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)
Friday, October 27, 2023
Cold War spy satellite imagery reveals Ancient Roman forts
An analysis of declassified imagery identifies 396 forts spanning from Syria to Iraq
CREDIT: FIGURE BY J.CASANA ET AL.; CORONA IMAGERY COURTESY U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY.
Two-thousand years ago, forts were constructed by the Roman Empire across the northern Fertile Crescent, spanning from what is now western Syria to northwestern Iraq.
In the 1920s, 116 forts were documented in the region by Father Antoine Poidebard, who conducted one of the world's first aerial surveys using a WWI-era biplane. Poidebard reported that the forts were constructed from north to south to establish an eastern boundary of the Roman Empire.
A new Dartmouth study analyzing declassified Cold War satellite imagery reveals 396 previously undocumented Roman forts and reports that these forts were constructed from east to west. The analysis refutes Poidebard's claim that the forts were located along a north-south axis by showing that the forts spanned from Mosul on the Tigris River to Aleppo in western Syria.
"I was surprised to find that there were so many forts and that they were distributed in this way because the conventional wisdom was that these forts formed the border between Rome and its enemies in the east, Persia or Arab armies," says lead author Jesse Casana, a professor in the Department of Anthropology and director of the Spatial Archaeometry Lab at Dartmouth. "While there's been a lot of historical debate about this, it had been mostly assumed that this distribution was real, that Poidebard's map showed that the forts were demarcating the border and served to prevent movement across it in some way."
For the study, the team drew on declassified Cold-War era CORONA and HEXAGON satellite imagery collected between 1960 and 1986. Most of the imagery is part of the open-access CORONA Atlas Project through which Casana and colleagues developed better methods for correcting the data and made it available online.
The researchers examined satellite imagery of approximately 300,000 square kilometers (115,831 square miles) of the northern Fertile Cresent. It is a place where sites show up particularly well and is archaeologically significant, according to Casana. The team mapped 4,500 known sites and then systematically documented every other site-like feature in each of the nearly 5 by 5 kilometer (3.1 mile by 3.1 mile) survey grids, which resulted in the addition of 10,000 undiscovered sites to the database.
When the database was originally developed, Casana had created morphological categories based on the different features evident in the imagery, which allows researchers to run queries. One of the categories was Poidebard's forts—distinctive squares measuring approximately 50 by 100 meters (.03 x .06 miles), comparable in size to about half a soccer field.
The forts would have been large enough to accommodate soldiers, horses, and/or camels. Based on the satellite imagery, some of the forts had lookout towers in the corners or sides. They would have been made of stone and mud-brick or entirely of the latter, so eventually, these non-permanent structures would have melted into the ground.
While most of the forts that Poidebard documented were probably destroyed or obscured by agriculture, land use, or other activities between the 1920s and 1960s, the team was able to find 38 of 116 of Poidebard's forts, in addition to identifying 396 others.
Of those 396 forts, 290 were located in the study region and 106 were found in western Syria, in Jazireh. In addition to identifying forts similar to the walled fortresses Poidebard found, the team identified forts with interior architecture features and ones built around a mounded citadel.
"Our observations are pretty exciting and are just a fraction of what probably existed in the past," says Casana. "But our analysis further supports that forts were likely used to support the movement of troops, supplies, and trade goods across the region."
Casana is available for comment at Jesse.J.Casana@dartmouth.edu. David Goodman '22 and Carolin Ferwerda, a research associate in the Spatial Archaeometry Lab at Dartmouth, also contributed to the study.
Distribution maps of forts documented by (top) Poidebard (1934), compared to (bottom) distribution of forts found on satellite imagery.
CREDIT
Figure by J.Casana et al., created using ArcGIS Pro version 3.0.
Experts in the Texas A&M University Department of Geography are teaming up with civil and chemical engineers and water resource, disaster recovery and public health researchers across the campus in a collaborative effort to better safeguard Texas Gulf Coast communities against climate-related emergencies, fueled by a three-year, $1.5 million grant from the National Academies Gulf Research Program (GRP).
The project, titled "Climate-LEAD: Climate Effects on Localized Environmental Health Disparities in Overburdened Texas Communities along Gulf Coast," is led by Texas A&M Assistant Professor of Geography Dr. Lei Zou and unites a diverse team of researchers from multiple departments within four Texas A&M colleges and schools — the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Engineering, the School of Architecture and the School of Public Health. The interdisciplinary collaboration spans researchers at various career stages, including junior, mid-career and senior professionals
Zou, a faculty fellow in the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center (HRRC), serves as principal investigator for the grant, one of four recently awarded by the GRP to advance the understanding of climate change effects on local health disparities. Collectively, these projects will create a series of models to better understand how environmental hazards influence human health outcomes and how those hazards will be affected by climate change under varying scenarios and time frames.
“Most models and data information products that identify vulnerable areas overburdened by pollution and susceptible to increased climate hazards are typically built on national datasets with limitations in data quality, coverage and scale resolution,” said Daniel Burger, senior program manager of the GRP’s Gulf Health and Resilience Board. “These awarded projects offer an opportunity to develop more robust models that incorporate localized data that enable community stakeholders, planners and decision-makers to fully understand current and future health risks to make the best decisions for their communities.”
Adverse conditions such as extreme heat, sea-level rise, flooding and extreme weather events are occurring more frequently and simultaneously, often interacting with non-climatic risks that threaten human health and well-being, such as heat-related stress and air and water pollution. Communities overburdened by these non-climatic risks are likely to experience more intense health impacts from climate change as adverse conditions compound, resulting in greater health disparities when compared to communities less exposed to environmental hazards. These disparities are particularly relevant to flood-prone communities in proximity to oil, gas and petrochemical facilities such as those located along the U.S. Gulf Coast.
Zou notes that the central goal of Texas A&M’s research is to anticipate and address the health consequences of climate change-induced air pollution and water insecurity in at-risk Texas communities situated near petrochemical facilities along the Gulf Coast. Through the seamless integration of recently established databases, localized models, web-based geographic information systems (webGIS), strategic frameworks, and community engagement, the project strives to formulate practical strategies that empower stakeholders to strengthen their ability to withstand evolving environmental pressures and safeguard public health.
“This project will pave the way for the development of state-of-the-art fine-scaled and localized databases, predictive models and innovative tools to combat environmental hazards under climate change,” Zou added.
Founded in 2013, the Gulf Research Program is dedicated to enhancing offshore energy safety, environmental protection and stewardship, and human health and community resilience in the Gulf of Mexico and other U.S. coastal regions.
Cannabis sativa, more commonly known as marijuana, has recently seen increased use and cultivation alongside widening legalization. Meanwhile, its non-psychoactive cultivar cousin, hemp, has long been used as a source of sustainable, natural fibers. Below are some recent papers published in ACS journals that blaze new trails into marijuana and hemp research. Reporters can request free access to these papers by emailing newsroom@acs.org.
"Minor, Nonterpenoid Volatile Compounds Drive the Aroma Differences of Exotic Cannabis" ACS Omega Oct. 12, 2023 The aroma of dried C. sativa leaves is often attributed to a class of chemical compounds called terpenes. However, these researchers found that the terpene content is similar between strains that smelled wildly different. Instead, they propose that other odorants including esters, alcohols and sulfur-containing molecules are responsible for the unique aromas. The team attributed a “strong, sulfuric, petroleum-citrus aroma” to one group of sulfur-containing molecules for the first time. This work could help classify the ever-increasing number of marijuana varieties, the researchers say.
"Natural Straw–Hemp-Reinforced Hybrid Insulation Materials" ACS Applied Engineering Materials Oct. 11, 2023 Hemp is a fast-growing, sustainable crop that provides natural fibers for clothing, rope, and now, building insulation. By reinforcing hemp fibers with wheat straw, this team has improved the fibers’ naturally insulative properties, creating a plant-based, insulative nanocomposite. In tests, the material acted as a flexible, water-repellent thermal insulator, and almost all of it could be recovered and reused. The researchers hope the composite will make building materials that are more environmentally friendly and economical.
"Hemp-Based Electronic Textiles for Sustainable and Wearable Applications" ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering Oct. 3, 2023 Electronic textiles, or e-textiles, are becoming a popular form of wearable technology. And like traditional electronics, manufacturing e-textiles can involve toxic chemicals and complicated processes. To make the process more sustainable, researchers coated hemp fibers with reduced graphene oxide and polypyrrole to create a highly conductive yarn, which was flexible and durable even in varying environmental conditions. When connected to a power source, e-textiles woven from the hemp yarn were able to successfully warm the wearer or monitor their movements.
The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS’ mission is to advance the broader chemistry enterprise and its practitioners for the benefit of Earth and all its people. The Society is a global leader in promoting excellence in science education and providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple research solutions, peer-reviewed journals, scientific conferences, eBooks and weekly news periodical Chemical & Engineering News. ACS journals are among the most cited, most trusted and most read within the scientific literature; however, ACS itself does not conduct chemical research. As a leader in scientific information solutions, its CAS division partners with global innovators to accelerate breakthroughs by curating, connecting and analyzing the world’s scientific knowledge. ACS’ main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.
To automatically receive news releases from the American Chemical Society, contact newsroom@acs.org.
UMass Lowell’s Nicolai Konow wants to bridge the gap between research on food processing and nutrient absorption.
“There is a divide between biomechanists, who study chewing and food transport, and physiologists, who examine what actually happens to food in the gastrointestinal tract,” said the assistant professor of biological sciences.
To help link the two fields, Konow edited and contributed to a special edition of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the world’s longest-running scientific journal. The issue, titled “Food processing and nutritional assimilation in animals,” includes 18 research papers that examine how animals, ranging from ants and sharks to monkeys, eat and digest food.
“This special issue is a call to arms for physiologists and biomechanists to start working together to get a more interdisciplinary angle on the effects of food processing on nutritional assimilation,” says Konow, a biomechanics expert. “There’s a crucial gap in our understanding of the journey of food.”
UMass Lowell alumnus and biological sciences teaching assistant Brian Richard worked with Konow to co-author a paper for the issue that establishes that all animal classes, such as mammals and amphibians, contain members that chew their food. Richard conducted research on rhythmic chewing for the publication while he was an undergraduate student at the university.
“It was very exciting to take part in research while an undergraduate, because it helped with my career development,” said Richard, whose goal is to become a professor, combining his passions for research and teaching. “Having this paper published made me feel like I’m a legit scientist now.”
Konow served as the co-author of two subsequent papers, one of which dispelled earlier studies that stated salamanders do not chew.
“Researchers back in the day didn’t have the technology that we have now,” says Konow, who used an X-ray video camera to show that salamanders chew. “Our research on salamanders substantiates the claim made in the previous paper (co-authored by Richard) that chewing is a general trait across the vertebrate tree of life.”
Konow’s other paper used salamanders as a model to understand feeding constraints among animals that transitioned from water to land more than 350 million years ago.
“Salamanders are a really powerful tool for understanding that critical transformation in evolutionary history,” he said.
Additional papers in the special issue, produced by dozens of researchers from around the world, touched upon diverse topics such as the amount of energy it takes for primates to feed, the effect of climate change on nutritional assimilation in marsupials and how ants generate bite force.
“It’s been a great honor to compile this issue,” Konow said.
Fruit, nectar, bugs and blood: How bat teeth and jaws evolved for a diverse dinnertime
They don’t know it, but Darwin’s finches changed the world. These closely related species — native to the Galapagos Islands — each sport a uniquely shaped beak that matches their preferred diet. Studying these birds helped Charles Darwin develop the theory of evolution by natural selection.
A group of bats has a similar — and more expansive — evolutionary story to tell. There are more than 200 species of noctilionoid bats, mostly in the American tropics. And despite being close relatives, their jaws evolved in wildly divergent shapes and sizes to exploit different food sources. A paper published Aug. 22 in Nature Communications shows those adaptations include dramatic, but also consistent, modifications to tooth number, size, shape and position. For example, bats with short snouts lack certain teeth, presumably due to a lack of space. Species with longer jaws have room for more teeth — and, like humans, their total tooth complement is closer to what the ancestor of placental mammals had.
According to the research team behind this study, comparing noctilionoid species can reveal a lot about how mammalian faces evolved and developed, particularly jaws and teeth. And as a bonus, they can also answer some outstanding questions about how our own pearly whites form and grow.
“Bats have all four types of teeth — incisors, canines, premolars and molars — just like we do,” said co-author Sharlene Santana, a University of Washington professor of biology and curator of mammals at the Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture. “And noctilionoid bats evolved a huge diversity of diets in as little as 25 million years, which is a very short amount of time for these adaptations to occur.”
“There are noctilionoid species that have short faces like bulldogs with powerful jaws that can bite the tough exterior of the fruits that they eat. Other species have long snouts to help them drink nectar from flowers. How did this diversity evolve so quickly? What had to change in their jaws and teeth to make this possible?” said lead author Alexa Sadier, an incoming faculty member at the Institute of Evolutionary Science of Montpellier in France, who began this project as a postdoctoral researcher at the University California, Los Angeles.
Scientists don’t know what triggered this frenzy of dietary adaptation in noctilionoid bats. But today different noctilionoid species feast on insects, fruit, nectar, fish and even blood — since this group also includes the infamous vampire bats.
The team used CT scans and other methods to analyze the shapes and sizes of jaws, premolars and molars in more than 100 noctilionoid species. The bats included both museum specimens and a limited number of wild bats captured for study purposes. The researchers compared the relative sizes of teeth and other cranial features among species with different types of diets, and used mathematical modeling to determine how those differences are generated during development.
The team found that, in noctilionoid bats, certain “developmental rules” caused them to generate the right assortment of teeth to fit in their diet-formed grins. For example, bats with long jaws — like nectar-feeders — or intermediate jaws, like many insect-eaters, tended to have the usual complement of three premolars and three molars on each side of the jaw. But bats with short jaws, including most fruit-eating bats, tended to ditch the middle premolar or the back molar, if not both.
“When you have more space, you can have more teeth,” said Sadier. “But for bats with a shorter space, even though they have a more powerful bite, you simply run out of room for all these teeth.”
Having a shorter jaw may also explain why many short-faced bats also tended to have wider front molars.
“The first teeth to appear tend to grow bigger since there is not enough space for the next ones to emerge,” said Sadier.
“This project is giving us the opportunity to actually test some of the assumptions that have been made about how tooth growth, shape and size are regulated in mammals,” said Santana. “We know surprisingly little about how these very important structures develop!”
Many studies about mammalian tooth development were done in mice, which have only molars and heavily modified incisors. Scientists are not entirely sure if the genes and developmental patterns that control tooth development in mice also operate in mammals with more “ancestral” sets of chompers — like bats and humans.
Sadier, Santana and their colleagues believe their project, which is ongoing, can start to answer these questions in bats — along with many other outstanding questions about how evolution shapes mammalian features. They’re expanding this study to include noctilionoid incisors and canines, and hope to uncover more of the genetic and developmental mechanisms that control tooth development in this diverse group of bats.
“We see such strong selective pressures in these bats: Shapes have to closely match their function,” said Santana. “I think there are many more evolutionary secrets hidden in these species.”
Co-authors are Neal Anthwal, a research associate at King’s College London; Andrew Krause, an assistant professor at the Durham University in the U.K.; Renaud Dessalles, a mathematician with Green Shield Technology; Robert Haase, a researcher at the Dresden University of Technology in Germany; UCLA research scientists Michael Lake, Laurent Bentolila and Natalie Nieves; and Karen Sears, a professor at UCLA. The research is funded by the National Science Foundation.
A side-view image of the skull of a greater spear-nosed bat, Phyllostomus hastatus, a noctilionoid species with an omnivorous diet.
An extreme case of noctilionoid bats with a fruit-based diet, the wrinkle-faced bat, Centurio senex, has a short bulldog-like snout and reduced numbers of teeth.
The orange nectar bat, Lonchophylla robusta, is a noctilionoid species that has a longer jaw and drinks nectar.
The pale-faced bat, Phylloderma stenops, is a noctilionoid bat with an omnivorous diet.
The hairy-legged vampire bat, Diphylla ecaudata, feeds primarily on the blood of birds. It is one of three living species of vampire bats — all of them noctilionoid, and all with sharply reduced numbers of teeth and short jaws, likely due to their specialized diet.
CREDIT
Sharlene Santana/University of Washington
Bats in Tamana cave, on the Caribbean island of Trinidad.
Ask a biologist why predators don't exterminate all their prey, part of the answer often is that there is an ongoing arms race between predators and prey, with both parties continuously evolving new ways to cheat each other.
The hypothesis is particularly prevalent for bats and their prey; insects. 50 million years ago, the first bats evolved the ability to echolocate and thus hunt in the dark, and in response to this, some insects evolved ultrasound-sensitive ears so they could hear and evade the bats.
But if there is an ongoing arms race, bats should have responded to this, says University of Southern Denmark biologist, associate professor and bat expert Lasse Jakobsen, co-author of a new study published in Current Biology, In the study, he and colleagues question the evolutionary arms race between bats and insects.
The other authors are Daniel Lewanzik and Holger R. Goerlitz from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence and John M. Ratcliffe and Erik Etzler from the University of Toronto.
The main argument supporting the arms race hypothesis is that some bats do not call as loudly as others when hunting, and thus cannot be heard as easily by the insects. These are the barbastelles (Barbastella barbastellus), and they are approx. 20 dB quieter than other bats that hunt flying insects, which means that the sound pressure they emit is 10 times lower.
- The barbastelle is traditionally highlighted as the bat that has “struck back” at the insects, says Lasse Jakobsen.
But something puzzled him and his colleagues: If you look at the barbastelle’s close relatives, there are virtually no other members catching insects in the air. Instead, they eat insects that sit on surfaces such as leaves and branches, and those species are all quieter than the species that hunt flying insects.
In bat research circles, the bats that catch insects in the air are called hawking bats, while the bats that pick insects from a surface, so to speak, are called gleaning bats. The barbastelle is a hawking bat.
- If most of the barbastelle’s family are gleaners, then their ancestor was very likely also a gleaner, says Lasse Jakobsen.
Accordingly, it is therefore unlikely that the ancestor of the barbastelle was a loud hawker that evolved into the whispering barbastelle as a response to insect hearing.
- A species does not have free choice when it evolves in a new direction. For example, it is a condition for mammals that their ancestor did not have feathers, so their descendants will never evolve a wing with feathers. Instead, they have found another solution for flying: modified skin between the fingers, explains Lasse Jakobsen.
But if the barbastelle didn't evolve its ability to be quieter when hunting in the air, as part of the arms race between insects and bats; where does it come from?
- It is not an evolved ability. It just cannot produce louder calls than it does, because as a descendant of a gleaner it is probably morphologically limited. But it has found a niche, where it can use its low amplitude calls. It is an evolutionary coincidence; it sort of fell into this niche, where there was something to eat.
This niche is populated by flying, nocturnal insects that can hear and are thus good at avoiding nocturnal bats. But they cannot hear well enough to register the barbastelle, so they end up as their prey.
The reason for the morphological limitation must be found in how bats emit their sound. Most bats call out of their mouths, and this allows them to emit loud sounds. Many gleaners, on the other hand, emit sound with their noses, and this makes their calls 20 dB lower.
- So, the reason why the barbastelles are so quiet today is not an expression of an arms race between bats and insects, but rather simply an expression of the fact that it is descended from bats that cannot call as loudly as others, says Lasse Jakobsen.
Nocturnal flying insects: Examples of nocturnal flying insects are moths, beetles and mosquitoes. Many moths have ears and can hear if a bat is approaching. Until approx. 50 million years ago, when bats arose, nocturnal flying insects had no enemies of significance. Today, only bats hunt insects at night.
Inflammation is a risk factor for many chronic diseases, including cardiovascular disease (CVD), and the impact of diet on inflammation is an area of growing scientific interest. In particular, recommendations to limit red meat consumption are often based, in part, on old studies suggesting that red meat negatively affects inflammation – yet more recent studies have not supported this.
“The role of diet, including red meat, on inflammation and disease risk has not been adequately studied, which can lead to public health recommendations that are not based on strong evidence,” said Dr. Alexis Wood, associate professor of pediatrics – nutrition at the USDA/ARS Children's Nutrition Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital. “Our team sought to take a closer look by using metabolite data in the blood, which can provide a more direct link between diet and health.”
Wood and her team analyzed cross-sectional data captured from approximately 4,000 older adults participating in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA), and recently published their findings in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Cross-sectional data is a useful source of evidence on how diet affects health; it uses data that is observed with free-living people, without attempting to influence their usual lifestyle. In this way, it may be easier to take results from such studies and apply them to non-research settings. In addition to assessing participants’ self-reported food intake and several biomarkers, researchers also measured an array of dietary intake metabolites in blood. Plasma metabolites can help capture the effects of dietary intake as food is processed, digested and absorbed.
Researchers found that when adjusted for body mass index (BMI), intake of unprocessed and processed red meat (beef, pork or lamb) was not directly associated with any markers of inflammation, suggesting that body weight, not red meat, may be the driver of increased systemic inflammation. Of particular interest was the lack of a link between red meat intake and C-reactive protein (CRP), the major inflammatory risk marker of chronic disease.
“Our analysis adds to the growing body of evidence that indicates the importance of measuring plasma markers, such as metabolites, to track diet and disease risk associations, versus relying on self-reported dietary intake alone,” Wood said. “Our analysis does not support previous observational research associations linking red meat intake and inflammation.”
Because observational studies cannot indicate cause and effect, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) where individuals are randomly assigned to consume a dietary factor of interest or not consume it, are needed as an additional line of evidence to adequately understand if red meat does not alter inflammation. Several RCTs have demonstrated that lean unprocessed beef can be enjoyed in heart-healthy dietary patterns.
“We have reached a stage where more studies are needed before we can make recommendations to limit red meat consumption for reducing inflammation if we want to base dietary recommendations on the most up-to-date evidence,” Wood said. “Red meat is popular, accessible and palatable – and its place in our diet has deep cultural roots. Given this, recommendations about reducing consumption should be supported by strong scientific evidence, which doesn’t yet exist.”
Other contributors to this work include Goncalo Graca, Meghana Gadgil, Mackenzie K. Senn, Matthew A. Allison, Ioanna Tzoulaki, Philip Greenland, Timothy Ebbels, Paul Elliott, Mark O. Goodarzi, Russell Tracy, Jerome I. Rotter and David Herrington.
The study was supported by the Beef Checkoff. Wood was supported, in part, by the USDA/ARS (Cooperative Agreement 58-3092-5-001). Mark Goodarzi was supported by the Eris M. Field Chair in Diabetes Research. Jerome Rotter was supported, in part, by the National Institutes of Health grants from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease (DK063491), from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (UL1TR001881), the CHARGE Consortium, and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI; R01HL105756).
