How this 'artificial blowhole' aims to make wave energy mainstream

Jesse Orrall  CNET

There's a large cement structure off the coast of King Island in Tasmania, Australia, that looks like some kind of futuristic sound-weapon. But have no fear, it's merely the latest in wave energy technology. Called the UniWave200 and made by Wave Swell Energy, this "artificial blowhole" is a fresh take on a classic wave energy converter known as an oscillating water column.

© Provided by CNET The first UniWave200 off the coast of King Island in Tasmania, Australia Wave Swell Energy

As incoming waves flow into the chamber, air is compressed, which spins a turbine. But while most OWCs are bidirectional, meaning the turbine spins as air is pushed out by the rising waves and when air is sucked back in by the receding waves, the UniWave200 is a little different.

VIDEO New 'artificial blowhole' turns waves into energy and fights erosion

According to Wave Swell Energy Co-Founder and Executive Chair Tom Denniss, scale model tests actually showed a unidirectional turbine was more efficient than previous bidirectional turbines. The increased efficiency of a unidirectional turbine might help the UniWave200 achieve its goal of making wave energy into a mainstream renewable like wind and solar.

Denniss said the UniWave200 also has advantages over previous wave technologies in terms of accessibility and durability. Because the UniWave200 has no moving parts below the surface of the water, damage from the pounding of the waves is less likely and repair teams will have an easier time making fixes.

The UniWave200's potential usefulness extends beyond the realm of green energy. Desalination and hydrogen production could conceivably be built into future UniWave200s, since the basic materials needed for each process -- water and electricity -- are readily available.

But Denniss believes the most urgent use for this technology is as a form of protection from coastal erosion. For low-lying island nations threatened by more severe storms and rising sea levels due to climate change, investment in seawalls could prove to be necessary. With the incorporation of wave energy technology, these potential future seawalls could not only pay for themselves but also generate revenue and green energy for communities on the front lines of the climate crisis.

But first, the UniWave200 at King Island will have to lead the way. The first of its kind anywhere in the world, it's expected to be hooked up to the King Island grid in late February and be generating electricity by the end of March.

Denniss tells me the UniWave200's starting cost is below the starting cost of wind and solar at the same point in its development, and he predicts the cost will decrease at a similar rate as the technology scales up.

Biden revokes Trump orders on 'anarchist' cities and more




President Joe Biden on Wednesday formally revoked a series of presidential orders and memorandum signed by Donald Trump, including one that sought to cut funding from several cities the 45th president deemed “anarchist” havens and another mandating that federal buildings should be designed in a classical esthetic.

Since taking office last month, Biden has revoked dozens of Trump orders and issued dozens more of his own as he’s sought to target foundational aspects of Trump's legacy and promote aspect of his own agenda without going through Congress.

The latest slate of revocations targeted a grab-bag of issues, including a few that Trump signed in his last months in office.

Trump issued a memorandum in September that sought to identify municipal governments that permit “anarchy, violence and destruction in American cities.” The memorandum followed riots during anti-police and anti-racism protests over George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police. The Justice Department identified New York City, Portland, Oregon, and Seattle as three cities that could have federal funding slashed.

Those cities in turn filed a lawsuit to invalidate the designation and fight off the Trump administration’s efforts to withhold federal dollars.

Seattle city attorney Pete Holmes welcomed the Biden revocation, saying he was “glad to have this nonsense cleared from the decks."

Trump in his “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture” intoned that America’s forefathers “wanted public buildings to inspire the American people and encourage civic virtue." The memorandum added that architects should look to “America’s beloved landmark buildings” such as the White House, the U.S. Capitol, the Supreme Court, the Department of the Treasury and the Lincoln Memorial for inspiration.

Another order halted was one Trump issued in the final days of his presidency dubbed the “Ensuring Democratic Accountability in Agency Rulemaking." It called for limiting the ability of federal agency employees in making regulatory decisions.

Biden also revoked a 2018 order that called for agency heads across the government to review welfare programs — such as food stamps, Medicaid and housing aid — and strengthening work requirements for certain recipients.

___

Associated Press writer Gene Johnson in Seattle contributed to this report.

Aamer Madhani, The Associated Press

SIM EARTH

Scientists begin building highly accurate digital twin of our planet

ETH ZURICH

Research News

 

To become climate neutral by 2050, the European Union launched two ambitious programmes: "Green Deal" and "DigitalStrategy". As a key component of their successful implementation, climate scientists and computer scientists launched the "Destination Earth" initiative, which will start in mid-?2021 and is expected to run for up to ten years. During this period, a highly accurate digital model of the Earth is to be created, a digital twin of the Earth, to map climate development and extreme events as accurately as possible in space and time.

Observational data will be continuously incorporated into the digital twin in order to make the digital Earth model more accurate for monitoring the evolution and predict possible future trajectories. But in addition to the observation data conventionally used for weather and climate simulations, the researchers also want to integrate new data on relevant human activities into the model. The new "Earth system model" will represent virtually all processes on the Earth's surface as realistically as possible, including the influence of humans on water, food and energy management, and the processes in the physical Earth system.

Information system for decision-?making

The digital twin of the Earth is intended to be an information system that develops and tests scenarios that show more sustainable development and thus better inform policies. "If you are planning a two-?metre high dike in The Netherlands, for example, I can run through the data in my digital twin and check whether the dike will in all likelihood still protect against expected extreme events in 2050," says Peter Bauer, deputy director for Research at the European Centre for Medium-?Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and co-?initiator of Destination Earth. The digital twin will also be used for strategic planning of fresh water and food supplies or wind farms and solar plants.

The driving forces behind Destination Earth are the ECMWF, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT). Together with other scientists, Bauer is driving the climate science and meteorological aspects of the Earth's digital twin, but they also rely on the know-?how of computer scientists from ETH Zurich and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), namely ETH professors Torsten Hoefler, from the Institute for High Performance Computing Systems, and Thomas Schulthess, Director of CSCS.

In order to take this big step in the digital revolution, Bauer emphasises the need for earth sciences to be married to the computer sciences. In a recent publication in Nature Computational Science, the team of researchers from the earth and computer sciences discusses which concrete measures they would like to use to advance this "digital revolution of earth-?system sciences", where they see the challenges and what possible solutions can be found.

Weather and climate models as a basis

In their paper, the researchers look back on the steady development of weather models since the 1940s, a success story that took place quietly. Meteorologists pioneered, so to speak, simulations of physical processes on the world's largest computers. As a physicist and computer scientist, CSCS's Schulthess is therefore convinced that today's weather and climate models are ideally suited to identify completely new ways for many more scientific disciplines how to use supercomputers efficiently.

In the past, weather and climate modelling used different approaches to simulate the Earth system. Whereas climate models represent a very broad set of physical processes, they typically neglect small-?scale processes, which, however, are essential for the more precise weather forecasts that in turn, focus on a smaller number of processes. The digital twin will bring both areas together and enable high-?resolution simulations that depict the complex processes of the entire Earth system. But in order to achieve this, the codes of the simulation programmes must be adapted to new technologies promising much enhanced computing power.

With the computers and algorithms available today, the highly complex simulations can hardly be carried out at the planned extremely high resolution of one kilometre because for decades, code development stagnated from a computer science perspective. Climate research benefited from being able to gain higher performance by ways of new generations of processors without having to fundamentally change their programme. This free performance gain with each new processor generation stopped about 10 years ago. As a result, today's programmes can often only utilise 5 per cent of the peak performance of conventional processors (CPU).

For achieving the necessary improvements, the authors emphasize the need of co-?design, i.e. developing hardware and algorithms together and simultaneously, as CSCS successfully demonstrated during the last ten years. They suggest to pay particular attention to generic data structures, optimised spatial discretisation of the grid to be calculated and optimisation of the time step lengths. The scientists further propose to separate the codes for solving the scientific problem from the codes that optimally perform the computation on the respective system architecture. This more flexible programme structure would allow a faster and more efficient switch to future architectures.

Profiting from artificial intelligence

The authors also see great potential in artificial intelligence (AI). It can be used, for example, for data assimilation or the processing of observation data, the representation of uncertain physical processes in the models and data compression. AI thus makes it possible to speed up the simulations and filter out the most important information from large amounts of data. Additionally, the researchers assume that the use of machine learning not only makes the calculations more efficient, but also can help describing the physical processes more accurately.

The scientists see their strategy paper as a starting point on the path to a digital twin of the Earth. Among the computer architectures available today and those expected in the near future, supercomputers based on graphics processing units (GPU) appear to be the most promising option. The researchers estimate that operating a digital twin at full scale would require a system with about 20,000 GPUs, consuming an estimated 20MW of power. For both economic and ecological reasons, such a computer should be operated at a location where CO2-?neutral generated electricity is available in sufficient quantities.

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Cellular seafood

Researchers detail the long chain of events required for cultured seafood to deliver environmental benefits

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - SANTA BARBARA

Research News

 Meat alternatives are officially mainstream. To wit, Burger King added the plant-based Impossible Burger to its menu nationwide in 2019, and McDonald's plans to unveil its own McPlant in 2021. Alongside these vegetarian options, many companies are also working to culture meat outside of animals grown from cell lines. Proponents highlight a range of potential environmental and health benefits offered by this emerging industry, and several companies believe that these benefits could also play out with seafood.

A multidisciplinary team of researchers has taken a good, hard look at what it would take for cell-based seafood to deliver conservation benefits. They have compiled their findings into a paper in the journal Fish & Fisheries(link is external) in which they lay out the road map to change, comprising nine distinct steps. The authors contend that cell-based seafood faces a long, narrow path toward recovering fish stocks in the ocean, with success ultimately determined by the complex interplay of behavioral, economic and ecological factors.

"The core question of our work was, can this new technology -- cell-based seafood -- have a conservation benefit in the ocean?" said lead author Ben Halpern(link is external), a professor at UC Santa Barbara's Bren School of Environmental Science & Management and executive director of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS).

A team of 12 researchers from UC Santa Barbara converged to answer this question, including economists, ecologists and data scientists as well as experts on fisheries, aquaculture and cell-based meat technology. They brought their expertise and the scientific literature to bear in order to flesh out the key steps along this pathway. Eventually they distilled it to nine significant phases.

The journey begins by developing a viable product and introducing it to the market, where it must then drop to a price competitive with existing seafood. At this point, a significant proportion of consumers have to adopt the new product as a substitute for traditional seafood. This is a key step, the authors said, and particularly tricky to pull off.

The first four steps may be sufficient for the success of a new product, but achieving conservation outcomes is a much longer process. The new product must drive down demand for wild-caught seafood, and the decline in price must pass through a complicated supply chain to fishermen. The drop in price then needs to decrease fishing efforts, which may or may not enable fish stocks to recover. Finally, the ecological impacts of producing cellular seafood can't be greater than those of fishing, the researchers said.

Each of these steps brings with it a variety of hurdles, perhaps none harder than getting consumers to adopt the cultured seafood instead of buying wild-caught fish. Convincing people to take on something new and leave behind something old is a huge challenge, Halpern explained. It's also an understudied part of this process, he added.

Of course, millions of dollars have gone toward studying product adoption and diffusion, coauthor Jason Maier(link is external) pointed out. Researchers pore over the factors that influence a consumer's willingness to try, and ultimately take-up, a new product. The ability to sample the product, it's relative advantage over the item it intends to replace, and how well it suits consumer habits and values all affect the likelihood it will be adopted, he explained.

"So why do we say it is understudied?" Maier asks. "Well, because previous research has primarily focused on only the adoption process." But when it comes to environmental outcomes, substitution for the existing product is as important as adoption of the new one. For instance, many believed that farm-raised fish could release pressure on wild stocks. Instead, what researchers have seen are massive increases in seafood consumption with little direct evidence that aquaculture has reduced fishing pressure.

"The take home is that the pathway to get from creating this technology to more fish in the ocean is long and narrow," said Halpern. "There are a lot of steps that have to happen and the path gets narrower and narrower as you go along. So it's not impossible, but it is difficult for many reasons to get a conservation outcome, in terms of more fish in the ocean, from this cell-based seafood."

Most of these hurdles apply to any consumer-driven intervention in the ocean. It's challenging to harness people's preferences, their buying habits, to drive change. "Trying to use consumer behavior as a way to influence the ocean requires a lot more steps than top-down approaches like regulations," said coauthor Heather Lahr(link is external), the cell-based seafood project manager at UC Santa Barbara's Environmental Market Solutions Lab (emLab).

Society also needs to weigh the costs and impacts of other conservation measures against new technologies like cultured seafood, she added. Strategies like fishery management and marine reserves have already proven their worth.

And while the technologies for culturing beef and swordfish may be similar, the context could scarcely be less alike. Seafood comes from hundreds of species, with different life histories, habitats and diets, Lahr explained. What's more, consumers tend to group many species under a single culinary experience. "For instance, when consumers eat a fish taco they are expecting a white flaky fish which could be anything from farm raised tilapia to locally sourced halibut," Lahr said. Compare that with beef, which primarily comes from one species: Bos taurus, the European, or "taurine," cattle.

And, unlike terrestrial meats, seafood still comes primarily from the wild. Humans have less control over fish stocks than livestock, and fishing activity responds to consumer, economic and environmental changes differently than ranching. Fishermen also fall under different regulations than farmers.

There's also a mismatch between the fish that could benefit most from this technology and the species that the industry is focusing on. Financially important stocks and popular seafood items, like tuna and salmon, are typically already well managed, Lahr said.

"The stocks where the need is greatest are not actually where the clean seafood technology, the cell-based seafood companies, are focusing their efforts," Halpern added, "because there's not much money in those species." For instance, fish like anchovies and sardines used for feed and oil may be able to benefit more from cell-based technologies, but currently the price point for these species is too low to make the investment worthwhile.

This paper is one of several upcoming studies exploring the conservation benefits of cell-based seafood. The team will further investigate the possibilities of demand-driven conservation interventions and review the impacts that the rise of aquiculture has had on fisheries and wild stocks. They also plan to dive further into understanding how and why consumers change their behavior when confronted with new products. The initiative is part of a joint project(link is external) between NCEAS and emLab.

Halpern believes that, if society truly applies its resources toward developing technology to address a challenge, it will likely find one. "But whether the technology will actually achieve the intended outcome depends on so many other steps," he said. "So we need to think carefully through all those steps before counting on any particular solution to deliver the outcome we hope for."

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Improving road safety to tackle crime

Improving road safety in cities could result in a lower rate of violent crime, according to research from UCL.

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON

Research News

 Improving road safety in cities could result in a lower rate of violent crime, according to research from UCL.

Experts analysing crime and car accident data in Mexico City found a surprisingly high level of synchronicity between the two on a weekly cycle, suggesting that applying more resources to prevent road accidents would improve crime rates by enabling more efficient policing.

For the paper, published today in Cities as Complex Systems special issue in PLOS ONE, experts plotted the time and locations of nearly one million car accidents and 200,000 violent crimes from January 2016 to March 2020 in Mexico City, creating a 'heartbeat' - so-called because of its resemblance to an electrocardiogram - of the city.

The pattern of crash and crime occurrences were similar day by day, repeating on the weekly cycle, the concept of which had previously been unexplored. Experts observed 'valleys' during the night and peaks in the evening, where at a city level, crime peaked at 7.5 times more than in the depth of valleys, and car accidents peaked at 12.3 times.

Lead author Dr Rafael Prieto Curiel (UCL CASA) explained: "Distinct parts of the city have different heartbeats in terms of crime and of crashes. A neighbourhood with bars and restaurants has a different heartbeat than a residential neighbourhood or one with offices or schools. The land-use of the region can help us explain why we observe distinct heartbeats and make projections and forecasts".

Crime and road accidents have been observed and analysed together before, but not in terms of cyclic behaviour. The team analysed both by capturing weekly occurrences of crime and accidents, using geotagged data capturing time and location. This created the heartbeat of the city.

This heartbeat was then analysed for a more specific location, relating to distance from the Mexico City Metro and other public transport stations, to create 'tiles' of the city. Nearby tiles were found to have similar heartbeats, in that they saw peaks and valleys in crime and crashes at similar times during the week. These peaks and valleys related to economic activities, such as residents commuting to work.

The team further observed that crimes and crashes reach their respective intensity peak on Friday night and valley on Tuesday morning. The mathematical method the team used can be applied to other cities.

Using the weekly cycle makes it easier to predict peaks and valleys in the near future, with potential implications on city policing. Whereas most cities have resources - albeit of differing levels - in place to tackle and prevent crime, road safety has had comparatively less resource attributed to it.

Dr Prieto Curiel added: "Focusing more on preventing road accidents would improve crime prevention in urban areas and give more resource to police tackling crime. Serious road accidents usually require the presence of police officers to divert traffic and secure the area.

"Unfortunately, due to the temporal synchronisation between crashes and crime, the times when more officers are engaged with road accidents is also when they are most needed due to the high levels of crime. Therefore, road accidents reduce the presence of police officers and could increase response time to other emergencies."

Road accidents kill more than 1.35 million people around the world each year and 50 million people suffer non-fatal injuries in a crash. Three times more people are killed by cars than all types of crime and violence combined.

Additionally, crime and road accidents are becoming a more relevant urban problem. In Mexico, some of its cities suffer nearly twice the number of crimes per capita than the national level, so most of the urban population fears crime, In the US, for example, 54% of road accident deaths in 2018 occurred in urban areas, up from less than 40% in 2000.

SwRI scientist captures evidence of dynamic seasonal activity on a Martian sand dune

Research finds that airborne dust plumes are produced by sliding blocks of dry ice each spring

SOUTHWEST RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Research News

 

IMAGE: AN SWRI-LED STUDY IDENTIFIES PLUMES OF AIRBORNE DUST EMANATING FROM SOURCES INSIDE GULLIES AT MARS' RUSSELL CRATER MEGADUNE IN THE MARTIAN SPRING. THE PLUME PHENOMENA SUPPORT THE HYPOTHESIS THAT CO2... view more 

CREDIT: NASA/JPL/MALIN SPACE SYSTEMS (CTX) & NASA/JPL/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA (HIRISE)]

SAN ANTONIO -- Feb. 24, 2021 -- A Southwest Research Institute® (SwRI®) scientist examined 11 Mars years of image data to understand the seasonal processes that create linear gullies on the slopes of the megadune in the Russell crater on Mars. In early spring images, captured by two different cameras on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, SwRI's Dr. Cynthia Dinwiddie noticed airborne plumes of dusty material associated with the linear dune gullies on the sand dune's downwind slope. These clues point to active processes involving chunks of frozen CO2, or dry ice, sliding down the sand dune, kicking up sand and dust along the way.

Russell crater, on Mars, is home to the largest known sand dune in the solar system, providing a frequently imaged locale to study modern surface activity on the Red Planet.

"For two decades, planetary scientists have had many ideas about how and when very long, narrow gullies formed on frost-affected sand dunes on Mars," said Dinwiddie, first author of a paper outlining new research that has been accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. "Initially, scientists thought linear dune gullies were remnants of an ancient time when the climate on Mars supported liquid water on its surface. Then, repeat imaging showed that changes were happening now, when Mars is cold and arid. Several hypotheses have since been proposed, usually involving either CO2 ice or water ice."

Other scientists found imagery showing bright CO2 ice blocks at rest in dune gullies, suggesting a causal relationship between the blocks and the gullies.

"In this paper, we offer compelling new evidence that venting CO2 gas dislodges CO2 ice blocks that carve and modify linear dune gullies," Dinwiddie said. "While trace amounts of seasonally condensed water are present, it behaves like an innocent bystander, not actively participating in the processes," said coinvestigator Dr. Tim Titus of the U.S. Geological Survey.

During the bleak Martian fall and winter, cold temperatures condense part of the CO2 atmosphere onto the dune field's surface, creating ice deposits. Previous research has shown that in the winter and early spring, the translucent slab of CO2 ice allows radiation from the Sun to heat the dark sand under the ice, causing some ice to transition to gas (or sublimate) and become pressurized in the contact zone. This pressurized CO2 gas escapes to the atmosphere via weak zones in the ice, also expelling sand and dust in a jet of gas.

The ejected material falls back to the surface and forms dark spots around the vent. This research proposes that as the season wears on, repetitive venting breaks up the slab ice into discrete blocks on steep slopes near the crest of the dune. Venting gas eventually dislodges the blocks, and sends them sliding downslope, deepening and modifying existing gullies or carving new ones.

The airborne plumes consist of fine dust disturbed by the sliding block, whereas coarse dust is redeposited near the gullies, creating a seasonal, relatively bright fringe around active gullies. The off-gassing ice blocks temporarily clean dust from the dark gully sand, resulting in telltale brightness (albedo) variations in and around gullies.

"We observe this bright fringe pattern around active gullies for a short period of time, say, the equivalent of the last three weeks of October, which is early to mid-spring in the Earth's southern hemisphere," Dinwiddie said. "Shortly after this 'spring break,' Mars' dusty atmosphere blankets the area with a more homogenous façade, disturbed only by dust devils in the late spring and summer."

SwRI led this program, with thermal modeling of ice and dust provided by Titus and the U.S. Geological Survey. A NASA Mars Data Analysis Program grant funded this 12-month pilot study of seasonal dune processes in Russell crater. Dinwiddie and Titus have proposed to extend this research to other craters in the southern hemisphere of Mars, where craters provide low-lying traps for sand to accumulate and form frost-affected dune fields.

CAPTION

These airborne plumes of dusty material located on the downwind slope of this Martian megadune were an important clue, allowing an SwRI scientist to deduce that chunks of frozen CO2, or dry ice, slide down the gullies in the spring, kicking up sand and dust. While actively sliding CO2 ice blocks cannot be observed conclusively in this image, dense clouds of debris likely conceal mobile ice blocks. HiRISE

CREDIT

NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

USAGE RESTRICTIONS

Images/videos

For more information, see https://www.swri.org/planetary-science.

The new paper "Airborne Dust Plumes Lofted by Dislodged Ice Blocks at Russell Crater, Mars" can be found at the Geophysical Research Letters.

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Using a multipronged approach to investigate the diet of ancient dogs

CARL R. WOESE INSTITUTE FOR GENOMIC BIOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN

Research News

 

IMAGE: COPROLITES ARE FOUND AT ARCHEOLOGICAL SITES AND THEY PROVIDE DIETARY INSIGHT view more 

CREDIT: MALHI LAB

Coprolites, or fossilized dog feces, are often used to understand the dietary preferences of ancient civilizations. However, the samples are often contaminated, making the analysis difficult. A new study, published in Scientific Reports, uses different techniques to improve the investigation of coprolites.

"We have been interested in analyzing coprolites for many years. We have attempted to extract DNA and look at the microbiome before, but the tools were not as robust," said Ripan Malhi (GNDP/GSP/IGOH), a professor of anthropology. "As far as I know, this is the first time anyone has used multiple approaches to provide a snapshot of the daily diet, health, and the long-term trends in ancient dogs of the Americas, all in one study."

The samples were recovered from Cahokia, near modern St. Louis, Missouri. At its peak, Cahokia was a large urban center with a population greater than London or Paris. Several other investigations have shown that there is an overlap between the diet of dogs and humans, either because the dogs were fed the same food or because they ate human food scraps. Therefore, investigating coprolites also provides an insight into human health and diet.

"Initially, the residents were growing crops such as squash and sunflowers. As the city got bigger, it is believed that the diet shifted to maize. Our analysis suggests the same since we saw that some of the dogs were also eating maize," said Kelsey Witt, a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University and former PhD student in the Malhi lab.

The maize samples were examined using stable isotope analysis, which is used to measure different forms of carbon in a sample. Depending on the carbon concentrations, one can identify what kind of plant was consumed. The researchers also investigated the animal and plant remains in the coprolites to show that walnuts, grapes, a variety of fish, and duck were a part of the dogs' diet.

The researchers also used DNA sequencing to determine the microbiome--the community of microbes--of the coprolites. "The technique we used came out in 2020. It helped us verify whether the samples were from dogs or humans, as well as confirm general aspects of diet which can only be done by comparing the microbiomes," said Karthik Yarlagadda, a PhD student in the Malhi lab.

Although the techniques are novel and more sensitive, coprolites are still challenging to study for a number of reasons. The DNA has already passed through the digestive process in the dogs and has therefore been broken down. Furthermore, since the samples are ancient, the extracted DNA is degraded to a large extent due to weathering.

"One of the biggest challenges we faced was dealing with sample contamination," Yarlagadda said. "These samples were deposited a thousand years ago. After that, the environment changed, certain microbes died off, and new microbes took over. All these factors complicate the analysis."

The researchers are working with the Indigenous communities to further understand what the diets looked like in their ancestors. "Since there are a lot of limitations to our research, talking to community members about what their ancestors ate and how they interacted with dogs helps us understand our results better," Witt said.

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The study "Integrative analysis of DNA, macroscopic remains and stable isotopes of dog coprolites to reconstruct community diet" can be found at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-82362-6. The work was sponsored by the Vice Chancellor of Research, University of Illinois, and the Illinois State Archaeological Survey.

Privacy issues and security risks in Alexa Skills

RUHR-UNIVERSITY BOCHUM

Research News

 

With the voice commands "Alexa Skills," users can load numerous extra functions onto their Amazon voice assistant. However, these Skills can often have security gaps and data protection problems, as a team of researchers from the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) and North Carolina State University discovered, together with a former PhD student who started to work for Google during the project. They will present their work at the "Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS)" conference on 24 February 2021.

More than 90,000 Skills analyzed

In their study, the researchers around Christopher Lentzsch and Dr. Martin Degeling studied first-time the ecosystem of Alexa Skills. These voice commands are developed not only by the U.S. tech company Amazon itself but also by external providers. Users can download them at a store operated by Amazon directly, and in some cases, they are also activated automatically by Amazon.

The researchers obtained and analyzed 90,194 Skills from the stores in seven country platforms. They found significant deficiencies for safe use. "A first problem is that Amazon has partially activated Skills automatically since 2017. Previously, users had to agree to the use of each Skill. Now they hardly have an overview of where the answer Alexa gives them comes from and who programmed it in the first place," explains Dr. Martin Degeling from the RUB Chair of System Security. Unfortunately, it is often unclear which Skill is activated at what time. For example, if you ask Alexa for a compliment, you can get a response from 31 different providers, but it's not immediately clear which one is automatically selected. Data that is needed for the technical implementation of the commands can be unintentionally forwarded to external providers.

Publishing new Skills under a false identity

"Furthermore, we were able to prove that Skills can be published under a false identity. Well-known automotive companies, for example, make voice commands available for their smart systems. Users download these believing that the company itself has provided these Skills. But that is not always the case," says Martin Degeling. Although Amazon checks all Skills offered in a certification process, this so-called Skill squatting, i.e., the adoption of already existing provider names and functions, is often not noticeable.

"In an experiment, we were able to publish Skills in the name of a large company. Valuable information from users can be tapped here," explains the researcher. So if an automotive supplier has not yet developed a Skill for its smart system in the car to turn up or turn down the music in the car, for example, attackers would be able to do so under the supplier's name. "They can exploit users' trust in the well-known name and in Amazon to tap into personal information such as location data or user behaviour," Degeling says. Criminals, however, could not directly tap encrypted data or change commands with malicious intent in this process to manipulate the smart car, for example to open the car doors.

Circumventing Amazon's security check

The researchers also identified another security risk: "Our study also showed that the Skills could be changed by the providers afterward," explains Christopher Lentzsch from the RUB Chair of Information and Technology Management. This vulnerability places the security of the previous certification process on the part of Amazon into another perspective. "Attackers could reprogram their voice command after a while to ask for users' credit card data, for example," Lentzsch says. Amazon's testing usually catches such prompts and does not allow them - the trick of changing the program afterward can bypass this control. By trusting the abused provider name and Amazon, numerous users could be fooled by this trick.

Unsufficient data protection declarations

In addition to these security risks, the research team also identified significant lacks in the general data protection declarations for the Skills. For example, only 24.2 percent of the Skills have a so-called Privacy Policy at all, and even fewer in the particularly sensitive areas of "Kids" and "Health and Fitness." "Especially here, there should be strong improvements," Degeling says.

Amazon has confirmed some of the problems to the research team and says it is working on countermeasures.

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Technical details and the scientific paper are available from the researchers on the website http://www.alexa-skill-analysis.org.

Experts call for home battery storage to protect vulnerable during outages

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY'S MAILMAN SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH

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Extreme weather driven by climate change is making power outages more commonplace even as the need for electricity-dependent home health equipment grows. In this context, battery storage can help protect medically vulnerable households, according to researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. The article is published in the journal Futures.

For the millions reliant on electricity for home medical equipment, even short-term power outages can lead to a potentially life-threatening situation. Society's most vulnerable populations--elders, the ill, and the poor--face the greatest risks. Only a fraction of individuals who rely on medical equipment like oxygen concentrators, nebulizers, ventilators, dialysis, and sleep apnea machines has an alternative source of power to use in the event of an outage. During outages related to the 2019 Camp Fire in Northern California, vulnerable residents reported complications, including one man who awoke when his sleep apnea breathing machine failed in the middle of the night and he couldn't breathe. One woman had to spend the night in her wheelchair because her special mattress required electricity to remain inflated.

The researchers call for policies to support resilient power systems--ideally, battery storage paired with solar photovoltaics--that provide clean, reliable emergency backup power by storing electricity for use when grid power is unavailable. One model is the California Self-Generation Incentive Program, which provides incentives for residential battery storage, and includes energy storage incentives for low-income residents. Additional lessons come from a study in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, which found that residents preferred solar-powered battery backups to diesel generators due to ease of use, low cost, and an elimination of fumes that exacerbate asthma and other lung conditions.

Community facilities like senior centers, public schools, and health centers often lack backup power, too. During an emergency, vulnerable residents typically turn to these facilities for heating/cooling, refrigeration to store perishable items and temperature-regulated medicines, lighting, and outlets to charge cell phones and medical equipment. Without backup power, critical facilities ultimately must limit operations or close entirely.

"Climate change coupled with an aging energy infrastructure is driving extreme weather-related power outages, as we've seen recently in Texas," says co-author Diana Hernández, PhD, associate professor of sociomedical sciences. "The technology to improve resiliency and energy independence exists, and it needs to be made more accessible to those who could most benefit. Battery storage units, particularly those powered by the sun, are a critical tool to help vulnerable individuals and communities survive the climate crisis."

In a separate review of scientific literature published in Current Environmental Health Reports, researchers found that power outages have important health consequences ranging from carbon monoxide poisoning, temperature-related illness, gastrointestinal illness, and mortality to cardiovascular, respiratory, and renal disease hospitalizations, especially for individuals relying on electricity-dependent medical equipment. Evidence from the U.S. suggests older adults, poorer families, and individuals of non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic race/ethnicity are least likely to have a three-day supply of food, drinking water, and medication, a preparedness measure for power outages.

Overall, the researchers found that more work is needed to better define and capture the relevant exposures and outcomes. "There is urgent need for data to inform disaster mitigation, preparedness, and response policies (and budgets) in an increasingly energy-reliant world," said first author Joan Casey, PhD, assistant professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia Mailman School.

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Authors of the article on battery backup include corresponding author Marriele Mangoa, Clean Energy Group, Montpelier, VT; and Joan Casey and Diana Hernández at the Columbia Mailman School. The research was supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Authors of the literature review include Joan Casey, Mihoka Fukurai, and Diana Hernández at Columbia Mailman School; and Satchit Balsari and Mathew V. Kiang at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, Boston. The research was supported by National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences grants (ES027023, ES009089) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (DA051534).

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.