1 week in a foster home makes shelter dogs’ lives better

A new study shows that a week away from the kennel may be one of the best stress-relievers a shelter dog can get—and pairing them with a familiar canine buddy when they return helps even more.

Millions of dogs enter US animal shelters each year, and while many eventually find new homes, the experience can be deeply stressful. Loud kennels, erratic routines, and isolation all take a toll on their well-being.

The new study led by Virginia Tech’s School of Animal Sciences identifies one of the simplest and most effective ways to ease that strain: Give dogs a break in a foster home.

Conducted in partnership with Arizona State University and two animal shelters, one in Arizona and one in Virginia, the study found that a week in a foster home significantly reduced cortisol, a key hormone linked to stress. Wearable sensors showed the dogs spent more time resting.

The study also found that upon returning to the shelter, dogs housed with a familiar companion had a more restful re-entry.

“This is the longest foster period we’ve studied and the effects were even stronger than what we saw with shorter stays,” says Lisa Gunter, an animal behavior and welfare expert in Virginia Tech’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and lead author of the study.

“This is especially encouraging. We have yet to find the beneficial limits of a stay in a foster home for dogs in shelters.”

How one week at home affects shelter dogs

Unlike earlier research focused on fostering stays of just a couple nights, this study looked at what happens when dogs spend a full week in a home.

Researchers tracked 84 shelter dogs across 17 days: five in the shelter, seven in a foster home, and five more back in the shelter. They collected over 1,300 urine samples to measure cortisol and used collar-mounted activity monitors to track rest and their movements.

The results showed clear changes in both hormone levels and the dogs’ behavior. During the foster stay, cortisol levels dropped significantly—an effect that was twice as large as that seen in shorter stays. Sensor data showed dogs spent more time resting in homes. Importantly, cortisol levels weren’t higher when dogs returned to the shelter as compared with their pre-fostering period.

“While these improvements in dogs’ welfare were temporary in the foster home, dogs were no more stressed in the shelter following foster care as they were before it,” Gunter says.

“That’s encouraging because that’s often a concern. Instead, foster care is a chance for dogs to rest and recharge in a home.”

Why familiar kennelmates matter

The study also examined whether returning to the shelter and living with a familiar companion helped dogs cope more effectively.

Before the foster stay, dogs housed with a compatible kennelmate showed no major differences in stress or activity levels. But after the week away, those reunited with a familiar dog rested more and engaged in less high activity than dogs housed alone or with a new companion.

“For dogs, familiar relationships provide stability—like a best friend in a stressful situation,” says Erica Feuerbacher, associate professor and coprincipal investigator on the study. “Being kenneled with a known companion helped them settle faster and rest more easily.”

Feuerbacher’s previous research has shown that cohousing familiar dogs not only reduces stress but can also increase adoption rates.

Improving shelter dog welfare and adoption

The findings build on years of work by Gunter and Feuerbacher aimed at improving the lives and adoptability of shelter dogs.

In an earlier study across 51 shelters and nearly 28,000 dogs, Gunter and colleagues found that short outings of as little as one to four hours increased dogs’ likelihood of adoption by five times. Dogs who spent one or two nights in foster care were over 14 times more likely to find permanent homes.

“Those adoptions weren’t usually by the foster families,” Gunter says. “Instead, these dogs were out in the community, walking in a neighborhood, or being seen in a home on social media. That visibility makes a real difference.”

Together, these studies suggest that foster stays and cohousing can meaningfully improve dogs’ experiences in the shelter and how quickly they get adopted.

Gunter says these are practical, low-cost strategies shelters can implement now.

“We keep finding that when dogs leave the kennel and go into a home, they do better,” Gunter says. “These are the types of interventions shelters can use to improve the lives of dogs in their care.”

The full study appears in PeerJ.

Source: Virginia Tech

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Lead exposure as a kid tied to depression symptoms later

A new analysis finds that increased concentrations of lead in the blood during childhood were associated with increased depressive symptoms in adolescence.

While lead exposure in children has been associated with cognitive and behavioral problems, few studies have examined later psychiatric symptoms.

The new research in JAMA Network Open underscores the long-term behavioral outcomes associated with early environmental exposures, the researchers says. Exposure levels at age 8 seemed to be particularly significant.

“We found compelling associations suggesting that lead exposure throughout childhood is associated with depressive symptoms,” says study author Christian Hoover, a student in the PhD program in epidemiology at Brown University’s School of Public Health.

“In addition, it appeared, based on our results, that there was a pattern where age 8 was a really consequential time in terms of a child’s exposure and an association with developing onset and severity of depressive symptoms.”

Lead is a neurotoxicant affecting cognitive and behavioral functioning, and research has shown that any exposure is associated with adverse health outcomes in children and adults. Despite the reduced uses of lead in the US, children are still exposed through environmental sources like dust, soil, and drinking water from aging pipes. Few studies have evaluated relatively low blood-lead measures throughout childhood in association with child depression and anxiety. This is concerning, the researchers say, given that these psychiatric conditions are prevalent among US adolescents.

To address that knowledge gap, the researchers analyzed the data of 218 pairs of caregivers and children in the Health Outcomes and Measures of Environment Study, which followed children and their families from the second trimester of pregnancy to age 12 years, assessing associations of environmental toxicant exposures with various health outcomes, and at around age 12, assessing anxiety and depression. The researchers also measured blood lead concentrations at the ages of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, and 12 years.

They found that each doubling in mean childhood blood lead concentrations was associated with increased risk of elevated child-reported depressive symptoms. Low levels of childhood blood lead concentrations were associated with self-reported depressive symptoms in later childhood, with particularly large increases in risk when exposures occurred in late childhood and early adolescence.

The researchers hypothesized that several biological mechanisms could explain how lead exposure may be associated with psychiatric illness, including through altered neurotransmitter function, reduced neurogenesis, and disrupted synaptic plasticity, particularly in brain regions associated with mood regulation. Other proposed mechanisms include oxidative stress, inflammation, and genetic modifications that may contribute to the onset and persistence of mental health symptoms after lead exposure.

“These findings suggest that low-level lead exposure during childhood and adolescence is associated with mental health in later childhood, highlighting the need for continued efforts to prevent lead exposure and the need to reduce lead exposure in older children,” says study author Joseph Braun, a professor of epidemiology and the director of Brown’s Center for Climate, Environment, and Health.

Future studies should continue to explore how to prevent cumulative or later-childhood lead exposure and whether distinct long-term patterns of lead exposure may be associated with child mental health outcomes, the researchers concluded.

Funding for this research came from the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences.

Source: Brown University

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How vines search for and attach to other plants

A new study unlocks a formula that explains vines’ ability to search for and attach to host plants.

Twisting upwardly on trees and other plants—along with houses and even lampposts—vines are a wonder of nature. However, their marvels mask their parasitic behavior: in attaching to other life forms, vines block sunlight necessary for growth and strangle their hosts, preventing the flow of water and other nutrients.

While these threats were widely known, less clear is what gives vines their searching, attaching, and climbing capabilities.

An international team of scientists has now unlocked a formula that enables vines to search for and attach to host plants—rapid elongation, directional movement, and the production of specialized contacting cells—and identified the gene family that engineers this formula.

“Our research shows how molecular mechanisms are linked to plant movement—something we haven’t clearly understood,” explains Joyce Onyenedum, an assistant professor of environmental studies at New York University and an author of the study, which appears in the journal the New Phytologist.

“Crucially, it gives us greater insight into these ropey parasites. They pose an ongoing menace to trees and other plants—among nature’s best tools for storing atmospheric carbon dioxide.”

It has been well-established that large tree branches bend through the production of fiber cells, called “G-fibers”, which are specialized cells that contract. In a study published last year, Onyenedum and her colleagues reported that G-fibers were common within the stems of vines. But the actual role of these cells was unclear.

In the New Phytologist study, Onyenedum and her colleagues, who included Lena Hunt, an NYU postdoctoral researcher, and Charles Anderson, a Penn State biologist, sought to address this question.

To do so, the scientists studied common bean vines, which are cultivated globally, often seen in home gardens, and grow vertically. Specifically, they studied the role of a particular hormone, brassinosteroid, which is known to regulate plants’ developmental processes, including elongation, by comparing growth in a normal bean vine to one that was engineered to produce an excess amount of this hormone.

These excess hormones repressed the development of G-fiber cells and produced “lazy vines” that elongate too fast and move in directionless manner.

The below timelapse video shows the two bean vines—the left plant has hormone levels typically found in vines and climbs normally; the right plant, by contrast, has an excess amount of hormones, creating an imbalance that stifles climbing:

Video courtesy of the Onyenedum Lab/New York University

The researchers also identified a candidate gene, XTH5, which is fundamental in plants’ structural growth and is specifically expressed during G-fiber development—thus potentially spotting the key actor supporting the coiling and gripping of vines.

“Genes like XTH5 allow plants to remodel their cell walls, which are complex structures that provide strength and flexibility to plants. This study demonstrates that cell wall remodeling is a critical component of plant movements such as twining,” says Anderson.

“Our work shows that rapid elongation, directional movement, and the production of certain cells facilitates the maneuvering and eventual attachment of vines upon their host, thus unlocking the secrets to their behavior,” concludes Onyenedum.

The study also included researchers from the New York Botanical Garden, Brazil’s Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, and the University of Michigan.

This research was supported by an CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (240167).

Source: NYU

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Wildfire smoke exposure in pregnancy may raise autism risk in kids

Exposure to wildfire smoke during the final months of pregnancy may raise the risk that a child is later diagnosed with autism, according to a new study.

The study in Environmental Science & Technology analyzed more than 200,000 births in Southern California from 2006 to 2014. The researchers found that children whose mothers were exposed to wildfire smoke during the third trimester were more likely to be diagnosed with autism by age 5.

The strongest association was observed among mothers exposed to more than 10 days of wildfire smoke during the final three months of pregnancy. In that group, children had a 23% higher risk of autism diagnoses compared to those whose mothers were never exposed to smoke from wildfires during pregnancy.

The study is the first to examine the potential link of prenatal wildfire smoke exposure and autism. The findings do not establish a conclusive link between prenatal wildfire exposure and autism but add to growing evidence of the adverse impact of air pollutants on fetal neurological development.

“Both autism and wildfires are on the rise, and this study is just the beginning of investigating links between the two,” says corresponding author Mostafijur Rahman, assistant professor of environmental health sciences at the Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at Tulane University.

“As climate change increases the frequency and intensity of wildfires in many parts of the world, understanding their relationship with autism is important to being able to develop preventive policy and interventions that will protect pregnant women and their children.”

The study focused solely on California, which leads the nation in both yearly acres burned by wildfire and rates of childhood autism diagnoses. It also comes one year after the Eaton and Palisades fires destroyed more than 16,000 structures in the second- and third-most destructive California wildfires on record, respectively.

Autism is a condition characterized by a range of divergent communicative, behavioral, and learning traits. Since 2000, the prevalence of autism diagnoses has increased each year, a trend often attributed in part to greater awareness and screening. Additionally, a growing body of research has linked prenatal exposure to air pollution with autism risk, with heavy metals in particles being a commonly theorized culprit.

Wildfires can cause high-concentration spikes of air pollution in a short amount of time. Burning vegetation and buildings release toxic metals and other pollutants that can be inhaled. Additionally, the fine particles that comprise smoke and air pollution can pose a threat regardless of toxicity. Inhalation of smoke can cause inflammation and stress.

In the study, mothers of children diagnosed with autism tended to be older, more likely to never had a previous pregnancy, and had a higher prevalence of pre-pregnancy diabetes and obesity. Four times as many boys were diagnosed with autism as girls.

The potential association in the third trimester aligns with a 2021 Harvard University study that also found a higher risk of autism in children linked to air pollution exposure during late pregnancy, a period marked by rapid fetal brain growth and development.

“Further study is needed to understand how wildfire smoke exposure to pregnant mothers could cause autism in their children, and to determine how exposure may interact with biology, genetics and other environmental exposures,” says lead author David Luglio, a postdoctoral fellow with the Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.

“This study is just one piece of a much larger puzzle, and the findings tell us there are more pieces to be put together.”

The study was conducted in collaboration with Kaiser Permanente Southern California, University of Southern California, Harvard University, and Sonoma Technology, Inc.

Source: Tulane University

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Why ice storms are so bad for power grids

As a massive winter storm continues to pummel the eastern United States with dangerous ice and freezing rain, more than a million customers across multiple states remain without power.

Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, and other Southern states have been particularly hard hit, with some officials warning that outages could persist for days or longer.

Sara Eftekharnejad, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science in Syracuse University’s College of Engineering and Computer Science, studies power system stability, reliability, and the integration of renewable energy into electrical grids.

Here, she explains what makes ice storms so destructive to electrical infrastructure and what lessons this storm offers for building more resilient power systems:

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Why is Dry January so popular?

Wrapping up Dry January? An expert has answers for you about why taking a break from drinking alcohol has become so popular.

Millions of people worldwide begin the new year by participating in Dry January, a monthlong break from alcohol that has evolved from a niche wellness challenge into a mainstream cultural phenomenon.

“The rising popularity of Dry January and similar temporary alcohol abstinence challenges seems to follow broader health and wellness trends, with participants motivated by concerns about alcohol’s effects on their health,” says Michelle Zaso, assistant professor of psychology at Syracuse University. “Many people document their Dry January experiences on social media, amplifying the visibility of these challenges.”

Why 31 days?

The appeal of Dry January isn’t just about timing, which is strategically positioned as a fresh start following the sometimes alcohol-heavy holiday season. The monthlong timeframe provides a clear, manageable goal rooted in behavioral psychology.

“S.M.A.R.T. goals, which are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound, might be more effective than vague resolutions, because they help individuals track progress and stay motivated,” Zaso says. Unlike open-ended commitments to “drink less,” a defined 31-day period offers a concrete finish line.

Participating in January means joining millions of others taking the same challenge simultaneously, creating community support as people share experiences, swap mocktail recipes, and celebrate milestones together, turning what could be an isolating experience into a shared journey.

Benefits beyond January

For those who complete the challenge, the benefits can extend well beyond the month itself. Research shows reduced alcohol consumption offers numerous advantages: greater energy, improved sleep, weight loss, better mental health, and improvements in such biological health markers as insulin resistance.

Perhaps most significantly, taking part in Dry January or similar breaks appears to create lasting behavior change for many participants. Research on US young adults found that half of those who participated in a temporary alcohol abstinence challenge reported drinking less afterward, and 15% continued abstaining after the challenge ended.

“Dry January provides a space for people to reflect on their relationship with alcohol and rethink their drinking habits,” Zaso says.

Concerns about the trend

One common concern is whether people simply make up for lost time once February arrives. However, research suggests these fears are largely unfounded for those who complete the full month.

“‘Rebound’ effects—drinking more after participating in Dry January—have not been consistently identified for most people who complete these challenges,” says Zaso. When rebound drinking does occur, it appears particularly among participants who didn’t complete the full month of abstinence.

Zaso emphasizes that Dry January isn’t appropriate for everyone. “People who have been drinking heavily over time should seek medical help before stopping or reducing their drinking, as withdrawal can be dangerous,” she says.

For those seeking longer-term support, she recommends professional resources like the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism’s (NIAAA) Alcohol Treatment Navigator.

A generational shift

For Gen Z, Dry January fits into a larger cultural transformation. Young adults today are drinking significantly less than previous generations, a trend driven partly by growing health consciousness.

“Growing concern about alcohol’s health effects might be driving more people to reduce their drinking and participate in Dry January challenges,” Zaso says. “The rising popularity of these movements could help destigmatize choosing not to drink, potentially contributing to broader reductions in overall alcohol consumption.”

For anyone curious about reassessing their relationship with alcohol, Zaso points to NIAAA’s “Rethinking Drinking” website as a helpful starting point.

Whether one participates in Dry January, Sober October, or any other monthlong abstinence challenge, the movement reflects a growing recognition that taking an intentional break from alcohol can offer valuable insights and tangible benefits, Zaso says.

Source: Syracuse University

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As energy drink ingredient fuels leukemia, it may affect bone health

As taurine fuels leukemia, it may also affect bone health, researchers report.

In a study last year, researchers discovered that taurine, available in energy drinks and as a supplement, feeds the growth of leukemia stem cells.

A new study expands that work and suggests that as taurine fuels leukemia, it becomes less available for other normal cells and may result in weaker bones in mice.

Many cancer patients have reduced bone density and struggle with osteoporosis and osteopenia—and researchers speculate that lack of taurine uptake may be involved.

“It appears that leukemia cells and bone-producing cells have dual requirements for taurine,” explains senior author Jeevisha Bajaj.

“If leukemia cells are rapidly using taurine and thus depleting levels of taurine in the bone marrow, it could explain why other cells that also rely on taurine for bone strength are coming up short.”

The journal Cell Death & Disease published the latest paper focusing on bone health. Bajaj also led the 2025 leukemia study, which appears in the journal Nature.

Taurine is an amino acid made naturally in the body. Individuals also consume taurine in foods such as meat, fish, eggs, and in energy drinks and supplements. Although more research is needed, taurine has been linked to benefits and potential drawbacks for overall health. In the context of leukemia, taurine may be harmful.

Bajaj encourages people with cancer to speak with their oncologists before using any supplements, and to be cautious about taking taurine.

The bone marrow microenvironment is key to the latest research from the Bajaj lab, and has been a longtime focus of scientists who are members of the University of Rochester’s Wilmot Cancer Institute’s Cancer Microenvironment (CM) research program.

Not only do many types of cancer, including leukemia, develop in the bone marrow, but the interactions and signaling between all cells and tissues in the bone marrow environment are critical for normal bone and blood development, while also supporting cancer. Researchers have shown they can manipulate signals and genes in the microenvironment to improve cancer outcomes.

PhD candidate Christina M. Kaszuba, a student in the University of Rochester biomedical engineering graduate program, led this project. She works exclusively in the Bajaj lab studying cells and components of the bone that contribute to cancer development, with the goal of finding new cancer drugs.

While the lab members were investigating leukemia, they made an interesting observation, Kaszuba says.

“We noticed that the bones in mice lacking the ability to take up taurine looked weaker and were brittle,” she says. “This motivated us to study what could be happening to the bones and bone-forming cells in the absence of taurine in normal, non-cancer mouse models.”

Kaszuba focused on mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs), which evolve into bone and cartilage and are responsible for the continual renewal and repair of bone. They analyzed RNA gene expression data from mice and confirmed that a taurine transporter gene is in fact enriched in MSCs.

Next, they studied what happens when mice lose the taurine transporter gene and discovered that MSCs show defects in becoming mature bone cells, thus impacting bone growth and strength—identifying taurine as a key regulator of MSCs and the fate of bone development.

More investigation will help to understand the dynamics of taurine uptake in the bone marrow and the impact of blocking taurine to suppress leukemia growth versus supplementing taurine to support bone repair.

Their present work, along with Bajaj’s earlier study on leukemia, indicates that complex interactions and dietary factors are necessary for overall health.

“These can be hijacked by cancers for their own growth,” Bajaj says, “and thus contribute to side effects often seen in cancer patients.”

The National Institutes of Health funded the research.

Source: University of Rochester

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