It’s morning and you wake on a comfortable foam mattress made partly from greenhouse gas. You pull on a T-shirt and sneakers containing carbon dioxide pulled from factory emissions. After a good run, you stop for a cup of joe and guiltlessly toss the plastic cup in the trash, confident it will fully biodegrade into harmless organic materials. At home, you squeeze shampoo from a bottle that has lived many lifetimes, then slip into a dress fashioned from smokestack emissions. You head to work with a smile, knowing your morning routine has made Earth’s atmosphere a teeny bit carbon cleaner.
Sound like a dream? Hardly. These products are already sold around the world. And others are being developed. They’re part of a growing effort by academia and industry to reduce the damage caused by centuries of human activity that has sent CO 2 and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere ( SN: 3/12/22, p. 16 ).
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The need for action is urgent. In its 2022 report, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, stated that rising temperatures have already caused irreversible damage to the planet and increased human death and disease ( SN: 5/7/22 & 5/21/22, p. 8 ). Meanwhile, the amount of CO 2 emitted continues to rise. The U.S. Energy Information Administration predicted last year that if current policy and growth trends continue, annual global CO 2 emissions could rise from about 34 billion metric tons in 2020 to almost 43 billion by 2050.
Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is one strategy for mitigating climate change long noted by the IPCC as having “considerable” potential. A technology that has existed since the 1970s, CCS traps CO 2 from smokestacks or ambient air and pumps it underground for permanent sequestration. Today, 27 CCS facilities operate around the world — 12 in the United States — storing an estimated 36 million tons of carbon per year , according to the Global CCS Institute. The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act includes $3.5 billion in funding for four additional U.S. direct capture facilities.
But rather than just storing it, the captured carbon could be used to make things. This year for the first time, the IPCC added carbon capture and utilization , or CCU, to its list of options for drawing down atmospheric carbon. CCU captures CO 2 and incorporates it into carbon-containing products like cement, jet fuel and the raw materials for making plastics. Still in early stages of development and commercialization, CCU could reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions by 20 billion tons in 2050 — more than half of the world’s global emissions today, the IPCC estimates.
Such recognition was a big victory for a movement that has struggled to emerge from the shadow of its more established cousin, CCS, says chemist and global CCU expert Peter Styring of the University of Sheffield in England. Many CCU-related companies are springing up and collaborating with each other and with governments around the world, he adds.
The potential of CCU is “enormous,” both in terms of its volume and monetary potential, said mechanical engineer Volker Sick at a CCU conference in Brussels in April. Sick, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, directs the Global CO 2 Initiative, which promotes CCU as a mainstream climate solution. “We’re not talking about something that’s nice to do but doesn’t move the needle,” he added. “It moves the needle in many, many aspects.”
Plastics are made from fossil fuels, and their production is on the rise. Researchers hope to do things differently, using carbon that is already above ground to make plastics.
The use of carbon dioxide in products is not new. CO 2 is used to make soda fizzy, keep foods frozen (as dry ice) and convert ammonia to urea for fertilizer. What’s new is the focus on making products with CO 2 as a strategy to slow climate change. Today’s CCU market, estimated at $2 billion, could mushroom to $550 billion by 2040, according to Lux Research, a Boston-based market research firm. Much of this market is driven by adding CO 2 to cement — which can improve its properties as well as reduce atmospheric carbon — and to jet fuel, which can lower the industry’s large carbon footprint. CO 2 -to-plastics is a niche market today, but the field aims to battle two crises at once: climate change and plastic pollution.
Plastics are made from fossil fuels, a mix of hydrocarbons formed by the remains of ancient organisms. Most plastics are produced by refining crude oil, which is then broken down into smaller molecules through a process called cracking. These smaller molecules, known as monomers, are the building blocks of polymers. Monomers such as ethylene, propylene, styrene and others are linked together to form plastics such as polyethylene (detergent bottles, toys, rigid pipes), polypropylene (water bottles, luggage, car parts) and polystyrene (plastic cutlery, CD cases, Styrofoam).
It takes a lot of energy to break the strong double bonds between the carbon (black) and oxygen atoms (red) in a carbon dioxide molecule. To save energy, researchers are experimenting with chemical and bioinspired catalysts.
But making plastics from fossil fuels is a carbon catastrophe. Each step in the plastics life cycle — extraction, transport, manufacture and disposal — emits massive amounts of greenhouse gases, mostly CO 2 , according to the Center for International Environmental Law, a nonprofit law firm based in Geneva and Washington, D.C. These emissions alone — more than 850 million tons of greenhouse gases in 2019 — are enough to threaten global climate targets .
And the numbers are about to get much worse. A 2018 report by the Paris-based intergovernmental International Energy Agency projected that global demand for plastics will increase from about 400 million tons in 2020 to nearly 600 million by 2050. Future demand is expected to be concentrated in developing countries and will vastly outstrip global recycling efforts.
Plastics are a serious crisis for the environment , from fossil fuel use to their buildup in landfills and oceans ( SN: 1/16/21, p. 4 ). But we’re a society addicted to plastic and all it gives us — cell phones, computers, comfy Crocs. Is there a way to have our (plastic-wrapped) cake and eat it too?
Yes, says Sick. First, he argues, cap the oil wells. Next, make plastics from aboveground carbon. Today, there are products made of 20 to over 40 percent CO 2 . Finally, he says, build a circular economy, one that reduces resource use, reuses products, then recycles them into other new products.
“Not only can we eliminate the fossil carbon as a source so that we don’t add to the aboveground carbon budget, but in the process we can also rethink how we make plastics,” Sick says. He suggests they be specifically designed “to live very, very long so that they don’t have to be replaced … or that they decompose in a benign manner.”
But creating plastics from thin air is not easy. CO 2 needs to be extracted, from the atmosphere or smokestacks, for example, using specialized equipment. It often needs to be compressed into liquid form and transported, generally through pipelines. Finally, to meet the overall goal of reducing the amount of carbon in the air, the chemical reaction that turns CO 2 into the building blocks of plastics must be run with as little extra energy as possible. Keeping energy use low is a special challenge when dealing with the carbon dioxide molecule.
There’s a reason that carbon dioxide is such a potent greenhouse gas. It is incredibly stable and can linger in the atmosphere for 300 to 1,000 years. That stability makes CO 2 hard to break apart and add to other chemicals. Lots of energy is typically needed for the reaction.
“This is the fundamental energy problem of CO 2 ,” says chemist Ian Tonks of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. “Energy is necessary to fix CO 2 to plastics. We’re trying to find that energy in creative ways.”
Catalysts offer a possible answer. These substances can increase the rate of a chemical reaction, and thus reduce the need for energy. Scientists in the CO 2 -to-plastics field have spent more than a decade searching for catalysts that can work at close to room temperature and pressure, and coax CO 2 to form a new chemical identity. These efforts fall into two broad categories: chemical and biological conversion.
Early experiments focused on adding CO 2 to highly reactive monomers like epoxides to facilitate the reaction. Epoxides are three-membered rings composed of one oxygen atom and two carbon atoms. Like a spring under tension, they can easily pop open. In the early 2000s, industrial chemist Christoph Gürtler and chemist Walter Leitner of Aachen University in Germany found a zinc catalyst that allowed them to break open the epoxide ring of polypropylene oxide and combine it with CO 2 . Following the reaction, the CO 2 was joined permanently to the polypropylene molecule and was no longer in gas form — something that is true of all CO 2 -to-plastic reactions. Their work resulted in one of the first commercial CO 2 products — a polyurethane foam containing 20 percent captured CO 2 . Today, the German company Covestro, where Gürtler now works, sells 5,000 tons of the product annually in mattresses, car interiors, building insulation and sports flooring.
More recent research has focused on other monomers to expand the variety of CO 2 -based plastics. Butadiene is a hydrocarbon monomer that can be used to make polyester for clothing, carpets, adhesives and other products.
In 2020, chemist James Eagan at the University of Akron in Ohio mixed butadiene and CO 2 with a series of catalysts developed at Stanford University. Eagan hoped to create a polyester that is carbon negative, meaning it has a net effect of removing CO 2 from the atmosphere, rather than adding it. When he analyzed the contents of one vial, he discovered he had created something even better: a polyester made with 29 percent CO 2 that degrades in high pH water into organic materials.
“Chemistry is like cooking,” Eagan says. “We took chocolate chips, flour, eggs, butter, mixed them up, and instead of getting cookies we opened the oven and found a chicken potpie.”
Eagan’s invention has immediate applications in the recycling industry, where machines can often get gummed up from the nondegradable adhesives used in packaging, soda bottle labels and other products. An adhesive that easily breaks down may improve the efficiency of recycling facilities.
Tonks, described by Eagan as a friendly competitor, took Eagan’s patented process a step further. By putting Eagan’s product through one more reaction, Tonks made the polymer fully degradable back to reusable CO 2 — a circular carbon economy goal. Tonks created a start-up this year called LoopCO 2 to produce a variety of biodegradable plastics.
Researchers have also harnessed microbes to help turn carbon dioxide into useful materials including dress fabric. Some of the planet’s oldest-living microbes emerged at a time when Earth’s atmosphere was rich in carbon dioxide. Known as acetogens and methanogens, the microbes developed simple metabolic pathways that use enzyme catalysts to convert CO 2 and carbon monoxide into organic molecules. In the atmosphere, CO will react with oxygen to form CO 2 . In the last decade, researchers have studied the microbes’ potential to remove these gases from the atmosphere and turn them into useful products.
The ethanol used to create these products comes from LanzaTech’s two commercial facilities in China, the first to transform waste CO, a main emission from steel plants, into ethanol. The ethanol goes through two more steps to become polyester. LanzaTech partnered with steel mills near Beijing and in north-central China, feeding carbon monoxide into LanzaTech’s microbe-filled bioreactor.
Steel production emits almost two tons of CO 2 for every ton of steel made. By contrast, a life cycle assessment study found that LanzaTech’s ethanol production process lowered greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 80 percent compared with ethanol made from fossil fuels.
In February, researchers from LanzaTech, Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and others reported in Nature Biotechnology that they had genetically modified the Clostridium bacterium to produce acetone and isopropanol , two other fossil fuel–based industrial chemicals. Company CEO Jennifer Holmgren says the only waste product is dead bacteria, which can be used as compost or animal feed.
Other researchers are skipping the living microbes and just using their catalysts. More than a decade ago, chemist Charles Dismukes of Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J., began looking at acetogens and methanogens as a way to use atmospheric carbon. He was intrigued by their ability to release energy when making carbon building blocks from CO 2 , a reaction that usually requires energy. He and his team focused on the bacteria’s nickel phosphide catalysts, which are responsible for the energy-releasing carbon reaction.
Dismukes and colleagues developed six electrocatalysts that are able to make monomers at room temperature and pressure using only CO 2 , water and electricity. The energy-releasing pathway of the nickel phosphide catalysts “lowers the required voltage to run the reaction, which lowers the energy consumption of the process and improves the carbon footprint,” says Karin Calvinho, a former student of Dismukes who is now chief technical officer at RenewCO 2 , the start-up Dismukes’ team formed in 2018.
RenewCO 2 plans to sell its monomers, including monoethylene glycol, to companies that want to reduce their carbon footprint. The group proved its concept works using CO 2 brought into the lab. In the future, the company intends to obtain CO 2 from biomass, industrial emissions or direct air capture.
LanzaTech genetically modifies bacteria to transform carbon dioxide into ethanol and other building blocks for plastics and other products. RenewCO 2 uses nickel-based catalysts inspired by bacteria to do the same — break down CO 2 using little energy to make new things.
Yet researchers and companies face challenges in scaling up carbon capture and reuse. Some barriers lurk in the language of regulations written before CCU existed. An example is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s program to provide tax credits to companies that make biofuels. The program is geared toward plant-based fuels like corn and sugarcane. LanzaTech’s approach for making jet fuel doesn’t qualify for credits because bacteria are not plants.
Other barriers are more fundamental. Styring points to the long-standing practice of fossil fuel subsidies, which in 2021 topped $440 billion worldwide. Global government subsidies to the oil and gas industry keep fossil fuel prices artificially low , making it hard for renewables to compete, according to the International Energy Agency. Styring advocates shifting those subsidies toward renewables.
“We try to work on the principle that we recycle carbon and create a circular economy,” he says. “But current legislation is set up to perpetuate a linear economy.”
As companies try to reduce their carbon footprint, many are doing life cycle assessments to quantify the full carbon cost of their products.
The happy morning routine that makes the world carbon cleaner is theoretically possible. It’s just not the way the world works yet. Getting to that circular economy, where the amount of carbon above ground is finite and controlled in a never-ending loop of use and reuse will require change on multiple fronts. Government policy and investment, corporate practices, technological development and human behavior would need to align perfectly and quickly in the interests of the planet.
In the meantime, researchers continue their work on the carbon dioxide molecule.
“I try to plan for the worst-case scenario,” says Eagan, the chemist in Akron. “If legislation is never in place to curb emissions, how do we operate within our capitalist system to generate value in a renewable and responsible way? At the end of the day, we will need new chemistry.”
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
Today, you can buy a pair of sneakers partially made from carbon dioxide pulled out of the atmosphere. But measuring the carbon-reduction benefits of making that pair of sneakers with CO 2 is complex. There’s the fossil fuel that stayed in the ground, a definite carbon savings. But what about the energy cost of cooling the CO 2 into liquid form and transporting it to a production facility? And what about when your kid outgrows the shoes in six months and they can’t be recycled into a new product because those systems aren’t in place yet?
As companies try to reduce their carbon footprint, many are doing life cycle assessments to quantify the full carbon cost of products, from procurement of materials to energy use in manufacturing to product transport to user behavior and end-of-life disposal. It’s a mind-bogglingly difficult metric, but such bean-counting is needed to hold the planet to a livable temperature, says low-carbon systems expert Andrea Ramirez Ramirez of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.
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Carbon accounting is easy to get wrong, she says. Differences in starting points for determining a product’s “lifetime” or assumptions about the energy sources can all affect the math.
Carbon use can be reduced at many points along the production chain—by using renewable energy in the manufacturing process, for instance, or by adding atmospheric CO 2 to the product . But if other points along the chain are energy-intensive or emit CO 2 , she notes, the final tally may show a positive rather than a negative number.
A product is carbon negative only when its production actually removes carbon from the environment, temporarily or permanently. The Global CO 2 Initiative, with European and American universities, has created a set of LCA guidelines to standardize measurement so that carbon accounting is consistent and terms such as “carbon neutral” or “carbon negative” have a verifiable meaning.
Life cycle assessments are an attempt to measure the carbon costs of each step of the production, transport, use and disposal or recycling of a product.
In the rush to create products that can be touted as fighting climate change, however, some firms have been accused of “ greenwashing ” – making products or companies appear more environmentally friendly than they really are. Examples of greenwashing , according to a March 2022 analysis by mechanical engineers Grant Faber and Volker Sick of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor include labeling plastic garbage bags as recyclable when their whole purpose is to be thrown away; using labels such as “eco-friendly” or “100% Natural” without official certification; and claiming a better carbon footprint without acknowledging the existence of even better choices. An example would be “fuel-efficient” sport utility vehicles, which are only fuel efficient when compared with other SUVs rather than with smaller cars, public transit or bicycles.
Good LCA analysis, Sick says, can distinguish companies that are carbon-friendly in name only, from those that are truly helping the world clear the air.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
Spain’s Alhambra palace is considered a pinnacle of medieval Islamic architecture. Scientists now know why some of its intricate gold decorations turned purple.
Once upon a time, Spain’s hilltop Alhambra palace glittered with gold. Over the centuries, though, the Islamic citadel’s ornate, gilded structures on its ceilings and elsewhere fell into disrepair, with curious purple splotches marring them. The stains’ origins were a mystery. But scientists say they now understand the chemistry behind the purple tinge.
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Medieval artisans crafted some Alhambra ceilings to look like a cave’s stalactites, then gilded them with a layer of tinfoil topped by a gold-and-silver alloy. In the 19th century, people covered the degrading gilding with gypsum, a white mineral found in plaster.
Geologist Carolina Cardell of Spain’s University of Granada first noticed purple stains on the gypsum in 1993, but she and her colleagues didn’t have the tools to understand the splotches back then. Things changed when the university obtained two types of electron microscopes. The microscopes couple to other instruments that reveal a sample’s chemical elements and compounds at the nanoscale.
Cardell’s colleague Carmen Navarrete, a former head of restoration at the Alhambra, died before the team could get answers. Cardell and electron microscopy expert Isabel Guerra, also of the University of Granada, soldiered on without Navarrete to examine layers of gilding, gypsum and stains from the Alhambra. “We said we have to finish this and dedicate this work to her,” Cardell says.
Dots in microscope images of the gypsum proved to be pure gold nanospheres, most of which are about 70 nanometers wide. Nanoparticles’ colors depend on their size, which influences their interactions with light, and 70 nanometers is the right size for a purple hue.
Based on the elements and compounds detected, Cardell and Guerra conclude that multiple corrosion processes formed the nanoparticles ( SN: 3/21/15 ). Though pure gold is resistant to corrosion, the gold-and-silver alloy in the Alhambra is not. Flaws in the gilding let in moisture, including the Mediterranean’s chloride-rich airborne sea spray. That created chemical contacts between the gilding’s metals akin to those in a battery. As a result, the underlying tin corroded, pushing its way through defects in the alloy and covering some of the gold as grayish grime.
Different parts of the gold were thus exposed to different oxygen concentrations. That triggered further chemical reactions that dissolved some of the gold, paving the way for the spheres’ formation. Those spheres ended up settling in the gypsum, Cardell says.
“The level of detail of the study is phenomenal,” says Francesca Casadio, who heads the conservation science department at the Art Institute of Chicago. “Others are going to see these purplish hues and they are going to have a rubric to understand the phenomenon.”
Few reports of purple gold on damaged artwork and architecture exist. Cardell thinks that the white gypsum coating added to the Alhambra in the 19th century made the purple easy to notice. “We think that this purple color… is more widespread than people imagine.”
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
Human geneticist Regina Betz of University Hospital Bonn in Germany and her team had just linked three genes to a rare disorder with eye-catching symptoms : silvery, spangly, spun glass hair that just will not lie flat. Called uncombable hair syndrome, patients can have dry, shiny strands that stand away from the scalp like a cloud of dandelion fluff. Only about 100 cases had ever been reported.
But after the study, which looked at 18 cases, people from all over the world reached out. “They said, ‘Oh, I have a child like this’ or, ‘Oh, I looked exactly like that as a child,’” says study coauthor Buket Basmanav, a geneticist also at University Hospital Bonn. “Regina said, ‘Send us your samples.’”
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The gene, PADI3 , encodes an enzyme involved in hair shaft formation. Mutations in PADI3 can disrupt the process, tinkering with the hair’s structure. In people with the syndrome, the hair shaft is grooved, like “a paper straw that has collapsed in on itself,” says Gillian Westgate, a hair biologist at the University of Bradford in England who was not involved in the study.
Basmanav and her colleagues also linked nearly 4 percent of the cases to variants of TGM3 or TCHH , the two other hair shaft genes that the team had previously studied. Nearly a quarter of the cases in the new study remain genetically unexplained.
The work could help doctors diagnose the disorder, which often improves with age and isn’t typically tied to health problems. Genetically testing kids with the unusually lofty locks might ease the minds of parents worried that their child’s poufy ‘do is a sign of something more serious, Westgate says.
A diagnosis of uncombable hair syndrome can be a relief, Basmanav adds, because “we don’t expect any additional symptoms to show up.”
Meghan Rosen is a staff writer who reports on the life sciences for Science News . She earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology with an emphasis in biotechnology from the University of California, Davis, and later graduated from the science communication program at UC Santa Cruz.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
Many people’s perception of time has been distorted during the pandemic. Some people report that time feels as if it’s moving faster than before while others say it’s moving slower.
coffeekai/istock/getty images plus
Time hasn’t made much sense since spring 2020 for many people, myself included. In February 2020, during the Before Times, my family traveled to Barcelona, a relatively carefree trip that now feels like a lifetime ago. Other times, I feel like I blinked, and three years vanished. How can my son be starting fifth grade? He was a second grader just a minute ago.
Welcome to “blursday.” Back when the pandemic started, the term hit the zeitgeist. The word captured that sense of time disintegrating as our worlds and routines turned upside down ( SN: 9/14/20 ). Days melted together, then weeks, then years.
As people began wondering about why time felt so out of whack, Simon Grondin, a psychologist at Laval University in Quebec City, and colleagues penned a theory paper seeking to explain the phenomenon. Our time is typically punctuated by events, such as dinner dates or daily commutes, Grondin and his team wrote in October 2020 in Frontiers in Psychology . Such events provide temporal landmarks . When those landmarks disappear, days lose their identities. Time loses its definition.
Since the initial shutdowns, cognitive neuroscientists and psychologists have been scrambling to document people’s changing relationship with the clock. Early findings from those efforts now confirm that the pandemic did lead many people worldwide to experience distortions in their perception of time.
For instance, two surveys of more than 5,600 people taken during the first six months of the pandemic in the United States showed that roughly two-thirds of respondents reported feeling strangely out of sync . Days felt as if they were blurring together, the present loomed overly large and the future felt uncertain, researchers reported in August in Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice and Policy.
“All of a sudden everything went on stop.… We could not be the people we were used to being in the world anymore,” says health psychologist Alison Holman of the University of California, Irvine.
For some people, distortions in time may feel like a strange, somewhat unsettling phenomenon, but one they can shake off. For others, the trauma of the past few years combined with this weird perception of time is a worrisome mix: They could be at risk of lingering mental health problems, Holman says.
Those who reported greater feelings of time distortion, and thus may be at higher risk of developing mental health problems, included participants ages 18 to 29 and women. Previous life experience, including preexisting mental health challenges and high levels of lifetime stress or trauma, also heightened one’s likelihood of feeling out of sync.
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Holman first observed how a warped sense of time can hurt people’s well-being as a graduate student in the 1990s. For her dissertation, she interviewed survivors of the southern California fires of 1993 within days of the fires’ onset. She found that two years later, the individuals who had lost their sense of time during the fires still reported feeling greater distress than those who had largely kept their temporal bearings.
“People who experienced temporal disintegration … got stuck in that past experience. They couldn’t put together the flow from past to present to future,” she says.
Now Holman hopes that measuring how much people feel like time is falling apart during the pandemic might provide an early indicator of who might need help with recovery.
Other recent research during the pandemic suggests that those experiencing time as moving more slowly seem to struggle with greater mental distress than those who experience time as moving fast. For instance, respondents who reported that time felt like it was going very slowly also reported higher levels of loneliness , researchers reported in August in Nature Human Behaviour.
In a similar line of work, experimental psychologist Ruth Ogden of Liverpool John Moores University in England and colleagues are seeking to understand how people might eventually remember the pandemic, and what that could mean for recovery. Ogden and her team asked almost 800 respondents in the United Kingdom to reflect on the start of the pandemic a year after it started.
Only 9 percent said the preceding 12 months felt precisely like a year, while 34 percent said that time felt shorter, the researchers wrote in July in PLOS One . Most respondents, 57 percent, said that the preceding 12 months felt longer than a year .
When a traumatic event feels long in hindsight, people may feel that the trauma is much closer in the rearview mirror than it is in reality. Such negative emotions could lengthen people’s recovery from the pandemic, Ogden and her team suspect. Remembering “a longer pandemic may feel more recent and thus more present,” the team writes.
Mindfulness training that brings people back to the present is one promising way to overcome distortions in time perception, says Olivier Bourdon, a psychologist at the University of Quebec in Montreal ( SN: 9/26/22 ).
But unlike more finite traumas, such as wildfires and mass shootings, the pandemic is not yet in the rearview mirror. Many people are stuck not in the past but a sort of liminal present. While the answers for how to treat people in this instance are far from clear, Bourdon says the key is helping people knit together their past, present and future selves. “If you’re stuck in a specific time perspective, it’s bad for health,” he says.
Helping people rebuild a new vision for the future is especially crucial for well-being, research suggests. People must, Holman says, “have some sense of tomorrow.”
S. Grondin, E. Mendoza-Duran and P-A Rioux. Pandemic, quarantine, and psychological time . Frontiers in Psychology, Vol. 11, October 20, 2020, p. 581036, doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.581036.
Sujata Gupta is the social sciences writer and is based in Burlington, Vt.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
Some people in Sydney are in a battle with birds over trash. Residents there are putting bricks on top of trash cans or wedging water bottles in their handles to deter sulphur-crested cockatoos (one shown) from breaking in.
Barbara Klump/Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
Human trash can be a cockatoo’s treasure. In Sydney, the birds have learned how to open garbage bins and toss trash around in the streets as they hunt for food scraps. People are now fighting back.
Bricks, pool noodles, spikes, shoes and sticks are just some of the tools Sydney residents use to keep sulphur-crested cockatoos ( Cacatua galerita ) from opening trash bins, researchers report September 12 in Current Biology . The goal is to stop the birds from lifting the lid while the container is upright but still allowing the lid to flop open when a trash bin is tilted to empty its contents.
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This interspecies battle could be a case of what’s called an innovation arms race, says Barbara Klump, a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Radolfzell, Germany. When cockatoos learn how to flip trash can lids , people change their behavior, using things like bricks to weigh down lids, to protect their trash from being flung about ( SN Explores: 10/26/21 ). “That’s usually a low-level protection and then the cockatoos figure out how to defeat that,” Klump says. That’s when people beef up their efforts, and the cycle continues.
Researchers are closely watching this escalation to see what the birds — and humans — do next. With the right method, the cockatoos might fly by and keep hunting for a different target. Or they might learn how to get around it.
In the study, Klump and colleagues inspected more than 3,000 bins across four Sydney suburbs where cockatoos invade trash to note whether and how people were protecting their garbage. Observations coupled with an online survey showed that people living on the same street are more likely to use similar deterrents, and those efforts escalate over time.
Tricks such as attempting to scare the parrots off with rubber snakes don’t work very well, Klump says. Nor does blocking access with heavy objects such as bricks; cockatoos use brute force to push them off. Hanging weights from the front of the lid or wedging items such as sneakers and sticks through a bin’s back handles work better. The team didn’t see any birds get inside bins with these higher levels of protection
The findings hint at an arms race, Klump says, but the missing piece is how the birds will respond as people try new ways of blocking bins. Some survey responses suggest that the parrots are learning.
“Bricks seemed to work for a while, but cockies got too clever,” one survey respondent wrote. “Neighbours on other side of highway suggested sticks. They work.”
It would be interesting to explore the benefits and issues of different methods from the perspective of both humans and birds, says Anne Clark, a behavioral ecologist at Binghamton University in New York who wasn’t involved with the work. “I’m curious the degree of effort that people put into this and whether sometimes that effort limited their use of one solution versus another.” Some people, for instance, might not have the time to attach a small weight to the lid of the bin or might depend on their children, who can’t lift heavy bricks, to put out the trash.
In the same vein, cockatoos may stay away from tactics that take too long to beat. Bricks, for instance, are easy to quickly push off a bin; breaking sticks or pool noodles wedged through the bin’s back handle could take more time. Perhaps if enough people in a neighborhood adopt a highly effective method, Clark says, the cockatoos may not find it worth it to stop by.
Erin I. Garcia de Jesus is a staff writer at Science News . She holds a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Washington and a master’s in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
