Category: Science News

{Until now, there has not been a way to forecast eruptions of restless volcanoes because of the constant seismic activity and gas and steam emissions. Volcanologists have shown that periods of seismic quiet occur immediately before eruptions and can be used to forecast an eruption. The duration of the silence can indicate the level of energy that will be released. Longer quiet periods mean a bigger bang.}

When dormant volcanoes are about to erupt, they show some predictive characteristics–seismic activity beneath the volcano starts to increase, gas escapes through the vent, or the surrounding ground starts to deform. However, until now, there has not been a way to forecast eruptions of more restless volcanoes because of the constant seismic activity and gas and steam emissions. Carnegie volcanologist Diana Roman, working with a team of scientists from Penn State, Oxford University, the University of Iceland, and INETER has shown that periods of seismic quiet occur immediately before eruptions and can thus be used to forecast an impending eruption for restless volcanoes. The duration of the silence can indicate the level of energy that will be released when eruption occurs. Longer quiet periods mean a bigger bang.

The research is published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

The team monitored a sequence of eruptions at the Telica Volcano in Nicaragua in 2011. It is a so-called stratovolcano, with a classic-looking cone built up by many layers of lava and ash. They started monitoring Telica in 2009 with various instruments and by 2011 they had a comprehensive network within 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) of the volcano’s summit.

The 2011 eruptive event was a month-long series of small to moderate ash explosions. Prior to the eruption, there was a lack of deep seismicity or deformation, and small changes in sulfur dioxide gas emissions, indicating that the eruption was not driven by fresh magma. Instead, the eruption likely resulted from the vents being sealed off so that gas could not escape. This resulted in an increase in the pressure that eventually caused the explosions.

Of the 50 explosions that occurred, 35 had preceding quiet periods lasting 30 minutes or longer. Thirteen explosions were preceded by quiet intervals of at least five minutes. Only two of the 50 did not have any quiet period preceding the explosion.

“It is the proverbial calm before the storm,” remarked Roman. “The icing on the cake is that we could also use these quiet periods to forecast the amount of energy released.”

The researchers did a “hindsight” analysis of the energy released. They found that the longer the quiet phase preceding an explosion, the more energy was released in the ensuing explosion. The quiet periods ranged from 6 minutes before an explosion to over 10 hours (619 minutes) for the largest explosion.

The researchers were also able to forecast a minimum energy for impending explosions based on the data from the previous quiet/explosion pairs and the duration of the particular quiet period being analyzed. The correlation between duration of quiet periods and amount of energy released is tied to the duration of the gas pathways being blocked. The longer the blockage, the more pressure builds up resulting in more energy released. Sealing might be occurring due to mineral precipitation in cracks that previously acted as gas pathways, or due to the settling of the rock near the volcano’s surface.

“What is clear is that this method of careful monitoring of Telica or other similar volcanoes in real time could be used for short-term forecasts of eruptions,” Roman said. “Similar observations of this phenomenon have been noted anecdotally elsewhere. Our work has now quantified that quiet periods can be used for eruption forecasts and that longer quiet periods at recently active volcanoes could indicate a higher risk of energetic eruptions.”

The paper’s other authors are Mel Rodgers of Oxford University, Peter LaFemina of Penn State University, Halldor Geirsson of the University of Iceland, and Virginia Tenorio of the Instituto Nicaraguense de Estudios Territoriales.

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Nicaraguan Institute of Earth Sciences (INETER).

{Cognitive biologists studied tool-related decisionmaking in an Indonesian cockatoo. They found that the animals seemed to carefully ponder about their choices: while doing so the animals scrutinized details such as differences in quality between the two food rewards, but also the functionality of the available tool as means to obtain the out-of reach food in the situation at hand.}

As animal tool use events are extremely rare, is often quickly rated as intelligent. Nevertheless, some types of tool use can be controlled by much simpler processes that are a part of the respective animal’s inborn behavioural repertoire. Intelligent tool use requires the ability to flexibly adapt a behaviour to changing environmental situations. The Indonesian Goffin’s cockatoo has even the rare capacity to use two different types of tools (sticks for probing and raking food into reach as well dropping stones/balls into tubes to knock out a reward inside). The same birds also previously showed a solid performance in the classic “marshmallow” experiment from human psychology: They controlled their impulse to consume an immediate lower quality food item in the prospect of gaining a better food type after a time delay.

Isabelle Laumer, Alice Auersperg und Thomas Bugnyar from the University of Vienna and the Veterinary University of Vienna now investigate flexibility in tool related decision-making in the Goffin’s cockatoo. Two different types of food items were used: Cashew nut which is their favourite food type and Pecan nut which the birds like but disregard if cashew nut is available as well. The also used two types of apparatuses containing a food item which was temporarily out-of-reach and two types of tools: an apparatus which is only operable by probing with a stick tool but not by dropping a ball inside and an apparatus which could only be operated by dropping a ball inside but not by probing with a stick. During testing, an apparatus was placed on a table and a choice between two items (usually a food item and a tool) was offered alongside. Once birds had picked one item the other was immediately removed.

Interestingly, the cockatoos flexibly adapted their decisions to different situations. “If a lower value food or a high value food was out-of-reach inside the apparatus and the choice was between a high value food item and a tool, they chose the food over the tool, even when the tool was functional for the apparatus,” explains Isabelle Laumer who conducted the study as part of her PhD thesis. “However, when the cockatoos could decide between the lower value food and a tool they choose the tool but only provided that it worked for the available apparatus: For example when the stick and the lower value food was available but the ball apparatus was on the table they chose the low value food over the tool. When the stick apparatus with the high value food inside was available they chose the stick tool over the immediate lower value food,” she further elaborates.

Nevertheless, the birds’ ability to solve the problem stopped when both apparatuses were offered at the same time each bearing a different food type and the decision was between the both tools. In the latter case researchers believe that the animals may have hit a limit in working memory capacity due to the amount of task components involved.

“Our findings parallel previous results in primates: the cockatoos could overcome immediate impulses in favor of future gains even if this implied tool use. Beyond that we additionally found that they at same time attended to the functionality of the available tool in the present contex,” says Alice Auersperg, Head of the Goffin Lab in Austria. She continues: “As wild Goffin cockatoos are unlikely to be specialized on tool use, this shows that tool related decision-making can arise from relatively general modes of cognitive processing as, for example a combination of flexibility, sensorimotor and impulse control.”

{Children who often go hungry have a greater risk of developing impulse control problems and engaging in violence, according to new UT Dallas research.}

The study, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, found that people who experienced frequent hunger as kids were more than twice as likely to exhibit impulsivity and injure others intentionally as adolescents and adults.

Thirty-seven percent of the study’s participants who had frequent hunger as children reported that they had been involved in interpersonal violence. Of those who experienced little to no childhood hunger, 15 percent said they were involved in interpersonal violence. The findings were strongest among whites, Hispanics and males.

Previous research has shown that childhood hunger contributes to a variety of other negative outcomes, including poor academic performance. The study is among the first to find a correlation between childhood hunger, low self-control and interpersonal violence.

“Good nutrition is not only critical for academic success, but now we’re showing that it links to behavioral patterns. When kids start to fail in school, they start to fail in other domains of life,” said Dr. Alex Piquero, Ashbel Smith Professor of Criminology and associate dean for graduate programs in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences.

Researchers used data from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions to examine the relationship between childhood hunger, impulsivity and interpersonal violence. Participants in that study responded to a variety of questions including how often they went hungry as a child, whether they have problems controlling their temper, and if they had physically injured another person on purpose.

More than 15 million U.S. children face food insecurity — not having regular access to adequate nutrition, according to the study. Piquero said the results highlight the importance of addressing communities known as food deserts that have little access to grocery stores with healthy food choices.

The findings suggest that strategies aimed at alleviating hunger may also help reduce violence, Piquero said.

“At the very least, we need to get children the nutritional food they need,” Piquero said. “It’s not a very difficult problem to address, and we can envision lots of gains.”

Piquero also has co-authored other recent studies related to the role that self-control plays in delinquency and violence.

{A new study from the Florida State University suggests that inadequate amount of stimulation in the workplace and an unclean working environment can both affect the brain functions of employees on the long run.}

Previously, researchers have been debating whether dirty workplace or working in an unstimulating environment that took the biggest toll on brain health as people aged.

“Psychologists say that the brain is a muscle, while industrial hygienists point to chemicals in the work environment that may cause decline,” explained Joseph Grzywacz, the Norejane Hendrickson Professor of Family and Child Sciences and lead researcher on the study, in a statement.

The new study, published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, suggests that both workplace cleanliness and stimulation plays an important role in the long-term cognitive well-being of employees.

“There are real things in the workplace that can shape cognitive function: some that you can see or touch, and others you can’t. We showed that both matter to cognitive health in adulthood,” Grywacs added in a press release.

For the study, researchers analyzed the data of 4,963 adults aging from 32 to 84 from the 48 contiguous states. The researchers the individual workplace of each participant and their ability to maintain and later use information they learned. Executive functioning skills such as their ability to complete tasks, manage time and pay attention were also observed. Each participant was also asked if they are experiencing any issues in their memory.

Their study resulted into two major findings. First, researchers discovered that learning new skills and facing new challenges resulted in stronger cognitive performance particularly for women as they aged. On the other hand, cognitive decline were observed in both men and women exposed to dirty working environment.

Their findings suggests that higher stimulation in the workplace can improve the cognitive performance of the employees, but at the same time, maintaining clean working environment is also very important to prevent possible decrease in brain function of the employees.

{Milk cartons, toys, grocery bags, bubble wrap, machine parts, and even artificial hips. Every year, humanity makes more products from polyethylene than any other plastic, about 100 million metric tons in all. We also throw a lot of it away. Polyethylenes make up about 60% of the plastics in landfills worldwide, where they degrade slowly if at all. Now, researchers report that they’ve repurposed a pair of existing catalysts to break down a wide array of polyethylenes, converting them into liquid fuels and other valuable chemicals. Faster and more durable versions of the catalysts are in the works, and they could spur recycling efforts that prevent millions of tons of the plastics from clogging our landfills and swirling around the world’s oceans.}

As the name suggests, polyethylenes are made of many copies of ethylene, a simple hydrocarbon building block with two carbon atoms surrounded by four hydrogens. Catalysts connect millions of these ethylenes into long chains, which can be linear or branching, affecting the rigidity, toughness, and density of the finished products. In most cases, the final polyethylenes are inert and stubbornly resistant to breakdown.

That durability stems from a simple fact: All the links between atoms are single bonds, which are highly stable and difficult to break, explains Zhibin Guan, a chemist at the University of California, Irvine, who helped lead the new effort. To change that, Guan and his colleagues teamed up with researchers led by chemist Zheng Huang at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai to repurpose two existing catalysts. These catalysts, developed by University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, chemist Maurice Brookhart and colleagues, are normally used to link short hydrocarbons, called alkanes, together into longer—and more valuable—hydrocarbon chains, such as those found in diesel fuel.

When the two catalysts are added to a batch of short alkanes, the first catalyst strips hydrogen atoms off adjacent carbon atoms in single alkane molecules. The newly free chemical handles bond to each other, forming a double bond between the neighboring carbon atoms. The double bonds create a weak link in the short alkane chains—a vulnerability that the second catalyst exploits to split the alkane chain. Split alkanes then react with each other, forming a soup of very short alkanes and medium-length alkanes. The latter typically contain 10 to 12 carbons—the perfect ingredients for diesel fuel.

Guan and Huang wondered whether the same process could work in reverse to break apart the very long polyethylenes, which can contain up to millions of carbons. To find out, they mixed polyethylene waste such as garbage bags with short liquid alkanes and then added in the two catalysts. Again, the first one stripped off hydrogens from adjacent carbon atoms in both the long polyethylene chains and short alkanes to form double bonds; the second split the molecules and randomly stitched split molecules back together. The result, which the researchers report today in Science Advances, is that they continue to break down the long chains until they reach the size of chains found in fuels and other valuable hydrocarbons.

“This is very innovative and a clever application of these catalysts,” Brookhart says. But he cautions that the process still needs work to be commercially viable. For starters, the catalysts break down polyethylene slowly, over the course of a day or more. They are also expensive and decompose after breaking apart just a few thousand polymer chains, far less than the millions carried out by most commercial catalysts. Guan and his colleagues are working to overcome those problems, in the hopes that they can one day extract new value from the millions of tons of plastic waste that we discard every year.

{Scientists have released survey results showing that children who receive positive attention and care from their parents tend to have high incomes, high happiness levels, academic success, and a strong sense of morality.}

A research group led by NISHIMURA Kazuo (Project Professor at the Kobe University Center for Social Systems Innovation) and YAGI Tadashi (Professor at the Doshisha University Faculty of Economics) have released survey results showing that children who receive positive attention and care from their parents have high incomes, high happiness levels, academic success, and a strong sense of morality. These findings will be presented as a discussion paper at the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI, a Japanese policy think tank).

Project Professor Nishimura’s group aimed to discover the effects of parenting methods in Japan. To achieve this, in January 2016 they carried out an online survey as part of the RIETI project “Fundamental Research for Sustainable Economic Growth in Japan.” They obtained answers from 5000 women and men to questions and statements about their relationships with their parents during childhood, including statements such as “My parents trusted me,” and “I felt like my family had no interest in me.” Using this data, they identified four key factors: (dis)interest, trust, rules, and independence, as well as “time spent together,” and “experiences of being scolded.” Based on their results, the research group divided parenting methods into the following 6 categories.

{{Supportive:}}

High or average levels of independence, high levels of trust, high levels of interest shown in child, large amount of time spent together

{{Strict:}}

Low levels of independence, medium-to-high levels of trust, strict or fairly strict, medium-to-high levels of interest shown in child, many rules

{{Indulgent:}}

High or average levels of trust, not strict at all, time spent together is average or longer than average

{{Easygoing:}}

Low levels of interest shown in child, not strict at all, small amount of time spent together, few rules

{{Harsh:}}

Low levels of interest shown in child, low levels of independence, low levels of trust, strict

{{Average:}}

{{Average levels for all key factors}}

The results demonstrated that people who had experienced “supportive” child-rearing where parents paid them a lot of positive attention reported high salaries, academic success, and high levels of happiness. On the other hand, participants subjected to a “strict” upbringing where parents paid them high levels of attention combined with strict discipline reported high salaries and academic achievement, but lower happiness levels and increased stress.

{Teenagers with type 2 diabetes have significant changes in total brain gray matter volume and in regions of gray matter involved in seeing and hearing, memory, emotions, speech, decision making, and self-control.}

Researchers at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center discovered that these teens have six regions with significantly less gray matter, and three with significantly more. They found a relationship between less gray matter volume in the brain and the ability to pronounce and sound out unfamiliar words.

“Previous studies suggested that youth with type 2 diabetes have changes in brain structure and poorer cognitive function scores compared to their peers,” says Amy Sanghavi Shah, MD, a physician-scientist in the division of Endocrinology at Cincinnati Children’s and senior author of the study. “Total and regional brain volume had not been assessed comprehensively until now. We also sought to determine if the findings we found here could explain poorer cognitive scores.”

The study was presented June 14, 2016 at the American Diabetes Association’s Scientific Sessions in New Orleans. Jacob Redel, MD, a fellow in the division of Endocrinology at Cincinnati Children’s and lead author of the study, presented the findings at the ADA Presidents Oral Session.

The researchers studied 20 teens with type 2 diabetes and compared them to 20 teens without type 2 who were similar in age, race and sex. All participants in the study had high-resolution MRIs. Neither group had prior neurological or psychological disease or prior abnormal MRIs.

“Our results do not show cause and effect,” says Dr. Redel. “We don’t know if the changes we found are the direct result of diabetes, but studies in adults with type 2 diabetes with longer duration of disease also show brain volume differences, brain vascular changes and cognitive decline. However, our findings suggest that preventing type 2 diabetes in adolescents is important to prevent possible complications in the future.”

The researchers are considering another study adding participants who are obese without type 2 diabetes and a larger number of participants. This would allow them to examine whether differences found on MRI are more related to obesity or high blood sugar seen in diabetes and test whether other cognitive domains, such as memory, language, intellect and attention, are affected by brain volume differences.

{Researchers studying bone artefacts discovered in the Kuumbi Cave, Zanzibar, have found evidence to suggest that bone tools were used for hunting, and even as poison arrow tips. The findings, published in the journal Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa, suggest that bone technology was a central element to the Kuumbi Cave’s inhabitants over 13,000 years ago.}

Bone technology — such as its use as an arrow tip — was essential to a Stone Age man’s lifestyle and has been shown to have been in use 60,000 years ago. The majority of the evidence to support this has been found in sites in southern Africa, but now the artefacts found in the Kuumbi Cave show that this technology was being adopted in eastern Africa as well.

The researchers investigated seven bone artefacts recovered from the Kuumbi Cave, five bone projectile points, a bone awl, and a notched bone tube. By analysing the artefacts with a camera and microscopes, they were able to compare the manufacture techniques and wear to previous discoveries and to attempts to replicate this technology in the laboratory.

Their findings showed that the bone projectile points are likely to have been used for poison arrows, partly due to the slender and short nature of the arrow heads, and partly supported by a previous discovery of charcoal from the Mkunazi plant, which is known to have poisonous fruit.

The use of poison-tipped arrows by a Stone Age man is thought to have stemmed from a lack of technology and stone-tipped arrows often lack the power to directly kill larger animals, such as zebra or buffalo. Previous work has estimated that poison-tipped arrows may have been used as far back as 24,000 BP (years before present), and the researchers conclude that this technology, better known from southern Africa, may also have been used 13,000 BP in eastern Africa.

{A University of Toronto-led team has reported the discovery of a new lizard in the middle of the most- visited island in the Caribbean, strengthening a long-held theory that communities of lizards can evolve almost identically on separate islands.}

The chameleon-like lizard — a Greater Antillean anole dubbed Anolis landestoyi for the naturalist who first spotted and photographed it — is one of the first new anole species found in the Dominican Republic in decades.

“As soon as I saw the pictures, I thought, ‘I need to buy a plane ticket,’” says Luke Mahler of U of T’s Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and lead author of an article on the discovery published today online in The American Naturalist.

“Our immediate thought was that this looks like something that’s supposed to be in Cuba, not in Hispaniola — the island that Haiti and the Dominican Republic share,” says Mahler. “We haven’t really seen any completely new species here since the early 1980s.”

What’s more, the new species could help piece together a long-standing puzzle of similar looking species that exist on different Caribbean islands.

“I got a grainy photo from local naturalist Miguel Landestoy, who saw a nesting pair of birds that were mobbing a branch,” says Mahler. “He saw they were flying around what he thought was a new species of heavily camouflaged anole clinging to that branch.” It wasn’t possible to say much from the photo though, and Mahler didn’t think much of it. “You get all these people who say they found a new species but it’s almost always just an atypical individual of a very common species,” says Mahler. “So you get pretty hardened against thinking claims like these are legit.”

A few years after the initial photo, Landestoy caught one of the lizards and emailed clear images of the find to Mahler and several other researchers he’d been working with. “As soon as I opened the email, I thought ‘what on earth is that!?,’” says Mahler.

Well-studied ecologically, Greater Antillean anoles are a textbook example of a phenomenon known as replicated adaptive radiation, where related species evolving on different islands diversify into similar sets of species that occupy the same ecological niches.

Examples of this could be long-tailed grass dwellers, bright green canopy lizards, and stocky brown species that perch low on tree trunks, each living in similar environments on more than one island.

Although most Greater Antillean anoles may have a matching counterpart on another island, scientists have long known that a sizeable fraction do not — roughly one fifth of the region’s anole species are ‘exceptions to the rule’ so far.

Most noticeable among these unique lizards are Cuban anoles from the Chamaeleolis group.

Chamaeleolis anoles look less like typical anoles and more like chameleons: large, cryptic, slow-moving, and prone to clinging to lichen-covered branches high in forest canopies.

Scientists believed there was nothing like these Cuban lizards on the other Greater Antillean islands.

Anolis landestoyi was found in the Dominican Republic but bears a strong resemblance to Cuba’s Chamaeleolis anoles.

The new discovery suggests that there may be fewer exceptions to this island evolution rule than the science community previously appreciated.

“Like the discovery of a missing puzzle piece, Anolis landestoyi clarifies our view of replicated adaptive radiation in anoles,” says Mahler, noting that the discovery adds new support for the idea that the buildup of ecological communities on islands can be surprisingly predictable.

Though new to science, Anolis landestoyi is already at risk. The new species is restricted to a unique habitat only found in a small area in the western Dominican Republic that is rapidly disappearing due to illegal deforestation. Mahler, who also works with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), hopes that the new discovery will help to bring attention to conservation issues in the region.

Next for Mahler and team is to figure out if Anolis landestoyi evolved on Hispaniola to be strikingly similar to Cuba’s Chamaeleolis anoles or if the similarity is due to shared ancestry. The new species and Chamaeleolis are close relatives, but are not next of kin.

“We don’t know if it’s convergence or the fact that it’s pretty closely related to Chamaeleolis, which may have colonized Hispaniola from Cuba,” says Mahler. “But either way, things are more similar across these two islands than we thought.”

“I always wanted to describe a new species,” says Mahler. “Doing so is the fulfillment of a dream I’ve had since I was a little kid.

{A new study suggests an intriguing strategy to boost memory for what you’ve just learned: hit the gym four hours later. The findings reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on June 16 show that physical exercise after learning improves memory and memory traces, but only if the exercise is done in a specific time window and not immediately after learning.}

“It shows that we can improve memory consolidation by doing sports after learning,” says Guillén Fernández of the Donders Institute at the Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands.

In the new study, Fernández, along with Eelco van Dongen and their colleagues, tested the effects of a single session of physical exercise after learning on memory consolidation and long-term memory. Seventy-two study participants learned 90 picture-location associations over a period of approximately 40 minutes before being randomly assigned to one of three groups: one group performed exercise immediately, the second performed exercise four hours later, and the third did not perform any exercise. The exercise consisted of 35 minutes of interval training on an exercise bike at an intensity of up to 80 percent of participants’ maximum heart rates. Forty-eight hours later, participants returned for a test to show how much they remembered while their brains were imaged via magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

The researchers found that those who exercised four hours after their learning session retained the information better two days later than those who exercised either immediately or not at all. The brain images also showed that exercise after a time delay was associated with more precise representations in the hippocampus, an area important to learning and memory, when an individual answered a question correctly.

“Our results suggest that appropriately timed physical exercise can improve long-term memory and highlight the potential of exercise as an intervention in educational and clinical settings,” the researchers conclude.

It’s not yet clear exactly how or why delayed exercise has this effect on memory. However, earlier studies of laboratory animals suggest that naturally occurring chemical compounds in the body known as catecholamines, including dopamine and norepinephrine, can improve memory consolidation, the researchers say. One way to boost catecholamines is through physical exercise.

Fernández says they will now use a similar experimental setup to study the timing and molecular underpinnings of exercise and its influence on learning and memory in more detail.