It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, January 19, 2023
University of Warwick Energy and Net Zero roadmap helps reduce KW/h
WMG, at the University of Warwick, has launched an Energy and Net Zero Roadmap called Business Energy Aid Toolkit to help manufacturing SME companies reduce their energy consumption
WMG, at the University of Warwick, has launched an Energy and Net Zero Roadmap called Business Energy Aid Toolkit (BEAT), to help manufacturing small, medium enterprise (SME) companies reduce their energy consumption, save on costs and increase profitability. The programme has already proven a success, with business energy savings of up to 90%.
In response to the current energy crisis, WMG, at the University of Warwick, specialising in driving innovation in science, technology and engineering, has assembled a team of engineers and business specialists dedicated to helping SMEs. The work they will deliver through BEAT, involves a thorough review of SMEs manufacturing energy consumption, including looking at their operational efficiency to provide a detailed assessment with a set of energy saving recommendations.
According to the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, the UK private sector comprises largely of non-employing businesses and small employers. SMEs account for 99.9% of the business population (5.6 million businesses).* Therefore, improving energy efficiency has an important role to play in delivering affordable, sustainable and secure energy for the UK.
WMG, ran a successful pilot programme in October 2022, working with three companies who have already yielded great success, with energy savings of up to 90% on individual machines and up to 46% in the overall production facility. Results show that there has been considerable cost savings for the companies that has also helped them to kick start their journey to net zero.
One of these pilot companies is Alucast** who have made the following
19,971 kgCO2 = 19.9 tonnes. This is the equivalent of driving 65,670 miles in an average car. (First 2 years).
19.9 tonnes CO2 = Driving around the world in a diesel car 2.86 times.
In addition to energy saving recommendations, BEAT will also advise on what the likely return on energy saving infrastructure investments would be and where companies can look to for further help with investment.
The programme uses proven tools and techniques such as a combination of monitoring equipment including energy clamps which enable detailed analysis of the energy used by individual machines, and value stream maps to illustrate beneficial saving.
For example, it could be as simple as energy saving advice or it could be as complicated as a full data gathering audit for how a company is using energy in processes. For high energy using companies (e.g. foundries, heat treatment etc.) the WMG team can offer advice on how to use waste heat at a low cost to lessen energy costs.
Christopher Wells, project lead, at WMG, University of Warwick said, “The Energy and Net Zero Roadmap - Business Energy Aid Toolkit, is a value-based programme for manufacturing SMEs. We recognise that companies need help and assistance in reducing their energy consumption and not just reducing the price they pay per KWh.
“Our team are dedicated to helping manufacturing businesses save energy and increase profitability. This not only helps to preserve our rich manufacturing base but helps companies and the UK move toward net zero targets.
“Furthermore, we’ve always been at the forefront of helping manufacturers maximise the use of innovation. That is why we are working with companies to maximise the use of innovative techniques in areas such as the field of heat recovery, taking a more transformative step such as introducing new or replacement technologies or business practices. This has never been more important than in the case of energy usage reduction.”
Tony Sartorius, Chairman of Alucast said, “In the current energy crisis, the Business Energy Aid Toolkit (BEAT) has been beneficial to Alucast, as we are a high energy user with three aluminium foundries..
“We began by selecting several machines to assess and managed their uptime more effectively to ensure energy is only used when actually processing parts only. This effectively eliminated idle time energy use and created substantial CO2 reductions around 10 tonnes per annum, whilst at the same time reducing KWhs used.
“The team of WMG engineers have helped the company reduce our energy usage, lower carbon emissions, and save waste. We have also had the opportunity to exchange best practice at several roundtables and visit other factories to assess where energy savings could be made.”
WMG has provided top five tips to businesses to help lower their energy consumption. Learn more here. WMG is the largest academic department at the University of Warwick and is the leading international role model for successful collaboration between academia and the public and private sectors, driving innovation in science, technology and engineering. The University of Warwick is one of the UK’s leading universities with an acknowledged reputation for excellence in research and teaching, for innovation, and for links with business and industry.
Information on Alucast (one of the companies participating in the WMG BEAT pilot scheme).
Alucast is an aluminum foundry in Wednesbury, (West Midlands), and a very high energy user. As most manufacturers are, Alucast were struggling with increased energy prices and looking for ways to reduce consumption and measure the benefits for full machine shop roll out. This project focused on the benefits of shut down periods over the weekends rather than leaving machines idle, a common manufacturing idea is that it causes issues in the restart if machines are fully shut down. This project aimed to measure the potential savings and de-risk the process. By measuring consumption of 4 different types of machines when left idle over a weekend compared to being switched off measured savings of 95,107 kWh, £78,225 and 19,971 kgCO2eq over a 2 year period on 17 machines. The percentage energy consumption saving over the weekend is 100% but over a working week this will save an average of 19% of energy consumption.
19,971 kgCO2 = 19.9 tonnes. This is the equivalent of driving 65,670 miles in an average car. (First 2 years).
19.9 tonnes CO2 = Driving around the world in a diesel car 2.86 times.
IMAGE: CHLAMYDIAE, KNOWN AS BACTERIAL PATHOGENS OF HUMANS, ORIGINALLY EVOLVED IN SINGLE-CELLED MICROORGANISMS LONG BEFORE GAINING THE ABILITY TO INFECT HUMANS. THE IMAGE SHOWS SOIL AMOEBA (LABELED IN GREEN) AND THEIR CHLAMYDIAL SYMBIONTS (LABELED IN ORANGE).view more
CREDIT: EVA HEINZ
All chlamydiae today live inside the cells of hosts ranging from amoeba to animals. A team of scientists from the University of Vienna and the Wageningen University & Research found that the ancestor of chlamydiae likely already lived inside host cells, but that chlamydiae infecting amoeba evolved later in ways unexpected for intracellular bacteria. The study published in Nature Microbiology is an important step for understanding the emergence and evolution of endosymbiotic bacteria, including human pathogens.
Chlamydiae are known for the human pathogen Chlamydia trachomatis, but this group of bacteria evolved over a billion years ago—long before even the first animals. Nevertheless, all chlamydiae found today live inside a broad range of hosts from small amoeba to animal cells. But what has been puzzling scientists since the first chlamydiae genomes were sequenced 20 years ago is that, while chlamydiae infecting animals have small genomes similar to other endosymbionts, those that infect amoeba have larger genome sizes more similar to free-living bacteria. The study of this diverse bacterial group's evolution, however, has been hampered by the difficulty to grow these microbes in the lab.
The teams around Matthias Horn (University of Vienna) and Thijs Ettema (Wageningen University & Research) could circumvent this problem: "We've only recently gained the capability to sequence genomes directly from environmental samples to explore the breadth of chlamydial diversity," explain the researchers. With this new data in hand, they then traced back the evolution of chlamydiae. Using state-of-the-art computational methods, they reconstructed the genome of the last common ancestor of all known chlamydiae. The researchers found that "this extinct microbe had all the genes needed to be an endosymbiont. Even genes important for chlamydial animal pathogens today were likely already present." This means that chlamydiae have been infecting host cells for over a billion years of evolutionary history.
However, to their surprise the research team also found that chlamydiae infecting amoeba gained many metabolic genes only later, despite the fact that endosymbionts have fewer opportunities to exchange genes with other bacteria. "Our results show that more gene exchange happened in some chlamydiae than expected for endosymbionts," the authors explain, "including the gain of key metabolic genes".
This result challenges how we think about the evolution of endosymbionts. But the researchers also suggest a solution to this conundrum: "It's not so surprising when you think about the environment these chlamydiae live in: Amoeba often host multiple endosymbionts and feed on free-living bacteria, so there are other microbes around increasing the accessible gene pool. In addition, most chlamydiae move between different hosts, and exposure to changing environments could explain why it might be beneficial for these endosymbionts to keep and even gain additional metabolic genes."
The scientists are curious to see whether this mode of endosymbiont evolution is more widespread. In any case, this study is an important step for understanding the emergence and evolution of endosymbiotic bacteria, including human pathogens.
Gene gain facilitated endosymbiotic evolution of Chlamydiae.
Samsung leads in U.S. patents as overall grants hit four-year low
Self-driving vehicles, fossil fuel drilling and AI among hottest areas for R&D activity; applications hit an all-time high, according to annual analysis by IFI CLAIMS Patent Services
IMAGE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE IFI CLAIMS 2022 PATENT RANKING AND TRENDS ANALYSIS.view more
CREDIT: DIGITAL SCIENCE / IFI CLAIMS.
U.S. patent grants issued in 2022 dropped to their lowest level since 2018, and South Korean electronics titan Samsung took the top spot from longtime leader IBM as East made gains on West among the Top 50 patent assignees during the past year. Nonetheless, patent applications hit an all-time high in 2022 as the United States emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic – a harbinger for a resurgence in innovation and grants over the next one to two years.
These are among the findings by IFI CLAIMS Patent Services, a Digital Science company which compiles and tracks data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and other patent-issuing agencies around the globe. The data can be found in the newly published 2022 U.S. Top 50 and IFI Global 250 patent rankings.
Samsung came in atop the annual IFI Top 50 patent earners with longtime leader IBM in second place. This is the first time a company other than IBM has been in the top slot since 1993. Based on the data, IBM’s U.S. patent grants decreased in 2022, going from 8,681 in 2021 to 4,398 last year, a nearly 50 percent regression. But even Samsung, with 6,248 grants, saw a moderate decline (2 percent) from the prior year.
Still with one of the strongest U.S. patent portfolios, IBM’s new placement on this year’s list is attributable, according to IBM’s blog, to its heightened focus since 2020 on prioritizing open source, collaboration and partnerships, and advancing the state of the art around the company’s key technology areas including hybrid cloud, AI, quantum computing, semiconductors and security.
Following Samsung and IBM, the top 10 patent earners were Taiwan Semiconductor, Huawei Technologies, Canon, LG Electronics, Qualcomm, Intel, Apple and Toyota Motor.
The past year marks the third straight to see declines in patent grants, since the start of the pandemic. Across the board, U.S. patent grants declined just over 1 percent from 2021, representing a vigorous rebound following a 7 percent dip the prior year. Grants dropped from 327,321 to 323,015. Published patent applications, meanwhile, hurtled from 410,092 in 2021 to a record 417,922 last year, a 2 percent increase and the continuation of a five-year run of rising USPTO requests. Highlights from the full analysis and an overview of trends appear on the IFI website.
“Everything was trending upward until COVID hit, but grants have been declining. This might be due to the fact the USPTO faces a growing backlog of applications, some 700,000 currently, up from 540,000 unexamined patents in 2018,” said Mike Baycroft, CEO of IFI CLAIMS Patent Services. “But the continued growth in applications is encouraging for innovation. First comes the filing, then typically 12-18 months later the application becomes public, then in another 18 months the grant is issued, so we expect to see a post-COVID upturn in the next couple of years.”
A West-to-East shift in the Top 50
Looking at the Top 50 alone, IFI’s data noted a shift from West to East. In addition to Samsung’s ascendance, Asian-based companies on the list earned 14 percent more patents than Western countries in 2022 (41,055 vs. 35,365), far eclipsing Asia’s edge in 2021 of just 1 percent. Japan, China and South Korea alone accounted for 40,114 patents, compared to 32,130 for United States companies.
A total of three Chinese companies made the Top 50: Huawei at #4, BOE Technology Corp. at #11, and Guangdong Oppo sliding into the #43 spot, formerly occupied by its national counterpart Advanced New Technologies, which fell off the list in 2022.
U.S. awards majority of patents outside America
A stunning 56 percent of U.S. grants in 2022 did not go to U.S. firms. American companies, however, led among patent grantees, earning 142,703 patents, or 44 percent of all patents issued by the USPTO (vs. 46 percent in 2021) and more than three times as many as its closest national competitor, Japan (46,504). Chinese firms were third, with 24,538 grants during the last 12 months. South Korea (22,359) and Germany (14,746) rounded out the top five countries represented. Of the five countries to see an uptick in patent grants in the past year, China was the only one with double-digit growth, standing head and shoulders above the rest with almost 19 percent more than in 2021.
U.S. stalwarts lose position
Among U.S. companies, GE (-11), Texas Instruments (-7), AT&T (-9), Boeing (-8), Ford (-4), Microsoft (-6), Intel (-2), and Apple (-2) fell lower on the Top 50 list, while Dell (+18), and Hewlett-Packard Development Co. (+12) gained considerably in the rankings. Applied Materials and Capital One both entered the top 50 at #44 and #45, respectively. Amazon and Halliburton Energy Services were the only American companies that held their positions from the prior year, with Amazon earning 1,863, down 4 percent, and Halliburton earning 906, up 4 percent. The biggest non-American risers in the Top 50 were Japan’s Murata Manufacturing Company (#38) and Brother Industries (#49), which both leaped 10 spots from 2021.
Autonomous vehicle tech is hot; earth drilling keeps rocking
Technology related to autonomous vehicles (e.g., self-driving cars) ascended to the No. 1 spot among IFI’s Fastest Growing Technologies list last year, despite failing to crack the top 10 classes the year before. “Drive Control Systems for Autonomous Road Vehicles” saw a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 64.3 percent for the period 2018-2022. Of note is that while “Computing Based on Biological Models” dropped to No. 4 from its perch at No. 1 last year, Artificial Intelligence research has pervaded multiple patent categories, including Earth Drilling, “Quantum Computers” and “Machine Learning.”
Rounding out the top Fastest Growing Technologies were “Electrical Digital Data Processing” (CAGR 33.9%); “Special Features Related to Earth Drilling Including AI and Simulation Models” (CAGR 32.5%); “Computing Based on Biological Models” (CAGR 32.1%); and “Electrically Operated Smoking Devices” (CAGR 31.3%). Interestingly, “Cigars, Cigarettes” also made the Top 10 (CAGR 28.3%). Who would have thought in 2022 that patents for Earth Drilling and Cigars/Cigarettes would be among the fastest growing categories?
IFI noted that “Special Features Related to Earth Drilling,” which focuses on helping improve earth drilling for oil and gas had moved up from 6th in 2021 to 3rd in 2022. This led IFI to look at U.S. grants for “Green” patents which appear to outpace Earth Drilling by more than 2 to 1. Upon closer inspection IFI found that the majority of grants (66%) in the Green class are for mitigating technologies needed to battle effects of fossil fuels. Only about one-third of Green patents are for truly renewable energies (solar, wind, green hydrogen, water, etc.) where 2022 data show that Earth Drilling grants actually outpaced them by 27 percent.
“As far as patent activity is concerned, we’re not yet seeing a shift toward renewable energy, and some of the fast growing sub-technology areas are focused on improving and more efficiently harvesting traditional fossil fuel sources,” said Baycroft.
Japan and Panasonic dominate total global patent holdings
As of January 3, 2023, Japanese companies owned more than one in three of all worldwide patent “families,” with 1.5 million or 40 percent of the Global 250. China is second with 25 percent and the U.S. is third with 16 percent. Panasonic leads the IFI Global 250 list with 94,341 patent families, and Samsung was just behind. Hitachi, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Canon rounded out the top five.
A patent family is a collection of global patent filings related to a single invention. As a result, a patent for the same invention filed in multiple jurisdictions is only counted once. The IFI Global 250 list is a look back at total active patent families owned by a single company, not just patents earned in any given year.
Japan also had 92 representative companies (37%) on the Global 250, well ahead of the U.S. (55 companies; 22%) and China (45 companies; 18%). Germany, France and South Korea had far fewer representative companies in the third, fourth and fifth positions.
IBM was the highest-ranking American company on this list, coming in at No. 16 with 43,014 patent families. Other U.S. concerns on this list included Microsoft (30th; 31,563 families), GE (38th; 27,008), Intel (44th; 23,758), Alphabet/Google (46th; 22,935) and Amazon (76th; 13,519).
Patent activity provides valuable insight into companies’ R&D activity for researchers, analysts, and investors. It speaks to productivity and IP strategy, and frequently reveals technology trends and the competitive landscape within various industries. Often the true value of a company lies with its intellectual properties, so examining patent assets is a key tool in gauging the intangible assets of publicly traded companies.
To create your own analysis, visit the IFI CLAIMS Live 1000, a free tool which uses data from the top 1000 companies that received patents across multiple countries and patent jurisdictions. The tool shows live data and offers interactive features that allow users to create and sort their own lists using a variety of filters.
About IFI CLAIMS Patent Services
IFI CLAIMS Patent Services uses proprietary data architecture to produce the industry’s most accurate patent database. The CLAIMS Direct platform allows for the easy integration of applications, other data sets, and analysis software. Headquartered in New Haven, Connecticut, with a satellite office in Barcelona, Spain, IFI CLAIMS is part of Digital Science, a digital research technology company based in London. For more information, visit www.ificlaims.com.
About Digital Science
Digital Science is a technology company working to make research more efficient. We invest in, nurture and support innovative businesses and technologies that make all parts of the research process more open and effective. Our portfolio includes admired brands including Altmetric, Dimensions, Figshare, ReadCube, Symplectic, IFI CLAIMS, Overleaf, Ripeta and Writefull. We believe that together, we can help researchers make a difference. Visit www.digital-science.com and follow @digitalsci on Twitter.
General Biomics and The Jackson Laboratory announce intellectual property licensing agreement
The agreement will aid in the understanding of the microbiome in human disease
Farmington, CONN. – General Biomics, Inc. and The Jackson Laboratory (JAX) announced an expansive and exclusive intellectual property licensing agreement across six areas of human health. The agreement will enable JAX to transfer hundreds of microbiome samples, as well as other materials, datasets and related know-how, accrued by researcher George Weinstock, Ph.D., formerly the director of microbial genomics and professor and Evnin Family Chair at The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine and professor of genetics and genome science at UConn Heath, to General Biomics. As part of this transaction, JAX will become a shareholder in General Biomics.
General Biomics,located in the UConn Technology Incubator in Farmington, was founded in 2020 by Dr. Weinstock and Dr. Yanjiao Zhou, an assistant professor at UConn Health researching human disease through the microbiome. General Biomics’ mission is to deliver novel multi-omic solutions to human healthcare through knowledge of the human microbiome. “The microbiome is a crucial key in our understanding of human disease. General Biomics is pleased to be able to utilize the materials and data we have collected and generated over many years at The Jackson Laboratory to assess and treat a variety of conditions,” said Weinstock, who will serve as executive vice president and chief scientific officer of the startup. “By obtaining these valuable materials and IP, we will be able to translate years of scientific research into therapies that could change lives for many individuals living with chronic conditions.”
During his career at JAX, Dr. Weinstock investigated the human microbiome in a wide variety of contexts, including how it contributes to human conditions and diseases such as aging, asthma, the immune response, cancer, substance use disorders, metabolic syndromes, and much more. He was named Evnin Family Chair at JAX in 2015. Before joining JAX, he served as associate director of The Genome Institute at Washington University in St. Louis, where he led the NIH effort to sequence the Human Microbiome. Previously, Dr. Weinstock was co-director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center (HGSC) at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and professor of molecular and human genetics.
“At JAX, we take very seriously our role helping to translate research into therapeutics and providing hope to families dealing with devastating medical conditions,” said Lon Cardon, Ph.D., FMedSci, JAX president and CEO. “We are pleased to collaborate with General Biomics to support its mission to use the microbiome as a key predictor of and solution to a variety of conditions and diseases as well as the biomedical research sector’s growth in the State of Connecticut.”
In its initial product development program, supported by samples, materials and data licensed from JAX, General Biomics will address medical disorders that affect newborns and young infants, especially premature infants who require hospitalization. Dr. Weinstock and Dr. Zhou have found considerable evidence exists that the gut microbiome plays an important role in the development of these maladies. A key component of the program will collaborate with a large childrens’ hospital, the details of which will be announced in an upcoming news release from General Biomics. The intention of the program is to develop novel, patentable tests, which will greatly reduce the costs of hospitalization and dramatically reduce the mortality and morbidity in these patients. Other areas of health and disease that are contained in the agreement include: asthma, oncology, immune and inflammatory responses, aging, and health and wellness.
General Biomics received seed financing in January 2022, which has been used to begin its scientific operations and create its business strategy. Steve Lombardi, a genomics industry leader with over forty years of experience, is the company’s executive chairman and is leading its business efforts and fundraising activities.
About General Biomics
General Biomics Inc. is an early stage, privately funded company headquartered in Farmington, Connecticut at the UConn technology Incubator. Its mission is to improve human health through the knowledge of the human microbiome. The company’s key asset is a multi-omic data analysis platform that can elucidate the microbiome’s impact of specific medical conditions.
About The Jackson Laboratory
The Jackson Laboratory is an independent, nonprofit biomedical research institution with a National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Center and nearly 3,000 employees in locations across the United States (Maine, Connecticut, California), Japan and China. Its mission is to discover precise genomic solutions for disease and empower the global biomedical community in the shared quest to improve human health. For more information, please visit www.jax.org.
Oklahoma researcher uses CAREER Award to innovate UAS-radar technologies for studying snowpack
This five-year project will develop a custom UAV-based radar suite to measure the depth and distribution of snow and ice to support actionable risk management strategies and socioeconomic resiliency
IMAGE: JAY W. MCDANIEL, PH.D., ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN THE SCHOOL OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING AND A RESEARCHER IN THE ADVANCED RADAR RESEARCH CENTER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA, HAS RECEIVED A FACULTY EARLY CAREER DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM (CAREER) AWARD FROM THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION’S OFFICE OF POLAR PROGRAMS.view more
CREDIT: IMAGE PROVIDED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA.
NORMAN, OKLA. – Jay W. McDaniel, Ph.D., assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a researcher in the Advanced Radar Research Center at the University of Oklahoma, has received a prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Program, known as a CAREER award, from the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs.
This five-year project will allow the McDaniel Microwave Group to develop a custom unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV-based radar suite with sophisticated signal processing techniques to measure the depth and distribution of snow and ice to support actionable risk management strategies and socioeconomic resiliency from snow-related weather events.
The Power of Snow
Snowfall is a crucial component to Earth’s climate system. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Geological Survey, snowmelt provides approximately 75% of the water supply for the western United States
“Here in the mid-central part of America, a large portion of our water starts as snow on mountains. The water that comes from that snow goes into watersheds which ends up in our lakes and rivers, and some of the water trickles down into our aquifers – what’s used for domestic, industrial or agricultural purposes,” McDaniel said.
In mountainous regions, the impacts of snowfall, snowmelt and the distribution of snow by wind, are much broader.
“For residents in mountainous regions, and especially in the Arctic, people rely on (snowmelt) for drinking water. They rely on it for ice roads, so transportation – and more importantly, they rely on it to not hurt their well-being because if that ice melts, it affects transportation routes. If a large piece of ice, or several pieces of ice break off and clump together in a river – called an ice jamming event – it can cause floods. And probably the most notorious, snow avalanches, are a huge concern and the number one deadliest snow-related natural hazard,” he said.
“All of this comes back to understanding snow and its onset and melt, its characteristics or material properties, and its impact on the thermal balance between the underlying terrain, or ice, and the atmosphere,” he added.
Developing UAS-Based Radar Technology
For this project, McDaniel will develop a custom snow- and ice-penetrating sensor technology that can be flown by UAS over snow covered areas with the ability to produce detailed and fine-tuned data of snow hydrology, the study of the composition, dispersion, movement and distribution of snow, as well as data on snow-loading – the weight and density of snow – on freshwater lakes and river ice.
“In Year 1, we will take all of the science and what we know about snow and ice, and we will correlate that back to what part of the electromagnetic spectrum is most ideal for remote sensing and then we build a system around it,” McDaniel said.
“One of the things that we want to look at is, can we utilize this radar data and use coherent change detection – a signal processing technique where you can fly over snowpack one day and understand where the distribution is. And then you can fly over the next day and based on how the snow moved, you can represent that change. That could give you a pretty good indicator of a high-risk avalanche zone if a large portion of the snow was relocated into one area,” he added.
By improving their understanding of bulk-snow characteristics and redistribution of snow by wind, McDaniel and his collaborators, including researchers from CReSIS, or the Center for Remote Sensing and Integrated Systems at the University of Kansas, will be able to support snow-related risk mitigation methods like the potential for supporting safer and more effective avalanche search and rescue efforts, avalanche forecasting models, and snow fence placement used to prevent avalanches.
Once the initial system is developed, the research team will begin testing the system in the Fraser Experiment Forest, located on the outskirts of Denver and maintained by the U.S. Forest Service.
“(Fraser) is a representative testing ground because it is a mountainous region where we can experience a lot of the complexities in a field experiment that we would expect to see in the Arctic,” he said. “Once we’ve got this system built and done some field testing, we can start data processing. How well did it work? What can you learn from that? What fine-tuning on the radar system can you do to make it work better?”
After refinement and continued iterations, McDaniel ultimately hopes this radar system will be able to scale for future Artic and climate modeling applications beyond this five-year project.
Training the Next Generation
A unique component of the NSF CAREER program is an educational outreach component that connects students into research efforts. McDaniel, who was a first-generation college student, is particularly excited about the opportunities this presents. He will incorporate aspects of this project into his graduate and undergraduate courses, experiential laboratory exercises, summer internships, and as part of a “RISING STudent Ambassador Research” program, dubbed RISING STAR, aimed at supporting Native American and first-generation students.
“I'm excited about two things – one is, I'm going to offer summer internships, primarily targeted at the undergraduate level because I'm a major believer in undergraduate research,” McDaniel said.
One of the internship positions will be targeted at first-generation, economically disadvantaged and disabled students through Project Threshold, a program of OU’s TRIO Center – a federal outreach and student services program designed to identify and provide services for individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds. Another internship position will be filled through AISES, OU’s American Indian Science and Engineering Society.
The second component, McDaniel’s student ambassador program is intended to foster peer-mentorship and support through the education pipeline.
“It's essentially a way to train students, get them integrated, get them very involved and well-versed in this kind of research as an undergraduate versus waiting until grad school,” said McDaniel. “The newcomers to the program are paired with a graduate student within my group, then they get research guidance, provided materials on career planning, graduate school, and creating a resume. And then these new students build their way up the program and go back to their representative communities and help recruit newer students to get involved with my research.”
“I'm very excited about first-generation students and bringing them into my group, to build a very strong, successful, and diverse group of researchers who help build the pipeline, and then ideally, that pipeline doesn't ever end,” he added.
About the University of Oklahoma Office of the Vice President for Research and Partnerships
The University of Oklahoma is a leading research university classified by the Carnegie Foundation in the highest tier of research universities in the nation. Faculty, staff and students at OU are tackling global challenges and accelerating the delivery of practical solutions that impact society in direct and tangible ways through research and creative activities. OU researchers expand foundational knowledge while moving beyond traditional academic boundaries, collaborating across disciplines and globally with other research institutions as well as decision makers and practitioners from industry, government and civil society to create and apply solutions for a better world. Find out more at ou.edu/research
About the University of Oklahoma
Founded in 1890, the University of Oklahoma is a public research university located in Norman, Oklahoma. OU serves the educational, cultural, economic and health care needs of the state, region and nation. For more information visit www.ou.edu.
Need a hand? This robotic hand can help you pick your food items and plate your dish
From tiny grains of rice to a water bottle, the robotic hand designed by SUTD can pick and place items safely and reliably to meet the dynamic demands of food, logistics and consumer goods industries
VIDEO: THE RWS GRIPPER OVERCOMES LIMITATIONS POSED BY PREVIOUS GRIPPERS USING A WELL PACKAGED DESIGN OF MULTIMATERIAL SOFT ACTUATORS AND PASSIVE COMPLIANT MECHANISMS TO PRODUCE CONSIDERABLE RECONFIGURATIONS IN THE GRIPPER WORKSPACE VOLUME WITHOUT INCREASING THE GRIPPER VOLUME OR WEIGHT.view more
CREDIT: SUTD
Researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design’s (SUTD) Bio-Inspired Robotics and Design Laboratory have developed a new reconfigurable workspace soft (RWS) robotic gripper that can scoop, pick and grasp a wide range of consumer items. The RWS gripper’s comprehensive and adaptive capabilities make it particularly useful in logistics and food industries where they depend on robotic automation to meet increasing demands in efficiently picking and packing items.
The RWS gripper can reliably scoop rice or couscous with radii as small as 1.5 millimeters or pick items as thin as 300 microns such as business cards or thin instruction manuals from flat surfaces. It can also grasp large convex, nonconvex, and deformable items such as melons, cereal boxes, or detergent refill bags which can weigh as much as 1.4kg.
Compared to traditional rigid grippers, soft grippers use compliant soft actuators and functional hyper elastic materials, allowing them to grasp a wider range of geometries safely and reliably. In addition, soft grippers’ high degrees of freedom and compliance enable several grasp modes despite under actuation and oversimplified control strategies.
While being advantageous over their rigid counterparts, soft gripper capabilities such as contact effort are mostly a consequence of the gripper workspace, defined as the range of positions a robot can reach to interact with its physical environment. This, in turn, is largely constrained by the gripper design. Moreover, soft grippers designed for highly specific grasping tasks such as scooping grains or wide payloads are usually limited in grasping other payload types or in their manipulation versatility.
To overcome these limitations, the SUTD research team designed the RWS gripper using multimodal actuation, in which the grasping workspace of a soft gripper can be changed rapidly for payloads with different contact area requirements. Their research study titled 'A Multimodal, Reconfigurable Workspace Soft Gripper for Advanced Grasping Tasks' was published in Soft Robotics.
The RWS gripper can modify and increase its grasping workspace volume by 397% using a combination of shape morphing fingers, retractable nails and an expandable palm, enabling the widest range of grasping capabilities to date achieved by a single soft gripper.
The RWS gripper's ability to quickly reconfigure its grasping workspace makes it an ideal candidate for challenging applications for which multiple task-specific grippers would otherwise be required.
The SUTD research team is taking steps to commercialise the RWS grippers in various high-mix automation applications.
“We are in discussions with various logistics companies, both in the food and packaging sectors, to set up proof of value studies. The team is excited to create market impact and provide new solutions for our industry partners,” shared Assistant Professor Pablo Valdivia y Alvarado, Principal Investigator and Team lead from SUTD.
(A) Plot showing the workspace volumes of the RWS gripper in its four modes. The gripper volume in the unactuated state (“RWS”) is also plotted for reference. (B) Illustration showing the variation of gripper contact area for various grasping modes, each contact area best suited for a payload type. (C) RWS Gripper grasping (top row, from left to right) a cookie pack (power grasping mode) yogurt container (wide grasping mode) egg and tofu stack (power grasping mode), (bottom row, from left to right), cherry tomato, crisp and coin (pinch grasping mode), and chickpeas (scoop grasping mode) (D) The RWS gripper grasping payloads from YCB benchmark object sets—(top row, from left to right) a mug, knife, tuna can, bolt, screw driver; (middle row, from left to right) scissors, can of spam, baseball, clamp, strawberry; (bottom row, from left to right) marker, screw driver, nut, credit card.
A Multimodal, Reconfigurable Workspace Soft Gripper for Advanced Grasping Tasks
Expanding Medicaid led to decreased postpartum hospitalizations
A new study conducted by researchers at Brown and NYU provides additional evidence that expanding Medicaid can contribute to better health for new parents
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — According to health care experts, the benefits for brand-new parents and their infants having access to health care during pregnancy as well as during the postpartum period are indisputable. Even so, many patients — including a third of women with pregnancy coverage through Medicaid — are uninsured before or after pregnancy.
To better understand how access to health care and insurance impacts postpartum health, a new study examined postpartum hospitalizations in states that had expanded Medicaid as well as those that had not.
In the study published in January in Health Affairs, researchers found a 17% reduction in hospitalizations during the first 60 days postpartum in states that expanded Medicaid — and, looking further out, some evidence of a smaller decrease in hospitalizations between 61 days and six months postpartum.
Since hospitalizations are evidence of health issues that exacerbate to the point of requiring an inpatient hospital stay, the results provide evidence that Medicaid expansion is beneficial for the health of those who have just given birth, said study co-author Maria Steenland, an assistant professor of health services, policy and practice (research) at Brown University.
“Our findings indicate that expanding Medicaid coverage led to improved postpartum health for low-income birthing people,” Steenland said.
Medicaid provides health insurance for qualifying low-income Americans. In states that adopted the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansions since 2014, new eligibility rules allowed a larger share of low-income adults to qualify for Medicaid coverage both before pregnancy and after a 60-day postpartum period. This led to significant increases in Medicaid enrollment and overall insurance coverage both before and after pregnancy, as well as greater continuity of insurance coverage among low-income parents, Steenland explained.
Previous research had examined the effect of Medicaid expansion on postpartum health insurance. But there’s less information available on how the Medicaid expansion affects the use of health services during and after pregnancy — like whether, when and why new parents go to the doctor after giving birth.
Even prior to the ACA expansions, patients who had access to Medicaid during pregnancy were able to keep their health care coverage for 60 days after giving birth. However, without the expansion, Medicaid coverage ended at that point. The new study examined whether expanding Medicaid to cover people during pregnancy and after the 60-day postpartum cutoff period affected their rates of inpatient hospitalization.
The research, conducted by Steenland and Laura Wherry, an assistant professor of economics and public service at New York University, is the first to look at postpartum hospitalization under the ACA Medicaid expansion — “a signal of maternal health that hasn’t previously been examined,” Wherry said.
Compared to other high-income countries, the United States performs notably poorly on several measures of maternal health, Wherry noted: “There’s an ongoing conversation by health policy experts about the types of interventions that could improve maternal health in this country,” she said. “Our study looks at that question in the context of expanding access to health insurance through Medicaid.”
Steenland was a postdoctoral fellow at Brown when she first connected with Wherry, who studies the changing role of the Medicaid program and its impact on access to health care and health. The new analysis, which is part of an ongoing collaboration between the two scholars, took advantage of underused longitudinal hospital data from the period from 2010 to 2017 to examine hospitalizations after childbirth.
The researchers compared changes in hospitalizations among low-income patients with a Medicaid-financed delivery in states that did and did not expand Medicaid under the ACA, for six months after giving birth. The four expansion states included Iowa, Maryland, New Mexico and Washington; the four non-expansion states were Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and Utah. The data came from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project State Inpatient Databases.
In their analysis, the researchers found similar trends in postpartum hospitalizations among new parents in the two groups of states before the ACA Medicaid expansions.
Starting at the time of Medicaid expansion, the relative trend in hospitalizations within 60 days postpartum decreased in expansion states compared with non-expansion states. The researchers found a 17% reduction in hospitalizations during the first 60 days postpartum associated with the Medicaid expansions. Approximately 75% of this decline can be attributed to a decrease in childbirth-related hospitalizations.
They found some evidence of a decrease in postpartum hospitalizations after 60 days. However, Wherry explained, because hospitalizations during this time period tend to be rare, the sample size was too small to draw conclusions.
“We already know from previous studies that Medicaid expansion increased postpartum health insurance,” Steenland said. “This work is our attempt to add to this literature by looking at a potential health outcome of these changes in health insurance coverage.”
The study design allowed the researchers to identify a causal effect of the policy, Wherry said.
“The 17% drop in the occurrence of 60-day postpartum hospitalizations as a result of Medicaid expansion is a meaningful decrease,” she said.
The policy landscape is constantly changing, Steenland said, and there is political momentum to extend Medicaid pregnancy coverage past the 60 days through the first year.
The researchers said that moving forward, they are interested in examining how state policies extending Medicaid pregnancy coverage through the first year after giving birth will impact not only a person’s health, but also other aspects of their lives, including their mental health and financial status.
Funding for this study was provided in part by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P2C HD041020) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Policies for Action program.
A study by UC Davis Health researchers assessed telehealth visits’ carbon footprint and their potential savings in lives, costs and time compared to in-person visits. It included data from five University of California health care systems over the pandemic’s first two years.
The study found substantial savings for patients and the environment, including eliminating the need to commute 53,664,391 miles – that’s 113 round trips from Earth to the moon! Telehealth also saved an estimated 204 years of travel time, $33,540,244 travel-related costs and 42.4 injuries and 0.7 fatalities.
“Our study documented the many benefits of utilizing telehealth for ambulatory visits,” said Sristi Sharma, a UC Davis preventive medicine physician and lead author of the study. “It is the first, large-scale study to evaluate the round-trip distance, time, and cost-saving, and greenhouse gas emissions prevented from telehealth use during the pandemic.”
Climate change, the pandemic and telehealth
The pandemic forced health care institutions to adopt telehealth for medical appointments. While the technology has been around for many years, it had been underutilized by medical organizations.
“The world is currently in a climate crisis. Being one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, the health care industry should be taking serious steps to decrease its carbon footprint and telehealth is one of them,” Sharma said.
The team looked at data from five UC health systems: UC Davis, UC San Francisco, UC Los Angeles, UC Irvine and UC San Diego. They calculated the round-trip distance, travel time, travel costs, injuries and fatalities avoided, and greenhouse gas emissions that patients would have generated had they gone for in-person ambulatory services instead of telehealth services. They included visits only during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The statewide university system serves close to 40 million people. Between January 2020 and December 2021, UC health systems’ clinics had close to 16.8 million outpatient visits. Approximately 18% of these visits were telehealth visits.
Telehealth is good for patients, health care organizations and the environment
The study showed that telehealth can be a safe, efficient and cost-effective method to address climate change. It recommended telehealth ambulatory services as a patient-friendly mode of care, even when the pandemic is over.
During the two years of telehealth use studied, the university health systems alone saved the need to travel close to 53.7 million miles. On average, telehealth allowed the patient to avoid:
- traveling 17.6 miles
- spending around 35 minutes traveling to the visit
- paying the estimate of $11 for travel to their appointments
The researchers also estimated the reduced greenhouse gas emissions due to fewer vehicle trips. They found the CO2 emission savings alone were close to 21,466 metric tons over the two years. This is equivalent to a year’s worth of CO2 emissions from the electricity use of 4,177 U.S. homes.
The team is hoping that health care facilities can build on the momentum created by the COVID-19 safety measures and hold on to telehealth, even after the pandemic is over.
“Even if only 25% of ambulatory visits were conducted via telehealth, there would still be substantial cost savings and reduction in greenhouse gas emissions,” said James Marcin, director of the UC Davis Center for Health and Technology, professor of pediatrics, and senior author of the study.
