What’s not in the news headlines or titles of Alzheimer disease articles? #InMice

There is increasing scrutiny around how science is communicated to the public. For instance, a Twitter account @justsaysinmice (with 70.4K followers in January 2021) was created to call attention to news headlines that omit that mice, not humans, are the ones for whom the study findings apply. This is the case of many headlines reporting on Alzheimer disease (AD) research. AD is characterized by a degeneration of the human brain, loss of cognition, and behavioral changes, for which no treatment is available. Around 200 rodent models have been developed to study AD, even though AD is an exclusively human condition that does not occur naturally in other species and appears impervious to reproduction in artificial animal models, an information not always disclosed. It is not known what prompts writers of news stories to either omit or acknowledge, in the story’s headlines, that the study was done in mice and not in humans. Here, we raised the hypothesis that how science is reported by scientists plays a role on the news reporting. To test this hypothesis, we investigated whether an association exists between articles’ titles and news’ headlines regarding the omission, or not, of mice. To this end, we analyzed a sample of 623 open-access scientific papers indexed in PubMed in 2018 and 2019 that used mice either as models or as the biological source for experimental studies in AD research. We found a significant association (p < 0.01) between articles’ titles and news stories’ headlines, revealing that when authors omit the species in the paper’s title, writers of news stories tend to follow suit. We also found that papers not mentioning mice in their titles are more newsworthy and significantly more tweeted than papers that do. Our study shows that science reporting may affect media reporting and asks for changes in the way we report about findings obtained with animal models used to study human diseases.

This study reveals that when scientists omit from the papers’ title that research findings were obtained using mice, as opposed to humans, the media tend to replicate the trend by omitting the use of mice from the news stories headlines that report on these papers, thereby perpetuating the misleading omission.     

Minuartia moraldoi (Caryophyllaceae), a new species from Cilento (Campania,S. Italy)

ABSTRACT

A new Minuartia was discovered in Cilento (S. Italy). The species described here as M. moraldoi belongs to the ser. Graminifoliae.     

Age and reproductive investment in grass goby females in the Venice lagoon

The present work describes the relationship between age and reproductive investment in the grass goby females in the Venice Lagoon. Age was estimated by otoliths reading, while reproductive investment was assessed by either the relative number of mature females across the breeding season and their gonadosomatic index. Females from different size/age classes differed in the timing and level of reproductive investment. The oldest females (3+ years old) appeared earlier in the spawning habitat, investing more at the beginning of the breeding season. In turn a later arrival in the spawning habitats has been observed for younger females (0+) and smaller individuals of 1+ and 2+ age classes. Present results gave evidence of an earlier age/size at sexual maturity of the grass goby in the Venice Lagoon compared to previous information on the species from the same lagoon and from other Mediterranean areas. Results were discussed in the light of previous data on reproductive strategy of nesting males and of the relationship between fishing pressure and life history traits in the Venice lagoon.     

Life cycle assessment of emerging environmental technologies in the early stage of development: A case study on nanostructured materials

The use of nanostructured materials has been recently proposed in the field of environmental nanoremediation. This approach consists in using nanomaterials not directly, but as building blocks for the design of nano‐porous micro‐dimensional systems, overcoming the eco‐ and health‐toxicology risks generally associated with the use of nano‐sized technologies. Herein we report the use of life cycle assessment (LCA) as an eco‐design tool for optimizing the production of cellulose nanosponges (CNS), nanostructured materials recently developed for water remediation purposes. LCA was applied from the acquisition of raw materials to the synthesis of CNS (from cradle‐to‐gate), considering three production systems, from the lab‐level to a modeled scale‐up system. The lab‐scale LCA identified the main environmental hotspots, namely the energy‐consuming steps and the final purification of the material (washing step). In a second lab‐scale production, an improvement action could be implemented, switching the washing solvent from methanol to water and decreasing the washing temperature. A second LCA showed a reduced contribution to the impacts from the materials, while the global impacts remained within the same order of magnitude. A simulated scale‐up of the process allowed to optimize the energy‐consuming steps and the water consumption, through internal recycling. A third LCA assessed the resulting benefits and a decrease in the global impacts by two orders of magnitude. Our study contributes to the discussion of LCA community, providing a focus on the importance of scaling‐up of emerging technologies, namely nanostructured porous materials, highlighting the benefits of a LCA based approach since the very beginning of product design (eco‐design).