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Influencers promoting sustainable lifestyles on social media should be differently regulated, study says

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Influencers promoting sustainable lifestyles on social media should be differently regulated, study says


sustainable investing
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

The work of influencers promoting sustainable lifestyles on social media should be differently regulated so consumers are better protected, a new study says.

There are gaps in the current and forthcoming EU consumer protection measures set up to govern the commercial practices of content creators promoting sustainable products and services, according to the research, which appears in the Journal of Consumer Policy.

Reliable but relatable communication on sustainable lifestyles on social media could reach many consumers and contribute to changing their behavior patterns. This includes de-influencers, who encourage people to buy different, greener or more responsibly produced items.

The recommendations in the study are designed to allow content creators to maintain their freedom of speech and to conduct their businesses.

They include changing regulations to clarify content creators’ legal status as professionals when they are being paid for the work. This would provide more legal certainty and facilitate the provision of additional training on their legal rights and obligations, and the creation of codes of conduct.

The study says, provided content creators simply reiterate sustainable claims issued to them by the brands, and that they did not have reasonable cause to doubt the veracity of such claims, the brands could be responsible for any misinformation rather than the influencer. This would differ if content creators had more creative control over the communication with their audience and drafted their own sustainable claims.

Professor Joasia Luzak, from the University of Exeter, who carried out the study, said, “How and what influencers communicate to their users will be influenced by the social media platforms they use and their relationships with brands they represent. When they receive marketing materials for a product they are to promote, they may not always be able to question and verify this product information.

“Content creators may then inadvertently misinform their followers simply because they do not have access to the relevant information. However, unreliable content may also reflect a lack of due care.”

Current rules say influencers can’t mislead consumers by action or omission. They can be held responsible for breaching guidelines solely or jointly with the brand whom they were representing. Guidelines should apply when content creators’ commercial activities are “frequent” on their social media channels.

The research says this frequency requirement is ill-suited to apply to content creators’ activities. It does not account for content creators spreading their activity between various social media channels, or non-monetized content. The frequency requirement also overlooks the fact that even one commercial post could cause consumer harm.

The study says it would be preferable to remove the suggested requirement of “frequent” posting of monetized content for content creators to qualify as traders engaging in commercial practices.

Online content creation should count as a professional activity, regardless of commercial gain enjoyed by influencers. Instead, the commercial intent driving the communication should be the determinant factor. Registration of such a professional activity in the Member States would be required, otherwise content creators are likely to remain free of obligations imposed by the current European consumer protection.

The option to hold content creators responsible alongside brands gives consumers more opportunities to claim compensation for their damage.

The EU Green Transition Directive prohibits traders from misleading consumers about the durability or repairability of products, or about their environmental or social impact. As sustainable activists often mention these characteristics, any content creators who qualify as traders will need to ensure that they, or the traders providing them with promotional materials, can indeed justify such claims.

More information:
J. Luzak, 3Rs of Sustainable Activism on Social Media: Relatability, Reliability and Redress, Journal of Consumer Policy (2024). DOI: 10.1007/s10603-024-09574-x

Provided by
University of Exeter

Citation:
Influencers promoting sustainable lifestyles on social media should be differently regulated, study says (2024, September 12)
retrieved 12 September 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-09-sustainable-lifestyles-social-media-differently.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.





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Responding to work emails after hours found to contribute to burnout, hostility

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Responding to work emails after hours found to contribute to burnout, hostility


work at night
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Imagine it’s Friday evening. You’re about to watch a new Netflix drama, trying to unwind after a long week. Suddenly, your phone pings with a work email marked “urgent.” Your heart sinks; your stress levels rise. Even if you choose not to respond immediately, the damage is done. Work has again encroached on your personal life.

The intrusion of work into home life, helped along by smartphones and other technologies, might seem like a triumph of efficiency. But this constant connectivity comes at a cost to employees and employers alike, research suggests.

As a professor of communications, I wanted to understand what happens when people feel compelled to dash off work emails after dinner and before breakfast. So a colleague and I conducted a study investigating the effects of after-hours work communication.

We found a disturbing link between work-related communication outside of regular hours and increased employee burnout. Answering emails after hours was linked to worse productivity, employees badmouthing their employers and other negative behaviors.

The research, conducted through a survey of 315 full-time U.S. employees across various industries, draws upon the “conservation of resources theory” to explain how after-hours communication depletes employees’ mental and emotional reserves.

The data is unequivocal: Engaging in work-related communication after regular business hours leads to emotional exhaustion, which in turn can spill over into counterproductive work behavior.

Why it matters

This scenario is increasingly common: More than half of American employees reported checking work-related messages at least once over the weekend, according to a 2013 survey conducted by the American Psychological Association. The numbers have doubtless only risen since then.

Our findings show the consequences of this shift in the modern workplace. When the boundaries between home and work are eroded, it doesn’t just hurt people’s job and life satisfaction—it affects organizational performance, too.

We have seen firsthand the long-term impact of blurred lines between work and personal time through communication technology. In my opinion, this study is a critical wake-up call, highlighting the need for clear boundaries that protect employees’ personal time from becoming just another extension of their workday.

What’s next

The blurring of work and life boundaries remains a major issue in organizational communication, and the impact of artificial intelligence has emerged as a significant research topic since ChatGPT was launched in November 2022. That’s why my team is currently exploring how AI influences skills and well-being within organizational communication.

Provided by
The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.The Conversation

Citation:
Responding to work emails after hours found to contribute to burnout, hostility (2024, September 12)
retrieved 12 September 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-09-emails-hours-contribute-burnout-hostility.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.





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Over two-million acres of floodplain development occurred in US in last two decades, study finds

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Over two-million acres of floodplain development occurred in US in last two decades, study finds


Over two-million acres of floodplain development occurred in U.S. in last two decades, study finds
Credit: Armen Agopian, University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science

A nationwide analysis of community-level floodplain development found that over two-million acres of floodplain were developed over the past two decades across the United States, with roughly half of all new floodplain housing built in Florida.

These findings from scientists at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science provide new information on patterns of floodplain development that pose a potential risk to people and communities in regions like the Southeastern U.S. that are especially prone to flooding.

In the new study, researchers combined geospatial land use, impervious surface, and housing data with information from digitized regulatory floodplain maps to measure new floodplain development for communities across the U.S. The analysis, published in the journal Earth’s Future, found that over 840,000 new residential properties were built in the floodplain across the U.S. with about 398,000 of those built in Florida, which represents 21% of all new housing built in the state and the highest total of any U.S. state.

“Given the size of floodplains and amount of new overall housing growth, those figures are actually much less than we would expect,” said the study’s lead author Armen Agopian, a Ph.D. student in the Abess graduate program at the Rosenstiel School.

The researchers note that if new housing was distributed proportionally to the share of floodplain land in Florida, they would expect to see 40% of new housing built in the floodplain.

They also found that 74% of communities across the United States have limited new development in floodplains, and 87% have limited new housing in floodplains through local government regulations and practices. The analysis also found that coastal communities are more likely to concentrate new development and housing in floodplains as compared to inland communities.

The study revealed that communities that participate in FEMA’s Community Rating System, a voluntary incentive program that rewards communities that adopt certain practices with discounted flood insurance rates, were found to have a higher likelihood of floodplain development.

“Communities with a flood problem enroll in the program, but participating alone isn’t enough to support safer development patterns. Instead, communities need both to participate and to improve their floodplain management practices—those are the ones that start to limit floodplain development,” said Agopian.

Development in flood-prone areas is a major driver of increases in flood-related damage, increasing both the likelihood that a flood will impact people and infrastructure and the severity of harm when it does.

This study is the first comprehensive dataset measuring floodplain development outcomes, community by community, nationwide. To date, most research on flood damage and actions has focused on the places that have experienced big floods with homes destroyed or lives lost.

“What we find is that many communities around the nation have taken smart action early on, avoiding development in their floodplains from the start. There’s a lot we can learn from these communities that are often with little fanfare avoiding flood problems from the start,” said senior author of the study Katharine Mach, professor and chair of the Rosenstiel School Department of Environmental Science and Policy.

More information:
Armen Agopian et al, A Nationwide Analysis of Community‐Level Floodplain Development Outcomes and Key Influences, Earth’s Future (2024). DOI: 10.1029/2024EF004585

Provided by
Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science

Citation:
Over two-million acres of floodplain development occurred in US in last two decades, study finds (2024, September 12)
retrieved 12 September 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-09-million-acres-floodplain-decades.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.





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An evolutionary battleground: Plants vs. microbes

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An evolutionary battleground: Plants vs. microbes


Evolutionary battleground: Plants vs. microbes
This is a 3D reconstruction from a microscopic image showing bacteria gathered on root tissue. The images are of a plant with no bacteria (A), a plant with bacteria that do not produce IAA (B), and four plants with bacteria that do produce IAA (C-F). Credit: Kenneth Acosta, Rutgers University and William Chrisler, EMSL/PNNL

Gazing out on a freshwater pond, you may see tiny green plants with oval-shaped leaves floating in clusters. In overgrown ponds, these plants coat the water’s surface. These plants—called duckweed or water lentils—can grow so fast that they can double their numbers in just one to two days. But what you can’t see in that pond is the evolutionary battle between the plants and microbes trying to invade them.

Plants depend heavily on microbes around them. The community of bacteria, viruses, fungi and other microbes that accompany a plant is called a microbiome.

Microbiomes are often specific to a type of plant in a particular location. There are often beneficial microbes that are part of a plant’s microbiome. But at the same time, there are pathogenic microbes that the plants need to defend themselves against. Understanding how plants defend themselves against pathogens—or fail to do so—could help scientists know how to better manipulate microbiomes to benefit bioenergy crops.

Scientists supported by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science are investigating how bacteria interact with plants’ hormones and affect their growth.

An evolutionary showdown

One of plants’ lines of defense against microbes is their stomata. Stomata are little pores on plants’ leaves, stems, flowers, and roots that open and close to take in carbon dioxide and let out oxygen and water. They act like gates to a city. Just like gates, stomata create a physical barrier to invading bacteria. The plant has hormones that regulate whether the guard cells are keeping the stomata open or closed. However, certain bacteria can hack this system.

Another key player in this evolutionary back-and-forth are plant hormones called auxins. Auxins are an important class of hormones that affect how plants grow and develop. The most common auxin in nature is called Indole-3 acetic acid—IAA for short.

In plants, IAA affects cells’ length, plants’ reaction to the direction of gravity, and the structure of roots. To protect against pathogens, plants can reduce IAA’s impact. Because plants need to both grow and defend themselves, it’s important for them to increase or decrease IAA when needed.

But as it so often happens in evolution, some bacteria have found a crack in this defense. Bacteria found in association with plants also produce IAA and do so in a similar way as plants. As part of that process, some of those bacteria evolved an override to the plants’ IAA management. They produce enough IAA to affect the plants’ chemical pathways and growth.

Plants that have auxin pathways affected by these bacteria grow shorter primary roots than those that don’t. They also grow more roots that run parallel to the surface of the ground and have more root hairs (the tiny root cells that bud from the surface layer of the root).

Peering into the process

These evolutionary fights are more than just an ecological wonder. They’re also important for bioenergy crop productivity, agricultural productivity, and conservation. Charting how, when, and where bacteria produce plant hormones can help scientists understand how plants adapt to changing environments.

Increasing the production of a specific hormone from a plant’s microbiome or creating a synthetic microbiome could help farmers improve crop growth. Knowing how pathogens affect root growth and overall biomass could allow scientists to avert those problems when growing those plants to make biofuels.

To investigate this relationship, researchers from Rutgers University, the University of Tennessee, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studied duckweed. The genus of plants known as duckweed is extremely common and well-studied. Scientists have a lot of information about its genetics, including variations in DNA sequences between different populations of duckweed.

In a previous study, the group sampled the microbiome of duckweeds in the wild and found that it was similar to many common plants. Of 47 bacterial strains they analyzed, almost 80% produced compounds similar to IAA. With the support of scientists from the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (a DOE Office of Science user facility), the team inoculated duckweed seedlings with 21 of those strains.

Some of the treated seedlings were regular “wild-type” in their root growth. Some plants had other bacteria strains that were producing the active auxin IAA. In these, the plants’ roots grew much shorter and with much more branching. Similarly, plants missing a gene that is required to sense the presence of auxins were less sensitive to IAA than wild-type plants. These plants didn’t respond to the IAA-producing bacteria.

Revealing the invasion

Surprisingly, of the 21 bacterial strains, only four affected plant growth in the way scientists expected. Not coincidentally, they were the ones that produced the most IAA in test tubes. It appears that although the rest could produce some compounds related to IAA, the amounts weren’t enough to trigger a response from the plants. Those four seemed to be exceptionally good at getting past the plants’ defenses.

But were those bacteria getting past the defenses because of the IAA or some other approach? The scientists answered that question by studying the mutant plants that lacked the gene that regulates auxin. They found that the bacteria could not simply move into the plant cells and colonize the mutant plants. Clearly, these bacteria had found a way to hack the auxin system to work in their favor.

The next question was where the bacteria got in. While plants’ stomata are a defense mechanism, they’re also a weakness. Using special dyes and microscopes, the researchers found loads of the invading bacteria in the stomata of the wild-type duckweed. In contrast, most of the bacteria in the mutant plants were on the surface, where they couldn’t home in on the stomata. Like an invader tricking the guards at the gates of a walled city, the successful bacteria used the auxin system to trick the guard cells.

Tracking just a little of this evolutionary tug-of-war between plants and bacteria suggests that plants are likely to have multiple defense mechanisms against bacteria that produce IAA.

While the leaves and stems of plants can be readily seen above ground, a whole complex system of cooperative and competitive behavior is hidden from view. By illuminating these relationships, scientists are setting the foundation to grow plants for biofuels in more sustainable ways.

Provided by
US Department of Energy

Citation:
An evolutionary battleground: Plants vs. microbes (2024, September 12)
retrieved 12 September 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-09-evolutionary-battleground-microbes.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.





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New computer simulations help scientists advance energy-efficient microelectronics

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New computer simulations help scientists advance energy-efficient microelectronics


New computer simulations help scientists advance energy-efficient microelectronics
a) Schematic structure of a field-effect transistor (FET) with ultra-thin HfO2/ZrO2-based ferroelectric gate oxide. The polycrystalline multi-phase and multi-domain ferroelectric film exhibits an effective negative capacitance (NC). b) Logarithm of the drain current as a function of the gate voltage Vg for a conventional FET and a negative capacitance FET (NCFET). For a matched Off-current Ioff the supply voltage can be reduced or the On-current Ion can be boosted at the same supply voltage. c) Simplified metal-ferroelectric-insulator-semiconductor-metal (MFISM) capacitor structure simulated in this study. d) Due to the NC effect, the MFISM capacitor shows an overall capacitance enhancement compared to an otherwise identical metal-insulator-semiconductor-metal (MISM) structure. Credit: Advanced Electronic Materials (2024). DOI: 10.1002/aelm.202400085

Thanks to advances in microchips, today’s smartphones are so powerful they would have been considered supercomputers in the early 1990s. But the rising ubiquity of artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things—the vast network of connected devices that have enabled everything from smart grids to smart homes—will require a new generation of microchips that not only outpace previous records of miniaturization and performance but are also more energy efficient than current technologies.

As part of this effort, Berkeley Lab scientists are working to revolutionize the transistor, one of the fundamental components in computer microchips, for superior performance and energy efficiency. Recent work has shown the promise of new transistor materials that use an unusual property called negative capacitance to enable more efficient memory and logic devices. When a material has negative capacitance, it can store a greater amount of electrical charge at lower voltages, which is the opposite of what happens in conventional capacitive materials.

Now, a multidisciplinary team of researchers have developed an atomistic understanding of the origins of negative capacitance, enabling them to enhance and customize this phenomenon for specific device applications. The advance was made possible by FerroX, an open-source, 3D simulation framework that the team custom-designed for the study of negative capacitance. Their work was reported in the journal Advanced Electronic Materials.

The work represents a significant milestone of a multiyear project, “Co-Design of Ultra-Low-Voltage Beyond CMOS Microelectronics,” which aims to design new microchips that could perform better and require less energy than conventional silicon chips.

While it’s not uncommon for materials development to be closely linked to applications, Berkeley Lab’s co-design approach to microelectronics research, where the atomistic understanding of material properties is driven and informed by specific device requirements, tightens the connection between research aims in all aspects of device development and relies on the interdisciplinary team science for which the lab is famous in the hope of accelerating the pathway from R&D to commercialization.

“There’s a lot of trial and error in the making of new materials. It’s like making a new recipe. Researchers typically have to work days and nights in the lab to change that recipe. But with our modeling tool, FerroX, you can use your own computer to target specific parameters that can affect the performance of the negative capacitance effect,” said Zhi (Jackie) Yao, a research scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Applied Mathematics & Computational Research Division and senior author on the study.

Yao and first author Prabhat Kumar, a postdoctoral scholar in the Applied Mathematics & Computational Research Division, co-led the development of FerroX for the microelectronics co-design project.

Uncovering the atomistic origins of negative capacitance

In 2008, co-author Sayeef Salahuddin, a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley and senior faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, first proposed the concept of negative capacitance to demonstrate a new approach to designing energy-efficient computers.

Negative capacitance typically appears in materials with ferroelectric properties. Ferroelectric materials have promise as energy-efficient computer memories because their built-in electrical polarization can be used to store data, for example, that can be written and erased using a low-power electric field.

In the years following Salahuddin’s pioneering proposal, researchers have learned that the negative capacitance effect in thin films of ferroelectric hafnium oxide and zirconium oxide (HfO2-ZrO2) occurs when the films are composed of a mixture of phases.

That means that small regions or “grains” of the film have slightly different arrangements of atoms or “phases.” The size of these phase grains are tiny—just a few nanometers across—but the different phases have distinct electronic properties that can interact with each other and give rise to macroscopic phenomena such as negative capacitance.

The Salahuddin group has already made use of this phenomenon to produce record-breaking microcapacitors, but in order to unlock the full potential of negative capacitance, the researchers needed a deeper understanding of its atomistic origins.

To do this, a multidisciplinary team co-led by Yao and Kumar developed FerroX. The open-source framework allowed them to develop 3D phase-field simulations of a ferroelectric thin film, in which they could vary the phase composition at will and study the impacts on the film’s electronic properties.

“Our goal was to understand the origin of negative capacitance in these films, which is not well understood,” Kumar said. “Our simulations are the first to help researchers tailor a material’s properties for further improvements in negative capacitance observed in the lab.”

As a result, the Berkeley Lab researchers found that the negative capacitance effect can be enhanced by optimizing the domain structure—reducing the size of the ferroelectric grains and arranging them to have a particular direction of ferroelectric polarization.

“This approach to enhancing negative capacitance was unknown before our study because previous models lacked the scalability to easily explore the design space and lacked physics customization,” Yao said.

Yao attributes this new modeling capability to working firsthand with materials scientists like Salahuddin, who helped the FerroX development team understand how to shape their models around the physics of ferroelectrics, and to the unique multidisciplinary strengths of Berkeley Lab, where researchers across the scientific disciplines are in close proximity to the Perlmutter supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC).

Perlmutter supports complex simulation, data analytics, and artificial intelligence experiments requiring multiple graphics processing units (GPUs) at a time. Yao, Kumar, and team relied significantly on Perlmutter to develop FerroX, which is now available to other researchers as an open-source framework that is portable from laptops to supercomputers.

“It’s exciting that FerroX will be able to help such a vast community of researchers in academia, industry, and the national labs,” Yao said.

While FerroX models in the current study simulate the origin of negative capacitance as it evolves at the transistor gate, the Berkeley Lab team plans to use the open-source framework to simulate the entire transistor in future studies.

“Over the years, we have made significant progress in both the physics of negative capacitance and integrating that physics into real microelectronics devices,” said Salahuddin. “With FerroX, we can now model these devices starting from atoms, and that will allow us to design microelectronics devices with optimal negative capacitance performance. That would not have been possible without the strength of this co-design group of researchers spanning computing sciences and materials sciences.”

More information:
Prabhat Kumar et al, 3D Ferroelectric Phase Field Simulations of Polycrystalline Multi‐Phase Hafnia and Zirconia Based Ultra‐Thin Films, Advanced Electronic Materials (2024). DOI: 10.1002/aelm.202400085

Provided by
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory


Citation:
New computer simulations help scientists advance energy-efficient microelectronics (2024, September 12)
retrieved 12 September 2024
from https://techxplore.com/news/2024-09-simulations-scientists-advance-energy-efficient.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.





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