Research News

Livestock grazing in forests has intensified human-wildlife conflicts and caused habitat degradation for endangered species. Working with India’s Centre for Wildlife Studies, conservation experts Binbin Li and Kelley Reardon, iMEP ’19, studied the impact of livestock loss in natural habitats on farming household decisions. The findings, published in Biological Conservation, showed that higher profit is more important to households than potential livestock losses, and that emerging livestock types could provide a win-win solution in some cases.

Despite cognitive decline being the most feared aspect of growing old, there is a lack of research into the potential effect air pollution and other risk factors can have on brain function, especially in developing countries. Using data from the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Study to conduct two separate studies, environmental health expert John Ji and colleagues in China and the U.S. found that reducing exposure to PM2.5 (tiny, harmful airborne particles) could delay or prevent poor cognitive function, while increasing residential greenness could have a similarly positive effect.

Exposure to air pollutants has been associated with respiratory and cardiovascular illness, yet the scientific community still does not fully understand the underlying molecular mechanisms. After testing 53 adults over two months, environmental health expert Jim Zhang and colleagues found that breathing in ozone for different time durations could affect a person’s inflammatory responses in different ways. The findings were published in Environmental Pollution. Zhang is director of the Regional Ozone Sino-U.S. Collaborative Research Center.

With the recent rise of polarization and adversarial politics, many have blamed political parties for constraining individuals in forming a reasoned and dispassionate view of politics and issues. In a chapter for “Research Handbook for Political Partisanship” (Edward Elgar, 2020), political scientist Philip Santoso empirically measures the strength of partisan bias across 15 European countries and concludes that it’s the structure of the media environment that shapes how citizens acquire information and form political attitudes.