Bullinger, Fong, and Julia Fleckman, a colleague from the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, found that the presence of an additional store accepting Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits in the least densely populated areas of Connecticut was associated with an 11.3% drop in substantiated cases of child maltreatment.

While the data included in their study were from Connecticut, Bullinger and Fong believe the effects may be applicable nationwide.

“This research further demonstrates how large-scale public policy initiatives may be more successful than targeted, family-level interventions in helping prevent child maltreatment," said Bullinger. She is an assistant professor in the School of Public Policy and the study’s lead author.

The study, published in Economics & Human Biology, is the latest in a series of studies by Bullinger — some of which, Fong also participated in — finding that policy steps such as increasing the minimum wage, promoting family leave, providing more access to Medicaid, or preventing evictions, can dramatically reduce the incidence of child maltreatment and improve child and family well-being.

“We often think about SNAP as a strategy for addressing food insecurity,” said Fong, an assistant professor in the School of History and Sociology. “But these findings show how expanding public benefits access also has positive spillover effects on the child welfare system.”

The study is based on U.S. Census data for neighborhoods with more than 50 children in Connecticut and state retailer and child maltreatment report data from 2011 to 2015.

In each neighborhood, the researchers tracked the number of stores that accepted SNAP along with the number of reports and substantiated incidents of child maltreatment and followed the fluctuations in maltreatment reports over time. They also took steps to exclude other factors that could have influenced maltreatment numbers, such as statewide policy changes and ZIP Code-level unemployment rates.

After accounting for those variables, they found that in the least densely populated parts of Connecticut, the presence of one additional store accepting SNAP benefits was associated with a 4.4% reduction in child maltreatment reports along with the 11.3% drop in the number of substantiated cases.

They did not find a similar effect in more densely populated areas.

The researchers point to the difficulties rural residents may face in traveling long distances to stores that accept SNAP benefits in areas where public transportation is often scarce as one potential reason, Fong said.

As for why having a nearby store that takes SNAP benefits helps reduce child maltreatment, Bullinger said having a convenient place to purchase food with benefits may help relieve financial pressure on families and reduce parental stress — both significant contributors to child maltreatment.

“Parents can use these benefits where they weren’t able to before, and that lowers mental stress and potentially frees up income in their household to better care for their kids,” she said.

Bullinger and Fong note that the effects may be at least as intense in sparsely populated rural areas across the country where public transportation and food pantries are less common.

Their paper, “Proximity to SNAP-Authorized Retailers and Child Maltreatment Reports,” is published in the August 2021 edition of Economics & Human Biology. It is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ehb.2021.101015.

The School of Public Policy and the School of History and Sociology are units of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.

Because Jupiter has been largely unchanged since its formation at the birth of our solar system, scientists hope Juno will resolve unanswered questions not only about the massive planet, but also about how our solar system evolved. Among the key questions are how much water exists there, and how that water evolved from the hydrogen-rich early solar system.

"Jupiter collected much of the original solar nebula, that sheet of material that surrounded our sun when it formed," said Paul Steffes, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a member of the Juno Mission Team. "Knowing how much water is in the atmosphere of Jupiter is going to give us real insight into how the whole solar system has evolved. Understanding Jupiter really helps us understand how we got started."

To detect and measure water, Juno will carry a radiometer that can measure radio emissions produced by the planet itself at microwave frequencies. As those signals pass through Jupiter's atmosphere, they are altered by the water and other constituents. Understanding how the signals were altered can tell scientists much about the atmosphere of the giant planet. The probe will receive microwave signals at six different frequencies that scientists know are emitted at various levels of the planet's atmosphere.

"The intensity of the microwave radiation at specific frequencies gets weaker depending on how much water is there," Steffes explained. "We'll be able to not only say whether or not there's water there, but we'll also be able to say at what altitude it exists based on the signatures of the microwaves coming out of the planet's atmosphere."

Interpreting that data will require knowledge that Steffes and his students are developing by simulating the Jupiter atmosphere in their pressure vessel, which is located inside an oven on the roof of Georgia Tech's Van Leer Building.

Though Jupiter is a long way from the sun, the planet's gravitational forces create high temperatures and tremendous pressures in the lower layers of the atmosphere where the water is believed to exist. The laboratory atmospheric simulations allow Steffes and his students to study the behavior of microwave signals passing through ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, helium, hydrogen and water vapor at pressures up to 100 times those of the Earth.

The researchers, including graduate student Danny Duong, have made thousands of measurements at different temperatures, pressures and microwave frequencies as the signals pass through different combinations of gases. The laboratory work is expected to be completed during 2012.

"The measurements we've made will allow the radiometer on Juno to be calibrated," Steffes explained. "When Juno gets to Jupiter, we'll know what conditions each microwave signature corresponds to."

Earlier attempts to quantify the water on Jupiter -- the solar system's largest planet -- produced conflicting information. Steffes assisted the Galileo mission, which dropped a probe into the planet's atmosphere in 1995 and found surprisingly little water. Yet when the Comet Shoemaker-Levy crashed into Jupiter in 1994, it stirred up oxygen that led scientists to believe water was abundant.

Once Juno reaches the planet, it will go into an elliptical polar orbit to avoid Jupiter's deadly radiation belts, which would harm the probe's electronic systems. Juno is scheduled to make 30 orbits, each of which will take 11 days. The researchers then expect to take about 18 months to process the information sent back to Earth.

Beyond measuring water on Jupiter, Juno will also study the planet's gravitation field in an effort to determine whether a solid core exists and how the giant body rotates. It will also measure magnetic fields and investigate Jupiter's auroras, which are the strongest in the solar system. And it will take a look at the planet's polar areas for the first time ever.

Juno is also notable because it will be the first deep-space probe to be powered by photovoltaic arrays, which were less expensive than the nuclear generators used on earlier missions.

Steffes has been studying planetary atmospheres for more than 25 years, and has simulated conditions on Venus, Neptune, Saturn and Uranus in addition to Jupiter. The work has continued under the same contract since 1984. Georgia Tech's research into other planets goes back more than 50 years, Steffes noted.

Studies of other planetary atmospheres can now be done from Earth using radio telescopes such as the Very Large Array in New Mexico, or the new Atacama array in Chile. But Jupiter's radiation belts, which are made up of energized particles spewed into the atmosphere by the volcanic moon Io, prevent that.

"To test for water, you have to operate at frequencies that are pretty low, about the same as a cell phone," Steffes said. "But the radiation belts are generating huge amounts of noise at those frequencies, so we couldn't do this observation from Earth because the radiation belts would mask the signal from Jupiter's atmosphere. We are very fortunate to have this opportunity to observe Jupiter with the Juno spacecraft."

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.

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