Tag Archives: environment

Genetics

Science and genetics used to boost Fernside farm – New Zealand Herald

Fernside dairy farmer Julie Bradshaw is passionate about the ability of genetics to create the most efficient herd of cows. Photo / Supplied

A five-year irrigation study has helped Julie Bradshaw make science-based decisions on her Fernside dairy farm.

Bradshaw also uses genetics to improve her herd, as part of her goal to reduce her farm's environmental footprint.

Bradshaw took part in the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) co-innovation study from 2016 to 2021.

The study provided landowners with real-time data and forecasts to make science-based irrigation decisions.

This data included measured rainfall, soil moisture, soil temperature, drainage and estimated evaporation, as well as two, six and 15-day rainfall and weather forecasts.

The practical study gave each farmer a fantastic insight into their own land and irrigation practices, while also providing a broader picture of what was happening in the catchment, Bradshaw said.

Having access to precise data also helped Bradshaw and her neighbouring farmers to apply exactly the right amount of irrigation and fertiliser at the right time which aided in mitigating environmental impacts.

"It was amazing. We had so much data and information that we had never had before," she said.

"[This] has helped us make decisions about irrigation and fertiliser use ... backed up by facts and scientific data."

Having these records also made it easier for Farm Environment Plans and audits, Bradshaw said.

"We can show that we have been using our water resource correctly."

All farmers involved in the study were able to see each other's data and this high level of transparency helped the group understand what was happening in various parts of the catchment, Bradshaw said.

"We have always been very open - it's just information and data about water. Getting to know more about other farms is helpful because we are learning from each other along the way."

Although the study had ended, Bradshaw still logged in to the group's website most days to enable her to make accurate decisions about water allocation for the Cust Main Drain Water User's Group.

The group was established 25 years ago to manage water allocation during the irrigation season when water takes were restricted.

"It has been such a bonus to be able to see where everyone is sitting in terms of the moisture on their paddocks, as this helps me to allocate the water more accurately to where it is needed.

"Not only do you see today's moisture levels but you also get a future reading, so you can see where things are heading."

Last year Bradshaw and her husband Peter received the Sire Proving Scheme Farmers of the Year Award from the Livestock Improvement Corporation (LIC).

The couple had worked with LIC for 15 years and the award recognised their record-keeping and commitment to having their entire herd DNA-tested.

"We have a KiwiCross herd which is a cross between Holstein-Friesian and Jersey cows," she said.

"I am really passionate about the ability of genetics to improve your overall herd quality. Having 99 per cent of the ancestry of the cows recorded is an immense help when doing the breeding."

Bradshaw believed improving the overall quality of the herd meant, that if she needed to reduce her stock levels in the future, she knew exactly which animals had the best genetics to meet future farming limits.

She was committed to using science to reduce her impact on local waterways.

"Genetics and DNA testing are so helpful when you think about the possibility of reducing herd numbers in the future.

"We must think ahead and use science to help us make the best decisions both for our business operation and for the environment."

Bradshaw was also participating in a six-month farming project, which examined how the next generation of farmers used innovation to improve their practices.

Waimakariri Landcare Trust (WLT) and Waimakariri Irrigation Limited (WIL) have partnered with the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) for this project, with support from MPI's Sustainable Food and Fibre Futures fund, along with Environment Canterbury, Ballance, and DairyNZ.

Bradshaw aimed to learn more about genetics through the course of the MPI innovation project.

"We have three cows that LIC would like a bull calf out of, so that will be an interesting process to follow.

She was also keen to use the MPI innovation project to improve the quality of the grass throughout the farm.

"With the colder and wetter spring we had last year, followed by a cloudy and cooler summer, our grass didn't contain enough sugar and energy for the cows. We want to work on that throughout this project."

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Science and genetics used to boost Fernside farm - New Zealand Herald

Cell Biology

Heated Debate Persists over the Origins of Complex Cells – Scientific American

For billions of years after the origin of life, the only living things on Earth were tiny, primitive cells resembling todays bacteria. But then, more than 1.5 billion years ago, something remarkable happened: One of those primitive cells, belonging to a group known as the archaea, swallowed another, different one a bacterium.

Instead of being digested, the bacterium took up permanent residence within the other organism as what biologists call an endosymbiont. Eventually, it integrated fully into its archaeal host cell, becoming what we know today as the mitochondrion, the crucial energy-producing component of the cell.

Its acquisition has long been viewed as the key step in what is arguably the most important evolutionary leap since the origin of life itself: the transition from early primitive cells, or prokaryotes, to the more sophisticated cells of higher organisms, or eukaryotes, including ourselves.

Its a neat story youll find in most biology textbooks but is it quite that simple? In the last few years, new evidence has challenged the notion that mitochondria played a seminal role in this transition. Researchers sequencing the genomes of modern-day relatives of the first eukaryotes have found many unexpected genes that dont seem to come from either the host or the endosymbiont. And that, some scientists suggest, might mean that the evolution of the first eukaryotes involved more than two partners and happened more gradually than suspected.

Others dont see a reason yet to abandon the theory that the acquisition of the mitochondrion was the spark that ignited the rapid evolution of eukaryotes giving rise, eons later, to plants, animals, vertebrates, ourselves. Fresh evidence from genomics and cell biology may help resolve the debate, while also pointing to knowledge gaps that still need to be filled to understand one of the foundational events in our own ancestry, the origin of complex cells.

Uncertainties arose when mystery genes turned up in the last decade when researchers including Toni Gabaldn, an evolutionary genomicist at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, and his colleagues took advantage of todays cheap gene sequencing technology to explore the genomes of a wide range of eukaryotes, including several obscure, primitive, modern-day relatives of early eukaryotes.

They expected to find genes whose lineage traced back to either the archaeal host or the mitochondrial ancestor, a member of a group called the alphaproteobacteria. But to their surprise, the scientists also found genes that seemed to come from a wide range of other bacteria. Gabaldn and colleagues hypothesized that the cellular ancestor of eukaryotes had acquired the genes from a variety of partners. Those partners could have been additional endosymbionts that were later lost, or free-living bacteria that passed one or a few of their genes to the ancestral host in a common process called horizontal gene transfer. Either way, the tango that led to eukaryotes involved more than two dancers, they suggested.

It is clear now that there are additional contributions from additional partners, says Gabaldn, who wrote about the early evolution of eukaryotes in the 2021 Annual Review of Microbiology.

Its tough to know exactly where those ancient foreign genes came from because so much time has elapsed. But there are many more recent, looser endosymbioses where the origin of foreign genes is easier to identify, says John McCutcheon, an evolutionary cell biologist at Arizona State University in Tempe who wrote about endosymbiont evolution in the 2021 Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology. Studying these might, by analogy, give us a shot at understanding how mitochondria and the first eukaryotes could have evolved, he says.

A prime example is a roughly 100-million-year-old partnership between insects called mealybugs and two bacterial endosymbionts, one nested inside the other in the mealybugs cells. (The endosymbionts make essential amino acids that the mealybug cant get from its diet.) Based on a genomic analysis, McCutcheon and his colleagues found that the mealybugs metabolic pathways are now a mosaic made up of genes that originated with the bugs themselves, came in with their endosymbionts or were picked up by horizontal transfer from other microbes in the environment. To make this work, McCutcheons team showed, mealybug cells had to evolve an apparatus that transports proteins to and fro between what were once independent organisms allowing ones from the mealybug cell nucleus to journey across two sets of endosymbiont membranes for use by the innermost endosymbiont

Something similar occurs in a single-celled, amoeba-like eukaryote called Paulinella. Paulinella has an endosymbiont, engulfed tens of millions of years ago, that allows it to harvest energy from sunlight without the chloroplast organelles that usually power photosynthesis. Eva Nowack, who leads a lab at the University of Dusseldorf in Germany, discovered that Paulinelllas genome now contains genes from the endosymbiont along with others that were acquired through horizontal gene transfer.

Remarkably, the endosymbiont imports more than 400 proteins from the host nucleus, so it also must have evolved a complicated protein transport system like the mealybugs. Thats quite exciting, says molecular evolutionist Andrew Roger, who studies the evolution of organelles at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, because it suggests that evolving these transport systems anew isnt as difficult as previously thought.

These examples illustrate how endosymbionts become integrated with their hosts and suggest that horizontal gene transfers from various sources could have been quite frequent early in the evolution of eukaryotes, too. It doesnt show that is what happened in the formation of the mitochondria, but it shows that its possible, says McCutcheon.

Others agree. Theres lots of strong evidence for horizontal gene transfer in eukaryotes, so theres really no reason to say that it couldnt have happened during that period of the prokaryote-eukaryote transition. In fact, it almost certainly did happen, Roger says.

The implication is that the ancient host could have gradually acquired eukaryotic traits one at a time, like a shopper picking up items in a shopping bag, via horizontal gene transfers or by gobbling a series of endosymbionts, explains John Archibald, a comparative genomicist at Dalhousie University. Some of those newly acquired genes could have been useful to the host as it evolved the rest of the machinery found in modern eukaryotic cells.

If so, by the time the ancient host engulfed the precursor of mitochondria, it would have already possessed many eukaryotic features, perhaps including some organelles, the internal compartments surrounded by membranes meaning that mitochondria would have been not the main driver of eukaryotic evolution but a late addition.

But despite all the evidence supporting a gradualist hypothesis for the evolution of eukaryotes, there are some reasons for doubt. The first is that these more recent endosymbioses may not tell us much about what happened during the origin of eukaryotes after all, in these cases the modern host cells were already eukaryotes. These examples tell us how easy it is, once you have a eukaryotic cell, to establish intracellular endosymbioses, says Bill Martin, an evolutionary biologist who studies the origins of eukaryotes at the University of Dusseldorf. But eukaryotes already have all the intracellular machinery needed to engulf another cell. Its not at all clear that the ancestral proto-eukaryote had that ability, Martin says which would make the barrier to that first endosymbiosis much higher. That, to him, argues against a gradual evolution of the eukaryotic cell.

In fact, some evidence suggests that key eukaryotic features were acquired all at once, rather than gradually. All eukaryotes have the exact same set of organelles familiar to anyone who has studied cell biology: nucleus, nucleolus, ribosomes, rough and smooth endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi apparatus, cytoskeleton, lysosome and centriole. (Plants and a few other photosynthetic eukaryotes have one extra, the chloroplast, which everyone agrees arose through a separate endosymbiosis.) That strongly suggests the other cellular components all originated at about the same time if they didnt, different eukaryotic lineages ought to have different mixes of organelles, says Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz, a cell biologist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Janelia Research Campus in Virginia.

Some biochemical evidence points that way, too. The ancestral host and endosymbiont belonged to different branches of the tree of life archaea and bacteria, respectively that use different molecules to build their membranes. None of the membranes of eukaryotic organelles are exclusively archaeal in structure, so its unlikely they came from the ancestral host cell. Instead, this suggests that the archaeal host was a relatively simple cell that evolved its other organelles only after the arrival of the mitochondrial ancestor.

But what about all those mysterious foreign genes recently found in the eukaryotic family tree? Theres another possible explanation, Martin says. All those foreign genes could have arrived in a single package with the endosymbiont that evolved into the mitochondrion. Later in the 1.5 billion years following that event those genes could have been scattered among many bacterial groups, courtesy of the ease with which bacteria swap genes to and fro. That would give the erroneous impression that multiple partners contributed genes to the early eukaryote.

Moreover, Martin adds, if the gradualist idea is correct, different lineages of eukaryotes should have fundamentally and measurably different collections of genes, but he has shown they do not. There is no evidence to suggest that there were serial acquisitions, Martin says. A single acquisition of mitochondria at the origin of eukaryotes is enough.

The debate is unlikely to be settled soon. Its very hard to find data thats going to make us clearly distinguish between these alternatives, says Roger. But if further studies of obscure, primitive eukaryotes revealed some that have only a subset of eukaryotic organelles, this could lend weight to the gradualist hypothesis. On the other hand, if evidence was found for a way that a simple archaeal cell could acquire an endosymbiont, that would make the mitochondria early hypothesis more plausible.

People are drawn to big questions, and the harder they are to answer, the more people are drawn to them and debate them, says Archibald. Thats what makes it fun.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.

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Heated Debate Persists over the Origins of Complex Cells - Scientific American

Physiology

The Health Effects of Extreme Heat – The New York Times

When W. Larry Kenney, a professor of physiology at Pennsylvania State University, began studying how extreme heat harms humans, his research focused on workers inside the disaster-stricken Three Mile Island nuclear plant, where temperatures were as high as 165 degrees Fahrenheit.

In the decades that followed, Dr. Kenney has looked at how heat stress affects a range of people in intense environments: football players, soldiers in protective suits, distance runners in the Sahara.

Of late, however, his research has focused on a more mundane subject: ordinary people. Doing everyday things. As climate change broils the planet.

Heat advisories and excessive heat warnings were in effect on Monday across much of the eastern interior of the United States, following a weekend of record-smashing heat in the countrys Southwest. The heat will move farther Northeast in the next few days, according to the National Weather Service, into the upper Mississippi Valley, western Great Lakes and Ohio Valley.

With severe heat waves now affecting swaths of the globe with frightening regularity, scientists are drilling down into the ways life in a hotter world will sicken and kill us. The aim is to get a better grip on how many more people will be afflicted by heat-related ailments, and how frequent and severe their suffering will be. And to understand how to better protect the most vulnerable.

One thing is for sure, scientists say: The heat waves of the past two decades are not good predictors of the risks that will confront us in the decades to come. Already, the link between greenhouse-gas emissions and sweltering temperatures is so clear that some researchers say there may soon no longer be any point trying to determine whether todays most extreme heat waves could have happened two centuries ago, before humans started warming the planet. None of them could have.

And if global warming is not slowed, the hottest heat wave many people have ever experienced will simply be their new summertime norm, said Matthew Huber, a climate scientist at Purdue University. Its not going to be something you can escape.

Whats tougher for scientists to pin down, Dr. Huber said, is how these climatic shifts will affect human health and well-being on a large scale, particularly in the developing world, where huge numbers of people are already suffering but good data is scarce. Heat stress is the product of so many factors humidity, sun, wind, hydration, clothing, physical fitness and causes such a range of harms that projecting future effects with any precision is tricky.

There also havent been enough studies, Dr. Huber said, on living full time in a warmer world, instead of just experiencing the occasional roasting summer. We dont know what the long-term consequences of getting up every day, working for three hours in nearly deadly heat, sweating like crazy and then going back home are, he said.

The growing urgency of these issues is drawing in researchers, like Dr. Kenney, who didnt always think of themselves as climate scientists. For a recent study, he and his colleagues placed young, healthy men and women in specially designed chambers, where they pedaled an exercise bike at low intensity. Then the researchers dialed up the heat and humidity.

They found that their subjects started overheating dangerously at much lower wet-bulb temperatures a measure that accounts for both heat and mugginess than what they had expected based on previous theoretical estimates by climate scientists.

Effectively, under steam-bath conditions, our bodies absorb heat from the environment faster than we can sweat to cool ourselves down. And unfortunately for humans, we dont pump out a lot more sweat to keep up, Dr. Kenney said.

Heat is climate change at its most devastatingly intimate, ravaging not just landscapes and ecosystems and infrastructure, but the depths of individual human bodies.

Heats victims often die alone, in their own homes. Apart from heatstroke, it can cause cardiovascular collapse and kidney failure. It damages our organs and cells, even our DNA. Its harms are multiplied in the very old and very young, and in people with high blood pressure, asthma, multiple sclerosis and other conditions.

When the mercury is high, we arent as effective at work. Our thinking and motor functions are impaired. Excessive heat is also associated with greater crime, anxiety, depression and suicide.

The toll on the body can be strikingly personal. George Havenith, director of the Environmental Ergonomics Research Center at Loughborough University in England, recalled an experiment years ago with a large group of subjects. They wore the same clothes and performed the same work for an hour, in 95 degree heat and 80 percent humidity. But by the end, their body temperatures ranged from 100 degrees to 102.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

A lot of the work were doing is trying to understand why one person ends up on one side of the spectrum and the other one on the other, he said.

For years, Vidhya Venugopal, a professor of environmental health at Sri Ramachandra University in Chennai, India, has been studying what heat does to workers in Indias steel plants, car factories and brick kilns. Many of them suffer from kidney stones caused by severe dehydration.

One encounter a decade ago has stayed with her. She met a steelworker who had been working 8-to-12-hour days near a furnace for 20 years. When she asked him how old he was, he said 38 to 40.

She was sure shed misunderstood. His hair was half white. His face was shrunken. He didnt look younger than 55.

So she asked how old his child was and how old he was when he got married. The math checked out.

For us, it was a turning point, Dr. Venugopal said. Thats when we started thinking, heat ages people.

Great Salt Lake. Local politicians and scientists are warning that climate change and rapid population growth are shrinking the lake, creating a bowl of toxic dust that could poison the air around Salt Lake City. But there are no easy solutions to avert that outcome.

Carbon dioxide levels. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit its highest level ever, scientists said. Humans pumped 36 billion tons of the planet-warming gas into the atmosphere in 2021, more than in any previous year.

Poor U.S. performance. The Environmental Performance Index, published every two years by researchers at Yale and Columbia, found that the United States performance on combating climate change had declinedin relation to other countries largely as a result of Trump-era policies.

Extreme heat. Global warming has made the severe heat wave in Pakistan and Indiahotter and much more likely to occur in the future, according to scientists. The researchers said that the chances of a heat wave in South Asia like this one have increased by at least 30 times since preindustrial times.

Adelaide M. Lusambili, a researcher at the Aga Khan University in Kenya, is investigating heats effects on pregnant women and newborns in Kilifi County, on Kenyas coast. In communities there, women fetch water for their families, which can mean walking long hours in the sun, even while pregnant. Studies have linked heat exposure to preterm births and underweight babies.

The most heartbreaking stories, Dr. Lusambili said, are of women who suffered after giving birth. Some walked great distances with their 1-day-olds on their backs, causing the babies to develop blisters on their bodies and mouths, and making breastfeeding difficult.

It has all been enough, she said, to make her wonder whether climate change is reversing the progress Africa has made on reducing newborn and childhood mortality.

Given how many people have no access to air-conditioners, which are themselves making the planet hotter by consuming huge amounts of electricity, societies need to find more sustainable defenses, said Ollie Jay, a professor of heat and health at the University of Sydney.

Dr. Jay has studied the bodys responses to sitting near an electric fan, wearing wetted clothing and sponging down with water. For one project, he recreated a Bangladeshi garment factory in his lab to test low-cost ways of keeping workers safe, including green roofs, electric fans and scheduled water breaks.

Humans have some ability to acclimatize to hot environments. Our heart rate goes down; more blood is pumped with each stroke. More sweat glands are activated. But scientists primarily understand how our bodies adapt to heat in controlled laboratory settings, not in the real world, where many people can duck in and out of air-conditioned homes and cars, Dr. Jay said.

And even in the lab, inducing such changes requires exposing people to uncomfortable strain for hours a day over weeks, said Dr. Jay, who has done exactly that to his subjects.

Its not particularly pleasant, he said. Hardly a practical solution for life in a stifling future or, for people in some places, an increasingly oppressive present. More profound changes in the bodys adaptability will only occur on the time scale of human evolution.

Dr. Venugopal gets frustrated when asked, about her research on Indian workers, India is a hot country, so whats the big deal?

Nobody asks what the big deal is about having a fever, but heatstroke puts the body in a similar state.

That is human physiology, Dr. Venugopal said. You cant change that.

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The Health Effects of Extreme Heat - The New York Times

Neuroscience

How Wisdom, Resilience and Mastery Work Together to Boost Well-Being in Old Age – Neuroscience News

Summary: Wisdom helps strengthen resilience and mastery to reduce stress and increase well-being, improving a persons ability to better handle later-life adversity and age-related loss.

Source: University of Florida

Its not just wisdom that gives some people a sense of well-being as they age.

A new study shows that while wise people tend to be more satisfied with their lives,wisdomalso works to strengthenresilienceand mastery to reduce stress and enable a person to better handle late life adversity and aging-related losses.

Understanding how wisdom, resiliency and mastery work together to improve a persons subjective well-being later in life is important given common challenges of aging, from death of loved ones and close friends to impaired health and mobility, said Monika Ardelt, lead author and a sociology professor at the University of Florida. It is also important because traits that mark wisdom, resiliency and mastery can be taught.

The study was publishedin the German journalPraxis Klinische Verhaltensmedizin und Rehabilitation(Practice of Clinical Behavioral Medicine and Rehabilitation). Dilip V. Jeste of the University of California, San Diego, is the co-author.

The researchers used data on 994 adults from the Successful AGing Evaluation study conducted in California to assess the interplay between resilience, mastery, perceived stress and wisdom and response to adverse life events. The average age of those studied was 77.

Wisdom was assessed using a three-dimensional model Ardelt developed, which incorporates cognitive, reflective and compassionate dimensionsan interest in lifes deeper meaning and acceptance of lifes uncertainties; being able to perceive events from multiple perspectives; and having sympathetic love and compassion for others.

Resiliency was defined asolder adults perceived ability to bounce back after adversity and their sense of mastery or control over their environment, life and future.

Not everyone gets wiser as they get older, Ardelt said.

A person has to be interested in the deeper meaning of life, open to perceiving things from different perspectives and have an intellectual humility about the fact that there is so much more to know. The really important part is learning from experiences and not everybody is learning from their experiences.

The study found that wisdom in old age tends to enhance resilience and a sense of mastery and to reduce perceptions of stress directly and indirectly through greater resilience and mastery.

Those who scored high in wisdom also tended to be more resilient and to have a stronger sense of mastery over their lives. And these three characteristics might reinforce each other, leading to greater wisdom, resilience and mastery as adverse events are encountered and overcome.

This suggests that coping skills, focusing on silver linings during stressful events while trying to learn from the experience, and feeling in control of ones life might be possible pathways from wisdom to well-being through a reduction in stress, the researchers said in the article.

Ardelt said the study adds to research on subjective well-being in later life and emphasizes the importance of wisdom-related therapy in old age.

It is good to be wise, Ardelt said. Old age is hard, but we can cultivate wisdom in people so they have the tools, along with resilience and mastery, to minimize stress and maintain a sense of well-being when crisis hits.

Author: Press OfficeSource: University of FloridaContact: Press Office University of FloridaImage: The image is credited to University of Florida

Original Research: Open access.Wisdom as a Resiliency Factor for Subjective Well-Being in Later Life by Monika Ardelt & Dilip V. Jeste. Practice of Clinical Behavioral Medicine and Rehabilitation

Abstract

Wisdom as a Resiliency Factor for Subjective Well-Being in Later Life

Objectives. Research has shown that wisdom tends to be positively associated with subjective well-being (SWB) in later life, especially if older adults encounter physical or social hardship. Yet, the role of resiliency in the wisdom and well-being relationship has not been investigated. We extended our earlier study that investigated the buffering effect of wisdom on the inverse relationship between adverse life events and SWB(Ardelt & Jeste, 2018) to analyze whether resiliency mediates the association between three-dimensional wisdom and SWB by reducing stress.

Method. A structural equation path model was employed, using data from the Successful AGing Evaluation (SAGE) study of 994 adults between the ages of 51 and 99 years (M = 77, SD = 12). Wisdom was assessed as an integration of cognitive, reflective, and compassionate (affective) dimensions, resiliency as resilience and a sense of mastery and control, and SWB as a latent variable with mental health, happiness, and life satisfaction as effect indicators.

Results. Resilience, mastery, and perceived stress fully mediated the positive association between wisdom and SWB.

Discussion. Wisdom seems to strengthen resilience, mastery, and equanimity during the later years of life, which helps older adults to maintain a sense of well-being despite aging-related losses. The study indicates that wisdom is a valuable psychological resource in old age.

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How Wisdom, Resilience and Mastery Work Together to Boost Well-Being in Old Age - Neuroscience News

Human Behavior

Tracking COVID in wastewater is the future but not in Florida – Tampa Bay Times

As COVID-19 testing continues to recede in Florida, it is far behind other states in tracking the virus with promising technology that relies on wastewater.

The Florida Department of Health received more than $1.2 million from the federal government last summer to build a statewide system to detect the virus in wastewater. Eight months later, the state wont say whether such a program exists.

A department spokesperson said federal money mostly went towards increasing lab capacity but did not elaborate.

Without a state wastewater testing network, 12 of Floridas 67 counties turned to outside help to track the virus. Pinellas Countys program is funded by the federal government. Others, such as in Hillsborough, are paid for by a private company.

But that patchwork approach has limitations.

On April 15, testing in Pinellas and five other counties ended when federal funding expired. Data collected by the six counties went dark just as the states average daily infections jumped 80 percent in two weeks.

This is our best early warning sign, said University of Miami microbiologist Helena Solo-Garbiele. But without it: We lose our ability to detect surges.

While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says testing will resume, it took three months to restart after the last interruption of funding.

Colorado, however, wasnt affected. It took advantage of the same federal grant that Florida received to build its network and now tests 60 percent of the states population. That system still functions as infections rise across the U.S.

The strength of wastewater surveillance is that it doesnt rely on human behavior: No one has to decide to get tested for COVID-19. Nor is anyone prevented from being tested by factors beyond their control.

Infected individuals shed the SARS-CoV-2 virus in their waste, sending virus particles into sewage water. Researchers can determine in real-time whether infections are spreading through a community by sampling its wastewater.

It doesnt matter if you get tested or not, if youre symptomatic or asymptomatic, Solo-Gabriele said. If you poop, youre in the sample.

That helps health officials quickly detect viral surges because at this point in the pandemic, she said, the official case count is likely missing a lot of infections. Every day, the CDC reports the number of positive COVID-19 cases detected across the country, but that count includes only test results that are reported to state and federal health agencies.

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As public testing sites disappear, Floridians have turned to at-home tests the results of which are not reported to health officials or have foregone testing altogether.

That makes CDC data less reliable. In the past month, Florida recorded the fewest test results since June 2020.

The limitation of wastewater tracking is that it cannot reveal exactly how many infections are in a community at a given time. Public health officials still need data from testing sites, hospitals and other facilities to find that out and to calculate positivity rates.

But public health officials can use wastewater tracking to gain a holistic understanding of the pandemic and react to rapidly changing conditions, said Edwin Oh, a microbiologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

The more important question here is: What is the trend over the last two or three weeks? he said. If we start seeing those trends (rise), we will definitely start seeing cases showing up in the hospital soon after.

Nevada started analyzing sewage in February 2020, when clinical tests were still scarce. Health officials detected COVID-19 in wastewater basically at the same time that we had our first confirmed case, Oh said.

When omicron hit the state in December, he said, the variant was identified using wastewater data. Researchers tracked its spread from high-tourist areas around Las Vegas to the rest of the state by looking at where the variant appeared in sewage water.

But for tracking to work, health officials have to use the data to deploy testing and vaccination resources quickly enough. That didnt happen in Nevada, Oh said.

Weve been fighting each surge as a sort of catch-up game, he said. The next time this happens, hopefully public health organizations are a little bit more prepared (and) a little bit more ready to believe in the data.

Two Pinellas treatment plants may be the countys best early-warning system to track the growing BA.2 wave and the ones that will come later.

Tucked away in a residential neighborhood between St. Petersburg and Pinellas Park, the South Cross Bayou water plant is one of two county utilities that monitor residents infection levels. The other is the William E. Dunn Water Reclamation Facility in Palm Harbor.

South Cross Bayou serves about 220,000 residents. The William E. Dunn plant serves about 82,000. Together they cover almost a third of Pinellas nearly 1 million residents. Earlier this month, Tampa Bay Times reporters toured the South Cross Bayou plant. More than 20 million gallons of raw sewage that is flushed, rinsed and poured down Pinellas drains flows daily through the plants pipes.

For every 1,000 gallons of sewage, about one teaspoon is sucked up by the plants sampling equipment and deposited into a refrigerated plastic jug atop a beige building on the plants outskirts. Twice a week, samples from that jug are decanted into small bottles and shipped to a lab.

Youre looking at 200,000 people in one shot, said Pinellas County microbiologist Bina Nayak, gesturing toward the murky gray liquid accumulating in the jug. Can you imagine testing 200,000 people versus just one wastewater sample?

Nayak was coordinating research projects for Pinellas County Utilities when she heard about the CDCs wastewater testing. She urged county officials to join.

We had to step up to the plate, Nayak said, for the sake of the community, our customers, and the public health agencies that would use the data.

In total, 11 Florida wastewater plants serving portions of six counties are part of the CDC program. That means wastewater surveillance only tests 1 out of every 5 Floridians.

On April 15, the last date that data was available, viral levels at the two Pinellas plants were the highest since early March.

During the tour of the South Cross Bayou plant, Nayak climbed the two-story metal staircase to the top of the headworks building where samples are collected. She weaved through a maze of tubes and instruments, toward a metal box that holds the sampling equipment.

Beneath her, a 20-foot metal screen removed leaves, diapers and other non-processables from the 300 gallons of raw sewage that rushed past each second. Every time the screen cycled through the muck, the machinery burped up a dizzying bouquet of odors.

It smells like gold to me, Nayak joked, adjusting her neon blue hardhat in the unseasonably muggy April heat. There is so much good data in there, as long as you actually use it.

The federal program that funds testing in Pinellas County was meant to be temporary while states built their own capability, said Amy Kirby, a CDC microbiologist who leads the surveillance system.

Researchers have been looking for pathogens like polio and influenza in wastewater for years, Kirby said, but the effort to build the infrastructure has never been worth the return on investment until COVID-19 came along.

The pandemic left state and local health agencies scrambling to roll out testing as quickly as possible. So now theres this patchwork of programs and funding, she said, and not all the wastewater surveillance activities in the U.S. are linked to the national system.

One of the largest players in the private testing market is Biobot Analytics, an MIT start-up that wants to market the technology.

Last year the company raised $20 million. It already has contracts with more than 700 municipalities in all 50 states, according to the Boston Globe, including Hillsborough County. But Biobot does not report that data to the CDC. Instead the company shares the data on its website, using its methodology.

Biobot, which collects data from six Florida counties, said its up to local governments to share COVID-19 data with the CDC.

The company started collecting Hillsboroughs data in June 2021. A county spokesperson said they havent received any reports from Biobot.

The amount of coronavirus detected in Hillsboroughs wastewater has doubled in the past month, according to Biobots website. Its an estimate based on the countys Northwest Regional Water Reclamation Facility and the city of Tampas Howard F. Curren facility.

Its unclear if Biobots data-sharing policy will affect the nations wastewater surveillance program. The company took over the federal program on April 15, when it was awarded a $10.2 million contract to oversee the next year of testing.

That contract covers 500 utility providers across the country, according to the CDC. But Biobot and the CDC say the company wont share COVID-19 data from the 700 utilities not covered by the contract.

The federal government hoped to avoid this jumble of programs by enlisting state agencies to oversee their own surveillance systems, Kirby said. In August 2021, Florida and 32 other states received federal money to establish their own testing, according to the CDC. So far 14 states have done it.

Colorado used $9.4 million of that funding to increase staffing and capacity through July 2023. Officials hope to expand statewide. Colorados Department of Health and Environment reports up-to-date data on its website and shares it with the CDC.

Florida Department of Health spokesperson Jeremy Redfern said Thursday in an email that state labs collect sewage samples to identify COVID-19 variants and that officials helped the utility companies get this project going so they could report to the CDC.

The state does not report wastewater data, however, and there is no statewide system for doing so. Last month the Times requested the states application to obtain the $1.2 million federal grant. The department has yet to provide it.

Edwin Oh, the Nevada microbiologist, said tracking will become more important as the country dedicates fewer resources to future COVID-19 waves.

The need for contact tracing is really going away for many public health organizations and testing sites are harder and harder to find, he said. And thats exactly why I truly believe that wastewater surveillance will be here to stay.

Editors note: This story was updated with a response from the Florida Department of Health.

Tampa Bay: The Times can help you find the free, public COVID-19 testing sites in the bay area.

Florida: The Department of Health has a website that lists testing sites in the state. Some information may be out of date.

The U.S.: The Department of Health and Human Services has a website that can help you find a testing site.

The COVID-19 vaccine for ages 5 and up and booster shots for eligible recipients are being administered at doctors offices, clinics, pharmacies, grocery stores and public vaccination sites. Many allow appointments to be booked online. Heres how to find a site near you:

Find a site: Visit vaccines.gov to find vaccination sites in your ZIP code.

More help: Call the National COVID-19 Vaccination Assistance Hotline.

Phone: 800-232-0233. Help is available in English, Spanish and other languages.

TTY: 888-720-7489

Disability Information and Access Line: Call 888-677-1199 or email DIAL@n4a.org.

OMICRON VARIANT: Omicron changed what we know about COVID. Heres the latest on how the infectious COVID-19 variant affects masks, vaccines, boosters and quarantining.

KIDS AND VACCINES: Got questions about vaccinating your kid? Here are some answers.

BOOSTER SHOTS: Confused about which COVID booster to get? This guide will help.

BOOSTER QUESTIONS: Are there side effects? Why do I need it? Heres the answers to your questions.

PROTECTING SENIORS: Heres how seniors can stay safe from the virus.

GET THE DAYSTARTER MORNING UPDATE: Sign up to receive the most up-to-date information.

Were working hard to bring you the latest news on the coronavirus in Florida. This effort takes a lot of resources to gather and update. If you havent already subscribed, please consider buying a print or digital subscription.

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Tracking COVID in wastewater is the future but not in Florida - Tampa Bay Times

Neuroscience

Psychopaths Can Feel Emotions and Can Be Treated – Neuroscience News

Summary: Contrary to popular belief, those suffering from psychopathy are able to experience emotions, but they do have a blunted emotional response if their attention is directed toward something else. In essence, psychopaths feel emotions, but ignore them if they feel they might interfere with attaining personal goals.

Source: The Conversation

On any given day, millions of Americans curl up to watch their favorite crime shows. Whether it is FBI on CBS, Dexter on Showtime, Mindhunter on Netflix, Killing Eve on BBC, reruns of Law & Order, or any of a myriad of other similar shows, they draw huge audiences with their vivid portrayals of villains whose behaviors are perplexingly cruel. Ill confess: I am part of that audience. My students even make fun of how much crime television I, aresearcher who studies criminal behavior, watch.

I justify some of my TV time as work, providing material for my undergraduate lecture course and for my seminars on the nature of the criminal mind. But I am also captivated by the characters in these dramas, despite or because of how unrealistic many of them are.

One of the most common character types on crime TV is the psychopath: the person who commits brutal murders, acts recklessly and sits stone-cold in front of law enforcement officers. Although the shows are obviously fiction, their plotlines have become familiar cultural touchstones.

People watch Agent Hotchner on Criminal Minds label any character who is disturbingly violent as someone with psychopathy. They hear Dr. Huang on Law & Order: SVU refer to a youthful offender who hurt a young girl as an adolescent with psychopathy who he suggests is incapable of responding to treatment.

Such portrayals leave viewers with the impression that individuals with psychopathy are uncontrollably evil, unable to feel emotions, and incorrigible.

But extensive research, including years of work in my ownlab, demonstrates that the sensationalized conceptions of psychopathy used to drive those narratives are counterproductive and just plain wrong.

Psychopathy isclassified by psychologistsas a personality disorder defined by a combination of charm, shallow emotions, absence of regret or remorse, impulsivity and criminality. About 1% of the general population meets the diagnostic criteria of psychopathy, a prevalence roughly twice that of schizophrenia.

The exact causes of psychopathy have not been identified, but most scholars conclude that bothgenetics and environmentare contributing factors.

Psychopathy imposes ahigh coston individuals and on society as a whole.

People with psychopathy commit two to three times as much crime overall as others who engage in antisocial behavior and account for roughly 25% of the incarcerated population. They also commit new crimes after being released from incarceration or supervision at amuch higher ratethan other types of offenders.

My colleagues and I have found that people with psychopathy tend tostart using substancesat an earlier age and try more types of substances than others. There also is some evidence that people with psychopathy tendnot to respond wellto conventional therapeutic strategies.

Reality is significantly more nuanced and encouraging than the grim media narratives. Contrary to most portrayals, psychopathy is not synonymous with violence. It is true that individuals with psychopathy are more likely to commit violent crime than are individuals without the disorder, but violent behavior is not a requirement for a diagnosis of psychopathy.

Someresearchersargue that key traits of psychopathy are present in individuals who show no violent behavior but who tend toward impulsive and risky behaviors, take advantage of others and show little concern for the consequences of their actions. Those traits can be observed in politicians, CEOs and financiers.

Many crime shows, as well as many mainstream news stories, associate psychopathy with a lack of emotion, particularly of fear or remorse. Whether a character is standing calmly over a lifeless body or giving the classic psychopathic stare, viewers are accustomed to seeing people with psychopathy as almost robotic. The belief that people with psychopathy are emotionless is widespread not only among laypeople but among psychologists as well.

There is an element of truth here: Considerableresearchhas found that individuals with psychopathy exhibit a reduced ability to process emotions and to recognize the emotions of others. But my colleagues and I are finding evidence that individuals with psychopathy actually can identify and experience emotions under the right circumstances.

In my lab, we are conducting experiments that reveal a complex relationship between psychopathy and emotions.

In onestudy, we examined the supposed lack of fear of individuals with psychopathy using a simple lab test. We showed a group of participants the letter n and colored boxes on a screen. Seeing a red box meant a participant might get an electric shock; green boxes meant that they would not. The color of the box therefore signaled a threat.

As a brief aside, the shocks were not harmful, just slightly uncomfortable, and this study was approved by appropriate human subject protection review boards.

On some trials, we asked the participant to tell us the color of the box (forcing them to focus on the threat). On other trials, we asked the participant to tell us the case of the letter (forcing them to focus on the nonthreat), although the box was still displayed.

We could see that individuals with psychopathy displayed fear responses based on theirphysiologicalandbrainreactions when they had to focus on the shock threat.

However, they showed a deficit in fear responses when they had to tell us the case of the letter and the box was secondary to that task. Evidently, individuals with psychopathy are capable of experiencing emotion; they just have a blunted emotional response when their attention is directed toward something else.

This is an extreme version of the kind of processing we all do. In routine decision-making, we rarely focus explicitly on emotion. Rather, we use emotional information as a background detail that informs our decisions.

The implication is that individuals with psychopathy have a kind of mental myopia: The emotions are there, but they are ignored if they might interfere with attaining a goal.

Research in my lab and in others has uncovered additional evidence that individuals with psychopathy are capable of experiencing and labeling emotions in the context ofobserving emotionalscenesorfaces, thepainofothers,andexperiences of regret. Here, too, individuals with psychopathy are able to process emotion when focusing on the emotion, but they display deficits when emotion is hard to detect or is secondary to their objective.

Manystudieshave shown that individuals with psychopathy are great at using information and regulating their behavior if it is directly relevant to their objective; for instance, they can act charming and ignore emotions to con someone. But when information is beyond their immediate focus of attention, they often display impulsive behavior (such as quitting a job without a new one lined up) and egregious decision-making (such as seeking publicity for a crime while they are wanted by police).

They have difficulty processing emotion, but unlike the common characters on television, they are not inherently cold-blooded.

The image of the fearless killer draws on an outdated scientific conception of psychopathy. Instead, it appears that people with psychopathy can access emotions the emotional information just gets stifled by the focus on goals.

One of the most damaging fallacies about psychopathy in fiction, in the news and in some of the old scientific literature is that it is a permanent, unchanging condition. This idea reinforces the compelling good-versus-evil trope, but the latest research tells a quite different story.

Traits of psychopathy naturally decrease over time for many young people, starting in late adolescence into adulthood. Samuel Hawes, a psychologist at Florida International University, and his collaboratorstracked more than 1,000 individualsfrom childhood to adulthood, repeatedly measuring their traits of psychopathy.

Although a small group showed persistently high levels of psychopathic traits, more than half of the boys who initially had high levels of those traits trended downward over time and no longer presented with them later in adolescence.

With proper intervention, the prospects for improvement get better. We are finding thatyouths with traits of psychopathyand adults with psychopathy can change and respond to treatments that are tailored to their needs.

Several studies have documented the effectiveness ofspecific treatmentsdesigned to help youths learn to identify and respond to emotions. Parenting interventions that focuses on enhancing the emotional warmth of the caregiver and helping youths identify emotions seems to reduce symptoms and problematic behavior.

In a series of experiments, we have been investigating video games designed totrain the brainsof individuals with psychopathy by helping them improve the way they integrate information.

For example, we show a group of participants a face and instruct them to respond on the basis of the emotion they see and the direction in which the eyes are looking, coaching them to integrate all features of the face. Or we play a game in which we show participants a series of cards and see if they can pick up when we shift the rules, switching which one is a winning or losing card. The participants are not told when the shift will happen, so they have to learn to pay attention to subtle contextual changes as they go.

Our preliminary data shows that lab-based tasks like these can change the brains and real-world behavior of individuals with psychopathy.

Such studies open the possibility of reducing the social and personal harm caused by psychopathy. I believe society needs to retire the myths that individuals with psychopathy are fundamentally violent, emotionless and incapable of change.

The behavior of individuals with psychopathy is fascinating so much so that it does not need to be embellished to make for dramatic plotlines. We should work harder to aid individuals with psychopathy so that they can notice more information in their environment and use more of their emotional experience. Pop culture can help rather than hinder those goals.

Author: Arielle Baskin-SommersSource: The ConversationContact: Arielle Baskin-Sommers The ConversationImage: The image is in the public domain

Original post:
Psychopaths Can Feel Emotions and Can Be Treated - Neuroscience News

Physiology

CALS 2022 Summer Term courses that have limited or no prerequisites and fulfill breadth requirements CALS News – wisc.edu

Summer Term courses are a great way for UW undergraduates to get aheador stay on trackin their studies. They are also open to students enrolled at other universities, high school students and the general public. Below are some 2022 Summer Term courses from the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences that have no prerequisites and are open to all interested learners. These courses also fulfill breadth requirements such as Biological Science, Physical Science, Social Science and Humanities.

For more information about Summer Term, tuition and a full list of available courses, visit https://summer.wisc.edu/. See more information about CALS courses on the CALS 2022 Summer Term page.

AGRICULTURAL AND APPLIED ECONOMICS/AGRONOMY/INTER-AG/NUTRITIONAL SCIENCES 350: World Hunger and MalnutritionHunger and poverty in developing countries and the United States. Topics include: nutrition and health, population, food production and availability, and income distribution and employment.May 23 June 19Credit: 3Breadth: Biological Science

AGROECOLOGY/AGRONOMY/ENTOMOLOGY/ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES/COMMUNITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIOLOGY 103: Agroecology: An introduction to the Ecology of Food and AgricultureAgroecology has blossomed across the world in recent decades as not only a science, but also a practice, and a movement. Employ the multiple disciplines and perspectives that Agroecology affords to analyze our agricultural and food systems wihin a broader context of dynamic social and ecological relationships.June 20 August 14Credits: 3Breadth: Biological Science

AGRONOMY/ENTOMOLOGY/NUTRITIONAL SCIENCES 203: Introduction to Global HealthIntroduces students to global health concepts through multidisciplinary speakers dedicated to improving health through their unique training. It targets students with an interest in public health and those who wish to learn how their field impacts their global issues.June 13 July 10Credits: 3Breadth: Social Science

ANIMAL SCIENCES/DAIRY SCIENCES 101: Introduction to Animal SciencesAn overview of animal sciences covering anatomy, physiology, nutrition, reproduction, genetics, management, animal welfare, and behavior of domesticated animals. Food animals are emphasized to discuss their contributions to humans.June 20 August 14Credits: 3Breadth: Biological Science

ANIMAL SCIENCES 200: The Biology and Appreciation of Companion AnimalsA systematic coverage of many of the animals (including birds) that humans keep as their social companions. The classification, nutritional requirements, environmental considerations, reproductive habits, health, legal aspects and economics of companion animals and their supportive organizations.June 20 August 14Credits: 3Breadth: Biological Science

ANIMAL SCIENCES 240: Ancient Animals and PeoplesProvides an introduction to human and animal relationships from prehistory to the present. Examines how animals have influenced social and economic structures of past societies, with a focus on the advent of domestication. Explores the cultural and economic changes that domestication has had on human societies, as well as the behavioral, genetic, and morphological changes that this process had on once wild animals. Emphasizes the methods used to retrace human-animal interactions, drawing on cross-cultural examples from anthropology, ethnozoology, archaeology, history, and genetics.June 20 August 14Credits: 3Breadth: Biological Science, Social Science

BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS ENGINEERING 310: Project Economics & Decision AnalysisEvaluation techniques for research, development & engineering projects. Covers the time value of money and other cash-flow concepts, capital budgeting, economic practices and techniques used to evaluate and optimize decisions, and research & development project portfolio management techniques.June 20 August 14Credits: 3Breadth: Social SciencePrerequisites: MATH 113, 114, or (MATH 171 and 217)

BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS ENGINEERING/ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES 367: Renewable Energy SystemsLearn about the state-of-the-art in renewable energy applications including biomass for heat, electric power and liquid fuels as well as geo-energy sources such as wind, solar, and hydro power. Practice engineering calculations of power and energy availability of renewable energy sources and learn about requirements for integrating renewable energy sources into production, distribution and end-use systems.June 20 August 14Credits: 3Breadth: Physical SciencePrerequisites: MATH 112, 114, 217, or graduate/professional standing

COMMUNITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIOLOGY 140: Introduction to Community and Environmental SociologySociological examination of the linkages between the social and biophysical dimensions of the environment. Key topics include community organizing, local food systems, energy transitions, environmental justice, resource dependence, and sustainable development. Gateway to advanced courses in sociology.July 18 August 14Credits: 4Breadth: Social Science

COMMUNITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIOLOGY/FOREST AND WILDLIFE ECOLOGY 248: Environment, Natural Resources and SocietyIntroduces the concerns and principles of sociology through examination of human interaction with the natural environment. Places environmental issues such as resource depletion, population growth, food production, environmental regulation, and sustainability in national and global perspectives.May 23 June 19Credits: 3Breadth: Social Science

COMMUNITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIOLOGY 260: Latin America: An IntroductionLatin American culture and society from an interdisciplinary perspective; historical developments from pre-Columbian times to the present; political movements; economic problems; social change; ecology in tropical Latin America; legal systems; literature and the arts; cultural contrasts involving the US and Latin America; land reform; labor movements; capitalism, socialism, imperialism; mass media.May 23 June 19Credits: 3 4Breadth: Social Science

ENTOMOLOGY 201: Insects and Human CultureImportance of insects in humans environment, emphasizing beneficial insects, disease carriers, and agricultural pests that interfere with humans food supply. Environmental problems due to insect control agents.June 20 August 14Credits: 3Breadth: Biological Science

ENTOMOLOGY 205: Our Planet, Our HealthAn introduction to the multiple determinants of health, global disease burden and disparities, foundational global health principles, and the overlap between ecosystem stability, planetary boundaries, and human health. Explore the core fundamentals of global health scholarship, including but not limited to infectious disease, sanitation, and mental health, and also consider ecological perspectives on these issues through the lens of planetary boundaries. Attention is placed on how human-mediated global change (e.g. climate change, biodiversity loss, land-use patterns, geochemical cycling, agricultural practice) impacts human health and the ecosystem services we depend on. An overview of pertinent issues in sustainability science and planetary health discourse, including the Anthropocene and resilience to understand and critically assess global trends.June 20 August 14Credits: 3Breadth: Biological Science

FOOD SCIENCE 120: Science of FoodRelationship between food, additives, processing and health. How foods are processed.June 20 August 14Credits: 3Breadth: Biological Science

FOOD SCIENCE 150: Fermented Food and Beverages: Science, Art and HealthExplores the science behind fermented food and beverages, popularized by brewing, winemaking and breadmaking at home and in retail. Introduces the scientific principles that underlie food and beverage processing through fermentation. Covers how basic sciences such as chemistry, biochemistry and microbiology influence the process and desired outcomes when fermenting vegetables, milk, fruit, and grains.June 20 August 14Credits: 3Breadth: Biological Science

FOREST AND WILDLIFE ECOLOGY 110: Living with Wildlife Animals, Habitats and Human InteractionsA general survey course of wildlife and wildlife conservation for non-majors. Basic characteristics and management of wildlife populations and habitats. Human perceptions and interactions with wildlife. Current issues in wildlife management and conservation.June 20 August 14Credits: 3Breadth: Biological Science

FOREST AND WILDLIFE ECOLOGY 248: Environment, Natural Resources, and SocietyIntroduces the concerns and principles of sociology through examination of human interaction with the natural environment. Places environmental issues such as resource depletion, population growth, food production, environmental regulation, and sustainability in national and global perspectives.May 23 June 19Credits: 3Breadth: Social Science

GENETICS 133: Genetics in the NewsThe science of genetics is at the heart of many issues facing our society, and as such, genetics is often in the news. Explores the underlying genetics and methodologies to gain a deeper understanding of the science behind the headlines so that we can make more informed decisions as citizens.June 20 August 14Credits: 3Breadth: Biological Science

HORTICULTURE 350: Plants and Human WellbeingPlants provide not only the foundation of food, clothing, and shelter essential for human existence, but also some of the key raw materials for transcendence and abstraction through music, art, and spirituality. Since antiquity, we have co-evolved with plants and their derivative products, with each exerting a domesticating force on the other. It is, for example, impossible to think of our modern life without its plant-based accompaniments in the form of cotton, sugar, bread, coffee, and wood. Yet they are so ubiquitous we may forget they all derive from plants discovered, domesticated, bred, and farmed for millennia in a never-ending pursuit to improve our wellbeing. Major points of intersection between plants and human wellbeing will be explored from a horticultural point of view by highlighting a plant or group of plants that represent a primary commodity or resource through which humans have pursued their own aims and explore effects and impacts on human society.June 20 August 14Credits: 2Breadth: Biological Science

LIFE SCIENCES COMMUNICATION 212: Introduction to Scientific CommunicationWriting effective science digests, proposals, newsletters, and trade magazine articles for agriculture, natural resources, health and science-related topics.June 20 August 14Credits: 3General education: Communication Part BPrerequisites: Satisfied Communications A requirement

LIFE SCIENCES COMMUNICATION 251: Science, Media and SocietyIntroduction to communication at the intersection of science, politics and society; overview of the theoretical foundations of science communication and their relevance for societal debates about science and emerging technologies across different parts of the world.June 20 August 14Credits: 3Breadth: Humanities, Social Science

LIFE SCIENCES COMMUNICATION 350: Visualizing Science and TechnologyIntroduction to the basic principles in the visual communication of science information. Principles of design, perception, cognition as well as the use of technologies in the representation of science in the mass media will be explored through illustrated lectures and written critique.July 5 August 7Credits: 3Breadth: Humanities, Social SciencePrerequisites: Satisfied Communications A requirement or graduate/professional standing

MICROBIOLOGY 100: The Microbial WorldPrimarily for non-science majors. Roles of microorganisms and viruses in nature, health, agriculture, pollution control and ecology. Principles of disease production, epidemiology and body defense mechanisms. Biotechnology and the genetic engineering revolution.June 20 August 14Credits: 3Breadth: Biological Science

MICROBIOLOGY 101: General MicrobiologySurvey of microorganisms and their activities; emphasis on structure, function, ecology, nutrition, physiology, genetics. Survey of applied microbiologymedical, agricultural, food and industrial microbiology. Intended to satisfy any curriculum which requires introductory level microbiology.June 20 August 14Credits: 3Breadth: Biological SciencePrerequisites: CHEM 103, 108, 109, or 115. Not open to students with credit for MICROBIO 303.

MICROBIOLOGY 102: General Microbiology LaboratoryCovers techniques and procedures used in general microbiology, including cultivation, enumeration, aseptic techniques, physiology and selected applications.June 20 August 14Credits: 2Breadth: Biological SciencePrerequisites: MICROBIO 101, 303 or concurrent enrollment. Not open to students with credit for MICROBIO 304.

NUTRITIONAL SCIENCES 132: Nutrition TodayNutrition and its relationship to humans and their biological, social, and physical environment; current issues and concerns that affect the nutritional status of various population groups.June 20 August 14Credits: 3Breadth: Biological Science

PLANT PATHOLOGY 123: Plants, Parasites and PeopleThe course will explore the interaction between society and plant-associated microbes. Topics include: the Irish potato famine, pesticides in current agriculture, role of economics and consumer preference in crop disease management and the release of genetically engineered organisms.June 20 August 14Credits: 3Breadth: Biological Science

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CALS 2022 Summer Term courses that have limited or no prerequisites and fulfill breadth requirements CALS News - wisc.edu

Human Behavior

The Metaverse: What Is It, and Why Should You Care? – TechSpot

The Metaverse. Some are calling it the next evolution of the Internet, others say it's already existed for years. One way or another, it's the focus of some of the most influential media companies in the world, and you should look into it, too.

I've always been fascinated with the Metaverse, long before I even knew there was a name tied to the idea. Going all the way back to when I was a young boy. Like most other little boys, I was dreaming of being a superhero, a knight, a swashbuckler, and on the most whimsical days, some conglomeration of those and many more action-y archetypes rolled into one as I adventured through various worlds built in the collective fantasy of my friends and I.

Illustration by Mo

As time went on, I relegated those realm-treading ideas to the section at the back of my mind labeled "fanciful nonsense," right next to light-sabers and world peace-thinking that videogames and books would be the closest of proxy for exploring other worlds that I'd have in my lifetime.

That course of thinking was changed in an instant one Saturday afternoon on a visit to a friend's house. I had popped in unannounced to find many of my peers lumped into a crowd, trilling with unabashed awe. When they had enough sense about them collectively to notice the new arrival, I was ushered to the center of the crowd, and strapped into a bulky headset, the Oculus Rift, playing a game called Robo Recall a simple affair where you shoot at errant robots rampaging through a futuristic city.

Totally enveloped, with a level of immersion I had never approached, even with the most thrilling of media I'd ever consumed, I was gleefully tearing through these hordes of robots.

I wasn't pointing a crosshair at these robots and clicking like had always been the case before. Instead, I was looking down the sights of the wacky, futuristic weapons by moving my hand to eye level, pinching my real fingers together to catch a bullet, and slinging my wrist forward to throw things.

It was mere seconds before the thoughts of the bulky headgear and alien controllers were completely gone, and I was completely within this game. Alas, the game came not without danger- I whipped to my right to shoot one of those rampaging robots and felt a sharp crack in the back of my hand, and pulling the headset off, I realized I had clubbed one of my boys with the Rift's controller.

As he picked himself up from the floor I put myself into time-out for being a danger to myself and others, and as I sat off to the side watching as others took their own turns shooting robots I was totally elated. This thing I was seeing -- I knew it was monumentous. Not just because this technology on its own was revolutionary and kind of amazing to behold, but because it was a tiny baby-step between the real world and a fantastical and truly infinite one, appealing to some latent hope deep within me. Something that seemed so impossibly far away, was emerging into reality, and having the incredible courtesy not only to happen during my lifetime, but in front of my very eyes.

Before we delve into the vast and complex issue of trying to divine the future of technology a task in which many more qualified before me have failed miserably or become exalted in their unparalleled facticity, I would like to include something akin to a disclaimer.

Takes on the internet, smartphones, television, and basically every other innovation of technology at the time of their conception and adoption have a tendency to skew outwards to those two extremes. We highlight and make prolific use of the most egregious deniers using the clarity of hindsight to make those speakers of antiquity into a mockery, or highlight people who were ahead of their time while ignoring the middling opinions that make up the contemporary thought.

Image credit: Jezael Melgoza

While I sing the praises of the amazing technological advancements, I also hope to forewarn that there are terrible dangers afoot. The more we become lost in the coming wonderland, the more the masters of that domain will have the ability to influence our lives, ideas, and perception an opportunity we know they will seize if given.

I believe that the Metaverse is an inevitability, save for a catastrophe of infrastructure or a foundational shift in human behavior. As is the order of our society, what once was a whimsical idea will be breathed into reality moving forward, even if it manifests as malignant and damnably corrupted.

As I see it, humanity approaches the Metaverse, treading a narrow and harrowing path. Waiting at the end, the ultimate reward for going where we have never dared, nor had the ability to go before, an Eden where humanity's technological staking will allow us to meaningfully transcend many of the boundaries of our primary physical reality and largely eliminate the logistical hurdles of space and distance from a myriad of activities.

The danger lies on either side of that path, pulling at us with an avaricious gravity towards gray quagmires of corporate control. Places where many of humanity's base freedoms are an illusion. The barons of those desolate kingdoms having complete control over what may exist within this new reality that we adopt.

As we explore the idea of the Metaverse here today, I plead with you to consider that the technology that will soon be at our disposal does not have the innate quality of being a supreme good, nor an ultimate, undoing evil. It is something that will be built and guided by the actions and ideals of many people, and has the capability to end up in either of these final destinations, and so many in between.

The prefix "Meta-" means beyond, and "-verse" refers to the Universe. Combine them to get the rather fitting term "Metaverse," meaning "beyond the Universe." All things considered, Metaverse feels an appropriately extravagant word for the ideas it represents.

This shiny new buzzword we're throwing around isn't actually so new. It originated in the 1992 Sci-fi novel, Snow Crash. I feel it is of note that this is the same place that is thought to have popularized the term "avatar" when referring to a digital representation of someone, so just with that accolade you can tell Snow Crash had its effect on the tech decades beyond when it was written.

While that's all good and dandy, choosing to use this term feels like a terrible, looming omen when you look at the source material. Snow Crash presents a dystopian, fractured state in a year very near to our own. In this shattered vision of America, what are essentially corporate oligarchs have all of the power in the presented society, and aim to employ literal memetic viruses that reprogram the human mind.

Facebook, a company constantly under fire for misuse of information and largely accused of shady and unscrupulous practices, taking up its new mantle of "Meta," and pledging to build the Metaverse seems to be about as on the nose as falling face first into asphalt. The cynic in me almost sees this as a brazen admission. Like, they're coming right out and saying, "Yup, we're done hiding it. We are untenably unconcerned with the well being of you lowly peasants. Our hegemony over information will be brutal and unceasing."

"Well," you might be asking, "now that you've scared me with your grossly exaggerated pessimism, what actually is this Metaverse thing you're talking about?" And I'd say that it's rather difficult to pin down.

What might have someone said if you asked them what an automobile was in the early 1880's, prior to their public sale? There were some brilliant people, and they probably could have come up with some idea of what that might be, but the first automobiles were not yet available for them to see.

The Metaverse exists in this same space at the moment. We can talk about it, and think about it, but it is rather impalpable in that the Metaverse is very different from anything that exists right now.

Illustration by Mo

As simply as I can put it, the Metaverse is a network of virtual 3D spaces we would be able to venture into and move between, functioning as a sort of 3D internet- or an "internet of places." Ideally, it would be engaged with using virtual reality devices, but would likely allow for augmented reality and traditional 2D displays to participate as well.

Imagine the world in The Matrix or Ready Player One. Those are two contemporary, and also dystopian (is anyone else noticing a pattern emerge?), examples of a Metaverse. Hopefully, the emerging real world version won't involve enslavement by robotic overlords or a large, and rather uncomfortable looking port being drilled into the back of your head, but I'm not going to file it away as an impossibility.

There have been things that you might have interacted with before that are tiny microcosms of what the Metaverse might be when it comes into reality. Games like World of Warcraft and Runescape have full blown human-driven economies, in worlds populated by millions of people. Fortnite has been host to live and synchronous events for millions of users on several occasions now, and regularly incorporates through collaboration the intellectual properties of other companies in the form of events and cosmetics. Roblox allows users to create games, events, and cosmetics that other users can buy and use. Twitch and YouTube allow for viewers to consume content in a live and social way, regardless of location.

Now, to imagine the Metaverse all you need to do is roll all of those, and a million other things, into one simultaneously cohesive and disjointed package. I'm not going to lie to you here and pretend I know what's going to happen in the future, but I sure can try to take my best guess.

The Metaverse wouldn't just be for gaming, even if most of my examples might indicate otherwise. Digital games just serve as a great jumping off point for many of the ideas involved because they are our most common foray into virtual worlds. Instead, the Metaverse would serve as humanity's new Mecca for interaction if everything goes as planned, where instead of heading to a website on the Internet, you would navigate to a virtual space within the Metaverse. At this point in time it's a set of ideas that we have a rough outline to strive towards in the future.

Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist in the realm of tech, and now rising to a higher strata of fame as some sort of Metaverse oracle figure, has many writings on the Metaverse that are openly praised by enthusiasts and the figureheads of tech alike. He laid out these core elements of the Metaverse as a part of a growing series of essays discussing this upcoming new era of technology.

Persistent - Possibly the least controversial element in discussions I have found. There must be no ending to the Metaverse, nor stoppages. It would just go on in perpetuity. Like today's internet, the Metaverse must always be there. Individual pieces, say a particular game or virtual plaza, might lose support from their owners or have a lapse in availability due to extenuating circumstances, but the Metaverse as a network needs to be something that is always available if you have a device and a connection.

Image credit: Sandro Katalina

Live - The Metaverse should largely take place in real time. Even though there will be instanced content maybe in the order of a dungeon in a video game, or a private movie showing, most things taking place should be happening for everyone at the same time.

A very solid example of this is the aforementioned live events hosted in Fortnite. When Ariana Grande's music was playing at her digital concert, everyone was hearing it simultaneously and participating in mini-games with other players for the duration.

A complete economy - In the Metaverse people will be able to own, trade, and invest in just about anything that goes on there. This likely begins with digital goods and real estate, but will become more diverse with a variety of services and speculative assets as time goes on. It's highly likely that there will be jobs that exist entirely within the Metaverse, and the currencies of choice will become legitimized and able to be exchanged with real world money.

If you're like me, the concept of digital property may sound preposterous, but in doing research about the Metaverse I found examples going back almost two decades that offered a small bit of legitimacy. Entropia Universe, an MMO that launched in 2003, has had virtual land and buildings sold for hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars in at least one case.

Unlimited user capacity - Like today's internet, there should be hypothetically no limit to how many people might be using the Metaverse at once. Not every single place within the Metaverse needs to be able to house the entire world, but the overall network of spaces should be unlimited in capacity.

Inter-usage of data and assets - A good portion of the items that exist within the Metaverse should be able to move with you from one setting or scene to another. Your favorite "I'm with stupid" hat for your avatar should be able to follow you from a movie viewing, to a game, to your company's virtual workspace (though you might want to take that off unless your boss is really cool) to most other places you go in the Metaverse.

Populated by a diverse pool of creators - In the Metaverse, anyone should be able to develop experiences for others to enjoy. Games, videos, movies, episodicals, and more should be able to enter this realm from any person with the know-how.

Like how anyone can make a website on the internet today, anyone should be able to set up their own space within the Metaverse and populate it with whatever they like. With the amazing programs some of which I'll touch on later in this piece this creation will be easier and more accessible to people without the specialized skills you need to make similar things today.

This last criterion is one glimmering shard of hope for the Metaverse. I know it is the general impression that Meta, Epic and Microsoft own the Metaverse before it even exists, however this is not the reality. Just like the Internet, no sole proprietor will own the Metaverse. Undoubtedly, some of the existing titanic tech companies, and a handful of new ones, will have a large influence and an equally large share of the traffic there, but it is something that belongs to everyone. There is the possibility that if the Metaverse is treated as such from the get-go, we might steer it away from the failings that plague the Internet in its current state.

The Metaverse won't be some monolithic piece of sci-fi level tech. It is an intricate web of slowly developing pieces that will come together into a global conglomerate. Hopefully, just like the internet before it, there will be constant evolution and change throughout the life of the Metaverse.

Now that the Metaverse is on people's minds and making waves in the media, we're sure to see a growing wave of support pouring into its development. Even if there is no shortage of people who will disparage the very concept, the Metaverse is still likely to be adopted quickly if it follows the trend of emerging technologies of the past.

Image credit: Muhammad Asyfaul

Humans are creatures of convenience, and if this new stuff makes their lives easier or more enjoyable they will use it. I may not be ancient and wizened, but I have been around long enough to remember when smartphones were "just a silly little fad."

Here are some examples of companies and their projects that are making a push into the Metaverse.

Meta, formerly Facebook, has made quite the show hiring a force of ten thousand European workers to develop the Metaverse. What exactly they have in mind is still shrouded in some mystery. We can take a look at one of their latest projects to get a glimpse into what they might be up to. Meta launched Horizon Worlds at the end of last year. This project works as a hub to explore user-designed 3D worlds in virtual reality.

In its current state, this appears to be rather rudimentary and impractical, but if you can look beyond the simplistic graphics and the horrifically puny 20 user limit per world, you can get a glimpse of how the Metaverse might work from a user standpoint.

Horizon has you open into a miniature hub-world where you can browse through community made content. Once you find a place to go, you just tap a button and you're teleported there.

Something like this will be a necessity in a realized Metaverse. Just like the Internet, you'll need some sort of browser program unless you just love punching in direct addresses. It looks like Meta's goal here is to create Metaverse navigation tools and they are largely neglecting to make content of their own.

Epic has been very forward that they hope to be on the vanguard of the Metaverse's creation. Massive hit game, Fortnite, has proven to be more culturally significant than you might expect from a cartoonishly styled game for all ages. Without trying to be disparaging, at least some of the astronomical success Fortnite has seen is from its events and crossovers with other massive brands.

At the peak of the hype around the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you could log into Fortnite to find a special game-mode where you had the chance to play as Thanos. When they changed the game's iconic map out for a newer one, there was a lead up event with cutscenes starring Dwayne Johnson.

They have used the game as a platform for live digital events for massively popular musical guests. You can find character crossovers from every place imaginable. There's John Wick, Spiderman, and even some real people like Ninja and Ariana Grande have been immortalized as skins in the game.

The point in all this is: Epic is doing the type of stuff that has to make the Metaverse a very fun and interesting place, and are setting a gold standard for the types of entertainment that will be huge within it. Furthermore, Fortnite gives people the opportunity to make their own island, and design the games and activities there, giving users a taste of that network-of-places style so important to the Metaverse.

Some of Epic's other efforts can be seen as both steps towards establishing themselves within the Metaverse and being very developer friendly. They are selling access to Unreal Engine licensing at a very competitive rate, and offering a desirable shopfront for smaller developers by taking a much smaller cut of the pie when it comes to revenue relative to other major sellers.

They are also giving free access to developers for their Easy Anti-Cheat and Voice services, both used in the smooth multiplayer experience of Fortnite (and many other titles you've probably heard of). By having this shared communication infrastructure built into many games, including one of the largest of all time, they are establishing a stronger case that those platforms define the standard when moving forward.

Since the interchange of assets and information from place to place is a key element of a realized Metaverse, there will be a coming standardization of many things, and it appears that Epic is trying now to establish leverage for their own creations to set that standard in the areas where they are staked.

With those things in mind and the absolutely staggering visuals of the new Unreal Engine 5, it wouldn't surprise me if Epic's engine, communication services, and storefront are worked to become a foundational piece of the Metaverse as it moves forward.

Epic has also recently fought legal battles with Apple and Google over what they call antitrust behavior about their market practices, claiming that among other things, the high share they demand, is harmful to developers using their storefronts. While Apple was found in their case not to be monopolistic, there was an injunction made that forbids them from continuing some practices that limited consumer choices in their stores.

While none of us are green enough to think that this is done out of altruism on Epic's part, the fact that corporate maneuvering has a side effect that is beneficial to smaller developers offers hope that some of these giant players might come to challenge the practices of their competitors moving forward.

For the Metaverse to live up to its potential, it will need to be an environment where developers of all sizes have the opportunity to add their own creations with fair chance at compensation.

Microsoft is trying to advance remote business solutions for the Metaverse with something called Mesh. Microsoft mesh is touting its "Holoportation" technology- live scanning and rendering of something inside of a virtual space.

In the Mesh trailer below you see the participants each wearing AR or VR headsets working together over a holographic display laid out on the table. Beyond that, Mesh allows integration with Office 365, and can allow users to introduce their files into the shared space for real-time edits from their team.

Any movement or changes should be visible wherever the viewers are within about a tenth of a second. As high-speed internet becomes available ubiquitously, this is just about as close to teleportation as we're gonna get short of a real life teleportation device. By making remote work and meetings as seamless as they can be by utilizing this new software with augmented reality, we are likely to see more and more people become remote workers.

Nvidia is definitely a contender in the literal shaping of the Metaverse, with Omniverse, a suite of programs used to create virtual spaces and bring them to life. It is kind of like the aforementioned Mesh, but for building 3D environments.

By coupling with the tools that people are using today to shape, edit, texture, render etc. 3D places and things, and adding the ability to collaborate these things in real time, this program is leaping forward in how streamlined and cooperative the process of building in 3D can be.

Either Omniverse, or something like it is going to be what shapes the places that make up the Metaverse. Omniverse makes it easier than ever to create high quality virtual spaces, which are the foundation of anything happening in the Metaverse. Imagine the things that you might see if entire teams of environmental designers, and animators working together in one live space.

On top of all of that, there are AI-powered solutions within these programs to speed up the tedium inherent to these types of tasks. The most amazing tool that I saw automatically animated faces speaking by tying them to a video or script. As these tools become more and more powerful, making a world of your own will eventually become easy enough for most anyone to do it.

Even though I've only spoken of corporate endeavors in this section, in a place that's designed to be an endless world of experiences, the user generated will vastly outnumber the proprietary in volume. Everyone, if they so desire, will be able to leave their own mark on this new world.

Image credit: S R

The Metaverse needs you to exist. There will be a need for the creative types to fill it with interesting things to do. We need to be technically oriented to design the necessary infrastructure to support it. We need the politically inclined to vote for policy makers that resist the iron grip of those that would pervert these new vistas for personal gain. We need people who understand this new technology and how to drive it to its fullest potential. Only together with our wonderful tapestry of skills can make real this new place that not long ago we all relegated as fanciful nonsense.

As with every other wave of technology, this one will bring with it solutions to old problems, and pose new ones of its own. The creation and operation of a project of this scale will create many, many jobs. Meta is hiring ten thousand to work on building the Metaverse.

As it comes closer to reality, there will be a growing need for specialized development of hardware and software ecosystems that rise to the myriad challenges present in bringing the Metaverse to fruition. Not only will these rising fields create employment for many people, but they will need people to teach them, and design their software and equipment.

Image: Mo

Furthermore, in this environment where you need only to log in to work instead of commute, startups utilizing the new tech can hire workers from anywhere in the world and invite them to their virtual space. As the Metaverse is embraced by the masses, many people will be untethered physically from their job.

As of March 2021, 21% of Americans were teleworking, and according to Global Workplace Analytics' expectations, by the end of 2021, 25-30% of the global workforce was to be working from home. During the era of the Metaverse, that section of the workforce will only grow, and they can choose to live wherever they like with little consideration for where their employers may be. Perhaps this new paradigm will allow people to move closer to their families, or maybe an introverted professional would like a remote house far away from the bustle of cities.

There is something going on in Venezuela that we'll see more of after the Metaverse becomes accessible. Due to a period of unprecedented inflation, many people there have turned to selling gold and items in the aforementioned multiplayer game Runescape, because it has a relatively stable in-game economy and using it to bring in foreign money from the global player-base was more sustainable and effective in earning than even high-skill jobs within Venezuela.

In ways similar to this, the Metaverse might be utilized creatively to open up avenues of capital to those that need it the most.

For certain types of disabilities, the Metaverse has the potential to be an even field in a way that real life can't quite match. Those with reduced mobility will likely be able to participate in events they might be barred from in real life, while perhaps a deaf individual might have the option to render subtitles for the goings on in a way to feel more included. As a physically disabled person, the Metaverse shines as a rapturous decoupling of the bodies of the enfeebled and their ability to participate in things like exploration and socialization.

It's no secret that being endlessly connected to everyone else has some negative modifier on social interactions and mental health, especially in teenagers. From 2008 to 2019, the reported rates of suicidal thoughts and behaviors in young adults rose by 47% along with the meteoric rise of social media and those two phenomena are largely believed to be intertwined.

Image credit: Shubham Dhage

The Metaverse might worsen this social woe, but some say the opposite. Virtual worlds are thought to be more socially intimate than scrolling through your feed. Maybe a new form of social media based on doing and experiencing things together will be a mentally healthier alternative than looking at selectively chosen snapshots and snippets of others' lives. It's unknown what effect this will have on socialization, but we can all try to hope for a turn to the positive. I for one, know anecdotally that Twitter and Instagram introduced leagues more strife into my life than stacking blocks with my friends in Minecraft.

The Metaverse will likely require a staggering amount of energy to keep running. We know little so far about how the Metaverse will be hosted, or how its data will be managed, but it is almost a certainty that it will have its costs. There's no telling which available technology, or new ones, we will use to create and distribute electricity in the future, but as it stands now there is a likelihood that the Metaverse has the potential to be environmentally deleterious within the existing state in which energy is produced.

Like with the internet, we can imagine there will be an army of scammers trying to defraud normal people, and any new tech is going to empower them with new tools and strategies. Americans are defrauded out of billions of dollars each year through internet and telephone scam strategies. Unless preventive measures are taken to protect people in the Metaverse, or there is education made available on how to protect yourself in this environment, more Metaverse users than necessary will fall victim to these new methods.

Like all new things, the Metaverse will be unpredictable, and tainted by certain less than desirable elements, but has the potential to be something wonderful and fun to reignite that childish whimsy so often pushed away in our modern world. A new and endless frontier for exploration waits just over the horizon. Together we can dive in and experience a whole new universe of possibilities as it unfolds right in front of us. Not long ago, this kind of technology would have been impossible to tell apart from magic, and we are so lucky to see it all coming together.

Masthead credit: julien Tromeur

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The Metaverse: What Is It, and Why Should You Care? - TechSpot

Neuroscience

2022 needs to be the year of leadership – here’s what to expect – AdNews

Neuro-Insights CEO Peter Pynta looks at the developing trends hes seeing in marcomms and how that will change over the next 12 months

Power is gained in multiple ways. Some assume it, others aim to take it, and those who think creatively appreciate that it can be earned. From our perspective in neuroscience, the last of those three is where a brand is able to position itself and can deliver the most efficient behaviour changes in their target audience.

Ill outline three areas where I feel will require greater leadership from those in our industry.

Corporate social licence to operateGlobally over the last five years, the number of B Corps has tripled. In 2020, there was a 23% increase alone.

Consumers are increasingly looking to buy from companies that they align with their values. In fact a recent survey found that 83% of Gen Z workers consider purpose when deciding where to work.

And corporate communications have a greater focus on targeting social responsible leadership. Mike & Annie Cannon-

Brookes have come out and promised $1.5 Billion towards limiting global warming by 1.5 degrees. The idea of purpose and taking a stand may not be new in the marketing space, but other environmental factors mean that the issue has more impact than ever before for those that get it right.

Leadership - both political and corporate - is never more important than while in a crisis, and the last 18 months have left a permanent transition mentality for most businesses. Whether thats in our industry, or any other.

In fact, the biggest vacuum which has been left has come from absence of real leadership at the highest levels. The approach from government has been distinctly reactionary and slow to changes in policy and mindset. And this gridlock will continue into next year, as most are canvassing the court of public opinion for short-term ideas of vote winning policies to fit neatly within the current election cycle.

Youll have the seen that many more businesses have been creatively encouraging their customers, and Australians in general, to get vaccinated. While the government has flip flopped on the issue of vaccination rates being a race, brands have been rolling up their marketing sleeves to inject some much needed media spend on the issue. Here again, weve seen corporate Australia to be far more proactive and single-minded than most governments.

This position of authority is not without its risks. Should a brand run a single campaign on an issue and not integrate that value into the way it does business, it will be called out. Any social cause a brand supports must be done authentically and with previously earned social licence; an ad campaign is not enough for this type of approach. Weve seen that when a brand gets it right it can connect deeply with the emotions of consumers. The one theme weve seen routinely this year in communications is that the moment of truth eg. Volvos melting icebergs crashing into the sea, driving a pronounced peak in Emotional Intensity with consumers. These moments are extremely authentic and powerful!

Evolving media metricsWeve all known the limitations of relying on volume metrics for advertising campaigns. Sure, while 3 million people may have had a chance to see your ad, honestly how many took the time to consider, or even view it in the first place?The demand from clients is rightly heating up, which is why weve seen a lot of investment in greater efforts to capture the true value of an advert.

The out-of-home industry undertook an industry changing research project in 2019. And from January next year, the information media planners will have access to will dramatically change, as the Neuro Impact Factor will be implementable across every single outdoor site in the country. Two years working together with the OMA and its members, neuroscience has been able to assign a value metric on the effectiveness of a given campaign which can be implemented at the planning stage of a campaign.

Will it guarantee outcomes? Well measurement is not a simple task. And creative has a strong role to play. But from the years of research weve found evidence that when you commit something to long-term memory (in essence, the Neuro Impact Factor), it has an 86 per cent correlation with real-world sales. Thinkbox UKs Payback series provides additional independent validation of the link between real-world sales and our neuro metrics. The Neuro Impact Factor will become the routine way to evaluate and buy media in the OOH space.

Elsewhere weve seen developments in attention. Many national and even international businesses have been backing attention-based metrics. Which is great that theres so much demand from clients to challenge the status quo. I expect this trend to mature over the next 12 months, as we see what investors are able to glean from the projects into the field.

And yes, while its true, you will need to see an advert before it can be committed to long-term memory, you dont need to look directly at it. Peripheral vision allows a significant degree of cognitive processing. The most fascinating findings come from campaigns that benefit from cross-channel priming - where we routinely find higher Memory Encoding (approx +15%) with lower levels of visual attention. Neuroscience found that the brain reacted to the stimulus of an OOH ad within a split second and could store that information in long-term memory. It was defined as the power of a glance.

Attention may be the new buzzword, however the last two decades of research in the neuroscience industry has found that its only explains about 15 per cent of what makes a person likely to store in memory; creative, context and priming all help explain the wider 85 per cent of the picture.

Context is King & Currency!Deliver the right message, at the right time to an appropriate customer and youve got yourself a winning marketing formula. Which is simple to appreciate, but in reality there are many other invisible environmental factors at play that affect the effectiveness of your ad.

Whilst weve heard a lot lately about privacy, crumbling cookies and the renaissance of context, the business case for context will be a real focus in 22 and beyond. Receptivity and real effectiveness will be centre stage! A recent project with IAS found that matching messages to media contextually has a significant payback. A good example of this is the finding that the effectiveness increases by anywhere from 25-40% when messages are congruent to a surrounding context.

Effectiveness in this project was measured by looking directly at brain activity - long term memory encoding - as messages were exposed during natural online browsing behaviour. This is the type evidence that will propel advertisers and agencies to routinely apply contextual criteria to media buys.

Weve recently discovered a great deal more on how media context works - adding weight to a whole new media language - again, beyond TRAPS, R&F, viewability, CTR etc etc When a message is matched to its surrounding environment, it can increase effectiveness (Long Term Memory Encoding) by up to 40%. Thats serious payback.and worth all the effort to engineer the alignment in the first place!

This new media language should also become a trading currency. If this happens then advertisers will have a dramatically more meaningful way of planning and buying media. Ideally the same techniques can be applied to the creative execution to ensure the fit between media and message. The emergence of better standards of media governance from outside and inside the industry will demand more accountability and transparency on media budgets. To deliver on that increasing desire from regulators and clients, I expect to see more rigour applied for campaigns which can objectively quantify the results; ideally standardising across media and creative using the same methodology. Clients have always needed to be able to demonstrate the fit and effectiveness of their campaigns and now technology is giving more options to better answer those questions.

We now see that as an ad walks through the doorway to memory, a rich assortment of media attributes simultaneously join the message.helping the brain to store those brand memories in the most relevant way. The media attributes that link with the ad are what we refer to as shared contextual equity. This is exactly how the surrounding media environment helps to shape the meaning of an ad at the moment of exposure. Not all impressions leave the same impression.

A fascinating parallel exists in medical science as well. Improvements in the effectiveness of pharmaceuticals is being driven by more targeted application of drugs and treatments that are tuned to patients individual characteristics. The idea of Precision Medicine seeks to customise the drug to reflect the environment in which its consumed. Its recognised as one of the Top 10 Trends in Pharma Industry Innovations of 2021. We see this being eminently achievable in the media and communications industry as well - if you can tune your medicine to its environment then it will become more potent.

Likewise if we can get the right fit between message and medium I suspect the same advancements can be expected in our industry.

We will see this part of the media ecosystem becoming far more prevalent in 22 and beyond. It will take on renewed importance in the advertising economy of the future.

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2022 needs to be the year of leadership - here's what to expect - AdNews

Human Behavior

Here’s How Researchers Trained Lab Rats To Drive Tiny Cars – Snopes.com

To learn more about how environmental factors influence the cognitive abilities of humans, researchers have trained rodents to drive tiny cars.

It may sound far out, but rats have similar pathways and chemicals in their brains as do people, and these often serve as a starting point to learn more about how the human brain works. And one such video that has circulated the internet for the last several years shows that just like people do, lab rats can be taught how to drive tiny cars.

The video itself is not necessarily new. Research conducted by psychologist from the University of Richmond in 2019, then published in January 2020 in the peer-reviewed journal Behavioural Brain Research, first described the astute rats. At the time of its publication, media outlets likeNPR, BBC and New Scientist shared the video and the findings that it embodied.

The driving rats resurfaced again in early January 2022 when the video was shared to the Reddit thread r/todayilearned. As of this writing, the video had since been removed but had received 2,700 upvotes beforehand.

The area of research focus is known as experience-based neuroplasticity, or how a persons environment and interactions with the world around them can shape the brain and its neural networks.

We love to study these animals, and were always amazed at what they can do in the lab with their behavior, their cognitive flexibility, and their emotional resilience. The rodent behavior and their brains help us learn more about human behavior and brains, explained study author Kelly Lambert, professor of behavioral neuroscience, in a news release at the time.

Lab rats used in the study live a somewhat bourgeoise life for a rodent. They have larger cages, more animals to interact with, and plenty of stimulus to create an enriched environment closer to those where they may naturally live. Studies show that these animals are more motivated and train more efficiently than those found in traditional laboratory settings.

Training is a big part of their life, and we know even with humans that training can change the brain in really interesting ways. Just learning to juggle can increase the density or the area of certain areas of our brains cortex, said Lambert.

Cue the rodent operated vehicle (ROV). Rats were taught to drive their pint-sized vehicles in a forward direction, as well as steer in more complex navigational pattern. When compared to other rats, those housed in enriched environments demonstrated more robust learning in their performance and a heightened interest even after the trials ended.

The ROV was made up from a modified ELEGOO EL-KIT-012UNO Project Smart Robot Car Kit V 3.0 (you can buy one here) designed so that the rad could move the car by touching or grabbing a bar. Movement could be stopped simply by releasing contact. stop movement by releasing contact. The rats were trained to touch the bars and move the car with the incentive of tiny pieces of Fruit Loops cereal, which were eventually placed at the end of the driving range. As training progressed, the distance to the tiny marshmallow treats increased with the longest distance travelled by a rat being 110 centimeters after about a month of training.

This research study found that rats housed in a complex, enriched environment (i.e., environment with interesting objects to interact with) learned the driving task, but rats housed in standard laboratory cages had problems learning the task (i.e., they failed their driving test). That means the complex environment led to more behavioral flexibility and neuroplasticity, said Lambert.

Following the study, researchers analyzed rat poop and found ratios of dehydroepiandrosterone and corticosterone, two types of stress hormones, that suggested driving training created a sort of emotional resilience in rats that lived both enriched and normal housing.

Though rats driving cars are adorable, the scientists note that their findings could inform future strategies for addressing mental health and helping to understand various illnesses. Neuroplasticity and the ability to learn new skills could have indications for anxiety, depression, emotional resilience and cognitive ability. This type of training can change a brain and learning to juggle multiple tasks can increase areas prone to certain conditions.

It appears the study above was just the beginning. In 2021, the team unveiled the Rat Car II which featured new equipment with less than 1,000 horse power, advance control for tiny rat hands, and once again motivation in the form of fruit loops.

Curious about how Snopes writers verify information and craft their stories for public consumption? Weve collected some posts that help explain how we do what we do. Happy reading and let us know what else you might be interested in knowing.

Sources

Amazon.Com: KEYESTUDIO Smart Car Robot,4WD Programmable DIY Starter Kit for Arduino for Uno R3 Electronics Programming Project/STEM Educational/Science Coding Robot Toys for Kids Teens Adults,12+: Toys & Games. https://www.amazon.com/KEYESTUDIO-Bluetooth-Controller-Ultrasonic-Programming/dp/B08276N3D9/ref=asc_df_B08276N3D9/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=507731305156&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=2989603916883922511&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9021356&hvtargid=pla-1045715635134&psc=1. Accessed 7 Jan. 2022.

Scientists Have Trained Rats to Drive Tiny Cars to Collect Food. New Scientist, https://www.newscientist.com/article/2220721-scientists-have-trained-rats-to-drive-tiny-cars-to-collect-food/. Accessed 7 Jan. 2022.

Crawford, L. E., et al. Enriched Environment Exposure Accelerates Rodent Driving Skills. Behavioural Brain Research, vol. 378, Jan. 2020, p. 112309. ScienceDirect, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbr.2019.112309.

Kelly Lambert Media Kits Expert Guides Newsroom University of Richmond. News, https://news.richmond.edu/experts/media-kits/lambert.html. Accessed 7 Jan. 2022.

Scientists Taught Rats How To Drive Tiny Cars. NPR, 23 Oct. 2019. NPR, https://www.npr.org/2019/10/23/772557752/scientists-taught-rats-how-to-drive-tiny-cars.

Neuroplasticity: How to Rewire Your Brain. BBC Reel, https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p098v92g/neuroplasticity-how-to-rewire-your-brain. Accessed 7 Jan. 2022.

Newman, Amy E. M., et al. Dehydroepiandrosterone and Corticosterone Are Regulated by Season and Acute Stress in a Wild Songbird: Jugular Versus Brachial Plasma. Endocrinology, vol. 149, no. 5, May 2008, pp. 253745. PubMed Central, https://doi.org/10.1210/en.2007-1363.

Richmond, University of. Driving On: Latest on Driving Rats Research Project. 2021. Vimeo, https://vimeo.com/519057874.

substantial-freud. TIL Rats Can Learn to Drive, and Seem to Enjoy It. R/Todayilearned, 5 Jan. 2022, http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/rwv0tm/til_rats_can_learn_to_drive_and_seem_to_enjoy_it/.

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Here's How Researchers Trained Lab Rats To Drive Tiny Cars - Snopes.com