How Valentine’s Day push supply chains into overdrive

An expert has answers for you about how Valentine’s Day puts supply chains to the test.

At first glance, Valentine’s Day seems to follow a simple formula: red roses, a box of chocolates, and a last-minute dinner reservation. But behind every box of heart-shaped candies and perfectly timed flower delivery is a high-stakes logistical operation racing against the calendar.

Each February, the global supply chain shifts into overdrive to meet one of the most emotionally and economically demanding shopping weeks of the year. Flowers are harvested thousands of miles away from the United States and rushed onto cargo planes. Chocolate and candy makers ramp up production months in advance. Miss the deadline, and the product may be worthless.

A big deal for the economy

Valentine’s Day is more than a cultural tradition—it’s a full-scale economic event. According to the National Retail Federation’s annual survey, Americans spent a record $27.5 billion on Valentine’s Day in 2025, and projections suggest consumer spending will remain robust in 2026, hovering around $27.7 billion. On average, each US household is expected to spend close to $188 on gifts, dining, and experiences.

That spending is spread across a wide range of products and services, each with its own supply-chain pressures. Market research shows more than half of Valentine’s Day shoppers purchase candy, while roughly 40% buy flowers, creating predictable but intense spikes in demand.

“They actually have to start planning for Valentine’s Day six months in advance,” says Robert Handfield, a supply-chain expert and a professor in North Carolina State University’s Poole College of Management.

“I worked with Lindt Chocolate and they typically do a one-year planning process. Since everything has to be in the stores mid-January, by December they start sending things out.”

Consumer spending on Valentine’s Day also extends far beyond traditional romantic gifts. Research indicates that nearly one-third of Valentine’s Day spending goes toward non-romantic recipients, including friends, coworkers, classmates, teachers, and even pets. At the same time, Valentine’s Day remains one of the busiest days of the year for restaurants, ranking just behind Mother’s Day, adding further strain to food supply chains and last-mile delivery networks during an already busy winter season.

Flowers and chocolates

Chocolates and roses often begin their journey far from the stores they fill each February. According to the Society of American Florists, more than 250 million roses are produced specifically for Valentine’s Day.

“There is more than just one ‘largest’ producer of flowers, but the majority come from Colombia and Ecuador,” Handfield says. “We have a lot of domestic growers in California, and then the Netherlands is really known for their tulips.”

While producing and exporting so many flowers across countries and oceans may seem overwhelming, Handfield says the process has become highly refined over time.

“They [the countries] have it under control,” he says. “Growers start preparing months in advance. But it’s a hard balance, making sure the flowers don’t bloom too early and they don’t die in transit. These rose breeders have spent quite a bit of time with these supply chains so they are very careful.”

The other major Valentine’s Day staple, chocolate, comes with its own logistical demands. Chocolate companies like Russel Stover and Hershey’s follow similarly meticulous timelines. According to Handfield, inventory is staged in distribution centers by December to ensure products reach store shelves by January, well ahead of the holiday rush.

Tariff heartbreak?

With imposed tariffs on European countries making headlines, some consumers may wonder whether flowers and chocolates will come with a higher price tag this Valentine’s Day. Handfield says shoppers are unlikely to feel that impact.

“Most people have seen the disruptions, but companies account for this in their forecasting and planning,” he says. “I don’t anticipate getting any challenges when it comes to getting flowers from your boyfriend.”

While Valentine’s Day may be fueled by emotion, its success depends on precision. Months of planning, miles of transportation, and carefully timed deliveries all converge on a single date circled on the calendar. For supply-chain experts, it’s a reminder that even the most romantic traditions rely on systems designed to move fast, adapt quickly, and deliver on time.

So when roses arrive fresh and chocolates line store shelves on February 14, the real perfect match may be the one unfolding behind the scenes: every link in a global supply chain working flawlessly so millions of moments aren’t missed.

Source: North Carolina State University

The post How Valentine’s Day push supply chains into overdrive appeared first on Futurity.

from Futurity https://ift.tt/UaxfVZs

Hair shows banning lead in gas worked

A new study finds that banning lead in gas worked—and the proof is in your hair.

Prior to the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, Americans lived in communities awash with lead from industrial sources, paint, water supply pipes, and, most significantly, tailpipe emissions.

A dangerous neurotoxin that accumulates in human tissues and is linked to developmental deficits in children, environmental lead levels have come way down in the years since, and so have human exposures.

An analysis of hair samples conducted by University of Utah scientists shows precipitous reductions in lead levels since 1916.

“We were able to show through our hair samples what the lead concentrations are before and after the establishment of regulations by the EPA,” says demographer Ken Smith, a distinguished professor emeritus of family and consumer studies.

“We have hair samples spanning about 100 years. And back when the regulations were absent, the lead levels were about 100 times higher than they are after the regulations.”

‘We should not forget the lessons of history’

The findings, which appear in PNAS, underscore the vital role of environmental regulations in protecting public health. The study notes lead rules are now being weakened by the Trump administration in a wide-ranging move to ease environmental protections.

“We should not forget the lessons of history. And the lesson is those regulations have been very important,” says coauthor Thure Cerling, a distinguished professor of both geology and biology.

“Sometimes they seem onerous and mean that industry can’t do exactly what they’d like to do when they want to do it or as quickly as they want to do it. But it’s had really, really positive effects.”

Lead is the heaviest of heavy metals that, like mercury and arsenic, accumulate in living tissue and are toxic at even low levels. Yet lead holds very useful properties, great for fashioning into pipes and as a chemical additive. Lead was added to paint to improve durability, speed up drying, and produce vibrant colors with greater coverage. Lead also improved the performance of automobile engines by preventing pistons from “knocking.”

By the 1970s, its toxicity became well established, and EPA regulations began phasing it out of paint, pipes, gasoline, and other consumer products.

Hair and history

To document whether these steps were helping reduce lead exposure in people, Smith joined with geologist Diego Fernandez and Cerling, who had developed techniques to discern where animals have lived and what they eat based on chemical analysis of hair and teeth.

The lead research is built on a previous study funded by the university’s Center on Aging and the National Institutes of Health that had recruited Utahns who consented to provide blood samples and family health histories.

The US Mining and Smelting Co. plant in Midvale, Utah, 1906. Photo used by permission, Utah Historical Society.
For the new study, the researchers asked members of that cohort to provide hair samples, both contemporary and from when they were young. These people obliged, and some were able to find ancestors’ hair preserved in family scrapbooks dating as far back as a century. In all, the team acquired hair samples from 48 individuals in this manner, offering a robust window into lead levels along Utah’s populous Wasatch Front, which historically experienced heavy lead emissions from industrial sources.

“The Utah part of this is so interesting because of the way people keep track of their family history. I don’t know that you could do this in New York or Florida,” says Smith, who directed the U’s Pedigree and Population Program at the Huntsman Cancer Center while these studies were conducted.

This region supported a vibrant smelting industry through most of the 20th century, centered in the cities of Midvale and Murray. Most of Utah’s smelters were shuttered by the 1970s, around the same time the EPA clamped down on the use of lead in consumer products.

The research team ran the hair samples through mass spectrometry equipment at the facility directed by Fernandez.

“The surface of the hair is special. We can tell that some elements get concentrated and accumulated on the surface. Lead is one of those. That makes it easier because lead is not lost over time,” says Fernandez, a research professor in the geology and geophysics department.

“Because mass spectrometry is very sensitive, we can do it with one hair strand, though we cannot tell where the lead is in the hair. It’s probably on the surface mostly, but it could also be coming from the blood if that hair was synthesized when there was high lead in the blood.”

Blood would provide a better exposure assessment, but hair is far easier to collect and preserve, and more importantly, it offers clues to long-ago exposures for a person who has grown up or even deceased.

“It doesn’t really record that internal blood concentration that your brain is seeing, but it tells you about that overall environmental exposure,” Cerling says.

“One of the things that we found is that hair records that original value, but then the longer the hair has been exposed to the environment, the higher the lead concentrations are.”

The team’s findings regarding lead in hair run parallel to the reductions of lead in gasoline following the EPA’s establishment by President Richard Nixon.

Prior to 1970, for example, gasolines contained about 2 grams of lead per gallon. That might not sound like much, but considering the billions of gallons of fuel American automobiles burn each year, it adds up to nearly 2 pounds of lead released into the environment per person a year.

“It’s an enormous amount of lead that’s being put into the environment and quite locally,” Cerling says. “It’s just coming out of the tailpipe, goes up in the air, and then it comes down. It’s in the air for a number of days, especially during the inversions that we have and it absorbs into your hair, you breathe it and it goes into your lungs.”

But after the 1970s, even as gasoline consumption escalated in the United States, the concentrations of lead in the hair samples plummeted, from as high as 100 parts per million (ppm) to 10 ppm by 1990. In 2024, the level was less than 1 ppm.

Support for the research came from the Huntsman Cancer Foundation and the National Cancer Institute through a grant to the Utah Population Database and the University of Utah.

Source: University of Utah

The post Hair shows banning lead in gas worked appeared first on Futurity.

from Futurity https://ift.tt/FULhjIw

Why retailers rarely use ‘Super Bowl’

A business professor has answers for you about how trademark rules shape promotions and retail marketing strategy for one of the biggest sales periods of the year.

The Super Bowl isn’t just the biggest game in sports, it’s also a major driver of commercial sales. Yet many retailers avoid saying its name at all.

With “Super Bowl” tightly protected as a trademark, brands must find creative ways to capture the excitement without crossing legal boundaries.

Courtney Cothren is an associate teaching professor at the University of Missouri’s Robert J. Trulaske, Sr. College of Business.

Cothren, whose professional experience includes retail consulting, explains below what the Super Bowl trademark means for retailers, consumers, and brand strategy:

The post Why retailers rarely use ‘Super Bowl’ appeared first on Futurity.

from Futurity https://ift.tt/4TuVy8g

Is there a link between viral infection and ALS?

Researchers have made a potentially game-changing discovery about the development of devastating motor neuron diseases like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

The team identified a specific type of mouse—the CC023 strain—that responds to a viral infection in a way that looks remarkably similar to humans with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

“This is exciting because this is the first animal model that affirms the long-standing theory that a virus can trigger permanent neurological damage or disease—like ALS—long after the infection itself occurred,” says Candice Brinkmeyer-Langford, a neurogenerative disease expert with the Texas A&M University School of Public Health.

The CC023 strain provides a unique “test track” for scientists to identify early warning signs for ALS through the biomarkers that appear after infection, she says. In addition, it could lead to testing and new treatments, especially for sporadic ALS, which makes up more than 90% of cases and is not hereditary.

For its study in the Journal of Neuropathology & Experimental Neurology, the team used Theiler’s murine encephalomyelitis virus (TMEV) to infect five strains of genetically diverse animal models. They then assessed how the unique DNA of the different strains affected their responses to the virus during acute, subacute, and chronic phases of infection.

The researchers tracked changes over time and between the different mice strains using five methods:

• Comparing spinal cord inflammation between infected and healthy mice at different times.
• Comparing levels of inflammation among the five mouse strains.
• Determining if higher levels of inflammation were directly linked to more paralysis and other severe physical symptoms.
• Measuring the amount of virus present.
• Testing whether higher amounts of the virus led to higher levels of spinal cord inflammation.

There were four key findings:

• Early damage. Within the first two weeks, all mouse strains showed nerve damage in the lumbar spine. Some strains showed signs of illness as early as four days after infection.
• Muscle loss. Over the long-term phase of the illness, the virus was eliminated from the spinal cord, but the CC023 mice experienced permanent muscle wasting.
• ALS similarities. The CC023 mice showed physical symptoms and lesions very similar to those seen in humans with ALS.
• Immune response. While the immune cells of the mice were very active early on to fight the virus, this activity stopped once the virus was cleared.

In short, the initial viral infection spread and infected the lumbar spinal cord early on, triggering an immune reaction, lesions, and signs of illness. The virus was cleared over time, but the lesions and clinical symptoms persisted, and in the CC023 strain these signs resembled ALS-like disease.

The bottom line, according to Brinkmeyer-Langford? Genetics matter.

“This study gives us a new way to understand the various types of damage caused by a viral infection to the spinal cord and its nerves and muscles, especially since we now know that the initial viral infection triggers lasting, damaging reaction in susceptible individuals,” she says.

Support for this work came from the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Source: Texas A&M University

The post Is there a link between viral infection and ALS? appeared first on Futurity.

from Futurity https://ift.tt/1xDIJp3

Light reflecting on leaves may help identify dying forests

The way light reflects on leaves may help researchers identify dying forests.

Early detection of declining forest health is critical for the timely intervention and treatment of droughted and diseased flora, especially in areas prone to wildfires.

Obtaining a reliable measure of whole-ecosystem health before it is too late, however, is an ongoing challenge for forest ecologists.

“This has the potential to revolutionize forest health monitoring.”

Traditional sampling is too labor-intensive for whole-forest surveys, while modern genomics—though capable of pinpointing active genes—is still too expensive for large-scale application. Remote sensing offers a high-resolution solution from the skies, but currently limited paradigms for data analysis mean the images obtained do not say enough, early enough.

A new study from researchers at the University of Notre Dame uncovers a more comprehensive picture of forest health. Funded by NASA, the research shows that spectral reflectance—a measurement obtained from satellite images—corresponds with the expression of specific genes.

Reflectance is how much light reflects off of leaf material, and at which specific wavelengths, in the visible and near-infrared range. Calculated as the ratio of reflected light to incoming light and measured using special sensors, reflectance data reveals a unique signature specific to the leaf’s composition and condition.

“This has the potential to revolutionize forest health monitoring,” says Nathan Swenson, the Gillen Director of the University of Notre Dame Environmental Research Center (UNDERC) who led the study.

“By connecting reflectance with gene expression, we can get a real-time measure of forest health at the genomic level that picks up the early indicators of declining forest health and connects them back to real changes happening on the cellular level.”

The study appears in Nature: Communications Earth & Environment.

While reflectance is a strong indicator of both physical and chemical leaf properties, the utility of knowing these features is limited without the ability to determine their molecular origin.

“We now have the ability to fly an airplane over a whole forest and rapidly document the traits of every tree’s canopy, but what we can actually say about a certain tree’s condition is still quite simple,” says Swenson, professor in the biological sciences department.

“So, we wanted to go beyond that, asking: Is there a significant relationship between the reflectance of a leaf and its gene expression?”

In short, the answer is yes.

Swenson, with the help of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars, collected leaf samples from two common tree species—sugar maple and red maple—at the University’s UNDERC field site in northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

At the point of collection, reflectance data for the surface of each leaf was measured and recorded, before the sample was preserved and processed for gene expression analysis. This analysis focused on genes related to water response, drought, photosynthesis, and plant-pest or plant-pathogen interactions. The reflectance data was also processed to determine the wavelengths of light reflected or absorbed by a particular leaf.

For more than half of the genes analyzed, the researchers found a strong correlation with specific reflectance wavelengths. This means that across most of the trees surveyed, those whose leaves expressed a certain gene reflected or absorbed the same “signature” wavelengths of light as other leaves that expressed the same gene.

“We’ve done it here on just a small scale, but the potential for predicting the expression of hundreds to thousands of ecologically important genes from reflectance is immense,” Swenson says. “We could monitor whole forests on the genomic scale, via sensors on the international space station.”

To apply this newly-defined correlation to whole forests, Swenson is looking to scale previous research. A 2024 study published in PLOS Biology combined satellite images with artificial intelligence-enabled computational networks to create tree species maps for the National Ecological Observatory Network.

The AI model, developed by a multi-institutional team including Swenson, can be trained to identify particular trees by species using images of the whole forest’s canopy collected by sensors. When layered together with reflectance and gene expression data, the model has the potential to generate a complete profile for a single tree based on its species, reflectance signature and the gene expression map for that species. Doing so would allow researchers to single out struggling individuals or clusters more efficiently for intervention.

“You can take these models that we’re generating at the leaf level and apply them to those new data sets of reflectance whether that’s from an airplane or from a satellite. And then you can build a map of gene expression on the scale of a national forest,” Swenson says.

“The end goal here is using the right data to rapidly assess how trees are responding to stressors, so that we can intervene before the forest hits a crisis point.”

Source: University of Notre Dame

The post Light reflecting on leaves may help identify dying forests appeared first on Futurity.

from Futurity https://ift.tt/KjwuOrW

Risk of death due to pregnancy is vastly underestimated

Commonly cited statistics on the mortality risk of pregnancy when compared to abortion in the US are a vast undercount, according to a new study.

Amid national discussions of the importance of abortion access for maternal health, the goal of the study was to estimate risks using updated data to provide accurate information that could help inform decisions by patients, clinicians and policymakers.

“It is widely understood by scientists that continuing a pregnancy carries a much higher risk of death than having an abortion,” says lead study author Maria Steenland, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Health.

“Our new analysis shows that it is far more dangerous to be pregnant than to have an abortion, and this gap in mortality risk is even larger than previously recognized.”

The findings suggest that abortion bans force pregnant people who otherwise would have sought abortion care to take on the substantially increased health risks associated with continued pregnancy, the researchers noted, including hemorrhage and high blood pressure.

“Our findings underscore how dangerous abortion bans are for pregnant people: forcing someone to continue a pregnancy puts them at a dramatically higher risk of death—along with so many other harms,” says study author Benjamin Brown, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School.

“The data also highlight the urgent need to lower mortality rates for all pregnant, birthing, and postpartum people.”

Steenland, whose research goal is to identify policy options to increase the equity and quality of women’s health services, and Brown, an OB-GYN with a subspecialty in complex family planning (including complex abortion and contraception care), connected while Steenland was an assistant professor of health services, policy and practice (research) at Brown University’s School of Public Health.

The new analysis found that the mortality risk from pregnancy (including up to one year postpartum) is 44 to 70 times higher than the mortality risk from abortion—three times higher than previously estimated. Prior to this study, a commonly cited statistic was that the risk of death associated with childbirth is approximately 14 times higher than that of abortion. This statistic was based on data from 1998 to 2005, and during that timeframe, mortality rates for people with ongoing pregnancies have been estimated to be between 8.8 and 14.5 per 100,000 live births. The current study, using data from 2018 to 2021, found an annual average of 32.3 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, with the highest rate of 43.9 occurring in 2021.

The study defined pregnancy-related deaths as occurring during pregnancy or within one year from the end of pregnancy. They were further identified by hundreds of specific underlying pregnancy-related causes such as hypertension disorders, obstetric hemorrhage, complications from chronic heart and kidney disease, and various infections occurring while pregnant.

One major factor involved in the new estimates was the availability of new data. In 2003, a pregnancy checkbox option was added to death certificates to indicate whether the deceased person was pregnant. When the checkbox was fully implemented in 2018, it addressed prior undercounting of maternal deaths but also led to a potential problem of overcounting, where the cause of death for the deceased person may have been misclassified as being related to pregnancy.

To calculate pregnancy-related death rates, the research team analyzed data on deaths and births (live and stillbirth) from the US National Vital Statistics System, as well as abortion-related deaths from the Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System between 2018 to 2021. Data on the number of abortions during that time came from the Guttmacher Institute, a nonpartisan research nonprofit that monitors abortion surveillance data in the US and globally.

To account for possible overcounting of maternal deaths, the study removed nonspecific causes of pregnancy-related mortality, such as “other specified pregnancy-related conditions,” which prior research showed was likely to be misclassified. The study also excluded deaths from COVID-19 and deaths of people whose pregnancy ended because of miscarriage or self-induced abortion.

“Even with this conservative approach to calculating maternal mortality, we found the risk of dying from pregnancy and childbirth far exceeded the risk of dying from abortion,” says study author Marie Thoma, a reproductive and perinatal epidemiologist and an associate professor at the University of Maryland.

“People deserve access to updated information about these comparative risks and policies that reflect these realities.”

The risk of death due to abortion has decreased since previous studies were conducted, most likely because more people who have an abortion have it earlier in the pregnancy, which is generally safer, the researchers say. They note that increased restrictions to abortion access will likely affect maternal health going forward.

The research appears in JAMA Network Open.

Source: Brown University

The post Risk of death due to pregnancy is vastly underestimated appeared first on Futurity.

from Futurity https://ift.tt/Yi4Ua2M

Watch: These metal tubes don’t sink in water

Scientists have engineered unsinkable metal tubes.

The superhydrophobic design could lead to resilient ships, floating platforms, and renewable energy innovations.

More than a century after the Titanic sank, engineers still have hopes of someday creating “unsinkable” ships. In a step toward reaching that lofty goal, researchers at the University of Rochester’s Institute of Optics have developed a new process that turns ordinary metal tubes unsinkable—meaning they will stay afloat no matter how long they are forced into water or how heavily they are damaged.

Chunlei Guo, a professor of optics and of physics and a senior scientist at URochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics, and his team describe their process for creating aluminum tubes with remarkable floating abilities in a study published in Advanced Functional Materials. By etching the interior of aluminum tubes, the researchers create micro- and nano-pits on the surface that turn it superhydrophobic, repelling water and staying dry.

When the treated tube enters water, the superhydrophobic surface traps a stable bubble of air inside the tube, which prevents the tube from getting waterlogged and sinking. The mechanism is similar to how diving bell spiders trap an air bubble to stay buoyant underwater or how fire ants form floating rafts with their hydrophobic bodies.

“Importantly, we added a divider to the middle of the tube so that even if you push it vertically into the water, the bubble of air remains trapped inside and the tube retains its floating ability,” says Guo.

Guo and his lab first demonstrated superhydrophobic floating devices in 2019, featuring two superhydrophobic disks that were sealed together to create their buoyancy. But the current tube design simplifies and improves the technology in several key areas. The disks that the researchers previously developed could lose their ability to float when turned at extreme angles, but the tubes are resilient against turbulent conditions like those found at sea.

“We tested them in some really rough environments for weeks at a time and found no degradation to their buoyancy,” says Guo.

“You can poke big holes in them, and we showed that even if you severely damage the tubes with as many holes as you can punch, they still float.”

Multiple tubes can be linked together to create rafts that could be the basis for ships, buoys, and floating platforms. In lab experiments, the team tested the design using tubes of varying lengths, up to almost half a meter, and Guo says the technology could be easily scaled to the larger sizes needed for load-bearing floating devices.

The researchers also showed how rafts made from superhydrophobic tubes could be used to harvest water waves to generate electricity, offering a promising renewable energy application.

This project was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and URochester’s Goergen Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.

Source: University of Rochester

The post Watch: These metal tubes don’t sink in water appeared first on Futurity.

from Futurity https://ift.tt/rNWM1Jp