A longitudinal perspective to migrant health: Unpacking the immigrant health paradox in Germany.

Previous research finds that recent immigrants are healthier than the native-born, while more established immigrants exhibit worse health, suggesting a process of unhealthy assimilation. However, previous literature is mostly based on cross-sectional data or on longitudinal analyses similarly failing to disentangle individual-level variation from between-individual confounding. Moreover, previous longitudinal studies are often limited in their study of different health outcomes (few and mostly subjective health), populations (sometimes only elderly individuals), time periods (short panels) and geographical contexts (mostly Australia, Canada and USA). We address these limitations by comparing the health trajectories of adult immigrants and natives in Germany over extended periods, using data from years 2002-2021 of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), and investigating a wide range of health outcomes, including self-assessed physical and mental health measures, diagnosed illnesses, and health behaviors. We employ a longitudinal approach that stratifies immigrants by age at arrival, and compares them to natives of the same age. This allows us to estimate both Hierarchical Linear Models and more rigorous Fixed Effects models to further address confounding. Cross-sectionally, we confirm previous literature's findings: recent immigrants are healthier than natives and established immigrants. Longitudinally, we find support for the unhealthy assimilation hypothesis concerning subjective health and mental health, but not for the others health indicators or behaviors. We interpret these findings as possible evidence of immigrants' reduced access to timely health care and emphasize the need for greater longitudinal research investigating migrant gaps in various health outcomes.

Explaining the attainment of the second-generation: When does parental relative education matter?

How can we understand unexplained variation in the educational outcomes of the children of immigrants? A growing literature posits that standard educational transmission models fail to explain national origin differences in attainment because they ignore immigrant selectivity - the degree to which immigrants differ from non-migrants in their sending countries. The immigrant selectivity hypothesis is usually tested using indicators of parents' relative or "contextual" educational attainment, measuring their rank in the educational attainment distribution of their country of origin. However, using this proxy, current support for the hypothesis is mixed. We outline three conditions for the use of educational selectivity as a proxy for relative social positioning among the children of immigrants. We test our conditions using an adult and a youth sample from a large household panel survey in the UK. We supplement our analyses by exploring relative education data from prior research on Italy, France and the United States. Triangulating these varied sources, we illustrate cases when our three conditions do and do not hold, providing evidence from the UK and other contexts. We provide guidelines on the use of relative education as a measure of relative social standing in cross-national research as well as an assessment of the immigrant selectivity hypothesis in explaining second-generation educational outcomes.

COVID-19 and inequalities in educational achievement in Italy.

We use longitudinal data from over 1.5 million Italian students to examine differences in the mathematics and reading achievement of students who completed primary and lower secondary school in 2020-21 (COVID cohort) and those who completed it in 2018-19 (non-COVID cohort). We also examine the evolution of inequalities by gender, socio-economic condition, and prior academic achievement during the pandemic. On average, the primary school COVID cohort experienced a small increase in reading achievement and a drop in mathematics achievement compared to the non-COVID cohort. The lower secondary school COVID cohort experienced a large reduction in mathematics achievement and a smaller reduction in reading achievement compared to the non-COVID cohort. Previously middle-achieving students suffered the most from the pandemic, while high achievers gained. Socio-economic inequalities in achievement remained stable for secondary school students and somewhat decreased for primary school students between the non-COVID and COVID cohorts. Gender disparities were broadly reduced across domains and school levels, except for primary school math.

The impact of air travel on the precocity and severity of COVID-19 deaths in sub-national areas across 45 countries.

Human travel fed the worldwide spread of COVID-19, but it remains unclear whether the volume of incoming air passengers and the centrality of airports in the global airline network made some regions more vulnerable to earlier and higher mortality. We assess whether the precocity and severity of COVID-19 deaths were contingent on these measures of air travel intensity, adjusting for differences in local non-pharmaceutical interventions and pre-pandemic structural characteristics of 502 sub-national areas on five continents in April-October 2020. Ordinary least squares (OLS) models of precocity (i.e., the timing of the 1st and 10th death outbreaks) reveal that neither airport centrality nor the volume of incoming passengers are impactful once we consider pre-pandemic demographic characteristics of the areas. We assess severity (i.e., the weekly death incidence of COVID-19) through the estimation of a generalized linear mixed model, employing a negative binomial link function. Results suggest that COVID-19 death incidence was insensitive to airport centrality, with no substantial changes over time. Higher air passenger volume tends to coincide with more COVID-19 deaths, but this relation weakened as the pandemic proceeded. Different models prove that either the lack of airports in a region or total travel bans did reduce mortality significantly. We conclude that COVID-19 importation through air travel followed a 'travel as spark' principle, whereby the absence of air travel reduced epidemic risk drastically. However, once some travel occurred, its impact on the severity of the pandemic was only in part associated with the number of incoming passengers, and not at all with the position of airports in the global network of airline connections.

The Contribution of Agriculture, Forestry and other Land Use activities to Global Warming, 1990-2012.

We refine the information available through the IPCC AR5 with regard to recent trends in global GHG emissions from agriculture, forestry and other land uses (AFOLU), including global emission updates to 2012. Using all three available AFOLU datasets employed for analysis in the IPCC AR5, rather than just one as done in the IPCC AR5 WGIII Summary for Policy Makers, our analyses point to a down-revision of global AFOLU shares of total anthropogenic emissions, while providing important additional information on subsectoral trends. Our findings confirm that the share of AFOLU emissions to the anthropogenic total declined over time. They indicate a decadal average of 28.7 ± 1.5% in the 1990s and 23.6 ± 2.1% in the 2000s and an annual value of 21.2 ± 1.5% in 2010. The IPCC AR5 had indicated a 24% share in 2010. In contrast to previous decades, when emissions from land use (land use, land use change and forestry, including deforestation) were significantly larger than those from agriculture (crop and livestock production), in 2010 agriculture was the larger component, contributing 11.2 ± 0.4% of total GHG emissions, compared to 10.0 ± 1.2% of the land use sector. Deforestation was responsible for only 8% of total anthropogenic emissions in 2010, compared to 12% in the 1990s. Since 2010, the last year assessed by the IPCC AR5, new FAO estimates indicate that land use emissions have remained stable, at about 4.8 Gt CO2 eq yr-1 in 2012. Emissions minus removals have also remained stable, at 3.2 Gt CO2 eq yr-1 in 2012. By contrast, agriculture emissions have continued to grow, at roughly 1% annually, and remained larger than the land use sector, reaching 5.4 Gt CO2 eq yr-1 in 2012. These results are useful to further inform the current climate policy debate on land use, suggesting that more efforts and resources should be directed to further explore options for mitigation in agriculture, much in line with the large efforts devoted to REDD+ in the past decade.

Phosphorylated ezrin is located in the nucleus of the osteosarcoma cell.

The survival of osteosarcoma patients is connected to metastasis. The ezrin expression is associated with the development of metastasis and poor outcome in osteosarcoma. Ezrin is present in the cytoplasm and after phosphorylation assumes an active form and links F-actin to the cell membrane. This study evaluated ezrin and phosphorylated ezrin at site Tyr354 and Thr567 expression and its subcellular localization in osteosarcoma. We studied 50 osteosarcoma patients (mean follow-up 9.8 years). Ezrin expression was assessed using immunohistochemical and immunofluorescence analysis on tissue microarray and cultured cells of human osteosarcoma 143B. The western blot analysis was carried out on cultured cells. The majority of osteosarcomas, showing cytoplasmic positivity for ezrin, phosphorylated and unphosphorylated, were associated with membranous and nuclear positivity for phosphorylated ezrin Thr567 and phosphorylated ezrin Tyr354, respectively. Ezrin expression was associated with high-grade osteosarcoma (P=0.04), with metastasis (P=0.04) and with tumors that developed metastasis (P=0.04); phosphorylated ezrin Thr567 expression was present mostly in tumors with metastasis (P=0.01) and in osteosarcomas that did not develop metastasis (P=0.002). The osteosarcoma patients with ezrin expression have a short survival. The cytoplasmic ezrin expression in osteosarcoma matches its role of membrane-cytoskeleton linker protein. The subcellular trafficking of ezrin is not blocked and it is linked to ezrin phosphorylation, also in cancer. The phosphorylated ezrin Tyr354 nuclear localization suggests its possible role as a nuclear factor in osteosarcoma. The phosphorylated ezrin Thr567 phosphorylation may not be necessary in osteosarcoma metastatic progression but it was modulated. The ezrin expression is associated with more aggressive osteosarcomas and with metastasis.