“This exciting new species demonstrates that pseudosuchians were occupying coastal habitats on a global basis during the Middle Triassic,” said Dr. Nate Smith, lead author of the paper, and Gretchen Augustyn Director and Curator of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Capturing fossil life from the eastern Panthalassan Ocean of the Triassic, the locality that includes the Favret Formation is known for fossils of sea-going creatures like ammonites along with marine reptiles like the giant ichthyosaur C. youngorum — finding the newly described B. eremicarminis came as a bit of a shock.

“Our first reaction was: What the hell is this?” said co-author Dr. Nicole Klein of the University of Bonn. “We were expecting to find things like marine reptiles. We couldn’t understand how a terrestrial animal could end up so far out in the sea among the ichthyosaurs and ammonites. It wasn’t until seeing the nearly completely prepared specimen in person that I was convinced it really was a terrestrial animal.”

Pseudosuchian archosaurs have been unearthed in fossil beds from the shores of the ancient Tethys Ocean, but this is the first coastal representative from the Panthalassan Ocean and western hemisphere, revealing that these crocodile relatives were present in coastal environments worldwide during the Middle Triassic. Interestingly, these coastal species aren’t all from the same evolutionary group, suggesting that pseudosuchians (and archosauriforms more broadly) were independently adapting to life along the shores.

“Essentially, it looks like you had a bunch of very different archosauriform groups deciding to dip their toes in the water during the Middle Triassic. What’s interesting, is that it doesn’t look like many of these ‘independent experiments’ led to broader radiations of semi-aquatic groups,” said Smith.

During the Triassic, archosaurs, “the ruling reptiles,” arose and split into two groups with two surviving representatives: birds, the descendants of dinosaurs, and crocodilians (alligators, crocodiles, and gharials), the descendants of pseudosuchian archosaurs like B. eremicarminis. While today’s crocodilians are similar enough to be mistaken for one another by most people, their ancient relatives varied wildly in size and lifestyle. The evolutionary relationships of B. eremicarminis and its relatives suggest that pseudosuchians achieved great diversity very quickly following the End-Permian mass extinction — the extent of which is waiting to be discovered in the fossil record.

“A growing number of recent discoveries of Middle Triassic pseudosuchians are hinting that an underappreciated amount of morphological and ecological diversity and experimentation was happening early in the group’s history. While a lot of the public’s fascination with the Triassic focuses on the origin of dinosaurs, it’s really the pseudosuchians that were doing interesting things at the beginning of the Mesozoic,” Smith said.

The new species underlines the multiplicity of these ancient reptiles during the Triassic, from giants like Mambawakale ruhuhu to smaller animals like the newly described B. eremicarminis, which probably reached around 5-6 feet in length. Exactly how long B. eremicarminis was and how it survived along the coasts remains shrouded in the past. Only a few elements of the individual’s skull were found, and any clues to how it fed and hunted are similarly absent. What’s more clear is that B. eremicarminis likely stuck pretty close to the shore. Its well-preserved limbs are well-developed without any of the signs of aquatic living like flippers or altered bone density.

The research team wanted a name that paid respect to the original human inhabitants of the Augusta Mountains where the specimen was found, and so consulted a member of the Fallon Paiute Shoshone Tribe to decide on an appropriate name.”Benggwi-Gwishinga,” a word that means “catching fish” in Shoshone, was combined with the Greek word for Sobek, the Egyptian crocodile-headed god, to coin the new genus, Benggwigwishingasuchus. The specific epithet eremicarminis translates to “desert song,” honoring two supporters of NHMLAC who have a passion for the paleontology and opera of the Southwest. Thus, the full name is meant to translate roughly as “Fisherman Croc’s Desert Song.”

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (MPI-AB) and the University of Konstanz used a special method to study male common noctule bats, which are found throughout Europe. Their aim was to understand exactly how much energy bats consume during the day and how this changes over the course of the year.

“Bats are fascinating animals that often share their habitat with us humans,” says Lara Keicher, the lead author of the study. “But bats are still shrouded in mystery. We don’t yet have a clear answer to simple questions such as: How much food do they need and can they find enough of it in different seasons to survive?” To predict how bats will fare in a changing climate, Keicher says it is crucial to know their energy requirements.

Bats with heart rate transmitters

To find out, the scientists fitted bats with small heart rate transmitters weighing just 0.8 grams. As with humans, heart rate can be used to determine energy consumption. The transmitters, which the bats only wore for a few days, send out an audio signal of the bats’ heartbeat, which is then recorded using a radio receiver. However, this only works if the receiver is within a few hundred meters from the bats.

“During the day, it was no problem to record the heart beats without major interruptions because bats were resting in tree caves or bat boxes,” says Keicher, who carried out the study as part of her doctoral thesis at the University of Konstanz and the MPI-AB. At night, however, bats fly out to hunt insects and can cover several kilometers in a short time. In order to accompany the bats around the clock, including during their nocturnal flight, the researchers flew in a small airplane to follow individuals for entire flights lasting more than an hour. “I know that we surprised Konstanz locals when our small plane flew in circles over the island of Mainau late at night,” recalls Keicher.

Awake during the day

The team, which also included members of the Swiss Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research and the University of Freiburg, found that the heart rate of bats reaches around 900 beats per minute during flight. According to Keicher, who analyzed the signal, “it sounded like a single high-pitched tone to our ears.”

Using the unique recordings of heart beats, the scientists discovered fascinating strategies that bats use to budget their energy consumption in different seasons. They found that male common noctule bats consume up to 42% more energy in summer compared to spring. This is mainly due to the fact that the bats in spring go into a kind of short daytime hibernation known as “torpor” — an energy-saving state in which heart rate can be reduced to six beats per minute. “We saw that bats in spring could ramp up their heart rates when they wake up, reaching the top speed of 900 beats per minute within only a few minutes,” says Keicher.

The team was surprised that male bats did not use torpor in summer at all. Keicher explains: “In the warmer months, when food is plentiful, males stay awake during the day to invest energy in sperm production in order to be ready for mating in the autumn.” To replenish the energy used up, the males hunt twice as long in summer as in spring and eat up to 33 June beetles or over 2500 mosquitoes in one night.

The results have provided insights into the energetic challenges of bats and their fascinating survival strategies. This understanding will allow better predictions of how increasingly extreme temperature fluctuations or changes in food availability will affect the animals’ lives and potentially threaten them.

The senior author of the study, MPI-AB scientist Dina Dechmann, says: “All bat species are protected in Germany and some are threatened with extinction. Basic research that investigates the behavior of the animals and their adaptations to the environment can help us develop protective measures so that, for example, common noctule bats can continue to be seen in the night sky over Konstanz.”

In a new study published July 10 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, archaeologists from Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Pittsburgh and their colleagues report the largest and most extensively dated archaeobotanical record from interior east Africa.

Up until now, scientists have had virtually no success in gathering ancient plant remains from east Africa and, as a result, have had little idea where and how early plant farming got its start in the large and diverse area comprising Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

“There are many narratives about how agriculture began in east Africa, but there’s not a lot of direct evidence of the plants themselves,” said WashU’s Natalie Mueller, an assistant professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences and co-first author of the new study. The work was conducted at the Kakapel Rockshelter in the Lake Victoria region of Kenya.

“We found a huge assemblage of plants, including a lot of crop remains,” Mueller said. “The past shows a rich history of diverse and flexible farming systems in the region, in opposition to modern stereotypes about Africa.”

The new research reveals a pattern of gradual introductions of different crops that originated from different parts of Africa.

In particular, the remnants of cowpea discovered at Kakapel rock shelter and directly dated to 2,300 years ago constitute the earliest documented arrival of a domesticated crop — and presumably of farming lifeways — to eastern Africa. Cowpea is assumed to have originated in west Africa and to have arrived in the Lake Victoria basin concurrent with the spread of Bantu-speaking peoples migrating from central Africa, the study authors said.

“Our findings at Kakapel reveal the earliest evidence of domesticated crops in east Africa, reflecting the dynamic interactions between local herders and incoming Bantu-speaking farmers,” said Emmanuel Ndiema from the National Museums of Kenya, a project partner. “This study exemplifies National Museums of Kenya’s commitment to uncovering the deep historical roots of Kenya’s agricultural heritage and fostering an appreciation of how past human adaptations can inform future food security and environmental sustainability.”

Constantly changing landscape

Situated north of Lake Victoria, in the foothills of Mount Elgon near the Kenya-Uganda border, Kakapel is a recognized rock art site that contains archaeological artifacts that reflect more than 9,000 years of human occupation in the region. The site has been recognized as a Kenyan national monument since 2004.

“Kakapel Rockshelter is one of the only sites in the region where we can see such a long sequence of occupation by so many diverse communities,” said Steven T. Goldstein, an anthropological archaeologist at the University of Pittsburgh (WashU PhD ’17), the other first author of this study. “Using our innovative approaches to excavation, we have been uniquely able to detect the arrival of domesticated plants and animals into Kenya and study the impacts of these introductions on local environments, human technology and sociocultural systems.”

Mueller first joined Goldstein and National Museums of Kenya to conduct excavations at the Kakapel Rockshelter site in 2018. Their work is ongoing. Mueller is the lead scientist for plant investigations at Kakapel; the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology (in Jena, Germany) is another partner on the project.

Mueller used a flotation technique to separate remnants of wild and domesticated plant species from ashes and other debris in a hearth excavated at Kakapel. Although she has used this technique in her research in many other parts of the world, it is sometimes difficult to use this approach in water-scarce locations — so it has not been widely used in east Africa.

The scientists used direct radiocarbon dating on carbonized seeds to document the arrival of cowpea (also known as the black-eyed pea, today an important legume around the world) about 2,300 years ago, at about the same time that people in this area began to use domesticated cattle. Researchers also found evidence that sorghum arrived from the northeast at least 1,000 years ago. They also recovered hundreds of finger millet seeds, dating back to at least 1,000 years ago. This crop is indigenous to eastern Africa and is an important heritage crop for the communities that live near Kakapel today.

One unusual crop that Mueller uncovered was field pea (Pisum), burnt but perfectly intact. Peas were not previously considered to be part of early agriculture in this region. “To our knowledge, this is the only evidence of peas in Iron Age eastern Africa,” Mueller said.

The exceptional pea is pictured in the paper, and it represents its own little mystery. “The standard peas that we eat in North America were domesticated in the near east,” Mueller said. “They were grown in Egypt and probably ended up in east Africa by traveling down the Nile through Sudan, which is also likely how sorghum ended up in east Africa. But there is another kind of pea that was domesticated independently in Ethiopia called the Abyssinian pea, and our sample could be either one!”

Many of the plant remnants that Mueller and her team found at Kakapel could not be positively identified, Mueller said, because even modern scientists working in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda today don’t have access to a good reference collection of samples of plants from east Africa. (As a separate project, Mueller is currently working on building such a comparative collection of Tanzania’s plants.)

“Our work shows that African farming was constantly changing as people migrated, adopted new crops and abandoned others at a local level,” Mueller said. “Prior to European colonialism, community-scale flexibility and decision-making was critical for food security — and it still is in many places.”

Findings from this study may have implications for many other fields, Mueller said, including historical linguistics, plant science and genetics, African history and domestication studies.

Mueller is continuing to work on identifying the wild plants in the assemblage, especially those from the oldest parts of the site, before the beginning of agriculture. “This is where human evolution occurred,” Mueller said. “This is where hunting and gathering was invented by people at the dawn of time. But there has been no archaeological evidence about which plants hunter-gatherers were eating from this region. If we can get that kind of information from this assemblage, then that is a great contribution.”

Emeritus Professor Perry Bartlett and Dr Daniel Blackmore from UQ’s Queensland Brain Institute led the study in which volunteers did physical exercise and had brain scans.

Emeritus Professor Perry Bartlett and Dr Daniel Blackmore have shown high intensity exercise boosts cognition in healthy older adults and the improvement was retained for up to 5 years.

Emeritus Professor Bartlett said it is the first controlled study of its kind to show exercise can boost cognition in healthy older adults not just delay cognitive decline.

“Six months of high-intensity interval training is enough to flick the switch,” Emeritus Professor Bartlett said.

“In earlier pre-clinical work , we discovered exercise can activate stem cells and increase the production of neurons in the hippocampus, improving cognition.

“In this study, a large cohort of healthy 65 — 85-year-old volunteers joined a six-month exercise program, did biomarker and cognition testing and had high-resolution brain scans.

“We followed up with them 5 years after the program and incredibly they still had improved cognition, even if they hadn’t kept up with the exercises.”

Ageing is one of the biggest risks for dementia, a condition that affects almost half a million Australians.

“If we can change the trajectory of ageing and keep people cognitively healthier for longer with a simple intervention like exercise, we can potentially save our community from the enormous personal, economic and social costs associated with dementia,” Emeritus Professor Bartlett said.

Emeritus Professor Bartlett and Dr Blackmore worked in collaboration with Honorary Professor Stephan Riek and The School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences at UQ.

During the study, the researchers assessed the impact of three exercise intensities: • Low — predominantly motor function, balance and stretching • Medium — brisk walking on a treadmill • High — four cycles running on a treadmill at near maximum exertion

Dr Blackmore said only the high-intensity interval exercise led to cognitive improvement that was retained for up to 5 years.

“On high-resolution MRI scans of that group, we saw structural and connectivity changes in the hippocampus, the area responsible for learning and memory,” Dr Blackmore said.

“We also found blood biomarkers that changed in correlation to improvements in cognition.

“Biomarkers can be useful in predicting the effectiveness of the exercise a person is doing.”

With 1 in 3 people aged 85 years likely to develop dementia, Dr Blackmore said the impact of the research was far-reaching.

“Our finding can inform exercise guidelines for older people and further research could assess different types of exercise that could be incorporated into aged care,” he said.

“We are now looking at the genetic factors that may regulate a person’s response to exercise to see if we can establish who will and who will not respond to this intervention.

“The use of biomarkers as a diagnostic tool for exercise also needs further research.”

The research was published in Aging and Disease.

It receives ongoing support from the Stafford Fox Medical Research Foundation.

A research team based at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute has for the first time witnessed what is happening in the human brain when feelings of curiosity like this arise. In a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the scientists revealed brain areas that appear to assess the degree of uncertainty in visually ambiguous situations, giving rise to subjective feelings of curiosity.

“Curiosity has deep biological origins,” said corresponding author Jacqueline Gottlieb, PhD, a principal investigator at the Zuckerman Institute. The primary evolutionary benefit of curiosity, she added, is to encourage living things to explore their world in ways that help them survive.

“What distinguishes human curiosity is that it drives us to explore much more broadly than other animals, and often just because we want to find things out, not because we are seeking a material reward or survival benefit,” said Dr. Gottlieb, who is also a professor of neuroscience at Columbia’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. “This leads to a lot of our creativity.”

Joining Dr. Gottlieb on the research were Michael Cohanpour, PhD, a former graduate student at Columbia (now a data scientist with dsm-firmenich), and Mariam Aly, PhD, also previously at Columbia and now an acting associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

In the study, researchers employed a noninvasive, widely used technology to measure changes in the blood-oxygen levels in the brains of 32 volunteers. Called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, the technology enabled the scientists to record how much oxygen different parts of the subjects’ brains consumed as they viewed images. The more oxygen a brain region consumes, the more active it is.

To unveil those brain areas involved in curiosity, the research team presented participants with special images known as texforms. These are images of objects, such as a walrus, frog, tank or hat, that have been distorted to various degrees to make them more or less difficult to recognize.

The researchers asked participants to rate their confidence and curiosity about each texform, and found that the two ratings were inversely related. The more confident subjects were that they knew what the texform depicts, the less curious they were about it. Conversely, the less confident subjects were that they could guess what the texform was, the more curious they were about it.

Three pairs of texforms showing unrecognizable and clear versions of objects. (Credit: Gottlieb Lab/Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute)

Using fMRI, the researchers then viewed what was happening in the brain as the subjects were presented with texforms. The brain-scan data showed high activity in the occipitotemporal cortex (OTC), a region located just above your ears, which has long been known to be involved in vision and in recognizing categories of objects. Based on previous studies, the researchers expected that when they presented participants with clear images, this brain region would show distinct activity patterns for animate and inanimate objects. “You can think of each pattern as a ‘barcode’ identifying the texform category,” Dr. Gottlied said.

The researchers used these patterns to develop a measure, which they dubbed “OTC uncertainty,” of how uncertain this cortical area was about the category of a distorted texform. They showed that, when subjects were less curious about a texform, their OTC activity corresponded to only one barcode, as if it clearly identified whether the image belonged to the animate or the inanimate category. In contrast, when subjects were more curious, their OTC had characteristics of both barcodes, as if it could not clearly identify the image category.

Also active during the texform presentations were two regions in the front of the brain. One is the anterior cingulate cortex, which previous studies implicated in information gathering. The other is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which is involved in monitoring a person’s subjective perceptions of value and confidence about different situations. In the new study, both areas were more active when subjects reported being more confident in knowing a texform’s identity (and thus, less curious to see the clarified image).

This is really the first time we can link the subjective feeling of curiosity about information to the way your brain represents that information.

Importantly, said Dr. Gottlieb, vmPFC activity seemed to provide a neurological bridge between the subjective feeling of curiosity and the OTC certainty measure. It’s as though this region read out the uncertainty encoded by the distributed activity pattern in the OTC and helped a person decide if they needed to be curious about the texform.

“This is really the first time we can link the subjective feeling of curiosity about information to the way your brain represents that information,” Dr. Gottlieb said.

The study has two important implications, Dr. Gottlieb said. First, although the study focused on perceptual curiosity elicited by visual stimuli, people experience other forms of curiosity, such as curiosity about trivia questions and factual matters (i.e. how tall is the Eiffel tower?) or social curiosity (which restaurant did my friends go to last night?). One intriguing possibility of the study, she noted, is that the mechanism it has uncovered may generalize to other forms of curiosity. For example, an fMRI study investigating sounds of varying recognizability may show that auditory areas in the brain convey the uncertainty regarding the sound and the vmPFC reads out this uncertainty to determine curiosity.

A second possibility on Dr. Gottlieb’s mind is that the findings could have diagnostic and even therapeutic implications for those with depression, apathy or anhedonia (the inability to feel pleasure), which are conditions often marked by a lack of curiosity.

“Curiosity entails a sort of enthusiasm, a willingness to expend energy and investigate your surroundings. And it’s intrinsically motivated, meaning that nobody is paying you to be curious; you are curious merely based on the hope that something good will come when you learn,” Dr. Gottlieb said. “Those are just some of the amazing things about curiosity.”

The atmosphere of HD 189733 b, a Jupiter-sized gas giant, has trace amounts of hydrogen sulfide, a molecule that not only gives off a stench but also offers scientists new clues about how sulfur, a building block of planets, might influence the insides and atmospheres of gas worlds beyond the solar system.

The findings are published today in Nature.

“Hydrogen sulfide is a major molecule that we didn’t know was there. We predicted it would be, and we know it’s in Jupiter, but we hadn’t really detected it outside the solar system,” said Guangwei Fu, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins who led the research. “We’re not looking for life on this planet because it’s way too hot, but finding hydrogen sulfide is a stepping stone for finding this molecule on other planets and gaining more understanding of how different types of planets form.”

In addition to detecting hydrogen sulfide and measuring overall sulfur in HD 189733 b’s atmosphere, Fu’s team precisely measured the main sources of the planet’s oxygen and carbon — water, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide.

“Sulfur is a vital element for building more complex molecules, and — like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphate — scientists need to study it more to fully understand how planets are made and what they’re made of,” Fu said.

At only 64 light-years from Earth, HD 189733 b is the nearest “hot Jupiter” astronomers can observe passing in front of its star, making it a benchmark planet for detailed studies of exoplanetary atmospheres since its discovery in 2005, Fu said.

The planet is about 13 times closer to its star than Mercury is to the sun and takes only about two Earth days to complete an orbit. It has scorching temperatures of 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit and is notorious for vicious weather, including raining glass that blows sideways on winds of 5,000 mph.

As it did by detecting water, carbon dioxide, methane, and other critical molecules in other exoplanets, Webb gives scientists yet another new tool to track hydrogen sulfide and measure sulfur in gas planets outside the solar system.

“Say we study another 100 hot Jupiters and they’re all sulfur enhanced. What does that mean about how they were born and how they form differently compared to our own Jupiter?” Fu said.

The new data also ruled out the presence of methane in HD 189733 b with unprecedented precision and infrared wavelength observations from the Webb telescope, countering previous claims about that molecule’s abundance in the atmosphere.

“We had been thinking this planet was too hot to have high concentrations of methane, and now we know that it doesn’t,” Fu said.

The team also measured levels of heavy metals like those on Jupiter, a finding that could help scientists answer questions about how a planet’s metallicity correlates to its mass, Fu said.

Less-massive giant icy planets like Neptune and Uranus contain more metals than those found in gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, the largest planets in the solar system. The higher metallicities suggest Neptune and Uranus accumulated more ice, rock, and other heavy elements relative to gases like hydrogen and helium during early periods of formation. Scientists are testing whether that correlation also holds true for exoplanets, Fu said.

“This Jupiter-mass planet is very close to Earth and has been very well studied. Now we have this new measurement to show that indeed the metal concentrations it has provide a very important anchor point to this study of how a planet’s composition varies with its mass and radius,” Fu said. “The findings support our understanding of how planets form through creating more solid material after initial core formation and then are naturally enhanced with heavy metals.”

In coming months, Fu’s team plans to track sulfur in more exoplanets and figure out how high levels of that compound might influence how close they form near their parent stars.

“We want to know how these kinds of planets got there, and understanding their atmospheric composition will help us answer that question,” Fu said.

This research was supported by NASA through the JWST GO program.

Other authors are Luis Welbanks, Dana R. Louie, and Michael Line of Arizona State University; Drake Deming, Jegug Ih, Arjun B. Savel, Eliza M.-R. Kempton, and Matt Nixon of University of Maryland; Julie Inglis and Heather A. Knutson of California Institute of Technology; Michael Zhang of University of Chicago; Joshua Lothringer of Utah Valley University; Julianne I. Moses and Gregory Henry of Tennessee State University; Everett Schlawin of University of Arizona; David K. Sing of Johns Hopkins; and Thomas Greene of NASA Ames Research Center.

The study, published in JAMA, found that most survey respondents felt they would recover faster if cared for at home, rather than in the hospital, and that they felt safe being treated at home.

Researchers say their study provides important insights about patient and family preferences as policymakers weigh whether to extend a pandemic-era program that allowed hospitals to provide care at home.

“Patients of course want the best-quality care, but often prefer to be at home, especially if technology allows them to work closely with their physician team toward recovery,” says Melissa A. Frasco, research scientist at the Schaeffer Center.

The research also found that 82% of respondents felt comfortable with managing a patient’s medications at home, and 67% reported willingness to provide more in-depth care such as wound care.

Hospital-level care can often be provided at home for many patients with acute conditions using remote patient-monitoring tools, daily in-person or telehealth visits by clinicians, and in-home infusions. Previous studies have shown that such care can reduce readmissions and lower costs compared with traditional hospital care.

The researchers used a sample of the Understanding America Study to survey about 1,100 respondents about their preferences. Responses showed that 47% agreed that hospital-at-home care was an acceptable alternative to inpatient care. Meanwhile, only about 17% felt negatively about hospital-at-home care’s merits, while 36% were neutral on the issue. Further, 56% agreed — including 21% who strongly agreed — that people recover faster at home than in the hospital.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) temporarily authorized at-home care services during the COVID-19 pandemic under the Acute Hospital Care at Home waiver. Congress extended the waiver through December 31, 2024, with a requirement that CMS comprehensively study care quality before it would approve reimbursements over the long term. Currently, 322 hospitals across 37 states have been approved to provide at-home care.

“Our findings offer valuable information for policymakers and health systems as they navigate a new landscape of post-pandemic patient care,” says co-author Erin L. Duffy, director of research training at the Schaeffer Center. “Extending reimbursement for hospital-at-home care could go a long way toward reducing costs and improving outcomes, benefiting all parties involved.”

Acceptability of hospital care at home did not vary across sociodemographics, health insurance coverage, health status, prior hospitalizations or telehealth use, the researchers found.