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)
Wednesday, January 15, 2025
Ground-penetrating radar reveals new secrets under Milan's Sforza Castle
Milan, 14 January 2025 – In the context of a PhD thesis, the Politecnico di Milano carried out a cutting-edge technological investigation, working in collaboration with the Sforza Castle and with technical support from Codevintec. The survey revealed the presence of numerous passages under the Castle, in the area once covered by the "Ghirlanda" or outer wall, some of which could be linked to secret military passages, also shown in Leonardo's designs. According to historical sources, Ludovico il Moro had an underground passageway built to allow him to visit his beloved wife Beatrice d 'Este, who was buried in the Basilica of Santa Maria delle Grazie. This passageway is immortalised in Leonardo's drawings, and has long been the subject of legends and considerable speculation. But now, thanks to technology, it seems that its existence can be confirmed. However, there are many other secret passageways.
The investigation used advanced technologies, such as GPR and laser scanners, to create an accurate map of the Castle's sub-surface and the underground structures. These instruments were able to reveal underground cavities and passageways about a foot or two beneath the surface. As Franco Guzzetti, professor of Geomatics at the Politecnico di Milano, explained: "The aim is to create a digital twin of the Sforza Castle, a digital model that not only shows the current appearance of the Castle, but also allows us to explore the past, by revealing ancient structures that are no longer visible."
As well as providing a historical record, the data collected could be integrated with augmented reality to develop immersive experience projects that combine history and innovation. Francesca Biolo, researcher at the ABC Department of the Politecnico, also pointed out: "The GDR technology has added to our 3D model by providing data about well-known but inaccessible spaces, revealing unknown pathways and suggesting ideas for further research into these secret passages."
Ground-penetrating radar reveals new secrets under Milan's Sforza Castle
Credit
Politecnico di Milano
Ground-penetrating radar reveals new secrets under Milan's Sforza Castle
Frogs and toads of the Amazon and Atlantic Rainforest will suffer the worst impact of drought combined with warming
A study predicts that 36% of anurans’ habitats worldwide will soon be threatened by a combination of rising temperatures and water scarcity. Brazil has the greatest diversity of anurans in the world and some of the most vulnerable anuran habitats
Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo
A Lesser tree frog (Dendropsophus minutus) in the Santa Virgínia area of Serra do Mar State Park, in the municipality of São Luis do Paraitinga (São Paulo state): anurans are highly sensitive to water loss
An international team of researchers has completed the most comprehensive survey ever of the predicted planetwide effects of drought and global warming on anurans (frogs and toads). An article reporting their findings is published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
“The Amazon and the Atlantic Rainforest are the biomes with the most anuran species and the highest probability of an increase in both the frequency and intensity or duration of drought events. This will be harmful to the physiology and behavior of countless species. These biomes are among the regions of the planet with the greatest diversity of amphibians. Many species only occur in these places,” said Rafael Bovo, a researcher at the University of California, Riverside (USA), and one of the authors of the article.
The raw data used in the study had never previously been collected by any scientist. Most of the data was assembled by Bovo during research he conducted in Brazil with a scholarship from FAPESP, more precisely for his doctorate at São Paulo State University’s Institute of Biosciences (IB-UNESP) in Rio Claro, and for postdoctoral studies at the University of São Paulo’s Institute of Biosciences (IB-USP).
The findings include a prediction that between 6.6% and 33.6% of anuran habitats will become arid by the period 2080-2100, depending on the level of greenhouse gas emissions from now on. If greenhouse gas emissions rise moderately and global warming increases by 2 °C, 15.4% of these habitats will be exposed to more drought events.
If greenhouse gas emissions reach a high level by the end of this century and global warming increases by 4 °C, more than a third (36%) of these habitats will suffer from drought events that may be devastating for anurans, which are particularly sensitive to water loss owing to their thin, highly permeable skin.
In practice, in a future world 4 °C warmer, anurans in the Amazon, Central America, Chile, the northern U.S. and the European Mediterranean are predicted to experience drought events lasting an additional four months per year.
Even 2 °C warming, however, will increase the duration of droughts by one to four consecutive months per year in most of the Americas, Europe, southern and central Africa, and southern Australia.
Combination
The researchers concluded that frogs and toads may experience twice the rate of water loss in some arid regions and that the combination of drier weather and higher temperatures may double the reduction in anuran activity compared with the expected impact of warming alone.
“In a hotter and drier environment than the one they’ve adapted to in their evolutionary history, anurans will have to spend less time outside their shelters to avoid the heat and dryness, both of which accelerate evaporative water loss. As a result, they will also have to spend less time foraging and finding mates for reproduction, which will directly affect the viability of these populations,” Bovo said.
Biophysical simulations performed by the researchers showed, for example, that anurans will spend less time in activity in tropical regions of the planet, including the Amazon and part of the Atlantic Rainforest biome, under all climate scenarios throughout the year. While warming alone and drought alone will decrease activity hours by 3.4% and 21.7% respectively, the combination of warming and drought will decrease activity hours by 26%.
Besides the data collected in the field and in the lab by Bovo, the survey also gleaned and standardized information from the scientific literature. The process lasted about three years.
The resulting database comprises both planetwide climate forecasts for the end of the century and information on the natural history of 6,416 species listed as “threatened” by the International Union for Conservation (IUCN). The variables analyzed by the researchers included geographical distribution, use of microhabitats, and presence of behavioral and physiological strategies to avoid water loss, such as posture, burrowing to shelter from environmental pressure, secretion, or waterproofing via cutaneous surface fluid or lipids, for example.
In a previous article, Bovo and collaborators showed how thermal breadth in frogs and toads may vary even within species, and how this can influence predictions of the impact of climate change based solely on thermal tolerance.
The researchers are now focusing on understanding whether some species have sufficient plasticity to adjust relatively quickly to a drier environment and whether they are able to adapt over an evolutionary scale of thousands of years. The long-term goal is to refine the models on which predictions of local or regional species extinction are based, enabling their use as benchmarks for other animal groups that are sensitive to warming and water scarcity.
“There are only two possible solutions for anurans to avoid extinction: migration or adaptation. We want to develop a deeper understanding of which species still have the ability to adjust their physiology and behavior, in a single lifetime or over several generations, so as to survive these profound changes, and to help predict the magnitude of the biodiversity that will remain at the end of the century,” Bovo said.
About FAPESP
The São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) is a public institution with the mission of supporting scientific research in all fields of knowledge by awarding scholarships, fellowships and grants to investigators linked with higher education and research institutions in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. FAPESP is aware that the very best research can only be done by working with the best researchers internationally. Therefore, it has established partnerships with funding agencies, higher education, private companies, and research organizations in other countries known for the quality of their research and has been encouraging scientists funded by its grants to further develop their international collaboration.
"Over the past three years, global project announcements for green hydrogen have almost tripled," says PIK researcher and lead author Adrian Odenweller. "However, only seven percent of the production capacity originally announced for 2023 has been completed on time during this period." According to the study, the recent problems with the market ramp-up of green hydrogen can be attributed to increased costs, a lack of willingness to pay on the demand side and uncertainties about future subsidies and regulation.
"Enormous additional subsidies of around one trillion US dollars would be required to realise all announced hydrogen projects by 2030," explains Falko Ueckerdt from PIK, "Green hydrogen will continue to have difficulties meeting the high expectations in the future due to a lack of competitiveness." However, permanent subsidies are not a solution. The two researchers therefore recommend using demand-side instruments such as binding quotas to channel green hydrogen specifically into sectors that are difficult to electrify, such as aviation, steel or chemicals. For example, according to an EU regulation, 1.2 percent of all aviation fuels must be blended with synthetic fuels based on hydrogen from 2030. This quota is set to rise to 35 percent by 2050.
Subsidy requirements far exceed announced global subsidies
In their study, the researchers quantify three key gaps between theory and practice: the past implementation gap, the future ambition gap and the future implementation gap. The first results from the difference between originally announced hydrogen projects and the projects actually realised in 2023. The ambition gap refers to the discrepancy between the amount of hydrogen that would be required by 2030 according to 1.5-degree scenarios and the projects currently announced by 2030. Although announced hydrogen projects are sufficient for the majority of the scenarios analysed, a wide implementation gap remains: The subsidies required to realise all projects by 2030 far exceed the global public financial support announced to date.
The study is based on a global and manually verified project database with 1232 green hydrogen projects announced until 2030. For each of the 14 designated end uses of the projects, the authors calculate the competitiveness gap between the green product and its fossil competitor. Together with the volume and the timing of the project announcements, this yields the subsidies required to realise all projects by 2030.
The researchers warn against fossil lock-ins, which could tie companies to fossil fuels and thus endanger climate targets. In the long term, a transition to technology-neutral market mechanisms such as carbon pricing is crucial in order to limit public costs and ensure a level playing field with other climate mitigation options. They therefore recommend a robust strategy that supports hydrogen projects in the short term through direct subsidies and demand-side regulation, but is based on realistic expectations for hydrogen.
Article: Adrian Odenweller, Falko Ueckerdt (2025): Green Hydrogen ambition and implementation gap. Nature Energy. [DOI: 10.1038/s41560-024-01684-7]
Abdul Latif Khan, assistant professor of biotechnology at the University of Houston Cullen College of Engineering Technology Division, examined the communities of microbiomes living in and around the roots (rhizosphere) and on the leaves (phyllosphere) of four types of hemp plants.
Hemp has become increasingly popular for its versatile uses: CBD-rich varieties are in high demand for pharmaceutical products, while fiber-rich varieties are valued for industrial applications like textiles. Now, a new University of Houston study of hemp microbes, published in the journal Nature, may help scientists create special mixtures of helpful microbes to make hemp plants produce more CBD or have better-quality fibers.
As a community of tiny organisms including microbes, the plant microbiome helps plants absorb nutrients, handle stress and produce valuable compounds.
The study, led by Abdul Latif Khan, assistant professor of biotechnology at the Cullen College of Engineering Technology Division, examined the communities of microbiomes living in and around the roots (rhizosphere) and on the leaves (phyllosphere) of four types of hemp plants. Khan’s team also compared how these microorganisms differ between hemp grown for fiber and hemp grown for CBD production.
“In hemp, the microbiome is important in terms of optimizing the production of CBD and enhancing the quality of fiber. This work explains how different genotypes of hemp harbor microbial communities to live inside and contribute to such processes,” reports Khan. “We showed how different types of hemp plants have their own special groups of tiny living microbes that help the plants grow and stay healthy.”
“Understanding these microorganisms can also lead to more sustainable farming methods, using nature to boost plant growth instead of relying heavily on chemicals,” said Waqar Ahmad, the paper’s first author and doctoral student of Khan’s.
Among the findings:
· Microbiome diversity was significantly different in soil, root, leaf, stem - and also in CBD and fiber genotypes.
· Roots and soil showed higher bacterial diversity
· Leaves and stems had higher fungal diversity.
· Bacteria such as Sphingomonas, Pseudomonas and Bacillus were highly present among the hemp plants that produced fiber.
· Microbacterium and Rhizobium were more abundant in CBD-producing hemp as were fungi like Penicillium and Nigrospora, but fungi Alternaria and Gibberella were associated with fiber plants.
“Different genotypes have different microbiomes, affecting physiology, nutrient uptake, stress resilience, and production of secondary metabolites such as CBD. Our findings might suggest that these endophytic microorganisms have a major role in impacting CBD production and high-quality fiber in hemp,” said Khan.
The team included Venkatesh Balan, UH associate professor of biotechnology at the Cullen College of Engineering Technology Division; Aruna Weerasooriya, professor of medicinal plants at Prairie View A&M University; and Ram Ray, professor of agronomy at Prairie View A&M University.
Journal
Nature
Article Title
Microbiome diversity and variations in industrial hemp genotypes
Researcher to study how climate warming impacts farm ponds
Chengbin Deng is leading an NSF-funded effort to better understand how small farms are impacted by human- and climate-based changes to their environments.
NORMAN, OKLA. – A University of Oklahoma researcher has received funding from the National Science Foundation to monitor farm ponds across Oklahoma. The research will improve understanding of how small bodies of water respond to human- and climate-based changes.
Farm ponds, like other comparably sized water bodies, are sensitive to environmental changes. When it comes to monitoring their size, the available products provide imperfect pictures: the nationwide product provides high-resolution data with the most accurate view of the water but does not update frequently, and the global surface water product that updates regularly is lower resolution, which does not capture bodies like ponds.
“If we can collect timely information on these ponds, not only can we enhance the resilience of the water availability and the aquatic system but also we may enhance the resilience of social and agricultural production system,” said Chenbing Deng, Ph.D., a professor in the OU Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability, who is leading the research.
Deng is a remote-sensing scientist who uses satellite data and aerial photographs to study environmental change. To generate a complete view of these ponds on a sub-seasonal basis, Deng will leverage both optical data and other types of data, such as radar data. Radar can help acquire data on days when satellites are unable to see the ground.
Before coming to OU, Deng’s research focused on changes in urban environments. Now, it has expanded to include rural environments and climate change and adaptation.
“While climate change is related to the urban environment, I’ve actually broadened my research view to include natural environments, such as farm ponds and surface water bodies,” Deng said. “One of the reasons for this change is how relevant such research is to the rural communities in Oklahoma and that the small farm ponds themselves are extremely sensitive to changes in climate.”
He says the data will be collected daily, providing near real-time updates on the changes happening in these ponds, but bi-weekly or even monthly data would be an improvement from what is currently available. Monthly updates will allow researchers to see how human variables, such as construction, impact water. This monitoring will allow Deng to dig deeper into the cause and effect of the populations and environment surrounding these ponds.
“We’ll look at how human beings try to alter or change the landscape, such as through agricultural activities. Or, in the case of climate change, that may be another reason for water changes. There could be a lot of different factors that dominate,” said Deng.
The answers given by these observations will help inform where water should be kept.
While Deng hopes that this can build to focus on a larger geographic area in the future, for now the observations will focus on the Great Plains area, predominantly Oklahoma, with a small amount of Texas as well. “Even doing one state like Oklahoma is already very challenging because of the number of datasets,” said Deng.
He hopes that in the future, the research can span beyond visual observations to include input from farmers and rural community members on their thoughts and perceptions of water.
