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, April 23, 2021
New data could inform youth-focused pandemic messaging
Polls of people aged 14 to 24 about masks, distancing and more show the importance of focusing communications on protecting others
Now that teens and young adults across the country account for an increasing share of COVID-19 cases, and many have become eligible for vaccination, several recently published studies based on polls of this age group provide insights into the kinds of messaging that might work best for both preventing transmission and vaccine uptake.
Using data from text-message polls of people between the ages of 14 and 24 taken at several points in 2020, researchers from the University of Michigan find a clear theme: that most young people are taking COVID-19 seriously and trying to follow public health guidance, and that many of them they are motivated by the desire to protect others.
The latest paper, in the Journal of Adolescent Health's May issue, finds that 86% of young people are moderately or very concerned about spreading COVID-19. The data come from the MyVoice poll, which allows open-ended answers to questions texted to a national sample of young people.
At the time the poll was taken, 89% said they wear masks or other face coverings all or most of the time - and the most common reason they gave was to prevent themselves from spreading the coronavirus.
But nearly 20% said that they made exceptions when they were near people they considered close contacts or part of their "pod," and 16% said they based their mask-wearing behavior on social cues, such as whether they felt they could trust that the people they were with had been cautious about potential sources of exposure.
Melissa DeJonckheere, Ph.D., the first author of the paper and an assistant professor in U-M's Department of Family Medicine, says, "By and large, youth thought they were doing the right thing and following face covering guidelines, even when making exceptions. At the time our data were collected, youth were engaged and concerned about their impact on others, and overall wanted to do their part."
Kao-Ping Chua, M.D., Ph.D., senior author and an assistant professor of pediatrics, says that the findings have implications for improving messaging to young people around COVID-19 vaccination, as well as mask use. "Public health campaigns should leverage youths' desire to protect others and not be the cause of spread. Youth may not be very strongly motivated to get a vaccine to protect themselves. A message like "Get a vaccine to protect your grandparents" might be more effective."
Two other recent MyVoice papers found similarly high percentages of youth reported following rules about social distancing for the most part, but making exceptions for close contacts including situations where young people seemed to be misinterpreting public health guidance. Protecting others was cited as the most common motivation for distancing and following other guidance.
Brazil prostitutes strike for first-line Covid shots Prostitutes in the city of Belo Horizonte in southeast Brazil have gone on strike for a week, demanding to be included in the group of front-line workers receiving priority coronavirus vaccines
Thousands of sex workers in the city have been forced by pandemic-related closure of hotels -- where they rented rooms to sell their services -- to solicit for clients on the street, they say.
"We are in the front line, moving the economy and we are at risk," Cida Vieira, president of the Association of Prostitutes of Minas Gerais state, told AFP. "We need to get vaccinated."
Vieira and other women held a protest Monday in a street lined with shuttered hotels where they used to ply their trade, waving placards declaring: "Sex workers are professionals" and "Sex work and health."
"We are part of the priority group because we deal with various types of people and our lives are at risk," said Lucimara Costa, one of the protesting prostitutes.
The government has prioritized health workers, teachers, the elderly, indigenous people and people with underlying health conditions for the first vaccination round.
It hopes to vaccinate these priority groups, some 77 million people, in the first half of 2021, but experts say this may drag into September due to the shortage of doses.
"We are a priority group, we are health educators, peer educators. We form part of that group, since we give information about STIs for men, distribute condoms..." said Vieira.
Like the rest of Brazil, Minas Gerais state has been battling a second pandemic wave, but the number of deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, at 121, is among the lowest in the country.
The Covid-19 pandemic has claimed more than 332,000 lives in Brazil, a toll second only to the United States.
mel/js/mlr/caw AFP 2021-04-07
Hubble celebrates 31st birthday with giant star on the edge of destruction
IMAGE: IN CELEBRATION OF THE 31ST ANNIVERSARY OF THE LAUNCH OF THE NASA/ESA HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE, ASTRONOMERS AIMED THE CELEBRATED OBSERVATORY AT ONE OF THE BRIGHTEST STARS SEEN IN OUR GALAXY... view more
CREDIT: NASA, ESA AND STSCI
The giant star featured in this latest Hubble Space Telescope anniversary image is waging a tug-of-war between gravity and radiation to avoid self-destruction. The star, called AG Carinae, is surrounded by an expanding shell of gas and dust -- a nebula -- that is shaped by the powerful winds of the star. The nebula is about five light-years wide, which equals the distance from here to our nearest star, Alpha Centauri.
The huge structure was created from one or more giant eruptions several thousand years ago. The star's outer layers were blown into space, the expelled material amounting to roughly 10 times the mass of our Sun. These outbursts are typical in the life of a rare breed of star called a Luminous Blue Variable (LBV), a brief unstable phase in the short life of an ultra-bright, glamorous star that lives fast and dies young. These stars are among the most massive and brightest stars known. They live for only a few million years, compared to the roughly 10-billion-year lifetime of our own Sun. AG Carinae is a few million years old and resides 20 000 light-years away inside our Milky Way galaxy. The star's expected lifetime is between 5 million and 6 million years.
LBVs have a dual personality. They appear to spend years in semi-quiescent bliss and then they erupt in a petulant outburst, during which their luminosity increases -- sometimes by several orders of magnitude. These behemoths are stars in the extreme, far different from normal stars like our Sun. In fact AG Carinae is estimated to be up to 70 times more massive than our Sun and shines with the blinding brilliance of 1 million suns.
Major outbursts such as the one that produced the nebula featured in this image occur a few times during a LBV's lifetime. A LBV star only casts off material when it is in danger of self-destruction. Because of their massive forms and super-hot temperatures, luminous blue variable stars like AG Carinae are in a constant battle to maintain stability. It's an arm-wrestling contest between radiation pressure from within the star pushing outward and gravity pressing inward. This arm-wrestling match results in the star's expanding and contracting. The outward pressure occasionally wins the battle, and the star expands to such an immense size that it blows off its outer layers, like a volcano erupting. But this outburst only happens when the star is on the verge of coming apart. After the star ejects the material, it contracts to its normal (large) size, settles back down, and becomes stable again.
LBV stars are rare: fewer than 50 are known among the galaxies in our local group of neighbouring galaxies. These stars spend tens of thousands of years in this phase, a blink of an eye in cosmic time. Some are expected to end their lives in titanic supernova blasts, which enrich the Universe with the heavier elements beyond iron.
Like many other LBVs, AG Carinae remains unstable. It has experienced lesser outbursts that have not been as powerful as the one that created the present nebula. Although AG Carinae is semi-quiescient now, its searing radiation and powerful stellar wind (streams of charged particles) have been shaping the ancient nebula, sculpting intricate structures as outflowing gas slams into the slower-moving outer nebula. The wind is travelling at up to 1 million kilometres per hour, about 10 times faster than the expanding nebula. Over time, the hot wind catches up with the cooler expelled material, ploughs into it, and pushes it farther away from the star. This "snowplough" effect has cleared a cavity around the star.
The red material is glowing hydrogen gas laced with nitrogen gas. The diffuse red material at upper left pinpoints where the wind has broken through a tenuous region of material and swept it into space. The most prominent features, highlighted in blue, are filamentary structures shaped like tadpoles and lopsided bubbles. These structures are dust clumps illuminated by the star's light. The tadpole-shaped features, most prominent at left and bottom, are denser dust clumps that have been sculpted by the stellar wind. Hubble's sharp vision reveals these delicate-looking structures in great detail.
The image was taken in visible and ultraviolet light. Hubble is ideally suited for observations in ultraviolet light because this wavelength range can only be viewed from space.
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More information:
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.
Each year in the month of April, ESA/Hubble uses the telescope's anniversary as an opportunity to develop special initiatives to engage and involve the public in this annual milestone. You can explore all of the ESA/Hubble 31st Anniversary initiatives that have been and will be announced here: ESAHubble.org/Hubble31. You can engage with ESA/Hubble's 31st anniversary activities on social media using #Hubble31.
The observations were conducted as part of the Hubble observing program 16434 (PI: Christopher Britt). They were taken with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 UVIS channel.
As Hubble celebrates it's 31st year of operations, below are some captivating facts about the famous observatory's achievements and impact:
Launched on 24 April 1990, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has made more than 1.5 million observations of about 48 000 celestial objects.
In its 31-year lifetime, the telescope has racked up more than 181 000 orbits around our planet, totaling over 7.2 billion kilometres.
Hubble observations have produced more than 169 terabytes of data, which are available to present and future generations of researchers.
Astronomers using Hubble data have published more than 18 000 scientific papers, with more than 900 of those papers published in 2020.
VR visualization supports research on molecular networks
A new VR platform enables the display of huge amounts of data. This can be helpful in the study of rare genetic defects, among other things.
CEMM RESEARCH CENTER FOR MOLECULAR MEDICINE OF THE AUSTRIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
IMAGE: GREEN-SCREEN COMPOSITION SHOWING A USER IMMERSED IN THE GENOME-SCALE MOLECULAR INTERACTION NETWORK. view more
CREDIT: SEBASTIAN PIRCH, PUBLISHED IN NATURE COMMUNICATIONS 2021.
Networks offer a powerful way to visualize and analyze complex systems. However, depending on the size and complexity of the network, many visualizations are limited. Protein interactions in the human body constitute such a complex system that can hardly be visualized. Jörg Menche, Adjunct Principal Investigator at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Professor at the University of Vienna and research group leader at Max Perutz Labs (Uni Wien/MedUni), and his team developed an immersive virtual reality (VR) platform that solves this problem. With the help of VR visualization of protein interactions, it will be possible in the future to better recognize correlations and identify those genetic aberrations that are responsible for rare diseases.
The larger and more complex networks are, the more difficult their visualization on the screen becomes. Conventional computer programs quickly reach their limits. This challenge was addressed by network scientist Jörg Menche and his research group at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. They developed a VR platform for exploring huge amounts of data and their complex interplay in a uniquely intuitive fashion.
The body as a network
The representation of complex data can be particularly important in the search for the cause of rare diseases, because the human body, with its approximately 20,000 proteins that are encoded in the human genome and interact with each other, represents a huge complex network. Whether movement or digestion - at the molecular level, all biological processes are based on the interaction between proteins. If the protein interactions are illustrated in a network, a barely representable picture of about 18,000 dots - proteins - and about 300,000 lines between these dots will be created. Menche and his research group used the virtual reality (VR) platform they developed to make this image "readable" and, in collaboration with St. Anna Children's Cancer Research, succeeded in making the entirety of protein interactions visible for the first time. This makes it possible to interactively explore the vast and complex network.
Approaching the cause of rare immune diseases
For their study, published in Nature Communications, first author Sebastian Pirch and Menche's research group identified connection patterns between different protein complexes in the human body and linked them to their biological functions. In addition, the scientists used global databases to identify specific protein complexes associated with a particular disease. "While conventional forms of representation would look like a proverbial 'hairball', the 3-dimensional representation enables the precise analysis and observation of the different protein complexes and their interactions," says study author Pirch. This can be particularly important in the identification of rare genetic defects and crucial for therapeutic measures. "On the one hand, our study represents an important proof of concept of our VR platform; on the other hand, it directly demonstrates the enormous potential of visualizing molecular networks," says project leader Menche. "Especially in rare diseases, severe immune diseases, protein complexes associated with specific clinical symptoms can be analyzed in more detail to develop hypotheses about their respective pathobiological mechanisms. This facilitates the approach to disease causes and subsequently the search for targeted therapeutic measures."
About the VR platform
The platform developed by Menche's research group is designed for maximum flexibility and extensibility. Key features include the import of user-defined code for data analysis, easy integration of external databases, and a high degree of design freedom for arbitrary elements of user interfaces. The researchers were able to draw on technology normally used in the development of 3D computer games, such as the globally popular game Fortnite. By publishing the source code, the researchers hope to convince other developers of the potential of virtual reality for analyzing scientific data.
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The study "VRNetzer: A Virtual Reality Network Analysis Platform" was published in the journal Nature Communications on April 23, 2021. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-22570-w.
Authors: Sebastian Pirch, Felix Müller, Eugenia Iofinova, Julia Pazmandi, Christiane V. R. Hütter, Martin Chiettini, Celine Sin, Kaan Boztug, Iana Podkosova, Hannes Kaufmann & Jörg Menche
Funding: This work was supported by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) through projects VRG15-005 and NXT19-008, and by an Epic MegaGrant.
Jörg Menche studied physics in Leipzig, Recife and Berlin. He did his PhD with Reinhard Lipowsky at the Max-Planck-Institute for Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam (Germany), and was a postdoctoral fellow with Albert-László Barabási at Northeastern University and at the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. He joined CeMM in 2015 as a Principal Investigator. In September 2020, he received a joint professorship at the Max Perutz Labs and the Faculty of Mathematics of the University of Vienna, and became CeMM Adjunct PI.
The mission of CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences is to achieve maximum scientific innovation in molecular medicine to improve healthcare. At CeMM, an international and creative team of scientists and medical doctors pursues free-minded basic life science research in a large and vibrant hospital environment of outstanding medical tradition and practice. CeMM's research is based on post-genomic technologies and focuses on societally important diseases, such as immune disorders and infections, cancer and metabolic disorders. CeMM operates in a unique mode of super-cooperation, connecting biology with medicine, experiments with computation, discovery with translation, and science with society and the arts. The goal of CeMM is to pioneer the science that nurtures the precise, personalized, predictive and preventive medicine of the future. CeMM trains a modern blend of biomedical scientists and is located at the campus of the General Hospital and the Medical University of Vienna. http://www.cemm.at
The Max Perutz Labs are a research institute established by the University of Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna to provide an environment for excellent, internationally recognized research and education in the field of Molecular Biology. Dedicated to a mechanistic understanding of fundamental biomedical processes, scientists at the Max Perutz Labs aim to link breakthroughs in basic research to advances in human health. The Max Perutz Labs are located at the Vienna BioCenter, one of Europe's hotspots for Life Sciences, and host around 50 research groups, involving more than 450 scientists and staff from 40 nations. http://www.maxperutzlabs.ac.at
St. Anna CCRI is an internationally renowned multidisciplinary research institution with the aim to develop and optimize diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic strategies for the treatment of children and adolescents with cancer. To achieve this goal, it combines basic research with translational and clinical research and focus on the specific characteristics of childhood tumor diseases in order to provide young patients with the best possible and most innovative therapies. Dedicated research groups in the fields of tumor genomics and epigenomics, immunology, molecular biology, cell biology, bioinformatics and clinical research are working together to harmonize scientific findings with the clinical needs of physicians to ultimately improve the wellbeing of our patients. http://www.ccri.at, http://www.kinderkrebsforschung.at
Army, ASU publish human-autonomy communication tips
IMAGE: ARMY RESEARCHERS PUBLISH A PAPER SUGGESTING HOW FUTURE SOLDIERS WILL COMMUNICATE IN COMPLEX AND AUTONOMOUS ENVIRONMENTS. view more
CREDIT: U.S. ARMY PHOTO ILLUSTRATION
ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. -- Army and Arizona State University researchers identified a set of approaches to help scientists assess how well autonomous systems and humans communicate.
These approaches build on transformational scientific research efforts led by the Army's Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance, which evolved the state of robots from tools to teammates and laid the foundation for much of the service's existing research into how humans and robots can work together effectively.
As ideas for autonomous systems evolve, and the possibilities of ever-more diverse human-autonomy teams has become a reality; however, no clear guidelines exist to explain the best ways to assess how well humans and intelligent systems communicate, Army researchers said.
"The future Army is going to have complex teams in terms of how they will involve autonomy in different ways," said Dr. Anthony Baker, postdoctoral scientist at the U.S. Combat Capabilities Development Command, known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory. "There is a clear need to be able to measure communication in those types of teams because communication is what defines teamwork. It reflects how the team thinks, plans, makes decisions and succeeds or fails.
If you can't measure how the team is doing, you can't do anything to improve their performance, their decision-making, all of those things that make it more likely for the Army to maintain a decisive overmatch on the battlefield and for the warfighter to accomplish the mission, he said.
In the recently published Human-Intelligent Systems Integration journal paper Approaches for Assessing Communication in Human-Autonomy Teams, researchers listed 11 critical approaches for assessing communication in human-autonomy teams. Baker said their focus is to change Soldier involvement with those systems.
The approach considers communication structure:
Who is saying what to whom and when
Dynamics, or how interaction patterns evolve over time
Emotion, which looks at how information is communicated through facial expressions and vocal features like tone and pitch
Content, which draws on different aspects of words and phrases themselves
"If we want Soldiers and intelligent systems to work well together, we have to have the right measurement tools to analyze and study their communication because communication is so critical to how well they can perform," Baker said.
As lead author on the paper, Baker said it won't be enough to study these things after the teams are fielded.
"We need the measurement tools while those teams and technologies are being developed by the Army," he said.
Because multi-domain operations are fundamentally dependent on improving the efficiency and optimization of communications within and between domains, the goal of this cross-cutting work is for these systems to be able to work with teams more naturally, he said.
According to Baker, this work may also provide a critical roadmap for analyzing communication in complex human-autonomy team structures such as those forecasted for Next Generation Combat Vehicle operations.
"There may be a time when a smart, load-carrying mule robot should carry a squad's extra gear completely independently and without Soldier involvement, but there is also a push in some areas to make it so that if systems do need to involve Soldiers, they can do so in a way that's more natural for the Soldiers, like working with a human teammate," Baker said.
Consider how a Soldier telling a robotic system, "I need you to take that gear up the hill and wait an hour before going to the next zone," is much easier than inputting a series of buttons and switches on a remote control.
"We want intelligence assessments, command and control decisions and other important things like that to be possible with less Soldier involvement, but we still want Soldier engagement for some things, and we want it to be easier," Baker said. "Hence why the RCTA had a large focus on making Soldier-robot interactions more efficient."
The Robotics CTA was a decade-long research initiative began in 2009 that coalesced a community of researchers from the Army, academia and industry to identify scientific gaps and move the state of the art in ground combat robotics. Strategic investments in Army-led foundational research resulted in advanced science in four critical areas of ground combat robotics that effect the way U.S. warfighters see, think, move and team.
Baker said it laid the groundwork for a lot of how the Army thinks about human-robot interaction and drove the shift in how government and industry look at robots as teammates, rather than just tools.
The laboratory's Human-Autonomy Teaming essential research program, or HAT ERP, continues down paths started in the RCTA, which laid broad building blocks for how to describe, model, design and implement new ways of partnering humans and robots, which are intelligent systems with physical forms.
"RCTA was not interested in explaining or providing ways to study communication between human teammates, instead being aimed at how humans and robots communicate," Baker said. "Our work looks at it from the perspective that we will need ways to study the communication of any type of team-whether or not those teams currently involve any number of robots or autonomy. We want to be agnostic to the overall makeup of the team, so we provide communication assessments suitable for many different scenarios."
These communication assessment approaches also apply to Soldier-only teams as well.
"Imagine a future human-autonomy team that has to re-task an autonomous vehicle to go join another platoon, and now the team is just humans only," he said. "Our work seeks to provide the literature with ways to analyze communication in those teams, no matter what they look like or what they're supposed to do, so that we can draw conclusions about how well they are working together and accomplishing their goals."
Future research will seek to validate some of the approaches identified in the paper using datasets collected from Next Generation Combat Vehicle lab studies and field experiments, Baker said.
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Pepper the robot talks to itself to improve its interactions with people
VIDEO: THIS VIDEO SHOWS PEPPER THE ROBOT EXPLAINING ITS REASONING AND HOW THAT CAN HELP RESOLVE CONFLICTS WITH HUMAN USERS. view more
CREDIT: ANTONIO CHELLA, ARIANNA PIPOTONE
Ever wondered why your virtual home assistant doesn't understand your questions? Or why your navigation app took you on the side street instead of the highway? In a study published April 21st in the journal iScience, Italian researchers designed a robot that "thinks out loud" so that users can hear its thought process and better understand the robot's motivations and decisions.
"If you were able to hear what the robots are thinking, then the robot might be more trustworthy," says co-author Antonio Chella, describing first author Arianna Pipitone's idea that launched the study at the University of Palermo. "The robots will be easier to understand for laypeople, and you don't need to be a technician or engineer. In a sense, we can communicate and collaborate with the robot better."
Inner speech is common in people and can be used to gain clarity, seek moral guidance, and evaluate situations in order to make better decisions. To explore how inner speech might impact a robot's actions, the researchers the researchers built a cognitive model of inner speech that makes robots able to speak to themselves and deployed them in a commercially-available Pepper robot.
The scientists found that, with the help of inner speech, Pepper is better at solving dilemmas. In one experiment, the user asked Pepper to place the napkin at the wrong spot, contradicting the etiquette rule. Pepper started asking itself a series of self-directed questions and concluded that the user might be confused. To be sure, Pepper confirmed the user's request, which led to further inner speech.
"Ehm, this situation upsets me. I would never break the rules, but I can't upset him, so I'm doing what he wants," Pepper said to itself, placing the napkin at the requested spot. Through Pepper's inner voice, the user can trace its thoughts to learn that Pepper was facing a dilemma and solved it by prioritizing the human's request. The researchers suggest that the transparency could help establish human-robot trust.
Comparing Pepper's performance with and without inner speech, Pipitone and Chella discovered that the robot had a higher task-completion rate when engaging in self-dialogue. Thanks to inner speech, Pepper outperformed the international standard functional and moral requirements for collaborative robots--guidelines that machines, from humanoid AI to mechanic arms at the manufacturing line, follow.
"People were very surprised by the robot's ability," says Pipitone. "The approach makes the robot different from typical machines because it has the ability to reason, to think. Inner speech enables alternative solutions for the robots and humans to collaborate and get out of stalemate situations."
Although hearing the inner voice of robots enriches the human-robot interaction, some people might find it inefficient because the robot spends more time completing tasks when it talks to itself. The robot's inner speech is also limited to the knowledge that researchers gave it. Still, Pipitone and Chella say their work provides a framework to further explore how self-dialogue can help robots focus, plan, and learn.
"In some sense, we are creating a generational robot that likes to chat," says Chella. The authors say that, from navigation apps and the camera on your phone to medical robots in the operation rooms, machines and computers alike can benefit from this chatty feature. "Inner speech could be useful in all the cases where we trust the computer or a robot for the evaluation of a situation," Chella says.
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This work was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
iScience (@iScience_CP) is an open access journal from Cell Press that provides a platform for original research and interdisciplinary thinking in the life, physical, and earth sciences. The primary criterion for publication in iScience is a significant contribution to a relevant field combined with robust results and underlying methodology. Visit: http://www.cell.com/iscience. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.
Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.
Gauging groundwater
The largest assessment of global groundwater wells finds many are at risk of drying up
"Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water." It's a silly rhyme, but one that highlights a simple fact: Humans have long relied on wells -- such as the one on the hill visited by Jack and Jill -- for their primary drinking water supply.
Although the number of people who draw their water by pail is declining as pumps become ever more widespread, groundwater wells still supply drinking water to more than half of the world's population and sustain over 40% of irrigated agriculture. But this vital resource underfoot often gets overlooked.
UC Santa Barbara assistant professors Debra Perrone and Scott Jasechko have compiled the most comprehensive assay of groundwater wells to date, spanning 40 countries that collectively account for half of all global groundwater pumping. Their study, the cover story of the April 23 edition of the journal Science, offers an unprecedented account of the world's groundwater resources.
"We analyzed construction records for tens of millions of groundwater wells around the world," said Jasechko, of the university's Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, "and the big take home is that many wells are at risk of running dry." Up to one in five wells in their survey, to be exact.
"These groundwater wells are used to withdraw water for household use or irrigation," added Perrone, a faculty member in the Environmental Studies Program. "Our study is the first time that groundwater wells and water level observations have been stitched together like this, providing local insights at the global scale."
Reaching these conclusions required the better part of six years' work by Perrone and Jasechko. The researchers culled their data from more than 100 unique databases around the world, sometimes in different formats and languages.
The first step involved compiling roughly 39 million records of functional groundwater wells that included depth, purpose, location and construction date. Rather than delegate processing the data to an algorithm or AI, the researchers carefully went through tidying it up manually. "We wanted to be sure we understood the limitations and nuances for each database we analyzed," Jasechko said.
With the data sorted, the authors compared the depths of local water tables against well depths. They found that 6 to 20% of the wells in their global sample were at risk of running dry if water levels continue to decline by just a few meters. They sought to find trends in the depths of new wells compared to existing wells in a given area from 1950 through 2015. While newer wells tended to be deeper than older ones, the trend was not ubiquitous, they said. Functional wells were not getting substantially deeper in many of the areas they surveyed.
The researchers then pulled data from roughly 1.1 million monitoring wells, which provide measurements of groundwater levels and conditions. These records supplied not only an account of where the water table lay, but also how much it fluctuated over the course of the year. Seasonal variation, they found, was typically within one meter.
By comparing depth trends to measurements from nearby monitoring wells, Perrone and Jasechko could also deduce how close functional wells were to drying out. They found that in many areas groundwater levels are declining, yet new wells are not being drilled deeper to keep pace with the falling water table. Since wells aren't getting substantially deeper in many areas, newer wells are at least as vulnerable as older wells should groundwater levels continue to decline.
"In some places, groundwater levels are close to the bottom of wells," Perrone stated. "If groundwater levels continue to decline in these places, wells will go dry, leaving people without access to water."
The two researchers also availed themselves of data from NASA's GRACE mission. The pair of GRACE satellites detect small differences in the Earth's gravitational field as they orbit the planet. This provided Perrone and Jasechko with information about groundwater reserves for regions where data from monitoring wells is limited.
"We only have groundwater level monitoring data for a few dozen countries," Jasechko said, "but GRACE data allows us to explore changes in water storage around the globe." While the resolution was coarse, the additional information confirmed the disconnect between declining groundwater and the construction of deeper wells.
There are many reasons not to drill deeper. It's much more expensive in terms of drilling and operational costs. The quality of groundwater can also decrease at depth, often becoming more saline toward the bottom of an aquifer.
"Drilling wells is expensive," Jasechko remarked. "Even if fresh water exists deep underground, not every individual or household has the capital to drill a new well to access it, which raises concerns about equity when wells run dry."
The pair hope to expand the coverage of their dataset, especially to countries like China, Iran and Pakistan, three major users of groundwater that the researchers could not obtain records from. They also plan to investigate the extent of groundwater decline in future research, looking for information on how quickly water tables are dropping and where the trend is accelerating.
Groundwater can provide a lifeline in even the most arid regions.
Perrone and Jasechko have made a name for themselves in the field of groundwater research by approaching the topic with enormous datasets like this one. The global study comes on the heels of another paper published in Nature on groundwater resources across the United States. There, they revealed the extent to which rivers across the country are losing flow to aquifers, in part due to pumping.
Together, the findings paint a broad picture not just of wells in danger, but of dwindling groundwater resources as a whole. While pumping may have the most direct impact on aquifers, the authors note, human activity has many indirect effects on groundwater quality and levels. Industrial activity, water diversion and even pavement and runoff affect the water beneath our feet. Climate change may exert the greatest influence over the long term, as it alters the distribution and intensity of precipitation and evapotranspiration from plants and soils worldwide.
"These findings highlight the importance of groundwater resources and groundwater management to the global community," Perrone said. "Putting all the data together reveals that declining groundwater levels threaten wells in many places across the world."
Groundwater sustainability is a complex issue with a lot of considerations and tradeoffs, the authors acknowledged. Deciding on a course of action won't be easy, but compiling and analyzing large datasets like this are a critical first-step in tackling the challenge. "With these data, we can make more informed management decisions to help us use groundwater sustainably," Perrone said.
Response options should be at the center of climate risk assessment and management
IMAGE: INTERACTIONS OF A SINGLE DRIVER FOR EACH DETERMINANT OF A RISK, NAMELY HAZARD, VULNERABILITY, EXPOSURE, AND RESPONSE TO CLIMATE CHANGE. view more
CREDIT: SIMPSON ET AL. 2021 (PLEASE HYPERLINK TO PAPER)
A team of researchers from the Africa Climate and Development Initiative (ACDI) led a global team of 21 climate risk scholars to better understand and inform decision making around climate change risks in Africa and globally by examining how the drivers of risk interact.
Their work extends on existing risk frameworks with the hope that this research could help decision makers, managers and researchers understand the inherent complexity of climate change.
"Understanding the interactions among risks holds potential to change the way we respond to the risks. This is important because policy makers may worry about the risk of implementing a response as much, or more so, than the risk the response aims to reduce. This can lead to inaction at the very time when we need to be most active and investing heavily in our response to climate change," said Dr Nick Simpson, lead author of the paper published in One Earth, and postdoctoral fellow at the ACDI based at the University of Cape Town (UCT).
Two important responses to climate change - adaptation and mitigation - are often not considered as part of climate risk assessment. In the article, the team, extends the existing risk framework used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by including response options, identifying multiple interactions of drivers of risk, and risk interactions in risk assessment.
Across the suite of terms that have been applied to climate change risk for human and natural systems, there is a commonality: an interaction or aggregation of the determinants of risk (hazard, exposure, vulnerability), and of multiple risks. The researchers expand on this by explicitly recognising that a response to climate change can also be a driver of risk as shown in the diagram below.
Yet, response has been generally considered separately or secondarily to interactions between hazards, exposures and vulnerabilities. As a result, response is considered for how it can manage or reduce risk rather than how it might also create risk. But response should be at the centre of climate risk assessment and management.
Simpson highlighted the importance of this innovation: "If human and biological response to climate change was better integrated with conceptualisation of risk, its assessment would be more policy relevant and better reflect real-world decision making around risk," he said.
The framework goes on to identify two more categories of complex climate change risk and highlights the importance of also considering the interactions of the multiple drivers of risk and interactions between risks themselves. This is particularly important in the African context where there is unique vulnerability and exposure challenges for particular populations and is well illustrated by the interactions of risks during the Cape Town drought.
Effective responses to the drought were delayed due to the political risk of declaring a disaster and a lack of feasible water supply alternatives. Responses became increasingly urgent in early 2018 as the potential of a 'Day Zero' event became possible, the point at which a city of four million people might run out of water. The risk of 'Day Zero' was anticipated to cascade to affect risks to health, economic output and security and responses by different groups interacted to generate risks to municipal finance.
Considering interactions among these multiple risk and risk drivers is important as it shifts risk assessment from a concentration on individual climate hazards or interactions of hazards as a single 'event', such as a drought or flood, to situate that climate hazard within a set of multiple events interacting continuously with evolving social and economic conditions.
