Where Are America's Volunteers?

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: While the United States recently experienced record highs in total volunteer hours and charitable dollars given to community organizations, these seemingly positive numbers mask a troubling trend: fewer Americans are engaging in their community by volunteering and giving than in any time in the last two decades. The importance of recognizing and addressing this decline in American’s participation in their community cannot be overstated. Throughout the country, volunteers work with congregations, charities, and other nonprofit organizations to provide needed services of all types to people and communities. However, while people, communities, and organizations all rely on the work provided by volunteers, volunteering also generates indirect positive benefits for communities and for volunteers themselves. Given the decline of charitable behaviors among Americans and the importance of these behaviors for the well-being of individuals and communities, this brief analyzes data from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS) to explore – for the first time – how the recent national decline in American volunteering played out in all 50 states (plus the District of Columbia) and 215 metro areas. Every September between 2002 and 2015, the CPS collected national statistics on volunteering through a supplemental survey. Among its many strengths, the CPS sample includes more than 55,000 households that generate reliable statistics for all states and most major metropolitan areas

Shifting Milestones, Fewer Donors and Volunteers: 21st Century Life for Young Adults and the Impact on Charitable Behaviors

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The United States has experienced declines in adults’ rates of volunteering with organizations and charitable giving over the last two decades. Because these behaviors generate wide-ranging benefits for communities as well as the volunteers themselves, it is essential to figure out how to turn around these downward trends. First we need to better understand the societal factors driving these declines. Research on volunteering with organizations has frequently focused on the health benefits that older volunteers enjoy, and the positive effects of volunteering for children and adolescents. These studies fit into a larger literature on the benefits of prosocial behavior, which can include giving to charity and informal civic activities in addition to volunteering with an organization. However, with only a few recent exceptions, there are few empirical studies that address the question of why volunteering and giving rates have risen and fallen in recent years. This brief focuses on how the volunteering and giving rates of young adults (ages 22 through 35) are related to their life choices. Our study focuses on five milestones that have historically been associated with the transition to adulthood: completing formal higher education, getting a job, marrying, becoming a parent, and living independently. To address this question, we combine data featured in recent U.S. Census Bureau research, which found that Americans are reconceiving the idea of what it means to reach adulthood, with data collected from the Current Population Survey (CPS) Supplement on Volunteering (Volunteer Supplement). Every September between 2002 and 2015, the CPS Volunteer Supplement collected national statistics on volunteering through or for an organization. Starting in 2008, the Supplement also began collecting data on giving to charity

Good Intentions, Gap in Action: The Challenge of Translating Youth's High Interest in Doing Good into Civic Engagement

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Volunteering has long been recognized as a primary mechanism for creating productive and active citizens. A large and diverse body of research describes how volunteering promotes beneficial outcomes for young people: volunteering enables youth to develop social connections and “soft skills” that smooth the transition to adulthood and encourage lifelong community engagement. Social institutions, such as family, religion, and schools, play important roles in the development of many young people by providing paths of entry into volunteering and other forms of community engagement. Our research has shown that teenagers have volunteered at much higher rates over the last two decades (2002-2015) than they did the mid-1970s and late 1980s. Moreover, according to research by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) conducted over the last 51 years, the desire to do good is at an all-time high among entering college students. In 2016, HERI reported that record numbers of first-year college students felt “helping others in difficulty” and “becoming a comm unity leader” was an “essential” or “very important” personal objective. In this report, we analyze for the first time high school and college student data on actual student engagement taken from the Current Population Survey (CPS), which is conducted monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau. Each September between 2002 and 2015, the CPS included a supplemental survey on volunteering that collected data from a national sample of more than 55,000 households, with representative samples in every state and the District of Columbia

Millennial changes in North American wildfire and soil activity over the last glacial cycle

Climate changes in the North Atlantic region during the last glacial cycle were dominated by the slow waxing and waning of the North American ice sheet as well as by intermittent Dansgaard-­‐Oeschger (DO) events. However prior to the last deglaciation, little is known about the response of North American vegetation to such rapid climate changes and especially about the response of biomass burning, an important factor for regional changes in radiative forcing. Here we use continuous, high-­‐resolution ammonium (NH4+) records derived from the NGRIP and GRIP ice cores to document both North American NH4+ background emissions from soils and wildfire frequency over the last 110,000 yr. Soil emissions increased on orbital timescales with warmer climate, related to the northward expansion of vegetation due to reduced ice-­‐covered areas. During Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 3 DO warm events, a higher fire recurrence rate is recorded, while NH4+ soil emissions rose only slowly during longer interstadial warm periods, in line with slow ice sheet shrinkage and delayed ecosystem changes. Our results indicate that sudden warming events had little impact on NH4+ soil emissions and NH4+ aerosol transport to Greenland during the glacial but triggered a significant increase in the frequency of fire occurrence.This paper has greatly benefitted from the Sir Nicholas Shackleton fellowship, Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, U.K., awarded to HF in 2014. The Division for Climate and Environmental Physics, Physics Institute, University of Bern acknowledges the long-­‐term financial support of ice core research by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research. EW is supported by a Royal Society professorship. NGRIP is directed and organized by the Department of Geophysics at the Niels Bohr Institute for Astronomy, Physics and Geophysics, University of Copenhagen. It is supported by funding agencies in Denmark (SNF), Belgium (FNRS-­‐CFB), France (IPEV and INSU/CNRS), Germany (AWI), Iceland (RannIs), Japan (MEXT), Sweden (SPRS), Switzerland (SNSF) and the USA (NSF, Office of Polar Programs).This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Nature Publishing Group via http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo249

Protection of Stem Cell-Derived Lymphocytes in a Primate AIDS Gene Therapy Model after In Vivo Selection

Background: There is currently no effective AIDS vaccine, emphasizing the importance of developing alternative therapies. Recently, a patient was successfully transplanted with allogeneic, naturally resistant CCR5-negative (CCR5 delta 32) cells, setting the stage for transplantation of naturally resistant, or genetically modified stem cells as a viable therapy for AIDS. Hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) gene therapy using vectors that express various anti-HIV transgenes has also been attempted in clinical trials, but inefficient gene transfer in these studies has severely limited the potential of this approach. Here we evaluated HSC gene transfer of an anti-HIV vector in the pigtailed macaque (Macaca nemestrina) model, which closely models human transplantation. Methods and Findings: We used lentiviral vectors that inhibited both HIV-1 and simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV)/HIV-1 (SHIV) chimera virus infection, and also expressed a P140K mutant methylguanine methyltransferase (MGMT) transgene to select gene-modified cells by adding chemotherapy drugs. Following transplantation and MGMT-mediated selection we demonstrated transgene expression in over 7% of stem-cell derived lymphocytes. The high marking levels allowed us to demonstrate protection from SHIV in lymphocytes derived from gene-modified macaque long-term repopulating cells that expressed an HIV-1 fusion inhibitor. We observed a statistically significant 4-fold increase of gene-modified cells after challenge of lymphocytes from one macaque that received stem cells transduced with an anti-HIV vector (p<0.02, Student's t-test), but not in lymphocytes from a macaque that received a control vector. We also established a competitive repopulation assay in a second macaque for preclinical testing of promising anti-HIV vectors. The vectors we used were HIV-based and thus efficiently transduce human cells, and the transgenes we used target HIV-1 genes that are also in SHIV, so our findings can be rapidly translated to the clinic. Conclusions: Here we demonstrate the ability to select protected HSC-derived lymphocytes in vivo in a clinically relevant nonhuman primate model of HIV/SHIV infection. This approach can now be evaluated in human clinical trials in AIDS lymphoma patients. In this patient setting, chemotherapy would not only kill malignant cells, but would also increase the number of MGMTP140K-expressing HIV-resistant cells. This approach should allow for high levels of HIV-protected cells in AIDS patients to evaluate AIDS gene therapy

Novel genetic loci associated with hippocampal volume

The hippocampal formation is a brain structure integrally involved in episodic memory, spatial navigation, cognition and stress responsiveness. Structural abnormalities in hippocampal volume and shape are found in several common neuropsychiatric disorders. To identify the genetic underpinnings of hippocampal structure here we perform a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of 33,536 individuals and discover six independent loci significantly associated with hippocampal volume, four of them novel. Of the novel loci, three lie within genes (ASTN2, DPP4 and MAST4) and one is found 200 kb upstream of SHH. A hippocampal subfield analysis shows that a locus within the MSRB3 gene shows evidence of a localized effect along the dentate gyrus, subiculum, CA1 and fissure. Further, we show that genetic variants associated with decreased hippocampal volume are also associated with increased risk for Alzheimer's disease (rg =-0.155). Our findings suggest novel biological pathways through which human genetic variation influences hippocampal volume and risk for neuropsychiatric illness

Advancing microbial sciences by individual-based modelling

Remarkable technological advances have revealed ever more properties and behaviours of individual microorganisms, but the novel data generated by these techniques have not yet been fully exploited. In this Opinion article, we explain how individual-based models (IBMs) can be constructed based on the findings of such techniques and how they help to explore competitive and cooperative microbial interactions. Furthermore, we describe how IBMs have provided insights into self-organized spatial patterns from biofilms to the oceans of the world, phage-CRISPR dynamics and other emergent phenomena. Finally, we discuss how combining individual-based observations with IBMs can advance our understanding at both the individual and population levels, leading to the new approach of microbial individual-based ecology (μIBE)

Classifying the evolutionary and ecological features of neoplasms

The consensus conference was supported by Wellcome Genome Campus Advanced Courses and Scientific Conferences. C.C.M. is supported in part by US NIH grants P01 CA91955, R01 CA149566, R01 CA170595, R01 CA185138 and R01 CA140657 as well as CDMRP Breast Cancer Research Program Award BC132057. M.J. is supported by NIH grant K99CA201606. K.S.A. is supported by NCI 5R21 CA196460. K. Polyak is supported by R35 CA197623, U01 CA195469, U54 CA193461, and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. K.J.P. is supported by NIH grants CA143803, CA163124, CA093900 and CA143055. D.P. is supported by the European Research Council (ERC-617457- PHYLOCANCER), the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (BFU2015-63774-P) and the Education, Culture and University Development Department of the Galician Government. K.S.A. is supported in part by the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and NCI R21CA196460. C.S. is supported by the Royal Society, Cancer Research UK (FC001169), the UK Medical Research Council (FC001169), and the Wellcome Trust (FC001169), NovoNordisk Foundation (ID 16584), the Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF), the European Research Council (THESEUS) and Marie Curie Network PloidyNet. T.A.G. is a Cancer Research UK fellow and a Wellcome Trust funded Investigator. E.S.H. is supported by R01 CA185138-01 and W81XWH-14-1-0473. M.Gerlinger is supported by Cancer Research UK and The Royal Marsden/ICR National Institute of Health Research Biomedical Research Centre. M.Ge., M.Gr., Y.Y., and A.So. were also supported in part by the Wellcome Trust [105104/Z/14/Z]. J.D.S. holds the Edward B. Clark, MD Chair in Pediatric Research, and is supported by the Primary Children's Hospital (PCH) Pediatric Cancer Research Program, funded by the Intermountain Healthcare Foundation and the PCH Foundation. A.S. is supported by the Chris Rokos Fellowship in Evolution and Cancer. Y.Y. is a Cancer Research UK fellow and supported by The Royal Marsden/ICR National Institute of Health Research Biomedical Research Centre. E.S.H. was supported in part by PCORI grants 1505–30497 and 1503–29572, NIH grants R01 CA185138, T32 CA093245, and U10 CA180857, CDMRP Breast Cancer Research Program Award BC132057, a CRUK Grand Challenge grant, and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. A.R.A.A. was funded in part by NIH grant U01CA151924. A.R.A.A., R.G. and J.S.B. were funded in part by NIH grant U54CA193489