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Although it is well established that viewing nature can help individuals recover from a stressful experience, the dose-response curve describing the relationship between tree cover density and stress recovery is totally unclear. A total of 160 participants engaged in a standard Trier Social Stress Test to induce stress. Participants were then randomly assigned to watch 1 of 10 three-dimensional videos of street scenes that varied in the density of tree cover (from 2% to 62%). Participants completed a Visual Analog Scale questionnaire at three points in the experiment. Analysis revealed a positive, linear association between the density of urban street trees and self-reported stress recovery, adjusted R2 = .05, F(1, 149) = 8.53, p < .01. This relationship holds after controlling for gender, age, and baseline stress levels. A content analysis of participants’ written narratives revealed a similar but even stronger association. These findings suggest that viewing tree canopy in communities can significantly aid stress recovery and that every tree matters.

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Overuse of portable electronic devices depletes one’s attention capacity, a critical cognitive resource. Although contact with nature promotes attentional functioning, we do not know the extent to which exposure to nature and the use of electronic devices interact to promote or inhibit attentional functioning. In this study, 81 participants performed cognitive tasks and then were randomly assigned to one of four rest treatments: green settings with or without a laptop computer and barren settings with or without a laptop computer. Attention was measured three times. Analysis showed a significant effect for both setting and use of a laptop as well as a significant interaction between setting and laptop use. A further analysis controlling for time spent focused on the laptop screen produced similar results. The findings show that using an electronic device in green settings substantially counteracts the attention enhancement benefits of green spaces.

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Using a spherical aberration (Cs)-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) and electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS), we investigated a 6° low-angle [001] tilt grain boundary in SrTiO3. The enhanced spatial resolution of the aberration corrector leads to the observation of a number of structural variations in the edge dislocations along the grain boundary that neither resemble the standard edge dislocations nor partial dislocations for SrTiO3. Although there appear to be many variants in the structure that can be interpreted as compositional effects, three main classes of core structure are found to be prominent. From EELS analysis, these classifications seem to be related to Sr deficiencies, with the final variety of the cores being consistent with an embedded TiOx rocksalt-like structure.

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