Saturday, December 24, 2022

PROTECTIONI$T NATIONALI$M
Brexit has cracked Britain's economic foundations

Story by Hanna Ziady • CNN

It’s been two years since former Prime Minister Boris Johnson signed his Brexit trade deal and triumphantly declared that Britain would be “prosperous, dynamic and contented” after completing its exit from the European Union.

Brexit costs government £40bn a year in lost tax revenue
Duration 2:33  View on Watch

The Brexit deal would enable UK companies to “do even more business” with the European Union, according to Johnson, and would leave Britain free to strike trade deals around the world while continuing to export seamlessly to the EU market of 450 million consumers.

In reality, Brexit has hobbled the UK economy, which remains the only member of the G7 — the group of advanced economies that also includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States — with an economy smaller than it was before the pandemic.

Years of uncertainty over the future trading relationship with the European Union, Britain’s largest trading partner, have damaged business investment, which in the third quarter was 8% below pre-pandemic levels despite a UK-EU trade deal being in place for nearly two years.

And the pound has taken a beating, making imports more expensive and stoking inflation while failing to boost exports, even as other parts of the world have enjoyed a post-pandemic trade boom.

Brexit has erected trade barriers for UK businesses and foreign companies that used Britain as a European base. It’s weighing on imports and exports, sapping investment and contributing to labor shortages. All this has exacerbated Britain’s inflation problem, hurting workers and the business community.

“The most plausible reason as to why Britain is doing comparatively worse than comparable countries is Brexit,” according to L. Alan Winters, co-director of the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy at the University of Sussex.

The sense of gloom hanging over the UK economy is captured by striking workers, who are walking out in ever larger numbers over pay and conditions as the worst inflation in decades eats into their wages. At the same time, the government is cutting spending and hiking taxes to fill the hole in its budget.

While Brexit isn’t the cause of Britain’s cost-of-living crisis, it has made the problem more difficult to solve.

“The UK chose Brexit in a referendum, but the government then chose a particularly hard form of Brexit, which maximized the economic cost,” said Michael Saunders, a senior adviser at Oxford Economics and former Bank of England official. “Any hope for economic upside from Brexit is pretty much gone.”



NHS nurses strike over pay outside St Thomas' Hospital in London on December 20, 2022. - Maja Smiejkowska/Reuters


Businesses count the cost

Although Britain voted to leave the European Union in June 2016, its exit from the single market and customs union was finalized only on December 24, 2020, when the two sides finally agreed a free trade deal.

The Brexit deal, known as the Trade and Cooperation Agreement, came into effect on January 1, 2021.

It eliminated tariffs on most goods but introduced a raft of non-tariff barriers, such as border controls, customs checks, import duties and health inspections on plant and animal products.

Before Brexit, a farmer in Kent could ship a truckload of potatoes to Paris just as easily as they might send it to London. Those days are no more.

“We hear stories every single day from small businesses about the nightmare of forms, transportation, couriers, things getting stuck for weeks at a time… the epic length of the problems is just gobsmacking,” said Michelle Ovens, the founder of Small Business Britain, a campaign group.

“The way things have panned out in the last two years has been really bad for small businesses,” Ovens told CNN.

Researchers at the London School of Economics estimate that the variety of UK products exported to the European Union declined by 30% during the first year of Brexit. They said that this was likely because small exporters had exited small EU markets.

Take the example of Little Star, a UK company that makes jewelry for children. Its business took off in the Netherlands and it had plans to expand to France and Germany next. But since Brexit, only two of more than 30 of its Dutch customers are prepared to handle the costs and paperwork to obtain stock from the company.

Products that took two days to ship are now taking three weeks, while import duties and sales taxes have made it much harder to compete with European jewelers, according to Rob Walker, who co-founded the business with his wife, Vicky, in 2017. The company is now looking to the United States for growth opportunities.

“Isn’t it mad that we have to look to the other side of the Atlantic to do business, because it’s so difficult to do business with people 30 miles away?” Walker said.



A truck passes a Union Jack, at the Port of Dover on April 1, 2021. The UK government has delayed post-Brexit checks on EU food imports until the end of 2023.
 - Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg/Getty Images

A British Chambers of Commerce survey of more than 1,168 businesses published this month reported that 77% said Brexit has not helped them increase sales or grow their businesses. More than half said they were finding it difficult to adapt to the new rules for trading goods.

Siteright Construction Supplies, a manufacturer in Dorset, told the Chamber that importing parts from the European Union to fix broken machines has become a costly and “time-consuming nightmare.”

“Brexit has been the biggest-ever imposition of bureaucracy on business,” according to Siteright.

Nova Dog Chews, a producer of snacks for canines, said it would have lost all its EU trade had it not set up a base in the bloc. “This has cost our business a huge amount of money, which could have been invested in the UK had it not been for Brexit,” it added.

A UK government spokesperson told CNN that the government’s export support service has provided exporters with “practical support” on the implementation of the Brexit deal. The deal is “the world’s largest zero tariff, zero quota free trade deal,” the spokesperson added. “It secures the UK market access across key service sectors and opens new opportunities for UK businesses across the globe.”

Permanent damage to trade


Britain won’t easily replace what it has lost by forfeiting unfettered access to the world’s largest trading bloc.

The only substantive new trade deals it has struck since exiting the European Union, which did not simply roll over the deals it had as an EU member, have been with Australia and New Zealand. By the government’s own estimate, these will have a negligible impact on the UK economy, increasing GDP in the long run by just 0.1% and 0.03% respectively.

By contrast, the UK Office for Budget Responsibility, which produces economic forecasts for the government, expects Brexit to reduce Britain’s output by 4% over 15 years compared to remaining in the bloc. Exports and imports are projected to be around 15% lower in the long run.

Initial data has borne this out. According to the OBR, in the fourth quarter of 2021, UK goods export volumes to the European Union were 9% below 2019 levels, with imports from the European Union 18% lower. Goods exports to non-EU countries were 18% weaker than in 2019.

The United Kingdom “appears to have become a less trade-intensive economy, with trade as a share of GDP falling 12% since 2019, two and a half times more than in any other G7 country,” the OBR said in the March report.

The decline in exports to non-EU countries could be a sign that UK businesses have become less competitive as they battle higher supply chain costs following Brexit, according to Jun Du, an economics professor at Aston University in Birmingham.

“The UK’s trading ability has been damaged permanently [by Brexit],” Du told CNN. “It doesn’t mean it can’t recover, but it’s been set back for a number of years.”

Research by the Centre for European Reform, a think tank, estimates that over the 18 months to June 2022, UK goods trade is 7% lower than it would have been had Britain remained in the European Union.

Investment is 11% weaker and GDP is 5.5% smaller than it would have been, costing the economy £40 billion ($48.4 billion) in tax revenues annually. That’s enough to pay for three quarters of the spending cuts and tax rises that UK finance minister Jeremy Hunt announced in November.

A heavy economic toll

The United Kingdom is projected to have one of the worst performing economies next year among developed nations.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development expects the UK economy to shrink by 0.4%, ahead only of sanctioned Russia. GDP in Germany is forecast to be 0.3% smaller.

The International Monetary Fund forecasts growth of just 0.3% for UK GDP next year, ahead of only Germany, Italy and Russia, which are expected to contract.

Both institutions say high inflation and rising interest rates will weigh on spending by consumers and businesses in Britain.

According to the Confederation of British Industry, a leading business group, the fall in private sector activity picked up pace in December and has now declined for five consecutive quarters.

The downward trend “looks set to deepen” in 2023, principal economist at the CBI Martin Sartorius said in a statement.

“Businesses continue to face a number of headwinds, with rising costs, labor shortages, and weakening demand contributing to a gloomy outlook for next year. ”

— Julia Horowitz contributed to this report.




On the Question of Free Trade

Karl Marx



[Marx delivered this address before the
Democratic Association of Brusels, 9 January, 1848]



At the end of 1847, Brussels had hosted a "Free Trade Congress," which was designed to further the general Free Trade campaign English manufacturers were waging. In 1846, the English bourgeoisie repealed England's Corn Laws and were ready to take their cause abroad.

Marx asked for a slot to speak, but the Congress closed before his name could come up on the lists. So instead he delivered his speech to the Democratic Association -- of which he was among the vice-presidents.

When the Free Trade question raged again in the late 1880s, Marx's speech was reissued in English, with a lengthy introduction by Engels. "Free Trade vs. Protectionism" is a question that remains periodically relevant as long as capitalism exists. Indeed, when the recent US-Canada-Mexico Free Trade negotiations took place in the early 1990s, even the New York Times felt compelled to quote Marx's speech.
Marx's speech was transcribed in French in February 1848 and published in Brussels. Later that year, it was translated into German and published in Germany.


https://cooperative-individualism.org/marx-karl_on-the-question-of-free-trade-1848.htm


 

CONVERSION THERAPY
"Homo healers“ are not forbidden – but they should be
Story by Refresh News • 8h ago


Provided by Refresh Lifestyle CAEN

When you’re sick, you go to the doctor. And if you’re homosexual, then you go into treatment. Sounds logical doesn’t it? That is at least the point of view of some organizations, mainly Christian ones, that offer such treatments: “re-educate” homosexuals. That’s no longer the case in New York. The US state banned so-called conversion therapies, at least for minors, a few days ago. It’s the 15th state to outlaw the expertly-disapproved practice of converting homosexuals to heterosexuality.

But hey, that doesn’t matter! In Germany you can still do it. Political parties have repeatedly pushed for a ban, and doctors and psychotherapists warn of the serious damage caused by the „re-education“. Nevertheless, conversion therapies are still allowed in our country. How can that be? And how does conversion therapy actually work?
 
Mental pressure, cold showers and nude dances

What happens when trying to get a “patient” on the path to heterosexuality can only be guessed at. There are only a few testimonials on the internet. Former participants report from talk therapies, in which they are drummed into thinking that they are not „normal“, that their physical feelings are not right. And they are alone in that. Others even tell of physical torment and weekends away from civilization, with cold showers and nude dancing. Even if no organization openly offers conversion therapy, evangelical and Christian groups with such offers are particularly noticeable: In 2014, the Christian association for life orientation in Germany made headlines with itthat he classifies homosexuality as a mental disorder and promotes treatments. That came out in a question that the Greens asked in the Bundestag at the time. Other clubs that appear there: The Association of Catholic Doctors, the White Cross, desert power and the Offensive Young Christians.



Doctors and the church are also against the therapy

In the eyes of these associations, homosexuality is a disease that can – and must – be cured. Sexual orientation has long been recognized as such: the American Psychiatric Association removed it from its diagnostic classification system as early as 1974, and the World Health Organization followed suit in 1992. Scientists and doctors have long agreed that homosexuality is not “abnormal”. The German Medical Association, the World Medical Association and civil rights organizations have years ago public statements submitted, in which they expressly reject conversion therapies. Even the evangelical church in central Germany did that. Only politicians have not yet managed to ban the „re-education therapies“ by law.

„Charlatans who make sick instead of healing“


And that’s dangerous. Experts classify the consequences of such therapy, especially for young people, as serious: there is talk of Fears, social isolation, depression and even suicide. Volker Beck, then a member of the Bundestag for the Greens, formulated it even more strikingly some time ago: „Homo healers are charlatans and make people ill instead of healing.“ So: Conversion therapies are a violation of human rights. And have long been banned.

New York and EU: A wake-up call? Hopefully!


Because for the clubs it is probably one thing above all: quick money. For example, homosexuals pay 600 dollars for conversion therapy in the USA – for a single weekend. And in Germany? It could even happen that the health insurance pays in the end. This also settles the bills for psychotherapeutic sessions on which no therapy goal is noted.

Germany is damn late. The US shows them how, and the European Parliament voted by a large majority just last year to ban conversion therapy by law.This actually lays a foundation stone that Germany should urgently build on now.







DONATE TO UNRWA

 



As we approach the end of the year, we tend to look back and reflect on how this year has passed and what it meant for us. We also look ahead and hope that next year will be happier, healthier, and safer. 

Nadine is reflecting too. She is an eloquent and passionate 11-year-old Palestine refugee who wrote a letter to the world. A letter that speaks straight to the heart, expressing the hope of millions of Palestine refugee children.

The suffering of Palestine refugee children pushes their psychological and physical condition to the brink. Nadine is a child with hopes and dreams. She asks the world for a chance to live peacefully and enjoy her fundamental human rights, such as education, proper nutrition, safety, and security. 

 During this holiday season, seize the opportunity today and lend a caring hand to Palestine refugees. As Nadine said, we will not forget your kindness.  

Tis the season of giving

With immense gratitude,
Yasmine El-Maghrabi
Digital Engagement Officer, UNRWA

Trans Mountain pipeline fine for bird disturbances upheld while penalty slashed

Yesterday 

A review panel is upholding a fine against the Trans Mountain pipeline for violations that resulted in disturbing bird nests.

But the Canada Energy Regulator is dramatically slashing the amount of the penalty from $88,000 in the original ruling to $4,000.

In February, the regulator found the pipeline company hadn't given its contractors enough environmental training.

That resulted in the destruction or disturbance of the nests of three robins and one Anna's hummingbird.

Trans Mountain appealed the ruling, but a majority of the panel agreed with the investigator who laid the charge.

In its written decision, the panel concluded Trans Mountain broke the rules by failing to adequately implement environmental safeguards it had promised.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 23, 2022.

Pipeline protest: „We experience police violence here like in a war zone“.

Story by Refresh News • Yesterday


Lindsay Nance is outside the courthouse in Morton County, North Dakota filming live on Facebook, „The trial has been postponed until January.“ She’s there to support accused activists. The 28-^year-old shoots freelance documentaries. She has been living at the Standing Rock Reservation protest camp since October of this year. 15,000 people are demonstrating against the construction of the pipeline with their mere presence. It is almost 2,000 kilometers long and is intended to transport oil from North Dakota to Illinois. The oil will be extracted beforehand using the controversial fracking method. Construction is almost complete, except for this last stretch.

The two reasons for the protest: According to the planned construction plan, the pipeline would run through an area that has belonged by treaty to the Sioux tribe „Lakota People“ living there since 1851. The fact that the land is sacred and that there are cemeteries there has also not been taken into account in the planning. In addition, it is to pass under a lake that serves as a water reservoir for the Missouri River – the Time reported. That is why the protesters call themselves „Water Protectors“. That the pipeline will eventually leak and pollute the water is to be expected. Just 150 miles from the camp, according to Washington Post spilled around 666,000 liters of oil on December 13.

Veterans ask for forgiveness


About a week earlier, the responsible U.S. Army agency halted construction and ordered a new environmental assessment. The protesters celebrated, but saw this only as a stage victory. Another part of the Army showed solidarity with the protests. A group of veterans formed a human chain around the camp and later asked at a solemn ceremony in tears, publicly asking forgiveness for all the military’s crimes against Native Americans. Some of them reportedly felt for the first time as if they were serving and defending their country, Lindsay reports. Also, for the first time in modern history, hundreds of other tribes came together to support the protests, he said. They answered the call of The Standing Rock Youth Council and came to the camp.

A place to pray


„It’s a place of prayer more than anything else,“ Lindsay says, describing the atmosphere. She originally came to the camp to film a music festival that activists were organizing on site. Then she went back to her apartment only once to pack – and hasn’t left the camp since. „There are sweat lodges here, sacred fires, lots of conversations and prayers with the older Lakota People – all of it shook me to the core.“ She could never have prepared for the spiritual experience. In addition, Lindsay would also have learned about an American history that she had not known before: „I met older people who were forced to go to boarding schools. There, they had no contact with their family, weren’t allowed to speak their language, and weren’t allowed to live their traditions.“ This is how the American government worked against Native American culture.

BayernLB supports the pipeline


Despite the small successes and broad support, the outcome is uncertain. Not least because Donald Trump is among the investors in the $3.8 billion bank, along with many global banks. „There’s a lot of work to be done,“ Lindsay says. Among the work, to pull his money out of the investing banks. Some banks have already withdrawn their investment – but partly incomplete and more for PR purposes, the activist warns. The Bavarian state bank BayernLB is also among the investors and wants to „closely monitor the situation“, as Deutschlandfunk reports. Hopefully, she also observed the 20th of November attentively.

Rubber bullets and water cannons at freezing temperatures

On the night about a month ago, the situation between the protesters and the police escalated. Lindsay describes it as one of the worst nights of her life. Tear gas, rubber bullets and pepper spray were used, according to Lindsay. Despite sub-zero temperatures, water cannons were used for six hours. „Many were covered in ice and returned to their unheated tents to sleep.“ Long Range Acoustic Devices, acoustic devices used as megaphones and to emit unpleasant loud sounds, did the rest. One woman was hit in the face by a rubber bullet without warning. The nearest hospital refused to treat her swollen and bleeding eye due to lack of health insurance. Meanwhile, she is staying in a hotel not far from Trump Tower. There she is preparing for surgery on her blinded eye. At Gofundme you can support them financially. „We experience oppression and police violence here like in a war zone,“ comments Lindsay.

One-sided reporting


Lindsay herself regularly reports on the events on her Facebook page. „This is very important because the mainstream media distorts facts,“ she says. In addition, she says, the Morton County Sheriff’s Department has been issuing false press releases. Another reporting controversy involved Ed Ou. The Canadian photojournalist was denied entry into the U.S. after he stated at the airport that he wanted to cover the Standing Rock Reservation. Ed has won awards and has traveled to many crisis areas as a reporter. Despite this, police officers forced him to hand over his smartphone. The fact that he had a duty of confidentiality to his informants, which was thus no longer guaranteed, did not convince the police officers, as the BBC wrote.

The first negotiations


The first hearings on detained water protectors will take place in January. According to Lindsay, the mass arrest of protesters also constitutes a violation of the right of assembly. The outcome of these first negotiations then serves as a precedent for the other 500.

Image source: Renegade Medai

Feds look to modify Indian Act with Bill C-38

Yesterday 

Up to 3,500 more people could qualify for Indigenous status if the government follows through on its new Bill C-38, which would modify sections of the Indian Act, the federal government said last week.

The introduction of these legislative amendments to the Indian Act seeks to address four areas, including enfranchisement, individual deregistration, natal band reaffiliation and membership, as well as outdated and offensive language related to dependent persons.

Federal Indigenous Services minister Patty Hajdu said a consultation in early 2023 will help the government shape the law.

“As we work in partnership with First Nations to right the wrongs of the past, this step is an important one. We know there is so much more to do, and we will soon launch a co-developed consultation in early 2023 to address other areas like the second-generation cut-off,” she said. “I look forward to doing this important work with partners and parliamentarians as we continue to address colonial laws and structures.”

Bill C-38 would seek to ensure First Nation individuals with family histories of enfranchisement are entitled to registration under the Indian Act and can pass on this entitlement to descendants to the same degree as those without family histories of entitlement.

“Eliminating gender-based discrimination is ongoing and requires sustained effort,” Hajdu said. “Bill C-38 proposes amendments to the Indian Act that responds to rights holders and legal action taken against the federal government related to enfranchisement, individual deregistration, natal band membership, as well as outdated and offensive language related to dependent persons.”

The changes to the Indian Act are an offshoot of public consultations held in 2018 and 2019, where input was received from over 650 participants, representing 395 First Nation communities and/or governments.

The conclusion was that Canada should work with First Nations to proactively address issues related to registration and band membership provisions of the Indian Act.

Marc Lalonde, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Iori:wase

 Presenting “ionocaloric” refrigeration: A new approach to efficient and sustainable cooling


Peer-Reviewed Publication

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS)

Seeking to make cooling more climate friendly and efficient, researchers used an environmentally-benign solvent and a salt – versus hydrofluorocarbons or other liquid refrigerants – to present a new refrigeration system that improves over existing refrigeration technologies, including solid-state caloric effect-based approaches. Their system takes advantage of the way changing the ionic concentration in a solution drives phase transitions. Here, this enables a reversible cooling cycle that the researchers call “ionocaloric” refrigeration. For more than a century, vapor-compression technologies have dominated refrigeration applications. However, for refrigerants, these systems often use hydrofluorocarbons, which are environmentally harmful and have a significant climate impact. Thus, developing high-efficiency cooling technologies that use environmentally safe, low-climate impact alternatives has become an important goal – even more so as cooling becomes more pressing in our warming world. Caloric effect-based cooling, like magneto- or electrocaloric refrigeration, which use solid materials that heat or cool when subjected to a changing magnetic or electric field, are promising technologies. However, they remain somewhat limited by their energy efficacy and cooling potential. Here, Drew Lilley and Ravi Prasher present a new approach to cooling – ionocaloric refrigeration – which leverages the large temperature change and heat absorption associated with repeatedly melting an ethylene carbonate (EC) solvent with a sodium iodide (NaI) salt. Lilley and Prasher describe the reversible process – the cooling cycle starts by mixing the solid form of EC with NaI, which, like adding road salt to an icy road, decreases the temperature of the mix through the solid-to-liquid phase transition. Then, using electrodialysis, the NaI is removed from the mixture, which purifies the EC, causing an increase in temperature as it recrystallizes back into a solid. According to the authors, in various tests, the ionocaloric approach had a cooling potential like that of current refrigerants and greater than other caloric effect-based cooling approaches. “The findings of Lilley and Prasher point to a new member in the caloric material family. It exhibits large efficiency and could be environmentally benign,” writes Emmanuel Defay in a related Perspective. “This is a serious contender for the future of cooling.”

Universities lag in capturing and using data to make institutional decisions

Reports and Proceedings

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS)

In a Policy Forum, Christine Borgman and Amy Brand argue that most universities lag behind industry, business, and government when it comes to leveraging data they generate for strategic decision-making and planning. Their view is informed by interviews with university leaders from 12 U.S. institutions. Interview questions addressed factors including participants' roles in considering how data is used in making key decisions, and the state of data infrastructure and management at their respective universities. Through their interviews, the authors note several common challenges universities face in capturing and exploiting institutional data. These include a lack of staff expertise in data management or governance and tension among stakeholders regarding data access, control, use and privacy. Investing in knowledge infrastructures, data management capacity, and transparent data sources could help address these challenges. “Even when their universities are ‘data rich,’ they also may be ‘data poor’ in that they are struggling to exploit data resources to their strategic advantage, or ‘data blind’ in being reluctant to initiate stakeholder discussions necessary to build consensus or governance,” write Borgman and Brand. “We encourage university leaders to embrace more objective and transparent data-informed models for decision-making.”

Glassfrogs hide red blood cells in their liver to become transparent

Researchers finally decipher how a species of frog becomes a master of camouflage with the help of modern biomedical imaging techniques

Peer-Reviewed Publication

DUKE UNIVERSITY

blood perfusion changes with activity_transmitted.mp4 

VIDEO: A GLASSFROG DURING DIFFERENT LEVELS OF ACTIVITY, SHOWING THE CHANGE IN RBC PERFUSION WITHIN ITS CIRCULATORY SYSTEM. THE SAME ANIMAL WAS FILMED ACROSS ALL THREE CONDITIONS USING TRANSMITTED LIGHT. view more 

CREDIT: JESSE DELIA

DURHAM, N.C. -- Glassfrogs make themselves transparent while they rest by taking red blood cells from circulation and concealing them in their livers. A multi-disciplinary team of biologists and biomedical engineers has shown how these frogs make themselves see-through in research that appears December 23 in the journal Science.

It’s easy to miss a glassfrog in its natural environment. The northern glassfrog, Hyalinobatrachium fleischmanni, measures no more than a few centimeters, and they are most active at night, when their green skin helps them blend in with the surrounding leaves and foliage.

But these amphibians become true masters of camouflage during the day when they’re asleep.

“When glassfrogs are resting, their muscles and skin become transparent, and their bones, eyes and internal organs are all that’s visible,” said Carlos Taboada, a post-doctoral fellow at Duke and a co-first author of the paper. “These frogs sleep on the bottoms of large leaves, and when they’re transparent, they can perfectly match the colors of the vegetation.”

Many animals in the sea can change the color of their skin or become completely transparent, but it’s a far less common skillset on land. One reason transparency is so difficult to achieve is because of red blood cells in the circulatory system. Red blood cells are adept at absorbing green light, which is the color of light usually reflected by plants and other vegetation. In return, these oxygen-rich cells reflect red light, making blood –– and by extension the circulatory system –– highly visible, especially against a bright green leaf. 

Glassfrogs are some of the only land-based vertebrates that can achieve transparency, which has made them a target for study. Taboada first began studying glass frogs as a post-doctoral fellow in the lab of Sönke Johnsen, a professor of biology at Duke who specializes in studying transparency. Working with Jesse Delia, who traveled around the world collecting different glassfrogs for the study, they observed that red blood cells seemed to be disappearing from the circulating blood whenever the frogs became transparent.

They conducted additional imaging tests on the animals, proving via optical models that the animals were able to achieve transparency because they were pushing red blood cells out of their vessels. He suspected that the cells were being stored in one of the frog’s inner organs which are packaged in a reflective membrane.

For a see-through animal, its biology was shockingly challenging to decipher. The research drew on the expertise of biologists and biomedical engineers not only at Duke but at the American Museum of Natural History, Stanford University and the University of Southern California.

“If these frogs are awake, stressed or under anesthesia their circulatory system is full of red blood cells and they are opaque,” explained Delia, now a post-doctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History. “The only way to study transparency is if these animals are happily asleep, which is difficult to achieve in a research lab. We were really banging our heads against the wall for a solution.”

But Taboada had learned about an imaging technology called photoacoustic microscopy, or PAM, when he was studying biliverdin, the compound that gives certain species of frogs their signature green color. PAM involves shooting a safe laser beam of light into tissue, which is then absorbed by molecules and converted into ultrasonic waves. These sound waves are then used to make detailed biomedical images of the molecules. The imaging tool is non-invasive, quiet, sensitive and, in a stroke of luck, available at Duke.

“PAM is the ideal tool for non-invasive imaging of red blood cells because you don’t need to inject contrast agents, which would be very difficult for these frogs,” explained Junjie Yao, an assistant professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke who specializes in PAM technologies. “The red blood cells themselves provide the contrast, because different types of cells absorb and reflect different wavelengths of light. We could optimize our imaging systems to specifically look for red blood cells and track how much oxygen was circulating in the frog’s bodies.”

In their imaging set-up, the frogs slept upside down in a petri dish, similar to how they would sleep on a leaf, and the team shined a green laser at the animal. The red blood cells in the frog’s body absorbed the green light and emitted ultrasonic waves, which were then picked up by an acoustic sensor to trace their whereabouts, with high spatial resolution and high sensitivity.

The results were startlingly clear: When the frogs were asleep, they removed nearly 90 percent of their circulating red blood cells and stored them in their liver.

In further tests, the team also saw that red blood cells flowed out of the liver and circulated when the frogs were active, and then re-aggregated in the liver while the frogs were recovering.

“The primary result is that whenever glassfrogs want to be transparent, which is typically when they're at rest and vulnerable to predation, they filter nearly all the red blood cells out of their blood and hide them in a mirror-coated liver -- somehow avoiding creating a huge blood clot in the process,” said Johnsen. “Whenever the frogs need to become active again, they bring the cells back into the blood stream, which gives them the metabolic capacity to move around.”

According to Delia and Taboada, this process raises questions about how the frogs can safely store almost all their red blood cells in their liver without clotting or damaging their peripheral tissues. One potential next step, they said, could be to study this mechanism and how it could one day apply to vascular issues in humans. 

This work also introduces glassfrogs as a useful model for research, especially when paired with the state-of-the-art photoacoustic imaging. As long-time glassfrog researchers, they are excited about the new avenues of study now available to them and interested collaborators.

“We can learn more about the glassfrog’s physiology and behavior, or we can use these models to optimize imaging tools for biomedical engineering,” Delia said. “This started because Carlos and I thought this frog was doing something weird with its blood, and it led to productive collaborations both at Duke and across the globe.”

“Our successful collaboration has been a great example of how multiple disciplines can jointly advance science in the most synergistic way,” said Yao. “We are extremely excited about the future interactions between the biology and engineering teams. With all the strength on board, the sky is the limit.”

This work was supported the National Geographic Society grant (NGS-65348R-19), the Human Frontier Science Program postdoctoral fellowship (LT 000660/2018-L), the Gerstner Scholars Fellowship provided by the Gerstner Family Foundation and the Richard Gilder Graduate School at the American Museum of Natural History, start-up funds from Stanford University and start-up funds from Duke University, the National Institutes of Health grants (R01 EB028143 R01 NS111039 and RF1 NS115581 BRAIN Initiative), the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2144788), the Duke Institute of Brain Science Incubator award, the American Heart Association Collaborative Sciences award (18CSA34080277), and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (2020-226178).

CITATION: “Glassfrogs Conceal Blood in Their Liver to Maintain Transparency,” Carlos Taboada, Jesse Delia, Maomao Chen, Chenshuo Ma, Xiaorui Peng, Xiaoyi Zhu, Liaming Jiang, Tri Vu, Qifa Zhou, Junjie Yao, Laureo O’Connell, Sonke Johnsen. Science, December 22, 2022. DOI: 10.1126/science.abl6620