Earth

Axions are hypothetical elementary particles which were first postulated by physicists in order to solve the so-called strong CP problem, a theoretical inadequacy of the strong interaction. However, in the past few years it has emerged that axions or axion-like particles (ALPs) could also help to solve other puzzles in modern physics. They are seen as promising candidates for constituents of dark matter and their existence might also explain the experiment/theory discrepancy when it comes to the value of the anomalous magnetic moment of muons, as has been recently shown by physicists from Mainz. The search for these ALPs is therefore a very topical issue. "In the last few years, physicists have developed numerous forms of related experiments, and have particularly concentrated on looking at ultra-light ALPs as possible candidates for what makes up dark matter," Prof. Matthias Schott explains. "Now, for the first time, we are proposing a detailed research program using the LHC's ATLAS Experiment where we can undertake a targeted search for relatively heavy ALPs, which, once found, could solve the problem associated with the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon."

The search can now begin. The European Research Council (ERC) is supporting the project, entitled 'Search for Axion-Like Particles at the LHC - Light@LHC', awarding an ERC Consolidator Grant of more than €1.5 million to Matthias Schott. The project will be carried out over the next 5 years within the PRISMA+ Cluster of Excellence at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU).

New analysis algorithms are based on artificial intelligence

When the LHC, the world's largest particle accelerator, comes back online in 2021 after its long break, Matthias Schott and his team of researchers will be focusing on two processes that occur following the collision of protons or lead atoms. Firstly, it is postulated that a Higgs-Boson decays into two ALPs which in turn decay into two photons; secondly, it is assumed that ALPs initially develop from two photons before decaying into two photons again.

Although this may sound simple, it is in fact highly complex. "We therefore need completely new approaches for identifying photons and analyzing the results," Schott illustrates. "In order to achieve the required sensitivity for photon detection, we have to develop special reconstruction algorithms, for example, which are based on modern concepts employed in connection with artificial intelligence. Of course, we hope that these developments will also prove successful in the other fields of physics covered by the ATLAS Experiment." But that's not the whole story. Even with the new, specially developed algorithms that will enable them to cover a very large search area, it will not be possible for the researchers to 'capture' all of the ALPs they may be hoping to net. In order to offset this, from 2021 CERN is expected to begin working on a new experiment in a side tunnel of the LHC. Around 480 meters behind the ATLAS Experiment, the FASER Detector will primarily be used to register particles that interact so weakly with other particles that they simply continue unimpeded on their original trajectory, making them invisible to previous detectors. "Hence FASER is predestined, so to speak, to look for ALPs. And with the help of the ERC grant, we plan to build a specially designed ALP-detecting component for the detector here in Mainz, and then transport it to CERN."

ERC Consolidator Grants for outstanding researchers

The ERC Consolidator Grant is one of the most richly endowed EU funding awards for individual researchers. The European Research Council uses these grants to support outstanding researchers in developing their own projects, usually seven to twelve years after they have completed their doctorates. In order to receive a grant, applicants must not only demonstrate excellence in research, but also provide evidence of the pioneering nature of their project and its feasibility.

Matthias Schott, born in Nuremberg in 1979, studied physics at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg and the University of Cambridge in the UK, and acquired his doctorate at the Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich. In 2008, he was awarded one of the eminent Fellowships of the CERN research center in Geneva and as a result of his outstanding research was appointed to a CERN Research Staff post in 2010. In August 2012, Matthias Schott came to JGU where he set up an Emmy Noether junior research group funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG); later he was awarded a Lichtenberg Professorship sponsored by the Volkswagen foundation, aiming at the high-precision measurement of the mass of the W boson at hadron colliders. After research stays at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University College London, Matthias Schott continues his research as full professor for Experimental Particle Physics at JGU.

In 1945, the Soviet Army seized the film archive of the Third Reich, the so-called Reichfilmarchive, and brought it from Berlin to Moscow. The archive contained thousands of movies from various countries. Since then, the German, American, and a few European trophies circulated throughout the Soviet Union despite a lack of an effective distribution license. This copyright violation turned out to be a stumbling block in the relations between the USSR and the USA, while the early Cold War confrontation between the two superpowers added a political twist to the conflict.

Both countries were now using cinematography as a weapon in their fight, trying to do as much harm to the opponent as possible. Kristina Tanis https://www.hse.ru/staff/tanis, a researcher from HSE University, investigates the battles between the two film industries.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17503132.2019.1652395

The Soviet Union benefited from screening foreign films at the end of the 1940s and the start of the 1950s for two reasons. On the one hand, the distribution of the films provided a source of revenue from the box office. On the other hand, foreign movies expanded the Soviet film repertoire during the so-called film-famine (malokartinye), which coincided with a policy of making 'fewer but better films'. For example, as many as 48 foreign movies and only 22 Soviet pictures were screened in 1948. The situation remained pretty much the same over the following couple of years, with this ratio being 44: 11 in 1949; 27: 13 in 1950; 37: 10 in 1951, and 39: 22 in 1952.

Foreign movies were shown either in state city cinemas or in closed networks. While anybody could buy a ticket to the state cinema, the closed networks, such as cinema clubs and other venues, distributed tickets to 'members only'.

'Bootleg' Hollywood

As far as foreign films are concerned, the state cinemas demonstrated either German trophy films seized in Berlin, or the European and American pictures previously licensed for broadcast.

At the end of the 1940s, copyright was governed by the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, which was adopted in 1886. Neither the USA nor the USSR was a signee to document. Moreover, the two countries did not have any bilateral agreement protecting copyright, and this resulted in the uncertain legal status of the American pictures from the Reichfilmarchive. Soviet officials did not dare broadcast them publicly, as they were afraid of being accused of theft, and they would prefer to avoid any risk of an international scandal. The USA was an ally of the USSR in WWII, and their movies could hardly be regarded as trophies. On the other hand, the Soviet Union did not want to lose a reliable source of income either. The Soviet Ministry of Cinematography released American movies in closed networks. The films were often renamed or modified, if needed, e.g., scenes of a religious, ideological, mystical or erotic nature were cut out before a film was screened. No advertising in the press was allowed. A precedent was set though.

On February 22, 1949, Ivan Bolshakov, the Soviet Minister of Cinematography, wrote an indignant letter to the Head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department:

'On behalf of the Ministry of Cinematography of the USSR, I would like to draw your attention to the inadmissibility of the publication in the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda of the title of the American film Venetian Adventures released on closed screens. The American film Venetian Adventures (original title The Adventures of Marco Polo) was only allowed to be screened on a closed network, without any advertising. The publication in the press of any information about the films might lead to the studio receiving claims, since we have no license for broadcasting these films. The USSR

Ministry of Cinematography appeals to prohibit the publication by the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda of any information about films released on closed networks.'

In 1948, the United States proposed that the USSR purchase 20 Hollywood films for a total of USE 1,000,000. The films included both new works and some of the booties kept in the Soviet film archive.

Negotiations lasted two years and were widely covered in the American and European press, which was designed to show that the Soviet Union did not shut itself off from the world. Unfortunately, the parties failed to reach any agreement.

Mirror Response

Meanwhile, the US started the production of the anti-Soviet film The Iron Curtain based upon a true story of Soviet defector Igor Gouzenko. In September 1945, a clerk of the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Igor Gouzenko, applied for political asylum, providing the Canadian authorities with evidence on Soviet nuclear espionage in Canada. The Gouzenko Affair served as a catalyst for the deterioration of relations between East and West. The movie was directed by William Wellman, Twentieth Century Fox, and screened in 1950. The works of Aram Khachaturian, Sergei Prokofiev, Nikolai

Miaskovsky, and Dmitry Shostakovich were used as the film score.

The illegal use of these Soviet composers' works made it possible for the USSR to instigate proceedings against the Hollywood company and unleash an active accusatory campaign in the press, trying to ban the release of the film and discredit the American film industry for Western European film markets. Although the legal claims came to nothing, as the two countries had not concluded any bilateral or international copyright agreement, the first nights of The Iron Curtain were accompanied by communist protests across Europe. Eventually, the Soviet officials gained an official injunction in the French Union, Luxemburg, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, and Italy.

In revenge, the Soviet authorities decided to film an anti-American movie. The Ministry of Cinematography was supposed to produce a film drawn upon the American defector Annabelle Bucar's book The

Truth about American Diplomats and also make a film sketch based on Maksim Gorky's novel City of the Yellow Devil. Alexander Dovzhenko was appointed to direct the cinematic adaptation of Bucar's book. The film called Farewell, America was scheduled for release in 1951, but, for unknown reasons, the film was put on shelf until 1996. As for the production of the film sketch based on Gorky's novel, no relevant documents can be found in the Ministry of Cinematography's archive.

After the release of The Iron Curtain, the Soviet authorities felt entitled to show American films from the seized Reichsfilmarchive publicly in state cinemas. In 1949, Frank Capra's film Mr. Deeds Goes to Town appeared on Soviet screens under the modified title The Dollar Rules. The original plot of the movie was changed dramatically. In the American film, the main character, a naïve Mr. Deeds, inherits a fortune and moves from a small town to New York, where he faces the cynicism and injustice of the megalopolis. Overcoming all obstacles, Deeds comes out as winner and finds true love. While the original film had a happy ending, the Soviet version depicts the anti-humanism of the US social and political system, ending with a close-up of the imprisoned protagonist. Moreover, the following opening credits prefaced this film:

'Gorky called New York the citadel of American imperialism, and the "city of the yellow devil". People sacrifice everything to money here, i.e., the conscience of a judge, the honour of a journalist, the life of millions of ordinary people. The main character of this film, Longfellow Deeds, is an honest but simple-minded person who tries to help people without shelter and work. For the Soviet viewer, it is not difficult to understand that, going this way, Deeds cannot change anything in the world of the Yellow Devil, the dollar.

Starting from 1950, Soviet officials added the opening credit title 'This film was captured as a trophy...' to each film of the Reichfilmarchive, which aggravated the diplomatic confrontation over the copyright between the USA and the USSR that lasted until the Soviet-American relations improved under Nikita Khrushchev.

In September 1952, the Universal Copyright Convention (UCC) was accepted under the auspices of UNESCO. The treaty filled in the gaps of the international legal framework caused by the Berne Convention, centered largely on European countries.

Foreign Movies through the Eyes of the Soviet Viewers

The Soviet cultural phenomenon of trophy films began appearing in the late Stalin period. Interestingly enough, viewers' attitudes to those movies changed dramatically over the 30-40 years after their release. While at the end of the 1940s, those pictures were believed to be primitive and inane, at the beginning of the 1990s, people regarded them as a taste of freedom.

This is indicated by what's written in people's diaries. For instance, in 1948, Boris Vronsky, a geologist, a writer and a poet, recollects that 'it's been a long time since I last was in a cinema club. Tonight I watched La bohème, one of the German films which Glavkinoprokat allows to be screened from time to time. Beautiful voices, good acting, although the plot is a bit trite.' He added a few months later: 'I've taken my daughter to the cinema today. It was one of the German musical comedies, Song for You, a banal and inept thing, the only merit of which is the main character's voice.'

In his novel In Search of Melancholy Baby (written in 1987 in the USA, first published in Russia in 1991), Vasily Aksenov writes that 'I have watched The Journey Will Be Dangerous (originally titled Stagecoach) 10 times or more, and The Fate of the Soldier In America (originally titled Roaring Twenties) at least fifteen times. My friends and I used to quote those films incessantly. For us, they were a window into a bigger world, outside of Stalin's stinky den.'

'In the 1940-1950s, viewers scrutinized entertaining and ideology-free movies of different genres though the lens of the "high-brow message", where each piece of work was supposed to convey, or in the context of education, asking themselves what they could learn by watching a particular movie' explains the author of the research. 'In 1980-1990s, trophy films were regarded as a window to another world and, in general, as a trigger of destalinization and total westernization processes, or sometimes even the collapse of the USSR. The differences in the interpretation might have depended on the common historical context that set certain perception, or, perhaps, the Soviet viewers simply did not know the right words to describe the entertaining movies.

Cold cloud top temperatures can tell forecasters if a tropical cyclone has the potential to generate heavy rainfall, and that is exactly what NASA's Aqua satellite found when it observed the temperatures in Tropical Cyclone Belna over northwestern Madagascar.

One of the ways NASA researches tropical cyclones is using infrared data that provides temperature information. The AIRS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a look at those temperatures in Belna and gave insight into the storm's strength.

Cloud top temperatures provide information to forecasters about where the strongest storms are located within a tropical cyclone. Tropical cyclones do not always have uniform strength, and some sides have stronger sides than others. The stronger the storms, the higher they extend into the troposphere, and the colder the cloud temperatures are.

On Dec. 9 at 5:35 p.m. EST (2235 UTC) NASA's Aqua satellite analyzed the storm using the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument. AIRS found coldest cloud top temperatures as cold as or colder than minus 63 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 53 degrees Celsius) around the center and in a band of thunderstorms east of center over northwestern Madagascar. NASA research has shown that cloud top temperatures that cold indicate strong storms that have the capability to create heavy rain.

ReliefWeb reported that Belna made landfall in Soalala district in the west of Madagascar during the afternoon on Dec. 9. The rainfall that was evident in the AIRS infrared imagery occurred upon landfall, coupled with strong winds.

On Dec. 10 at 4 a.m. EST (0900 UTC), forecasters at the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) noted that Belna had weakened to a tropical storm and had maximum sustained winds near 60 knots (69 mph/111 kph). Belna was moving to the south.

Belna was located near latitude 18.3 degrees south and longitude 44.8 degrees east. It was over land in west-central Madagascar and about 349 nautical miles northeast of Europa Island. Europa Island is a tropical atoll in the Mozambique Channel. It is located about one-third of the way between southern Madagascar and Mozambique.

The JTWC forecast calls for Belna to move south-southeast across Madagascar. The storm will slowly weaken and is expected to dissipate in south central Madagascar by Dec. 12.

Tropical cyclones and hurricanes are the most powerful weather events on Earth. NASA's expertise in space and scientific exploration contributes to essential services provided to the American people by other federal agencies, such as hurricane weather forecasting.

The AIRS instrument is one of six instruments flying on board NASA's Aqua satellite, launched on May 4, 2002.

By Rob Gutro
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Prior to starting the project, which involved 3,000 primary school children across North East England, knowledge of UK mammals was generally poor. On average, pupils were able to name only three wild UK mammals. In most cases pupils were able to name more domestic animals than wild animals and a quarter of pupils named zoo animals like lions.

Samantha Mason, a PhD candidate at Durham University, who will be presenting the findings at the conference, said: "Some species that you might think more pupils would name such as hedgehogs and badgers were named by less than 20% of pupils, perhaps because of the strongly nocturnal nature of these species. Otter and beavers, both the focus of conservation successes over recent decades, were named by less than 5% of pupils."

After participating in the project, pupils could name on average, six UK mammals. They were also more likely to name animals to species level rather than group, for instance 'grey squirrel' instead of 'squirrel'. They could also better distinguish between native and introduced species.

Preliminary results also suggest that pupils had an increased connection to nature after participating in the project.

Teachers also showed an increased knowledge of UK mammals after the project and reported feeling inspired to include more outdoor learning in school. Some of the schools involved even went on to buy their own camera traps.

On the benefits of the MammalWeb project, Samantha Mason said: "Not only does this project increase the amount of data we have for UK wildlife, providing crucial knowledge to aid in conservation, it benefits the participants involved by increasing their knowledge and connection to nature, which in turn has been shown to have many positive benefits on physical and mental health.

"These benefits exert positive feedback on each other. When an individual benefits from being part of the project they will likely submit more records, and so will benefit even further from it. In many cases the initial intervention may only need to be small for it to spark this positive feedback loop and create a large impact.

"Schools have the potential to be key participants in ecological citizen science projects, contributing valuable data in large quantities. There seems to be a latent enthusiasm for local biodiversity within schools that we're not currently tapping into."

The MammalWeb project involved lending camera traps, normally used by researchers in the field, to 42 schools in the North East of England for one month. In that time schools contributed over 2,000 photo sequences and submitted over 13,000 classifications.

Schools also received either a workshop for pupils or training session for teachers where they learnt about UK mammals and practised classifying them. Children completed questionnaires before and after their involvement in the project, one of the key questions being "Please name all the mammals you know that live in the UK".

The researchers found there was large variation in the size and quality in the outdoor areas of the schools. Some only had small areas of concrete with few places for camera traps, which consequently captured very little wildlife. "It is evident that, in these schools in particular, more effort needs to be put in to make sure these pupils have opportunities to learn about and connect with nature.", said Samantha Mason.

The researchers also acknowledge that pressures on teachers and schools leave little scope for outdoor learning or extra-curricular activities on local wildlife. "One way of overcoming this is to try to integrate wider scientific projects with aspects of the curriculum.", said Samantha. "For example, recognising that living things can be grouped in a variety of ways, could be taught by grouping species captured on camera traps into nocturnal/diurnal categories".

With more support the researchers hope to expand the project to include more areas in the UK. This would allow them to compare the impacts of the project on children living in urban and rural environments. Other citizen sciences projects could also be brought in to expand beyond mammals.

"With sufficient funding, there is no reason why we couldn't work with schools in Europe in the future", said Samantha. "It would be particularly great for schools to classify camera trap photos from schools in different countries via MammalWeb, so they can compare the mammal communities."

Samantha Mason will present MammalWeb's work on Wednesday 11 December 2019 at the British Ecological Society annual meeting. The conference will bring together 1,200 ecologists from more than 40 countries to discuss the latest research.

The benefits of multispecies mixtures were so strong that yields from a mixture of four species under drought conditions matched or exceeded yields for monocultures under normal rainfall conditions.

The four species tested were agriculturally important and used for grazing livestock in temperate regions: perennial ryegrass, chicory, red clover and white clover.

"Multi-species mixtures can be an effective, farm-scale practical action that could be used to mitigate or even adapt to the effects of severe weather events such as drought", said Dr. John Finn, Researcher at Teagasc, who will be presenting this collaborative research with Agroscope Switzerland at the conference.

"When I first started talking about investigating effects of drought in Irish grassland in 2009, some of the farmers that we spoke to thought I was crazy! There was more concern about winter waterlogging than summer drought. Since then, however, we have had two serious summer droughts, most recently in 2018. All of the climate models indicate that summer droughts will become more frequent and more severe."

In Europe this means that grasslands will be increasingly subjected to intense winter rain precipitation and summer droughts. Protecting yield stability through methods like increasing the species diversity in grassland systems will become increasingly important.

In this study the effects of the experimental drought were substantial. However, compared to monocultures, higher yields in the four-species mixtures helped to compensate for this reduction. In Ireland, across three harvests during and just after the drought period, the average monoculture yields of 1.41 tonnes ha-1 in a harvest dropped to 1.08 tonnes due to drought; the multispecies mixture under drought yielded 1.3 tonnes ha-1.

In Switzerland, the average monoculture yields of 1.63 tonnes ha-1 in a harvest dropped to 1.26 tonnes ha-1 under drought; the multispecies mixture under drought yielded 1.9 tonnes ha-1. In addition, the variation in yield decreased as plant diversity increased.

The researchers sowed combinations of the four species in different plots to compare monocultures, two-species mixtures and four-species mixtures. Half of the plots (3 metres by 5 metres) were covered in rain shelters to create a severe drought event for nine weeks. This allowed them to compare the effects of plant diversity as well as drought on yield. A cutting regime was used to mimic grazing.

The research was performed across two sites in Ireland and Switzerland as part of AnimalChange, an EU project aimed at developing scientific guidance on sustainable development for livestock production under climate change.

The researchers are now looking to extend the length of the study and test other factors. "Our experiment was sown in one year, and we applied treatments over the following two years. Ideally, we would like to continue the experiment for several years." said John Finn.

"We didn't have a grazing treatment, and it would be important to confirm that the observed mixture benefits in a cutting regime would also occur under grazed conditions. This work is currently ongoing."

The researchers have also begun testing the effects of greater species diversity, expanding the tests from four crops to six, introducing timothy grass and plantain, and looking more closely at levels of nitrogen fertiliser.

"We are finding similar results with six species over two years. This work is also being presented at the BES meeting in Belfast by Guylain Grange (PhD researcher at Teagasc).", said John Finn.

For as many as one in three people, life events or situations that pose no real danger can spark a disabling fear, a hallmark of anxiety and stress-related disorders. Cognitive behavioral therapy and antidepressants help about half the people suffering from anxiety, but millions of others do not find sufficient relief from existing therapies.

Researchers at Yale University and Weill Cornell Medicine report Dec. 9 on a novel way that could help combat such anxiety: When life triggers excessive fear, use a safety signal.

In humans and in mice, a symbol or a sound that is never associated with adverse events can relieve anxiety through an entirely different brain network than that activated by existing behavioral therapy, the researchers write in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"A safety signal could be a musical piece, a person, or even an item like a stuffed animal that represents the absence of threat," said Paola Odriozola, Ph.D. candidate in psychology at Yale and co-first author.

The approach differs from behavioral therapy, which slowly exposes patients to the source of their fear, such as spiders, until a patient learns that spiders do not represent a significant threat and anxiety is decreased. And for many people, exposure-based therapy does not truly help.

The new study may explain why.

In the new research, subjects were conditioned to associate one shape with a threatening outcome and a different shape with a non-threatening outcome. (In mice, tones were used in the conditioning instead of shapes.) The shape associated with threat alone was presented to subjects, and later subjects viewed both threatening and non-threatening shape together. Adding the second, non-threatening shape -- the safety signal -- suppressed the subjects' fear compared to the response to the threat-related shape alone. Brain imaging studies of both human and mice subjects presented with the signals showed this approach activated a different neural network than exposure therapy, suggesting safety signaling might be an effective way to augment current therapies.

"Exposure-based therapy relies on fear extinction, and although a safety memory is formed during therapy, it is always competing with the previous threat memory," explained Dylan Gee, assistant professor of psychology at Yale and co-senior author. "This competition makes current therapies subject to the relapse of fear -- but there is never a threat memory associated with safety signals."

Gee stressed that the need for alternatives for those suffering from anxiety-related disorders is great.

"Both cognitive behavioral therapy and antidepressants can be highly effective, but a substantial part of the population does not benefit sufficiently, or the benefits they experience don't hold up in the longer term," she said.

Scientists have identified systematic meanders in the globe-circling northern jet stream that have caused simultaneous crop-damaging heat waves in widely separated breadbasket regions-a previously unquantified threat to global food production that, they say, could worsen with global warming. The research shows that certain kinds of waves in the atmospheric circulation can become amplified and then lock in place for extended periods, triggering the concurrent heat waves. Affected parts of North America, Europe and Asia together produce a quarter of the world food supply. The study appears this week in the journal Nature Climate Change.

"We found a 20-fold increase in the risk of simultaneous heat waves in major crop-producing regions when these global-scale wind patterns are in place," said lead author Kai Kornhuber, a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University's Earth Institute. "Until now, this was an underexplored vulnerability in the food system. During these events there actually is a global structure in the otherwise quite chaotic circulation. The bell can ring in multiple regions at once."

Kornhuber warned that the heat waves will almost certainly become worse in coming decades, as the world continues to warm. The meanders that cause them could also potentially become more pronounced, though this is less certain. Because food commodities are increasingly traded on a global scale, either effect could lead to food shortages even in regions far from those directly affected by heat waves.

The jet stream is a fast-moving river of air that continuously circles the northern hemisphere from west to east. It generally confines itself to a relatively narrow band, but can meander north or south, due to a feature scientists call Rossby waves. Among other effects, these atmospheric wobbles may pull frigid air masses from the polar regions, or hot ones from the subtropics, into the populous midlatitudes. The wobbles strongly influence daily weather. When they become particularly large, they can bring prolonged heat waves, droughts or floods in summer; or in colder seasons, abnormal cold spells.

Because the earth's atmospheric circulation is so vast and complicated, only in recent years have scientists been able to pick out global patterns in the Rossby waves. The new study builds on previous discoveries of such patterns, and links them to measurable losses in crop production.

Combing through large amounts of climate data from 1979 to 2018, Kornhuber and colleagues zeroed in on two Rossby waves with specific wavelengths, termed wave-5 and wave-7; that is, north-south wobbles in the jet stream that produce either 5 or 7 peaks and corresponding troughs around the planet's circumference. They found that while waves of lower or higher lengths seem to wobble around randomly, wave-5 and wave-7 patterns can lock into a grid of symmetric, often much larger meanders centered over predictable regions. The wave-5 patterns tend to hover over central North America, eastern Europe and eastern Asia; the wave-7 patterns over western-central North America, western Europe and western Asia. In both cases, the results are the same: hot air swirls up from the south into the peaks, producing abnormal spikes in temperature that can go on for weeks. This in turn reduces rainfall, dries up soils and vegetation, and kills crops in each region.

"Normally, low harvests in one region are expected to be balanced out by good harvests elsewhere," said study coauthor Dim Coumou of the Institute for Environmental Studies at VU University Amsterdam, who has been studying Rossby waves for years. "These waves can cause reduced harvests in several important breadbaskets simultaneously, creating risks for global food production."

The scientists showed that in years when these amplified waves occurred during two or more summer weeks, cereal production went down 4 percent when averaged across all the affected regions, and as much as 11 percent in a single affected region. Food-price spikes often followed. The waves have hit in 1983, 2003, 2006, 2012 and 2018, when many temperature records fell across the United States, Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia. In addition to killing crops, the waves have killed thousands of people, especially in Europe and Russia, where air conditioning is far less common than in North America.

While the study focuses mainly on hot spells in the Rossby waves' northern peaks, it also suggests that opposite extremes can occur in the southerly troughs. A precursor study by Kornhuber and others earlier this year noted that during the 2018 northern heat waves, more southerly regions including the Balkans and Japan saw extraordinary rains and destruction from flooding and landslides. During a 2010 northern heat outbreak in Russia, concurrent flooding on the Indus River in Pakistan displaced millions and destroyed crops.

Many scientists believe that Rossby waves will grow and stall more often as the planet warms. Kornhuber said that this scenario is quite plausible-almost all the global events have occurred since 2000- but that says is not yet enough data to form a consensus on this. Regardless, he said, "even if the frequency or the size of the [Rossby] waves doesn't change, the heat extremes linked to the patterns will become more severe, because the atmosphere as a whole is heating."

Study coauthor Radley Horton, a climatologist at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a part of the Earth Institute, said, "If climate models are unable to reproduce these wave patterns, risk managers such as reinsurers and food security experts may face a blind spot when assessing how simultaneous heat waves and their impacts could change in a warming climate."

Theodore Shepherd, a professor of climate science at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom who was not involved in the study, said, "We have strong observational evidence of this wave pattern. What is open for discussion is how it might respond to climate change." He noted that many consensus scientific statements, including those from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have proved to be underestimations of how fast and far the effects of global warming might move.

Washington, DC-- Saturn's icy moon Enceladus is of great interest to scientists due to its subsurface ocean, making it a prime target for those searching for life elsewhere. New research led by Carnegie's Doug Hemingway reveals the physics governing the fissures through which oceanwater erupts from the moon's icy surface, giving its south pole an unusual "tiger stripe" appearance.

"First seen by the Cassini mission to Saturn, these stripes are like nothing else known in our Solar System," lead author Hemingway explained. "They are parallel and evenly spaced, about 130 kilometers long and 35 kilometers apart. What makes them especially interesting is that they are continually erupting with water ice, even as we speak. No other icy planets or moons have anything quite like them."

Working with Max Rudolph of the University of California, Davis and Michael Manga of UC Berkeley, Hemingway used models to investigate the physical forces acting on Enceladus that allow the tiger stripe fissures to form and remain in place. Their findings are published by Nature Astronomy.

The team was particularly interested in understanding why the stripes are present only on the moon's south pole but were also keen to figure out why the cracks are so evenly spaced.

The answer to the first question turns out to be a bit of a coin toss. The researchers revealed that the fissures that make up Enceladus' tiger stripes could have formed on either pole, the south just happened to split open first.

Enceladus experiences internal heating due to the eccentricity of its orbit. It is sometimes a little closer to Saturn and sometimes a littler farther, which causes the moon to be slightly deformed--stretched and relaxed--as it responds to the giant planet's gravity. It is this process that keeps the moon from freezing completely solid.

Key to the formation of the fissures is the fact that the moon's poles experience the greatest effects of this gravitationally induced deformation, so the ice sheet is thinnest over them. During periods of gradual cooling on Enceladus, some of the moon's subsurface ocean will freeze. Because water expands as it freezes, as the icy crust thickens from below, the pressure in the underlying ocean increases until the ice shell eventually splits open, creating a fissure. Because of their comparatively thin ice, the poles are the most susceptible to cracks.

The researchers believe the fissure named after the city of Baghdad was the first to form. (The stripes are named after places referred to in the stories of One Thousand and One Nights, which are also called Arabian Nights.) However, it didn't just freeze back up again. It stayed open, allowing ocean water to spew from its crevasse that, in turn, caused three more parallel cracks to form.

"Our model explains the regular spacing of the cracks," Rudolph said.

The additional splits formed from the weight of ice and snow building up along the edges of the Baghdad fissure as jets of water from the subsurface ocean froze and fell back down. This weight added a new form of pressure on the ice sheet.

"That caused the ice sheet to flex just enough to set off a parallel crack about 35 kilometers away," Rudolph added.

That the fissures stay open and erupting is also due to the tidal effects of Saturn's gravity. The moon's deformation acts to keep the wound from healing--repeatedly widening and narrowing the cracks and flushing water in and out of them--preventing the ice from closing up again.

For a larger moon, its own gravity would be stronger and prevent the additional fractures from opening all the way. So, these stripes could only have formed on Enceladus.

"Since it is thanks to these fissures that we have been able to sample and study Enceladus' subsurface ocean, which is beloved by astrobiologists, we thought it was important to understand the forces that formed and sustained them," Hemingway said. "Our modeling of the physical effects experienced by the moon's icy shell points to a potentially unique sequence of events and processes that could allow for these distinctive stripes to exist."

An inflammatory marker called sCD14 is related to brain atrophy, cognitive decline and dementia, according to a study of more than 4,700 participants from two large community-based heart studies. The study was published Monday, Dec. 9, in the journal Neurology.

"We have strong reason to believe that sCD14 can be a useful biomarker to assess a person's risk of cognitive decline and dementia," said study senior author Sudha Seshadri, M.D., professor of neurology at UT Health San Antonio and director of the university's Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer's and Neurodegenerative Diseases.

"The most exciting part is that we could assess this risk in advance, when there is ample time to intervene and change the course of a person's life," Dr. Seshadri said.

"Higher levels of sCD14 were associated with markers of brain aging and injury, such as total brain atrophy and a decline in executive functioning--the decision-making needed for many activities of daily life," said study lead author Matthew Pase, Ph.D., of the Florey Institute for Neuroscience and Mental Health in Melbourne, Australia.

The researchers studied risk of dementia in 1,588 participants from the Framingham Heart Study and 3,129 participants from the Cardiovascular Health Study. Dr. Pase and Dr. Seshadri are Framingham investigators.

Plasma sCD14 was measured in participants' blood upon study enrollment. In the Framingham group, brain MRI and cognitive testing were performed within one year after the blood draw for sCD14. A second round of tests was performed after seven years. Surveillance for dementia was conducted over an average of nine years.

In the Cardiovascular Health Study, the first brain MRI was obtained three to four years after enrollment and a second round five years later.

"Cost-effective, blood based biomarkers are greatly needed to detect and track the progression of preclinical brain injury predisposing to dementia," the researchers state in the paper. "Such biomarkers could also act as endpoints in clinical trials of disease-modifying interventions and expand our understanding of disease biology."

There are not yet any drug trials to see if lowering sCD14 levels would help cognition in humans. However, treatment with several targeted anti-inflammatory medications--such as statins--can lower sCD14. "There is a growing recognition of the role of inflammation in neurodegeneration and vascular injury-related cognitive decline and dementia," Dr. Seshadri said.

LA JOLLA--(December 9, 2019) While scientists know of about 25,000 genes that code for biologically important proteins, additional, smaller genes hiding in our DNA may be just as important. But these tiny lines of genetic code have proven tough to track down.

A new study from the Salk Institute identified over 2,000 new, small genes--expanding the number of human genes by 10 percent. These previously unknown genes are known as small open reading frames (smORFs), and the scientists have developed a method for detecting these important genetic sequences in human cell lines.

"We've expanded the human genome," says Salk Professor Alan Saghatelian, co-corresponding author of the study, published in Nature Chemical Biology on December 9, 2019. "This work can really be applied to better understand human biology and may eventually have implications for diseases ranging from cancer to diabetes."

Over the last ten years, Saghatelian and his colleagues have been developing methods to better identify smORFs that affect human health. Already, "microproteins" encoded by smORFs have been linked to immune function, cell stress and even early muscle development. Saghatelian says there is growing evidence that detecting smORFs could lead scientists to new biomarkers and drug targets for human diseases.

Thomas Martinez, first author of the study and postdoctoral fellow in the Saghatelian lab, led the effort to use a technique called Ribo-Seq to see which smORFS actually encoded proteins in cells. Ribo-Seq is routinely used for detecting the production of larger proteins but proved less consistent for detecting smORFs. The team solved this problem by optimizing the experiment to more reliably detect smORFs and yield the most robust estimate of the number smORFs in the human genome.

Martinez's work made it possible to find smORFs in three human cell lines, taken from leukemia, ovarian cancer and immortalized kidney cells. Around 7,500 smORFs showed up in at least one cell line. Of those, around 1,500 appeared in at least two cell lines--and kept showing up when the researchers repeated their experiments. The reproducibility of the results gave the researchers confidence that these newly spotted genes really existed.

"We finally have reliable information that the human genome contains at least 2,500 to 3,500 smORFs," says Saghatelian.

The challenge now is to figure out which smORFs are involved in disease--and whether the microproteins they code for could be disease targets. Already, the researchers have identified around 500 smORFs that show up in all three cell lines, suggesting they could have important biological functions.

"Right now, our methods can tell us if a smORF exists or doesn't exist, but it doesn't give us a lot of information on what is actually related to disease," says Saghatelian. "Going forward, the lab will start doing more research to find smORFs that may be specific to diseases like cancer or diabetes."

Saghatelian says the science of smORFs is still in its early days, so the researchers hope other labs around the world will use their methods to hunt for smORFs in their own cell lines.

"This is really an unexplored area," says Martinez. "At the end of the day, you want to know what all the parts are in the genome."

PHILADELPHIA - The antibiotic vancomycin alters the gut microbiome in a way that can help prime the immune system to more effectively attack tumor cells after radiation therapy. A new study in mice from researchers at the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania found giving a dose of the common antibiotic not only helped immune cells kill tumors that were directly treated with radiation, but also kill cancer cells that were further away in the body, paving the way for researchers to test the approach in a human clinical trial. The Journal of Clinical Investigation published the findings today.

More than half of all patients with solid tumors undergo radiation therapy at some point during their treatment. In recent years, multiple studies have shown that giving patients higher doses of radiation over the course of fewer treatments - called hypo-fractionated radiotherapy - can induce a stronger immune response in patients. In addition, hypo-fractionated doses have the ability to impact other tumors cells in the body that weren't directly treated with radiation. This is known as the abscopal effect.

"Our study shows that vancomycin seems to boost the effect of the hypo-fractionated radiation itself on the targeted tumor site while also aiding the abscopal effect, helping the immune system fight tumors away from the treatment site," said the study's senior author Andrea Facciabene, PhD, an associate professor of Radiation Oncology in Penn's Perelman School of Medicine.

Facciabene and his team chose vancomycin for a few specific reasons. First, it mostly targets gram-positive bacteria, making it disruptive to the gut microbiome. Second, it's a large molecule, which means it stays in the gut and does not circulate to the rest of the body the way other antibiotics do. The fact that it is not systemic limits the impact it has on the rest of the body's microbiome.

In this study, researchers found vancomycin specifically improved the function of dendritic cells, which are the messenger cells that T cells rely on to know what to attack. While researchers used melanoma, lung, and cervical cancer models for this work, they note the approach could have implications for a wide variety of cancer types. This study also builds off the team's previous research, which showed a similar effect in T cell therapies, meaning it adds to a growing body of evidence.

Still, the researchers note this study only scratches the surface when it comes to understanding the connection between the makeup of the gut microbiome and its impact on radiotherapy-induced immune responses to cancer. They say further research is needed to understand the implications of specific strains or clusters of bacteria.

"However, what's clear is that antibiotics play a role and can potentially impact treatments and outcomes for cancer patients," Facciabene said. The researchers are planning a phase 1 study to translate this approach into the clinic.

Water is the basis of all life on earth. Its structure is simple - two hydrogen atoms bound to one oxygen atom - yet its behavior is unique among liquids, and scientists still do not fully understand the origins of its distinctive properties.

When charged polymers are dissolved in water the aqueous solution becomes more viscous than expected. This high viscosity is used by nature in the human body. The lubricating and shock-absorbing properties of the synovial fluid - a solution of water and charged biopolymers - is what allows us to bend, stretch and compress our joints over our entire lives without damage.

In a study published in Science Advances, researchers from the Laboratory for Fundamental BioPhotonics (LBP) at EPFL's School of Engineering have shed new light on the viscosity of aqueous solutions. They showed that, contrary to the traditional view that repulsive interactions between polymers are solely responsible for the increase in viscosity, a nuclear quantum effect between water molecules also has a part to play.

"So far, our understanding of charged polymer-water solutions was based on theories that treated the water itself as a background," says Sylvie Roke, head of the LBP. "Our study shows that water-water interactions actually play an important role. The same could also be true of other physical and chemical processes that influence biology."

Why water is unique

Water derives its unique properties from hydrogen bonds - short lived bonds between an oxygen atom of one water molecule and a hydrogen atom of another - that break and re-form hundred-thousands of billions of times per second. These bonds give liquid water a short-lived three-dimensional structure.

It has long been known that water becomes more viscous when charged polymers are dissolved in it. The viscosity is influenced by the size of the molecule and additionally by the charge. The reason why charged polymers increase viscosity more than neutral ones has been attributed to like charges on the polymers repelling one another. In this study, however, the EPFL researchers found that the electrical charges also interact with the water molecules and alter the water-water interactions, further hindering the flow of the solution.

The researchers measured viscosity by recording how long it took different solutions to flow down through a narrow tube. They also used special laser technology, developed at the lab, to probe water-water interactions in the same solutions on a molecular level. They found that the polymers made the hydrogen bond network more ordered which, in turn, correlated with an increase in viscosity.

The researchers then repeated the experiments with heavy water (D2O), a molecule that is almost identical to light water (H2O) but has a slightly different hydrogen bonding network. They found surprisingly large differences in both water-water interactions and viscosity. Since polymers repel one another in the same way in both light and heavy water, they concluded that these differences must arise from small differences in the way the two molecules interact, meaning that a nuclear quantum effect is at play.

Their discovery - that the stickiness of charged polymer solutions partially stems from nuclear quantum effects in water - has fundamental implications. "Water is everywhere," explains Roke. "It makes up around 60% of the human body. These insights into the properties of water and how it interacts with other molecules, including biomolecules, will prove useful for developing new technologies - not just in health and biosciences, but also in materials and environmental science."

The Antarctic is one of the parts of earth that we know the least about. Due to the massive ice shield, the collection of geophysical information on site is extremely difficult and expensive. Satellite data from the European Space Agency (ESA) has now been used as the basis for new insights on the deep structure of the continent. Scientists from Kiel University (CAU) recently published their discoveries in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth in cooperation with scientists from the British Antarctic Survey, Great Britain, and Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

Looking into the deep from space

The newly evaluated data from the ESA's GOCE satellite mission dedicated to the earth's gravitational field, combined with seismological models, enables unprecedented insights into the lithosphere, which consists of the crust and the earth's upper mantle below the frozen continent. To do so, Folker Pappa, doctoral researcher at Kiel University and lead author of the study, along with Jörg Ebbing, Professor for Geophysics at Kiel University, used special gradient data of the satellite, among other information: "This allows a much greater level of detail when analysing deep earth structures," says Pappa. It enables the researchers to draw conclusions about such things as the depth of the transition from crust to mantle - and these measurements are dramatically different over the 14 million square kilometre region. "Under West Antarctica, which is geologically young, the earth's crust is comparatively thin with about 25 kilometres, and the earth's mantle is viscous at a depth of less than 100 kilometres. East Antarctica, on the other hand, is an old cratonic shield and more than one billion years old. Here, the mantle rocks still have solid properties at a depth of more than 200 kilometres."

Representation of the deep 3D structure of the Antarctic now also permits new findings about the so-called glacial-isostatic adjustment, explains co-author Professor Wouter van der Wal from Delft University of Technology: "This is a key process that determines how the continent responds to current and past ice sheet thinning. We found large variations in mantle temperature beneath the continent, which lead to the uplifting and subsiding of the ground with very different speeds across the continent. These new constraints on crustal and lithosphere thickness are also pivotal in the quest to estimate Antarctic geothermal heat flux and how it affects subglacial melting and ice sheet flow."

"These are natural interactions between the ice and the solid earth. Until now, it was not possible to examine these processes more closely in the Antarctic in detail due to a lack of earth models," added Pappa. His personal highlight are the Gamburtsev Subglacial Mountains that are still barely explored and over three thousand metres high: "The solid earth is the thickest here, at around 260 kilometres. This is an exciting structure, and we don't know exactly what it looks like because the mountain range is completely covered with ice shields."

Antarctica as a 3D model and its connection to other continents

The research was funded by the European Space Agency within the projects GOCE+Antarctica and 3D Earth. The international consortium of both projects consists of nine institutions in six European countries. "3D Earth offers us tantalising new geophysical findings about the deep structure and development of Antarctica. These new models showing the thickness of the crust and the lithosphere are crucial to understanding the fundamental composition and tectonic architecture of the Antarctic, for example," emphasises Dr Fausto Ferraccioli, head geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey and co-author of the study. "Further findings that we can derive from the study concern are the former connections between Antarctica and other continents such as Australia, Africa and India," said Ferraccioli.

"We are finally getting to know the Antarctic properly," says Ebbing. In addition to the temperature distribution, the researchers have also determined other properties of the solid earth, such as the composition and the rock density.

Part of the project is an impressive 3D model of the Antarctic, created by the ESA. ESA's Roger Haagmans noted: "These are important findings also in the context of understanding sea-level change as a consequence of ice loss from Antarctica. When ice mass is lost, the solid Earth rebounds and this effect needs to be accounted for in ice volume changes. This can be better determined once the structure and composition of the Earth interior are better understood."

DALLAS - Dec. 9, 2019 - UT Southwestern researchers have developed a software tool that uses artificial intelligence to recognize cancer cells from digital pathology images - giving clinicians a powerful way of predicting patient outcomes.

The spatial distribution of different types of cells can reveal a cancer's growth pattern, its relationship with the surrounding microenvironment, and the body's immune response. But the process of manually identifying all the cells in a pathology slide is extremely labor intensive and error-prone.

"As there are usually millions of cells in a tissue sample, a pathologist can only analyze so many slides in a day. To make a diagnosis, pathologists usually only examine several 'representative' regions in detail, rather than the whole slide. However, some important details could be missed by this approach," said Dr. Guanghua "Andy" Xiao, corresponding author of a study published in EBioMedicine and Professor of Population and Data Sciences at UT Southwestern.

The human brain, Dr. Xiao added, is not good at picking up subtle morphological patterns. Therefore, a major technical challenge in systematically studying the tumor microenvironment is how to automatically classify different types of cells and quantify their spatial distributions, he said.

The AI algorithm that Dr. Xiao and his team developed, called ConvPath, overcomes these obstacles by using AI to classify cell types from lung cancer pathology images.

Here's how it works: The ConvPath algorithm can "look" at cells and identify their types based on their appearance in the pathology images using an AI algorithm that learns from human pathologists. This algorithm effectively converts a pathology image into a "map" that displays the spatial distributions and interactions of tumor cells, stromal cells (i.e., the connective tissue cells), and lymphocytes (i.e., the white blood cells) in tumor tissue.

Whether tumor cells cluster well together or spread into stromal lymph nodes is a factor revealing the body's immune response. So knowing that information can help doctors customize treatment plans and pinpoint the right immunotherapy.

Ultimately, the algorithm helps pathologists obtain the most accurate cancer cell analysis - in a much faster way.

"It is time-consuming and difficult for pathologists to locate very small tumor regions in tissue images, so this could greatly reduce the time that pathologists need to spend on each image," said Dr. Xiao, who also has an appointment in the Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics and is a member of both the Quantitative Biomedical Research Center (QBRC) and the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center at UTSW.

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- The last remaining tropical glaciers between the Himalayas and the Andes will disappear in the next decade - and possibly sooner - due to climate change, a new study has found.

The glaciers in Papua, Indonesia, are "the canaries in the coal mine" for other mountaintop glaciers around the world, said Lonnie Thompson, one of the senior authors of the study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"These will be the first to disappear; the others will certainly follow," said Thompson, distinguished university professor in the School of Earth Sciences and senior research scientist at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at The Ohio State University.

The glaciers, atop a mountain near Puncak Jaya, on the western half of the island of New Guinea, have been melting for years, Thompson said. But that melt increased rapidly due in part to a strong 2015-2016 El Niño, a phenomenon that causes tropical ocean water and atmospheric temperatures to get warmer. El Niños are natural phenomena, but their effects have been amplified by global warming.

The study suggests that the glacier will disappear in the next 10 years, most likely during the next strong El Niño.

Thompson said it is likely that other tropical glaciers, such as those on Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and Quelccaya in Peru, will follow.

"I think the Papua, Indonesia, glaciers are the indicator of what's going to happen around the world," Thompson said.

Thompson and his team have been monitoring the glacier since 2010, when they drilled ice cores to determine the composition and temperature of the atmosphere around the glacier throughout history. Even then, the glacier was shrinking. That melt started at least 150 years ago, Thompson said, but has quickened in the last decade. The researchers found signs of melting at both the top of the glacier and at the bottom.

During the 2010 drilling expedition, the team installed a string of PVC pipe sections, connected by a rope, into the ice. Their idea was to measure how much ice had been lost by periodically measuring the rope sections left uncovered as the ice melted.

When the stake was measured in November 2015, about five meters of rope had been uncovered, meaning that the glacier surface was melting at a rate of about one meter per year. A team went back in May 2016, and saw that an additional approximately 4.26 meters of rope had been uncovered - a rapid increase in melting over just six months.

The team also measured the extent of the glacier's melt by measuring its surface area, which shrank by about 75 percent from 2010 to 2018. The ice field had shrunk so much that by 2016 it had split into two smaller glaciers. Then, in August 2019, a mountain climber scaling the peak took a photo of the glacier, showing its near disappearance.

"The glacier's melt rate is exponentially increasing," Thompson said. "It's similar to visiting a terminal cancer patient, and documenting the change in their body, but not being able to do anything about it."

Globally, glacier melt is a major contributor to sea level rise, which, along with warming ocean waters, can lead to more frequent and more intense storms.

Thompson said the mountaintop glaciers around the world contribute between a third and a half of the annual sea level rise in the Earth's oceans.

"They are much more vulnerable to the rising temperatures because they're small and they're warmer - they're closer to the melting threshold," he said. "Ice is just a threshold system. It is perfectly happy at freezing temperatures or below, but everything changes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

Climate change has increased the temperature of the atmosphere, which means the air around the glacier is warmer. But it has also changed the altitude at which rain turns to snow. That means that where snow once fell on top of the glacier, helping rebuild its ice year-by-year, rain is now falling. That rainfall is the kiss of death for a glacier.

Water absorbs more energy - more heat - from the sun than snow does, so increasing the water on top of the glacier warms the glacier even more, accelerating the melting of the remaining ice.

"If you want to kill a glacier, just put water on it," Thompson said. "The water basically becomes like a hot water drill. It goes right through the ice to the bedrock. So, when water starts to accumulate on top of the glacier, the glacier starts to melt much faster than current models predict as the models are driven by temperature changes but don't account for the effect of water accumulating on the glacier surface."

Once water starts streaming through crevasses in the glacier to the bedrock, it also begins to lubricate the glacier along its bottom. This eventually creates a warm pool beneath the glacier, which may cause the glacier to slide, ever-so-slowly, down the mountain to lower elevations where temperatures are warmer.

Such was the case with this glacier, the researchers learned when they first drilled in 2010. The cores they brought to the surface showed meltwater at the base of the glacier as well as at the top.

That melt can affect the information scientists are able to learn from the cores, which normally provide year-by-year data records of the climate around the glacier. As the glacier melts, those year-by-year records can become blurred. In this case, however, the cores still showed evidence of El Niño events throughout the ice cores' history. Because so much of the glacier has melted, the cores hold data for only the last 50 years, despite the fact that these glaciers have likely occupied these mountaintops for the last 5,000 or so years.

The glacier's disappearance is a cultural loss, too, Thompson said: The indigenous people who live around the mountain worship it.

"The ridges and the valleys are the arms and legs of their god, and the glacier is the head," he said.

When the team drilled in 2010, some of the elders of the indigenous communities protested: "In their words, they thought we were 'drilling into the skull of their god to steal the god's memories,'" Thompson said. "I told them that was exactly what we were doing. We needed to preserve those memories because the glacier was going to melt."

That started a debate throughout the indigenous community, weighing whether the team should be allowed to continue its research mission to learn the history contained within the ice, or was it more important that the glacier remain undisturbed? Thompson said the elders of the community were strongly in favor of kicking the research team out while the younger people, he said, wanted the mission to continue. In this case, the younger people won.

"It was the young people who were saying, 'Have you not seen what's happening?'" Thompson said.