Can anything minimize the serious polarization among groups in countries like Israel and the US? With the global escalation in conflicts among population groups, acts of violence by residents of cities and the increasing participation of youth in civil conflicts, there appears to be an urgent need to develop science-based methods to mitigate hatred and aggression and foster empathy and dialogue among youth growing up in the reality of a long-term conflict.

Eight sessions of dialogue-enhancing interventions among Jewish and Arab youth resulted in an impact on brain function, hormonal response, social behavior and attitudes towards the conflict and gains were retained seven years later.

Prof. Ruth Feldman, director of the Center for Developmental Social Neuroscience at Reichman University’s Ivcher School of Psychology, together with her research partners, examined whether it’s possible to build an intervention for teenagers from polarized groups in a society that has experienced multigenerational conflict, based on findings from the field of neuroscience. They wondered whether such interventions improve the brain’s reactions towards others, and can these improvements be preserved over time?

For the study, the researchers built a unique synchrony-focused intervention and examined its effects on the neural and hormonal responses and communication behavior among Jewish and Arab adolescents. The intervention, entitled “Tools of Dialogue” is a manualized group intervention of eight meetings between Jewish and Arab teenagers.

Each meeting lasted about two-and-a-half hours and was held in groups of 12 boys or girls, half of them Jews and half of them Arabs. The sessions were led by two mediators, one Jewish and one Arab, both of which have vast experience in facilitating Jewish-Arab groups.

“Our research findings showed that youth who received the intervention showed a broad and multidimensional bio-neurobehavioral change and the intervention gains lasted for years,” said Feldman. “This study is the first of its kind to show that an intervention based on increasing behavioral synchrony in groups engaged in intractable conflict stimulates the brain's empathic response, attenuates the neural basis of prejudice, reduces the cortisol response (stress), increases oxytocin (love) and shapes interpersonal interaction that is more mutual and less hostile.

This change is evident in the participants even after seven years, and the youth who underwent the intervention developed more tolerant attitudes towards the other, believed in finding a solution, and were actively involved in initiatives for dialogue and peace as young adults.”

https://m.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/mind-and-spirit/article-729118

The transition to agriculture from hunting and gathering in pre-colonial North America led to changes in age-independent mortality, or mortality caused by factors that are not associated with age, according to a new study by a Penn State-led research team. The team found that the intensification of crop use occurred in two phases, the first of which led to a decline in human age-independent mortality, while the second is associated with a rise in it. The study is the first to tie patterns of age-independent mortality to food production.

“This study tells the story of our shared human experience,” said George Milner, distinguished professor of anthropology at Penn State and lead author. “We have several examples around the world where we see a move toward crop domestication as an independent event – eastern North America, particularly the midcontinent, being one of them, but so too the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East. Also, there are demographic changes happening. This paper addresses the relationship between the move toward agriculture and demographic change.”

The researchers examined previously published data to identify general trends in archaeobotanical samples, or the remains of plants in the archaeological record, and skeletal samples from sites across eight states stretching from Illinois to northern Alabama. They wanted to study the relationship between the domestication of crops and an index that uses skeletal data to capture the frequency of juveniles aged five to 19 years old relative to all individuals aged five or more. Anthropologists normally use the index to measure fertility rates and population growth, but the new work shows it is more responsive to age-independent mortality.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2209478119

Researchers from Rutgers and other universities have developed a behavioral model that explains a long-standing healthcare mystery: Why do so many terminally ill patients undergo intense last-ditch treatments with little chance of meaningful life extension?

Surveys repeatedly indicate that nearly all people would rather die peacefully at home, yet painful, long-shot treatments remain common, and efforts to reduce usage have failed.

Previous analyses have mostly emphasized patients’ treatment preferences at the end of life. The new model, which its creators named the Transtheoretical Model of Irrational Biomedical Exuberance (TRIBE), focuses squarely on clinician psychology and family dynamics.

“Old models tended to assume that clinicians were purely rational agents, leading patients toward logical choices,” said Paul R. Duberstein, lead author of the study and chair of the Department of Health Behavior, Society and Policy at the Rutgers School of Public Health. “Once doctors have recommended a treatment or procedure, there’s enormous pressure on patients to undergo it.”

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953622008528#ack0010

In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of Toronto researchers have demonstrated that their new smartphone application helps to significantly improve memory recall, which could prove beneficial for individuals in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of memory impairment.

Known as HippoCamera for its ability to mimic the function of the brain’s hippocampus in memory construction and retention, the app enhances the encoding of memories stored in the brain by boosting attention to daily events and consolidating them more distinctly, thus later enabling richer, more comprehensive recall.

In a two-step process, HippoCamera users record a short video of up to 24 seconds of a moment they want to remember with a brief eight-second audio description of the event. The app combines the two elements just as the brain’s hippocampus would, with the video component sped up to mimic aspects of hippocampal function and to facilitate efficient review. Users then replay cues produced by HippoCamera at later times on a curated and regular basis to reinforce the memory and enable detailed recall

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2214285119

Nearly two thirds of the sharks and rays that live among the world's corals are threatened with extinction, according to new research published Tuesday, with a warning this could further imperil precious reefs.

Coral reefs, which harbor at least a quarter of all marine animals and plants, are gravely menaced by an array of human threats, including overfishing, pollution and climate change.

Shark and ray species—from apex predators to filter feeders—play an important role in these delicate ecosystems that "cannot be filled by other species", said Samantha Sherman, of Simon Fraser University in Canada and the wildlife group TRAFFIC International.

But they are under grave threat globally, according to the study in the journal Nature Communications, which assessed extinction vulnerability data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to look at 134 species of sharks and rays linked to reefs.

The authors found 59 percent of coral reef shark and ray species are threatened with extinction, an extinction risk almost double that of sharks and rays in general.

Among these, five shark species are listed as critically endangered, as well as nine ray species, all so-called "rhino rays" that look more like sharks than stingrays.

https://phys.org/news/2023-01-thirds-reef-sharks-rays-extinction.html

Visits to parks, community gardens and other urban green spaces may lower city dwellers’ use of drugs for anxiety, insomnia, depression, high blood pressure, and asthma, research has found.

Researchers in Finland found that visiting such areas three to four times a week cuts people’s chances of turning to drugs for mental health problems or high blood pressure by a third, and for asthma by about a quarter.

Moreover, the positive effects of visiting green spaces were stronger among those reporting the lowest annual household income, the researchers found.

The findings correlate with a growing body of evidence that a lack of access to green spaces is linked to a range of health problems. Access tends to be unequal, with poorer communities having fewer opportunities to be in nature.

To investigate the link, researchers from the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare drew on the responses of 16,000 randomly selected residents of Helsinki, Espoo and Vantaa – three cities that make up the largest urban area in Finland – to the Helsinki capital region environmental health survey in 2015-16.

The survey gathered information on how city dwellers aged at least 25 experienced residential green and blue spaces within a 1km (0.62-mile) radius of their homes. Green areas included forests, gardens, parks, castle parks, cemeteries, zoos, natural grasslands, moors and wetlands; and blue areas included sea, lakes, and rivers.

Respondents were asked to report their use of prescribed drugs for anxiety, insomnia and depression, and for high blood pressure and asthma. They were then asked how often they spent time or exercised outdoors in green spaces, during May and September, with options ranging from never to five or more times a week.

The researchers chose prescription drugs as a proxy for ill health. They picked those for anxiety, insomnia and depression, and high blood pressure and asthma in particular because they are used to treat common but potentially serious health issues.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/17/visiting-green-spaces-deters-mental-health-drug-use-researchers-find

National parks are the backbone of conservation. Yet mounting evidence shows that many parks are too small to sustain long-term viable populations and maintain essential, large-scale ecological processes, such as large mammal migrations and natural disturbance regimes.

A new study published on Jan. 11, 2023, in Scientific Reports found that enhancing ecological connectivity, known as “corridors” or “linkages,” among several of the oldest and largest national parks in the Western United States would greatly extend the time that many mammal species populations can persist. The authors analyzed the value of establishing ecological corridors for large mammals between Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks and between Mount Rainier and North Cascades National Parks. Their findings show that these corridors would not only enlarge populations, but also allow species to shift their geographic ranges more readily in response to climate change.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-26428-z

In a study using data from nearly 1,200 older adults, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers have added to a growing body of evidence that loss of the sense of smell is a predictive marker for an increased risk of frailty as people age. Building on previous research showing that olfactory dysfunction is a common early sign of brain-linked cognitive decline, the new findings suggest the link to frailty is likely not just in the brain but also in the nose itself.

If further studies affirm the findings, the researchers say, screening older adults’ ability to smell various scents could be as important as testing hearing and vision over time.

Results of the study, published Jan. 10 in the Journal of Gerontology, looked at the prevalence of frailty, an age-related syndrome of physiological decline, along with two different ways of assessing the ability to smell: olfactory sensitivity (the ability to detect an odor’s presence) and olfactory identification (the ability to detect and name an odor). Olfactory identification is a central measure of smell function, which has been linked to frailty and relies on higher-order cognitive processing to interpret and classify an odor. This suggests that neurological function may help to explain the relationship between smell and frailty. However, researchers say the ability to merely detect an odor without having to use higher-level neurological processes and the relationship of the ability to detect odors alone with frailty have been understudied.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/gerona/glac237

The paper, Extended producer responsibility for fossil fuels, was written by an team of international experts, including Oxford Professor of Geosystem Science, Myles Allen. Their paper concludes compelling fossil fuel producers to pay for carbon clean-up could end these fuels’ contribution to global warming without pitting climate action against meeting society’s energy needs—at a relatively affordable cost.

They argue carbon capture and storage is an affordable way of ‘stopping fossil fuels from causing further global warming’.

Speaking on Radio 4’sToday Programme this morning, Professor Allen said, ‘The crucial point about this new paper…is we could stop fossil fuels causing global warming, we could do it in a generation without upending the world economy, but only if we introduce a radical approach to climate policy: this is the idea of extending the principle of producer responsibility to fossil fuels.’

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aca4e8

About a quarter of the world’s electricity currently comes from power plants fired by natural gas. These contribute significantly to global greenhouse gas emissions (amounting to 10% of energy-related emissions according to the most recent figures from 2017) and climate change.

By gathering data from 108 countries around the world and quantifying the emissions by country, a McGill-led team, which includes researchers from Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, University of Texas (Austin) and the University of Maryland, has estimated that total global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the life cycle of gas-fired power is 3.6 billion tonnes each year. They found that this amount could be reduced by as much as 71% if a variety of mitigation options were used around the world.

“We were astonished by how large the potential reduction in greenhouse gases could be by 2050, and even by 2030,” says Sarah Jordaan, an associate professor in the Department of Civil Engineering and the Trottier Institute in Sustainability in Engineering and Design at McGill University and the first author on the paper which was recently published in Nature Climate Change. “If natural gas is going to play a role in a low carbon future, even for a transitional period, there will be a need to improve efficiency in power plants and to cut methane emissions from natural gas production as well as to capture and store CO2.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01503-5