The study drew on two long-running Dutch cohorts. The ReLife study enrolled 368 patients with newly diagnosed, localised renal cell carcinoma between 2018 and 2021, while the EnCoRe study followed 504 patients with stages I to III colorectal cancer recruited from 2012 onwards. From these cohorts, 326 patients with renal cell carcinoma and 358 with colorectal cancer produced valid accelerometer data. Each participant wore a small, validated activity monitor — an activPAL in the ReLife study and a MOX accelerometer in EnCoRe — strapped continuously to the front of the thigh for seven consecutive days. Because these devices sit directly on the leg, they can distinguish sitting and reclining from standing with far greater accuracy than wrist-worn trackers or memory-based questionnaires, which research has shown tend to overestimate activity and underestimate sitting time.

The timing of the measurements is what makes the findings clinically striking. Patients with kidney cancer were assessed at a median of twelve weeks after surgery, and patients with colorectal cancer at roughly six to eight weeks after treatment — a window when recovery habits are still being formed and when clinicians have a genuine opportunity to intervene. Sedentary behaviour was defined as any waking activity expending 1.5 metabolic equivalents or less while sitting or reclining, while physical activity was captured across light-intensity and moderate-to-vigorous categories. On average, patients with kidney cancer spent 10.1 hours per day sedentary, of which 5.4 hours accumulated in prolonged bouts, alongside 42 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity. Patients with colorectal cancer fared worse still, averaging 10.7 sedentary hours per day and just 90 minutes of total physical activity.

Rather than treating sitting and moving as separate variables, the researchers used a statistical technique called latent profile analysis, which searches for hidden subgroups of people who share similar patterns across multiple behaviours simultaneously. This matters because the two behaviours compete for the same 24 hours: every additional hour of sitting necessarily displaces an hour that could have been spent standing, walking, or exercising. The analysis considered sedentary time, prolonged sedentary bouts, standing time, sedentary breaks, and various measures of physical activity, standardising each indicator before testing models containing one to seven profiles. Fit statistics including the Akaike and Bayesian Information Criteria pointed consistently to a three-profile solution in both cancer populations, with entropy values of 0.84 indicating good separation between the groups and average membership probabilities exceeding 90 percent.

The three profiles that emerged were labelled the most sedentary, the average, and the highly active. In the kidney cancer group, 28 percent of patients fell into the most sedentary profile, spending an average of 11.9 hours per day sitting or reclining — 7.6 of those hours in unbroken stretches — while still managing 72 minutes of daily physical activity. In the colorectal cancer group, 16 percent belonged to the most sedentary profile, logging a remarkable 13.1 sedentary hours per day, 9.1 of them in prolonged bouts, against only 44 minutes of total physical activity. At the other extreme, the highly active kidney cancer patients spent 8.1 hours sedentary but accumulated 61 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity and 5.2 hours of standing daily, while their colorectal counterparts managed 125 minutes of physical activity and 4.1 hours standing against 9.0 sedentary hours.

One of the most provocative insights is that high sitting and high moving can coexist in the same person. Even patients in the most sedentary profiles engaged in some daily physical activity, meaning it is entirely possible to meet the standard recommendation of 150 minutes of weekly moderate-to-vigorous exercise while still spending the majority of waking life motionless. More than three quarters of the kidney cancer patients in the study met the physical activity guideline, yet average sedentary time in both groups exceeded the 9.1 hours per day reported for the general Dutch population. For cancer survivors, whose long-term health depends on both sides of the energy balance, this dissociation between exercise and sedentary time represents a blind spot in conventional lifestyle advice.

The correlates of profile membership add another layer of complexity. Using multinomial logistic regression that adjusted for all factors simultaneously, the researchers found that men with kidney cancer were more than twice as likely as women to belong to the most sedentary profile, with an odds ratio of 2.18. Men with colorectal cancer, conversely, were less likely to be in the highly active group. Higher educational attainment was associated with a lower likelihood of belonging to the highly active profile in both populations — a counterintuitive finding that contrasts with some previous studies and may reflect differences in occupational activity that the analysis could not fully capture. Higher body mass index was consistently linked to a lower chance of being highly active, with each additional kilogram per square metre reducing the odds by roughly 8 to 9 percent in both groups.

Two findings in particular challenge intuition. First, patients with kidney cancer who reported better physical functioning were less likely to sit all day, which fits the idea that a minimum functional capacity is needed to break up sitting time. Second, and more surprisingly, higher fatigue scores were associated with a lower likelihood of belonging to the most sedentary profile in both cancer groups. The authors caution that these effect sizes were small and may not be clinically meaningful, and they note that the relationship between fatigue and activity is bidirectional: fatigue is a well-known barrier to exercise, yet exercise is one of the most effective treatments for cancer-related fatigue. Former smokers with colorectal cancer were nearly twice as likely as never smokers to be highly active, a result the researchers describe as unexpected given that smoking has generally been linked to inactivity in prior work.

The study has honest limitations. Response rates were around 44 to 45 percent in both cohorts, and the researchers acknowledge that health-conscious individuals are more likely to volunteer for such studies — which helps explain why physical activity levels in the sample were relatively high compared with other cancer survivor populations. The cross-sectional design means no conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn, and because the analysis was exploratory without adjustment for multiple testing, some associations may be false positives that require external validation. Age, living situation, employment, comorbidities, alcohol consumption, tumour stage, and treatment details showed no statistically significant associations with profile membership.

Nevertheless, the implications for survivorship care are clear. Activity patterns after cancer treatment are heterogeneous, and the same three-profile structure appeared in two very different cancer populations even though the absolute hours of sitting and moving differed between them. Men, patients with higher education, and those with higher body mass index emerged as consistent candidates for targeted support, while the coexistence of high sitting with adequate exercise suggests that interventions should address sedentary behaviour directly rather than assuming that exercise prescriptions alone will solve the problem. The recent CHALLENGE trial, which showed that a structured three-year exercise programme significantly improved disease-free survival in patients with colon cancer, has already demonstrated how powerful movement can be after treatment. This new study adds a crucial nuance: to fully realise that potential, clinicians may need to look not just at how much their patients move, but at how much of the day they never leave the chair.

Subject of Research: Physical activity and sedentary behaviour profiles in patients shortly after treatment for localised renal cell carcinoma and colorectal cancer

Article Title: Activity profiles and their correlates in patients with localised renal and colorectal cancer shortly after treatment: a cross-sectional analysis

Article References: Siffels, A., Bours, M. J. L., van Roekel, E. H., Weijenberg, M. P., Sedelaar, J. P. M., Breukink, S. O., Keulen, E. T. P., Janssen-Heijnen, M., Frenken, K. G., Aben, K. K. H., Maurits, J. S. F., Kiemeney, L. A. L. M., Buffart, L. M., & Vrieling, A. (2026). Activity profiles and their correlates in patients with localised renal and colorectal cancer shortly after treatment: a cross-sectional analysis. Journal of Cancer Survivorship. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11764-026-02106-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11764-026-02106-1

Keywords: renal cell carcinoma, colorectal cancer, cancer survivorship, physical activity, sedentary behaviour, accelerometers, latent profile analysis, fatigue, body mass index, health-related quality of life, lifestyle interventions, Activity

The research, led by Ethan Gough and Soumya Basu of the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, together with senior author Subhra Chakraborty and colleagues, drew on stool samples and immune measurements from 27 adult volunteers who participated in a controlled clinical trial. Each volunteer received two doses of ACE527, a live attenuated oral ETEC vaccine candidate, and was subsequently challenged with the virulent ETEC strain H10407, a well-characterized isolate that has long served as a benchmark strain in human challenge studies of enteric vaccines. The trial was registered under ClinicalTrials.gov identifier NCT01060748, and the microbiome analysis was approved by the Johns Hopkins University Institutional Review Board under protocol IRB 20100221.

To characterize the bacterial communities living in the participants’ intestines, the team performed 16S ribosomal RNA sequencing on stool samples collected during the trial. This technique amplifies and sequences a molecular marker present in all bacteria, allowing researchers to identify which microbial taxa are present and in what relative abundances, without needing to culture the organisms in the laboratory. From these data the investigators computed two standard measures of community structure: alpha diversity, which captures how many species are present and how evenly distributed they are within a single sample, and beta diversity, which measures how similar or different microbial communities are between individuals or across time points.

The immune outcomes of interest were drawn from enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay measurements of antibody responses directed against two key ETEC antigens: the B subunit of heat-labile toxin, known as LTB, and colonization factor antigen I, or CFA/I, a surface structure the bacteria use to adhere to the intestinal lining. Antibodies were quantified both in serum, reflecting systemic immunity, and in the antibody-in-lymphocyte-supernatant assay, or ALS, which captures antibodies secreted by circulating plasmablasts and serves as a surrogate for mucosal immune activation in the gut. Both IgG and IgA classes were measured, with IgA of particular interest because it is the dominant antibody isotype at mucosal surfaces and is widely regarded as a correlate of protection against intestinal pathogens.

The statistical analysis went well beyond simple comparisons. The team used regression models to link individual bacterial taxa to immune readouts, applied the Microbiome Regression-Based Kernel Association Test, known as MiRKAT, to test whether overall community composition predicted immune responses, and employed a relaxed least absolute shrinkage and selection operator, or LASSO, approach to identify parsimonious sets of taxa associated with protection. Protection itself was assessed clinically, based on whether volunteers developed severe diarrhea and on whether ETEC could be detected as colonizing the gut after the challenge with H10407.

One of the clearest signals emerged from the alpha diversity analysis. Volunteers with higher inverse-Simpson diversity, a metric that increases both with the number of species present and with their evenness, tended to mount weaker ALS IgA responses against both LTB and CFA/I. In other words, a more diverse gut community was associated with a blunted mucosal antibody response to the vaccine. This finding is intriguing because it runs counter to the common assumption that greater microbial diversity is inherently beneficial; in the specific context of oral live attenuated vaccine immunogenicity, a densely populated and diverse intestinal ecosystem may compete with the vaccine strain or modulate innate immune signaling in ways that dampen the antigen-specific response.

Beta diversity told a different story. The overall composition of the gut community, considered as a whole, correlated with increased serum anti-CFA/I IgA, suggesting that the identity of the microbes present, rather than simply their number, shapes the systemic arm of the antibody response. At the level of individual taxa, the vaccination series was associated with a measurable increase, on the order of 25 to 30 percent, in the relative abundance of several groups, including the Eubacterium brachy group, members of Family XIII AD3011, and Actinomyces. Whether these shifts represent a direct effect of vaccine colonization on the ecosystem or an indirect consequence of the immune activation that vaccination triggers remains an open question, but the consistency of the direction of change across participants suggests a reproducible vaccine-microbiome interaction.

Perhaps the most consequential findings concerned specific bacterial families whose abundance tracked with protection. Members of Anaerovoraceae, Peptostreptococcaceae, Oscillospiraceae, and Veillonellaceae were associated with enhanced immune responses and, importantly, with protection against severe diarrhea and against ETEC colonization following the challenge. In contrast, several other groups, including Ruminococcaceae, Sutterellaceae, Coriobacteria, Clostridia, and Actinobacteria, showed antagonistic associations, being linked in the opposite direction with immune outcomes or protection. These antagonistic taxa are not necessarily harmful in their own right; the associations are statistical relationships that require mechanistic follow-up. Nonetheless, the pattern suggests that the interplay between a person’s resident microbiota and an oral vaccine is not uniform across the microbial community but instead involves specific lineages that either support or hinder the generation of protective immunity.

The implications for vaccine development are considerable. Oral live attenuated vaccines must survive passage through the stomach, establish limited replication in the intestine, and present their antigens to the gut-associated lymphoid tissue, and every one of those steps occurs in the context of a complex microbial ecosystem that can facilitate or obstruct them. If the microbiome modulates take of the vaccine strain, the magnitude of mucosal IgA responses, or the likelihood of sterilizing protection after exposure to wild-type bacteria, then microbiome status may help explain a long-standing puzzle in ETEC vaccine research: why candidate vaccines that perform reasonably well in controlled human challenge studies among adults in industrialized settings often show weaker immunogenicity and efficacy when tested in infants and young children in endemic countries, whose gut communities differ markedly from those of the trial volunteers in Baltimore.

The authors emphasize that the study, funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases through grants R01AI153399 and R56AI168316 and additionally supported by the PATH agreement GAT.1371-05689-CTA, is an early step in a longer research program. With 27 participants, the analysis is necessarily exploratory, and associations identified through sequencing and regression modeling will need to be validated in larger and more diverse cohorts, ideally including populations in ETEC-endemic regions where the public health burden is greatest. Still, the work offers a concrete roadmap: specific taxonomic markers, measurable by inexpensive 16S sequencing, could eventually help researchers stratify volunteers in vaccine trials, stratify risk in endemic populations, or even guide the rational use of microbiome-directed adjuncts such as targeted prebiotics to maximize the protective potential of future ETEC vaccines. As enteric vaccine science matures, it appears increasingly clear that the answer to whether a vaccine works may lie not only in the vaccine itself but in the trillions of microbes with which it shares the intestine.

Subject of Research: How gut microbiota composition influences immune responses and protection following oral ETEC vaccination and challenge

Article Title: Influence of gut microbiota on immune responses and protection in volunteers receiving the live attenuated oral ETEC vaccine ACE527 followed by virulent ETEC H10407 challenge

Article References: Gough, E., Basu, S., Brubaker, J., DeNeraing, B., Sack, D., Bourgeois, A. L., Walker, R., Harro, C. D., & Chakraborty, S. (2026). Influence of gut microbiota on immune responses and protection in volunteers receiving the live attenuated oral ETEC vaccine ACE527 followed by virulent ETEC H10407 challenge. Gut Pathogens. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13099-026-00878-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13099-026-00878-6

Keywords: ETEC, gut microbiota, ACE527 vaccine, H10407 challenge, IgA response, mucosal immunity, 16S rRNA sequencing, diarrhea, vaccine immunogenicity, microbiome diversity, Influence, microbiota

Systematic maps occupy a distinctive place in the evidence synthesis landscape. Unlike systematic reviews, which seek to answer a narrowly defined question by appraising and combining the results of individual studies, systematic maps are designed to describe the breadth of a research field. They catalogue what has been studied, where, how, and with what methods, providing a structured overview that can reveal clusters of activity and, just as importantly, blind spots. For a topic as sprawling as evidence use in policy—a field that draws on political science, public administration, sociology, psychology, and evaluation studies—such a cartographic exercise is not merely useful but arguably essential.

The updated map described in the article builds on earlier systematic mapping work in this domain, reflecting a field that has grown rapidly over the past two decades. The movement often labelled evidence-based policy has generated an enormous volume of empirical and conceptual scholarship, examining everything from the role of think tanks and knowledge brokers to the impact of research funding incentives and the cognitive biases of decision-makers. The task facing the authors of the map was to impose order on this abundance: to search systematically across academic databases, apply transparent inclusion criteria, screen thousands of records, and code the studies that survived screening according to a consistent framework.

That framework matters. A systematic map is only as good as its coding scheme, and the categories used to classify factors influencing evidence use inevitably shape the picture that emerges. Common clusters in this literature include the characteristics of the evidence itself—its perceived quality, relevance, timeliness, and accessibility; the characteristics of the policy context, including political will, institutional capacity, and the presence of formal requirements for evidence in decision-making; the characteristics of individual actors, such as policymakers’ trust in researchers and their training in interpreting quantitative findings; and the characteristics of the interactions between the two worlds, encompassing knowledge translation mechanisms, intermediaries, co-production arrangements, and personal networks.

One of the most robust findings across decades of research in this area is the persistence of what scholars have long called the gap between the production of evidence and its use. Early models assumed a linear process in which researchers generate knowledge and policymakers apply it, but the empirical literature has repeatedly shown that policy is driven by a far messier set of influences. Ideology, public opinion, lobbying, fiscal pressures, and electoral cycles all compete with research findings for attention and authority. As a result, contemporary scholarship tends to conceptualize evidence use not as a simple transfer but as a social process of exchange, negotiation, and sense-making, in which different forms of knowledge—including professional experience, stakeholder input, and political judgement—interact with scientific research.

The updated map’s contribution lies partly in its comprehensiveness and partly in its currency. Fields evolve, and a map that seemed current a few years ago can quickly become outdated as new studies multiply. By refreshing the search and incorporating recent literature, the authors were able to capture developments such as the growing interest in knowledge brokering organizations, the expansion of behavioural insights units within governments, and the intensified scrutiny of evidence use that accompanied policymaking during global crises. Each of these developments has generated new empirical work, and mapping it allows the field to see whether emerging themes are merely fashionable or whether they represent sustained areas of investigation.

Methodologically, the map also sheds light on how researchers have studied evidence use. The literature is dominated by qualitative approaches—case studies, interviews, and documentary analysis—alongside a substantial body of conceptual and theoretical writing. Quantitative measurement of evidence use remains comparatively rare, in part because use itself is notoriously difficult to define and observe. Does evidence use mean that a citation appears in a policy document, that a policymaker reports being influenced by research, that a programme design reflects a specific finding, or that outcomes improve after an evidence-informed intervention is adopted? Each definition leads to different methods and different conclusions, and the map makes these methodological patterns visible in a way that individual studies cannot.

The practical implications of such mapping are considerable. For funders, a systematic map indicates where investment in new research is most likely to yield genuine advances rather than duplicating existing work. For practitioners—knowledge brokers, science advisors, and research-impact officers—it provides an organized inventory of the factors that empirical studies have linked to successful evidence uptake, which can inform the design of translation activities and partnership programmes. For policymakers themselves, the map is a reminder that the barriers to evidence-informed decisions are rarely about the absence of research alone; they are frequently embedded in institutional incentives, time pressures, and the structure of the policy process.

The gaps revealed by the map are as instructive as its clusters. Coverage is uneven across policy domains, with education, health, and environmental policy attracting disproportionate attention while other sectors remain understudied. Much of the literature originates in high-income, English-speaking countries, raising questions about the transferability of findings to different political and administrative cultures. Longitudinal studies that trace evidence use over time are scarce, as are studies that follow specific pieces of research from publication to policy outcome. And the perspectives of certain actors—frontline implementers, citizens, and marginalized communities—are underrepresented relative to those of senior officials and academic researchers.

Ultimately, the updated systematic map serves as both a stocktaking exercise and an agenda-setting device. It consolidates what the field knows about the factors influencing evidence use in policy, makes that knowledge navigable, and highlights the questions that remain open. In an era when governments face contested information environments and heightened demands for accountability, understanding how research actually enters—and sometimes fails to enter—the machinery of government has never been more consequential. Maps of this kind do not resolve those questions, but they ensure that the next generation of researchers begins its work with a clear-eyed view of the terrain already travelled.

Subject of Research: Factors influencing the use of evidence in public policy, examined through an updated systematic map of the research literature

Article Title: What factors influence evidence use in policy? An updated systematic map

Article References: What factors influence evidence use in policy? An updated systematic map. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41599-026-08391-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41599-026-08391-6

Keywords: evidence use, policy, systematic map, evidence-based policy, knowledge translation, knowledge brokering, evidence synthesis, policy process, research uptake, science-policy interface, factors, influence

The stakes of this research are considerable. Roughly one in four early care and education teachers leaves their position every year, a turnover rate dramatically higher than the roughly 10 percent annual rate observed among kindergarten teachers. Each departure disrupts the stable relationships young children need for healthy development, degrades classroom quality, increases child-to-adult ratios, and piles additional stress onto the teachers who remain. Worse still, studies show that most early childhood teachers who quit their center do not simply move to another one; they leave the field entirely, compounding a staffing shortage that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has flagged as a threat to families’ access to affordable childcare.

The new study, published in the Early Childhood Education Journal by Erin G. Fox, Sarah N. Lang, and Kelly M. Purtell, draws on the 2019 National Survey of Early Care and Education Workforce Questionnaire, a federally funded survey designed to capture a nationally representative portrait of the workforce serving children from birth through age five who have not yet entered kindergarten. Because the survey disproportionately sampled low-income areas, the researchers applied statistical sampling weights to ensure their findings generalize to the broader national population of center-based teachers. The analysis was preregistered on the Open Science Framework, a practice that commits researchers to their analysis plan in advance and reduces the risk of cherry-picking results.

To measure the risk of departure, the team constructed a binary indicator of turnover intention from two survey questions: whether respondents had done anything in the past three months to look for a new or additional job, and their main reason for doing so. Teachers searching only for a second job or summer employment, which do not signal intent to quit their current classroom role, were classified as not intending to leave. The three focal predictors were equally carefully measured. Compensation came from the survey’s calculated continuous hourly wage variable. Workplace support was a composite of three items asking teachers whether they and their co-workers were treated with respect day to day, whether teamwork was encouraged, and whether they had help dealing with difficult children or parents, a scale that showed strong internal consistency. Mental health was assessed with the brief seven-item version of the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale.

The statistical strategy relied on weighted binary logistic regression, a technique suited to predicting a yes-or-no outcome while accounting for the survey’s complex sampling design. In the primary model, teachers who reported greater workplace support had roughly half the odds of intending to leave compared with those who felt less supported, an odds ratio of about 0.51. Each increment of depressive symptoms increased the odds of turnover intention. Hourly wage, by contrast, was not significantly associated with turnover intention at all, a result that held even after controlling for an extensive set of covariates including race and ethnicity, education level, years in the field, possession of a Child Development Associate credential, household income, receipt of government assistance, marital status, and number of children at home. The full model accounted for approximately 14 percent of the variability in turnover intention.

Guided by Cumming and Wong’s holistic framework of early childhood educator well-being, which treats individual, relational, and workplace factors as interconnected, the researchers also tested whether depression changes the game. Prior regional studies had hinted that teachers with poorer mental health may be more sensitive to low pay or weak workplace support, making those conditions more likely to push them toward the door. Yet in this nationally representative sample, neither interaction term reached statistical significance. Depression did not meaningfully amplify the relationship between workplace support and turnover intention, nor between wage and turnover intention, though the interaction with workplace support came relatively close with a p-value of .09.

The null finding on wages is arguably the most provocative result, and the authors offer several plausible explanations. Average hourly pay in the sample was just $14.38, and compensation across centers varies relatively little, meaning a teacher committed to the field is unlikely to find meaningfully better pay simply by switching employers. That structural ceiling may mute wage differences as a motivator for job searching. There is also the question of calling: many early childhood teachers describe their work as a vocation, accepting low wages because they find the work meaningful, a commitment that may paradoxically contribute to their financial fragility. Importantly, the authors caution that the wage null finding does not mean money does not matter. Previous experimental evidence from Virginia showed that financial incentive payments reduced turnover, and low compensation has been linked to worse mental health and diminished capacity to provide high-quality care. Other dimensions of financial well-being, such as benefits and one-time bonuses, may still shape decisions to stay or go.

The findings on workplace support and mental health point toward actionable strategies for center leaders. Cultures of respect, teamwork, and practical help handling challenging interactions appear to function as a genuine retention lever, not merely a nicety. Leadership practices such as open communication, formal recognition of teachers’ accomplishments, investment in professional development, peer mentorship programs, and collaborative team-building can all foster the relational climate that the data suggest keeps teachers in their classrooms. On the mental health front, interventions ranging from social-emotional learning programs designed for teachers to mindfulness training have shown promise in bolstering educators’ resilience and well-being, and the new evidence suggests such supports may pay dividends in workforce stability.

The study also carries instructive caveats. Its cross-sectional design precludes causal conclusions, and the workplace support scale showed a ceiling effect, with responses clustered at the positive end, which may have limited the ability to detect moderation effects. Both workplace support and depression were self-reported, raising the possibility that the cognitive biases associated with depression color how teachers perceive their work environments, making the two constructs difficult to fully disentangle. The data, collected in 2019, predate the COVID-19 pandemic, which evidence suggests intensified both turnover and mental health strains in the early childhood workforce. And with the model explaining only about 14 percent of the variance, much of the story of why teachers stay or leave remains untold.

Even with those limitations, the national scope of the analysis marks a meaningful advance over the small, regional studies that have long dominated this literature, confirming that workplace support and mental well-being are robust correlates of turnover intention across the country rather than artifacts of particular states or programs. The authors conclude that targeting supportive workplace climates and teachers’ mental health through prevention and intervention may be among the most effective ways to reduce early childhood teachers’ intention to leave their jobs. For a field in which one departure can fracture a young child’s first relationships outside the family, that message carries urgency well beyond the staff lounge.

Subject of Research: Predictors of turnover intention among center-based early care and education teachers in the United States

Article Title: Examining Influence on Early Care and Education Teachers’ Intention to Leave: Compensation, Workplace Support, and Depressive Symptoms

Article References: Fox, E. G., Lang, S. N., & Purtell, K. M. (2026). Examining Influence on Early Care and Education Teachers’ Intention to Leave: Compensation, Workplace Support, and Depressive Symptoms. Early Childhood Education Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-026-02329-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10643-026-02329-y

Keywords: early care and education, teacher turnover, turnover intention, workplace support, depressive symptoms, compensation, teacher retention, early childhood workforce, mental health, childcare, Examining, Influence

What unfolded across China in the summer of 2026 was not a string of isolated bad luck. It was, according to the scientists and commentary accompanying the events, a demonstration of a new normal: extreme events once labeled “once-in-a-century” are increasingly compound, concurrent, and geographically dispersed, arriving faster than the institutions and infrastructure built to manage them. A warming trend that outpaces the global average, as officially acknowledged by Chinese meteorological authorities, is raising both the frequency and the intensity of extremes. When a single season delivers typhoon remnants to a northeastern inland province, catastrophic urban flooding to central China, and near-record heat to the northwest simultaneously, the premise that hazards arrive one at a time, separated by decades of recovery and planning, collapses entirely.

The term “once-in-a-century” is shorthand for an event with a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year, a statistical construct known to hydrologists as the hundred-year return period. Specialists have long recognized that this language is easily misinterpreted: it describes a probability, not a promise that such an event will occur only once every hundred years. In any given century, a 1-percent-annual-chance flood may strike twice, three times, or not at all, and independent river basins can each experience their own hundred-year event in the same year. Yet the intuitive public reading — that a community has earned a century of safety after surviving one such flood — persists, and it shapes how residents, officials, and even engineers respond when the waters return far sooner than the label implies.

Climate change has rendered the historical baseline on which those return periods rest effectively obsolete. The statistics embedded in flood maps and design standards assume stationarity, the idea that the range of natural variability observed in the past will continue into the future. That assumption no longer holds. On 20 July 2021, Zhengzhou recorded 201.9 millimeters of rainfall in a single hour, a new national record, with three-day cumulative rainfall of 617.1 millimeters, approaching the city’s entire annual mean. The deluge overwhelmed a city that had, in part, been built under China’s “sponge city” programme, an ambitious urban design initiative intended to absorb and reuse stormwater rather than shunt it into overburdened drainage networks. Four years later, in August 2025, Zhengzhou’s flood-control emergency response was again raised to Level III, with work, business, classes, and public transport suspended citywide. The hundred-year flood had taken four years to make its second appearance.

These events carry direct and severe health consequences, from drowning and traumatic injury to the disruption of routine and emergency medical care. Globally, public health systems have developed genuine capacity to respond to the acute aftermath of a single flood. China’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, issues detailed post-flood guidance on indoor mold identification and remediation, with explicit precautions for vulnerable groups including pregnant women, children under 12, adults over 65, and people with asthma. This is well-designed, evidence-based guidance. But it is guidance calibrated to a single, bounded event: dry the building, remove saturated porous materials within 48 hours, ventilate, and protect vulnerable residents during cleanup. It says nothing about a household, or a health system, absorbing a second or third such event within years rather than decades, nor about heat and flood advisories issued in the same week to the same population. Adaptation guidance built for isolated disasters, however rigorous, is necessary but insufficient for compound, recurring ones.

The problem is not merely communicative but structural. Reservoirs, drainage systems, evacuation routes, and emergency stockpiles are sized against historical exceedance probabilities, and insurance and recovery budgets are paced to the expectation of long intervals between catastrophic losses. When extremes cluster, recovery is truncated. Communities still repairing one flood face the next before foundations have dried, and the cumulative physical and psychological burden of repeated displacement and rebuilding accumulates in ways that single-event frameworks never anticipated. Meanwhile, simultaneous hazards compete for the same response capacity: the personnel, shelters, and supply chains needed for flood evacuation in one province are the same resources a heat emergency in another might demand, and heat itself compounds flood risk by pre-conditioning drought, hardening soils, and altering atmospheric moisture available for subsequent downpours.

Three shifts follow from this pattern, argued in commentary published in The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific by John S. Ji and Qihong Deng. First, risk communication should retire probabilistic century-scale language in public-facing materials in favor of terms that convey trend and recurrence, such as “increasingly frequent severe rainfall” rather than “once-in-a-century flood,” so that recurrence within a decade is not received as a statistical anomaly requiring no institutional response. The words officials choose shape whether a second hundred-year flood in four years is read as a freak coincidence or as evidence of a trend demanding action. Second, infrastructure and early-warning design standards, including within the sponge city and reservoir safety programmes, should incorporate non-stationary risk models that use recent-period distributions rather than full-record historical baselines, which mathematically dilute the recent shift toward higher-intensity rainfall. A century of rain-gauge data in which the wettest years cluster in the last decade tells a very different story than the same record averaged across its full length.

Third, public health guidance should evolve from single-event response protocols toward compound-event and cumulative-exposure frameworks, addressing populations facing sequential or simultaneous heat and flood risks within the same season, as well as the mental and physical health burdens of repeated displacement and recovery. That means modeling the health effects of mold exposure after repeated inundation, planning clinically for populations that experience flooding and extreme heat within weeks of one another, and treating the psychological toll of chronic disaster exposure as a first-order public health concern rather than an afterthought. The tools exist — epidemiological surveillance, seasonal forecasting, and increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence-based forecasting and digital simulation systems that Chinese cities are already deploying — but they must be aimed at the compound problem, not the singular one.

Experts and meteorological authorities have officially acknowledged the warming trend and the rising frequency of extremes, and there are encouraging signs of technical adaptation in forecasting and alerting. Public health guidance and infrastructure standards, however, continue to speak as if these events remain rare. This summer made the mismatch impossible to ignore. Flood warnings in the northeast and heat alerts in the northwest arrived in the same week, and a city rebuilt to absorb the once-unthinkable watched the once-unthinkable return within a political term. The climate has changed. The language, and the standards built upon it, need to change with it.

Subject of Research: Compound climate extremes and the obsolescence of once-in-a-century risk communication

Article Title: Compound climate extremes and “once-in-a-century” risk communication

Article References: Ji, J. S., & Deng, Q. (2026). Compound climate extremes and “once-in-a-century” risk communication. The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific, 74, Article 101973. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lanwpc.2026.101973

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.lanwpc.2026.101973

Keywords: compound climate extremes, once-in-a-century flood, risk communication, non-stationary risk, sponge city, Zhengzhou rainfall, Typhoon Bavi, Tropical Storm Maysak, public health preparedness, extreme heat, climate change, flood resilience

Materialistic values, defined by the prominence people place on financial success, possessions, and physical appearance relative to other life priorities, have been extensively linked to poorer well-being. Meta-analytic evidence, including a large 2014 synthesis by Dittmar and colleagues in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, shows that a strong materialistic orientation is reliably associated with lower personal well-being. More recent meta-analytic work by Bradshaw and colleagues in 2023 extended this conclusion to the domain of life goals, finding universal wellness costs when people prioritize extrinsic goals over intrinsic ones. Understanding where these values come from, and how they are or are not passed down within families, therefore carries practical significance well beyond academic curiosity.

To probe the mechanisms of value transmission, the research team recruited 208 young adults, of whom 168 were women and 40 were men, with a mean age of 20.20 years and a standard deviation of 6.42 years. Participants, described as being in the stage of emerging adulthood theorized by Jeffrey Arnett, reported on their own materialistic values, their perceptions of their parents’ materialism, the parenting environment they grew up in, and their own life goals. Emerging adulthood is a developmental window in which identity, values, and long-term aspirations are still actively being shaped, making it a strategic period in which to examine the residue of family socialization.

Statistically, the study employed moderated mediation analysis, a regression-based framework popularized by Andrew Hayes that tests whether an indirect effect operates through a mediator and whether that indirect effect changes strength depending on a moderator. In this design, children’s materialism was modeled as the mediator linking parental materialism to children’s life goals, while the perceived family environment, specifically whether it was democratic or authoritarian in character, was tested as a moderator of the first path, the link between parental materialism and children’s own materialism. This architecture allowed the researchers to ask not merely whether parents influence children, but under what relational conditions that influence materializes.

The results delivered a surprise in the direct path. Parental materialism, on its own, did not predict whether the young adult participants endorsed extrinsic life goals centered on wealth, fame, or image. Values transmission, in other words, is not automatic. A materialistic parent does not reliably produce a materialistically driven child simply by existing as a role model. This finding echoes a broader literature on parent-child value similarity, including work by Barni, Knafo-Noam, and Schwartz, which shows that resemblance between parents and children on values is often modest and depends heavily on the quality of the relationship and the socialization context rather than on parental intentions alone.

The critical factor turned out to be the family environment. When participants perceived a democratic family climate, one characterized by warmth, dialogue, negotiation, and responsiveness to the child’s perspective, the relationship between parental materialism and children’s materialism was positive. In such homes, materialistic parents apparently modeled and communicated consumer values that children absorbed and internalized. In contrast, under an authoritarian family environment, marked by coercive control, strict demands, and limited open communication, the relationship between parental materialism and children’s materialism was negative. Children raised in authoritarian households were less likely to adopt their parents’ materialistic orientation, suggesting that value transmission requires a channel of influence that authoritarian climates appear to close.

The interpretation offered by the researchers is that the family environment enables or disables the transmission of materialistic values, and that these values, once adopted, guide young people’s focus toward extrinsic objectives. Theoretical frameworks from Grusec and Goodnow on value internalization help explain the pattern: children internalize parental values most effectively when they accurately perceive the values’ content and accept them, both of which are fostered by democratic, warm parenting and undermined by coercive discipline that provokes resistance rather than emulation. Related consumer research, such as Richins and Chaplin’s work on material parenting, similarly shows that how goods are used in the parenting process matters as much as parental attitudes toward possessions themselves.

Why might authoritarian parenting blunt materialistic transmission? One possibility is reactance: adolescents in controlling households may distance themselves from parental models, rejecting values associated with parents they experience as domineering. Another relates to emotional security, since prior research, including Ching and Wu’s study of parental conflict and adolescent materialism, suggests that insecurity can itself foster materialistic values as a compensatory mechanism, but the dynamics of that compensation may interact with parenting style in complex ways. The moderated mediation results indicate that materialism in children did serve as the conduit through which family conditions ultimately related to extrinsic life goals, meaning that the family climate shaped children’s materialism, and children’s materialism in turn shaped the goals they set for their lives.

The study’s limitations warrant caution in interpretation. The design was cross-sectional and correlational, relying on retrospective perceptions of parenting rather than observed family behavior, so causal direction cannot be firmly established; it is possible, for instance, that shared materialism produces a more relaxed family climate rather than the reverse. The sample was also skewed toward women, and all measures were self-reported by adult children, leaving parental perspectives unmeasured directly. The authors note that data supporting the findings are available from the corresponding author upon request, and the work followed ethical protocols including informed consent.

Nevertheless, the findings carry clear implications. For practitioners and parents concerned about the cultural pull of consumerism, the message is that values are not inherited through instruction alone but through relational climate. Democratic parenting appears to open a channel through which parental values, for better or worse, flow to children, which means the same openness that helps transmit generosity, curiosity, or civic engagement can also transmit materialism. Authoritarian environments, while perhaps limiting materialistic contagion, come with their own well-documented psychological costs. The broader takeaway is a call for intentionality: parents who wish to buffer their children against materialistic values may need to attend not only to their own consumption habits and stated ideals, but to the everyday emotional and communicative fabric of family life in which those values either take root or wither. As societies grapple with the well-being toll of extrinsic goal pursuit documented across cultures, this research suggests that the first and perhaps most powerful arena of intervention remains the home.

The distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic goals traces back to self-determination theory, which holds that aspirations such as personal growth, close relationships, and community contribution tend to satisfy basic psychological needs, whereas pursuits of wealth, fame, and image offer only contingent satisfactions. The present findings suggest that the family is one setting where this goal orientation is calibrated long before individuals make deliberate choices about their priorities.

It is also worth noting that value transmission in families is rarely a one-way street. Research on parent-child value similarity indicates that children actively filter, negotiate, and sometimes reject what parents offer, and that perceived norms within the family shape whether parental messages are heard as genuine convictions or as mere expectations. The democratic climate in this study may function precisely as such a channel, giving children enough access to parental reasoning to reconstruct materialistic values as their own.

Future work could follow families over time, incorporate both parents’ and children’s reports, and test whether these dynamics hold across cultures with differing levels of consumer development, questions the authors’ data-sharing statement should help address.

Subject of Research: Materialistic Heritage: The Influence of Parental Figures on Children’s Life Goals

Article Title: Materialistic Heritage: The Influence of Parental Figures on Children’s Life Goals

Article References: Lins, S., Caria, M. A., & de Melo, C. F. (2026). Materialistic Heritage: The Influence of Parental Figures on Children’s Life Goals. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00536-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00536-5

Keywords: Materialistic, Heritage, Influence, Parental, Figures, Children, Life, Goals, scientific research

The research, conducted by Aaron Boyd and Tamzin A. Blewett of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta, was designed to address a deceptively simple question: does the methodological decision to expose test organisms individually or collectively change the results of a toxicity experiment? The question matters because toxicology studies split along these lines depending on their goals. Regulatory protocols, including the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Test No. 211 for Daphnia magna reproduction, typically prescribe individual housing to eliminate confounding variables. Meanwhile, many exploratory and mechanistic studies house animals in groups to maximize throughput, approximate natural conditions, or simply conserve laboratory space and resources. If these two approaches produce systematically different data, then comparisons across studies—cornerstones of meta-analysis, risk assessment, and reproducibility efforts—may be built on shifting sand.

To probe the issue, the researchers exposed daphnids to organic ultraviolet filters, a class of sunscreen chemicals that has become an emerging concern in aquatic environments. The team worked with avobenzone, octocrylene, and oxybenzone, three of the most widely used organic UV filters, which have been detected in surface waters around the globe and have prompted legislative bans in jurisdictions including Hawaii, Palau, Aruba, and the U.S. Virgin Islands largely due to concerns about coral toxicity. Ultraviolet filters offered an ideal test case for the study because they represent a realistic and environmentally relevant contaminant class, and because prior work from the Blewett laboratory had already characterized their multigenerational effects on daphnids under individual-housing conditions. By repeating the exposure paradigm under group-housing conditions and comparing the two directly, the researchers could isolate the influence of conspecific presence from the influence of the chemicals themselves.

The experimental design followed daphnids across five continuous generations, a demanding undertaking that required careful synchronization of feeding, water changes, and chemical dosing across both housing regimes. Crucially, the study controlled for the most obvious confounding factor: resources. Group-housed and individually housed animals received the same ratio of food and water per organism, meaning that any differences emerging between the two treatments could not be attributed simply to one group having more algae to eat or more space to swim. This resource-matched design distinguishes the new work from earlier density studies, where the effects of crowding and the effects of resource limitation were often inextricably entangled. What remained, after accounting for nutrition and volume, was the biological signal of social environment itself—the physical and chemical presence of other members of the same species.

The results were striking. Baseline mortality among daphnids housed in groups was double that of individually housed counterparts, even in the absence of any toxicant. This elevated death toll in the group-housing scenario was not merely a laboratory artifact of depleted resources, since feeding was matched per animal; rather, it pointed to the subtle but potent stress of living alongside conspecifics. Aquatic organisms constantly exchange chemical cues through the water, releasing metabolites, pheromones, and kairomones that can alter the physiology of their neighbors. Prior research has demonstrated that Daphnia engage in negative interference, with chemical mediation of competition reducing growth and fecundity even when food is abundant. The doubled mortality observed in this study underscores just how consequential these invisible interactions can be for a standard toxicity endpoint as fundamental as survival.

Perhaps the most dramatic finding concerned sex ratios. Daphnia magna are cyclic parthenogens, reproducing clonally for most of the year but switching, under certain environmental cues, to the production of males and resting eggs. Sex determination in this species is widely understood to be environmental rather than genetic, influenced by factors such as population density, food availability, and stress. In the group-housed populations, the proportion of males climbed across successive generations, reaching a maximum of roughly ten percent of the population. Individually housed daphnids, by contrast, showed no comparable shift. Because the resource environment was held constant between treatments, the researchers could attribute this sex-ratio distortion to the presence of conspecifics—a result consistent with previous work showing that Daphnia females adjust sex allocation in response to current population density and sex ratio. The implication for toxicology is unsettling: a chemical treatment that happens to be tested in a group-housing design could appear to have endocrine-disrupting or sex-skewing effects that are actually driven, at least in part, by density-mediated developmental programming.

Reproductive timing and effort also diverged sharply between the two housing regimes. Group-housed daphnids experienced delayed maturation, taking longer to reach reproductive competence than their individually housed counterparts, and they produced broods at a lower frequency. In life-history terms, the crowded animals appeared to adopt a fundamentally different strategy: slowing down, delaying investment in reproduction, and presumably reallocating energy toward maintenance and competition. This pattern echoes classic findings from the 1990s showing that Daphnia magna can shift from a strategy of producing many low-quality offspring to fewer, better-provisioned ones in response to intraspecific interaction. The new study extends that framework into the toxicology context, showing that these life-history shifts emerge even when per-capita resources are equalized, and that they persist across multiple generations rather than resetting between broods.

Critically, the researchers found that these housing-driven differences were largely independent of chemical treatment. Whether daphnids were exposed to avobenzone, octocrylene, oxybenzone, or vehicle controls, the gap between individual and group housing persisted across the measured endpoints. In other words, conspecific presence did not merely modify the toxicity of the ultraviolet filters; it acted as its own independent stressor, reshaping the baseline against which any chemical effect must be measured. This is a subtle but important point. Some previous studies had suggested that intraspecific competition could amplify toxicant effects, as seen in outdoor pond microcosms where crowding increased the impact of pesticides, and in work showing that intraspecific interactions heightened the toxicity of metals to daphnids. The new results indicate that the picture is more complicated: at least for organic UV filters under these conditions, social environment alters organismal physiology across a broad front, but it does not necessarily interact strongly with the chemical stressor itself.

The multigenerational dimension of the study carries particular weight for the field. Toxicology increasingly embraces multigenerational designs as a way to capture delayed effects, transgenerational inheritance, and adaptation. Yet the new findings show that the housing condition itself leaves a multigenerational signature: the elevated mortality, male production, and reproductive delays of group-housed lineages were not transient acclimation responses but stable features that characterized entire lineages across five generations. For any laboratory embarking on a multigenerational exposure study, this means that the housing decision made on day one will shape the entire trajectory of the experiment. A control group housed in groups may exhibit mortality and reproductive profiles so different from an individually housed control in another laboratory that the two “controls” are, in effect, measuring different biological systems.

These results arrive amid a broader reckoning with reproducibility in the life sciences. A widely cited 2016 survey in Nature found that more than 70 percent of researchers had failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiment, and methodological variance—including seemingly trivial husbandry details—has been repeatedly implicated as a hidden driver of irreproducibility. In aquatic toxicology specifically, prior work from the Blewett group had already asked whether group versus individual exposure alters experimental outcomes, and a recent study on temperate fish demonstrated that social isolation alone can influence metabolism, copper accumulation, and thermal tolerance. The new Daphnia study adds a multigenerational, resource-controlled data point to this growing literature, and its message is consistent: the social environment of the test organism is not background noise but a first-order experimental variable.

The authors emphasize that the goal is not to declare one housing method superior to the other. Individual housing remains appropriate when the aim is to minimize uncontrolled variation, and it underpins standardized regulatory tests. Group housing, meanwhile, better reflects the crowded, chemically complex conditions organisms actually face in nature, where density-dependent effects modulate chemical toxicity in real ecosystems. The danger lies in the cross-study comparison of data generated under different regimes without acknowledging the confound. Ecological risk assessments frequently pool toxicity values from many laboratories to derive benchmarks such as species sensitivity distributions; if some of those values came from crowded beakers and others from solitary vessels, the resulting benchmarks may embed a hidden methodological bias. The study’s authors argue that housing density and conspecific presence should be explicitly reported—and ideally explicitly considered—in the interpretation and comparison of toxicity data.

For a field that leans heavily on a handful of model organisms to safeguard aquatic ecosystems, the lesson from this research is a humbling one. The water flea in the crowded beaker and the water flea in the solitary vessel may carry the same species name and the same genome, but over five generations they become, physiologically, different animals. As ultraviolet filters and countless other contaminants continue to flow into the world’s waters, understanding their true risks will require not only better chemistry and longer exposures, but a more honest accounting of the social lives of the organisms doing the telling.

Excitons are quasiparticles formed when a photon excites an electron, leaving behind a positively charged hole; the electron and hole remain bound together by Coulomb attraction. In monolayer semiconductors such as transition metal dichalcogenides, excitons dominate the optical response and are central to proposals for exciton-based circuits, transistors and quantum light sources. When two such monolayers are stacked on top of one another with a slight twist or lattice mismatch, electrons and holes can spatially separate into different layers, forming so-called interlayer excitons. These interlayer excitons possess long lifetimes, inherit the spin-valley properties of their parent materials, and carry a permanent out-of-plane dipole moment—all qualities that make them attractive for future optoelectronic technologies.

Yet controlling the flow of interlayer excitons has proved challenging. Conventional approaches rely on external electric fields, strain gradients or patterned potentials to herd excitons across a device. Such methods are often slow, energy-intensive or limited by the mobility of the excitons themselves, which can become trapped by defects, moiré disorder or interactions with the surrounding environment. The new work demonstrates a fundamentally different mechanism. By carefully engineering the stacking geometry of a van der Waals heterobilayer, the researchers created a situation in which the local atomic registry between the two layers varies across the sample. The lattice, seeking to minimize its total energy, undergoes a spontaneous reconstruction: regions of high-symmetry stacking expand and contract, reshaping the local potential landscape experienced by the excitons.

The crucial insight is that this reconstruction is not a static curiosity. As the researchers show, the reconstructed lattice effectively creates internal electric fields and band-alignment variations that act on the interlayer excitons’ permanent dipole moment. The result is a built-in drift force that propels excitons across the material at remarkable speed—orders of magnitude faster than diffusion alone would allow. In ultrafast optical measurements, the team tracked exciton populations as they moved between different stacking domains, observing a coherent, directional flow that correlated precisely with the spatial pattern of lattice reconstruction. The excitons, in effect, ride a wave carved by the crystal itself.

The experimental strategy combined several state-of-the-art techniques. The heterobilayers were assembled from monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides using deterministic transfer methods, allowing precise control over the relative orientation of the two lattices. Optical microscopy and spectroscopy revealed the characteristic photoluminescence signatures of interlayer excitons in different stacking configurations, while spatially and temporally resolved measurements mapped how exciton emission evolved across the reconstructed domains after pulsed laser excitation. Complementary theoretical modeling and atomistic simulations confirmed that the observed drift velocities and trajectories emerge naturally from the reconstructed band structure, without the need for any externally applied field.

From a technical standpoint, the mechanism can be understood through the interplay of moiré physics and exciton dipoles. In a twisted or lattice-mismatched bilayer, the superposition of the two atomic lattices generates a moiré superlattice with a period of several nanometers. At small twist angles, the system lowers its elastic energy by deforming into triangular domains of near-perfect high-symmetry stacking, separated by narrow domain walls where the stacking registry changes abruptly. This lattice reconstruction modifies the local band edges: the energy of the interlayer exciton, which depends on the relative alignment of the conduction and valence bands in the two layers, varies across the moiré cell. Because the interlayer exciton carries a permanent dipole perpendicular to the layers, any gradient in its potential energy produces a force. The reconstructed lattice thus acts as a nanoscale, self-assembled potential gradient, driving excitons along well-defined crystallographic directions.

The speed of the effect is what sets it apart. Exciton diffusion in conventional semiconductor structures typically proceeds at velocities limited by thermal randomization and scattering with phonons and impurities. In the reconstructed heterobilayer, the deterministic drift component dominates over diffusion, enabling exciton transport over micron-scale distances on picosecond timescales. Such speeds approach those seen in deliberately engineered exciton funnels and are far beyond what natural diffusion would achieve over comparable distances. Moreover, because the driving force is intrinsic to the crystal structure, the effect is robust against the disorder that often plagues external-field approaches, and it operates without any need for electrodes, gates or patterned substrates.

The implications ripple across several research frontiers. For excitonics—a proposed paradigm in which excitons rather than electrons or photons carry information—the demonstration of fast, field-free, structurally guided exciton drift provides a missing ingredient: a way to route excitonic signals through a device using nothing more than cleverly designed stacking geometry. Because interlayer excitons also couple strongly to light, such routing could be read out optically, enabling hybrid photonic-excitonic circuits on a chip. For moiré physics, the result underscores that lattice reconstruction is not merely a structural side effect but an active agent that can be exploited to shape excitonic and electronic behavior. And for fundamental science, the work offers a clean platform to study how topological defects in a crystal lattice interact with neutral quasiparticles carrying electric dipoles.

The discovery also raises tantalizing questions that the field will now pursue. Can the direction and magnitude of the reconstruction-driven drift be tuned dynamically, for example by applying strain, gating the layers, or modulating the twist angle? Could domain walls themselves—where the stacking registry flips—serve as reconfigurable exciton waveguides or beam splitters? Might similar mechanisms operate for other dipolar quasiparticles, including trions, polaritons or even exciton condensates in the strongly correlated regimes now accessible in moiré systems? The researchers suggest that the interplay between lattice dynamics and exciton transport could be engineered with a precision that was previously unimaginable, effectively turning crystallography into a design tool for quantum materials.

There are, of course, practical hurdles on the road to applications. Van der Waals heterostructures must be assembled with exceptional cleanliness to avoid contamination and bubbles that disrupt the delicate reconstruction patterns. The optical measurements used to observe exciton drift remain demanding, requiring ultrafast lasers and low-temperature cryogenics in many cases, although the underlying physics persists at elevated temperatures. Scaling from laboratory-scale flakes to wafer-scale devices will require advances in growth and transfer techniques. Nevertheless, the rapid progress in two-dimensional materials engineering over the past decade gives reason for optimism that these challenges will be met.

What makes the result resonate beyond the specialist community is its conceptual elegance. Rather than fighting against the intrinsic tendencies of a layered crystal, the researchers harnessed them. The lattice, under the gentle constraint of twist-angle engineering, reorganizes itself into a landscape of nanoscale potentials—and the excitons, obeying simple electrostatic forces, stream across that landscape at extraordinary speed. It is a vivid reminder that in the quantum materials of the twenty-first century, structure and function are inseparable: the very geometry of atoms in a stack of atomically thin sheets can become the engine that moves light-matter quasiparticles across a chip.

As laboratories worldwide continue to explore the rich physics of moiré materials, this demonstration of fast interlayer exciton drift driven by lattice reconstruction is likely to be remembered as a turning point—the moment when structural self-organization in van der Waals heterostructures was transformed from a phenomenon to be characterized into a resource to be exploited. Whether it leads to practical exciton circuits, new classes of optoelectronic devices, or deeper insights into correlated states of matter, one thing is clear: the humble crystal lattice has revealed itself to be a far more dynamic and powerful player in the story of two-dimensional materials than anyone had fully appreciated.

The theoretical starting point is the auditory deprivation hypothesis, which holds that early suboptimal auditory stimulation impairs the development of language, and that language, in turn, scaffolds the emergence of executive functioning. Classic work in this tradition, including Conway, Pisoni, and Kronenberger’s account of how sound supports cognitive sequencing, and Botting and colleagues’ demonstration that nonverbal executive function is mediated by language in deaf and hearing children, has framed deafness as a neurocognitive risk factor. Kesarwani and Debbarma accept this framework but add a crucial twist: the instruments used to measure executive functioning are themselves saturated with language, meaning that any assessment in the deaf population risks confounding true cognitive differences with linguistic load.

The search strategy combined terms for executive functioning and hearing impairment, including cognitive functioning, linguistic influence on executive functioning, and the influence of cochlear implants, with the keyword ‘young adults’ added to isolate the relevant age group. Databases such as Scopus, PsycINFO, and PubMed were queried, and twelve studies survived the inclusion criteria. The multidimensional nature of executive functioning was mapped using measures spanning working memory, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility, planning, and theory of mind, ranging from self-report inventories such as the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function–Adult version to behavioral paradigms like the Eriksen flanker task, which requires participants to respond to a target letter while ignoring distracting flanking letters—a design that can be delivered almost entirely visually.

The pattern that emerges is striking. On language-dependent measures—verbal fluency tasks, self-report questionnaires, and complex verbal reasoning batteries—deaf young adults consistently score lower than hearing peers. But when the review examined visually presented, low-language behavioral paradigms, the group differences shrank substantially, and in some domains disappeared altogether. This dissociation suggests that what has been interpreted as an executive functioning deficit in deaf young adults may, in considerable measure, reflect the linguistic demands of the assessment tools rather than a core cognitive impairment. In other words, the measuring stick itself may be bent.

The findings are consistent with the broader literature on visual attention in deaf populations. Studies such as those by Sladen and colleagues and Rothpletz and colleagues found that deaf adults can show intact, and in some cases enhanced, attentional deployment to the visual periphery, a plausible adaptation to a world perceived primarily through vision. Similarly, research on visual-spatial skills by Marschark, Spencer, and colleagues indicates that hearing status interacts with language experience in ways that do not map neatly onto simple deficit narratives. The new review synthesizes this evidence to argue that executive functioning in deaf young adults is mediated jointly by language exposure and task modality—two factors that most standard clinical batteries fail to disentangle.

Cochlear implants add another layer of complexity. The review reports that implantation is associated with improved cognitive skills, aligning with longitudinal work by Sarant and colleagues showing cognitive gains in older adults receiving implants, and with Kronenberger and colleagues’ neurocognitive risk model for implanted children. Yet even among implanted individuals, linguistic skills remain the primary predictor of executive functioning outcomes. This is a crucial nuance: restoring auditory input appears to help, but it does not erase the foundational role of early language access. The implication is that language-rich environments—whether signed or spoken—during the critical early years remain the strongest protective factor for later executive functioning.

The review also engages with theory of mind, the capacity to attribute mental states to others, which is often classified under the broader executive functioning umbrella. Studies of deaf college students by Marschark, Edwards, and colleagues, and work by Lecciso and colleagues on deaf adults, show that theory-of-mind performance is heavily dependent on linguistic proficiency and conversational access. Native signers with deaf signing parents frequently perform comparably to hearing peers, while deaf individuals with delayed or impoverished early language access show the largest gaps. This mirrors Woolfe’s findings with deaf native signing children and reinforces the review’s central thesis: language experience, not deafness per se, drives many of the cognitive differences documented in the literature.

Methodologically, the authors validated their instruments where possible. Hauser, Lukomski, and Samar demonstrated that the BRIEF-A can be reliable and valid for deaf college students, but only after careful adaptation, and their work appears alongside studies using the Adult Executive Functioning Inventory and general ability measures such as the General Ability Measure for Adults. The review highlights that self-report inventories pose a particular problem in the deaf population because their items are embedded in idiomatic written English, and comprehension of such language is itself a variable under study. When the test’s language load correlates with the construct’s linguistic dependence, measurement error and true variance become indistinguishable—a psychometric trap the authors urge the field to escape.

The real-world stakes are considerable. Executive functioning predicts academic achievement, employment, social maturity, and psychological adjustment, and Xiong and colleagues recently showed that executive dysfunction contributes to anxiety in hearing-impaired college students through pathways involving smartphone addiction and academic procrastination. If assessments systematically overestimate executive difficulties in deaf young adults, misdiagnosis, inappropriate support decisions, and lowered expectations may follow. Conversely, if genuinely deficient skills in verbal working memory or sequencing are masked by poorly designed visual tasks, individuals may miss interventions that could help. Accurate, linguistically sensitive measurement is thus not an academic nicety but a prerequisite for equitable education, clinical care, and workplace policy.

The authors close with a forward-looking recommendation: future assessment of executive functioning in deaf young adults should be linguistically sensitive by design, favoring visually delivered, low-language behavioral paradigms, reporting participants’ language histories explicitly, and treating modality of presentation as an experimental variable rather than a fixed convenience. They acknowledge the review’s limitations—twelve studies is a modest evidence base, and heterogeneity in samples, signing status, implantation history, and measures complicates synthesis—and note that no datasets were generated or analysed beyond the published literature. Still, the message lands with force. A generation of findings portraying deaf young adults as cognitively at risk may need recalibration, because a substantial share of the measured gap may belong to the tests, not the test-takers. For a population already navigating environments built for the hearing, that distinction matters: cognitive capacity should be measured on its own terms, not filtered through the language of those doing the measuring.

Executive functioning is not a single capacity but a family of interrelated processes that continue developing well into the mid-twenties, with the prefrontal cortex maturing gradually across adolescence and early adulthood. This protracted developmental trajectory means that the young adult years represent a window in which individual differences in cognitive control become consequential for real-world outcomes such as higher education, employment, and independent living. It also means that measurement choices made during this period can shape trajectories of support, since a young adult identified as having weak planning or working memory skills may be steered toward particular academic accommodations or clinical services on that basis.

The auditory scaffolding account underlying the review draws on a wider body of work in cognitive neuroscience suggesting that early sensory experience shapes the neural architecture available for later cognition. Temporal sequencing, in particular, is thought to depend on experience with the rapid, sequential structure of spoken language, so that children deprived of clear auditory input during sensitive periods may develop alternative but differently organized strategies for encoding order and sequence. Research with deaf native signers is informative here: when sign language is acquired from birth, many aspects of cognitive development proceed on a typical timetable, indicating that a fully accessible visual language can serve the same scaffolding function that spoken language serves for hearing children.

This perspective reframes deafness-related cognitive research as a natural experiment in modality and language experience rather than a search for deficits. Comparisons among deaf native signers, deaf late signers, oral deaf individuals with cochlear implants, and hearing controls allow researchers to separate the contributions of auditory access, language timing, and communication modality. Studies that include such detailed language histories tend to find that the timing and richness of early language exposure predict cognitive outcomes more consistently than audiological factors such as degree of hearing loss.

For practitioners, the practical takeaway is that assessment batteries for deaf young adults should be selected and interpreted with the linguistic demands of each instrument made explicit. Visual, nonverbal tasks can serve as a baseline against which performance on verbal measures is compared, and discrepancies between the two may signal linguistic load rather than cognitive weakness. Bilingual assessment frameworks that account for both signed and spoken language proficiency, and that involve examiners fluent in the client’s preferred language, offer a promising route toward measurement that reflects genuine ability rather than the accident of test design.

Subject of Research: Executive functioning in deaf young adults: a systematic review of measures and linguistic influence

Article Title: Executive functioning in deaf young adults: a systematic review of measures and linguistic influence

Article References: Kesarwani, S., & Debbarma, R. (2026). Executive functioning in deaf young adults: a systematic review of measures and linguistic influence. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 402. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01694-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01694-0

Keywords: Executive, functioning, deaf, young, adults, systematic, review, measures, linguistic, influence, scientific research

When underground rocks are subjected to intense heat, especially in regions known as large igneous provinces, previously locked sulfur and carbon compounds are released as gases. These emissions occur as fluids migrate from heated metamorphic rocks to the Earth’s surface, paralleling in impact the gas outputs typically attributed to volcanic eruptions. The study, published in Science Advances, outlines how these gases influence the atmosphere and global climate.

Sulfur gases released during metamorphism transform into sulfate aerosols in the atmosphere, which serve as reflective particles. These tiny sulfate aerosols act like mirrors, scattering sunlight and significantly reducing the solar energy reaching the Earth’s surface. Additionally, they promote cloud formation by acting as nuclei for water vapor condensation, enhancing the reflectivity of clouds and reinforcing rapid cooling events. However, sulfur aerosols have a short atmospheric lifetime, typically dispersing within days.

In contrast, carbon gases released alongside sulfur have a substantially longer atmospheric residence time. Unlike sulfur, carbon does not readily react or condense and thus remains in the atmosphere for thousands to millions of years. This persistent carbon presence leads to long-term greenhouse warming following the initial cooling spikes caused by sulfur aerosols. The interplay of these short-term cooling and prolonged warming phases might help explain the significant climate oscillations that coincide with mass extinction events.

The study highlights key extinction intervals that may have been influenced by this dual gas release mechanism, including the massive biodiversity losses at the end of the Ordovician around 440 million years ago and the Permian extinction, often called the “Great Dying,” approximately 252 million years ago. These events saw profound declines in marine and terrestrial species, reshaping the trajectory of life on Earth.

By integrating geochemical data with atmospheric science, the researchers provide a more nuanced understanding of Earth’s past climate dynamics. This approach challenges the traditional singular explanation centered on volcanic emissions and underscores the complexity of Earth’s deep-time environmental changes.

These findings have far-reaching implications for understanding how Earth’s interconnected systems respond to disturbance. They demonstrate that mass-extinction triggers stem from multiple interacting geological and atmospheric processes rather than isolated volcanic events, expanding the framework through which scientists explore past climate catastrophes.

As researchers continue to unravel these mechanisms, this novel insight into metamorphic gas emissions enriches our comprehension of Earth’s environmental sensitivity, informing models of both ancient and modern climate change. It also points to the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration to decode the planet’s complex climatic history.

Subject of Research: Geological and atmospheric processes driving ancient climate change and mass extinctions
Article Title: Metamorphic sulfur release as a driver of sustained cooling and mass extinction
News Publication Date: July 1, 2026
Web References: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aee2277
Image Credits: Devin Bittner/FSU College of Arts and Sciences
Keywords: Paleoclimatology, Mass Extinction, Metamorphism, Sulfur Emissions, Climate Change