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, July 09, 2026
From bursts to creep: scientists rewrite the story of mud volcano flows
New study in Geology proposes a new model for understanding mud volcano dynamics
Boulder, Colo., USA: Mud volcanoes are often pictured as dramatic geological phenomena featuring the sudden eruption of large volumes of fiery mud in short, powerful bursts. By examining recent activity at the Lokbatan mud volcano in Azerbaijan, an international team of researchers led by the University of Oslo found that many eruptions are relatively small and short-lived, producing only modest amounts of material near the crater. Instead of building large flows all at once, these outbursts seem to “wake up” much older mud deposits that were already sitting on the slopes.
The team combined field observations, satellite imagery, and geophysical measurements to track how these older mud flows behave over time. A key player is a hidden, water-rich layer beneath the surface that acts like a lubricant, allowing the overlying mud to slide, almost like a slow‑moving glacier. This slow, step-by-step motion has been ongoing for years, quietly reshaping the landscape in ways that are not immediately visible.
Based on these findings, the authors propose a new model for mud volcano dynamics: Large mud flows are not generated by single, catastrophic eruptions, but instead grow progressively through repeated small events that reactivate and push existing material downslope triggering a slow creeping. This new perspective changes how scientists understand these systems and has important implications for hazard assessment and monitoring.
Contact: Dr. Adriano Mazzini email: adriano.mazzini@geo.uio.no Dr. Petr Brož email: petr.broz@ig.cas.cz The study combines expertise from researchers in Norway, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, France, Italy, and Azerbaijan.
The Geological Society of America (GSA) is a global professional society with more than 18,000 members across over 100 countries. As a leading voice for the geosciences, GSA advances the understanding of Earth's dynamic processes and fosters collaboration among scientists, educators, and policymakers. GSA publishes Geology, the top-ranked “geology” journal, along with a diverse portfolio of scholarly journals, books, and conference proceedings—several of which rank among Amazon’s top 100 best-selling geology titles.
Participants in a Dartmouth study explored real-world scenes in virtual reality while the headset tracked their gaze. Where each person looked, and for how long, was distinctive enough that an AI model could tell participants apart by connecting the objects they focused on thematically and determining the personal meaning they held. In follow-up tests, the AI model correctly predicted what would grab participants' attention in new settings.
Walk into a crowded coffee shop, and what catches your eye as you take in the scene could say as much about you as the spirals on your fingertips or the mutations in your DNA.
Eye movements are so unique, in fact, that they could be used to identify you through the objects that have personal meaning, according to a new study by Dartmouth researchers in the Proceedingsof the National Academy of Sciences. The findings reveal the depth to which we subjectively evaluate what's around us, while also suggesting that in a world of constant surveillance, we may be giving away more personal information than we realize.
Psychologists have long studied where people consciously or unconsciously focus their attention as they scan a new environment. While we usually come away with a similar understanding of the place itself, each person has distinct perception of how they got there, where they look, and for how long.
It's that variation that the study’s senior author, Caroline Robertson, and her team studied.
“From the earliest moments of taking in a new environment, we make radically different choices about what we pay attention to,” says Robertson, who is an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth. “This work suggests that our latent conceptual priorities are embedded in the signatures of our gaze.”
A conceptual priority is a kind of personal bias that shapes what jumps out at us visually. A flag and a football, for example, look nothing alike physically, but they are connected by abstract ideas of identity such as patriotism or the United States. The study suggests that, in new environments, we spend more time seeking out information that is conceptually rich and personally meaningful to us.
And what people look for in an unfamiliar environment can distinguish one person from another by the objects and concepts that mean something to them, like a personality fingerprint, the researchers report.
Looking at where people look
Robertson studies visual attention and became focused on the individual differences that kept popping up in her experiments. With the study’s first author, Amanda (“AJ”) Haskins, who received her PhD from Dartmouth in 2024, and former research assistant Katherine Packard ’23, Robertson had about 60 study participants wearing VR headsets immerse themselves in a series of images of everyday scenes, including an auto repair shop, a public swimming pool, and an airport. Participants were free to turn their heads, move their bodies, and look where they pleased in the 16 seconds allotted for each image.
Meanwhile, the researchers used eye-tracking data recorded by the headsets to model each individual’s gaze pattern. They created a machine-learning model to recreate where participants looked within each space; a vision model to recreate the objects that held their attention; and a large language model, or LLM, to look at the conceptual themes that tie these objects together.
The LLM, which are the deep-learning systems that power artificial intelligence, generated captions for each image it processed that hinted at potential storylines. For example, one caption read, “a flag that is on the wall and could be signaling national identity,” while another read, “a missile that is for military equipment and could be part of an aeronautics display.”
When the researchers analyzed the results, they found that the vision model and the LLM could identify individuals by their unique eye movements, and that the LLM, which specifically encoded their conceptual preferences, could do this most accurately. The conceptual map, in other words, was most predictive.
Objects that don't look alike but are thematically linked could be used to tell participants apart when considered as a whole. For example, one person taking in an office scene first looked at writing-related items such as keyboards and notepads, while another individual focused on architectural elements like moldings and decorative backsplashes. These objects' conceptual similarities reveal each participant's unique preferences or interests.
These individual preferences were long lasting, the researchers find. When half the group returned a week later to explore a new set of scenes, the models built from their earlier eye-tracking data accurately predicted the visual features that would grab their attention.
“This suggests that individual differences in gaze patterns contain stable, personality-level preferences that extend beyond testing days,” Robertson says.
Though their gaze patterns varied, the participants had three main perceptual stages. In the first two seconds of taking in a new scene, their gaze focused on spatial dimensions, like the image’s horizon and center, before shifting to prominent visual elements, and after about eight seconds, to the meanings encoded in them.
That intuitively made sense to the researchers. We typically orient ourselves in space and then check out objects and people before transitioning to an interpretive mode that attempts to understand what it all means.
The richer the conceptual information that the LLM received, the more fine-grained distinctions it could pick up on. The researchers found that longer captions containing more context, such as “a hat that is on her head and could be keeping the sun from her eyes,” seemed to elicit more distinctive responses than just “a hat that is on her head.” The more distinctive the eye patterns, the easier they were for the LLM to pick up.
What the eyes give away
The researchers point out that eye-tracking data alone may not reveal our politics or personalities. But their findings suggest that VR and AR could be more intrusive than we realize, potentially giving away more personal data to advertisers than we do now with our clicks across the web.
The study may be the first to use an LLM to model visual gaze—and it will likely not be the last. The researchers are hopeful that the novel AI methods used in the study could have clinical applications.
“Individual gaze differences aren’t random, but rather, are consistent from place to place and stable over time,” says Haskins, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Diego. “That’s important if we want to use gaze as a clinical marker of conditions like autism.”
One hallmark of autism is a reduced focus on faces, but it’s been unclear whether face avoidance is more visual than conceptual. The approach the researchers used could help to distinguish between the two.
It could also make earlier diagnosis of autism possible. Symptoms can show up as early as two years old, but currently the national average age at diagnosis is four. “The sooner you could know that a child is processing the world differently, the sooner you could augment the teaching environment,” Robertson says.
The team’s next steps include exploring whether multimodal models that track both visual and cognitive attention could improve predictions further. They also want to test whether the conceptual priorities they’ve identified vary systematically across cultures or clinical groups.
In the past few years, new rules from governments across Europe have required companies to increase their reporting on their sustainability efforts. Since then, stakeholders such as NGOs and journalists have been able to use those insights to ramp up their criticism against companies. That’s according to a new study published this month in the Journal of Management Studies.
“Stakeholders have raised more critiques, because these new rules have made it easier to compare companies”, explains Julia Bartosch, assistant professor of organizational change at Radboud University. “In the past, companies could reduce criticism by highlighting relatively generic efforts in sustainability when regulation was lacking altogether. We found that with the more equal playing field the regulation provides, companies that provide more details on their sustainability activities actually raise expectations on responsible business conduct and accordingly scrutiny. “This is for the functioning of the regulation a positive result” says Bartosch, “and business have to catch up with such expectations in order to avoid scrutiny and thus to close the gap between their conduct and raised expectations.”
The research is timely, as policymakers across Europe are currently debating how detailed sustainability reporting requirements should be. Recent proposals succeeded in reducing reporting obligations for companies, because of concerns that extensive disclosure creates administrative burdens and harms business. According to Bartosch, the results suggest something different. “With this research, we show that less precise and more voluntary regulation that became more or less standard across many countries is simply not better for business, because such lax regulation does not protect against stakeholder complaints."
“Stricter regulations could have been a way to better distinguish between companies that truly invest in the sustainability of their business operations and those that merely ‘pretend’ to do so. That opportunity has now been missed”, Bartosch explains.
Shield against criticism
For a long time, reporting on corporate social responsibility efforts (so-called CSR) was voluntary for businesses. “This allowed those companies that were reporting to use their reporting to show off their activities, also as a shield against criticism”, explains Bartosch.
Since 2017, regulation in the EU has forced companies to disclose what activities they’re having on CSR. Such regulation has increased the amount of information and created a level playing field, meaning that the reports of different firms have become more similar, particularly as those that were behind the times have caught up. Importantly, Bartosch highlights that the regulation is set up in such a way that disclosure is mandated, but the actual oversight is done by stakeholders and the private market rather than by governments. In their study, Bartosch and her colleagues Emma Avetisyan (Audencia Business School) and Philipp A. Thompson (Freie Universität Berlin) were interested in finding out whether these policies actually worked in terms of activating this way of oversight.
More transparency, more scrutiny
To do that, Bartosch and her colleagues analysed data from more than 1500 companies across the world, between 2007 and 2018. Bartosch: “What we found was that companies that were required to disclose information about their environmental, social and governance activities received significantly more public accusations about irresponsible business conduct. The transparency has made it easier for investors, NGO’s, journalists and other stakeholders to point out failures and shortcoming by these companies. The regulation worked as intended to activate oversight.”
Government Orchestration at Play: The Influence of Disclosure Regulation on Stakeholder Accusations and the Role of CSR
Study questions growing international trade in critically endangered sand tiger sharks
Researchers note that no formal stock assessment has been completed for this population, meaning scientists do not know whether current removals are sustainable.
In a new study led by University of Delaware researchers Aaron Carlisle and Ed Hale points to concern in the international trade of tiger sharks, a critically endangered shark species globally, for display in aquariums.
The Northwest Atlantic population—including sharks that congregate in Delaware Bay—is considered healthier than populations elsewhere due to decades of U.S. fisheries protections. However, researchers note that no formal stock assessment has been completed for this population, meaning scientists do not know whether current removals are sustainable.
Historically, U.S. aquariums collected only one or two sharks every few years. Since 2018, however, private collection companies have dramatically increased harvests under scientific collection permits intended for public display. Between 2018 and 2024, 80 sand tiger sharks were collected from Delaware waters—representing roughly 27% of all sand tiger sharks currently displayed in aquariums worldwide.
Nearly 90% of sharks collected from Delaware Bay in recent years were exported overseas rather than remaining in U.S. aquariums. From 2021 to 2024, the largest destinations included China, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea and Thailand, raising questions about allowing foreign institutions to benefit from sharks protected through decades of U.S. conservation efforts.
Researchers conclude that without better scientific data and stronger oversight, the expanding international trade in wild sand tiger sharks risks conflicting with the very conservation goals that have helped protect one of the species' last relatively stable populations.
To speak with Carlisle or Hale further about this highly important topic, email mediarelations@udel.edu.
About The Study: Among this large, diverse sample of individuals in the United States, formulary rejections were frequent and often resulted in delayed or absent treatment, highlighting trade-offs between cost and access to medicines.
Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Joseph F. Levy, PhD, email jlevy@jhu.edu.
Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.
# # #
Embed this link to provide your readers free access to the full-text article
Seagrass meadows play a major overlooked role in feeding and nourishing coastal communities, according to a new study published in Cell Reports Sustainability and led by researchers at the Department of Ecology, Environment and Plant Sciences, Stockholm University.
Coral reefs are famous for supporting huge numbers of fish. But this study shows that seagrass meadows may be just as important, and in some cases even more important, for the fish that people actually catch and eat.
The research team studied fish from 20 seagrass meadows and 20 coral reefs along a 3,000-km stretch of coastline from Kenya to Mozambique. They looked at six key nutrients that people need to stay healthy like calcium, iron, zinc, selenium, vitamin A, and omega-3 fatty acids. Instead of looking at each nutrient one by one, the scientists treated fish more like natural multivitamins.
“Fish don’t nourish people one nutrient at a time,” says Benjamin Jones, doctor in marine ecology who carried out the research as a PhD student at Stockholm University and is now Chief Conservation Officer at Project Seagrass. “They come as a package. A single fish contains iron, zinc, calcium, selenium, vitamin A, and omega-3s. We wanted to understand which habitats produce fish with the best mix of these nutrients.”
After accounting for differences in fish biomass, the team found that for the top three most important food fish species, nutrient support was over 8 times higher in seagrass meadows than coral reefs. On average, seagrass fish communities were 1.6 times more nutritionally rich than coral reef fish communities.
Two important food fish prized in the region, rabbitfish and parrotfish, were also far more common in seagrass meadows. In terms of biomass, they were 5 times and 65 times more abundant in seagrass than on coral reefs.
“We know that coral reefs have more fish overall, but seagrass meadows had more of the fish that really matter for local food,” says Benjamin Jones. “This changes how we should think about these habitats. Seagrass isn’t just a fish nursery, nor just a carbon stock, it’s food infrastructure, nature’s own supermarket.”
The study also found that an average seagrass fish could provide around 5 per cent of a young child’s daily iron needs, 70 per cent of their selenium needs, and 21 per cent of their zinc needs.
These numbers don’t mean that every child eats this amount. The study measured the nutrients that could be available from fish, not what people consume. But the findings show that seagrass meadows play an overlooked role in supporting the health of coastal communities.
Millions of people in tropical coastal regions rely on fisheries for food and income, and many of these communities face poverty, limited livelihood options, and high risks of malnutrition.
The findings also challenge the way ocean conservation is often framed. Coral reefs attract global attention, and rightly so. They are rich in biodiversity and support major fisheries. But coral reefs are also under severe pressure from climate change, bleaching, ocean warming, acidification, and overfishing. Seagrass meadows are also declining, especially in tropical regions, because of poor water quality, sewage pollution, coastal development, sediment runoff, and physical damage. Yet they receive far less attention and funding.
The authors argue that this must change.
“Our results really underscore the need to protect seagrass meadows, which are often overlooked in the shadow of more well-known habitats such as coral reefs and mangrove forests, while at the same time avoiding fishery closures, as these could jeopardize one of the most important sources of nutritious food for local communities along tropical coastlines”, says Johan Eklöf, professor in marine ecology at Stockholm University, and co-author of the study.
The study argues that seagrass should not replace coral reefs in conservation priorities. Instead, it shows that the two habitats do different jobs and need equal attention.
Coral reefs support more fish biomass. Seagrass meadows provide reliable access to key food fish that can contain a powerful mix of nutrients.
“Reefs and seagrass meadows work together,” said Benjamin Jones. “If we want coastal fisheries to feed people, we need to protect the whole seascape.”
Key findings
Seagrass fish communities were 1.6 times more nutritionally rich than coral reef fish communities after accounting for fish biomass and depth.
For the top three regional food fish species, predicted nutrient support was 8.4 times higher in unfished seagrass meadows than unfished coral reefs.
In fished areas, predicted nutrient support from these same species was 8.8 times higher in seagrass meadows than coral reefs.
Two important food fish were far more common in seagrass: Siganus sutor was 5 times higher by biomass, and Leptoscarus vaigiensis was 65 times higher by biomass.
An average seagrass-associated fish could provide around 5 per cent of a young child’s daily iron needs, 70 per cent of selenium needs, and 21 per cent of zinc needs.
The study shows that seagrass meadows should be recognised as vital food-security habitats, not just biodiversity or carbon habitats.
Notes for editors
The study, “Seagrass meadows sustain fish communities vital for human nutrition,” is published in Cell Reports Sustainability.
The research was led by Dr Benjamin Jones who conducted the study during his PhD at the Department of Ecology, Environment and Plant Sciences (DEEP) at Stockholm University and is now Chief Conservation Officer at Project Seagrass. The study was co-authored by Professor Johan Eklöf (DEEP, Stockholm University), together with global collaborators from BEAR, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Eduardo Mondlane University, Zanzi Marine and Coastal Solutions, the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute, and Södertörn University.
The study analysed fish communities from paired seagrass meadow and coral reef habitats across Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique. Fish survey data were combined with FishBase data to estimate the potential availability of calcium, iron, zinc, selenium, vitamin A, and omega-3 fatty acids.
