Tech

Modern communications technology, regardless of use, relies on a similar formula: devices send signals and information through data centers, towers and satellites en route to their final destination. The effectiveness of the communication relies on how well that information travels, and there are a variety of factors that can slow down that journey - geography, weather and more.

A new device created by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin can overcome challenges like bad weather to deliver more secure, reliable communications. This could aid military communications in challenging areas, improve the ability of self-driving cars to see the environment around them and speed up wireless data for potential 6G networks.

Ray Chen, professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and leader of the project, made a comparison to TV satellite dishes that go out or become fuzzy during poor weather. The same thing can happen with communications technology, and that's the problem Chen wants to fix.

Chen's device operates in an area of the light spectrum - mid infrared - that allows signal to penetrate through clouds, rain and other weather to get to their intended target without shedding significant amounts of light.

"Low light loss means signal can travel further, and through the earth's atmosphere, with better integrity and less power consumption," Chen said.

Chen's findings were recently published in the journal Optica.

weather proof communicationsweather proof chip
The device is an indium phosphide chip capable of beam steering, the act of re-directing light in the direction of a specific target. The concept allows signal to be transmitted more accurately than other methods, reducing interference and saving power.

However, beam steering has its weaknesses that hold back mass adoption; namely that devices can only bounce light in narrow directions. Chen compares it with a person with poor peripheral vision.

However, Chen's device features much wider angles for steering light, increasing the range by about 30 degrees compared to the other options, without moving parts or side lobes of light that trail off in various directions and decrease efficiency.

"For beam steering to be safe, you want to have a full view, you don't want to have a bunch of blind spots," Chen said.

A lot of self-driving cars are equipped with Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) technology that can sense the environment around it. Typically, these take the form of large devices attached to the top of cars with spinning arrays.

The LIDAR devices have to spin because of the limited field of vision, Chen said. And any time you rely on a moving part, there is a risk of it breaking. The chip Chen created doesn't require moving parts because of its wider field of vision. And fewer blind spots in the technology increases safety in situations where momentary lapses can prove dangerous.

The chips can be integrated into everything from military vehicles, to satellites, to skyscrapers. Chen is working on infusing artificial intelligence into the device for environmental sensing. The mid infrared is a part of the light spectrum that humans can't see without aids like night vision goggles, but devices in that range can pick up things like gas leaks and smoke stack emissions.

In big cities, where it's not practical to dig deeply underground to lay fiber cables, these devices can increase internet speeds. Putting them atop skyscrapers can enable free-space optical communication, a technology that allows wireless data to travel through the air using light.

Chen's next big step in the project involves field-testing the device and refining its packaging to enable its application in free-space optical communications.

Ecotourism offers a specific travel experience: It focuses on nature, education and sustainability. Often, these destinations highlight endangered or threatened species and engage visitors in making socially responsible choices.

But a new study by researchers at the University of Georgia suggests ecotourism's altruistic attractions may be overshadowed by another benefit: photos for social media. Recently published in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism, the research could help guide tourism operators as they weigh the costs and benefits of attracting visitors who care most for natural beauty only when it can be captured on their phone.

"It's been traditionally presumed that people are pursuing ecotourism because they are interested in making an environmentally or socially responsible choice--and this understanding is important for a host of reasons, including management and market segmentation," said Justin Beall, the study's lead author. "But our study throws a wrench in that a bit by showing that not only is it environmental values that are influencing people to participate in ecotourism, but people are also engaging in ecotourism so they can get good photographs to post online and present to their friends and loved ones."

Beall, a recent graduate of the UGA Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, wrote the paper as part of his master's thesis. Co-authors included Warnell faculty members Bynum Boley and Kyle Woosnam, as well as UGA alumnus Adam Landon, now with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.

Social status over sustainability

Say, for example, someone visits an ecotourism destination and shares photos and descriptions on social media. They are conveying an image of someone who cares about sustainability, the local community and education--all components of ecotourism. But, Beall said, travelers surveyed for the study revealed that how these photos look may be even more important than their own environmental values.

"People have a tendency to do something that elevates their status--I think we all kind of do it. This idea is not new," added Boley. "It used to be a Porsche or a wristwatch or jewelry, but now it's a little more subtle, and channeled through travel experiences.

"So, our big debate is, do people choose ecotourism because they have strong environmental values, or is it a new way to show off to your peers that you're cool?"

Earlier research has suggested that ecotourists have motivations beyond environmental and social values. But with the rise of smartphones and social media, factors such as self-development, relaxation or escape are taking a back seat to the potential for likes and clicks. Boley has underscored this in more recent studies, showing how social media is changing how we view and experience travel.

Now, with this latest study, it appears the influence of social media has also reached ecotourism.

Overcrowding

While the travel industry is reeling from COVID-19, visitors to remote, natural-focused destinations are up in the U.S. On the one hand, this research presents an opportunity for the ecotourism industry to market itself by highlighting scenic opportunities to potential travelers.

But then there are problems of overcrowding to consider. Too many tourists can also be a bad thing--especially when they're visiting sensitive natural areas. The problem is compounded for ecotourism destinations, where a small staff typically manages a larger and more fragile area. For example, visitors may stray off the established trail for their own set of photos, wandering into sensitive areas.

For years, ecotourists were categorized as a highly desirable segment of the tourism market. They have money to spend, they're environmentally conscious and they are concerned about their effects on their destination. But perhaps that's no longer true.

"What if all of a sudden you realize most of the people who showed up to your site aren't ecotourists that care about your site, but just want to get the picture?" Beall asked. "With ecotourism done well, you can have this sort of low-volume, high-value tourism. But if you have all these other people that are getting in on it, and they're not concerned about their environmental impacts, where their money goes or what they do, then it could threaten the destination's sustainability."

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., November 12, 2020--A new hydrocarbon study contradicts conventional wisdom about how methane is trapped in rock, revealing a new strategy to more easily access the valuable energy resource.

"The most challenging issue facing the shale energy industry is the very low hydrocarbon recovery rates: less than 10 percent for oil and 20 percent for gas. Our study yielded new insights into the fundamental mechanisms governing hydrocarbon transport within shale nanopores," said Hongwu Xu, an author from Los Alamos National Laboratory's Earth and Environmental Sciences Division. "The results will ultimately help develop better pressure management strategies for enhancing unconventional hydrocarbon recovery."

Most of U.S. natural gas is hidden deep within shale reservoirs. Low shale porosity and permeability make recovering natural gas in tight reservoirs challenging, especially in the late stage of well life. The pores are miniscule--typically less than five nanometers--and poorly understood. Understanding the hydrocarbon retention mechanisms deep underground is critical to increase methane recovering efficiency. Pressure management is a cheap and effective tool available to control production efficiency that can be readily adjusted during well operation--but the study's multi-institution research team discovered a trade-off.

This team, including the lead author, Chelsea Neil, also of Los Alamos, integrated molecular dynamics simulations with novel in situ high-pressure small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) to examine methane behavior in Marcellus shale in the Appalachian basin, the nation's largest natural gas field, to better understand gas transport and recovery as pressure is modified to extract the gas. The investigation focused on interactions between methane and the organic content (kerogen) in rock that stores a majority of hydrocarbons.

The study's findings indicate that while high pressures are beneficial for methane recovery from larger pores, dense gas is trapped in smaller, common shale nanopores due to kerogen deformation. For the first time, they present experimental evidence that this deformation exists and proposed a methane-releasing pressure range that significantly impacts methane recovery. These insights help optimize strategies to boost natural gas production as well as better understand fluid mechanics.

Methane behavior was compared during two pressure cycles with peak pressures of 3000 psi and 6000 psi, as it was previously believed that increasing pressure from injected fluids into fractures would increase gas recovery. The team discovered that unexpected methane behavior occurrs in very small but prevalent nanopores in the kerogen: the pore uptake of methane was elastic up to the lower peak pressure, but became plastic and irreversible at 6,000 psi, trapping dense methane clusters that developed in the sub-2 nanometer pore, which encompass 90 percent of the measured shale porosity.

Led by Los Alamos, the multi-institution study was published in Nature's new Communications Earth & Environment journal this week. Partners include the New Mexico Consortium, University of Maryland, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology Center for Neutron Research.

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Electronic shirts that keep the wearer comfortably warm or cool, as well as medical fabrics that deliver drugs, monitor the condition of a wound and perform other tasks, may one day be manufactured more efficiently thanks to a key advance by Oregon State University researchers.

The breakthrough involves inkjet printing and materials with a crystal structure discovered nearly two centuries ago. The upshot is the ability to apply circuitry, with precision and at low processing temperatures, directly onto cloth - a promising potential solution to the longstanding tradeoff between performance and fabrication costs.

"Much effort has gone into integrating sensors, displays, power sources and logic circuits into various fabrics for the creation of wearable, electronic textiles," said Chih-Hung Chang, professor of chemical engineering at Oregon State. "One hurdle is that fabricating rigid devices on cloth, which has a surface that's both porous and non-uniform, is tedious and expensive, requiring a lot of heat and energy, and is hard to scale up. And first putting the devices onto something solid, and then putting that solid substrate onto fabric, is problematic too - it limits the flexibility and wearability of the fabric and also can necessitate cumbersome changes to the fabric manufacturing process itself."

Chang and collaborators in the OSU College of Engineering and at Rutgers University tackled those challenges by coming up with a stable, printable ink, based on binary metal iodide salts, that thermally transforms into a dense compound of cesium, tin and iodine.

The resulting film of Cs2SnI6 has a crystal structure that makes it a perovskite.

Perovskites trace their roots to a long-ago discovery by a German mineralogist. In the Ural Mountains in 1839, Gustav Rose came upon an oxide of calcium and titanium with an intriguing crystal structure and named it in honor of Russian nobleman Lev Perovski.

Perovskite now refers to a range of materials that share the crystal lattice of the original. Interest in them began to accelerate in 2009 after a Japanese scientist, Tsutomu Miyasaka, discovered that some perovskites are effective absorbers of light. Materials with a perovskite structure that are based on a metal and a halogen such as iodine are semiconductors, essential components of most electrical circuits.

Thanks to the perovskite film, Chang's team was able to print negative-temperature-coefficient thermistors directly onto woven polyester at temperatures as low as 120 degrees Celsius - just 20 degrees higher than the boiling point of water.

A thermistor is a type of electrical component known as a resistor, which controls the amount of current entering a circuit. Thermistors are resistors whose resistance is temperature dependent, and this research involved negative-temperature-coefficient, or NTC, thermistors - their resistance decreases as the temperature increases.

"A change in resistance due to heat is generally not a good thing in a standard resistor, but the effect can be useful in many temperature detection circuits," Chang said. "NTC thermistors can be used in virtually any type of equipment where temperature plays a role. Even small temperature changes can cause big changes in their resistance, which makes them ideal for accurate temperature measurement and control."

The research, which included Shujie Li and Alex Kosek of the OSU College of Engineering and Mohammad Naim Jahangir and Rajiv Malhotra of Rutgers University, demonstrates directly fabricating high-performance NTC thermistors onto fabrics at half the temperature used by current state-of-the-art manufacturers, Chang said.

"In addition to requiring more energy, the higher temperatures create compatibility issues with many fabrics," he said. "The simplicity of our ink, the process' scalability and the thermistor performance are all promising for the future of wearable e-textiles."

ITHACA, N.Y. - It's not a stretch to say that stretchable sensors could change the way soft robots function and feel. In fact, they will be able to feel quite a lot.

Cornell University researchers have created a fiber-optic sensor that combines low-cost LEDs and dyes, resulting in a stretchable "skin" that detects deformations such as pressure, bending and strain. This sensor could give soft robotic systems - and anyone using augmented reality technology - the ability to feel the same rich, tactile sensations that mammals depend on to navigate the natural world.

The researchers, led by Rob Shepherd, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, are working to commercialize the technology for physical therapy and sports medicine.

Their paper, "Stretchable Distributed Fiber-Optic Sensors," published in Science. The paper's co-lead authors are doctoral student Hedan Bai and Shuo Li.

Bai drew inspiration from silica-based distributed fiber-optic sensors and developed a stretchable lightguide for multimodal sensing (SLIMS). This long tube contains a pair of polyurethane elastomeric cores. One core is transparent; the other is filled with absorbing dyes at multiple locations and connects to an LED. Each core is coupled with a red-green-blue sensor chip to register geometric changes in the optical path of light.

The researchers designed a 3D-printed glove with a SLIMS sensor running along each finger. The glove is powered by a lithium battery and equipped with Bluetooth so it can transmit data to basic software, which Bai designed, that reconstructs the glove's movements and deformations in real time.

"Right now, sensing is done mostly by vision," Shepherd said. "We hardly ever measure touch in real life. This skin is a way to allow ourselves and machines to measure tactile interactions in a way that we now currently use the cameras in our phones. It's using vision to measure touch. This is the most convenient and practical way to do it in a scalable way."

Bai and Shepherd are working with Cornell's Center for Technology Licensing to patent the technology, with an eye toward applications in physical therapy and sports medicine. Both fields have leveraged motion-tracking technology but until now have lacked the ability to capture force interactions.

The researchers are also looking into the ways SLIMS sensors can boost virtual and augmented reality experiences.

"VR and AR immersion is based on motion capture. Touch is barely there at all," Shepherd said. "Let's say you want to have an augmented reality simulation that teaches you how to fix your car or change a tire. If you had a glove or something that could measure pressure, as well as motion, that augmented reality visualization could say, 'Turn and then stop, so you don't overtighten your lug nuts.' There's nothing out there that does that right now, but this is an avenue to do it."

Maunakea, Hawaii - Astronomers have discovered the brightest infrared light from a short gamma-ray burst ever seen, with a bizarre glow that is more luminous than previously thought was possible.

Its half-second flash of light, detected in May of this year, came from a violent explosion of gamma rays billons of light-years away that unleashed more energy in a blink of an eye than the Sun will produce over its entire 10-billion-year lifetime.

The study has been accepted in The Astrophysical Journal and will be published online later this year. A pre-print is available on arXiv.org.

"It's amazing to me that after 10 years of studying the same type of phenomenon, we can discover unprecedented behavior like this," said Wen-fai Fong, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University and lead author of the study. "It just reveals the diversity of explosions that the universe is capable of producing, which is very exciting."

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope quickly captured the glow within just three days after the burst and determined its near-infrared emission was 10 times brighter than predicted, defying conventional models.

"These observations do not fit traditional explanations for short gamma-ray bursts," said Fong. "Given what we know about the radio and X-rays from this blast, it just doesn't match up. The near-infrared emission that we're finding with Hubble is way too bright."

To zero in on this new phenomenon's exact brightness, the team used W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea in Hawaii to pinpoint the precise distance of its host galaxy.

"Distances are important in calculating the burst's true brightness as opposed to its apparent brightness as seen from Earth," said Fong. "Just as the brightness of a light bulb when it reaches your eye depends on both its luminosity and its distance from you, a burst could be really bright because either it is intrinsically luminous and distant, or not as luminous but much closer to us. With Keck, we were able to determine the true brightness of the burst and thus the energy scale. We found it was to be much more energetic than we originally thought."

Using Keck Observatory's Low Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (LRIS) and DEep Imaging and Multi-Object Spectrograph (DEIMOS), the team determined the burst came from a galaxy located at a redshift of z = 0.55 - quite a bit farther than the initial calculated distance.

Lasting less than two seconds, short gamma-ray bursts are among the most energetic, explosive events known; they live fast and die hard. Scientists think they're caused by the merger of two neutron stars, extremely dense objects about the mass of the Sun compressed into the volume of a small city. A neutron star is so dense that on Earth, one teaspoonful would weigh a billion tons!

Neutron star mergers are very rare and extremely important because scientists think they are one of the main sources of heavy elements in the universe, such as gold and uranium.

Along with a short gamma-ray burst, scientists expect to see a "kilonova" whose peak brightness typically reaches 1,000 times that of a classical nova. Kilonovae are an optical and infrared glow from the radioactive decay of heavy elements and are unique to the merger of two neutron stars, or the merger of a neutron star and a black hole.

What Fong and her team saw was too bright to be explained even by a traditional kilonova. They provide one possible explanation for the unusually bright blast. While most short gamma-ray bursts probably result in a black hole, the neutron star merger in this case may have instead formed a magnetar, a supermassive neutron star with a very powerful magnetic field. The magnetar deposited a large amount of energy into the ejected material of the kilonova, causing it to glow even brighter.

"What we detected even outshines the one confirmed kilonova discovered in 2017," said co-author Jillian Rastinejad, a graduate student with Fong's team at Northwestern University. "As a first-year graduate student working with real-time data for the first time when this burst happened, it's remarkable to see our discovery motivate a new and exciting magnetar-boosted model."

With such an event, the team expects the ejecta from the burst to produce light at radio wavelengths in the next few years. Follow-up radio observations may ultimately prove the origin of the burst was indeed a magnetar. The birth of a magnetar from a neutron star merger has never definitively been seen before, as they are expected to be rare outcomes.

The short gamma-ray burst was first detected with NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. Once the alert went out, the team quickly enlisted other telescopes to conduct multi-wavelength observations. They analyzed the afterglow in X-ray with Swift Observatory, optical and near-infrared with Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope, Hubble, and Keck Observatory, and in radio wavelengths with the Very Large Array. This particular gamma-ray burst was one of the rare instances in which scientists were able to detect light across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope is particularly well-suited for this type of observation.

"We can't wait to combine the power of Keck and JWST along with other facilities as a team to go after even more enigmatic events like these," said Keck Observatory Chief Scientist John O'Meara. "This study shows that we have much left to learn."

In a study that has unprecedented implications to advance both medicine and biodiversity conservation, researchers have sequenced 131 new placental mammal genomes, bringing the worldwide total to more than 250.

The results of the mammal genome project, published in the Nov. 12 issue of the journal Nature, catalog and characterize whole branches of Earth's biodiversity, spanning approximately 110 million years of mammal evolution--the largest and most diverse mammalian comparative genomics project to date. Oliver Ryder, Ph.D., Kleberg endowed director of Conservation Genetics at the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research, is one of the project's co-authors. He says that while the genetic material biobanked in San Diego Zoo Global's Frozen Zoo® has benefited his organization's conservation efforts, "Little did we know how broadly it would impact humankind."

While museum specimens were found to be mostly inadequate--because the most powerful sequencing technologies require large amounts of DNA and intact cells--San Diego Zoo Global's biobank contains 10,000 living cell cultures representing nearly 1,200 taxa, including more than 310 species classified as vulnerable, endangered, critically endangered or extinct.

Ryder compares the genome project to the invention of the microscope. "Before the microscope, we couldn't see what was going on inside of a cell. Now, we're viewing life from an entirely new perspective. DNA carries instructions, and now we're able to read those."

The study identifies genetic innovations that seem to protect certain animals from diseases like cancer and diabetes. It also pinpoints genomic elements that have remained unchanged across millions of years of evolution, which predict where mutations are likely to be associated with risk of disease, and could reveal new avenues of therapeutic development.

Important new findings for conservation have emerged for species conservation, too. "Genome sequences for endangered species can help identify a species' extinction risks and steer conservation efforts," says Megan Owen, Ph.D., corporate director of wildlife conservation science at San Diego Zoo Global. "They also give wildlife officials tools to apprehend poachers and wildlife traffickers." For this study, researchers prioritized endangered species like the Russian saiga, the black rhinoceros, the Pacific pocket mouse and the Peninsular bighorn sheep, among other species.

Across the nation, top universities offer comprehensive health services to more than 20 million students in the form of primary, urgent and mental health care services. Management of medical records within student health centers is often outdated and unconnected to local health systems or the students' home health care providers, creating significant challenges to providing safe and consistent health care to students, especially in the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Six months before COVID-19 hit, UC San Diego was the first university in California to connect its almost 40,000 student health records to the electronic health record platform of its top-ranked academic medical center, UC San Diego Health. The experience has created a model for other colleges and is described in the November issue of Journal of American College Health.

"After the medical record transition, we observed significant improvements to the provision of care for UC San Diego students. The goal was to enhance care coordination, increase the availability of vital medical information, and offer access to the resources and expertise of UC San Diego Health," said Christopher Longhurst, MD, chief information officer at UC San Diego Health. "These benefits were amplified during the pandemic. By sharing health records, we've improved the continuity of care for students through same-day video visits, improved turnaround for radiology results, and accessible COVID-19 testing."

Thousands of medical records were converted to UC San Diego Health's Epic medical record management system in a safe and secure HIPAA- and FERPA-protected environment. Given the wide prevalence of Epic's electronic health record system, which serves more than 50 percent of the U.S. population, onboarding the students meant immediate connections to their local and out-of-state health records.

"Here's what's impressive," said Longhurst. "When the medical records went live, we instantly had access to 93,000 unique medical record documents from 262 health systems in the U.S. Over the course of six months, almost 250,000 unique documents were shared from clinics and hospitals across California, Oregon, Philadelphia, Virginia, Wisconsin, and numerous other states. The institutions included CVS, children's hospitals and cancer hospitals. Imagine how important these medical records were to understanding the big picture needs of our students."

Marlene Millen, MD, senior author of the published study and chief medical information officer, agreed.

"When you have a student's full documented medical history, you can undoubtedly improve the delivery of care, especially when it's shared care with other providers," said Millen, who is also a practicing internist at UC San Diego Health. "Students may not be able to recall all details of their medical histories. Because Epic is widely used, we could access records from their past and current providers. While most students are generally healthy, many have medical issues. With this system, you can see what the student's regular primary doctor is prescribing. Knowing if a student is taking insulin, birth control, Ritalin or any prescription is vitally important -- especially during a pandemic."

"Being integrated into a health system during COVID-19 gave us access to a number of tools which streamlined our ability to care for our students," added Angela L. Scioscia, MD, interim executive director of UC San Diego Student Health and Well-Being. "First of all, we were connected to a very efficient laboratory process for rapid COVID test results that were recorded in the students' charts within 24-hours. This meant quick notification to students with instructions on how to quarantine and receive care, if needed."

The integration offered additional health resources to a campus striving to maintain a safe environment during COVID-19. When stay-at-home orders went into place, the student health team was able to switch to video visits for mental health visits with no downtime.

"UC San Diego Student Health and Well-Being converted to video visits for more than 95 percent of students who utilize campus health services," said Scioscia. "The video visits meant uninterrupted care for students and was critical to students seeking mental health care during an extraordinary stressful period of time."

When UC San Diego implemented its Return to Learn initiative, more than 1,480 students successfully self-tested for COVID-19 over three weeks, demonstrating the feasibility of this approach to large-scale SARS-CoV-2 screening. Because all student records were already in Epic, it was straightforward to develop a registry of students and place bulk orders for the tests. Results posted directly to the medical record and its online portal for immediate access by student.

Structured data in the integrated EHR is also available for large-scale analysis and automated public health reporting. Future studies may evaluate interventions for depression and eating disorders.

"With the depth of demographic information available, including race, ethnicity, and language, as well as sexual orientation and gender identity, analysis of potential health disparities is also possible," said Scioscia. "We can do good work on health disparities because we get insight into our population and explore whether there are disparities in the delivery or the outcomes for our student population."

"Our advice to other campuses with a student health service is to work with your university or local hospital to share electronic health records. Based on our experience, the care provided to the students is immediately enhanced because of the ability of the student health center to access far more resources and expertise than sitting independently," said Longhurst. "The shared health records benefit the student immediately and long after they graduate."

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Service requests to city non-emergency telephone lines can help identify "hotspots" for opioid use and overdoses, a study in Columbus found.

Researchers found that calls to the 311 line - used in many cities across the United States to report non-emergency issues - tracked closely to places and times in Columbus in which opioid overdose events were on the rise.

Findings showed that calls about code violations, public health and street lighting were the best indicators of opioid use in Columbus communities.

"Complaints to the city about issues like streetlight repair, abandoned vehicles and code violations reflect disorder and distress that are also linked to opioid use," said Yuchen Li, lead author of the study and doctoral candidate in geography at The Ohio State University.

"311 data helps identify which parts of the community may be the next hotspot for opioid overdoses."

The study was published today in the journal Scientific Reports.

The results suggest that data from 311 calls can be an effective opioid overdose surveillance indicator to direct outreach and resources to where they are needed, said Harvey Miller, co-author of the study and professor of geography at Ohio State.

"311 calls are in some ways a conversation between communities and the city about what is of immediate concern to residents," said Miller, who is director of Ohio State's Center for Urban and Regional Analysis.

"This data provides a more dynamic and useful way to track the opioid crisis in American cities."

For the study, the researchers obtained data on Columbus emergency personnel responses to opioid overdoses in the city between 2008 and 2017. These incidents are tracked, aggregated and summarized on the Franklin County Opioid Crisis Activity Levels (FOCAL) Map.

Researchers compared the location and time of each overdose with data they received on 311 calls received from residents in the same area near the same time.

The 311 calls are not about drug use, Miller said. But the results show they do indicate when areas are becoming a hotspot for opioid overdoses.

"The 311 data points to the environmental and social stressors that are also associated with drug use," he said.

"The results add to the scientific evidence that the opioid crisis is rooted in social inequality, distress and under-investment in communities."

Findings showed that 10 out of 21 types of 311 requests were specifically associated with nearby opioid overdoses. Calls about code violations, public health issues such as pest management, food security and unsanitary conditions due to animals, and problems with street lighting were the most accurate predictors of opioid overdose hotspots.

Other calls linked to drug problems included those about abandoned vehicles, animal complaints, law enforcement, refuse/trash/litter, street maintenance, traffic signs and water/sewers/drains.

Calls that were not related to overdoses included those about snow and ice removal, trees, and recreation and parks.

"The kind of request types that we would expect to be good indicators of opioid use are the ones that worked," Miller said.

"They are also the same indicators that suggest poverty and distress."

The power of using 311 calls to identify opioid hotspots is that it is much more up to date than other indicators of social distress, Li said.

"Communities are dynamic and are always changing. 311 calls can provide us valuable information in faster time frames than we get from Census data," he said.

Climate change is causing hurricanes that make landfall to take more time to weaken, reports a study published 11th November 2020 in leading journal, Nature.

The researchers showed that hurricanes that develop over warmer oceans carry more moisture and therefore stay stronger for longer after hitting land. This means that in the future, as the world continues to warm, hurricanes are more likely to reach communities farther inland and be more destructive.

"The implications are very important, especially when considering policies that are put in place to cope with global warming," said Professor Pinaki Chakraborty, senior author of the study and head of the Fluid Mechanics Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST). "We know that coastal areas need to ready themselves for more intense hurricanes, but inland communities, who may not have the know-how or infrastructure to cope with such intense winds or heavy rainfall, also need to be prepared."

Many studies have shown that climate change can intensify hurricanes - known as cyclones or typhoons in other regions of the world - over the open ocean. But this is the first study to establish a clear link between a warming climate and the smaller subset of hurricanes that have made landfall.

The scientists analyzed North Atlantic hurricanes that made landfall over the past half a century. They found that during the course of the first day after landfall, hurricanes weakened almost twice as slowly now than they did 50 years ago.

"When we plotted the data, we could clearly see that the amount of time it took for a hurricane to weaken was increasing with the years. But it wasn't a straight line - it was undulating - and we found that these ups and downs matched the same ups and downs seen in sea surface temperature," said Lin Li, first author and PhD student in the OIST Fluid Mechanics Unit.

The scientists tested the link between warmer sea surface temperature and slower weakening past landfall by creating computer simulations of four different hurricanes and setting different temperatures for the surface of the sea.

Once each virtual hurricane reached category 4 strength, the scientists simulated landfall by cutting off the supply of moisture from beneath.

Li explained: "Hurricanes are heat engines, just like engines in cars. In car engines, fuel is combusted, and that heat energy is converted into mechanical work. For hurricanes, the moisture taken up from the surface of the ocean is the "fuel" that intensifies and sustains a hurricane's destructive power, with heat energy from the moisture converted into powerful winds.

"Making landfall is equivalent to stopping the fuel supply to the engine of a car. Without fuel, the car will decelerate, and without its moisture source, the hurricane will decay."

The researchers found that even though each simulated hurricane made landfall at the same intensity, the ones that developed over warmer waters took more time to weaken.

"These simulations proved what our analysis of past hurricanes had suggested: warmer oceans significantly impact the rate that hurricanes decay, even when their connection with the ocean's surface is severed. The question is - why?" said Prof. Chakraborty.

Using additional simulations, the scientists found that "stored moisture" was the missing link.

The researchers explained that when hurricanes make landfall, even though they can no longer access the ocean's supply of moisture, they still carry a stock of moisture that slowly depletes.

When the scientists created virtual hurricanes that lacked this stored moisture after hitting land, they found that the sea surface temperature no longer had any impact on the rate of decay.

"This shows that stored moisture is the key factor that gives each hurricane in the simulation its own unique identity," said Li. "Hurricanes that develop over warmer oceans can take up and store more moisture, which sustains them for longer and prevents them from weakening as quickly."

The increased level of stored moisture also makes hurricanes "wetter" - an outcome already being felt as recent hurricanes have unleashed devastatingly high volumes of rainfall on coastal and inland communities.

This research highlights the importance for climate models to carefully account for stored moisture when predicting the impact of warmer oceans on hurricanes.

The study also pinpoints issues with the simple theoretical models widely used to understand how hurricanes decay.

"Current models of hurricane decay don't consider moisture - they just view hurricanes that have made landfall as a dry vortex that rubs against the land and is slowed down by friction. Our work shows these models are incomplete, which is why this clear signature of climate change wasn't previously captured," said Li.

The researchers now plan to study hurricane data from other regions of the world to determine whether the impact of a warming climate on hurricane decay is occurring across the globe.

Prof. Chakraborty concluded: "Overall, the implications of this work are stark. If we don't curb global warming, landfalling hurricanes will continue to weaken more slowly. Their destruction will no longer be confined to coastal areas, causing higher levels of economic damage and costing more lives."

Camels have evolved a seemingly counterintuitive approach to keeping cool while conserving water in a scorching desert environment: They have a thick coat of insulating fur. Applying essentially the same approach, researchers at MIT have now developed a system that could help keep things like pharmaceuticals or fresh produce cool in hot environments, without the need for a power supply.

Most people wouldn't think of wearing a camel-hair coat on a hot summer's day, but in fact many desert-dwelling people do tend to wear heavy outer garments, for essentially the same reason. It turns out that a camel's coat, or a person's clothing, can help to reduce loss of moisture while at the same time allowing enough sweat evaporation to provide a cooling effect. Tests have showed that a shaved camel loses 50 percent more moisture than an unshaved one, under identical conditions, the researchers say.

The new system developed by MIT engineers uses a two-layer material to achieve a similar effect. The material's bottom layer, substituting for sweat glands, consists of hydrogel, a gelatin-like substance that consists mostly of water, contained in a sponge-like matrix from which the water can easily evaporate. This is then covered with an upper layer of aerogel, playing the part of fur by keeping out the external heat while allowing the vapor to pass through.

Hydrogels are already used for some cooling applications, but field tests and detailed analysis have shown that this new two-layer material, less than a half-inch thick, can provide cooling of more than 7 degrees Celsius for five times longer than the hydrogel alone -- more than eight days versus less than two.

The findings are being reported today in a paper in the journal Joule, by MIT postdoc Zhengmao Lu, graduate students Elise Strobach and Ningxin Chen, Research Scientist Nicola Ferralis and Professor Jeffrey Grossman, head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

The system, the researchers say, could be used for food packaging to preserve freshness and open up greater distribution options for farmers to sell their perishable crops. It could also allow medicines such as vaccines to be kept safely as they are delivered to remote locations. In addition to providing cooling, the passive system, powered purely by heat, can reduce the variations in temperature that the goods experience, eliminating spikes that can accelerate spoilage.

Ferralis explains that such packaging materials could provide constant protection of perishable foods or drugs all the way from the farm or factory, through the distribution chain, and all the way to the consumer's home. In contrast, existing systems that rely on refrigerated trucks or storage facilities may leave gaps where temperature spikes can happen during loading and unloading. "What happens in just a couple of hours can be very detrimental to some perishable foods," he says.

The basic raw materials involved in the two-layer system are inexpensive -- the aerogel is made of silica, which is essentially beach sand, cheap and abundant. But the processing equipment for making the aerogel is large and expensive, so that aspect will require further development in order to scale up the system for useful applications. But at least one startup company is already working on developing such large-scale processing to use the material to make thermally insulating windows.

The basic principle of using the evaporation of water to provide a cooling effect has been used for centuries in one form or another, including the use of double-pot systems for food preservation. These use two clay pots, one inside the other, with a layer of wet sand in between. Water evaporates from the sand out through the outer pot, leaving the inner pot cooler. But the idea of combining such evaporative cooling with an insulating layer, as camels and some other desert animals do, has not really been applied to human-designed cooling systems before.

For applications such as food packaging, the transparency of the hydrogel and aerogel materials is important, allowing the condition of the food to be clearly seen through the package. But for other applications such as pharmaceuticals or space cooling, an opaque insulating layer could be used instead, providing even more options for the design of materials for specific uses, says Lu, who was the paper's lead author.

The hydrogel material is composed of 97 percent water, which gradually evaporates away. In the experimental setup, it took 200 hours for a 5-millimeter layer of hydrogel, covered with 5 millimeters of aerogel, to lose all its moisture, compared to 40 hours for the bare hydrogel. The two-layered material's cooling level was slightly less -- a reduction of 7 degrees Celsius (about 12.6 degrees Fahrenheit) versus 8 C (14.4 F) -- but the effect was much longer-lasting. Once the moisture is gone from the hydrogel, the material can then be recharged with water so the cycle can begin again.

Especially in developing countries where access to electricity is often limited, Lu says, such materials could be of great benefit. "Because this passive cooling approach does not rely on electricity at all, this gives you a good pathway for storage and distribution of those perishable products in general," he says.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - A new study by led by researchers at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and The Ohio State University College of Medicine finds that exercising your brain with "neurobics" before surgery can help prevent post-surgery delirium.

Essentially, your brain can be prepared for surgery, just as the body can, by keeping your mind active and challenged, according to findings published online in the journal JAMA Surgery.

To study the effects of neurobics to prevent delirium, researchers gave 268 patients over the age of 60 an electronic tablet loaded with a brain game app. Patients were asked to play one hour of games per day in the days leading up to a major surgery requiring general anesthesia.

"Not all patients played the games as much as we asked, but those who played any at all saw some benefit," said Dr. Michelle Humeidan, an associate professor of anesthesiology at Ohio State College of Medicine Wexner Medical Center and first author of the study. "Patients who practiced neurobics were 40% less likely to experience postoperative delirium than those who did not, and the results improved the more hours they played."

The electronic tablet-based preoperative cognitive exercise targeted memory, speed, attention, flexibility, and problem solving functions. Those who played five to 10 hours cut their risk by more than half, and those who played the prescribed 10 hours or more had a 61% reduction in delirium rates compared to the control group.

In recent years, doctors have embraced "pre-habilitation" for patients leading up to surgery, which may include exercise, a healthy diet and controlling any chronic conditions. However, none of those interventions address postoperative delirium, a complication that is especially common in older patients and causes mental confusion leading to longer hospital stays, slower recoveries, and even an increased risk of death.

"Our intervention lowered delirium risk in patients who were at least minimally compliant. The ideal activities, timing, and effective dose for cognitive exercise-based interventions to decrease postoperative delirium risk and burden need further study," said co-author Dr. Sergio Bergese, a professor of anesthesiology and neurological surgery at Stony Brook University, who was working at Ohio State Wexner Medical Center in 2015 when the study started.

Future research will explore exactly how brain games impact mechanisms in the brain, and how much patients should practice neurobics to reap the full benefits.

"Using the app was ideal for this study because we could easily track how long and how often patients were playing," said Humeidan, who's also an anesthesiologist at Ohio State Wexner Medical Center. "But things like reading the newspaper, doing crossword puzzles or anything you enjoy to challenge your mind for an hour each day may improve your mental fitness and help prevent delirium as well."

An international team of researchers with an effort called the Zoonomia Project has analyzed and compared the whole genomes of more than 80 percent of all mammalian families, spanning almost 110 million years of evolution. The genomic dataset, published today in Nature, includes genomes from more than 120 species that were not previously sequenced, and captures mammalian diversity at an unprecedented scale.

The dataset is aimed at advancing human health research. Researchers can use the data to compare the genomes of humans and other mammals, which could help identify genomic regions that might be involved in human disease. The authors are also making the dataset available to the scientific community via the Zoonomia Project website, without any restrictions on use.

"The core idea for the project was to develop and use this data to help human geneticists figure out which mutations cause disease," said co-senior author Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, scientific director of vertebrate genomics at the Broad and professor in comparative genomics at Uppsala University.

However, in analyzing the new genomes, the authors also found that mammalian species with high extinction rates have less genetic diversity. The findings suggest that sequencing even just a single individual could provide crucial information, in a cost efficient way, on which populations may be at higher risk for extinction and should be prioritized for in-depth assessment of conservation needs.

"We wrote the paper to talk about this large, unique dataset and explain why it is interesting. Once you make the data widely available and explain its utility to the broader research community, you can really change the way science is done," said co-senior author Elinor Karlsson, director of the Vertebrate Genomics Group at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Zoonomia data have already helped researchers in a recent study to assess the risk of infection with SARS-CoV-2 across many species. The researchers identified 47 mammals that have a high likelihood of being reservoirs or intermediate hosts for the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Mapping mammals

The Zoonomia Project, formerly called the 200 Mammals Project, builds on a previous project, the 29 Mammals Project, which began sequencing mammalian genomes in 2006. The latest project extends the work by exploring the genomes of species that can perform physiological feats that humans can't, from hibernating squirrels to exceptionally long-lived bats. The project also included genomes of endangered species.

In the new study, the researchers collaborated with 28 different institutions worldwide to collect samples for genomic analysis, with the Frozen Zoo at the San Diego Global Zoo providing almost half of the samples. The team focused on species of medical, biological, and biodiversity conservation interest and increased the percentage of mammalian families with a representative genome from 49 to 82.

The project also developed and is sharing tools that will enable researchers to look at every "letter" or base in a mammalian genome sequence and compare it to sequences in equivalent locations in the human genome, including regions likely to be involved in disease. This could help researchers identify genetic sites that have remained the same and functional over evolutionary time and those that have randomly mutated. If a site has remained stable across mammals over millions of years, it probably has an important function, so any change in that site could potentially be linked to disease.

In releasing the data, the authors call upon the scientific community to support field researchers in collecting samples, increase access to computational resources that enable the analysis of massive genomic datasets, and share genomic data rapidly and openly.

"One of the most exciting things about the Zoonomia Project is that many of our core questions are accessible to people both within and outside of science," said first author Diane Genereux, a research scientist in the Vertebrate Genomics Group at the Broad. "By designing scientific projects that are accessible to all, we can ensure benefits for public, human, and environmental health."

Six days after a prone and restrained George Floyd died under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien dismissed charges that racism is rampant among police by arguing that "a few bad apples" are giving police "a terrible name."

But O'Brien's widely expressed view made little sense to sociologist Jomills H. Braddock II, a University of Miami professor who studies equity and social injustice. Braddock doubted that just a few individuals could be responsible for the pervasive evidence showing that Black and Latino people are far more vulnerable to police brutality, racial profiling, shootings, and other mistreatment.

So, as protests over Floyd's death roiled the nation, Braddock and fellow University of Miami sociologists--recent graduate Rachel Lautenschlager; Alex Piquero, chair of the Department of Sociology and Arts and Sciences Distinguished Scholar; and Nicole Leeper Piquero, professor of sociology and associate dean--set out to answer a question that, surprisingly, had never been directly addressed: How pervasive is racial bias among police? And if there is such bias, is it the same for whites, Blacks, and Hispanics?

The answer, Piquero said, should give everybody pause. According to their study published in the American Sociological Association's Contexts magazine, almost one of five officers exhibit high levels of implicit, or unconscious, pro-white/anti-Black bias, and roughly one of eight officers exhibit high levels of explicit, or conscious, pro-white bias.

Culled from one of the largest, public data sets of hidden biases, those statistics seem to confirm Braddock's hunch that biases among police are widespread, a finding he and Piquero hope will lay the bad apple explanation to rest and prompt police departments to focus on eradicating the imbedded biases that workers everywhere bring to their jobs.

"There are lots of other studies that show that doctors or lawyers or public schoolteachers have implicit pro-white biases that affect their performance with people of color,'' Braddock said. "But there seems to be such a reluctance to acknowledge the possibility that bias exists beyond a handful of individuals in policing. Not recognizing this represents an obstacle to doing something about it. So, let's stop using the excuse of a few bad apples."

The researchers arrived at their conclusion by analyzing the responses of roughly 4.8 million adults, including nearly 8,000 police officers, who took the Implicit Association Test (IAT) between 2016-2019. Designed by Project Implicit, a nonprofit network of researchers who investigate hidden biases that influence perception, judgment, and action, the test is one of the most widely used measures of unconscious pro-white/anti-Black attitudes.

By measuring how quickly and accurately respondents pair white faces with "good" words and Black faces with "bad" words, and comparing that with the inverse, the IAT produces scores for pro-Black/anti-white bias and pro-white/anti-Black bias. By comparing the nearly 8,000 police officers who took the test to the millions of test-takers in other professions, the researchers found what they called "alarming levels" of both implicit and explicit bias among the responding police officers.

"We find that officers exhibit consistently higher levels of bias than members of the public overall and compared to other members of their own racial groups," the researchers wrote. "The level of implicit bias among police is perhaps not surprising because it is fairly widespread. However, the extent of explicit bias found among police is both surprising and alarming."

The researchers also noted that, while Black individuals who took the IAT exhibited much lower levels of conscious bias than other racial groups, Black police displayed a greater explicit pro-white/anti-Black bias than other Black people--a finding that the researchers said raises several questions about the police profession: Do people choosing to become police officers already hold such views? Does law enforcement itself somehow instill or further enmesh such perceptions? Or is it some combination of both?

Though unable to answer those questions with the limited demographic measures in the Project Implicit data, the researchers said their study shows that the often-proposed solution of diversifying police workforces to reflect the communities they serve will not by itself eliminate racial inequality in policing. Instead, they said, race awareness must be considered a fundamental and continuous component of police training and professional development, not merely a onetime task to be checked off.

"Although a small number of police may be responsible for a disproportionate number of misconduct incidents, the mistreatment of Black people appears to be embedded within, and legitimated by, a collective, organizational culture characterized by anti-Black prejudice," they wrote. "Therefore, training programs must focus not only on changing officers' individual biases but transforming shared beliefs about race."

And, although their study focused on police, both Braddock and Piquero emphasized that implicit biases are by no means a police problem, but a societal problem. After all, as their study noted, both police and members of the public hold explicit and implicit pro-white biases--a reality that the scholars attributed to individual socialization in a racialized and gendered society.

"Whether you're a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, an airline pilot, or a police officer, you accumulate these attitudes over a lifetime and that's what we need to be addressing," Piquero said. "People in all kinds of professions have these attitudes. It's just magnified now in policing because of the higher stakes and the atrocities that we see in video accounts like that of George Floyd's death. What we need to do is better socialize children as early as possible to not just recognize differences, but to embrace and learn from them."

Developing new materials takes a lot of time, money and effort. Recently, a POSTECH research team has taken a step closer to creating new materials by applying AI to develop high-entropy alloys (HEAs) which are coined as "alloy of alloys."

A joint research team led by Professor Seungchul Lee, Ph.D. candidate Soo Young Lee, Professor Hyungyu Jin and Ph.D. candidate Seokyeong Byeon of the Department of Mechanical Engineering along with Professor Hyoung Seop Kim of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering have together developed a technique for phase prediction of HEAs using AI. The findings from the study were published in the latest issue of Materials and Design, an international journal on materials science.

Metal materials are conventionally made by mixing the principal element for the desired property with two or three auxiliary elements. In contrast, HEAs are made with equal or similar proportions of five or more elements without a principal element. The types of alloys that can be made like this are theoretically infinite and have exceptional mechanical, thermal, physical, and chemical properties. Alloys resistant to corrosion or extremely low temperatures, and high-strength alloys have already been discovered.

However, until now, designing new high-entropy alloy materials was based on trial and error, thus requiring much time and budget. It was even more difficult to determine in advance the phase and the mechanical and thermal properties of the high-entropy alloy being developed.

To this, the joint research team focused on developing prediction models on HEAs with enhanced phase prediction and explainability using deep learning. They applied deep learning in three perspectives: model optimization, data generation and parameter analysis. In particular, the focus was on building a data-enhancing model based on the conditional generative adversarial network. This allowed AI models to reflect samples of HEAs that have not yet been discovered, thus improving the phase prediction accuracy compared to the conventional methods.

In addition, the research team developed a descriptive AI-based HEA phase prediction model to provide interpretability to deep learning models, which acts as a black box, while also providing guidance on key design parameters for creating HEAs with certain phases.

"This research is the result of drastically improving the limitations of existing research by incorporating AI into HEAs that have recently been drawing much attention," remarked Professor Seungchul Lee. He added, "It is significant that the joint research team's multidisciplinary collaboration has produced the results that can accelerate AI-based fabrication of new materials."

Professor Hyungyu Jin also added, "The results of the study are expected to greatly reduce the time and cost required for the existing new material development process, and to be actively used to develop new high-entropy alloys in the future."