Discrimination alters brain-gut 'crosstalk,' prompting poor food choices and increased health risks

 People frequently exposed to racial or ethnic discrimination may be more susceptible to obesity and related health risks in part because of a stress response that changes biological processes and how we process food cues. These are findings from UCLA researchers conducting what is believed to be the first study directly examining effects of discrimination on responses to different types of food as influenced by the brain-gut-microbiome (BGM) system.

The changes appear to increase activation in regions of the brain associated with reward and self-indulgence -- like seeking "feel-good" sensations from "comfort foods" -- while decreasing activity in areas involved in decision making and self-control.

"We examined complex relationships between self-reported discrimination exposure and poor food choices, and we can see these processes lead to increased cravings for unhealthy foods, especially sweet foods, but also manifested as alterations in the bidirectional communication between the brain and the gut microbiome," said Arpana Gupta, PhD, a researcher and co-director of the UCLA Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center and the UCLA G. Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience.

"Our results show that a person's brain-gut crosstalk may change in response to ongoing experiences of discrimination -- affecting food choices, cravings, brain function, and contributing to alterations in gut chemistry that have been implicated in stress and inflammation. It appears that in response to stressful discrimination experiences, we seek comfort in food, manifested as increased cravings, and increased desire for highly palatable foods, such as high-calorie foods and, especially, sweet foods. These alterations may ultimately cause people exposed to discrimination to be more vulnerable to obesity and obesity-related disorders," said Gupta, senior author of the paper, which appears in Nature Mental Health.

Previous studies have looked into many factors -- genetics, diet, exercise, and others -- that could contribute to disproportionately high rates of obesity and related disorders occurring in African Americans and others in communities of color. Few studies have addressed the potential role of discrimination in obesity, and this is the first known study providing direct evidence of possible brain-gut interactions linking discrimination to eating behaviors.

The findings are based on results of functional MRI brain scans, sophisticated statistical modeling techniques, and analyses of metabolites of the glutamate pathway in the digestive tract.

Participants included 107 people -- 87 women and 20 men -- of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds who completed a validated and widely used questionnaire that measures chronic experiences of unfair treatment. Based on their scores, participants' responses were divided into "high discrimination exposure" and "low discrimination exposure" groups.

All participants provided stool samples. They also completed a "food-cue" task while MRI brain scans were acquired to evaluate brain responses to pictures of five different types of food:

1. Unhealthy, high-calorie, savory.
2. Unhealthy, high-calorie, sweet.
3. Healthy, low-calorie, savory.
4. Healthy, low-calorie, sweet.
5. Non-food -- a control comparison consisting of pixelated images created from pictures of food.

Using these measurements, the researchers focused on discrimination-related differences in the various food group categories -- looking at responses to the food cues in key regions of the brain. Results showed:

• In people reporting more discrimination experiences, unhealthy food cues caused greater activation in regions of the brain associated with reward processing, motivation, cravings, and appetite responses. These regions have been linked to the "feel-good" aspects coming from consuming certain food.
• Stress from discrimination experiences altered brain responses in brain regions involved with self-regulation in response to food cues for unhealthy foods, but not for healthy foods.
• Unhealthy sweet food played a major role in the bidirectional communication between the brain and gut microbiome.

Through analysis of fecal samples, the researchers looked for changes in 12 glutamate metabolites -- substances resulting from the breakdown of glutamate. As a neurotransmitter, glutamate has been associated with numerous stress responses and aging, and in this study, participants in the greater discrimination group had higher levels of two glutamate metabolites that have been implicated in inflammatory processes, oxidative stress and increased risk for developing obesity.

The authors say considering both the present results and previously published research, greater discrimination exposure may lead to alterations in the bidirectional brain-gut microbiome communication that skews our biology towards unhealthy eating behaviors and cravings for unhealthy foods. This occurs via inflammatory processes in the brain-gut microbiome system involved in dysregulations of glutamatergic signaling and modulation of the frontal-striatal circuits.

Gupta said the revelations may help researchers develop treatments that target the brain or the gut.

"At the brain level, treatments could be developed to modulate the food-related reward system or the hyper-aroused brain circuits associated with stress and discrimination exposure. On the other end of the spectrum, at the gut level, it also means we can target the glutamatergic pathways -- possibly with probiotic supplementation or anti-inflammatory dietary changes -- as a therapeutic approach to treat stress-related experiences such as discrimination," she said.

Fair and sustainable futures beyond mining

 Mining brings huge social and environmental change to communities: landscapes, livelihoods and the social fabric evolve alongside the industry. But what happens when the mines close? What problems face communities that lose their main employer and the very core of their identity and social networks? A research fellow at the University of Göttingen provides recommendations for governments to successfully navigate mining communities through their transition toward non-mining economies. Based on past experiences with industrial transitions, she suggests that a three-step approach centred around stakeholder collaboration could be the most effective way forward. This approach combines early planning, local-based solutions, and targeted investments aimed at fostering economic and workforce transformation. This comment article was published in Nature Energy.

Dr Kamila Svobodova, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the University of Göttingen, argues that, in practice, governments struggle to truly engage mining communities in both legislation and action. Even the more successful, often deemed exemplary, transitions failed to follow the principles of open and just participation or invest enough time in the process. Early discussions about how the future will look following closure help to build trust and relationships with communities. A combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches engages people at all levels. This ensures that the local context is understood and targeted specifically. It also establishes networks for collaboration during the transition. Effective coordination of investments toward mining communities, including funding to implement measures to support workers, seed new industries, support innovations, and enhance essential services in urban centres, proved to be successful in the past.

"To ensure energy security, it's essential for governments to recognize the profound transformation that residents of mining communities experience when they shift away from mining," Svobodova explains. "Neglecting these communities, their inherent strength of mining identity and unity, could lead to social and economic instability, potentially affecting the overall national energy infrastructure."

Moving toward closure and consequently away from mining is not an easy or short journey. "It is essential that governments recognize that the transition takes time, and persistence is essential for success," says Svoboda. "They should openly communicate their strategies, ensuring communities and other stakeholders are well-informed and engaged. Building trust and providing guidance helps residents navigate the uncertainties associated with transitions. By embracing the three-step approach that centers around stakeholder engagement, governments can prioritize equitable and just outcomes when navigating mining transitions as part of their energy security strategies."

Ecological theory can help explain why segregation persist

 An ecological theory may help to explain why segregation is so widespread and persistent in US cities, according to a paper published today in Buildings and Cities. The new way of framing segregation's endurance may provide a useful tool to study and address systemic racism, and could ultimately reveal novel ways of breaking the cycle.

As an urban ecologist at Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Steward Pickett is always on the lookout for spatial differences, or patchiness, in the environment. He then studies those patterns and unpacks their drivers. Working in Baltimore, Pickett and his colleagues couldn't help noticing the patchy distribution of Black and white populations across the city. But formal policies of segregation ended decades ago.

"So why does Baltimore stay segregated?" he wondered. "And what are the ecological implications of that? This knowledge is critical to supporting anti-racist progress toward environmental justice for all people living in cities."

Segregation has well documented social and economic consequences. Its legacy can also be felt in the way that environmental resources and risks are unevenly distributed within cities. For example, communities of color are more likely to be exposed to flooding, air pollution, toxic metals, and mosquito-borne diseases, and are less likely to have access to amenities such as green spaces, cooling street trees, and adequate waste removal.

"In Baltimore, through decades of research, we have documented that compared to white neighborhoods, Black Baltimoreans have less tree canopy coverage, more vulnerability to heat extremes, less stormwater management investment, and increased exposure to disease vectors," said Pickett.

When the team analyzed the history of Baltimore and the institutional and legal mechanisms that have kept segregation in place, the process started to look familiar. "I thought, this looks like the adaptive resilience cycle in ecology literature, but here the resilient trait is white control of the spatial organization of racialized groups in the city," said Pickett. "It just seemed to be a very powerful way to organize our observations."

The 'adaptive cycle of resilience' emphasizes the ability of a system to adjust to shocks or disturbances and retain its fundamental structure. The theory divides resilience -- or in this case, segregation's tenacity -- into four phases: disturbance, reorganization, growth, and conservation of resources.

The cycle starts with a baseline condition. Then, a "disturbance" shakes up that condition, releasing resources or freeing up new ways of thinking ("reorganization"). What follows is a time when the system takes advantage of those opportunities ("growth") before settling down into a state that persists for a while ("conservation").

Drawing on historical examples, the paper shows how this cycle has worked to reinforce segregation in Baltimore. In the 1880s, Baltimore was organized by fine-scale segregation, with African Americans living in smaller homes along narrow alleys, and whites living in larger homes on nicer streets. However, starting in the late 1870s, the Great Migration saw large numbers of African Americans moving from the South to the North or from rural to urban areas (acting as "disturbance" to the established pattern of segregation). Baltimore's Black population surged and began spreading beyond the alley houses ("reorganization").

Resisting this diffusion through the city, white elites pushed for an ordinance that, in 1911, forbade Black and white residents from living on the same city block ("growth" or novelty in the control of segregation). This coarser scale of segregation persisted for a few years ("conservation"), until the Supreme Court overturned the ordinance in 1917, starting a whole new turn of the resilience cycle, causing Baltimore's white power structure to initiate alternativemethods to maintain the segregationist system, such as neighborhood improvement associations and deed covenants.

"Again and again, we see that when segregation meets a crisis point, it will reconstruct itself to keep segregation going," explained Pickett. "It doesn't go away -- it changes scale, and the mechanisms that enforce it change."

The paper provides several other examples illustrating the similarities between the adaptive resilience cycle and real-world decisions in planning, zoning, investment, and real estate that have reinforced segregation throughout Baltimore's history. The authors also point out that segregation's cycle of resilience could be disrupted by community action, policy adjustment, and planning practice.

Baltimore is far from the only city living with modern-day segregation; segregation and its impacts persist in many cities across the US and all over the globe. Understanding the mechanisms that reinforce segregation could help activists to identify or exploit crisis points within the cycle, the authors note, and invite new tools to create a more socially just world.

Pickett hopes the paper will help to change how people think about segregation and systemic racism. "Segregation is not 'natural' -- it's been made and reinforced," he said. "But it doesn't have to be this way. What can be made can also be unmade."

Protecting lands slows biodiversity loss among vertebrates by five times

 Protecting large swaths of Earth's land can help stem the tide of biodiversity loss -- including for vertebrates like amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds, according to a new study published in Nature Sept. 27. The study, led by the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) and Conservation International, emphasizes the importance of proper governance for the success of protected lands, and offers much-needed support for the United Nations' "30 by 30" initiative to conserve the world's biodiversity.

Human activity has accelerated the natural extinction rate of vertebrates by 22 times. Such biodiversity loss can destabilize food webs and jeopardize the many benefits biodiversity provides to people, including crop pollination, healthy diets and disease control.

"Humans are inextricably dependent on biodiversity for survival," said Justin Nowakowski, SERC conservation biologist and lead author of the study. "It provides food, fuel, fiber and other ecosystem services that we depend on for life."

Class Struggles

Nowakowski's team captured data for over 1,000 species spanning every continent except Antarctica. They gathered their information from two databases: Living Planet and BioTIME, which contain biodiversity studies compiled from all over the world. The authors examined how 2,239 vertebrate populations fared over time, both inside and outside protected areas. To control for confounding variables, the authors took care that protected versus unprotected sites were as similar as possible in other respects.

On average, vertebrates declined 0.4% per year inside protected areas -- nearly five times more slowly than vertebrates outside protected areas (1.8% per year).

"Protected areas take us from a situation in which biodiversity is not-so-slowly ebbing away, to one where populations are at least close to stable," said Luke Frishkoff, coauthor and assistant professor of biology at the University of Texas at Arlington. "They buy us much-needed time to figure out how to reverse the biodiversity crisis." At these rates, Frishkoff added, populations outside protected areas could see their numbers cut in half in just 40 years. Meanwhile, it would take 170 years for a population in a protected area to undergo the same fate.

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Some vertebrate classes benefited more than others. Amphibians and birds inside protected lands enjoyed the biggest reprieves. The authors suspect this is because those classes face some of the biggest threats on the outside. For example, wetland birds are frequent victims of habitat loss. Amphibians, meanwhile, are dying in droves from the chytrid fungus while battling habitat loss and climate change. Their smaller sizes may contribute as well.

"Amphibians typically have fairly small home ranges, and they're also really sensitive to small changes in the environment," said coauthor Jessica Deichmann, an ecologist with the Liz Claiborne & Art Ortenberg Foundation. "So, with amphibians living within protected areas, you're really able to protect more of the habitat that they're utilizing than you are with, say, a mammal that has a really large home range."

However, conversion of land nearby to agriculture or development diminished the benefits of protected areas, and climate change is compounding the problem. Reptiles were found to be especially vulnerable to climate change, even within protected areas. Amphibians suffered more from nearby land conversion. This makes connections between protected areas even more critical to conservation, the authors pointed out -- especially as climate change continues to take its toll.

"Protected areas are tied to a specific place," Nowakowski said. "But species are on the move….We need to design protected areas that are connected and account for this reality."

Protectionist Politics

This study validates the importance of the United Nations' work to protect biodiversity. At the United Nations Biodiversity Conference last December, nearly 200 nations pledged to counter rapid extinctions by protecting 30% of Earth's land and water by 2030. The "30 by 30" commitment created a rush to establish more protected areas. But merely addressing the amount of protected land is not enough according to many conservation experts. It is vital to confirm that protected areas are meeting their primary goal: conserving biodiversity within those areas.

"Countries can comply with 30 by 30 by creating 'paper parks' [parks that exist on maps but are largely ineffective]," Deichmann said. "But that will not achieve the desired outcomes of 30 by 30. This study helps us better understand how we can actually achieve 30 by 30, through the creation of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures."

To work well, the data show that protected areas need one more crucial ingredient: a stable, effective government. When the authors ran their analyses, good governance had just as powerful an impact for vertebrates as living in a protected area.

Nations with effective governments often see better enforcement of environmental laws. Corruption-free governments are also less likely to misappropriate conservation money -- and are therefore more likely to get international conservation money in the first place. Government transparency can help with community empowerment as well, according to coauthor Carlos Muñoz Brenes, a social scientist with Conservation International. When local communities have a voice in conservation laws, including about protected lands, those protections frequently work better.

But protected areas alone are not enough. Conservation scientists increasingly recognize that Earth needs a portfolio of approaches to safeguard biodiversity, especially in the face of rapid environmental changes.

"There are mechanisms that are more flexible, that could contribute to protecting those biodiversity values and ecosystem values outside protected areas," Muñoz Brenes said.

As an example, Muñoz Brenes pointed to "payment for ecosystem services" programs. Costa Rica, where Muñoz Brenes was born, has run such a program since 1996. Under the program, funded by a national gas tax, landowners near protected areas receive a payment from the government to preserve forests on their property.

"We have been able to reverse deforestation in Costa Rica, and a great deal thanks to this program," Muñoz Brenes said. "But not only that, we have been able to increase forest cover through this mechanism outside protected areas." Other flexible measures include biological corridors and Indigenous-led protected areas that limit but do not entirely restrict human activity.

Nature-based solutions can help tackle climate change and food security, but communities outside Europe are missing out

 Nature-based solutions (NBS) can help grand challenges, such as climate change and food security, but, as things stand, communities outside of Europe do not stand to benefit from these innovations. New research from the University of Surrey has found that more than 60% of NBS are located in Europe, with other regions showing poor use of the technologies.

The research found that 33% of NBS were what are known as green solutions. These can include urban green spaces such as parks, green roofs, and green walls that can provide cooling and shade, absorb rainfall, and improve air quality.

A significant proportion (31%) of NBS were hybrid solutions. These can include green roofs that incorporate solar panels or rainwater harvesting systems to capture and use rainwater.

Professor Prashant Kumar, Director of the Global Centre for Clean Air Research (GCARE) and corresponding author of the study, said:

"The good news is that we found a wealth of evidence of more communities successfully adopting nature-based solutions to not only deal with climate change and hazards but societal issues such as water and food security. What is very concerning is that we found a lack of evidence of authorities or organisations investing in nature-based solutions for vulnerable communities outside of Europe."

The team from GCARE analysed the implementation of more than 500 NBS case studies from across the globe. They found more than 88% of them were supported by national policies, which ensured the financial viability of the NBS.

The most common use of NBS was to address water-based hazards such as floods and landslides. This accounted for 45% of all case studies.

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The second most common type of hazard addressed by NBS was meteorological/climatological hazards like heatwaves and droughts, which accounted for around 30% of the case studies. Around 24% of the case studies were focused on environmental hazards like soil degradation and air pollution. Fire hazards were the least common type of hazard addressed by NBS, accounting for only around 1% of the case studies.

Professor Kumar commented:

"We believe that as much as 68% of the case studies we analysed addressed UN Sustainability goals for life on land, climate action and clean water. Imagine the impact these innovations could have if they were implemented in our most vulnerable communities.

"This is why we believe that knowledge transfer must be near the top of the agenda so we can all benefit from the transformational benefit of nature-based solutions."

The study was supported by the EU project, OPERANDUM (Grant Agreement No: 776848) and published in the Science of the Total Environment journal.

The University of Surrey is a world-leading centre for excellence in sustainability -- where our multi-disciplinary research connects society and technology to equip humanity with the tools to tackle climate change, clean our air, reduce the impacts of pollution on health and help us live better, more sustainable lives. The University is committed to improving its own resource efficiency on its estate and being a sector leader, aiming to be carbon neutral by 2030. A focus on research that makes a difference to the world has contributed to Surrey being ranked 55th in the world in the Times Higher Education (THE) University Impact Rankings 2022, which assesses more than 1,400 universities' performance against the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Scientists develop method to predict the spread of armed conflicts

 Around the world, political violence increased by 27 percent last year, affecting 1.7 billion people. The numbers come from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), which collects real-time data on conflict events worldwide.

Some armed conflicts occur between states, such as Russia's invasion of Ukraine. There are, however, many more that take place within the borders of a single state. In Nigeria, violence, particularly from Boko Haram, has escalated in the past few years. In Somalia, populations remain at risk amidst conflict and attacks perpetrated by armed groups, particularly Al-Shabaab.

To address the challenge of understanding how violent events spread, a team at the Complexity Science Hub (CSH) created a mathematical method that transforms raw data on armed conflicts into meaningful clusters by detecting causal links.

"Our main question was: what is a conflict? How can we define it?," says CSH scientist Niraj Kushwaha, one of the coauthors of the study published in the latest issue of PNAS Nexus. "It was important for us to find a quantitative and bias-free way to see if there were any correlations between different violent events, just by looking at the data."

Inspiration

"We often tell multiple narratives about a single conflict, which depend on whether we zoom in on it as an example of local tension or zoom out from it and consider it as part of a geopolitical plot; these are not necessarily incompatible," explains coauthor Eddie Lee, a postdoctoral fellow at CSH. "Our technique allows us to titrate between them and fill out a multiscale portrait of conflict."

In order to investigate the many scales of political violence, the researchers turned to physics and biophysics for inspiration. The approach they developed is inspired by studies of stress propagation in collapsing materials and of neural cascades in the brain.

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Kushwaha and Lee used data on violent battles in Africa between 1997 and 2019 from ACLED. In their analysis, they divided the geographic area into a grid of cells and time into sequential slices. The authors predicted when and where new battles would emerge by analyzing the presence or absence of battles in each cell over time.

"If there's a link between two cells, it means a conflict at one location can predict a conflict at another location," explains Kushwaha. "By using this causal network, we can cluster different conflict events."

Snow and sandpile avalanches

Observing the dynamics of the clusters, the scientists found that armed clashes spread like avalanches. "In a way evocative of snow or sandpile avalanches, a conflict originates in one place and cascades from there. There is a similar cascading effect in armed conflicts," explains Kushwaha.

The team also identified a "mesoscale" for political violence -- a time scale of a few days to months and a spatial scale of tens to hundreds of kilometers. Violence seems to propagate on these scales, according to Kushwaha and Lee.

Additionally, they found that their conflict statistics matched those from field studies such as in Eastern Nigeria, Somalia, and Sierra Leone. "We connected Fulani militia violence with Boko Haram battles in Nigeria, suggesting that these conflicts are related to one another," details Kushwaha. The Fulani are an ethnic group living mainly in the Sahel and West Africa.

Forecasting

Policymakers and international agencies could benefit from the approach, according to the authors. The model could help uncover unseen causal links in violent conflicts. Additionally, it could one day help forecast the development of a war at an early stage. "By using this approach, policy decisions could be made more effectively, such as where resources should be allocated," notes Kushwaha.

Score, then rank: Researchers propose an integrated approach to grant review assessments

 The public funding of science is responsible for many of the biomedical and other scientific breakthroughs on which our lives depend. However, the process through which funding decisions are made, the peer review of grant proposals, has been historically understudied, and current approaches can lead to undesirable outcomes. Writing in Research Integrity and Peer Review, Stephen A. Gallo, then affiliated with the American Institute of Biological Sciences, and Michael Pearce, Carole J. Lee, and Elena A. Erosheva from the University of Washington highlight problems related to proposal rating in grant review and propose a protocol to ameliorate them.

In many review programs, say the authors, proposals are funded primarily on the basis of reviewer ratings and summary statistics derived from them that represent reviewers' assessment of proposal quality. Relying solely on ratings, however, can pose problems for establishing funding priorities, "especially when distinguishing between similarly rated proposals, especially for projects of high quality, where only a few minor weaknesses can make the difference between a funded project and a rejection." Furthermore, say Gallo and colleagues, the use of ratings rubrics "often forces reviewers to penalize a project based on a series of identified but minor weaknesses, despite the fact that they may find the application overall to be potentially significant."

To address these concerns, the authors suggest adding rankings to the traditional rating approach and describe an innovative methodology called the Mallows-Binomial, which can then produce integrated proposal scores, as well as an induced preference ordering. In so doing, the approach allows funders to consider reviewers' scores alongside their opinions about how well the proposals stack up against one another. Pearce states that the inclusion of ranking will "more accurately distill reviewer opinion into a useful output to make an informed funding decision."

For research funders, the authors suggest clear benefits of the Mallows-Binomial protocol in comparison with ratings-only approaches. These include "providing a ranked priority list with confidence metrics, a higher degree of discrimination between similarly rated proposals, and a robustness to outliers and reviewer inconsistencies," features that will be important in distilling reviewer opinion "into a useful output to make the best, most informed decision" for funding crucial research.

Machine learning, blockchain technology could help counter spread of fake news

 A proposed machine learning framework and expanded use of blockchain technology could help counter the spread of fake news by allowing content creators to focus on areas where the misinformation is likely to do the most public harm, according to new research from Binghamton University, State University of New York.

The research led by Thi Tran, assistant professor of management information systems at Binghamton University's School of Management, expands on existing studies by offering tools for recognizing patterns in misinformation and helping content creators zero in the worst offenders.

"I hope this research helps us educate more people about being aware of the patterns," Tran said, "so they know when to verify something before sharing it and are more alert to mismatches between the headline and the content itself, which would keep the misinformation from spreading unintentionally."

Tran's research proposed machine learning systems -- a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) and computer science that uses data and algorithms to imitate the way humans learn while gradually improving its accuracy -- to help determine the scale to which content could cause the most harm to its audience.

Examples could include stories that circulated during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic touting false alternate treatments to the vaccine.

The framework would use data and algorithms to spot indicators of misinformation and use those examples to inform and improve the detection process. It would also consider user characteristics from people with prior experience or knowledge about fake news to help piece together a harm index. The index would reflect the severity of possible harm to a person in certain contexts if they were exposed and victimized by the misinformation.

"We're most likely to care about fake news if it causes a harm that impacts readers or audiences. If people perceive there's no harm, they're more likely to share the misinformation," Tran said. "The harms come from whether audiences act according to claims from the misinformation, or if they refuse the proper action because of it. If we have a systematic way of identifying where misinformation will do the most harm, that will help us know where to focus on mitigation."

Based on the information gathered, Tran said, the machine learning system could help fake news mitigators discern which messages are likely to be the most damaging if allowed to spread unchallenged.

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"Your educational level or political beliefs, among other things, can play a role in whether you are likely to trust one misinformation message or not and those factors can be learned by the machine learning system," Tran said. "For example, the system can suggest, according to the features of a message and your personality and background and so on, that it's 70% likely that you'll become a victim to that specific misinformation message."

While other studies have been conducted about using blockchain -- a type of shared database technology -- as a tool to fight fake news, Tran's research also expands on previous findings by exploring user acceptability of such systems more closely.

Tran proposed surveying 1,000 people from among two groups: fake news mitigators (government organizations, news outlets and social network administrators) and content users who could be exposed to fake news messages. The survey would lay out three existing blockchain systems and gauge the participants' willingness to use those systems in different scenarios.

Traceability is one of the nice features of blockchain, Tran said, because it can identify and classify sources of misinformation to help with recognizing the patterns.

"The research model I've built out allows us to test different theories and then prove which is the best way for us to convince people to use something from blockchain to combat misinformation," Tran said.

Tran recently presented his research at a conference hosted by SPIE, the international non-profit dedicated to advancing light-based research and technologies. One paper focused on the machine learning-based framework and another paper dealt with the use of blockchain.

Picturing where wildlands and people meet at a global scale

 Researchers led by a team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have created the first tool to map and visualize the areas where human settlements and nature meet on a global scale. The tool, which was part of a study recently published in Nature, could improve responses to environmental conflicts like wildfires, the spread of zoonotic diseases and loss of ecosystem biodiversity.

These areas where people and wildlands meet are called the wildland-urban interface, or WUI for short. More technically, a WUI (pronounced "woo-ee") describes anywhere that has at least one house per 40 acres and is also 50% covered by wildland vegetation such as trees, shrubland, grassland, herbaceous wetland, mangroves, moss and lichen.

Franz Schug, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at UW-Madison, explains that the areas were initially used by the U.S. Forest Service to assist with wildfire management in the Western United States.

Areas defined as WUI cover only about 4.7% of land on Earth, but about half of the human population lives within them. Many people enjoy living in these places because they like to be near the amenities of nature, explains Volker Radeloff, a professor of forest and wildlife ecology at UW-Madison.

"It reflects an affinity of people to nature, which is a good thing. If people said in general, 'No, we rather not be anywhere near a forest,' I'd be more worried with that," Radeloff says.

But these areas are also hot spots for environmental conflicts like wildfires, the spread of diseases from animals, habitat fragmentation and loss of biodiversity. While climate change is projected to increase the potential environmental conflict in the WUI, population growth increases the frequency in which humans and wildlands come into contact in many places. Knowing where both is likely to happen globally is important for planning for the future.

Yet, the WUI has only been prominently described in the United States and a few other developed countries. Schug saw a gap in the research. He set out to investigate WUIs' worldwide distribution, though mapping the high-resolution, global view required him to wrangle and make sense of a lot of information.

"I think the greatest challenge is just the amount of data that went into this," he says. "We have two servers in the basement [of the lab building] that were reactivated for that purpose. I think the whole thing covers several terabytes of data processing."

After setting up the computer program, it took three months to run through all the data, flagging the regions that qualify as a WUI. The land cover and building data they fed the computer was sourced from publicly available databases and stored on large servers.

Schug was able to record previously undocumented WUI in eastern Asia, East Africa and parts of South America.

Unsurprisingly, WUI around the world don't all look the same or have the same kinds of ecosystems. If the goal is to be able to inform better management practices, Schug realized he would need to provide more context on what the kinds landscapes made up these WUIs. After all, managing rain forests is very different from managing grasslands.

"Especially in these biomes, where other studies predict that most likely climate change will have an impact on fire severity and fire frequencies, where a lot of people live, they're definitely areas that will be a future interest," Schug says.

The WUI is already being leveraged in countries like Poland, Argentina and Portugal, but Radeloff and Schug see this global view as a tool that can help land managers around the world know where they need to keep an eye on in the future.

As the climate changes, some of these biomes will see more wildfires, more people and animals coming into contact with each other for the first time and more opportunities for the spread of disease and ecosystem disruption.

Schug hopes this work will inspire further regionalized research around the WUIs they've documented, empowering local land managers to better prepare for change.

Children's IQs not diminished by concussion, study suggests

 The angst parents feel when their children sustain injuries is surely one of the universal conditions of parenthood. That anxiety is heightened greatly when those injuries involve concussions. But a new study led out of the University of Calgary, published today in the medical journal Pediatrics, may set worried parental minds slightly at ease.

The findings -- taken from emergency room visits in children's hospitals in Canada and the United States -- show that IQ and intelligence is not affected in a clinically meaningful way by pediatric concussions.

The study compares 566 children diagnosed with concussion to 300 with orthopedic injuries. The children range in age from eight to 16 and they were recruited from two cohort studies. The Canadian cohort encompasses data collected from five children's hospital emergency rooms, including Alberta Children's Hospital in Calgary, along with those in Vancouver, Edmonton, Ottawa, and Montreal (CHU Sainte-Justine). In the Canadian hospitals, patients completed IQ tests three months postinjury.

The U.S. cohort was conducted at two children's hospitals in Ohio, wherein patients completed IQ tests three to 18 days, postinjury.

"Obviously there's been a lot of concern about the effects of concussion on children, and one of the biggest questions has been whether or not it affects a child's overall intellectual functioning," says Dr. Keith Yeates, PhD, a professor in UCalgary's Department of Psychology and senior author of the Pediatrics paper. Yeates is a renowned expert on the outcomes of childhood brain disorders, including concussion and traumatic brain injuries.

"The data on this has been mixed and opinions have varied within the medical community," says Yeates. "It's hard to collect big enough samples to confirm a negative finding. The absence of a difference in IQ after concussion is harder to prove than the presence of a difference."

Combining the Canadian and U.S. cohorts gave the Pediatrics study an abundant sample and it allowed Yeates and his co-authors -- from universities in Edmonton, Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, Atlanta, Utah, and Ohio, along with Calgary's Mount Royal University -- to test patients with a wide range of demographics and clinical characteristics.

"We looked at socioeconomic status, patient sex, severity of injuries, concussion history, and whether there was a loss of consciousness at the time of injury," says Yeates. "None of these factors made a difference. Across the board, concussion was not associated with lower IQ."

The children with concussion were compared to children with orthopedic injuries other than concussion to control for other factors that that might affect IQ, such as demographic background and the experience of trauma and pain. This allowed the researchers to determine whether the children's IQs were different than what would be expected minus the concussion.

The findings of the study are important to share with parents, says Dr. Ashley Ware, PhD, a professor at Georgia State University and lead author of the paper. While the Pediatrics research was underway, Ware was a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at UCalgary, where Yeates was her supervisor.

"Understandably, there's been a lot of fear among parents when dealing with their children's concussions," Ware says. "These new findings provide really good news, and we need to get the message to parents."

Dr. Stephen Freedman, PhD, co-author of the paper, a professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine at the Cumming School of Medicine, agrees. "It's something doctors can tell children who have sustained a concussion, and their parents, to help reduce their fears and concerns," says Freedman. "It is certainly reassuring to know that concussions do not lead to alterations in IQ or intelligence."

Another strength of the Pediatrics research is that incorporates the two cohort studies, one testing patients within days of their concussions and the other after three months.

"That makes our claim even stronger," says Ware. "We can demonstrate that even in those first days and weeks after concussion, when children do show symptoms such as a pain and slow processing speed, there's no hit to their IQs. Then it's the same story three months out, when most children have recovered from their concussion symptoms. Thanks to this study we can say that, consistently, we would not expect IQ to be diminished from when children are symptomatic to when they've recovered."

She adds: "It's a nice 'rest easy' message for the parents."

Climate science is catching up to climate change with predictions that could improve proactive response

 In Africa, climate change impacts are experienced as extreme events like drought and floods. Through the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (which leverages expertise from USG science agencies, universities, and the private sector) and the IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Center, it has been possible to predict and monitor these climatic events, providing early warning of their impacts on agriculture to support humanitarian and resilience programming in the most food insecure countries of the world.

Science is beginning to catch up with and even get ahead of climate change. In a commentary for the journal Earth's Future, UC Santa Barbara climate scientist Chris Funk and co-authors assert that predicting the droughts that cause severe food insecurity in the Eastern Horn of Africa (Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia) is now possible, with months-long lead times that allow for measures to be taken that can help millions of the region's farmers and pastoralists prepare for and adapt to the lean seasons.

"We've gotten very good at making these predictions," said Funk, who directs UCSB's Climate Hazards Center, a multidisciplinary alliance of scientists who work to predict droughts and food shortages in vulnerable areas.

In the summer of 2020, the CHC predicted that climate change, interacting with naturally occurring La Niña events, would bring devastating sequential drought to the Eastern Horn of Africa. The region normally has two wet seasons a year -- spring and fall. An unprecedented five rainy seasons in a row failed. Eight months before each of those failures, the CHC anticipated droughts. Fortunately, agencies and other collaborators paid heed to those early warnings and were able to take effective actions, Funk said. Within the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the forecasts helped motivate hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance for millions of starving people.

These efforts were a far cry from similar predictions of sequential droughts that the researchers, collaborating with the USAID-supported Famine Early Warning Systems Network, made for the same region ten years earlier. Predictions that went largely unheeded. "More than 250,000 Somalis died," Funk said. "It was just really horrible."

At the time, he said, the available forecasts weren't able to predict rainfall deficits in this region. While the models said East Africa would become wetter, observations showed substantial declines in the spring wet season. And to be fair, he added, the group's long-range weather prediction capabilities were still in their infancy. "We made an accurate forecast, but we didn't understand very well what was going on scientifically," Funk said. "Now, following our success in 2016/17, and extensive outreach efforts, the humanitarian relief community appreciates the value of our early warning systems."

In the intervening 10 years, the researchers have worked to discern and understand the broad, often distant mechanisms that drive drought in the Eastern Horn of Africa and create accurate, tailored forecasts for the region. They built on research showing that increased rainfall around Indonesia, caused by anthropogenic increases in sea surface temperatures, resulted in less moisture flowing on to the East African coast during the rainy months. These changes in moisture flows drive back-to-back droughts. But as climate change increases western Pacific sea surface temperatures, it becomes more and more possible to predict devastating water shortages.

"We've published about 15 scientific papers on this topic," Funk said, "and we've forecasted dry seasons in 2016-2017, which helped prevent a famine that year." As he discusses in his book "Drought, Flood, Fire (Cambridge University Press, 2021)," "climate change amplifies natural sea surface temperature variations, which opens the door to better forecasts."

In the new commentary and a longer paper currently at preprint stage, also coming out in Earth's Future, the co-authors highlight, respectively, the opportunities associated with these long range outlooks, and the physical mechanisms explaining the predictability.

"To reduce the impacts of climate extremes, we need to look for opportunities," said CHC Specialist and Operations Analyst Laura Harrison. "We need to pay attention to not just how climate is changing, but how these changes can support more effective predictions for droughts and for advantageous cropping conditions. As a community, we also need to foster communication about successful resilience strategies."

"Flooding still happens, drought still happens, people still get hurt, but we can try to reduce the harm."

With climate models that can predict extreme ocean states at eight-month lead times, and weather forecasts that can make projections at two weeks and at 45 days, CHC scientists and researchers now can provide actionable information to collaborators on the ground to help local farmers anticipate and plan for dry conditions.

"We're working with this group called Plant Village, who is providing agricultural advisories to millions of Kenyans, and helping them take actions that can help make their crops more drought-resistant," Funk said.

This proactivity is something Funk and collaborators hope will become a bigger part of climate change strategy for the Eastern Horn of Africa, as their models predict more of these drought-forming conditions in the region's future. A better local understanding of the mechanisms that result in droughts, and investments in early warning systems and adaptation measures, may initially be costly, they said, "but are relatively inexpensive when compared to post-impact, response-based alternatives such as humanitarian assistance and/or funding safety-net programs."

Education and participation can build trust and ultimately increase resilience. The CHC is building on what they learned in East Africa, and using it to feed partnerships in other parts of the world. In southern Africa, for example, they are collaborating with the Zimbabwe Meteorological Services Department and the Knowledge Impact Network to support the development of actionable climate services.

"Understanding that climate change makes extremes more frequent is really empowering because now we can try to anticipate those bad effects," Funk said. "Flooding still happens, drought still happens, people still get hurt, but we can try to reduce the harm."

Why Italy? By Tracy Beanz

A diff article.Excellent analysis
Please read we all are or were worried why Italy is going down with the Virus. An in-depth article. Please take time and read.


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Why Italy?
By Tracy Beanz - March 20, 2020

Mayor of Florence Encouraged Italians to ‘Hug a Chinese’ Before Coronavirus Pandemic Hit

Italy has been ravaged by the Wuhan Coronavirus, but the reasons why are linked more closely to globalism than the age of the infected.

Hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants now live both legally and illegally in Italy, with 300K legally registered and many more illegal.
Italy recently entered into a new economic partnership with China called “One belt, One road”
China has revitalized northern Italian ports in order to transport goods more efficiently to the rest of Europe
The mayor of Florence initiated a social media campaign called “Hug a Chinese” using Chinese produced video as an engine to dispel the “racism” against the Chinese in Italy
Thirty years ago, Italy saw the beginnings of what would become a serious issue with illegal immigration. What was surprising, was that the immigrants couldn’t just walk over a border to enter the country, they had to flock from China. It began with Italians hiring the Chinese off the books at cheap wages to work making garments in towns and villages renowned for their craftmanship, and morphed into Italians seeing the Chinese learn how to do it faster and cheaper; often times watching as their family owned businesses were shuttered because they were outbid. The Chinese took over the Italian craft and made it their own. What didn’t change was the coveted “Made in Italy” label. The NY Times began documenting the trend in 2010 writing:

Over the years, Italy learned the difficult lesson that it could no longer compete with China on price. And so, its business class dreamed, Italy would sell quality, not quantity. For centuries, this walled medieval city just outside of Florence has produced some of the world’s finest fabrics, becoming a powerhouse for “Made in Italy” chic.

And then, China came here.

Chinese laborers, first a few immigrants, then tens of thousands, began settling in Prato in the late 1980s. They transformed the textile hub into a low-end garment manufacturing capital, enriching many, stoking resentment and prompting recent crackdowns that in turn have brought cries of bigotry and hypocrisy.

The city is now home to the largest concentration of Chinese in Europe; some legal, many more not. Here in the heart of Tuscany, Chinese laborers work round the clock in some 3,200 businesses making low-end clothes, shoes and accessories, often with materials imported from China, for sale at midprice and low-end retailers worldwide.

The trend continued as whole villages in Italy became Chinese villages, with the Chinese displacing the Italians who lived there, creating their own neighborhoods, and pushing out decades of Italian family owned business. They weren’t known for following the rules. It caused much local consternation; the Italians were forced to pay their taxes and follow the employment guidelines, while the Chinese seemed to have built flourishing enterprises by skirting the rules, treating their people poorly, and engaging in rich human smuggling operations, to boot. There was little accountability for the Chinese, and much for the native Italians.

Outside of the typical problems one would see with such an influx of immigrants from a far-off land, were also other, more scandalous ones.

In 2017, the Bank of China agreed to pay a 600,000 euro fine to settle a money laundering case involving its Milan branch, court documents showed. The Florence court hearing the case gave four employees of the Milan branch of China’s fourth biggest bank a suspended two-year prison sentence for failing to report illicit money transfers. Florence prosecutors leading the so-called “River of Money” investigation alleged that more than 4.5 billion euros ($4.78 billion) was smuggled to China from Italy between 2006 and 2010 by Chinese people living mainly in Florence and nearby Prato. About half of the money was sent via BOC, the prosecutors said. The court also ordered BOC to pay back 980,000 euros which it said it had earned through the illegal operations. According to the prosecutors, the proceeds sent to China came from a series of illegal activities, including counterfeiting, embezzlement, exploitation of illegal labour and tax evasion. Bank of China said in a statement it had not committed any crime and was not admitting guilt by agreeing to pay the fine, which was a way of closing the case and saving time.

The wheel of corruption kept spinning, and the Italian people became more and more angry. Sometimes, this led to violence. It also led to a nationwide sentiment that something needed to change, and the populist uprising we have been seeing across the globe also began to take a foothold in Italy.

From 2018:

At a time when Europe is filled with anti-immigrant rhetoric, political extremists have pointed to the demographic shifts in Prato as proof that Italy is under siege. In February, Patrizio La Pietra, a right-wing senator, told a Prato newspaper that the city needed to confront “Chinese economic illegality,” and that the underground economy had “brought the district to its knees, eliminated thousands of jobs, and exposed countless families to hunger.” Such assertions have been effective: in Italy’s recent national elections, Tuscany, which since the end of the Second World War had consistently supported leftist parties, gave twice as many votes to right-wing and populist parties as it did to those on the left. Giovanni Donzelli, a member of the quasi-Fascist Fratelli d’Italia party, who last month was elected a national representative, told me, “The Chinese have their own restaurants and their own banks—even their own police force. You damage the economy twice. Once, because you compete unfairly with the other businesses in the area, and the second time because the money doesn’t go back into the Tuscan economic fabric.”

In March of 2019, Italy entered into a new agreement with China, part of its “one belt, one road” initiative, a sweeping economic agreement with the country that saw the port of Triesta in northern Italy “revitalized” and managed by The PRC.

The project makes enormous infrastructure investments to move Chinese goods and resources. Italy became the first of the Group of 7 nations that once dominated the global economy to take part in China’s “One Belt One Road” throughout Asia, Africa and Europe.

The Trump administration, which tried and failed to stop the deal, focused in the days leading up to Mr. Xi’s visit on blocking any Italian use of 5G wireless networks developed by the Chinese electronics giant Huawei, which Washington warned could be used by Beijing to spy on communications networks.

Italy, which is saddled with crushing debt, hopes to lift its lagging economy by exporting goods to China and inviting more Chinese investment.

But opponents of the project in the Trump administration and in the European Union worry that Italy has turned itself into a Trojan Horse, allowing China’s economic — and potentially military and political — expansion to reach into the heart of Europe.

The detailed reporting on this slow takeover is expansive, and we could continue here for many paragraphs, but let us fast forward to early 2020. As China withheld information about the seriousness and spread of Wuhan corona-virus, many of these immigrants were returning- and arriving – from China. Once news of the virus became mainstream and China felt increasing backlash over the handling of the crisis, they turned to one of their major economic hubs for some help.

It wasn’t chance. It wasn’t age. It wasn’t overall health, and it wasn’t the good-hearted nature of the Italian people that caused the virus to ravage their nation. It was a leadership who are now under the thumb of the Chinese government.

On February 1, 2020, the mayor of Florence initiated something called “Hug a Chinese” day.
(Sorry I could not get the video downloaded)

This video was released on February 4, and was produced by the Chinese government. Under the guise of being “woke”, the Italian government prodded their citizens to erase the stigma surrounding the virus, and hug one of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese who had been living, recently returned, or recently arrived in Italy. Italy had become dependent on China, and their capital is a large percentage of the Italian economy. When “One Belt One Road” began early in 2019, the Italians made clear they were willing to partner with China in their quest for global dominance, and sadly it appears in their attempt to please the purse strings, they put a large percentage of their citizens in harms way.

This may also explain the enormous amount of aid and assistance flowing into Italy now by way of China. Far from being compassionate, the Chinese are likely looking to protect their investment.

So when folks ask, “Why Italy?” the reasons are clear. Along with an ageing population who may not be the healthiest, there is also a government now beholden to China, who acting at their behest, took extreme measures to the opposite of social distancing. For an in depth look at the cluster history inside Italy, please see here.

China’s global dominance has become clear even to the average observer in recent months, as Americans have become aware of the supply line dependence on China for even our most vital commodity; medicine. UncoverDC columnist Carol King detailed some of those issues in a piece that you can read here. We have even witnessed the legacy media seemingly hold water for the communist nation, choosing to parrot the claim of “racism” against China because our President has chosen to correctly name the virus what it is, the Chinese virus – rather than bow to the propaganda of a foreign nation hell bent on our destruction.

If one positive thing can come of the Wuhan corona-virus, maybe it will be that the world will finally open its eyes to just how sinister China has been over the past few decades, slithering in to our households, seemingly unbeknownst to us, and co-opting even our most basic necessities. Time will tell, but one thing is clear- it appears that “Why Italy?” is more nefarious than anyone could have initially thought.

Tracy Beanz is the Founder and Editor in Chief at UncoverDC

Hurricane resilience in the bahamas: Ecosystem

As new hurricanes gain strength in the Atlantic, residents of the Bahamas have barely begun recovering from destroyed villages and flooded streets brought by Hurricane Dorian's battering this month. The losses were grim validation of a new Stanford-led study on coastal risk throughout the country.

The study predicts a tripling of storm-related damages if protective ecosystems such as coral reefs and mangrove forests are degraded or lost. The findings, published in Frontiers in Marine Science, are being used by the Bahamian government, development banks and local communities to pinpoint key areas where investment in natural ecosystems could support a more storm-resilient future.

"Climate change is forcing coastal nations to reckon with a new reality of disaster management and rethink the business-as-usual development model in order to survive," said Jessica Silver, ecosystem services analyst at Stanford's Natural Capital Project and lead author on the study. "In the Bahamas, the islands hardest hit by Hurricane Dorian -- Grand Bahama and Abaco -- are those our research identified as the most at risk to coastal hazards in the whole country. Understanding and mapping at-risk areas and their natural assets is a first step in changing development norms."

The integrated approach scientists used in this study could also help other coastal communities plan where to invest in natural habitats to reduce storm damage. A combination of open-source modeling software and cutting-edge environmental analyses with local information can be used to identify where and how people in coastal communities are at greatest risk to climate disasters.

Natural solutions

Silver and other researchers at the Natural Capital Project have been working in the Bahamas for five years alongside government partners, Bahamian scientists, The Nature Conservancy and the Inter-American Development Bank. Together, they have modeled coastal hazards and the role nature plays in reducing risk in the country.

"We need solutions that leverage powerful allies to protect coastal communities now and in the future," Silver said. "In the Bahamas, these allies include the hundreds of kilometers of coastal forests, mangroves, barrier and fringing reef, and seagrasses that envelop the archipelago."

The work is part of a growing body of research showing that natural defenses can, in many places, represent more climate-resilient alternatives to traditional built shoreline protection -- like seawalls and jetties -- which is expensive to build and maintain.

For example, coral reefs weaken storm surges by taking the energy out of waves. The waves that do make it past the reefs are buffered by mangrove forests and seagrass beds, which also secure sand and sediment to prevent shoreline erosion. By the time a storm reaches homes and streets, the island's environmental barricades have gradually lessened its strength. These natural defenses are also a local source of sustenance and economic security. Healthy coastal habitats support abundant fisheries -- a resource especially important in the aftermath of a storm, when food supplies are low. Thriving marine areas help communities regain their financial footing through key industries like tourism and commercial fishing.

Actionable advice

Local decision-makers often lack basic information about where and how to invest in critical risk-reducing ecosystems. So, the research team combined information on storm waves and sea-level rise with maps of coastal habitats and census data to close this information gap. The researchers assessed the risk reduction provided by coral reefs, mangroves and seagrass along the entire coast of the Bahamas using open-source software developed by the Natural Capital Project. They looked at current and projected sea-level rise scenarios to identify the most vulnerable groups of people and where they live.

"Our results show that the population most exposed to coastal hazards would more than double with future sea-level rise and more than triple if ecosystems were lost or degraded," said Katie Arkema, co-author and lead scientist at the Natural Capital Project. "We see that on populated islands like Grand Bahama and Abaco, natural habitats provide protection to disproportionately large numbers of people compared to the rest of the country. Without them, the destruction from Dorian could have been even worse."

The study equips the Bahamian government and supporting development banks with clear, actionable information to guide future investments in natural ecosystems. It shows where nature is providing the greatest benefit to people and can help decision-makers understand where and how targeted conservation and restoration projects could support coastal resilience. In the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian's destruction, the Stanford team has been in close communication with their Bahamian co-authors, who are already using these results to call for strategic investments in nature.

"We hope, in some small way, that the results of this study will help our friends and colleagues build a more resilient future for the Bahamas," Silver said. "And, we hope that other countries will look to the Bahamas as a beacon of progress and fortitude in the face of climate adversity."

Kids in poor, urban schools learn just as much as others

Schools serving disadvantaged and minority children teach as much to their students as those serving more advantaged kids, according to a new nationwide study.

The results may seem surprising, given that student test scores are normally higher in suburban and wealthier school districts than they are in urban districts serving mostly disadvantaged and minority children.

But those test scores speak more to what happens outside the classroom than how schools themselves are performing, said Douglas Downey, lead author of the new study and professor of sociology at The Ohio State University.

"We found that if you look at how much students are learning during the school year, the difference between schools serving mostly advantaged students and those serving mostly disadvantaged students is essentially zero," Downey said.

"Test scores at one point in time are not a fair way to evaluate the impact of schools."

Downey conducted the study with David Quinn of the University of Southern California and Melissa Alcaraz, a doctoral student in sociology at Ohio State. Their study was published online recently in the journal Sociology of Education and will appear in a future print edition.

Many school districts have moved away from evaluating schools by test scores, instead using a "growth" or "value-added" measure to see how much students learn over a calendar year.

While these growth models are considered by the researchers to be a big improvement over using test scores at one point in time, they still don't account for the summers, during which kids from advantaged areas don't backtrack in their learning the way children from disadvantaged areas often do.

This "summer loss" for disadvantaged students isn't surprising, given the difficulties they face with issues like family instability and food insecurity, Downey said.

"What is remarkable is not what happens in summer, but what happens when these disadvantaged students go back to school: The learning gap essentially disappears. They tend to learn at the same rate as those from the wealthier, suburban schools," he said.

"That is shocking to a lot of people who just assume that schools in disadvantaged areas are not as good."

Downey and his colleagues used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study -- Kindergarten Cohort 2010-2011, which involved more than 17,000 students in 230 schools around the country. This study used a subsample of about 3,000 of the children who participated.

Children took reading tests at the beginning and end of kindergarten and near completion of their first and second grades.

That allowed the researchers to calculate how much children learned during three school periods and compare that to what happened during the summers.

This approach is similar to how new drugs are sometimes tested in medical research, Downey explained. In drug trials, researchers compare how patients fare while they are taking a drug to when they are not.

"In our case, we think of schools as the treatment and the summers as the control period when the students aren't receiving treatment," he said.

The results showed that children in schools serving disadvantaged students, on average, saw their reading scores rise about as much during the school year as did those in more advantaged schools.

That doesn't mean all schools were equally good, Downey said. But the findings showed that the "good" schools weren't all concentrated in the wealthier areas and the "bad" schools in the poor areas.

Downey said there are limitations to this study, most importantly that the data doesn't allow researchers to see what happens to students in later grades.

But this isn't the first time Downey and his colleagues have found that schools in advantaged and disadvantaged areas produce similar learning. A 2008 study, also published in the Sociology of Education, found similar results, but with less comprehensive data than this new research.

Downey said he has been somewhat surprised that the 2008 study and this new research hasn't engaged education researchers more.

"The field has not responded as energetically as I expected. I think our findings undermine a lot of social science assumptions about what role schools play in promoting disadvantage," he said.

Instead of being "engines of inequality" -- as some have argued -- this new research suggests schools are neutral or even slightly compensate for inequality elsewhere.

Disadvantaged kids start with poorer home environments and neighborhoods and begin school behind students who come from wealthier backgrounds, Downey said.

"But when they go to school they stop losing ground. That doesn't agree with the traditional story about how schools supposedly add to inequality," he said.

"We are probably better off putting more energy toward addressing the larger social inequalities that are producing these large gaps in learning before kids even enter school."

Downey emphasized that the results don't mean that school districts don't need to invest in disadvantaged schools.

"As it stands, schools mostly prevent inequality from increasing while children are in school," he said.

"With more investments, it may be possible to create schools that play a more active role in reducing inequality."