Tech

We've all heard the adage, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again," but new research from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh finds that it isn't all about repetition. Rather, internal states like engagement can also have an impact on learning.

The collaborative research, published in Nature Neuroscience, examined how changes in internal states, such as arousal, attention, motivation, and engagement can affect the learning process using brain-computer interface (BCI) technology. Findings suggest that changes in internal states can systematically influence how behavior improves with learning, thus paving the way for more effective methods to teach people skills quickly, and to a higher level of proficiency.

Using a BCI learning paradigm, the researchers observed how neural activity changed, and the degree to which these changes were influenced by shifts in internal states, as subjects performed tasks by moving a cursor on a computer screen using only patterns of neural activity.

As the study unfolded, the team began to notice occasional large, abrupt fluctuations in neural population activity within the motor cortex. At first, they did not understand why this was happening, but over time, they came to realize that the fluctuations happened whenever the subject was surprised with a change in the task. (Changes ranged from brief pauses to perturbations of the BCI mapping.) At these moments, the subjects' pupils dilated, suggesting that the abrupt fluctuation was the neural manifestation of an internal state, engagement.

"We weren't looking for this particular effect in the neural data," says Steve Chase, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon and the Neuroscience Institute. "The pupil diameter was tightly correlated with the engagement signal that we saw in the neural activity, and it seems to have a massive effect in the motor cortex."

Ultimately, the research suggests that subjects' level of engagement or attention can make things easier or harder to learn, depending on the context.

"You might have imagined that the brain would be set up with a clear segregation of functions, like motor areas to motor control, and emotional areas to emotional control, and sensory areas to sensory representation," says Aaron Batista, professor of bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh. "What we're finding is a serendipitous kind of intrusion of an internal state into a motor area. It could be that we can harness that signal to improve learning."

The group's work is ongoing and done in collaboration with the Center for Neural Basis of Cognition, a cross-university research and educational program between Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh that leverages each institution's strengths to investigate the cognitive and neural mechanisms that give rise to biological intelligence and behavior.

"One of the unique parts of our collaboration is how integrated we all have been throughout the entire project, from experimental design, to experimental conduction, to data analyses, and adopting; we're all involved in all parts of that," says Byron Yu, professor of biomedical engineering and electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon. "The findings here might one day help people learn everyday skills, such as math or dance, more quickly and to a higher level of proficiency."

In recent years, robots have gained artificial vision, touch, and even smell. "Researchers have been giving robots human-like perception," says MIT Associate Professor Fadel Adib. In a new paper, Adib's team is pushing the technology a step further. "We're trying to give robots superhuman perception," he says.

The researchers have developed a robot that uses radio waves, which can pass through walls, to sense occluded objects. The robot, called RF-Grasp, combines this powerful sensing with more traditional computer vision to locate and grasp items that might otherwise be blocked from view. The advance could one day streamline e-commerce fulfillment in warehouses or help a machine pluck a screwdriver from a jumbled toolkit.

The research will be presented in May at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. The paper's lead author is Tara Boroushaki, a research assistant in the Signal Kinetics Group at the MIT Media Lab. Her MIT co-authors include Adib, who is the director of the Signal Kinetics Group; and Alberto Rodriguez, the Class of 1957 Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Other co-authors include Junshan Leng, a research engineer at Harvard University, and Ian Clester, a PhD student at Georgia Tech.

As e-commerce continues to grow, warehouse work is still usually the domain of humans, not robots, despite sometimes-dangerous working conditions. That's in part because robots struggle to locate and grasp objects in such a crowded environment. "Perception and picking are two roadblocks in the industry today," says Rodriguez. Using optical vision alone, robots can't perceive the presence of an item packed away in a box or hidden behind another object on the shelf -- visible light waves, of course, don't pass through walls.

But radio waves can.

For decades, radio frequency (RF) identification has been used to track everything from library books to pets. RF identification systems have two main components: a reader and a tag. The tag is a tiny computer chip that gets attached to -- or, in the case of pets, implanted in -- the item to be tracked. The reader then emits an RF signal, which gets modulated by the tag and reflected back to the reader.

The reflected signal provides information about the location and identity of the tagged item. The technology has gained popularity in retail supply chains -- Japan aims to use RF tracking for nearly all retail purchases in a matter of years. The researchers realized this profusion of RF could be a boon for robots, giving them another mode of perception.

"RF is such a different sensing modality than vision," says Rodriguez. "It would be a mistake not to explore what RF can do."

RF Grasp uses both a camera and an RF reader to find and grab tagged objects, even when they're fully blocked from the camera's view. It consists of a robotic arm attached to a grasping hand. The camera sits on the robot's wrist. The RF reader stands independent of the robot and relays tracking information to the robot's control algorithm. So, the robot is constantly collecting both RF tracking data and a visual picture of its surroundings. Integrating these two data streams into the robot's decision making was one of the biggest challenges the researchers faced.

"The robot has to decide, at each point in time, which of these streams is more important to think about," says Boroushaki. "It's not just eye-hand coordination, it's RF-eye-hand coordination. So, the problem gets very complicated."

The robot initiates the seek-and-pluck process by pinging the target object's RF tag for a sense of its whereabouts. "It starts by using RF to focus the attention of vision," says Adib. "Then you use vision to navigate fine maneuvers." The sequence is akin to hearing a siren from behind, then turning to look and get a clearer picture of the siren's source.

With its two complementary senses, RF Grasp zeroes in on the target object. As it gets closer and even starts manipulating the item, vision, which provides much finer detail than RF, dominates the robot's decision making.

RF Grasp proved its efficiency in a battery of tests. Compared to a similar robot equipped with only a camera, RF Grasp was able to pinpoint and grab its target object with about half as much total movement. Plus, RF Grasp displayed the unique ability to "declutter" its environment -- removing packing materials and other obstacles in its way in order to access the target. Rodriguez says this demonstrates RF Grasp's "unfair advantage" over robots without penetrative RF sensing. "It has this guidance that other systems simply don't have."

RF Grasp could one day perform fulfillment in packed e-commerce warehouses. Its RF sensing could even instantly verify an item's identity without the need to manipulate the item, expose its barcode, then scan it. "RF has the potential to improve some of those limitations in industry, especially in perception and localization," says Rodriguez.

Adib also envisions potential home applications for the robot, like locating the right Allen wrench to assemble your Ikea chair. "Or you could imagine the robot finding lost items. It's like a super-Roomba that goes and retrieves my keys, wherever the heck I put them."

The recent power outages in Texas brought attention to its power grid being separated from the rest of the country. While it is not immediately clear whether integration with other parts of the national grid would have completely eliminated the need for rolling outages, the state's inability to import significant amounts of electricity was decisive in the blackout.

A larger power grid has perks, but also has perils that researchers at Northwestern University are hoping to address to expedite integration and improvements to the system.

An obvious challenge in larger grids is that failures can propagate further -- in the case of Texas, across state lines. Another is that all power generators need to be kept synchronized to a common frequency in order to transmit energy. The U.S. is served by three "separate" grids: The Eastern interconnection, the Western interconnection and the Texas interconnection, interlinked only by direct-current power lines. Any persistent deviation in frequencies within a region can lead to an outage.

As a result, researchers are searching for ways to stabilize the grid by looking for methods to mitigate deviations in the power generators' frequencies.

The new Northwestern research shows that counter to assumptions held by some, there are stability benefits to heterogeneity in the power grid. Examining several power grids across the U.S. and Europe, a team led by Northwestern physicist Adilson Motter recently reported that generators operating on different frequencies return to their normal state more quickly when they are damped by "breakers" at different rates than generators around them.

The paper was published March 5 in the journal Nature Communications.

Motter is the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor in the department of physics and astronomy in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. His research focuses on nonlinear phenomena in complex systems and networks.

Motter compares power grids to a choir: "It's a little bit like a choir without a conductor. The generators have to listen to others and speak in sync. They react and respond to each other's frequencies."

Listen to an out-of-whack frequency, and the result can be a failure. Given the interconnected makeup of the system, a failure can propagate across the network. Historically, these malfunctions have been prevented by using active controllers. However, failures are often caused precisely by control and equipment errors. This points to a need to build additional stability within the design of the system. To achieve that, the team looked into leveraging the natural heterogeneities of the grid.

When the frequencies of the power generators are moved away from the synchronous state, they can swing around for a long time and even become more erratic. To mitigate these fluctuations, they came up with something akin to a door mechanism used to close a door the fastest, but without slamming.

"Mathematically, the problem of damping frequency deviations in a power generator is analogous to the problem of optimally damping a door to get it to close the fastest, which has a known solution in the case of a single door," Motter said. "But it's not a single door in this analogy. It's a network of many doors that are coupled with each other, if you can imagine the doors as power generators."

When creating an "optimal damping" effect, they discovered that rather than making each damper identical, damping the power generators in a way that is suitably different from each other can further optimize their ability to synchronize to the same frequency as quickly as possible. That is, suitably heterogenous damping across the network can lead to improved stability in the power grids studied by the team.

This discovery could have implications for future grid design as developers work to optimize technology and in considerations to further integrate now separated networks.

Telehealth has become a critical way for doctors to still provide health care while minimizing in-person contact during COVID-19. But with phone or Zoom appointments, it's harder for doctors to get important vital signs from a patient, such as their pulse or respiration rate, in real time.

A University of Washington-led team has developed a method that uses the camera on a person's smartphone or computer to take their pulse and respiration signal from a real-time video of their face. The researchers presented this state-of-the-art system in December at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference.

Now the team is proposing a better system to measure these physiological signals. This system is less likely to be tripped up by different cameras, lighting conditions or facial features, such as skin color. The researchers will present these findings April 8 at the ACM Conference on Health, Interference, and Learning.

"Machine learning is pretty good at classifying images. If you give it a series of photos of cats and then tell it to find cats in other images, it can do it. But for machine learning to be helpful in remote health sensing, we need a system that can identify the region of interest in a video that holds the strongest source of physiological information -- pulse, for example -- and then measure that over time," said lead author Xin Liu, a UW doctoral student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering.

"Every person is different," Liu said. "So this system needs to be able to quickly adapt to each person's unique physiological signature, and separate this from other variations, such as what they look like and what environment they are in."

The team's system is privacy preserving -- it runs on the device instead of in the cloud -- and uses machine learning to capture subtle changes in how light reflects off a person's face, which is correlated with changing blood flow. Then it converts these changes into both pulse and respiration rate.

The first version of this system was trained with a dataset that contained both videos of people's faces and "ground truth" information: each person's pulse and respiration rate measured by standard instruments in the field. The system then used spatial and temporal information from the videos to calculate both vital signs. It outperformed similar machine learning systems on videos where subjects were moving and talking.

But while the system worked well on some datasets, it still struggled with others that contained different people, backgrounds and lighting. This is a common problem known as "overfitting," the team said.

The researchers improved the system by having it produce a personalized machine learning model for each individual. Specifically, it helps look for important areas in a video frame that likely contain physiological features correlated with changing blood flow in a face under different contexts, such as different skin tones, lighting conditions and environments. From there, it can focus on that area and measure the pulse and respiration rate.

While this new system outperforms its predecessor when given more challenging datasets, especially for people with darker skin tones, there's still more work to do, the team said.

"We acknowledge that there is still a trend toward inferior performance when the subject's skin type is darker," Liu said. "This is in part because light reflects differently off of darker skin, resulting in a weaker signal for the camera to pick up. Our team is actively developing new methods to solve this limitation."

The researchers are also working on a variety of collaborations with doctors to see how this system performs in the clinic.

"Any ability to sense pulse or respiration rate remotely provides new opportunities for remote patient care and telemedicine. This could include self-care, follow-up care or triage, especially when someone doesn't have convenient access to a clinic," said senior author Shwetak Patel, a professor in both the Allen School and the electrical and computer engineering department. "It's exciting to see academic communities working on new algorithmic approaches to address this with devices that people have in their homes."

EUGENE, Ore. -- April 2, 2021 -- Across California's Central Valley, under stress from large-scale agriculture and climate change, native bee species that are flexible in their pollination behavior when around other wild bee populations appear best suited for survival in shrinking habitats.

That's the primary finding of a study published online April 1 in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

A research team led by University of Oregon biologist Lauren C. Ponisio
identified 1,150 network interactions involving 157 wild bee species and 152 plant species at 63 sites spread across three counties. The findings emerged from observations of adult bees from 31 species whose pollination activities with at least five plants overlapped during multiple crop-growing seasons.

"We looked at the ability of these bees to change their roles in these plant-pollinator interaction networks," Ponisio said. "This ability proved to be important for which species persisted in the landscape as well as for the higher number of habitat patches being occupied."

An important behavior tied to that vitality was the ability of some wild bee species that chose plants being less targeted for pollination by competing species, said the study's lead author, Marilia P. Gaiarsa, who was a postdoctoral researcher in Ponisio's former lab at the University of California, Riverside.

Ponisio joined the UO's Data Science Initiative in July 2020 as an assistant professor in the Department of Biology and member of the Institute of Ecology and Evolution. Gaiarsa now is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Zurich, where she is studying the response of species interactions to climate change.

"In the Central Valley, there are areas of intensive industrial agriculture, monocultural farming, that are experiencing a 90 percent habitat loss for native bees," Ponisio said.

Understanding what factors promote ecosystem health and ecosystem services, such as pollination, Gaiarsa said, is vital for helping species that are facing extinction from various extinction drivers such as intensive agriculture, deforestation and climate change.

"One way to turn around these negative effects is through the process of ecosystem restoration," she said. "By going into a degraded area and planting native plants known to be important resources for bees, we can restore some of the lost interactions and potentially restore the populations of these species."

The valley is a product of large land grants purchased for farming years ago. Large single-crop enterprises dominate the fertile land. Over time, hedgerows were added between some farms to restore patches of native plants that support native species, especially bees crucial to crop pollination. Bees, in turn, need nectar from the plants for nutrition.

Hedgerows observed in the study were created by planting flowers along the margins of fields more than a decade ago in a project led by study co-author Claire Kremen, Ponisio's doctoral adviser at the University of California, Berkeley.

"At these hedgerows there are tiny patches of bee populations in these seas of monoculture agriculture," Ponisio said. "Some colonize these patches; others go live in them for a while but eventually go extinct."

By looking into the population dynamics of different species, the research team sought to understand if different species visited different habitat patches and, in turn, how well they were able to persist on the landscape. Occupation of different patches, Gaiarsa said, should increase the number of interactions at each site and potentially increase plant diversity and overall ecosystem health.

"If a particular bumblebee species pollinates several plants that are only pollinated by a couple of other bee species, maybe that bumblebee species will be able to colonize more habitat patches because there may be very little competition with other bees for its plant resources," she said.

Organic solar cell (OSC) is one of the most important green energy technologies. The photovoltaic efficiencies of OSCs are closely related to the photoactive layers, which are prepared by blending electron donor and acceptor materials. With the emergence of a large number of new organic photovoltaic materials and effective molecular modification methods, the photovoltaic efficiency of OSCs has been greatly improved. Accordingly, the molecular structure of the materials is becoming much more complex with high costs, which is difficult to meet the requirements of the industrialization of OSCs. Thus, it is of great importance to develop novel photovoltaic materials with low-cost and high performance simultaneously.

Some classical conjugated polymers (such as polythiophenes, polythienylene vinylenes, polyphenylene vinylenes, etc.) in the early stage of organic photovoltaic field have simple molecular structure and great cost advantage, which play important roles in the early research of OSCs. However, the classical conjugated polymers have gradually faded out of high efficiency OSCs due to the problem that "the aggregation state and molecular energy level cannot match well with the new non-fullerene-acceptors". Therefore, can we explore an effective molecular design strategy, which could revitalize the classic low-cost polymers with high photovoltaic performance?

Recently, the National Science Review (NSR) online published the latest research work of the research group of Professor Zhang Shaoqing of University of science and technology, Beijing and the research group of Hou Jianhui of Institute of chemistry of Chinese Academy of Sciences. Based on the classic backbone of poly(thienylene vinylene) (PTV), an ester substituted PTV derivative, PTVT-T, was designed and prepared in very few steps. A remarkable photovoltaic efficiency of 16.2% was then realized by using PTVT-T as donor material.

The key point of the molecular design strategy is that the symmetrical diester groups were introduced in the repeated segments of PTVT-T, which enable its significant aggregation effect in solution state and the molecular energy level of PTVT-T can be modulated synergistically.

In the repeat unit of PTVT-T, the introduction of the symmetrical ester substituents makes the polymer have a more stable planar conformation, which leads to a significant "aggregation effect in solution state". As a result, nano scale phase separation morphology can be easily formed in the active layer. Low-lying Homo level is also important for designing new polymer donor materials, which enables high output voltage in the corresponding OSCs. The diester groups in PTVT-T exhibits significant electron withdrawing properties, which reduces its HOMO energy level to - 5.28 eV.

The outstanding advantages of PTVT-T are: (a) the low-cost feature enabled by the very simple chemical structure and synthesis method; (b) matched photoelectronic properties with three typical acceptor materials; (c) the corresponding OSCs have high performance and good stability.

PTVT-T show simple chemical structure and does not contain the F atom, which are commonly used in other highly efficient polymer donors. Therefore, the synthesis steps and the costs of PTVT-T are significantly lower than those of the polymers with state-of-the-art efficiencies. PTVT-T can work well with the representative acceptors, PCBM, IT-4F and eC9, showing great potential to match with new emerging acceptor materials.

Particularly, a remarkable efficiency of 16.20% can be realized by blending PTVT-T with the acceptor eC9, and the corresponding devices show good stability, i.e., the cells can maintain over 80% of the initial efficiency after continuous illumination of AM 1.5G for about 500 hours.

This work demonstrated that the conjugated polymers with simple chemical structure, especially for the classical polymers developed in the early stage of OSC, will be revitalized by rational molecular design method and realize highly efficient OSC with low-cost feature.

Scientists in Japan have developed and tested a novel probiotic formulation to control severe diarrhea in calves, ensuring their health and reducing mortality, and in turn reducing economic loss.

The health of calves is a crucial component in animal husbandry; diseases that affect calves cause economic losses to livestock farms either directly, due to death of the calves, or indirectly, due to weight loss that reduces productivity over the animals' lifespans. In Japan, bovine rotavirus (BRV) and bovine cryptosporidiosis infections are major diseases that cause severe diarrhea in calves.

A team of scientists from Hokkaido, including Associate Professor Satoru Konnai of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at Hokkaido University, have developed a novel probiotic supplement and verified its efficacy as an antidiarrheal medication for calves. Their results have been published in the journal Veterinary Microbiology.

Diarrhea in calves (bovine diarrhea) is caused by a variety of pathogens, including bacteria, viruses and protists. Antibiotics are an extremely effective means of treating bacterial diarrhea, but they are ineffective when the cause is a virus, a protist or an antibiotic-resistant bacteria. There is a need for a novel treatment to prevent bovine diarrhea. Probiotic is a term used to describe microorganisms that have a beneficial effect on human health when consumed. There have been a number of peer reviewed studies on the effect of various probiotics in humans, showing that probiotics are effective in preventing a number of diseases.

Fermented milks (FMs) have been used as probiotics in animal husbandry as far back as the 1970s; however, the efficacy of these FMs has been inconsistent due to the wide variations in the manufacturing process. Furthermore, there have been cases where FMs themselves have been the source of diarrhea-causing pathogens. The scientists proposed that fermented milk replacers (FMRs) could be an ideal candidate for high-quality and safe probiotics in calves. They set out to develop a unified protocol to manufacture FMRs and evaluate their efficacy.

The scientists tested the efficacy of a novel FMR and a lactic acid-based milk replacer (LAB-MR) on newborn calves, compared to commercially milk replacers. In clinical studies, the calves were fed with the milk replacers throughout the experiment. The calves were then exposed to BRV on day 5; the efficacy of each treatment was evaluated 10 days after infection with BRV. The milk replacers were also subjected to field trials, on farms with a history of high prevalence of BRV and bovine cryptosporidiosis over the previous three years.

Their results showed that bovine diarrhea due to BRV was much less severe in calves fed with FMR or with LAB-MR. Further, tissue damage to the intestine was reduced, and milk intake during diarrhea was increased compared to calves on the commercial milk replacer. In the field trials, FMR feeding reduced the incidence of diarrhea in a dairy farm with a high incidence of enteritis as a result of mixed infection with BRV and bovine cryptosporidiosis. Interestingly, the lactobacillus strains in the LAB-MR did not ferment the milk replacer, indicating this strain can protect against diarrhea in calves without fermentation--there may be another mechanism by which LAB-MR protects against diarrhea.

Skyrmions - tiny magnetic vortices - are considered promising candidates for tomorrow's information memory devices which may be able to achieve enormous data storage and processing capacities. A research team led by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has developed a method to grow a particular magnetic thin-film material that hosts these magnetic vortices. A central aspect of this new method is the abrupt heating of the material with short, very bright flashes of light, as the international team, consisting of scientists from HZDR, the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research Dresden, TU Dresden (TUD), and Chinese partners, describes in the journal Advanced Functional Materials (DOI: 10.1002/adfm.202009723).

In 2009, a research team had made a remarkable discovery: They found that tiny magnetic vortices can form in a material called manganese silicide - an alloy of manganese and silicon. Since then, these skyrmions, named after British physicist Tony Skyrme, have been considered promising candidates for future magnetic storage devices. They can be easily formed on and erased from surfaces and are no larger than a few nanometers (billionths of a meter), which makes them much smaller than the magnetic bits on today's hard drives that measure about 50 nanometers.

"In addition, skyrmions can be better targeted with electricity than with magnetic fields, as is done with current hard drives," explains Dr. Shengqiang Zhou, a physicist at HZDR's Institute of Ion Beam Physics and Materials Research. "Targeting with an electric current allows us to achieve better scalability, which might enable us to build much denser and faster storage devices in the future." But there are still some obstacles to overcome along the way. Among other things, silicon and manganese present an unfavorable property when they form crystals of manganese silicide: Instead of consistently producing one specific, well-defined phase, the two elements can form many different crystal phases. Thin films of an Mn-Si alloy, known as the B20 phase, are particularly suitable for the formation of skyrmions.

Undesirable crystal phases

Producing this alloy is anything but easy, though, because another undesirable crystal phase, called MnSi1.7, inevitably forms during the production process, impeding or preventing the formation of skyrmions. Specifically, lower temperatures and slower cooling of the material favors MnSi1.7. Shengqiang Zhou's team has now developed a method that prevents its formation, leaving only thin layers of flawless B20-MnSi.

The core element of the new process is a special heat treatment. "It's a bit like making a pancake," Zhou explains. "It tastes best when it is crispy on the outside and as soft as possible on the inside." When you pour the batter into a hot pan, it bakes so fast that the inside stays nice and soft. When you bake the batter in the oven, however, it heats up much more evenly and hardens all over - and you get a rather mediocre pancake.

Heating with flashes

So the experts used this pancake strategy of rapid, intense heating as their model. "When we heat a thin manganese film placed on top of a silicon wafer very briefly, we introduce very little energy into the material," Zhou explains their rationale. "This means it will cool down fast - so fast, in fact, that the unwanted MnSi1.7 won't have time to form." The challenge is how to heat something rapidly and vigorously at the same time. The research group found the solution in bright, intense flashes of white light.

Such flashes can be generated at the "BlitzLab", a Helmholtz Innovation Lab located on the Rossendorf campus. Various series of measurements confirmed the assumption: "By varying the power of the flashes, we were able to adjust the ratio of the different crystal phases with great precision," reports Shengqiang Zhou. "When we applied relatively strong powers, thin films of pure B20-MnSi formed as we had hoped."

As a result, the skyrmions that can be generated in these layers are now stable over a much wider temperature and magnetic field range than previously observed in this material. Manganese silicide itself is unlikely to be suitable for practical use since it only works at very low temperatures. But it could serve as an important model for other, more practicable materials. "Many alloys pose the problem that they have different phases," Zhou explains. "And our approach could help separate these phases in the future."

New research by the University of Kent has found that using low-cost psychological interventions can reduce vehicle engine idling and in turn improve air quality, especially when there is increased traffic volume at railway level crossings.

A team of psychologists led by Professor Dominic Abrams, Dr Tim Hopthrow and Dr Fanny Lalot at the University's School of Psychology, found that using carefully worded road signage can decrease the number of drivers leaving engines idling during queues at crossing barriers.

The research, which was funded by Canterbury City Council following a successful grant bid to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), observed 6,049 drivers' engine idling at the St Dunstan's and St Stephen's level crossings in Canterbury, Kent. The researchers tested the effects of three intervention signs fixed to lampposts, which amplified existing signs to request drivers to switch off their engines. These were:

'Join other responsible drivers in Canterbury. Turn off your engine when the barriers are down' (Social norm messaging).

'Turn off your engine when the barriers are down. You will improve air quality in the area' (Outcome efficacy messaging).

'Think about your actions. When the barriers are down please turn off your engine' (Self-regulation messaging).

The social norm and outcome efficacy messages successfully increased the proportion of drivers who turned off their engines, by 42% and 25%, respectively. This reduction in vehicle idling significantly reduced concentrations of atmospheric particulate matter (PM2.5) two metres above ground level.

The presence of larger numbers of other drivers boosted the impact of the social norm road signage. These findings demonstrate that drivers may feel a stronger urge to conform to the norm of turning their engines off when those ahead of them in traffic do too. This reduces harmful emissions when it is most urgent to do so.

This research, published by the Journal of Environmental Psychology, is the first of its kind to show that behavioural change induced by persuasive messages translates into observable changes in air quality and pollutant concentration levels.

As a result of the research, Canterbury City Council has installed permanent road signage at the St Dunstan's, St Stephen's and Sturry railway level crossings.

Professor Abrams said: 'People have many creative ideas about how to improve air quality, but how do we know which will work? This research used a scientific method that enabled us to design effective messages to change people's behaviour, improving the air quality for themselves and others. Just as importantly, we have also discovered types of messages that do not work so well. This approach should also work when planning ways to encourage other behaviours that can improve air quality, health and quality of the environment.'

Kelly Haynes, Environmental Health Officer - Air Quality at Canterbury City Council, said: 'Improving air quality in the district is a major focus of the council and research like this is vital to that work.

'The results clearly show the right messages in the right locations can be really effective in reducing the number of people leaving their engines running which is one of the main contributors to poor air quality in our city.

'These signs are just one of many things we're doing to tackle air quality including the introduction of a new hybrid car club in Canterbury and plans to install more electric vehicle charging points across the district.'

Helsinki, Finland -- The EU will be home to 30 million electric cars by 2030 and the European Commission is preparing tough targets for recycling these and other batteries. Yet the impacts of battery recycling, especially for the sizeable lithium-ion batteries of the electric cars soon filling our streets, has been largely unstudied.

In a new study, researchers at Aalto University have investigated the environmental effects of a hydrometallurgical recycling process for electric car batteries. Using simulation-based life-cycle analysis, they considered energy and water consumption, as well as process emissions.

'Battery recycling processes are still developing, so their environmental footprints haven't yet been studied in detail. To be beneficial, recycling must be proven to be more ecological than producing raw materials- we can't just assume recycling is automatically better, even though we know mining the raw materials has large environmental impacts, like high energy and water consumption,' says Mari Lundström, Assistant Professor at Aalto University.

Battery recycling often uses smelting, which typically loses lithium and other raw materials. Novel hydrometallurgical processes, which separate battery metals from waste by dissolution, enable the recovery of all metals but consume large amounts of energy and chemicals, and often produce contaminated wastewaters.

According to the results, the carbon footprint of the raw material obtained by the recycling process studied is 38% smaller than that of the virgin raw material. The difference is even greater if copper and aluminium recovered during mechanical pre-treatment are included. The results also point to problem areas.

'Life-cycle analysis identifies the areas where recycling can be improved. For example, we noticed that using sodium hydroxide as a neutralizing chemical significantly increases the environmental load of our process,' says Marja Rinne, a doctoral student at Aalto University.

This kind of analysis, which the researchers say has been rarely done for battery recycling, can also be done before new processes are taken into use. It is useful for determining how certain choices or process parameters affect the environmental impacts of a process, so it can be a beneficial decision-making tool for both industry and policymakers.

'Simulation-based life-cycle analysis can be used even at the design stage of recycling processes to assess the environmental impacts and find the best possible options,' says Lundström.

The potential benefits of finding the best recycling processes are substantial; the EU aims to recycle 70% of the mass battery waste by the end of the decade. It is also setting targets for specific metals used in batteries: 95% of cobalt, nickel and copper, and 70% of lithium must be recycled by 2030. It is estimated that the global lithium battery recycling market will be worth 19 billion by 2030.

According to Lundström, now is the time to develop alternative recycling methods, as the amount of battery waste will skyrocket with the rapid growth of electric cars.

'We will have a massive need for recycling, and we have to find the most viable and ecological recycling processes. Research into technological innovations and their environmental impact go hand in hand,' she says.

In the study, the team also assessed the industrial scalability of the process and made recommendations on how to best modify the process accordingly.

Children with a common but regularly undiagnosed disorder affecting their language and communication are likely to be finding the transition back to school post-lockdown harder than most, according to a team of psychologists.

Two children in every class of 30 are estimated to have Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) (around 8%), yet public awareness, diagnosis and referral to speech and language therapists all remain low in the UK.

DLD is a condition where children have problems acquiring their own language for no obvious reasons. Unlike temporary language delay (which reflects the natural variation of age at which children learn to speak and communicate), DLD is a lifelong condition with significant impacts for individuals in childhood and in later life, in particular their mental health.

Common challenges for children include difficulty understanding what others say and struggling to articulate their ideas through speech. This can result in problems interacting and learning to play with peers, which researchers believe exacerbates mental health concerns and was the focus of a new study from the psychologists at the University of Bath.

Published today [Wednesday 31 March 2021], the new research which drew on insights from specialist schools around the UK, focused on social challenges experienced by children with Language Disorders. It highlights regular struggles for young people in resolving disagreements and accessing group play, which the researchers say might be mitigated by adjusting / adapting playtimes according to children's specific needs. This might include space for quieter reflection, potentially with options for drawing or board games.

Lead researcher, Dr Vanessa Lloyd-Esenkaya from the University of Bath, who used to work as a learning assistant in primary schools helping young people with language and communications challenges, explains: "We think of playtime as being a period of release for kids and a chance for them to relax with friends, and it is, but it can also create new challenges for children to deal with.

"This study finds children with Language Disorders can struggle to keep up with group games that have multiple rules - the type you'll often see forming spontaneously and at a fast pace on a school playground. They also frequently misinterpret social cues, have difficulties resolving conflicts independently, and find it hard to understand and regulate emotions, according to parents and specialist school staff.

"This year, more than ever, children have had to adapt to changing environments. Protecting children from mental health difficulties is at the forefront of all our minds. This study is timely because children with Language Disorders, such as DLD, were already at risk of developing mental health difficulties before the pandemic hit. It's important we find ways to better help children with their peer relationships to enhance their wellbeing."

The researchers say that early referrals for DLD are particularly important in order to help put the right support in place for young people and stress the positive impacts such interventions can make.

Dr Lloyd-Esenkaya adds: "Research shows that for every £1 spent on Enhanced Speech and Language Therapy £6.43 is returned in savings over children's lifetimes. Language is engrained into every aspect of our lives and so DLD has a huge impact on everyday functioning, but with the right support people with DLD can thrive. It's likely that teachers will have kids in their class who have DLD but don't have a diagnosis. Schools can support children with Language Disorders by providing alternative spaces to play at lunchtime such as drawing or board game clubs and using visual resources, such as wall charts and social stories, to help children work through their emotions and any peer conflicts."

Dr Yvonne Wren, Director of Bristol Speech and Language Therapy Research Unit comments: "It is easy to mislabel children with DLD but it is vital that these children are identified to ensure they get the right help and support. This hidden disability can have a major impact on children's progress at school, both socially and academically."

Superalloys that withstand extremely high temperatures could soon be tuned even more finely for specific properties such as mechanical strength, as a result of new findings published today.

A phenomenon related to the invar effect - which enables magnetic materials such as nickel-iron (Ni-Fe) alloys to keep from expanding with increasing temperature - was reported to have been discovered in paramagnetic, or weakly magnetized, high-temperature alloys.

Levente Vitos, Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, says the breakthrough research, which includes a general theory explaining the new invar effect, promises to advance the design of high-temperature alloys with exceptional mechanical stability. The article was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Led by Vitos, the research team was comprised of KTH researchers Zhihua Dong, Wei Li and Stephan Schönecker.

Short for "invariant," invar plasticity enables magnetically-disordered Ni-Fe alloys to show practically invariant deformation behavior over a wide temperature range - making them ideal for turbines and other mechanical uses in extremely high temperatures.

The invar effect however has never been fully understood, and Vitos says that these new findings help explain the peculiar high-temperature properties of special alloys used in jet engines, such as nickel-based superalloys.

Invar has two known effects: thermal expansion and elasticity (the ability to spring back after bending, for instance). Because both of these effects are linked with the interplay between temperature and magnetic order, they are considered to be specific to magnetically-ordered alloys.

Using first-principles quantum mechanical modeling, the researchers identified how invariant plasticity also occurs in non-magnetic alloys, when a structural balance exists at the atomic level between cubic and hexagonal close-packed structures.

The new discovery emerges from a long-term collaboration with industry to find alternatives to carcinogenic cobalt in hard metals, such as cutting tools. Vitos says this finding broadens the palette of invar phenomena and material compositions, with clear implications for new applications.

"Our findings create a new platform for tailoring high-temperature properties of technologically relevant materials towards plastic stability at elevated temperatures," he says.

University of Rochester researchers who demonstrated superconducting materials at room temperatures last fall, now report a new technique in the quest to also create the materials at lower pressures.

In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, the lab of Ranga Dias, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and of physics and astronomy, describes separating hydrogen atoms from yttrium with a thin film of palladium.

"This is a completely new technique that nobody has used before for high pressure superhydride synthesis," Dias says.

Hydrogen rich materials are critical in the quest for room temperature superconductors because "you want stronger bonds and light elements. Those are the two very basic criteria," Dias says. "Hydrogen is the lightest material, and the hydrogen bond is one of the strongest."

Palladium is known to be a very good catalyst for "breaking down hydrogen molecules and diffusing them into whatever material you want to study," Dias says. In this case, a tiny layer of palladium protects the yttrium, a reactive transition metal, from oxidizing, but at same time, breaks down the hydrogen into individual atoms, which are then transported into the yttrium.

This is done inside a diamond anvil, which is used to compress the materials.

The resulting yttrium superhydride is superconducting at 12 degrees Fahrenheit and about 26 million pounds per square inch, still too high for practical applications. But it is a significant improvement over the room temperature materials the researchers reported last fall in Nature.

In that paper, the researchers reporting combining hydrogen with carbon and sulfur, which was superconducting at about 36 million pounds per square inch. (Pressure at sea level is about 15 psi.)
"We will continue to use this new method to synthesize new superconducting materials at ambient pressure," Dias says.

The researchers used raman spectroscopy, which they believe is more effective than the X-ray diffraction techniques that are traditionally used to measure the behavior of hydrogen atoms.

To validate that, the researchers collaborated with Eva Zurek, professor of chemistry at the State University at Buffalo, who prepared theoretical simulations of how the hydrogen atoms could be expected to behave when transported into the yttrium. Those simulations were in "good agreement" with the lab's experimental data, Dias says.

Other coauthors on the paper include lead author Elliot Snider '19 (MS), Nathan Dasenbrock-Gammon '18 (MA), Raymond McBride '20 (MS), and Noah Meyers, all of the Dias lab; Xiaoyu Wang of the State University at Buffalo; and Keith Lawlor and Ashkan Salamat of the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

First discovered in 1911, superconductivity gives materials two key properties. Electrical resistance vanishes. And any semblance of a magnetic field is expelled, due to a phenomenon called the Meissner effect. The magnetic field lines have to pass around the superconducting material, making it possible to levitate such materials, something that could be used for frictionless high-speed trains, known as maglev trains.

Superconducting materials could also have applications in medical imaging and scanning techniques such as MRI and magnetocardiography; faster, more efficient electronics for digital logic and memory device technology.

A team from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) and the CIBER Bioengineering, Biomaterials and Nanomedicine (CIBER-BBN) has designed and tested, at a preclinical level, a new biomaterial for the treatment and recovery of muscle injuries. It is a boron-loaded alginate hydrogel, which would be administered with a subcutaneous injection. According to the tests carried out so far -in animal models-, it is capable of regenerating damaged muscle very rapidly -specifically, in half the time it takes for it to regenerate naturally.

The scientific advance could also be applied to the prevention and treatment of muscle atrophy associated with aging. The results of the work of these Spanish researchers have been published in the journal Materials Science & Engineering C.

The key to the high performance of this biomaterial lies in the release of boron, with which the hydrogel is loaded in a simple way. When released, it stimulates the integrins -proteins which are present in all cells of the body and play a fundamental role in the adhesion of cells to the extracellular matrix-, which generates a correct formation of tissues.

According to the UPV and CIBER-BBN team, the simultaneous stimulation of the integrins that bind fibronectin and the boron ion transporter (NaBC1) significantly improves muscle regeneration at the anatomical level. It does so because it induces a greater number of adhesions, and of greater size, in undifferentiated muscle cells, which are those that participate in muscle regeneration after an injury, which ultimately favours the formation of differentiated myotubes that are necessary for the correct creation of new regenerating muscle fibres.

"In the tests that we have carried out in our laboratories after inducing an acute injury with cardiotoxin (cobra snake venom) in mice, the activation of NaBC1 accelerated the process of muscle regeneration. We verified that, by adding boron to damaged muscle cells, their level of adhesion increased, and now they adhered in a faster and more robust way, allowing the muscle to regenerate in a shorter period of time", adds Dr. Patricia Rico, researcher at the CIBER-BBN at the Centre for Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering of the Universitat Politècnica de València.

Thus, this work suggests a simple and novel way to achieve muscle regeneration through the interaction between specific receptors on the cell membrane. "If, for example, a second degree fibrillar tear takes 30 days to regenerate, the use of our hydrogel reduces the recovery time to 15 days," remarks Patricia Rico.

Dr. Rico's team is currently working on the study of the application of this new biomaterial to the treatment of muscular dystrophies such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a rare inherited disease that affects 1 in 100,000 children. "Our objective is to assess the possibilities of our system for the treatment of this dystrophy, which usually manifests between two and three years of age and which, being a degenerative disease, drastically reduces the life expectancy of these children," concludes Patricia Rico.

Philadelphia, March 31, 2021 - In an article appearing in the Journal of Dairy Science®, scientists from the United States Department of Agriculture and the Council on Dairy Cattle Breeding provide an insightful review of how US dairy industry breeding selection objectives are established, as well as detail opportunities and obstacles related to new technologies for documenting animal performance.

Genetic selection has been an extremely efficacious tool for the long-term enhancement of livestock populations, and the implementation of genomic selection has doubled the rate of gain in dairy cattle. Data captured through the national dairy herd improvement program are used to calculate genomic evaluations for comparing and ranking animals for selection. Over time, most of the focus on the selection indices used to rank bulls and cows on their genetic merit has changed from yield traits to fertility, health, and fitness traits.

Today, most breeding stock are selected and marketed using the net merit dollars (NM$) selection index, which progressed from two traits in 1926 (milk and fat yield) to a mix of 36 individual traits following the most recent update three years ago. Updates to the index depend upon the estimation of a variety of values, and it can be challenging to reach an agreement among stakeholders on what should be included in the index at each review and how those traits should be weighted. Phenotypes for some of the new traits are difficult or costly to measure or depend upon changes to on-farm practices that have not been widely implemented. There is also a need to collect more comprehensive data about the environment in which animals perform, including information about feeding, housing, milking systems, and infectious and parasitic load.

"The rate of change is rapid, and farmers need objective sources of information more than ever before," said first author John B. Cole, PhD, affiliated with the Animal Genomics and Improvement Laboratory, Agricultural Research Service, United States Department of Agriculture, Beltsville, MD, USA, at the time the review was accepted for publication. "The best way for the industry to meet the needs of the dairy producers, who drive the whole system, is to treat genetic evaluations as a shared good for the benefit of all."

The number of traits evaluated continues to increase, and is mind-boggling to many, which indicates that new approaches to classify and express traits may be necessary.