People often think of disasters as great equalizers. After all, a tornado, wildfire or hurricane doesn’t discriminate against those in its path. But the consequences for those impacted are not “one-size-fits-all.”

That’s evident in recent storms and wildfire disasters and in the U.S. Census Bureau’s newly released results from its national household surveys showing who was displaced by disasters in 2023.

Overall, the Census Bureau estimates that nearly 2.5 million Americans had to leave their homes because of disasters in 2023, whether for a short period or much longer. However, a closer look at demographics in the survey reveals much more about disaster risk in America and who is vulnerable.

It suggests, as researchers have also found, that people with the fewest resources, as well as those who have disabilities or have been marginalized, were more likely to be displaced from their homes by disasters than other people.

Decades of disaster research, including from our team at the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center, make at least two things crystal clear: First, people’s social circumstances – such as the resources available to them, how much they can rely on others for help, and challenges they face in their daily life – can lead them to experience disasters differently compared to others affected by the same event. And second, disasters exacerbate existing vulnerabilities.

This research also shows how disaster recovery is a social process. Recovery is not a “thing,” but rather it is linked to how we talk about recovery, make decisions about recovery and prioritize some activities over others.

Lessons from past disasters

Sixty years ago, the recovery period after the destructive 1964 Alaskan earthquake was driven by a range of economic and political interests, not simply technical factors or on need. That kind of influence continues in disaster recovery today. Even disaster buyout programs can be based on economic considerations that burden under-resourced communities.

This recovery process is made even more difficult because policymakers often underappreciate the immense difficulties residents face during recovery.

Following Hurricane Katrina, sociologist Alexis Merdjanoff found that property ownership status affected psychological distress and displacement, with displaced renters showing higher levels of emotional distress than homeowners. Lack of autonomy in decisions about how to repair or rebuild can play a role, further highlighting disparate experiences during disaster recovery.

What the Census shows about vulnerability

The 2023 census data consistently showed that socially vulnerable groups reported being displaced from their homes at higher rates than other groups.

People over 65 had a higher rate of being displaced than younger people. So did Hispanic and Black Americans, people with less than a high school education and those with low household incomes or who were struggling with employment compared to other groups. While the Census Bureau describes the data as experimental and notes that some sample sizes are small, the differences stand out and are consistent with what researchers have found.

Low-income and marginalized communities are often in areas at higher risk of flooding from storms or may lack investment in storm protection measures.

The morass of bureaucracy and conflicting information can also be a barrier to a swift recovery.

After Hurricane Sandy, people in New Jersey complained about complex paperwork and what felt to them like ever-changing rules. They bemoaned their housing recovery as, in researchers’ words, a “muddled, inconsistent experience that lacked discernible rationale”.

Residents who don’t know how to find information about disaster recovery assistance or can’t take time away from work to accumulate the necessary documents and meet with agency representatives can have a harder time getting quick help from federal and state agencies.

Disabilities also affect displacement. Of those people who were displaced for some length of time in 2023, those with significant difficulty hearing, seeing or walking reported being displaced at higher rates than those without disabilities.

Prolonged loss of electricity or water due to an ice storm, wildfire or grid overload during a heat emergency can force those with medical conditions to leave even if their neighbors are able to stay.

That can also create challenges for their recovery. Displacement can leave vulnerable disaster survivors isolated from their usual support systems and health care providers. It can also isolate those with limited mobility from disaster assistance.

Helping communities build resilience

Crucial research efforts are underway to better help people who may be struggling the most after disasters.

For example, our center was part of an interdisciplinary team that developed a framework to predict community resilience after disasters and help identify investments that could be made to bolster resilience. It outlines ways to identify gaps in community functioning, like health care and transportation, before disaster strikes. And it helps determine recovery strategies that would have the most impact.

Shifts in weather and climate and a mobile population mean that people’s exposure to hazards are constantly shifting and often increasing. The Coastal Hazard, Equity, Economic Prosperity, and Resilience Hub, which our center is also part of, is developing tools to help communities best ensure resilience and strong economic conditions for all residents without shortchanging the need to prioritize equity and well-being.

We believe that when communities experience disasters, they should not have to choose among thriving economically, ensuring all residents can recover and reducing risk of future threats. There must be a way to account for all three.

Understanding that disasters affect people in different ways is only a first step toward ensuring that the most vulnerable residents receive the support they need. Involving community members from disproportionately vulnerable groups to identify challenges is another. But those, alone, are not enough.

If we as a society care about those who contribute to our communities, we must find the political and organizational will to act to reduce the challenges reflected in the census and disaster research.

This article, originally published March 4, 2024, has been updated with severe storms in mid-March.

Tricia Wachtendorf, Professor of Sociology and Director, Disaster Research Center, University of Delaware and James Kendra, Director, Disaster Research Center and Professor, Public Policy & Administration, University of Delaware

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

NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft, headed to Jupiter’s ice-covered moon Europa in October 2024, will carry a laser-etched message that celebrates humanity’s connection to water. The message pays homage to past NASA missions that carried similar messages.

As the president of Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or METI, International, I helped design the message on Clipper with two fellow members of our board of directors: linguists Sheri Wells-Jensen and Laura Buszard-Welcher. METI International is a scientific organization dedicated to transmitting powerful radio messages to extraterrestrial life.

We collected audio recordings in 103 languages, and we decided how to convert these into waveforms that show these sounds visually. Colleagues from NASA etched these waveforms into the metal plate that shields the spacecraft’s sensitive electronics from Jupiter’s harsh radiation.

I also designed another part of the message that visually depicts the wavelengths of water’s constituents, because water is so important to the search for intelligent life in the universe.

Etching messages into spacecraft isn’t a new practice, and Clipper’s message fits into a decades-old tradition started by astronomer Carl Sagan.

In 1972 and 1973, two Pioneer spacecraft headed to Jupiter and Saturn carrying metal plaques engraved with scientific and pictorial messages. In 1977, two Voyager spacecraft headed to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Nepture bearing gold-plated copper phonograph records. These records contained tutorials in mathematics and chemistry, as well as music, photos and sounds of Earth and greetings in 55 languages.

Water words

As water is essential for life on Earth, searching for its presence elsewhere has been key to many NASA missions. Astronomers suspect that Europa, where Clipper is headed, has an ocean underneath its icy surface, making it a prime candidate for the search for life in the outer solar system.

Part of the Clipper message features the word for water in 103 languages. We started with audio files collected online, but we then needed to analyze those and find an output that could be engraved on a metal plate. I ended up going back to some of the techniques I used in some of my early psycholinguistic research, where I explored how emotions are encoded in speech.

The 103 spoken words we recorded represent a global snapshot of the diversity of Earth’s languages. The outward-facing side of the Clipper plate shows the words as waveforms that track the varying intensity of sound as each word is spoken.

Each person whom we recorded saying the word “water” for the waveform had a connection to water. For example, the lawyer who contributed the word for water in Uzbek – “suv” – organizes an annual music festival in Uzbekistan to raise awareness of the desertification of the Aral Sea.

The native speaker of the Catalan water word – “aigua” – hunts for exoplanets, discovering potentially habitable planets that orbit other stars.

The Drake Equation

Clipper’s message also pays homage to astronomer Frank Drake, the father of SETI – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – by bearing the Drake Equation, his namesake formula. By drawing on scientific data, as well as some best guess hunches, the Drake Equation estimates the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the galaxy currently sending messages into the cosmos.

By one widely quoted estimate, there are a tenth as many of these extraterrestrial civilizations as one’s average lifetime in years. If civilizations survive for a million years, for example, there should be about 100,000 in the galaxy. If they last only a century on average, scientists would estimate that about 10 exist.

Radio astronomers study the universe by examining the radiation that chemical elements in space give off. They spend much of their time mapping the distribution of the most abundant chemical in the universe – hydrogen.

Hydrogen emits radiation at a certain frequency called the hydrogen line, which radio telescopes can detect. During Project Ozma, the first modern-day SETI experiment, Drake looked for artificial signals at the same frequency, because he figured scientists on other worlds might recognize hydrogen as universally significant and broadcast signals at that frequency.

The water hole

As our team developed our water words message, I realized that the message would only make sense if it were discovered by someone already familiar with the contents inscribed on the plate. The Drake Equation would only make sense if someone already knew what each of the terms in the equation stood for.

The Europa Clipper will crash into Jupiter or one of its other moons, with Ganymede or Callisto the leading candidates. But if for some reason the mission changes and it survives that fate, then humans far in the future with a radically different cultural background and different language conventions may retrieve it millennia from now as an ancient artifact.

To ensure we had at least one part of the message that a distant future scientist might be able to understand, I also designed a pictorial representation of the same frequency that Drake used for Project Ozma: the hydrogen line. We engraved this on the Clipper plate, along with a frequency called the hydroxyl line.

When hydrogen (H+) and hydroxyl (OH-) combine, they form water. Scientists call the range of frequencies between these lines the “water hole.” The water hole represents the part of the radio spectrum where astronomers conducted the first SETI experiments.

We displayed the hydrogen and hydroxyl lines using their wavelengths in the Clipper message. The metal plate also has diagrams showing what hydrogen and hydroxyl look like at the atomic level.

We’re hoping that future chemists would recognize these chemical components as the ingredients of water. If they do, we will have succeeded in communicating at least a few core scientific concepts across time, space and language.

Waveforms let our team tie the messages on the two sides of the Clipper plate together. On the water words side, over a hundred words are depicted by their waveforms. On the other side, the wavelengths of hydrogen and hydroxyl – the constituents of water – are etched into the plate.

METI International funded the collection and curation of the water words, as well as my design of the hydrogen and hydroxyl lines, providing these to NASA at no cost.

While designing the message for the Europa Clipper, we got to reflect on the importance of water on Earth, and think about why astronomers feel so compelled to search for it beneath the icy crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa. The spacecraft is scheduled to enter Jupiter’s orbit in April 2030.

Douglas Vakoch, President, METI International; Professor Emeritus, California Institute of Integral Studies

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

Cataract surgery is one of the most popular and commonly performed procedures in the world. The vast majority of patients have excellent outcomes with few complications.

Here are the numbers:

• By age 80, over half of all Americans have cataracts.

• Close to 4 million cataract surgeries are performed in the U.S. every year.

• Over 90% of patients have 20/20 vision with glasses after surgery, although those with other eye conditions may not do as well, including those with glaucoma, a progressive disease typically associated with elevated pressure within the eye; diabetic retinopathy, which ultimately can cause leakage in the retinal tissues; and macular degeneration, a disease that is typically related to age.

• The rate of post-surgery infection from endophthalmitis is less than 0.1%.

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As ophthalmologists who have performed thousands of these procedures, we know that many patients have misconceptions about both cataracts and the surgery. For example, some think a cataract is a growth on the eye’s surface.

We like to compare a cataract with the frosted glass of a bathroom window, where light can be transmitted but details cannot. Or when turbulence from a storm causes normally clear water in the ocean to become murky. In much the same way, the eye’s once transparent lens becomes cloudy.

About the surgery

Cataract surgery removes the clouded lens of the eye and replaces it with a new, clear lens to restore your vision. Most patients report the procedure is painless.

It’s typically an elective surgery that is performed on an outpatient basis. The patient is often awake, under local anesthesia, with sedation similar to that used for dental procedures. We like to say patients receive the equivalent of three margaritas in their IV.

Numbing drops are then applied to the eye’s surface, along with an anesthetic inside the eye. Patients with claustrophobia, or movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, may not be suitable candidates for awake surgeries and require general anesthesia.

Before surgery, patients receive dilating drops to make the pupil as large as possible. The surgeon makes a tiny incision, usually with a small pointed scalpel, between the clear and white part of the eye to gain access to the lens capsule, a thin membrane similar in thickness to a plastic produce bag at the grocery store.

This capsule is suspended by small fibers called zonules, which are arranged like the springs that suspend a trampoline from a frame. The surgeon then creates a small opening in the capsule, called a capsulotomy, to gain access to the cataract. The cataract is then broken into smaller parts so they are removable through the small incision.

This is similar to a tiny jackhammer, breaking the large lens into smaller pieces for removal. That sounds scary, but it’s painless. Ultrasound emulsifies the lens and vacuum power then aspirates it from the eye.

Laser-assisted cataract surgery has been found to have similar outcomes to traditional cataract surgery.

Complications are rare

Serious complications, such as postoperative infection, bleeding in the eye or a postoperative retinal detachment are rare; they occur in approximately 1 in 1,000 cases. But even in many of these situations, appropriate management can salvage useful vision.

Capsular complications deserve additional discussion. According to some studies, they occur in up to 2% of cases. If a hole or tear of the posterior capsule is encountered during cataract surgery, the clear gel in the vitreous – the back chamber of the eye – may be displaced into the front chamber of the eye.

If that happens, the gel must be removed at the time of the cataract surgery. This will reduce the likelihood of additional postoperative complications, but those who have the procedure, known as a vitrectomy, have an increased risk for additional complications, including postoperative infections and postoperative swelling.

After the surgery

Patients usually go home right after the procedure. Most surgery centers require that the patient have someone drive them home, more for the anesthesia rather than the surgery. Patients begin applying postoperative drops that same day and must wear an eye shield at bedtime for a few weeks after surgery.

Patients should keep the eye clean and avoid exposure to dust, debris and water. They should try not to bend over and should avoid heavy lifting or straining in the first week or so after surgery. Lifting or straining can cause a surge of blood pressure to the face and eye. Known as a choroidal hemorrhage, it can lead to bleeding into the wall of the eye and be devastating to vision.

Things that cause only moderate increases in heart rate such as walking are OK. Routine postoperative examinations are usually completed the day after surgery, about a week after surgery and about a month after surgery.

A choice of lens

The plastic lens used to replace the cataract, or intraocular lens, requires careful sizing for optimal results and a nuanced discussion between patient and surgeon.

Early intraocular lens technologies were monofocal, and most patients with these lenses chose distance correction and used reading glasses for near tasks. This is still the preferred approach for approximately 90% of patients having cataract surgery today.

Recent advances have led to intraocular lenses that offer multifocality – the opportunity to have near as well as distance vision, without glasses. Some multifocal lenses are even in the trifocal category, which includes distance, near, and intermediate vision, the latter of which in recent years has become very important for computer and phone use.

Most patients with these advanced technology multifocal lenses are happy with them. However, a small percentage of patients with multifocal lenses can be so bothered by visual disturbances – notably night glare and halos around light sources in the dark – that they request removal of the multifocal lens to exchange it for a standard intraocular lens. These exchanges are a reasonable option for such situations and offer relief for most affected patients.

Determining who’s an ideal candidate for a multifocal intraocular lens is an area of active research. Most clinicians would recommend against such a lens for a patient with a detail-oriented personality. Such patients tend to fixate on the shortcomings of these lenses despite their potential advantages.

As with many technologies, current generation advanced technology intraocular lenses are much better than their predecessors. Future offerings are likely to offer improved vision and fewer side effects than those available today.

But these newer lenses are often not reimbursed by insurance companies and often entail substantial out-of-pocket costs for patients.

Deciding on what type of lens is best for you can be complicated. Fortunately, except in unusual circumstances, such as when a cataract develops after trauma to the eye, there is seldom a hurry for adult cataract surgery.

Allan Steigleman, Associate Professor of Ophthalmology, University of Florida and Elizabeth M. Hofmeister, Associate Professor of Surgery, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences

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

In the U.S., wildland firefighters are able to stop about 98% of all wildfires before the fires have burned even 100 acres. That may seem comforting, but decades of quickly suppressing fires has had unintended consequences.

Fires are a natural part of many landscapes globally. When forests aren’t allowed to burn, they become more dense, and dead branches, leaves and other biomass accumulate, leaving more fuel for the next fire. This buildup leads to more extreme fires that are even harder to put out. That’s why land managers set controlled burns and thin forests to clear out the undergrowth.

However, fuel accumulation isn’t the only consequence of fire suppression.

Fire suppression also disproportionately reduces certain types of fire. In a new study, my colleagues and I show how this effect, known as the suppression bias, compounds the impacts of fuel accumulation and climate change.

What happened to all the low-intensity fires?

Most wildfires are low-intensity. They ignite when conditions aren’t too dry or windy, and they can often be quickly extinguished.

The 2% of fires that escape suppression are those that are more extreme and much harder to fight. They account for about 98% of the burned area in a typical year.

In other words, trying to put out all wildfires doesn’t reduce the total amount of fire equally – instead, it limits low-intensity fires while extreme fires still burn. This effect is worsened by climate change.

Too much suppression makes fires more severe

In our study, we used a fire modeling simulation to explore the effects of the fire suppression bias and see how they compared to the effects of global warming and fuel accumulation alone.

Fuel accumulation and global warming both inherently make fires more severe. But over thousands of simulated fires, we found that allowing forests to burn only under the very worst conditions increased fire severity by the same amount as more than a century’s worth of fuel accumulation or 21st-century climate change.

The suppression bias also changes the way plants and animals interact with fire.

By removing low-intensity fires, humans may be changing the course of evolution. Without exposure to low-intensity fires, species can lose traits crucial for surviving and recovering from such events.

After extreme fires, landscapes have fewer seed sources and less shade. New seedlings have a harder time becoming established, and for those that do, the hotter and drier conditions reduce their chance of survival.

In contrast, low-intensity fires free up space and resources for new growth, while still retaining living trees and other biological legacies that support seedlings in their vulnerable initial years.

By quickly putting out low-intensity fires and allowing only extreme fires to burn, conventional suppression reduces the opportunities for climate-adapted plants to establish and help ecosystems adjust to changes like global warming.

Suppression makes burned area increase faster

As the climate becomes hotter and drier, more area is burning in wildfires. If suppression removes fire, it should help slow this increase, right?

In fact, we found it does just the opposite.

We found that while conventional suppression led to less total area burning, the yearly burned area increased more than three times faster under conventional suppression than under less aggressive suppression efforts. The amount of area burned doubled every 14 years with conventional fire suppression under simulated climate change, instead of every 44 years when low- and moderate-intensity fires were allowed to burn. That raises concerns for how quickly people and ecosystems will have to adapt to extreme fires in the future.

The fact that the amount of area burned is increasing is undoubtedly driven by climate change. But our study shows that the rate of this increase may also be a result of conventional fire management.

The near total suppression of fires over the last century means that even a little additional fire in a more fire-prone future can create big changes. As climate change continues to fuel more fires, the relative increase in area burned will be much bigger.

This puts more stress on communities as they adapt to increased extreme wildfires, from dealing with more wildfire smoke to even changing where people can live.

A way forward

To address the wildfire crisis, fire managers can be less aggressive in suppressing low- and moderate-intensity fires when it is safe to do so. They can also increase the use of prescribed fire and cultural burning to clear away brush and other fuel for fires.

These low-intensity fires will not only reduce the risk of future extreme fires, but they also will create conditions that favor the establishment of species better suited to the changing climate, thereby helping ecosystems adapt to global warming.

Coexisting with wildfire requires developing technologies and approaches that enable the safe management of wildfires under moderate burning conditions. Our study shows that this may be just as necessary as other interventions, such as reducing the number of fires unintentionally started by human activities and mitigating climate change.

Mark Kreider, Ph.D. Candidate in Forest and Conservation Science, University of Montana

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