The GovLab at NYU Tandon releases report on the impact of online communities

https://virtual-communities.thegovlab.org

NYU TANDON SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING

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BROOKLYN, New York, Wednesday, February 24, 2021 -The Governance Lab (The GovLab) at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering released a report, "The Power of Virtual Communities," which examines the role online groups play in creating opportunities for people to build new kinds of meaningful communities they often could not form in real space.

This first-of-its-kind research was built on interviews with 50 Facebook community leaders in 17 countries, 26 global experts from academia and industry, unique access to Facebook's underlying research and an original global survey conducted by YouGov of 15,000 people in 15 countries who are currently members of online and in-person communities, which found that in 11 of those countries the majority of people said that the most meaningful communities to which they belong are primarily online.

"Around the world, people who are otherwise voiceless in physical space are becoming powerful leaders of groups that confer a true sense of meaning and belonging for their members," said Beth Simone Noveck, director of The GovLab. "This brief report, which tells the stories of several of those leaders and how they govern global communities is, we hope, the beginning of greater and much needed study of online groups and their impact on social and political life."

Many of these Facebook groups cut across traditional social groupings and bring together people around a shared trait or interest:

Female IN (FIN), created as a safe space for women in the Nigerian diaspora to discuss and seek support for problems associated with such challenges as relationship struggles, health issues, abuse, grief and loss. Female IN grew by word-of-mouth into a 1.8 million-person community with members in more than 100 countries.

Surviving Hijab encourages its 920,000 female members to take up or continue wearing the Muslim head covering in the face of political and social criticism.

Blind PenPals enables its 7,000 blind and visually impaired members to share stories and advice.

Canterbury Residents Group acts as a public square in the British city of Canterbury and has 38,000 members, about the same size as the city's population.

Subtle Asian Traits, which began as a modest initiative among nine young Australians of Chinese background to share funny memes about their Asian heritage, has expanded to a group of 1.82 million people who discuss and share the experience of growing up Asian in mostly majority-White societies.

The GovLab's report findings note that:

• Membership in online communities confers a strong sense of community, the lack of physical proximity notwithstanding.
• Online groups are a still fluid form of human organization that in many cases attract members and leaders who are marginalized in the physical societies they inhabit, and who use the platform to build new kinds of communities that would be difficult to form otherwise.
• Many of these groups have counter-cultural norms and are what political scientists might call "cross-cleavage" communities. These groups cut across traditional social groupings, and bring together people normally divided by geography around a shared trait or interest.
• The flexible affordances of online platforms have enabled new kinds of leaders to emerge in these groups with unique skills in moderating often divisive dialogues, sometimes among millions of members.
• Most groups are run as a labor of love; many leaders are neither trained nor paid and the rules that govern their internal operations are often uncodified and the hosting platform - in this case Facebook - holds significant power over their operations and future.
• These groups, some of which have huge memberships, remain emergent and largely unrecognized: they are outside traditional power structures, institutions and forms of governance.
• More research is needed to understand whether and how these groups will operate as genuine communities over the long term, especially given the tensions that derive from conducting public life on a private platform such as Facebook, and how such groups and their leaders can be supported to ensure they provide maximum voice, participation and benefit to their members

Further, results from the YouGov survey and the interviews with group leaders indicated that the three most essential traits and behaviors for leaders to exhibit were welcoming differences of opinions, being visible and communicating well, and acting ethically at all times.

This report, published in six languages, further shines a light on the role leaders have and why it is important to further support them in running their community.

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You can download the full report and the executive summary here. You can also view a panel discussion about the report's implications and the future of digital community building here.

About The Governance Lab at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering

The Governance Lab's mission is to improve people's lives by changing the way we govern. Our goal at The GovLab is to strengthen the ability of institutions -- including but not limited to governments -- and people to work more openly, collaboratively, effectively, and legitimately to make better decisions and solve public problems. We believe that increased availability and use of data, new ways to leverage the capacity, intelligence, and expertise of people in the problem-solving process, combined with new advances in technology and science, can transform governance. For more information, visit thegovlab.org.

About the New York University Tandon School of Engineering

The NYU Tandon School of Engineering dates to 1854, the founding date for both the New York University School of Civil Engineering and Architecture and the Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute. A January 2014 merger created a comprehensive school of education and research in engineering and applied sciences as part of a global university, with close connections to engineering programs at NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai. NYU Tandon is rooted in a vibrant tradition of entrepreneurship, intellectual curiosity, and innovative solutions to humanity's most pressing global challenges. Research at Tandon focuses on vital intersections between communications/IT, cybersecurity, and data science/AI/robotics systems and tools and critical areas of society that they influence, including emerging media, health, sustainability, and urban living. We believe diversity is integral to excellence, and are creating a vibrant, inclusive, and equitable environment for all of our students, faculty and staff. For more information, visit engineering.nyu.edu.

Tool that more efficiently analyzes ocean color data will become part of NASA program

Stevens uses machine learning-driven techniques to develop a long-awaited tool that better reveals the health of Earth's oceans and the impacts of climate change

STEVENS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

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IMAGE: THE GOAL OF OC-SMART IS TO IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF GLOBAL OCEAN COLOR PRODUCTS RETRIEVED FROM SATELLITE SENSORS, ESPECIALLY UNDER COMPLEX ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS. THE TOP IMAGE SHOWS OC-SMART'S PERFORMANCE IN... view more 

CREDIT: STEVENS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology have developed a new machine learning-powered platform, known as OC-SMART, that can process ocean color in satellite images 10 times faster than the world's leading platform. The work, which will be adopted by NASA, is one of the first machine learning-based platforms in ocean color analysis that can process both coastal and open ocean regions globally to reveal data on sea health and the impact of climate change.

The work, led by Knut Stamnes, a physics professor at Stevens, and spearheaded by Yongzhen Fan Ph.D. '16, a visiting physics scholar in Stamnes' lab, solves a 30-year-old problem in retrieving data from both coastal regions and open ocean areas. For decades, NASA's SeaDAS platform exceled at analyzing ocean color from open ocean with clean air, but it frequently recovered inaccurate results from coastal areas and inland waters such as the Great Lakes, where the complex interplay among the atmosphere, sea, light, reflections, and air particulates made analysis difficult.

"It is vital to study coastal areas and inland waters," said Stamnes, an expert on radiative transfer whose work appears in the December 2020 issue of Remote Sensing of Environment. "Even though these areas make up a small fraction of the world in terms of mass, it's where we live and where all the biological activity happens."

The OC-SMART platform, or Ocean Color-Simultaneous Marine and Aerosol Retrieval Tool, adds to SeaDAS' capabilities by taking data from satellite imagery and processing them through special algorithms, which are built on powerful machine learning techniques and extensive simulations of radiative transfer. In this project, radiative transfer is defined as the complex flow of electromagnetic energy between the ocean and the atmosphere. This process impacts how ocean color is perceived and analyzed by SeaDAS, the world's leading platform for processing ocean color from satellite images for decades.

The OC-SMART software will now be incorporated into NASA's SeaDAS platform. Final products of the software include useful data on chlorophyll concentrations and the presence of phytoplankton and pollution, all helpful indicators of the ocean's state. Notably, Stamnes said, OC-SMART will be adapted to the upcoming NASA PACE mission scheduled to launch in 2023. Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem, or PACE, is a NASA Earth-observing satellite mission that will continue and advance observations of global ocean color, biogeochemistry, and ecology, as well as the carbon cycle, aerosols and clouds.

"OC-SMART is a general, all-purpose, easy to use platform," said Wei Li, a physicist at Stevens who worked on the project and has been contacted by several researchers in other countries since the software became publicly available.

The European Space Agency has a platform similar to OC-SMART, but it focuses mainly on European coastal areas and not worldwide. A tool that could process coastal as well as open ocean regions globally was needed, said Nan Chen, a physicist at Stevens who was also involved in the project.

"For years, scientists were having difficulty processing ocean color in coastal regions and places that experience heavy pollution or other air particles such as sandstorms," Fan, the lead author, added. "That's why we developed OC-SMART in order to solve these problems."

The OC-SMART comes at a time when there is growing interest in analyzing ocean color in coastal areas, said Stamnes. OC-SMART is also one of the first tools in ocean color analysis to use machine learning, which has only begun to make inroads into oceanography.

"There are satellites now in orbit that are giving us more information on what's going on around the coasts and in places like the big lakes," said Stamnes. "So, this opens new areas of research. And with machine learning, it's a whole new game."

Study identifies strengths and challenges of responding to dual disasters

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES CENTER

Research News

 

New Orleans, LA -- A new study of how the 2020 major hurricanes and the COVID-19 pandemic affected each other as well as disaster response found that although prior experience enabled community-based organizations to respond to the pandemic, the pandemic is also creating new challenges to preparing for and responding to natural disasters. The research is published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, available here.

"Two major crises hit Louisiana and coastal communities in the Southeastern United States in 2020 - a significant increase in the frequency and severity of hurricanes, and the COVID-19 pandemic," says Benjamin Springgate, MD, MPH, Chief of Community & Population Medicine at LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 26 representatives of community-based programs in southern Louisiana. The participants ranged in age from 28 to 70. The majority (61.5%) were non-Hispanic white; 30.8% were Black; one participant (3.8%) was Latinx and one participant (3.8%) was Vietnamese. Three-fourths of the participants lived in Orleans Parish, and most represented local-level organizations. Participants represented 24 community-based agencies and organizations that provide a wide variety of services, including environmental and social justice issues impacting underserved communities, community health promotion, health and mental health services, disaster preparedness and recovery, funding of community initiatives, community development, faith-based services, affordable housing, child welfare advocacy and support, and criminal justice reform.

"Local leaders noted that due to the pandemic, it is now harder to plan for evacuations in the event of a hurricane," adds Dr. Springgate. "Organizations find it is also more difficult to provide in-person client services and challenging to plan for providing food and other resources to residents who may shelter in place during a storm."

The analysis also identified several strengths based on disaster preparedness experience and capabilities.

"Local organizations identified several strengths based on their disaster preparedness experience - particularly that based on prior experience with hurricanes, they already had a framework for how to respond and adapt to the novel challenges presented by COVID," Dr. Springgate notes.

The analysis shows that the increase in demand for disaster-related services has been accompanied by a decrease in the availability of services due to a decline in available financial resources as well as the constraints on services delivery imposed by protocols designed to prevent the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.

The authors conclude that despite the anticipated challenges to delivering services in response to a natural disaster, the networks of partnerships and prior experiences with disaster preparedness and response, along with certain features of the community that have fostered resilience to adverse events, represent key assets in coping with the pandemic and with the current hurricane season. Though limited to a particular setting with extensive experience with climate-related disasters and preparedness and response, the lessons for interaction with a pandemic context may have important implications for approaches in other areas to consider enhancing preparedness and response resources, training and partnerships.

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Other LSU Health New Orleans authors include Dr. Ashley Wennerstrom, Olivia Sugarman, Carter Pesson, Jessica E. Seay, and Caroline N. Stallard. Other authors were Lawrence A. Palinkas from the University of Southern California, Jill Hancock from Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Diana Meyers from St. Anna's Episcopal Church, Arthur Johnson from Lower Ninth Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development, Mara Polk from National Alliance on Metal Illness-New Orleans, and Kenneth B. Wells from the University of California, Los Angeles.

This research was supported by a grant from the National Academy of Sciences' Gulf Research Program (NCT03977844, B. Springgate, PI).

LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans educates Louisiana's health care professionals. The state's flagship health sciences university, LSU Health New Orleans includes a School of Medicine with branch campuses in Baton Rouge and Lafayette, the state's only School of Dentistry, Louisiana's only public School of Public Health, and Schools of Allied Health Professions, Nursing, and Graduate Studies. LSU Health New Orleans faculty take care of patients in public and private hospitals and clinics throughout the region. In the vanguard of biosciences research in a number of areas in a worldwide arena, the LSU Health New Orleans research enterprise generates jobs and enormous economic impact. LSU Health New Orleans faculty have made lifesaving discoveries and continue to work to prevent, advance treatment, or cure disease. To learn more, visit http://www.lsuhsc.edu, http://www.twitter.com/LSUHealthNO, or http://www.facebook.com/LSUHSC.

SEE https://selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/naomi-klein-the-shock-doctrine.pdf

 

Record-high Arctic freshwater will flow to Labrador Sea, affecting local and global oceans

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

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IMAGE: A SIMULATED RED DYE TRACER RELEASED FROM THE BEAUFORT GYRE IN THE ARTIC OCEAN (CENTER TOP) SHOWS FRESHWATER TRANSPORT THROUGH THE CANADIAN ARCTIC ARCHIPELAGO, ALONG BAFFIN ISLAND TO THE WESTERN... view more 

CREDIT: FRANCESCA SAMSEL AND GREG ABRAM

Freshwater is accumulating in the Arctic Ocean. The Beaufort Sea, which is the largest Arctic Ocean freshwater reservoir, has increased its freshwater content by 40% over the past two decades. How and where this water will flow into the Atlantic Ocean is important for local and global ocean conditions.

A study from the University of Washington, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows that this freshwater travels through the Canadian Archipelago to reach the Labrador Sea, rather than through the wider marine passageways that connect to seas in Northern Europe. The open-access study was published Feb. 23 in Nature Communications.

"The Canadian Archipelago is a major conduit between the Arctic and the North Atlantic," said lead author Jiaxu Zhang, a UW postdoctoral researcher at the Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean and Ecosystem Studies. "In the future, if the winds get weaker and the freshwater gets released, there is a potential for this high amount of water to have a big influence in the Labrador Sea region."

The finding has implications for the Labrador Sea marine environment, since Arctic water tends to be fresher but also rich in nutrients. This pathway also affects larger oceanic currents, namely a conveyor-belt circulation in the Atlantic Ocean in which colder, heavier water sinks in the North Atlantic and comes back along the surface as the Gulf Stream. Fresher, lighter water entering the Labrador Sea could slow that overturning circulation.

CAPTION

This map shows the study region of the Beaufort Gyre and nearby waters, with colors showing the average surface salinity for 1983-2008. Labels show the Labrador Sea's exit region, Nares Strait, Lancaster Sound, Davis Strait and Fram Strait.

CREDIT

Zhang et al./Nature Communications

"We know that the Arctic Ocean has one of the biggest climate change signals," said co-author Wei Cheng at the UW-based Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean and Atmosphere Studies. "Right now this freshwater is still trapped in the Arctic. But once it gets out, it can have a very large impact."

Fresher water reaches the Arctic Ocean through rain, snow, rivers, inflows from the relatively fresher Pacific Ocean, as well as the recent melting of Arctic Ocean sea ice. Fresher, lighter water floats at the top, and clockwise winds in the Beaufort Sea push that lighter water together to create a dome.

When those winds relax, the dome will flatten and the freshwater gets released into the North Atlantic.

"People have already spent a lot of time studying why the Beaufort Sea freshwater has gotten so high in the past few decades," said Zhang, who began the work at Los Alamos National Laboratory. "But they rarely care where the freshwater goes, and we think that's a much more important problem."

Using a technique Zhang developed to track ocean salinity, the researchers simulated the ocean circulation and followed the Beaufort Sea freshwater's spread in a past event that occurred from 1983 to 1995.

Their experiment showed that most of the freshwater reached the Labrador Sea through the Canadian Archipelago, a complex set of narrow passages between Canada and Greenland. This region is poorly studied and was thought to be less important for freshwater flow than the much wider Fram Strait, which connects to the Northern European seas.

In the model, the 1983-1995 freshwater release traveled mostly along the North American route and significantly reduced the salinities in the Labrador Sea -- a freshening of 0.2 parts per thousand on its shallower western edge, off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, and of 0.4 parts per thousand inside the Labrador Current.

The volume of freshwater now in the Beaufort Sea is about twice the size of the case studied, at more than 23,300 cubic kilometers, or more than 5,500 cubic miles. This volume of freshwater released into the North Atlantic could have significant effects. The exact impact is unknown. The study focused on past events, and current research is looking at where today's freshwater buildup might end up and what changes it could trigger.

"A freshwater release of this size into the subpolar North Atlantic could impact a critical circulation pattern, called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which has a significant influence on Northern Hemisphere climate," said co-author Wilbert Weijer at Los Alamos National Lab.

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This research was funded by the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and NOAA. Other authors are Mike Steele at the UW Applied Physics Laboratory and Tarun Verma and Milena Veneziani at Los Alamos National Lab.

For more information, contact Zhang at jiaxuzh@uw.edu

CAPTION

The Beaufort Gyre is a clockwise wind pattern in the western Arctic Ocean that causes freshwater to accumulate at the ocean's surface. When those winds relax, the freshwater drains not through Fram Strait, but through the narrow channels of the Canadian Archipelago to reach the Labrador Sea, off the coast of Canada's Newfoundland and Labrador.

CREDIT

University of Washington

Revive the map: 4D building reconstruction with machine learning

SKOLKOVO INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY (SKOLTECH)

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IMAGE: REVIVE THE MAP view more 

CREDIT: FARELLA E.M, ET AL./ MDPI APPLIED SCIENCES

A research team from Skoltech and FBK (Italy) presented a methodology to derive 4D building models using historical maps and machine learning. The implemented method relies on the geometric, neighbourhood, and categorical attributes to predict building heights. The method is useful for understanding urban phenomena and changes contributing to defining our cities' actual shapes. The results were published in the MDPI Applied Sciences journal.

Historical maps are the most powerful source used to analyze changes in urban development. Nevertheless, maps represent the 3D world in the 2D space, which describes the main features of the urban environment but fails to incorporate other spatial information, such as building heights. In 3D/4D city modeling applications based on historical data, the lack of building heights is a major obstacle for accurate space representation, analysis, visualization, or simulations.

Scientists from Skoltech and 3DOM research unit of FBK Trento explored machine learning solutions for inferring building heights from historical maps.

Their method tested on four historical maps of Trento (years 1851, 1887, 1908, and 1936) and Bologna (years 1884 and 1945), reflecting the biggest changes in the urban structures over the last centuries, helped reconstruct multi-temporal (4D) versions of these cities.

"The implemented learning and predictive procedures tested on historical data have proven to be effective and promising for many other applications. Based on a few attributes for the prediction, it will soon be expanded to diverse real-life contexts with missing elevation data. The resulting models will be a great help in bridging the geospatial knowledge gap in past or remote situations," Emre Ozdemir, a Skoltech and FBK Trento PhD student, explains.

CAPTION

Revive the map

CREDIT

Farella E.M, et al./ MDPI Applied Sciences

Ancient skeletal hand could reveal evolutionary secrets

A 4.4 million-year-old skeleton could show how early humans moved and began to walk upright, according to new research led by a Texas A&M anthropology professor

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY

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Evolutionary expert Charles Darwin and others recognized a close evolutionary relationship between humans, chimps and gorillas based on their shared anatomies, raising some big questions: how are humans related to other primates, and exactly how did early humans move around? Research by a Texas A&M University professor may provide some answers.

Thomas Cody Prang, assistant professor of anthropology, and colleagues examined the skeletal remains of Ardipithecus ramidus ("Ardi"), dated to 4.4 million years old and found in Ethiopia. One of Ardi's hands was exceptionally well-preserved.

The researchers compared the shape of Ardi's hand to hundreds of other hand specimens representing recent humans, apes and monkeys (measured from bones in museum collections around the world) to make comparisons about the kind of locomotor behavior used by the earliest hominins (fossil human relatives).

The results provide clues about how early humans began to walk upright and make similar movements that all humans perform today.

This discovery is described in a study published in the current issue of Science Advances.

"Bone shape reflects adaptation to particular habits or lifestyles - for example the movement of primates - and by drawing connections between bone shape and behavior among living forms, we can make inferences about the behavior of extinct species, such as Ardi, that we can't directly observe, Prang said.

"Additionally, we found evidence for a big evolutionary 'jump' between the kind of hand represented by Ardi and all later hominin hands, including that of Lucy's species (a famous 3.2 million-year-old well-preserved skeleton found in the same area in the 1970s). This 'evolutionary jump' happens at a critical time when hominins are evolving adaptations to a more human-like form of upright walking, and the earliest evidence for hominin stone-tool manufacture and stone-tool use, such as cut-marks on animal fossils, are discovered."

Prang said the fact that Ardi represents an earlier phase of human evolutionary history is important because it potentially shines light on the kind of ancestor from which humans and chimpanzees evolved.

"Our study supports a classic idea first proposed by Charles Darwin in 1871, when he had no fossils or understanding of genetics, that the use of the hands and upper limbs for manipulation appeared in early human relatives in connection with upright walking," he said. "The evolution of human hands and feet probably happened in a correlated fashion."

Since Ardi is such an ancient species, it might retain skeletal features that were present in the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees. If this is true, it could help researchers place the origin of the human lineage - in addition to upright walking - into a clearer light.

"It potentially brings us one step closer to an explanation for how and why humans evolved our form of upright walking," Prang said.

He added that the big change in hand anatomy between Ardi and all later hominins occurs at a time, roughly between 4.4 and 3.3 million years ago, coinciding with the earliest evidence of the loss of a grasping big toe in human evolution. This also coincides with the earliest known stone tools and stone cut-marked animal fossils.

He said it appears to mark a major change in the lifestyle and behavior of human relatives within this timeframe.

"We propose that it involves the evolution of more advanced upright walking, which enabled human hands to be modified by the evolutionary process for enhanced manual manipulation, possibly involving stone tools," Prang said

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This research was funded by the Wenner Gren Foundatio

Paleontologists discover new insect group after solving 150-year-old mystery

SFU-led research team uncovers how fossil dragonfly relatives have been misclassified due to their striking similarity

SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY

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IMAGE: WING OF THE NEW SPECIES OKANAGRION HOBANI, FROM THE MCABEE FOSSIL SITE IN BRITISH COLUMBIA, A DAMSELFLY-LIKE INSECT OF THE NEW SUBORDER CEPHALOZYGOPTERA. view more 

CREDIT: COPYRIGHT ZOOTAXA, USED BY PERMISSION.

For more than 150 years, scientists have been incorrectly classifying a group of fossil insects as damselflies, the familiar cousins of dragonflies that flit around wetlands eating mosquitoes. While they are strikingly similar, these fossils have oddly shaped heads, which researchers have always attributed to distortion resulting from the fossilization process.

Now, however, a team of researchers led by Simon Fraser University (SFU) paleontologist Bruce Archibald has discovered they aren't damselflies at all, but represent a major new insect group closely related to them.

The findings, published today in Zootaxa, show that the distinctive shape of the insect's non-protruding, rounded eyes, set close to the head, are the defining features of a suborder related to damselflies and dragonflies that the researchers have named Cephalozygoptera.

"When we began finding these fossils in British Columbia and Washington State, we also thought at first they must be damselflies," says Archibald.

But on closer inspection, the team noticed they resembled a fossil that German paleontologist Hermann Hagen wrote about in 1858. Hagen set the precedent of linking the fossil to the damselfly suborder despite its different head shape, which didn't fit with damselflies at all.

Damselflies have short and wide heads with eyes distinctively protruding far to each side. Hagen's fossil, however, had an oddly rounded head and eyes. But he assumed this difference was false, caused by distortion during fossilization.

"Paleontologists since Hagen had written that these were damselflies with distorted heads," Archibald says. "A few hesitated, but still assigned them to the damselfly suborder."

The SFU-led team, including Robert Cannings of the Royal British Columbia Museum, Robert Erickson and Seth Bybee of Brigham Young University and SFU's Rolf Mathewes, sifted through 162 years of scientific papers and discovered that many similar specimens have been found since Hagen's time.

They experienced a eureka moment when they realized the odd heads of their new fossils were, in fact, their true shape.

The researchers used the fossil's defining head shape to name the new suborder Cephalozygoptera, meaning "head damselfly".

The oldest known species of Cephalozygoptera lived among dinosaurs in the Cretaceous age in China, and were last known to exist about 10 million years ago in France and Spain.

"They were important elements in food webs of wetlands in ancient British Columbia and Washington about 50 million years ago, after the extinction of the dinosaurs," says Archibald. "Why they declined and went extinct remains a mystery."

The team named 16 new species of Cephalozygoptera. Some of the fossils were found on the traditional land of the Colville Indian tribe of northern Washington, and so Archibald and his coauthors collaborated with tribal elders to name a new family of them. They called the family "Whetwhetaksidae", from the word "whetwhetaks", meaning dragonfly-like insects in the Colville people's language.

Archibald has spent 30 years combing the fossil-rich deposits of southern British Columbia and northern interior Washington. To date, in collaboration with others, he has discovered and named more than 80 new species from the area.

CAPTION

Wings of the new species Okanagrion threadgillae, from the Republic fossil site in northern Washington, a damselfly-like insect of the new suborder Cephalozygoptera.

CREDIT

Copyright Zootaxa, used by permission.

Scientists describe earliest primate fossils

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

Research News 

IMAGE: SHORTLY AFTER THE EXTINCTION OF THE DINOSAURS, THE EARLIEST KNOWN ARCHAIC PRIMATES, SUCH AS THE NEWLY DESCRIBED SPECIES PURGATORIUS MCKEEVERI SHOWN IN THE FOREGROUND, QUICKLY SET THEMSELVES APART FROM THEIR... view more 

CREDIT: ANDREY ATUCHIN

A new study published Feb. 24 in the journal Royal Society Open Science documents the earliest-known fossil evidence of primates.

A team of 10 researchers from across the U.S. analyzed several fossils of Purgatorius, the oldest genus in a group of the earliest-known primates called plesiadapiforms. These ancient mammals were small-bodied and ate specialized diets of insects and fruits that varied by species. These newly described specimens are central to understanding primate ancestry and paint a picture of how life on land recovered after the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago that wiped out all dinosaurs -- except for birds -- and led to the rise of mammals.

Gregory Wilson Mantilla, a University of Washington professor of biology and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the UW's Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture, co-led the study with Stephen Chester of Brooklyn College and the City University of New York. The team analyzed fossilized teeth found in the Hell Creek area of northeastern Montana. The fossils, which are now part of the collections at the University of California Museum of Paleontology, are estimated to be 65.9 million years old, about 105,000 to 139,000 years after the mass extinction event. Based on the age of the fossils, the team estimates that the ancestor of all primates --including plesiadapiforms and today's primates such as lemurs, monkeys and apes -- likely emerged by the Late Cretaceous and lived alongside large dinosaurs.

"It's mind blowing to think of our earliest archaic primate ancestors," said Wilson Mantilla. "They were some of the first mammals to diversify in this new post-mass extinction world, taking advantage of the fruits and insects up in the forest canopy."

The fossils include two species of Purgatorius: Purgatorius janisae and a new species described by the team named Purgatorius mckeeveri. Three of the teeth found have distinct features compared to any previously known Purgatorius species and led to the description of the new species.

Purgatorius mckeeveri is named after Frank McKeever, who was among the first residents of the area where the fossils were discovered, and also the family of John and Cathy McKeever, who have since supported the field work where the oldest specimen of this new species was discovered.

"This was a really cool study to be a part of, particularly because it provides further evidence that the earliest primates originated before the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs," said co-author Brody Hovatter, a UW graduate student in Earth and space sciences. "They became highly abundant within a million years after that extinction."

"This discovery is exciting because it represents the oldest dated occurrence of archaic primates in the fossil record," said Chester. "It adds to our understanding of how the earliest primates separated themselves from their competitors following the demise of the dinosaurs."

CAPTION

High resolution CT scans of an assortment of fossilized teeth and jaw bones of Purgatorius.

CREDIT

Gregory Wilson Mantilla/Stephen Chester

Co-author on the study was the late William Clemens who was a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley and former director of the UC Museum of Paleontology. Additional co-authors are Jason Moore and Wade Mans of the University of New Mexico; Courtney Sprain of the University of Florida; William Mitchell of Minnesota IT Services; Roland Mundil of the Berkeley Geochronology Center; and Paul Renne of UC Berkeley and the Berkeley Geochronology Center. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the UC Museum of Paleontology, the Myhrvold and Havranek Charitable Family Fund, the UW, the CUNY and the Leakey Foundation.

For high resolution images and interviews, contact burkepr@uw.edu.

Link to full release with images:

https://www.washington.edu/news/2021/02/24/earliest-primate-fossils/

Data transfer system connects silicon chips with a hair's-width cable

The advance could improve energy efficiency of data centers and lighten the load for electronics-rich vehicles

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

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Researchers have developed a data transfer system that can transmit information 10 times faster than a USB. The new link pairs high-frequency silicon chips with a polymer cable as thin a strand of hair. The system may one day boost energy efficiency in data centers and lighten the loads of electronics-rich spacecraft.

The research was presented at this month's IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference. The lead author is Jack Holloway '03, MNG '04, who completed his PhD in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) last fall and currently works for Raytheon. Co-authors include Ruonan Han, associate professor and Holloway's PhD adviser in EECS, and Georgios Dogiamis, a senior researcher at Intel.

The need for snappy data exchange is clear, especially in an era of remote work. "There's an explosion in the amount of information being shared between computer chips -- cloud computing, the internet, big data. And a lot of this happens over conventional copper wire," says Holloway. But copper wires, like those found in USB or HDMI cables, are power-hungry -- especially when dealing with heavy data loads. "There's a fundamental tradeoff between the amount of energy burned and the rate of information exchanged." Despite a growing demand for fast data transmission (beyond 100 gigabits per second) through conduits longer than a meter, Holloway says the typical solution has been "increasingly bulky and costly" copper cables.

One alternative to copper wire is fiber-optic cable, though that has its own problems. Whereas copper wires use electrical signaling, fiber-optics use photons. That allows fiber-optics to transmit data quickly and with little energy dissipation. But silicon computer chips generally don't play well with photons, making interconnections between fiber-optic cables and computers a challenge. "There's currently no way to efficiently generate, amplify, or detect photons in silicon," says Holloway. "There are all kinds of expensive and complex integration schemes, but from an economics perspective, it's not a great solution." So, the researchers developed their own.

The team's new link draws on benefits of both copper and fiber optic conduits, while ditching their drawbacks. "It's a great example of a complementary solution," says Dogiamis. Their conduit is made of plastic polymer, so it's lighter and potentially cheaper to manufacture than traditional copper cables. But when the polymer link is operated with sub-terahertz electromagnetic signals, it's far more energy-efficient than copper in transmitting a high data load. The new link's efficiency rivals that of fiber-optic, but has a key advantage: "It's compatible directly with silicon chips, without any special manufacturing," says Holloway.

The team engineered such low-cost chips to pair with the polymer conduit. Typically, silicon chips struggle to operate at sub-terahertz frequencies. Yet the team's new chips generate those high-frequency signals with enough power to transmit data directly into the conduit. That clean connection from the silicon chips to the conduit means the overall system can be manufactured with standard, cost-effective methods, the researchers say.

The new link also beats out copper and fiber optic in terms of size. "The cross-sectional area of our cable is 0.4 millimeters by a quarter millimeter," says Han. "So, it's super tiny, like a strand of hair." Despite its slim size, it can carry a hefty load of data, since it sends signals over three different parallel channels, separated by frequency. The link's total bandwidth is 105 gigabits per second, nearly an order of magnitude faster than a copper-based USB cable. Dogiamis says the cable could "address the bandwidth challenges as we see this megatrend toward more and more data."

In future work, Han hopes to make the polymer conduits even faster by bundling them together. "Then the data rate will be off the charts," he says. "It could be one terabit per second, still at low cost."

The researchers suggest "data-dense" applications, like server farms, could be early adopters of the new links, since they could dramatically cut data centers' high energy demands. The link could also be a key solution for the aerospace and automotive industries, which place a premium on small, light devices. And one day, the link could replace the consumer electronic cables in homes and offices, thanks to the link's simplicity and speed. "It's far less costly than [copper or fiber optic] approaches, with significantly wider bandwidth and lower loss than conventional copper solutions," says Holloway. "So, high fives all round."

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This research was funded, in part, by Intel, Raytheon, the Naval Research Laboratory, and the Office of Naval Research.

Written by Daniel Ackerman, MIT News Office