Science

As nature connection researchers, we’re aware of the innumerable benefits of spending time outside in nature. We’re also aware that, like so many other interactions, immersing oneself in nature is an experience that is now available virtually. In fact, virtual reality (VR) companies now promote VR nature as tools for corporate wellness.

Some universities have also added VR to staff or student services. When we learned that our staff association at University of Waterloo was offering a new wellness initiative linked to nature, our excitement faded upon realizing the initiative wasn’t about real nature—such as encouraging staff members to take regular breaks to sit by the stream on campus, or to walk around nearby Columbia Lake—but VR nature.

Headsets would be available for use in libraries pre-loaded with the Nature Treks VR app, which lets users explore natural settings like beaches, greenery and oceans, choosing the time of day and the weather.

Waterloo is not the first institution to turn to such tools to support well-being. The McGill Student Wellness Hub similarly offers VR sessions with “Mindful Escapes,” an app in which users can “embark on virtual journeys to serene landscapes, calming forests, ocean depths or mountain adventures.”

VR nature appears to be a wellness trend.

Technological nature

We’re skeptical that VR nature will enable the diverse benefits that real nature offers. What might be the consequences of such “technological nature”—nature mediated and augmented by a technological interface?

Peter H. Kahn of the University of Washington, who has done foundational work in this field, concludes from a multitude of studies that “in terms of human well-being, technological nature is better than no nature, but not as good as actual nature.”

Turning to technology such as VR headsets for nature immersion contributes to what one expert in environmental psychology, Susan Clayton, calls a transformation of experience. First, VR allows the user to control and therefore optimize and homogenize their nature experience, perhaps selecting only glorious weather and the most sensational or pristine wilderness. Technologically optimized depictions of nature “may lead people to be less interested in, or satisfied by, messy, unexciting, local ecosystems.”

Might VR headsets diminish users’ appreciation of immersive and restorative nature experiences that can be found in their local greenspace?

Sensory immersion

Second, VR headsets fail to provide the sensory immersion and embodiment of actual nature. Sensory inputs such as smell, sound, touch and sight are all intertwined in the complex relationship between nature immersion and well-being, but VR headsets remove the sensuality of nature experiences.

For example, stimulating one’s sense of touch can lead to increased psychological restoration and numerous tree species produce chemical compounds that have psychological and physiological benefits. The rapidly growing area of research on the microbiome-brain connection stresses the importance of encountering beneficial bacteria through contact with soil, something that a VR headset cannot replicate.

And finally, a recurrent issue with VR headset use is the onset of “cybersickness,” nausea that appears to be exacerbated by walking or movement. This may make users of VR headsets wary of moving while wearing the headset, which is another disadvantage compared to being outside free of one.

In addition to losing these facets of experience in nature, another factor we wonder about is the evidence base for purchasing these devices. The study cited in the University of Waterloo announcement, which specifically evaluates the efficacy of Nature Treks VR for wellness, lacked a control group and had a small sample size. The study authors state that due to their lack of a control group, “a causal relationship between the VR experience and participants’ mood could not be established.”

More research on the contrast between VR and real nature for well-being must be undertaken to rigorously compare the two.

Access and equity issues

VR nature experiences may appeal to those who did not grow up with opportunities to have immersive experiences in nature and thus don’t feel entirely comfortable there. They may also appeal to those who have accessibility limitations.

However, defaulting to VR could contribute to the existing inequity in access to the benefits of real nature immersion. It may make it easier to turn to technological nature experiences rather than developing accessible nature programming.

The disparities in benefits between the virtual and real nature experiences raise a big question: why are wellness initiatives investing in these new tech tools rather than hands-on experiences that prioritize sensory immersion?

Funding opportunities often seem to favor the new “techno-fix” that offers a streamlined and simple solution. But the introduction of such tools necessitates reflection on the values of workplace wellness. Is the goal to attain wellness as efficiently as possible, instead of aspiring to the most effective modalities?

Rather than donning headsets, we encourage people to engage in simple outdoor activities to cultivate a deeper connection with nature. There’s a lot to be said for making use of whatever green space you have access to: go outside, slow down and, if possible, smell the proverbial roses.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Do the United States and China truly shape the global economic agenda? A new study investigating the relationship between global powers and the stock market has revealed they have more economic influence than previously thought.

The study by Charles Darwin University (CDU) and Griffith University revealed how rich and powerful nations influence the policies of less powerful economies by exploring the correlation between the Global Power Index (GPI) and relative stock market performance and integration.

This study is the first of its kind to establish such a relationship. The research is published in the Global Finance Journal.

The authors examined economic and stock market data over 25 years for 11 nations: Australia, Canada, China, Germany, France, India, Italy, Korea, Mexico, the United Kingdom and the United States.

These regions represent 58.05% of the gross domestic product of global markets and 46.17% of the global population.

Lead author and CDU Associate Professor of Accounting and Finance Rakesh Gupta said the results showed the Australia and United States stock market changes with respect to other markets were more stable, whereas India’s and China’s stock market changes with respect to other markets were more volatile.

“The findings of the study are significant for investors who seek to benefit from investing in international investments,” Dr. Gupta said.

“A portfolio manager from a market with strong global power who seeks international diversification benefits is less likely to benefit from diversifying into markets that have stronger and increasing global power. They will need to invest in markets with weaker and declining global power.”

The study also found education and environmental awareness are likely to impact the stock market.

“Findings suggest that more environmentally aware investors cause stock markets to deviate from each other,” Dr. Gupta said.

“Similarly, a higher level of education impacts negatively on the convergence of the stock markets. This can also be interpreted as environmentally aware investors and more educated investors looking at domestic markets more favorably and, as such, cause investors to invest locally.”

Dr. Gupta said based on the study’s findings, Australia should continue aligning itself economically with major powers such as the United States.

“When we consider Australia, it is developed but not powerful from a global perspective and as such it may not have an impact on global markets,” Dr. Gupta said.

“Whereas China, which is a developing economy but powerful, may influence more. This has implications for Australian investors who seek to invest in overseas markets. To gain benefits of diversification, investors need to consider investments in markets that have lesser global power.

“From an economic perspective, Australia’s alignment with strong global power, such as the U.S. may be implicitly a good and strategic decision in terms of influencing global economic policy. Australia may continue to benefit from its alignment with China as well because of its rising global power.”

Archaeologists have analyzed textiles from the ancient city of Huacas de Moche, Peru, showing how the population’s cultural traditions survived in the face of external influence.

After the Inca, the Moche culture is one of the best-known archaeological cultures of the Andes. It is famed for its colorful temple complexes, the biggest of which, Huacas del Sol in Huacas de Moche, one of the largest known Moche sites, may have been the largest structure in the New World at its peak (c. AD 650–900).

Despite this, relatively little is known about what caused the end of the Moche culture. It has often been proposed that it was erased through the expansion of the powerful Wari Empire.

“The people who built Huacas de Moche, now known as the Moche (a.k.a. the Mochicas), are only known to us through archaeology as they had no writing system,” says lead author Dr. Jeffrey Quilter from Harvard University’s Peabody Museum.

“The date range for when the Moche culture existed has been debated for many decades.”

To attempt to determine the end date for the Moche culture, a team of researchers from several North and South American institutions, including the National University of Trujillo, analyzed and dated material culture from Huacas de Moche, with a particular focus on textiles. The work is published in the journal Antiquity.

“Our research involved our wrestling with the thorny and complicated issue of how ancient people identified themselves,” states Dr. Quilter. “In brief, when did the Moche stop being Moche at the site of Huacas de Moche?”

By analyzing production techniques and styles of the textiles, they determined that the majority were made using Moche techniques, but often contained design influences from other cultures, most notably the expansive Wari Empire from the southern highlands of Peru.

Radiocarbon dating of these textiles found that they date well into the tenth century AD, considerably later than previous estimations. This suggests that a sense of Moche identity may have persisted longer than previously thought. Importantly, these findings highlight the resilience of the Moche culture while also adapting to foreign influences.

Whether the people who both retained old ways and adapted to new ones thought of themselves as Moche, however, cannot be determined with certainty through archaeology.

This calls into question the way we view archaeological cultures. The Moche culture may not have ‘ended’ in a definitive sense, wiped out by the expansion of a ‘stronger’ neighbor, neither by a climate phenomenon. Instead, the culture transformed over time as a result of interaction with different peoples.

“Our research indicates that longstanding Moche material cultural practices and styles continued to be valued at Huacas de Moche, long after the presumed end of the archaeological culture,” says Dr. Carlos Rengifo from the National University of Trujillo.

“Even as the world about them changed, some sense of Moche identity appears to have been maintained.”

It also highlights the difficulties of examining past cultural identity without written evidence.

“Until recently, it is likely that no one referred [to] themselves as Moche,” concludes Dr. Quilter.

“Nevertheless, the archaeological culture that we call Moche clearly represents a distinct socio-cultural phenomenon and identity for those people who participated in it. Just as determining the cultural identity of any prehistoric community is fraught with difficulties, so too is identifying how they came to take on a new one.”

Following Barack Obama’s reelection as U.S. president in 2012, the mental health of college-educated Black men improved significantly, while those who didn’t attend college reported worse mental health, according to new research from Rice University sociologists.

“Four More Years! Or So What? The Mental Health Significance of Barack Obama’s 2012 Presidential Re-Election among Black Adults” is published in the Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race.

Lead researcher Tony Brown, distinguished professor of sociology at Rice, said he and his co-authors were interested in following up their study examining the health implications of Obama’s election in 2008—which showed positive mental health effects for Black males—and seeing what, if anything, changed.

Brown and his co-authors examined black adults’ mental health for 30 days prior to and 30 days following the 2012 election. Data for the study came from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, a nationally representative survey of 400,000 U.S. adults evaluating different health aspects.

Similar to their study results following Obama’s 2008 election, the researchers found the 2012 reelection resulted in a significant mental health shift for Black men. However, this time around, not all men saw health benefits.

While college-educated Black men experienced nearly three fewer poor mental health days per month following Obama’s reelection, Black men with no college education experienced more than one extra poor mental health day per month.

“Based on our analysis, it appears that Black men with lower levels of education were really disappointed in Obama or at least didn’t feel that he lived up to the hype or followed through on certain promises, like better jobs, health care access and more,” Brown said.

“We also suspect he alienated some Black men—and possibly many Black women—by downplaying the inequality and outright racism faced by these individuals. And this is why we think we’re seeing worse mental health among these individuals.”

Rice Ph.D. student Quintin Gorman Jr., co-lead author of the study, said “relative deprivation theory” may explain the shift in mental health benefits from 2008 to 2012. This sociological theory describes a situation in which individuals sense that when they compare themselves to others, they are deprived of certain resources, and this sense of deprivation can translate into negative health outcomes.

Brown said this chasm between more and less educated Black men was highlighted by Obama himself many times during his presidency. One notable example was a graduation speech he gave at Morehouse College, a historically Black college in Atlanta.

“In this specific situation, he talked about these men who had just graduated in super glowing terms and even encouraged them to ‘pull their pants up’ and not behave like the low-income Black men,” Brown said.

“The rhetoric he used suggested that if you were college educated, then you were deserving of respect, and we believe this type of communication during Obama’s presidency is just one example that could explain why less educated Black men felt the way they do and why we saw their mental health worsen.”

As for Black women, like in 2008, they did not experience any mental health benefits from Obama’s reelection. While Brown could not pinpoint a specific reason, he says there are a few possible explanations.

“We theorize that Black women could have been concerned over death threats toward Obama, worrying about him in the same way they would worry about their own husbands, fathers or sons,” Brown said.

“They might also have been concerned over how President Obama would deal with discrimination against Black men versus Black women or doubt whether any racial progress would happen, especially since so little changed after 2008.”

Brown also said Black women may have worried that Obama’s reelection would result in a racial backlash in years to come, resulting in the country moving back toward a racist “status quo.”

The researchers said they hope this study will encourage Black people to be more engaged politically, voting for candidates who will advocate for them and address inequality, broadly defined. They also hope health scholars will reimagine social determinants of health to include large-scale socio-political shifts like elections.

Archaeologists analyzed thirteenth century BC bronze and flint arrowheads from the Tollense Valley, north-east Germany, uncovering the earliest evidence for large-scale interregional conflict in Europe. The Tollense Valley in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania is well-known as the site of a large conflict dating to c. 1250 BC.

The quantity of human remains found (more than 150 individuals) suggests over 2,000 people were involved, an amount unprecedented for the Nordic Bronze Age. First proposed to be a battlefield in Antiquity in 2011, nowadays the site is often referred to as “Europe’s oldest known battlefield,” since no other conflict of this scale has been discovered that dates earlier.

However, very little is known about the people who fought and died at Tollense over 3,000 years ago. Who was involved in the battle, and where did they come from? To answer these questions, a team of researchers from several German institutions compared bronze and flint arrowheads found in the valley with over 4,000 contemporary examples from across Europe.

Their results are published in the journal Antiquity.

“The arrowheads are a kind of ‘smoking gun,'” says lead author of the research, Leif Inselmann, who collected more than 4,700 arrowheads from Central Europe for his M.A. thesis at Göttingen University. “Just like the murder weapon in a mystery, they give us a clue about the culprit, the fighters of the Tollense Valley battle and where they came from.”

The majority of the arrowheads are of types occasionally found in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, suggesting that most of the people who fought at Tollense were relatively local. However, other types such as arrowheads with straight or rhombic bases, with unilateral barbs or with a pointed tang instead of a socket are better known from a region to the south that encompasses modern Bavaria and Moravia.

These types of arrowheads have not been found in burials from the Tollense region, indicating that local people were not simply acquiring the arrowheads through trade with the south and using them in battle themselves.

This suggests that at least some of the people fighting at Tollense were not from the area, implying southern warriors, or perhaps even a southern army, were involved in the conflict.

At several contemporary sites in southern Germany, large amounts of bronze arrowheads were found as well, suggesting that the thirteenth century BC was a period of European prehistory that saw an overall increase in armed conflict. Importantly, this is also the earliest example of interregional conflict in Europe, implying this period corresponded with increased scale and professionalization of organized violence.

“The Tollense Valley conflict dates to a time of major changes,” concludes Inselmann, now at the Freie Universität Berlin. “This raises questions about the organization of such violent conflicts. Were the Bronze Age warriors organized as a tribal coalition, the retinue or mercenaries of a charismatic leader—a kind of ‘warlord,’ or even the army of an early kingdom?”

In 2019, historian Lukas Rieppel published a book about the history of dinosaur fossils and their excavation in the late 1800s to create museum displays.

But an entire facet of the story didn’t make it into the book, the Brown University associate professor of history said, because he couldn’t do it justice at the time. Rieppel wondered about the ways that Native people in North America thought about fossils before non-Native scientists showed up on fact-finding and excavation missions.

Rieppel has devoted the last two-plus years addressing precisely that question. He has been studying the history of the White River Badlands in South Dakota and Nebraska in partnership with Craig Howe, a citizen of the Oglala Sioux Tribe who grew up in the Pine Ridge Reservation and founded the Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies there.

“I wanted to focus on a specific place and a particular group of people,” said Rieppel, who joined the Brown faculty in 2013. “And I knew that it was important to collaborate with Native people who live in the area, so working with Craig has been a wonderful opportunity.”

Through a series of trips, Rieppel spent nearly a year at the Pine Ridge Reservation, which is one of the largest Native reservations in the U.S. In addition to working with Howe, his time there included getting to know the land by hiking with a knowledgeable guide in the White River Badlands and working with the Woksape Tipi Library and Archives at Oglala Lakota College in Kyle, South Dakota.

The extensive collaborations and research has culminated in a scientific commentary, “Why museums should repatriate fossils,” published in Nature; an interactive digital map tracing an 1874 expedition in the Black Hills led by George Armstrong Custer; and a series of columns in Pine Ridge’s weekly newspaper, the Lakota Times, which aim to make the research accessible to a wider audience.

Multiple Brown students have contributed to the project, including Audrey Wijono, a senior history concentrator who helped with the digital map creation this summer. Wijono and other students worked with archival materials, including journals, newspapers and firsthand accounts, to describe what happened on each day of Custer’s expedition.

“I appreciated how this experience underlined the importance of rereading colonial histories for Indigenous experiences, and the importance of making these histories publicly available,” Wijono said.

Howe, who has a Ph.D. in architecture and anthropology, said he has valued the opportunity to produce work that centers Lakotan history and culture within the broader context of 19th-century U.S. history.

“What our research center has been pushing back against for 20 years is anti-intellectualism dealing with American Indian thought and philosophy, and so we approach these narratives with critical intentionality,” Howe said. “Our academic training gives us a grounding and a way to talk about these things that can be supported with evidence.”

Uncovering untold stories from historic expeditions

For the Nature commentary, Howe and Rieppel researched two expeditions that took place during the summer of 1874—only six years after the Treaty of Fort Laramie was signed, wherein the United States formally recognized Lakotan sovereignty in a region about the size of Spain.

The first and more prominent expedition consisted of more than 1,000 heavily armed troops led by Custer and included scientists whose job was to document the area’s rich geological resources.

The second occurred later that year, when—according to the pair’s research—Yale University paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh dug up two tons of prehistoric fossils without permission from the Lakotan people and transported them to New Haven, Connecticut.

“When [Marsh] shipped the fossils to Connecticut, most of the Lakotan meanings and stories tied to them were stripped away,” Howe and Rieppel wrote in the article. “Perhaps most egregiously, Marsh’s specimens were subsequently used to support an erroneous, racist theory of evolutionary progress that was deployed to justify the imperial expansion of the United States.”

In the article, Rieppel and Howe urge natural history museums to research their ties to extractive colonial practices and invest in repairing their relationships with Native tribes.

“The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie—which, according to a 1980 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, remains in effect—explicitly sets aside the lands around the Black Hills for the ‘absolute and undisturbed use and occupation’ of Lakotan people,” Howe and Rieppel wrote. “Why should this language not cover the extraction of specimens?”

To broaden public access to their scholarship, Rieppel and Howe designed an interactive digital map of Custer’s expedition, which is rich with historical details and archival photos. Titled “In and Out of Place: Resource Extractions from Treaty Lands,” the map is part of an ongoing collaboration with Brown’s Center for Digital Scholarship.

Students like Wijono have worked on the project with the support of Brown’s Undergraduate Teaching and Research Awards program, which funds student and faculty collaborations.

“By mining the rich archive of primary source material for information about the region’s Native inhabitants, the project is turning the extractive goals of the expeditions back on themselves,” Rieppel said.

Another key component of Howe and Rieppel’s project is a series of weekly Lakota Times columns, which describe what Custer’s expedition reveals about Lakotan history and culture. The series was published in the Lakota Times from July to September 2024.

The final column focused on how Lakotan people responded to the expedition by trying to engage the United States using diplomacy—which contrasted starkly with the behavior of expedition soldiers, the researchers found.

“Lakotans knew what was going on in their treaty lands,” Howe and Rieppel wrote. “They did not like what they saw, but they still tried to honor their treaty. For that, they were met with deception and violence.”

Rieppel and Howe said they are committed to continuing their work. They are currently exploring the creation of a museum exhibit of extracted fossils within the treaty lands.

“I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who has taken time to share their knowledge and experience,” Rieppel said. “It’s important that the intellectual property created from these projects stay in the treaty lands, just like the fossils should go back to the treaty lands.”

When scientists make important discoveries, both big and small, they typically publish their findings in scientific journals for others to read. This sharing of knowledge helps to advance science: it can, in turn, lead to more important discoveries.

But published research papers can be retracted if there is an issue with their accuracy or integrity. And in recent years, the number of retractions has been rising sharply. For example, in 2023 more than 10,000 research papers were retracted globally. This marked a new record.

The huge number of retractions indicates a lot of government research funding is being wasted. More importantly, the publication of so much flawed research also misleads other researchers and undermines scientific integrity.

Fueling this troubling trend is a mentality known in academia as “publish or perish” which has existed for decades. The publication of research papers drives university rankings and career progression, yet the relentless pressure to publish has contributed to an increase in fraudulent data. Unless this changes, the entire research landscape may shift toward a less rigorous standard, hindering vital progress in fields such as medicine, technology and climate science.

A ‘publish or perish’ environment

Universities and research institutes commonly use the rate of publications as a key indicator of research productivity and reputation.

The Times Higher Education Index, which ranks these institutions, assigns 60% of its score to research, and publications are fundamental to this score.

Additionally, publications are closely tied to individual career advancement. They influence decisions on tenure, promotions and securing funding.

These factors create a “publish or perish” environment, a term first coined in 1942 by sociologist Logan Wilson.

A growing trend

Recent evidence indicates the constant pressure to generate data and publish papers may be affecting the quality of research and fueling retractions of research papers.

Retraction Watch is one of the largest databases to monitor scientific retractions. Launched in 2010, it reveals a growing trend in the number of publications being retracted.

In the past decade, there have been more than 39,000 retractions, and the annual number of retractions is growing by around 23% each year.

Nearly half the retractions were due to issues related to the authenticity of the data. For example, in August the United States Office of Research Integrity found that Richard Eckert, a senior biochemist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, faked data in 13 published papers. Four of these papers have been corrected, one has been retracted and the remainder are still awaiting action.

Plagiarism was the second most common reason research papers were retracted, accounting for 16% of retractions.

Fake peer review was another reason why research papers were retracted.

Typically, when a publication is submitted to a journal, it undergoes peer review by experts in the same field. These experts provide feedback to improve the quality of the work.

However, the use of fake peer reviewers has increased tenfold over the past decade. There has also been an eightfold rise in publications linked to so-called “paper mills,” which are businesses that provide fake papers for a fee.

In 2022, up to 2% of all publications were from paper mills.

Genuine mistakes in the scientific process accounted for only roughly 6% of all retractions in the last decade.

More pressure, more mistakes

One reason for the surge in retractions over the last decade may be that we are getting better at finding and detecting suspicious data.

Digital publishing has made it easier to detect potential fabrication, and more scientists are making a brave stand against these dubious practices. No doubt, the current number of retractions is an underestimate of a much larger pool.

But the intensification of the “publish or perish” culture within universities also plays a major role.

Nearly all academic staff are required to meet specific publication quotas for performance evaluations, while institutions themselves use publication output to boost their rankings. High publication counts and citations enhance a university’s position in global rankings, attracting more students and generating income from teaching.

The prevailing reward system in academia often prioritizes publication quantity over quality. When promotions, funding, and recognition are tied to the number of papers published, scientists may feel pressured to cut corners, rush experiments, or even fabricate data to meet these metrics.

Changing the model

Initiatives such as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment are pushing for change. This initiative advocates for evaluating research based on its quality and societal impact rather than journal-based metrics such as impact factors or citation counts.

A shift in journal policies to prioritize the sharing of all experimental data would enhance scientific integrity. It would ensure researchers could replicate experiments to verify others’ results.

Also, universities, research institutions and funding agencies need to improve their due diligence and hold those responsible for misconduct accountable.

Including a simple question such as, “Have you ever had or been involved in a retracted paper?” on grant applications or academic promotions would improve the integrity of research by deterring unethical behavior. Dishonest answers could be easily detected, thanks to the availability of online tools and databases such as Retraction Watch.

Over the past 20 years, scientific research has significantly improved our quality of life. Career scientists must shoulder the responsibility of ensuring researchers uphold the values of truth and integrity that are fundamental to our profession. Protecting the integrity of our work is foremost to our mission, and we must remain vigilant in safeguarding these principles.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Hydrogen gas, owing to its high energy density and carbon-free nature, is gaining much attention as the energy source for a green and sustainable future. Despite being the most abundant element in the universe, hydrogen is mostly found in a bound state as chemical compounds such as ammonia, metal hydrides, and other hydrogenated compounds.

Among all the hydrogen carriers, ammonia stands out as a promising candidate owing to its wide availability, high hydrogen content with hydrogen making up 17.6% of its mass, and ease of liquefaction as well as transportation.

A major drawback that hinders its exploitation as an on-demand green hydrogen source for practical applications is the need for extremely high temperatures (>773K) for its decomposition. Hydrogen production for fuel cells and internal combustion engine usage calls for high ammonia conversion rates at low temperatures.

To solve this problem, a new compact process that could operate at a lower temperature was presented by Professor Yasushi Sekine from Waseda University, with his team including Yukino Ofuchi and Sae Doi from Waseda University, and Kenta Mitarai from Yanmar Holdings. They demonstrated an experimental setup of a high rate of ammonia-to-hydrogen conversion at remarkably lower temperatures by applying an electric field in the presence of a highly active and readily producible Ru/CeO₂ catalyst.

This study was published in Chemical Science on August 27, 2024.

“This is a collaborative project between our laboratory at Waseda University and Yanmar Holdings which is a leading company in ammonia utilization. We aimed to develop a process that would enable us to exploit the ability of ammonia to generate hydrogen on-demand,” states Sekine.

“So, we started investigating conventional thermal catalytic systems where the reaction proceeds through N and H adsorbate formation through dissociation of N–H bonds and the recombination of the adsorbates to form respective N₂ and H₂ gases.”

The team observed that the rate-determining step on an active metal Ru was the desorption of nitrogen at low temperatures and the dissociation of N–H at high temperatures. Their effort to overcome this issue led them to electric field-assisted catalytic reactions. This technique improved the proton conduction at the surface of the catalyst and reduced the activation energy required for the reaction along with its reaction temperatures to facilitate efficient ammonia conversion.

Using this information, the team designed a novel thermal catalytic system for low-temperature decomposition of ammonia to hydrogen assisted by easily producible Ru/CeO₂ catalyst and DC electric field. They found that their proposed strategy efficiently decomposed ammonia even below 473 K.

Given a long enough contact time between the ammonia feed and the catalyst, 100% conversion rate was achieved at 398 K, surpassing the equilibrium conversion rate. This was attributed to the electric field’s ability to promote surface protonics—proton hopping on the catalyst surface assisted by a DC electric field. This lowers the apparent activation energies of the ammonia conversion reaction.

In contrast, they observed that the lack of an electric field significantly slowed down the nitrogen desorption process, causing the ammonia decomposition reaction to stop after some time. The significance of surface protonics in improving ammonia conversion rate was further supported by the experimental and density functional theory calculations carried out by the researchers.

This new strategy demonstrates that green hydrogen can be produced from ammonia at low temperatures with an irreversible pathway, ensuring almost 100% conversion at high reaction rates.

“We believe that our proposed method can accelerate the widespread adoption of clean alternative fuels by making the on-demand synthesis of CO₂-free hydrogen easier than ever,” concludes Sekine.

What do immigration, inheritance taxation and cannabis legalization have in common? Not much, actually. Yet if we know somebody’s stance on one of these issues, we can make a good guess about their view on the others.

Politics often seems to work in one dimension: parties and politicians are located on a spectrum stretching from from far left to far right. Knowing someone’s opinion on a single wedge issue is often enough to place them on this ideological dimension, which in turn makes it possible to predict their positions on other issues. And in countries such as the US we’ve seen more and more people polarized into opposing political camps at either end of this spectrum.

One-dimensional politics can seem as natural to us as an apple falling from a tree—it’s simply how we think about politics. But just like gravity, the mysterious force shaping our politics in this way does warrant a scientific explanation.

My colleagues and I wanted to understand how people end up so profoundly divided, and the study we published earlier this year proposes a model for how it might work. It suggests the less we are able to separate politics from personal relations, the more polarized we become.

This is more than just an academic matter. If politics is reduced to a single ideological dimension, it can keep us from finding innovative solutions to our most urgent problems.

If, for example, the best solution to a housing crisis were a combination of deregulation and public investment, it might not be possible to enact if each half of the solution were rejected by one side of the political spectrum. That makes understanding how politics can become so polarized important on a very practical level.

The problem is that, no matter how far we look into the past, we overwhelmingly find politics organized along one main dimension of ideological conflict: before left v right, it was Catholics v Protestants, Roundheads v Cavaliers, all the way back to Optimates v Populares in ancient Rome.

The issues may have changed, but the basic dichotomy has remained stable. This makes it very difficult to investigate the origins of one-dimensional politics. After all, we can’t experiment with whole societies—at least not in real life.

Simulating societies

To overcome this limitation, we decided to opt for an unusual approach. We created virtual societies, each populated by a multitude of simulated people, known as agents.

Each agent had a variety of opinions, represented as coordinates in a space with several dimensions. We didn’t give specific meanings to the coordinates or the dimensions, but you can think of them as representing disconnected issues like defense spending, railway nationalization or abortion rights.

At the start of each simulation, the agents’ positions were purely random and not organized along a single ideological dimension of left versus right. But over time, the agents interacted and influenced each other, organizing themselves into new collective states.

These simulated societies therefore provided us with a testbed for different theories used in political science, such as the assumption that people are rational, to see whether they could explain one-dimensional politics and the emergence of political polarization.

To do this, we translated these theories into computational protocols that governed the agents’ interactions and the way they adapted their opinions. We then checked whether these protocols were enough to trigger the emergence of a single ideological dimension.

Initially, we modeled our agents as rational decision makers in the tradition of mainstream political science. When encountering other agents, they would either meet them halfway, or reject them, But either way, this did not give rise to a single ideological dimension. Agents would either converge on a consensus or remain scattered.

However, politics isn’t a purely rational affair. It’s often characterized by gut feelings and anger. But political science hasn’t always been successful in integrating emotion into decision-making models. So for inspiration we looked to one of the founders of social psychology.

In the 1950s, Austrian-born psychologist Fritz Heider coined the term cognitive balance theory, which claims that people strive for consistency in their mental patterns. For example, we find it disconcerting when two of our friends hate each other, or a friend is in love with someone we despise. Similarly, we try to avoid disagreeing with people we like just as much as we avoid agreeing with people we dislike.

We translated this balance mechanism into our simulation. When two of our agents encountered each other, they first determined how much they agreed or disagreed on various political issues. Then, they translated agreement into sympathy and disagreement into dislike. Finally, they adjusted their issue positions in a way that increased consistency.

If they met someone with whom they mostly agreed, they adjusted their opinions to defuse the remaining disagreements. In the opposite case, they tried to make their disagreement stronger.

All this happened in tiny increments every time agents met. But through a myriad of interactions, agents finally self-organized into single ideological dimensions—no matter how many issue dimensions we started the simulation with.

Where exactly individual agents ended up on this ideological continuum depended on one crucial factor: the strength of the connection between disagreement on issues and personal dislike.

If this connection is weak—meaning agents could dislike each other but still agree, or like each other and disagree—agents remained close to the center. If it was strong, the simulated society broke into two opposed camps—it became polarized.

This suggests polarization is linked to people’s ability to connect to others on a personal level. When we lose sight of the fact that those we disagree with are usually decent human beings with good intentions, we may find ourselves diverging more and more on political issues, with less room for compromise.

This is notable at a time when so much political debate is conducted online through impersonal or anonymous social media accounts. The real world is much more complex than a one-dimensional view of politics would suggest. And people are much more than the political views they share online.

In the end, we will never be able to eliminate the force of cognitive balance—just as we can’t get rid of gravity. But we can find ways to increase the personal connection between people who hold different political views.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The internet can be a toxic place. Disinformation, hate speech and trolling are not just abundant—they are encouraged by the economy of clicks which governs many online platforms. There are no good clicks, no bad clicks, only clicks. By that metric, mutual hostility is great, because it results in lots of clicks.

But this is only one side of the web.

As I have discovered in my research there are also lesser-known places on the internet where mutual care flourishes.

These online oases are built, carefully tended, and fiercely protected by dedicated people who usually share a niche interest. Members connect and share information with each other that can often be life-changing, helping them overcome personal barriers both great and small.

Informal networks

“Informal networks” are social connections that allow people to share information around a common interest or need.

In the past, a version of this would be village gossip. In times of urgency, this grapevine of social connections ensured people could respond without waiting for the next newspaper—or attend to matters the newspaper would not even cover.

Today, while geographically bounded informal networks are dissolving, they are forming online.

For example, people who have relatively rare chronic conditions can find others on Facebook or in online forums who can provide information on lived experience, tips on how to get quality medical care or ideas for how to continue with a sport.

These networks often exist in a dual world, both online and in person.

Finding the right people

Diabetes is an increasingly common condition, and it makes everyday life more complex and challenging.

In my own research, I discovered a group of keen runners with diabetes who were initially strangers but became connected through chance social encounters. They bonded over a shared challenge: how to find the right diet and manage blood sugar levels so they could keep running.

One runner explained that “finding the right people saved the life I loved, maybe even my life.” This network includes a dietitian and a sports scientist, and provides information and guidance that would never appear in a book.

Local and family history is another topic around which online informal networks form.

Often, specific knowledge is key, as one member of an online local history group explained: “When I was trying to get access to the [local archive] I found it really difficult to get the archivist to be helpful […] I got guidance [via an online group] on how to get on her right side, so I could get what I was after.”

Again, this isn’t the sort of knowledge that is going to be published. But it is vital for those pursuing it out of interest.

The opposite of division

These informal networks present a stark contrast to the divisive pattern found in some parts of the web. Too-frequent posting and divisive or offensive attitudes are quickly going to get you expelled.

Those who run the Facebook groups and online forums I research are usually volunteers. The main source of information is other members, so there is an inherent need to be a good citizen. As one person explained: “I want the community to work, but I have no time or patience for people who are being disruptive.”

Status comes from being friendly, constructive and informative, and there is an expectation of reciprocal behavior. Many groups, such as the runners with diabetes, encounter each other in real life and are located in a set geographical area.

Discussions often occur across time, spanning in-person chats over coffee, chance encounters at an event, online one-to-one messaging and forum posts. The network spans different social and technological contexts.

The value of these online informal networks is getting knowledge of real experience, and often the emotional support needed to put that experience into practice.

While commercial online platforms value conflict, as it produces enraged engagement and higher advertising revenue, the currencies of these networks are empathy and insight.

A new model

However, the pressures of the world outside the online oasis still exist. Most groups need occasional policing. For example, moderators of a diabetic discussion forum have continually had to expel people touting “snake oil” solutions.

More often, though, anti-social behavior results in participants being ignored and left on their own. A rogue post will more likely result in a telling off from other posters than the moderator needing to step in. Everyone is involved in both creating and defending the value of the informal network.

Unlike many parts of the internet, online informal networks don’t care about clicks: they survive on real-world benefit. They dissolve when they no longer deliver the benefits people want or need.

Instead of just thinking about clicks, the companies controlling major online platforms could help improve the internet by learning from what is valued in informal networks.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.