 

“Carbon dioxide is such a stable molecule, so it's hard to break down,” said Co. “Whether it takes two or twelve steps to complete a reaction, it usually requires a lot of energy.”  

While chemists typically use electrochemistry to generate and store the energy needed, streamlining the process using this team’s new framework could make it easier to realize the energy needs of a potential chemical reaction. Importantly, it’s a significant step in designing better, more sustainable fuels, said Cui, especially since the method is simple enough not to require expensive equipment and can be easily adapted for other types of catalysts. 

“Our framework enables other researchers to extend the same experiment to a wide range of catalysts,” said Cui. 

Researchers noted that while their method does have some limitations, next steps include plans to further refine their model and methods in order to yield more nuanced insights into the chemical world. 

“Even a very simple technique such as the one we used in this study can make a really huge difference in this field,” said Cui. “So as long as your idea is new, you may be able to measure something that was previously considered impossible to measure.”

Other Ohio State co-authors include Kassidy Aztergo and Jiseon Hwang. The study was supported by the National Science Foundation. 

Thanks to the Ohio Biodiversity Conservation Partnership (OBCP), the Ohio Bee Survey is entering its fifth year of data collection. More than 330 species of bees have been collected either in water bowls or nets, including almost 50 “specialist” species.

“Specialist bees have narrow diets, restricting their pollen collection to a few plant species, and often exhibit specific habitat associations, too,” said Karen Goodell, a professor at The Ohio State University Newark and a member of OBCP. “We’ve collected a ton of ecological data over the last few years about these rare species. We now know where they occur and have a better understanding of their habit requirements.” 

OBCP was founded at the university in 2010. H. Lisle Gibbs has been the director since its inception. A collaboration between Ohio State’s Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology and the School of Environment and Natural Resources brings research expertise to the Ohio Division of Wildlife.

Each year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service distributes funding to each state to support animal conservation through the State Wildlife Grant Program. Ohio receives about $3 million annually, and roughly one-third goes to OBCP.

“We have Ohio State faculty working closely with the Ohio Division of Wildlife,” Gibbs said. “We provide scientific research to help them do their job, which is to protect the biodiversity of the state.”

OBCP’s knowledge base is wide-ranging, Gibbs said.

“We’re talking about insects to vertebrates: rattlesnakes, hellbenders and more,” he said. “The state draws on our expertise, and we move forward with research.”

The relationship between Ohio State and the Ohio Division of Wildlife has developed into a strong one over the last 15 years, Gibbs said. Ohio State has proven it can be a good, reliable partner to the division.

“One of the things I’ve learned in my career is that trust is important,” he said. “There is a great deal of trust involved in this partnership. Both organizations take the long view, that we’re in this for a long time, and the work is important.”

Workforce development is a byproduct of the collaboration, he said.

“In addition to research, we’re doing practical things here,” he said. “We’re training students who can move into jobs at the division. And the funding we receive covers all components of research, so it supports graduate and undergraduate students, as well as postdoctoral fellows at the university.”

One method of data collection for the bee survey consisted of trapping bees in passive water traps. The traps often catch other insects as well, Goodell said.

“We call that ‘bycatch,’” she said. “Flies, butterflies, spiders, ants – we saved all those specimens, which have become sources for undergraduate projects.”

One of those projects provided a valuable update to state hoverfly species counts.

“Hoverflies are considered pollinators and beneficial insects,” she said. “We’ve now completed the largest hoverfly survey of Ohio. Prior to this, the most recent one was done 100 years ago.”

In addition to the researchers, students and division employees, another group of people is contributing to OBCP’s work: community scientists. Many of the bee specimens are collected by volunteers with an interest in science, Goodell said.

“There are quite a lot of people interested in pollinators in Ohio,” she said. “Many are retirees who are looking to do something engaging and helpful.”

“You can leverage the interest of the general public, a cast of thousands, to collect data,” Gibbs said. “That volume wouldn’t be possible with a small team of three or four graduate students and a postdoc.”

This collaboration between academics and government employees, between the state and the people who live in it, is exactly what Gibbs hoped to achieve 15 years ago.

“What we’re doing is special,” Gibbs said. “We are a land-grant university, and this is exactly what we’re supposed to be doing – conducting research that benefits the citizens of Ohio.”

The findings suggest that interventions designed to boost positive family experiences and shield children from negative experiences may not be hitting the mark on a national scale, the study’s authors say. 

In all, the study examined the prevalence of 11 adverse and seven positive childhood experiences reported by parents of adolescents between 2016 and 2023 in a large national survey. Adverse experiences included parental divorce, death or incarceration, witnessing violence and facing discrimination. Positive experiences included being mentored by an adult, family resilience in the face of difficulties, participating in organized or service activities, and neighborhood safety and support. 

Senior author Susie Breitenstein, a professor of nursing at The Ohio State University, develops research-based parent training programs designed to improve the social and emotional well-being of parents and children. 

“I do early intervention parenting work, and the goal really is to decrease the incidence of adverse childhood experiences and increase the incidence of positive childhood experiences. So this really connects with the work of our lab in terms of early intervention and prevention through strength-based approaches in parenting,” Breitenstein said. 

“I think at a local level we have had some success, but at a national level it doesn’t seem like we’ve really moved the needle a lot on some of these experiences,” she said. “This was kind of surprising to us.” 

The study is published today (Oct. 20, 2025) in JAMA Pediatrics. 

Previous research has shown that adverse childhood experiences can raise the risk for disease, mental illness and substance misuse in adulthood, and positive childhood experiences may help prevent kids from having psychological and relationship problems as adults. 

Most additional research has focused on identifying segments of the population at highest risk for adverse childhood experience or estimating how many adverse or positive life events the average child will experience. 

The Ohio State team took a different approach, aiming to describe the percentage of teens who experienced specific adverse and positive childhood experiences, and whether the prevalence changed over eight years spanning the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. Data on 125,564 adolescents aged 12 to 17 came from the National Survey of Children’s Health. 

“We predicted that we might see pretty dramatic changes in direction around 2020 or 2021. And one of the surprising things we found was that, with a couple of exceptions that make a lot of sense, things were actually pretty stable,” said co-author and lead statistician Nathan Helsabeck, a research assistant professor of nursing at Ohio State. 

“We saw a decrease in economic hardship in the first couple of years as the country was coming out of the 2008 financial crisis, and then directly following COVID in 2021, we saw a decrease in participation in activities, which is thought to be a positive childhood experience.” 

Economic hardship showed the sharpest drop among adverse childhood experiences, decreasing in prevalence by about 25% from 2016 to 2023. The most common adverse experience, affecting at least 30% of teens but declining by about 1% during the study period, was having divorced parents. The adverse experience with the steepest increase, of about 6% overall, was racial discrimination. 

There was a bright spot: Among this national sample, positive childhood experiences were far more common than adverse experiences, with positives reported by between roughly 40% and 90% of parents compared to all negative experiences affecting fewer than 35% of adolescents. 

Adverse childhood experiences have had a prominent role in influencing policy, Breitenstein said – but positive experiences are gaining traction among researchers exploring whether positive childhood experiences may buffer the effects of negative events. 

“There are complex dynamics across experiences that intersect across family, community and the broader society,” she said. “And in our work, we constantly talk about strength-based approaches and the importance of propping those up, and how to do that. Because sometimes you can’t avoid these adverse experiences, especially when we talk about something like divorce.” 

Using national data to detail the overall prevalence of childhood experiences at a population level has accomplished a central goal for the team: providing a baseline to inform future studies. 

“This is a really clear, straightforward baseline that other researchers or policymakers could use to build a case for an intervention or other work,” Helsabeck said. 

Breitenstein and her colleagues, who study how social and community support influence outcomes for youth experiencing homelessness and psychiatric treatment, plan to put the data to use. 

“There are a lot of things that help strengthen children’s experiences, but they don’t always cross paths or build on each other,” Breitenstein said. “We know these things matter, so we’ll use the data to shore up the resources we can to help support others.” 

This work was supported by the Ohio State College of Nursing Martha S. Pitzer Center for Women, Children and Youth; the National Institute of Nursing Research; and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. 

First author Jack Krupa, who led the research project, worked in Breitenstein’s lab through the former Discovery Postbaccalaureate Research Education Program, an Ohio State College of Medicine initiative funded by the National Institutes of Health. He is now a PhD student at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Additional co-authors, all from Ohio State, were Jodi Ford, Kayla Herbell, Margaret Fitzpatrick, Lia Pinkus, Stephanie Hosley and Barbara Warren.

A team led by researchers at The Ohio State University compared the annual out-of-pocket and total costs of 33 neurologic medications either covered by insurance and sold by commercial pharmacies or bought online through the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company. Out-of-pocket costs include copay, coinsurance and deductible charges, and total costs reflect all consumer out-of-pocket and insurance premium payments as well as what insurers pay. 

Overall, direct-to-consumer out-of-pocket neurologic drug costs were 75% higher than for insured medicines at retail pharmacies, but the total annual costs of the drugs from Cuban’s online pharmacy were 431% lower than those sold by commercial pharmacies to insured patients. 

Because health plan out-of-pocket costs are in addition to insurance premiums paid by beneficiaries, the findings suggest the direct-to-consumer pharmacy may offer uninsured patients similar pricing for medications without having to pay the premium. 

The higher out-of-pocket costs at Cuban’s pharmacy reflected an average across the board, but many of the medications are inexpensive – so the higher price did not reflect a significant amount of money, said first author Amanda Gusovsky Chevalier, assistant professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine at Ohio State’s College of Medicine. 

For 76% of the online pharmacy drugs, the difference in out-of-pocket payments was less than $200 per year. 

“The difference was close to zero for a lot of these different medications,” Gusovsky Chevalier said. “The reason that’s notable is because this price that patients can get directly from a website is the same as the cost to patients who, on top of buying medications, are paying a premium for an insurance plan that’s probably coming out of their paycheck. 

“So the cost you’re paying that is subsidized by your insurance provider is the same as what you could pay at the Mark Cuban pharmacy. This could be a great option for uninsured patients who are paying completely out of pocket.” 

The study was published recently in JAMA Network Open. 

Gusovsky Chevalier and colleagues had previously published an analysis of neurologic drug costs from commercial pharmaceutical and Medicare supplemental insurance claims databases from 2012-2021, enabling the team to calculate 2024 estimates for out-of-pocket and total costs of the medications. For this new study, those estimates were compared to prices posted on the Cost Plus Drug Company website on Dec. 10, 2024. 

“I had heard about the Mark Cuban pharmacy through colleagues and thought it would be interesting to compare the costs because his pharmacy is very direct-to-consumer – they cut out the middleman and whatever is advertised on the website is what you’re paying for, and that’s your only cost,” she said. 

The analysis included drugs used to manage 11 neurologic conditions, among them Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis (MS), peripheral neuropathy and Parkinson’s disease. 

The highest-priced medications (annual costs) in the direct-to-consumer pharmacy – and therefore all paid out of pocket – were the MS drugs glatiramer acetate ($24,186) and fingolimod ($2,185), and cyclosporine ($2,185), a treatment for myasthenia gravis. All other medications examined in the study from the Mark Cuban pharmacy cost less than $635 per year. 

The medications with the highest 2024 insurance plan annual out-of-pocket and total costs, respectively, were teriflunomide for MS ($286 and $11,739), droxidopa for orthostatic hypotension ($238 and $11,618) and fingolimod ($240 and $8,394). 

Out-of-pocket costs for only two medications, teriflunomide and droxidopa, were lower (40% and 18%, respectively) in the direct-to-consumer pharmacy compared to commercial insurance plans. Eighteen of the 33 medications had lower total annual costs at Cuban’s pharmacy compared to private plans. 

Those two drugs and one other MS medication, dimethyl fumarate, stood out for their markedly reduced total costs: Results estimated aggregate annual savings of at least $11 million each by using the direct-to-consumer pharmacy instead of commercial insurance plans at a retail pharmacy. 

“Total costs represent system-level spending, and we look at them because we want to know how much money is moving around to be able to cover these medication costs,” Gusovsky Chevalier said.

The authors noted that there can be drawbacks to relying on a direct-to-consumer pharmacy – the Cost Plus online pharmacy listed only 33 of 79 commercially available neurologic medications at the time of the analysis. And patients who work both sides of the system to pay the lowest prices would risk having fragmented prescription records that could lead to unintended drug interactions.

Even so, the findings suggest direct-to-consumer online pharmacies may be an attractive alternative source of prescription medications, especially for patients who lack insurance coverage, the authors concluded. 

“Our research has shown that the costs of medications just continue to rise through insurance plans, and it’s really important to find ways for patients to access medicines,” Gusovsky Chevalier said. “I think this adds to a larger body of evidence showing that these direct-to-consumer pharmacies have the potential to disrupt the market in some significant way in the future. 

“It’s important for people to know that online pharmacies like this are available.” 

Co-authors of the study include Chun Chieh Lin, Kevin Kerber and senior author James Burke of Ohio State; Evan Reynolds of Michigan State University; and Brian Callaghan of the University of Michigan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scientists at The Ohio State University and the University of Houston have received two grants from the National Institutes of Health totaling $25 million to test daily drops of atropine as a nearsightedness preventive therapy in children age 6-11 years old.

“The more nearsightedness you have, the more at risk you are as an older adult of sight-threatening complications – retinal detachments, atrophy at the back of the eye, glaucoma and macular degeneration,” said Jeffrey Walline, co-principal investigator on the grants and professor of optometry at The Ohio State University. “So anything we can do to reduce the amount of myopia reduces your risk of those complications. And that’s our goal, ultimately.” 

Walline is co-leading the study with David Berntsen, Golden-Golden Professor and chair of clinical sciences at the University of Houston College of Optometry, and Lisa Jordan, director of the Data Coordination and Analysis Center at Ohio State. 

Previous studies in the United States and Asia have suggested atropine can slow the progression of nearsightedness after its onset. This new study aims to administer the drug before diagnosis in children deemed at highest risk for myopia, or nearsightedness, based on their school vision screening outcomes. 

People are born farsighted, and previous research has suggested that kids whose farsightedness has decreased to a specific measure by third grade are at the highest risk – with almost 90% accuracy – for developing nearsightedness by eighth grade. Those children will be recruited to join the study. 

The clinical trial will be conducted at Ohio State, the University of Houston, and 12 additional centers across the United States. Researchers plan to enroll over 600 children who will be randomized to receive nightly drops of either 0.05% low-concentration atropine or a placebo for two years. 

The timing of the onset of nearsightedness in children receiving the drug will be compared to those who receive the placebo. Any children in the placebo arm of the trial who are diagnosed with myopia during the study will begin receiving the atropine drops. All children who become nearsighted will also receive an annual voucher for corrective lenses, Walline said. 

The eye grows fastest just before the onset of myopia, which tends to begin between the ages of 8 and 10 and progresses up to about age 16. After that, the eye might continue to grow but does not become more myopic in most people.  

The researchers predict the atropine drops will reduce the proportion of children who become nearsighted from 20% in the placebo group to 10% in the treatment group, and that atropine will slow pre-myopic eye growth by 30% over the course of the study. 

Myopia affects at least one-third of adults in the United States, and is becoming more prevalent – because, the scientific community believes, children are spending less time outdoors now than in the past. 

In decades past, myopia hasn’t been thought of so much as a disease than as a nuisance condition. But in the past 10 years, optometry research has advanced beyond alleviating symptoms to better understand and address the mechanisms of nearsightedness with an eye toward lowering the risk for vision loss in adulthood, Walline said. 

Walline, Berntsen and Jordan previously co-led studies showing that contact lenses can effectively slow the progression of nearsightedness. The research team reported in 2020 that multifocal contact lenses with the strongest reading power dramatically slowed further progression of myopia in nearsighted kids as young as 7 years old, and in 2025, they reported that those benefits lasted after the treatment ended. 

“We’ve shown that kids can handle treatments from a very young age, and so we’re just applying a different treatment now,” Walline said. “If they become nearsighted during our study, we will also give them the option of wearing contact lenses.” 

In addition to the health ramifications of myopia, correcting the condition is expensive, costing an estimated $4 billion to $7 billion annually in the United States. And high myopia not only threatens vision, but limits the options for refractive surgery, contact lenses and glasses – all factors that point to the importance of getting ahead of the diagnosis, Walline said. 

“Myopia affects such a large number of people, and even if the effects for given individuals aren’t particularly bad, if we can save the sight of just a few people, I think it’s ultimately very important,” he said. “This affects one out of every three people in the United States. We can make a big difference.”

Researchers found that middle-schoolers were less likely to be motivated to engage in risky sexual behaviors if they sought information from primarily informational sites rather than ones that are more about interaction with peers.

Many previous studies have found that use of social media is related to poorer health outcomes for adolescents, but this research suggests that “not all social media is the same,” said Eric Anderman, co-author of the new study and professor of educational psychology at The Ohio State University.

“Adolescents have better outcomes when they rely on sites where they can get accurate information rather than sites where they are mostly hearing from other teens.”

The study was published online yesterday (Sept. 15, 2025) in the journal Health Psychology.

The study was a joint project between Ohio State and Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus. It involved 2,691 seventh and eighth graders in a large urban school district in the Midwest.

All students were enrolled in a sexual health class using the Get Real curriculum, which is used nationwide. This includes nine 45–50-minute lessons each year, delivered over two weeks by a professional health educator.  It emphasizes social and emotional skills as a key component of healthy relationships and responsible decision making.

The researchers surveyed the students five times during the seventh and eighth grades, both before and after the Get Real sessions.

At each of the surveys, students were asked about three sexual health issues that were discussed in the Get Real curriculum: their ability to refuse unwanted sex, their ability to negotiate the use of condoms and their intentions to have sex.

Students were also asked to indicate how likely they were to use each of eight social media platforms to get information about sexual health or human sexuality. The platforms were TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Google.

Results showed that, overall, the curriculum helped reduce risky behavior in the students. But their use of social media to investigate sexual health topics did have an impact, Anderman said.

And the results were different for those who relied more heavily on social media that focuses on interactivity with peers – Snapchat, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter and Instagram – compared to less interactive and more informational sites, like YouTube, TikTok and Google.

Use of interactive sites was linked to lower ability to refuse sexual activity, while use of informational sites wasn’t related to that ability, the study found.

Those who relied more on interactive sites had a lower ability to negotiate the use of condoms, while those who used informational sites had a greater ability, results showed.

Finally, the use of interactive sites was linked to higher intentions to have sex, whereas the use of informational social media was unrelated to sexual intentions.

All of these results were found after taking into account a variety of other factors that could relate to sexual decision making, Anderman said.  That includes student GPA, parents’ education, race and ethnicity, and sex and gender.  The researchers also asked students about their honesty in completing the surveys and sensation seeking – their interest in risky activities.

“The bottom line is that using informational social media sites didn’t result in bad things happening, but using interactive sites did,” Anderman said.

The reason may be that interactive sites encourage the spread of misinformation among teens who don’t have accurate knowledge, he explained.

“Many kids do use interactive sites to get sexual health information and they very seldom fact check what they find.”

Anderman said it is important for parents to talk to their children about social media use: Make it clear that not all sites are the same, and they need to be careful about where they go to get information about sexual health.

“Let them know that just because someone tells you something on Snapchat, that doesn’t mean it is true,” he said. 

“Teens need to hear that from parents, they need to hear that from teachers, they need to hear it from multiple places.”

Anderman recalled that one of the seventh graders taking the Get Real curriculum, in an opportunity to ask anonymous questions, asked if it was true that girls could not get pregnant the first time they had sex.

“That’s an example of one of those things kids may be hearing on some social media. We want to make sure that they don’t take these kinds of statements as true, that they go to places where they can get the right information,” he said.

Co-authors of the study were Hyun Ji Lee, a former postdoctoral researcher at Ohio State who is now an assistant professor at Hunter College; Yvonne Allsop, who received her PhD at Ohio State and is now an assistant professor at Eastern Michigan University; Yue Sheng, who received her PhD at Ohio State and is now an assistant professor at the University of Alabama-Birmingham; and Mary Kay Irwin, senior director of School-Based Health at Nationwide Children’s Hospital.

The study was funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Population Affairs.

Leading these advances are researchers at The Ohio State University: Engineers are developing a nuclear propulsion system that uses liquid uranium to directly heat rocket propellant as an alternative to solid fuel elements used by traditional nuclear propulsion systems.  

Their concept, called the centrifugal nuclear thermal rocket (CNTR), is specially designed to improve rocket performance while simultaneously minimizing any engine risk.  

While similar breakthroughs in the field have focused more on affordability than performance, CNTR potentially offers a substantial advantage for future crewed space missions even compared to other types of nuclear-powered systems in that it can approximately double an engine’s efficiency, said Dean Wang, a senior member of the project and an associate professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State. 

“In recent years, there has been quite an increased interest in nuclear thermal propulsion technology as we contemplate returning humans to the moon and working in cis-lunar space,” said Wang. “But beyond it, a new system is needed, as traditional chemical engines may not be feasible.” 

Chemical engines have been used in spaceflight since the very beginning of the space age.  However, they are limited in thrust, and use large quantities of propellant. Consequently, missions to the outer reaches of the solar system can take a very long time – nine years in the case of the New Horizons spacecraft that flew by Pluto.  

Because of these limitations, future missions will require propulsion systems that can reduce travel time, increase the amount of material sent on the mission, or both, if researchers want to safely send astronauts to far-off destinations — all vital reasons why demonstrating the potential of these approaches is so important, said Wang.  

“The longer you are in space, the more susceptible you are to all types of health risks,” he said. “So if we can make that any shorter, it’d be very beneficial.”  

If the team’s design is successful, implementing their engine in future rockets could make it easier to travel farther on less fuel, as the highest specific impulse — the amount of thrust achievable from a specific amount of propellant — of a chemical engine is about 450 seconds.  Nuclear propulsion engines based on designs tested in the 1960s achieved approximately 900 seconds and, according to the team, a CNTR could achieve even higher values. 

Utilizing nuclear thermal propulsion would also mean more flexibility for mission operations, as rockets could take advantage of additional flight trajectories not possible with chemical engines,  to help reach deep-space targets in shorter periods of time. More notably, because these systems can utilize a range of potential substances as propellant, widespread use could quickly facilitate the development of in-space resources such as asteroids and Kuiper Belt objects, said Wang.  

Overall, these heightened capabilities could allow quicker round-trip human missions to Mars as well as support novel one-way robotic missions to the outer planets, including Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, said Spencer Christian, a PhD student in engineering at Ohio State. Under John Horack, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State, Christian leads prototype construction of CNTR.  

“You could have a safe one-way trip to Mars in six months, for example, as opposed to doing the same mission in a year,” said Christian. “Depending on how well it works, the prototype CNTR engine is pushing us towards the future.” 

Despite these newfound avenues for increased space exploration, like with any emerging innovation, there are many engineering challenges that still have to be addressed, said Wang.  

“We have a very good understanding of the physics of our design, but there are still technical challenges that we need to overcome,” he said.  

Many of these challenges were detailed in a study the team recently published in the journal Acta Astronautica. Some potential hurdles include ensuring that the methods used for startup, operation and shutdown avoid instabilities as well as envisioning ways to minimize the loss of uranium fuel and accommodate potential engine failures. 

This team’s CNTR concept is expected to reach design readiness within the next five years — but in preparing their model for potential next-generation use, researchers are most looking forward to showing how well it could fare under extreme conditions.  

After all, a final laboratory demonstration will likely help inform the direction of future nuclear thermal propulsion technologies. “We need to keep space nuclear propulsion as a consistent priority in the future, so that technology can have time to mature,” said Wang. “It’s a huge benefit that we can’t afford to miss out on.”  

The team’s effort was supported by a grant provided by NASA.

In developing the new system, researchers at The Ohio State University also discovered that combining two bacterial species in the electro-fermentation mix not only helped accelerate the process, but allowed for more targeted chemical production. 

In this study, the food waste consisted of ice cream and sour cream – but the team has expanded the work with experiments using coffee grounds and lake algae. 

Eventual adoption of the technology could reap many benefits: efficient, sustainable and cost-effective production of multipurpose chemicals using source materials that would otherwise end up incinerated or in a landfill, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. 

“We are creating an industry from another industry’s waste,” said first author Beenish Saba, a research scientist in food, agricultural and biological engineering at Ohio State. 

“We’re making use of waste that a contractor charges businesses to take to a landfill, where it produces methane gas. We are suggesting that industries can put up a simple bioreactor in which they can produce other important byproducts.” 

The study was published recently in the Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering. 

This work builds upon previous waste valorization research done by Saba and Katrina Cornish, professor emerita of horticulture and crop science and food, agricultural and biological engineering at Ohio State and a co-lead author of the current study.  

The valorization work involved analysis of physical and chemical properties of 46 food waste samples to identify good candidates for conversion to chemicals and biogases through a variety of processes – including fermentation. 

In the new study, Saba and colleagues compared the output and duration of conventional fermentation and electro-fermentation. Conventional practices consist of placing food waste and bacteria in a bottle, adjusting nutrient levels and incubating the materials at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Electro-fermentation is accomplished at room temperature inside a bioreactor outfitted with an electrode powered by minimal external voltage. 

“In conventional fermentation, the bacteria are happily growing and they will produce some solvents and gases,” Saba said. “In the second step, we gave them a little tingling electricity so the bacteria can feel a little irritation, and the metabolism was fast. They were growing and happily eating, and they produced more byproducts – meaning we can increase the yield.” 

There was another bonus to development of this new microbial electrochemical system: production of hydrogen gas. 

Experiments showed that combining two bacterial species from the Clostridium family contributed to hydrogen gas production while also reducing fermentation waste – it is known that the commonly used species C. bijerinckii generates carbon dioxide while converting food waste into alcohols, but it turns out another species, C. carboxidivorans, consumes that CO2. 

“It means the waste product of one bacteria is utilized by the other bacteria,” Saba said. “It was possible that there could have been an antagonistic relationship, but we tested growing them together and found there’s a synergistic relationship between these two bacteria that works well.” 

And in addition to consuming the CO2, C. carboxidivorans produces hydrogen gas and solvents. 

“Carbon dioxide is still there, but most of it is consumed, and it gives us hydrogen gas – an additional product. We now have two valuable products and one waste product,” she said. 

The work dovetails with an increased focus on using food waste and agricultural residue to create biobased products, Saba said. 

“We are working on improving the yield, cost efficiency and scalability,” she said. “The government is asking for work in this area and industry is interested in getting value from waste and not paying for its disposal. 

“So much material that is agricultural or biological in nature is just going to waste. It’s much better to utilize them and make valuable products.” 

This research was supported by the Ohio State President’s Research Excellence-Catalyst program funding and the Ohio Water Development Authority. 

Additional co-authors were Stephen Akinola, Ann Christy and Thaddeus Ezeji, all of Ohio State.

Using this method could advance technologies like memory devices and sensors, as well as pave the way to future soft materials that are both smart and flexible. 

Liquid crystals, which are used in liquid crystal display (LCD) screens for TVs and phones,  utilize their molecules to mimic the properties of both liquids and solids, giving them unique properties. While soft materials like liquids, gels and polymers have been widely used for their easy-to-process structures and lightweight properties, they tend to deform easily and often require replacement.

Everyday materials are made of molecules that align themselves in preferred directions. But liquid crystals could become much more useful if their molecules are all facing in one direction – obtaining what is called polar order.  

That can be difficult to do in soft materials, said Xiaoguang Wang, co-author of the study and an assistant professor in chemical and biomolecular engineering at The Ohio State University.

“Soft matter can’t compete with existing solid-state storage in speed, reliability or miniaturization, so the question becomes how might we control its internal structure to make it competitive or comparable to traditional hard materials,” said Wang. 

In searching for a solution, researchers found that they could program the movement of liquid crystals with the help of external forces, such as liquid or electricity. In this study’s case, water droplets were used to determine if scientists could influence the liquid crystal’s interface. 

First, the team etched pillars into a piece of silicon and infused liquid crystals between the spaces. Then a layer of water was introduced on top. 

Similarly to how a magnet’s north and south poles would react to a magnetic field, researchers saw that depending on where the droplet was moved, the molecules would immediately respond by pointing in that direction. By moving the droplet over the liquid crystals a second time, that movement could then be changed and pointed in a new direction, said Wang.

Significantly, the experiment also revealed that liquid crystal molecules could be taught to remember their orientation, opening up new ways for soft materials to exchange information without the need for electronics. “It can memorize the directionality of the information that we write into it, which means that our vector-based system operates like a memory device,” said Wang.

The study was recently published in Nature Physics.

While scientists are still working to incorporate this method into bigger projects, gaining the ability to control the position of liquid crystals’ molecules could lead not only to new functionalities for all sorts of technologies, but also new types of physics, said Ufuoma Kara, lead author of the study and a former graduate research associate at Ohio State.

“By imposing a greater level of polarity within these liquid crystal materials, we can explore new levels of applications,” he said. “Part of that includes expanding the amount of knowledge able to be embedded in their systems.” 

While it’s no easy feat, being able to cultivate materials with such abilities on a larger scale would suggest that the next generation of liquid crystals could one day act as both super-small computer processors and vast, reprogrammable memory storage devices. 

“There’s something very exciting in this discovery, and I think it’s a great foundation to spark some curiosity in young people who want to pursue this type of science,” said Kara.

Other co-authors include Boyuan Chen, Rajdeep Mamtani, Yang Xu, Alan Weible, Eric Boerner and Zhan Yang from Ohio State, as well as Simon Čopar and Uroš Tkalec from the University of Ljubljana, Shucong Li from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Yuxing Yao from the California Institute of Technology, and Robin L. B. Selinger from Kent State University.

This work is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Ohio State Materials Research Seed Grant Program, the Center for Emergent Materials, the Center for Exploration of Novel Complex Materials, and the Institute for Materials Research. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The researchers also estimated the 10 counties most and least likely to have long-term power outages in the five states that border the Gulf.

Findings showed that counties with vulnerable populations in terms of social, economic and demographic factors were often susceptible to longer-term outages.

That was especially true along the Mississippi River, in Texas counties bordering the Gulf, in southern and central Florida and throughout Louisiana and Mississippi.

“Communities that are already struggling when a disaster strikes and then endure a long power outage – that can compound their problems,” said Smitha Rao, co-author of the study and assistant professor of social work at The Ohio State University.

“We see this study as a conversation starter, a way to begin prioritizing which communities may need the most help both modernizing their electrical grid and recovering power after disasters.”

The study was published online recently in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.

The study is novel by combining power outage, disaster and social vulnerability information (from 2017 to 2022) at the county level in one of the most disaster-prone areas of the United States, said study co-author Shane Scaggs, an incoming President’s Postdoctoral Scholar at Ohio State.

“We didn’t just look at big disasters like hurricanes. Anything that knocked out power from just a few hours to days to weeks was included in our model,” Scaggs said.

“Even short power disruptions can have a big impact on vulnerable communities.”

The study included information on outages and disasters for 482 out of 534 counties in the five-state region.

Findings showed that hurricanes/tropical storms and heat waves were associated with the longest power outages.  Louisiana had longer power outages than the other states.

Longer outages clustered in coastal and riverside counties, particularly along the Mississippi Delta and Florida coast.

The researchers found that seven of the 10 counties predicted to have the longest outages were in Louisiana, all along the Mississippi Delta. Of the remaining three counties, one was in Texas and two were in Florida.

On the measure of social vulnerability, the 10 counties ranged from low to high levels, although most had midlevel to high levels of vulnerability.

“By mapping where social vulnerability and prolonged outages intersect following hazards, we can support decision makers and community leaders in identifying where investments and interventions are most urgently needed,” said study co-author Anaís Roque, an assistant professor of environmental social sciences at Duke University.

The 10 counties with the lowest outage durations were all in Texas, perhaps because more than half the counties in the study were in that state, Rao said.

Just as in the counties with the longest outages, those with the shortest outages had a wide range of social vulnerability, from low to high.

“There wasn’t a simple correlation in which the most vulnerable counties were always the ones with the longest outages,” Scaggs said.

“But the high-vulnerability communities might be more susceptible to harm from long outages because they already have limited capacity to adapt and recover from disasters.”

Rao said this study can help guide where to focus infrastructure investment, grid modernization and community discussions on emergency management.

“We identified the counties that were faring worse on both counts: higher levels of social vulnerability and longer power outages,” she said.

“That may be where conversations can start about making improvements.”

Alexandria Asuan, an undergraduate research assistant who graduated from Ohio State in May, was also a co-author.

This research was supported by the Sustainability Institute at Ohio State.

A new study of long-tailed macaques suggests the monkeys seem to like some of the same kind of content that humans do: videos featuring aggression and individuals they know.

“Humans and macaques are both social animals who have a fundamental need to belong,” said Brad Bushman, co-author of the study and professor of communication at The Ohio State University.

“It’s not surprising that they both would be most interested in the video content that may help them navigate relationships in their groups.”

The study was published online recently in the journal Animal Cognition. It was led by Elisabeth H.M. Sterck, professor of animal behaviour and cognition at Utrecht University in The Netherlands.

Researchers showed two-minute videos to 28 macaques that lived at a primate research center in The Netherlands. Each macaque saw multiple videos over time featuring monkeys in their group or strangers. Each individual video showed monkeys in one of four types of activities: conflict, grooming of each other, running, or sitting.

The researchers calculated how much time the monkeys spent looking directly at the screen and their reactions while watching.

Findings showed the macaques paid the most attention to videos featuring conflicts between monkeys. Running was the next most popular type of video. Grooming and sitting attracted the least attention.

It is notable that both macaques and humans seem to be attracted to videos featuring similar content, Bushman said.

“We have plenty of research showing the popularity of violent media with humans. Now we have some evidence that other primates might also be attracted to conflict and aggression in videos,” Bushman said.

“From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense. Both humans and other animals may be hardwired to pay attention to aggression because that is an adaptive response that increases survival,” he added.

The other significant finding of the study was that the macaques watched videos featuring members of their own group more closely than those involving strangers.

“This indicates that gathering social information on group members is more important than getting information about strangers,” Sterck said.

And seeing familiar faces on the screen isn’t just something that’s attractive to monkeys.

“When we as humans watch movies, we like to see actors we know – we like to see the stars playing in big movies more than we do actors who are not familiar to us,” Bushman said.

Findings also showed that low-ranking and less aggressive macaques paid more attention than others to the videos.

“More dominant individuals can be more confident that aggression will not affect them – they don’t have to pay attention to others as much,” Sterck said.

“Lower-ranking individuals can become an aggression victim and that may be why they pay more attention to what others are doing in the videos.”

In addition, high-strung macaques that were more easily stressed paid less attention to group members than those who did not act as stressed.

“We found that the gathering of social information from the videos differed with dominance rank and behavioral tendencies, which may reflect personality,” Sterck said.

The research involved two separate groups of macaques that live at the Biomedical Primate Research Centre in Rijswijk, The Netherlands.

The “stranger” videos that the macaques viewed were those monkeys from a third out-of-view group.

In each enclosure, there is a corridor where the macaques are accustomed to participating in cognitive tests. There were four compartments where the monkeys could watch videos on a laptop.  The subjects entered the corridor on their own volition, and were isolated from other monkeys of their multi-generational group during the two-minute videos.

“The macaques are very visual animals. Their eyesight is similar to that of humans and they are very interested in watching videos,” Sterck said.

The researchers said the findings showed that humans share tendencies with our monkey relatives, including the attraction to videos with conflict.

“Even this brief exposure to aggressive media captured the attention of macaques in the study,” Bushman said. “When you see this in some of our closest primate relatives, it is easy to see why humans are so interested in violent media.”

Other co-authors of the study, all from Utrecht University, were Sophie Kamp, Ive Rouart, Lisette van den Berg, Dian Zijlmans and Tom Roth.

While only 10% of Earth is covered in glacial ice, these masses have far-reaching impacts on all the world’s ecosystems. Rapid melting can trigger natural disasters, and glaciers help to regulate the planet’s temperature and sea level and are sources of pristine fresh drinking water.

To better differentiate between seasonal ice loss and that caused by long-term climate trends, researchers studied the fluctuating heights of three glaciers: the La Perouse Glacier in North America, the Viedma Glacier in South America and the Skamri Glacier located in Central Asia.

Their analysis revealed that between 2019 and 2023, the Viedma Glacier (Argentina) and the La Perouse Glacier (Alaska) experienced consistent thinning, but the Skamri Glacier (Pakistan)  had been stable enough to experience a small net gain of ice, said Rongjun Qin, co-author of the study and an associate professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at The Ohio State University.

Measurements in this study were made using daily high-resolution images gathered by the PlanetScope satellite constellation, which researchers then used to create 3D reconstructions of how glacial ice flows evolved over time. By incorporating local and global climate data into these models to explore seasonal variations of glacier melt, the team essentially designed a way to monitor the behavior of glaciers across diverse regions.

“This is something that we’ve been thinking about for a long time, because existing glacier studies have such sparse seasonal observations since it’s difficult to get data out of remote areas,” said Qin, who is also a core faculty member of Ohio State’s Translational Data Analytics Institute. “What we wanted to do is to use medium-to-high resolution data to broaden those capabilities and improve the accuracy of the 3D models generated from that data.”

The study was recently published in the journal GIScience & Remote Sensing.

According to the study, while many modern 2D tracking techniques can provide valuable insights into glacier flow, previous studies tend to capture only short-term snapshots or else offer observations without in-depth motion analysis or high-resolution 3D data. This team’s work may help scientists keep better track of seasonal climate issues like glacier melt and expand long-term observations of these masses, and their 3D model method also reveals new data about how quickly the glaciers react to changes in the weather.

The Viedma and Skamri Glaciers, for example, exhibit a 45-day lag time in response to changes in local climate conditions like rain or snow. The La Perouse Glacier, however, was shown to react to changes almost immediately, meaning that its flow can very quickly become faster or slower based on how much precipitation it has accumulated.

In another finding, researchers concluded that behavior differences in all three are driven by distinct environmental and climatic conditions, but suggest that both local and global factors, rather than any single one, are responsible for patterns in glacier motion dynamics worldwide.

Such observations are vital to deepening our global understanding of glacier science, and with further improvements, this study’s algorithm could also be a useful tool for future disaster prediction and management, said Qin. Already, scientists have used similar systems to warn communities of natural disasters that would have led to tragedy.

In all, researchers hope that supporting modeling works like this one will inspire more scientists to utilize satellite data to investigate other types of important environmental research questions.

“Hopefully we can build on all sorts of applications that people are interested in with this,” said Qin.

Shengxi Gui of Ohio State was a co-author. This work’s data was provided by PlanetScope.

The analysis showed that over a dozen pesticides influence human gut bacteria growth patterns, affect how gut microorganisms process nutrients and camp out inside some bacteria. Researchers say the resulting “atlas” of molecular mechanisms, which they have made publicly available, is a resource that can be leveraged for targeted studies on relevant diseases and potential therapeutic strategies. 

Experiments in mice showed that one gut bacteria species provides some protection against pesticide toxicity, hinting at the possibility for a probiotic approach to preventing some of their damaging health effects – in this case, inflammation. 

“We’ve provided further understanding of how pesticides or environmental pollutants impact human health by modulating an important collection of microorganisms,” said senior author Jiangjiang Zhu, associate professor of human sciences at The Ohio State University.  

“We also identified certain microbes that can degrade, remove or clear some of these pesticides from biological systems, which may be potential therapeutics in the future to help people clear toxicity from the gut that have been introduced by food and water intake, providing better solutions for human health.” 

The research was published recently in Nature Communications. 

The findings are based on investigating the interactions in the lab between 18 pesticide compounds selected for their widespread agricultural use around the world and 17 species from four major bacterial domains in the human gut that are associated with either health maintenance or disease states. Among the pesticides included were DDT (banned in the United States but used indoors in some countries to control malaria-carrying mosquitoes), atrazine, permethrin and chlorpyrifos. Even with limitations on their use, residues from some legacy pesticides still circulate in soil and water, Zhu said. 

“We grew bacteria in culture and exposed them to relevant concentrations of pesticides to see how microbes responded to those pesticide exposures,” said first author Li Chen, a senior research associate in Zhu’s lab, who managed over 10,000 samples that were analyzed in the study. 

Based on the findings, the team developed a bacteria-pesticide interaction network detailing which pesticides either promoted or inhibited bacterial growth and the bacteria that absorbed pesticide chemicals – an indication of one way exposure to pesticides can be prolonged in the body.  

“Most previous environmental health studies reported that pesticide contamination affects the overall composition of gut bacteria,” Chen said. “We showed those pesticides really can affect specific gut bacteria and detailed how these changes will affect the general composition.” 

The analysis identified specific metabolic changes in 306 pesticide-gut microbe pairs, leading to examination of how those altered growth patterns and accumulation of chemicals affected metabolites – the molecular products of biochemical reactions that break down nutrients to produce energy and perform other essential functions. Metabolites have numerous roles, from altering the metabolic process itself to sending signals related to multiple cell functions and immune system activation. 

In addition, the study team performed a separate analysis zeroing in on another important class of molecules that can be produced by gut microbes – the fatty, oily and waxy compounds called lipids that are essential to many body functions. 

Researchers also studied the effects of pesticide exposure in healthy mice first given antibiotics to clear their digestive systems of microbes. The team introduced Bacteroides ovatus, a common strain of human gut bacteria, to one group of mice and compared them to controls after four weeks of exposure to pesticides. 

Results verified what was seen in the lab, showing that pesticides generated inflammation in multiple organs in the mice and that the presence of the introduced bacteria after chemical exposure set off a range of changes in metabolic activity and lipid production. Specifically, an increase in some classes of lipids inhibited the signaling pathway of a protein linked to oxidative stress. 

“We identified microbes that may modulate the toxic effect of pesticides to the host by somehow buffering the inflammation process,” said Zhu, also an investigator in The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center Molecular Carcinogenesis and Chemoprevention Research Program.  

“We know inflammation is generally bad for the body. If something toxic is going to induce it, and there are other molecules that can counteract that agent, you may have a solution to intervene or prevent larger-scale damage.” 

In the next phrase of this work, Zhu’s lab plans to further explain where metabolic changes to gut microbes fit into various health and disease conditions after pesticide exposure. He expects other scientists will do the same. 

“We are mapping out this central interaction between pesticides and gut microbes. And then other labs can leverage what we have discovered – for example, after exposure to a pesticide, gut microbe reactions may lead to downstream consequences that contribute to disease research and eventually help with predicting targets or identifying an intervention strategy,” he said. 

This research was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. Zhu is also supported by the Provost’s Scarlet and Gray Associate Professor Program at Ohio State. 

Additional co-authors include Chao Guo, Huan Zhang, Shiqi Zhang, Andrew Gold, Ming Hu and Dayong Wu, all of Ohio State; Hong Yan and Caroline Johnson of Yale University; Shanshan Di and Xinquan Wang of Zhejiang Academy in Hangzhou, China; and Yu Wang of Johns Hopkins University.

The study found that having both maladies at diagnosis predicted higher, continuing levels of depression during the next eight months. Those who had only high levels of depression or only high levels of inflammation, or neither of them, showed no changes in depression over time.

In the analyses, the researchers took into account a wide variety of other factors that could affect the results, including age, race, partner status, education, employment status, lifetime smoking, and any cancer treatments the patients received.

“What this suggests is that there may be an additive effect or perhaps a synergy between inflammation and depression that can lead to worse outcomes with depression,” said Barbara L. Andersen, corresponding author of the study and professor of psychology at The Ohio State University.

The results are important because high depression levels have been linked to poorer outcomes in lung cancer patients, suggesting that patients with high inflammation and depression may be at particular risk, Andersen said.

The study was published online recently in the journal Biopsychosocial Science and Medicine.

Andersen and colleagues at Ohio State’s College of Medicine and The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute studied 182 patients who were newly diagnosed with advanced lung cancer (Stage IV). The patients were followed with monthly depression assessments for eight months.

A previous study with the same participants found that depression was linked to higher levels of inflammation in lung cancer patients at diagnosis.  This study was designed to see how that combination affected future levels of depression, which had not been studied before, Andersen said.

Participants completed a depression measure. In addition, levels of neutrophils and lymphocytes from patients’ blood samples were used to calculate a measure of systemic inflammation, called the Advanced Lung Cancer Inflammation Index (ALI). A previous study by Andersen showed ALI from these patients predicted their survival.  That study also found that overall, 35% of the patients had moderate to severe depressive symptoms. That study was the first to show that, among these patients with higher levels of depression, upwards of 70% also had high inflammation.

“We found that this is a particularly alarming combination. None of the three other groups in our study – those with just high inflammation, those with just high depression, or those with neither – had increasing levels of depression over the eight months,” Andersen said.

Scientists don’t know for sure how inflammation and depression interact to increase depression, she said.

One hypothesis is that inflammation in the body, as seen in this study, can be transmitted to the brain, where it settles into the microglia. During inflammation, the microglia can release harmful substances associated with the development of depression.

These findings are important because of all cancer patients, those with lung cancer are among those with the highest rates of depression, Andersen explained. And the fact that depression is already linked to systemic inflammation suggests the risk is compounded.

“Our findings suggest the need to screen for depression and determine inflammation biomarkers at diagnosis of lung cancer,” she said.

“This can help identify vulnerable patients who need psychological therapies to reduce depressive symptoms with a possibility of impacting inflammation as some studies have found.”

Co-authors on the study, all from Ohio State, were Kylie Park, Peter Shields, John Myers and Sarah Reisinger.

This research received funding from the Pelotonia Beating Lung Cancer in Ohio (BLCIO) research initiative.

Researchers at The Ohio State University conducted an experiment with a national sample of high-level executives and found that those with subprime credit scores tended to be “yes persons” – even when it was counterproductive.

In contrast, executives with prime credit scores critically evaluated external information, more effectively processing decisions involving risk.

“Responsible CEOs do not want executives who are going to be  ‘yes persons,’ they want someone who evaluates data objectively,” said Noah Dormady, co-author of the study and associate professor at Ohio State’s John Glenn College of Public Affairs.

“That’s the issue we’re picking up in this study. Executives with higher credit scores were much more likely to think thoughtfully and critically about the data and make objective decisions.”

Dormady conducted the research with Yiseon Choi, a doctoral student in the Glenn College. Their study was published recently in the International Journal of Production Economics.

Executives who participated in this study self-reported their FICO scores, which is one type of credit score. The two biggest factors in FICO scores are a person’s payment history – such as how often they are late paying bills – and how much they owe. Other factors include their credit mix, length of credit history and how much new credit they have.

These factors tend to be correlated with income; however the study focused exclusively on the top-level executives in a company, who are referred to as C-suite executives. These executives would all have similar levels of income.

Credit scores are known to be predictive of a person’s risk tolerance, Choi said.

“This is important because prior research suggests that personal financial habits may extend to professional decision making,” she said.

This study involved data from a controlled experiment previously led by Dormady, and involving 303 C-suite executives at middle-market firms (those with annual revenues between $10 million and $1 billion), in partnership with Ohio State’s National Center for the Middle Market.

In the experiment, the participants had to make an investment recommendation to a chief operations officer involving inventories. They had to decide whether to invest in inventories that could act as a buffer in case of a catastrophe, like a hurricane, that temporarily halted production at the company.

“The decision to stockpile inventories is one of opportunity cost. For a company, the cost of those inventories can take away from currently productive plant, equipment, and workforce.” “It can be a difficult decision that involves managing risk for the company,” Dormady said.

The executives in the study went through 10 decision making periods, and each period had 2 rounds. In each period, they were randomly given a unanimous recommendation from a group of advisers that, in the scenario, were appointed by their CEO. The advice in each period was either to invest in the inventory or not, and this was given between each round of decisions.

After that, the participants were told whether a catastrophe had occurred or not.  Overall, the participants had a 25% chance of having a catastrophe in each period.  In the end, some participants in the study experienced no catastrophes, and some had as many as 7 in their 10 periods.

The key finding was that executives with the best, prime credit ratings tended to take the advisers’ advice only when it matched their own experiences in the experiment. If the executives experienced more catastrophes, they were more likely to accept the advice of the advisers if they told them to invest in more inventory.

But they weren’t afraid to reject the advice if it conflicted with their own experience.

“Those with higher FICO scores were more confident to make their own decisions, possibly because the financial decisions they made in their personal lives worked out well, compared to those with lower FICO scores,” Choi said.

In fact, executives with subprime credit scores were about twice as likely to follow the advice of advisers, even when it was inaccurate, when compared to those with prime credit.

“Executives with subprime credit were more likely to simply defer to the appointed advisors, even disregarding their lived experience,” Dormady said.

“That suggests executives with lower credit scores are more likely to be the type of decision maker who follows consensus over fact.”

The researchers noted that they took into account a variety of demographic and other factors about the executives in the study, including gender, veteran status and other personal details. But it was the FICO score that was most meaningful when it came to how they responded to risk in the scenarios.

Given the strong results in this study, does that mean companies should use FICO scores to screen candidates for top executive positions? Dormady said that is a complex question that raises ethical issues.

More replication studies should be done to confirm the results, he said, and guidelines are needed to ensure that credit score data is not misused or abused.

Researchers found that most individuals think they would be more likely than the average person to disobey an immoral or unlawful order from an authority figure.  

This phenomenon, called the “better-than-average effect,” reveals that people are fairly resistant to internalizing beliefs that may harm their self-perceptions. In extreme cases, ignoring how everyone is subject to social pressure could leave a person vulnerable to the desires of malicious actors.  

“Social pressures are way more powerful and impactful than we give them credit for,” said Philip Mazzocco, lead author of the study and an associate professor of psychology at The Ohio State University. “If you fall under the sway of these pressures, you could end up engaging in behavior inconsistent with your values and morals.”

The research began as a class project designed by Mazzocco’s students, who based it on the Milgram experiment, a 1960s-era study that aimed to understand the link between obedience and authority. In these experiments, participants were asked by an authority figure to deliver what they believed to be painful and, at times, lethal electric shocks to another person.  

The Milgram experiment suggested that people would obey authority even in conflict with their own beliefs.  

The new study by Mazzocco and colleagues was recently published in the journal Current Psychology.

In this work, Mazzocco’s team had more than 400 adults read first-person accounts of the shock study before asking them to predict their responses and those of the average person. Prior to these predictions, half were told that 65% of those in the original study exhibited “complete obedience,” whereas the other half were given no additional information about the results.  

Participants were asked at what voltage level, if any, they thought they would disobey and end the study. They could choose on a dial which ranged from 1 (which meant quitting the study after the first shock was delivered) to 31 (exhibiting complete obedience throughout the experiment). On average, participants thought they themselves would quit the study around dial 7. In contrast, participants surmised that the average person would not stop the study until approximately dial 12.  

Those who were informed of the results of the Milgram study – that 65% of the original participants continued all the way to the final voltage level – did predict that the average person would administer significantly higher voltages than did those who were not told. But those who were informed did not think they themselves would deliver significantly higher shocks than did those who were not told. This was another indication of the better-than-average effect. 

These results were almost identical to obedience levels reported by previous studies and correctly fit the team’s theory that most would underpredict their likely obedience in a classic Milgram scenario. This suggests that in the absence of real compliance pressures, even fully imagining yourself in a situation can still lead a person to underestimate its influence on them.  

“Just reading about a situation is not sufficient, as doing so doesn’t really internalize the point that we're all really susceptible to these pressures,” said Mazzocco. The study also likens the perceived difference between predicted and actual obedience to watching a horror movie play out from the safety of home versus the certainty of actually being pursued by someone.  

Notably, while 65.2% of participants had not heard of the Milgram experiment before, researchers found that prior knowledge of the Milgram experiment didn’t alter how participants viewed the likeliness of their participation. Finally, personality and value tests were given to participants to determine what role personal characteristics might play in a real-life situation.  

One significant predictor of actual obedience in a Milgram-like scenario was conscientiousness – the personality trait of being responsible and having a tendency to adhere to rules and norms. Those who exhibited this trait were more likely to want to appease the experimenter.  

But singular personality traits aside, not every human can be the exception to the rule, said Mazzocco. “Studies like these are relevant to society because if we all assume we’re so resistant to obedience, we are not going to immunize ourselves against authority figures who want to take advantage of us,” he said. 

Such immunization techniques include learning to avoid situations where intense social pressures exist or having a strategy to deal with or escape a potentially negative encounter.  

Still, Mazzocco admits removing oneself isn’t always possible, and recommends cultivating curiosity to help a person keep true to their values.  

Other Ohio State co-authors include Katie Reitler, Lauren Little, John Korte, Monicka Ridgill and Xamina Stalnaker.  

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

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

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

The research was published recently in Analytical Chemistry. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John LaRocco, lead author of the study and a research scientist in psychiatry at The Ohio State University College of Medicine, devised a way to bake starch into aerogel, a type of ultralight styrofoam typically used to provide effective insulation. Two launchers propelled tennis balls into a mock head at point-blank range. Results showed the material was able to both halt high-speed projectiles and protect against blunt force trauma.

“We found that our composite could absorb about 70% of the impact force under the best conditions,” said LaRocco. “In other words, only 30% of that impact force was going through.”

The study was recently published in the journal Technologies.

Concussions can be financially and physically costly, so the low-cost design of this material makes it apt for use across many industries, including construction and defense, the researchers said. While many of these injuries can be prevented with helmets or other protective equipment, typical gear can sometimes be too bulky or impractical to provide sufficient shielding from severe head injuries. That’s why implementing the new material could provide better protection for sports players, said Taeyoon Eom, co-author of the study and a recent graduate of Ohio State.

“Our material is lightweight and inexpensive, so it should be used to increase the standard that people are using now for concussion safety and offer more protection at less weight,” said Eom, who recently experienced a severe concussion of his own after a boxing match. His incident inspired him to help look for ways to refine current concussion safety methods. 

To do this, the team tested the protectiveness of three material samples: one with no protection, another with aerogel foam padding, and the composite aerogel foam with cornstarch baked into it. In some cases, a hardhat was added as an additional variable to determine if any of the material samples would work well as a helmet liner. 

Next, a commercially available spring-powered gun that shoots tennis balls for dogs to chase and a combustion-fired potato cannon were used to launch tennis balls at the mock heads. To accurately measure the deflection and kinetic energy of each projectile, sensitive electronics were also sandwiched between the layers of each material, and its data sent to a computer vision program the team developed. 

Their results showed that the fully composite material was shown to bend only about 31% as much as the aerogel alone, meaning it was better at absorbing more impact. It also prevented the electronics from being physically damaged, unlike the gel alone. “It was essentially an iterative process of trial and error,” said Eom. 

Although past studies involving aerogel composite have reported impact absorptions of 80% relative to this team’s composite, the study notes the materials used in previous research were much costlier. 

The researchers said the advantage of combining the starch with the aerogel is that it improves impact resistance, with the composite absorbing and dissipating the energy of a blunt hit more effectively on impact. This allows for thinner and more flexible protective gear, without compromising safety. 

“This project was a real knockout,” said LaRocco. 

Other Ohio State co-authors were Tanush Duggisani, Ian Zalcberg, Jinyi Xue, Ekansh Seth, Nicolas Zapata, Dheeraj Anksapuram, Nathaniel Muzumdar and Eric Zachariah.

Researchers found that having a stronger attachment to a social media influencer is linked to younger consumers having improved feelings of well-being in those areas.

The findings show a complex dynamic for young people who follow the latest trends in fashion as they shop online and develop one-sided relationships with influencers who they turn to for shopping advice.

“Our findings are among the first to show the negative role that FOMO has on young consumers as they look to keep up with what’s fashionable,” said Abbey Bartosiak, who led the research while earning a PhD in consumer sciences at The Ohio State University.

“But it also shows that feeling a strong connection to a social media influencer who may help them decide what to buy can be related to their feelings of well-being.”

The study was published recently in the journal PLOS One.

FOMO is normally seen as a fear of missing out on events and parties that your friends are attending, but this study shows another side of the phenomenon – fear of missing out on the latest fashion trends.

“Our study shows that this kind of FOMO is a real thing, and that it is linked to people’s well-being,” said Cäzilia Loibl, co-author of the study and professor and chair of consumer sciences at Ohio State.

The study involved a sample of 863 U.S. adults between 18 and 40 years old who participated online. All of them used social media and said they followed a social media influencer.

An influencer is someone who has become famous through social media and not through traditional celebrity means, like being a movie star or professional athlete. These influencers often have partnerships with companies to endorse their products or services.

This new form of marketing has grown quickly, and the number of firms using influence marketing almost doubled from 4,000 in 2019 to 7,300 in 2021, with Instagram being the preferred channel, according to the Influencer Marketing Hub.

Because of the stunning growth of influencer marketing, the researchers wanted to see how it is connected to consumer behavior in terms of FOMO and well-being.

“A key reason for the success of social media influencer marketing is that followers feel they connect to the influencer like a friend,” Bartosiak said.

In this study, participants completed measures of how much FOMO they experienced and how attached they felt to the influencers they followed. In addition, they rated their experiences of shopping on social media, such as how often they bought items recommended by influencers. Finally, they rated their social, psychological and financial well-being.

The researchers expected that people with higher levels of FOMO would feel less well-being in all three areas, judging from findings in other studies, which is exactly what they found.

“If you feel that you’re missing out on events or trends that your friends are involved in, it is not surprising that your well-being will be hurt,” Loibl said.

But researchers also expected that those who reported stronger attachments to influencers could reverse that trend. That, again, is what they found for the two areas of social and psychological well-being.

“This may be one reason why social media influencers are so popular,” Bartosiak said.

“If you feel connected to this influencer and her lifestyle, you might feel that the products you buy based on her recommendations make your life better. And that is linked to well-being.”

However, there was one surprise for the researchers. They hypothesized that those with stronger attachments to influencers would have a more negative sense of financial well-being. The thought was that people would buy more things on the advice of the influencer – possibly things they didn’t need or couldn’t afford – and that could be linked to higher levels of financial regret.

But that’s not what they found. Even financial well-being was higher for those with stronger attachments to social media influencers.

The researchers emphasized that they didn’t have objective financial data on participants, and the financial well-being measure was based just on their self-reports.

“We don’t know why people felt better about their financial well-being. It is something we are exploring in another study,” Loibl said.

Bartosiak said the study findings show why consumers are attracted to social media influencers, but it is still not clear the impact is all positive.

“Influencers can provide a sense of connection that benefits consumers in terms of their feelings of well-being, but there are still concerns about overconsumption and what this might do to people in the long run,” she said.

“There’s still more to learn about what this is doing to people.”

The study was co-authored by Jung Eun Lee, an associate professor of consumer and design sciences at Auburn University.

The analysis of biological samples from more than 1,000 people also revealed metabolic shifts associated with changing disease severity and with genetic mutations known to increase the risk for colorectal cancer. 

Though there is more analysis to come, the resulting “biomarker discovery pipeline” shows promise as a noninvasive method of diagnosing colorectal cancer and monitoring disease progression, said Jiangjiang Zhu, co-senior author of the study and an associate professor of human sciences at The Ohio State University. 

“We believe this is a good tool for disease diagnostics and monitoring, especially because metabolic-based biomarker analysis could also be utilized to monitor treatment effectiveness,” said Zhu, also an investigator in The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center Molecular Carcinogenesis and Chemoprevention Research Program. 

“When a patient is taking drug A versus drug B, especially for cancer, time is essential. If they don’t have a good response, we want to know that as soon as possible so we can change the treatment regimen. If metabolites can help indicate a treatment’s effectiveness faster than traditional methods like pathology or protein markers, we hope they could be good indicators for doctors who are caring for patients.” 

The tool is not intended to replace colonoscopy as the gold standard for cancer screening, Zhu said, and further study with additional samples is planned before the pipeline would be ready for translation to a clinical setting. 

The research was published recently in the journal iMetaOmics. 

This work also represents an advance in machine learning techniques, combining two established methods to design the new platform: partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) for big-picture differentiation of molecular profiles, and an artificial neural network (ANN) that, in this case, pinpoints molecules that improve the platform’s predictive value. The team called the resulting biomarker pipeline PANDA, short for PLS-ANN-DA.

“We took the best of both worlds and put them together to leverage their strengths and complement each other to offset their potential weaknesses,” Zhu said. “We were looking at all kinds of possibilities to tease out the biomarkers that could be predictive or indicative of disease progression and the different stages of the disease. That gave us some strong confidence that this method has great potential for future diagnoses.” 

Two sets of biological data extracted from blood samples were analyzed: metabolites, products of biochemical reactions that break down food to produce energy and perform other essential functions, and transcripts, RNA readouts of DNA instructions that predict related protein changes. 

The biological samples are a significant part of the study’s strength, Zhu said, because they were collected as part of large research projects: The Ohio Colorectal Cancer Prevention Initiative (OCCPI) and an Ohio State Wexner Medical Center clinical laboratory biobank. In all, 626 samples came from people with colorectal cancer – including patients with high-risk genetic mutations. Another 402 samples from age- and gender-matched healthy individuals were obtained by Jieli Li, co-senior study author and associate professor-clinical of pathology in Ohio State’s College of Medicine. 

“We, as humans, at different stages of our lives, actually have quite different biochemistry,” Zhu said. “This valuable collection of samples enabled us to run high-throughput metabolomics analysis to understand the molecular changes from people who don’t have cancer with people who have cancer, and also from early-stage to late-stage disease. 

“We also have data from patients with genetic mutations that we can compare to the metabolite data to look at whether metabolic changes are an indication of predictive values for the genetic mutations. To our knowledge, this is the first time this has been done at this scope and scale because we are looking at literally hundreds of patients.” 

Biomarkers are tricky to rely on for diagnostics across different populations because of the many conditions that affect molecular profiles in living systems – so this study highlights several molecular changes with potential, but not certainty, in assessing colorectal cancer’s presence and progression in a nationally representative group of patients. 

The metabolism pathways linked to one family of compounds called purines, which are needed for DNA formation and degradation, stood out in the analysis because they were more active overall in cancer patients compared to healthy controls, and were less active with more advanced tumor stages.   

“It’s certainly an indication that this biomarker may be associated with the underlying mechanisms of cancer biology,” Zhu said. “We are cautiously optimistic in saying that we’re not only doing biomarker discovery, but we’re also providing clues for mechanistic investigations.” 

The team plans to continue analyzing metabolites related to different types of biological signals to refine the PANDA biomarker pipeline. 

“Some of the markers we identified are a little bit finicky, and there’s a lot of noise within those signals, but we have pushed the field forward to develop potential next-generation biomarkers and the novel bioinformatics pipeline for colorectal cancer diagnosis and monitoring,” Zhu said. 

This work was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, an Ohio State fellowship and Pelotonia, which funded the statewide OCCPI. Zhu is also supported by the Provost’s Scarlet and Gray Associate Professor Program at Ohio State. 

Additional co-authors include first author Rui Xu, Hyein Jung, Fouad Choueiry, Shizi Zhang, Rachel Pearlman and Ning Jin, all of Ohio State, and Heather Hampel of the City of Hope National Cancer Center.

The protective effect was enhanced by delivering the antibody in a nasal spray that disperses these molecules throughout the respiratory tract, where they stick to the slippery mucus lining to lie in wait for invading viral particles. 

The engineered molecule is based on the IgM version of an immunoglobulin antibody, the generic first line of antibody defense against infection – but with an added structural feature that attaches to a very specific location on the influenza A surface to neutralize the virus. 

“It’s a better platform with a better antibody. If we can prepare the respiratory environment with this enhanced engineered molecule, it can capture and intercept the virus in an early stage,” said co-lead author Kai Xu, assistant professor of veterinary biosciences at The Ohio State University. “This would be a therapy that not only can be used for prevention of seasonal flu – it potentially could also be used against pandemic strains in the future.” 

The study was published April 29 in Nature Communications. 

Influenza A viruses are divided into subtypes based on characteristics of two major surface proteins, hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) – as in, for example, the strain annually circulating in people, H1N1, and a less common H3N2 virus that co-circulates during flu season. 

Previous work has shown that monoclonal IgG antibodies engineered to target the influenza A HA protein lose potency as the virus mutates its way out of their crosshairs. 

These antibodies, mimicking mature natural flu-fighters of the adaptive immune system, attach to a precise section of the surface protein to disable the virus’s ability to bind to a host cell receptor and enter the cell to make copies of itself. But once viruses figure out where they’re being targeted by antibodies, they mutate those sites to escape recognition by the immune system. 

Xu and colleagues theorized that building an anti-flu antibody based on the IgM isotype (an early, first-line immune responder known for its pentameric shape), featuring more structural sites capable of binding to the HA protein as well as an IgG-level tight and precise target, would increase the antibody’s neutralization capacity.  

The team constructed and evaluated 18 IgM antibodies based on existing IgG antibodies known to target different segments of the HA protein, landing on one IgM version that was superior in cell culture studies at neutralizing a panel of H1N1 and H3N2 flu viruses that have been circulating in people for at least 50 years. 

“The advantage is that we utilized the multivalency feature of IgM combined with the potency of a mature broadly neutralizing antibody,” Xu said. “Multivalent means that this molecule has multiple arms to capture the virus, so the virus has very little chance to escape. 

“And because IgM is a large molecule, when it binds to the viral surface it effectively covers the surface, so it prevents receptor engagement.” 

Experiments showed that even if a mutation affected this IgM antibody’s strong attraction to a specific HA binding site, the antibody’s large size and multivalency could help it outpace viral escape attempts. 

“By enhancing the capacity for it to recognize the mutated or differentiated viral surface regions, it can cross-protect against different influenza virus infections and can also work even after mutations occur,” Xu said. 

In mouse experiments, researchers delivered a single dose of the IgM antibody in a nasal spray, intending to place a layer of the engineered antibody across the mucosal surfaces of the nasal cavities and lungs. 

“The primary purpose is to refuse viruses before they can get into a host cell,” Xu said. “The mucosal immunity is more efficient than systemic immunity at intercepting, so the initial infection can be reduced or eliminated.” 

Researchers followed the preventive nasal spray with lethal doses of H1N1 and H3N2 flu viruses. Compared to control animals that did not receive preventive treatment, mice receiving the IgM antibody had better outcomes: No mice got sick from the H3N2 strain, and most survived the H1N1 infection and recovered from symptoms. 

The molecules remained on the mouse mucosal surface for seven days, an indication that a single spray could last for weeks in humans. 

“The adhesiveness of the molecule extends its protection window, and that’s one advantage of this strategy,” Xu said. 

Though this work focused on historic and seasonal versions of influenza A, Xu said the team of structural biologists, immunologists and virologists see the findings as a proof of principle to help establish the IgM platform as a potential therapeutic technology for different viruses – including bird flu, an influenza A H5 virus – and even non-viral diseases like cancer. 

Xu co-led the study with Xinli Liu of the University of Houston, Tong-Ming Fu of IGM Biosciences Inc. and Zhiqiang An of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Additional co-authors from those institutions and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases also worked on the study. 

This research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, IGM Biosciences and the Welch Foundation.

For decades, astronomers only had theories about where some of the heaviest elements in nature, like gold, uranium and platinum, come from. But by taking a fresh look at old archival data, researchers now estimate that up to 10% of these heavy elements in the Milky Way are derived from the ejections of highly magnetized neutron stars, called magnetars.

Until recently, astronomers had unwittingly overlooked the role that magnetars, essentially dead remnants of supernovae, might play in early galaxy formation, said Todd Thompson, co-author of the study and a professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University.

“Neutron stars are very exotic, very dense objects that are famous for having really big, very strong magnetic fields,” said Thompson. “They’re close to being black holes, but are not.”

While the origins of heavy elements had long been a quiet mystery, scientists knew that they could only form in special conditions through a method called the r-process (or rapid-neutron capture process), a set of unique and complex nuclear reactions, said Thompson. 

Scientists saw this process in action when they detected the collision of two super-dense neutron stars in 2017. This event, captured using NASA telescopes, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO) and other instruments, provided the first direct evidence that heavy metals were being created by celestial forces.  

But further evidence showed that other mechanisms might be needed to account for all these elements, as neutron star collisions might not produce heavy elements fast enough in the early universe. According to this new study, building on these clues helped Thompson and his collaborators recognize that powerful magnetar flares could indeed serve as a potential ejectors of heavy elements, a finding confirmed by 20-year-old observations of SGR 1806–20, a magnetar flare so bright that some measurements of the event could only be made by studying its reflection off the moon. 

By analyzing this magnetar flare event, researchers determined that the radioactive decay of the newly created elements matched up with their theoretical predictions about the timing and types of energies released by a magnetar flare after it ejected heavy r-process elements. The researchers also theorized that magnetar flares produce heavy cosmic rays, extremely high-velocity particles whose physical origin remains unknown. 

“I love new ideas about how systems work, how new discoveries work, how the universe works,” Thompson said. “That’s why results like this are really exciting.”

The study was recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Magnetars may provide unique insights into galactic chemical evolution, including the formation of exoplanetary systems and their habitability. 

Not only do magnetars produce valuable metals like gold and silver that end up on Earth, the supernova explosions that cause them also produce elements like oxygen, carbon and iron that are vital for many other, more complex celestial processes. 

“All of that material they eject gets mixed into the next generation of planets and stars,” said Thompson. “Billions of years later, those atoms are incorporated into what could potentially amount to life.” 

Altogether, these findings have deep implications for astrophysics, particularly for scientists studying the origin of both heavy elements and fast radio bursts – brief shivers of electromagnetic radio waves from faraway galaxies. Understanding how matter ejects from magnetars could help scientists learn more about them. 

Due to their rarity and short duration, magnetar flares can be difficult to observe, 

and current space-based telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble don’t have the dedicated abilities needed to detect and study their emission signals. Even more specialized observatories like NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope can only see the brightest part of gamma-ray flashes from nearby galaxies. 

Instead, one proposed NASA mission, the Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI), could bolster the team’s work by surveying the Milky Way for energetic events like giant magnetar flares. Though another event like SGR 1806-20 might not occur this century, if a magnetar flare did detonate in our backyard, COSI could be used to better identify the individual elements created from its eruption and allow this team of researchers to confirm their theory about where heavy elements in the universe come from. 

“We’re generating a bunch of new ideas about this field, and ongoing observations will lead to even more great connections,” said Thompson.

The study was supported by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Charles University Grant Agency and the Simons Foundation. Co-authors include Anirudh Patel and Brian D. Metzger from Columbia University, Jakub Cehula from Charles University in Prague, Eric Burns from Louisiana State University and Jared A. Goldberg from the Flatiron Institute. 

Scientists first reported in 2016 that specific gut microbes known as commensal bacteria, which cause no harm and often contribute to host health, set off production and release of a gut-originated T cell that drives up body-wide autoimmune disease in mice. Since then, the team has focused on explaining this unexpected twist in the typically harmonious relationship between these microbes and the body. 

The gut is where the action begins, but the overall outcome can be attributed to T cells’ “plasticity” – their flexibility to respond to a changing environment, such as in our body’s barrier, the gut. 

In this case, reprogrammed T helper cells adopt characteristics of a new T helper cell type while preserving some of their original traits, making them “super powerful and potent – and if you are dealing with autoimmune disease, that’s bad news,” said senior study author Hsin-Jung Joyce Wu, professor of internal medicine, division of rheumatology and immunology, at The Ohio State University College of Medicine.   

“This is really the first time it’s been shown that T cell plasticity, which typically occurs in the gut, can have this dramatic impact outside the gut with systemic impact on autoimmune disease.” 

The findings likely have relevance to human patients, Wu said: Many of the gene expressions detected in these abnormal cells in mice also exist in the same cells in people with rheumatoid arthritis. 

The research was published April 30 in Nature Immunology.

An estimated 18 million people worldwide are affected by rheumatoid arthritis (RA), a chronic autoimmune disease causing inflammation throughout the body and pain in the joints. Like other autoimmune diseases, RA is caused by the immune system attacking the body’s tissues and organs. Though the exact cause is unknown, genetics and environmental exposures – such as smoking and changes of gut commensal bacteria, or dysbiosis – are among the risk factors. 

The abnormal T cell in question is called a T follicular helper 17 (T_FH17) cell – meaning it functions as a T_FH cell but also displays T helper 17 (T_H17) cell signatures. Several previous studies have reported that the human equivalent of these types of cells are found in the blood of patients with autoimmune diseases, and are linked to more severe symptoms, but little has been known about the cells’ backstory. 

These cells have been a puzzle, Wu said, because the conventional T_FH cells are expected to be nonmobile, and just reside in B cell follicles to help B cells, another immune cell type critical for the development of RA. But unlike conventional T_FH cells, the T_FH17 cells also have the traveling capabilities of T helper 17 cells, which are known to migrate rapidly to infection sites where they produce a proinflammatory protein called IL-17.

Following their 2016 study, Wu’s lab has now discovered that the systemic T_FH cells traced back to Peyer’s patches, lymphoid tissue in the small intestine, and induced by typically harmless microbes called segmented filamentous bacteria, are enriched with T_FH17 cells. 

More specifically, fate-mapping mouse models showed that the hybrid cells derived from T helper 17 (T_H17) cells in the gut transformed into T follicular helper cells inside Peyer’s patches, and that the segmented filamentous bacteria enhanced the cell reprogramming process. 

“The key is T cell plasticity only happens in very few places, which is why it’s been overlooked – the dominant place to find them is in the gut barrier,” Wu said. “And that’s one of few places in the body where the environment can change from one second to the next, and therefore induction of T cell plasticity occurs to accommodate the ever-changing environmental challenge.” 

The team then used fluorescent tagging of cells in the arthritic mouse model to observe the cells’ movement from the gut to the rest of the body.

“That’s how we knew they were really traveling,” Wu said. Importantly, these cells also acquire a stronger capability to help B cells compared to conventional T_FH cells. 

“That’s what makes them ultra-pathogenic T_FH cells in RA, a systemic disease, because they are very mobile and can potently help B cells,” she said. 

To demonstrate the hazard associated with these abnormal T_H17-derived T_FH cells, researchers compared RA development in genetically susceptible mouse models injected with only conventional T_FH cells (as a control group) or conventional T_FH cells mixed in with around 20% of T_H17-derived T_FH cells. 

Substituting a small number of the conventional cells with these aberrant cells increased the arthritis-related ankle thickening in mice by 4.8-fold compared to control mice, a finding that took Wu and colleagues by surprise.

Researchers also sequenced the gene expression profiles of the aberrant T follicular helper cells isolated from the gut of RA mouse models and found that they shared several similarities with those of T_FH cells circulating in the blood of people with RA – including the gut signature, hinting that a similar mechanism is behind human disease as well.

“That, to me, was exciting, to find this cross-species signature, which suggests the translational potential of this research,” Wu said. “We are hoping to improve patients’ health and life. For the future, as T_FH17 cells can be found in other type of autoimmune patients, such as lupus patients, if we can determine that these abnormal T_FH cells are a potential target not just for RA, but across autoimmune diseases, that would be very useful.” 

This work was supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. 

Co-authors include Tingting Fan, Chi Tai, Madeline Cutcliffe, Haram Kim, Ye Liu, Jianying Li, Gang Xin, Mollyanna Grashel, Laurie Baert, Chinwe Ekeocha, Paige Vergenes, Judith Lin, Beatriz Hanaoka and Wael Jarjour of Ohio State; Kiah Sleiman and Trevor Tankersley of the University of Arizona; Svetlana Lima and Randy Longman of Weill Cornell Medicine; Wan-Lin Lo of the University of Utah; Min Wang and Xuan Zhang of the National Center of Gerontology in Beijing; and George Tsokos of Harvard Medical School.