Energycane produces more biodiesel than soybean at a lower cost

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURAL, CONSUMER AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES

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IMAGE: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS RESEARCHERS (L TO R) STEVE LONG, SHRADDHA MAITRA, VIJAY SINGH, AND DEEPAK KUMAR CONDUCTED A SERIES OF STUDIES ON BIOFUEL PRODUCTION FROM ENERGYCANE. view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS.

URBANA, Ill. ¬- Bioenergy from crops is a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels. New crops such as energycane can produce several times more fuel per acre than soybeans. Yet, challenges remain in processing the crops to extract fuel efficiently.

Four new studies from the University of Illinois explore chemical-free pretreatment methods, development of high-throughput phenotyping methods, and commercial-scale techno-economic feasibility of producing fuel from energycane in various scenarios.

The studies are part of the ROGUE (Renewable Oil Generated with Ultra-productive Energycane) project at U of I. ROGUE focuses on bioengineering accumulation of triacylglycerides (TAGs) in the leaves and stems of energycane, enabling the production of much more industrial vegetable oil per acre than previously possible.

"The productivity of these non-food crops is very high per unit of land. Soybean is the traditional crop used for biodiesel, but we can get higher yield, more oil, and subsequently more biofuel from lipid-producing energycane," says Vijay Singh, Founder professor in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering (ABE) at U of I and co-author on all four papers.

Biofuel production from crops involves breaking down the cellulosic material and extracting the oil in a series of steps, explains study co-author Deepak Kumar, assistant professor in the Chemical Engineering Department at State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF) and adjunct research scientist at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at U of I.

"The first step is to extract the juice. That leaves bagasse, a lignocellulosic material you can process to produce sugars and subsequently ferment to bioethanol," Kumar says.

"One of the critical things in processing any lignocellulosic biomass is a pretreatment step. You need to break the recalcitrant structure of the material, so enzymes can access the cellulose," he adds. "Because energycane is a relatively new crop, there are very few studies on the pretreatment and breakdown of this bagasse to produce sugars, and to convert those sugars into biofuels."

The pretreatment process also yields some unwanted compounds, which inhibit enzymes that convert the sugar into biofuels. The U of I researchers investigated the best pretreatment methods to maximize the breakdown while minimizing the production of inhibitors. Typically, the pretreatment process uses chemicals such as sulfuric acid to break down the biomass at high temperature and pressure.

"We use a chemical-free method, which makes it more environmentally friendly," Kumar explains. "Furthermore, harsh chemicals may alter the oil structure or quality in the biomass."

The researchers tested their method using nine different combinations of temperature and time intervals. They were able to achieve more than 90% cellulose conversion at the optimal conditions, which is equivalent to results from chemical pretreatment methods.

The second study built on those results to further investigate the relationship between temperature, inhibitor production, and sugar recovery.

"We pretreated the lignocellulosic biomass over a range of different temperatures to optimize the condition for minimal inhibitor generation without affecting the sugar recovery. Then we added cryogenic grinding to the process," says Shraddha Maitra, postdoctoral research associate in ABE and lead author on the study.

"In cryogenic grinding, you treat the bagasse with liquid nitrogen, which makes it very brittle, so upon grinding the biomass fractures easily to release the sugars. This further increased sugar recovery, mainly xylose, by about 10% compared to other refining processes," Maitra explains.

Other industries use similar methods, for example for spices and essential oils, where it is important to preserve the qualities of the product. But applying them to biofuel production is new.

In a third study, Maitra and her co-authors investigated time-domain nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) technology to determine the stability and recovery of lipids by monitoring changes in total, bound, and free lipids after various physical and chemical feedstock preprocessing procedures.

The research team's fourth study investigated the commercial-scale techno-economic feasibility of engineered energycane-based biorefinery. They used computer modeling to simulate the production process under two different scenarios to determine capital investment, production costs, and output compared with soybean-based biodiesel.

"Although the capital investment is higher compared to soybean biodiesel, production costs are lower (66 to 90 cents per liter) than for soybean (91 cents per liter). For the first scenario, processing energycane had overall slightly lower profitability than soybean biodiesel, but yields five times as much biodiesel per unit of land," says Kumar, the lead author on the study.

"Energycane is attractive in its ability to grow across a much wider geography of the U.S. south east than sugarcane. This is a region with much underutilized land, yet capable of rain-fed agriculture," says ROGUE Director Steve Long, Ikenberry Endowed Chair of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois.

"As a perennial, energycane is suitable for land that might be damaged by annual crop cultivation. Our research shows the potential to produce a remarkable 7.5 barrels of diesel per acre of land annually. Together with co-products, this would be considerably more profitable than most current land use, while having the potential to contribute greatly to the national U.S. goal of achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. This proves how valuable it is to build on the successes already achieved in bioengineering energycane to accumulate oils that are easily converted into biodiesel and biojet," Long states.

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The first study, "Chemical free two-step hydrothermal pretreatment to improve sugar yields from energy cane," is published in Energies. [doi.org/10.3390/en13215805]. Authors include Ankita Juneja, Deepak Kumar, Vijay Kumar Singh, Yadvika, and Vijay Singh.

The second study, "Balancing sugar recovery and inhibitor generation during energycane processing: Coupling cryogenic grinding with hydrothermal pretreatment at low temperatures," is published in Bioresource Technology. [doi.org/10.1016/j.biortech.2020.124424]. Authors include Shraddha Maitra and Vijay Singh.

The third study, "Development and validation of time-domain 1H=NMR relaxometry correlation for high-throughput phenotyping method for lipid contents of lignocellulosic feedstocks," is published in GCB Bioenergy. [https://doi.org/10.1111/gcbb.12841]. Authors are Shraddha Maitra, Bruce Dien, Stephen Long, and Vijay Singh.

The fourth study, "Techno-economic feasibility analysis of engineered energycane-based biorefinery co-producing biodiesel and ethanol," is published in GCB Bioenergy. Authors include Deepak Kumar, Stephen Long, Amit Arora, and Vijay Singh. [https://doi.org/10.1111/gcbb.12871]

Partial funding for the studies was provided by the Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program, U.S. Department of Energy, under Award Number DE-SC0018254.

The Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering is in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences and The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois.

Disclai

 

Open-source software to help cities plant in pursuit of clean air

UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM

Research News

 

Software to help towns and cities use street-planting to reduce citizens' exposure to air pollution has been developed by researchers at the University of Birmingham.

Street planting, or 'green infrastructure', is an essential part of the urban realm, but there is a misconception that plants remove or 'soak up' a lot of pollution. Instead, planting at this scale primarily serves to redistribute pollution by changing air currents within streets and beside open roads.

Because of this, not only the position and amount of planting within a street, but also the layout and orientation of that street, are critical to its impacts on local air quality.

The software - the Green Infrastructure for Roadside Air Quality or 'GI4RAQ' Platform - has been designed by experts in the University of Birmingham's Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR) and School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, in partnership with practitioner organisations, including: Transport for London, Greater London Authority and Birmingham City Council. It is the result of three years' collaboration, funded principally through three Innovation grants from the Natural Environment Research Council.

Free to use and open-source, the software enables practitioners to estimate the changes in pollutant concentrations (throughout the cross-section of a street) resulting from different planting schemes. It focusses on key pollutants from road transport: NO2 (nitrogen dioxide) and PM2.5 (fine particulate matter). Its calculations draw on wind data from monitoring stations across the UK, and determine how background wind conditions interact with the local urban form and planting specified by the user.

The software's performance and underlying science are documented in a paper published last month in the open-access journal, Forests.

Lead researcher, Dr James Levine says: "In reducing our exposure to pollution from nearby vehicles, strategic planting can complement essential emission reductions in reducing health impacts. But it's not as simple as thinking that any planting will do good - if indiscriminate, it's just as likely to have a negative impact. There are many good reasons to invest in green infrastructure but, if planting in the name of improving air quality, we must ensure it delivers genuine benefits. By estimating the benefits at planning, we can ensure good schemes are robust to cost-cutting and fully realised."

Informed by their work with Dr Levine, Transport for London is currently exploring a potential 'healthy and resilient streets' scheme with the Greater London Authority. Dr Levine is also in discussion with The Mersey Forest and Liverpool City Council regarding a scheme in central Liverpool.

Paul Nolan OBE, Director of the Mersey Forest, commented: "The GI4RAQ Platform bridges the gap between academic researchers and organisations like The Mersey Forest, cutting through the often-mixed messages regarding the impacts of vegetation on urban air quality, in support of projects delivering genuine, lasting benefits."

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The GI4RAQ team is led by Dr Levine and includes: doctoral student Ms Helen Pearce, who wrote the open-source air quality code (https://github.com/GI4RAQ/GI4RAQ-open); Prof Rob MacKenzie (Director of BIFoR) and Dr Xiaoming Cai; Tommy Morrison, Chris Thompson and Matt Sadler of Wild Ilk Design Studio, who developed the web interface; all with funding from the Natural Environment Research Council through grants, NE/S00940X/1, NE/S013814/1, NE/S00582X/1 and NE/S003487/1, and studentship grant, NE/R011265/1.

Scientists show the importance of contact with nature in the city during the lockdown

RUDN UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

IMAGE: THE MEASURES TAKEN DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC LIMITED THE ACCESS OF CITIZENS TO NATURAL OBJECTS. IT IS STILL UNEXPLORED, WHAT CONSEQUENCES THIS HAD FOR THE RESIDENTS AND WHAT CONCLUSIONS SHOULD... view more 

CREDIT: RUDN UNIVERSITY

The measures taken during the COVID-19 pandemic limited the access of citizens to natural objects. It is still unexplored, what consequences this had for the residents and what conclusions should be drawn for more effective urban planning. RUDN University scientists with colleagues from Australia and Germany studied how the restrictions associated with COVID-19 affected the use of blue and green infrastructure by citizens in Moscow (Russia) and Perth (Australia), and what consequences this had for their health. In the article "Human Dimensions of Urban Blue and Green Infrastructure during a Pandemic. The Case Study of Moscow (Russia) and Perth (Australia)", published in Sustainability, they presented the results of a study on the importance of green and blue infrastructure for the physical and mental health of the citizens. The results give a basis for developing a balanced strategy for landscape design and urban space planning based on the development of green infrastructure that allows effectively maintaining the well-being and health of citizens, especially during a crisis such as that caused by COVID-19.

The significant challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic emphasized that the concept and features of the modern environmentally balanced cities development should consider not only the implementation of economic and social urban strategies, but also functional urban design, related to the urban spaces planning and the development of green infrastructure. Using the results of a web questionnaire survey conducted in May-July 2020 in Moscow (Russia) and Perth (Australia), the article presents an analysis of the significance of contact with nature and various objects of green and blue infrastructure of cities, as well as their changes during and after the COVID-19 restrictions. In order to identify the way people relate to green and blue urban objects and what role they play in providing a comfortable environment, as well as how the general restrictions associated with COVID-19 affected the nature of their interaction with natural infrastructure, they developed a questionnaire of 25 questions, which became the basis of an online study.

216 Muscovites and 110 residents of Perth took part in the survey. The results were analysed statistically. The survey data collected during the isolation period provided information about access to green and blue urban spaces, inequalities in access, as well as changes in the development of urban green infrastructure that are necessary from the respondents' point of view. Scientists analysed the social aspects of citizens' perception of natural objects of the urban and emphasized the importance of contact with nature for maintaining physical and mental health, socio-cultural identification, and socialization (the importance of green and blue objects as social and multicultural spaces). In both cities, measures taken during the COVID-19 restricted people's access to green spaces and water bodies, which negatively affected their mental and physical health and well-being. The survey results showed that the quality, functionality, and location of open natural spaces illustrate the inequality in their distribution and accessibility to the population. In some cases, it was noted that residents of certain areas of cities suffered from limited access to natural objects.

"The COVID-19 circumstances, when access to natural urban facilities was limited for millions of people around the world, highlighted that in extraordinary situations, urban nature can play an essential role in contributing to human well-being and shaping human-nature relationships. Studies have confirmed that public green and blue spaces play a key role not only in maintaining a comfortable environmental situation, but also in restoring mental and physical health during and after an emergency. owever, the issues of how these differential impacts could influence future urban development that will make the cities sustainable and resilient towards addressing challenges, such as those associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change, need to be better understood. In this sense, the comparison of experiences from cities in different countries could be very valuable," says Diana Dushkova, PhD, associate professor at the RUDN University and senior researcher at The Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research

The researchers compared Moscow and Perth as two cities with different approaches to the organization of natural objects and landscaping strategies. In Moscow, most of the green areas and water bodies are open to public. In Perth, more than half of the city's green infrastructure facilities are located on private territories. It turned out that residents of Perth and Moscow consider access to nature equally important, even though cities differ in size, climatic conditions, and planning approaches. In both cities, more than 60% of residents said that the opportunity of contact with nature is important or extremely important for physical and mental health. Among the main values of contact with nature, citizens noted fresh air (82.9% in Perth and 51.6% in Moscow), a sense of unity with nature (89.5% in Perth and 71.2% in Moscow), the scenic beauty (89.5% in Perth and 71.2% in Moscow). The differences in the responses of residents of the two cities are noticeable in questions that relate to the specifics of the restrictions adopted in the pandemic. Changes in visiting natural spaces before and during the pandemic are especially noticeable in Moscow, where strict restrictions were introduced. 56.9% of Muscovites visited green and water zones less often. In Perth, parks and other natural recreation areas remained open, and 59.4% of residents did not visit urban natural spaces less often, and 26.7% even began to do it even more often.

"Our results showed that urban residents are aware of the value of green and blue spaces and emphasize their important role in maintaining health and well-being, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is new convincing evidence that the issues of accessibility of natural objects and their balanced distribution in urban areas should be considered in the development strategy of a modern city, which considers the new requirements of the modern world in ensuring safe and comfortable life and maintaining human health. In addition, it indicates that access to nature and public rights to use green spaces determine the overall resilience of cities to the crisis. The obtained results obtained provide the basis for further research in the development of modern approaches to landscape design and planning of urban green and water zones and allow us to see how effectively they can ensure and maintain the well-being and health of citizens, especially during a crisis such as that caused by COVID --19," says Diana Dushkova.

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A biological fireworks show 300 million years in the making

DOE/ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY

Research News

IMAGE: FROG EGGS LIKE THOSE PICTURED HERE RELEASE ZINC WHEN FERTILIZED, MUCH LIKE MAMMALIAN EGGS DO. view more 

CREDIT: (IMAGE BY TERO LAAKSO/LICENSED UNDER CC BY-SA 2.0.)

Five years ago, researchers at Northwestern University made international headlines when they discovered that human eggs, when fertilized by sperm, release billions of zinc ions, dubbed "zinc sparks."

Now, Northwestern has teamed up with the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and Michigan State University (MSU) to reveal that these same sparks fly from highly specialized metal-loaded compartments at the egg surface when frog eggs are fertilized. This means that the early chemistry of conception has evolutionary roots going back at least 300 million years, to the last common ancestor between frogs and people.

"This work may help inform our understanding of the interplay of dietary zinc status and human fertility." -- Thomas O'Halloran, professor, Michigan State University

And the research has implications beyond this shared biology and deep-rooted history. It could also help shape future findings about how metals impact the earliest moments in human development.

"This work may help inform our understanding of the interplay of dietary zinc status and human fertility," said Thomas O'Halloran, the senior author of the research paper published June 21 in the journal Nature Chemistry.

O'Halloran was part of the original zinc spark discovery at Northwestern and, earlier this year, he joined Michigan State as a foundation professor of microbiology and molecular genetics and chemistry. O'Halloran was the founder of Northwestern's Chemistry of Life Processes Institute, or CLP, and remains a member.

The team also discovered that fertilized frog eggs eject another metal, manganese, in addition to zinc. It appears these ejected manganese ions collide with sperm surrounding the fertilized egg and prevent them from entering.

"These breakthroughs support an emerging picture that transition metals are used by cells to regulate some of the earliest decisions in the life of an organism," O'Halloran said.

To make these discoveries, the team needed access to some of the most powerful microscopes in the world as well as expertise that spanned chemistry, biology and X-ray physics. That unique combination included collaborators at the Center for Quantitative Element Mapping for the Life Sciences, or QE-Map, an interdisciplinary National Institutes of Health-funded research hub at MSU and Northwestern's CLP. The research relied heavily on the tools and expertise available at Argonne.

The research team brought sections of frog eggs and embryos to Argonne for analysis. Using both X-ray and electron microscopy, the researchers determined the identity, concentrations and intracellular distributions of metals both before and after fertilization.

X-ray fluorescence microscopy was conducted at beamline 2-ID-D of the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a DOE Office of Science User Facility at Argonne. Barry Lai, group leader at Argonne and an author on the paper, said that the X-ray analysis quantified the amount of zinc, manganese and other metals concentrated in small pockets around the outer layer of the eggs. They found these pockets contained more than 30 times the manganese as the rest of the eggs, and 10 times the zinc.

"We are able to do this analysis because of the elemental sensitivity of the beamline," Lai said. "In fact, it is so sensitive that substantially lower concentrations can be measured."

Complementary scans were conducted using transmission electron microscopy at the Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM), a DOE Office of Science User Facility at Argonne. Further analysis was performed on a separate prototype scanning transmission electron microscope that includes technology developed by Argonne Senior Scientist Nestor Zaluzec, an author on the paper. These scans were performed at smaller scales -- down to a few nanometers, about 100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair -- but found the same results: high concentrations of metals in pockets around the outer layer.

Both X-ray and electron microscopy showed that the metals in these pockets were almost completely released after fertilization.

"Argonne has the tools necessary to examine these biological samples at these scales without destroying them with X-rays or electrons," Zaluzec said. "It's a combination of the right resources and the right expertise."

The APS is in the process of undergoing a massive upgrade, one that will increase the brightness of its X-ray beams by up to 500 times. Lai said that an upgraded APS could complete these scans much more quickly or with higher spatial resolution. What took more than an hour for this research could be done in less than one minute after the upgrade, Lai said.

"We often think of genes as key regulating factors, but our work has shown that atoms like zinc and manganese are critical to the first steps in development after fertilization," said MSU Provost Teresa K. Woodruff, Ph.D., another senior author on the paper.

Woodruff, an MSU foundation professor and former member of CLP, was also a leader of the Northwestern team that discovered zinc sparks five years ago. With the discovery of manganese sparks in African clawed frogs, or Xenopus laevis, the team is excited to explore whether the element is released by human eggs when fertilized.

"These discoveries could only be made by interdisciplinary groups, fearlessly looking into fundamental steps," she said. "Working across disciplines at the literal edge of technology is one of the most profound ways new discoveries take place."

"Xenopus is a perfect system for such studies because their eggs are an order of magnitude larger than human or mouse eggs, and are accessible in large numbers " said Carole LaBonne, another senior author on the study, CLP member, and chair of the Department of Molecular Biosciences at Northwestern. "The discovery of zinc and manganese sparks is exciting, and suggests there may be other fundamental signaling roles for these transition metals."

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About Argonne's Center for Nanoscale Materials The Center for Nanoscale Materials is one of the five DOE Nanoscale Science Research Centers, premier national user facilities for interdisciplinary research at the nanoscale supported by the DOE Office of Science. Together the NSRCs comprise a suite of complementary facilities that provide researchers with state-of-the-art capabilities to fabricate, process, characterize and model nanoscale materials, and constitute the largest infrastructure investment of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. The NSRCs are located at DOE's Argonne, Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley, Oak Ridge, Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories. For more information about the DOE NSRCs, please visit https://science.osti.gov/User-Facilities/User-Facilities-at-a-Glance.

About the Advanced Photon Source

The U. S. Department of Energy Office of Science's Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory is one of the world's most productive X-ray light source facilities. The APS provides high-brightness X-ray beams to a diverse community of researchers in materials science, chemistry, condensed matter physics, the life and environmental sciences, and applied research. These X-rays are ideally suited for explorations of materials and biological structures; elemental distribution; chemical, magnetic, electronic states; and a wide range of technologically important engineering systems from batteries to fuel injector sprays, all of which are the foundations of our nation's economic, technological, and physical well-being. Each year, more than 5,000 researchers use the APS to produce over 2,000 publications detailing impactful discoveries, and solve more vital biological protein structures than users of any other X-ray light source research facility. APS scientists and engineers innovate technology that is at the heart of advancing accelerator and light-source operations. This includes the insertion devices that produce extreme-brightness X-rays prized by researchers, lenses that focus the X-rays down to a few nanometers, instrumentation that maximizes the way the X-rays interact with samples being studied, and software that gathers and manages the massive quantity of data resulting from discovery research at the APS.

This research used resources of the Advanced Photon Source, a U.S. DOE Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation's first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America's scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.

The U.S. Department of Energy's 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, visit https://energy.gov/science.

 

What kind of sea ice is that? Ask Knut!

A new app under development is using deep learning and artificial intelligence to classify different kinds of sea ice

NORWEGIAN UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Research News

 

IMAGE: THE ASK KNUT APP HAS BEEN DEVELOPED USING THOUSANDS OF DIFFERENT KINDS OF ICE PHOTOGRAPHS. THE IMAGE SHOWS WHAT THE APP SEES COMPARED TO WHAT HUMANS SEE. view more 

CREDIT: SVEINUNG LØSET/NTNU

If you've watched Netflix, shopped online, or run your robot vacuum cleaner, you've interacted with artificial intelligence, AI. AI is what allows computers to comb through an enormous amount of data to detect patterns or solve problems. The European Union says AI is set to be a "defining future technology."

And yet, as much as AI is already interwoven into our everyday lives, there's one area of the globe where AI and its applications are in their infancy, says Ekaterina Kim, an associate professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) Department of Marine Technology. That area is the Arctic, an area where she has specialized in studying sea ice, among other topics.

"It's used a lot in marketing, in medicine, but not so much in Arctic (research) communities," she said. "Although they have a lot of data, there is not enough AI attention in the field. There's a lot of data out there, waiting for people to do something with them."

So Kim and her colleagues Ole-Magnus Pedersen, a PhD candidate from the Department of Marine Technology and Nabil Panchi, from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, decided to see if they could develop an app that used artificial intelligence to identify sea ice in the Arctic.

You may think there's not much difference between one chunk of sea ice and another, but that's just not so.

In addition to icebergs, there's deformed ice, level ice, broken ice, ice floes, floe bergs, floe bits, pancake ice and brash ice.

The researchers wanted the app to be able to distinguish between the different kinds of ice and other white and blue objects out there, like sky, open water and underwater ice.

Different kinds of ice really matter to ship captains, for example, who might be navigating in icy waters.  Actual icebergs are nothing like brash ice, the floating bits of ice that are 2 metres in diameter or less. Think of it --the Titanic wouldn't have sunk if it had just blundered into a patch of brash ice instead of a big iceberg.

Another factor that adds urgency to the situation is climate change, which is dramatically altering sea ice as oceans warm. Even with the help of satellite images and onboard ship technologies, knowing what's in icy waters ahead can be a difficult challenge, especially in fogs or storms.

"Ice can be very difficult for navigation," Kim said. "From the water (at the ship level) It can be hard to detect where there is strong ice, multiyear ice, and different ice.  Some ice is much more dangerous than other types.

The team began teaching their app's AI system using a comprehensive collection of photographs taken by another NTNU ice researcher, Sveinung Løset.

But an AI system is like a growing child -- if it is to learn, it needs to be exposed to lots of information. That's where turning the AI into an app made sense. Although the COVID-19 pandemic has shut down most cruise operations, as the pandemic wains, people will begin to take cruises again -- including to the Arctic and Antarctic.

Kim envisions tourists using the app to take pictures of different kinds of ice to see who finds the most different kinds of ice. And every one of those pictures helps the app learn.

"If the app is used for 'infotainment,'  accuracy isn't that important," Kim said.  "It can even be fun when the model makes mistakes."

As the AI learns, Kim says, the increasingly complex dataset could be taken into the classroom, where navigators could learn about ice in a much more sophisticated way.

Currently, students just look at pictures or listen to a PowerPoint presentation, where lecturers describe the different kinds of ice.

"So this could revolutionize how you learn about ice," she said. "You could have it in 3-D, you could emerge yourself and explore this digital image all around you, with links to different kinds of ice types."

The researchers are planning an AI in the Arctic workshop in September to explore AI applications in these remote areas.

"There are extreme challenges unique to the Arctic, from human activities and impacts in remote Arctic locations to Arctic data acquisition, sharing, and quality," Kim said. "We need to direct AI applications towards solving Arctic challenges that are important for the world as well as to highlight the 'black holes' or knowledge gaps and raise awareness on what does not work, needs improvements."

CAPTION

As global warming thaws Arctic sea ice, more and more ships will travel these waters. Knowing what kinds of ice they might meet can help make the journey safer. The photo shows the Swedish icebreaker Oden in broken and brash ice.

CREDIT

Sveinung Løset/NTNU

For more information about the workshop, see https://www.ntnu.edu/imt/aidingarctic

Reference: N. Panchi, E. Kim and A. Bhattacharyya, "Supplementing remote sensing of ice: Deep learning-based image segmentation system for automatic detection and localization of sea ice formations from close-range optical images," in IEEE Sensors Journal, doi: 10.1109/JSEN.2021.3084556.

 

Reading the rocks: Geologist finds clues to ancient climate patterns in chert

BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY

Research News

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. -- A million years ago, dry seasons became more frequent and forests retreated before the encroaching savanna. Meanwhile, clustered around a nearby lake, our ancient ancestors fashioned stone tools.

During the long press of years, mud and sediment in that East African lake turned to stone, trapping pollen and microscopic organisms in its lattice. Today, researchers like Kennie Leet analyze samples of these ancient sediments, known as sediment cores, to create a picture of the environment early humans called home.

A doctoral student in geological sciences, Leet is the first author on "Labyrinth patterns in Magadi (Kenya) cherts: Evidence for early formation from siliceous gels," published in a recent issue of Geology, the leading journal in the field. Co-authors include Distinguished Professor of Geological Sciences and Environmental Studies Tim Lowenstein, her advisor, as well as Robin Renaut of Canada's University of Saskatchewan, R. Bernhart Owen of Hong Kong Baptist University and Andrew Cohen of the University of Arizona.

Leet's research is part of the National Science Foundation-funded Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project (HSPDP), which looks at how the climate may have impacted hominin evolution in the East African rift. Overall, the project looks at the last 5 million years; Leet's portion of the project considers the last million.

She particularly focuses on the origin of the chert found in Kenya's Lake Magadi. A fine-grained rock that forms from siliceous material, chert is "cryptocrystalline," composed of crystals so small that they can't even be seen by high-powered microscopes, much less the naked eye.

Scientists believe that chert forms on the earth's surface and thus contains information about the environment at the time of its formation, she explained. Because of this quality, they can use chert to calculate the time period for particular climactic events, such as droughts -- not unusual in East Africa, where the climate oscillates between wet and dry periods.

Opening a window into the distant past, the chert points to an even larger trend.

"One of the surprising things we found was that there has been a progressive drying trend for the last million years in East Africa. It's just been progressively getting drier and drier," she said. "But in that, we still have the oscillation between wet and dry."

In the Geology article, she explores a labyrinth pattern she found in the rocks of this period. Patterns are common in nature, and this specific one is formed by drying, she explained.

"It tells us that all of the chert formation and solidification occurred near the surface, where there was exposure to air," she said. "Because this happened before the sediments were buried and compacted, there is other supporting evidence, such as really beautifully preserved plant fragments and single-celled organisms called diatoms."

The time period coincides with the region's transition from trees and forests to grasslands, which biologists and microbiologists on the team are able to track through pollen preserved in the sediment core. During that period, the early humans of Lake Magadi were also creating stone tools in new ways. Researchers wonder: Were these ancient communities moving about and trading more, prompted by drought?

Interestingly, the trend has reversed over the last decade, with the region becoming wetter. In fact, one of the places she stayed during a visit to Kenya in 2019 is now underwater, she said.

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Climate changed the size of our bodies and, to some extent, our brains

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

Research News

IMAGE: SKULLS: - LEFT: AMUD 1, NEANDERTHAL, 55.000 YEARS AGO, ~1750 CM³ - MIDDLE: CRO MAGNON, HOMO SAPIENS, 32.000 YEARS AGO, ~1570 CM³ - RIGHT: ATAPUERCA 5, MIDDLE PLEISTOCENE HOMO, 430.000 YEARS AGO,... view more 

CREDIT: MANUEL WILL

• The average body size of humans has fluctuated significantly over the last million years and is strongly linked to temperature.
• Colder, harsher climates drove the evolution of larger body sizes, while warmer climates led to smaller bodies.

  Brain size also changed dramatically but did not evolve in tandem with body size.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers, led by the Universities of Cambridge and Tübingen, has gathered measurements of body and brain size for over 300 fossils from the genus Homo found across the globe. By combining this data with a reconstruction of the world's regional climates over the last million years, they have pinpointed the specific climate experienced by each fossil when it was a living human.

The study reveals that the average body size of humans has fluctuated significantly over the last million years, with larger bodies evolving in colder regions. Larger size is thought to act as a buffer against colder temperatures: less heat is lost from a body when its mass is large relative to its surface area. The results are published today in the journal Nature Communications.

Our species, Homo sapiens, emerged around 300,000 years ago in Africa. The genus Homo has existed for much longer, and includes the Neanderthals and other extinct, related species such as Homo habilis and Homo erectus.

A defining trait of the evolution of our genus is a trend of increasing body and brain size; compared to earlier species such as Homo habilis, we are 50% heavier and our brains are three times larger. But the drivers behind such changes remain highly debated.

"Our study indicates that climate - particularly temperature - has been the main driver of changes in body size for the past million years," said Professor Andrea Manica, a researcher in the University of Cambridge's Department of Zoology who led the study.

He added: "We can see from people living today that those in warmer climates tend to be smaller, and those living in colder climates tend to be bigger. We now know that the same climatic influences have been at work for the last million years."

The researchers also looked at the effect of environmental factors on brain size in the genus Homo, but correlations were generally weak. Brain size tended to be larger when Homo was living in habitats with less vegetation, like open steppes and grasslands, but also in ecologically more stable areas. In combination with archaeological data, the results suggest that people living in these habitats hunted large animals as food - a complex task that might have driven the evolution of larger brains.

"We found that different factors determine brain size and body size - they're not under the same evolutionary pressures. The environment has a much greater influence on our body size than our brain size," said Dr Manuel Will at the University of Tubingen, Germany, first author of the study.

He added: "There is an indirect environmental influence on brain size in more stable and open areas: the amount of nutrients gained from the environment had to be sufficient to allow for the maintenance and growth of our large and particularly energy-demanding brains."

This research also suggests that non-environmental factors were more important for driving larger brains than climate, prime candidates being the added cognitive challenges of increasingly complex social lives, more diverse diets, and more sophisticated technology.

The researchers say there is good evidence that human body and brain size continue to evolve. The human physique is still adapting to different temperatures, with on average larger-bodied people living in colder climates today. Brain size in our species appears to have been shrinking since the beginning of the Holocene (around 11,650 years ago). The increasing dependence on technology, such as an outsourcing of complex tasks to computers, may cause brains to shrink even more over the next few thousand years.

"It's fun to speculate about what will happen to body and brain sizes in the future, but we should be careful not to extrapolate too much based on the last million years because so many factors can change," said Manica.

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EHR alerts go unread, do not lead to deprescribing of medicines linked to dementia

REGENSTRIEF INSTITUTE

Research News

 

IMAGE: THE VAST MAJORITY OF ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORD (EHR) ALERTS ATTEMPTING TO REDUCE THE PRESCRIBING OF HIGH-RISK MEDICATIONS LINKED TO DEMENTIA IN OLDER ADULTS WENT UNREAD IN A STUDY LED BY... view more 

CREDIT: REGENSTRIEF INSTITUTE

INDIANAPOLIS -- The vast majority of electronic health record (EHR) alerts attempting to reduce the prescribing of high-risk medications linked to dementia in older adults went unread in a study led by research scientists from Regenstrief Institute, Purdue University and Indiana University School of Medicine. The goal of the intervention was to facilitate the deprescribing of anticholinergics through both provider and patient-based alerts, however, engagement with the alerts was so low, the study team was unable to conclude if this approach could be an effective method.

Anticholinergics are drugs which affect the brain by blocking acetylcholine, a nervous system neurotransmitter that influences memory, alertness and planning skills. They are linked to dementia and prescribed for many conditions common in older adults including depression, urinary incontinence, irritable bowel syndrome and Parkinson's disease. These medications are used by approximately one in four older adults each year, and nearly half of older adults have used this type of medication at least once in a five-year period.

Many medical groups have come out in support of deprescribing anticholinergics, but it is challenging to execute in an already busy primary care environment.

"Deprescribing is very complex and rarely prioritized over common medical problems during visits with primary care providers," said study lead author Noll Campbell, PharmD, M.S., research scientist at the IU Center for Aging Research at Regenstrief and assistant professor of pharmacy at Purdue University College of Pharmacy. "In this study, we used principles of behavioral economics in the design of EHR nudges directed at both providers and patients to promote the deprescribing of high-risk anticholinergic medications. However, very few of the alerts were viewed by either recipient, so we are now evaluating how we can change or improve this approach."

In this study, an alert let the provider know that the patient had high-risk anticholinergic medications prescribed in the medical record and offered alternatives to those medications. Alerts also prompted staff to play a video providing education about the medicines and modeling a discussion that led to a change in prescription for patients who were prescribed one of the target medications.

The research team conducted the cluster randomized trial in Eskenazi Health clinics and compared the medication records to the previous year to see if there were any changes. They found there were no significant differences in deprescribing between the control group and the intervention group.

During the course of the study, 85 percent of alerts to providers and 95 percent of alerts to medical assistants went unread, so study authors cannot conclude that priming patients and providers for the discussion is not a feasible strategy, only that the methods used in this study were not successful in reaching the target recipients.

"One option going forward is to experiment with different design approaches in EMR-based nudges," said Dr. Campbell. "Alternatively, a shift towards human-based interventions that can manage the complexity of deprescribing activities may be more effective at deprescribing high-risk anticholinergic medications. While we pursue the goal of understanding clinical implications, we are also cognizant of the scalability of interventions if there is clinical benefit realized by reducing these high-risk medications."

Dr. Campbell and his colleagues at Regenstrief are currently conducting a clinical trial designed to determine if stopping anticholinergic medications results in sustained improvements in cognition. This trial involves clinical pharmacists working with physicians and patients to switch to safer medicines.

Another study at the IU Center for Aging Research at Regenstrief is testing an app called BrainSafe, which provides information on anticholinergics to patients with the goal of leading them to initiate a deprescribing conversation.

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"Multicomponent behavioral intervention to reduce exposure to anticholinergics in primary care older adults" is published in the June print issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. This study was supported by a grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) (P30HS24384).

In addition to Dr. Campbell, authors on the paper are Richard Holden, PhD of Regenstrief, the Sandra Eskenazi Center for Brain Care Innovation, IU School of Medicine and the Center for Health Innovation and Implementation Science; Qing Tang, M.S. of IU School of Medicine; Malaz Boustani, M.D., MPH of Regenstrief, the Sandra Eskenazi Center for Brain Care Innovation, IU School of Medicine and the Center for Health Innovation and Implementation Science; Evgenia Teal, M.A. of Regenstrief; Jennifer Hillstrom, B.S. of the Sandra Eskenazi Center for Brain Care Innovation; Wanzhu Tu, PhD of Regenstrief Institute and IU School of Medicine; Daniel O. Clark, PhD of Regenstrief, the Sandra Eskenazi Center for Brain Care Innovation and IU School of Medicine and Christopher M. Callahan, M.D. of Regenstrief, the Sandra Eskenazi Center for Brain Care Innovation and IU School of Medicine.

About Regenstrief Institute

Founded in 1969 in Indianapolis, the Regenstrief Institute is a local, national and global leader dedicated to a world where better information empowers people to end disease and realize true health. A key research partner to Indiana University, Regenstrief and its research scientists are responsible for a growing number of major healthcare innovations and studies. Examples range from the development of global health information technology standards that enable the use and interoperability of electronic health records to improving patient-physician communications, to creating models of care that inform practice and improve the lives of patients around the globe.

Sam Regenstrief, a nationally successful entrepreneur from Connersville, Indiana, founded the institute with the goal of making healthcare more efficient and accessible for everyone. His vision continues to guide the institute's research mission.

About Purdue University College of Pharmacy

The mission of the Purdue University College of Pharmacy is to advance scientific discovery and development, maximize global health outcomes through patient care and public service, and educate and train students to become leading pharmacists and scientists. The goal is to transform the practice and science of pharmacy to lead advances in human health.

About IU School of Medicine

IU School of Medicine is the largest medical school in the U.S. and is annually ranked among the top medical schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. The school offers high-quality medical education, access to leading medical research and rich campus life in nine Indiana cities, including rural and urban locations consistently recognized for livability.

About Noll Campbell, PharmD, M.S.

In addition to his role as a research scientist at Regenstrief Institute, Noll Campbell, PharmD, M.S., is an assistant professor of pharmacy practice at the Purdue University College of Pharmacy.