Cardiology

How a big CMS update on carotid stenting could impact interventional cardiology – Cardiovascular Business

The decision received widespread support from U.S. medical societies, including those in the fields of neurology, radiology and cardiology. More than 800 comments were received during the CMS review process, with the majority expressing support for the expanded coverage.

"There were 14 medical societies or organizations that came out in favor, that includes the American Association of Neurology, and all of the cardiac, radiology and neurology communities entirely coming out in favor," explained Ken Rosenfield, MD, MSCA member and section head of vascular medicine and intervention, and chairman of STEMI and Acute MI Quality Improvement Committee at Massachusetts General Hospital.

He said MSCA worked to show consensus among many of the experts from the various specialties involved in carotid care and submit the request for review that included a clear and referenced outline of the clinical evidence.

The new CMS national coverage determination has greatly broadened the number of patients eligible for reimbursement when they undergo minimally invasive, catheter-based stenting. The biggest thing the CMS change does is lift off the restriction of payment being the deciding factor for care rather than what is best for a patient.

"I don't think it changes the hospital's business model or bottom line, but I think what it really does is improves patient quality outcomes. Because what you have now is the option to do multiple approaches to a patient without restriction by payment. So if medical therapy is the right thing to do, that's what you do. And if I'm a carotid center, but I think the right thing to do is endarterectomy because a patient has a bulky lesion or a type 3 arch or something like that, I'm going to send 'em a surgery and there's no inhibition for crossing over for the therapeutic which is most appropriate for the patient. And in the end, that reduces total mortality and total neurologic complications," Gray explained.

Rosenfield said patients will also benefit from having more informed decision-making.

"One thing that was important in the decision that CMS finally issued was that there should be a shared decision-making process that patients go through with their physician, be it a surgeon, a cardiologist, a radiologist, a neurologist or a neurosurgeon, and that all of the options are required to be presented to the patient so that the patient can make an informed decision. Now, in many instances, it might be the most appropriate thing to do an endarterectomy or to do optimal medical therapy. But in some instances, it will be clear that stenting is the right approach, and then there's going to be this big gray zone where patients will have the option of transcarotid artery revascularization (TCAR) using stenting or endarterectomy. And in that case, now the patient will actually be able to make their own informed decision for elective procedures," Rosenfield explained.

CMS now approves carotid stenting for asymptomatic patients with a stenosis of 70% or more, and symptomatic patients with more than 50% stenosis, Gray said. The decision allows for various catheter vascular access options including transfemoral, transradial or transcarotid.

While many patients may opt for the less invasive procedure if they have a choice, he said there are a lot of good clinical reasons for open surgical procedures, including the presence of comorbidities or anatomic issues that make catheter navigation difficult. Each patient case will have different circumstances, so ideally there should be a team-based approach to CEA or CAS.

"That doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have sign off for carotid procedure by one or another specialty. In fact, CMS rejected that and they agreed that anybody who's managing carotid disease should have full knowledge of all of the different options and their pluses and minuses and should present a balanced approach to the patient. The Multi-Specialty Carotid Alliance is really keen on ensuring that we end up with optimal outcomes for these patients that we think quality should be monitored and assured and that patients deserve that. So we're going to work very intensively on that with all of our colleagues from all different specialties to try to achieve that," Rosenfield said.

Often in medicine, when a solution to a problem is developed, such as a drug or device, the screening for patients with that condition increases and it is often found there is much larger patient population that originally thought. This certainly happened with the development of transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) as an alternative to open heart surgery, where much larger population of of aortic stenosis patients came out of the woodwork and surprised cardiology in the past decade. The same thing happened when the FDA cleared use of transcatheter closure devices for patent foramen ovale (PFO), Gray said.

"When you create a therapy for patients, we find those patients and there's more surveillance for that problem. When you have limited options for that, it becomes less attractive. It's not great. I mean, that's not the way medicine should be practiced, but that's the reality of it," Gray explained.

Rosenfield said if CAS procedure volume goes up, it also will likely spur new investment to develop better interventional therapies. Keep in mind that the currently available stents, catheters and embolic protection systems for CAS were developed 15-20 years ago with little new innovation since. Rosenfield said the lack of innovation is mainly due to the lack of reimbursement and resulting lower numbers of CAS patients.

"I think that one of the things that happened as a result of the lack of coverage for CAS is a complete absence of investment in the carotid innovation space. There are a couple of notable exceptions, but by and large, there hasn't been a lot of innovation in this space," he said. I firmly believe we're going to get there."

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How a big CMS update on carotid stenting could impact interventional cardiology - Cardiovascular Business

Cardiology

The Daylight Saving Time Health Effects You Might Not Be Expecting, According to a Cardiology Specialist (Exclusive) – PEOPLE

As you prepare to spring ahead when Daylight Saving Time starts this weekend, prepare for the various health effects that could come with it as well.

On Sunday, March 10 at 2:00 a.m. local time, clocks across the United States and Canada will turn forward one hour to 3:00 a.m. local time. The biannual temporal event allows for more daylight at night between mid-March to early November.

Some love the extra sunlight in their day, but for those who like to catch their full eight hours of shuteye (or parents who want their kids to stay in bed longer), it's a less popular practice. This is because the Sunday time leap results in one less hour of sleep.

Dr. Rachana Kulkarni, regional Director of Cardiovascular Services for RWJBarnabas Health and Director of its Women's Heart Center, tells PEOPLE that "everyone" is affected by Daylight Saving Time because of circadian rhythm.

Commonly referred to as our internal body clock, a circadian rhythm is "the discipline the body goes by" that dictates multiple processes in the body. When that gets disrupted, Dr. Kulkarni says "the whole body and its basic metabolic function gets affected."

While ackowledging the "wonderful" extra hour of light that comes with Daylight Savings, Dr. Kulkarni who's board certified in cardiology and nuclear cardiology says it also comes with "some health challenges," which she attributes to "the disruption of the circadian rhythm."

Since sleep is "one of life's essential aids," Dr. Kulkarni says, it's among the most essential qualities to maintain good cardiovascular health. When our circadian rhythm is disturbed, our sleep is impacted.

Fortunately, she says "the most vulnerability comes in the first week" of our body's initial response to getting one less hour of sleep.

Read on for the negative and positive health effects associated with Daylight Saving Time and the helpful ways to combat the challenges.

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Because the time change causes everyone to lose one hour of sleep, a disrupted circadian rhythm can result in some difficulty adjusting to the new schedule.

The American Health Association offers several detailed tips to combat this challenge, but Dr. Kulkarni highlighted some of the standouts. She says "we need to start thinking of this and transitioning our own health habits to get better" in the days leading up to Daylight Saving Time.

One easy way to acclimate your body: "getting out and get as much natural light as possible each day" after the time change occurs. And Saturday night before the leap, "wind down a little earlier."

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There are certain cardiovascular risks associated with Daylight Saving Time, according to Dr. Kulkarni, including an increase in risks for stroke and heart attack.

Even during typical weeks, she says, emergency rooms and cardiologists see "a significant increase" in heart attack and strokes on Mondays, though the reason is unclear; "there is lot of debate in cardiology literature as to why this happens," she says.

"Now add that to disruption of the circadian rhythm," Dr. Kulkarni says of Daylight Saving Time and the number goes up furhter.

"There's a marked increase in heart attack and strokes" in the days following the change, she says, and that increase can last for up to a week.

Dr. Kulkarni says those who are "at risk for heart disease" and "risk factors like diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, family history" should be attentive to their health during this time. One particular group she mentions is post-menopausal women, who are "very prone for heart and health risks because of lack of sleep and interruption of the circadian rhythm."

"We have data and research to support that one in four post menopausal women are at risk for having irregular heart rhythm, such as atrial fibrillation," she explains. "Sleep disturbance is very common in perimenopausal and post menopausal women and that increases their risk."

As a result of disrupted sleep or sleep deprivation, cognitive function may be impacted. This is because our bodies need "seven to nine hours of sleep" to rest our bodies, hearts and brains, says Dr. Kulkarni.

Lack of good sleep "can lead to cognitive decline because you are unable to focus," she explains. "If your body is not rested, you are unable to focus that next day."

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"Studies have shown that lack of good sleep, which is our body's reset point for the next day, or irregular sleep, can lead to depression," says Dr. Kulkarni. "Studies have shown that younger people are more likely to face depression and obesity due to lack of sleep."

Dr. Kulkarni says disrupted sleep and poor nighttime habits are correlated with weight issues linked to diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

When we feel tired, she explains we're "less likely to exercise." She says studies have shown sleep loss can "increases the risk of visceral obesity, which increases your cardiovascular risk."

Younger people "are more likely to face depression and obesity due to lack of sleep," while older people "are more likely to have cognitive decline ... and higher cardiovascular risk."

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There also many benefits associated with Daylight Saving Time, including the most obvious: More sunlight!

"If we are prudent about how to transition our body, there are so many positives that we get with more daylight," Dr. Kulkarni says.

"It allows us to get more natural light, which is good for the body... So we need to take advantage of all those positives," she continues. "Exposure to natural light is a wonderful thing to do."

Dr. Kulkarni points out the benefits of natural light. She says it "allows better health" thanks to increased Vitamin D, but also says "it's amazing" for our bodies and our psyche.

Increased daylight and warming temperatures make physical fitness much more enticing during the hibernation-friendly winter months.

"My suggestion is to go outside and start exercising," Dr. Kulkarni says.

"We are going to now have light when we go out [before work] and when we come home," she explains. "So take advantage of the extra light that we have."

Dr. Kulkarni suggests going outside for a walk or a run whatever form of activity will "get yourself some fresh air." She says these are all great benefits to "turn this challenge" of Daylight Saving Time "into opportunity."

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Despite the inevitable circadian rhythm disruption which affects sleep, there are ways to get your health back on track during Daylight Saving Time.

"We should know that these are the challenges and we should prep ourselves in a better way," Dr. Kulkarni says. "Get our bodies adjusted, start sleeping a little early, avoid caffeine, get into a good health hygiene so then, you are going to reap benefits of all the positives of Daylight Saving Time."

"Fear risks, mitigate [them], get into good sleep hygiene, and then it's all good," Dr. Kulkarni continues. "It's up to us. I always say knowledge is power!"

Maintaining good sleep hygiene and cutting back on screen time at night is also "super important to incorporate those good health habits," adds Dr. Kulkarni. "Avoid devices in the bedroom and shut all the devices down an hour before your bedtime to reduce the exposure to blue light."

Dr. Kulkarni's "appeal to all people" during Daylight Saving Time: "Limit use of technology. This is a good time to get out!"

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The Daylight Saving Time Health Effects You Might Not Be Expecting, According to a Cardiology Specialist (Exclusive) - PEOPLE

Cardiology

With the correct research, AI in pediatric cardiology has great potential – Contemporary Pediatrics

Scott Ceresnak, MD, cardiac electrophysiologist, director, of the Pediatric Electrophysiology Program, Stanford Medicine Childrens Health, Palo Alto, California, shared his excitement regarding the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in the pediatric cardiology space, including wearable technology, in this video interview with Contemporary Pediatrics.

Ceresnak noted mass research is needed to figure out how AI can further be used in health care, but explained trials are underway in various health care spaces.

Transcript (edited for clarity):

Contemporary Pediatrics:

Dr. Ceresnak, when it comes to AI, it's dominating the headlines in the medical field for a varying number of reasons, but we have seen in some indications and populations, that technology trickle into the pediatric space. From a cardiology perspective, what are some of those findings and what are you starting to see be rolled out, or tested if nothing else?

Scott Ceresnak, MD:

You know, AI is such a hot topic now. And, really, there's so much promise with the technology going forward. I would say a couple of things with AI, first of all, as you mentioned, so much of the AI data that's being generated, and algorithms that are being generated are adult centric, right?

So I think we have to be a bit careful. And just because these algorithms work well, on adults, we don't know if that's going to trickle down if those specific algorithms are going to work in children. So I think the first step is, for most AI algorithms, you need big data, right? So you need a big data sets to understand how can you distinguish normal or abnormal. Then you need a good big group to validate that algorithm. Does it work? So, we need big datasets in children that can really, A.) Provide good machine learning algorithms, and then B.) validate them and see do they work or not.

I think that's a big step for us is really getting a lot of big data to generate these algorithms and generate specific pediatric level algorithms. So I think the first steps that are coming is do these algorithms work in children? Do the adult algorithms working children? And then can we develop our own pediatric specific elements? And I think there's a lot of work in CG space, electrocardiograms, and that there's a lot of work that a bunch of groups are doing here at Stanford and a bunch of other groups across the country, great centers are doing a lot of machine learning work on ECGs.

As I mentioned before, echocardiography, looking sonograms of the heart, one of my colleagues at Stanford Charitha Reddy is doing great work looking at, can we create artificial intelligence-based readings of these echocardiograms? Can we distinguish normal from abnormal and take away the human part of the reading. And really, I think amazing work is being done. I feel like we're sort of at the tip of the iceberg and what we can do and what we're starting to see in the pediatric space and I'm super excited about what's to come, really on the electrophysiology side and ECG algorithms and other arrhythmia detection algorithms. But then also, looking at in hospital infection of arrhythmias and early detection of potential events in the hospital, and imaging wise. I think, on the imaging side, this is going to revolutionize the way we sort of see echocardiograms and other imaging modalities in children.

I'm excited about this space, especially wearables, and I think they carry great promise and I think they carry a lot of hope for arrhythmia detection in children. I would caution people too to say that, as I mentioned before, all these algorithms are built for adults.

I think we have to be careful how we interpret the data and the combination of using the watch and using the data that we can get from these smartwatches, but also using the clinical judgment of important people who are experts in the field, is going to be really important to strike that balance between not raising anxiety too much in terms of families, but also, truly picking up the arrhythmias that we can treat and we can help kids going forward.

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With the correct research, AI in pediatric cardiology has great potential - Contemporary Pediatrics

Cardiology

Cardiologist aims to improve care, reduce costly air transport – The Taos News

Without a cardiologist since Dr. Geilan Ismail retired in 2022, any replacement arriving at Holy Cross Medical Center would be newsworthy.

Dr. Tiziano Scarabelli, the hospital's new cardiologist, is introducing heart patients to newer diagnostic methods, which he said not only save lives but will also reduce airlifts out of Taos and improve patient care and their overall quality of life.

By using a top-of-the-line CT scan machine Holy Cross obtained in 2023 in conjunction with software that compiles a detailed 3D image of a patient's heart, Scarabelli said he is able to diagnose patients more accurately and discharge non-emergent patients quicker than ever before at Holy Cross.

"When there was a patient coming to the [emergency department] with chest pain, there was the conventional approach," he said, explaining that echocardiogram stress tests either physical or using nuclear medicine require a patient to stay at the hospital for up to 36 hours.

While he still employs both tests regularly at Holy Cross, he said coronary CT angiograms can be performed without injecting any drug and don't require patients to fast, allowing them to be "discharged in [as few as] six hours," Scarabelli said.The test works by revealing calcified coronary arteries indicating coronary plaques immediately and clearly in the imaging, which can be completed in 20 minutes.

Scarabelli shared a PowerPoint presentation with the Taos News of 3D images of hearts, some in various stages of visible to a layman coronary artery disease. In fact one of the goals of the imaging is to very clearly communicate to patients the consequences of a poor diet, obesity, a lack of physical activity or not taking one's prescribed heart or diabetes medicine, for example.

"It has a very significant impact in terms of changes of behavior," Scarabelli said. "That is very important to provide a pictorial representation of the work done by the patients."

Holy Cross CEO James Kiser agreed the CT angiogram is able to provide imaging of the heart faster and with a high degree of accuracy. He said Scarabelli is an expert in using the technology and interpreting the detailed information it provides.

Scarabelli was born and raised in Vercelli, Italy. He has taught at several universities and is licensed to practice medicine in over a dozen states. As a young man, he graduated with a degree in medicine from the University of Turin, then completed a fellowship in cardiology at the University of Brescia. He subsequently moved to England, where he carried out research projects for several years.

Tizianos subspecialty is cardio-oncology, whose primary goal is to prevent and treat cardiovascular complications of cancer, chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy, according to his hospital bio. Kiser has said that one of his priorities is to bring a cancer treatment clinic to Holy Cross.

"We are blessed to have Dr. Tiziano Scarabelli and his wife, Carol Chen-Scarabelli, NP, staffing the Holy Cross Cardiology Department," Dr. Lucas Schreiber said. "It is unusual to find such well-trained and academically inclined clinicians practicing in such a small community. When Dr. Geilan Ismail retired, I feared we would not find a replacement of her caliber. In Dr. Scarabelli, the Taos community is once again receiving state-of-the-art, highly competent and guideline-driven cardiac care."

Scarabelli's wife, Nurse Practitioner Carol Chen-Scarabelli, came to work at Holy Cross with her husband, and shares his drive to serve the folks who live within the hospital's service area.

"With the multimodality imaging we have, including the coronary CT scanner, in order to rule out any significant blockage in the arteries or your heart, it's making a huge difference," Chen-Scarabelli said. "Before, if someone came in with chest pain and you weren't sure if they were having a heart attack and you had to airlift them out. They're getting a $75,000 bill for airlifting, not counting your hospital bill.

"I told [Christus St. Vincent Hospital in Santa Fe] when they came up to visit, I said, 'Well, if they didn't have a heart attack, then they'll get one when they see that bill,'" Chen-Scarabelli said. "If the coronary CT helps us to diagnose rapidly, if they have significant blockage, they do need to be airlifted; [but] we've had some but they weren't urgent like that, and they were able to drive down or have a family member take them instead of being airlifted."

Scarabelli said just three patients he's seen have had to be airlifted out of Taos for treatment at a larger clinic. All three required surgery.

"The negative predictive value of a negative CT angiogram is 100 percent," Scarabelli said, clapping his hands with finality. "If I say it is negative to the patient, 'Go home,' it is done. It's the power of the procedure that allows this hospital to make big jumps in care."

Scarabelli said that after a quarter-century teaching medicine and heading up departments at learning hospitals or running clinical practices in several larger communities in the United States, Taos feels like the right place to be.

"The reality is, I've been an academician all my life," he said. "I became a professor of medicine at Wayne State University [in Michigan] when I started 22 years ago. I'm a professor of medicine at the Royal College. I continue to do that; I'm still an academician. But they no longer pay me.

"I'm sick and tired of the political thing in academia," Scarabelli added. "Academia is worse than the politics in the White House. Here, I'm surrounded by people who have the most genuine desire to help me to do things well."

After renting for six months in Taos, Scarabelli said he, his wife and 14-year-old daughter Caroline have moved into their own home.

"For my first time ever and I'm very honest with you, not even in Italy, not in England, where I lived many years, not in the U.S., I always felt not accepted I feel part of the community," Scarabelli said.

"I used the term community in the past and it was, like, something up there; I didn't understand what it means," Scarabelli said, gesturing to overhead to something out of reach. "I have become aware of that."

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Cardiologist aims to improve care, reduce costly air transport - The Taos News

Cardiology

Researcher promotes subsidies to bring cardiac care closer to home in rural areas – Montana Right Now

A model of the mammalian heart (Photo by Souza e Silva via Wikimedia Commons | CC-BY-SA 4.0).

Luring cardiologists to rural parts of Iowa may mean subsidizing their salaries, a new study has found.

Tom Gruca, a marketing professor at the University of Iowas Tippie College of Business, looked at data from more than 40 years of public health in his state. His study, Bringing the Doctor to the Patients: Cardiology Outreach to Rural Areas, found that paying doctors to participate in traveling practice models could help alleviate the coming cardiologist shortage in his state.

Using subsidies and an existing Visiting Consultant Clinic model would be a better and more cost-effective way to get cardiology care to rural patients, he said.

A VCC model is a formal arrangement between a rural hospital or clinic and a specialist physician, typically from an urban area nearby. In a VCC arrangement, the specialists travel to rural areas on a regular basis to see patients in their own communities. There, they can use the rural hospital to examine them and provide basic support and non-invasive procedures, and treat them in larger hospitals for more complex procedures.

The policy that the American Heart Association and everybody else always talks about is lets get doctors to move to rural areas, Gruca said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. That might work with the primary care physician because if theres a hospital there, theres probably enough equipment and staff for them to do what theyre doing. This will not work for almost any specialist because they need the imaging equipment, the surgical equipment, the surgery nurses, and all that other stuff to do their jobs.

The VCC model is used in every state, he said. Looking at the numbers the research found that the model would not only provide rural patients with access to care, but save money.

Putting a cardiologist in a rural community would mean the doctor would not have enough patients or patient visits to support their practice, Gruca said. And paying cardiologists on a per-mile basis to drive to rural communities would be excessively expensive. In some cases, getting doctors to give up patient time to spend up to three hours of windshield time to get rural communities to participate in the VCC model was a challenge.

His research found that a state investment of about $430,000 per year would provide doctors with the necessary funding to cover windshield time and still provide current levels of cardiology coverage in the state.

Getting that cardiology care to rural communities is important on a number of levels, he said. First, rural residents are more likely to have cardiology issues. According to one study, between 2010 and 2015, the death rate for rural residents from coronary heart disease was significantly higher than it was for those in urban areas. And a 2017 study found that people in rural areas have a 30 percent higher risk of dying from a stroke due to their increased chronic disease, and reduced access to pre-hospital care.

Second, research shows that rural residents who have access to cardiology care are better off for it.

What we can say is that the difference between having VCC outreach and not having VCC outreach means anywhere between 700,000 and a million rural residents having better access, he said. And studies show that Medicaid patients who see a specialist at least once a year are way more likely to stay out of the hospital and way more likely to live for another year.

Even more important, he said, is that rural America is facing a pending shortage of cardiologists. Currently, the state has fewer than 200 cardiologists, Gruca said, almost all of them in urban areas. Nationally, the number of cardiologists is expected to decline by as much as 10% due to retirement and aging workloads. While fellowship programs graduate about 1,500 new cardiologists a year, he said, about 2,000 leave the practice annually.

I thought, whats going to happen when the number of cardiologists goes down? he said. When this shortage actually hits If we lose 10% of our current cardiologists there are a lot of cities (in Iowa) that will get no outreach at all.

Similar programs have worked in Australia, he said. The same kind of subsidies could be successful in encouraging specialist physicians to work in rural areas as well.

Even though the program was expensive, he said, it will still save states money over the alternative.

We looked at what it would take to hire people and put them into rural areas and the cost was many, many times (the annual subsidies) simply because they would have very little to do, he said. If we pay them some amount to do this outreach and we build a mathematical model to figure out how much would we have to pay them per mile or per minute its actually really many, many, many times the $400,000 for the subsidy that we calculated.

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

The post Researcher promotes subsidies to bring cardiac care closer to home in rural areas appeared first on Daily Montanan.

Three winners will receive a pair of ticket to Menopause the Musical 2 at the Brick on the campus of MSU on Wednesday, March 13.

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Researcher promotes subsidies to bring cardiac care closer to home in rural areas - Montana Right Now

Human Behavior

Bees Reveal a Human-Like Collective Intelligence We Never Knew Existed – ScienceAlert

The humble bumblebee is proof that brain size isn't everything.

This little insect with its wee, seed-sized brain has shown a level of collective intelligence in experiments that scientists thought was wholly unique to humans.

When trained in the lab to open a two-step puzzle box, bumblebees of the species Bombus terrestris could teach the solution to another bee that had never seen the box before.

This naive bee would not have solved the puzzle on its own. To teach the 'demonstrator' bees the non-intuitive solution in the first place, researchers had to show them what to do and offer them a reward after the first step to keep them motivated.

"This finding challenges a common opinion in the field: that the capacity to socially learn behaviors that cannot be innovated through individual trial and error is unique to humans," write the team of researchers based in the United Kingdom and United States.

Humans have a long history of 'moving the goalposts' on what sets our species apart from all others.

Once, it was thought that humans were the only animals with culture. But 'viral' songs among sparrows, the evolving dialects and traditions of whales, the regional hunting strategies of orcas, and the learned tool tricks of apes, crows, and dolphins, all suggest that socially transmitted behaviors are also present in animal societies, too.

Some of these cultural behaviors even show signs of refinement and improvement over time. Homing pigeons, for instance, learn from each other and adjust their culture's flight paths year on year.

An influential way to move the goalposts on human intelligence is to say that humans are unique from other animals because we can learn things from each other that we could not invent independently.

Think of the device you are reading this article on right now. No one human can invent all its parts and mechanics from scratch on their own and in one lifetime. It's taken decades of work and refinement to get to this advanced stage. Even the very act of reading is a skill that generations of humans have built upon little by little.

Obviously, no animal can put together an iPhone or read an article on animal intelligence. But at a basic level, bumblebees join chimpanzees in "cast[ing] serious doubt on this supposed human exceptionalism," writes Alex Thornton, an ecologist at the University of Exeter, in a review of the bumblebee research for Nature.

Chimpanzees have large brains and rich cultural lives, but the discovery among bumblebees, Thornton argues, is "all the more remarkable because it focuses not on humanity's primate cousins, but on an animal with a brain that is barely 0.0005 percent of the size of a chimpanzee's."

Underestimated for decades, largely because of their size, bumblebees are finally getting their due.

Recent experiments in the lab show these bees can learn from each other, use tools, count to zero, and perform basic mathematical equations.

The collective intelligence of their hive mind is also not to be dismissed.

To test it, behavioral scientist Alice Bridges from Queen Mary University of London and colleagues housed colonies of bumblebees with a two-step puzzle for a total of 36 or 72 hours over 12 or 24 consecutive days, with no human help.

After all that time, the bees could not figure out how to get to the sugary reward. Bumblebees spend on average about 8 days foraging in their lifetimes, so it's as if they had up to a third of their lifetime foraging time to work on the puzzle.

In the image below, you can see the puzzle. The yellow circle contains a drop of sugar under a plastic lid. Bees can get to it by pushing the red tab, but only once the blue tab has been pushed out of the way.

It took a human to painstakingly show them the way, and this was only possible using an extra reward. But once one bee figured it out, they could teach others how to move the two tabs to retrieve a sugary treat.

A similar experiment on chimps was also published recently in Nature Human Behavior. Both the vertebrate and invertebrate case studies showed a sharing of ideas that were exceptionally hard to learn alone.

Of course, this behavior wasn't observed in the wild. It had to be taught to the bees and chimps first. But the findings leave open the possibility that if there were a rare, once-in-a-lifetime innovator in chimp or bee society an Einstein among bees their ideas might stick around in animal culture and be used for generations to come.

Bees' famous honey waggle dance, pointing out the distance, direction, and quality of sources of food, for instance, is a behavior that was once thought to be purely instinctive, but it now appears to be somewhat shaped by social influences.

In 2017, researchers also trained bumblebees to roll a ball into a goal for a reward. To score, the insects had to learn from each other and remedy their previous mistakes. And so they did.

The newest experiment, Thornton writes, "suggests that the ability to learn from others what cannot be learnt alone should now join tool use, episodic memory (the ability to recall specific past events) and intentional communication in the scrapheap" of explanations for human cognition and culture.

The study was published in Nature.

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Bees Reveal a Human-Like Collective Intelligence We Never Knew Existed - ScienceAlert

Human Behavior

We can’t combat climate change without changing minds. This psychology class explores how. – Northeastern University

Published on

March 7, 2024

PSYC-4660: Humans & Nature is part of a broader academic push at Northeastern to explore the intersection of environmental science and cognitive processing and how it can lead to tangible changes.

When Northeastern professors John Coley and Brian Helmuth tell their students to introduce themselves, they really mean it.

Its a clammy Monday afternoon in mid-January, and the 15 members of PSYC-4660 Humans & Nature: The Psychology of Social-Ecological Systems on Northeastern Universitys Boston campus are taking turns in front of a projector. Theyre going through detailed PowerPoint slides outlining their majors, family backgrounds, college resumes thus far, hobbies, dogs and cats. Some grew up going to grandparents farms and camping every weekend in rural New England; one works part time for a company that sells carbon credits. Eshna Kulshreshtha, born and raised in California, talks about the small arguments she and her Indian immigrant parents have about recycling.

Ive never had a class where we spent an hour just doing introductions, says Kulshreshtha, a second-year marine science major, in an interview a few days later.

In another context it might be oversharing; here it has a point. The central argument of the class is that our personal backgrounds, behaviors and resulting worldviews may hold the key to saving the planet.

A new offering for the spring 2024 semester, PSYC-4660 is a seminar in cognition, a subset of psychology that covers how people encode, represent and process information from the environment in the brain, according to Coley, a psychology professor with a dual appointment in environmental science. Humans & Nature zeros in on how those things inform our interactions with the natural world, and the in-depth intros underscore just how different those can be from person to person based on their backgrounds.

Cataloged as an upper-level psychology class but available to any interested undergrad, the seminar is also part of a larger push at Northeastern to explore the relationship between brain and environmental sciences, including collaborative research papers and a new Ph.D. program currently accepting applicants for the coming fall.

I have become more and more convinced that this is a critical component to getting people and, honestly, agencies and governments to act in a more sustainable way, Coley says.

A marine science professor based at Northeasterns Nahant campus, Helmuth researches how climate change impacts coastal ecosystems. He has spent a large chunk of his career underwater, and more of it than he would like watching many of those ecosystems disappear. In his view, many solutions to issues affecting the planet are clear-cut; how to effectively implement them at scale is another story.

In most environmental problems the issue is not the science, he says a few days after the class meeting. Weve got a lot of solutions. Its the human behavior side thats hard to change. In policy, theres a lot of experimentation, but its kind of trial and error.

Coley is a developmental psychologist by training; early in his career, he researched how very young children categorize the natural world. The first big study I did at Northeastern looked at kids from across Massachusetts from inner-city Boston and Somerville to some very rural places in Western Massachusetts and how [their] experiences led to differences in how kids think about relations among plants and animals, he says. Further research examined how those backgrounds affected college kids learning in biology and other life science classes.

In most environmental problems the issue is not the science. Weve got a lot of solutions. Its the human behavior side thats hard to change.

The two initially met through Nicole Betz, a graduate student in Coleys lab. Last year, the three co-authored a paper on how human exceptionalism the idea that humans are different and set apart from other organisms can hinder sustainable behavior.

Humans & Nature is a further exploration of that type of academic research in a classroom setting with readings, lectures and a heavy emphasis on class discussions, all dealing with questions about how we think comes to bear on biodiversity preservation, food systems and climate change, according to the syllabus.

For the first few weeks, for example, the course content focuses on biodiversity conservation, or preserving the richness of species on Earth. An academic paper by sustainability scientist Thomas McShane explores the trade-offs between preserving biodiversity and human well-being; another, from 2019, explores possible links between a richer array of species and increased mental health in humans. Research from 2016 by a trio of ecologists in the academic journal Global Environmental Change focuses on urban biodiversity, outlining possible ways to marry development and conservation of natural environments in an economically equitable way.

The class is not proscriptive: I dont think there are specific misconceptions that were trying to puncture, Helmuth says. A lot of this is helping the students identify complexities in their different worldviews as they relate to those topics. Id be very surprised, even with a class this size, if they were all at the same starting point.

After introductions, the class breaks into small groups to discuss the assigned reading: a thin textbook called Human Dependence on Nature: How to Help Solve the Environmental Crisis by Haydn Washington. They talk together at length about collectivism and the sense of community in small, rural villages around the world and how it contrasts to the individualist, comparatively isolated routines of Western European and American societies.

We can follow a behavior but not value it in the United States, a student muses. I think its harder. In other societies where [people are more immediately affected by] the general health of their community, it might be easier to implement a belief in sustainability and helping the world around you.

The conversation isnt just geopolitical. Its a group in their early 20s, and millennials catch strays for being off-trend and having a collectively dire outlook on global warming. I recently saw a video that was like Stanley cups are over because the moms have gotten to it now its not cool, one student says. Were getting sick of things a lot faster, and overconsumption speeds up.

Theres a shift in our younger generation thats more inclined towards an understanding and appreciation for nature, which was lost on the millennial population because there was so much talk about climate change and overconsumption that everyone got overwhelmed, says another.

Kulshreshtha has experienced these types of vast differences in attitude even within her family. She grew up frequently visiting relatives in New Delhi and Noida in India. There, she explains, sustainability and eco-friendliness arent talked about nearly as much as they are in the United States, but not because people dont care about it. Rather, sustainable habits and practices are more baked into daily life.

Especially now, in the United States, people constantly pushing you to think about, like, Hey, make sure youre recycling the right thing, she says. Thats always on the forefront of your mind is this thing Im doing environmentally friendly?

With my extended family, its not something that they talk about, but theyre not being as harmful to the environment in their daily lives, she continues. My family in India still gets milk delivered every morning from the milkman, they put the bottles outside again every day. If you get groceries, youre not getting individual plastic bags for your broccoli and carrots. The street food vendors use bowls made out of leaves and wooden utensils. All these things are already integrated into Indian culture, so its not like you have to be actively thinking about how much plastic youre using every day.

Helmuth and Coley both think those types of insights can have direct impacts, particularly at a place like Northeastern. Environmental psychology with a focus on the natural world isnt a totally new concept, but tying it directly to human behavior and policy in an academically rigorous way is a next step. The course dovetails with research the two men have collaborated on, with implications for real-world scenarios like science education curricula and aiding the federal government on more effective environmental messaging and policy (Helmuth was a co-author of the White Houses most recent National Climate Assessment, released in November).

In the fall, Northeastern will begin admission to a new Ph.D. program in Human Behavior and Sustainability Sciences that integrates traditional core requirements of psychology and environmental science graduate programs. The hope is that this sort of interdisciplinary training could lead to more collaborations like theirs. Someone in psychology who [specializes in] decision-making and someone who studies salt marsh restoration could work together, Coley says. We want to provide Ph.D. students with structured opportunities to make those connections across fields.

And theyre optimistic about the future possibilities those collaborations could lead to. One advantage of teaching someplace like this is that these students are going to take over the world, Helmuth says. We already have a lot of students through co-ops working in the city of Boston, in state offices, at NASA. Anything we do in a classroom here is going to multiply itself.

Schuyler Velasco is a Northeastern Global News Magazine senior writer. Email her at s.velasco@northeastern.edu. Follow her on X/Twitter @Schuyler_V.

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We can't combat climate change without changing minds. This psychology class explores how. - Northeastern University

Human Behavior

Franciscan AI expert warns of technology becoming a ‘pseudo-religion’ – Detroit Catholic

ROME (CNS) -- Artificial intelligence risks giving technology a "pseudo-religion" status by shaping the way people engage with information and reality, a leading expert on artificial intelligence said.

Interacting with artificially intelligent large language models like OpenAI's ChatGPT could "fracture us from reality," Franciscan Father Paolo Benanti, an expert on artificial intelligence and professor of moral theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University, said March 7 at a conference organized by the Pontifical Academy of Theology.

Relying on such models could "reduce our capacity to have a strengthened, more sophisticated (way of) reasoning," he said, since people would have less need to engage in the focused thought required for tasks that can be completed by artificially intelligent technology.

Artificial intelligence, he said, can alter humanity's relationship with reality "to the point that (humanity's) desire for control, which satisfies the anxiety typical of the human condition, could take on a tendency toward a pseudo-religion regarding machines."

The theologian said that as machines become increasingly "humanized," humans also become increasingly "mechanized." As an example, he suggested considering a boy performing a task on a phone. "Is it his fingers that control the screen or are the phone's notifications controlling the behavior of the boy?" he asked.

"External causes such as interactions with machines can change our behavior," he said.

By using algorithms that consume and process the vast amounts of data humans produce, "the machine is not only able to predict our behavior, but is also able to produce our behavior," he said.

But unlike laws created by governments, which are also intended to influence human behavior, algorithms are developed by private companies that have financial earnings and not the public good as their primary objective, he said, citing as an example the world of e-commerce, which suggests products to users based on collected data about their shopping history and interests.

Father Benanti said that the "knowledge" produced by artificial intelligence can make data the principal way people making sense of and exercise control over their reality -- which is what he said religious thinking seeks to do -- and he said theology must confront such a rapid transformation in the way people view the world around them.

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Franciscan AI expert warns of technology becoming a 'pseudo-religion' - Detroit Catholic

Human Behavior

Freshwater resources at risk thanks to human behavior – Blue Mountain Eagle

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Freshwater resources at risk thanks to human behavior - Blue Mountain Eagle