Leahgates

Who says an unbridled love of cucumbers will never get you anywhere? Because of my love of cucumbers, @hendricksgin asked if wanted to go flying in their cucumber adorned hot air balloon next week!!! ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ I responded to their email with this pic. Hopefully they get the message that YES! I’m SUPER EXCITED to eat cucumbers in a hot air balloon!!! ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ As mesmerized as @sirwallace_thecat is, he can’t come. Apparently sharp claws and balloons don’t mix... #imgoinginaballoon #balloondog #notanad #notanadvertisement

Coolin down yo summer heat 🔥

Cosmoooo

Sociology Twitter lit up after the US Women’s National Team’s World Cup win with the revelation that many of their players were sociology majors in college. It is an inspiration to see the team succeed at the highest levels and call for social change while doing so.

V important #soctwitter news: Megan Rapinoe, Crystal Dunn, Abby Dahlkemper, & Rose Lavelle were Sociology majors in undergrad #USAvNED #USWNT pic.twitter.com/4cLy99I1ld

— Neda Maghbouleh (@nedasoc) July 8, 2019

This news also raised an interesting question: do student athletes major in sociology because it is a compelling field (yay, us!) or because they are tracked into the major by academic advisors who see it as an “easy” choice to balance with sports?

According to data from the NCAA, the most common majors for both student athletes and the wider student body at Division 1 schools are business, STEM, and social sciences. Trend data show the biggest difference is in the choice between business and STEM; both groups seem to pick up social science majors at similar rates.

While the rate of majors is not that different, there is something special that sociology can do for these students. Student athlete lives are heavily administered. Between practice, conditioning, scheduled events, meals, and classes, many barely have a few hours to complete a full load of course work. In grad school, I tutored many student athletes who were sociology majors, and I watched them juggle their work with the demands of heavy travel schedules and intense workouts, all under the watchful eye of an army of advisors, coaches, mentors, and doctors. The experience is very close to what Erving Goffman called a “total institution” in Asylums:

“A total institution may be defined as a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life. (1961, p. xiii)”

We usually associate total institutions with prisons and punishment, but this definition highlights the intense management that defines the college experience for many student athletes. When I tutored athletes in sociology, we spent a lot of time comparing their readings to the world around them. Sociological thinking about institutions, bureaucracy, and work gave them a language to think about and talk about their experiences in context.

Athletic programs can be complicated for colleges and universities, and there is ongoing debate about how the “student” status in student athlete shapes their obligation to pay for all this work. As debates about college athletics continue, it is important for players, fans, and administrators to think sociologically about their industry to see how it can better serve players as both students and athletes.

Evan Stewart is an assistant professor of sociology at University of Massachusetts Boston. You can follow him on Twitter.

(View original at https://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

that's it, that's the best joke I'm ever going to write, it's all downhill from here

You might feel bad about having a less-than-manicured lawn, but it’s great for bees and other pollinators.

Beyond supporting healthy ecosystems for other species (including us), pollinators are key to bringing food to our tables, not to mention coffee, chocolate, and tequila.

Cutting yourself some slack in the yard can provide pollinators with food, shelter, and protection from pesticides, three things they need to survive. You probably shouldn’t let it all go and risk one of those sanctimonious letters from your homeowner’s association, but a lighter touch can make life easier for native pollinators—and you. Here’s how:

1. Learn to love clover and dandelions

Flowering weeds are an important food source for native bees, so you can feel good about leaving them in your lawn, says Rachel Mallinger, an assistant professor of pollinator ecology and conservation with the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

“Providing floral resources is probably the number one thing that people can do, whether that’s just providing a few plants on your balcony, having a whole pollinator garden, or just letting flowering weeds be.”

2. Bare or sandy patches have a function

Unlike honey bees, many species of native bees don’t live in hives or colonies but by themselves in small holes the ground. When you’ve got a thin spot in your lawn or part of your garden that’s not covered in thick mulch or weed barrier, you’re providing habitat to native bees.

And you don’t have to worry about having wild bees in your yard, as they don’t defend their nests the way social bees and wasps sometimes do, says Jamie Ellis, professor of honey bee husbandry, ecology, and conservation.

“In general, it’s the social bees and wasps that are the stinging problems, not the solitary ones,” Ellis says. “Solitary bees are quite gentle.”

3. That old stump is also useful

It’s also a great habitat for solitary native bees, Mallinger says.

4. Let the bugs be

Going easy on insecticides around your home and yard can reduce unintended harm to beneficial species like bees, Mallinger says. And when you use pesticides, choose options that are least toxic to pollinators and follow the instructions on the label, Ellis suggests. For more information, visit the Honey Bee Research & Extension Lab’s website.

5. Bees love lazy mowers

Mowing less often can make your yard more pollinator-friendly. “Our landscapes don’t all have to be really short green grass,” Mallinger says. “We can have yards and habitats that look more wild, but that means changing people’s way of viewing habitats and not seeing that as messy or weedy, but seeing that as actually beneficial.”

If the neighbors complain when you skip a week of mowing, you can say you’re doing it for the bees.

Don’t have a yard? Hear Mallinger’s tips for helping bees and pollinators through food choices and more here:

Source: University of Florida

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Intensifying climate change will increase the future risk of violent armed conflict within countries, according to a new study.

Synthesizing views across experts, the study in Nature estimates climate has influenced between 3 percent and 20 percent of armed conflict risk over the last century and that the influence will likely increase dramatically.

In a scenario with 4 degrees Celsius of warming (approximately the path we’re on if societies do not substantially reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases), the influence of climate on conflicts would increase more than five times, leaping to a 26 percent chance of a substantial increase in conflict risk, according to the study.

Even in a scenario of 2 degrees Celsius of warming beyond preindustrial levels—the stated goal of the Paris Climate Agreement—the influence of climate on conflicts would more than double, rising to a 13 percent chance.

“Appreciating the role of climate change and its security impacts is important not only for understanding the social costs of our continuing heat-trapping emissions, but for prioritizing responses, which could include aid and cooperation,” says Katharine Mach, director of the Stanford Environment Assessment Facility and the study’s lead author.

Climate change-driven extreme weather and related disasters can damage economies, lower farming and livestock production, and intensify inequality among social groups. These factors, when combined with other drivers of conflict, may increase risks of violence.

“Knowing whether environmental or climatic changes are important for explaining conflict has implications for what we can do to reduce the likelihood of future conflict, as well as for how to make well-informed decisions about how aggressively we should mitigate future climate change,” says Marshall Burke, assistant professor of earth system science and a coauthor of the study.

No precedent

Researchers disagree intensely as to whether climate plays a role in triggering civil wars and other armed conflicts. To better understand the impact of climate, the analysis involved interviews with and debates among experts in political science, environmental science, economics, and other fields who have come to different conclusions on climate’s influence on conflict in the past.

The experts, who also served as coauthors of the study, agree that climate has affected organized armed conflict in recent decades. However, they make clear that other factors, such as low socioeconomic development, the strength of government, inequalities in societies, and a recent history of violent conflict have a much heavier impact on conflict within countries.

The researchers don’t fully understand how climate affects conflict and under what conditions. The consequences of future climate change will likely be different from historical climate disruptions because societies will be forced to grapple with unprecedented conditions that go beyond known experience and what they may be capable of adapting to.

“Historically, levels of armed conflict over time have been heavily influenced by shocks to, and changes in, international relations among states and in their domestic political systems,” says James Fearon, professor of political science and coauthor of the study.

“It is quite likely that over this century, unprecedented climate change is going to have significant impacts on both, but it is extremely hard to anticipate whether the political changes related to climate change will have big effects on armed conflict in turn. So I think putting nontrivial weight on significant climate effects on conflict is reasonable.”

How to prepare?

Reducing conflict risk and preparing for a changing climate can be a win–win approach. The study explains that adaptation strategies, such as crop insurance, post-harvest storage, training services, and other measures, can increase food security and diversify economic opportunities, thereby reducing potential climate–conflict linkages. Peacekeeping, conflict mediation, and post-conflict aid operations could incorporate climate into their risk reduction strategies by looking at ways climatic hazards may exacerbate violent conflict in the future.

However, the researchers make clear there is a need to increase understanding of these strategies’ effectiveness and potential for adverse side effects. For example, food export bans following crop failures can increase instability elsewhere.

“Understanding the multifaceted ways that climate may interact with known drivers of conflict is really critical for putting investments in the right place,” Mach says.

Additional coauthors are from Stanford; the University of Exeter; the Peace Research Institute Oslo; the Norwegian University of Science and Technology; the National Bureau of Economic Research; the University of Denver; the University of Antwerp; Lancaster University; the University of Colorado Boulder; the College of William & Mary; the University of Hamburg; and Uppsala University.

The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, the European Research Council, the German Science Foundation, and the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research supported the work.

Source: Stanford University

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The two-toed sloth appears to be the last survivor of an ancient lineage previously thought extinct, research finds.

Meanwhile, the three-toed sloth is more closely related to a large family that included ancient elephant-sized ground sloths, say the researchers.

Sloths once roamed the Americas, ranging from tiny, cat-sized animals that lived in trees all the way up to massive ground sloths that may have weighed up to six tons. The only species we know and love today, however, are the two-toed and three-toed sloths—but paleontologists have been arguing how to classify them, and their ancestors, for decades.

Two new studies shake up the sloth family tree, overturning a longstanding consensus on how the major groups of sloths are related.

“The results are surprising on many levels,” says Graham Slater, an assistant professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago and coauthor of one of the papers. “Not only do they rewrite sloth classification, they suggest much of what we thought we knew about how sloths evolved may be wrong.”

Collagen in the fossils

Slater’s study, in Nature Ecology & Evolution, uses a new approach that uses proteins in fossils to discover evolutionary relationships. This marks the first time an entire lineage has been mapped with the method.

“All of these ancient sloths must have occupied really important roles in grazing and browsing the landscape, and so they’re important to understanding how these ecosystems worked, but getting a handle on their evolution has been difficult,” says Slater, who specializes in analyzing the patterns of evolution in mammals.

The existing hierarchy is built on how physically similar the fossils look to one another. But Slater, working with Ross MacPhee with the American Museum of Natural History and Samantha Presslee at the University of York, wanted to explore the possibilities of an emerging field called paleoproteomics—extracting information from proteins inside fossilized bone.

Instead of DNA, which is a fragile molecule that needs specific conditions to survive inside fossils—”getting ancient DNA is a bit of a lottery,” Slater says—scientists have been looking at proteins instead. Protein molecules are sturdier, and since DNA is translated directly into proteins, they hold much of the same information. So the scientists extracted collagen from multiple fossils, analyzed it to reconstruct the sequences of amino acids, and then compared these to one another to piece together relationships between the species.

“What came out was just remarkable. It blew our minds—it”s so different from anything that’s ever been suggested,” Slater says.

Gigantic sloths and modern ones

Previously, scientists thought that the unau—the three-toed sloth with cute black lines around its eyes—was an outlier species that diverged early in the group’s evolution. But based on the new evidence, it actually appears to be nested within a large group of different ground sloths that includes those gigantic, elephant-sized sloths.

Meanwhile, the ai (or two-toed sloth) had been classified in with a family called Megalonychidae, which includes everything from Central American and Caribbean sloths to an Ice Age-era American ground sloth that Thomas Jefferson first described (due to the fossil’s large claws, he thought it was a lion). But according to the findings, two-toed sloths are actually the last survivors of a branch previously thought to be extinct, which likely split off about 20 million years ago.

The protein evidence also revealed that those extinct Caribbean sloths were the descendants of an early branch that split from other sloths around 30 million years ago. This is interesting evidence for another longstanding question: whether there was a short-lived land bridge connecting South America and what would become the West Indies, many millions of years ago. If wanderlust drove ancient sloths across the bridge, their presence in the islands would support that idea. Thus far no conclusive fossil evidence has turned up, but the genetic split 30 million years ago makes sense if those sloths were then geographically isolated after the land bridge disappeared.

The new conclusions also cast doubt on our picture of how sloths evolved, because the West Indian sloths look as though they lived in trees. “We’ve been used to thinking that today’s sloths each evolved independently for life in the trees from a ground-dwelling ancestor, but our results suggest that the ancestral sloth may have been at home in both,” Slater says.

Verified results

Though revolutionary, the results square with a DNA analysis released the same day by a group with the French National Centre for Scientific Research and other institutions. That group was able to pull mitochondrial DNA from several critical fossils, and the two independent analyses align very closely. “Exceptional results demand exceptional verification,” says MacPhee, so the two groups agreed to publish simultaneously.

The team is excited about pushing the boundaries of the field of paleoproteomics. Evolutionary paleobiology is greedy for more and older data, and proteins could provide it.

“The very oldest DNA you can get is 800,000 years old, but in theory we should be able to get protein data from specimens that are millions of years old,” Slater says. “A whole bunch of questions suddenly come into reach. It opens doors that we were only dreaming of.”

Funding came from the National Science Foundation.

Source: University of Chicago

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CI Tau b is a paradoxical planet, but new research is starting to answer questions about how a planet so large could have formed around a star that’s only 2 million years old.

Researchers conducted a four-year near-infrared spectroscopic analysis of light from the close-orbiting giant exoplanet, or “hot Jupiter,” in a nine-day orbit around its parent star about 450 light years from Earth in the constellation Taurus.

“The exciting thing is that we are able to detect light directly from the planet, and it’s the first time that’s been done for a close-in planet around a star this young,” says Christopher Johns-Krull, professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and coauthor of a forthcoming study in Astrophysical Journal Letters. “The most valuable way to learn how planets form is to study planets, like CI Tau b, that are either still forming or have just formed.”

For decades, most astronomers believed giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn formed far from their stars over periods of 10 million years or more. But the discovery of dozens of “hot Jupiters” led to new theoretical models that describe how such planets might form.

CI Tau b’s age makes it the perfect candidate for observation with the Immersion Grating Infrared Spectrograph (IGRINS), a unique, high-resolution instrument used during observations of CI Tau b from McDonald Observatory’s 2.7-meter Harlan J. Smith Telescope and Lowell Observatory’s 4.3-meter Discovery Channel Telescope, Johns-Krull says.

Because each atomic element and molecule in a star emits light from a unique set of wavelengths, astronomers can look for specific signatures, or spectral lines, to see if an element is present in a distant star or planets. Spectral lines can also reveal the temperature and density of a star and how fast it’s moving.

Researchers used the spectral lines from carbon monoxide to distinguish the light the planet emitted from the light a nearby star emitted, says Lisa Prato of Lowell Observatory.

“Many of the spectral lines that are in the planet are also in the star,” Prato says. “If both the planet and star were stationary, their spectral lines would all blend together, and we wouldn’t be able to tell what was from the star and what was from the planet. But because the planet rapidly orbits the star, its lines shift back and forth dramatically.

“At about 2 million years old, CI Tau b is by far the youngest hot Jupiter directly detected.”

“We can subtract out the star’s lines and see only the lines from the planet. And from those, we can determine how bright the planet is, relative to the star, which tells us something about how it formed.”

That’s because the brightness of a star or planet depends upon both its size and temperature.

“Direct observational evidence of the mass and brightness of CI Tau b is particularly useful because we also know it orbits a very young star,” says lead author Laura Flagg, a PhD student at Rice. “Most of the hot Jupiters we’ve found are orbiting middle-aged stars. CI Tau’s age gives a tight constraint for putting models to the test: Can they produce a planet this bright and this massive in so little time?”

Flagg’s analysis of spectral lines from carbon monoxide showed that CI Tau b has a mass of 11.6 Jupiters and is about 134 times fainter than its parent star. That provides strong evidence that it formed via a “hot start,” a theoretical model that describes how gravitational instabilities could form giant planets more rapidly than traditional models, Prato says, adding that the new study provides a unique empirical yardstick to measure competing theories.

“At about 2 million years old, CI Tau b is by far the youngest hot Jupiter directly detected,” she says. “We now have a mass and brightness for it—the only directly measured mass and brightness for a young hot Jupiter—and that provides very strong tests for planet-formation models.”

Coauthor Daniel Jaffe of the University of Texas at Austin designed IGRINS, which uses a silicon-based diffraction grating to improve both the resolution and number of near-infrared spectral bands observable from distant objects like CI Tau b and its parent star. Scientists moved IGRINS from McDonald to Lowell midway through the study.

The researchers presented a paper on the work at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Additional coauthors are from Lowell Observatory and the University of Texas at Austin. Support for the work came from Rice, the National Science Foundation, the University of Texas at Austin, the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, NASA, and Lowell Observatory.

Source: Rice University

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If Americans changed their diets by swapping out just one item each day, they could greatly reduce their carbon footprint from food, according to a new report.

“We found that making one substitution of poultry for beef resulted in an average reduction of dietary greenhouse gases by about a half,” says Diego Rose, professor and director of nutrition at Tulane University School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine.

“To our knowledge, this is the only nationally representative study of the carbon footprint of individually chosen diets in the US,” Rose says. “We hope this research will raise awareness about the role of the food sector in climate change and the sizable impact of a simple dietary change.”

Food production is an important contributor to climate change, accounting for about a quarter of carbon emissions globally, researchers say. For the study, they examined the real-world diets of thousands of people in the United States.

Researchers used diet information from more than 16,000 participants in the 2005-2010 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a portion of which asked participants to recall all the foods they consumed in the previous 24 hours.

The researchers then used this information to determine which foods had the highest greenhouse gas emissions and to calculate a carbon footprint for each individual diet.

They found that the 10 foods with the highest impacts on the environment were all cuts of beef and that about 20 percent of participants reported consuming one of these high-carbon foods.

Using simulation, the researchers calculated a new carbon footprint for each diet by replacing beef with the closest related poultry product. For example, a broiled beef steak was replaced with broiled chicken and ground beef with ground turkey. The researchers performed each substitution only one time for each person that consumed one of the high-carbon foods.

Animal foods contribute more to greenhouse gas emissions than plant foods. Ruminant animal foods such as beef and lamb have particularly high carbon footprints because cows and sheep also release methane gas.

“Our simulation showed that you don’t have to give up animal products to improve your carbon footprint,” Rose says. “Just one food substitution brought close to a 50 percent reduction, on average, in a person’s carbon footprint.”

The researchers plan to expand this research, which focused on dietary greenhouse gas emissions, to include other environmental impacts such as water use.

Although not the subject of this study, the researchers point out that food waste and overeating also increase the carbon footprint of our diet. So, in addition to eating low-carbon foods, better meal planning and eating leftovers can also help reduce carbon footprint.

Rose presented the paper at the American Society for Nutrition’s annual meeting in Baltimore.

Source: Tulane University

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California’s paid parental leave law appears to have improved the mental health of mothers and the overall welfare of their infant children, according to new research.

The study is the first to assess the impact of paid family leave on maternal well-being.

Using data from the National Survey of Children’s Health and the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, the study finds a 5.5 percent to 9 percent improvement in self-reported ratings of mental health among California mothers after the 2004 implementation of paid family leave, as compared to women who gave birth in California before the law went into effect and to those who live in other states.

The study also found improvements in overall infant health and reduced rates of asthma among children born after the law’s implementation, according to study author Lindsey Bullinger, an assistant professor in Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Public Policy.

“So much of the focus on paid family leave is on the employment implications. But paid time off to recover from childbirth and bond with a child could also have effects on the health of both parents and children. Some research has explored the health effects for children, but nearly no research has looked at the health of those who take the leave in the US,” Bullinger says.

The study did not find any improvement as a result of the law in how new fathers reported their mental health status, or in measures of respiratory or food allergies in children. But it did find improvements in how parents felt like they were coping with the day-to-day demands of parenting.

The improvements in maternal mental health and overall child well-being may be the result of children spending more time at home after birth instead of in daycare, increased opportunities for parents to care for their children, reductions in parental stress and anxiety, and improved economic outcomes, all of which have been shown to have a positive effect on child health, according to the study.

The results were particularly strong in low-income households, Bullinger says.

“Many families do not have paid leave through their employers and cannot afford to take unpaid leave after the birth of a child,” Bullinger says. “Relative to higher-income families who can, paid family leave could be more impactful for poorer families, since the jump between what leave they could afford to take before the law compared to after the law is larger. And that’s what we see in the study. Paid leave in California had stronger effects for children and parents from lower income families.”

Paid family leave is a perennial issue across the United States, and the results contained in the new paper could prove useful to state and federal lawmakers considering implementation of such policies, Bullinger says.

“Most of the research on paid family leave is from Europe and Canada. But there, leave lengths are much longer, in the range of 25 to 52 weeks, so it is not clear if that research is helpful in the US where leaves are typically much shorter. These findings can help policymakers in both designing programs and evaluating the costs and benefits of those programs in the US.”

The study appears in the Journal of Health Economics.

Source: Georgia Tech

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New research provides evidence that two food assistance programs, SNAP and WIC, are in fact complementary, not redundant.

Forty million Americans, including 6.5 million children, are food insecure, according to the US Department of Agriculture, which means they do not have enough food for an active, healthy life.

Many rely on SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program)—the largest food assistance program for low-income families—to help make ends meet. Still, 51.2 percent of households receiving SNAP benefits, commonly known as food stamps, were food insecure in 2016.

Given the extent of food insecurity, economists developed a economics-based methodology to analyze potential redundancies between SNAP and WIC (the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children), the third-largest food assistance program in the US.

Their research, published in the Southern Economic Journal, shows that participating in both SNAP and WIC compared to SNAP alone increases food security by at least 2 percentage points and potentially as much as 24 percentage points.

Difficult to measure

“Our findings can help policymakers design more efficient programs to meet food needs,” says Helen Jensen, professor emeritus of economics at Iowa State University. “We know low-income families often participate in more than one food assistance program, and we find the combination of SNAP and WIC helps reduce food insecurity for participating households.”

The programs are similar, but serve different needs. WIC covers specific foods to meet the nutritional needs of pregnant women, new mothers, and infants and young children. Participants also receive nutrition counseling and referrals for health services, such as prenatal programs.

In comparison, eligible households can use SNAP benefits to buy most food items. All households included in the study were potentially eligible for both programs, but chose whether or not to participate.

This “self-selection” makes it difficult to ascertain whether a program causes a change in food insecurity, researcher say. WIC and SNAP benefits are not randomly assigned, so any differences in food security outcomes between participants and nonparticipants could be due to actual causal impacts of the programs or unobserved differences between households that apply for benefits and those that do not.

If households at greatest risk of becoming food insecure are most likely to apply—for example, in the case of a job loss—it might falsely appear the programs are ineffective in alleviating food insecurity, the researchers say. In fact, while participants may be less food secure than eligible nonparticipants, participants may still be more food secure than they would have been in a world without the programs.

Further, households may systematically under-report benefits, often because they don’t want to admit they are receiving government assistance.

“For these reasons, traditional econometric methods lead to misleading estimates,” says Oleksandr Zhylyevskyy, associate professor of economics. “With that in mind, we developed a methodology that allows us to more accurately measure the true effects of WIC and SNAP.”

True benefits

The researchers applied their methodology to data from the USDA’s National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey or FoodAPS, which provides self-reported household participation in SNAP and WIC and validated data for SNAP participation. The study included 460 households that were income-eligible for both programs. Researchers surveyed them for one week.

On average, households were families of four with two children, one under the age of six. The average monthly income was about $1,600. More than 75 percent rented a home or apartment, 26 percent did not own or lease a vehicle, and 11 percent had used a food pantry within the past 30 days.

FoodAPS matched survey responses about SNAP participation with official administrative records to identify response errors, but no similar verification was available for WIC. The new methodology was specifically designed to handle this type of scenario in which researchers can corroborate answers for some survey questions, but not others, the researchers say.

“Our goal was to strike a balance between making assumptions that are weak enough to be credible, but strong enough to be informative,” says Brent Kreider, professor of economics. “Policymakers may ask whether these programs actually work or merely increase government spending without reducing food insecurity. We find WIC helps even when SNAP is already in place.”

The National Bureau of Economic Research funded the work.

Source: Iowa State University

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A new “virtual biopsy” device uses sound vibrations and pulses of near-infrared light instead of a scalpel to quickly determine a skin lesion’s depth and potential malignancy, a new study reports.

The ability to analyze a skin tumor non-invasively could make biopsies much less risky and distressing to patients, researchers say.

Currently, physicians who perform surgical biopsies often don’t know the extent of a lesion–or the necessity of referring the patient to a specialist for extensive tissue removal or plastic surgery–until surgery has already begun.

The first-of-its-kind experimental procedure, called vibrational optical coherence tomography (VOCT), creates a 3D map of the lesion’s width and depth under the skin with a tiny laser diode.

It also uses soundwaves to test the lesion’s density and stiffness since cancer cells are stiffer than healthy cells. An inch-long speaker applies audible soundwaves against the skin to measure the skin’s vibrations and determine whether the lesion is malignant.

“This procedure can be completed in 15 minutes with no discomfort to the patient, who feels no sensation from the light or the nearly inaudible sound. It’s a significant improvement over surgical biopsies, which are invasive, expensive, and time-consuming,” says Frederick Silver, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, and lead researcher of the paper in Skin Research & Technology.

A prototype VOCT device accurately distinguished between healthy skin and different types of skin lesions and carcinomas, the study shows. The researchers tested the device over six months on four skin excisions and on eight volunteers without skin lesions.

Further studies are needed to fine-tune the device’s ability to identify a lesion’s borders and areas of greatest density and stiffness, which would allow physicians to remove tumors with minimally invasive surgery.

The researchers are currently waiting for FDA approval for large-scale testing. Additional researchers are from Rutgers, the Neigel Center for Cosmetic and Laser Surgery, and the Center for Advanced Eye Care.

Source: Rutgers University

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