Photo: Peter Paplanus/Flickr CC BY 2.0. Blue-spotted salamanders are just fine with being supercooled. Lucky guys, they have a “natural anti-freeze.”
Got icy weather? Stay indoors if you can and read about salamanders that survive icy weather, and even benefit from it.
Nell Greenfieldboyce reports at National Public Radio (NPR), “In ancient times, people thought moist-skinned salamanders could survive in fire. That’s not true, of course, but some salamanders have a surprising ability to deal with another temperature extreme: freezing cold.
“In fact, blue-spotted salamanders can remain active even when chilled below the normal freezing point of body fluids — a state that scientists call ‘supercooled.’ That surprised researchers who recently saw these amphibians out and about at Bat Lake in Canada’s Algonquin Provincial Park in late winter.
” ‘We noticed that okay, there’s still ice on the ground, the lake’s still frozen, but for some weird reason, there were blue-spotted salamanders on land,’ recalls Danilo Giacometti, a researcher who is now at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.
“These salamanders live up to their name, with black bodies sporting shimmery blue spots. Besides Canada, they’re found in the northern part of the United States, across the Great Lakes region and New England. … They spend cold winters underground, but emerge from their burrows in the forests in early spring to migrate to nearby pools of water so that they can start breeding.
“It’s been known for a while that blue-spotted salamanders can occasionally be seen walking on snow, but it was thought that this happened when temperatures had actually warmed up a bit, says biologist Glenn Tattersall of Brock University in Ontario, a member of the research team. ‘The presumption that we had was that maybe they were moving over snow while the temperatures are just close to freezing,’ he says.
“When they saw these salamanders out in the frigid cold, though, the researchers had a thermal camera with them. Together with another scientist named Patrick Moldowan, they took thermal images that let them measure the body temperature of the animals. What they found is that some blue-spotted salamanders actually had body temperatures below freezing, as low as 25 degrees Fahrenheit. …
“These salamanders apparently have some kind of ability to use a natural anti-freeze that allows them to become supercooled, according to the researchers’ report in the Canadian Journal of Zoology. …
” ‘They showed that there’s activity in this supercooled state,’ says Don Larson with the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, who wasn’t part of this research team. … ‘They’re still able to do things.’ He says this probably helps these salamanders by letting them start their breeding as early as possible, while maybe avoiding predators that are still hunkered down.
“Amphibians can be surprisingly adept at dealing with frigid temperatures, he says. He’s been studying the Alaskan wood frog, which can freeze solid for months; its heart stops completely.
“And in Russia, there are Siberian salamanders ‘that we know can survive down to negative 40 or colder,’ he says. …
” ‘We know that there are some very extreme limits,’ says Larson, but compared to all the research that’s been done on what birds and mammals do in the winter, scientists know remarkably little about how cold-blooded amphibians get by.” More at NPR, here.
We could all use some of that “natural anti-freeze.” Maybe some government someday will fund more research.
Have you seen any blue-spotted guys where you live?
Art: L.M.F. Doyère, “Mémoire sur les Tardigrades,” Annales des sciences naturelles: Zoologie et biologie animale, 1840. Tardigrades are one of the life forms that survive under extreme conditions.
Science writer Alex Riley has hope for our planet, but his hope doesn’t necessarily include humans. Maybe if more of us appreciated and learned from science, he would feel differently.
At the Christian Science Monitor, Erin Douglass interviews Riley about the adaptive life forms he studied for his new book, Super Natural.
“In Super Natural,” she writes, “award-winning science writer Alex Riley casts his inquisitive, generous gaze upon … the far-deep, far-up, and far-flung life-forms that inhabit Earth’s less move-in-ready biomes. From snailfish and wood frogs to painted turtles and tardigrades, these remarkable creatures display a knack for thriving – or at least carrying on – in a niche of their own. …
Erin Douglass “You describe finding solace in nature as a boy growing up in the 1990s. Do you have an early memory that stands out?”
Alex Riley “I grew up in North Yorkshire, so northern England. It was very rural, very picturesque, but very lonely as well. You had to find your own interests.
“We had this pond at the bottom of the garden, and frogspawn was there. It’s very mundane for grown-ups – a frog turns from a tadpole to a froglet to a frog – but for me to watch that was enthralling. Even today, that strikes me as something incredible: There are transformations going on around us, whether it’s caterpillars to moths or tadpoles into frogs. I think that metamorphosis was really crucial to my upbringing.”
Douglass “You organize the book by conditions – heat, cold, depth, height, etc. Why did you choose this framework?
Alex Riley “I didn’t want to make it too complex. I wanted a layperson to pick up this book, look at those chapters, and say, ‘OK, I understand these environmental stresses, and I want to learn more about them.’
“In the book’s sequence, I started with water – or lack of water – because water is so associated with life. That’s what NASA used to search for extraterrestrial life. Everything that we know in terms of life on Earth has involvement with water and requires it in their cells. We evolved from water. “
Douglass “What’s behind the title?
Riley “There’s a double meaning there. You Americans say ‘super’ for ‘very’ – so all of this stuff is very natural. But there’s also this supernatural element that’s sort of inexplicable. We can’t even comprehend how fungi survived in Chernobyl on the reactor that exploded, and actually used the radiation for their sustenance. We can’t imagine what it’s like to live in complete darkness and have no association with sunlight.” …
Douglass “You call the tardigrade ‘the poster child of life’s resilience.’ What makes these tiny beings so amazing?”
Riley “They’ve been studied since the 1770s, and we’re still trying to uncover how they are so tough. They’re adorable: Under a microscope, they look like little bears with a piglike snout, eight chubby legs. Even their movement is adorable. They don’t just swim or walk – they bumble through grains of sand and moss, and in the seabed. And yet, they’re almost indestructible.”
Douglass “Which creature impressed you the most?”
Riley “The microbes that live in the subsurface. There’s water down there, and there’s radiation from the rocks, and that radiation splits the water and it produces hydrogen. All these microbes need is that hydrogen and something to accept it; chemosynthesis is what they’re doing, but it’s very, very basic. We didn’t know that life could exist below the surface, below soil level. But these microbes have been found 5 kilometers down into the bedrock.
“If we’re going to find extraterrestrial life, say on the moons of Saturn or the moons of Jupiter, these are worlds that are ice-covered, and they’re going to be dark. Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe. If there is going to be life elsewhere, then these little microbes in the subsurface seem to be a good example of what it could be like.”
Douglass “You emphasize that endurance over the ages is only possible with ingenuity – and being different. Would you say more about that?”
Riley “Life has to be different in order to survive, because to compete for resources, it pays to go against the grain. If you’re a snailfish living 8,000 meters down in the Mariana Trench, you’ve got a pretty good life because you’ve pushed into this extreme that no other fish can get into. You have no predation, and you’ve got all the anthropods you can possibly eat. These oddities are actually a natural part of what life on Earth does. …
“For humans, our ingenuity was our intelligence, for all of its costs and all of its negatives. It will be ingenuity – in renewable energy sources and other forms of technology – that will enable us to live sustainably on this planet. …
“There’s this comfort that I get from thinking in deep time – not in political, five-year slots, but thinking beyond a human lifespan. What’s going to come next? Perhaps life will be more symbiotic because we have been so extractive. It’s a spectrum of hope that I have. I think we can, we have to, live more sustainably. But even if we don’t, life will adapt.”
Art: Michael Francis Reagan. Adirondack Park covers one-fifth of New York State — larger than Yellowstone, Yosemite, and many other national parks combined. It differs from those national parks, says the Nature Conservancy, in that it combines existing towns, businesses, recreation, and wilderness.
When I was very young, I used to visit a great aunt who had a “camp” in New York State’s beautiful Adirondacks. It’s all coming back to me as I read Ginger Strand’s article in the Nature Conservancy magazine.
She begins by describing a meeting she had with scientists at Follensby Pond.
“This place served as timberland for over a hundred years and was privately owned by different families, but it still has a primeval feel … a unique, interlinked landscape of forest, streams, wetlands and rare silver maple floodplains. In 2008, The Nature Conservancy bought this vast parcel of land from the estate of the former owner. In addition to Follensby Pond, the 14,600-acre property includes 10 miles along the Raquette River, a prime paddling waterway that makes up part of the longest inland water trail in the United States. …
“It was widely expected that TNC would sell the land to the state of New York. Instead, to the surprise of everyone, including itself, TNC concluded that the property needed a special level of management and protection, and kept it. In 2024 the Nature Conservancy sold two conservation easements to the state. The easements opened part of the parcel to recreational access and designated the rest of it as a freshwater research preserve with managed public access. …
“The 6-million-acre Adirondack Park, covering one-fifth of New York state, is the largest park in the lower 48 states. But it differs from national parks, like Yellowstone or Yosemite, and state parks, which are typically set aside for recreation or wildlife. Managed by two state agencies, the park has no gates or entry fees, and it’s peppered with small towns, farms, timberlands, businesses, and hunting camps, all nestled among forests, mountains, rivers, and lakes. All told it is one of the largest tracts of protected wilderness east of the Mississippi, and if it had a heart, it would be right about at Follensby Pond.
“Follensby Pond is not really a pond, but rather a 102-foot-deep lake slightly larger than Central Park. For the local Haudenosaunee and Abenaki, it was a hunting area, accessed via canoe routes that traversed the Raquette River, the historic ‘highway of the Adirondacks.’ … Tourists sought it out until the 1890s, when a timber company bought the land. In private hands, it became a family retreat as well as timberland. …
“In 2008, the Nature Conservancy closed on the Follensby property. Just about everyone expected the organization to sell it to New York state to become part of the Adirondack Forest Preserve. But with the economy entering a recession, the state had no funds to buy another big parcel. Under no time pressure to transfer the land, TNC began studying it. …
“To start, TNC hosted a ‘bioblitz,’ bringing 50 scientists — geologists, soil scientists, ecologists, fish experts — onto the land to survey its flora and fauna. What the science showed was that this property wasn’t just historically vaunted; it was ecologically significant. The lake in particular held a ‘functioning ecosystem that is almost as intact as they come,’ says Michelle Brown [Michelle Brown, a senior conservation scientist for TNC in New York]. …
“This lake harbors a population of freshwater lake trout. And not just any lake trout — ‘old-growth’ lake trout, according to past research led by McGill University. Because of the minimal fishing at Follensby, the trout have been able to grow older than similar trout might in other lakes. …
“The trout’s length here can reach 2 to 3 feet; the record one here weighed 31 pounds. That’s a prized quarry for someone who has been obsessed with fishing since he was four. Yet [Dirk Bryant, who directs land conservation for TNC in New York] loves the idea of keeping the pond and these fish protected.
” ‘The hardest thing for me as an angler was to learn to think differently. … But we’re thinking about our fisheries in climate change. The lake trout is our timber wolf, our apex predator.’ Now, he says, many of the lakes that used to have the trout don’t have them anymore.
“In fact, a 2024 study found that soon only 5% of the lakes in the Adirondacks will be capable of supporting native populations of trout. … Follensby Pond is one of a rare few cool enough and healthy enough to support lake trout. …
“ ‘If you have some intact waters that can support native populations, those are the places that will support adaptation to climate change, as well as providing brood stock for restocking other waters,’ Bryant says. ‘You don’t hunt wolves in Yellowstone.’ …
“Still, when the ‘brain trust’ floated the idea of protecting the pond as a freshwater preserve, it was a surprise to many. … Paddling guidebooks in particular had been anticipating that the Follensby parcel would soon be accessible. The Adirondacks team looked for ways to balance protecting the lake with not turning the area into a conservation fortress.
“ ‘There were all these different needs: public access, Indigenous access, hunting clubs with leases, the fishery, the town,’ [Peg Olsen, TNC’s Adirondacks director] says. ‘We wanted to honor and respect all the stakeholders.’
“They landed on a compromise. The conservation easements sold to New York state create two distinct areas on the Follensby property. On nearly 6,000 acres along 10 miles of the Raquette River, one easement creates new public access for hiking, paddling, camping, hunting and fishing. The other easement protects a nearly 9,000-acre section around Follensby Pond as a freshwater research preserve, guided by a public-private consortium, to collaborate on research and preserve the lake’s unique ecosystem. While making Follensby a living laboratory, it also provides for Indigenous access and managed public access aimed at education.
“Like the wider Adirondack Park, with its combination of private lands, active towns and protected wilderness areas, it, too, will be an ongoing experiment in balancing environmental preservation with human communities.”
Read more at the Nature Conservancy magazine, here.
People absorb information differently, so to each his own. I hope today’s attempt to explain scientific differences between reading a book and listening to one doesn’t make you think reading is necessarily better than listening. We all know the vital importance of being read to as a child.
Let’s see what Stephanie N. Del Tufo, assistant professor of education & human development at the University of Delaware, has to say at Science Alert, via the Conversation.
“As a language scientist, I study how biological factors and social experiences shape language. My work explores how the brain processes spoken and written language, using tools like MRI and EEG.
“Whether reading a book or listening to a recording, the goal is the same: understanding. But these activities aren’t exactly alike. Each supports comprehension in different ways. Listening doesn’t provide all the benefits of reading, and reading doesn’t offer everything listening does. Both are important, but they are not interchangeable.
“Your brain uses some of the same language and cognitive systems for both reading and listening, but it also performs different functions depending on how you’re taking in the information.
“When you read, your brain is working hard behind the scenes. It recognizes the shapes of letters, matches them to speech sounds, connects those sounds to meaning, then links those meanings across words, sentences and even whole books. The text uses visual structure such as punctuation marks, paragraph breaks or bolded words to guide understanding. You can go at your own speed.
“Beyond identifying the words themselves, the listener’s brain must also pay attention to tone, speaker identity and context to understand the speaker’s meaning.
“Many people assume that listening is easier than reading, but this is not usually the case. Research shows that listening can be harder than reading, especially when the material is complex or unfamiliar.
“Listening and reading comprehension are more similar for simple narratives, like fictional stories, than for nonfiction books or essays that explain facts, ideas or how things work. My research shows that genre affects how you read. In fact, different kinds of texts rely on specialized brain networks.
“Reading difficult material tends to be easier than listening from a practical standpoint, as well. Reading lets you move around within the text easily, rereading particular sections if you’re struggling to understand, or underlining important points to revisit later.
“A listener who is having trouble following a particular point must pause and rewind, which is less precise than scanning a page and can interrupt the flow of listening, impeding understanding.
“Even so, for some people, like those with developmental dyslexia, listening may be easier. Individuals with developmental dyslexia often struggle to apply their knowledge of written language to correctly pronounce written words, a process known as decoding. Listening allows the brain to extract meaning without the difficult process of decoding.
“People often listen while doing other things, like exercising, cooking or browsing the internet – activities that would be hard to do while reading. When researchers asked college students to either read or listen to a podcast on their own time, students who read the material performed significantly better on a quiz than those who listened.
“Many of the students who listened reported multitasking, such as clicking around on their computers while the podcast played. This is particularly important, as paying attention appears to be more important for listening comprehension than reading comprehension. …
“Each activity offers something different, and they are not interchangeable. The best way to learn is not by treating books and audio recordings as the same, but by knowing how each works and using both to better understand the world.”
Photo: Sean Waugh. NOAA’s National Severe Storm Lab has been looking into the hail problem.
Here’s my periodic reminder that cutting out funding for scientific research can affect your life. The important work of the National Severe Storm Lab of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Oklahoma is just one example of what may be lost.
Nick Gilmore at public radio WVTF in Virginia reported recently on NOAA’s research into hail.
“Just picture this – it’s a warm afternoon and a thunderstorm starts to roll overhead. You head indoors and hear rain begin to fall. As the cracks of thunder get louder, you peek out the window to see large chunks of ice on the ground. … Rain makes sense to fall from a storm – but large pieces of ice?
“ ‘Hail is one of those things that we don’t really know how it forms,’ says Sean Waugh, a research scientist at NOAA’s Severe Storms Laboratory.
“We do know some of the basics. Strong thunderstorms have strong updrafts – think like a vacuum cleaner that’s able to lift moisture high up into the atmosphere. It’s cold up there, so that water freezes into a small stone. It collects more water, refreezes as it cycles through the storm – more water, refreezes. … Eventually, the hailstone gets too heavy and tumbles to the earth below. Waugh says wind speed, direction and moisture in the air also play a part in hailstorm development.
We also know hail can be expensive.
“ ‘In any given year, it’s 60-80% of the damage that comes from severe thunderstorms,’ says Ian Giammanco – a meteorologist at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety. He says we’re just getting more hailstorms these days.
“ ‘Rewind the clock all the way back to 2008 – every year since then, we’ve had over $10 billion in damage from hail. This has crept up now to a $20-30 billion problem.’
“Giammanco says that’s why research like what Sean Waugh is doing is so important – finding out what hail looks like before it hits the ground. …
“Waugh says, ‘We don’t know what broke when it landed, how much of that mass, or size or shape have we lost between when it fell and when we find it, right? I’ve seen six-inch diameter stones melt before I can get out of the car to pick them up.’ …
“There are other questions, too: how fast does hail fall? Does it fall in a specific orientation? Does the stone melt while it’s falling to the earth below?
” ‘These are all really, really important questions if you’re trying to ascertain what hail looks like to a radar. And that’s a really critical piece of knowledge if you’re trying to warn for hail in real time, which is obviously the goal! Most people want to know if there’s going to be golf balls falling at their house or softballs.’ …
“Waugh and his team have built a complex rig that observes hail in free fall and in real time. They head out from Oklahoma – typically to the Southern Plains – to get the system in front of a storm producing large hail.
“The rig has high speed and high-quality cameras, and Waugh says there’s another key component.
” ‘But we need a lot of light to do that. Otherwise, the image would just be dark,’ he explains. ‘So, the LED array I have on the back of the truck produces about 30% more light than the sun!’ …
“ ‘We can use that knowledge to improve our forecasts of what storms are likely going to produce hail days in advance. By understanding the type of hail that different storms produce, that increases our ability to model it properly and then forecast that in the future,’ Waugh says. ‘And that way people can take appropriate action to protect life and property.’ ”
More at public radio WVTF, here. Cool video of hail in flight.
I don’t get the funding cuts. The jobs that will be lost at the weather center are in Oklahoma, so it’s not just coastal communities that will be hurt. And anyway, don’t hurricanes damage golf courses in Florida sometimes? Weather is something no human can be the boss of, so it’s just common sense to try to understand it.
Please share your hail stories.
From the University of Oklahoma news site, OU Daily.
Photo: Wes McRae/Georgia Tech School of Music. Dinosaur Choir is a musical instrument that reconstructs the vocal tract of a Corythosaurus — a type of duck-billed dinosaur with a large, distinctive crest on its head.
Where will the imagination of science-oriented artists take us next? Here’s the story of two imagineers who investigated how dinosaurs might have sounded back in the day.
Verity Burns writes at Wired, “What did dinosaurs really sound like? If you’ve ever found yourself asking that question, a musical project using 3D models of dino skulls could be getting closer to answering it. …
“Dinosaur Choir is a musical instrument developed by artists Courtney Brown and Cezary Gajewski, which reconstructs the vocal tract of a Corythosaurus—a type of duck-billed dinosaur with a large, distinctive crest on its head.
“To make a sound, the user stands in front of a camera while blowing into a microphone. Depending on how hard they blow and the shape of their mouth as they do, the vocalizations that resonate through the dinosaur’s skull will change. In effect, the user’s breath becomes the dinosaur’s breath. The result is not the roar that we hear in the movies, but something that sounds more like a deep wail.
“The instrument has just been recognized at Georgia Tech’s 2025 Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, an event that brings together inventors from around the world to discuss ideas on the future of music. …
“ ‘In 2011, we were on a family road trip and we stopped off at a dinosaur museum in New Mexico,’ Brown tells Wired. ‘There I saw an exhibit of a Parasaurolophus, which had crests like a Corythosaurus. There had been many theories as to why this family of dinosaurs had these crests, but researchers have settled on the idea that it could have been for sound resonation. As a musician, I felt empathy with them.’ …
“Brown was inspired and immediately started work on her first project, Rawr! A Study in Sonic Skulls, which is the work that Dinosaur Choir continues. Both projects focus on the Corythosaurus, but at different stages of their lifespan to investigate how changes to the crest in adult maturity affects their sound. However, the biggest difference between the two projects is the way the sound is made — the reimagining of the dinosaur’s vocal box.
“ ‘With Rawr!, we used a mechanical larynx, so people would have to actually blow into a mouthpiece to create the sound. But once we started exhibiting it, we realized it wouldn’t be possible for people to interact with it in a way that was hygienic — and the pandemic solidified that. That’s when I started thinking about something more computational. And as I have a computer science degree, it also made more sense.’
“The work on Dinosaur Choir officially began in 2021, with Brown traveling to Canada, where the Corythosaurus is supposed to have lived, to update her research. She and Gajewski worked with paleontologist Thomas Dudgeon, from the University of Toronto and the Royal Ontario Museum, to analyze the most recent CT scans and 3D fabrications. From those, they built a life-size replica of an adult Corythosaurus’ head, right down to its intricate nasal passages.
“ ‘I’m extremely proud of my nasal passages,’ jokes Brown. ‘I learned CT segmentation for about a year to get them as accurate as possible, taking into consideration the effects that being buried for millions of years would also have had on them.’
“With the skull model complete, work then began on imagining the dinosaur vocalizations themselves. Recreating the vocal box in computational form gave Brown much more control to test out new, and perhaps even conflicting research, without having to rebuild everything from scratch.
“ ‘The models are based on a set of mathematical equations that relate to the mechanics of the voice — things like changes in air pressure and a number of other affected variables through time,’ she says. …
“So far, Brown has developed two models for Dinosaur Choir — one based on the syrinx of a raven, and a more recent one based on that of a dove, but she is also working on one of an alligator too. As these models are computational, they can be switched between in real time during a performance, and participants can also experiment with different trachea lengths and vocal membrane widths to hear the effects on the sound. …
“ ‘We [can’t] completely rule out that non-avian dinosaurs maybe didn’t vocalize at all. Soft tissue [like vocal chords] rarely preserves, and the vocalizations are also a type of behavior that leaves no fossils at all. In my heart, I truly believe they vocalized, but feelings are not facts. So much is lost to time.’ ”
Photo: Melanie Stetson Freeman/CSM. The friendship between Bella, a stray dog, and Tarra, a resident of the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, exemplifies feelings that are not unusual in the animal kingdom.
If you have ever heard Sy Montgomery on Boston Public Radio or read any of her wonderful books about animals, you will know that there is at least one scientist who believes critters have feelings. (FYI: with the exception of the Bobbitt worm, Sy Montgomery loves them all.)
Other scientists also have noticed that animals have feelings. At the Christian Science Monitor, Stephanie Hanes reports on research showing that many “animals exhibit signs of experiencing emotions and being self-aware.”
“This past April,” she writes, “a group of biologists and philosophers unveiled the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness at a conference at New York University in Manhattan. The statement declared that there is ‘strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds.’ It also said that empirical evidence points to ‘at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience’ in all vertebrates and many invertebrates, including crustaceans and insects.
“Researchers have found myriads of indications of perception, emotion, and self-awareness in animals. The bumblebee plays. Cuttlefish remember how they experienced past events. Crows can be trained to report what they see.
“Given these findings, many believe there should be a fundamental shift in the way that humans interact with other species. Rather than people assuming that animals lack consciousness until evidence proves otherwise, researchers say, isn’t it far more ethical to make decisions with the assumption that they are sentient beings with feelings?
“ ‘All of these animals have a realistic chance of being conscious, so we should aspire to treat them compassionately,’ says Jeff Sebo, director of the Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy at New York University. ‘But you can accept that much and then disagree about how to flesh that out and how to translate it into policies.’
“Sasha Prasad-Shreckengast is trying to get into the mind of a chicken. This is not the easiest of feats, even here at Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, a scenic hamlet in the rolling Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. For decades the sanctuary has housed, and observed the behavior of, farm animals – like the laying hens Ms. Prasad-Shreckengast is hoping to tempt into her study.
“Chickens, it turns out, have moods. Some might be eager and willing to waddle into a puzzle box to demonstrate innovative problem-solving abilities. But other chickens might just not feel like it.
“Ms. Prasad-Shreckengast also knows from her research, published this fall in the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, that some chickens are just more optimistic than others – although pessimistic birds seem to become more upbeat the more they learn tasks.
“ ‘We just really want to know what chickens are capable of and what chickens are motivated by when they are outside of an industrial setting,’ Ms. Prasad-Shreckengast says. ‘They have a lot more agency and autonomy.’ …
“In other words, how do chickens really think? And how do they feel? And, to get big picture about it, what does all of that say about chicken consciousness?
“In some ways, these are questions that are impossible to answer. There is no way for humans, with their own specific ways of perceiving and being in the world, to fully understand the perspective of a chicken – a dinosaur descendant that can see ultraviolet light and has a 300-degree field of vision.
“Yet increasingly, scientists like Ms. Prasad-Shreckengast are trying to find answers. What they are discovering, whether in farm animals, bumblebees, dogs, or octopuses, is a complexity beyond anything acknowledged in the past. …
“Researchers have found myriads of indications of perception, emotion, and self-awareness in animals. The bumblebee plays. Cuttlefish remember how they experienced past events. Crows can be trained to report what they see. …
“Ms. Prasad-Shreckengast’s study takes place in the wide hallway of Farm Sanctuary’s breezy chicken house. Unlike in pretty much any other chicken facility, the birds here come and go as they please from spacious pens.
“Following up on her previous research, she has designed a challenge that she hopes will appeal to most of her moody chickens. It is a ground-level puzzle box, with a push option, a pull option, and a swipe option. Birds are rewarded with a blueberry when they solve a challenge. …
“The idea of consent – which is a basic, foundational principle in the study of human behavior – is also a hallmark of animal studies here at Farm Sanctuary. To the uninitiated, this might sound absurd, with images of chickens signing above the dotted line. But it is not actually all that rare. Studies of dogs, dolphins, and primates all depend on the animals agreeing, in their own way, to participate. …
“Spearheaded by Kristin Andrews, professor of philosophy and the research chair in animal minds at York University in Canada, the idea emerged from conversations she had with two colleagues, Jonathan Birch, a philosopher at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Jeff Sebo, director of the Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy at New York University. …
“ ‘People were dimly aware that new studies were identifying new evidence for consciousness – not only in birds, but also reptiles, amphibians, fishes, and then a lot of invertebrates, too,’ says Dr. Sebo. ‘But there was no central, authoritative place people could look for evidence that the views of mainstream scientists were shifting.’ …
“For instance, trees communicate, and fungal networks send messages throughout a forest. Species such as sea turtles and bats use electromagnetic fields, a force we cannot even perceive, to guide their movements and migrations. Snakes see infrared light, birds and reindeer see ultraviolet light, and dolphins use sound waves to navigate underwater. …
“For generations, the dominant perspective has been that the human perspective is the best view in the house, with the most complex and complete picture of reality.
“But there hasn’t been a species studied over the past 20 years that hasn’t turned out to exhibit pain. There hasn’t been a species that hasn’t turned out to be more internally complicated than people expected, Dr. Andrews says. …
“ ‘That word, “consciousness,” is the problem,’ Dr. Andrews says. ‘The thing that everybody in the field agrees on is that consciousness refers to feeling – ability to feel things. … But then if you start asking people to give a real, concrete definition of consciousness, they’re not able to do it.’ …
“For the purposes of the declaration, researchers said, they focused on what is called ‘phenomenal consciousness.’ This is the idea that ‘There is something that it’s like to be a particular organism,’ explains Christopher Krupenye, professor of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University. … Basically means that an animal experiences the world not as a machine, but as a being. Phenomenal consciousness is what you are experiencing right now in your body with the sight of words on a page as you read this article.”
There are numerous species described in the article at the Monitor, here. Don’t miss the playful bees.
Photo: Zihui Zhou/University of California, Berkeley. A carbon-capturing powder, pictured on Berkeley’s campus.
Somehow or other scientific research about global warming will continue. Today’s example comes from Berkeley in California.
At the Guardian, Katharine Gammon reports, “An innocuous yellow powder, created in a lab, could be a new way to combat the climate crisis by absorbing carbon from the air.
“Just half a pound of the stuff may remove as much carbon dioxide as a tree can, according to early tests. Once the carbon is absorbed by the powder, it can be released into safe storage or be used in industrial processes, like carbonizing drinks.
“ ‘This really addresses a major problem in the tech field, and it gives an opportunity now for us to scale it up and start using it,’ says Omar Yaghi, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s not the first material to absorb carbon, but ‘it’s a quantum leap ahead [of other compounds] in terms of the durability of the material.’
“The powder is known as a covalent organic framework, with strong chemical bonds that pull gases out of the air. The material is both durable and porous, and can be used hundreds of times, making it superior to other materials used for carbon capture.
“Yaghi has been working on similar materials for decades. It’s part of a broader push to collect tiny amounts of carbon from the air – either from power plants or from air around cities. Yaghi’s research with Zihui Zhou, a graduate student in his lab, and others was published in the journal Nature. …
“Yaghi’s team tested the new powder and found that it could successfully absorb and release carbon more than 100 times. It fills up with carbon in about two hours, and then must be heated to release the gas before starting the process over again. It only requires a temperature of about 120F to release the carbon; that makes it an improvement over other methods, which require a much higher temperature.
“That feature means places that already produce extra heat – such as factories or power plants – could use it to release the gas and start the cycle again. The material could be incorporated into existing carbon capture systems or future technology.
“Yaghi … plans to scale the use of this type of carbon capture with his Irvine, California-based company, Atoco, and believes the powder can be manufactured in multi-ton quantities in less than a year.
“Shengqian Ma, a chemist at the University of North Texas who was not involved in the new work, says this technology could be gamechanging. ‘One longstanding challenge for direct air capture lies in the high regeneration temperatures,’ he says, adding that the new material can substantially reduce the energy needed to use direct air capture. …
“Says Farzan Kazemifar, a associate professor in the department of mechanical engineering at San Jose State University who was not involved in the new study, ‘In the short term, replacing large emitters of carbon dioxide – like coal power plants – with renewable electricity offers the fastest reduction in emissions. However, in the long term, in case the emissions don’t go down at the desired pace, or if global warming effects intensify, we may need to rely on technologies that can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and direct air capture is one of those technologies.’
“Still, removing carbon from the air remains difficult, and as with all early-stage lab-scale studies, the challenge is scaling up the system for pilot studies. … Any technology to capture the gas from the air requires moving huge volumes of air – and that requires large electricity consumption for running fans, says Kazemifar. …
“Some scientists worry that the expectations of direct air capture systems has been overly rosy. A group of scientists from MIT recently wrote a paper analyzing the assumptions of many climate stabilization plans, and pointing to ways that direct air capture may be overly optimistic.
“Ma also points out that a major challenge to using this approach to combat climate change lies in the high cost of materials for creating substances that capture carbon.
“Still, Yaghi says this material can change the way we address carbon removal. ‘This is something we’ve been working on for 15 years, that basically addresses some of the lingering problems,’ he says.”
I think we don’t give enough credit to ancient wisdom. Researchers of former times may have been ignorant of cars and computers and smart phones, but why do we think they were unintelligent? (I’m a little cranky because I recently attended a talk on reflexology that barely mentioned traditional Chinese medicine.)
Today we learn that art works from centuries ago suggest humans were observing animals self-medicating long before contemporary scientists started publishing papers on the practice.
Adrienne Mayor, a classics, history and philosophy of science scholar at Stanford University, writes in the Conversation, “When a wild orangutan in Sumatra recently suffered a facial wound, apparently after fighting with another male, he did something that caught the attention of the scientists observing him.
“The animal chewed the leaves of a liana vine – a plant not normally eaten by apes. Over several days, the orangutan carefully applied the juice to its wound, then covered it with a paste of chewed-up liana. The wound healed with only a faint scar. The tropical plant he selected has antibacterial and antioxidant properties and is known to alleviate pain, fever, bleeding and inflammation. …
“In interviews and in their research paper, the scientists stated that this is ‘the first systematically documented case of active wound treatment by a wild animal’ with a biologically active plant. …
“To me, the behavior of the orangutan sounded familiar. As a historian of ancient science who investigates what Greeks and Romans knew about plants and animals, I was reminded of similar cases reported by Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, Aelian and other naturalists from antiquity. A remarkable body of accounts from ancient to medieval times describes self-medication by many different animals. The animals used plants to treat illness, repel parasites, neutralize poisons and heal wounds.
“The term zoopharmacognosy – ‘animal medicine knowledge’ – was invented in 1987. But as the Roman natural historian Pliny pointed out 2,000 years ago, many animals have made medical discoveries useful for humans.
Indeed, a large number of medicinal plants used in modern drugs were first discovered by Indigenous peoples and past cultures who observed animals employing plants and emulated them.
“Some of the earliest written examples of animal self-medication appear in Aristotle’s ‘History of Animals‘ from the fourth century BCE, such as the well-known habit of dogs to eat grass when ill, probably for purging and deworming.
“Aristotle also noted that after hibernation, bears seek wild garlic as their first food. It is rich in vitamin C, iron and magnesium, healthful nutrients after a long winter’s nap. The Latin name reflects this folk belief: Allium ursinum translates to ‘bear lily,’ and the common name in many other languages refers to bears.
“Pliny explained how the use of dittany, also known as wild oregano, to treat arrow wounds arose from watching wounded stags grazing on the herb. Aristotle and Dioscorides credited wild goats with the discovery. Vergil, Cicero, Plutarch, Solinus, Celsus and Galen claimed that dittany has the ability to expel an arrowhead and close the wound. Among dittany’s many known phytochemical properties are antiseptic, anti-inflammatory and coagulating effects.
“According to Pliny, deer also knew an antidote for toxic plants: wild artichokes. The leaves relieve nausea and stomach cramps and protect the liver. To cure themselves of spider bites, Pliny wrote, deer ate crabs washed up on the beach, and sick goats did the same. Notably, crab shells contain chitosan, which boosts the immune system.
“When elephants accidentally swallowed chameleons hidden on green foliage, they ate olive leaves, a natural antibiotic to combat salmonella harbored by lizards. Pliny said ravens eat chameleons, but then ingest bay leaves to counter the lizards’ toxicity. Antibacterial bay leaves relieve diarrhea and gastrointestinal distress. Pliny noted that blackbirds, partridges, jays and pigeons also eat bay leaves for digestive problems.
“Weasels were said to roll in the evergreen plant rue to counter wounds and snakebites. Fresh rue is toxic. Its medical value is unclear, but the dried plant is included in many traditional folk medicines. Swallows collect another toxic plant, celandine, to make a poultice for their chicks’ eyes. Snakes emerging from hibernation rub their eyes on fennel. Fennel bulbs contain compounds that promote tissue repair and immunity.
“According to the naturalist Aelian, who lived in the third century BCE, the Egyptians traced much of their medical knowledge to the wisdom of animals. Aelian described elephants treating spear wounds with olive flowers and oil. He also mentioned storks, partridges and turtledoves crushing oregano leaves and applying the paste to wounds.”
Need more proof that modern science sometimes just reinvents the wheel? Read the Conversation, here. No paywall. Fun artworks.
In ancient times, Arabic translations of Greek helped spur scientific inquiry.
You may have seen that there are contemporary publishers planning to use artificial intelligence to translate texts. Ha! What could possibly go wrong? If you have ever used Google Translate, you know the answer to that: AI works only up to a point.
Today’s excerpt from Josephine Quinn’s book How the World Made the West, focuses on benefits that came from the traditional type of translation.
“In the eighth-century CE the Abbasids undertook to collect the wisdom of the world in their new capital at Baghdad. … The operation was lavishly funded by [the second Abbasid caliph, al-Mansur] as well as by members of his household, courtiers, merchants, bankers, and military leaders. …
“What is often now called the ‘Translation Movement’ … was part of a wider commitment by Islamic scholars and political leaders to scientific investigation that also saw caliphs commission new works of science, geography, poetry, history, and medicine.
The real legacy of the Arabic translations is the impetus they gave to further thought.
“It is well-known that classic works of Greek science and philosophy were translated into Arabic before they were translated into other European languages — including Latin. What is less well-known is that the point of translating foreign works was not to preserve them but to build on them. As links around the Mediterranean continued to increase, that Arabic scholarship began to reach western Europe, and to change the way people there thought.
“Back in Baghdad, as so often happened, cultural change began from the outside — and in this case with the collection and comparison of foreign knowledge. The fundamental model and first material for the Abbasid translation project came from Iran, where sixth-century Sasanian shahs had commissioned Persian translations of important Indian and Greek works.
“Living Iranians were an inspiration too. … Persian scholars had already started to translate classic works of their own literature into Arabic. This ensured their preservation, and advertised the history and high culture of Iranian lands. Sasanian intellectuals also maintained useful links with scientific traditions farther east, above all with Indian mathematicians, the most advanced in the ancient world, and they had already translated important works from Sanskrit into their own language. …
“Incorporating the work of Greek thinkers into the Arabic canon was by contrast a declaration of cultural hegemony over the rump Roman empire at Constantinople, where older learning had been set aside in favor of Christian genres from sermons to saints’ lives, and where ancient science and philosophy now moldered in archives and monasteries.
“More immediately, the project took inspiration from the contemporary intellectual culture of western Asia, revitalized by the unification under Islam of regions once subject to either Persia or Rome. … This world produced well-traveled intellectuals expert in topics from military strategy to astrology, and comfortable in Greek, Syriac, Middle Persian (Pahlavi), and now Arabic as well.
“The final key component came from farther east. Paper had been invented in China in the second century BCE and by the second century CE it is found in the trading oases of the Tarim Basin. … As paper was much cheaper to produce than papyrus, it finally made writing in great quantity a practical prospect.
“In the early ninth century scientific scholarship in Baghdad coalesced around a library called the ‘House of Wisdom’ (Bayt al-Hikma), and the translation efforts were put on a more organized footing. … Persian scholars translated into Arabic works that had already been translated from other languages into their own, and since there was comparatively little direct Greco-Arabic bilingualism, Arabic translations of Greek works were often made from Syriac versions. …
“We have a useful guide to the foreign works considered worthy of investigation in the form of an encyclopedia entitled Keys of the Sciences written by Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (c. 780–850), a Persian-speaking mathematician and astronomer from the central Asian oasis of Khwarazm, south of the Aral Sea, who worked at the House of Wisdom.
“He divided the work into two books: one describes ‘Islamic religious law and Arabic sciences,’ defined as law, theology, grammar, secretaryship, poetry, and history; the other is devoted to ‘the sciences of foreigners such as the Greeks and other nations’: philosophy, logic, law, medicine, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy/astrology, music, mechanics, and alchemy. …
“Practical Greek texts also found their way into the collection, on topics from engineering to military tactics to falconry. Popular literature included books of fables, ‘wisdom sayings,’ and letters supposedly exchanged between famous historical figures. …
“Some of the Greek texts were acquired through personal request, even from the caliph himself. Other manuscripts were found on investigative missions. [A] tenth-century compendium of literature written in Baghdad reports that camel-loads of old works were discovered in a pagan Greek temple that had been locked since the arrival of Christianity, getting worn and gnawed at by pests. …
“Most ancient science was indeed lost to western Europe for almost a millennium: such works were usually written in Greek, even by Romans, and they disappeared with the knowledge of that language. …
“Greek texts were far from the only inspiration for Arabic science. [But the] manipulation, criticism, and sometimes outright rejection of foreign works by intellectuals working in the Islamic world catalyzed a scientific revolution.”
Photo: Weliton Menário Costa via Science. Says Science magazine: “In his winning ‘Dance Your Ph.D.’ video, Weliton Menário Costa shifts his dance style to match other dancers, mimicking how kangaroos adapt their personalities to fit the group.”
This is a story about Science magazine’s annual “Dance Your PhD” competition. The winning video replicates something a researcher studied — kangaroo behavior. Runners up included dances about stream-bank erosion and moth mating.
Sean Cummings writes at Science, “In a broad grassland beneath an Australian sunset, dancers in everything from fishnets to field attire let loose an unchoreographed mishmash of steps, leaps, twirls, and twerks. There’s no unified style to the movement, but the resulting video — this year’s winner of Science’s annual ‘Dance Your Ph.D.’ contest — carries meaning nonetheless in its joyful madness. To Weliton Menário Costa, its creator, this dance mirrors the one between individuality and conformity in kangaroos — and celebrates the value of diversity in all species.
“Menário Costa, who was awarded $2750 in the annual contest now sponsored by the quantum technology-artificial intelligence (AI) company SandboxAQ, earned his ecology Ph.D. in 2021 at the Australian National University, studying eastern gray kangaroos (Macropus giganteus) living at Wilsons Promontory National Park. Even as joeys, he found, individual kangaroos seemed to have distinct personalities. Bolder animals, for instance, would approach a remote-controlled model car driven near them whereas others shied away. These personalities aren’t set in stone, however: The marsupials modify their behavior to conform with those around them, adjusting as they move between groups.
“Menário Costa, who has since transitioned from science into a career as a singer-songwriter under the name WELI, recorded an original song, Kangaroo Time, for the contest. He then recruited a score of dancer friends representing styles from urban to classical, ballet to Brazilian funk. ‘I wanted to showcase the diversity of kangaroo behavior, and the easiest way was to get the diversity of dance we already have. I didn’t choreograph them, they were just being themselves,’ Menário Costa says. The only instruction?
Do as the ’roos do. In other words, mingle with dancers of other styles and adjust your movements in response, gradually unifying into a group effort.
“The result resonated with a judging panel of artists, dancers, and scientists. ‘There was a sense of surprise and delight in it. You could tell they were having fun through the process’ … says judge Alexa Meade, a visual artist who uses optical illusions in her work. She also praised the video’s original songwriting and costumes, as well as the simplicity and accessibility with which it explained the science relating to kangaroo group dynamics.
“Besides finding a whimsical way to teach viewers about kangaroos, Menário Costa hopes to convey the message that diversity — in all its forms — should be celebrated. ‘Kangaroos are different, just like us,’ he says. ‘Differences happen in all species—.’ …
“The project also provided a way for Menário Costa to translate his academic experiences into an accessible form for friends and family in his small Brazilian hometown. Many of them didn’t fully understand what he was doing in Australia, he says — including his grandmother. ‘Once I released Kangaroo Time, she was like, “That’s my grandson! I get it now!” says Menário Costa, who [planned] to release his first EP, Yours Academically, Dr. WELI, at the beginning of March. …
“ ‘This year’s entries did a great job of incorporating art and science to [create something] greater than the sum of their parts,’ Meade says. In the past, she explains, ‘some entries have incredible research but the dance component feels like an afterthought, or we might get some incredible dance performance, but I’m not sure what it has to do with science. It has to be a blending that accentuates both.’ The entries were so strong, the judges noted, that the second-ranked dance in the social science category might have won the whole thing if not up against the kangaroos.” Click on that one: It’s pretty funny.
You can make a dance about anything — as I learned when I was 14 and had to choreograph a dance about oxygen in combustion. You couldn’t just show Antoine Lavoisier mixing chemicals but had to somehow replicate the chemicals themselves!
Photo: Mata, et al, CC BY 4.0. Entomology Today says, “City insects need native plants just like country insects do. A new study, conducted in a small greenspace in Melbourne, Australia, found that an increase in the diversity and complexity of plant communities leads to a large increase in insect biodiversity, a greater probability of attracting insects, and a higher number of ecological interactions between plants and insects.”
My friend Jean Devine, founder of Biodiversity Builders and Devine Native Plantings, works with young people to plant native species that nurture beneficial insects. Between her and University of Texas Prof. Alex Wild, @alexwild, I have been learning a lot about bugs and how essential to life they can be. I even work hard to understand some of Alex’s posts, of which the following is not unusual: “A genomic study of a small group of tiger beetles shows that convergent color evolution had misled past morphological taxonomists.” Ha!
Meanwhile, under the title “Every Little Bit Helps,” Entomology Today advises those responsible for plantings in cities thus: “By increasing the diversity of native plants in urban areas, researchers from the University of Melbourne have seen a seven-fold increase in the number of insect species in just three years, confirming the ecological benefits of urban greening projects. The findings were published [in August] in the British Ecological Society journal, Ecological Solutions and Evidence.
“The study, conducted in a small greenspace in Melbourne, Australia, found that an increase in the diversity and complexity of plant communities leads to a large increase in insect biodiversity, a greater probability of attracting insects, and a higher number of ecological interactions between plants and insects.
“Bringing nature into cities has been shown to deliver a host of benefits, from well-being to increased biodiversity and climate change mitigation. Being able to quantify the benefits of greening projects like rooftop gardens or urban wildflower meadows has become a sharp focus for people creating and funding them.
However, prior to this study, little evidence had been documented on how specific greening actions can mitigate the detrimental effects of urbanization through boosting the numbers of indigenous insect species that have become rare or ceased to exist in a particular area.
“ ‘Our findings provide crucial evidence that supports best practice in greenspace design and contributes to re-invigorate policies aimed at mitigating the negative impacts of urbanization on people and other species,’ says Luis Mata, Ph.D., researcher at the University of Melbourne’s School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences, lead research scientist at Cesar Australia, and lead author of the study.
“Prior to the beginning of the study in April 2016, the research team’s chosen greenspace was limited in vegetation: simply a grass lawn and two trees. Across April, the site was substantially transformed through weeding, the addition of new topsoil, soil decompaction and fertilization, organic mulching, and the addition of 12 indigenous plant species.
“Across the four-year length of the study, the researchers conducted 14 insect surveys using entomological nets to sample each plant species for ants, bees, wasps, beetles and more. Overall, 94 insect species were identified, 91 of which were indigenous to Victoria, Australia.
“ ‘Most importantly, the indigenous insect species we documented spanned a diverse array of functional groups: detritivores that recycle nutrients, herbivores that provide food for reptiles and birds, predators and parasitoids that keep pest species in check,’ Mata says.
“The 12 plant species planted at the beginning of the study were found to support an estimated 4.9 times more insect species after only one year than the original two plant species that previously existed in the greenspace where the research took place. …
“ ‘An increase in the diversity and complexity of the plant community led to, after only three years, a large increase in insect species richness, a greater probability of occurrence of insects within the greenspace, and a higher number and diversity of interactions between insects and plant species,’ Mata says. …
“ ‘I’d love to see many more urban greenspaces transformed into habitats for indigenous species,’ Mata says. ‘We hope that our study will serve as a catalyst for a new way to demonstrate how urban greening may effect positive ecological changes.’ ”
Photo: Derek Lovley/Ella Maru Studio/UMass Amherst via Newsweek. Scientists have figured out how to use nanopores to make electricity from thin air. These 100nm pores harvest electricity from water molecules in the air.
Scientists, thank goodness, are still doing science, despite recent hostility. At the Washington Post, Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff has a cool story on scientific methods being used to unlock the green energy hidden around us.
“Nearly any material can be used to turn the energy in air humidity into electricity, scientists found in a discovery that could lead to continuously producing clean energy with little pollution.
“The research, published in a paper in Advanced Materials, builds on 2020 work that first showed energy could be pulled from the moisture in the air using material harvested from bacteria. The new study shows nearly any material, such as wood or silicon, can be used, as long as it can be smashed into small particles and remade with microscopic pores. But there are many questions about how to scale the product. …
“ ‘It’s like a small-scale, man-made cloud,’ said Jun Yao, a professor of engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the senior author of the study. ‘This is really a very easily accessible, enormous source of continuous clean electricity.’ …
“That could include a forest, while hiking on a mountain, in a desert, in a rural village or on the road.
“The air-powered generator, known as an ‘Air-gen,’ would offer continuous clean electricity because it uses the energy from humidity, which is always present, rather than depending on the sun or wind. Unlike solar panels or wind turbines, which need specific environments to thrive, Air-gens could conceivably go anywhere, Yao said.
“Less humidity, though, would mean less energy could be harvested, he added. Winters, with drier air, would produce less energy than summers.
“The device, the size of a fingernail and thinner than a single hair, is dotted with tiny holes known as nanopores. The holes have a diameter smaller than 100 nanometers, or less than a thousandth of the width of a strand of human hair.
“The tiny holes allow the water in the air to pass through in a way that would create a charge imbalance in the upper and lower parts of the device, effectively creating a battery that runs continuously. …
“While one prototype only produces a small amount of energy — almost enough to power a dot of light on a big screen — because of its size, Yao said Air-gens can be stacked on top of each other, potentially with spaces of air in between. Storing the electricity is a separate issue, he added.
“Yao estimated that roughly 1 billion Air-gens, stacked to be roughly the size of a refrigerator, could produce a kilowatt and partly power a home in ideal conditions. The team hopes to lower both the number of devices needed and the space they take up by making the tool more efficient. Doing that could be a challenge.
“The scientists first must work out which material would be most efficient to use in different climates. Eventually, Yao said he hopes to develop a strategy to make the device bigger without blocking the humidity that can be captured. He also wants to figure out how to stack the devices on top of each other effectively and how to engineer the Air-gen so the same size device captures more energy. …
“It could be embedded in wall paint in a home, made at a larger scale in unused space in a city or littered throughout an office’s hard-to-get-to spaces. And because it can use nearly any material, it could extract less from the environment than other renewable forms of energy.”
Well, OK, it needs work. But you know that someone will move this into the practical realm someday. More at the Post, here.
By the way, it is also possible to make drinking water from air. Read about how that is actually happening in Africa, here.
Photo: Akhila Ram. High School student Akhila Ram won a 2022 ‘Most Innovative’ award for her invention to measure groundwater.
When I get discouraged about what we’re doing to the planet, I remind myself of all the young people coming along who like to solve problems.
Today’s post is about those who are addressing water scarcity. Akhila Ram, a high school student in Lexington, Massachusetts, won a science award for her groundwater-measuring gadget. And at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), there are young professors focused on reusing wastewater to save on potable water.
Collin Robisheaux writes at the Boston Globe, “Akhila Ram, a 12th-grader at Lexington High School, isn’t exactly like other high school students. In her free time she enjoys baking, painting – and inventing technologies to map out groundwater levels across the United States in order to monitor problems like water depletion.
“Ram’s invention is a computer model that uses machine learning to interpret data collected by NASA’s GRACE satellite in order to predict groundwater within a few feet of its actual level. While groundwater monitoring tools already exist, they can be expensive to install.
“Ram’s system could give farmers, well owners, and local officials a cost-effective method of monitoring groundwater. According to Ram, this model is the first to use a statistical approach on a large region to predict changes in groundwater levels. …
“The inspiration behind the invention is personal for Ram.
“ ‘My grandparents live in India, and their city faced a major drought,’ Ram said in an interview. ‘It was because of poor management. And I wanted to [do research on] solutions that could be used to properly manage water resources. … I’ve always been really passionate about climate change,’ Ram said. ‘That’s what led me here. I’ve always been trying to come up with ideas in this realm of sustainability and the environment.’ More at the Globe, here.
Meanwhile young college professors at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) are finding ways to make better use of wastewater.
David Staudacher reports at Rise magazine, “Water is our most precious resource, but climate change, pollution, and a growing human population has made this resource even more scarce. More than 2 billion people live in water-stressed countries. …
“To reduce this scarcity, two professors in civil, materials and environmental engineering are looking around in the world to find better ways to reclaim and reuse both fresh water and wastewater.
“To find best practices in water reuse, Associate Professor Sybil Derrible and his team have studied the work done in cities and countries around the world. In search of new water sources, many countries are turning to ocean water. …
“ ‘In places like Singapore, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, there are only a few ways to get water,’ Derrible said. ‘One is from the sea through desalination, and another is by reclaiming used water. Desalination requires a lot of electricity. Recycling used water can save energy and money.’
“Derrible and his team are developing a framework to analyze water circularity — which is the practice of not wasting or losing water and recovering the resources it contains as it is reused in multiple applications — by examining how cities collect, treat, and reuse water. In Singapore, for example, municipalities collect rainwater and recycle wastewater back to industries where it doesn’t need to be treated.
“Derrible wants to create a universal framework that takes into account ideas like this and that can be used anywhere in the world, including places where fresh water is not scarce.
“ ‘Many industries require extensive volumes of water, but the water does not need to be potable. Here, used water that was minimally treated can be sufficient,’ he said. Some places in the United States are already reusing wastewater. In warm climates like Las Vegas, wastewater is used to irrigate golf courses.
“ ‘It’s a big deal because the future of many cities includes reusing water and it is becoming more and more common for many cities in the world because water is a precious resource,’ he said.
“Also, in most countries, water distribution systems consist of large, highly pressurized pipe networks that require an excessive amount of energy and that are vulnerable to large-scale contamination if something goes wrong. However, in Hanoi, Vietnam, water is distributed at low pressures, and most buildings are equipped with a basement tank, a rooftop tank, and separate water treatment processes, resulting in a system that consumes less energy and that is more resilient. …
“Even a city like Chicago — with its vast freshwater resource in Lake Michigan — can benefit from reusing water. Professor Krishna Reddy is working with the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRDGC) and several UIC professors on an interdisciplinary project investigating ways to reuse treated wastewater from MWRDGC processing plants in the region and beyond.
“The district discharges some treated water into the Chicago River, where it makes its way into the Mississippi River and ultimately into the Gulf of Mexico. But ‘from a sustainability point of view, this is not a good reuse of a resource,’ Reddy said. ‘We suggest recycling the treated water where it can be reused for beneficial purpose without any further treatment.’ The researchers are gathering data to understand how much water MWRDGC produces, uses, and discharges, and are examining the quality of the water the plants both take in and discharge. One goal is to find new uses for wastewater.
“ ‘One interesting thing is that there are a large number of industries near the water reclamation plants, and they use a lot of water,’ Reddy said. ‘Maybe some of the industries nearby could use the treated water, or it could be used for other applications like agriculture or recreational parks irrigation, toilet flushing, landscaping, and golf courses.’ “
Photo: Time magazine, 2020. At 15, scientist Gitanjali Rao made history with a device to detect lead in drinking water. ‘You don’t need a PhD to make a difference,’ she says.
More kids are getting into science these days, and I think their enthusiasm is going to benefit us all.
Anne Branigin reports at the Lily, “Gitanjali Rao just finished her final exam of the year and, like any other teenager, is eager to begin her summer.
“The 15-year-old is, in many ways, not your typical teen. She landed on the cover of Time magazine in 2020 as its inaugural ‘Kid of the Year’ for her scientific achievements, which include building a device, Tethys, that detects lead in drinking water.
“But Rao doesn’t see herself as exceptional. In fact, when she was younger, she didn’t even see herself as ‘the science type.’ She was driven, instead, by trying to find solutions to problems in her community. Once she discovered science and technology could be a means of finding those solutions, there was no turning back.
‘Using science and technology as social change became something that was intuitive to me and something that I wanted to keep doing,’ she said. …
“Rao says her passion for STEM has shaped her days and her goals — she is working on creating a global network of young innovators to tackle global problems. It also fuels her relentless optimism for the future and all its possibilities. …
“Anne Branigin: I’m curious what a normal day looks like for you during a very not-normal year.
“Gitanjali Rao: A normal day obviously involves being your normal high school student, just, you know, maintaining a social life, still doing homework every single day, studying for exams. But then there’s this added layer of my research and innovations. A lot of my work has been focused on running my innovation workshops for students all over the globe, which is also taking up a little bit — a lot of my energy and time trying to maintain that sort of situation as well. And also just being, even remotely, in the public eye obviously comes with its own perks, but also disadvantages of being able to manage that as well. …
“I love helping people. I love using science and technology to do that. So that priority always comes first. … I don’t do eight things at a time. I might do eight things in a day, but not eight things at a time because I know what I need to focus on. I know how to prioritize my work. …
“Anne Branigin: On the subject of your generation, there’s a recent study showing that interest in STEM is at an all-time high among young people.
“Gitanjali Rao: It honestly makes me really happy to see younger generations engaging in science. Today’s kids are tomorrow’s innovators and they [will] make the world better, stronger and more sustainable in the future. …
“Anne Branigin: What do you think makes your generation’s approach to science unique?
“Gitanjali Rao: So a question that I commonly get is, what is one word to describe your generation? And I like to say, hotheaded — but in a good way. Our generation, if we put our mind to something, we want to get it done. That’s how I have been. That’s how a lot of my friends have been. …
“Anne Branigin: In the past, we haven’t always seen people of color and women and other members of marginalized communities really be the drivers of this technology. I’m curious how you’ve been thinking about equity and how those conversations have come up with your peers.
“Gitanjali Rao: My generation is destined to be innovators more than any generation that came before. And we’re the first generation to grow up as natural innovators because of how we live, where we live and what we have access to from a technology standpoint.
“Where I want to see that equity change is in education. Access to resources is something that obviously people have faced across the world. It’s an issue still to this day. It’s the 21st century, and we’re still talking about girls and women struggling to get education. But what it’s important to recognize is that a lot of times, the ideas start in the bare minimum.
“With my device, Tethys, to detect lead in drinking water, I started with a cardboard box and a couple of drawings on a piece of paper. And honestly, what that turned into was not looking at what resources I had, but dreaming big and then thinking back to reality.
“So equity is something that we need to work together to make a difference. But until then, it’s about using what we have on hand. Most of the innovators that I talk to online don’t have their driver’s license. I don’t have my driver’s license. But at the same time, it gives me this opportunity to be like, ‘Okay, with the resources that I have on hand, without having money to spend, what can I do?’ “
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