Earth

University of Wyoming researchers have been studying how best to bolster the southern sea otter population, which suffers from low genetic diversity and has been further ravaged by Toxoplasma brain disease and others, shark attacks and illegal shootings by fishermen.

Currently hovering at around 3,000 animals along the California coast, this small subspecies is listed as a threatened species under the federal Endangered Species Act.

"This paper provides analyses and data vitally necessary to southern sea otter recovery," says Holly Ernest, a UW professor of wildlife genomics and disease ecology, and the Wyoming Excellence Chair in Disease Ecology in the Department of Veterinary Sciences and the Program in Ecology. "The paper provides evidence that its genetic diversity is low and staying low. Even with modest increases in population numbers, genetic diversity has not increased."

"Sea otters have recovered in their core area but have not recolonized where they used to be," says Erick Gagne, a former UW postdoctoral researcher who worked with Ernest on the study. "They are currently locked between just off the south of San Francisco Bay to just north of Santa Barbara. They used to go through to Oregon and connect with the northern sea otter."

Currently, the northern sea otters, which are much more abundant, have a territory that ranges from northern Washington up through Alaska.

Gagne, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Colorado State University, was lead author and Ernest was senior author of a paper, titled "Measures of Effective Population Size in Sea Otters to Reveal Specific Considerations for Wide-Ranging Species," that was published May 1 (today) in Evolutionary Applications. The peer-reviewed, open access journal publishes papers that use concepts from evolutionary biology to address biological questions of health, social and economic relevance.

Kyle Gustafson, a UW postdoctoral researcher, also was involved in the study. Researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey, University of California-Santa Cruz, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, Seattle Aquarium and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Washington, D.C., were other contributors to the paper.

In the 1700s and 1800s, there were "a ton of sea otters" located up and down the California coast, and on up to Russia and Japan, Gagne says. Around 1900, southern sea otters, which had been hunted heavily, were thought to be extinct. Approximately 50 southern sea otters were discovered in the Big Sur area in 1938. About 3,000 remain today, Gagne says.

"When you have that large of a reduction, you lose genetic diversity," he says. "As the numbers recover, genetic diversity does not recover as rapidly, leaving the population vulnerable."

Southern sea otters are important to the ecosystem because their diet includes a lot of invertebrates, including sea urchins and abalone, which graze on kelp. If sea otters did not eat these invertebrates, kelp forests, which provide food habitat for multiple species of fish, would be lost, Gagne says.

However, as sea otter populations reach high numbers in the core, the southern sea otters' food supply becomes limited. In turn, this makes it difficult for the animal numbers to increase in their limited core range.

"Some biologists would like to see their (southern sea otter) range expand northward," Gagne says.

While some northern sea otters could be relocated to breed with the southern sea otter population and increase southern sea otter numbers while simultaneously bolster genetic diversity, there is a potential downside. Northern sea otters could bring diseases with them or could try to swim back north and run into the "shark gauntlet" near San Francisco Bay, Ernest says. Sharks tend to congregate around the region, making it difficult for sea otters to disperse north of the bay.

The southern sea otter is smaller than its similar counterpart, the northern sea otter. The facial structure and skull shape are different between the two, Gagne says.

Studying Effective Population Size

The paper examined one of the methods, known as "effective population size," that is included in the southern sea otter recovery plan. Effective population size is a measure of the individuals that are contributing genetically to the next generation of the species, Ernest explains.

Conservation genetic techniques and considerations of the evolutionary potential of a species are increasingly being applied to species conservation. For example, effective population size estimates are useful for determining the conservation status of species. Yet, accurate estimates of current effective population size remain difficult to obtain, according to the paper.

The paper shows that the way this method is calculated can make important differences in the final effective population size number. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recovery plan uses effective population size to determine when the southern sea otter is to be delisted as a federally threatened species. If Fish and Wildlife use old methods of calculation, the southern sea otter may be delisted too soon for true recovery, Gagne says.

After being hunted to near extinction during the North Pacific fur trade, the southern sea otter has recovered over part of its former range but remains at relatively low numbers, making it desirable to obtain accurate and consistent estimates of effective population size.
Although previous theoretical papers have compared the validity of several methods, comparisons of estimators using empirical data in applied conservation settings are limited.

"Studies like these take decades," says Ernest, who has been studying southern sea otters for 13 years, dating back to her time as a researcher at the University of California-Davis.

For this study, Gagne and Ernest combined 13 years of demographic and genetic data from 1,006 sea otters to assess multiple effective population size estimators, as well as temporal trends in genetic diversity and population genetic structure. Genetic diversity of the southern sea otter was low and did not increase over time, according to the paper. There was no evidence for distinct genetic units, but some evidence for genetic isolation by distance, the paper concludes.

"To get this 13-year data set was really valuable," Ernest says.

Based on their results, Gagne, Ernest and the paper's co-authors recommend the development of new delisting criteria for the southern sea otter. They advise the use of multiple estimates of effective population size for other wide-ranging species, species with overlapping generations or with sex-biased dispersal, as well as the development of improved metrics of genetic assessments of populations.

"We need new measures to assess their genetic well-being," Gagne says. "That's the next step for sea otters and other endangered species."

Marine scientists from WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society), University of Warwick, and University of Queensland have identified two key factors that create the ideal conditions needed for high species diversity in coral reefs: thermal energy in the form of warm water and low climate stress.

In a new study recently published in the Journal of Biogeography, scientists from a number of institutions working in the western Indian Ocean found that, in certain locations, thermal energy and low climate stress in the right proportions allow many coral species to grow and thrive together. The discovery has implications to where the strongest management is needed to avert declines in coral species associated with heavy fishing and climate change.

The authors of the study titled "Thermal energy and stress properties as the main drivers of regional distribution of coral species richness in the Indian Ocean" are: Mebrahtu Ateweberhan of the University of Warwick and WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society); Tim R. McClanahan of WCS; Joseph Maina of WCS and the University of Queensland; and Charles Sheppard of the University of Warwick.

Using published species lists and satellite-derived environmental datasets for the Indian Ocean, the researchers calculated many standard and unique oceanographic variables and uncommon statistical methods to uncover this finding. Reef area was also among the main controlling factors, highlighting the significance of the combination of available energy, thermal stress, and large reef areas for driving the numbers of species.

A consistent finding was that the type of the temperature distribution was the strongest factor controlling the number of coral species. The second most important factor was the thermal energy; thus, warm water supports more species but unusually hot and cold water reduce their numbers. Coral reefs with the most species were located along a swath of ocean from Western Australia to Central Indian Ocean Islands and southern India but locations between East Africa and Mozambique Channel and Southern Red Sea and Gulf of Aden also had high diversity. Reefs with the lowest numbers of species were in the Arabian Gulf, Gulf of Oman, South Africa and southwest Madagascar, Gulf of Kutch, Bay of Bengal, and the Mascarenes Islands.

"Diverse coral communities live on the edge between warm and stressful seawater," said Dr. McClanahan, study co-author and Senior Conservation Zoologist for WCS. "Warm seawater is critical to supporting the creation and maintenance of species, but experiencing hot and cold water at some rare frequencies is deadly for many of these same species."

The current results modelled species and environmental relationship in 44 Indian Ocean reef locations with the good natural history surveys to provide evidence linking large-scale geography and oceanography with seawater temperature frequencies, where climate warming is changing these frequencies.

McClanahan also reminds us that "warm water events are becoming more common as climate variability increases with global warming. More stressful temperatures will increasingly penetrate these high diversity locations and drive local species extinctions."

Lead author Dr. Ateweberhan added: "The study emphasizes the critical need to incorporate seawater temperature variability in coral reef conservation programs if plans are going to effective at insuring the persistence of high diversity reefs."

The study made two unique advances. The first was to include unique seawater temperature distribution metrics and the other was the choice of the analytic statistical tools. These new metrics suggest that properties of the temperature distributions patterns matter more than average temperature stability for driving species diversity.

And, these metrics are different enough that they are not replaceable when evaluating coral species distributions. The new statistical technique, called quantile regression, has the ability to investigate relationships for specific parts of the data distribution, a key difference to standard methods that evaluate responses around averages. This makes it appropriate for analysing ecological and species data where environmental conditions vary considerably and equally distributed environmental variance is uncommon.

Ateweberhan explained: "Our conclusions from the quantile regression method would have been hidden and less convincing using standard regression methods. Consequently, we found patterns previously obscured by increasing the variables examined and loosening the assumptions of the data distributions."

Corals form the foundation of the reef ecosystem that in turn support a vast diversity of fish and invertebrate species that live on tropical reefs. Consequently, the findings contribute substantially to a new understanding of the forces that promote coexistence of the Earth's vast richness of species and provides a better understanding on how to manage them.

If you're a parent whose teenagers spend family road trips with earbuds firmly in place, you may want to encourage them to unplug, then turn the car radio to something the whole family can enjoy.

It just might do wonders for your future relationship with your son or daughter, according to a new study from the University of Arizona.

Researchers found that young men and women who shared musical experiences with their parents during childhood -- and especially during adolescence -- report having better relationships with their moms and dads as they enter young adulthood.

"If you have little kids, and you play music with them, that helps you be closer to them, and later in life will make you closer to them," said study co-author Jake Harwood, professor and head of the UA Department of Communication. "If you have teenagers and you can successfully listen to music together or share musical experiences with them, that has an even stronger effect on your future relationship and the child's perception of the relationship in emerging adulthood."

Researchers surveyed a group of young adults, average age 21, about the frequency with which they engaged with their parents, as children, in activities such as listening to music together, attending concerts together or playing musical instruments together. Participants reported on their memories of experiences they had between ages 8 and 13 and age 14 and older.

They also shared how they perceive their relationship with their parents now.

While shared musical experiences at all age levels were associated with better perceptions of parent-child relationship quality in young adulthood, the effect was most pronounced for shared musical experiences that took place during adolescence.

"With young kids, musical activity is fairly common -- singing lullabies, doing nursery rhymes," Harwood said. "With teenagers, it's less common, and when things are less common you might find bigger effects, because when these things happen, they're super important."

The research, published in the Journal of Family Communication, started as an undergraduate project by Sandi Wallace, who was a student in Harwood's class in music and communication and is the lead author of the study.

"I was interested in seeing if music, with all of its power and influence on society today, could perhaps influence and positively affect the parent-child relationship," said Wallace, who earned her bachelor's degree in communication from the UA in December and will start the communication master's program in the fall.

For their study, Wallace and Harwood controlled for other ways children spent time with their parents growing up, and were able to determine that music seems to have a unique effect.

They say two factors may help explain the relationship between shared musical experiences and better relationship quality.

This first is coordination.

"Synchronization, or coordination, is something that happens when people play music together or listen to music together," Harwood said. "If you play music with your parent or listen to music with your parents, you might do synchronized activities like dancing or singing together, and data shows that that causes you to like one another more."

The other way music may strengthen relationship quality is through empathy, Wallace said.

"A lot of recent research has focused on how emotions can be evoked through music, and how that can perpetuate empathy and empathic responses toward your listening partner," she said.

Harwood and Wallace found evidence that both coordination and empathy play a role, although coordination appears to be more influential, based on study participants' responses to questions measuring their empathy for their parents as well as how in sync they feel with their parents when working to complete a task together.

Important for parents to note is that shared musical experiences with their children don't have to be complicated. In fact, simple activities such as listening to music in the car together may have an even greater impact than more formal musical experiences such as playing in a band together, according to the researchers' findings, although their study sample of participants who played musical instruments with their parents was limited.

Future research should look more closely at the differences between formal and informal musical experiences, and also consider how music may affect the quality of other types of relationships, including romantic partnerships, Wallace said.

For now, Wallace and Harwood urge parents to increase their musical interactions with their kids -- especially their teens -- and even empower them to control the radio dial every now and then.

"For people who are just becoming parents or have small children, they may be thinking long term about what they want their relationship with their kids to be," Wallace said. "It's not to say that this is going to be the prescription for a perfect relationship, but any parent wants to find ways to improve their relationship with their child and make sure that it's maintained long term, and this may be one way it can be done."

The American pika (Ochotona princeps), a relative of rabbits, occupies rocky environments in the mountains of western Northern America. It has been widely thought that pikas could not survive extremes of temperature and thus were at risk of running out of space at the tops of mountains as temperatures rise due to climate change. But is there more to the story?

Previously, when researchers visited pika habitat sites warmer or drier than usual in the Great Basin, where they had historically lived, they found that many of these sites no longer were occupied. It was thought that pikas had been forced to higher ground to escape the warming temperatures or had died, and it was concluded that pikas were in threat of extinction in the Great Basin due to climate change. However, these studies were focused on historic sites and did not examine the distribution of pikas at other marginal locations or in environments where they would more typically be expected to occur.

A new study, "Distribution, climatic relationships, and status of American pikas in the Great Basin, USA", published in Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research, examined the largest set of records for occupied and extirpated (vacant) pika sites across a four-state region encompassing the entire Great Basin, and documented pikas inhabiting climates and territories never before reported.

The study found that pikas occur in conditions wetter and colder, as well as warmer and drier, than described from the prior limited sites. Pikas were found at elevations spanning 7,800 feet in elevation, from 5,350 feet to above 13,000 feet, and traversing 40 mountain ranges across California, Oregon, Nevada and Utah.

"This evidence provides an important new perspective on the status of pikas in the Great Basin," said Connie Millar, a senior research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service's Pacific Southwest Research Station and lead author of the study. "Pikas are persisting broadly across the region, and these findings give us reason to believe that the species is able to tolerate a wider set of habitat and climate conditions than previously understood."

Millar and her colleagues gathered 2,387 records of occupied pika sites, 89 records of previously occupied sites that were later found vacant, and 774 records of sites that contain older signs of occupancy, but at which extirpation could not be confirmed. No consistent pattern could be detected in the elevations or climates of the confirmed and unconfirmed extirpated sites. Additionally, some areas of population loss were found close to other inhabited areas sharing similar climate.

"Climate conditions do not adequately explain locations of the extirpated and 'old-sign' sites," Millar said, "suggesting that other factors interact with climate and contribute to the loss of pika populations in some environments." Recognizing that non-climatic factors influence pika declines is important information that enriches our understanding of conditions that allow this species to persist and those that may contribute to local declines.

Charlottesville, VA (May 1, 2018). Preliminary research using mcDESPOT magnetic resonance imaging shows changes in the myelin content of white matter in the brain following mild traumatic brain injury. Myelin changes are apparent at the time of injury and 3 months afterward. For more details, see the article, "Prospective study of myelin water fraction changes after mild traumatic brain injury in collegiate contact sports, by Heather S. Spader, MD, and colleagues, published today in the Journal of Neurosurgery.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 1.7 million people in the United States sustain a traumatic brain injury (TBI) each year, and about 75% of these TBIs are mild TBIs, which include concussions.

Despite the gentle modifier, "mild" TBIs can cause disabling symptoms (headaches, dizziness, nausea, difficulties with concentration, and others), which in some cases do not resolve for weeks, months, or longer. In some contact-sport athletes, repeated mild TBIs have been linked to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a serious neurodegenerative disease that develops later in life and is responsible for severe personality and neurocognitive changes.

What motivated the authors of the present study is the need for better diagnostic and prognostic tools for mild TBI, particularly in people who face greater risks of receiving one or more injuries, such as athletes engaged in contact sports. Thus far, conventional neuroimaging studies have been unable to reveal changes in the brain immediately following concussion and other mild TBIs.

Spader and colleagues tested a specific magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique--multicomponent driven equilibrium single pulse observation of T1 and T2 (mcDESPOT for short)--to see if they could find evidence of white matter changes in the brains of male college rugby and football players after mild TBI. White matter tracts (bundles of axons covered by myelin) are susceptible to primary injury from mechanical forces at the time of head injury and again to secondary injury from the swelling and chemical changes that naturally occur in the brain following head trauma.

The researchers assessed white matter changes by measuring the myelin water fraction (MWF)--the ratio of myelin-associated water to total water--in voxels on neuroimaging studies. Changes in the MWF represent changes in the amount of myelin, the white fatty substance that acts as a sheath covering the axons of neurons. The higher the MWF, the more myelin is present. When sufficient amounts of myelin are present and organized, the myelin sheath aids in the swift and accurate transmission of electrical impulses from the nerve cell body across the axon and on to other nerve cells, muscles, or glands. Damage, loss, or disorganization of myelin slows down or impedes this process.

Twenty-three male Brown University students participated in the study: 12 contact sport players (CSPs) who had sustained mild TBIs (one member of the rugby team and 11 football players) and 10 age-matched controls with no such injury (athletes from non-contact sport teams, specifically swimming, fencing, and cross-country).

The CSPs underwent mcDESPOT imaging at the time of diagnosis of mild TBI (within 72 hours after injury) and again 3 months afterward. The controls underwent an identical imaging session. One CSP had also sustained a mild TBI some time before the study commenced; none of the controls had ever sustained a mild TBI.

The researchers compared the MWF in the brains of CSPs at each of the two time points with the MWF in the brains of the control players, which served as an uninjured comparison. The researchers also compared the MWF in the brains of CSPs at diagnosis with the MWF measured at the 3-month follow-up examination.

Here are the pertinent findings:

The MWF in the brains of the CSPs at the time of diagnosis (within 72 hours after injury) was significantly higher than the MWF in the brains of the controls.

The MWF in the brains of the CSPs 3 months after injury was also significantly higher than the MWF in the brains of the controls.

The MWF in the brains of the CSPs was higher 3 months after injury than at the time of diagnosis.

These findings are depicted on MWF maps, essentially anatomical masks of white matter over which colored areas show an increased or a decreased MWF.

The increased MWF after mild TBI found in this study demonstrates an active remyelination process after mild TBI. However, as the researchers point out, increased myelin alone is not necessarily a good thing. Animal studies have shown that remyelination following mild TBI may result in disorganized and therefore less functional myelin.

In a related investigation, the researchers compared MWF maps obtained in this study with PET scans obtained in patients suspected of having CTE. The researchers found that the sites of increased MWF in CSPs at both time points corresponded to sites of brain changes in patients suspected of having CTE.

The study is preliminary and no clear clinical ramifications of the MWF changes are apparent. The authors call for further studies in which a true baseline MWF can be determined in CSPs before injury occurs rather than relying on a surrogate baseline MWF from non-contact sport players. The researchers also point out the need for a larger study population. Nevertheless, they note: "this study provides a basis for additional studies aimed at understanding the underlying neuropathophysiology of the brain's recovery from [mild] TBI."

When asked about the study, Dr. Spader replied, "We were surprised by the finding of increased myelin in the contact sports players compared with non-contact sports players at baseline and 3 months after injury. Using the mcDESPOT sequence, we can see that there is a remyelination process after an injury. The next question, however, is to determine if the increased myelin leads to the formation of a type of scar tissue that can cause disorganized signaling in the brain and which can eventually lead to an increased susceptibility to neurodegenerative disorders such as dementia."

When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Cyclone Flamboyan in the Southern Indian Ocean it analyzed the storm in visible and infrared light.

Flamboyan, the 21st tropical cyclone of the Southern Indian Ocean season, formed over the weekend of April 28 and 29.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS, instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite provided a visible-light image of Flamboyan on April 30 at 4:05 a.m. EDT. The image showed that northwesterly vertical wind shear was pushing the storms southeast of the center.

The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder that also flies aboard Aqua captured an infrared image of the storm on April 30. The infrared data provides cloud top temperatures, and the coldest cloud tops are highest in the atmosphere, and are the strongest storms. The infrared data showed wind shear had pushed strongest storms with the coldest cloud tops southeast of the center. The most powerful thunderstorms had cloud top temperatures as cold as or colder than minus 63 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 53 degrees Celsius). Storms with cloud top temperatures that cold have the capability to produce heavy rainfall.

On April 30 at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 UTC), the storm was centered near 15.9 degrees south latitude and 84.2 degrees east longitude, about 861 nautical miles southeast of Diego Garcia. Flamboyan is moving to the south-southwest at 8 mph (7 knots/12.9 kph). The Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) noted that Flamboyan had maximum sustained winds near 80 mph (70 knots/129.6 kph) making it a Category 1 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. Wind shear is expected to weaken Flamboyan over the next several days.

A study of the most recent near-reversals of the Earth's magnetic field by an international team of researchers, including the University of Liverpool, has found it is unlikely that such an event will take place anytime soon.

There has been speculation that the Earth's geomagnetic fields may be about to reverse , with substantial implications, due to a weakening of the magnetic field over at least the last two hundred years, combined with the expansion of an identified weak area in the Earth's magnetic field called the South Atlantic Anomaly, which stretches from Chile to Zimbabwe.

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of international researchers model observations of the geomagnetic field of the two most recent geomagnetic excursion events, the Laschamp, approximately 41,000 years ago, and Mono Lake, around 34,000 years ago, where the field came close to reversing but recovered its original structure.

The model reveals a field structures comparable to the current geomagnetic field at both approximately 49,000 and 46,000 years ago, with an intensity structure similar to, but much stronger than, today's South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA); their timing and severity is confirmed by records of cosmogenic nuclides. However, neither of these SAA-like fields developed into an excursion or reversal.

Richard Holme, Professor of Geomagnetism at the University of Liverpool, said: "There has been speculation that we are about to experience a magnetic polar reversal or excursion. However, by studying the two most recent excursion events, we show that neither bear resemblance to current changes in the geomagnetic field and therefore it is probably unlikely that such an event is about to happen.

"Our research suggests instead that the current weakened field will recover without such an extreme event, and therefore is unlikely to reverse."

The strength and structure of the Earth's magnetic field has varied at different times throughout geological history. At certain periods, the geomagnetic field has weakened to such an extent that it was able to swap the positions of magnetic north and magnetic south, whilst geographic north and geographic south remain the same.

Called a geomagnetic reversal, the last time this happened was 780,000 years ago. However, geomagnetic excursions, where the field comes close to reversing but recovers its original structure, have occurred more recently.

The magnetic field shields the Earth from solar winds and harmful cosmic radiation. It also aids in human navigation, animal migrations and protects telecommunication and satellite systems. It is generated deep within the Earth in a fluid outer core of iron, nickel and other metals that creates electric currents, which in turn produce magnetic fields.

Air temperature increases from climate change will make New Hampshire's streams warmer, according to Dartmouth-led research published in Freshwater Biology.

The study examined the extent to which stream waters are warming, which has implications for freshwater ecosystems across the nation given that many species depend on cold water to survive.

"Understanding how climate change is affecting our streams can help us identify which watershed areas should be of conservation or management priority, particularly areas that act as cold water refuges for brook trout and aquatic invertebrates," said Lauren Culler, the lead author and a research assistant professor of environmental studies.

Previous studies show that stream temperatures react to changes in air temperature and that this can affect the distribution, abundance, physiology, behavior and mortality of cold water fish and other species such as mayflies and stoneflies, invertebrates that support species such as brook trout. Yet, long-term monitoring of stream temperatures has typically been inadequate. Furthermore, most locations with long-term data are in highly managed or urban areas, which affect the natural relationship between air and water temperatures.

The research team analyzed 11 years of air temperatures and stream temperatures (2001 to 2011) in Dartmouth's Second College Grant, 27,000 acres of boreal forest in the Dead Diamond River Watershed, the largest uninhabited watershed in New Hampshire and Vermont. The watershed is home to the only native population of brook trout in the two states and is also in the fastest warming region in the contiguous U.S. The researchers examined how diurnal and daily air temperature changes corresponded with water temperature changes, and then built a model predicting maximum stream temperature as a function of air temperature.

The study found that changes in air temperature were a prominent driver of changes in water temperature from June through September but that the streams varied in their sensitivity. For every 1-degree Celsius or 1.8 Fahrenheit increase in air temperature, the maximum daily water temperature increased by 0.5 to 0.8 Celsius or 0.9 to 1.2 Fahrenheit. Although streams appeared to be buffered to some extent from increases in air temperature, the researchers expect that future warming will bring about stressful thermal conditions for cold-water loving species such as brook trout. "Once temperatures reach about 20 Celsius (68 Fahrenheit), we know that many stream organisms start to experience adverse effects," explained Culler.

Stakeholders can use the model developed for the study, to help identify watersheds of priority and inform policy. Such protections may include conserving headwater lands, which affect downstream habitats that according to the study, "are colder and less sensitive to changes in air temperature." The researcher team calls on stream temperatures to be monitored, to help ensure the future of our freshwater ecosystems.

New York, NY - An innovative book distribution program that provides free children's books in low-income neighborhoods, combined with supportive adults who encourage reading, can boost children's literacy and learning opportunities, finds a new study by NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

"Both physical and psychological proximity to books matter when it comes to children's early literacy skills," said Susan B. Neuman, professor of childhood and literacy education at NYU Steinhardt and the study's lead author. "Children need access to books in their neighborhoods, as well as adults who create an environment that inspires reading."

Reading aloud to children has been touted by experts as a key to developing skills early in life that translate to later academic success. In fact, a 2014 position statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics called for parents to read aloud to their infants starting from birth.

At the heart of these recommendations is the assumption that all children have the opportunity to learn from a selection of high quality, age-appropriate books. However, a recent NYU Steinhardt study of three major cities shows that access to books remains a significant barrier to reading with children; many poor neighborhoods were found to be "book deserts," or communities with limited to no access to children's books.

Other prior research shows that creating both physical and psychological proximity to books helps get them into the hands of children. For example, creating reading corners in classrooms that are accessible and attractive encourages children to engage with books. From a psychological perspective, people help shape the setting for a child's literacy development through, for instance, reading to children or engaging them in rich dialogue around books.

The current study, funded by JetBlue and published in the journal Urban Education, examines a community-wide effort to promote greater access to books through a book distribution program in neighborhoods identified as "book deserts." Four low-income neighborhoods - three in Detroit and one in Washington, D.C. - received with vending machines that dispensed free children's books over the summer months, a time when children traditionally have less access to books.

The vending machines held children's books, provided by Random House Children's Books, in slots arranged by age ranges. Similar to a snack machine, an individual could review the selections, press a button, and a book would be dispensed free of charge. Book titles were selected to reflect a variety of genres, including fiction and nonfiction, as well as multicultural themes and authors. Selections changed every two weeks to encourage people to return to the machine.

The study was designed to capture how, why, and in what ways these machines were used. Neuman and her coauthor, Jillian Knapczyk, used several measures to examine how greater access to books and adult support for book reading functioned within these communities.

The researchers studied the vending machine sites, the traffic patterns around them, and conducted brief interviews with individuals using the machines. They also assessed children's school readiness skills before the vending machines were installed and again at the end of the summer, and had parents complete questionnaires. They sought to determine the influence of adult support on children - for instance, children who visited the vending machines with a teacher and independently visited with their parents or grandparents were identified as receiving high adult support.

The researchers found that providing greater access through close physical proximity to books and greater adult support for book reading enhanced children's opportunities to learn.

Throughout the summer, the vending machines were heavily used, distributing more than 64,000 books over the eight-week period - 26,200 to unique, one-time users and 38,235 to return users. Often two or three books were selected in a single visit.

"Our study provides a vivid counterpoint to the view that low-income parents are less inclined and less interested in their children's early education. This study challenges that view and provides an alternative scenario, recognizing that providing access to resources -- reaching families where they are -- and encouraging adult support may be a key enabler toward enhancing parent engagement and children's early literacy development," Neuman said.

Children who had the highest adult support - visiting a machine with both a parent and with a teacher from the childcare center - seemed to thrive and slightly gain throughout the summer. They saw a boost in their school readiness skills, and were able to recognize more book titles (suggesting greater exposure to books) than other children with less adult support.

In analyzing traffic patterns, the researchers found that an average of 180 people passed by a vending machine over a two-hour period, suggesting that the machines were highly visible. Despite the sizable traffic flow, not all passersby took advantage of the machines: 60 percent used them, while 40 percent did not.

Interviews revealed that those who used the machines enjoyed reading, and appreciated the opportunity to have books more accessible in the community. Parents and grandparents were highly influential in encouraging children to select books. Those who didn't select a book most often cited a lack of interest in reading. In other words, the physical proximity of books did not convert non-readers into readers, and changes in the environment alone may not be enough to motivate those who do not enjoy reading.

"Our findings suggest that only having one side of the equation - access to books or adult support - is insufficient. Rather, both are necessary. Without access to books, one cannot read to children; without adult supports, children cannot be read to," said Neuman.

JetBlue's Soar with Reading program has donated nearly $3 million worth of books to children in need, including in the communities where this study was conducted.

Increasing fires and summer droughts caused by global warming are drastically changing a globally unique bio-region of northern California and southwestern Oregon, according to new research funded by the National Science Foundation and published today in the journal Scientific Reports.

The Klamath, as the region is known, is a pocket of the Pacific Northwest known for its rugged mountains, wild rivers, and Mediterranean climate. The area is a hotspot of biological diversity and a storehouse of carbon--home to an astonishing 29 species of conifers and many rare plants that exist only in this small region of the world.

These forests are well-adapted to wildfire, but more severe fires--like the region's record-breaking Biscuit Fire of 2002, which burned 500,000 acres--have a greater impact on the area's biodiversity. As plants recover, the iconic conifers must compete with a host of more fire-resilient shrubs and other species, which sweep through the understory and begin to grow quickly.

Jonathan Thompson, Senior Ecologist at the Harvard Forest and co-author on the study, explains, "If the fire-free interval is too short or if the growing conditions are too dry, the shrubs can persist indefinitely, and the iconic conifers are squeezed out."

The research team, composed of scientists from the Harvard Forest, Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, and Portland State University, simulated the next 100 years of forest dynamics in the Klamath according to five potential climate futures. One climate future was simply a continuation of recent climate trends (1949-2010); the others projected shifts, from conservative to extreme, in warming and seasonal precipitation.

Every climate change scenario led to increased summer drought, which reduced plant survival overall. Climate change also increased the size, intensity, and frequency of wildfires, which can kill even the largest trees, reduce the survival rate of new tree seedlings, and pave the way for growth of those low-growing shrubs, which in turn create more fuel for future fires. Because of this shift in the plant population, the warmest climate simulations created fires that would break all records of burned area size for the region.

The most surprising result? Shrubs swept into the forest even in the absence of intensified climate change. Even with a continuation of recent climate, the region can expect at least 1/3 of the iconic cone-bearing trees to replaced by shrubs over the coming century.

The researchers believe that this is due in part to legacy of fire suppression that initially gave the conifers an edge over shrubs during the 20th century.

Looking to the future, Thompson adds, "As the climate continues to warm, big severe wildfires will be more frequent, and the dry conditions that follow will increasingly favor shrubs over conifers. The combination will mean less of the conifer forest that make the Klamath so distinct."

Irvine, Calif., April 27, 2018 - Climate models predict that an increase in greenhouse gases will dry out the Amazon rainforest in the future while causing wetter conditions in the woodlands of Africa and Indonesia. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine and other institutions have identified an unexpected but major factor in this worldwide precipitation shift: the direct response of the forests themselves to higher levels of carbon dioxide.

"People tend to think that most of the disruption will come from heat going into the oceans, which, in turn, will alter wind patterns," said James Randerson, UCI's Ralph J. & Carol M. Cicerone Chair in Earth System Science. "We have found that large-scale changes in rainfall can, in part, be attributed to the way tropical forests respond to the overabundance of carbon dioxide humans are emitting into the atmosphere, particularly over dense forests in the Amazon and across Asia."

A new study led by former UCI postdoctoral scholar Gabriel Kooperman and published today in Nature Climate Change, demonstrates that interactions between rainforests and rising CO2 levels will contribute to an asymmetrical pattern of rainfall change across the tropics.

In many aspects of Earth system science, the local effects of environmental factors can impact faraway regions through their influence on the circulation and movement of moisture within the atmosphere. The UCI-led group predict a similar cascade of events, beginning with stomata, small structures on the underside of leaves that open and shut in order for plants to take in the CO2 they need to grow - and that also release water vapor.

When more CO2 is present, these orifices do not open as widely, which reduces the amount of water evaporated into the atmosphere. According to the researchers, this small process at the plant level, multiplied across the rainforest, will cause changes in the atmosphere, affecting the way winds blow and the flow of moisture coming from the ocean.

"In many tropical forest regions, the moisture supplied by transpiration, which connects water underground at the root level directly to the atmosphere as it is pulled up to the leaves, can contribute as much as moisture evaporated from the ocean that rains back down at a given location - which is normal rainforest recycling," said Kooperman, now an assistant professor of geography and atmospheric sciences at the University of Georgia.

"But with higher CO2, trees and forests evaporate less moisture into the air, so fewer clouds are formed above the Amazon," he said. "And rather than [joining with the usually abundant clouds and] raining over the forest, water vapor from the Atlantic Ocean blows across the South American continent to the Andes mountain range, where it comes down as rain on the mountain slopes, with limited benefit to the rainforest in the Amazon basin."

This recipe for drought in South America is unique to the Amazon and distinctly different from an increase in rainfall predicted over forests in Central Africa and the Maritime Continent, a vast area between the Pacific and Indian oceans that includes Malaysia, Papua New Guinea and the heavily populated Indonesian archipelago.

Randerson said that the reduction in evaporation will lead to warming over the forests on islands such as Borneo, Java and Sumatra, which are surrounded by humid air above warm ocean surfaces. "You'll get a stronger contrast in heating over the islands compared to the nearby ocean, and so it will enhance a natural ocean-land breeze, pulling in more moisture from these neighboring ocean systems to increase rainfall over the forests," he said.

The research project, which used a combination of standard simulations provided through the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 and simulations with the state-of-the-art Community Earth System Model, revealed that the response of tropical vegetation to higher CO2 can be an important driver of climate change in the tropics, according to Kooperman.

He also highlighted the fact that the resulting droughts and forest mortality in the Amazon and a potential increase in flooding in other rainforests may have an impact on biodiversity, freshwater availability and food supplies for economically vulnerable populations.

SAN DIEGO, April 26, 2018 - A significant update to the PROGRESS-CTO (PROspective Global Registry for the Study of Chronic Total Occlusion Intervention) International Registry was presented today as late-breaking clinical science at Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions (SCAI) Scientific Sessions 2018. The study includes results of Chronic Total Occlusion Percutaneous Intervention (CTO PCI) for more than 3,000 patients across 20 centers in the United States, Europe, and Russia. The new data from the PROGRESS-CTO registry are representative of contemporary practice and outcomes.

The World Health Organization estimates that 7.3 million deaths around the world are due to coronary heart disease making it the second cause of death in people under the age of 59 after HIV/AIDS, and reaching the first position in those 60 years and older (European Heart Journal). Approximately 20 percent of such patients are known to have a complication from CAD called CTO, or complete blockages of the arteries that have typically been present for more than three months (NCBI). CTO PCI is a minimally invasive procedure that has been evolving with constant improvement of equipment and techniques.

The authors outline contemporary outcomes of CTO PCI by analyzing the clinical, angiographic and procedural characteristics of 3,122 CTO interventions performed in 3,055 patients at 20 centers in the United States (17), Europe (2) and Russia (1). The researchers analyzed success rates of antegrade wire escalation, antegrade dissection and re-entry and the retrograde approach on CTO interventions performed.

The mean age was 65?10 years and 85 percent of the patients were men with high prevalence of diabetes (43 percent), prior myocardial infarction (MI) (46 percent), prior coronary artery bypass graft surgery (33 percent) and prior PCI (65 percent). The overall technical and procedural success rate was 87 percent and 85 percent, respectively. The rate of in-hospital major complications was 3 percent (composite of death 0.9 percent), acute MI (1.1 percent), stroke (0.3 percent), tamponade (0.9 percent), emergency surgery (0.2 percent) and re-PCI (0.4 percent). The success rates for the antegrade wire escalation, antegrade dissection and re-entry and retrograde approach were 87.3 percent, 89.7 percent and 83 percent, respectively.

"The high success and acceptable complication rates suggest that at experienced centers CTO PCI can provide significant clinical benefits to the patients," said Peter Tajti, MD, Abbott Northwestern Hospital, Minneapolis Heart Institute in Minneapolis, MN. "The study results can facilitate discussions with both patients and physicians about the risk to benefits of the procedure and guide decision making on CTO PCI."

The authors are working on a new, multi-center study including centers from around the world to further assess the effect of CTO PCI symptoms when compared to the placebo-controlled procedure.

Session Details:
"Late-Breaking Clinical Science II: The Hybrid Approach of Percutaneous Coronary Interventions for Chronic Total Occlusion: Update from the PROGRESS-CTO (PROspective Global Registry for the Study of Chronic Total Occlusion Intervention) International Registry" [April 26, 2018, 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. PDT, Seaport DE]

University of Colorado Cancer Center researchers recently completed the largest-ever study of thyroid cancer genetics, mining the data of 583 patient samples of advanced differentiated thyroid cancer and 196 anaplastic thyroid cancers. In addition to identification of specific genes that may drive these cancers and thus provide attractive targets for treatment, the researchers found that in several samples of advanced differentiated and anaplastic thyroid cancer (the most aggressive and dangerous forms of the disease), mechanisms meant to repair faulty DNA had been broken. These broken repair mechanisms led to a subset of thyroid cancers accumulating a high number of genetic alterations - and this "high mutation burden" is a marker recognized by the FDA to recommend treatment with anti-cancer immunotherapies.

"Anaplastic thyroid cancer is a particularly terrible cancer - people wonder what makes it so bad, and advanced thyroid cancer causes significant morbidity. I've had a very productive relationship with Foundation Medicine, primarily to study rare salivary gland cancers and I'm pleased that we've been able to extend our collaboration to the study of thyroid cancers to hopefully answer some of these questions," says Daniel Bowles, MD, clinical and translational investigator at CU Cancer Center and Head of Cancer Research at the Denver Veterans Administration Medical Center.

Bowles worked with first author Nikita Pozdeyev, MD, PhD, to analyze tumor samples submitted by oncologists from around the United States to Foundation Medicine for genetic analysis that could inform treatment strategies. Interestingly, the fact that clinicians who submitted these samples were specifically seeking possible treatment strategies meant that the majority of samples were from advanced cancers.

"Genetic analysis of early-stage thyroid cancers is most often not necessary - we successfully treat these tumors with surgery and radioactive iodine," Pozdeyev says. "But with distant metastases, genetic information becomes important for treatment. Because oncologists had sought this genetic information, our study is enriched for advanced cases."

The researchers point out that even large treatment centers are likely to only a few of these most dangerous, anaplastic thyroid cancers every year. Due to the current study's industry-academia collaboration, the researchers were able to explore 196 of these anaplastic thyroid cancers, "giving us sufficient analytical power to use machine learning and statistical analysis to make sense of the data," Pozdeyev says.

In addition to finding that some anaplastic thyroid cancers carried a high overall mutation burden that could make immunotherapy an attractive treatment option, the group found specific genetic changes driving anaplastic cancers, including amplifications of the genes KDR, KIT and PDGFRA. These genes encode a kind of on-off switch called "receptor tyrosine kinases" that many cancer cells use to speed their growth and proliferation. In this case, these receptor tyrosine kinases happen to be targeted by the drug lenvatinib, which earned FDA approval for use in kidney cancer. In collaboration with Drs. Bryan Haugen and Rebecca Schweppe, the researchers treated a cohort of thyroid cancer cell lines with lenvatinib, finding that it was the cell line with amplification of KDR, KIT and PDGFRA that was especially sensitive to the drug, hinting that treatment with lenvatinib may be an attractive strategy against a subset of anaplastic thyroid cancers.

"As a clinician, I learn from this study that every patient with advanced thyroid cancer that we consider for systemic therapy should be genotyped - knowledge of genetic background may affect how we treat that patient," Pozdeyev says. "There are many drugs targeting many genetic changes that are approved for other cancers, which we would not usually think to use in thyroid cancer. Some of the findings in this paper will potentially change that."

Irvine, Calif., April 26, 2018 -- Coral reef bleaching is stark evidence of the damage being inflicted by global climate change on marine ecosystems, but a research team led by scientists at the University of California, Irvine has found some cause for hope. While many corals are dying, others are showing resilience to increased sea surface temperatures, pointing to possible clues to the survival and recovery of these vitally important aquatic habitats.

"Field observations have shown a heterogeneity or patchiness of the bleaching process at the reef scale, which means that some corals are responding differently to heat stress," said Aryan Safaie, lead author of a study published today in Nature Communications.

"We know that some species are more thermally tolerant than others," he added. "But our study shows additionally that certain locations within a reef might be more amenable to allowing corals to persist in the face of increasing water temperature."

To reach this conclusion, Safaie, a Ph.D. student in UCI's Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, said it was necessary to examine reefs more closely in terms of both space and time, versus relying solely on satellite remote-sensing products. He and his collaborators analyzed decades' worth of field data collected at 118 locations spanning five coral reef regions around the world, including the Great Barrier Reef near Australia and sites in the Indian Ocean, Pacific Ocean, Caribbean Sea and the Red Sea.

"Satellite images are indispensable in giving us the big picture and providing tools for long term projections of ocean health," he said. "But, these spacecraft collect data only once or twice weekly, there just isn't enough to provide a clear understanding of the daily and hourly variability of ocean conditions unless you're looking at more frequently reported field observations."

The team found that in reef locations with more high-frequency temperature variability - water temperature spiking during the day and dropping at night, day in and day out - severe bleaching was less likely to occur.

"We think of corals as these thermally sensitive organisms, and that temperature variability would mean they would have a harder time all the time," said coauthor Kristen Davis, UCI assistant professor of civil & environmental engineering and Earth system science. "Instead, what we found is that higher daily temperature variability made corals stronger and more resilient when a thermal stress event came along."

The upshot of this work, according to Davis, is that scientists now have a better way to predict the outcome of coral reef bleaching events, which can lead to better conservation strategies.

"As we move into a time when corals are threatened by global warming, if there are some living corals remaining on a reef after a bleaching event, there will be some genetic material to repopulate the reef with corals that are more thermally resilient," she said.

Davis said further work is needed to identify where these super corals live, so that those areas can be protected from over fishing and development.

Where do seabirds go when their nesting colony is buried by a volcano? In 2008, the eruption of the Kasatochi volcano in the Aleutian archipelago provided a rare opportunity to track how the island's Crested and Least auklet populations responded when their nesting colony was abruptly destroyed. As a new study from The Auk: Ornithological Advances shows, the birds were surprisingly adaptable, establishing a new colony on freshly created habitat nearby in only four years.

Crested and Least auklets rely on habitat that must be maintained by continual disturbance--they nest in crevices in talus slopes formed by rock falls, which eventually become unusable when they're filled in with soil and debris. The volcano's 2008 eruption buried all of the suitable nesting habitat for the 100,000 Crested Auklets and 150,000 Least Auklets that had been nesting on Kasatochi.

The U.S. Geological Survey's Gary Drew and his colleagues surveyed the island and its bird community by boat twice prior to the eruption and five times in the first eight years afterward, as well as deploying time lapse cameras at two locations on Kasatochi to monitor the auklets' activity. Eleven months after the eruption, birds were sitting on the thick layer of ash covering their former nesting site, with no sign of any successful nests; the number of auklets turning up at the site declined each year. However, in 2012, Drew and his colleagues found a new auklet colony at a recently formed talus field north of the original colony site. Surveys of birds at sea indicated that some may also have moved to another nearby island.

"We were surprised at the speed at which the auklets were able to shift and make use of the new colony site. These birds typically nest in very large colonies, so there may be a tipping point where newly available habitat shifts rapidly from being a site of no or low density nesting to a site of high density nesting," says Drew. "Fortunately, both Crested and Least auklets are currently doing well and we do not have any immediate concerns regarding the status of these two species. That said, these findings provide us a potential template for predicting the trajectory of auklet populations in response to habitat loss and interpreting auklet behaviors following future disturbance events."

"The volcanic eruption at Kasatochi in 2008 provided the rare opportunity to document the response of a colonial seabird to the sudden and complete destruction of their nesting habitat. This study capitalized on that opportunity and gives us a glimpse into the ability of these species to disperse to nearby colonies and colonize new habitat," adds the University of New Brunswick's Heather Major, an expert on Aleutian seabirds who was not involved in the study. "This study is therefore important to our understanding of dispersal and habitat selection, and more generally, the ability of these two species to respond to large disturbances at their nesting colonies."