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In this paper, we present findings from four separate studies using different data sources and methods to examine Chinese attitudes toward the United States amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The empirical results consistently indicate a marked and significant decline in Chinese attitudes toward the US between late 2019 and the end of 2022. Using a quasi-experimental design and granular survey data that exploit daily variations in public opinion, we offer additional evidence that the decline in Chinese attitudes toward the United States followed a distinct pattern not true for Chinese attitudes toward other countries. Specifically, the rise in Chinese unfavorability toward the United States closely corresponded to the heightened Chinese attention to the pandemic's progression in the United States. These results collectively suggest a causal effect of COVID-19, shedding light on how public health crises, international relations, and media jointly shape the increasing enmity between the two great powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we present the results from a large-scale field experiment designed to measure racial discrimination among the American public. We conducted an audit study on the general public--sending correspondence to 250,000 citizens randomly drawn from public voter registration lists. Our within-subjects experimental design tested the public's responsiveness to electronically delivered requests to volunteer their time to help with completing a simple task--taking a survey. We randomized whether the request came from either an ostensibly Black or an ostensibly White sender. We provide evidence that in electronic interactions, on average, the public is less likely to respond to emails from people they believe to be Black (rather than White). Our results give us a snapshot of a subtle form of racial bias that is systemic in the United States. What we term everyday or "paper cut" discrimination is exhibited by all racial/ethnic subgroups--outside of Black people themselves--and is present in all geographic regions in the United States. We benchmark paper cut discrimination among the public to estimates of discrimination among various groups of social elites. We show that discrimination among the public occurs more frequently than discrimination observed among elected officials and discrimination in higher education and themedical sector but simultaneously, less frequently than discrimination in housing and employment contexts. Our results provide a window into the discrimination that Black people in the United States face in day-to-day interactions with their fellow citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates Black and White consumers' preferences for Black versus White people in United States advertising contexts over 66 y, from 1956 until 2022, a time in which the United States has experienced significant ethno-racial diversification. Examining Black and White consumers' reactions to visual advertising over more than half a century offers a unique and dynamic view of interracial preferences. Mass advertising reaches an audience of billions and can shape people's attitudes and behavior, emphasizing the relevance of clarifying the influence of race in advertising, how it has evolved over time, and how it may contribute to mitigating discrimination based on racial perceptions. A meta-analysis of extant experiments into the relationship between the depicted endorser's race (i.e., the model in a visual ad) and the reaction of Black and White viewers pertains to 332 effect sizes from 62 studies reported in 52 scientific papers, comprising 10,186 Black and White participants. Our results are anchored in a conceptual framework, including a comprehensive set of perceiver (viewer), target (endorser), social/societal context, and publication characteristics. Without accounting for temporal dynamics, the results indicate ingroup favoritism, such that White viewers prefer White models and Black viewers prefer Black models. But by controlling for the publication year, it is possible to observe a time-dependent trend: Historically, White consumers preferred endorsers of the same race, but this preference has significantly shifted toward Black endorsers in recent years. In contrast, the level of Black consumers' reactions to endorsers of the same race remains largely unchanged over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The US global leadership in science and technology has greatly benefitted from immigrants from other countries, most notably from China in the recent decades. However, feeling the pressure of potential federal investigations since the 2018 launch of the China Initiative, scientists of Chinese descent in the United States now face higher incentives to leave the United States and lower incentives to apply for federal grants. Analyzing data pertaining to institutional affiliations of more than 200 million scientific papers, we find a steady increase in the return migration of scientists of Chinese descent from the United States to China. We also conducted a survey of scientists of Chinese descent employed by US universities in tenured or tenure- track positions (n = 1,304), with results revealing general feelings of fear and anxiety that lead them to consider leaving the United States and/or stop applying for federal grants. If the situation is not corrected, American science will likely suffer the loss of scientific talent to China and other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether school COVID-19 policies influenced enrollment differently by student age and race/ethnicity. Unlike much prior research, we i) analyze enrollments for virtually the entire U.S. public school population for both the 2020- 2021 and 2021-2022 school years, ii) compare enrollment trends within districts in order to isolate subgroup heterogeneity from district characteristics, and iii) account for district selection into preferred learning modes. Analyzing data on over 9,000 districts that serve more than 90% of public school students in the United States, we find enrollment responses to COVID policies differed notably. We find that White enrollments declined more than Black, Hispanic, and Asian enrollments in districts that started the 2020-2021 school year virtually, but in districts that started in-person the reverse was true: Non-White enrollments declined more than White enrollments. Moreover, Black, Hispanic, and Asian families responded more than White families to higher COVID-19 death rates in the months preceding the start of the 2021 school year. In 2021-2022, enrollment differences by the previous year's learning mode persisted. Racial/ethnic differences did not vary by whether the district required masking in classrooms. These findings are consistent with the greater risk faced by communities of color during the pandemic and demonstrate an additional source of disparate impact from COVID policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concern over democratic erosion has led to a proliferation of proposed interventions to strengthen democratic attitudes in the United States. Resource constraints, however, prevent implementing all proposed interventions. One approach to identify promising interventions entails leveraging domain experts, who have knowledge regarding a given field, to forecast the effectiveness of candidate interventions. We recruit experts who develop general knowledge about a social problem (academics), experts who directly intervene on the problem (practitioners), and nonexperts from the public to forecast the effectiveness of interventions to reduce partisan animosity, support for undemocratic practices, and support for partisan violence. Comparing 14,076 forecasts submitted by 1,181 forecasters against the results of a megaexperiment (n = 32,059) that tested 75 hypothesized effects of interventions, we find that both types of experts outperformed members of the public, though experts differed in how they were accurate. While academics' predictions were more specific (i.e., they identified a larger proportion of ineffective interventions and had fewer false-positive forecasts), practitioners' predictions were more sensitive (i.e., they identified a larger proportion of effective interventions and had fewer false-negative forecasts). Consistent with this, practitioners were better at predicting best-performing interventions, while academics were superior in predicting which interventions performed worst. Our paper highlights the importance of differentiating types of experts and types of accuracy. We conclude by discussing factors that affect whether sensitive or specific forecasters are preferable, such as the relative cost of false positives and negatives and the expected rate of intervention success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies anticipate that carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) will be essential to decarbonizing the U.S. economy. However, prior work has not estimated the time required to develop, approve, and implement a geologic sequestration site in the United States. We generate such an estimate by identifying six clearance points that must be passed before a sequestration site can become operational. For each clearance point (CP), we elicit expert judgments of the time required in the form of probability distributions and then use stochastic simulation to combine and sum the results. We find that, on average, there is a 90% chance that the time required lies between 5.5 and 9.6 y, with an upper bound of 12 y. Even using the most optimistic expert judgements, the lower bound on time is 2.7 y, and the upper bound is 8.3 y. Using the most pessimistic judgements, the lower bound is 3.5 y and the upper bound is 19.2 y. These estimates suggest that strategies must be found to safely accelerate the process. We conclude the paper by discussing seven potential strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A longstanding line of research in urban studies explores how cities can be understood through their appearance. However, what remains unclear is to what extent urban dwellers' everyday life can be explained by the visual clues of the urban environment. In this paper, we address this question by applying a computer vision model to 27 million street view images across 80 counties in the United States. Then, we use the spatial distribution of notable urban features identified through the street view images, such as street furniture, sidewalks, building façades, and vegetation, to predict the socioeconomic profiles of their immediate neighborhood. Our results show that these urban features alone can account for up to 83% of the variance in people's travel behavior, 62% in poverty status, 64% in crime, and 68% in health behaviors. The results outperform models based on points of interest (POI), population, and other demographic data alone. Moreover, incorporating urban features captured from street view images can improve the explanatory power of these other methods by 5% to 25%. We propose "urban visual intelligence" as a process to uncover hidden city profiles, infer, and synthesize urban information with computer vision and street view images. This study serves as a foundation for future urban research interested in this process and understanding the role of visual aspects of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic presented enormous data challenges in the United States. Policy makers, epidemiological modelers, and health researchers all require up-to-date data on the pandemic and relevant public behavior, ideally at fine spatial and temporal resolution. The COVIDcast API is our attempt to fill this need: Operational since April 2020, it provides open access to both traditional public health surveillance signals (cases, deaths, and hospitalizations) and many auxiliary indicators of COVID-19 activity, such as signals extracted from deidentified medical claims data, massive online surveys, cell phone mobility data, and internet search trends. These are available at a fine geographic resolution (mostly at the county level) and are updated daily. The COVIDcast API also tracks all revisions to historical data, allowing modelers to account for the frequent revisions and backfill that are common for many public health data sources. All of the data are available in a common format through the API and accompanying R and Python software packages. This paper describes the data sources and signals, and provides examples demonstrating that the auxiliary signals in the COVIDcast API present information relevant to tracking COVID activity, augmenting traditional public health reporting and empowering research and decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Major changes to the operation of local newsrooms--ownership restructuring, layoffs, and a reorientation away from print advertising--have become commonplace in the last few decades. However, there have been few systematic attempts to characterize the impact of these changes on the types of reporting that local newsrooms produce. In this paper, we propose a method to measure the investigative content of news articles based on article text and influence on subsequent articles. We use our method to examine over-time and cross-sectional patterns in news production by local newspapers in the United States over the past decade. We find surprising stability in the quantity of investigative articles produced over most of the time period examined, but a notable decline in the last 2 y of the decade, corresponding to a recent wave of newsroom layoffs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents estimates of the prevalence of dementia in the United States from 2000 to 2016 by age, sex, race and ethnicity, education, and a measure of lifetime earnings, using data on 21,442 individuals aged 65 y and older and 97,629 person-year observations from a nationally representative survey, the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The survey includes a range of cognitive tests, and a subsample underwent clinical assessment for dementia. We developed a longitudinal, latent-variable model of cognitive status, which we estimated using the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method. This model provides more accurate estimates of dementia prevalence in population subgroups than do previously used methods on the HRS. The age-adjusted prevalence of dementia decreased from 12.2% in 2000 (95% CI, 11.7 to 12.7%) to 8.5% in 2016 (7.9 to 9.1%) in the 65+ population, a statistically significant decline of 3.7 percentage points or 30.1%. Females are more likely to live with dementia, but the sex difference has narrowed. In the male subsample, we found a reduction in inequalities across education, earnings, and racial and ethnic groups; among females, those inequalities also declined, but less strongly. We observed a substantial increase in the level of education between 2000 and 2016 in the sample. This compositional change can explain, in a statistical sense, about 40% of the reduction in dementia prevalence among men and 20% among women, whereas compositional changes in the older population by age, race and ethnicity, and cardiovascular risk factors mattered less. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies in the United States have shown that minority students might face a trade-off between better academic performance and peer acceptance, which has been termed "acting White." This paper investigates racial differences in the relationship between grades and popularity in five Brazilian schools. Popularity is measured using friendship ties among students, assigning a higher value to students more central in the network. The racial composition of friendship ties is generally diverse, although they tend to favor racial peers, especially among Black students. We find a positive correlation between grades and popularity of non-White students that is driven by their friendships with their White classmates. This contrasts with patterns associated with acting White, where a negative correlation between minorities' grades and their popularity among racial peers is not compensated by their status among White students. We also investigate how academic performance is associated with racial identity choice conditional on skin color, finding a weak negative relationship between higher grades and the odds of classification as mixed race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Streamflow often increases after fire, but the persistence of this effect and its importance to present and future regional water resources are unclear. This paper addresses these knowledge gaps for the western United States (WUS), where annual forest fire area increased by more than 1,100% during 1984 to 2020. Among 72 forested basins across the WUS that burned between 1984 and 2019, the multibasin mean streamflow was significantly elevated by 0.19 SDs (P < 0.01) for an average of 6 water years postfire, compared to the range of results expected from climate alone. Significance is assessed by comparing prefire and postfire streamflow responses to climate and also to streamflow among 107 control basins that experienced little to no wildfire during the study period. The streamflow response scales with fire extent: among the 29 basins where >20% of forest area burned in a year, streamflow over the first 6 water years postfire increased by a multibasin average of 0.38 SDs, or 30%. Postfire streamflow increases were significant in all four seasons. Historical fire–climate relationships combined with climate model projections suggest that 2021 to 2050 will see repeated years when climate is more fire-conducive than in 2020, the year currently holding the modern record for WUS forest area burned. These findings center on relatively small, minimally managed basins, but our results suggest that burned areas will grow enough over the next 3 decades to enhance streamflow at regional scales. Wildfire is an emerging driver of runoff change that will increasingly alter climate impacts on water suppliesand runoff-related risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vascular disease is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the United States and globally. Pathological vascular remodeling, such as atherosclerosis and stenosis, largely develop at arterial sites of curvature, branching, and bifurcation, where disturbed blood flow activates vascular endothelium. Current pharmacological treatments of vascular complications principally target systemic risk factors. Improvements are needed. We previously devised a targeted polyelectrolyte complex micelle to deliver therapeutic nucleotides to inflamed endothelium in vitro by displaying the peptide VHPKQHR targeting vascular cell adhesion molecule 1 (VCAM1) on the periphery of the micelle. This paper explores whether this targeted nanomedicine strategy effectively treats vascular complications in vivo. Disturbed flow-induced microRNA-92a (miR-92a) has been linked to endothelial dysfunction. We have engineered a transgenic line (miR-92aEC-TG/Apoe-/-) establishing that selective miR-92a overexpression in adult vascular endothelium causally promotes atherosclerosis in Apoe-/- mice. We tested the therapeutic effectiveness of the VCAM-1–targeting polyelectrolyte complex micelles to deliver miR-92a inhibitors and treat pathological vascular remodeling in vivo. VCAM-1–targeting micelles preferentially delivered miRNA inhibitors to inflamed endothelial cells in vitro and in vivo. The therapeutic effectiveness of anti–miR-92a therapy in treating atherosclerosis and stenosis in Apoe-/- mice is markedly enhanced by the VCAM-1–targeting polyelectrolyte complex micelles. These results demonstrate a proof of concept to devise polyelectrolyte complex micelle-based targeted nanomedicine approaches treating vascular complications in vivo [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The form of political polarization where citizens develop strongly negative attitudes toward out-party members and policies has become increasingly prominent across many democracies. Economic hardship and social inequality, as well as intergroup and racial conflict, have been identified as important contributing factors to this phenomenon known as “affective polarization.” Research shows that partisan animosities are exacerbated when these interests and identities become aligned with existing party cleavages. In this paper, we use a model of cultural evolution to study how these forces combine to generate and maintain affective political polarization. We show that economic events can drive both affective polarization and the sorting of group identities along party lines, which, in turn, can magnify the effects of underlying inequality between those groups. But, on a more optimistic note, we show that sufficiently high levels of wealth redistribution through the provision of public goods can counteract this feedback and limit the rise of polarization. We test some of our key theoretical predictions using survey data on intergroup polarization, sorting of racial groups, and affective polarization in the United States over the past 50 y. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically examines how the opening of K--12 schools is associated with the spread of COVID-19 using county-level panel data in the United States. As preliminary evidence, our event-study analysis indicates that cases and deaths in counties with in-person or hybrid opening relative to those with remote opening substantially increased after the school opening date, especially for counties without any mask mandate for staff. Our main analysis uses a dynamic panel data model for case and death growth rates, where we control for dynamically evolving mitigation policies, past infection levels, and additive countylevel and state-week "fixed" effects. This analysis shows that an increase in visits to both K--12 schools and colleges is associated with a subsequent increase in case and death growth rates. The estimates indicate that fully opening K--12 schools with in-person learning is associated with a 5 (SE = 2) percentage points increase in the growth rate of cases. We also find that the association of K--12 school visits or in-person school openings with case growth is stronger for counties that do not require staff to wear masks at schools. These findings support policies that promote masking and other precautionary measures at schools and giving vaccine priority to education workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land conservation efforts throughout the United States sustain ecological benefits while generating wealth in the housing market through capitalization of amenities. This paper estimates the benefits of conservation that are capitalized into proximate home values and quantifies how those benefits are distributed across demographic groups. Using detailed property and household-level data from Massachusetts, we estimate that new land conservation led to $62 million in new housing wealth equity. However, houses owned by low-income or Black or Hispanic households are less likely to be located near protected areas, and hence, these populations are less likely to benefit financially. Direct study of the distribution of this new wealth from capitalized conservation is highly unequal, with the richest quartile of households receiving 43%, White households receiving 91%, and the richest White households receiving 40%, which is nearly 140% more than would be expected under equal distribution. We extend our analysis using census data for the entire United States and observe parallel patterns. We estimate that recent land conservation generated $9.8 billion in wealth through the housing market and that wealthier and White households benefited disproportionately. These findings suggest regressive and racially disparate incidence of the wealth benefits of land conservation policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Depression has robust natural language correlates and can increasingly be measured in language using predictive models. However, despite evidence that language use varies as a function of individual demographic features (e.g., age, gender), previous work has not systematically examined whether and how depression's association with language varies by race. We examine how race moderates the relationship between language features (i.e., first-person pronouns and negative emotions) from social media posts and self-reported depression, in a matched sample of Black and White English speakers in the United States. Our findings reveal moderating effects of race: While depression severity predicts I-usage in White individuals, it does not in Black individuals. White individuals use more belongingness and self-deprecation-related negative emotions. Machine learning models trained on similar amounts of data to predict depression severity performed poorly when tested on Black individuals, even when they were trained exclusively using the language of Black individuals. In contrast, analogous models tested on White individuals performed relatively well. Our study reveals surprising race-based differences in the expression of depression in natural language and highlights the need to understand these effects better, especially before language-based models for detecting psychological phenomena are integrated into clinical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite experimental and observational studies demonstrating that biodiversity enhances primary productivity, the best metric for predicting productivity at broad geographic extents-functional trait diversity, phylogenetic diversity, or species richness-remains unknown. Using >1.8 million tree measurements from across eastern US forests, we quantified relationships among functional trait diversity, phylogenetic diversity, species richness, and productivity. Surprisingly, functional trait and phylogenetic diversity explained little variation in productivity that could not be explained by tree species richness. This result was consistent across the entire eastern United States, within ecoprovinces, and within data subsets that controlled for biomass or stand age. Metrics of functional trait and phylogenetic diversity that were independent of species richness were negatively correlated with productivity. This last result suggests that processes that determine species sorting and packing are likely important for the relationships between productivity and biodiversity. This result also demonstrates the potential confusion that can arise when interdependencies among different diversity metrics are ignored. Our findings show the value of species richness as a predictive tool and highlight gaps in knowledge about linkages between functional diversity and ecosystem functioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the significance of including noncontiguous regions of the United States in climate research. It argues that excluding these areas leads to inaccurate national climate risk assessments and hampers policy decisions. The article acknowledges the challenges of data collection in these regions but suggests that advancements in modeling and regional climate models can help address this issue. Collaboration between the research community, funders, project managers, and local experts is emphasized as crucial. The article also discusses the need to improve climate data coverage in areas outside of the continental United States to ensure equitable access to climate information and address historical exclusion and social injustices. Incorporating local and traditional climate knowledge, improving monitoring and observations, and building partnerships with underrepresented communities are suggested as ways to supplement limited datasets. The article underscores the importance of including all states and territories in research efforts to better serve communities and make informed choices. [Extracted from the article]

The warnings of potential climate migration first appeared in the scientific literature in the late 1970s when increased recognition that disintegrating ice sheets could drive people to migrate from coastal cities. Since that time, scientists have modeled potential climate migration without integrating other population processes, potentially obscuring the demographic amplification of this migration. Climate migration could amplify demographic change--enhancing migration to destinations and suppressing migration to origins. Additionally, older populations are the least likely to migrate, and climate migration could accelerate population aging in origin areas. Here, we investigate climate migration under sea-level rise (SLR), a single climatic hazard, and examine both the potential demographic amplification effect and population aging by combining matrix population models, flood hazard models, and a migration model built on 40 y of environmental migration in the United States to project the US population distribution of US counties. We find that the demographic amplification of SLR for all feasible Representative Concentration Pathway-Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (RCP-SSP) scenarios in 2100 ranges between 8.6-28 M [5.7-53 M]--5.3 and 18 times the number of migrants (0.4-10 M). We also project significant aging of coastal areas as youthful populations migrate but older populations remain, accelerating population aging in origin areas. As the percentage of the population lost due to climate migration increases, the median age also increases--up to 10+ y older in some highly impacted coastal counties. Additionally, our population projection approach can be easily adapted to investigate additional or multiple climate hazards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biomass-derived sustainable aviation fuel holds significant potential for decarbonizing the aviation sector. Its long-term viability depends on crop choice, longevity of soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration, and the biomass-to-biojet fuel conversion efficiency. We explored the impact of fuel price and SOC value on viable biojet fuel production scale by integrating an agroecosystem model with a field-to-biojet fuel production process model for 1,4-dimethylcyclooctane (DMCO), a representative high-performance biojet fuel molecule, from Miscanthus, sorghum, and switchgrass. Assigning monetary value to SOC sequestration results in substantially different outcomes than an increased fuel selling price. If SOC accumulation is valued at $185/ton CO2, planting Miscanthus for conversion to DMCO would be economically cost-competitive across 66% of croplands across the continental United States (US) by 2050 if conventional jet fuel remains at $0.74/L (in 2020 US dollars). Cutting the SOC sequestration value in half reduces the viable area to 54% of cropland, and eliminating any payment for SOC shrinks the viable area to 16%. If future biojet fuel prices increase to $1.24/L-Jet A-equivalent, 48 to 58% of the total cultivated land in the United States could support a more diverse set of feedstocks including Miscanthus, sorghum, or switchgrass. Among these options, only 8–14% of the area would be suitable exclusively for Miscanthus cultivation. These findings highlight the intersection of natural solutions for carbon removal and the use of deep-rooted feedstocks for biofuels and biomanufacturing. The results underscore the need to establish clear and consistent values for SOC sequestration to enable the future bioeconomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

apidly changing wildfire regimes across the Western United States have driven more frequent and severe wildfires, resulting in wide-ranging societal threats from wildfires and wildfire-generated smoke. However, common measures of fire severity focus on what is burned, disregarding the societal impacts of smoke generated from each fire. We combine satellite-derived fire scars, air parcel trajectories from individual fires, and predicted smoke PM2.5 to link source fires to resulting smoke PM2.5 and health impacts experienced by populations in the contiguous United States from April 2006 to 2020. We quantify fire-specific accumulated smoke exposure based on the cumulative population exposed to smoke PM2.5 over the duration of a fire and estimate excess asthma-related emergency department (ED) visits as a result of this exposure. We find that excess asthma visits attributable to each fire are only moderately correlated with common measures of wildfire severity, including burned area, structures destroyed, and suppression cost. Additionally, while recent California fires contributed nearly half of the country’s smoke-related excess asthma ED visits during our study period, the most severe individual fire was the 2007 Bugaboo fire in the Southeast. We estimate that a majority of smoke PM2.5 comes from sources outside the local jurisdictions where the smoke is experienced, with 87% coming from fires in other counties and 60% from fires in other states. Our approach could enable broad-scale assessment of whether specific fire characteristics affect smoke toxicity or impact, inform cost-effectiveness assessments for allocation of suppression resources, and help clarify the growing transboundary nature of local air quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A longitudinal analysis of small-scale solar energy generation in the United States is used to demonstrate how transition studies can explain nonlinearity in multidecade changes of consumption-production systems. Nonlinearity involves uneven development of sustainability innovations with episodes of rapid growth but also periods of slow growth, stalling, or even collapse. Factors that affect the increasing feasibility and attractiveness of small-scale solar include technological improvements, declining costs, and changes in global energy markets. However, a more complete explanation of nonlinearity highlights the importance of a type of systems analysis that also includes strategic action and broader societal and policy changes. Specifically, efforts by the utilities constrained the growth of small-scale solar by weakening policy support because of the perceived threat, but the solar industry and advocates responded with countervailing action in a changing context. As the transition developed, strategic action (including goals, targets, tactics, and coalition partners) changed and became more conflictual. However, by the beginning of the 2020 decade, the development of microgrids, digital technologies, storage, and virtual power plants in combination with net-zero energy policies provided indications of potential for a reconfiguration of the relationship that could be less polarized and conflicted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this speculative article, I argue that the expansion of economic activity in space may offer a uniquely promising way to escape indefinitely from what economists call “secular stagnation,” a state of self-fulfilling, persistently sluggish economic growth that has increasingly threatened high-income countries. Economists have pointed to both supply-side and demand-side drivers of secular stagnation, and space as a focal point for investment can—at least in principle—address both. On the supply side, space is an unlimited frontier that, as have frontiers in the past, may inspire the individualism, innovation, and world-building needed to sustainably increase productivity and population growth. On the demand side, public investment toward increased economic activity in space could meaningfully add to aggregate demand if it reached historical peak benchmarks in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cyanobacteria are infamous producers of toxins. While the toxic potential of planktonic cyanobacterial blooms is well documented, the ecosystem level effects of toxigenic benthic and epiphytic cyanobacteria are an understudied threat. The freshwater epiphytic cyanobacterium Aetokthonos hydrillicola has recently been shown to produce the "eagle killer" neurotoxin aetokthonotoxin (AETX) causing the fatal neurological disease vacuolar myelinopathy. The disease affects a wide array of wildlife in the southeastern United States, most notably waterfowl and birds of prey, including the bald eagle. In an assay for cytotoxicity, we found the crude extract of the cyanobacterium to be much more potent than pure AETX, prompting further investigation. Here, we describe the isolation and structure elucidation of the aetokthonostatins (AESTs), linear peptides belonging to the dolastatin compound family, featuring a unique modification of the C-terminal phenylalanine-derived moiety. Using immunofluorescence microscopy and molecular modeling, we confirmed that AEST potently impacts microtubule dynamics and can bind to tubulin in a similar matter as dolastatin 10. We also show that AEST inhibits reproduction of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Bioinformatic analysis revealed the AEST biosynthetic gene cluster encoding a nonribosomal peptide synthetase/polyketide synthase accompanied by a unique tailoring machinery. The biosynthetic activity of a specific N-terminal methyltransferase was confirmed by in vitro biochemical studies, establishing a mechanistic link between the gene cluster and its product. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Air pollution poses well-established risks to physical health, but little is known about its effects on mental health. We study the relationship between wildfire smoke exposure and suicide risk in the United States in 2007 to 2019 using data on all deaths by suicide and satellite-based measures of wildfire smoke and ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentrations. We identify the causal effects of wildfire smoke pollution on suicide by relating year-over-year fluctuations in county-level monthly smoke exposure to fluctuations in suicide rates and compare the effects across local areas and demographic groups that differ considerably in their baseline suicide risk. In rural counties, an additional day of smoke increases monthly mean PM2.5 by 0.41 μg/m³ and suicide deaths by 0.11 per million residents, such that a 1-μg/m³ (13%) increase in monthly wildfire-derived fine particulate matter leads to 0.27 additional suicide deaths per million residents (a 2.0% increase). These effects are concentrated among demographic groups with both high baseline suicide risk and high exposure to outdoor air: men, working-age adults, non-Hispanic Whites, and adults with no college education. By contrast, we find no evidence that smoke pollution increases suicide risk among any urban demographic group. This study provides large-scale evidence that air pollution elevates the risk of suicide, disproportionately so among rural populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Errors in clinical decision-making are disturbingly common. Recent studies have found that 10 to 15% of all clinical decisions regarding diagnoses and treatment are inaccurate. Here, we experimentally study the ability of structured information-sharing networks among clinicians to improve clinicians' diagnostic accuracy and treatment decisions. We use a pool of 2,941 practicing clinicians recruited from around the United States to conduct 84 independent group-level trials, ranging across seven different clinical vignettes for topics known to exhibit high rates of diagnostic or treatment error (e.g., acute cardiac events, geriatric care, low back pain, and diabetes-related cardiovascular illness prevention). We compare collective performance in structured information-sharing networks to collective performance in independent control groups, and find that networks significantly reduce clinical errors, and improve treatment recommendations, as compared to control groups of independent clinicians engaged in isolated reflection. Our results show that these improvements are not a result of simple regression to the group mean. Instead, we find that within structured information-sharing networks, the worst clinicians improved significantly while the best clinicians did not decrease in quality. These findings offer implications for the use of social network technologies to reduce errors among clinicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The western United States has experienced severe drought in recent decades, and climate models project increased drought risk in the future. This increased drying could have important implications for the region’s interconnected, hydropower-dependent electricity systems. Using power-plant level generation and emissions data from 2001 to 2021, we quantify the impacts of drought on the operation of fossil fuel plants and the associated impacts on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, air quality, and human health. We find that under extreme drought, electricity generation from individual fossil fuel plants can increase up to 65% relative to average conditions, mainly due to the need to substitute for reduced hydropower. Over 54% of this drought-induced generation is transboundary, with drought in one electricity region leading to net imports of electricity and thus increased pollutant emissions from power plants in other regions. These drought-induced emission increases have detectable impacts on local air quality, as measured by proximate pollution monitors. We estimate that the monetized costs of excess mortality and GHG emissions from drought-induced fossil generation are 1.2 to 2.5x the reported direct economic costs from lost hydro production and increased demand. Combining climate model estimates of future drying with stylized energy- transition scenarios suggests that these drought-induced impacts are likely to remain large even under aggressive renewables expansion, suggesting that more ambitious and targeted measures are needed to mitigate the emissions and health burden from the electricity sector during drought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is substantial concern about democratic backsliding in the United States. Evidence includes notably high levels of animosity toward out-partisans and support for undemocratic practices (SUP) among the general public. Much less is known, however, about the views of elected officials--even though they influence democratic outcomes more directly. In a survey experiment conducted with state legislators (N = 534), we show that these officials exhibit less animosity toward the other party, less SUP, and less support for partisan violence (SPV) than the general public. However, legislators vastly overestimate the levels of animosity, SUP, and SPV among voters from the other party (though not among voters from their own party). Further, those legislators randomly assigned to receive accurate information about the views of voters from the other party reported significantly lower SUP and marginally significantly lower partisan animosity toward the other party. This suggests that legislators' democratic attitudes are causally linked to their perceptions of other-party voters' democratic attitudes. Our findings highlight the importance of ensuring that office holders have access to reliable information about voters from both parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electric vehicle sales have been growing rapidly in the United States and around the world. This study explores the drivers of demand for electric vehicles, examining whether this trend is primarily a result of technology improvements or changes in consumer preferences for the technology over time. We conduct a discrete choice experiment of new vehicle consumers in the United States, weighted to be representative of the population. Results suggest that improved technology has been the stronger force. Estimates of consumer willingness to pay for vehicle attributes show that when consumers compare a gasoline vehicle to its battery electric vehicle (BEV) counterpart, the improved operating cost, acceleration, and fast-charging capabilities of today's BEVs mostly or entirely compensate for their perceived disadvantages, particularly for longer-range BEVs. Moreover, forecasted improvements of BEV range and price suggest that consumer valuation of many BEVs is expected to equal or exceed their gasoline counterparts by 2030. A suggestive market-wide simulation extrapolation indicates that if every gasoline vehicle had a BEV option in 2030, the majority of new car and near-majority of new sport-utility vehicle choice shares could be electric in that year due to projected technology improvements alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across the United States, police chiefs, city officials, and community leaders alike have highlighted the need to de-escalate police encounters with the public. This concern about escalation extends from encounters involving use of force to routine car stops, where Black drivers are disproportionately pulled over. Yet, despite the calls for action, we know little about the trajectory of police stops or how escalation unfolds. In study 1, we use methods from computational linguistics to analyze police body-worn camera footage from 577 stops of Black drivers. We find that stops with escalated outcomes (those ending in arrest, handcuffing, or a search) diverge from stops without these outcomes in their earliest moments--even in the first 45 words spoken by the officer. In stops that result in escalation, officers are more likely to issue commands as their opening words to the driver and less likely to tell drivers the reason why they are being stopped. In study 2, we expose Black males to audio clips of the same stops and find differences in how escalated stops are perceived: Participants report more negative emotion, appraise officers more negatively, worry about force being used, and predict worse outcomes after hearing only the officer's initial words in escalated versus non-escalated stops. Our findings show that car stops that end in escalated outcomes sometimes begin in an escalated fashion, with adverse effects for Black male drivers and, in turn, police-community relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bone grafting procedures have become increasingly common in the United States, with approximately 500,000 cases occurring each year at a societal cost exceeding $2.4 billion. Recombinant human bone morphogenetic proteins (rhBMPs) are therapeutic agents that have been widely used by orthopedic surgeons to stimulate bone tissue formation alone and when paired with biomaterials. However, significant limitations such as immunogenicity, high production cost, and ectopic bone growth from these therapies remain. Therefore, efforts have been made to discover and repurpose osteoinductive small-molecule therapeutics to promote bone regeneration. Previously, we have demonstrated that a single-dose treatment with the small-molecule forskolin for just 24 h induces osteogenic differentiation of rabbit bone marrow-derived stem cells in vitro, while mitigating adverse side effects attributed with prolonged small-molecule treatment schemes. In this study, we engineered a composite fibrin-PLGA [poly(lactide-co-glycolide)]-sintered microsphere scaffold for the localized, short-term delivery of the osteoinductive small molecule, forskolin. In vitro characterization studies showed that forskolin released out of the fibrin gel within the first 24 h and retained its bioactivity toward osteogenic differentiation of bone marrow-derived stem cells. The forskolin-loaded fibrin-PLGA scaffold was also able to guide bone formation in a 3-mo rabbit radial critical-sized defect model comparable to recombinant human bone morphogenetic protein-2 (rhBMP-2) treatment, as demonstrated through histological and mechanical evaluation, with minimal systemic off-target side effects. Together, these results demonstrate the successful application of an innovative small-molecule treatment approach within long bone critical-sized defects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mass shootings are becoming more frequent in the United States, as we routinely learn from the media about attempts that have been prevented or tragedies that destroyed entire communities. To date, there has been limited understanding of the modus operandi of mass shooters, especially those who seek fame through their attacks. Here, we explore whether the attacks of these fame-seeking mass shooters were more surprising than those of others and clarify the link between fame and surprise in mass shootings. We assembled a dataset of 189 mass shootings from 1966 to 2021, integrating data from multiple sources. We categorized the incidents in terms of the targeted population and shooting location. We measured “surprisal” (often known as “Shannon information content”) with respect to these features, and we scored fame from Wikipedia traffic data—a commonly used metric of fame. Surprisal was significantly higher for fame-seeking mass shooters than non-fame-seeking ones. We also registered a significant positive correlation between fame and surprisal controlling for the number of casualties and injured victims. Not only do we uncover a link between fame-seeking behavior and surprise in the attacks but also we demonstrate an association between the fame of a mass shooting and its surprise. Mass shootings are becoming more frequent in the United States, as we routinely learn from the media about attempts that have been prevented or tragedies that destroyed entire communities. To date, there has been limited understanding of the modus operandi of mass shooters, especially those who seek fame through their attacks. Here, we explore whether the attacks of these fame-seeking mass shooters were more surprising than those of others and clarify the link between fame and surprise in mass shootings. We assembled a dataset of 189 mass shootings from 1966 to 2021, integrating data from multiple sources. We categorized the incidents in terms of the targeted population and shooting location. We measured “surprisal” (often known as “Shannon information content”) with respect to these features, and we scored fame from Wikipedia traffic data—a commonly used metric of fame. Surprisal was significantly higher for fame-seeking mass shooters than non-fame-seeking ones. We also registered a significant positive correlation between fame and surprisal controlling for the number of casualties and injured victims. Not only do we uncover a link between fame-seeking behavior and surprise in the attacks but also we demonstrate an association between the fame of a mass shooting and its surprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the United States has been experiencing historically high suicide rates. In the face of mental health care provider shortages that leave millions needing to travel longer to find providers with schedule openings, if any are available at all, the inaccessibility of mental health care has become increasingly central in explaining suicidality. To examine the relationship between access to care and suicide, we leverage a dataset mapping all licensed US psychiatrists and psychotherapists (N = 711,214), as of early 2020, and employ real-world transportation data to model patients' mobility barriers. We find a strong association between reduced mental health care provider spatial-social accessibility and heightened suicide risk. Using a machine learning approach to condition on a host of 22 contextual factors known to be implicated in suicide (e.g., race, education, divorce, gun shop prevalence), we find that in locales where individuals seeking care can access fewer mental health care providers, already more likely to be saturated by demand, suicide risk is increased (3.2% for each reduced SD of psychiatrist accessibility; 2.3% for psychotherapists). Additionally, we observe that local spatial-social accessibility inequalities are associated with further heightened risk of suicide, underscoring the need for research to account for the highly localized barriers preventing many Americans from accessing needed mental health services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health insurance coverage in the United States is highly uncertain. In the post-Affordable Care Act (ACA), pre-COVID United States, we estimate that while 12.5% of individuals under 65 are uninsured at a point in time, twice as many--one in four--are uninsured at some point over a 2-y period. Moreover, the risk of losing insurance remained virtually unchanged with the introduction of the landmark ACA. Risk of insurance loss is particularly high for those with health insurance through Medicaid or private exchanges; they have a 20% chance of losing coverage at some point over a 2-y period, compared to 8.5% for those with employer-provided coverage. Those who lose insurance can experience prolonged periods without coverage; about half are still uninsured 6 mo later, and almost one-quarter are uninsured for the subsequent 2 y. These facts suggest that research and policy attention should focus not only on the "headline number" of the share of the population uninsured at a point in time, but also on the stability and certainty (or lack thereof) of being insured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2010, US life expectancy growth has stagnated. Much research on US mortality has focused on working-age adults given adverse trends in drug overdose deaths, other external causes of death, and cardiometabolic deaths in midlife. We show that the adverse mortality trend at retirement ages (65+ y) has in fact been more consequential to the US life expectancy stagnation since 2010, as well as excess deaths and years of life lost in 2019, than adverse mortality trends at working ages. These results reveal that the United States is experiencing a "double jeopardy" that is driven by both mid-life and older-age mortality trends, but more so by older-age mortality. Understanding and addressing the causes behind the worsening mortality trend in older ages will be essential to returning to the pace of life expectancy improvements that the United States had experienced for decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Powassan virus is an emerging tick-borne virus of concern for public health, but very little is known about its transmission patterns and ecology. Here, we expanded the genomic dataset by sequencing 279 Powassan viruses isolated from Ixodes scapularis ticks from the northeastern United States. Our phylogeographic reconstructions revealed that Powassan virus lineage II was likely introduced or emerged from a relict population in the Northeast between 1940 and 1975. Sequences strongly clustered by sampling location, suggesting a highly focal geographical distribution. Our analyses further indicated that Powassan virus lineage II emerged in the northeastern United States mostly following a south-to-north pattern, with a weighted lineage dispersal velocity of ~3 km/y. Since the emergence in the Northeast, we found an overall increase in the effective population size of Powassan virus lineage II, but with growth stagnating during recent years. The cascading effect of population expansion of white-tailed deer and I. scapularis populations likely facilitated the emergence of Powassan virus in the northeastern United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing fire severity and warmer, drier postfire conditions are making forests in the western United States (West) vulnerable to ecological transformation. Yet, the relative importance of and interactions between these drivers of forest change remain unresolved, particularly over upcoming decades. Here, we assess how the interactive impacts of changing climate and wildfire activity influenced conifer regeneration after 334 wildfires, using a dataset of postfire conifer regeneration from 10,230 field plots. Our findings highlight declining regeneration capacity across the West over the past four decades for the eight dominant conifer species studied. Postfire regeneration is sensitive to high-severity fire, which limits seed availability, and postfire climate, which influences seedling establishment. In the near-term, projected differences in recruitment probability between low- and high-severity fire scenarios were larger than projected climate change impacts for most species, suggesting that reductions in fire severity, and resultant impacts on seed availability, could partially offset expected climate-driven declines in postfire regeneration. Across 40 to 42% of the study area, we project postfire conifer regeneration to be likely following low-severity but not high-severity fire under future climate scenarios (2031 to 2050). However, increasingly warm, dry climate conditions are projected to eventually outweigh the influence of fire severity and seed availability. The percent of the study area considered unlikely to experience conifer regeneration, regardless of fire severity, increased from 5% in 1981 to 2000 to 26 to 31% by mid-century, highlighting a limited time window over which management actions that reduce fire severity may effectively support postfire conifer regeneration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scale and pace of energy infrastructure development required to achieve netzero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are unprecedented, yet our understanding of how to minimize its potential impacts on land and ocean use and natural resources is inadequate. Using high-resolution energy and land-use modeling, we developed spatially explicit scenarios for reaching an economy-wide net-zero GHG target in the western United States by 2050. We found that among net-zero policy cases that vary the rate of transportation and building electrification and use of fossil fuels, nuclear generation, and biomass, the "High Electrification" case, which utilizes electricity generation the most efficiently, had the lowest total land and ocean area requirements (84,000 to 105,000 km² vs. 88,100 to 158,000 km² across all other cases). Different levels of land and ocean use protections were applied to determine their effect on siting, environmental and social impacts, and energy costs. Meeting the net-zero target with stronger land and ocean use protections did not significantly alter the share of different energy generation technologies and only increased system costs by 3%, but decreased additional interstate transmission capacity by 20%. Yet, failure to avoid development in areas with high conservation value is likely to result in substantial habitat loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long-term data allow ecologists to assess trajectories of population abundance. Without this context, it is impossible to know whether a taxon is thriving or declining to extinction. For parasites of wildlife, there are few long-term data--a gap that creates an impediment to managing parasite biodiversity and infectious threats in a changing world. We produced a century-scale time series of metazoan parasite abundance and used it to test whether parasitism is changing in Puget Sound, United States, and, if so, why. We performed parasitological dissection of fluid-preserved specimens held in natural history collections for eight fish species collected between 1880 and 2019. We found that parasite taxa using three or more obligately required host species--a group that comprised 52% of the parasite taxa we detected--declined in abundance at a rate of 10.9% per decade, whereas no change in abundance was detected for parasites using one or two obligately required host species. We tested several potential mechanisms for the decline in 3+-host parasites and found that parasite abundance was negatively correlated with sea surface temperature, diminishing at a rate of 38% for every 1 °C increase. Although the temperature effect was strong, it did not explain all variability in parasite burden, suggesting that other factors may also have contributed to the long- term declines we observed. These data document one century of climate-associated parasite decline in Puget Sound--a massive loss of biodiversity, undetected until now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades, multiple countries with high vaccine coverage have experienced resurgent outbreaks of mumps. Worryingly, in these countries, a high proportion of cases have been among those who have completed the recommended vaccination schedule, raising alarm about the effectiveness of existing vaccines. Two putative mechanisms of vaccine failure have been proposed as driving observed trends: 1) gradual waning of vaccine-derived immunity (necessitating additional booster doses) and 2) the introduction of novel viral genotypes capable of evading vaccinal immunity. Focusing on the United States, we conduct statistical likelihood-based hypothesis testing using a mechanistic transmission model on age-structured epidemiological, demographic, and vaccine uptake time series data. We find that the data are most consistent with the waning hypothesis and estimate that 32.8% (32%, 33.5%) of individuals lose vaccine-derived immunity by age 18 y. Furthermore, we show using our transmission model how waning vaccine immunity reproduces qualitative and quantitatively consistent features of epidemiological data, namely 1) the shift in mumps incidence toward older individuals, 2) the recent recurrence of mumps outbreaks, and 3) the high proportion of mumps cases among previously vaccinated individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing evidence suggests that fine particulate matter (PM2.5) likely increases the risks of dementia, yet little is known about the relative contributions of different constituents. Here, we conducted a nationwide population-based cohort study (2000 to 2017) by integrating the Medicare Chronic Conditions Warehouse database and two independently sourced datasets of high-resolution PM2.5 major chemical composition, including black carbon (BC), organic matter (OM), nitrate (NO3 -), sulfate (SO4 2-), ammonium (NH4 +), and soil dust (DUST). To investigate the impact of long-term exposure to PM2.5 constituents on incident all-cause dementia and Alzheimer's disease (AD), hazard ratios for dementia and AD were estimated using Cox proportional hazards models, and penalized splines were used to evaluate potential nonlinear concentration-response (C-R) relationships. Results using two exposure datasets consistently indicated higher rates of incident dementia and AD for an increased exposure to PM2.5 and its major constituents. An interquartile range increase in PM2.5 mass was associated with a 6 to 7% increase in dementia incidence and a 9% increase in AD incidence. For different PM2.5 constituents, associations remained significant for BC, OM, SO4 2-, and NH4 + for both end points (even after adjustments of other constituents), among which BC and SO4 2-showed the strongest associations. All constituents had largely linear C-R relationships in the low exposure range, but most tailed off at higher exposure concentrations. Our findings suggest that long-term exposure to PM2.5 is significantly associated with higher rates of incident dementia and AD and that SO4 2-, BC, and OM related to traffic and fossil fuel combustion might drive the observed associations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diversification of police forces is widely promoted as a reform for reducing racial disparities in police-civilian interactions and increasing police legitimacy. Despite these potential benefits, nearly every municipal police department in the United States remains predominately White and male. Here, we investigate whether the scale and persistence of minority underrepresentation in policing might partly be explained by a lack of support for diversification among voters and current police officers. Across two studies (N = 2, 661) sampling the US adult population and residents from a city with one of the least representative police forces in the country, individuals significantly overestimate officer diversity at both the local and national levels. We find that correcting these biased beliefs with accurate information reduces trust in police and increases support for hiring new officers from underrepresented groups. In the municipal sample, these corrections also cause an increase in residents' willingness to vote for reforms to diversify their majority White police department. Additional paired decision-making experiments (N = 1, 663) conducted on these residents and current police officers demonstrate that both prefer hiring new officers from currently underrepresented groups, independent of civil service exam performance and other hiring criteria. Overall, these results suggest that attitudes among voters and police officers are unlikely to pose a major barrier to diversity reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the opioid epidemic in the United States, states have passed policies aimed at regulating how opioids are prescribed by physicians. For such policies to be effective, however, opioids must be prescribed to the patients for whom they are intended. Whether opioid prescriptions are written for those who are not intended to consume them is empirically difficult to show. In a commercially insured population, we examined opioid prescriptions written for and filled by spouses of patients undergoing outpatient surgery on the day of a patient's surgery compared with the surrounding days. Because patients may be unable to fill prescriptions themselves immediately after surgery, surgeons may prescribe opioids to a patient's spouse, which would be clinically inappropriate. Among 450,125 opioid-naïve couples studied, for patients who did not fill perioperative opioid prescriptions themselves, the rate of spousal fills on the day of surgery (DOS) was 2.39 fills per 1,000 surgeries compared with 0.44 fills on all other perioperative days (adjusted odds ratio (aOR), 5.5, 95% CI, 4.6-6.5). Increases in spousal opioid fills were not present for patients that filled opioid prescriptions themselves. These findings suggest intentional, clinically inappropriate prescribing of opioids. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coral reefs are experiencing severe decline, and urgent action is required at local and global scales to curb ecosystem loss. Establishing new regulations to protect corals, however, can be time consuming and costly, and it is therefore necessary to leverage existing legal instruments, such as policies originally designed to address terrestrial rather than marine activities, to prevent coral reef degradation. Focusing on the United States, but drawing on successful examples worldwide, we present actionable pathways to increase coral protections under legislation that was originally designed to advance clean freshwater, safe drinking water, and emergency management. We identify specific legal policies and procedures (e.g., industrial permit limits, nonpoint source management incentives, and floodplain restoration programs) that can curb coral reef pollution and can be extended to other countries with similar regulations in place. Coral reef practitioners should consider a broad array of currently underused, actionable, and intersecting environmental policies that can be applied to mitigate coral stress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anti-Black racism remains a pervasive crisis in the United States. Racist social systems reinforce racial inequalities and perpetuate prejudicial beliefs. These beliefs emerge in childhood, are difficult to change once entrenched in adolescence and adulthood, and lead people to support policies that further reinforce racist systems. Therefore, it is important to identify what leads children to form prejudicial beliefs and biases and what steps can be taken to preempt their development. This study examined how children’s exposure to and beliefs about racial inequalities predicted anti-Black biases in a sample of 646 White children (4 to 8 years) living across the United States. We found that for children with more exposure to racial inequality in their daily lives, those who believed that racial inequalities were caused by intrinsic differences between people were more likely to hold racial biases, whereas those who recognized the extrinsic factors underlying racial inequalities held more egalitarian attitudes. Grounded in constructivist theories in developmental science, these results are consistent with the possibility that racial biases emerge in part from the explanatory beliefs that children construct to understand the racial inequalities they see in the world around them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Air pollution levels in the United States have decreased dramatically over the past decades, yet national racial-ethnic exposure disparities persist. For ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5), we investigate three emission-reduction approaches and compare their optimal ability to address two goals: 1) reduce the overall population average exposure ("overall average") and 2) reduce the difference in the average exposure for the most exposed racial-ethnic group versus for the overall population ("national inequalities"). We show that national inequalities in exposure can be eliminated with minor emission reductions (optimal: ~1% of total emissions) if they target specific locations. In contrast, achieving that outcome using existing regulatory strategies would require eliminating essentially all emissions (if targeting specific economic sectors) or is not possible (if requiring urban regions to meet concentration standards). Lastly, we do not find a trade-off between the two goals (i.e., reducing overall average and reducing national inequalities); rather, the approach that does the best for reducing national inequalities (i.e., location-specific strategies) also does as well as or better than the other two approaches (i.e., sector-specific and meeting concentration standards) for reducing overall averages. Overall, our findings suggest that incorporating location-specific emissions reductions into the US air quality regulatory framework 1) is crucial for eliminating long-standing national average exposure disparities by race-ethnicity and 2) can benefit overall average exposures as much as or more than the sector-specific and concentration-standards approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Androgen receptor (AR) signaling is crucial for driving prostate cancer (PCa), the most diagnosed and the second leading cause of death in male patients with cancer in the United States. Androgen deprivation therapy is initially effective in most instances of AR-positive advanced or metastatic PCa. However, patients inevitably develop lethal castration-resistant PCa (CRPC), which is also resistant to the next-generation AR signaling inhibitors. Most CRPCs maintain AR expression, and blocking AR signaling remains a main therapeutic approach. GATA2 is a pioneer transcription factor emerging as a key therapeutic target for PCa because it promotes AR expression and activation. While directly inhibiting GATA2 transcriptional activity remains challenging, enhancing GATA2 degradation is a plausible therapeutic strategy. How GATA2 protein stability is regulated in PCa remains unknown. Here, we show that constitutive photomorphogenesis protein 1 (COP1), an E3 ubiquitin ligase, drives GATA2 ubiquitination at K419/K424 for degradation. GATA2 lacks a conserved [D/E](x)xxVP[D/E] degron but uses alternate BR1/BR2 motifs to bind COP1. By promoting GATA2 degradation, COP1 inhibits AR expression and activation and represses PCa cell and xenograft growth and castration resistance. Accordingly, GATA2 overexpression or COP1 mutations that disrupt COP1-GATA2 binding block COP1 tumor-suppressing activities. We conclude that GATA2 is a major COP1 substrate in PCa and that COP1 promotion of GATA2 degradation is a direct mechanism for regulating AR expression and activation, PCa growth, and castration resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]