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    in Computers Math

    Table tennis brain teaser: Playing against robots makes our brains work harder

    Captain of her high school tennis team and a four-year veteran of varsity tennis in college, Amanda Studnicki had been training for this moment for years.
    All she had to do now was think small. Like ping pong small.
    For weeks, Studnicki, a graduate student at the University of Florida, served and rallied against dozens of players on a table tennis court. Her opponents sported a science-fiction visage, a cap of electrodes streaming off their heads into a backpack as they played against either Studnicki or a ball-serving machine. That cyborg look was vital to Studnicki’s goal: to understand how our brains react to the intense demands of a high-speed sport like table tennis – and what difference a machine opponent makes.
    Studnicki and her advisor, Daniel Ferris, discovered that the brains of table tennis players react very differently to human or machine opponents. Faced with the inscrutability of a ball machine, players’ brains scrambled themselves in anticipation of the next serve. While with the obvious cues that a human opponent was about to serve, their neurons hummed in unison, seemingly confident of their next move.
    The findings have implications for sports training, suggesting that human opponents provide a realism that can’t be replaced with machine helpers. And as robots grow more common and sophisticated, understanding our brains’ response could help make our artificial companions more naturalistic.
    “Robots are getting more ubiquitous. You have companies like Boston Dynamics that are building robots that can interact with humans and other companies that are building socially assistive robots that help the elderly,” said Ferris, a professor of biomedical engineering at UF. “Humans interacting with robots is going to be different than when they interact with other humans. Our long term goal is to try to understand how the brain reacts to these differences.”
    Ferris’s lab has long studied the brain’s response to visual cues and motor tasks, like walking and running. He was looking to upgrade to studying complex, fast-paced action when Studnicki, with her tennis background, joined the research group. So the lab decided tennis was the perfect sport to address these questions with. But the oversized movements – especially high overhand serves – proved an obstacle to the burgeoning tech.

    “So we literally scaled things down to table tennis and asked all the same questions we had for tennis before,” Ferris said. The researchers still had to compensate for the smaller movements of table tennis. So Ferris and Studnicki doubled the 120 electrodes in a typical brain-scanning cap, each bonus electrode providing a control for the rapid head movements during a table tennis match.
    With all these electrodes scanning the brain activity of players, Studnicki and Ferris were able to tune into the brain region that turns sensory information into movement. This area is known as the parieto-occipital cortex.
    “It takes all your senses – visual, vestibular, auditory – and it gives information on creating your motor plan. It’s been studied a lot for simple tasks, like reaching and grasping, but all of them are stationary,” Studnicki said. “We wanted to understand how it worked for complex movements like tracking a ball in space and intercepting it, and table tennis was perfect for this.”
    The researchers analyzed dozens of hours of play against both Studnicki and the ball machine. When playing against another human, players’ neurons worked in unison, like they were all speaking the same language. In contrast, when players faced a ball-serving machine, the neurons in their brains were not aligned with one another. In the neuroscience world, this lack of alignment is known as desynchronization.
    “If we have 100,000 people in a football stadium and they’re all cheering together, that’s like synchronization in the brain, which is a sign the brain is relaxed” Ferris said. “If we have those same 100,000 people but they’re all talking to their friends, they’re busy but they’re not in sync. In a lot of cases, that desynchronization is an indication that the brain is doing a lot of calculations as opposed to sitting and idling.”
    The team suspects that the players’ brains were so active while waiting for robotic serves because the machine provides no cues of what they are going to do next. What’s clear is that our brains process these two experiences very differently, which suggests that training with a machine might not offer the same experience as playing against a real opponent.
    “I still see a lot of value in practicing with a machine,” Studnicki said. “But I think machines are going to evolve in the next 10 or 20 years, and we could see more naturalistic behaviors for players to practice against.” More

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    in Computers Math

    Kids judge Alexa smarter than Roomba, but say both deserve kindness

    Most kids know it’s wrong to yell or hit someone, even if they don’t always keep their hands to themselves. But what about if that someone’s name is Alexa?
    A new study from Duke developmental psychologists asked kids just that, as well as how smart and sensitive they thought the smart speaker Alexa was compared to its floor-dwelling cousin Roomba, an autonomous vacuum.
    Four- to eleven-year-olds judged Alexa to have more human-like thoughts and emotions than Roomba. But despite the perceived difference in intelligence, kids felt neither the Roomba nor the Alexa deserve to be yelled at or harmed. That feeling dwindled as kids advanced towards adolescence, however. The findings appear online April 10 in the journal Developmental Psychology.
    The research was inspired in part by lead author Teresa Flanagan seeing how Hollywood depicts human-robot interactions in shows like HBO’s “Westworld.”
    “In Westworld and the movie Ex Machina, we see how adults might interact with robots in these very cruel and horrible ways,” said Flanagan, a visiting scholar in the department of psychology & neuroscience at Duke. “But how would kids interact with them?”
    To find out, Flanagan recruited 127 children aged four to eleven who were visiting a science museum with their families. The kids watched a 20-second clip of each technology, and then were asked a few questions about each device.

    Working under the guidance of Tamar Kushnir, Ph.D., her graduate advisor and a Duke Institute for Brain Sciences faculty member, Flanagan analyzed the survey data and found some mostly reassuring results.
    Overall, kids decided that both the Alexa and Roomba probably aren’t ticklish and wouldn’t feel pain if they got pinched, suggesting they can’t feel physical sensations like people do. However, they gave Alexa, but not the Roomba, high marks for mental and emotional capabilities, like being able to think or getting upset after someone is mean to it.
    “Even without a body, young children think the Alexa has emotions and a mind,” Flanagan said. “And it’s not that they think every technology has emotions and minds — they don’t think the Roomba does — so it’s something special about the Alexa’s ability to communicate verbally.”
    Regardless of the different perceived abilities of the two technologies, children across all ages agreed it was wrong to hit or yell at the machines.
    “Kids don’t seem to think a Roomba has much mental abilities like thinking or feeling,” Flanagan said. “But kids still think we should treat it well. We shouldn’t hit or yell at it even if it can’t hear us yelling.”
    The older kids got however, the more they reported it would be slightly more acceptable to attack technology.

    “Four- and five-year-olds seem to think you don’t have the freedom to make a moral violation, like attacking someone,” Flanagan said. “But as they get older, they seem to think it’s not great, but you do have the freedom to do it.”
    The study’s findings offer insights into the evolving relationship between children and technology and raise important questions about the ethical treatment of AI and machines in general, and as parents. Should adults, for example, model good behavior for their kids by thanking Siri or its more sophisticated counterpart ChatGPT for their help?
    For now, Flanagan and Kushnir are trying to understand why children think it is wrong to assault home technology.
    In their study, one 10-year-old said it was not okay to yell at the technology because, “the microphone sensors might break if you yell too loudly,” whereas another 10-year-old said it was not okay because “the robot will actually feel really sad.”
    “It’s interesting with these technologies because there’s another aspect: it’s a piece of property,” Flanagan said. “Do kids think you shouldn’t hit these things because it’s morally wrong, or because it’s somebody’s property and it might break?”
    This research was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (SL-1955280, BCS-1823658). More

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    in Computers Math

    Study finds record-breaking rates of sea-level rise along the U.S. Southeast and Gulf coasts

    Sea levels along the U.S. Southeast and Gulf coasts have been rapidly accelerating, reaching record-breaking rates over the past 12 years, according to a new study led by scientists at Tulane University.
    In the study, published in Nature Communications, researchers said they had detected rates of sea-level rise of about a half an inch per year since 2010. They attribute the acceleration to the compounding effects of man-made climate change and natural climate variability.
    “These rapid rates are unprecedented over at least the 20th century and they have been three times higher than the global average over the same period,” says Sönke Dangendorf, lead author and the David and Jane Flowerree Assistant Professor in the Department of River-Coastal Science and Engineering at Tulane.
    The authors studied a combination of field and satellite measurements since 1900, pinpointing the individual contributors to the acceleration.
    “We systematically investigated the different causes, such as vertical land motion, ice-mass loss, and air pressure, but none of them could sufficiently explain the recent rate,” said Noah Hendricks, co-author and undergraduate student in Dangendorf’s team at his former institution, Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.
    “Instead, we found that the acceleration is a widespread signal that extends from the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico up to Cape Hatteras in North Carolina and into the North Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Seas, which is indicative for changes in the ocean’s density and circulation.”
    Over the past 12 years this entire area, known as the Subtropical Gyre, has been expanding primarily due to changing wind patterns and continued warming. Warmer water masses need more space and thus lead to a rise in sea level.
    The scientists suggest that the recent acceleration was an unfortunate superposition of man-made climate change signals and a peak in weather-related variability that lasted over several years. They conclude that the rates will likely return to the more moderate values as predicted by climate models in the coming decades.
    “However, this is no reason to give the all clear,” said Torbjörn Törnqvist, co-author and the Vokes Geology Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Tulane. “These high rates of sea-level rise have put even more stress on these vulnerable coastlines, particularly in Louisiana and Texas where the land is also sinking rapidly.”
    Dangendorf said the “results, once again, demonstrate the urgency of the climate crisis for the Gulf region. We need interdisciplinary and collaborative efforts to sustainably face these challenges.”
    Also collaborating on the study were Qiang Sun from Tulane, John Klinck and Tal Ezer from Old Dominion University, Thomas Frederikse from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California , Francisco M. Calafat from the National Oceanography Centre in Liverpool, UK, and Thomas Wahl from the University of Central Florida in Orlando. More

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    Satellite imagery reveals ‘hidden’ tornado tracks

    When a strong tornado roars through a city, it often leaves behind demolished buildings, broken tree limbs and trails of debris. But a similarly powerful storm touching down over barren, unvegetated land is much harder to spot in the rearview mirror.

    Now, satellite imagery has revealed a 60-kilometer-long track of moist earth in Arkansas that was invisible to human eyes. The feature was presumably excavated by a tornado when it stripped away the uppermost layer of the soil, researchers report in the March 28 Geophysical Research Letters. This method of looking for “hidden” tornado tracks is particularly valuable for better understanding storms that strike in the winter, when there’s less vegetation, the researchers suggest. And recent research has shown that wintertime storms are likely to increase in intensity as the climate warms (SN: 12/16/21).

    Over 1,000 tornadoes strike the United States each year, according to the National Weather Service. But not all are equally likely to be studied, says Darrel Kingfield, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo., who was not involved in the research.

    For starters, storms that pass over populated areas are more apt to be analyzed. “There’s historically been a pretty big population bias,” Kingfield says. Storms that occur over vegetated regions also tend to be well studied, simply because they leave obvious scars on the landscape. Ripped-up grasses or downed trees function like beacons to indicate the path of a storm, says Kingfield, who has studied forests damaged by tornadoes.

    Spring and summer are peak storm seasons in the United States — more than 70 percent of tornadoes strike from March through September, according to NOAA. But on December 10, 2021, a cluster of storms started racing across the central and southern United States. Those tornadoes, which claimed more than 80 lives, swept across cities and also farmland, much of which had already been harvested for the season.

    Jingyu Wang, a physical geographer at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and his colleagues set out to detect the signatures of those deadly storms in unpopulated, barren landscapes.

    Swirling winds, even relatively weak ones, can suction up several centimeters of soil. And since deeper layers of the ground tend to be wetter, a tornado ought to leave behind a telltale signature: a long swath of moister-than-usual soil. Two properties linked with soil moisture level — its texture and temperature — in turn impact how much near-infrared light the soil reflects.

    Wang and his collaborators analyzed near-infrared data collected by NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites and looked for changes in soil moisture consistent with a passing tornado.

    When the team looked at data obtained shortly after the 2021 storm outbreak, they noticed a signal in northeastern Arkansas. The feature was consistent with a roughly 60-kilometer-long track of wet soil. Tornadoes had been previously reported in that area — outside the city of Osceola — so it’s likely that this feature was created by a powerful storm, the team concluded.

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    That makes sense, Kingfield says, and observations like these can reveal tornado signatures that might otherwise be missed. However, it’s important to acknowledge that this new technique works best in places where soils are capable of retaining water, he says. “You need to have clay-rich soils.”

    Even so, these results hold promise for analyzing other tornadoes, Kingfield says. It’s always useful to have a new tool for estimating the strength, path and structure of a storm, but many storms go relatively unexamined simply because of where and when they occur, he says. “Now we have this new ground truth.” More

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    How an Indigenous community in Panama is escaping rising seas

    In pictures from high above, the island of Gardi Sugdub resembles a container shipyard — small, brightly colored dwellings are jammed together cheek to jowl. At ground level, the island, one of more than 350 in the San Blas archipelago off the northern coast of Panama, is hot, flat and crowded. More than 1,000 people occupy the narrow dwellings that cover virtually every bit of the 150-by-400-meter island, which is slowly being swallowed by rising seas driven by climate change.

    This year, about 300 families from Gardi Sugdub are expected to begin moving to a new community on the mainland. The resettlement plan was initiated by the residents there more than a decade ago when they could no longer deny that the island couldn’t accommodate the growing population. Rising seas and intense storms are only making the predicament more dire.

    Many of the older adults will opt to stay put. Some still don’t believe climate change poses a threat, but 70-year-old Pedro Lopez is not among them. Lopez, whose cousin interpreted for him during our Zoom interview, currently shares a small house with 16 family members and the family dog. He doesn’t plan to move. He knows Gardi Sugdub, translated as Crab Island, along with many others in the archipelago, is going underwater, but he believes it won’t happen within his lifetime.

    The Indigenous Guna people have occupied these Caribbean islands since around the mid-1800s, when they abandoned the coastal jungle area near what is now the Panama-Colombia border to establish better trade and escape disease-carrying pests. Now, they are among the estimated hundreds of millions of people worldwide who by the end of the century may be forced to flee their land because of rising sea levels (SN: 5/9/20 & 5/23/20, p. 22).

    In the Caribbean, sea level rise currently averages around 3 to 4 millimeters per year. As global temperatures continue to rise, it is expected to hit 1 centimeter per year or more by century’s end.

    All of the islands of the San Blas archipelago will eventually be underwater and uninhabitable, says Steven Paton, who directs the Physical Monitoring Program at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. “Some may need to be abandoned very soon while others not for many decades,” he adds.

    Anthropologist Anthony Oliver-Smith of the University of Florida in Gainesville has studied people who are forced from their homes by disasters for more than 50 years. Around the world, he says, climate change has become a major driver of displacement, with people who have limited resources facing the worst of it.

    The impacts of climate change — flooding, rising seas and erosion — are threatening the Tuvaluans in the South Pacific, the Mi’Kmaq of Prince Edward Island in Canada and the Shinnecock Indian Nation of New York. Half of some 1,600 remaining tribe members there still occupy a more than 300-hectare territorial homeland on Long Island surrounded by multimillion-dollar Southampton mansions.

    The Guna relocation is being closely watched as a possible template for other threatened communities. What sets the Guna apart from many others is that they have a place to go.

    Rising sea levels in Guna Yala

    More than 30,000 Indigenous Guna inhabit the province now called Guna Yala, which includes the archipelago once known as San Blas and a strip of mainland. Most live on the islands, traveling back to the mainland to get water from the mouth of the river there, and in some cases to tend crops. Some of the islands sit several meters above average sea level, but the vast majority are uninhabited spits of land with palm trees, many only a meter or less above sea level.

    So far, only the residents of Gardi Sugdub are included in the relocation plan.

    The Guna people of the islands are sustained by the biodiversity there. The sea, mangroves and nearby mainland forests provide food, medicine and building materials. The men hunt and fish to provide seafood to the best restaurants in Panama City, and agriculture remains part of the economy. Guna communities elect traditional authorities known as sailas (“chiefs” in Guna) and argars (“chief’s spokesmen”), and they hold regular meetings to address community issues.

    In recent decades, the Guna have moved toward an economy based on tourism and providing services to outsiders. They earn money supplying food, souvenirs and cultural artifacts to tourists but allow visitors to the islands only with prior approval from the sailas. Outsiders are not permitted to own property or operate businesses.

    Carlos Arenas is an international human rights lawyer and an adviser on social and climate justice issues. When he visited Gardi Sugdub in 2014 as a consultant for Displacement Solutions, a nonprofit initiative focused on housing, land and property rights, he was tasked to assess the nascent relocation plans and provide recommendations. He was shocked to see the visible threat posed by the rising sea. “You cannot see much elevation,” Arenas says. “The level of exposure was extremely high, but they don’t see it necessarily that way. They have been living there for more than 170 years.”

    Heliodora Murphy grew up on Gardi Sugdub and has watched the ocean rise higher each year. The 52-year-old grandmother doesn’t understand those who dismiss climate change in light of the growing physical evidence all around. Murphy, also speaking through an interpreter, recalls her father bringing rocks and sand from a river on the mainland to shore up pathways and keep their home dry.

    Gardi Sugdub resident Pedro Lopez, left, plans to stay on the island, while Heliodora Murphy, right, has already picked out her new home on the mainland.COURTESY OF IVETTE N. ROGERS

    Arenas says that some families face a daily struggle against the ocean. They build barriers that are immediately destroyed and have to be built again.

    Some of the stopgap measures have been counterproductive, like filling in coral reefs to expand the land area. Reefs are a natural buffer against wave action, storm surges, flooding and erosion. Destroying them has only added to the peril.

    Today, Murphy says, storm surges carry water into her small, ground-level home. “It’s very different than in the past,” she says. “The waves are so much higher now.” About two years ago, she decided she’d move with her family. “We can’t stay here.”

    A history of autonomy

    Historically, the Guna have had a level of autonomy rare among Indigenous people. When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in what is now Colombia and Panama, the Guna lived primarily near the Gulf of Urabá on the northern coast of Colombia. The two groups clashed violently, prompting the Guna to abandon the coastal border area and move north into the jungle of Panama near the Caribbean. By the mid-1800s, entire villages had relocated again, this time to the San Blas archipelago.

    Panama declared its independence from Spain in 1821 and became a part of Gran Colombia. Throughout the 19th century, the Guna lived independently according to their customs. That changed in 1903 when Panama broke from Colombia. The new nation attempted to assimilate the people living on the archipelago.

    But having escaped Spanish rule centuries earlier and avoided Colombian authority as well, the Guna resisted Panama’s acculturation efforts. When the Guna couldn’t achieve détente through other means, they launched an armed attack against the Panamanians in February 1925.

    The United States, having occupied the Panama Canal Zone since 1903, had geopolitical interests in the region and threw its support behind the Guna. That support forced the Panamanian government into a negotiated peace that allowed the Guna to continue their way of life. In 1938, the Guna islands and adjacent coastline were recognized as a semiautonomous Indigenous territory, Guna Yala. The Guna have maintained control of that territory since.

    The Guna find a new home

    The Gardi Sugdub residents first broached the idea of relocation in 2010. “They basically ran out of room,” Oliver-Smith says.

    He describes the Guna as the Indigenous people in Latin America who have been perhaps most successful in defending their cultural heritage, language and territory. They initiated the plans for resettlement and made arrangements among themselves to set aside 17 hectares of property on the mainland for these purposes. The land, within the Guna Yala territory, is near a school and health center being built by the Panamanian government.

    The residents of Gardi Sugdub (the island is shown here in 2014) face overcrowding and rising seas. More than a decade ago, they initiated a plan to move more than 300 families to a new community on the mainland.ARNULFO FRANCO/AP PHOTO

    When Guna leaders approached the government, the Ministry of Housing initially promised to build 50 houses on the parcel. But it remained just that — a promise — until around 2014, when the Guna began to speak publicly about their situation. News of their predicament caught the attention of Indigenous rights organizations and eventually Displacement Solutions, which turned to Arenas and Oliver-Smith to evaluate the situation and offer recommendations about the best way forward.

    Following Displacement Solutions’ first report in 2014, Panama’s Ministry of Housing agreed to build 300 houses, along with the hospital and school. But Arenas, who until the COVID-19 pandemic started had visited Guna Yala every year or so, says progress remained slow, causing the Guna to question Panama’s commitment to the relocation. The Guna leveraged support from international groups and members of the Panamanian government to get the project moving. “They were the originators of the idea of resettlement,” Oliver-Smith says. “And they kept it alive.”

    Arenas estimates that roughly 200 of the 300 houses in the new community are complete. The cost for the houses, which are being paid for by the Panamanian government, exceeds $10 million, and the Inter-American Development Bank has invested $800,000 in technical assistance. The new homes will have cement floors, bamboo walls, zinc roofs, running water and full electrification.

    Before plans to relocate began, many Guna had already moved to cities including Panama City and Colón for school, work or simply to have more room. Arenas expects that many more people already living in mainland Panama will likely join their families in the new community. People on other Guna Yala islands will likely have to move eventually too.

    Murphy has already picked out her two-bedroom home for her small nuclear family of seven. Two daughters moved to Panama City years ago, and she hopes to see them more. But at around 40 square meters, the homes may not accommodate the typical multigenerational, double-digit Guna families. Lopez plans to stay on the island, letting the younger generations live in the family’s new home on the mainland.

    The Guna hope to retain their traditional customs through the move, including handiwork called wini and molas (examples shown).DIXON HAMBY/MOMENT/GETTY IMAGES PLUS

    To ensure that the ethnic and cultural identities they fought to preserve are not lost in the move, the Guna plan to develop programs to teach traditions and culture to the resettled generations. But even on Gardi Sugdub, younger generations seem less inclined to practice the traditional customs — like making and wearing wini (vibrantly colored beads worn around the arms and legs) and molas (intricately designed fabric dresses that have become a symbol of Guna life and resistance to colonialism). Murphy began learning the craft when she was 6 years old. She spends two months constructing each ensemble, which she sells to tourists for $80.

    Oliver-Smith is optimistic about the relocation plan but worries that the Panamanian government has repeated some mistakes that have doomed projects elsewhere by treating resettlement solely as a housing issue. “You don’t just pick people up and move them from point A to point B. It is a reconfiguring of a life of a people,” Oliver-Smith says. “It has political, social, economic, environmental, spiritual and cultural dimensions.”

    As is often the case when Indigenous and rural communities relocate, Arenas says, the government failed to make the Guna equal participants in the design concept. “The Panamanian government is trying to build a Panama City neighborhood in the middle of a tropical forest,” he says. “They have not tried to save a single tree of this beautiful landscape…. They removed everything. They tried to flatten the land because it’s cheaper…. It’s also extremely hot there, and the building materials are hot.” This increases the risk of failure, he says, because the houses don’t match the environment.

    But Murphy hopes everything will be better. The new village promises dry land and more space. And perhaps returning to the mainland the Guna occupied nearly 150 years ago will lead to a stronger connection to Guna historical culture and traditions.

    Oliver-Smith says the Guna are facing the challenge of resettlement with an intact culture and language that he hopes will be a basis for maintaining cultural continuity. His time spent with the Guna has convinced him that, as disruptive and devastating as resettlement can be, the Guna relocating as a cohesive group are perhaps best equipped to emerge intact even if not unscathed.

    “Carlos [Arenas] and I asked an old, retired saila if he thought resettlement would change the Guna,” he says. “He said, ‘No. Individuals may change out of choice, but our culture is eternal. It will never die.’ ” More

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    Internet access must become human right or we risk ever-widening inequality

    People around the globe are so dependent on the internet to exercise socio-economic human rights such as education, healthcare, work, and housing that online access must now be considered a basic human right, a new study reveals.
    Particularly in developing countries, internet access can make the difference between people receiving an education, staying healthy, finding a home, and securing employment — or not.
    Even if people have offline opportunities, such as accessing social security schemes or finding housing, they are at a comparative disadvantage to those with Internet access.
    Publishing his findings today in Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Dr Merten Reglitz, Lecturer in Global Ethics at the University of Birmingham, calls for a standalone human right to internet access — based on it being a practical necessity for a range of socio-economic human rights.
    He calls for public authorities to provide internet access free of charge for those unable to afford it, as well as providing training in basic digital skills training for all citizens and protecting online access from arbitrary interference by states and private companies.
    Dr Reglitz commented: “The internet has unique and fundamental value for the realisation of many of our socio-economic human rights — allowing users to submit job applications, send medical information to healthcare professionals, manage their finances and business, make social security claims, and submit educational assessments.
    “The internet’s structure enables a mutual exchange of information that has the potential to contribute to the progress of humankind as a whole — potential that should be protected and deployed by declaring access to the Internet a human right.”
    The study outlines several areas in developed countries where internet access is essential to exercise socio-economic human rights: Education — students in internet-free households are disadvantaged in obtaining a good school education with essential learning aids and study materials online. Health — providing in-person healthcare to remote communities can be challenging, particularly in the US and Canada. Online healthcare can help to plug this gap. Housing — in many developed countries, significant parts of the rental housing market have moved online. Social Security — accessing these public services today is often unreasonably difficult without internet access. Work — jobs are increasingly advertised in real time online and people must be able to access relevant websites to make effective use of their right to work.Dr Reglitz’s research also highlights similar problems for people without internet access in developing countries — for example, 20 per cent of children aged 6 to 11 are out of school in sub-Saharan Africa. Many children face long walks to their schools, where class sizes are routinely very large in crumbling, unsanitary schools with insufficient numbers of teachers.
    However, online education tools can make a significant difference — allowing children living remotely from schools to complete their education. More students can be taught more effectively if teaching materials are available digitally and pupils do not have to share books.
    For people in developing countries, internet access can also make the difference between receiving an adequate level of healthcare or receiving none. Digital health tools can help diagnose illnesses — for example, in Kenya, a smartphone-based Portable Eye Examination Kit (Peek) has been used to test people’s eyesight and identify people who need treatment, especially in remote areas underserved by medical practitioners.
    People are often confronted with a lack of brick-and-mortar banks in developing countries and internet access makes possible financial inclusion. Small businesses can also raise money through online crowdfunding platforms — the World Bank expects such sums raised in Africa to rise from $32 million in 2015 to $2.5 billion in 2025. More

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    Baseball’s home run boom is due, in part, to climate change

    Baseball is the best sport in the world for numberphiles. There are so many stats collected that the analysis of them even has its own name: sabermetrics. Like in Moneyball, team managers, coaches and players use these statistics in game strategy, but the mountain of available data can also be put to other uses.

    Researchers have now mined baseball’s number hoard to show that climate change caused more than 500 home runs since 2010, with higher air temperatures contributing to the sport’s ongoing home run heyday. The results appear April 7 in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

    Many factors have led to players hitting it out of the park more often in the last 40 years, from steroid use to the height of the stitches on the ball. Blog posts and news stories have also speculated about whether climate change could be increasing the number of home runs, says Christopher Callahan of Dartmouth College (SN: 3/10/22). “But nobody had quantitatively investigated it.”

    A climate change researcher and baseball fan, Callahan decided to dig into the sport’s mound of data in his free time to answer the question. After he gave a brief presentation at Dartmouth on the topic, two researchers from different fields joined the project.

    That collaboration produced an analysis that is methodologically sound and “does what it says,” says Madeleine Orr, a researcher of the impacts of climate change on sports at Loughborough University London, who was not involved with the study.

    The theorized relationship between global warming and home runs stems from fundamental physics — the ideal gas law says as temperature goes up, air density goes down, reducing air resistance. To see if home runs were happening due to warming, Callahan and colleagues took several approaches.

    First, the team looked for an effect at the game level. Across more than 100,000 MLB games, the researchers found that a 1-degree Celsius increase in the daily high temperature increased the number of home runs in a game by nearly 2 percent. For example, a game like the one on June 10, 2019, where the Arizona Diamondbacks and Philadelphia Phillies set the record for most home runs in a game, would be expected to have 14 home runs instead of 13 if it were 4 degrees C warmer.

    The researchers then ran game-day temperatures through a climate model that controls for greenhouse gas emissions and found that human-caused warming led to an average of 58 more home runs each season from 2010 to 2019. The analysis also showed that the overall trend of more home runs in higher temperatures goes back to the 1960s.

    The team followed that analysis with a look at more than 220,000 individual batted balls, made possible by the Statcast system — where high-speed cameras have tracked the trajectory and speed of every ball hit during a game since 2015. The researchers compared balls hit in almost exactly the same way on days with different temperatures, while controlling for other factors like wind speed and humidity. That analysis showed a similar increase in home runs per degree Celsius as the game-level analysis, with only lower air density due to higher temperatures left to explain higher numbers of home runs.

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    While climate change has “not been the dominant effect” causing more home runs, “if we continue to emit greenhouse gases strongly, we could see much more rapid increases in home runs” moving forward, Callahan says.

    Some fans feel that the prevalence of home runs has made baseball duller, and it’s at least part of the reason that the MLB unveiled several new rule changes for the 2023 season, Callahan says.

    Teams can adapt to rising temperatures by shifting day games to night games and adding domes to stadiums — the researchers found no effect of temperature on home runs for games played under a dome. But according to Orr, climate change may soon cause even more dramatic changes to America’s pastime, even with those adaptations.

    Because the sport is susceptible to snow, storms, wildfires, flooding and heat at various points during the season, Orr says, “I don’t think, without substantial change, baseball exists in the current model” within 30 years.

    Callahan agrees. “This sport, and all sports, are going to see major changes in ways that we cannot anticipate.” More

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    ‘Jet packs’ and ultrasounds could reveal secrets of pregnant whale sharks

    How do you know if the world’s largest living fish is expecting babies? Not by her bulging belly, it turns out.

    Scientists thought that an enlarged area on the undersides of female whale sharks was a sign of pregnancy. But a technique used for the first time on free-swimming animals showed only skin and muscle. These humps might instead be a secondary sex characteristic on mature females, like breasts on humans, researchers report in the March 23 Endangered Species Research.

    The ultrasound is part of a suite of new methods including underwater “jet packs” and blood tests that scientists hope could unlock secrets about this creature’s reproduction.

    Whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) are classified as globally endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. There are only an estimated 100,000 to 238,000 individuals left worldwide, which is more than a 50 percent decline in the last 75 years.

    In part because whale sharks are relatively rare, their reproductive biology is mostly a mystery (SN: 8/1/22). Nearly everything biologists think they know is based on the examination of one pregnant female caught by a commercial fishing boat in 1995.

    “Protecting organisms without knowing about their biology is like trying to catch a fly with our eyes closed,” says Rui Matsumoto, a fisheries biologist with the Okinawa Churashima Foundation in Japan. The organization researches subtropical animals and plants to maintain or improve natural resources in national parks.

    To learn more about these gentle giants, Matsumoto and shark biologist Kiyomi Murakumo of Japan’s Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium had to figure out how to keep up with them. Like superheroes in a comic book, the biologists used underwater jet packs — propellers attached to their scuba tanks — to swim alongside the fish, which average 12 meters in length and move about five kilometers per hour.

    Then the researchers had to maneuver a 17-kilogram briefcase containing a waterproof ultrasound wand on the undersides of 22 females swimming near the Galápagos Islands and draw blood with syringes from their fins. Until this study, the ultrasound wand had never been used outside of an aquarium on free-swimming wildlife.

    Fisheries biologist Rui Matsumoto uses a propeller mounted on his scuba tank to keep pace with a female whale shark to take an ultrasound of her belly.S. Pierce

    Performing these two tests on whale sharks is especially challenging, says study coauthor Simon Pierce, a whale shark ecologist with the Marine Megafauna Foundation, a nonprofit organization that uses research to drive marine conservation.  The fish “have some of the thickest skin of any animal — up to about 30 centimeters thick.”

    Another challenge is the seawater itself, which can contaminate blood samples. The researchers developed a two-syringe system, where the first syringe creates a vacuum and allows the second syringe to draw only blood. 

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    Back in the lab, the blood plasma from six of the females showed hormone levels similar to levels obtained from a captive immature female in an aquarium, indicating those wild females were not old enough to reproduce.

    Ultrasound imagery showed egg follicles in two of the 22 female sharks, meaning those females were mature enough to reproduce but not pregnant. The biologists did not locate a pregnant whale shark.

    Pioneering these noninvasive techniques on whale sharks has opened the door to possibly learning more about other endangered marine animals, too. Waterproof ultrasound wands mounted on a pole, Pierce says, are now being used on tiger sharks in places where the predators are drawn in by bait.

    Rachel Graham agrees developing these underwater sampling techniques is an “astounding feat.” But the marine conservation scientist and founder of MarAlliance, a marine wildlife conservation nonprofit, doubts whether most free-ranging wild marine animals, particularly faster-swimming sharks or marine mammals, would tolerate similar tests.

    “What makes whale sharks fairly unique … is that they move relatively slowly at times, have the ability to remain stationary, and they tolerate the presence of other animals — such as us — nearby,” says Graham, who has studied shark species around the world and was not involved in the new study.

    Coupled with satellite tracking, the new methods, could eventually show us where whale sharks give birth, Pierce says. Little is known about whale shark pups, including whether they are born in shallow or deep water, and whether pups are born one-at-a-time or if mothers gather to give birth together. “Assuming they do have some sort of breeding or pelagic nursery area we can identify … then that obviously goes quite a long way towards conserving the population.” More