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  • Boston University researchers say CTE is a cause of dementia

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    Boston University researchers in a groundbreaking study found that those with CTE have a much higher chance of being diagnosed with dementia.

    The largest study of its kind from the Boston University CTE Center reveals that the progressive brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy should be recognized as a new cause of dementia.

    The BU researchers discovered that those with advanced CTE — who had been exposed to repetitive head impacts — had four times higher odds of having dementia.

    “This study provides evidence of a robust association between CTE and dementia as well as cognitive symptoms, supporting our suspicions of CTE being a possible cause of dementia,” said Michael Alosco, associate professor of neurology at Boston University Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine.

    “Establishing that cognitive symptoms and dementia are outcomes of CTE moves us closer to being able to accurately detect and diagnose CTE during life, which is urgently needed,” added Alosco, who’s the co-director of clinical research at the BU CTE Center.

    The researchers studied 614 brain donors who had been exposed to repetitive head impacts, primarily contact sport athletes.

    By isolating 366 brain donors who had CTE alone, compared to 248 donors without CTE, researchers found that those with the most advanced form of CTE had four times increased odds of having dementia.

    The four times odds are similar to the strength of the relationship between dementia and advanced Alzheimer’s disease pathology, which is the leading cause of dementia.

    Dementia is a clinical syndrome that refers to impairments in thinking and memory, in addition to trouble with performing tasks of daily living like driving and managing finances. Alzheimer’s disease is the leading cause, but there are several other progressive brain diseases listed as causes of dementia that are collectively referred to as Alzheimer’s disease related dementias (ADRD).

    With this new study, the authors argue that CTE should now also be formally considered an ADRD.

    The study also reveals that dementia due to CTE is often misdiagnosed during life as Alzheimer’s disease, or not diagnosed at all. Among those who received a dementia diagnosis during life, 40% were told they had Alzheimer’s disease despite showing no evidence of Alzheimer’s disease at autopsy. An additional 38% were told the causes of their loved one’s dementia was “unknown” or could not be specified.

    In addition, this study addressed the controversial viewpoint expressed by some clinicians and researchers that CTE has no clinical symptoms. As recently as 2022, clinicians and researchers affiliated with the Concussion in Sport Group meeting, which was underwritten by international professional sports organizations, claimed, “It is not known whether CTE causes specific neurological or psychiatric problems.”

    Alosco said, “There is a viewpoint out there that CTE is a benign brain disease; this is the opposite of the experience of most patients and families. Evidence from this study shows CTE has a significant impact on people’s lives, and now we need to accelerate efforts to distinguish CTE from Alzheimer’s disease and other causes of dementia during life.”

    As expected, the study did not find associations with dementia or cognition for low-stage CTE.

    The BU CTE Center is an independent academic research center at the Boston University Avedisian and Chobanian School of Medicine. It conducts pathological, clinical and molecular research on CTE and other long-term consequences of repetitive brain trauma in athletes and military personnel.

     

     

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    Rick Sobey

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  • UMass Lowell shut out at home, can’t sweep Boston University

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    LOWELL – For the second weekend in a row, the UMass Lowell hockey team was unable to pull off a Hockey East sweep at home.

    One night after pulling out a thrilling overtime road victory over No. 20 Boston University, the River Hawks returned home to the Tsongas Center looking to bank more league points.

    But the Terriers had other ideas, as BU’s sophomore forward Cole Eiserman score a late goal in the second period, followed by a Nick Roukounakis goal in the third to help BU get a 3-0 win on Saturday night in front of a crowd of 5,856.

    “I thought it was a good game for the bulk of the night. I didn’t have a problem with the effort. The execution wasn’t there tonight, and we certainly made it hard on ourselves in the offensive zone, and weren’t able to get shots through,” UML head coach Norm Bazin said. “So we could do a better job that way and figure out what we can do to create more offense in the offensive zone, because I thought the effort with their first touches, for the most part were there, and the guys were hungry, but had nothing to show for it.”

    Boston University goalie Mikhal Yegorov was fantastic in net, with 23 saves in the victory, and forward Ben Merrill netted a late open net goal to seal the win.

    The River Hawks fell to 2-6 on home ice.

    The River Hawks (8-14-0, 4-8-0) hoped to take the season series against the ranked Boston University Terriers (12-9-1, 8-6-0) after their 4-3 overtime win the night prior at Agganis Arena in Boston.

    Early in the first period, senior center Dillan Bentley had a shot in front of the net that flew wide at the 18:00 mark. BU freshman forward Jack Murtagh found himself alone with a wide open shot in front, but River Hawks goalie Austin Elliott made a great blocker save to keep things even.

    UMass Lowell was able to attain its first power play opportunity of the game after a boarding call with 9:50 to go in the period, but their advantage was short lived, receiving a hooking call only four seconds into their power play chance to get back to an even 4-on-4 for the next two minutes. Both goalies traded big saving plays, as BU’s Yegorov made his at the 6:00 mark, with Elliott following that up with another great blocker save with 4:30 to go in the first. The Terriers got their first full power play chance of the game after a tripping call on the River Hawks with 1:33 to go. The first period ended scoreless, with UML leading shots on goal in the period, 6-4.

    In the second period, UML had a good scoring chance in front on a one-timer opportunity, only to be denied by Yegorov with a phenomenal diving save at the 15:00 mark. BU was given its second power play after a cross checking call on the River Hawks with 12:52 to go, but would be given an interference call only a minute and a half later to give UML its third power play chance as well.

    Elliott made another great save with 6:00 left as BU failed to corral the rebound off his blocker. BU’s Eiserman had a big breakaway chance with 3:00 to play, but his shot went wide right, as the game appeared to stay 0-0 heading into the third. Eiserman was able to make up for his mistake in miraculous fashion, however, scoring an unassisted goal with only 1.7 seconds left to give Boston University a huge 1-0 lead heading into the third, his ninth of the season.

    Knowing they had to be aggressive out the gates, the River Hawks opened up the third period with a slap shot from left wing Jay Ahearn that was saved glove side by Yegorov. UML dominated the first 10 minutes in shots on goal, with nine compared to BU with four.

    The Terriers had a 3-on-1 opportunity with 11:00 left, but Elliott kept the River Hawks in the game with a nice save, stick side. As the clock ran under 10 minutes to play, BU kept on the attack. With 9:20 left, Roukounakis was able to put another one in the back of the net, this time a rebound that bounced off Elliott’s left blocker, giving the Terriers a 2-0 lead with a little under half the period remaining.

    With three minutes left, the River Hawks opted to pull Elliott, giving them an extra attacker needing two goals to extend the game. This decision would prove to be detrimental, as BU’s Merrill scored an empty net goal with 2:00 left to give the Terriers a 3-0 lead, and eventual win against the River Hawks.

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    Mike Sidhly

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  • New Hampshire’s snowpack is shrinking. Researchers are still uncovering the scope of what it means.

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    Researcher Pamela Templer and her team removed snow from this study plot in Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest to simulate the increased freezing and thawing cycles created when snowpack recedes. Snowpack decline in the Northeast stresses trees and can reduce their ability to sequester carbon, Templer said. (Photo by Emerson Conrad-Rooney/Templer Lab)

    New England residents know that snow is disappearing from our landscape, and scientists have proven that climate change is to blame. But the effects of snowpack decline go far beyond what’s visible, and researchers working in the forests of New Hampshire and the Northeast are learning more about just how far the phenomenon stretches across seasons and landscapes. Their findings reveal how much tracking snow can tell us about the health of our forests and our world, and what is still to learn.

    The average amount of snow that accumulates on the ground throughout the winter season, or snowpack, is shrinking from year to year across the Northeast. While data has captured that effect (and linked it to human-caused climate change), many who live and recreate in the region have noticed it in their own lives — including the researchers who later took up the matter in their work.

    “I grew up cross-country skiing with my family,” said Emerson Conrad-Rooney, a doctoral student at Boston University whose work focuses on the effects of climate change on northern forests. Conrad-Rooney, who grew up in western Massachusetts, said the places they had grown up skiing through the winter were, in recent years, open only a handful of days all season long. “That’s been kind of separate from this research I’m doing, but just something that me and my family have seen … We’re, I think, definitely feeling that change,” they said.

    Eric Kelsey, a meteorologist and researcher at Plymouth State University, also grew up an enthusiastic winter recreator in Nashua. A love of snow and weather led Kelsey to learn more about the integral role of snowpack to the water cycle. But as he read more, Kelsey was struck by the relative lack of cohesive, long-term snowpack data, especially compared to other weather datasets tracking things like daily high and low temperatures and rainfall.

    “We just don’t have a climatology of snowpack — that was surprising to me,” Kelsey said.

    The problem, Kelsey said, was not necessarily a lack of data. For more than a century, people across the Northeast have logged information about snowfall, from dam operators attempting to predict how snowmelt would affect their rivers to farmers and ski slope proprietors.

    Appalachian Mountain Club employee Maddie Ziomek uses National Weather Service instruments to measure snowpack in the White Mountain National Forest. (Photo by Maddie Ziomek/Appalachian Mountain Club)

    Most tracked snow depth and snow water equivalent (the amount of water contained in that snow, a measure that fluctuates with snow density). Their observations, taken as a whole, are a rich collection of information about snowfall in New England, Kelsey said. But the records were also scattered and disparate, making it difficult for scientists to unlock the information they contained.

    Now, Kelsey and Plymouth State graduate student David Zywiczynski are halfway through a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration grant-funded effort to unify and clean that data, which includes measurements taken over yearslong periods from more than 400 sites. Then, they hope, scientists will be able to use it to make sense of long-term patterns in local snowpack, from general decline to years of snow drought — or abnormally low snowfall conditions.

    Because snowpack plays an important role in replenishing streams, lakes, and aquifers when it melts each spring, a tool to identify snow drought with more certainty could help forecasters anticipate the dry conditions that will likely persist later in the year, Kelsey said. The “snow drought index” Kelsey and Zywiczynski are working on to facilitate that may be the first tool of its kind in the nation.

    As historic data is put to work at Plymouth State, elsewhere in New Hampshire, scientists are tracking ongoing changes in forests as they unfold.

    Just beneath Mount Washington in Pinkham Notch, Appalachian Mountain Club Senior Scientist Georgia Murray oversees the collection of daily snowpack depth and snow water equivalent measurements. Data collected in the notch and above at the Mount Washington Observatory stretches back to the 1930s, Murray said, constituting one of the longer sets of continuous snowpack observations available in the region.

    Measurements from the two relatively close sites are often very different on the same day, highlighting how difficult it can be to assess snowpack, Murray said. Unlike rain, snow blows around once it falls, clearing off some areas completely and piling up in others. Having data from as many sites as possible is desirable for a more comprehensive understanding, Murray said, so she also works to encourage citizen scientists to measure and submit snowpack data across the region through a smartphone app.

    “It’s complex with snowpack, because you have, you know, nooks and crannies across the mountain, and so you have so many ways that snow is distributed differently. Having citizen science data fill in the gaps is something we really value in the mountain ecosystem, where we can’t be everywhere,” Murray said.

    Citizen science data also helps keep track of the downstream effects of snowpack decline, including its impact on plant life. Plants rely on natural cues to time their life cycles; when some cues, like the presence of snow, change while others, like day length, do not, they may be negatively impacted, Murray said.

    “In climate change, there can be these mismatches of synchronicity,” she said.

    Furthermore, as snow melts in spring, the water it releases carries nutrients through the soil, making them more available to the roots of hungry and thirsty young plants. But data shows that the timing of snow melt is changing, too, starting earlier and lasting for longer. Murray hopes citizen data will help shine a light on what that could mean for White Mountain plants, from delicate spring ephemeral wildflowers to alpine trees.

    “The snowmelt timing has a strong impact in the spring, and can have a ripple effect over the growing season,” she said.

    Understanding those and other ripple effects of snowpack decline is crucial to making informed predictions about what the future might bring for New England, researchers said.

    Pamela Templer, chair of the Biology department at Boston University and a researcher who has studied northern forests for more than two decades, established a set of three research plots at Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, in the White Mountains, about 10 years ago. The goal of the study, entitled “Climate Change Across Seasons Experiment,” or CCASE, was to assess how seasonal changes play off each other in yearly cycles.

    Before that study, researchers had shown that in summer, temperate forests experienced some positive effects from growing seasons that were stretching longer, Templer said. Separate studies, including in Templer’s own work, had revealed the negative impacts on temperate forests from warming winters. But Templer wanted to assess those two phenomena together.

    “We didn’t know at that point what the net effect of those two changes in climate were on the forest,” Templer said.

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    To do so, Templer and her team — including Conrad-Rooney and “a village” of other researchers — simulated the freeze-thaw cycle, which can occur in the forest floor when it is not protected by an insulating layer of snow, by removing snow in some plots and heating the ground before allowing it to re-freeze. Precise measurements of the trees within the plot, taken over the 10 years the study has run so far, tracked the forest’s growth and the amount of carbon it was storing away over that period.

    The work is a demonstration of one of the many ways snowpack decline can add stress into an ecosystem, said Kelsey, who was not involved in the study.

    To a tree, damage from repeated freezing and thawing “is, you know, like getting a cut on your finger,” Kelsey said. “It hurts, it will take some resources from your body to heal it, that could be doing other things… And as we know, if there’s too many stressors on a tree, it will die. So this is just adding another stressor to the trees. That’s not good.”

    Ultimately, Templer, Conrad-Rooney, and researcher Andrew Reinmann concluded in a study published this July that the benefits to trees from longer growing seasons were outweighed by the damage those trees suffered from repeated freeze-thaw cycles in the winter. That finding, they said, reveals that previous models projecting forests’ role in helping sequester carbon may have overestimated their role in absorbing greenhouse gas.

    “If we think that forests are actually storing more carbon than is actually happening, then that means that, maybe, more carbon would be going into our atmosphere than we realize,” Conrad-Rooney said.

    This realization has implications for scientists’ ability to model ecosystem changes into the future. It could also inform land conservation decisions, Templer said.

    “We need an accurate accounting,” she said. “If we’re going to use forests as nature-based solutions to climate change in terms of sequestering carbon, then we need to know how much they’re sequestering.”

    Researchers expect that as they continue to examine historic and current snowpack data, more effects and ripples of snowpack decline will emerge.

    From its role in keeping lakes cool through the summer to protecting the landscape from wildfire, snow impacts the water cycle all year long, Kelsey said. And – as is evident both in the origin of the field’s data and its implications – the study of snow brings together many interests, including those of industry, agriculture, tourism, homeowners with wells, and more.

    “It touches our lives in so many ways,” Murray said. “… We hope that people see the science that we’re doing, so that they can understand what’s happening, and how it links to their lives and the outdoors.”

    This story was originally published by New Hampshire Bulletin. Like Maine Morning Star, New Hampshire Bulletin is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Hampshire Bulletin maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Dana Wormald for questions: info@newhampshirebulletin.com.

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  • Morehouse Chapel Dean to Retire After Nearly Five Decades of Service

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    Carter Sr. (above) was the founding dean of the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel and a professor of religion since 1979.
    Photo by Tabius McCoy/The Atlanta Voice

    For nearly half a century, the Rev. Dr. Lawrence Edward Carter Sr. has stood at the heart of Morehouse College’s spiritual and intellectual life. Now, the founding dean of the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel & professor is preparing to close one chapter of his storied career.

    Carter, 76, announced he will retire from his deanship on June 30, 2026, after 47 years at the historically Black men’s college. His tenure, which began on July 1, 1979, when he was appointed by then-President Hugh Gloster, makes him one of the longest-serving leaders in Morehouse history.

    “This is my 46th year, and I will retire from the deanship June 30, 2026,” Carter said in an interview with The Atlanta Voice. “I will maintain my professorship and go on sabbatical for one year, which will complete 47 years with Morehouse College.”

    Carter (above) was selected unanimously from a pool of 500 candidates. Photo by Tabius McCoy/The Atlanta Voice

    From Dawson to Morehouse: Transforming the Chapel

    Born in Dawson, Georgia, Carter’s journey to the ministry started early. His mother later told him that his grandmother had prayed over him as an infant, asking God to “make this boy a preacher.” Carter didn’t learn of that prayer until after earning his doctorate at Boston University School of Theology.

    “I was wrestling with my calling from ninth through twelfth grade, and finally announcing it publicly my senior year, as something just between me and God,” he recalled. “So when I heard my mother say that, it stunned me.”

    Before coming to Morehouse, Carter served as acting director of the Martin Luther King Jr. African American Cultural Center at Boston University while completing his doctorate. Though some doubted he could lead the Morehouse chapel without being an alumnus, Carter was selected unanimously from a pool of 500 candidates.

    One of his earliest acts was persuading the Board of Trustees to rename Memorial Chapel as the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel. Carter said he didn’t want to preside over “a museum for battles that are no longer being fought.” The board eventually approved the change unanimously.

    Over the next four decades, Carter led the chapel’s evolution into a hub for global ethics, peacebuilding, and interfaith dialogue. He launched the Chapel Assistants Pre-Seminarians Program, widely regarded as a top feeder program for divinity schools nationwide. He also introduced initiatives like the Gandhi–King–Ikeda awards and the Community Builders Prizes, which brought international leaders to Morehouse’s campus.

    Photo by Tabius McCoy/The Atlanta Voice

    The chapel itself transformed under Carter’s leadership, both physically and philosophically. Beyond renaming the building for Martin Luther King Jr., he oversaw the installation of historic stone tablets on its facade, salvaged from a King monument at Boston University. Carter recalled being present when the monument was first dedicated: “The President himself dedicated it, and I was in the crowd. When he finished delivering his speech, he stepped from behind the podium, and walked three rows back, and handed me his speech, and said, ‘You’re the only one here who will appreciate this.’” 

    Years later, when Boston University renovated the monument with marble and gold lettering, the original stones were offered to Morehouse. Carter accepted them, seeing their arrival as divine confirmation of his calling to remain at the college. The chapel’s Thurman Tower also houses a time capsule with artifacts spanning thousands of years of African and world history, further grounding the space in a global legacy.

    Praise from Morehouse Leadership: A Lasting Legacy

    Carter’s influence has stretched well beyond the campus gates. Generations of Morehouse students trained under his mentorship have gone on to leadership in churches, seminaries, and public life. Recruiters from divinity schools, he said, often prefer Morehouse graduates because they “rise to the top of the class all over the nation.”

    In moments of national crisis, major media outlets have sought out Morehouse pastors and alumni, a testament to the chapel’s reach under his stewardship.

    Still, Carter’s path was not without challenges. In his 19th year, he nearly resigned, facing a crisis of faith, telling his wife Marva that he felt “burnt out” and “lonely.” A weeklong trip that included preaching in Los Angeles restored his sense of purpose. 

    “When I landed in Atlanta, everything said, you’re home,” he remembered.

    Preparing for the Next Chapter: A Scholar’s Passion

    Away from the pulpit, Carter is known as a voracious reader and collector of books, boasting what he believes to be the largest personal library of any Morehouse faculty member. His love of knowledge began as a child, flipping through books he couldn’t yet read but sensed contained “secrets, answers to the problems of the world.”

    His passion for education also connects him to the roots of Morehouse. Carter has written about the college’s founder, William Jefferson White, a journalist who risked his life by opening clandestine schools for enslaved people before establishing what became Morehouse in 1867.

    “There’s a reason why during slavery there were laws on the books against teaching enslaved Africans to read,” Carter said. “And there’s a reason why the founder of Morehouse College was considered the greatest Black journalist of his era.”

    Morehouse College plans an international search for Carter’s successor, chaired by trustee and alumnus Rev. Dr. Delman Coates, Class of 1995. Photo by Tabius McCoy/The Atlanta Voice

    Carter’s career has spanned multiple eras in Morehouse history, from Gloster to the present. His work helped redefine the chapel not only as a place of worship but as a platform for leadership, service, and global vision.

    As the college begins its search for a new chapel dean, Carter is looking ahead to a sabbatical and a slower pace. But he said the affirmation he has received since announcing his retirement has been both humbling and reassuring.

    The college plans an international search for his successor, chaired by trustee and alumnus Rev. Dr. Delman Coates, Class of 1995.

    Since announcing his retirement, Carter said his life has changed. Visitors from around the world have come to see him, offering thanks and reflections on his legacy.

    “Since July 1, my life has not been the same,” he said. “They’ve been telling me that I did it. And then the strange thing is, they’re saying nobody else could have done this, but you’ve done it.”

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    Noah Washington

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  • Research volunteers combat Parkinson’s.

    Research volunteers combat Parkinson’s.

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    Newswise — About three years before he retired, David Campbell noticed something weird happening as he typed. Whenever he tried to hit a letter, say “a,” he’d get “aaa,” like the keyboard was jamming or his finger was triple-tapping the key. That wasn’t the only thing that seemed off—his sense of smell was faltering. “Little things,” he says, “that I didn’t think of as being a big deal.”

    A couple of weeks after he retired in fall 2020, Campbell learned the little things weren’t so little—they were life-changing. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. The repeated “a” was caused by a slight tremor as nerve cells in his brain degenerated or died, interrupting the signals controlling his muscles. A tremor is many patients’ first Parkinson’s symptom, followed by a raft of other steadily worsening neurological issues, such as a quieter voice, slower movement, stiffer limbs, and tighter facial expressions. Almost all patients will suffer some loss of smell too.

    Although therapy and medications can bring some relief from the neurodegenerative disorder, there’s no cure. Somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million Americans have Parkinson’s, including actor Michael J. Fox, singer Neil Diamond, and civil rights activist Jesse Jackson.

    For Campbell, it was a pretty shabby retirement gift. As he tried to adjust to his new reality, the former Boston University laboratory engineer joined a support group and decided to volunteer for research studies that aimed to improve treatment—perhaps even plot the route to a cure. “I figured, I have the disease,” he says, “I might as well try to do something good with it.”

    That decision is already having an impact. With the help of volunteers like Campbell, researchers at Boston University’s Center for Neurorehabilitation, a hub for Parkinson’s research, education, and clinical care, have made two important advances that may help people with the disease walk more smoothly, even turn their shuffled steps into confident strides. In one study, they used wearable soft robotic apparel—a series of fabric wraps, cables, actuators, and sensors—to help patients walk farther and faster. A second study used a music-based technology to increase walking duration and distance—controlling a song’s beats per minute to keep the steps up.

    Based at BU Sargent College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences, the center has been at the forefront of research establishing the benefits of exercise and physical therapy in taming Parkinson’s disease’s impact and improving quality of life. And both of the newly tested therapies could find their way into patients’ everyday lives relatively quickly. The robotic device uses technology that’s already commercially available; the musical intervention uses store-bought headphones. But, says Terry Ellis, the Center for Neurorehabilitation’s director, without the volunteers who give up hours of their time to participate in research studies or help her team test ideas and tweak gadgets, none of it would be possible.

    That’s a story told across BU. Volunteers join research studies—as well as classroom discussions and clinical training programs—on a wide range of topics, participating in person or from home. Some even do it over decades, like those who’ve given their time to the long-running Framingham Heart Study and BU’s Black Women’s Health Study.

    “Most of our research is intervention studies, so there’s hypothetically some benefit for them,” says Ellis of her center’s work. Their fitness may improve, they may get to try out some symptom-relieving tools. “But without them, we couldn’t do the work. I’m always saying to [volunteers], the work wouldn’t exist without your participation and contribution.”

    Robotic Apparel Eliminates Freezing of Gait

    Being a research study guinea pig can be rewarding, and might even save or improve lives, but it’s hardly glamorous work. For most of the apparel study, the main volunteer (unnamed in the final paper to protect their privacy) spent his time walking back and forth—again, and again, and again. At first, it was to get a baseline of his walking ability, then to allow the researchers to monitor the robotic tech’s effectiveness at shifting his stride and fine-tune the technology.

    The patient, a 73-year-old male who’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s 10 years earlier, was struggling with a common Parkinson’s problem known as freezing of gait. During a freezing episode, thought to be caused by a malfunction in the brain’s locomotor circuitry, a patient’s stride shortens, their walking speed tumbles, and their muscle coordination falls out of whack. Then they just stop—it reportedly feels like their feet are glued to the floor. Things had gotten so bad for the patient working with Ellis—more than 10 freezing episodes a day, resulting in multiple falls—he’d taken to getting around on a kick scooter.

    “It’s just devastating,” says Ellis (CAMED’05), a Sargent professor and chair of physical therapy. “There’s really no medicine or surgery that improves this. It interferes tremendously with people’s everyday life.”

    She and her colleagues had tried wearable robotic apparel with people recovering from a stroke—finding it helped some regain their pre-stroke walking speeds—and wondered if similar technology might work for Parkinson’s too. That exosuit, which is now commercially available for stroke rehabilitation from medical device company ReWalk Robotics, was derived from a model developed for the military by Harvard University’s Biodesign Lab to increase service members’ endurance.

    In most iterations, the robotic apparel looks like a highly engineered sports brace, using an algorithm to drive motors and cables that strategically apply forces to supplement muscles and joints. The version the researchers tailored for the Parkinson’s study featured two bands: one around the waist, the other around the thigh, each connected by a spooled cable. When activated, the spool turns, retracting the cable and pulling the thigh up. Ellis calls it a mechanical assist: “It provides a little bit of force—it’s perceptible, but at a very low level.” The algorithm helps time the assistance to the users’ steps and tailor the amount of force needed.

    As the study progressed, the researchers put their volunteer through his paces with a range of different tasks, including timed walking tests in the lab and outside in the community, adjusting the force provided by the suit—and its timing—and assessing the biomechanics of his walking.

    The results were striking: when the suit was on, the volunteer strolled easily down the corridor, arms and legs swinging with a natural confidence; when it was powered down, the change was almost instant—he staggered, stumbled, shuffled, and grabbed at the wall for balance.

    When switched on, the robotic apparel eliminated his freezing of gait—the first time any study has shown a potential way to overcome the debilitating symptom. The findings were published in Nature Medicine.

    “It’s pretty amazing,” says Ellis, who collaborated with researchers from BU and Harvard University. “We think we’re driving an increase in step length and that’s preventing the shortening of the steps that leads to freezing. In future, we envision you could wear this like underclothes.” Her coauthors include Conor Walsh, a Harvard University professor of engineering and applied sciences; Franchino Porciuncula, a Sargent research scientist; and Jinsoo Kim, a Stanford University postdoctoral scholar and recent Harvard PhD student.

    The researchers even did an informal test outside the study, letting the volunteer take the apparel for a spin at home. “And he did pretty well,” says Ellis. “There were certain tight spots where it didn’t work as well as we would want, so we talked about playing with the algorithm to make it work better.”

    This was just a small study with one patient, so the next stage would be scaling the project up with more volunteers. But Ellis says because the base technology is already commercially available through ReWalk, there aren’t many barriers to getting the suit into clinics. She pictures a near future where a patient visits a physical therapist, their walking is assessed, and they get robotic apparel tailored for their needs. Even without the tech, the team’s findings on the biomechanics of freezing gait may help therapists better target treatments to combat it.

    Walking to the Beat Improves Quality of Life with Parkinson’s

    Another volunteer being helped to hit her stride is Ann Greehy. A former school guidance counselor, she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2015 and began volunteering at BU three years later. Her most recent contribution was as a volunteer on a project examining the use of music as a walking aid.

    In a new study published in the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease, Ellis and Porciuncula found they could use a song’s beats per minute to help people increase their gait speed and stride length, and cut out variability in their walking patterns. Greehy was one of those who’d helped them assess the technology.

    During the study, researchers placed sensors in subjects’ shoes to monitor their gait and gave them an Android device loaded with a music software app. The proprietary system, which uses a technique known as rhythmic auditory stimulation, plays music with beats per minute tailored to a patients’ natural walking cadence, helping them gradually increase their pace session by session; all the participants were asked to plug in their headphones and walk for 30 minutes, five days a week.

    “It was amazing when the beats started—it was a whole new experience,” says Greehy. “You put your shoulders back and you’re up walking.”

    After four weeks of using the system, which was developed by neurorehab company MedRhythms, the 23 study participants had a similar experience to Greehy. The researchers found that, compared to baseline, they had higher rates of daily moderate intensity walking (up by an average of 21.44 minutes) and more steps (up by 3,384 steps). In the paper, they noted “quality of life, disease severity, walking endurance, and functional mobility were improved after four weeks.”

    “People with Parkinson’s can’t move automatically—they have to think about the movement,” says Ellis, who collaborated on the study with researchers from the University of New England, Johns Hopkins University, and MedRhythms. The part of the brain, the basal ganglia, that sends the signals that help people walk without deliberate thought is dysfunctional. “You can’t possibly keep that level of attention to the task of walking, so we were trying to figure out how to provide an external signal if the internal signal is not working.”

    The music provided that signal—in the same way your workout playlist gets your feet moving on the gym treadmill. “You’re not thinking, ‘Oh, I want to run to the beat of the music,’” says Ellis. “It just happens, and so it takes a lot less cognitive energy.”

    Making Sense of Life with Parkinson’s

    One of Greehy’s highlights of the music study was making Ellis’ students laugh by sharing her favorite track: rapper Flo Rida’s “Club Can’t Handle Me.” They were “on the floor laughing at this old lady who likes Flo Rida,” she says. Like Greehy, many of the volunteers also come into BU to work with students, sitting in on classes and panels, talking to them about living with Parkinson’s disease, answering their questions, and giving them a chance to practice their care skills. Some volunteers also attend the Center for Neurorehabilitation as a patient, receiving physical therapy services.

    “Our research and clinic are one and the same,” says Ellis. “That chasm that can exist between research and clinical practice doesn’t exist here. The questions we try to answer with research come from our interactions with patients in the clinic—it’s their challenges and problems that they bring to us that make us curious about how to solve them.” And when they find a solution, they take it straight into the clinic.

    Another of the music study volunteers and clinic patients, retired psychologist Ed Hattauer, appreciates that focus on making lives better—including his own. “As an old-time PhD researcher, I really relish in the importance of doing research, but research that’s very practically oriented toward helping people do things.” Hattauer says that when he comes to the center, there’s “really a sense of personal caring that gets communicated. And I think what I carry away is a sense of hope. It helps sustain my hope and my feeling of emotional connection.”

    Greehy says there are a whole bunch of factors that keep her coming back: “I’ve gotten so much out of this it’s not even funny.” She loves working with students, she gets great tips from the therapists about maintaining her hobbies, like gardening, and she feels good being part of the push for a solution to the disease. Most importantly, volunteering has helped her make sense of life after her diagnosis.

    “What are you going to do with this disease?” says Greehy. “Are you just going to sit back or are we going to jump in? I want us to do more to wipe this thing out. I think it’s time.”

    Like other volunteers, Greehy knows the disease probably won’t be cured in her lifetime, but it won’t stop her trying.

    “I don’t know if they’ll find a cure for me necessarily,” says Campbell, “but I’ve been around research and development my whole life and it feels good to contribute in whatever way possible. I could just sit at home and wallow in pity and do nothing, but it feels proactive to go out and make an effort to advance the science.”

     

    Republishers are kindly reminded to uphold journalistic integrity by providing proper crediting, including a direct link back to the original source URL here.

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  • Scientists discover method to boost immune response against TB

    Scientists discover method to boost immune response against TB

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    Newswise — Tuberculosis is old—ancient even. The infectious bacterial disease that plagued Old Testament Israelites and took down pharaohs was eventually stunted by vaccinations, antibiotics, and public health measures like isolation, but it hasn’t been cured yet. More than a million people around the world still die from TB every year.

    Now, a Boston University-led research team has found a way to tweak immune cells to better fight the disease and—with the right backing and funding—they say it could be ready for clinical trials as soon as next year. In a study published in Science Advances, the researchers identified the genetic signatures of TB-susceptible and TB-resistant white blood cells, called macrophages, and then tested the ability of different compounds to transform vulnerable cells into more resilient ones.

    “The TB vaccine is not really 100 percent efficient and antibiotic resistance is becoming more prevalent,” says Igor Kramnik, the study’s corresponding author and a BU Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine associate professor of medicine. His team’s approach could add another weapon to the arsenal that’s fighting TB: a host-directed therapy, a way of helping the body better control infection and reduce disease-related inflammation. “It’s a way of treating the host, the patient, rather than focusing on the pathogen.” The project mixed lab-based studies at BU’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL) with a big data audit of potential compounds by scientists at University College Dublin, Ireland.

    “Tuberculosis, as one of my colleagues used to say, has studied us much longer than we have studied it,” says Kramnik, who’s also a NEIDL investigator. “It’s a serious and complex disease and our standard interventions are only partially efficient—none of them are sufficient to eradicate the disease.”

    But the latest work could help change that, according to Shivraj M. Yabaji, a NEIDL postdoctoral researcher.

    “We hope that our research will contribute to the development of more effective treatments for TB by better understanding how to fine tune the activation states of immune cells,” says Yabaji, the paper’s lead author. “This could potentially lead to therapies that target host immunity to tuberculosis.”

    Weak TB Vaccine, Rising Antimicrobial Resistance

    The cause of tuberculosis is a bacteria called Mycobacterium tuberculosis—a tiny rod-shaped germ less than 0.5 micrometers in diameter. Spread by a cough, sneeze, or even just a conversation, it can cause symptoms like fever, weight loss, and chest pain. In 2021—the most recent numbers available—more than 10 million people worldwide fell ill with TB, with the disease typically concentrating its attacks on their lungs.

    For 100 years, a vaccine—bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG)—has been the first line of defense against TB, albeit a somewhat ramshackle one. A recent study from Boston University showed that BCG has limited impact: researchers found it was only about 37 percent effective in children under five years of age and offered no protection for adolescents and adults. And antibiotics, the fallback for those who do become infected, are losing their power. According to the World Health Organization, “drug-resistant tuberculosis is a major contributor to antimicrobial resistance worldwide and continues to be a public health threat;” it reports that around 500,000 people die annually from drug-resistant TB.

    Kramnik has been studying TB for 30 years, though he’d initially expected to only spend a few years scrutinizing it before turning his focus to tumor biology.

    “I thought that tuberculosis would be a nice stepping stone, but I’m still here, trying to understand it,” he says. “It’s a disease that’s very different from others. Thinking about tuberculosis as a battle between a pathogen and a host isn’t really productive. What we’re probably dealing with is an evolutionarily refined coexistence of a pathogen and a host that eventually leads to incurable disease at its terminal stage.”

    A New Treatment to Enhance Natural Defenses Against TB

    One of TB’s biggest mysteries is why some people get sick when most others don’t; in particular, why so many patients initially ward off infection, then eventually succumb to it. Kramnik is also interested in why the bacteria is so intent on destroying the lung, which enables its transmission by infectious aerosols. In recent studies, his lab has used experimental mouse models, which mimic what happens to humans when they contract TB, to try to provide some answers.

    “It all led us to identify the importance of macrophage cells as major determinants, and regulators and controllers, of local immune response in the lung,” he says, “and a major cell that affects susceptibility in cases of growing infection.”

    Macrophages typically have two disease fighting states, says Kramnik: an active one that takes on and eliminates pathogenic intruders, and a regenerative one that helps rebuild tissue after infection. He discovered that in the case of TB, the cells can get stuck in a hyperactive, but ineffective, fight mode: a persistent and damaging inflammatory response that hurts the body, but doesn’t take down the pathogen. In the latest study, Kramnik, Yabaji, and their colleagues used the mouse models to look for ways to shut this response off and help the macrophages work more effectively.

    To start, they used RNA sequencing—a method for pinpointing which genes are expressed, or turned on—hoping it would help them zero in on the “genetic signature that differentiates the normal/resistant and aberrant/susceptible activation states,” says Kramnik. Using a test developed in collaboration with study coauthor Alexander A. Gimelbrant, an investigator at the Seattle-based Altius Institute for Biomedical Sciences, the team simultaneously measured the expression of 46 different genes that represented this signature. “This allowed us to look at gene expression patterns rather than individual genes to characterize the cell states and their changes in response to treatments.” They then tested a range of drugs to see if any would perturb, or change, the expression of the genes.

    Some molecules worked better than others, but no single one could shift a macrophage from a TB-vulnerable to a TB-resistant state. To uncover a potential combination that would work in synergy, the lab-based team sent all of their data to researchers at University College Dublin, Ireland, who had developed a machine learning algorithm they could use to predict whether particular combinations of drugs would be more effective. “We then went back to the bench and tested those predictions,” says Kramnik.

    They found two molecules that have shown promise as cancer treatments—Rocaglamide A (RocA) and a c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK) inhibitor—formed an especially good partnership. Together, they helped hinder cell signals related to inflammation and stress, while also boosting the pathways that carry stress resistance signals. “They would be good candidates for clinical trials, so it could change the medical treatment of tuberculosis,” says Kramnik.

    The researchers also discovered that using the two together allowed them to dial back on the effective dose of RocA, which can be potentially toxic at higher levels. Kramnik says their results show how to increase “therapeutic efficacy at lower drug doses and decrease toxic side effects. This is particularly important for chronic diseases that require long course treatments, such as tuberculosis.”

    Although the team is ready to move the research forward, bringing any therapy to trial would require fresh backing, whether from a pharmaceutical company or other institution. “We will be in position,” says Kramnik, “to partner with people who can bring it to the clinic. This is our goal.”

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    Boston University

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  • Warner Bros. CEO booed by students at Boston University graduation:

    Warner Bros. CEO booed by students at Boston University graduation:

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    Warner Brothers Discovery CEO met with boos at BU graduation


    Warner Brothers Discovery CEO met with boos at BU graduation

    02:19

    Commencement addresses are traditionally staid affairs, wherein top thinkers, business people or celebs, impart advice to a college’s class of graduates. But Boston University’s graduation on Sunday was marked by angry shouts and loud booing from the audience when Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav stood on the podium to deliver his speech. 

    Some graduates said they were displeased with Zaslav as their university’s choice of commencement speaker amid the ongoing writers strike, which began earlier this month. Zaslav also received an honorary doctor of laws degree at the event.

    About 11,500 film and TV writers are on strike after the Writers Guild of American and eight major studios, including Warner Bros. Discovery, failed to negotiate a new contract. (Paramount Global, the owner of CBS News and Paramount+, is another one of the major studios.) The guild argues that writers are making a smaller share of money earned by studios amid an explosion of streaming services. 

    “Occasionally raucous”

    “Pay your writers!” some students chanted, while others booed. Some graduates, dressed in their red commencement robes, joined a picket line near Boston University to show their solidarity with members of the Writers Guild of America. 

    Zaslav, a Boston University graduate, didn’t address the boos or protests outside the ceremony, according to Boston University, which described the event as “occasionally raucous.” Instead, Zaslav told the graduates to “show up” in life for friends and family, and to pursue what they love.

    “If you want to be successful, you have to figure out how to get along with everyone,” Zaslav added. “That includes difficult people.”

    screenshot-2023-05-22-at-11-13-04-am.png
    Boston University’s 2023 commencement address by Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav, was met with angry chants and signs from graduates about the ongoing writers strike.

    Steven Senne/AP


    Some students turned their back on Zaslav during his address. A few times during his speech, he had to pause because of the chants of “Pay your writers,” BU noted.

    “I’ve been conflicted about it for a few weeks now, given that I want to support my family and all the writers,” Sydney Shore, a BU graduate whose father and brother are part of the guild, told CBS Boston about Zaslav’s speech. “But also I accomplished something, so it’s important to me to celebrate my graduation.”

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  • ‘Pay your writers!’ Students boo Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav during commencement speech amid Hollywood writers strike

    ‘Pay your writers!’ Students boo Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav during commencement speech amid Hollywood writers strike

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    David Zaslav had an awkward Sunday. The Warner Bros. Discovery CEO delivered a commencement speech at Boston University, but it was memorable for all the wrong reasons. 

    As he reflected upon his career, audience members shouted “shut up Zaslav” and “we don’t want you here.” 

    The problem: His speech came during an ongoing strike by Hollywood writers, who want better pay, new contracts for the streaming era, and protection against content generated by artificial intelligence. “Pay your writers!” was another chant directed his way.

    “Writers Guild members are on strike because companies, including Warner Bros. Discovery, refused to guarantee any level of weekly employment in episodic television, attempted to pivot late night writers to a day rate, stonewalled on free work on script revisions for screenwriters, and refused to even discuss our proposal on the existential threat AI poses to all writers,” the guild said in a statement later, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

    Actor Sean Penn backed the writers this week, saying: “There’s a lot of new concepts being tossed about including the use of A.I. It strikes me as a human obscenity for there to be pushback on that from the producers.” 

    “Some people will be looking for a fight,” Zaslav told students, eliciting boos and cheers. “But don’t be the one they find it with. Focus on good people’s qualities. In my career, I’ve seen so many talented people lose opportunities or jobs because they couldn’t get along with others. You can’t choose the people you work with. Figure out what you like about a person—there’s always something—and do whatever it takes to navigate their challenges. We all have them.”

    Some students laughed at the sentiment. Vanessa Barlett, a graduating senior who helped lead a writers strike solidarity event at the university, told the Hollywood Reporter: “I’m in the same college as a bunch of film and TV kids. I’m friends with a lot of people in the College of Fine Arts, people who are in the theater arts program, so having a sense of solidarity is very important to me.”

    Zaslav also irked audience member when he spoke of his financial success as a lawyer, saying: “I was making good money, I was feeling really great.” That garnered boos and groans.

    Zaslav later said in a statement: “I am grateful to my alma mater, Boston University, for inviting me to be part of today’s commencement and for giving me an honorary degree, and, as I have often said, I am immensely supportive of writers and hope the strike is resolved soon and in a way that they feel recognizes their value.”

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    Steve Mollman

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  • Why do we fall for certain people? The science of attraction

    Why do we fall for certain people? The science of attraction

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    Newswise — Sometimes life’s most meaningful relationships grow from the briefest of connections. Like when you go to a party and meet someone wearing your favorite band’s T-shirt, or who laughs at the same jokes as you, or who grabs that unpopular snack you alone (or so you thought) love. One small, shared interest sparks a conversation—that’s my favorite, too!—and blossoms into lasting affection.

    This is called the similarity-attraction effect: we generally like people who are like us. Now, new findings from a Boston University researcher have uncovered one reason why.

    In a series of studies, Charles Chu, a BU Questrom School of Business assistant professor of management and organizations, tested the conditions that shape whether we feel attracted to—or turned off by—each other. He found one crucial factor was what psychologists call self-essentialist reasoning, where people imagine they have some deep inner core or essence that shapes who they are. Chu discovered that when someone believes an essence drives their interests, likes, and dislikes, they assume it’s the same for others, too; if they find someone with one matching interest, they reason that person will share their broader worldview. The findings were published in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

    “If we had to come up with an image of our sense of self, it would be this nugget, an almost magical core inside that emanates out and causes what we can see and observe about people and ourselves,” says Chu, who published the paper with Brian S. Lowery of Stanford Graduate School of Business. “We argue that believing people have an underlying essence allows us to assume or infer that when we see someone who shares a single characteristic, they must share my entire deeply rooted essence, as well.”

    But Chu’s research suggests this rush to embrace an indefinable, fundamental similarity with someone because of one or two shared interests may be based on flawed thinking—and that it could restrict who we find a connection with. Working alongside the pull of the similarity-attraction effect is a countering push: we dislike those who we don’t think are like us, often because of one small thing—they like that politician, or band, or book, or TV show we loathe.

    “We are all so complex,” says Chu. “But we only have full insight into our own thoughts and feelings, and the minds of others are often a mystery to us. What this work suggests is that we often fill in the blanks of others’ minds with our own sense of self and that can sometimes lead us into some unwarranted assumptions.”

    Trying to Understand Other People

    To examine why we’re attracted to some people and not to others, Chu set up four studies, each designed to tease out different aspects of how we make friends—or foes.

    In the first study, participants were told about a fictional person, Jamie, who held either complementary or contradictory attitudes to them. After asking participants their views on one of five topics—abortion, capital punishment, gun ownership, animal testing, and physician-assisted suicide—Chu asked how they felt about Jamie, who either agreed or disagreed with them on the target issue. They were also quizzed about the roots of their identity to measure their affinity with self-essentialist reasoning.

    Chu found the more a participant believed their view of the world was shaped by an essential core, the more they felt connected to the Jamie who shared their views on one issue.

    In a second study, he looked at whether that effect persisted when the target topics were less substantive. Rather than digging into whether people agreed with Jamie on something as divisive as abortion, Chu asked participants to estimate the number of blue dots on a page, then categorized them—and the fictional Jamie—as over- or under-estimators. Even with this slim connection, the findings held: the more someone believed in an essential core, the closer they felt to Jamie as a fellow over- or under-estimator.

    “I found that both with pretty meaningful dimensions of similarity as well as with arbitrary, minimal similarities, people who are higher in their belief that they have an essence are more likely to be attracted to these similar others as opposed to dissimilar others,” says Chu.

    In two companion studies, Chu began disrupting this process of attraction, stripping out the influence of self-essentialist reasoning. In one experiment, he labeled attributes (such as liking a certain painting) as either essential or nonessential; in another, he told participants that using their essence to judge someone else could lead to an inaccurate assessment of others.

    “It breaks this essentialist reasoning process, it cuts off people’s ability to assume that what they’re seeing is reflective of a deeper similarity,” says Chu. “One way I did that was to remind people that this dimension of similarity is actually not connected or related to your essence at all; the other way was by telling people that using their essence as a way to understand other people is not very effective.”

    Negotiating Psychology—and Politics—at Work

    Chu says there’s a key tension in his findings that shape their application in the real world. On the one hand, we’re all searching for our community—it’s fun to hang out with people who share our hobbies and interests, love the same music and books as us, don’t disagree with us on politics. “This type of thinking is a really useful, heuristic psychological strategy,” says Chu. “It allows people to see more of themselves in new people and strangers.” But it also excludes people, sets up divisions and boundaries—sometimes on the flimsiest of grounds.

    “When you hear a single fact or opinion being expressed that you either agree or disagree with, it really warrants taking an additional breath and just slowing down,” he says. “Not necessarily taking that single piece of information and extrapolating on it, using this type of thinking to go to the very end, that this person is fundamentally good and like me or fundamentally bad and not like me.”

    Chu, whose background mixes the study of organizational behavior and psychology, teaches classes on negotiation at Questrom and says his research has plenty of implications in the business world, particularly when it comes to making deals.

    “I define negotiations as conversations, and agreements and disagreements, about how power and resources should be distributed between people,” he says. “What inferences do we make about the other people we’re having these conversations with? How do we experience and think about agreement versus disagreement? How do we interpret when someone gets more and someone else gets less? These are all really central questions to the process of negotiation.”

    But in a time when political division has invaded just about every sphere of our lives, including workplaces, the applications of Chu’s findings go way beyond corporate horse trading. Managing staff, collaborating on projects, team bonding—all are shaped by the judgments we make about each other. Self-essentialist reasoning may even influence society’s distribution of resources, says Chu: who we consider worthy of support, who gets funds and who doesn’t, could be driven by “this belief that people’s outcomes are caused by something deep inside of them.” That’s why he advocates pushing pause before judging someone who, at first blush, doesn’t seem like you.

    “There are ways for us to go through life and meet other people, and form impressions of other people, without constantly referencing ourselves,” he says. “If we’re constantly going around trying to figure out, who’s like me, who’s not like me?, that’s not always the most productive way of trying to form impressions of other people. People are a lot more complex than we give them credit for.”

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  • Outdoor Dining Is Doomed

    Outdoor Dining Is Doomed

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    These days, strolling through downtown New York, where I live, is like picking your way through the aftermath of a party. In many ways, it is exactly that: The limp string lights, trash-strewn puddles, and splintering plywood are all relics of the raucous celebration known as outdoor dining.

    These wooden “streeteries” and the makeshift tables lining sidewalks first popped up during the depths of the pandemic in 2020, when restaurants needed to get diners back in their seats. It was novel, creative, spontaneous—and fun during a time when there wasn’t much fun to be had. For a while, outdoor dining really seemed as though it could outlast the pandemic. Just last October, New York Magazine wrote that it would stick around, “probably permanently.”

    But now someone has switched on the lights and cut the music. Across the country, something about outdoor dining has changed in recent months. With fears about COVID subsiding, people are losing their appetite for eating among the elements. This winter, many streeteries are empty, save for the few COVID-cautious holdouts willing to put up with the cold. Hannah Cutting-Jones, the director of food studies at the University of Oregon, told me that, in Eugene, where she lives,  outdoor dining is “ absolutely not happening” right now. In recent weeks, cities such as New York and Philadelphia have started tearing down unused streeteries. Outdoor dining’s sheen of novelty has faded; what once evoked the grands boulevards of Paris has turned out to be a janky table next to a parked car. Even a pandemic, it turns out, couldn’t overcome the reasons Americans never liked eating outdoors in the first place.

    For a while, the allure of outdoor dining was clear. COVID safety aside, it kept struggling restaurants afloat, boosted some low-income communities, and cultivated joie de vivre in bleak times. At one point, more than 12,700 New York restaurants had taken to the streets, and the city—along with others, including Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia—proposed making dining sheds permanent. But so far, few cities have actually adopted any official rules. At this point, whether they ever will is unclear. Without official sanctions, mounting pressure from outdoor-dining opponents will likely lead to the destruction of existing sheds; already, they keep tweeting disapproving photos at sanitation departments. Part of the issue is that as most Americans’ COVID concerns retreat, the potential downsides have gotten harder to overlook: less parking, more trash, tacky aesthetics, and, oh God, the rats. Many top New York restaurants have voluntarily gotten rid of their sheds this winter.

    The economics of outdoor dining may no longer make sense for restaurants, too. Although it was lauded as a boon to struggling restaurants during the height of the pandemic, the practice may make less sense now that indoor dining is back. For one thing, dining sheds tend to take up parking spaces needed to attract customers, Cutting-Jones said. The fact that most restaurants are chains doesn’t help: “If whatever conglomerate owns Longhorn Steakhouse doesn’t want to invest in outdoor dining, it will not become the norm,” Rebecca Spang, a food historian at Indiana University Bloomington, told me. Besides, she added, many restaurants are already short-staffed, even without the extra seats.

    In a sense, outdoor dining was doomed to fail. It always ran counter to the physical makeup of most of the country, as anyone who ate outside during the pandemic inevitably noticed. The most obvious constraint is the weather, which is sometimes pleasant but is more often not. “Who wants to eat on the sidewalk in Phoenix in July?” Spang said.

    The other is the uncomfortable proximity to vehicles. Dining sheds spilled into the streets like patrons after too many drinks. The problem was that U.S. roads were built for cars, not people. This tends not to be true in places renowned for outdoor dining, such as Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, which urbanized before cars, Megan Elias, a historian and the director of the gastronomy program at Boston University, told me. At best, this means that outdoor meals in America are typically enjoyed with a side of traffic. At worst, they end in dangerous collisions.

    Cars and bad weather were easier to put up with when eating indoors seemed like a more serious health hazard than breathing in fumes and trembling with cold. It had a certain romance—camaraderie born of discomfort. You have to admit, there was a time when cozying up under a heat lamp with a hot drink was downright charming. But now outdoor dining has gone back to what it always was: something that most Americans would like to avoid in all but the most ideal of conditions. This sort of relapse could lead to fewer opportunities to eat outdoors even when the weather does cooperate.

    But outdoor dining is also affected by more existential issues that have surmounted nearly  three years of COVID life. Eating at restaurants is expensive, and Americans like to get their money’s worth. When safety isn’t a concern, shelling out for a streetside meal may simply not seem worthwhile for most diners. “There’s got to be a point to being outdoors, either because the climate is so beautiful or there’s a view,” Paul Freedman, a Yale history professor specializing in cuisine, told me. For some diners, outdoor seating may feel too casual: Historically, Americans associated eating at restaurants with special occasions, like celebrating a milestone at Delmonico’s, the legendary fine-dining establishment that opened in the 1800s, Cutting-Jones said.

    Eating outdoors, in contrast, was linked to more casual experiences, like having a hot dog at Coney Island. “We have high expectations for what dining out should be like,” she said, noting that American diners are especially fussy about comfort. Even the most opulent COVID cabin may be unable to override these associations. “If the restaurant is going to be fancy and charge $200 a person,” said Freedman, most people can’t escape the feeling of having spent that much for “a picnic on the street.”

    Outdoor dining isn’t disappearing entirely. In the coming years there’s a good chance that more Americans will have the opportunity to eat outside in the nicer months than they did before the pandemic—even if it’s not the widespread practice many had anticipated earlier in the pandemic. Where it continues, it will almost certainly be different: more buttoned-up, less lawless—probably less exciting. Santa Barbara, for example, made dining sheds permanent last year but specified that they must be painted an approved “iron color.” It may also be less popular among restaurant owners: If outdoor-dining regulations are too far-reaching or costly, cautioned Hayrettin Günç, an architect with Global Designing Cities Initiative, that will “create barriers for businesses.”

    For now, outdoor dining is yet another COVID-related convention that hasn’t quite stuck—like avoiding handshakes and universal remote work. As the pandemic subsides, the tendency is to default to the ways things used to be. Doing so is easier, certainly, than coming up with policies to accommodate new habits. In the case of outdoor dining, it’s most comfortable, too. If this continues to be the case, then outdoor dining in the U.S. may return to what it was before the pandemic: dining “al fresco” along the streetlamp-lined terraces of the Venetian Las Vegas, and beneath the verdant canopy of the Rainforest Cafe.

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    Yasmin Tayag

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