Earth

What The Study Did: This observational study investigated whether presenting comorbidities in patients with COVID-19 in New York differed by race/ethnicity and whether case fatality rates varied among different ethnic and racial groups while accounting for presenting comorbidities and other risk factors.

Authors: Madhur K. Garg, M.D., and Andrew D. Racine, M.D., Ph.D., of the Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, are the corresponding authors.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

(doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.19795)

Editor's Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.

What The Study Did:Researchers examined changes in how common cardiovascular disease was in the highest-income earners compared with the rest of the population in the United States between 1999 and 2016.

Authors: Salma M. Abdalla, M.B.B.S., M.P.H., of the Boston University School of Public Health, is the corresponding author.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

(doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.18150)

Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.

Analysis of samples taken to test for respiratory viruses over the past five years suggests that the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 was associated with a large drop in circulation of other common respiratory viruses during the first wave. The study, presented at this week's ESCMID Conference on Coronavirus Disease (ECCVID), is by Dr Stephen Poole, BRC Clinical Research Fellow from the Southampton NIHR BRC, Southampton, UK, and colleagues.

Traditionally, respiratory virus associated disease predominantly affects those with underlying lung diseases. SARS-CoV-2 emerged in December 2019 as a novel respiratory viral pathogen in humans. Its effect on other circulating respiratory viruses and its overall impact on viral respiratory disease, remains largely unknown. The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 on the prevalence of common respiratory viruses and the clinical characteristics of respiratory virus associated disease, during the first wave of the pandemic.

Data for this retrospective cohort study were collected from patients who had multiplex polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing for common respiratory viruses as part of 3 large clinical trials during 4 recent winter seasons in Hampshire, England. Patients were adults in the Emergency department or Acute Medical Unit presenting with acute respiratory illness and recruited within the first 24 hours of admission.

The detection of all respiratory viruses during the first epidemic peak of SARS-CoV-2 in the UK (March-May) was compared to the same time period across four of the previous five years. The clinical features and outcomes associated with respiratory virus detection were compared.

The study included 856 patients who had multiplex PCR for respiratory viruses between March and May over 5 winters. Before 2020, a non-SARS-CoV-2 virus was detected in 202 (54%) of 371 patients (47% influenza A+B, 21% rhinovirus) compared to 4% patients (20/485) in 2020.

When compared to other respiratory viruses, patients with SARS-CoV-2 were signficantly less likely to have co-detection of a second respiratory virus (absolute difference 7.2%). As well as having worse clinical outcomes, patients with COVID-19 were much more likely to have pneumonia (81% compared to 24%).

It is well established that existing seasonal respiratory viruses are a frequent cause of exacerbation in COPD and asthma, and this was the diagnosis in 37% of cases from our cohort. Comparatively, these were the main clinical diagnosis in only 1% of SARS-CoV-2 infections.

The authors conclude: "The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 was associated with a substantial reduction in the circulation of other respiratory viruses and a change in the clinical characteristics and outcome of adult respiratory virus associated disease."

Dr Poole adds: "Respiratory virus circulation is notoriously difficult to predict so we cannot say with any degree of certainty what may happen during the second wave. Lockdown measures may have dramatically impacted the spread of other respiratory viruses earlier than COVID-19, due to these viruses having shorter incubation periods. Non-COVID respiratory virus circulation in a second wave will be influenced by public health interventions."

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Millions of people turn to their mobile devices when seeking medical advice. They're able to share their symptoms and receive potential diagnoses through chatbot-based symptom-checker (CSC) apps.

But how do these apps compare to a trip to the doctor's office?

Not well, according to a new study. Researchers from Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology have found that existing CSC apps lack the functions to support the full diagnostic process of a traditional visit to a medical facility. Rather, they said, the apps can only support five processes of an actual exam: establishing a patient history, evaluating symptoms, giving an initial diagnosis, ordering further diagnostic tests, and providing referrals or other follow-up treatments.

"These apps do not support conducting physical exams, providing a final diagnosis, and performing and analyzing test results, because these three processes are difficult to realize using mobile apps," said Yue You, a graduate student in the College of Information Sciences and Technology and lead author on the study.

In the study, the researchers investigated the functionalities of popular CSC apps through a feature review, then examined user experiences by analyzing user reviews and conducting user interviews. Through their user experience analysis, You and her team also found that users perceive CSC apps to lack support for a comprehensive medical history, flexible symptom input, comprehensible questions, and diverse diseases and user groups.

The findings could inform functional and conversational design updates for health care chatbots, such as improving the functions that enable users to input their symptoms or using comprehensible language and providing explanations during conversations.

"Especially in health and medicine, [another question is] is there something else we should consider in the chatbot design, such as how should we let users describe their symptoms when interacting with the chatbot?" said You.

Additionally, the findings could help individuals understand the influence of AI technology, such as how AI could influence or change traditional medical visits.

"In the past, people generally trusted doctors," You said. "But now with the emergence of AI symptom checkers and the internet, people have more sources of information. How would this information challenge doctors? Do people trust this information and why? I think this work is a starting point to think about the influence of AI symptom checkers."

MADISON, Wis. -- Nearly 30 years after recording a temperature of minus 93.2 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 69.6 Celsius) in Greenland, the measurement has been verified by the World Meteorological Organization as the coldest recorded temperature in the Northern Hemisphere.

The measurement was first recorded by a University of Wisconsin-Madison Antarctic Meteorological Research Center Automatic Weather Station in December 1991. An AWS is a standalone instrument suite developed by UW-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center and AMRC scientists and engineers to collect numerous environmental parameters such as air temperature, pressure, humidity, wind direction and speed. The information is then relayed via satellite back to SSEC in near real time.

Over time, these data have come to provide a benchmark for understanding weather extremes and climate change.

"The more data you have, the more you can understand what's going on globally, and make important political and environmental decisions related to climate change," says George Weidner, emeritus researcher with the UW-Madison Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. "It is also an important moment for the AWS systems in that their data are being accepted as official records."

Weidner is the lead author on a new paper published in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society this month that documents the low temperature finding.

In 2007, the WMO created an online archive of weather and climate extremes around the globe, helping to set benchmarks for future climate research. Other measurements include record high temperatures, wind speeds, and the impact of tropical cyclones, including the deadliest in history.

Extreme measurements like that in Greenland undergo a rigorous review process to make sure they are accurate and there is agreement with other meteorological data and weather forecast models. Due to the quality and preservation of the AWS station data provided by the Antarctic Meteorological Research Center, the WMO was able to verify the 1991 temperature and log it as part of the official record.

According to Weidner, this cold temperature was the result of several atmospheric conditions converging in a specific way.

The Klinck field site, where the coldest temperature was measured, is located in the middle of Greenland at an elevation of 10,170 feet (3,100 meters). Extreme cold air temperatures can occur when there is little wind to disturb an area, accompanied by clear skies.

In this case, the elevation and a splitting of the jet stream -- which usually flows over the Greenland ice sheet -- created a dead zone, allowing the already cold region to continue losing heat from the Earth. Similar conditions occur over Canada and result in the famed (or infamous) "polar vortex," which produces extreme cold that reaches the U.S.

For more than 40 years, the network of more than 60 Automatic Weather Station sites has helped provide real-time data for scientists in extreme places like Antarctica and Greenland and has helped build a more complete picture of changes in Earth's climate. In March 2017, the WMO confirmed some of the warmest ever recorded temperatures in Antarctica and used data from AMRC's AWS network to help verify these measurements.

Thunderstorms are weather disturbances characterized by concentrations of thunder, lightning and fierce winds.

When they accumulate in clusters, these storms are often accompanied by violent cloud bursts and flooding, which can devastate the areas affected.

Denmark is no stranger to this phenomenon. In 2011, large parts of Copenhagen were submerged by deluges that lead to roughly 6 billion kroner in damages reported to insurance companies.

In a new study, researchers from the University of Copenhagen shed light on one particular mechanism that has the potential to spawn powerful thunderstorms and cloud bursts:

"We conclude that the atmosphere's ability to generate large thunderstorms is influenced, among other things, by the difference between the temperature of the earth's surface during the night versus during the day. If the difference is great, we see more thunderstorms, and subsequently, more cloud bursts," explains Jan Olaf Härter, an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen's Niels Bohr Institute.

Along with his department colleagues, Härter used computer simulations to study the occurrence of so-called mesoscale convection systems -- particularly powerful thunderstorms that spread out over areas of 100 kilometers or more.

While these types of thunderstorms occur mainly in the tropics, they are also relevant in the Danish context.

"If summertime temperatures in Denmark continue to increase, I would not be surprised if we experience more thunderstorms and cloud bursts. And this is exactly what some climate models predict will occur within the next 20-30 years," says Jan Olaf Härter.

The significance of night- and daytime temperature differences

Thunder occurs when warm, moist surface level air rises into weather and meets cooler air higher up in the atmosphere.

This destabilizes the air above it even more and creates convection, which transports the warm air even higher.

It's like a pot of boiling water -- heated water at the bottom of a pot rises upwards and bubbles to the surface. The same occurs with thunderstorms.

"As warm air is shot up into the atmosphere, it meets with colder air and condenses, i.e., it forms clouds and raindrops. Consequently, thunderstorms are usually followed by dense rain and cloudbursts," explains Silas Boye Nissen, a PhD student at the Niels Bohr Institute, and one of the researchers behind the study.

The researchers conclude that the risk of major thunderstorms and cloud bursts is influenced by differences between the earth's surface temperature at night and day.

When the temperature difference is large, the risk of severe thunderstorms increases. And while scientists can't yet say for sure what affects the temperature differences, they propose a cautious hypothesis.

The difference between day- and nighttime surface temperatures is dependent upon the moisture content of soil.

If soil is moist, temperature differences are reduced; "Like a swimming pool or a sea that moderates day- and nighttime temperatures," explains Härter.

If, on the other hand, soil is dry, high daytime temperatures will decrease significantly overnight, as there is not enough moisture in the soil to absorb the heat.

Thunderstorms boosted by air pockets

Danish thunderstorms typically cover areas of about 10 kilometers, while tropical thunderstorms can spread over areas of 100 kilometers or more.

The reason why thunderstorms can be so powerful, in addition to large day and nighttime temperature variations at the earth's surface, also relates to a self-reinforcing mechanism.

"When differences in air temperature create clouds and intense rain, the rain uses up lots of energy on its way down as it slowly evaporates. As this occurs, each raindrop creates a pocket of cold air around it. As these pockets of cold air collide with other cold air pockets, of other weather systems, more clouds, rain and thunder are formed. This results in a self-reinforcing effect," explains Silas Boye Nissen, who concludes:

Torrential rain from cloud bursts often causes damage to homes and jeopardizes people's lives. As such, it is important to keep researching the causes of extreme weather phenomena."

A new way of analyzing the chemical composition of soil organic matter will help scientists predict how soils store carbon -- and how soil carbon may affect climate in the future, says a Baylor University researcher.

A study by scientists from Iowa State University and Baylor University, published in the academic journal Nature Geoscience, used an archive of data on soils from a wide range of environments across North America -- including tundra, tropical rainforests, deserts and prairies -- to find patterns to better understand the formation of soil organic matter, which is mostly composed of residues left by dead plants and microorganisms.

Researchers analyzed samples of 42 soils from archives of the National Ecological Observatory Network and samples taken from additional sites, representing all of the major soil types on the continent.

The soils were analyzed by William C. Hockaday, Ph.D., associate professor of geosciences at Baylor University, and visiting scientist Chenglong Ye, a postdoctoral scientist at Nanjing Agricultural University, in the Molecular Biogeochemistry Lab at Baylor. They used a technique called nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, which allowed them to analyze the chemical structure and composition of natural organic molecules in the soil.

"Soils are a foundation of society by providing food, clean water and clean air," Hockaday said. "Soils also have a major role in climate change as one of the largest reservoirs of carbon on the planet. Even so, the chemical makeup of this carbon has been debated by scientists for over 100 years."

"With this study, we wanted to address the questions of whether organic matter is chemically similar across environments or if it varies predictably across environments," said Steven Hall, Ph.D., the study's lead author and assistant professor of ecology, evolution and organismal biology at Iowa State.

The study revealed patterns in soil organic matter chemistry that held true across climates. Understanding these patterns, or rules for how and why organic matter forms and persists in soil, will help scientists predict how soils in various ecosystems store carbon. Carbon can contribute to climate change when released from soil into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas. An improved understanding of what kinds of soil carbon exist in different environments can paint a clearer picture of how soil carbon may affect climate and how future climate changes may affect the reservoir of soil carbon, researchers said.

"This study brought together a strong team of scientists, and for me, it was the first time to consider chemical patterns at a continental scale," Hockaday said. "It is exciting and gratifying when you inform a long-standing debate and offer an explanation of a major pattern that exists in nature."

The severe droughts in the USA and Australia are the first sign that the tropics, and their warm temperatures, are apparently expanding in the wake of climate change. But until now, scientists have been unable to conclusively explain the reasons for this, because they were mostly focusing on atmospheric processes. Now, experts at the AWI have solved the puzzle: the alarming expansion of the tropics is not caused by processes in the atmosphere, but quite simply by warming subtropical ocean.

Forest fires in Australia and California, droughts and water shortages in the Mediterranean - in the last few years, events such as these have become more frequent. Researchers attribute this to the fact that the tropics, the warm region surrounding the Equator, appear to be expanding. And that leads to the affected areas becoming hotter and drier. According to the official definition, the tropics extend across the Equator between the latitudes of 23 degrees North and 23 degrees South. The central area is humid, with a great deal of precipitation, while the marginal regions in the north and south are hot and dry. As a result of climate change, however, for some time now the dry regions have been expanding northwards in the Northern Hemisphere - as far as Southern California - and southwards in the Southern Hemisphere.

But up to now, climate researchers have had a problem. They couldn't conclusively explain this obvious expansion of the tropics using their climate models. The models simply didn't show the magnitude and the regional characteristic of the observed expansion. A team working with the physicists Hu Yang and Gerrit Lohmann at the Alfred Wegner Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven (AWI) has now discovered the likely cause. As the AWI experts report in the Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres, the reason for the expansion appears to be an altered warming of the ocean. To date, experts assumed that processes in the atmosphere played a major role - for instance a change in the ozone concentration or the aerosols. It was also thought possible that the natural climate fluctuations that occur every few decades were responsible for the expansion of the tropics. For many years researchers had been looking in the wrong place, so to speak.

"Our simulations show that an enhanced warming over the subtropical ocean in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres are the main drivers," says Hu Yang, the study's lead author. These subtropical warming patterns are generated by the dynamic of subtropical ocean gyres, measuring several hundreds of kilometres in diameter, which rotate slowly. These currents are especially well-known in the Pacific, because the majority of floating marine litter is concentrated in them. "Because the currents in the region bring together the surface warming water masses particularly intensely, it's easier for the subtropical ocean surface to accumulate warmth than in other regions - and the same applies to plastic," says Lohmann. As a result of this warming of the subtropical ocean, the tropical warm ocean regions are expanding. According to his calculations, this phenomenon is the catalyst for the tropics expanding to the north and south. "Previous researchers had been taking an overly complicated approach to the problem, and assumed it was due to complex changes in the atmosphere. In reality, it's due to a relatively simple mechanism involving ocean currents."

What led the experts to explore this avenue: data on ocean gyres that they happened to come across five years ago - data on ocean temperatures and satellite-based data, freely available on databases. Both sources indicated that the gyres were becoming warmer and more powerful. "That's what led us to believe that they might be a decisive factor in the expansion of the tropics," explains Hu Yang.

The AWI experts were right: their findings perfectly correspond to actual observations and the latest field data on tropical expansion. Just like in reality, their climate model shows that the tropics are now stretching farther to the north and south alike. In the Southern Hemisphere, the effect is even more pronounced, because the ocean takes up more of the overall area there than in the Northern Hemisphere.

Yet when it comes to the question of whether the droughts in Australia, California and the Mediterranean are due to the expansion of the tropics, Gerrit Lohmann can't give a definitive answer. "When talking about climate change, it's always difficult to quantify the respective parameters with absolute certainty," he says. "However, we can safely assume that the ocean currents and expansion of the tropics make droughts and hurricanes more likely to occur."

Tsukuba, Japan - To stay, or not to stay? When it comes to nutrient resource patches, researchers from Japan and Switzerland have discovered that marine bacteria have a knack for exploiting them efficiently, timing movements between patches to get the best resources.

In a study published this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A., researchers from the University of Tsukuba and ETH Zurich have revealed that marine bacteria optimize nutrient uptake by switching between dispersal and resource exploitation.

Heterotrophic bacteria (i.e., those that cannot produce their own food, instead obtaining nutrition from other sources of organic carbon, such as plant or animal matter) are the main recyclers of dissolved organic matter (DOM) in the ocean. Hotspots of DOM that are made up of particles, such as marine snow, are important to the global carbon cycle.

"Some groups of heterotrophic bacteria take advantage of these hotspots," says one of the lead authors of the study Assistant Professor Yutaka Yawata. "We used bacteria from one of these groups to look at whether optimal foraging theory is applicable to microbes, because their influence on the global carbon cycle ultimately depends on bacteria's ability to find and obtain nutrients from particles. Borrowing from the field of behavioral ecology, we referred to this process as foraging."

The researchers examined microbial foraging by studying the behavior of marine bacteria in seascapes of organic particles. They conducted experiments using single-cell tracking, where bacteria were video-recorded and the number of bacteria and the amount of time they spent on a surface was extracted and modelled.

"We found that foraging marine bacteria optimize nutrient uptake by rapidly switching between attached and planktonic lifestyles, and fine-tune the time spent on particles according to patch quality," explains Assistant Professor Yawata. "Bacteria stay longer on particles of higher quality, as predicted by patch use theory."

Patch use theory, which is part of optimal foraging theory, predicts that organisms foraging in a mixed-resource environment balance the time spent on a patch that yields diminishing returns with the costs of leaving that patch to find a fresh one. Until this study, the applicability of optimal foraging theory to microorganisms has been largely unknown.

Optimal foraging theory--and specifically patch use theory--provides a valuable framework for understanding microorganisms and their effects on ecosystems, such as quantifying and predicting the role of marine bacteria in the uptake and cycling of ocean nutrients.

A marine heatwave (ocean heatwave) is an extended period of time in which the water temperature in a particular ocean region is abnormally high. In recent years, heatwaves of this kind have caused considerable changes to the ecosystems in the open seas and at the coast. Their list of negative effects is long: Marine heatwaves can lead to increased mortality among birds, fish and marine mammals, they can trigger harmful algal blooms, and greatly reduce the supply of nutrients in the ocean. Heatwaves also lead to coral bleaching, trigger movements of fish communities to colder waters, and may contribute to the sharp decline of the polar icecaps.

Researchers led by Bern-based marine scientist Charlotte Laufkötter have been investigating the question of how anthropogenic climate change has been affecting major marine heatwaves in recent decades. In a study recently published in the well-known scientific journal Science, Charlotte Laufkötter, Jakob Zscheischler and Thomas Frölicher concluded that the probability of such events has increased massively as a result of global warming. The analysis has shown that in the past 40 years, marine heatwaves have become considerably longer and more pronounced in all of the world's oceans. "The recent heatwaves have had a serious impact on marine ecosystems, which need a long time to recover afterwards - if they ever fully recover," explains Charlotte Laufkötter.

A huge increase since the 1980s

In its investigations, the Bern team studied satellite measurements of the sea surface temperature between 1981 and 2017. It was found that in the first decade of the study period, 27 major heatwaves occurred which lasted 32 days on average. They reached maximum temperatures of 4.8 degrees Celsius above the long-term average temperature. In the most recent decade to be analyzed, however, 172 major events occurred, lasting an average of 48 days and reaching peaks of 5.5 degrees above the long-term average temperature. The temperatures in the sea usually fluctuate only slightly. Week-long deviations of 5.5 degrees over an area of 1.5 million square kilometers - an area 35 times the size of Switzerland - present an extraordinary change to the living conditions of marine organisms.

Statistical analyses demonstrate human influence

For the seven marine heatwaves with the greatest impact, researchers at the University of Bern carried out what is referred to as attribution studies. Statistical analyses and climate simulations are used to assess the extent to which anthropogenic climate change is responsible for the occurrence of individual extremes in the weather conditions or the climate. Attribution studies typically demonstrate how the frequency of the extremes has changed through human influence.

Without ambitious climate goals, marine ecosystems might disappear

According to the findings of the attribution studies, major marine heatwaves have become more than 20 times more frequent due to human influence. While they occurred every hundred or thousand years in the pre-industrial age, depending on the progress of global warming, in the future they are set to become the norm. If we are able to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, heatwaves will occur once every decade or century. If temperatures rise by 3 degrees, however, extreme situations can be expected to occur in the world's oceans once per year or decade. "Ambitious climate goals are an absolute necessity for reducing the risk of unprecedented marine heatwaves," emphasizes Charlotte Laufkötter. "They are the only way to prevent the irreversible loss of some of the most valuable marine ecosystems."

Women receiving fertility-sparing surgery for treatment of borderline ovarian tumours were able to have children, a study from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden published in Fertility & Sterility shows. Natural fertility was preserved in most of them and only a small proportion required assisted reproductive treatment such as in vitro fertilization. Survival in the group was also as high as in women who had undergone radical surgical for treatment of similar tumours.

"The ability to become pregnant seems to be preserved with fertility-sparing surgery, a knowledge that is absolutely critical for the advice and treatment given to young women with ovarian borderline tumours," says the study's first author Gry Johansen, doctoral student at the Department of Oncology-Pathology, Karolinska Institutet.

Earlier studies of fertility-sparing surgery (FSS) for borderline ovarian tumours (BOT) have primarily focused on the oncological therapeutic outcome, and knowledge about pregnancy and childbirth after FSS has been scant. In this study, researchers at Karolinska Institutet have also examined the effects of FSS on fertility in women of a fertile age treated for early-stage BOT.

Every year, some 700 women in Sweden develop ovarian cancer. Up to 20 percent of ovarian tumours are BOTs, and of these a third are diagnosed in young women of fertile age. FSS - which preserves the uterus and at least parts of the ovaries - is the most common option for women wishing to preserve fertility.

The relapse risk after FSS is larger than after radical cancer treatment, in which the uterus and both ovaries are removed, but the advantages make it an accepted course of action for young women.

The study is based on data from Sweden's healthcare registers. The selection included all women between the ages of 18 and 40 who received FSS for early-stage BOT between 2008 and 2015, according to the Swedish Quality Registry for Gynaecologic Cancer (SQRGC). The control group were peers with similar tumours treated with radical surgery.

The women who had given birth after FSS were identified using the National Board of Health and Welfare's Medical Birth Register and the National Quality Registry for Assisted Reproduction (Q-IVF).
In Sweden, assisted reproduction (IVF) is offered by the public health services and is free of charge for women under 40.

Of the 213 women who underwent FSS between 2008 and 2015 in Sweden, 23 percent had given birth to 62 babies after treatment. A minority - 20 women or 9 percent of the cohort - had undergone IVF. The women who had given birth after FSS were followed for 76 months, while the women who had not given birth were followed for 58 months.

The survival rate for the entire cohort of 277 women was an excellent 99 percent, and there was no difference between those who had received FSS and those who had undergone radical surgical cancer treatment.

"In the choice of treatment for borderline ovarian tumours, safety and the effectiveness for future childbearing must be taken into account," says the study's last author Kenny Rodriguez-Wallberg, researcher at the Department of Oncology-Pathology, Karolinska Institutet.

(Jena, Germany) The share of energy from renewable sources is constantly on the rise in Germany. At the beginning of 2020, for the first time ever, renewable energy was able to cover more than half of the electricity consumed in Germany. But the more important renewable energy sources become, the more urgent is the need to store the electricity produced in this way. Green energy could then also be used when the sun is not shining on the solar panels or no airflow is driving the wind turbines. To achieve this, suitable energy storage devices are indispensable. Researchers at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany) have recently developed promising new polymer electrolytes for redox flow batteries, which are flexible, efficient, and environmentally friendly. They report on their success in the current issue of the renowned research journal Advanced Energy Materials.

Huge potential of redox flow batteries

The new material developed by the Jena chemists is used in so-called redox flow batteries. "In this type of battery, the energy-storing components are dissolved in a solvent and can therefore be stored at a decentralised location, which allows the battery to be scaled as required, from a few millilitres to several cubic metres of electrolyte solution," says Prof. Dr Ulrich S. Schubert of the Center for Energy and Environmental Chemistry Jena (CEEC Jena) at the Friedrich Schiller University.

Thanks to this flexibility, redox flow batteries generally have a great potential to become an important means of energy storage in the future. Until now, however, they suffered from two weaknesses that have prevented their widespread use. The first was the frequent usage of environmentally hazardous and toxic heavy metal salts, such as vanadium dissolved in sulfuric acid, as electrolytes. The other problem was the restriction of the batteries to a maximum working temperature of 40 degrees Celsius, which necessitated the usage of an elaborate cooling system. With the help of the new material, these two problems were solved.

Cleaner, more heat-resistant, more efficient

"We have designed a new type of polymer that is soluble in water, which makes it suitable for use in an aqueous electrolyte, and that contains iron, which provides the ability to store electricity," explains Schubert. "At the same time, the polymer can cope with a significantly higher temperature of up to 60 degrees Celsius, so that the additional expense for a sensitive temperature management is eliminated." In addition, during their tests with the new system, the Jena researchers discovered that it also works more efficiently than its predecessors.

This means that electricity can be stored in a non-hazardous, water-based solution, which is then stored temporarily in tanks, and the electricity in the battery can be used again the next day without significant losses or additional effort. Systems of this kind can also be used in warmer regions, such as Africa, India or Brazil. "By improving the energy storage medium, we believe that the redox flow battery is once again in a good position to make an important contribution as the energy storage technology of the future," says Schubert. "And our development shows once again the great importance of novel polymers for the development of innovative storage methods."

New scientific publications reviewed since January 2020 strengthen the evidence that climate change increases the frequency and/or severity of fire weather in many regions of the world.

Published today at ScienceBrief.org, the updated review on the link between climate change and risks of wildfires focuses on articles relevant to the fires ongoing in the western United States, new findings relevant to the southeastern Australian wildfires that raged during the 2019-2020 season, and new findings published since an initial review of research was conducted in January 2020.

The ScienceBrief Review in January looked at 57 peer-reviewed papers on the link between climate change and wildfire risk published since the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report in 2013.

The update, led by Dr Matthew Jones of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia (UEA), covers 116 scientific articles. It involved researchers from UEA, the University of California, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia, and Met Office Hadley Centre, at the University of Exeter.

Fire weather refers to periods with a high fire risk due to a combination of high temperatures, low humidity, low rainfall and often high winds.

The western US is among the regions where the trends in fire weather have been most pronounced in the past at least 40 years. Fire activity is influenced by a range of other factors including land management practices. However, the authors say land management alone cannot explain recent increases in wildfire extent and intensity in the western US or southeast Australia because increased fire weather from climate change amplifies fire risk where fuels remain available.

Dr Jones, a senior research associate, said: “The western US is a hot spot for increases in fire weather caused by climate change, and it is completely unsurprising that wildfires are becoming more frequent and intense in the region.

“The western US is now more exposed to fire risks than it was before humans began altering the global climate by using fossil energy on a grand scale. Regardless of the ignition source, warmer, drier forests are primed to burn more regularly than they were in the past.

“Climate models indicate that fire weather will continue to rise this century in many parts of the world, and increasingly so for each added degree of global warming. A switch to an economy supported by renewable energy sources is needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change on fire risk.”

Key messages from the new analysis:

More than 100 studies published since 2013 show strong consensus that climate change promotes the weather conditions on which wildfires depend, increasing their likelihood.

Natural variability is superimposed on the increasingly warm and dry background conditions resulting from climate change, leading to more extreme fires and more extreme fire seasons.

Land management can enhance or compound climate-driven changes in wildfire risk, either through fuel reductions or fuel accumulation as unintended by-product of fire suppression. Fire suppression efforts are made more difficult by climate change.

There is an unequivocal and pervasive role of climate change in increasing the intensity and length in which fire weather occurs; land management is likely to have contributed too, but does not alone account for recent increases in wildfire extent and severity in the western US and in southeast Australia.

Informing the century-long riddle of why some birds, despite having a radically different forebrain organization than mammals, demonstrate comparable cognitive abilities, two new studies report that a neuron-dense part of the avian brain, the pallium, may help birds achieve these cognitive feats, including conscious awareness. Instead of the hallmark layering found in the cerebral cortex of mammals, the pallium in birds is characterized by high neuron density. Using 3d-polarized light imaging and neural circuit tracing techniques, Martin Stacho and colleagues characterized the anatomy of the pallium in pigeons and owls, which allowed them to visualize the region's neuronal structure in great detail. Stacho et al. discovered that the pallial fibers' structure and circuitry in each of the distantly related bird species are strikingly similar to the layered architecture of the mammalian cortex. This organization may be the foundation of birds' exceptional cognitive abilities. Andreas Nieder and colleagues observed the neuronal response in trained carrion crows as they responded to visual stimuli. The results revealed that, like the prefrontal cortex of primates, the pallium of crows exhibits neural activity that seemingly corresponds to the animal's perception about what it has seen, which may be a marker for consciousness, according to the authors. The two studies raise an interesting suggestion - could the mammalian cortex-like neural hardware that allows for complex cognitive abilities, such as consciousness, have already existed in the last common ancestor of birds and mammals 320 million years ago? Or, perhaps, it arose independently in both classes, despite very different forebrain organizations, by way of convergent evolution. Suzana Herculano-Houzel discusses the papers further in a related Perspective.

Severe marine heatwaves, like 2015's Pacific "blob," are far more likely to occur now than before human-induced global warming began, according to a new study. The findings underscore the importance of achieving ambitious climate goals to reduce the risks of marine heatwaves (MHWs) and avoid irreversible damage to marine ecosystems worldwide. In the last several decades, MHWs - localized periods of extremely high ocean temperatures - have been observed in all Earth's oceans. The longest and largest of which, often referred to as "the blob", occurred between 2013 and 2015 and saw sea temperatures in the north Pacific increase by more than 2.5 degrees Celsius (°C). Like many others in the recent past, this event has had severe impacts on marine organisms and ecosystems and the economic systems they support. However, very few studies to date have explored the link between global warming and the frequency and severity of MHWs. To better understand the human influence on these events and how they've changed due to our rapidly warming world, Charlotte Laufkötter and colleagues evaluated seven of the largest, most impactful and most recent MHWs. Using modeled simulations, they calculated how likely it would be for each to occur during preindustrial and modern climate conditions. The results show that the probabilities of high-impact MHWs occurring have significantly increased due to anthropogenic climate change. According to Laufkötter et al., the most impactful MHWs observed in the last decade would have occurred once every hundreds to thousands of years in preindustrial climate. These same events are projected to occur on a centennial to decadal basis under 1.5°C warming conditions and on a decadal to annual basis should the global average atmospheric temperature rise by 3 °C.