Aurelia Butler

More stories

  • 113 Shares179 Views

    in Computers Math

    Basketball Mathematics scores big at inspiring kids to learn

    New study with 756 1st through 5th graders demonstrates that a six-week mashup of hoops and math has a positive effect on their desire to learn more, provides them with an experience of increased self-determination and grows math confidence among youth. The Basketball Mathematics study was conducted at five Danish primary and elementary schools by researchers from the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports.
    Over the past decades, there has been a considerable amount of attention paid to explore different approaches to stimulate children’s learning. Especially, there has been a focus on how physical activity, separated from the learning activities, can improve children’s cognitive performance and learning. Conversely, there has been less of a focus aimed at the potential of integrating physical activity into the learning activities. The main purpose of this study therefore was to develop a learning activity that integrates basketball and mathematics and examine how it might affect children’s motivation in mathematics.
    Increased motivation, self-determination and mastery
    756 children from 40 different classes at Copenhagen area schools participated in the project, where about half of the them — once a week for six weeks — had Basketball Mathematics during gym class, while the other half played basketball without mathematics.
    “During classes with Basketball Mathematics, the children had to collect numbers and perform calculations associated with various basketball exercises. An example could be counting how many times they could sink a basket from three meters away vs. at a one-meter distance, and subsequently adding up the numbers. Both the math and basketball elements could be adjusted to suit the children’s levels, as well as adjusting for whether it was addition, multiplication or some other function that needed to be practiced,” explains Linn Damsgaard, who is writing her PhD thesis on the connection between learning and physical activity at the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports.
    The results demonstrate that children’s motivation for math integrated with basketball is 16% higher com-pared to classroom math learning. Children also experienced a 14% increase in self-determination compared with classroom teaching, while Basketball Mathematics increases mastery by 6% compared versus classroom-based mathematics instruction. Furthermore, the study shows that Basketball Mathematics can maintain children’s motivation for mathematics over a six-week period, while the motivation of the control group decreases significantly.
    “It is widely acknowledged that youth motivation for schoolwork decreases as the school year progresses. Therefore, it is quite interesting that we don’t see any decrease in motivation when kids take part in Basketball Mathematics. While we can’t explain our results with certainty, it could be that Basketball Mathematics endows children with a sense of ownership of their calculations and helps them clarify and concretize abstract concepts, which in turn increases their motivation to learn mathematics through Basketball Mathematics,” says PhD student Linn Damsgaard
    Active math on the school schedule
    Associate Professor Jacob Wienecke of UCPH’s Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports, who supervised the study, says that other studies have proved the benefits of movement and physical activity on children’s academic learning. He expects for the results of Basketball Mathematics on children’s learning and academic performance to be published soon:
    “We are currently investigating whether the Basketball Mathematics model can strengthen youth performance in mathematics. Once we have the final results, we hope that they will inspire school teachers and principals to prioritize more physical activity and movement in these subjects,” says Jacob Wienecke, who concludes:
    “Eventually, we hope to succeed in having these tools built into the school system and the teacher’s education. The aim is that schools in the future will include “Active English” and “Active Mathematics” in the weekly schedule as subjects where physical education and subject-learning instructors collaborate to integrate this type of instruction with the normally more sedentary classwork.” More

  • 175 Shares129 Views

    in Heart

    Wildfires launch microbes into the air. How big of a health risk is that?

    As climate change brings more wildfires to the western United States, a rare fungal infection has also been on the rise. Valley fever is up more than sixfold in Arizona and California from 1998 to 2018, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    Valley fever causes coughs, fevers and chest pain and can be deadly. The culprit fungi, members of the genus Coccidioides, thrive in soils in California and the desert Southwest. Firefighters are especially vulnerable to the disease. Wildfires appear to stir up and send the soil-loving fungi into the air, where they can enter people’s lungs.

    If the fires are helping these disease-causing fungi to get around, could they be sending other microorganisms aloft as well? Leda Kobziar, a fire ecologist at the University of Idaho in Moscow, decided in 2015 to see if she could find out if and how microorganisms like bacteria and fungi are transported by wildfire smoke — and what that might mean for human and ecological health.

    By 2018, Kobziar had launched a new research field she named “pyroaerobiology.” First, she asked if microorganisms can even survive the searing heat of a wildfire. The answer, she found, is yes. But how far bacteria and fungi can travel on the wind and in what numbers are two of the many big unknowns.

    With a recent push to spark new collaborations and investigations, Kobziar hopes that scientists will start to understand how important smoke transport of microbes may be.

    For Kobziar’s earliest studies in 2015, her students held up petri dishes on long poles to collect samples of the smoky air near a prescribed fire at the University of Florida experimental forest.L. Kobziar

    Today, Kobziar and colleagues use drones to collect samples at the University of Florida experimental forest.L. Kobziar

    Invisible but pervasive

    Air may look clear, but even in the cleanest air, “hundreds of different bacteria and fungi are blowing around,” says Noah Fierer, a microbiologist at the University of Colorado Boulder.

    Winds whisk bacteria and fungi off all kinds of surfaces — farm fields, deserts, lakes, oceans. Those microbes can rise into the atmosphere to travel the world. Scientists have found microorganisms from the Sahara in the Caribbean, for example.

    Many (if not most) of the airborne microorganisms, including bacteria, fungi and viruses, are not likely to cause disease, Fierer notes. But some can make people sick or cause allergic reactions, he says. Others cause diseases in crops and other plants.

    The billions of tons of dust that blow off of deserts and agricultural fields each year act as a microbial conveyor belt. In places like Arizona, people know to be alert for symptoms of airborne illnesses like Valley fever after dust storms, since infections increase downwind afterward. If dust can move living microorganisms around the globe, it makes sense that particulates in smoke would be microbe movers too, Kobziar says — assuming the microscopic life-forms can survive a fire and a spin in the atmosphere.

    Sign Up For the Latest from Science News

    Headlines and summaries of the latest Science News articles, delivered to your inbox

    Tiny travelers

    Rising temperatures and worsening droughts have led to longer and more intense wildfire seasons across the West (SN: 9/26/20, p. 12). Breathing wildfire smoke makes people sick (SN Online: 9/18/20), even causing premature death from heart and lung illnesses. In the United States, wildfire smoke causes about 17,000 premature deaths per year — a number projected to double by 2100, according to a 2018 study in GeoHealth.

    In other parts of the world, the effects are far worse. In 2015, smoke from illegal land-clearing blazes plus wildfires in Indonesia killed an estimated 100,000 people across Southeast Asia, according to a 2016 report in Environmental Research Letters. Blame is usually attributed to particulate matter — organic and inorganic particles suspended in the air, including pollen, ash and pollutants. But scientists and health officials are increasingly realizing that there’s an awful lot we don’t know about what else in smoke is affecting human health.

    The most intense fires, the ones that burn the hottest and release the most energy, can create their own weather systems and send smoke all the way into the stratosphere, which extends about 50 kilometers above Earth’s surface (SN: 9/14/19, p. 12). Once there, smoke can travel around the world just as ash from explosive volcanoes does. Kobziar’s team and others provided compelling evidence in the February ISME Journal that live, viable microorganisms can be carried in smoke plumes — at least near Earth’s surface if not higher up.

    The Fire and Smoke Model Evaluation Experiment, or FASMEE, team set this high-intensity crown fire in the aspens of Fishlake National Forest, Utah, in 2019. The team used a drone to measure microbial concentrations in this smoke.L. Kobziar

    In 2015, while at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Kobziar and her students collected the first air samples for this line of research during a series of planned, or prescribed, burns that Kobziar set at the school’s experimental forest. The group arrived at the forest armed with 3-meter-long poles topped with petri dishes to collect samples from the air.

    Before any fires were set, the team held the petri dishes in the air for three minutes to collect air samples as a pre-fire baseline. Then Kobziar, a certified prescribed burn manager (or as she calls it, a “fire lighter”), lit the fires. Once flames were spreading at a steady rate and smoke was billowing, students hoisted new petri dishes into the smoke, almost as if aiming a marshmallow on a stick at a campfire. This allowed them to collect smoky air samples to compare to the “before” samples.

    Back in the lab, in a dark room held at a constant 23° Celsius, both the baseline and smoky petri dishes — covered and sealed from further contamination — were left for three days. Microbes began to grow. Far more bacterial and fungal species populated the smoky petri dishes than the baseline dishes, indicating that the fire aerosolized some species that weren’t in the air before the fire, Kobziar says.

    These petri dishes show bacterial and fungal colonies that grew after five minutes of exposure to smoke. The smoke came from pine needles collected from Florida then burned in Kobziar’s University of Idaho lab.L. Kobziar

    These petri dishes show bacterial and fungal colonies that grew after five minutes of exposure to smoke. The smoke came from pine needles collected from Florida then burned in Kobziar’s University of Idaho lab.L. Kobziar

    “We were stunned at how many different microbial colonies survived the combustion environment and grew in the smoke samples, compared to very few in the ambient air,” she says. Based on DNA tests, Kobziar’s team identified 10 types of bacteria and fungi; some are pathogenic to plants, one is an ant parasite and one helps plants absorb nutrients. “This was the moment when the way we thought about smoke was completely transformed,” she says.

    In 2017, after Kobziar had moved to Idaho, her team collected soil samples from the University of Idaho’s experimental forest and burned them — this time, in the lab. As smoke unfurled above the burning soils, the researchers collected air samples, and again, sealed them and put them in a dark, warm room to see what would grow. After a week, lots of different microbes, including fungi, had multiplied into colonies on the plates, the researchers reported in 2018 in Ecosphere.

    Alive and on the move

    Since then, Kobziar’s team has collected more air samples during prescribed burns of varying intensities in Florida, Idaho, Montana and Utah, joining forces with the U.S. Forest Service Fire and Smoke Model Evaluation Experiment, or FASMEE, team. For her students’ safety, she’s replaced the poles and petri dishes with drones. She sends a single drone carrying a vacuum pump with a filter into smoke plumes at varying altitudes up to 120 meters, the team described in the journal Fire in 2019.

    [embedded content]
    The FASMEE team set up a mobile research lab on the fire line at Fishlake National Forest. Drone operators sent the machines into the smoke to collect samples, back to the “lab” to return samples, then back up to collect more multiple times. They found about 1,000 different microbe types in the smoke.

    In every experiment, the researchers have found living bacteria and fungi, many of which were not found in any of the air samples taken before the fires. In Utah smoke samples, for example, the FASMEE team found more than 100 different fungi that were not in the air before the fire, Kobziar says. Findings included species of Aspergillus, which can cause fevers, coughs and chest pain, as well as Cladosporium, molds that can cause allergies and asthma.

    Whether any of these microorganisms pose a danger to people is unknown, Kobziar cautions. Her team has not tested whether the microbial species that survive the heat can cause disease, but the group plans to do so.

    The research in Utah revealed another crucial fact: These microbes are tough. Even in smoke from high-intensity, high-temperature fires, about 60 percent of bacterial and fungal cells are alive, Kobziar says. Roughly 80 percent seem to survive lower-intensity fires, which is “about the same percentage of cells we’d expect to see alive in ambient air conditions,” she says. Thus, these first studies show that fires are sending live bacteria and fungi into the air. And that they can travel at least 120 meters above the ground and close to a kilometer from a flame front.

    But many basic questions remain, Kobziar says. How do the microbes change — in quantity, type or viability — based on distance traveled away from the flames? How far can they actually go? How do different fuel sources — pine trees, grasslands, deciduous trees or crops, for example — affect microbial release? How does fire intensity affect what is released and how far it travels? Does the type of combustion — smoldering (like a wet log on a campfire) versus high-intensity flaming fires — affect what is released? How does temperature or humidity or weather affect microbial survival?

    Then, of course, Kobziar has plenty of questions about how to conduct this new field of research: What are the safest and best ways to sample the air in the dangerous environment of an unpredictable wildfire? How do you avoid contaminating the biological samples?

    She’s been learning as she goes, honing her methodology. The answers to many of those questions could come if one of Kobziar’s dream collaborations comes true: She wants to work with the researchers whose studies involve the NASA DC-8 “flying laboratory,” which explores Earth’s surface and atmosphere for studies ranging from archaeology to volcanology.

    Researchers have already tracked many different chemicals released by fires into the stratosphere from the Arctic to the South Pacific and everywhere in between, using the DC-8 for NASA’s Atmospheric Tomography Mission, says Christine Wiedinmyer, a fire emissions modeler at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences in Boulder, Colo. Finding traceable signatures of fires everywhere in the atmosphere suggests that fires could also be sending bacteria and fungi around the world, she says.

    Nine kilometers above Earth’s surface, a camera on NASA’s DC-8 flying laboratory took this image of thunderclouds rising above columns of smoke from a fire in eastern Washington on August 8, 2019. Such storms, formed by intense fires, loft particulate matter, chemicals and maybe even microbes into the stratosphere.David Peterson/U.S. Naval Research Lab

    “Pyroaerobiology is so cool,” says Wiedinmyer, who tracks and simulates the movement of chemicals in wildfire smoke around the world. She sees no reason that such atmospheric chemistry models couldn’t also be used for tracking and forecasting the movement of microbes in smoke plumes — once researchers collect sufficient measurements. Those data might answer basic questions about the human health hazards of microorganisms in smoke.

    Microbiologist Fierer in Boulder and Wiedinmyer have collaborated on chemistry sampling and modeling. The two plan to move to bacterial and fungal modeling using data Fierer is gathering on microbial concentrations in wildfire smoke.

    Kobziar, meanwhile, is working with atmospheric modelers to figure out how to model microbes’ movements in smoke. The long-term aim is to develop models to supplement current air-quality forecasts with warnings of air-quality issues across the United States related to wildfire-released microorganisms in smoke.

    A U.S. map

    While Kobziar’s team focuses on measuring microbes in smoke, Fierer’s team is working to get a baseline of what microbes are in the air at different locations during normal times and then comparing the baseline to smoke. The group has been sampling indoor and outdoor air at hundreds of U.S. homes to “map out what microbes we’re breathing in as we’re walking around doing our daily business,” Fierer says. They are also sampling air across Colorado, which experienced record-breaking fires in 2020 (SN: 12/19/20 & 1/2/21, p. 32).

    Fierer’s team uses sampling stations with small, high-powered vacuums atop 2-meter-high poles to “sample air for a period of time without smoke. Then boom, smoke hits [the site], we sample for a few days when there’s smoke in the air, and then we also sample afterward,” Fierer says. Analyzing samples from before, during and after a fire is ideal, he says, as there’s tremendous variation in microbial and fungal populations in the air. Near a Midwestern city in winter, for example, microorganisms might include ones associated with local trees or, strangely, dog feces; near a Colorado cattle feedlot in summer, microbes might include those associated with cattle feces.

    Joanne Emerson, then a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder, samples air atop a 300-meter-tall tower at the Boulder Atmospheric Observatory.N. Fierer

    When the team gets its results — data collection and analysis have been delayed by the pandemic — Fierer says, “we will know the amounts and types of microbes found in wildfire smoke compared with paired smoke-free air samples, and whether those microbes are viable.” At least in Colorado. Once scientists get the measurements of how many microbes can be carried in smoke, and to what altitudes, Fierer’s group can combine that information with global smoke production numbers to come up with “some back-of-the-envelope calculations” of the volume of microbes traveling in smoke plumes. Eventually, he says, scientists could figure out how many are alive, and whether that even matters for human health — still “an outstanding question.”

    Big leaps forward could be made if more scientists get involved in the research, Fierer and Kobziar both say. This research needs a truly multidisciplinary approach, with microbiologists, forest ecologists and atmospheric scientists collaborating, Fierer says. Going it alone would “be equivalent to a microbiologist studying microbes in the ocean and not knowing anything about oceanography,” he says. Fortunately, after Kobziar and infectious disease physician George Thompson of the University of California, Davis published a call-to-arms paper in Science last December, summing up their pyroaerobiology research and noting key questions, several researchers from different fields expressed interest in investigating the topic. “That’s exactly what we hoped would happen,” Kobziar says.

    Is there danger?

    In recent years, Thompson has seen a substantial increase in patients getting Valley fever and other fungal infections after nearby wildfires. He was well aware that when particulate matter in smoke gets into the lungs, it can cause breathing difficulties, pneumonia and even heart attacks. In fact, scientists reported in the Journal of the American Heart Association in April 2020 that exposure to heavy smoke during 2015–2017 wildfires in California raised the risk of heart attacks by up to 70 percent.

    He began to wonder if California’s record-breaking infernos were stirring up other microbes along with the fungus that causes Valley fever. So he joined forces with Kobziar.

    The Valley fever link appears to be real, but so far, local. For example, after the 2003 Simi Fire burned through Ventura County, more than 70 people got sick with Valley fever. But whether the Coccidioides fungi can travel to make people sick at a distance from the fire, no one knows.

    There are ways to figure out if more people, either locally or farther away, are getting sick with bacterial or fungal infections after wildfires. One way, Thompson says, is to look at a community’s antibiotic prescriptions and hospitalizations in the month preceding and the month after a fire: More prescriptions or hospitalizations from bacterial or fungal infections after a fire could indicate a link.

    In 2019 at the American Transplant Congress meeting, for example, researchers linked California wildfires with increased hospitalizations related to Aspergillus mold and Coccidioides fungi infections.

    But until we know more about what microbes fires release and where they go, we won’t know how important such a link is for human health, Fierer says.

    There’s so much we don’t know yet, Thompson agrees. “We still have a lot of work to do. This is sort of the beginning of the beginning of the story.” More

  • 138 Shares139 Views

    in Computers Math

    165 new cancer genes identified with the help of machine learning

    A new algorithm can predict which genes cause cancer, even if their DNA sequence is not changed. A team of researchers in Berlin combined a wide variety of data, analyzed it with “Artificial Intelligence” and identified numerous cancer genes. This opens up new perspectives for targeted cancer therapy in personalized medicine and for the development of biomarkers.
    In cancer, cells get out of control. They proliferate and push their way into tissues, destroying organs and thereby impairing essential vital functions. This unrestricted growth is usually induced by an accumulation of DNA changes in cancer genes — i.e. mutations in these genes that govern the development of the cell. But some cancers have only very few mutated genes, which means that other causes lead to the disease in these cases.
    A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics (MPIMG) in Berlin and at the Institute of Computational Biology of Helmholtz Zentrum München developed a new algorithm using machine learning technology to identify 165 previously unknown cancer genes. The sequences of these genes are not necessarily altered — apparently, already a dysregulation of these genes can lead to cancer. All of the newly identified genes interact closely with well-known cancer genes and have been shown to be essential for the survival of tumor cells in cell culture experiments.
    Additional targets for personalized medicine
    The algorithm, dubbed “EMOGI” for Explainable Multi-Omics Graph Integration, can also explain the relationships in the cell’s machinery that make a gene a cancer gene. As the team of researchers headed by Annalisa Marsico describe in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, the software integrates tens of thousands of data sets generated from patient samples. These contain information about DNA methylations, the activity of individual genes and the interactions of proteins within cellular pathways in addition to sequence data with mutations. In these data, a deep-learning algorithm detects the patterns and molecular principles that lead to the development of cancer.
    “Ideally, we obtain a complete picture of all cancer genes at some point, which can have a different impact on cancer progression for different patients,” says Marsico, head of a research group at the MPIMG until recently and now at Helmholtz Zentrum München. “This is the foundation for personalized cancer therapy.”
    Unlike with conventional cancer treatments such as chemotherapy, personalized therapy approaches tailor medication precisely to the type of tumor. “The goal is to select the best therapy for each patient — that is, the most effective treatment with the fewest side effects. Additionally, we would be able to identify cancers already at early stages, based on their molecular characteristics.” More

  • 138 Shares189 Views

    in Heart

    Discarded COVID-19 PPE such as masks can be deadly to wildlife

    A Magellanic penguin in Brazil ingested a face mask. A hedgehog in England got itself entangled in a glove. An octopus off the coast of France was found seeking refuge under a mask.

    Wildlife and ecosystems around the world are suffering from the impact of discarded single-use COVID-19 protective gear, researchers warn March 22 in Animal Biology. Latex gloves and polypropylene masks which protect people from the coronavirus are exacerbating the plastic pollution problem when not disposed of properly and are causing wildlife deaths (SN:11/20/20). The study is the first global documentation of the impacts of COVID-19 litter on wildlife via entanglement, entrapment and ingestion (SN:12/15/20).

    In August 2020, volunteers cleaning canals in Leiden, Netherlands, chanced upon a perch — a type of freshwater fish — trapped inside a finger of a latex glove. The ensnared fish was the first recorded wildlife casualty caused by COVID-19 litter in the Netherlands. The find shocked two Leiden-based biologists — Auke-Florian Hiemstra and Liselotte Rambonnet — who wanted to know more about the extent of COVID-19 litter’s impact on wildlife. They embarked on an extensive search, online and in newspapers, to collate examples.

    A perch found trapped in a latex glove (pictured) in a Leiden canal inspired two Dutch biologists to look into how discarded single-use PPE is impacting animals around the world.Auke-Florian Hiemstra

    They found 28 such instances from all around the world, pointing to a larger, global problem.   The earliest reported victim was from April 2020: an American robin in Canada, which appears to have died after getting entangled in a face mask. Pets are at risk, too: In Philadelphia, a domestic cat ingested a glove, and a pet dog in Boston that had consumed a face mask. “Animals with plastic in their stomach could starve to death,” says Rambonnet, of Leiden University.

    “What this paper does is give us insight to the extent of the [COVID-19] litter’s impact on wildlife, so we can make efforts to minimize the consequences,” says Anna Schwarz, a sustainable plastics researcher at TNO, an independent organization for applied scientific research in Utrecht, Netherlands. That could be a tall order: A report published by Hong Kong–based marine conservation organization OceansAsia, for instance, estimates that 1.56 billion face masks would have entered the world’s ocean last year, part of the 8 million to 12 million metric tons of plastic that reaches the oceans annually.

    As the far-reaching impacts of COVID-19 litter on wildlife become more apparent over time, Hiemstra, of the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, and Rambonnet are relying on citizen scientists to help them continue monitoring the situation: At www.covidlitter.com, people from around the world can submit their observations of affected wildlife. To curb the growing hazards, the study authors recommend switching to reusables wherever possible, as well as cutting up disposal gloves and snipping the straps off of single-use masks to prevent animals from getting entangled or trapped in them.

    Sign Up For the Latest from Science News

    Headlines and summaries of the latest Science News articles, delivered to your inbox

    “The paper highlights the importance of proper waste management, especially the recycling or disposal of single-use materials,” says Schwarz.

    But the situation isn’t always so dire. Some animals have commandeered discarded PPE for their own uses. COVID-19 litter has become so pervasive that birds have been observed using face masks and gloves as building materials for their nests. “Bird nests from 2020 are so easy to recognize,” says Hiemstra. More

  • 100 Shares189 Views

    in Heart

    Corals’ hidden genetic diversity corresponds to distinct lifestyles

    Stony corals that build reefs have been hiding their diversity in plain sight. A genetic analysis of the most widespread reef coral in the Indo-Pacific revealed that rather than being a single species (Pachyseris speciosa), it was actually four distinct species of coral, researchers report April 2 in Current Biology.

    Coral reefs are the condominiums of ocean biodiversity, supporting more species per square meter than any other marine habitat. Understanding which coral species foster that biodiversity and how those corals behave is vital to taking care of them, especially as a warming climate threatens overall ocean biodiversity (SN: 5/6/20). “Just knowing what’s there is critical to tracking what we are losing,” says Rebecca Vega-Thurber, a marine microbiologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, who was not involved in the new study. The results suggest other corals thought to be a single species may actually be much more diverse than researchers realized.

    Using a combination of scuba gear and remotely operated vehicles, marine biologist Pim Bongaerts of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and colleagues sampled more than 1,400 P. speciosa corals from the ocean surface down to 80 meters. In the lab, the sampleslooked identical, and their internal structures were indistinguishable in scanning electron microscope images. Yet, their genomes — their full genetic instruction books — revealed the corals had diverged millions of years ago. That made sense for one of the species in the Red Sea’s Gulf of Aqaba, which was geographically separated from the others. But the other three newly identified species lived together on the same reefs in the waters off South Asia. If the corals were living together, why didn’t one overtake the other two, the team wondered.

    Examining habitat data from their dives, the researchers found the three distinct coral species favored different water depths, with one abundant in the top 10 meters and the other two flourishing deeper down. The three coral species also had different concentrations of photosynthetic algae and pigments, suggesting they had distinct strategies for hosting their algae partners that provide food. And spawning times of these three species were slightly spread out too. One released most of its gametes five days after the full moon, another seven days after, and the third at nine days and counting. The separation of spawning could help the eggs and sperm of each species hook up with its correct species match.

    Marine biologists Pim Bongaerts and Norbert Englebert collect coral samples during a dive at Holmes Reef in the Coral Sea north of Australia.David Whillas

    This study is the first to show how a set of cryptic reef corals are splitting up their shared ecological space — by depth, physiology and spawning time, Bongaerts says. “There are all these cryptic lineages occurring, but they’ve largely been ignored from an ecological point of view.”

    The results open the door to the possibility that many other doppelgänger corals may be multiple species that coexist thanks to ecological differences, says reef genomicist Christian Voolstra at the University of Konstanz in Germany. “There is a minimal chance that they picked the unicorn, but I highly doubt it. This paper shows that in all likelihood there is a huge diversity of reef corals with distinct ecologies.” More

  • 163 Shares159 Views

    in Heart

    A trek under Thwaites Glacier’s ice shelf reveals specific risks of warm water

    The under-ice trek of an autonomous underwater vehicle is giving scientists their first direct evidence for how and where warm ocean waters are threatening the stability of Antarctica’s vulnerable Thwaites Glacier. These new data will ultimately help scientists more accurately project the fate of the glacier — how quickly it is melting and retreating inland, and how far it might be from complete collapse, the team reports April 9 in Science Advances.

    “We know there’s a sick patient out there, and it’s not able to tell us where it hurts,” says Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at the University of California, Irvine who was not involved in the new study. “So this is the first diagnosis.”

    Scientists have eyed the Florida-sized Thwaites Glacier with mounting concern for two decades. Satellite images reveal it has been retreating at an alarming rate of somewhere between 0.6 to 0.8 kilometers per year on average since 2001, prompting some to dub it the “doomsday glacier.” But estimates of how quickly the glacier is retreating, based on computer simulations, vary widely from place to place on the glacier, Rignot and other researchers reported in Science Advances in 2019. Such uncertainty is the biggest difficulty when it comes to future projections of sea level rise (SN: 1/7/20).

    The primary culprit for the rapid retreat of Thwaites and other Antarctic glaciers is known: Relatively warm ocean waters sneak beneath the floating ice shelves, the fringes of the glaciers that jut out into the ocean (SN: 9/9/20). This water eats away at the ice shelves’ underpinnings, points where the ice is anchored to the seafloor that buttress the rest of the glacier against sliding into the sea.

    Sign Up For the Latest from Science News

    Headlines and summaries of the latest Science News articles, delivered to your inbox

    Scientists have used satellite data to roughly map out what lies beneath the Thwaites ice shelf. Three deep channels carved into the seafloor snake beneath a vast water-filled cavity 120 kilometers across. But without direct measurements of the chemistry and paths the water takes to reach Thwaites’ underbelly, it’s been impossible to know where the threatening water is really coming from, how warm it is, and where it’s attacking the ice, says Anna Wåhlin, a physical oceanographer at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

    In February and March 2019, Wåhlin and her colleagues sent the AUV Ran to traverse two of the deep channels. Gliding about 50 meters above the seafloor, the AUV collected the first direct measurements of temperature, salinity and oxygen levels in the water. From those measurements, the team was able to trace the origins of different parcels of water mixing beneath Thwaites.

    Based on its chemical makeup, some of the warm water came from neighboring Pine Island Bay. “We were very surprised,” because Pine Island Bay wasn’t previously thought to be a major player in the future of Thwaites, Wåhlin says. The water mass from there was near the bottom of the cavity, about 500 meters deep, and was both less salty than the surrounding seawater and several degrees Celsius warmer than the freezing point. That’s an unstable situation, likely to create turbulence, and increasing the potential for erosion of the ice, Wåhlin says.

    The find also suggests that what happens in Pine Island Bay doesn’t necessarily stay in Pine Island Bay — and that the fate of Thwaites may be closely intertwined with that of the Pine Island Glacier, another rapidly-melting river of ice, Wåhlin says. Together, the two glaciers are responsible for most of the ice and water that Antarctica is currently shedding. But while Thwaites is still pinned to the seafloor in some places, which slows its slide into the sea, those underpinnings are long gone for Pine Island, she says.

    In April, scientists identified three tipping points for the precarious Pine Island glacier, thresholds it might cross as climate conditions evolve that would lead to phases of rapid, irreversible retreat. The third and final threshold, prompted by a roughly 1.2 degree Celsius increase in the temperature of ocean waters compared with current ocean temperatures, would drive the glacier to complete collapse, the team found.

    An upcoming expedition Wåhlin and others are planning for January 2022 will use two AUVs to explore much farther into the cavity beneath Thwaites. Ideally, the AUVS will get several hundred kilometers closer to the shore, all the way to the grounding line, where the base of the glacier rests on land.

    “That’s the key down the line,” Rignot says. Observing how water masses are interacting with the glacier’s grounding line will be crucial to understanding the future of the glacier, he says. “That’s the place where melting makes the most difference to the glacier’s stability.”

    And there’s a lot that researchers still don’t know about the vast water cavity beneath Thwaites ice shelf, including its precise dimensions and the best places for AUVs to explore, he adds. “We are only just at the beginning.” More

  • 100 Shares179 Views

    in Computers Math

    Discovery could help lengthen lifespan of electronic devices

    Ferroelectric materials are used in many devices, including memories, capacitors, actuators and sensors. These devices are commonly used in both consumer and industrial instruments, such as computers, medical ultrasound equipment and underwater sonars.
    Over time, ferroelectric materials are subjected to repeated mechanical and electrical loading, leading to a progressive decrease in their functionality, ultimately resulting in failure. This process is referred to as ‘ferroelectric fatigue’.
    It is a main cause of the failure of a range of electronic devices, with discarded electronics a leading contributor to e-waste. Globally, tens of millions of tonnes of failed electronic devices go to landfill every year.
    Using advanced in-situ electron microscopy, the School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering researchers were able to observe ferroelectric fatigue as it occurred. This technique uses an advanced microscope to ‘see’, in real-time, down to the nanoscale and atomic levels.
    The researchers hope this new observation, described in a paper published in Nature Communications, will help better inform the future design of ferroelectric nanodevices.
    “Our discovery is a significant scientific breakthrough as it shows a clear picture of how the ferroelectric degradation process is present at the nanoscale,” said co-author Professor Xiaozhou Liao, also from the University of Sydney Nano Institute.
    Dr Qianwei Huang, the study’s lead researcher, said: “Although it has long been known that ferroelectric fatigue can shorten the lifespan of electronic devices, how it occurs has previously not been well understood, due to a lack of suitable technology to observe it.”
    Co-author Dr Zibin Chen said: “With this, we hope to better inform the engineering of devices with longer lifespans.”
    Observational findings spark new debate
    Nobel laureate Herbert Kroemer once famously asserted “The interface is the device.” The observations by the Sydney researchers could therefore spark a new debate on whether interfaces — which are physical boundaries separating different regions in materials — are a viable solution to the unreliability of next-generation devices.
    “Our discovery has indicated that interfaces could actually speed up ferroelectric degradation. Therefore, better understanding of these processes is needed to achieve the best performance of devices,” Dr Chen said.
    Story Source:
    Materials provided by University of Sydney. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More

  • 163 Shares129 Views

    in Computers Math

    Could Mario Kart teach us how to reduce world poverty and improve sustainability?

    Many Mario Kart enthusiasts are familiar with the rush of racing down Rainbow Road, barely squeaking around a corner, and catching a power-up from one of the floating square icons on the screen — or, less ideally, slipping on a banana peel laid by another racer and flying off the side of the road into oblivion. This heated competition between multiple players, who use a variety of game tokens and tools to speed ahead or thwart their competitors, is part of what makes the classic Nintendo racing game that has been around since the early 1990s so appealing.
    “It’s been fun since I was a kid, it’s fun for my kids, in part because anyone can play it,” says Andrew Bell, a Boston University College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of earth and environment. But as a researcher studying economic principles, Bell also sees Mario Kart as much more than just a racing game.
    In a recent paper, Bell argues that the principles of Mario Kart — especially the parts of it that make it so addictive and fun for players — can serve as a helpful guide to create more equitable social and economic programs that would better serve farmers in low-resource, rural regions of the developing world. That’s because, even when you’re doing horribly in Mario Kart — flying off the side of Rainbow Road, for example — the game is designed to keep you in the race.
    “Farming is an awful thing to have to do if you don’t want to be a farmer,” Bell says. “You have to be an entrepreneur, you have to be an agronomist, put in a bunch of labor…and in so many parts of the world people are farmers because their parents are farmers and those are the assets and options they had.” This is a common story that Bell has come across many times during research trips to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Malawi, and other countries in southern Africa, and is what largely inspired him to focus his research on policies that could aid in development.
    In his new paper, Bell argues that policies that directly provide assistance to farmers in the world’s poorest developing regions could help reduce poverty overall, while increasing sustainable and environmentally friendly practices. Bell says the idea is a lot like the way that Mario Kart gives players falling behind in the race the best power-ups, designed to bump them towards the front of the pack and keep them in the race. Meanwhile, faster players in the front don’t get these same boosts, and instead typically get weaker powers, such as banana peels to trip up a racer behind them or an ink splat to disrupt the other players’ screens. This boosting principle is called “rubber banding,” and it’s what keeps the game fun and interesting, Bell says, since there is always a chance for you to get ahead.
    “And that’s exactly what we want to do in development,” he says. “And it is really, really difficult to do.”
    In the video game world, rubber banding is simple, since there are no real-world obstacles. But in the real world, the concept of rubber banding to extend financial resources to agricultural families and communities who need it the most is extremely complicated. More