early adversity might affect their brains differently from boys, so we wanted to follow a large cohort of boys and girls through adolescence, studying

their brains and mental health, so we were bringing these kids back every two years until we were interrupted by covid, at which point we weren't able to scan brains for almost nine months. >> when you were finally able to bring them back and looked at them, what did you discover? >> we had trajectories of mental health, trajectories of brain function. we wanted to make sure we could continue our research, but it meant making sure that adolescence now are the same as adolescence before the pandemic. we were able to scan kids we scanned before they shut down with kids we scanned before the shutdown.

we found higher rates of depression, anxiety, sadness, but also, their brains appeared older. >> what does that mean? what does an older brain look like? >> as we go through adolescence, our brain ages as our body does, and with age, brains, we have cortical thinning. that is the outside part of the brain that becomes thinner. in an 80-year-old, we might call that atrophy. we don't want to call that atrophy in a 16-year-old. it's the same concept, the brain is starting to age. the volume of the hippocampus increases. the amygdala increases. that is what we found in these

kids, post-shut down. >> what do those areas of the brain you talked about have to do with their emotions or other functions of the brain? >> the amygdala in particular is involved in emotion and threat processing, and the hippocampus is more involved in memory and learning and concentration, and the cortex is involved in judgment and decision-making. we are finding aging effects in all of these areas of the brain. >> normally when you think about teens or maturing, you might think that is a good thing, but why is this actually alarming that their brain aging is happening faster?

>> i don't want to put out alarming because we don't know the consequences. we don't know if this is a temporary response to the pandemic. we are continuing to study these kids at age 20, so whether this is a persistent change in their brain trajectory following the pandemic shutdowns -- it's the mental health we can actually do something about. >> that is good to know because it could be temporary. we just don't know yet. we usually think of maturation as a good thing in teens. >> we do when it is a normal maturation. when it is accelerated in response to a stressor, we just don't know that is a positive change. >> what was it that usually

caused the sudden acceleration of aging in the brain? >> we had not seen this acceleration before the pandemic. other researchers found young children, 4, 5, 6 exposed to early adversity, chronic poverty , exposed to violence had these changes in their brains when they were 25. we know early effects that are prolonged can have these consequences, but we were surprised that less than a one-year pandemic shut down had this kind of profound effect. >> that it was adversity and traumatizing in some way. it's not the virus, right? it's the lock or loss.

>> we had 80 kids compared before the pandemic compared with 80 kids after. 10 have been affected. we studied them separately. the effects are little more pronounced, but it is not the infection. it is having gone through the pandemic. > with a lot of other unknowns, what is the next step for your team? >> it is continuing to study these kids to ask that question -- are these long-lasting changes? is this a version of long-haul covid without being infected? or is this a blip? is this a response that will normalize over time? the important thing we have had a sense of before with kids, the

pandemic has been a problem for mental health. that is what we need to support. >> professor ian gottlieb with stanford, thank you for sharing the results of your study with us. coming up next, hundreds of san francisco city employees are in the hotseat after they admit to having secret second jobs without disclosing them as required. why that could be

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second jobs on the side without disclosure. this comes after the san francisco standard uncovered that a department head had a side gig at a nonprofit that receives funding from the health department. joining us is reporter david shows stead. thanks for coming on. how did all of this come to light? it started with your investigation into the head of jail health services. >> we received a tip that this nonprofit called baker places asked the city for a $4 million bailout and threaten to close about five programs, and i started digging into the tax returns and saw lisa pratt, the director, on one of those documents. it struck me as odd because lisa pratt works for this city and

funds baker places. it turns out she never had the second job approved by the department of human resources, so that prompted other questions. >> what was pratt's explanation? >> pratt said she was working 20 hours a week on the weekends as an on-call doctor consultant, and she was "sleeping with her phone on." that is how she managed the implausible schedule. >> does she address this baker place asking for the bailout, and was any billable -- anybody able to draw a direct line between her involvement and whether they got the funding? >> she says she didn't know anything about the financial problems. >> i see. let's talk about what the rules are.

california is a right to work state. people are allowed to make a living. she made it a lot at both jobs, right? >> she makes over $400,000 for the city and was drawing over $100,000 for baker places, as well. >> i imagine the rule doesn't measure how much you are making. it has to be something like conflict of interest or disclosure. walk us through what the city's policy is with regards to taking on a side job. >> that is what struck my interest in this. part of the rule is if you are doing a job that interferes with the job you have for the city, you aren't allowed to take it, and that is why the schedule seems so impossible, working 20 hours while running one of the city's major health departments. that is one of the things, and the other thing is she was to be

referring patients or giving contracts to the nonprofit, and we haven't had any evidence, but we found she was working on the clock for the city and for this nonprofit. her role requires her to be on-call 24/7 for the city. >> what about this discovery? it led to the discovery of about $300 who came forward. >> it led to a department audit. several others have called for hearings. the department of public health started vigilantly reminding people they are required to seek approval, and i found out yesterday from the department that they had received 300 new

applications since pratt resigned from her nonprofit in the last month. there were 300 people who had previously not been authorized. >> it's a job you want to take on. it is a job waitressing or driving for uber or doordashing, would that be approved? >> city employees are allowed to take second jobs. the thing that has frustrated people is there seems to be a culture of them doing it under the table, and a lot of these people make a lot of money. we don't know exactly who these people are yet. we are working on it, but in lisa pratt's case, she was making a good amount from the city. >> perhaps this is the next phase of your investigation, but

do you know if other city departments have similar problems? are they in anomaly, the health department? >> health department has the most people working second jobs, and it may because it is somewhat common practice, but the second most people walking second jobs is in the public utilities commission with 18 people. it is a far jump from 18 to over 400 in the department of public health. >> do you know if they are talking about an investigation into whether any of that side job was done on company time or the time of the city? >> for lisa, we have confirmed it was done on time for the city because it requires her to be on-call 24/7.

we've uncovered some emails showing her responding to issues for baker places on tuesday at 3:00. >> one about the 300 others? what has happened to pratt? does she have one job now? >> she had to resign from her nonprofit job. she is still working for the city. >> is there an investigation into ethics in regards to her main job? >> the city keeps those things under wraps because it is a personnel issue. >> what do you expect will happen to the 300 others who have stepped forward to apply and say, i have a second job? >> they are attempting to follow the rules now. i think it will be interesting to see how many have applications approved. about 40 of them have already

been sent back to gather more paperwork for those applications, but time will tell how many are legitimate. >> as an isolated thing, the headline is unnerving to some people, but when you take a look at looking all of the headlines, how does this play into the perception right now? >> i think it struck a nerve because the health department is the lead agency in terms of the humanitarian crisis on the streets. it is frustrating that people might not be fully devoted to the job taxpayers are paying them for. >> you can check out more of the san francisco's story online. san francisco's story online. abc 7 will bring you

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>> what is in a word? a lot if it is the word that is defining 2022. william webster announced its word of the year, and this year, the word is "gas lighting," the act of trying to manipulate someone to thinking they are wrong about something when they are not. joining us is merriam-webster's editor at large. how are you? >> i'm good. >> how did this word of the year tradition start? >> for 400 years, people who made victories had noisy a -- had no idea what people actually looked at. once we went online, we had data about the curiosity of the public. which words send people to the

dictionary? it does tell us something interesting about ourselves and the past year, so we made it a tradition. >> is your selection criteria based on the number of lookups? is it based on that or other factors? >> it is a statistical measure. there are words of looked up day in and day out that have to do with words like english. we remove those from the selection process to make sure we can see which words were looked up in 2022 that were not in previous years. >> this year it is gas lighting. what is the official definition for the word? >> this word is defined in two ways. principally, the act or practice of grossly misleading someone,

potentially for one's own advantage, and that is a broader sense that we see more and more in recent years. it came from a more specific sense used by psychologists meaning, psychological manipulation of a person over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own perception of reality. pat has broadened into a strategic line that we see today, and we can see it all over. he see it used in politics, -- we see it used in politics, but we also see it in interpersonal relationships. >> yes, we do. why pass light? >> that is one of the reasons people have been looking at, it is not a self-evident word at all. it comes from the title of a blank about a relationship, a

manipulative and cruel has been lying to his wife, telling her things. she couldn't believe her own eyes. the movie was from the 1940's, and by the end of the 50's, this term was used in popular culture and psychological culture >>. now that we know that history, let's run through some of your runner-up boards. you can tell us why these words were considered. >> oligarchy? that is a word we associate with the former soviet union. there were many sanctions placed on oligarchs from russia and other countries, so this is a term that has become kind of a shorthand for the ruling class of russia. >> we will scroll through some

of them quickly. codified, talk about this one. >> the legislative response to a judicial rescission, in this case the repeal of roe v. wade, and codification is the possibility of putting it into code code is just a fancy word for law. codified in this case the roe v. wade decision. >> i'm sure we will use that word quite a bit. lgbtqia? >> this is another interesting one, and i can understand why people look this up. dictionaries measure our curiosity as much as the culture and news, and we are familiar with lgbt, but these other letters, we have to consult and look them up for ourselves. i want to make sure i get them for you correct.

these other initials stand for intersex and asexual. >> i also like this one because i know it. loamy. i played the new york times spelling game. >> wargames have become a thing in 2022, and i think that is great. it is great for word lovers. particularly five letter words for mortal -- wordle, people tell me they have to have the discipline to not look in the dictionary to play the games fairly, but people have to check if these are real words. >> real quick because we are running out of time, the last five years, you have pandemic

and vaccine. now we are starting to move out of that. do you find that the annual reveal is something people look forward to? >> absolutely because it tells us something about the words we use. words are important. words matter. it sends people to the dictionary. it is not about a single story for pandemic and vaccine, for example. it is about a broad story that touches many people. >> always love the dictionary, even more so. peter, thank you so much for coming on today. thank you for not gas lighting us. [laughter]

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>> thanks for joining us for "getting answers." we will be here every day tonight, several breaking stories as we come on the air. the feared rail strike across the u.s. averted tonight. also, the breaking headline at this hour involving former president trump and what this now means. first tonight, 24 hours after passing the house, senate democrats and republicans tonight passing the bill to avert that potentially devastating rail strike. but the senate more divided over sick leave. so tonight, what did those rail workers get in the end? rachel scott standing by live on the hill. also, there is breaking news involving former president trump tonight. 0 federal appeals court moments ago shutting down the special ma master, that review of documents seized at mar-a-lago. so, what does this now mean for the former president? pierre thomas with late reporting. also tonight, the stunning video.

the close call for two