The study, led by Emily Griffith, a PhD candidate in the Biodiversity, Earth & Environmental Science department, shows that fluorescent pigments in the feathers of Long-eared Owls can vary within a population and that variation gives clues as to why the owls have these special pigments.

To conduct the research, the team used a fluorometer — a device that measures fluorescence or light that is emitted after absorbing radiation such as UV light — to measure variation in the amount of fluorescent pigments in the feathers of Long-eared Owls migrating through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the spring of 2020.

“We are only beginning to describe fluorescent pigments in birds and other vertebrates,” said Griffith. “Although describing what species they are present in is important, in order to understand what their function is we need to also describe how they vary within a species like the Long-eared Owl.”

Griffith noted that in many bird species, pigments are used by males to attract females, which is why most people think of the males of many bird species as being more “colorful” than females. But the research team suspects that the function of these pigments is not necessarily related to sexual signaling.

“Our study shows that female Long-eared Owls have a much higher concentration of these pigments in their feathers, challenging a common misconception that colorful plumage is a ‘male’ trait,” said Griffith. “Moreover, this trait doesn’t follow a strict binary — the amount of fluorescent pigments in these owls exists on a spectrum where the amount of pigment is related to size, age and sex all together.”

The research team explained that fluorescent pigments have likely been used by animals for a long time, but technology has limited the study, or even acknowledgement of the pigments, until very recently. Griffith and her colleagues’ interest in the study stemmed from the fact that many owl researchers use these fluorescent feathers to age birds in the field, since the intensity of the fluorescent glow dissipates with time. Griffith added that researchers are just beginning to understand these “hidden” traits in Long-eared Owls and other birds — what the fluorescence means, where it can be found, how it got there and why it’s there.

“So little is known about fluorescent pigments in bird feathers and owls aren’t the only ones with fluorescent pigments,” said Griffith. “So, it’s a really exciting time to be interested in studying bird plumage.”

The team, from the Universities of Bristol and Cambridge, created the network, which uses standard fibreoptic infrastructure, but relies on a variety of quantum phenomena to enable ultra-secure data transfer.

The network uses two types of quantum key distribution (QKD) schemes: ‘unhackable’ encryption keys hidden inside particles of light; and distributed entanglement: a phenomenon that causes quantum particles to be intrinsically linked.

The researchers demonstrated the capabilities of the network via a live, quantum-secure video conference link, the transfer of encrypted medical data, and secure remote access to a distributed data centre. The data was successfully transmitted between Bristol and Cambridge — a fibre distance of over 410 kilometres.

This is the first time that a long-distance network, encompassing different quantum-secure technologies such as entanglement distribution, has been successfully demonstrated. The researchers presented their results at the 2025 Optical Fiber Communications Conference (OFC) in San Francisco.

Quantum communications offer unparalleled security advantages compared to classical telecommunications solutions. These technologies are immune against future cyber-attacks, even with quantum computers, which — once fully developed — will have the potential to break through even the strongest cryptographic methods currently in use.

In the past few years, researchers have been working to build and use quantum communication networks. China recently set up a massive network that covers 4,600 kilometres by connecting five cities using both fibreoptics and satellites. In Madrid, researchers created a smaller network with nine connection points that use different types of QKD to securely share information.

In 2019, researchers at Cambridge and Toshiba demonstrated a metro scale quantum network operating at record key rates of millions of key bits per second. And in 2020, researchers in Bristol built a network that could share entanglement between multiple users. Similar quantum network trials have been demonstrated in Singapore, Italy and the USA.

Despite this progress, no one has built a large, long-distance network that can handle both types of QKD, entanglement distribution, and regular data transmission all at once, until now.

The experiment demonstrates the potential of quantum networks to accommodate different quantum-secure approaches simultaneously with classical communications infrastructure. It was carried out using the UK’s Quantum Network (UKQN), established over the last decade by the same team, supported by funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), and as part of the Quantum Communications Hub project.

“This is a crucial step toward building a quantum-secured future for our communities and society,” said co-author Dr Rui Wang, Lecturer for Future Optical Networks in the Smart Internet Lab’s High Performance Network Research Group at the University of Bristol. “More importantly, it lays the foundation for a large-scale quantum internet — connecting quantum nodes and devices through entanglement and teleportation on a global scale.”

“This marks the culmination of more than ten years of work to design and build the UK Quantum Network,” said co-author Adrian Wonfor from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. “Not only does it demonstrate the use of multiple quantum communications technologies, but also the secure key management systems required to allow seamless end-to-end encryption between us.”

“This is a significant step in delivering quantum security for the communications we all rely upon in our daily lives at a national scale.” said co-author Professor Richard Penty, also from Cambridge and who headed the Quantum Networks work package in the Quantum Communications Hub. “It would not have been possible without the close collaboration of the two teams at Cambridge and Bristol, the support of our industrial partners Toshiba, BT, Adtran and Cisco, and our funders at UKRI.”

“This is an extraordinary achievement which highlights the UK’s world-class strengths in quantum networking technology,” said Gerald Buller, Director of the IQN Hub, based at Heriot-Watt University. “This exciting demonstration is precisely the kind of work the Integrated Quantum Networks Hub will support over the coming years, developing the technologies, protocols and standards which will establish a resilient, future-proof, national quantum communications infrastructure.”

The current UKQN covers two metropolitan quantum networks around Bristol and Cambridge, which are connected via a ‘backbone’ of four long-distance optical fibre links spanning 410 kilometres with three intermediate nodes.

The network uses single-mode fibre over the EPSRC National Dark Fibre Facility (which provides dedicated fibre for research purposes), and low-loss optical switches allowing network reconfiguration of both classical and quantum signal traffic.

The team will pursue this work further through a newly funded EPSRC project, the Integrated Quantum Networks Hub, whose vision is to establish quantum networks at all distance scales, from local networking of quantum processors to national-scale entanglement networks for quantum-safe communication, distributed computing and sensing, all the way to intercontinental networking via low-earth orbit satellites.

The good news? A multi-institutional team, led by researchers from the Penn State College of Medicine and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found that eight weeks of either mindfulness or cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) training led to meaningful improvements among adults with chronic low back pain that’s currently treated with opioids and had not responded to prior treatments. These behavioral therapies helped improve physical function and quality of life and reduce pain and opioid dose in a randomized clinical trial. The benefits persisted for up to 12 months.

The findings were published in JAMA Network Open. This is the largest trial to date comparing mindfulness with CBT as treatments for opioid-treated chronic pain and the research team followed up with participants over a longer time period than many previous trials of mindfulness.

“Both mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy were shown to be safe, effective treatments, providing lasting benefits for people with opioid-treated chronic back pain,” said Aleksandra Zgierska, Jeanne L. and Thomas L. Leaman, MD, endowed professor and vice chair of research of family and community medicine and professor of anesthesiology and perioperative medicine and of public health sciences at the Penn State College of Medicine, who led the study. “These evidence-based behavioral therapies should be standard of care available to our patients.”

Pain is multifaceted, especially chronic pain that can last for months or years. Chronic low back pain is the most common form of chronic non-cancer pain that’s treated with opioids. Previous research has shown that adults with chronic pain may benefit from behavioral therapies, which can help people change their thoughts about and relationship to pain, but it’s been understudied, the researchers explained. Studies on behavioral therapies were generally small in size and evaluated benefits over the short-term.

“People think of chronic pain as a physical condition that requires a physical intervention,” said Eric Garland, endowed professor in health sciences and professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego and senior author of the study.

The research team set out to evaluate the effectiveness of mindfulness compared to CBT as treatments for chronic opioid-treated low back pain and their long-term effects. CBT is considered the standard psychotherapy for chronic pain, but its long-term benefits haven’t been well studied. To date, only 17 studies have evaluated mindfulness for chronic low-back pain and three studies have compared mindfulness and CBT.

This study was planned in partnership with an advisory panel composed of clinicians and representatives of community and advocacy organizations that work with people with chronic pain as well as adults with opioid-treated chronic low back pain and their caregivers. The panel’s feedback, included throughout the study, helped the researchers design and implement the study and better translate the study’s results to be meaningful and useful to patients and clinicians.

The team enrolled 770 adults to participate in a randomized clinical trial conducted in three sites — Madison, Wisconsin; Boston, Massachusetts; and Salt Lake City, Utah. Participants, on average, experienced moderate-to-severe pain, functional limitations, compromised quality of life and numerous prior treatments for their chronic low-back pain and were treated with daily opioid medications for at least three months.

“The people in this study had quite severe back pain that interfered with their life and was bad enough to need opioid medication. Usually, in that condition, people don’t really get better over time on their own,” said Bruce Barrett, professor of family medicine and community health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-lead of the study.

Participants were then assigned to either receive mindfulness-based therapy or CBT, which were conducted in therapist-led, two-hour group sessions for eight weeks. The mindfulness group learned to notice the sensations they experienced, giving them more control over how they related and respond to the pain and other symptoms. The CBT group learned coping skills and strategies to change their negative thought patterns. Participants were instructed to practice on their own for 30 minutes a day, six days a week during the 12-month study and to continue with their routine care. They were not instructed to reduce their opioid dosage. They reported on their pain level, ability to do daily activities, mental and physical health-related quality of life and daily opioid medication use at the start of the study and after three, six, nine and 12 months.

At the end of the study, participants in both groups reported significant and long-lasting benefits including reductions in pain and daily opioid dose. They also reported increased function and health-related quality of life through 12 months. Both mindfulness and CBT tools were shown that they could be effective and used safely over the long-term, the researchers said.

“The goal of pain management is to improve quality of life, increase function and reduce the sense of suffering. The study’s interventions likely helped reduce the participants’ sense of suffering, which probably allowed them to function a whole lot better,” said Penney Cowan, founder of the American Chronic Pain Association and co-author and advisor on the study. “People can live with pain, but they need to know how to do it. This study provides a sense of hope. It says you can do this and help yourself to a better quality of life.”

The research team explained that people living with chronic pain assemble a toolkit filled with different self-coping and self-care methods to manage their pain. They can use these tools at different times and in different ways.

“Mindfulness and CBT are other tools that you can add to your toolbox to increase your capacity to cope and live a meaningful life,” said Christin Veasley, founder of the Chronic Pain Research Alliance and co-author and advisor on the study. “What’s important about the types of therapies, like the ones evaluated in this study, is that they can be used broadly across all pain conditions and all pain severities.”

For example, while participants were told to continue their usual treatment, including pain medication as advised by their usual clinicians, opioid dosage decreased in both groups through 12 months following the intervention. Zgierska explained that participants learned skills, like taking a mindful breath before taking medication. The improvements, the research team said, were the byproduct of people implementing these tools, learning to better cope with pain and deciding to decrease their opioid use on their own.

“These therapies aren’t a total cure, but they teach people how to develop the inner resources they need to cope with chronic pain and to live a better life,” Garland said. “Mindfulness is a self-regulated tool that comes from within, unlike surgery or medication where something is being done to you from the outside. By learning these techniques, patients continue to experience lasting benefit.”

Other Penn State College of Medicine authors include Vernon Chinchilli, distinguished professor; Chan Shen, professor; Wen-Jan Tuan, assistant professor; Robert Lennon, who was associate professor during the time of the research; and statisticians Yuxin Liu and Huamei Dong.

Other authors include Robert Edwards and Robert Jamison from Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital; Cindy Burzinski, Mary Henningfield, Alyssa Turnquist, Nalini Sehgal and Anthony Schiefelbein from the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Yoshio Nakamura from the University of Utah School of Medicine; and Elizabeth Jacobs from the University of California, Riverside School of Medicine.

Funding from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) supported this work. Funding and institutional support from the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health; Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School; University of Utah College of Social Work; and the Penn State College of Medicine also supported this work.

In their new paper, published in the Journal of Medical Entomology, researchers at the University of Illinois surveyed residential rain barrels around Champaign County to determine how often mosquitoes took up residence in rain barrels and what preventative measures would most effectively keep mosquitoes out.

Not only are mosquitoes annoying, they are also vectors of many dangerous diseases, such as West Nile virus. These mosquito-borne diseases continue to pose a threat to public health in part because of the prevalence of human-made mosquito habitat in urban and residential areas. Juvenile mosquitoes require standing water to develop in, and some of these water sources come from our own backyards.

“Rain barrels are an excellent tool for homeowners to help in reducing water use,” said Brian Allan, Principal Investigator on the study and Professor of Entomology at the University of Illinois. “But they hadn’t been carefully evaluated yet as a potential habitat for mosquitoes.”

Although other forms of green stormwater infrastructure such as rain gardens and infiltration catch basins may reduce mosquito presence, the Illinois research team hypothesized that rain barrels could serve as habitat for mosquitoes.

This hypothesis was supported when their residential survey of 115 rain barrels at 53 households around Champaign County between June and September 2016 found that over half of the households had at least one mosquito-positive rain barrel.

The survey collected information about each of the rain barrels, including the types of mosquito prevention techniques they used, if any. The researchers’ statistical analysis revealed that mosquitoes were less likely to be found in rain barrels that had a mesh covering over the lid of the barrel, which helps physically keep mosquitoes out. In addition, many vector control specialists recommend treating container habitats with approved mosquito prevention methods, such as the bacterial insecticide Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis (Bti), chlorine, or even predators of mosquito larvae such as goldfish. Analysis of the researchers’ survey results indicated that these three water treatment methods were also effective forms of mosquito prevention.

Along with the rain barrels themselves, the researchers also surveyed the homeowners’ knowledge of best practices for mosquito prevention. While most homeowners could identify short-term mosquito prevention methods such as dumping out water from their rain barrels, few were aware of long-term methods of prevention such as utilizing a mesh covering or an insecticide.

“Our findings confirmed that there are simple solutions for reducing mosquito habitat, though these solutions require homeowner education and compliance,” said Becky Cloud, first author on the paper and graduate student in the Program in Ecology, Evolution & Conservation Biology (PEEC) in the School of Integrative Biology at the University of Illinois.

It is crucial that current and future rain barrel owners are empowered to take the proper precautions to prevent mosquitoes from spawning in their barrels, which will mitigate both the nuisance of mosquito bites and the risk of vector-borne disease spread. Accessible community outreach programs held by educational institutions, public health districts, and mosquito abatement districts have the potential to play a crucial role in preparing homeowners to take appropriate steps to mosquito-proof their rain barrels.

Taking these preventative measures will reduce potential health risks and ensure that rain barrels remain a safe, effective, and environmentally sustainable tool for managing stormwater runoff.

Other co-authors on this study include Andrew Mackay, Associate Scientist at the Illinois Natural History Survey; Maeli Sanchez, formerly an undergraduate student in the School of Integrative Biology; and Catherine Wangen, formerly a lab technician in the Department of Entomology.