A worldwide analysis of stranded fossil fuel assets' impact on power plants' CO2 emissions.

Will power plants emit less or more CO2 in anticipation of stronger climate policies that would strand fossil fuel reserves? Here, using a worldwide data source on individual power plants' CO2 emissions and the value of countries' at-risk fossil fuel assets, we show that between 2009 and 2018, plants emitted more CO2 in countries where more assets would be devalued under a 1.5 °C scenario, which we theorize is due to these countries' regulatory leniency and plants' vested interest in long-term fossil fuel contracts. Although the extra amount of carbon emitted each year trigged by imperiled assets is relatively small, it would exhaust a sizable portion of the electricity sector's remaining carbon budget when added up over time. This is especially true in the U.S. and Russia where up to 16% and 12% of their budgets, respectively, could be spent within ten years due solely to the stranded asset effect.

Problematic social media use in childhood and adolescence.

At the time of writing, about 4.59 billion people use social media with many adolescents using their social media accounts across a myriad of applications and platforms. According to recent statistics, in 2022 individuals spent an average of 151 minutes on social media each day, illustrating the global relevance of social media (Dixon, 2022a,b). One of the pressing questions, internationally, is whether social media use is harmful and/or addictive. This question is of particular importance because many teenagers - and younger adolescents - spend considerable time on these platforms, which have increasingly become an integral part of their lives. Moreover, considering lifespan development, adolescents may be particularly vulnerable to specific features and advertisements shown to them on social media platforms. Growing prevalence of poor mental health in young people has led to recent recommendations in the United States to routinely screen for anxiety in 8-18 year olds, and for depression and suicide risk for adolescents between 12-18 years of age (US Preventive Services Task Force et al., 2022 a,b) - the conditions often accompanying problematic social media use. The present work not only provides insights into the current state of the literature but provides also recommendations.

Navigating Informed Consent Requirements and Expectations in Cluster Randomized Trials: Research Ethics Board Members' and Researchers' Views.

Informed consent is a cornerstone of ethical human research. However, as cluster randomized trials (CRTs) are increasingly popular to evaluate health service interventions, especially as health systems aspire toward the learning health system, questions abound how research teams and research ethics boards (REBs) should navigate intertwining consent and data-use considerations. Methodological and ethical questions include who constitute the participants, whose and what types of consent are necessary, and how data from people who have not consented to participation should be managed to optimize the balance of trust in the research enterprise, respect for persons, the promotion of data integrity, and the pursuit of the public good in the research arena. In this paper, we report the findings and lessons learned from a qualitative study examining how researchers and REB members consider the ethical dimensions of when data can be collected and used in CRTs in the evolving research landscape.

Disproportionality in Power Plants' Carbon Emissions: A Cross-National Study.

Past research on the disproportionality of pollution suggests a small subset of a sector's facilities often produces the lion's share of toxic emissions. Here we extend this idea to the world's electricity sectors by calculating national-level disproportionality Gini coefficients for plant-level carbon emissions in 161 nations based on data from 19,941 fossil-fuel burning power plants. We also evaluate if disproportionalities in plant-level emissions are associated with increased national carbon emissions from fossil-fuel based electricity production, while accounting for other well-established human drivers of greenhouse gas emissions. Results suggest that one potential pathway to decreasing nations' greenhouse gas emissions could involve reducing disproportionality among fossil-fuel power plants by targeting those plants in the upper end of the distribution that burn fuels more inefficiently to produce electricity.

Bringing the Polluters Back In: Environmental Inequality and the Organization of Chemical Production.

Environmental justice scholars have suggested that because chemical plants and other hazardous facilities emit more pollutants where they face the least resistance, disadvantaged communities face a special health risk. In trying to determine whether race or income has the bigger impact on a neighborhood's exposure to pollution, however, scholars tend to overlook the facilities themselves and the effect of their characteristics on emissions. In particular, how do the characteristics of facilities and their surrounding communities jointly shape pollution outcomes? We propose a new line of environmental justice research that focuses on facilities and how their features combine with communities' features to create dangerous emissions. Using novel fuzzy-set analysis techniques and the EPA's newly developed Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators, we test the influence of facility and community factors on chemical plants' health-threatening emissions. Contrary to the idea that community characteristics have singular, linear effects, findings show that facility and community factors combine in a variety of ways to produce risky emissions. We speculate that as chemical firms experiment with different ways of producing goods and externalizing pollution costs, new "recipes of risk" are likely to emerge. The question, then, will no longer be whether race or income matters most, but in which of these recipes do they matter and how.

Pathways to meaning: a new approach to studying emotions at work.

Research on the emotional consequences of interactive service work remains inconclusive in large part because scholars have not analyzed the mechanisms that lead frontline employees to adopt the meanings disseminated by their employers. The authors argue that the theoretical framework best suited for remedying this situation is the negotiated order perspective. It suggests that whether employees adopt a corporate-sanctioned meaning, and with what emotional effect, depends on the conjunction of several social conditions. The authors also propose a novel analytical strategy that can identify these conditional pathways and formalize the combinatorial logic of the negotiated order perspective: fuzzy-set techniques. To illustrate the utility of this approach, the article examines a university hospital that has tried to create a more meaningful and emotionally rewarding work environment for its nursing staff. Consistent with expectations, findings show that employees can embrace the same corporate-sanctioned meaning under different sets of conditions and with different emotional consequences.

New real-time technique to measure the size distribution of water-insoluble aerosols.

To date, there has been much research into the size distribution of ambient atmospheric aerosols, particularly either the total aerosol population or water-soluble ionic species such as sulfate or nitrate. Meanwhile, there have been virtually no size-resolved measurements of water-insoluble aerosols (WIA). This has been due to a lack of practical measurement technology rather than a reflection of the importance of WIA to climate and health. Particle solubility influences the planetary radiation balance both directly and indirectly: solubility influences both the amount of hygroscopic growth (and thus light scattering) that occurs as a function of relative humidity and the ability of particles to serve as cloud condensation nuclei (and thus the lifetime and albedo of clouds). Also, recent information suggests that WIA may be harmful to human health. To address these concerns, a new real-time technique has been developed to measure the size-resolved concentration of WIA. This technique involves the entrainment of particles into a liquid stream and measurement of the WIA size distribution using a liquid optical particle counter. The time resolution of this instrumentation is approximately 4 min (depending on flow rate) and is capable of sizing and counting insoluble particles with diameters of 0.25-2.0 microm at atmospheric concentrations as low as 0.1 cm(-3). Laboratory characterization using polystyrene latex spheres shows agreement within +/-5% of the liquid stream and air stream particle concentrations when adjusted for flow rate. The instrumentation was field-tested at a rural site on the edge of the metro-Atlanta urban area. During this test, the WIA concentration averaged 5% of the total particle concentration between 0.25 and 2.0 microm but reached as high as 35%.

Psychoanalysis, science and the seductive theory of Karl Popper.

OBJECTIVE: To present a critique of the ideas of Karl Popper, the philosopher of science, whose depiction of psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience is often used to justify attacks on psychoanalysis. METHOD: Published sources are used to provide a brief intellectual biography of Popper, a summary of his concept of science and a summary of criticisms of Popper's view of science. His depiction of psychoanalysis and Freud's reply are presented. Clinical, experimental and neurobiological research which refutes Popper's view is summarized. RESULTS: There is a vast scholarly published work critical of Popper's falsifiability criterion of science. Less recognized is Popper's misunderstanding and misrepresentation of psychoanalysis; his argument against it is logically flawed and empirically false. Even if Popper's theory of science is accepted, there is considerable clinical, experimental and neurobiological research in psychoanalysis which meets Popper's criterion of science. CONCLUSION: Attacks on psychoanalysis based on Popper's theory of science are ill-founded and reflect inadequate scholarship.

Spiritual interventions: how, when, and why nurses use them.

Researchers have performed limited studies regarding what nurses believe spirituality can do for their patients, the spiritual services they have offered, and under what circumstances. Because much of the extant research has only examined nurses involved in terminal care at different hospitals, it remains unclear upon which shared ideas and practices might nursing staff create a culture of spiritual care within a hospital. To address this situation, this study reports findings from a survey of bedside nurses at a university hospital.