Some previous research has found that typical familial patterns may get upended during crises, but that’s not what Shockley and her colleagues found in the early months of the COVID-19 shutdown.

“Most people have never undergone anything like this before, where all of a sudden they can’t rely on their normal child care, and most people’s work situation has changed too,” said Shockley, associate professor of psychology in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. “We thought this would be a chance for men to step in and partake equally in child care, but for many couples we didn’t see that happen.”

In mid-March, as schools and day cares closed and many shifted to remote work, Shockley and her colleagues quickly created a survey targeting dual-earner couples with at least one child under age 6.

“My son was 15 months old when this all started, and I know firsthand that you can’t just plop younger kids in front of a TV or expect them to do their schoolwork,” she said. “We were particularly interested in people who really had to provide active child care.”

The team initially surveyed 274 couples, conducting a follow-up survey with 133 of the same couples in May. The study, which will appear Journal of Applied Psychology, assessed marital tension, health and job performance in addition to child care strategies.

“When the wife does it all, not surprisingly, the outcomes are bad for the couple,” Shockley said. “It’s not just bad for the wife, it’s also bad for the husband, including in terms of job performance although his work role presumably hasn’t changed. When one person’s doing it all, there’s a lot of tension in the relationship, and it’s probably spilling over into the husband’s ability to focus at work.”

Though 36.6% of couples relied on the wife to provide most or all child care, 44.5% used more egalitarian strategies, and 18.9% used strategies that were not clearly gendered or egalitarian.

Egalitarian strategies included alternating work days, planning daily mini shifts that included both work and child care for husband and wife, and alternating shifts that changed day to day based on the couple’s work needs.

“When you look at the more egalitarian strategies, we found the best outcomes for people who were able to alternate working days,” Shockley said. “The boundaries are clear. When you’re working, you can really focus on work, and when you’re taking care of the kids, you can really focus on the kids. But not everybody has jobs amenable to that.”

When both people were working at home, planned mini shifts and needs-based alternation had similar well-being outcomes for the couple, but job performance was higher for couples who used needs-based alternation, according to Shockley.

“I think that’s due to the communication that comes with it, and the flexibility within your dyad at home,” she said. “For couples who are continuing to work remotely, I would say needs-based alternation with night-before communication about work needs is probably better than having fixed shifts.”

Although the paper doesn’t include qualitative quotes, Shockley remembers the participants’ comments quite clearly.

“People were saying, ‘I’m at my breaking point,’ and this was just two weeks in. A lot of people said, ‘I’m just not sleeping.’ You could feel people’s struggle, and there was a lot of resentment, particularly when the wife was doing it all,” she said.

“This really highlights some infrastructure issues we have with the way we think about child care in this country. The default becomes, ‘Oh well, the wife is going to pick up the slack.’ It’s not a long-term solution.”

Shockley also noted that the couples surveyed have relatively high incomes.

“Compared to the country, the household income of our study is pretty high,” she said. “This might look different in lower-income samples. We might see totally different strategies emerging, particularly if there’s less possibility for remote work.”

Co-authors include Malissa A. Clark and Hope Dodd at UGA and Eden B. King at Rice University.

Completely shifting to no-till would reduce soil loss and sediment yield by more than 70%, says Sanghyun Lee, doctoral student in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at U of I and lead author on the study, published in Journal of Environmental Management.

But even a partial change in tilling practices could have significant results, he adds.

“If we focus on the most vulnerable area in terms of soil erosion, then only 40% no-till shows almost the same reduction as 100% no-till implementation,” Lee says.

The study used physical data and computer modeling to estimate soil erosion in the Drummer Creek watershed, which is part of the Upper Sangamon River watershed in Central Illinois. The area’s main crops are corn and soybeans, and tillage is a predominant agricultural practice.

“The rate of soil erosion is increased and accelerated by unsustainable agricultural production. One of the main reasons is conventional tillage in the field,” Lee says. “Our model provides a tool to estimate the impacts of tilling on soil erosion across the watershed.”

Lee and co-authors Maria Chu, Jorge Guzman, and Alejandra Botero-Acosta developed the modeling framework, coupling a hydrological model (MIKE SHE) with the Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) to examine the impacts of no-till practice in the watershed. The WEPP model provided the sediment sources from the agricultural fields under different tillage practices and the hydrologic model simulated sediment transport across the watershed.

The researchers included historical data on climate, soil properties, sediment sample data, and other relevant measures, then used the coupled model to predict how different management practices affect soil erosion rates.

“Farmers may prefer tilling because wet climate conditions cause compacted soil,” Lee says. “However, soil erosion removes topsoil, which contains lots of nutrients, and this may reduce yield in the long term. Soil erosion also affects water quality, both locally over time and at a distance.

“Therefore, farmers need to weigh the benefits of tilling with the consequences of soil erosion and choose the best management strategies.”

The modeling framework can help identify the most vulnerable areas, so producers can implement sustainable management practices where it matters most, Lee notes.

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Materials provided by University of Illinois College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences. Original written by Marianne Stein. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

“The study addresses the impact of wildfires on global climate, and we extensively used the NCAR-Wyoming supercomputer (Cheyenne),” says Shane Murphy, a UW associate professor of atmospheric science. “Also, the paper used observations from UW and other teams around the world to compare to the climate model results. The main conclusion of the work is that wildfire smoke is more cooling than current models assume.”

Murphy was a contributing author of a paper, titled “Biomass Burning Aerosols in Most Climate Models Are Too Absorbing,” that was published Jan. 12 (today) in Nature Communications, an open-access journal that publishes high-quality research from all areas of the natural sciences. Papers published by the journal represent important advances of significance to specialists within each field.

Hunter Brown, who graduated from UW in fall 2020 with a Ph.D. in atmospheric science, was the paper’s lead author. Other contributors to the paper included researchers from Texas A&M University; North Carolina A&T State University; the University of Georgia; the Finnish Meteorological Institute; the Center for International Climate and Environmental Science, and Norwegian Meteorological Institute, both in Oslo, Norway; the University of Reading in the United Kingdom; North-West University in South Africa; the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, China; and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash.

The composition, size and mixing state of biomass burning aerosols determine the optical properties of smoke plumes in the atmosphere which, in turn, are a major factor in dictating how these aerosols perturb the energy balance in the atmosphere.

“We found that many of the most advanced climate models simulate biomass burning aerosols or smoke that is darker, or more light absorbing, than what we see in observations,” says Brown, of Juneau, Alaska. “This has implications for the climate predictions made by these models.”

Observations and models used in the study covered a wide temporal range. Africa, South America and Southeastern Asia, in addition to boreal fire regions, were chosen because these are the largest contributors to biomass burning smoke emissions in the world, Brown says.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) in Cheyenne was used for all of the data processing and the model sensitivity simulations, Brown says. Some of the other model data used for comparison in this study were generated elsewhere.

“When we compare global observations of wildfire smoke to simulated wildfire smoke from a collection of climate models, the vast majority of the models have smoke that is more light absorbing than the observations,” Brown explains. “This means that more energy from the sun is going toward warming the atmosphere in these models, as opposed to what we see in these field campaigns and laboratory studies, which report less absorbing smoke that has more of a cooling effect by scattering light away from the Earth and back to space.”

How absorbing these aerosols are in the atmosphere depends on the type of fuel that is burning, as well as the climate of the fire region. Generally, hot, dry grassland fires in Africa and Australia tend to have much darker smoke, which is more absorbing, while cooler, wetter boreal forest fires in North America and Northern Asia tend to have much brighter smoke, which is less absorbing.

After researchers made aerosol improvements to the model, African wildfire smoke still tended to be more absorbing than observations. This might be explained by simplifications in how aerosols evolve over time in the model, or it may be due to a lack of observations from this part of the world biasing the results toward the boreal fire regime, Brown explains.

“We were able to trace the disagreement between the model and observations to how the models represented the individual smoke particles, or aerosols, in the model,” Brown says. “This came down to how the model characterized their makeup, their size and the mixtures of different types of biomass burning aerosol. When we changed these variables in one of the models, we saw considerable improvement in the simulated smoke.”

This comparison of computer models and global observations is valuable for model development groups and may help reduce uncertainty in biomass burning aerosol climate impacts in models, Brown says.

The research, published Jan. 11 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, helps to resolve a long-standing debate about the role of climate change in the rising costs of flooding and provides new insight into the financial costs of global warming overall.

“The fact that extreme precipitation has been increasing and will likely increase in the future is well known, but what effect that has had on financial damages has been uncertain,” said lead author Frances Davenport, a PhD student in Earth system science at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). “Our analysis allows us to isolate how much of those changes in precipitation translate to changes in the cost of flooding, both now and in the future.”

The global insurance company Munich Re calls flooding “the number-one natural peril in the U.S.” However, although flooding is one of the most common, widespread and costly natural hazards, whether climate change has contributed to the rising financial costs of flooding — and if so, how much — has been a topic of debate, including in the most recent climate change assessments from the U.S. government and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

At the crux of that debate is the question of whether or not the increasing trend in the cost of flooding in the U.S. has been driven primarily by socioeconomic factors like population growth, housing development and increasing property values. Most previous research has focused either on very detailed case studies (for example, of individual disasters or long-term changes in individual states) or on correlations between precipitation and flood damages for the U.S. overall.

In an effort to close this gap, the researchers started with higher resolution climate and socioeconomic data. They then applied advanced methods from economics to quantify the relationship between historical precipitation variations and historical flooding costs, along with methods from statistics and climate science to evaluate the impact of changes in precipitation on total flooding costs. Together, these analyses revealed that climate change has contributed substantially to the growing cost of flooding in the U.S., and that exceeding the levels of global warming agreed upon in the United Nations Paris Agreement is very likely to lead to greater intensification of the kinds of extreme precipitation events that have been most costly and devastating in recent decades.

“Previous studies have analyzed pieces of this puzzle, but this is the first study to combine rigorous economic analysis of the historical relationships between climate and flooding costs with really careful extreme event analyses in both historical observations and global climate models, across the whole United States,” said senior author and climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh, the Kara J. Foundation Professor at Stanford Earth.

“By bringing all those pieces together, this framework provides a novel quantification not only of how much historical changes in precipitation have contributed to the costs of flooding, but also how greenhouse gases influence the kinds of precipitation events that cause the most damaging flooding events,” Diffenbaugh added.

The researchers liken isolating the role of changing precipitation to other questions of cause and effect, such as determining how much an increase in minimum wage will affect local employment, or how many wins an individual player contributes to the overall success of a basketball team. In this case, the research team started by developing an economic model based on observed precipitation and monthly reports of flood damage, controlling for other factors that might affect flooding costs like increases in home values. They then calculated the change in extreme precipitation in each state over the study period. Finally, they used the model to calculate what the economic damages would have been if those changes in extreme precipitation had not occurred.

“This counterfactual analysis is similar to computing how many games the Los Angeles Lakers would have won, with and without the addition of LeBron James, holding all other players constant,” said study co-author and economist Marshall Burke, an associate professor of Earth system science.

Applying this framework, the research team found that — when totaled across all the individual states — changes in precipitation accounted for 36 percent of the actual flooding costs that occurred in the U.S. from 1988 to 2017. The effect of changing precipitation was primarily driven by increases in extreme precipitation, which have been responsible for the largest share of flooding costs historically.

“What we find is that, even in states where the long-term mean precipitation hasn’t changed, in most cases the wettest events have intensified, increasing the financial damages relative to what would have occurred without the changes in precipitation,” said Davenport, who received a Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship in 2020.

The researchers emphasize that, by providing a new quantification of the scale of the financial costs of climate change, their findings have implications beyond flooding in the U.S.

“Accurately and comprehensively tallying the past and future costs of climate change is key to making good policy decisions,” said Burke. “This work shows that past climate change has already cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars, just due to flood damages alone.”

The authors envision their approach being applied to different natural hazards, to climate impacts in different sectors of the economy and to other regions of the globe to help understand the costs and benefits of climate adaptation and mitigation actions.

“That these results are as robust and definitive as they are really advances our understanding of the role of historical precipitation changes in the financial costs of flooding,” Diffenbaugh said. “But, more broadly, the framework that we developed provides an objective basis for estimating what it will cost to adapt to continued climate change and the economic value of avoiding higher levels of global warming in the future.”

“The more efficiently we burn methane and the less energy we use to burn it, the less greenhouse gas and pollutants it produces. So, anything we can do to get this combustion temperature down is an environmental win,” said Reza Shahbazian-Yassar, professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Shahbazian-Yassar and colleagues facilitated the development of a cutting edge catalyst made up of 10 different elements — each of which on its own has the ability to reduce the combustion temperature of methane — plus oxygen. This unique catalyst can bring the combustion temperature of methane down by about half — from above 1400 degrees Kelvin down to 600 to 700 degrees Kelvin.

Their findings are reported in the journal Nature Catalysis.

In previously-published research, Shahbazian-Yassar and colleagues demonstrated the ability to create multi-element nanoparticle catalysts, known as high entropy alloys using a unique shock-wave technique. Before this, materials scientists didn’t make serious attempts to create nanoparticles out of more than three elements because of the tendency of each elements’ atoms to separate from each other and become useless.

Taking advantage of the unique real-time, high-temperature electron microscopy system at UIC, Shahbazian-Yassar’s team showed that high entropy nanoparticles made up of 10 metal oxides were highly stable at temperatures up to 1,073 degrees Kelvin and the individual elements were distributed evenly throughout each nanoparticle forming a single, solid-state stable crystalline structure.

Their metal oxide alloy contained various mixtures of transition metals, which are rare-earth elements, and noble metals plus oxygen.

“It is almost impossible to maintain a perfect mix of these elements in a solid phase due to the differences in atomic radius, crystal structure, oxidation potential, and electronic properties of the elements,” said Zhennan Huang, a Ph.D. student in Shahbazian-Yassar’s lab and co-first author in the paper. “But we were able to show that this is possible.”

“Among multiple alloys with multiple elements that we created, the particles made of 10 elements not only were most effective in reducing the combustion point of methane gas but also the most stable at those temperatures,” said Shahbazian-Yassar, who is a corresponding author on the paper.

The researchers believe the catalyst could be used to reduce the output of harmful greenhouse gases produced by burning natural gas in individual households, to power turbines and even in cars that run on compressed natural gas.

Tangyuan Li, Yonggang Yao, Menghao Yang, Jinglong Gao, Alexandra Brozena, Liangbing Hu, Yifei Mo, Glenn Pastel, Miaolun Jiao, Qi Dong, Jiaqi Dai and Shuke Li of the University of Maryland; Pengfei Xie, Kaizhu Zeng, Han Zong and Chao Wang of Johns Hopkins University; Zhenyu Liu and Guofeng Wang of the University of Pittsburgh; Miaofang Chi of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Jian Luo of the University of California, San Diego, are co-authors on the paper.

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Materials provided by University of Illinois at Chicago. Original written by Sharon Parmet. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

John Johnson, professor emeritus of psychology at Penn State, recently conducted research with several colleagues revealing that an individual’s enjoyment of horror films could have better prepared them for the COVID-19 pandemic as opposed to others who do not enjoy frightening entertainment. Their findings are documented in Personality and Individual Differences.

“My latest research collaboration was unique in that my colleagues wanted to identify factors beyond personality that contributed to people’s psychological preparedness and resilience in the face of the pandemic,” Johnson explained. “After factoring out personality influences, which were actually quite strong, we found that the more movies about zombies, alien invasions and apocalyptic pandemics people had seen prior to COVID-19, the better they dealt with the actual, current pandemic. These kinds of movies apparently serve as mental rehearsal for actual events.

To me, this implicates an even more important message about stories in general — whether in books, movies or plays. Stories are not just entertainment, but preparation for life.”

Johnson said that in what might be considered retirement, his emeritus status has allowed him to continue to be engaged in the research projects of his choosing, while also helping other researchers along the way.

“Now that I am retired, I have all the time in the world and the freedom to choose any kind of research project that I find truly interesting,” said Johnson. “Many of my most recent projects began at the invitation of other researchers who hoped that I could lend my expertise to these projects. Most of these researchers are just beginning their careers, so in a way, I am teaching and mentoring them as well as helping them conduct their research.”

Johnson’s impact on personality research continues to be felt even in retirement, as young researchers and longtime colleagues still reach out to draw on his expertise.

“This study was conceived by a graduate student in human development and biology at the University of Chicago, Coltan Scrivner,” Johnson said. “I had recently reviewed a terrific paper he wrote on morbid curiosity, so I knew who he was. Coltan conducts research on the psychology of horror, and therefore contacted two Danish researchers who were experts on horror, Mathias Clausen and Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, to see if they would collaborate with him. I had previously conducted and published research with Mathias and Jens on what attracts people to horror and villains, so they invited me to the project. We all had input; mine was primarily on how to measure personality, preparedness and resilience, and how to conduct the statistics. Coltan collected the data online, and we quickly wrote up the results and submitted to a journal that was looking for studies on COVID-19. It has been an absolute joy to work with the Danish research team and their colleagues.”

The researchers designed a survey they pilot-tested. They administered the final survey to 310 persons via a website. Thirteen items in the survey assessed positive and negative resilience. A set of six questions covered preparedness for the pandemic.

Participants then indicated the extent to which they were fans of horror, zombie, psychological thriller, supernatural, apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic, science fiction, alien-invasion, crime, comedy, and romance genres in movies and television. Next, participants were asked about the past and present experience with and interest in films that were explicitly about pandemics. Other questions appeared in the survey for other projects and as controls.

The results of their collaborated effort may be enough to make many feel justified in staying up late to watch horror films, in spite of what their mothers told them.

“What we found was that people who watched certain kinds of movies before the pandemic seemed to be helped by them during the pandemic,” Johnson said.

Though, for those ready to fire up Netflix and get their horror fix now, they may be late to the party in preparing for the COVID pandemic. But, as Johnson explained, it is never too late to make ready for the next hurdle in life.

“I’m not sure that watching such movies now would be helpful for our current situation,” he said. “However, my understanding of pandemics and other life-challenging events is that similar future challenges are absolutely inevitable. The past is often forgotten too easily. Who remembered the Spanish flu epidemic until scientists brought up that piece of history during COVID-19? This reinforces my belief that consuming stories from books, films and maybe even video games is not just an idle pastime, but a way for us to imagine simulated realities that help prepare us for future challenges.”

Idle pastimes are not something easily understood by an individual with Johnson’s passion, and his continued efforts beyond his teaching days highlight that.

“I think that a lot of people assume that when professors retire with emeritus rank, they spend all of their time traveling, pursuing hobbies, or just relaxing at home,” said Johnson. “Although I have certainly done those things since I retired, I have also continued to conduct research and publish articles, often collaborating with younger researchers who need my expertise in personality measurement.”