Category: Featured Database

Drinking water source and exposure to regulated water contaminants in the California Teachers Study cohort

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Author: Spaur, Maya; Medgyesi, Danielle N.; Bangia, Komal; Madrigal, Jessica M.; Hurwitz, Lauren M.; Beane Freeman, Laura E.; Fisher, Jared A.; Spielfogel, Emma S.; Lacey, James V.; Sanchez, Tiffany; Jones, Rena R.; Ward, Mary H. Description: BACKGROUND: Pollutants including metals/metalloids, nitrate, disinfection byproducts, and volatile organic compounds contaminate federally regulated community water systems (CWS) and unregulated domestic wells across the United States. Exposures and associated health effects, particularly at levels below regulatory limits, are understudied. OBJECTIVE: We described drinking water sources and exposures for the California Teachers Study (CTS), a…

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‘Cropaganda’: Mythology of Corn Belt agriculture

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Author: Hall, Anaya L. Description: Even as scholars have increasingly recognized the role of industrial agricultural practices in contributing to non-point source pollution, drinking water in the Corn Belt remains perilously contaminated with excess nitrates, which pose a significant risk to human health and the environment. A recent lawsuit filed by the city of Des Moines, Iowa against three upstream counties over chronic nitrate pollution sparked heated debate around the roles and responsibilities of agricultural production. Drawing on Barthes’ theory of mythology, this paper explores how three core myths influence…

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Nitrate-nitrogen patterns in the Raccoon River Basin related to agricultural practices

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Author: Hatfield, J. L.; McMullen, L. D.; Jones, C. S. Description: Nitrate-N concentrations in the Raccoon River have increased beginning in the early 1970s. Since this river is the predominant water supply for the City of Des Moines in Iowa, there is concern about the potential long-term impacts of these trends. Improvements in water quality from agricultural watersheds are critical to protect the water supply, and understanding the factors affecting water quality will lead to potential changes in agricultural management to improve water quality. The historical database of nitrate-nitrogen (NO3-N)…

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Acceleration hotspots of North American birds’ decline are associated with agriculture

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Author: Leroy, Francois; Jarzyna, Marta A.; Keil, Petr Description: Human activities might have accelerated declines of population abundance, but this acceleration remains underexplored. Using 1033 North American Breeding Bird Survey routes, we analyze abundance change and its acceleration for 261 bird species, 54 avian families, and 10 habitats from 1987 to 2021. We show an average continent-wide decline of abundance of all birds per local route, with hotspots of decline in southern and warm parts of North America and hotspots of accelerating decline in the Mid-Atlantic, Midwest, and California, matching…

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Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe

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Author: Rigal, Stanislas; Dakos, Vasilis; Alonso, Hany; Aunins, Ainars; Benko, Zoltan; Brotons, Lluis; Chodkiewicz, Tomasz; Chylarecki, Przemyslaw; de Carli, Elisabetta; Del Moral, Juan Carlos; Domsa, Cristian; Escandell, Virginia; Fontaine, Benoit; Foppen, Ruud; Gregory, Richard; Harris, Sarah; Herrando, Sergi; Husby, Magne; Ieronymidou, Christina; Jiguet, Frederic; Kennedy, John; Klvanova¡, Alena; Kmecl, Primoz; Kuczynski, Lechoslaw; Kurlavicius, Petras; Kalas, John Atle; Lehikoinen, Aleksi; Lindstrom, Ake; Lorrilliere, Romain; Moshoj, Charlotte; Nellis, Renno; Noble, David; Eskildsen, Daniel Palm; Paquet, Jean-Yves; Pelissie, Mathieu; Pladevall, Clara; Portolou, Danae; Reif, Jiri­; Schmid, Hans; Seaman, Benjamin; Szabo, Zoltan D.; Szep,…

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Insect decline in the Anthropocene: Death by a thousand cuts

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Author: Wagner, David L.; Grames, Eliza M.; Forister, Matthew L.; Berenbaum, May R.; Stopak, David Description: Nature is under siege. In the last 10,000 y the human population has grown from 1 million to 7.8 billion. Much of Earth’s arable lands are already in agriculture, millions of acres of tropical forest are cleared each year, atmospheric CO2 levels are at their highest concentrations in more than 3 million y, and climates are erratically and steadily changing from pole to pole, triggering unprecedented droughts, fires, and floods across continents. Indeed, most…

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Are declines in insects and insectivorous birds related?

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Author: Tallamy, Douglas W.; Shriver, W. Gregory Description: A flurry of recently published studies indicates that both insects and birds have experienced wide-scale population declines in the last several decades. Curiously, whether insect and bird declines are causally linked has received little empirical attention. Here, we hypothesize that insect declines are an important factor contributing to the decline of insectivorous birds. We further suggest that insect populations essential to insectivorous birds decline whenever non-native lumber, ornamental, or invasive plant species replace native plant communities. We support our hypothesis by reviewing…

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The Pareto Effect In Tipping Social Networks: From Minority To Majority

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Author: Everall, Jordan P.; Tschofenig, Fabian; Donges, Jonathan F.; Otto, Ilona M. Description: How do social networks tip? A popular theory is that a small minority can trigger population-wide social change. This aligns with the Pareto principle, a semi-quantitative law which suggests that, in many systems, 80% of effects arise from 20% of the causes. In the context of the transition to net-zero emissions, this vital 20% can be a critical instigator of social tipping, a process which can rapidly change social norms. In this work, we asked whether the…

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Language models cannot reliably distinguish belief from knowledge and fact

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Author: Suzgun, Mirac; Gur, Tayfun; Bianchi, Federico; Ho, Daniel E.; Icard, Thomas; Jurafsky, Dan; Zou, James Description: As language models (LMs) increasingly infiltrate into high-stakes domains such as law, medicine, journalism and science, their ability to distinguish belief from knowledge, and fact from fiction, becomes imperative. Failure to make such distinctions can mislead diagnoses, distort judicial judgments and amplify misinformation. Here we evaluate 24 cutting-edge LMs using a new KaBLE benchmark of 13,000 questions across 13 epistemic tasks. Our findings reveal crucial limitations. In particular, all models tested systematically fail…

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The Medium is the Message: How Non-Clinical Information Shapes Clinical Decisions in LLMs

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Author: Gourabathina, Abinitha; Gerych, Walter; Pan, Eileen; Ghassemi, Marzyeh Description: The integration of large language models (LLMs) into clinical diagnostics necessitates a careful understanding of how clinically irrelevant aspects of user inputs directly influence generated treatment recommendations and, consequently, clinical outcomes for end-users. Building on prior research that examines the impact of demographic attributes on clinical LLM reasoning, this study explores how non-clinically relevant attributes shape clinical decision-making by LLMs. Through the perturbation of patient messages, we evaluate whether LLM behavior remains consistent, accurate, and unbiased when non-clinical information is…

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