Climatic Drivers of Honey Bee Disease Revealed in New Study

By NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY NOVEMBER 9, 2021

Honey bee colonies worldwide have suffered from a range of damaging diseases. A new study has provided clues on how changing weather patterns might be driving disease in UK colonies.

Publishing their findings in the journal Scientific Reports, the team led by Newcastle University found that the most severe disease of honey bees, caused by the Varroa mite, increased as climate temperatures increased but were reduced during heavy rainfall and wind.

Data collected from visits to over 300,000 honey bee colonies highlighted how the prevalence of six important honey bee diseases interacted in different ways with rainfall, temperature, and wind.

Study lead, PhD student Ben Rowland, from Newcastle University’s School of Natural and Environmental Sciences, said: “Our analysis clearly shows that the risk of a colony contracting one of the diseases we examined is influenced by the weather conditions experienced by that colony. Our work highlights some interesting contrasts; for example, rainfall can drive one disease to become more common whilst another will become rarer.”

Professor Giles Budge, who leads the Modelling Evidence and Policy Group at Newcastle University and was a senior author on the paper, said: “We have long known that weather can influence the ability of honey bees to leave the hive and forage for food, but to better understand how our climate can influence honey bee disease is fascinating! This new knowledge will help us predict how honey bee disease might be influenced by future climate change.”

The study also investigated the effect of weather on disease hotspots. The South West of England was at increased risk of disease caused by Varroa mites. In addition, the team highlighted a hot spot for risk for the notifiable and damaging disease European foulbrood in an area comprising Powys, Shropshire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire.

Reference: “Identifying the climatic drivers of honey bee (Apis mellifera) disease in England and Wales” by Ben Rowland, Steve P. Rushton, Mark D.F. Shirley, Mike A. Brown and Giles E. Budge, 9 November 2021, Scientific Reports.
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-01495-w

This work is being completed with funding from Bee Disease Insurance Ltd and the BBSRC.

 

“Virus-Killing” Air Filtration System Unveiled – Innovative Nanomaterial Destroys Viruses, Including Coronaviruses

By UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE NOVEMBER 7, 2021

Credit: University of Cambridge

A new carbon-based air filtration nanomaterial capable of capturing and destroying various viruses, including animal coronavirus, a close relative of SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that causes COVID-19 – has been developed by Cambridge scientists and engineers. 

The prototype, worked on and tested by a multidisciplinary team of researchers from the Boies Group, in the Department of Engineering, and with colleagues from the Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy and Department of Pathology, is equipped with ultra-thin carbon nanotube electrically conductive membranes. This new conductive filtration membrane enables simultaneous virus filtration and sanitization by thermal flashes via resistive heating to temperatures above 100°C, deactivating viruses, including betacoronavirus, in seconds. 

The researchers say the multifunctional filter is especially useful at fighting the viral spread of airborne diseases in confined environments such as emergency vehicles, hospitals, leisure, and education centers, whether it is used as a standalone unit or in conjunction with heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) filtration systems. The results, including findings taken during virus infectivity trials backed by theoretical modeling, are reported in the journal Carbon.

The filter represents a new class of conductive filtration mediums enabling electrical functionality with the capability to be mass-produced, and possessing filtration efficiency and air permeability that matches that of commercial HEPA (high-efficiency particulate air) filters. It effectively captures respiratory liquid droplets – a carrier of many viruses, including coronaviruses – that are produced through coughing, speaking and breathing and which remain suspended in the air for hours, migrating over tens of meters in confined environments. It is these respiratory particles that contribute to high infection rates in enclosed and crowded spaces. 

Produced by a unique process invented at the University, the innovative carbon nanotube material is also the pillar of the ANAM Initiative, funded by the EPSRC, which seeks to unlock the commercial potential offered by carbon nanotubes. 

PhD student Liron Issman said: “Based on the knowledge acquired by this project (the result of an Innovate UK-funded grant), several working prototypes have been developed showing the ability of the filter to achieve air purification of 99% of a small room or an ambulance within 10-20 minutes. Several industrial collaboration projects have been initiated with world-leading air filtration companies to introduce this carbon nanotube material into state-of-the-art applications to help combat COVID-19 and other airborne-based pathogens.

“To meet the market demands, our unique process is being scaled commercially by Q-Flo Limited, a University of Cambridge spin-out, to initially produce over 100,000 m2/yr of membrane material. The benefits of these conductive filtration materials are that they provide low flow resistance with high capture efficiency and capabilities for additional heating and sensing.”

Reference: “Filtration of viral aerosols via a hybrid carbon nanotube active filter” by Liron Issman, Brian Graves, Jeronimo Terrones, Myra Hosmillo, Rulan Qiao, Michael Glerum, Shuki Yeshurun, Martin Pick, Ian Goodfellow, James Elliott and Adam Boies, 6 July 2021, Carbon.
DOI: 10.1016/j.carbon.2021.07.004

 

Archaeologists Discover Almost 500 Ancient Ceremonial Sites in Southern Mexico

By UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA NOVEMBER 8, 2021

Tikal, the ruins of an ancient city, is one of the most famous archeological sites of Maya civilization.

The discovery shifts researchers’ understanding of the relationship between the Olmec civilization and the subsequent Maya civilization.

A team of international researchers led by the University of Arizona reported last year that they had uncovered the largest and oldest Maya monument – Aguada Fénix. That same team has now uncovered nearly 500 smaller ceremonial complexes that are similar in shape and features to Aguada Fénix. The find transforms previous understanding of Mesoamerican civilization origins and the relationship between the Olmec and the Maya people.

The team’s findings are detailed in a new paper published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. University of Arizona anthropology professor Takeshi Inomata is the paper’s first author. His UArizona coauthors include anthropology professor Daniela Triadan and Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Lab director Greg Hodgins.

Melina García (front) excavates the central part of Aguada Fenix, the largest and oldest Maya monument ever uncovered. A team of UArizona researchers reported on the discovery in 2020. The team has since uncovered nearly 500 smaller ceremonial complexes that are similar in shape and features to Aguada Fénix. Credit: Takeshi Inomata

Using data gathered through an airborne laser mapping technique called lidar, the researchers identified 478 complexes in the Mexican states of Tabasco and Veracruz. Lidar penetrates the tree canopy and reflects three-dimensional forms of archaeological features hidden under vegetation. The lidar data was collected by the Mexican governmental organization Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía and covered a 32,800-square-mile area, which is about the same size as the island of Ireland.

Publicly available lidar data allows researchers to study huge areas before they follow up with high-resolution lidar to study sites of interest in greater detail.

“It was unthinkable to study an area this large until a few years ago,” Inomata said. “Publicly available lidar is transforming archaeology.”

Missing Links?

There’s a longstanding debate over whether the Olmec civilization led to the development of the Maya civilization or if the Maya developed independently.

The newly uncovered sites are located in a broad area encompassing the Olmec region and the western Maya lowlands. The complexes were likely constructed between 1100 B.C. and 400 B.C. and were built by diverse groups nearly a millennium before the heyday of the Maya civilization between A.D. 250 and 950.

Nearly 500 ceremonial sites were uncovered using lidar and have been mapped across the study site. Credit: Inomata et al.

The researchers found that the complexes share similar features with the earliest center in the Olmec area, San Lorenzo, which peaked between 1400 and 1100 BC. Aguada Fenix in the Maya area and other related sites began to adopt San Lorenzo’s form and formalize it around 1100 BC.

At San Lorenzo, the team also found a previously unrecognized rectangular space.

“The sites are big horizontally but not vertically,” Inomata said. “People will be walking on one and won’t notice its rectangular space, but we can see it with lidar really nicely.”

The researchers’ work suggests that San Lorenzo served as a template for later constructions, including Aguada Fénix.

Excavation efforts at one of the nearly 500 uncovered sites, La Carmelita. Credit: Takeshi Inomata

“People always thought San Lorenzo was very unique and different from what came later in terms of site arrangement,” Inomata said. “But now we show that San Lorenzo is very similar to Aguada Fénix – it has a rectangular plaza flanked by edge platforms. Those features become very clear in lidar and are also found at Aguada Fénix, which was built a little bit later. This tells us that San Lorenzo is very important for the beginning of some of these ideas that were later used by the Maya.”

Sites Were Likely Ritual Spaces

The sites uncovered by Inomata and his collaborators were likely used as ritual gathering sites, according to the paper. They include large central open spaces where lots of people could gather and participate in rituals.

The researchers also analyzed each site’s orientation and found that the sites seem to be aligned to the sunrise of a certain date, when possible.

“There are lots of exceptions; for example, not every site has enough space to place the rectangular form in a desired direction, but when they can, they seem to have chosen certain dates,” Inomata said.

While it’s not clear why the specific dates were chosen, one possibility is that they may be tied to Zenith passage day, which is when the sun passes directly overhead. This occurs on May 10 in the region where the sites were found. This day marks the beginning of the rainy season and the planting of maize. Some groups chose to orient their sites to the directions of the sunrise on days 40, 60, 80 or 100 days before the zenith passage day. This is significant because the later Mesoamerican calendars are based on the number 20.

San Lorenzo, Aguada Fénix, and some other sites have 20 edge platforms along the eastern and western sides of the rectangular plaza. Edge platforms are mounds placed along the edges of the large rectangular plazas. They define the shape of the plazas, and each are usually no taller than about 3 feet.

“This means that they were representing cosmological ideas through these ceremonial spaces,” Inomata said. “In this space, people gathered according to this ceremonial calendar.”

Inomata stressed that this is just the beginning of the team’s work.

“There are still lots of unanswered questions,” he said.

Researchers wonder what the social organization of the people who built the complexes looked like. San Lorenzo possibly had rulers, which is suggested by sculptures.

“But Aguada Fénix doesn’t have those things,” Inomata said. “We think that people were still somehow mobile, because they had just begun to use ceramics and lived in ephemeral structures on the ground level. People were in transition to more settled lifeways, and many of those areas probably didn’t have much hierarchical organization. But still, they could make this kind of very well-organized center.”

Inomata’s team and others are still searching for more evidence to explain these differences in social organization.

“Continuing to excavate the sites to find these answers will take much longer,” Inomata said, “and will involve many other scholars.”

Reference: “Origins and spread of formal ceremonial complexes in the Olmec and Maya regions revealed by airborne lidar” by Takeshi Inomata, Juan Carlos Fernandez-Diaz, Daniela Triadan, Miguel García Mollinedo, Flory Pinzón, Melina García Hernández, Atasta Flores, Ashley Sharpe, Timothy Beach, Gregory W. L. Hodgins, Juan Javier Durón Díaz, Antonio Guerra Luna, Luis Guerrero Chávez, María de Lourdes Hernández Jiménez and Manuel Moreno Díaz, 25 October 2021, Nature Human Behaviour.
DOI: 10.1038/s41562-021-01218-1

Is It Possible to Explain How Consciousness Works

Credit...Evan M. Cohen

• Nov. 2, 2021, 11:23 a.m. ET

FEELING & KNOWING
Making Minds Conscious
By Antonio Damasio

We all know what it means to be conscious. Consciousness is what distinguishes being awake from being in a coma or a state of dreamless sleep. I am now conscious, and so (presumably) are you. Many animals — probably all mammals — have conscious minds, but plants and bacteria do not. Nor do computers (so far). Nor do stars, or rocks.

Why is consciousness important? Well, in a way, it’s the basis of everything that’s important. Without consciousness, there would be no pleasure or pain; no good or evil; no experiences of beauty, or of love. In a universe that never evolved conscious minds, nothing would matter.

Intimately familiar though we are with it, consciousness confronts us with a mystery. It doesn’t readily fit into our scientific conception of the world. Consciousness seems to be caused by neural firings in our brains. But how can these objective electrochemical events give rise to ineffable qualitative experiences, like the smell of a rose, the stab of a pain or the transport of joy? Why, when a physical system attains a certain degree of complexity, is it “like something” to be that system?

This is the “hard problem” of consciousness: the problem of how subjective mind arises from brute matter. (There is also an “easy problem,” that of determining what role consciousness plays in the information-processing economy of the mind. But one thing at a time.)

In the last few decades, the mystery of consciousness has exercised thinkers of all stripes, sometimes driving them to rather desperate-sounding devices. Philosophers (Thomas Nagel, David Chalmers) have flirted with “panpsychism,” the idea that consciousness might be a fundamental ingredient of all matter, right down to the atomic level. The Nobel-laureate physicist Roger Penrose has speculated that some kind of quantum magic might be behind it. In his mega-best-selling “Gödel, Escher, Bach,” the computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter argued that consciousness arises when the brain becomes intricate enough to form self-referential “strange loops” — neural equivalents of Gödel’s notorious formula that says, “I am not provable.”

Meanwhile, neuroscientists have tried to understand consciousness as a biological phenomenon — like, say, digestion. Using brain-imaging and other empirical techniques, they have sought out the neural signatures of conscious thought within the gray spongy matter in our skulls. Among them have been the Nobel laureates Francis Crick and Gerald Edelman, each of whom produced a book outlining his own favored take on consciousness. Today, one of the most distinguished researchers working along these lines is Antonio Damasio, a Portuguese American who holds a chair in neuroscience at the University of Southern California.

“Feeling & Knowing” represents a distillation of themes Damasio has explored in earlier books, which include “Descartes’ Error” (1994) and “Self Comes to Mind” (2010). The most prominent of his preoccupations is the importance of feeling. It is feeling, he thinks, that can bridge the conceptual abyss between the physical body and the conscious mind.

Before getting down to substance, a word about style. In a prologue, Damasio tells us that readers of his earlier books often missed the key ideas amid all the scientific details. So he set out to write “a focused and very brief book on consciousness.” Brief the new book is: It consists of 40-odd sections, some less than a page long, surrounded by ample white space. Each of these mini-chapters reads rather like a prose poem — often soaring to lyrical heights, though sometimes weighted down by bits of neuroscientific argot. “Focused,” though, is not the mot juste for it: Despite its brevity, it can be meandering and repetitious (“Feelings again, must we? We must indeed”). Crucial ideas often lie enshrouded in an elegant mist of metaphor. Still, the quality of the author’s mind, the boldness of his aims and the suspense of his argument propelled me through the book.

Put with brutal succinctness, Damasio’s brief goes like this: Mental activity consists of a stream of “images” that map aspects of the world around us. But these images, by themselves, cannot be conscious. For that, they must be related to a perspective, an “owner,” a self — this, after all, is what subjectivity means. And here is where feeling comes in. As Damasio uses the term, “feelings” are “the hybrid, interactive processes of the interior, at once mental and physical.” They register how well or badly its various subsystems are doing at maintaining homeostasis, at keeping the organism alive and flourishing. So feelings point within, to the interior; images point without, to the world. And when feelings and images come together in the brain, the result is conscious thought. To adapt a simile of Damasio’s, feelings are like a musical score that, when added to the silent reel of images in the mind, produces cinematic consciousness.

This is Damasio’s solution to the mystery of consciousness. What’s not to like? Plenty!

First, Damasio has adroitly dodged the “hard problem.” An image of (say) a bear is, in his account, a pattern of neural firing in the brain. A feeling of (say) fear is another such pattern. Put them together and you’ve just got a bigger and more complicated pattern of neural firing. Why should it be accompanied by qualitative consciousness? For Damasio to use the terms “images” and “feelings” to refer to these electrochemical events is to make them sound already conscious — which might be called the fallacy of tendentious nomenclature.

Second, for Damasio consciousness requires possessing a sense of self, an ability to entertain “me-ish” thoughts. But most mammals seem to have no such sense of self. They are incapable of recognizing themselves in a mirror. This is also true of human children in the first months of life — are we to suppose that they are not conscious? This might be called the “Unfair to babies!” objection.

Third, Damasio’s category of “feeling” is too capacious. It encompasses not only emotions, but also desires, and states of pleasure and pain. Is all of this really necessary for consciousness? Might not rational thought plus value-based goals be enough? Call this the “Unfair to Mr. Spock!” objection.

I could go on.

But if Damasio’s account of consciousness is not an unqualified success, that merely puts him in the company of all the other distinguished scientists and philosophers who have tried to crack this conundrum. And happily, “Feeling & Knowing” has supplementary virtues that make it well worth reading.

Chief among these is how beautifully Damasio expatiates on the theme of feeling — on how feelings “arise in the interior of organisms, in the depth of viscera and fluids where the chemistry responsible for life in all its aspects reigns supreme.” Here the master scientist unites with the silken prose-stylist to produce one thrilling insight after another. For instance: The neural channels that convey feeling, in contrast to those tasked with other mental functions, are uninsulated from the cells that environ them, and from the blood itself. This biochemical nakedness permits “intimate cross talk between body structures and nervous system.” (D. H. Lawrence’s “thinking with the blood” is not, alas, a pure metaphor.)

Damasio may not have dispelled the mystery of consciousness in this book. But he has succeeded brilliantly in narrowing the gap between body and mind.

 

To Understand Human Cognition Scientists Look Beyond the Individual Brain To Study the Collective Mind

By UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN NOVEMBER 7, 2021

In a new paper, scientists suggest that efforts to understand human cognition should expand beyond the study of individual brains. They call on neuroscientists to incorporate evidence from social science disciplines to better understand how people think.

“Accumulating evidence indicates that memory, reasoning, decision-making and other higher-level functions take place across people,” the researchers wrote in a review in the journal Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. “Cognition extends into the physical world and the brains of others.”

The co-authors – neuroscientist Aron Barbey, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Richard Patterson, a professor emeritus of philosophy at Emory University; and Steven Sloman, a professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown University – wanted to address the limitations of studying brains in isolation, out of the context in which they operate and stripped of the resources they rely on for optimal function.

U. of I. psychology professor Aron Barbey and his colleagues maintain that human cognition is a collective endeavor. Credit: Photo by L. Brian Stauffer

“In cognitive neuroscience, the standard approach is essentially to assume that knowledge is represented in the individual brain and transferred between individuals,” Barbey said. “But there are, we think, important cases where those assumptions begin to break down.”

Take, for instance, the fact that people often “outsource” the task of understanding or coming to conclusions about complex subject matter, using other people’s expertise to guide their own decision-making.

“Most people will agree that smoking contributes to the incidence of lung cancer – without necessarily understanding precisely how that occurs,” Barbey said. “And when doctors diagnose and treat disease, they don’t transfer all of their knowledge to their patients. Instead, patients rely on doctors to help them decide the best course of action.

Richard Patterson is a professor emeritus of philosophy at Emory University. Credit: Photo by Cynthia Patterson

“Without relying on experts in our community, our beliefs would become untethered from the social conventions and scientific evidence that are necessary to support them,” he said. “It would become unclear, for example, whether ‘smoking causes lung cancer,’ bringing into question the truth of our beliefs, the motivation for our actions.”

To understand the role that knowledge serves in human intelligence, the researchers wrote that it is necessary to look beyond the individual and to study the community.

“Cognition is, to a large extent, a group activity, not an individual one,” Sloman said. “People depend on others for their reasoning, judgment and decision-making. Cognitive neuroscience is not able to shed light on this aspect of cognitive processing.”

The limitations of individual knowledge and human dependence on others for understanding are the themes of “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone,” a book Sloman wrote with Phil Fernbach, a cognitive scientist and professor of marketing at the University of Colorado.

“The challenge for cognitive neuroscience becomes how to capture knowledge that does not reside in the individual brain but is outsourced to the community,” Barbey said.

Neuroscientific methods such as functional MRI were designed to track activity in one brain at a time and have limited capacity for capturing the dynamics that occur when individuals interact in large communities, he said.

Steven A. Sloman is a co-author of “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone.” Credit: Photo by Thad Russell

Some neuroscientists are trying to overcome this limitation. In a recent study, researchers placed two people face-to-face in a scanner and tracked their brain activity and eye movements while they interacted. Other teams use a technique called “hyperscanning,” which allows the simultaneous recording of brain activity in people who are physically distant from each another but interacting online.

Such efforts have found evidence suggesting that the same brain regions are activated in people who are effectively communicating with one another or cooperating on a task, Barbey said. These studies are also showing how brains operate differently from one another, depending on the type of interaction and the context.

Several fields of research are ahead of neuroscience in understanding and embracing the collective, collaborative nature of knowledge, Patterson said. For example, “social epistemology” recognizes that knowledge is a social phenomenon that depends on community norms, a shared language and a reliable method for testing the trustworthiness of potential sources.

“Philosophers studying natural language also illustrate how knowledge relies on the community,” Patterson said. “For example, according to ‘externalism,’ the meaning of words depends on how they are used and represented within a social context. Thus, the meaning of the word and its correct use depends on collective knowledge that extends beyond the individual.”

To address these shortfalls, neuroscientists can look to other social science fields, Barbey said.

“We need to incorporate not only neuroscience evidence, but also evidence from social psychology, social anthropology and other disciplines that are better positioned to study the community of knowledge,” he said.

Reference: “Cognitive Neuroscience Meets the Community of Knowledge” by Steven A. Sloman, Richard Patterson and Aron K. Barbey, 21 October 2021, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience.
DOI: 10.3389/fnsys.2021.675127

Aron Barbey is professor of psychology, neuroscience, and bioengineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an affiliate of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.

 

Evidence of Prehistoric Human Activity Discovered on Falkland Islands

By UNIVERSITY OF MAINE NOVEMBER 7, 2021

Kit Hamley holds a large male sea lion skull from a bone pile at New Island. Dozens of individual sea lions were present throughout the bone pile assemblages excavated at New Island. Credit: Kit Hamley

Since its first recorded sighting by European explorers in the 1600s, scientists and historians have believed that Europeans were the first people to ever set foot on the Falkland Islands. Findings from a new University of Maine-led study, however, suggests otherwise; that human activity on the islands predates European arrival by centuries. 

Kit Hamley, National Science Foundation graduate research fellow with the UMaine Climate Change Institute, spearheaded the first-ever scientific investigation into prehistoric human presence on the Southern Atlantic archipelago. She and her team collected animal bones, charcoal records and other evidence from across the islands over multiple expeditions and examined them for indications of human activity using radiocarbon dating and other laboratory techniques.

One notable sign of pre-European human activity derived from a 8,000-year-old charcoal record collected from a column of peat on New Island, located in the southwestern edge of the territory. According to researchers, the record showed signs of a marked increase in fire activity in 150 C.E., then abrupt and significant spikes in 1410 C.E., and 1770 C.E., the latter of which corresponds with initial European settlement. 

Researchers also gathered sea lion and penguin samples on New Island near the site where a landowner discovered a stone projectile point that is consistent with the technology Indigenous South Americans have used for the past 1,000 years. The bones were heaped in discrete piles at one site. Hamley says the location, volume and type of bones indicated that the mounds were likely assembled by humans. 

Most of the evidence Hamley and her colleagues collected indicated that Indigenous South Americans likely traveled to the Falkland Islands between 1275 C.E. and 1420 C.E. Arrival dates prior to 1275 C.E., however, cannot be ruled out because some evidence dates back even earlier, according to researchers. For example, the team found a tooth from an extinct Falkland Islands fox called the warrah with a radiocarbon date of 3450 B.C.E., the oldest for the species. Regardless, all of the team’s findings indicate that people landed in the archipelago before British navigator John Strong in 1690, the first European to set foot on the archipelago. 

Indigenous people likely visited the islands for multiple short-term stays, as opposed to long-term occupation, according to the UMaine researchers. As a result, they left few cultural materials there, but enough for Hamley and her colleagues to find a discernible anthropogenic and paleoecological footprint and conduct their study. 

“These findings broaden our understanding of Indigenous movement and activity in the remote and harsh South Atlantic Ocean,” says Hamley, a UMaine Ph.D. student of ecology and environmental sciences. “This is really exciting because it opens up new doors for collaborating with descendant Indigenous communities to increase our understanding of past ecological changes throughout the region. People have long speculated that it was likely that Indigenous South Americans had reached the Falkland Islands, so it is really rewarding to get to play a role in helping bring that part of the past to life of the islands.”

UMaine researchers who participated in the study with Hamley include her adviser, Jacquelyn Gill, an associate professor of paleoecology and plant ecology; Daniel Sandweiss, a professor of anthropology; and Brenda Hall, a professor of glacial geology. 

Other investigators involved in the research include Dulcinea Groff, a postdoctoral research scientist at the University of Wyoming and former UMaine Ph.D. student; Kathryn Krasinski, an assistant professor of anthropology at Adelphi University; John Southon; a researcher with the Department of Earth System Science at the University of California-Irvine; Paul Brickle, executive director of the South Atlantic Environmental Research Institute; and Thomas Lowell, a geology professor with the University of Cincinnati. 

Science Advances, a journal from the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS), published a report of their findings. 

Hamley’s most recent study builds on her research into the warrah (Dusicyon australis), an extinct species of fox. The warrah was the only native and terrestrial mammal to reside on the Falkland Islands at the time of European arrival. Subsequent hunting wiped the species out in 1856, making it the first extinct canid in the historic record, Hamley says. 

For years, various scholars, including Charles Darwin, have debated the warrah’s origins and how it came to the islands. Hamley hypothesizes that humans may have introduced the species to the archipelago prior to European settlement. Many previously rejected the theory based on a prior lack of scientific evidence, but the latest findings from Hamley’s team reopens that possibility, she says. Indigenous South Americans may have domesticated warrah as they have with other foxes and canids, and brought them to the islands during their voyages and short-term stays. 

During a 2018 expedition to the islands, Hamely and her colleagues found three warrah bone samples at Spring Point Farm in West Falkland. Carbon dating and isotopic analysis revealed the warrah whose bones were analyzed “had a marine-based diet consisting primarily of apex marine predators” like sea lions and fur seals, a similar diet to seafaring Indigenious South Americans in prehistoric times, according to researchers. While these findings could reflect coastal scavenging, it may exemplify the food their potential human counterparts were procuring and eating, researchers say. 

“This study has the potential to change the trajectory of future ecological research in The Falklands,” says Hamley. “The introduction of a top predator, like the warrah, could have had profound implications for the biodiversity of the islands, which are home to ground nesting seabirds such as penguins, albatross, and cormorants. It also changes the ever-captivating story of past human-canine relationships. We know that Indigenous South Americans domesticated foxes, but this study helps show how potentially important these animals were to those communities extending back thousands of years.” 

Hamley conducted her research during three expeditions to the Falkland Islands in 2014, 2016 and 2018. During the 2016 journey, she participated in UMaine’s Follow a Researcher program, through which scientists give K–12 students a glimpse of their work through live expedition updates, Twitter chats and videos. 

The study led by Hamley contributes to the growing body of scientific investigations into the ecological, anthropological and climate history of the Falklands Islands conducted by UMaine researchers. A 2020 UMaine-led study discovered that the establishment of seabird colonies on the islands in response to an abrupt regional cooling period 5,000 years ago changed its ecosystems. 

“As the world warms, we hope our growing understanding of the pre-colonial history of the Falklands will help decision-makers balance the needs of wildlife and people, who rely on ecotourism, fisheries and other industries,” says Gill, an NSF CAREER researcher who was named a 2020 Friend of the Planet by the National Center for Science Education. “We’re only just beginning to piece together the role people played in the Falklands before European settlement. Because of centuries of colonialism on the mainland, a lot of the oral knowledge about this period was lost. Western science needs updating, and we hope future work will be done in collaboration with the modern-day Indigenous people in the region; their ancestors were the first experts here.”

Reference: “Evidence of prehistoric human activity in the Falkland Islands” by Kit M. Hamley, Jacquelyn L. Gill, Kathryn E. Krasinski, Dulcinea V. Groff, Brenda L. Hall, Daniel H. Sandweiss, John R. Southon, Paul Brickle and Thomas V. Lowell, 27 October 2021, Science Advances.
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abh3803

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Sustainably Mining Rare Earth Elements From Fertilizer Byproduct

By PENN STATE UNIVERSITY NOVEMBER 6, 2021

Penn State engineers received a National Science Foundation grant to recover rare earth elements from phosphogypsum, a fertilizer byproduct stored indefinitely in open dumps and pumped into designated lakes, shown here.

Despite their name, rare earth elements are not actually that rare. The 17 metallic elements are ubiquitous in nature and are becoming even more common in technology, as a critical component of microchips and more. The “rare” description pertains to how difficult they are to extract into a useable form. The normal technique to pull them from composite minerals is typically energy intensive and produces significant carbon emissions, and a large portion of rare earth elements are lost in waste from other industrial processes. 

To develop a more sustainable process that can retrieve rare earth elements from phosphogypsum, a byproduct of fertilizer production, Penn State researchers were awarded a four-year, $571,658 National Science Foundation grant as part of a collaboration with Case Western Reserve University and Clemson University totaling $1.7 million in funding. Each university is independently funded to pursue a specific aspect of the project, but the project is centrally coordinated by researchers at Case Western Reserve. Lauren Greenlee, associate professor of chemical engineering, is leading the Penn State effort with co-principal investigator Rui Shi, assistant professor of chemical engineering. 

“Today, an estimated 200,000 tons of rare earth elements are trapped in unprocessed phosphogypsum waste in Florida alone,” Greenlee said, explaining that phosphogypsum is piped to ditches and ponds for indefinite storage. “This source of rare earth elements is presently untapped due to challenges associated with radioactive species and the difficulty of separating the individual elements. The vision for this project is to discover new separation mechanisms, materials and processes to recover valuable resources, including rare earth elements, fertilizers and clean water, from waste streams of the fertilizer industry, paving the way for a sustainable domestic supply of rare earth elements and a sustainable agriculture sector.”

Greenlee also noted that the United States relies largely on international sources for rare earth element supplies, and the COVID-19 pandemic has caused lengthy delays in the supply chains. 

“It’s a significant problem that’s compounded by the economic, environmental, and security complexities of obtaining and using rare earth elements internationally,” Greenlee said.  

Phosphogypsum is formed when phosphate rock is processed into fertilizer, and contains small amounts of naturally occurring radioactive elements, such as uranium and thorium. Because of this radioactivity, the byproduct is stored indefinitely, and improper storage can contaminate soil, water and the atmosphere. To harvest the rare earth elements trapped in phosphogypsum, the researchers propose a multistage process using engineered peptides capable of precisely identifying and separating out the rare earth elements through a specialized membrane. 

“Individual rare earth elements have similar sizes and identical formal charges, so traditional membrane separation mechanisms are insufficient,” Greenlee said. “A key technical goal of this research is to discover the mechanisms that underpin peptide-ion selectivity and leverage those mechanisms to design a new class of highly selective membranes.”

Case Western Reserve researchers Christine Duval, principal investigator and assistant professor of chemical engineering, and Julie Renner, co-principal investigator and assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, will develop the molecules to latch to specific rare earth elements. Their design will be guided by computational modeling work by Rachel Getman, principal investigator and associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Clemson. Once the peptides are developed, Greenlee will investigate how they work in water solutions, while Shi will use systems analysis tools, including techno-economic analysis and life cycle assessment, to evaluate the environmental impacts and economic feasibility of the proposed rare earth elements-recovery system under various design and operating conditions.

“What are the overall sustainability implications of this process?” Shi asked. “We want to navigate away from the current environmental impacts to be more sustainable, and we can do that by translating the fundamental research and laboratory-scale results to systems-level environmental and economic impacts. Then, we can integrate the sustainability results back into design to guide future research targets while advancing rare earth element recovery and phosphogypsum processing.”

The proposed project will also complement other Penn State research, including work using naturally occurring protein molecules to extract grouped rare earth elements from other industrial waste sources. 

“For our project, the hypothesis is that water molecules associated with the peptides binding to the rare earth elements reorganize, and we can precisely control that reorganization to be more efficient based on the individual rare earth element,” Greenlee said, noting that her team will examine the interactions at the atomic level by using X-ray absorption spectroscopy to validate how the molecules exchange atoms as they bind. “With modeling and experimentation, we’ll continue to iterate to ensure we understand how the molecules work together.”