Geologists, biologists unearth the atomic fingerprints of cancer

Scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder and Princeton University have, for the first time, employed a tool often used in geology to detect the atomic fingerprints of cancer.

In a case of medicine meets earth science, the researchers discovered that cancer cells may be made from a different assortment of hydrogen atoms than healthy tissue. The findings could give doctors new strategies for studying how cancer grows and spreads — and may even, one day, lead to new ways to spot cancer early on in the body.

The team, led by CU Boulder geochemist Ashley Maloney, will publish its findings this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“This study adds a whole new layer to medicine, giving us the chance to look at cancer at the atomic level,” said Maloney, a research associate in the Department of Geological Sciences.

She explained that in nature, hydrogen comes in two main flavors, or isotopes. Some hydrogen atoms, called deuterium, are a little heavier, while others, usually just known as hydrogen, are a little lighter. On Earth, hydrogen atoms outnumber deuterium atoms by a ratio of about 6,420 to one.

For decades, scientists from a number of fields have turned to the natural distribution of these atoms to reveal clues about the history of our planet. Climate scientists, for example, examine the hydrogen atoms trapped in the ice on Antarctica to infer how hot or cool Earth was hundreds of thousands of years ago.

In the new study, Maloney and her colleagues wondered: Could those same, tiny atoms provide hints about the lives of complex biological organisms?

To find out, the team grew cultures of yeast and mouse liver cells in the lab, then analyzed their hydrogen atoms. The team found that cells that are growing really fast, such as cancer cells, contain a much different ratio of hydrogen versus deuterium atoms. Think of it like cancer leaving a fingerprint on the doorknob of a crime scene.

The research is still in its early stages, and the team isn’t sure how this signal might appear, or not, in the bodies of real cancer patients. But the potential could be big, said Sebastian Kopf, a co-author of the study and an assistant professor in geological sciences.

“Your chances of survival are so much higher if you catch cancer early on,” Kopf said. “If this isotopic signal is strong enough that you could detect it through something like a blood test, that could give you an important hint that something is off.”

The metabolism of cancer

The study centers around a concept that has intrigued cancer researchers for years: metabolism.

Under normal conditions, the cells of organisms like yeast and animals generate energy through a process called respiration, in which they take in oxygen and release carbon dioxide. But that’s not the only way to get a sugar high. Colonies of baker’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), for example, can produce energy via fermentation, in which organisms break down sugars without help from oxygen and produce alcohol. It’s the same process that gives you beer.

“In humans, if an athlete performs beyond their aerobic limit, their muscles will also start fermenting, which doesn’t use oxygen,” Kopf said. “That gives you a quick energy boost.”

As it turns out, many cancer cells also fuel their growth through a similar get-rich-quick strategy.

Scientists have long searched for more ways to track these metabolic changes in cancer cells. Maloney, who led the new study as a Harry Hess Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton, and her advisor Xinning Zhang developed an idea: Track hydrogen.

Inside the cell

Today, Maloney manages CU Boulder’s Earth Systems Stable Isotope Lab, one of more than 20 Core Facilities on campus. As a graduate student, she explored hydrogen atoms in algae from tropical islands. Her current work was inspired by an unlikely source: her father, a dermatologist.

“He takes skin cancer cells off people all the time,” Maloney said. “I wondered how the metabolism of those cells might be different from the cells growing next to them.”

To understand that question, it helps to know how hydrogen winds up in cells in the first place. In some cases, those atoms come from a hard-to-pronounce, but critically important, enzyme known as nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADPH). Among its many roles in cells, NADPH collects hydrogen atoms then passes them to other molecules in the process of making fatty acids, an important building block for life.

NADPH, however, doesn’t always draw from the same pool of hydrogen. Previous research led by Zhang and focusingg on bacteria suggested that, depending on what other enzymes in a cell are doing, NADPH may sometimes use different hydrogen isotopes more or less often.

Which raised the question: If cancer rewires a cell’s metabolism, could it also alter how NADPH gets its hydrogen, ultimately altering the atomic makeup of a cell?

Window into cancer

To begin to find out, the researchers set up jars filled with flourishing colonies of yeast in labs at Princeton and CU Boulder. Separately, biologists at Princeton conducted an experiment with colonies of healthy and cancerous mouse liver cells. The researchers then pulled the fatty acids from the cells and used a machine called a mass spectrometer to identify the ratio of hydrogen atoms within.

“When we started the study, I thought, ‘Ooh, we have a chance to see something cool,” Maloney said. “It ended up creating a huge signal, which I didn’t expect.”

Fermenting yeast cells, the kind that resemble cancer, contained roughly 50 percent fewer deuterium atoms on average than the normal yeast cells, a startling change. Cancerous cells exhibited a similar but not quite as strong shortage in deuterium.

Zhang, the study’s senior author and an assistant professor of geosciences at Princeton, is hopeful that the research could one day help families around the world.

“Cancer, and other illnesses, are unfortunately a huge theme in many people’s lives. Seeing Ashley’s data was special, profound moment,” Zhang said. “It meant that a tool used to track planetary health might also be applied to track health and disease in lifeforms, hopefully one day in humans. Growing up in a family challenged by cancer, I hope to see this area expand.”

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Venus has almost no water: A new study may reveal why

Planetary scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder have discovered how Venus, Earth’s scalding and uninhabitable neighbor, became so dry.

The new study fills in a big gap in what the researchers call “the water story on Venus.” Using computer simulations, the team found that hydrogen atoms in the planet’s atmosphere go whizzing into space through a process known as “dissociative recombination” — causing Venus to lose roughly twice as much water every day compared to previous estimates.

The team will publish their findings May 6 in the journal Nature.

The results could help to explain what happens to water in a host of planets across the galaxy.

“Water is really important for life,” said Eryn Cangi, a research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) and co-lead author of the new paper. “We need to understand the conditions that support liquid water in the universe, and that may have produced the very dry state of Venus today.”

Venus, she added, is positively parched. If you took all the water on Earth and spread it over the planet like jam on toast, you’d get a liquid layer roughly 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) deep. If you did the same thing on Venus, where all the water is trapped in the air, you’d wind up with only 3 centimeters (1.2 inches), barely enough to get your toes wet.

“Venus has 100,000 times less water than the Earth, even though it’s basically the same size and mass,” said Michael Chaffin, co-lead author of the study and a research scientist at LASP.

In the current study, the researchers used computer models to understand Venus as a gigantic chemistry laboratory, zooming in on the diverse reactions that occur in the planet’s swirling atmosphere. The group reports that a molecule called HCO+ (an ion made up of one atom each of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen) high in Venus’ atmosphere may be the culprit behind the planet’s escaping water.

For Cangi, co-lead author of the research, the findings reveal new hints about why Venus, which probably once looked almost identical to Earth, is all but unrecognizable today.

“We’re trying to figure out what little changes occurred on each planet to drive them into these vastly different states,” said Cangi, who earned her doctorate in astrophysical and planetary sciences at CU Boulder in 2023.

Spilling the water

Venus, she noted, wasn’t always such a desert.

Scientists suspect that billions of year ago during the formation of Venus, the planet received about as much water as Earth. At some point, catastrophe struck. Clouds of carbon dioxide in Venus’ atmosphere kicked off the most powerful greenhouse effect in the solar system, eventually raising temperatures at the surface to a roasting 900 degrees Fahrenheit. In the process, all of Venus’ water evaporated into steam, and most drifted away into space.

But that ancient evaporation can’t explain why Venus is as dry as it is today, or how it continues to lose water to space.

“As an analogy, say I dumped out the water in my water bottle. There would still be a few droplets left,” Chaffin said.

On Venus, however, almost all of those remaining drops also disappeared. The culprit, according to the new work, is elusive HCO+.

Missions to Venus

Chaffin and Cangi explained that in planetary upper atmospheres, water mixes with carbon dioxide to form this molecule. In previous research, the researchers reported that HCO+ may be responsible for Mars losing a big chunk of its water.

Here’s how it works on Venus: HCO+ is produced constantly in the atmosphere, but individual ions don’t survive for long. Electrons in the atmosphere find these ions, and recombine to split the ions in two. In the process, hydrogen atoms zip away and may even escape into space entirely — robbing Venus of one of the two components of water.

In the new study, the group calculated that the only way to explain Venus’ dry state was if the planet hosted larger than expected volumes of HCO+ in its atmosphere. There is one twist to the team’s findings. Scientists have never observed HCO+ around Venus. Chaffin and Cangi suggest that’s because they’ve never had the instruments to properly look.

While dozens of missions have visited Mars in recent decades, far fewer spacecraft have traveled to the second planet from the sun. None have carried instruments capable of detecting the HCO+ that powers the team’s newly discovered escape route.

“One of the surprising conclusions of this work is that HCO+ should actually be among the most abundant ions in the Venus atmosphere,” Chaffin said.

In recent years, however, a growing number of scientists have set their sights on Venus. NASA’s planned Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (DAVINCI) mission, for example, will drop a probe through the planet’s atmosphere all the way to the surface. It’s scheduled to launch by the end of the decade.

DAVINCI won’t be able to detect HCO+, either, but the researchers are hopeful that a future mission might — revealing another key piece of the story of water on Venus.

“There haven’t been many missions to Venus,” Cangi said. “But newly planned missions will leverage decades of collective experience and a flourishing interest in Venus to explore the extremes of planetary atmospheres, evolution and habitability.”

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DDT pollutants found in deep sea fish off Los Angeles coast

In the 1940s and 1950s, the ocean off the coast of Los Angeles was a dumping ground for the nation’s largest manufacturer of the pesticide DDT — a chemical now known to harm humans and wildlife. Due to the stubborn chemistry of DDT and its toxic breakdown products, this pollution continues to plague L.A.’s coastal waters more than half a century later. While legal at the time, details of this industrial-scale pollution of the marine environment at a dump site some 15 miles offshore near Catalina Island have deeply concerned scientists and the public since they gained wider recognition in 2020.

Now, new research from scientists at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and San Diego State University (SDSU) finds deep-sea fish and sediments collected from near the Catalina Island offshore dump site are contaminated with numerous DDT-related chemicals.

The study, published May 6 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters and funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, suggests that the DDT-related chemicals dumped into the ocean decades ago may still be making their way into marine food webs.

Since the rediscovery of the offshore dump site near Catalina Island, scientists have been working to discern the extent and severity of the problem today. Of particular urgency are the questions of whether the decades-old chemicals, now settled on the seafloor thousands of feet underwater, are staying put or whether they are circulating in marine ecosystems where the compounds could be harming wildlife or even posing health risks to humans.

“These are deep-sea organisms that don’t spend much time at the surface and they are contaminated with these DDT-related chemicals,” said Lihini Aluwihare, a professor of ocean chemistry at Scripps and co-author of the study. “Establishing the current distribution of DDT contamination in deep-sea food webs lays the groundwork for thinking about whether those contaminants are also moving up through deep-ocean food webs into species that might be consumed by people.”

From 1948 until at least 1961, barges contracted by DDT-producer Montrose Chemical Corporation would motor from the Port of Los Angeles out toward Catalina and pump manufacturing waste laden with sulfuric acid and up to 2% pure DDT directly into the Pacific Ocean. Legal until 1972, this offshore dumping largely escaped public scrutiny because it was overshadowed by Montrose’s other waste disposal practice: Pumping a more dilute acidic slurry that also contained DDT through L.A. County sewers and into the ocean off Palos Verdes. An estimated 100 tons of DDT ended up in the sediments of the Palos Verdes Shelf, and the Environmental Protection Agency declared it an underwater Superfund Site in 1996. In 2000, a judge ordered the company to pay $140 million to remedy the environmental damages. Research has since linked the DDT pollution on the Palos Verdes Shelf to contamination and health problems in local wildlife including sea lions, dolphins, bottom-feeding fish, and even coastal California condors (likely from consuming dead marine mammals).

In 2011, UC Santa Barbara researcher David Valentine used an undersea robot to rediscover Montrose’s offshore dumping near Catalina at a place now known as Dumpsite 2. The findings leapt into the public consciousness in 2020 when the Los Angeles Times published the first in a series of expose?s unspooling the region’s toxic legacy of offshore dumping.

Valentine and Scripps researchers have helped map the extent of the dumping. To date, they’ve found DDT-related chemicals across an area of the seafloor larger than the city of San Francisco. What’s still unknown is if that pollution is staying put or if it is moving through the undersea environment in ways that pose dangers to marine life or humans.

Beginning in 2021, Aluwihare, study co-author Eunha Hoh of SDSU, and other collaborators began a series of research efforts to work on two key questions: Are the DDT-related chemicals lurking on the seafloor near Dumpsite 2 being stirred up and ingested by marine life in the deep? And could they identify a kind of chemical fingerprint unique to the contamination from Dumpsite 2 and other offshore dump sites that could be used to distinguish them from pollutants emanating from the Palos Verdes Shelf?

The team opportunistically collected sediment samples and deep-sea animals from the water column in the San Pedro Basin near Dumpsite 2 to test for a wide range DDT-related compounds. The research cruises to collect these samples were funded by the National Science Foundation and the Schmidt Ocean Institute.

Typically, testing for DDT looks for four to eight chemicals, but a 2016 paper co-authored by Hoh and Aluwihare identified 45 DDT-related chemicals in the blubber of dolphins from off the coast of Southern California. The results demonstrated that wildlife was being exposed to a much larger suite of DDT compounds in the real world. In the present study, the team tested for this larger suite of DDT-related chemicals, known as DDT+, in hopes that it could help develop a chemical fingerprint for Dumpsite 2 and the other offshore dump sites used by Montrose. Also, testing for DDT+ will provide a more holistic picture of the degree of contamination in sediment and animals that might otherwise go undetected.

When the researchers analyzed the sediments for the presence of DDT+ they found no fewer than 15 chemicals, 14 of which had been previously detected in birds and marine mammals in Southern California.

The researchers collected 215 fish spanning three common species near Dumpsite 2. Chemical analysis revealed that the fish contained 10 DDT-related compounds, all of which were also present in the sediment samples.

Two of the fish species were collected between 546 meters (1,791 feet) and 784 meters (2,572 feet) — Cyclothone acclinidens and Melanostigma pammelas — and the third, Leuroglossus stilbius, was collected between 546 meters (1,791 feet) and the surface. The species collected at shallower depths contained a lower concentration of contaminants and were missing a pair of DDT-related compounds that were present in the deepest fishes.

“None of these fish species are known to feed in the sediment of the seafloor,” said Anela Choy, biological oceanographer at Scripps and co-author of the study. “There must be another mechanism that is exposing them to these contaminants. One possibility is that there are physical or biological processes resuspending sediments around Dumpsite 2 and allowing these contaminants to enter deeper water food webs.”

The findings can’t yet rule out the Palos Verdes Superfund Site as a potential source of the contamination in the fish, said Aluwihare. But several lines of evidence uncovered in the study — the lower overall concentrations and two missing DDT-related compounds in the shallower water fish species, as well as the overlap between contaminants found in the sediment and those found in marine mammals and birds — point to the alarming possibility that pollution is moving from the seafloor and into the marine food web.

“Regardless of the source, this is evidence that DDT compounds are making their way into the deep ocean food web,” said Margaret Stack, an environmental chemist at SDSU and the study’s lead author. “That is cause for concern because it’s not a big leap for it to end up in marine mammals or even humans.”

Hoh said understanding the pathways by which the DDT-related chemicals are entering the food web is vital and “will help us figure out what to do as far as mitigation and what not to do in terms of offshore development that could make this problem worse by stirring up these contaminants.”

Aluwihare said more work needs to be done to pinpoint the source of the DDT contaminants they found in the deep-sea fish and establish whether the same contamination exists in larger, open-ocean fish species that are consumed by people.

Numerous additional studies are ongoing to answer these urgent questions. Researchers at Scripps and SDSU are currently analyzing samples from fish species targeted by recreational anglers and commercial fisheries, including basses and sanddab, for DDT+. Comparing the chemicals and their concentrations found in these fish with sediment samples collected from the Palos Verdes Shelf and Dumpsite 2 may allow the team to determine the source of the toxins in these fish.

“We are still seeing this DDT contamination in deep-sea organisms and ocean sediments more than 50 years after they were dumped there,” said Hoh. “I’m not sure if that company expected the consequences of their pollution to last this long, but they have.”

In addition to Aluwihare, Stack, Choy, and Hoh, Raymmah Garcia, Tran Nguyen,, Paul Jensen, and Johanna Gutleben of Scripps as well as, William Richardot, and Nathan Dodder of SDSU co-authored the study.

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We need to normalise death and dying, says carer

Abi Jenkins, who cared for a friend with terminal cancer, said “normalising” death might help people.

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‘I have a 50:50 chance of developing Alzheimer’s in my 50s’

John Jennings may have inherited a gene from his mother that could trigger early-onset of the condition.

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NHS problems leave new doctors without jobs

The NHS needs more doctors so why have some medical students been left in limbo waiting for a job?

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Sister cities can help communities better navigate the climate crisis

Anthropologists at Rice University suggest in a new study that establishing networks of ‘sister cities’ dedicated to addressing the impact of natural disasters can mitigate the devastation wrought by climate change.

Published in the journal Nature, “Sister cities for the Anthropocene” by professors Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer explores the connectivity of “sister cities,” broad-based, long-term, legal or social partnerships between two similar-sized communities in two countries. The original Sister Cities International program was born out of the aftermath of World War II and fears of nuclear conflict in the 1950s.

Historically, these relationships have centered on social and political factors like trade relationships, diplomacy and more. But Howe and Boyer believe they can be powerful tools to aid in dealing with the physical effects of climate change, especially as cities deal with things like wildfires, extreme storms and more. As a result, they recommend forming a network called “Sister Cities for the Anthropocene” to help track and raise awareness of the spread of related impacts and responses to climate-related disasters in urban communities across the world.

“The idea of this network is to create relationships and networks that help formulate ideas and best practices to cope with the consequences of climate change that are already with us, including the effects of natural disasters,” Howe said.

“This network also takes into account the consequences that we know are coming in the future,” Boyer said. “We know that we will have more extreme storms, more drought andmore wildfires. We want to prevent as many of those terrible effects as we can.”

Howe and Boyer wrote that in regions affected by chronic wildfire and droughts, “sister cities” might learn how other urban communities are assessing predictions of a hotter, drier future and making plans to adapt. In areas where flooding, sea-level rise or extreme storms increasingly threaten residents, “sister cities” can look at what responses have been initiated by nongovernmental organizations, community groups and media organizations and how the outcomes and impacts of these initiatives compare.

Howe said that while it is encouraging that many city leaders, urban professionals and residents are already talking about climate change, related disasters and mitigation strategies, this network would formalize relationships between cities and bring more public attention to the effects of climate change.

Howe and Boyer’s research is supported by the National Science Foundation’s Arctic Social Sciences Program in the Office of Polar Programs (award No. 2030474).

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Aligned peptide ‘noodles’ could enable lab-grown biological tissues

A team of chemists and bioengineers at Rice University and the University of Houston have achieved a significant milestone in their work to create a biomaterial that can be used to grow biological tissues outside the human body. The development of a novel fabrication process to create aligned nanofiber hydrogels could offer new possibilities for tissue regeneration after injury and provide a way to test therapeutic drug candidates without the use of animals.

The research team, led by Jeffrey Hartgerink, professor of chemistry and bioengineering, has developed peptide-based hydrogels that mimic the aligned structure of muscle and nerve tissues. Alignment is critical for the tissues’ functionality, but it is a challenging feature to reproduce in the lab, as it entails lining up individual cells.

For over ten years, the team has been designing multidomain peptides (MDPs) that self-assemble into nanofibers. These resemble the fibrous proteins found naturally in the body, much like a spiderweb at nanoscale.

In their latest study, published online and featured on the cover of the journal ACS Nano, the researchers discovered a new method to create aligned MDP nanofiber “noodles.” By first dissolving the peptides in water and then extruding them into a salty solution, they were able to create aligned peptide nanofibers — like twisted strands of rope smaller than a cell. By increasing the concentration of ions, or salt, in the solution and repeating the process, they achieved even greater alignment of the nanofibers.

“Our findings demonstrate that our method can produce aligned peptide nanofibers that effectively guide cell growth in a desired direction,” explained lead author Adam Farsheed, who recently received his Ph.D. in bioengineering from Rice. “This is a crucial step toward creating functional biological tissues for regenerative medicine applications.”

One of the key findings of the study was an unexpected discovery: When the alignment of the peptide nanofibers was too strong, the cells no longer aligned. Further investigation revealed that the cells needed to be able to “pull” on the peptide nanofibers to recognize the alignment. When the nanofibers were too rigid, the cells were unable to exert this force and failed to arrange themselves in the desired configuration.

“This insight into cell behavior could have broader implications for tissue engineering and biomaterial design,” said Hartgerink. “Understanding how cells interact with these materials at the nanoscale could lead to more effective strategies for building tissues.”

Additional study co-authors from Rice include chemistry department Ph.D. graduates Tracy Yu and Carson Cole, graduate student Joseph Swain, and undergraduate researcher Adam Thomas. Bioengineering undergraduate researcher Jonathan Makhoul, graduate student Eric Garcia Huitron, and Professor K. Jane Grande-Allen were also co-authors on the study. The team of researchers from the University of Houston includes Ph.D. student Christian Zevallos-Delgado, research assistant Sajede Saeidifard, research assistant professor Manmohan Singh and engineering professor Kirill Larin.

This work was supported in part by grants from the National Institutes of Health (R01DE021798, R01EY022362, R01HD095520, R01EY030063), the National Science Foundation (2129122), the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program, and the Welch Foundation (C-2141). The content in this news release is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the funding organizations.

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Quantifying U.S. health impacts from gas stoves

Households with gas or propane stoves regularly breathe unhealthy levels of nitrogen dioxide, a study of air pollution in U.S. homes found.

“I didn’t expect to see pollutant concentrations breach health benchmarks in bedrooms within an hour of gas stove use, and stay there for hours after the stove is turned off,” said Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability Professor Rob Jackson, senior author of the May 3 study in Science Advances. Pollution from gas and propane stoves isn’t just an issue for cooks or people in the kitchen, he said. “It’s the whole family’s problem.”

Among other negative health effects, breathing high levels of nitrogen dioxide, or NO2, over time can intensify asthma attacks and has been linked to decreased lung development in children and early deaths.

Although most exposure to NO2 is caused by cars and trucks burning fossil fuels, the researchers estimate that the mix of pollutants coming from gas and propane stoves overall may be responsible for as many as 200,000 current childhood asthma cases. One quarter of these can be attributed to nitrogen dioxide alone, according to the paper’s authors, who include scientists from Central California Asthma Collaborative, PSE Healthy Energy, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

“We found that just how much gas you burn in your stove is by far the biggest factor affecting how much you’re exposed. And then, after that, do you have an effective range hood — and do you use it?” said lead study author Yannai Kashtan, a PhD student in Earth system science.

Little room for additional exposure

Beyond asthma cases, the long-term exposure to NO2 in American households with gas stoves is high enough to cause thousands of deaths each year — possibly as many as 19,000 or 40% of the number of deaths linked annually to secondhand smoke. This estimate is based on the researchers’ new measurements and calculations of how much nitrogen dioxide people breathe at home because of gas stoves and the best available data on deaths from long-term exposure to outdoor NO2, which is regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The death toll estimate is approximate in part because it does not factor in the harmful effects of repeated exposure to extremely high levels of nitrogen dioxide in short bursts, as occurs in homes with gas stoves. It also relies on past studies of health impacts from nitrogen dioxide encountered outdoors, where additional pollutants from vehicles and power plants are present.

The researchers used sensors to measure concentrations of NO2 throughout more than 100 homes of various sizes, layouts, and ventilation methods, before, during, and after stove use. They incorporated these measurements and other data into a model powered by National Institutes for Standards and Technology (NIST) software known as CONTAM for simulating airflow, contaminant transport, and room-by-room occupant exposure in buildings. This allowed them to estimate nationwide averages and short-term exposures under a range of realistic conditions and behaviors, and cross-check model outputs against their home measurements.

The results show that nationwide, typical use of a gas or propane stove increases exposure to nitrogen dioxide by an estimated 4 parts per billion, averaged over a year. That’s three quarters of the way to the nitrogen dioxide exposure level that the World Health Organization recognizes as unsafe in outdoor air. “That’s excluding all outdoor sources combined, so it makes it much more likely you’re going to exceed the limit,” said Kashtan.

Understanding how gas stoves affect health

The study is the latest in a series from Jackson’s group at Stanford looking at indoor air pollution from gas stoves. Earlier studies documented the rate at which gas stoves emit other pollutants, including the greenhouse gas methane and the carcinogen benzene. But to understand the implications of stove emissions for human health, the researchers needed to find out how much pollutants spread through a home, build up, and eventually dissipate. “We’re moving from measuring how much pollution comes from stoves to how much pollution people actually breathe,” said Jackson, who is the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Provostial Professor in Earth System Science.

With any fuel source, particle pollution can rise from food cooking in a hot pan. The new research confirms that food emits little or no nitrogen dioxide as it cooks, however, and electric stoves produce no NO2. “It’s the fuel, not the food,” said Jackson. “Electric stoves emit no nitrogen dioxide or benzene. If you own a gas or propane stove, you need to reduce pollutant exposures using ventilation.”

Home size matters

Even in larger homes, concentrations of nitrogen dioxide routinely spiked to unhealthy levels during and after cooking even if a range hood was on and venting air outdoors. But people who live in homes smaller than 800 square feet — about the size of a small two-bedroom apartment — are exposed to twice as much nitrogen dioxide over the course of a year compared to the national average, and four times more compared to those living in the largest homes, upwards of 3,000 square feet.

Because home size makes such a difference, there are also differences in exposure across racial, ethnic, and income groups. Compared to the national average, the researchers found long-term NO2 exposure is 60% higher among American Indian and Alaska Native households, and 20% higher among Black and Hispanic or Latino households. This exposure to indoor air pollution from gas stoves compounds the fact that exposure to outdoor sources of nitrogen dioxide pollution, such as vehicle exhaust, is also typically higher among people in poorer, often minority, communities.

“People in poorer communities can’t always afford to change their appliances, or perhaps they rent and can’t replace appliances because they don’t own them,” Jackson said. “People in smaller homes are also breathing more pollution for the same stove use.”

This research was supported by HT, LLC.

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Physics confirms that the enemy of your enemy is, indeed, your friend

Now, Northwestern University researchers have used statistical physics to confirm the theory that underlies this famous axiom.

The study will be published on May 3 in the journal Science Advances.

In the 1940s, Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider introduced social balance theory, which explains how humans innately strive to find harmony in their social circles. According to the theory, four rules — an enemy of an enemy is a friend, a friend of a friend is a friend, a friend of an enemy is an enemy and, finally, an enemy of a friend is an enemy — lead to balanced relationships.

Although countless studies have tried to confirm this theory using network science and mathematics, their efforts have fallen short, as networks deviate from perfectly balanced relationships. Hence, the real question is whether social networks are more balanced than expected according to an adequate network model. Most network models were too simplified to fully capture the complexities within human relationships that affect social balance, yielding inconsistent results on whether deviations observed from the network model expectations are in line with the theory of social balance.

The Northwestern team, however, successfully integrated the two key pieces that make Heider’s social framework work. In real life, not everyone knows each other, and some people are more positive than others. Researchers have long known that each factor influences social ties, but existing models could only account for one factor at a time. By simultaneously incorporating both constraints, the researchers’ resulting network model finally confirmed the famous theory some 80 years after Heider first proposed it.

The useful new framework could help researchers better understand social dynamics, including political polarization and international relations, as well as any system that comprises a mixture of positive and negative interactions, such as neural networks or drug combinations.

“We have always thought this social intuition works, but we didn’t know why it worked,” said Northwestern’s István Kovács, the study’s senior author. “All we needed was to figure out the math. If you look through the literature, there are many studies on the theory, but there’s no agreement among them. For decades, we kept getting it wrong. The reason is because real life is complicated. We realized that we needed to take into account both constraints simultaneously: who knows whom and that some people are just friendlier than others.”

“We can finally conclude that social networks align with expectations that were formed 80 years ago,” added Bingjie Hao, the study’s first author. “Our findings also have broad applications for future use. Our mathematics allows us to incorporate constraints on the connections and the preference of different entities in the system. That will be useful for modeling other systems beyond social networks.”

Kovács is an assistant professor of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Hao is a postdoctoral researcher in his laboratory.

What is social balance theory?

Using groups of three people, Heider’s social balance theory maintains the assumption that humans strive for comfortable, harmonious relationships. In balanced relationships, all people like each other. Or, if one person dislikes two people, those two are friends. Imbalanced relationships exist when all three people dislike each other, or one person likes two people who dislike each other, leading to anxiety and tension. Studying such frustrated systems led to the 2021 Nobel Prize in physics to Italian theoretical physicist Giorgio Parisi, who shared the prize with climate modelers Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann.

“It seems very aligned with social intuition,” Kovács said. “You can see how this would lead to extreme polarization, which we do see today in terms of political polarization. If everyone you like also dislikes all the people you don’t like, then that results in two parties that hate each other.”

However, it has been challenging to collect large-scale data where not only friends but also enemies are listed. With the onset of Big Data in the early 2000s, researchers tried to see if such signed data from social networks could confirm Heider’s theory. When generating networks to test Heider’s rules, individual people serve as nodes. The edges connecting nodes represent the relationships among individuals.

If the nodes are not friends, then the edge between them is assigned a negative (or hostile) value. If the nodes are friends, then the edge is marked with a positive (or friendly) value. In previous models, edges were assigned positive or negative values at random, without respecting both constraints. None of those studies accurately captured the realities of social networks.

Finding success in constraints

To explore the problem, Kovács and Hao turned to four large-scale, publicly available signed network datasets previously curated by social scientists, including data from (1) user-rated comments on social news site Slashdot; (2) exchanges among Congressional members on the House floor; (3) interactions among Bitcoin traders; and (4) product reviews from consumer review site Epinions.

In their network model, Kovács and Hao did not assign truly random negative or positive values to the edges. For every interaction to be random, every node would need to have an equal chance of encountering one another. In real life, however, not everyone actually knows everyone else within a social network. For example, a person might not ever encounter their friend’s friend, who lives on the other side of the world.

To make their model more realistic, Kovács and Hao distributed positive or negative values based on a statistical model that describes the probability of assigning positive or negative signs to the interactions that exist. That kept the values random — but random within limits given by constraints of the network topology. In addition to who knows whom, the team took into account that some people in life are just friendlier than others. Friendly people are more likely to have more positive — and fewer hostile — interactions.

By introducing these two constraints, the resulting model showed that large-scale social networks consistently align with Heider’s social balance theory. The model also highlighted patterns beyond three nodes. It shows that social balance theory applies to larger graphlets, which involve four and possibly even more nodes.

“We know now that you need to take into account these two constraints,” Kovács said. “Without those, you cannot come up with the right mechanisms. It looks complicated, but it’s actually fairly simple mathematics.”

Insights into polarization and beyond

Kovács and Hao currently are exploring several future directions for this work. In one potential direction, the new model could be used to explore interventions aimed at reducing political polarization. But the researchers say the model could help better understand systems beyond social groups and connections among friends.

“We could look at excitatory and inhibitory connections between neurons in the brain or interactions representing different combinations of drugs to treat disease,” Kovács said. “The social network study was an ideal playground to explore, but our main interest is to go beyond investigating interactions among friends and look at other complex networks.”

The code and data behind the paper, “Proper network randomization is key to assessing social balance,” are available on Github: https://github.com/hbj153/signed_null

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