ACM launches new journal on autonomous transportation systems

ACM JATS now accepting submissions

Business Announcement

ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTING MACHINERY

The potential of autonomous cars, buses and trucks to revolutionize transportation and society is one of the most anticipated subjects in technology. Several companies have already developed working prototypes of autonomous vehicles and billions of dollars have been invested in research and development. At the same time, important challenges remain in the effort to bring autonomous transportation to the general public.

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, announced it is now accepting submissions for a new publication, the ACM Journal on Autonomous Transportation Systems (JATS). In launching the new journal, the ACM JATS editorial team recognizes that the area of autonomous transportation systems is at a critical point where issues related to data, models, computation, and scale are increasingly important. Based on the significant growth in research activity around autonomous transportation in areas including computer science, electrical engineering, civil engineering, sensor technology, and artificial intelligence, the new journal is envisioned as a timely addition to the field.

The ACM Journal on Autonomous Transportation Systems aims to cover the topics in design, analysis, and control of autonomous transportation systems. The expected topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Data Science in autonomous transportation systems
• Communication and real-time control in connected transportation systems
• Smart traffic analysis, management, and control solutions
• Public transit planning and operation
• Algorithm design for autonomous transportation systems
• Mathematical modelling of traffic flow
• Computation in transportation networks
• Algorithms for urban and inter-city logistics systems
• The latest advances in unmanned aerial systems

“Certainly, one of the main questions the public has with respect to autonomous vehicle systems is “Will they be safe?” explained JATS Co-Editor-in-Chief Satish V. Ukkusuri, Professor of Civil Engineering, Purdue University. “Ensuring the reliability of these systems will be a multidisciplinary effort, encompassing subdisciplines of computer science (including data processing and computer vision), electrical engineering (including the design and efficiency of sensors), and civil engineering (including how roadways should be planned to accommodate the specific needs of these vehicles). We envision JATS as a venue that will present outstanding research as well as allow for a continuous dialogue between these essential disciplines—all with a focus on collaboration to move the field forward.”   

“Recent developments, especially in computing technology, have allowed for leapfrog improvements in autonomous transportation systems,” added JATS Co-Editor-in-Chief Vaneet Aggarwal, Professor of Industrial Engineering, Purdue University. “Some pressing problems include improved communication and cooperation on the road. Car-to-car communication will need to be seamless, and we must have a functioning infrastructure to process massive amounts of data in real time. Despite these challenges, we are on the cusp of a transformative new technology becoming widely available and the ACM JATS Journal will make a valuable contribution to this field.”

The first issue of ACM JATS is slated to be published in 2023. In addition to Co-EiC’s Ukkusuri and Aggarwal, the JATS editorial team includes 10 Associate Editors. Reflecting ACM’s global membership, the JATS editorial team is made up of professionals working in countries including Australia, China, Singapore, and the United States.

About ACM
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field’s challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession’s collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.

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Green hydrogen: Short-term scarcity, long-term uncertainty

However, historic analogues suggest that emergency-like policy measures could foster substantially higher growth rates.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

POTSDAM INSTITUTE FOR CLIMATE IMPACT RESEARCH (PIK)

Green hydrogen would likely supply less than 1 % of final energy globally by 2035, while the European Union might hit the 1% mark a little earlier by about 2030. In particular, the EU’s 2030 plan to supply 10 million tons of green hydrogen with domestic capacity will be out of reach, unless policy makers can foster growth that is unprecedented for energy technologies. By 2040, a breakthrough to higher green hydrogen shares is more likely, but large uncertainties prevail, which increase today’s investment risks. However, history shows that emergency-like policy measures could yield substantially higher growth rates, expediting the breakthrough and increasing the likelihood of future hydrogen availability.

It has spurred a surge of enthusiasm in recent years and plays a pivotal role in facilitating many net-zero emissions scenarios: Green hydrogen and derived e-fuels are based on renewable electricity and produced through a process called electrolysis, splitting water molecules H2O into Hydrogen and Oxygen. “Much of the debate and research around hydrogen has revolved around demand-related questions of suitable applications, markets, and sectors. But so far no study analyzed the bottleneck of possible expansion pathways for electrolysis - a supply technology in its infancy that needs to experience rapid innovation and deployment to unleash its potential for climate change mitigation”, lead author Adrian Odenweller from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) explains.

A breakthrough for green hydrogen is not a given – decisive policy action is required

Today’s electrolysers are mostly small and individually manufactured; yet, global capacity needs to grow 6000-8000 fold by 2050 to contribute to climate neutrality scenarios compatible with the Paris Agreement. This dwarfs the simultaneously required 10-fold increase of renewable power, which is readily available and cost competitive.

Using an energy technology diffusion computer simulation and exploring thousands of possible worlds, the research team took a deep dive into probability and feasibility of ramping up electrolysis capacities.

“The broad success of green hydrogen is not at all a given. Even with electrolysis capacities growing as fast as wind and solar power, there is strong evidence of short-term scarcity and long-term uncertainty in terms of green hydrogen availability,” PIK co-author Falko Ueckerdt says. “Both impede investment in hydrogen end-uses and infrastructure, reducing green hydrogen’s potential and jeopardizing climate targets. Nonetheless, while this might make green hydrogen a risky bet from a policy perspective, historic analogues also suggest that emergency-like policy measures could foster substantially higher growth rates, expediting the breakthrough and increasing the likelihood of future hydrogen availability”. Such analogues include situations of wartime mobilisation (e.g. US aircraft or liberty ships in World War II), of massive public investments and central coordination (e.g. nuclear power in France or high-speed rail in China), or of market-driven deployment of highly modular IT innovations with low coordination requirements (e.g internet hosts or smartphones).

Investing political capital with growing knowledge, balancing remaining risks

Knowledge about hydrogen – from availability to costs – will grow very fast in the coming years, the authors argue. Fostering rapid investments into green hydrogen supply chains that enable unconventionally high growth rates of electrolysis would broaden the feasibility space beyond what has been experienced for energy analogues such as wind and solar. “This could break the vicious cycle of uncertain supply, insufficient demand, and incomplete infrastructure, and turn it into a positive feedback mechanism, in which each component bolsters the others. Short-term scarcity and long-term uncertainty are two sides of the same coin and could be resolved together through stronger policy support that engenders shared expectations of rapid growth,” says co-author Gregory Nemet of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Policies that kick-start a rapid deployment of electrolysers delivering Gigawatt-scale capacities in the upcoming few years could help to unlock substantial innovation and scaling effects and allow green hydrogen to meet demand in sectors inaccessible to direct electrification, according to the study. In conjunction with expanding renewable electricity, it could keep the window open to reaching a broader and more prominent role of hydrogen in a climate-neutral energy system.

However, policy makers should be aware that there remains a risk of overestimating green hydrogen’s potential, PIK co-author Gunnar Luderer notes: “Even under favourable developments for the foreseeable future, hydrogen supply will be much too scarce to substitute fossil fuel use on a broad scale. Policymakers should prioritize hydrogen incentives in sectors where no other alternatives exist, such as heavy industry (e.g. steel), or power supply in hours of low wind and solar electricity generation. However, hydrogen cannot be used as excuse to delay the roll-out of other readily available clean options such as electric mobility or heat pumps. To effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit climate risks, we need to scale all crucial zero-carbon technologies with full effort.”

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JOURNAL

Nature Energy

DOI

10.1038/s41560-022-01097-4 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Probabilistic feasibility space of scaling up green hydrogen supply

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

8-Sep-2022

Chlamydia’s stealthy cloaking device identified

Microbial proteins around a sexually transmitted infection allow pathogen to hide undetected inside host cells

Peer-Reviewed Publication

DUKE UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: AT LEFT: A WILD TYPE CHLAMYDIA (GREEN) SURROUNDED BY THE GARD PROTEIN (RED) THAT CLOAKS IT FROM DETECTION INSIDE HUMAN CELLS. RIGHT: CHLAMYDIA WITH GARD KNOCKED OUT (GREEN) ARE ENVELOPED BY THE ANTIMICROBIAL PROTEINS UBIQUITIN (YELLOW) AND RNF213 (MAGENTA). view more 

CREDIT: STEPHEN C. WALSH, DUKE UNIVERSITY

DURHAM, N.C. – Chlamydia, the leading cause of sexually transmitted bacterial infections, evades detection and elimination inside human cells by use of a cloaking device. But Duke University researchers have grasped the hem of that invisibility cloak and now hope they can pull it apart.

To enter the cell and peacefully reproduce, many pathogenic bacteria, including Chlamydia, cloak themselves in a piece of the cell’s membrane, forming an intracellular free-floating bubble called a vacuole or, in the case of Chlamydia, an inclusion. Chlaymydia’s cloak appears to be especially effective at evading the cell’s built-in immunity, allowing the infection to last for months.

A Duke team led by graduate student Stephen Walsh and Jörn Coers, PhD, an associate professor of molecular genetics and microbiology in the Duke School of Medicine, wanted to know how the cloaking worked.

“We knew there was the potential to kill Chlamydia, but when we did experiments with the human-adapted form, Chlamydia trachomatis, it was very good at growing in human cell cultures,” Coers said. Even after the scientists used an immune stimulant to alert the cell’s defense systems of the presence of Chlamydia, nothing happened. “We said, there’s the pathogen. Our defense system should see it. Why does it not see it?”

They ran their experiments again using a mouse-adapted version of the Chlamydia bacteria in human cells to see how the cell’s immune system responded to a non-human pathogen.

“Humans, don’t get mouse Chlamydia because it evolved with mice and human Chlamydia evolved with humans,” Coers said. “So there’s this really fine-tuned adaptation that the pathogen has undergone.” The mouse version of the bacterial inclusion was readily identified and labeled for destruction in human cells. 

“Chlamydia trachomatis is so good at evading our human responses,” Coers said. “It still causes an inflammatory disease, but it's a very slow disease.”

This evolutionary arms race between the immune system and the pathogen has been going on for millions of years. “Mouse and human adapted Chlamydia have a common ancestor,” Coers said. “However, this common ancestor may go back as far as when humans and rodents basically split from each other. This is a long time for the bacteria to really fine-tune their interactions with their host species.”

Working with Duke MGM colleagues Raphael Valdivia and Robert Bastidas, the researchers ran a large genetic screen of Chlamydia that identified a protein, GarD (gamma resistance determinant), that appeared to be blocking the host cell’s ability to mark a Chlamydia inclusion for destruction by the immune system.

Mutating their GarD genes left the bacteria vulnerable. “GarD is the stealth factor,” Coers said.

Specifically, GarD interferes with the ability of a giant signaling protein called RNF213 or mysterin to sense small bits of bacterial molecules poking out of the shell of the inclusion. “RNF213 is basically the eyes of the immune system,” Coers said. Having blinded mysterin in this fashion, the signal for immune flagging and destruction is never started.

The inside of a cell is swarming with these little bubbles of membrane-covered vacuoles; most are friends, but some, like the Chlamydia inclusion, are foes.

“There's so many different types of membranes and vacuoles that live inside a cell,” Coers said. “How is the immune system able to find the rare vacuole that contains a pathogen? In the case of Chlamydia, we really don't have the answer to that question. But whatever it is, we believe this enzyme (mysterin) is seeing it.”

Unfortunately, that’s all the further this story goes for now, Coers said. This is a great new insight into a pernicious infection, but several steps away from a therapy. Researchers still need to figure out how mysterin sees those bacterial molecules in the first place and how GarD blinds mysterin.

“If you could find a mechanism to deactivate GarD, then you can turn human Chlamydia into mouse Chlamydia,” Coers said. “That would allow us to harness the powers of our own immune system to clear infection.”

New Chlamydia infections occur in 200,000 Americans per year and are often asymptomatic for months or even years while being transmissible through sexual contact. With time, an untreated infection can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy and female infertility.

The US Centers for Disease Control recommends that young women be tested for Chlamydia annually.

This research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (A030801, AI150106, AI140019,U19-AI084044) and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

CITATION: “The Bacterial Effector GarD Shields Chlamydia Trachomatis Inclusoins from RNF213-Mediated Ubiquitylation and Destruction,” Stephen Walsh, Jeffrey Reitano, Mary Dikinson, Miriam Kutsch, Dulcemaria Hernandez, Alyson Barnes, Benjamin Schott, Liuyan Wang, Dennis Ko, So Young Kim, Raphael Valdivia, Robert Bastidas, Jörn Coers. Cell Host & Microbe, Nov. 9, 2022.

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JOURNAL

Cell Host & Microbe

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

The Bacterial Effector GarD Shields Chlamydia Trachomatis Inclusoins from RNF213-Mediated Ubiquitylation and Destruction

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

9-Nov-2022

Intelligent microscopes for detecting rare biological events

Peer-Reviewed Publication

ECOLE POLYTECHNIQUE FÉDÉRALE DE LAUSANNE

 

IMAGE: SULIANA MANLEY'S FLUORESCENT MICROSCOPE AT EPFL. MORE PHOTOS : HTTPS://GO.EPFL.CH/2022INTELLIGENTMICROSCOPES view more 

CREDIT: HILLARY SANCTUARY / EPFL

Imagine you’re a PhD student with a fluorescent microscope and a sample of live bacteria. What’s the best way use these resources to obtain detailed observations of bacterial division from the sample?

You may be tempted to forgo food and rest, to sit at the microscope non-stop and acquire images when bacterial finally division starts.  (It can take hours for one bacterium to divide!) It’s not as crazy as it sounds, since manual detection and acquisition control is widespread in many of the sciences.

Alternatively, you may want to set the microscope to take images indiscriminately and as often as possible. But excessive light depletes the fluorescence from the sample faster and can prematurely destroy living samples. Plus, you’d generate many uninteresting images, since only a few would contain images of dividing bacteria.

Another solution would be to use artificial intelligence to detect precursors to bacterial division and use these to automatically update the microscope’s control software to take more pictures of the event.

Drum roll… yes, EPFL biophysicists have indeed found a way to automate microscope control for imaging biological events in detail while limiting stress on the sample, all with the help of artificial neural networks. Their technique works for bacterial cell division, and for mitochondrial division. The details of their intelligent microscope are described in Nature Methods.

“An intelligent microscope is kind of like a self-driving car. It needs to process certain types of information, subtle patterns that it then responds to by changing its behavior,” explains principal investigator Suliana Manley of EPFL’s Laboratory of Experimental Biophysics. “By using a neural network, we can detect much more subtle events and use them to drive changes in acquisition speed.”

Manley and her colleagues first solved how to detect mitochondrial division, more difficult than for bacteria such as C. crescentus. Mitochondrial division is unpredictable, since it occurs infrequently, and can happen almost anywhere within the mitochondrial network at any moment. But the scientists solved the problem by training the neural network to look out for mitochondrial constrictions, a change in shape of mitochondria that leads to division, combined with observations of a protein known to be enriched at sites of division.

When both constrictions and protein levels are high, the microscope switches into high-speed imaging to capture many images of division events in detail. When constriction and protein levels are low, the microscope then switches to low-speed imaging to avoid exposing the sample to excessive light.

With this intelligent fluorescent microscope, the scientists showed that they could observe the sample for longer compared to standard fast imaging. While the sample was more stressed compared to standard slow imaging, they were able to obtain more meaningful data.

 “The potential of intelligent microscopy includes measuring what standard acquisitions would miss,” Manley explains. “We capture more events, measure smaller constrictions, and can follow each division in greater detail.”

The scientists are making the control framework available as an open source plug-in for the open microscope software Micro-Manager, with the aim of allowing other scientists to integrate artificial intelligence into their own microscopes.

 

#openscience #opensoftware #openplugin #fluorescentmicroscopy #bacteria #mitochondria

 

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JOURNAL

Nature Methods

DOI

10.1038/s41592-022-01589-x 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Imaging analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Cells

ARTICLE TITLE

Event-driven acquisition for content-enriched microscopy

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

8-Sep-2022

The science of super-recognizers’ amazing feats of recognition

New research in Psychological Science finds that super-recognizers distribute their gaze more evenly than typical viewers.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

ASSOCIATION FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

Editor’s note: This release is a slight modification of a release originally distributed by the University of Wollongong on September 1.

Super-recognizers never forget a face. They can catch a glimpse of their childhood friend in a rearview mirror and instantly know it's them. They help police departments and security agencies identify suspects. They also make good private detectives and unofficial investigators. 

But as fascinating as their superpower is, it remains poorly understood. Until now, scientists have believed super-recognizers were so good with faces because they processed them holistically by taking a facial snapshot and memorizing it.

In a paper published August 31 in the journal Psychological Science, psychologists from UNSW Sydney and the University of Wollongong (UOW) challenged this view, proving that super-recognizers—who  make up about 2 percent of society—look at faces just like all of us, but do it faster and more accurately.

How does this happen?

UNSW researcher and study lead author Dr. James Dunn explains that when super-recognizers catch a glimpse of a new face, they divide it into parts and then store these in the brain as composite images.

“They are still able to recognize faces better than others even when they can only see smaller regions at a time. This suggests that they can piece together an overall impression from smaller chunks, rather than from a holistic impression taken in a single glance,” Dunn said.

For the purpose of the study, co-lead author Dr. Sebastien Miellet, UOW researcher in the School of Psychology and an expert in active vision, used eye-tracking technology to analyze how super-recognizers scan and process faces and their parts.

“With much precision, we can see not only where people look but also which bits of visual information they use,” Miellet said.

When studying super-recognizers’ visual processing patterns, Dunn and Miellet realized that contrary to typical recognizers, super-recognizers focused less on the eye region and distributed their gaze more evenly than typical viewers, extracting information from other facial features, particularly when learning faces.

“So the advantage of super-recognizers is their ability to pick up highly distinctive visual information and put all the pieces of a face together like a puzzle, quickly and accurately,” Miellet said.

UNSW and UOW researchers will continue to study the super-recognizer population.

Miellet believes that one hypothesis is that super-recognizers’ superpower may stem from a particular curiosity and behavioral interest in other people. Potentially, super-recognizers may also be more empathetic than most of us.

“In the next stages of our study, we'll equip some super-recognizers and typical viewers with a portable eye tracker and release them onto the streets to observe, not in the lab but in real life, how they interact with the world,” Miellet said.

About the Research

‘Face information sampling in super-recognizers’, by Dunn James D*., Varela Victor P. L., Nicholls Victoria I., Papinutto Michael, White David, Miellet Sebastien* is published in Psychological Science, 2022. Preprint DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/z2k4a

*Equal contribution

About the Researcher

Dr. Sebastien Miellet is a researcher and lecturer in UOW’s School of Psychology and leader of the Active Vision lab where his research team analyses oculomotor strategies and how they impact face processing, scene perception, pedestrian safety, reading etc.

Media Resources

Dr. Sebastien Miellet is available for interviews through the UOW Media Office.

High-resolution images of Dr Miellet are available for download from Dropbox here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/3uhxg6fz56wvpvl/AADhFc1gnaywP_BAUT8982r8a?dl=0

Media Contacts

Alex Reszelska, Media and Public Relations, UOW

M: 0498 964 183 | E: areszelska@uow.edu.au 

UOW Media Office, T: +61 4221 4227 | E: media@uow.edu.au

To get in touch with Dr James Dunn, contact Lachlan Gilbert at UNSW Media, T: +61 2 9065 5241

E: lachlan.gilbert@unsw.edu.au

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JOURNAL

Psychological Science

DOI

10.1177/09567976221096320 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Face-Information Sampling in Super-Recognizers

Study: Minority, immigrant populations faced misinformation, hostility when seeking COVID-19 information online

Subjects sought information from US, home country sources, but experienced unique challenges

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS

LAWRENCE — When the COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe, many people turned to online sources to find health information. That was also largely the case for racial and ethnic minority populations in the United States, and a new study from the University of Kansas found they faced many of the same challenges such as encountering misinformation online, but also unique factors such as harassment, hostility and racial animus. They also relied on media from the United States and their home countries, as well as social media for information, but were hesitant to push back against misinformation.

Mass communications researchers at KU conducted in-depth interviews in early 2021 with 49 racial/ethnic minority individuals in the Midwest who migrated to the United States since 2014 about their COVID-19 online information experiences. In addition to the findings about where and how they received information, the study also found younger and healthier people showed more resistance to being vaccinated. The findings can help scholars, digital media and health communicators develop more effective health messaging and minority communication, the researchers wrote.

The study was written by Annalise Baines, doctoral candidate in KU’s William Allen White School of Journalism & Mass Communications; Hyunjin Seo, professor of journalism & mass communications and director of KU’s Center for Digital Inclusion; Muhammad Ittefaq, of James Madison University and former KU doctoral student; Fatemeh Shayesteh, doctoral candidate in journalism at KU; Ursula Kamanga of the University of Nevada; and Yuchen Liu of Cleveland State University. The study was published in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. 

The United States is home to more immigrants than any other country and was simultaneously hit hard by the pandemic. Those factors led researchers to examine how racial/ethnic minorities and immigrants navigated the pandemic and found information. Notably, most interviewees reported turning to online media from the U.S. and their country-of-origin to find information. While that information could prove helpful, it also provided an avenue for misinformation and harassment that was rampant on social media.

“We found that many of our interviewees rely on the news and social media, including Facebook and YouTube, to find health information during the pandemic. Noticeably, many participants use media sources from their country-of-origin as well as U.S. based sources. However, while these platforms allowed them to receive social support and find the necessary information about COVID-19 protections and other information, at times these networks created more stress and fear amongst the participants,” Baines said. “For instance, several interviewees described looking at and receiving hateful messages and racial slurs online, particularly among those immigrants from Asian countries. Unfortunately, these findings are not that surprising as people who migrated from Asian countries have faced xenophobia related to COVID-19 on social media since early 2020 when prominent individuals called it the ‘Chinese virus.’”

That added stress was illustrated by one interviewee, a 56-year-old woman who emigrated from South Korea.

‘I saw hateful comments toward Asian immigrants, some posts more specific to people from China, on Facebook calling them ‘spreaders of coronavirus’ while using F-words,” she said. “These experiences got me really stressed and nervous, so I didn’t want to visit even social media sites for a while.”

In addition to a hostile online environment, roughly two-thirds of participants also encountered misinformation, largely on social media such as Facebook and WhatsApp, and reported seeing it both coming from the U.S. and their countries of origin. However, they also largely reported treading carefully when deciding whether to correct or address the misinformation. They commonly wanted to consider cultural norms in both countries and expressed uncertainty in political beliefs of the person sharing the misinformation. But, when it was coming from family members or close friends, they were more likely to correct or push back against incorrect information.

Researchers also asked interviewees about their willingness to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. When asked in early 2021, as vaccines were beginning to become widely available to the public, about one-fifth said they would not get vaccinated, or at least “not for now.” The majority of those respondents were young and healthy, and they reported both a lower perceived risk or susceptibility to the virus and lower perceived benefit of a vaccine, as opposed to those who said they intended to get the shot.

Like their experiences in gathering information about the pandemic, respondents reported using both U.S. and country-of-origin media, as well as social media and information from friends and families, in making their vaccine decisions. Experience and information from friends and family most often influenced how much they trusted vaccines and their willingness to get them.

As racial/ethnic minorities and immigrants constitute a substantial part of the American population, better understanding how they obtain health information, especially during a pandemic and how that information affects vaccine willingness, can assist both researchers and those working in the health field, the research team wrote. For scholars, the study both provided new and needed empirical data on minority immigrants in terms of health beliefs and shed more light on the Health Belief Model, a theoretical framework commonly used in health research.

The findings can also help ensure accurate information is readily available for those seeking information on health-related topics such as the pandemic and how to address specific challenges such as harassment or reluctance to push back against misinformation.

“The findings from this study highlight the importance and urgency for media organizations, health care providers, policymakers and government entities to take measures to create better information environments related to COVID-19 on social media,” Baines said. “We found that two-thirds of our sample was exposed in some way to misinformation online. It is essential for relevant organizations to identify and eliminate misinformation online and provide an information hub tailored for specific populations so that any needs of underserved immigrant populations can be addressed.”

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JOURNAL

Convergence The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

DOI

10.1177/13548565221116075 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Survey

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Race/ethnicity, online information and COVID-19 vaccination: Study of minority immigrants’ internet use for health-related information

Tropical soils highly sensitive to global warming, warn researchers

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS

 

IMAGE: THE UNDERGROUND HEATING SYSTEM BEING INSTALLED IN THE FOREST PLOTS ON BARRO COLORADO ISLAND, PANAMA. view more 

CREDIT: GEETHA IYER.

Tropical soils highly sensitive to global warming, warn researchers

Global warming is likely to cause a decline in the number of species of microbes that live in tropical soils which could threaten the biodiversity of rainforests and increase carbon emissions, according to new research.

Microorganisms, which include bacteria and fungi, play a key role in the health of tropical forest ecosystems. They breakdown dead organic matter, either using the carbon it contains and transforming it or release it into the environment as CO2.

About a third of the carbon stored in soils is held in tropical soils - and they support around two-thirds of the world’s plant biomass.

Climate models suggest the tropics could warm by two to five degrees centigrade by the end of the century. To date, there has been little scientific research into the impact this level of warming could have on the tropical soil microbes that play a key role in plant health and in mediating carbon emissions into the environment.

Scientists heat a rainforest to simulate global warming

In a ground-breaking experiment on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, an international team of researchers led by the University of Leeds investigated what would happen if tropical soils were exposed to the levels of global warming that are being predicted by climate models.

They rigged an underground heating system to warm five experimental plots in a lowland tropical forest which they compared with unheated control plots.

Two years after the system was switched on, Dr Andrew Nottingham, a forest ecologist based at Leeds who led the study, said there were two major and unexpected findings.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Microbiology, Dr Nottingham and his team report that the biodiversity - or number of species of microbes - in the heated plots declined even though long-standing theory suggests the diversity of bacteria would increase when soil temperature goes up.

But the study found that many of the main bacterial and fungal groups in the unheated ‘natural’ plots could not be found in the heated plots, whilst they also identified bacteria and fungi in the heated plots that were not detected in the control plots.

Dr Nottingham said: “This research is prompting us to think differently about the way a warmer climate may affect tropical soils, which support some of the world’s richest biodiversity and are a globally important store of carbon.

“If the results that we have seen in just two years are representative of what will occur in global tropical soils, then there will be a major negative impact on the rich ecosystems they support. A major question is whether any of the microbes missing in the warmed plots played a key role in soil functioning, because we know that soil diversity is correlated with soil health. There are further likely implications for plants as tropical rainforests include associations and symbioses between microbes in the soil and the vegetation.

“These links are highly specific - so changes in the make-up of the microbes in warming soils are likely to affect the associations, potentially making many of them impossible. So, a change in the microbe community is likely to prompt a change in the plant community above ground.”

CO2 emissions increased sharply

The second major finding related to CO2 emissions from the soils. In experiments outside of the tropics, scientists have found that as temperatures rise, the amount of CO2 released into the environment increases. Given the huge amount of carbon stored in soils globally, and especially in the tropics, only a small percentage increase in the rate at which it is released could have a sizeable impact on climate change. The rate of acceleration in C02 emissions in the warmed tropical soil was three times higher than predicted.

Dr Nottingham said: “The implications of these results is alarming – but by demonstrating how sensitive these ecosystems are to a warming climate, the results emphasise the urgency for conserving these biodiverse and carbon-rich ecosystems and to tightly limit current warming.”

Professor Patrick Meir, a lead collaborator on the project from the University of Edinburgh, added: “Climate manipulation experiments like this, set up in the natural environment, are difficult to do and are very rare, particularly in tropical forests, where biodiversity and carbon storage is very high.

“This critical new information on the risk from climate warming both to biodiversity loss in soils and increased carbon emissions will help us predict and plan better for the changes ahead.”

The researchers acknowledged that there are still a lot of questions that need resolving, including the response of plants to warming from above-ground, and most notably that how the changes that have been seen in the experimental plots in Panama would play out across global ecosystems.

END

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JOURNAL

Nature Microbiology

DOI

10.1038/s41564-022-01200-1 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Microbial diversity decline and respiration increase in warmed tropical soil exceed predictions as communities adapt

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

5-Sep-2022

Technological revolution of membrane process for water treatment: PTC pre-coagulation for fouling control of ceramic membrane

Peer-Reviewed Publication

HIGHER EDUCATION PRESS

 

IMAGE: NONE view more 

CREDIT: XIAOMAN LIU, CHANG TIAN, YANXIA ZHAO , WEIYING XU, DEHUA DONG, KAIMIN SHIH, TAO YAN, WEN SONG

Membrane technology is widely applied in water treatment for removing suspended particles, colloids, and organic pollutants from polluted water. As a typical representative of inorganic membrane with the outstanding advantage such as high flux and chemical-resistance, ceramic membrane has massive potential value on the treatment of surface water, municipal wastewater, and drinking water. However, membrane fouling is a critical issue for the development and promotion of membrane process. This issue exists widely in various membrane processes, especially during the pressure-driven process of wastewater filtration. As a result, ceramic membrane is also inevitably restricted by membrane fouling. Therefore, an effective pretreatment technology to reduce membrane fouling is urgently needed in water treatment process.

Coagulation is regarded as one of the most successful pretreatment technologies against membrane fouling due to its low cost, high performance and the ability to remove natural organic matters (NOM). At present, Al- and Fe-based salts are the most widespread coagulants due to superior coagulation performance and cost-efficiency. But the apply Al- and Fe-based salts are limited by the biological toxicity and effluent coloring respectively. An advanced process, titanium-based coagulants have attracted wide attention in recent years due to innocuity, excellent performance and sludge recycling. It is expected to be used as a new generation coagulant to replace Al- and Fe-based coagulants to achieve efficient and safe water purification.

Based on the case of emerging titanium-based coagulant (polytitanium chloride, PTC), the researchers from University of Jinan, Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences) and the University of Hong Kong evaluated the pre-coagulation performance of titanium-based coagulants which was compared with conventional Al-based coagulant (polyaluminum chloride, PAC), and used four varied mathematical models to synthetically investigate the fouling mechanisms of the following ceramic membrane cross-flow filtration. This study entitled “Enhanced cross-flow filtration with flat-sheet ceramic membranes by titanium-based coagulation for membrane fouling control” is published online in Frontiers of Environmental Science & Engineering in 2022.

In this study, the research team found that the filtration performance of ceramic membrane enhanced by the emerging titanium-based coagulant. The PTC showed a significant advantage over PAC, resulting in about 20% higher organic matter removal. The follow-on filtration of the PTC-coagulated effluent with ceramic membrane produced a filtrate with improved quality (about 78.0% removal of DOC) and a high flux of around 600 L/(m2·h). As a reference, the PVDF membrane filtration could obtain comparable DOC removal (about 77.0%), but with a low filtration flux of ca. 60 L/(m2·h) only. Four mathematical models were involved in simulating the fouling mechanisms of ceramic membranes. In PTC case, the membrane fouling was slower slighter due to the main fouling mechanism of cake filtration which was indicated by the classical Hermia’s model simulation, whereas for PAC, standard filtration/intermediate filtration (blocking of membrane pores) was also a key fouling mechanism. And the standard law filtration and classical cake filtration model reported by Visvanathan and Ben aïm were not fit for fouling characterization of the ceramic membrane with no identification of R2 values of all different cases. A segmented simulation was required to distinguish the difference of fouling mechanisms between PTC and PAC cases using linear classical Hermia’s model.

This study investigated the enhanced cross-flow performance of ceramic membrane by PTC pre-coagulation. It was found that the ceramic membrane filtration showed high performance for surface water treatment and the PTC pre-coagulation could signally enhance ceramic membrane filtration performance and effectively control ceramic membrane fouling. This work not only provides a high-effective pretreatment technology to enhance filtration performance in water treatment but also offers an illumination for the development and evaluation of the advanced pre-coagulation technologies against membrane fouling.

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Founded in May 1954, Higher Education Press Limited Company (HEP), affiliated with the Ministry of Education, is one of the earliest institutions committed to educational publishing after the establishment of P. R. China in 1949. After striving for six decades, HEP has developed into a major comprehensive publisher, with products in various forms and at different levels. Both for import and export, HEP has been striving to fill in the gap of domestic and foreign markets and meet the demand of global customers by collaborating with more than 200 partners throughout the world and selling products and services in 32 languages globally. Now, HEP ranks among China's top publishers in terms of copyright export volume and the world's top 50 largest publishing enterprises in terms of comprehensive strength.

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About Frontiers of Environmental Science & Engineering

Frontiers of Environmental Science & Engineering (FESE) is the leading edge forum for peer-reviewed original submissions in English on all main branches of environmental disciplines. FESE welcomes original research papers, review articles, short communications, and views & comments. All the papers will be published within 6 months since they are submitted. The Editors-in-Chief are Prof. Jiuhui Qu from Tsinghua University, and Prof. John C. Crittenden from Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. The journal has been indexed by almost all the authoritative databases such as SCI, Ei, INSPEC, SCOPUS, CSCD, etc.

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JOURNAL

Frontiers of Environmental Science & Engineering

DOI

10.1007/s11783-022-1531-x 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Enhanced cross-flow filtration with flat-sheet ceramic membranes by titanium-based coagulation for membrane fouling control

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

15-Aug-2022