Similarly, across the globe — in 19 Eastern European countries, 25 Muslim countries and in Israel — low belief in evolution was linked to higher biases within a person’s group, prejudicial attitudes toward people in different groups and less support for conflict resolution.

The findings supported the hypothesis of lead author Stylianos Syropoulos, a Ph.D. candidate in the War and Peace Labof senior author Bernhard Leidner, associate professor of social psychology. They collaborated with co-first author Uri Lifshin at Reichman University in Israel and co-authors Jeff Greenberg and Dylan Horner at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The researchers theorized that belief in evolution would tend to increase people’s identification with all humanity, due to the common ancestry, and would lead to less prejudicial attitudes.

“People who perceive themselves as more similar to animals are also people who tend to have more pro-social or positive attitudes toward outgroup members or people from stigmatized and marginalized backgrounds,” Syropoulos explains. “In this investigation, we were interested in examining whether belief in evolution would also act in a similar way, because it would reinforce this belief that we are more similar to animals.”

In eight studies involving different areas of the world, the researchers analyzed data from the American General Social Survey (GSS), the Pew Research Center and three online crowdsourced samples. In testing their hypothesis about the associations of different levels of belief in evolution, they accounted for education, political ideology, religiosity, cultural identity and scientific knowledge.

“We found the same results each time, which is basically that believing in evolution relates to less prejudice, regardless of the group you’re in, and controlling for all of these alternative explanations,” Syropoulos says.

For example, religious beliefs, like political ideology, were measured separately from a belief or disbelief in evolution, the researchers note. “Regardless of whether one considers religion an important part of their life, belief in evolution relates to less prejudice independently from belief, or lack thereof, in God or any particular religion,” Syropoulos says.

Leidner adds, “This whole effect and pattern seems to be present in all major political systems. It’s very much a human phenomenon, no matter where you are in the world.”

The researchers note that Darwin’s 19^th century theory of evolution has been cited to perpetrate racism, prejudice and homophobia, in part through the phrase, “survival of the fittest,” used to describe the process of natural selection.

“There have been theoretical accounts that predict the opposite of what we found, so it was exciting for us to show that this actually is not the case, that the opposite is true and that belief in evolution seems to have pretty positive effects,” Leidner says.

The U.S.-based study involved data from 1993, 1994, 2000, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018 — the years the GSS surveyed Americans about their beliefs in evolution, as well as measures of attitudes toward immigrants, Blacks, affirmative action, LGBTQ people and other social matters.

The data analysis showed unfailingly “that the disbelief in human evolution is the driving factor and most consistent predictor of prejudice in comparison to other relevant constructs,” the paper states.

In the Israel-based study, people with a higher belief in evolution were more likely to support peace among Palestinians, Arabs and Jews. In the study involving countries in the Islamic world, belief in evolution was associated with less prejudice toward Christians and Jews. And in the study based in Eastern Europe, where Orthodox Christians are the majority, a belief in evolution was linked with less prejudice toward gypsies, Jews and Muslims.

Syropoulos posits that a belief in evolution may expand people’s “moral circle,” leading to a sense that “we have more in common than things that are different.”

The findings also suggest that “teaching evolution seems to have side effects that might make for a better or more harmonious society,” Leidner adds.

The next step, the researchers say, is to investigate how evolution is taught in the classroom and work toward developing models to study and strengthen the positive effects.

“These findings reveal a core principle of the nervous system, flexibility in the kinds of calculations the brain makes to represent aspects of the sensory world,” said Krishnan Padmanabhan, Ph.D., an associate professor of Neuroscience and senior author of the study recently published in Cell Reports. “Our work provides scientists with new tools to quantify and interpret the patterns of activity of the brain.”

Researchers developed a model to simulate the workings of the early olfactory system — the network the brain relies on for smelling. Employing computer simulations, they found a specific set of connections, called centrifugal fibers, which carry impulses from other parts of the central nervous system to the early sensory regions of the brain, played a critical role. These centrifugal fibers act as a switch, toggling between different strategies to efficiently represent smells. When the centrifugal fibers were in one state, the cells in the piriform cortex — where the perception of an odor forms — relied on the pattern of activity within a given instant in time. When the centrifugal fibers were in the other state, the cells in the piriform cortex improved both the accuracy and the speed with which cells detected and classified the smell by relying on the patterns of brain activity across time.

These processes suggest the brain has multiple responses to representing a smell. In one strategy, the brain uses a snapshot, like a painting or a photograph, at a given moment to capture the essential features of the odor. In the other strategy, the brain keeps track of the evolving patterns. It is attuned to which cells turn on and off and when — like a symphony.

The mathematical models the researchers developed highlight the critical feature of the nervous system — not only diversity in terms of the components that make up the brain but also how these components work together to help the brain experience the world of smell. “These mathematical models reveal critical aspects of how the olfactory system in the brain might work and could help build brain-inspired artificial computing systems,” Padmanabhan said. “Computational approaches inspired by the circuits of the brain such as this have the potential to improve the safety of self-driving cars, or help computer vision algorithms more accurately identify and classify objects in an image.”

Additional authors include Zhen Chen of the University of Rochester. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Cystinosis Research Foundation, and the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester Pilot Program.

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Materials provided by University of Rochester Medical Center. Original written by Kelsie Smith Hayduk. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The study, published Friday in JAMA Pediatrics, is the first large-scale research effort to compare the health outcomes of coronavirus infection from Omicron to Delta in children 4 and younger — the age group not yet able to be vaccinated.

The findings show that the Omicron variant is 6-8 times more infectious than the Delta variant. The severe clinical outcomes ranged from a 16% lower risk for emergency room visits to 85% less risk for mechanical ventilation. And about 1.8% of children infected with Omicron were hospitalized, compared to 3.3% with Delta.

The Case Western Reserve-led team analyzed the electronic health records of more than 651,640 children in the United States who had medical encounter with healthcare organizations between 9/2021-1/2022-including more than 22,772 children infected with Omicron in late December and late January — to more than 66,000 children infected when Delta was prevalent in the fall. The study also compared the records of more than 10,000 children immediately before the detection of Omicron in the U.S., but when Delta was still predominant.

Children younger than 5 are not yet eligible for COVID-19 vaccines and have a low rate of previous SARS-CoV-2 infections, which also limits their pre-existing immunity.

The team examined clinical health outcomes for pediatric patients during a 14-day window following SARS-CoV-2 infection. Among the factors they reviewed were: emergency room visits, hospitalizations, ICU admissions and mechanical ventilation use.

Further demographic data analysis found that children infected with Omicron were on average younger-1.5 years of age versus 1.7 years-and had fewer comorbidities.

“The major conclusion to our research was that many more children were infected with Omicron when compared to Delta, but the children who are infected are not impacted as severely as were children infected with the Delta variant,” said Pamela Davis, the Arline H. and Curtis F. Garvin Research Professor at the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine. “However, because there are so many more children infected, our hospitals were affected over the winter months by an influx of young children.”

“We saw the number of hospitalizations within this age group skyrocket in January of this year because the infection rate of Omicron is about 10 to 15 times compared to that of the Delta variant,” said Rong Xu, professor of biomedical infomatics and director of the Center for AI in Drug Discovery at the School of Medicine. “Omicron is less severe than Delta, however, the reduction of the severity range in clinical outcomes is only 16 to 85%. Furthermore, since so many un-vaccinated children were infected, the long-term effects of COVID-19 infections on the brain, heart, immune systems and other organs of children remains unknown and worrisome. “

The CDC recommends those age 5 and older receive a COVID-19 vaccine, and fully vaccinated people 12 and older receive a booster shot. According to updated guidance by the CDC, Americans no longer need to mask indoors in counties with low or medium “Covid-19 Community Level.”

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Materials provided by Case Western Reserve University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The paper, “Mortality, In-Hospital Morbidity, Care Practices, and 2-Year Outcomes for Extremely Preterm Infants in the US, 2013-2018,” examined the survival outcomes of 10,877 infants born at 22-28 weeks’ gestational age between January 1, 2013, and December 31, 2018, at 19 academic medical centers that form the NIH-funded Neonatal Research Network.

Survival among actively treated infants was 30.0% (60/200) at 22 weeks and 55.8% (535/958) at 23 weeks. This is a considerably higher rate of survival than when the study when previously conducted between 2008-2012, in which survival to discharge was 7% (22/334) for live-born infants at 22 weeks and 32% (252/779) for live-born infants at 23 weeks.

This improvement in outcomes for extremely pre-term infants can be attributed to multiple factors, including enhanced treatment protocols across participating medical centers, according to Carl D’Angio, M.D., co-author and Chief of the Division of Neonatology at URMC.

“Academic medical centers have been taking best-practices, applying them, and disseminating them to a wider and wider group nationally,” said D’Angio.

Collective improvement in care in a variety of areas has contributed to the change in outcomes, according to D’Angio. “When we look at survival at almost any group of infants, it’s a bundle of factors. There are similarities and differences in the way they’re treated at various centers, but there are elements where we’ve collectively moved forward, such as ventilation, nutrition and hydration.”

When infants are born at 22 or 23 weeks, nearly every organ is immature, with the lungs and the brain being among the systems most at risk, according to D’Angio.

In addition to studying survival outcomes, the paper assessed the health of severely pre-term infants after two years, including effects such as neurodevelopment, cerebral palsy, vision, hearing, rehospitalizations, and need for assistive devices. Slightly more than 8% had moderate to severe cerebral palsy, 1.5% had vision loss in both eyes, 2.5% needed hearing aids or cochlear implants, and 15% required mobility aids such as orthotics, braces, walkers, or wheelchairs.

Nearly 49% had no or only mild neurodevelopmental impairment, about 29% had moderate neurodevelopmental impairment and roughly 21% had severe neurodevelopmental impairment.

This study — and overall improvement in outcomes — can help clinicians provide clear information in discussions with families when babies are born extremely pre-term.

“We as clinicians support parents in a shared decision-making process when babies are born at the limits of viability,” said D’Angio. “The imminent delivery of an extremely premature infant is a major stressor for families. An important part of helping parents cope is presenting the data we have and letting parents know what to expect in the long-haul. This latest study is positive news for shaping those discussions and providing a more optimistic probability for good outcomes.”

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Materials provided by University of Rochester Medical Center. Original written by Scott Hesel. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The research, conducted by the University of Maine, University of Maine at Augusta, University of Vermont and Universite Laval in Quebec, Canada, attempted to understand how society can accomplish major, transformative social change, particularly the kind of social change necessary to tackle the growing problem of climate change.

The researchers studied a behavior that benefits groups, but does not spread without policy support, such as a costly measure to mitigate the effects of climate change. They created a mathematical model using an innovative combination of epidemiological and evolutionary techniques, which simulates a society where agents live in groups and adopt the beneficial behavior of peers — behavior that, given the right conditions, can spread virally, but not if the institutional costs are too high.

The model considers factors like the prevalence of adopters and non-adopters in a group; the diffusion of behaviors, both within the group and globally; the strength of institutions supporting the behavior and facilitating its spread; and the cost of those institutions.

“Our model is unique because it combines behavioral change and policy change in a single system, and encourages us to think about social change in a richer way. Large-scale social change is not just policy or behavior, but the emergence of a new self-reinforcing system that combines both. This allows us to ask new questions, such as ‘how would a new pattern of behavior and policy spread?'” says Timothy Waring, associate professor of social-ecological systems modeling at the University of Maine and co-author of the study.

The results showed that both behavioral change and policy change are required to achieve large-scale social change — and that they need to happen together. Though neither can get the job done on its own, policy change is especially critical.

The researchers found that sometimes the beneficial behavior can spread too far. In some cases, the spread of behavior beyond groups with supporting policy can reduce its perceived success and slow the spread of the policy, thereby limiting beneficial social change overall.

The simulation suggests that projects that involve both bottom-up viral spread of behavior and top-down policy change may be the best type of solution for large sustainability issues like climate change because they serve as an example and can spread between groups to influence major change.

“For example, let’s say a state wants to spread participation in a new organic composting law which would benefit towns,” Waring says. “To make the system work, the collected waste must be purely organic material. But contributing pure organic waste takes effort for households, so the behavior does not take off on its own. This is a common problem for policy implementation. But if towns experiment with systems to help support and spread the behavior, the successful town programs can spread between towns along with household contributions, resulting in effective, large-scale change.”

Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, lead author on the study and associate professor at the University of Vermont, says, “Our model can help figure out how to balance bottom-up and top-down effects so that new solutions can scale. For example, it can help determine when we should promote a behavior like composting all over the country to normalize it and when we should instead focus on a local well-funded pilot project to show the potential benefits of composting.”

Waring said that in future research, the team aims to apply these types of models to all sorts of beneficial social change, particularly the challenge of tackling climate change.

The study was published in the Royal Society Open Science on March 23, 2022. The research is part of track 2 of UMaine’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) project.

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Materials provided by University of Maine. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Texas Tech University found that although the number of flash droughts has remained stable during the past two decades, more of them are coming on faster. Globally, the flash droughts that come on the fastest — sending areas into drought conditions within just five days — have increased by about 3%-19%. And in places that are especially prone to flash droughts — such as South Asia, Southeast Asia and central North America — that increase is about 22%-59%.

Rising global temperatures are probably behind the faster onset, said co-author and UT Jackson School Professor Zong-Liang Yang, who added that the study’s results underscore the importance of understanding flash droughts and preparing for their effects.

“Every year, we are seeing record-breaking warming episodes, and that is a good precursor to these flash droughts,” he said. “The hope and purpose [of this research] is to minimize the detrimental effects.”

The research was published in Nature Communications. The study was led by doctoral student Yamin Qing and Professor Shuo Wang, both of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Flash droughts are relatively new to science, with the advancement of remote sensing technology during the past couple of decades helping reveal instances of soil rapidly drying out. This serves as the telltale sign of the onset of a flash drought and can make drought conditions appear seemingly out of the blue.

As the name suggests, flash droughts are short lived, usually lasting only a few weeks or months. But when they occur during critical growing periods, they can cause disasters. For example, in the summer of 2012, a flash drought in the central United States caused the corn crop to wither, leading to an estimated $35.7 billion in losses.

In this study, the scientists analyzed global hydroclimate data sets that use satellite soil moisture measurements to capture a global picture of flash drought and how it has changed during the past 21 years. The data showed that about 34%-46% of flash droughts came on in about five days. The rest emerge within a month, with more than 70% developing in half a month or less.

When they examined the droughts over time, they noticed the flash droughts happening more quickly.

The study also revealed the importance of humidity and variable weather patterns, with flash droughts becoming more likely when there’s a shift from humid to arid conditions. That makes regions that undergo seasonal swings in humidity — such as Southeast Asia, the Amazon Basin, and the East Coast and Gulf Coast of the United States — flash drought hot spots.

“We should pay close attention to the vulnerable regions with a high probability of concurrent soil drought and atmospheric aridity,” said Wang.

Mark Svoboda, the director of the National Drought Mitigation Center and originator of the term “flash drought,” said the advancement in drought-detecting technology and modeling tools — such as those used in this study — has led to growing awareness of the influence and impact of flash droughts. He said the next big step is translating this knowledge into on-the-ground planning.

“You can go back and watch that drought evolve in 2012 and then compare it to how that tool did,” said Svoboda, who was not part of the study. “We really have the stage well set to do a better job of tracking these droughts.”

The study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Hong Kong Research Grants Council.