STEP Demo pilot plant achieves supercritical CO2 fluid conditions

sCO2 demonstration facility on SwRI campus advances toward system-level testing

Business Announcement

SOUTHWEST RESEARCH INSTITUTE

 

IMAGE: SWRI’S JOHN KLAERNER, LEAD TURBINE ENGINEER, AND DR. JEFF MOORE, THE PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR OF THE STEP DEMO PROJECT, ARE PICTURED WITH THE RECENTLY ASSEMBLED SCO2 TURBINE FOR THE 10 MWE DEMONSTRATION PLANT UNDER CONSTRUCTION AT SWRI. THE FACILITY, DEVELOPED THROUGH A COLLABORATION BETWEEN SWRI, GTI ENERGY, GE RESEARCH AND THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY/NATIONAL ENERGY TECHNOLOGY LABORATORY (DOE/NETL), HAS ACHIEVED ITS FIRST OPERATION WITH CO2 AT SUPERCRITICAL FLUID CONDITIONS IN ITS COMPRESSOR SECTION, WHICH REPRESENTS SIGNIFICANT PROGRESS TOWARD READYING THE FACILITY FOR SYSTEM-LEVEL TESTING. view more 

CREDIT: SOUTHWEST RESEARCH INSTITUTE

SAN ANTONIO — March 7, 2023 —The Supercritical Transformational Electric Power (STEP) Demo pilot plant, a $155 million, 10-megawatt supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) test facility at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio, developed in partnership with GTI Energy and GE Research and sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, has successfully achieved its first operation with CO2 at supercritical fluid conditions in its compressor section. This accomplishment represents significant progress toward readying the facility for system-level testing.

“This exciting milestone represents a significant advancement for a truly transformational project,” said Dr. Tim Allison, director of SwRI’s Department of Machinery. “STEP Demo is laying the groundwork for power generation that is more efficient, with a smaller footprint.”

Unlike conventional power plants, which use water as the thermal medium in power cycles, STEP is designed to use high-temperature sCO2, which increases efficiency by as much as 10% due to its favorable thermodynamic properties. Carbon dioxide is nontoxic and nonflammable, and when held above a critical temperature and pressure can act like a gas while having the density near that of a liquid.

The efficiency of sCO2 as a working fluid allows for STEP turbomachinery to be approximately one-tenth the size of conventional power plant components, providing the opportunity to shrink the environmental footprint and construction cost of any new facilities. For example, a desk-sized sCO2 turbine can power up to 10,000 homes. The technology is also compatible with concentrated solar power and industrial waste heat.

“The sCO2 power cycle is a breakthrough clean, compact, and high-efficiency power generation technology that can deliver significant environmental performance. We look forward to continued operation of the current test to demonstrate control and operability of this power cycle while validating system performance over long periods of time,” notes Bhima Sastri, Director of Energy Asset Transformation, DOE Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management.

The STEP Demo pilot plant is one of the largest demonstration facilities in the world for sCO2 technology to dramatically improve the efficiency, economics, operational flexibility, space requirements and environmental performance of this new technology. The facility’s turbine is currently being installed and will be tested later this year.

SwRI is an industry leader in the development of sCO2 power cycles. Staff members have conducted numerous related U.S. Department of Energy projects advancing the efficiency, reliability and commercial readiness of sCO2 power cycle turbomachinery, heat exchangers, cycles and systems. The team brings extensive experience with sCO2 technology and the key building blocks to make the STEP Demo project a success and a landmark demonstration.

About STEP Demo
The STEP Demo pilot facility will demonstrate a fully integrated electricity generating power plant using transformational sCO2-based power cycle technology that can offer dramatically improved size, performance, economics, and operational flexibility, with less environmental impact. OEMs, engineering companies, and power plant owner/operators from around the globe are invited to join this open project to gain a better understanding of how sCO2 technology can improve high-efficiency power generation. www.stepdemo.us

About GTI Energy
GTI Energy is a leading research and training organization. Our trusted team works to scale impactful solutions that shape energy transitions by leveraging gases, liquids, infrastructure, and efficiency. We embrace systems thinking, open learning, and collaboration to develop, scale, and deploy the technologies needed for low-carbon, low-cost energy systems.

GTI Energy leads the STEP Demo project as the prime contractor with the U.S. Department of Energy/National Energy Technology Laboratory.
www.gti.energy

About the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management
The Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) conducts research, development, demonstration, and deployment that focuses on technologies to reduce carbon emissions and other environmental impacts from fossil fuel production and use and from key industrial processes, particularly the hardest-to-decarbonize applications in the electricity and industrial sectors. Priority areas of technology work include carbon capture, carbon conversion, carbon dioxide removal, carbon dioxide transport and storage, hydrogen production with carbon management, methane emissions reduction, and critical minerals production. To learn more, visit the FECM website or sign up for FECM news announcements. www.energy.gov/fecm/office-fossil-energy-and-carbon-management

About the National Energy Technology Laboratory
The National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) is the U.S. Department of Energy’s only Government-Owned, Government-Operated Laboratory. NETL focuses on the discovery, development, and deployment of technology solutions to enhance the nation’s energy foundation and protect the environment for future generations. These advanced technologies enable fossil fuels to produce the clean, reliable, and affordable energy needed to support increased domestic manufacturing, improve infrastructure, enhance global competitiveness, revitalize the workforce, and free the U.S. from dependence on foreign oil. www.netl.doe.gov

About GE Research
GE Research is GE’s innovation powerhouse where research meets reality. It is a world-class team of 1,000+ scientific, engineering and marketing minds (600+ Ph. Ds), working at the intersection of physics and markets, physical and digital technologies, and across a broad set of industries to deliver world-changing innovations and capabilities for their customers. www.ge.com/research

For more information, visit the STEP Demo website.

Teacher supports, guidance for elementary social studies education vary widely across U.S., report finds

Reports and Proceedings

RAND CORPORATION

A new RAND Corporation report finds that the basic infrastructure to support elementary (grades K-5) social studies instruction – academic standards, accountability requirements, assessment programs – is inadequate in many states. Even where state-level infrastructure to guide teachers’ instruction is in place, its comprehensiveness and quality vary greatly.

Support and guidance at the district and school level to underpin social studies instruction are also lacking compared to other core academic subjects. For example, elementary principals report less teacher evaluation and professional learning focused on social studies instruction than on reading/language arts, math and – to a lesser extent – science instruction.

Researchers conducted a review of state policies for social studies and analyzed results from nationally representative surveys of elementary teachers and principals about social studies instruction during the 2021-2022 school year.

“Over the past few decades, school systems have invested less in students’ civic development and more in academic and career preparation as educational priorities,” said Melissa Kay Diliberti, lead author of the report and assistant policy researcher at RAND, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization. “Our findings suggest that inadequate state and local infrastructure focused on social studies instruction may have affected what elementary teachers did in their classrooms in 2021-2022.”

For example, 29% of elementary principals surveyed said their schools had not adopted any recommended or required social studies curriculum materials, meaning that their schools or districts had not chosen any curricula to provide to teachers to support such instruction.

In turn, only 16% of elementary teachers surveyed reported using a required textbook for most of their social studies instructional time. More commonly, teachers cobbled together their instructional materials or leaned on self-created materials.

The researchers suggest that, ideally, all elementary social studies policies and guidance – state standards, accountability policies, assessment programs, teacher evaluation, professional learning opportunities, and guidance around materials – would work together to build coherent and strong infrastructure to support teachers’ instruction. This effort requires additional investments at all levels of the U.S. education system, from state policy to investments by school and district leaders themselves.

Other authors of  “The Missing Infrastructure for Elementary (K-5) Social Studies Instruction: Findings from the 2022 American Instructional Resources Survey” are Ashley Woo and Julia H. Kaufman.

RAND Education and Labor, a division of RAND, is dedicated to improving education and expanding economic opportunities for all through research and analysis. Its researchers address key policy issues in U.S. and international education systems and labor markets, from pre-kindergarten to retirement planning.

Synchronizing to a beat predicts how well you get ‘in sync’ with others

Peer-Reviewed Publication

DARTMOUTH COLLEGE

How well you synchronize to a simple beat predicts how well you synchronize with another mind, according to a new Dartmouth study published in Scientific Reports.

Previous work has demonstrated that the pupil dilation patterns of speakers and listeners synchronize spontaneously, illustrating shared attention. The team set out to understand how the tendency to synchronize in this way may vary at the individual level and generalize across contexts, as it has been widely debated whether one form of synchrony bears any relationship to another.

“We were quite surprised to find that how well your pupils dilate and constrict to something as simple as a rhythmic beat would predict how well you attend in the same way as another person,” says lead author Sophie Wohltjen, who was a graduate student in psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth at the time of the study and is now a postdoctoral researcher at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “What this suggests is that there may be some sort of underlying mechanism that can unite a lot of the different ways that we talk about synchrony.”

The research was comprised of two studies. In the first study, individuals listened to a series of tones and were asked to indicate which one was softer than the others while their pupil responses were tracked. Each individual completed this “oddball detection task” during nine separate sessions that were held on a different day and time for each session. The researchers found stable, individually-specific variation in the amount each person entrained to the oddball rhythm. Some people’s pupils dilated strongly in time with the beat, others less so, and however strongly a person synchronized one day predicted how strongly they synchronized the next.

In the second study, 82 individuals completed the oddball task once and also listened to audio recordings of four emotional stories while their pupil responses were tracked. The storytellers’ pupil dilations were recorded earlier when they read the stories. The researchers calculated the pupillary synchrony between the storyteller and listener and then compared this synchrony to how strongly the listener synchronized to the rhythmic beat of the oddball task.  

The results demonstrate that the more someone entrained to the rhythmic beat of the task, the more likely they were to synchronize their pupils with those of the storyteller. As these individuals could not see the storyteller, pupillary synchrony could not be explained as simple visual mimicry. Instead, this synchrony was evidence that the storyteller and listener were attending to the story in the same way.  

“Identifying that these two forms of synchrony—simple, metronomic entrainment and complex shared attention—are linked is really interesting, as it opens up all sorts of larger questions about why this tendency to synchronize varies between people,” says senior author Thalia Wheatley, the Lincoln Filene Professor in Human Relations and director of the Consortium for Interacting Minds at Dartmouth. “Do musicians synchronize their attention more easily with others? Why are some people super-synchronizers while others are unable to synchronize altogether? Do strong synchronizers find it easier to click with others? These are all questions we plan to investigate further,” says Wheatley.

“This simple measure of being able to entrain to a beat could have clinical implications for autism and other disorders, which are not only about having difficulty with social interaction but are also about timing,” adds Wheatley.

The research on synchrony to a beat builds on the team’s earlier work, which finds that making and breaking eye contact is linked to fluctuations of pupillary synchrony between conversation partners and makes conversation more engaging.

Wohltjen and Wheatley are available for comment at: wohltjen@wisc.edu and thalia.p.wheatley@dartmouth.edu.

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JOURNAL

Scientific Reports

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Synchrony to a beat predicts synchrony with other minds

How high altitude changes your body’s metabolism

When mice are exposed to chronically low levels of oxygen, similar to those experienced at 4,500 meters of elevation, their metabolism changes

Peer-Reviewed Publication

GLADSTONE INSTITUTES

 

IMAGE: A TEAM OF SCIENTISTS IN ISHA JAIN’S LAB AT GLADSTONE INSTITUTES SHOWED HOW CHRONICALLY LOW OXYGEN LEVELS, SUCH AS THOSE EXPERIENCED AT 4,500 METERS OF ELEVATION, REWIRE HOW MICE BURN SUGARS AND FATS. view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO: MICHAEL SHORT/GLADSTONE INSTITUTES

SAN FRANCISCO, CA—March 7, 2023—Compared to those of us who live at sea level, the 2 million people worldwide who live above 4,500 meters (or 14,764 feet) of elevation—about the height of Mount Rainier, Mount Whitney, and many Colorado and Alaska peaks—have lower rates of metabolic diseases such as diabetes, coronary artery disease, hypercholesterolemia, and obesity.

Now, researchers at Gladstone Institutes have shed light on this phenomenon. They showed how chronically low oxygen levels, such as those experienced at high elevation, rewire how mice burn sugars and fats. The work, published in the journal Cell Metabolism, not only helps explain the metabolic differences of people who live at high altitude, but could also lead to new treatments for metabolic disease.

“When an organism is exposed to chronically low levels of oxygen, we found that different organs reshuffle their fuel sources and their energy-producing pathways in various ways,” says Gladstone Assistant Investigator Isha Jain, PhD, senior author of the new study. “We hope these findings will help us identify metabolic switches that might be beneficial for metabolism even outside of low-oxygen environments.”

Mimicking High Altitude Living

Around sea level, where a third of the world’s population lives, oxygen makes up about 21 percent of the air we breathe. But people who live above 4,500 meters, where oxygen makes up just 11 percent of the air, can adapt to the shortage of oxygen—known as hypoxia—and thrive.

Researchers studying the impact of hypoxia have typically carried out their research in isolated cells or within cancerous tumors, which often lack oxygen. Jain’s group wanted a more nuanced look at how long-term hypoxia impacts organs throughout the body.

“We wanted to profile the metabolic changes that take place as an organism adapts to hypoxia,” says Ayush Midha, a graduate student in Jain’s lab and first author of the new paper. “We thought this might provide some insight into how that adaptation protects against metabolic disease.”

Midha, Jain, and their colleagues at Gladstone and UC San Francisco (UCSF) housed adult mice in pressure chambers containing either 21 percent, 11 percent, or 8 percent oxygen—all levels at which both humans and mice can survive. Over 3 weeks, they observed the animals’ behavior, monitored their temperature, carbon dioxide levels and blood glucose, and used positron emission tomography (PET) scans to study how different organs were consuming nutrients.

Redistributing Fuel

In the first days of hypoxia, the mice living in 11 percent or 8 percent oxygen moved less, spending hours completely still. By the end of the third week, however, their movement patterns had returned to normal. Similarly, carbon dioxide levels in the blood—which decrease when mice or humans breathe faster to try to get more oxygen—initially decreased but returned to normal levels by the end of the 3 weeks.

The animals’ metabolism, however, seemed more permanently altered by the hypoxia. For animals housed within the hypoxic cages, blood glucose levels and body weight both dropped, and neither returned to pre-hypoxic levels. In general, these more lasting changes mirror what has been seen in humans who live at high altitude.

When the researchers analyzed PET scans of each organ, they also discovered lasting changes. To metabolize fatty acids (the building blocks of fats) and amino acids (the building blocks of proteins), the body needs high levels of oxygen, while less oxygen is required to metabolize the sugar glucose. In most organs, hypoxia led to an increase in glucose metabolism—an expected response to the shortage of oxygen. But the scientists found that in brown fat and skeletal muscle—two organs already known for their high levels of glucose metabolism—levels of glucose consumption instead went down.

“Prior to this study, the assumption in the field was that in hypoxic conditions, your whole body’s metabolism becomes more efficient in using oxygen, which means it burns more glucose and fewer fatty acids and amino acids,” says Jain, who is also an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry at UCSF. “We showed that while some organs are indeed consuming more glucose, others become glucose savers instead.”

In retrospect, Jain says the observation makes sense; the isolated cells previously studied don’t need to make trade-offs to save glucose, while an entire animal, to survive, does.

The lasting effects of long-term hypoxia seen in the mice— lower body weight and glucose levels—are both associated with a lower risk of diseases in humans, including cardiovascular disease. Understanding how hypoxia contributes to these changes could lead to new drugs that mimic these beneficial effects.

With that goal in mind, Jain’s group hopes to follow up on this work with studies that look even more closely at how individual cell types and levels of signaling molecules change in different ways with hypoxia. Such research could point toward ways to mimic the protective metabolic effects of hypoxia with drugs—or high-altitude trips.

“We already see athletes going to train at altitude to improve their athletic performance; maybe in the future, we’ll start recommending that people spend time at high altitude for other health reasons,” says Midha.

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About the Study

The paper “Organ-Specific Fuel Rewiring in Acute and Chronic Hypoxia Redistributes Glucose and Fatty Acid Metabolism” was published in the journal Cell Metabolism on March 7, 2023.

Other authors are Yuyin Zhou, Bruno Queliconi, Alex Barrios, Augustinus Haribowo, and Brandon Chew of Gladstone; and Cyril Fong, Joseph Blecha, Henry VanBrocklin, and Younghou Seo of UCSF.

The work was supported by the Medical Scientist Training Program of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (T32GM141323), the National Institutes of Health (DP5OD026398), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (HR0011- 474 19-2-0018), the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and the National Science Foundation (2034836).

About Gladstone Institutes

Gladstone Institutes is an independent, nonprofit life science research organization that uses visionary science and technology to overcome disease. Established in 1979, it is located in the epicenter of biomedical and technological innovation, in the Mission Bay neighborhood of San Francisco. Gladstone has created a research model that disrupts how science is done, funds big ideas, and attracts the brightest minds.

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JOURNAL

Cell Metabolism

DOI

10.1016/j.cmet.2023.02.007 

ARTICLE TITLE

Organ-Specific Fuel Rewiring in Acute and Chronic Hypoxia Redistributes Glucose and Fatty Acid Metabolism

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

7-Mar-2023

Genetic and socioeconomic factors interact to affect risk of type 2 diabetes and obesity

Study’s findings have implications for both precision medicine and public health

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL

BOSTON – New research led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), a founding member of Mass General Brigham (MGB), indicates that socioeconomic and genetic factors likely interact in an additive way to affect people’s risks of developing obesity and type 2 diabetes. The findings, which are published in Diabetes Care, suggest that interventions to improve socioeconomic deprivation may decrease metabolic diseases at the individual and community levels, especially among people with concomitant high genetic risk.

Genetic and socioeconomic factors—one intrinsic and unmodifiable and one extrinsic and potentially modifiable—have both been shown to increase the risk of metabolic diseases, but the relative contributions of the two and the degree to which they may interact to impact a person’s risk are poorly understood. To investigate, scientists examined the independent and additive effects of genetic and socioeconomic risk in 26,737 and 223,843 participants of European genetic ancestry from the Mass General Brigham Biobank and the UK Biobank, respectively, as well as in 3,468 and 7,459 participants of non-European ancestry in the respective biobanks. The team examined individuals’ genetic data at millions of points across the genome as well as information related to education, income, and employment from their area of residence. Because educational attainment had the strongest association with type 2 diabetes and obesity out of all area-level socioeconomic variables examined, this was used as the primary socioeconomic risk measure.

Results indicated that people in the highest quintile of both genetic and socioeconomic risk had a more than seven-fold higher prevalence of type 2 diabetes (22.2% vs. 3.1%) and a more than three-fold higher prevalence of obesity (69.0% vs. 20.9%) compared with those in the combined lowest risk quintiles.

There was a significant positive interaction between genetic and socioeconomic risk on an additive scale.  This suggests that the absolute increase in metabolic disease prevalence with unfavorable socioeconomic risk was much greater for those at higher genetic risk than for those at lower genetic risk. For example, adverse area-level socioeconomic risk was associated with increased type 2 diabetes prevalence across the spectrum of genetic risk, but the absolute increase in prevalence was greatest in those at highest genetic risk: +9.2% in the highest genetic risk quintile vs. +1.7% in the lowest genetic risk quintile. Overall, the additive effects of genetic and socioeconomic factors accounted for 13.2% and 16.7% of type 2 diabetes and obesity prevalence, respectively.

“We believe that this research calls for a whole-person approach to metabolic disease prevention and that public health interventions may be most impactful if targeted to those who also have elevated genetic risk,” says lead author Sara Cromer, MD, an Endocrinologist in the Department of Medicine at MGH and an Instructor at Harvard Medical School. “The next steps in this research include expanding models to include more risk factors (such as lifestyle factors and behaviors), improving models for individuals of non-European ancestry, exploring the predictive value of area-level socioeconomic measures in diverse populations, and examining the gene–socioeconomic status interplay in regards to other outcomes.”

Senior author Miriam Udler, MD, PhD, an endocrinologist the department of Medicine at MGH, an investigator in the MGH Center for Genomic Medicine, and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, adds that the study highlights not only the high prevalence of metabolic disease among individuals with both genetic and socioeconomic risk factors, but also that genetic risk for these diseases is not deterministic. “People at high genetic risk who live in low-risk socioeconomic regions have similar rates of type 2 diabetes and obesity as those with low genetic risk living in certain socioeconomic risk regions,” she says. “More research is needed to understand exactly why this is.”

Co-authors include Chirag M. Lakhani, Josep M. Mercader, Timothy D. Majarian, Philip Schroeder, Joanne B. Cole, Jose C. Florez, Chirag J. Patel, Alisa K. Manning, Sherri-Ann M. Burnett-Bowie, Jordi Merino, and Miriam S. Udler.


This study was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the American Diabetes Association.

 

About the Massachusetts General Hospital

Massachusetts General Hospital, founded in 1811, is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. The Mass General Research Institute conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the nation, with annual research operations of more than $1 billion and comprises more than 9,500 researchers working across more than 30 institutes, centers and departments. In July 2022, Mass General was named #8 in the U.S. News & World Report list of "America’s Best Hospitals." MGH is a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system.

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JOURNAL

Diabetes Care

DOI

10.2337/dc22-1954 

ARTICLE TITLE

Association and Interaction of Genetics and Area-Level Socioeconomic Factors on the Prevalence of Type 2 Diabetes and Obesity

Department of Energy and NASA join forces on innovative lunar experiment

LuSEE-Night will utilize deployable antennas and radio receivers to measure these sensitive radio waves from the Dark Ages for the first time

Business Announcement

DOE/US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are working together to develop a science instrument that will survive the harsh and unforgiving environment of the nighttime lunar surface on the far side of the Moon to attempt first-of-its-kind measurements of the so-called Dark Ages of the Universe.

The instrument is named the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment – Night (LuSEE-Night), a collaboration between DOE’s Brookhaven and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, UC Berkeley’s Space Science Laboratory, and NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. LuSEE-Night is a pathfinder to understand the Moon’s radio environment to potentially look at a previously unobserved era in our cosmic history.

The Dark Ages are a time in our early universe that occurred between approximately 380,000 and 400 million years after the origin of the universe, known as the Big Bang. The Dark Ages were well before the formation of the stars and galaxies that we see today. Radio wave signals from this period are impossible to measure from Earth due to our planet’s constant “radio pollution” across nearly the entire electromagnetic spectrum. However, our Moon lacks an interfering atmosphere and ionosphere, and the far side of the Moon is continually shielded from harmful radio emissions from the Earth, as well as from the Sun during the lunar night. The far side of the Moon offers a unique environment that allows for observations of sensitive radio astronomy signals that cannot be obtained anywhere else in the near-Earth space environment.

LuSEE-Night, which will be delivered to the far side of the Moon on a future Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) flight, will utilize deployable antennas and radio receivers to measure these sensitive radio waves from the Dark Ages for the first time. By physically being on the lunar surface and taking measurements at the right time, several external sources of radio interference will be removed, including radio noise from the Sun, Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn. DOE scientists are excited about doing science from the far side of the Moon because it offers a unique environment that is advantageous to not only radio astronomy, but also for possible future gravitational wave observatories and other optical and infrared instrumentation.

“LuSEE-Night is a fascinating experiment that will allow us to observe something we’ve never been able to before - the Dark Ages signal,” said Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, Director of the Office of Science at DOE. “With this collaboration, DOE and NASA are setting conditions for successful exploration of the Dark Ages cosmology in the decades to come.”

However, a significant challenge will be for the instrument to survive the harsh, cold, and dark environment of the lunar night on the far side of the Moon long enough to collect and return data to Earth. Throughout the day and night cycle on the Moon, temperatures swing between around 250°F (120°C) during the day and -280°F (-173°C) at night. This temperature range presents a significant challenge to not only taking and transmitting the data, but also in keeping the instrument from freezing and ending the mission prematurely.

“LuSEE-Night will operate during the cold temperatures of the 14-day lunar night, when no sunlight is available to generate power or heat,” said Joel Kearns, Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “In addition to the significant potential science return, demonstration of the LuSEE-Night lunar night survival technology is critical to performing long-term, high-priority science investigations from the lunar surface.”

If successful, LuSEE-Night could help inform larger future instruments to further measure these otherwise undetectable radio frequencies and help scientists better understand the earliest period of the Universe’s formation and evolution. 

"This measurement is very challenging—radio emission from the galaxy is very bright, and our Dark Ages signal is hiding behind it,” said Stuart D. Bale, NASA’s Principal Investigator for LuSEE-Night and a professor at the University of California-Berkeley.

Anže Slosar, the DOE Science Lead and Collaboration Spokesperson added, "Every time we have opened a new frequency window in cosmology, we have unlocked new discoveries about the history of the Universe and our place within it."

Sven Herrmann, the instrument construction Project Manager for DOE and a research scientist at Brookhaven Laboratory and the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) said, "While I have been working on space missions my entire life, I am very excited about being able to do this for the first time for the Department of Energy."

Brookhaven National Laboratory leads the construction of the instrument for DOE, the science collaboration, and is responsible for the development of the radio receiver, crucial analog and digital electronics, as well as power systems. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is a collaborating institution and is responsible for the development of actuated antenna subsystem hardware and pre-flight antenna characterization.

Brookhaven National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit www.energy.gov/science.

Bees follow linear landmarks to find their way home, just like the first pilots

Study suggests that honeybees search for linear landscape elements that match mental map of home area

Peer-Reviewed Publication

 

IMAGE: A HARMONIC RADAR TRANSPONDER ATTACHED TO THE THORAX OF A FORAGER HONEYBEE. view more 

CREDIT: E BULLINGER, U GREGGERS, R MENZEL

In the earliest days of human flight, before the invention of the first radio beacons and ground-based electronic systems, and modern GPS, pilots commonly navigated by following roads and railways – striking linear landscape elements at ground level that guide towards a destination of interest.

Enter the honeybee. A century of research has shown that honeybees are navigators par excellence. They can navigate by their sense of smell, the sun, the sky’s pattern of polarized light, vertical landmarks that stand out from the panorama, and possibly the Earth’s magnetic field. They are also clever learners, able to recognize associations between disparate memories in order to generalize rules.

Now, scientists have shown that honeybees tend to search for their way home by orienting themselves in relation to the dominant linear landscape elements, just like the first pilots. The results are shown in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

Dr Randolf Menzel, an emeritus professor at the Department of Neurobiology of the Free University of Berlin, and the study’s lead author, explained: “Here we show that honeybees use a ‘navigation memory’, a kind of mental map of the area that they know, to guide their search flights when they look for their hive starting in a new, unexplored area. Linear landscape elements, such as water channels, roads, and field edges, appear to be important components of this navigation memory.”

Tiny transponder

In late summer of 2010 and 2011 near the village of Klein Lüben in Brandenburg, Menzel and colleagues caught 50 experienced forager honeybees and glued a 10.5-mg transponder on their back. They then released them in a new test area, too distant to be familiar to the bees. In the the test area was a radar, which could detect the transponders at a distance of up to 900 meters. The most notable landmark in the test area was a pair of parallel irrigation channels, running southwest to northeast.

When honeybees find themselves in unfamiliar territory, they fly in exploratory loops in different directions and over different distances, centered on the release spot. With the radar, the researchers tracked the exact exploratory flight pattern of each bee for between 20 minutes and three hours. The bees flew at up to nine meters above the ground during the experiment.

The researchers had collected foragers from five hives: the home area around hives A and B resembled the test area in terms of the number, width, length, and angle of linear landscape elements, especially irrigation channels. The home range around hives D and E was highly dissimilar in this regard, while the home area around hive C was intermediate in similarity to the test area. Other landmarks by which honeybees are known to find their way, such as structured horizons or vertical elements that stand out, were absent in the test area.

Non-random search pattern

Menzel et al. first simulated two sets of random flight patterns, centered on the release spot, and generated with different algorithms. Since the observed flight patterns were highly different from these, the researchers concluded that the honeybees didn’t simply conduct random search flights.

The researchers then used advanced statistics to analyze the orientation of flights and their frequency of flying over of each 100 x 100 meter block within the test area. They showed that the honeybees spent a disproportionate amount of time flying alongside the irrigation channels. Analyses showed that these continued to guide the exploratory flights even when the bees were more than 30 meters away, the maximum distance from which honeybees are able to see such landscape elements. This implies that the bees kept them in their memory for prolonged periods.

“Our data show that similarities and differences in the layout of the linear landscape elements between their home area and the new area are used by the bees to explore where their hive might be,” said Menzel.

Navigational memory

Importantly, machine learning algorithms showed that the irrigation channels in the test area were most informative for predicting the exploratory flights of bees from hives A and B, less so for bees from hive C, and least for bees from hives D and E. This suggests that the bees retained a navigational memory of their home area, based on linear landscape elements, and tried to generalize what they saw in the test area to his memory to find their way home.

“Flying animals identify such extended ground structures in a map-like aerial view making them highly attractive as guiding structures. It is thus not surprising that both bats and birds use linear landmarks for navigation. Based on the data reported here we conclude that elongated ground structures are also salient components of the honeybees’ navigation memory,” concluded the authors.

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JOURNAL

Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience

DOI

10.3389/fnbeh.2023.1070957 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Generalization of navigation memory in honeybees

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

6-Mar-2023

Bumblebees learn new “trends” in their behavior by watching and learning

Peer-Reviewed Publication

QUEEN MARY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON

A new study has shown that bumblebees pick up new “trends” in their behaviour by watching and learning from other bees, and that one form of a behaviour can spread rapidly through a colony even when a different version gets discovered.

The research, led by Queen Mary University of London and published in PLOS Biology, provides strong evidence that social learning drives the spread of bumblebee behaviour – in this case, precisely how they forage for food.

A variety of experiments were set up to establish this. The researchers designed a two-option puzzle box that could be opened either by pushing a red tab clockwise or a blue tab counter-clockwise to reveal a 50 per cent sucrose solution reward.

‘Demonstrator’ bees were trained to use either the red or blue tabs, with ‘observer’ bees watching. When it was the observers’ turn to tackle the puzzle, they overwhelmingly and repeatedly chose to use the same method that they had seen, even after discovering the alternative option. This preference for the taught option was maintained by whole colonies of bees, with a mean of 98.6% of box openings made using the taught method.

The importance of social learning to the acquisition of puzzle box solutions was also illustrated through the control group, which lacked a demonstrator. In this group, some bees managed to open the puzzle boxes, but did so far fewer times than those who benefitted from seeing another bee do it first. The median number of boxes opened in a day by the observer bees with a demonstrator was 28 boxes a day, whereas it was only 1 for the control colony.

In an additional experiment, the researchers put both ‘blue’ and ‘red’ demonstrators into the same populations of bees. In the first population, 97.3% of the 263 incidences of box-opening by observers by day 12 used the red method. In the second population, observers preferred the blue method over the red on all days except one. In both cases, this demonstrated how a behavioural trend might emerge in a population in the first place – for the most part, due to experienced bees retiring from foraging and new learners arising, rather than any bees changing their preferred behaviour.

Similar results from similar experiments have been used in species such as primates and birds to suggest that they, like humans, are capable of culture. If bumblebees are capable of this, too, this could potentially explain the evolutionary origin of many of the complex behaviours seen among social insects. It might be possible that what now appears instinctive could have been socially learnt, at least originally.

Dr Alice Bridges, the lead author from Queen Mary University of London, said: “Bumblebees – and, indeed, invertebrates in general - aren’t known to show culture-like phenomena in the wild. However, in our experiments, we saw the spread and maintenance of a behavioural “trend” in groups of bumblebees – similar to what has been seen in primates and birds. The behavioural repertoires of social insects like these bumblebees are some of the most intricate on the planet, yet most of this is still thought to be instinctive. Our research suggests that social learning may have had a greater influence on the evolution of this behaviour than previously imagined.”

Professor Lars Chittka, Professor of Sensory and Behavioural Ecology at Queen Mary University of London and author of the book ‘The Mind of a Bee’, said: “The fact that bees can watch and learn, and then make a habit of that behaviour, adds to the ever-growing body of evidence that they are far smarter creatures than a lot of people give them credit for.

“We tend to overlook the “alien civilisations” formed by bees, ants and wasps on our planet – because they are small-bodied and their societies and architectural constructions seem governed by instinct at first glance. Our research shows, however, that new innovations can spread like social media memes through insect colonies, indicating that they can respond to wholly new environmental challenges much faster than by evolutionary changes, which would take many generations to manifest.”

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JOURNAL

PLoS Biology

Puzzle-solving behavior spreads through bumblebee colonies

Bees that learned from others were more adept and preferred the learned solution over alternatives

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

 

IMAGE: BUMBLEBEES CAN LEARN BY WATCHING A TRAINED BEE DEMONSTRATING ONE OF TWO WAYS TO SOLVE PUZZLE FOR A SUGARY REWARD, THEN COPY THE BEE TO SOLVE THE PUZZLE IN THE SAME WAY view more 

CREDIT: DIEGO PEREZ-LOPEZ, PLOS (CC-BY 4.0, HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/4.0/)

Bumblebees learn to solve a puzzle by watching more experienced bees, and this behavioral preference then spreads through the colony, according to a study publishing March 7th in the open access journal PLOS Biology by Alice Dorothy Bridges and colleagues at Queen Mary University of London, UK.

Social animals like primates are skilled at learning by watching others, and previous work has shown that individual bees can learn tasks in this way, but it remained unclear whether these new behaviors would then spread through the colony. To investigate, researchers tested six colonies of bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) using a puzzle box that could be opened by rotating a lid to access a sugar solution. The bees could rotate the lid either clockwise or anticlockwise by pushing one of two different colored tabs.

The researchers trained bees to use one of these two solutions and then released these ‘demonstrator’ bees into a foraging arena alongside untrained bees and filmed them over a period of six to twelve days. Foraging bees with a demonstrator opened more puzzle boxes than control bees, and used the same puzzle solution that the demonstrator had been taught 98% of the time, suggesting that they learned the behavior socially rather than stumbling upon a solution themselves. In experiments where multiple demonstrators were each taught a different solution to the puzzle, untrained bees initially learned to use both methods, but over time they randomly developed a preference for one solution or the other, which then came to dominate in that colony.

The study is the first to document the spread of different behavioral approaches to solving the same problem in bees. The results provide strong evidence that social learning is important for the transmission of new behaviors through bumblebee colonies, as has previously been shown in primates and birds, the authors say.

Bridges adds, “These results in bumblebees, which are tiny-brained invertebrates, echo those previously found using similar experiments in primates and birds - which were used to demonstrate the capacity of those species for culture.”

Bees feeding from a puzzle box opened by pushing the blue tab

CREDIT

Alice Bridges (CC-BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Puzzle-solving behavior spread [VIDEO] |

In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Biology: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002019  
 

Author Interview: https://plos.io/3IFJz7c

Citation: Bridges AD, MaBouDi H, Procenko O, Lockwood C, Mohammed Y, Kowalewska A, et al. (2023) Bumblebees acquire alternative puzzle-box solutions via social learning. PLoS Biol 21(3): e3002019. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002019

Author Countries: United Kingdom, China

Funding: This study was funded by an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council programme grant, “Brains on Board” (ref. no. EP/P006094/1 to L.C.) and a Queen Mary University of London PhD studentship (to A.B.). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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JOURNAL

PLoS Biology

DOI

10.1371/journal.pbio.3002019 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

COI STATEMENT

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.