CANADA
'I quit': Wave of resignations prompts concerns over labour shortage

PROLETARIAN SELF VALORIZATION

© Provided by The Canadian Press

CALGARY — If not for COVID-19, Valerie Whitt might never have summoned the courage to quit her job.

The 50-year-old Markham, Ont. woman had been a project manager for Ontario Health for 13 years. She felt drained and exhausted from battling traffic to and from her downtown Toronto office for up to two hours every day, but she was intimidated by the thought of giving up her stable position and steady paycheque.

Then the pandemic hit. Office workers everywhere were ordered to work from home, and for the first time, Whitt got a taste of a different life. She was still doing her job, but without the grind of her commute. She had more time to exercise and to plan healthy meals, and more energy for her six- and 10-year-old daughters.


"Just having that space in my life — not having to get up and rush to work, rush the kids out the door — gave me a lot of time and space to really evaluate my life and what I wanted to do," said Whitt, who officially quit her job last week and will be freelancing as she works toward the goal of starting her own business.

"This pandemic has shown me there’s more important things in life than having that busy corporate career.”

Whitt's story is by no means an isolated case. As the Canadian economy emerges from more than 15 months of COVID-19 restrictions and workers begin to return to the office, experts say a wave of employee resignations could trigger labour shortages in a variety of sectors.

“We’re expecting to see a rise in attrition, really across all organizations,” said Steve Knox, vice-president of global talent acquisition for human resources firm Ceridian.

Knox said employers are already encountering employees who are enjoying work-from-home and don't want to return to office life, as well as employees who are burned out after a stressful year. He said some employees seem to have used the past 15 months to re-evaluate their life choices, and are now saying "I quit."

While there is no statistical evidence of a mass exodus happening in Canada yet, the trend already appears to be taking shape south of the border. According to U.S. Department of Labor statistics, the share of U.S. workers leaving jobs in April was 2.7 per cent, a jump from 1.6 per cent a year earlier and the highest level in more than 20 years.

"We’re always fast followers. We take our cues from the U.S,” Knox said.

A Statistics Canada report released in May said 22 per cent of Canadian businesses surveyed expect "retaining skilled employees" will be an obstacle over the next three months, while 23.8 per cent identified "shortage of labour force" as a looming issue. The sectors most concerned about retention were retail (32 per cent) and accommodation and food (31 per cent).

According to industry lobby group Restaurants Canada, more than 800,000 Canadian food service workers lost their jobs or had their hours reduced to zero during the COVID-19 pandemic. Paul Grunberg, owner of Vancouver restaurant Salvio Volpe, thinks some restaurant workers who were laid off more than once in the last year due to public health restrictions are fed up with instability and are now looking for entirely new careers.

"We (Salvio Volpe) are seeing significant turnover, and to be honest, I've been desperately hoping it's nothing I did," Grunberg said. "But I really feel like people are just, 'I want a change. I want to get out of the industry, and work someplace maybe that's less challenging.' "

In Alberta, where the unemployment rate still hovers close to nine per cent, there are growing fears that recruitment and retention challenges could slow the province's recovery from recession, said Scott Crockatt, spokesman for the Business Council of Alberta. He said some of the province's largest companies report filling vacancies is more difficult than expected right now.

“Staff are looking for more flexibility, and we’re hearing that across every sector," Crockatt said. "In some cases they’re not interested in going back to their previous employment if they can’t get that flexibility.”

At Edmonton-based Morgan Construction and Environmental, which is involved in oil and gas and mining projects across Western Canada, there are over 75 job openings right now where normally there would only be a handful. President and CEO Peter Kiss said many of his fly-in, fly-out workers from other provinces are quitting.

"It seems like any sort of work stress, the travel, the COVID requirements at site, all those other things, are just too much stress for people right now," Kiss said.

Stress was a major factor behind Emily Campbell's decision to quit her TV reporter job in Montreal and move back to her hometown of Calgary last month. The 30-year-old had been mulling the idea of moving closer to family for a while, but a year's worth of reporting on a major global health crisis by day and returning to an empty apartment at night solidified her plan.

"I was stressed out and anxious and lonely. I realized 'wow, I can't imagine doing this job for the next five years, let alone the next 25 years,' " Campbell said. “The longer the pandemic went on, it kind of clarified my priorities.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 7, 2021.

Amanda Stephenson, The Canadian Press

1. Kropotkin, Self-valorization And The Crisis Of Marxism

   https://libcom.org/library/kropotkin-self-valorization-crisis-marxism

   

   2008-01-03 · Where Kropotkin went back to the French Revolution and the Commune, these researchers have explored moments of class conflict and working class self-activity such as the liberation of London's Newgate Prison in 1780, the slave revolt in San …

CLASS WAR CONDO'S

Building collapse shows town's rich, middle-class division

SURFSIDE, Fla. (AP) — The condo tower collapse in Surfside could exacerbate the division that already exists between the tiny Florida town’s new luxury buildings built for the global elite and those constructed decades ago for the middle class. It is already creating headaches for some small businesses.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The town has seen the construction of numerous new condos in recent years, where large oceanfront units exceeding 3,000 square feet (280 square meters) with modern amenities can fetch $10 million and up. Meanwhile, small units of 800 square feet (75 square meters) in neighboring condo buildings constructed decades ago can be had for $400,000.

Ana Bozovic, a South Florida real estate broker, said the June 24 collapse of the 40-year-old, middle-class Champlain Towers South will exacerbate this division. At least 36 people were killed and more than 100 remain missing.

Bozovic said many buyers will now avoid older buildings, not just because they fear they might also fall but because of repair costs the Champlain South owners faced before the collapse: $80,000 to $300,000 per unit. These factors will decrease older condos’ value, while prices in luxury buildings will continue to skyrocket.

“The holders of capital who are moving here were never considering older buildings. They are buying newer structures and preconstruction, so I don’t see this putting a damper on their appetites," said Bozovic, founder of Analytics Miami. "What this will do is further depress sales of older structures and further bifurcate the market.”

Before the Champlain Towers South tragedy, Surfside, with about 6,000 residents on a half-square mile (1.3 square kilometers) of an island off Miami, was one of South Florida's most anonymous municipalities — though in January Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner rented a luxury condo in a new building two blocks from the collapse.

The town is known for its clean beaches and a 12-story limit on its buildings, and stands in contrast with neighboring Miami Beach and its world-famous nightlife, Bal Harbour with its high-end shopping and both with buildings that are double and triple the height of Surfside's tallest.

Mayor Charles Burkett said the town has experienced a “roller coaster" of emotions since the collapse. Demolition of the remaining portion of the structure and Tropical Storm Elsa, which brought strong winds and heavy rains to the area, have intensified what the community is going through.

“We have faced innumerable challenges, but the little good news is the resources we have are all aligned, all focused and pulling in the same direction,” he said.

Ryan Mermer moved to Surfside earlier this year from Palm Beach County, drawn by the quiet, the town's proximity to Miami's thriving business climate and its large Orthodox Jewish community. On Saturdays, much of the town closes for the Sabbath except for the chain stores. Surfside was home to Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Yiddish poet and short-story writer who won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature.

But Mermer also got a deal on a small apartment built a half-century ago, just steps away from the luxury condo that former President Donald Trump's daughter and son-in-law moved into. While Mermer's building was constructed for the middle class, today’s construction is aimed at the New York, European and South American elite, who are drawn by the state’s lifestyle, weather and lack of an income tax.

“I pay $1,375 (a month) ... across the street from the beach; Ivanka and Jared pay $38,000,” said Mermer, a real estate agent who also works for Holocaust Heroes Worldwide, a support group for survivors of the Nazi death camps.

In Surfside's low-key shopping district one recent afternoon, barber Aramis Armor and Freddy Elias, the co-owner of a tailor and dry cleaning shop, had no customers. The pandemic hit their businesses hard, both said, and the collapse and the resulting street closures made it difficult for anyone to reach them.

Amor says that in normal times, the business district is full of families — they can have an ice cream, eat pizza or drink a coffee in the many locally owned businesses that dot the downtown.

“They are all very nice, the clients are very good,” Armor said. He blamed city officials for his lack of business, saying they should never have let the collapsed building decay like it did.

Elias, who has owned Surfside businesses for 25 years, is hoping a federal low-interest loan promised by President Joe Biden's administration to stores affected by the collapse will tide him over until his customers return. Meanwhile, a partner was headed to a customer's home for a fitting rather than make the client fight traffic to get to the store.

“Since COVID and now this tragedy, it has been very, very bad for us,” Elias said. “We need help.”

The streets reopened this week.

__

Frisaro reported from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Associated Press writers Mike Schneider in Orlando and Gisela Salomon in Miami; photographer Marta Lavandier in Surfside; and researcher Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this report.

Terry Spencer And Freida Frisaro, The Associated Press

 AND A GOOD THING TOO OR WE WOULD CEASE TO EXIST

New clues to why there's so little antimatter in the universe

Radioactive molecules are sensitive to subtle nuclear phenomena and might help physicists probe the violation of the most fundamental symmetries of nature.

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Research News

Imagine a dust particle in a storm cloud, and you can get an idea of a neutron's insignificance compared to the magnitude of the molecule it inhabits.

But just as a dust mote might affect a cloud's track, a neutron can influence the energy of its molecule despite being less than one-millionth its size. And now physicists at MIT and elsewhere have successfully measured a neutron's tiny effect in a radioactive molecule.

The team has developed a new technique to produce and study short-lived radioactive molecules with neutron numbers they can precisely control. They hand-picked several isotopes of the same molecule, each with one more neutron than the next. When they measured each molecule's energy, they were able to detect small, nearly imperceptible changes of the nuclear size, due to the effect of a single neutron.

The fact that they were able to see such small nuclear effects suggests that scientists now have a chance to search such radioactive molecules for even subtler effects, caused by dark matter, for example, or by the effects of new sources of symmetry violations related to some of the current mysteries of the universe.

"If the laws of physics are symmetrical as we think they are, then the Big Bang should have created matter and antimatter in the same amount. The fact that most of what we see is matter, and there is only about one part per billon of antimatter, means there is a violation of the most fundamental symmetries of physics, in a way that we can't explain with all that we know," says Ronald Fernando Garcia Ruiz, assistant professor of physics at MIT.

"Now we have a chance to measure these symmetry violations, using these heavy radioactive molecules, which have extreme sensitivity to nuclear phenomena that we cannot see in other molecules in nature," he says. "That could provide answers to one of the main mysteries of how the universe was created."

Ruiz and his colleagues have published their results today in Physical Review Letters.

A special asymmetry

Most atoms in nature host a symmetrical, spherical nucleus, with neutrons and protons evenly distributed throughout. But in certain radioactive elements like radium, atomic nuclei are weirdly pear-shaped, with an uneven distribution of neutrons and protons within. Physicists hypothesize that this shape distortion can enhance the violation of symmetries that gave origin to the matter in the universe.

"Radioactive nuclei could allow us to easily see these symmetry-violating effects," says study lead author Silviu-Marian Udrescu, a graduate student in MIT's Department of Physics. "The disadvantage is, they're very unstable and live for a very short amount of time, so we need sensitive methods to produce and detect them, fast."

Rather than attempt to pin down radioactive nuclei on their own, the team placed them in a molecule that futher amplifies the sensitivity to symmetry violations. Radioactive molecules consist of at least one radioactive atom, bound to one or more other atoms. Each atom is surrounded by a cloud of electrons that together generate an extremely high electric field in the molecule that physicists believe could amplify subtle nuclear effects, such as effects of symmetry violation.

However, aside from certain astrophysical processes, such as merging neutron stars, and stellar explosions, the radioactive molecules of interest do not exist in nature and therefore must be created artificially. Garcia Ruiz and his colleagues have been refining techniques to create radioactive molecules in the lab and precisely study their properties. Last year, they reported on a method to produce molecules of radium monofluoride, or RaF, a radioactive molecule that contains one unstable radium atom and a fluoride atom.

In their new study, the team used similar techniques to produce RaF isotopes, or versions of the radioactive molecule with varying numbers of neutrons. As they did in their previous experiment, the researchers utilized the Isotope mass Separator On-Line, or ISOLDE, facility at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland, to produce small quantities of RaF isotopes.

The facility houses a low-energy proton beam, which the team directed toward a target -- a half-dollar-sized disc of uranium-carbide, onto which they also injected a carbon fluoride gas. The ensuing chemical reactions produced a zoo of molecules, including RaF, which the team separated using a precise system of lasers, electromagnetic fields, and ion traps.

The researchers measured each molecule's mass to estimate of the number of neutrons in a molecule's radium nucleus. They then sorted the molecules by isotopes, according to their neutron numbers.

In the end, they sorted out bunches of five different isotopes of RaF, each bearing more neutrons than the next. With a separate system of lasers, the team measured the quantum levels of each molecule.

"Imagine a molecule vibrating like two balls on a spring, with a certain amount of energy," explains Udrescu, who is a graduate student of MIT's Laboratory for Nuclear Science. "If you change the number of neutrons in one of these balls, the amount of energy could change. But one neutron is 10 million times smaller than a molecule, and with our current precision we didn't expect that changing one would create an energy difference, but it did. And we were able to clearly see this effect."

Udrescu compares the sensitivity of the measurements to being able to see how Mount Everest, placed on the surface of the sun, could, however minutely, change the sun's radius. By comparison, seeing certain effects of symmetry violation would be like seeing how the width of a single human hair would alter the sun's radius.

The results demonstrate that radioactive molecules such as RaF are ultrasensitive to nuclear effects and that their sensitivity may likely reveal more subtle, never-before-seen effects, such as tiny symmetry-violating nuclear properties, that could help to explain the universe's matter-antimmater asymmetry.

"These very heavy radioactive molecules are special and have sensitivity to nuclear phenomena that we cannot see in other molecules in nature," Udrescu says. "This shows that, when we start to search for symmetry-violating effects, we have a high chance of seeing them in these molecules."

###

This research was supported, in part, by the Office of Nuclear Physics, U.S. Department of Energy; the MISTI Global Seed Funds; the European Research Council; the Belgian FWO Vlaanderen and BriX IAP Research Program; the German Research Foundation; the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, and the Ernest Rutherford Fellowship Grant.

Like a molten pancake

New model for shield volcano eruption

GFZ GEOFORSCHUNGSZENTRUM POTSDAM, HELMHOLTZ CENTRE

Research News

There are some large shield volcanoes in the world's oceans where the lava is usually not ejected from the crater in violent explosions, but flows slowly out of the ground from long fissures. In the recent eruption of the Sierra Negra volcano in the Galapagos Islands, which lie just under a thousand kilometres off South America in the Pacific Ocean, one of these fissures was fed through a curved pathway in June 2018. This 15 kilometre-long pathway, including the kink, was created by the interaction of three different forces in the subsurface, Timothy Davis and Eleonora Rivalta from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, together with Marco Bagnardi and Paul Lundgren from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, now explain based on computer models in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Even before the eruption, the geoscientists in California had seen in radar satellite data that the surface of the flank of the 1140-metre-high Sierra Negra volcano had bulged to a height of about two metres: this bulge, about five kilometres wide, stretched from the crater rim about ten kilometres in a west-northwest direction and turned at a right angle to the north-northeast near the coast. Timothy Davis and his team then found out what this structure and its perplexing bend were all about with the help of computer models.

Driving Force 1: Hotspot beneath the Galapagos Islands

As with many other volcanoes in the middle of the world's oceans, a "hotspot" is hidden beneath the Galapagos Islands. For at least 20 million years, hot rock has been rising slowly from deep within the Earth's interior, like a solid, but difficult-to-form plasticine. Like a blowtorch, this hotspot, up to 200 kilometres wide, melts its way through the solid crust of the Earth. This hot magma is a little lighter than the solid rock around it, so it keeps rising until it collects in a large cavity about two kilometres below the crater of the Sierra Negra volcano. "With a diameter of around six kilometres and a thickness of no more than one kilometre, this magma chamber resembles an oversized pancake of molten rock," Timothy Davis describes this structure.

Driving Force 2: the Weight of the Volcano Rock

In the almost 13 years since the last eruption in October 2005, more and more magma has flowed into the chamber from below. There, the pressure rose and lifted the crater floor up to 5.20 metres. However, the enormous force of the gathering magma masses sought another way out. Deep underground, the viscous rock slowly crawled in a west-northwest direction. Another force plays an important role here: the enormous weight of the volcano's rock masses presses from above on the magma flow that is just forming. As the shield volcano becomes flatter and flatter towards the outside, the pressure there also decreases. As the molten rock is pressed in the direction with lower pressure, it slowly swells outwards in a magma flow that is four kilometres wide but only about two metres high.

Driving Force 3: Buoyancy

Near the coastline, the flattening shield volcano presses ever more weakly on the now almost ten-kilometre-long magma corridor deep below the surface. There, a third force gains the upper hand. The magma is much lighter than the rock around the passage and was previously only prevented from swelling by the overlying weight of the shield volcano. Near the coastline, however, this buoyancy becomes stronger than the pressure of the rock from above. On top of that, the magma slope there tilts about ten degrees into the depths. Together, these forces change the direction in which the viscous rock is pressed and the magma slope bends towards the north-northeast.

The rock cracks, the volcano erupts

Still, the magma swelling under the crater continues to increase the pressure until the upward-pressing molten mass begins to crack the rock around the magma passage. At no more than walking speed, this magma-filled crack (dyke) is travelling deep underground towards the coastline. "The magma rising from the crack reaches the surface after a few days and continues to flow there as lava, which solidifies after some time," Timothy Davis explains the subsequent course of the volcanic eruption.

Important prerequisite for prediction and hazard minimization

For the first time, the geophysicist was able to simulate such a tortuous magma propagation pathway feeding an eruption and determine the forces that control this. Timothy Davis and Eleonora Rivalta, together with their colleagues in California, have thus laid important foundations for research into such fissure eruptions. And they have taken a decisive step towards predicting such eruptions and thus reducing the dangers they pose.

 

New type of massive explosion explains mystery star

'Magneto-rotational hypernova' soon after the Big Bang fuelled high levels of uranium, zinc in ancient stellar oddity

ARC CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE FOR ALL SKY ASTROPHYSICS IN 3D (ASTRO 3D)

Research News

IMAGE: THE STAR SMSS J200322.54-114203.3. (CENTRE, WITH CROSSHAIRS) IN THE SOUTH-EASTERN CORNER OF THE CONSTELLATION AQUILA (THE EAGLE) CLOSE TO THE BORDER WITH CAPRICORNUS AND SAGITTARIUS. view more 

CREDIT: DA COSTA/SKYMAPPER

A massive explosion from a previously unknown source - 10 times more energetic than a supernova - could be the answer to a 13-billion-year-old Milky Way mystery.

Astronomers led by David Yong, Gary Da Costa and Chiaki Kobayashi from Australia's ARC Centre of Excellence in All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D) based at the Australian National University (ANU) have potentially discovered the first evidence of the destruction of a collapsed rapidly spinning star - a phenomenon they describe as a "magneto-rotational hypernova".

The previously unknown type of cataclysm - which occurred barely a billion years after the Big Bang - is the most likely explanation for the presence of unusually high amounts of some elements detected in another extremely ancient and "primitive" Milky Way star.

That star, known as SMSS J200322.54-114203.3, contains larger amounts of metal elements, including zinc, uranium, europium and possibly gold, than others of the same age.

Neutron star mergers - the accepted sources of the material needed to forge them - are not enough to explain their presence.

The astronomers calculate that only the violent collapse of a very early star - amplified by rapid rotation and the presence of a strong magnetic field - can account for the additional neutrons required.

The research is published today in the journal Nature.

"The star we're looking at has an iron-to-hydrogen ratio about 3000 times lower than the Sun - which means it is a very rare: what we call an extremely metal-poor star," said Dr Yong, who is based at the ANU.

"However, the fact that it contains much larger than expected amounts of some heavier elements means that it is even rarer - a real needle in a haystack."

The first stars in the universe were made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. At length, they collapsed and exploded, turning into neutron stars or black holes, producing heavier elements which became incorporated in tiny amounts into the next generation of stars - the oldest still in existence.

Rates and energies of these star deaths have become well known in recent years, so the amount of heavy elements they produce is well calculated. And, for SMSS J200322.54-114203.3, the sums just don't add up.

"The extra amounts of these elements had to come from somewhere," said Associate Professor Chiaki Kobayashi from the University of Hertfordshire, UK.

"We now find the observational evidence for the first time directly indicating that there was a different kind of hypernova producing all stable elements in the periodic table at once -- a core-collapse explosion of a fast-spinning strongly-magnetized massive star. It is the only thing that explains the results."

Hypernovae have been known since the late 1990s. However, this is the first time one combining both rapid rotation and strong magnetism has been detected.

"It's an explosive death for the star," said Dr Yong. "We calculate that 13 billion-years ago J200322.54-114203.3 formed out of a chemical soup that contained the remains of this type of hypernova. No one's ever found this phenomenon before."

J200322.54-114203.3 lies 7500 light-years from the Sun, and orbits in the halo of the Milky Way.

Another co-author, Nobel Laureate and ANU Vice-Chancellor Professor Brian Schmidt, added, "The high zinc abundance is definite marker of a hypernova, a very energetic supernova."

Head of the First Stars team in ASTRO 3D, Professor Gary Da Costa from ANU, explained that the star was first identified by a project called the SkyMapper survey of the southern sky.

"The star was first identified as extremely metal-poor using SkyMapper and the ANU 2.3m telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in western NSW," he said. "Detailed observations were then obtained with the European Southern Observatory 8m Very Large Telescope in Chile."

ASTRO 3D director, Professor Lisa Kewley, commented: "This is an extremely important discovery that reveals a new pathway for the formation of heavy elements in the infant universe."

Other members of the research team are based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, Stockholm University in Sweden, the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, Italy's Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica, and Australia's University of New South Wales.

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A universal approach to tailoring soft robots

An integrated design optimisation and fabrication workflow opens new opportunities for tailoring the mechanical properties of soft machines.

SINGAPORE UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY AND DESIGN

Research News

VIDEO: SOFT ROBOT WITH OPTIMISED SWIMMING PROPERTIES view more 

CREDIT: SUTD

By combining two distinct approaches into an integrated workflow, Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) researchers have developed a novel automated process for designing and fabricating customised soft robots. Their method, published in Advanced Materials Technologies, can be applied to other kinds of soft robots--allowing their mechanical properties to be tailored in an accessible manner.

Though robots are often depicted as stiff, metallic structures, an emerging class of pliable machines known as soft robots is rapidly gaining traction. Inspired by the flexible forms of living organisms, soft robots have wide applications in sensing, movement, object grasping and manipulation, among others. Yet, such robots are still mostly fabricated through manual casting techniques--limiting the complexity and geometries that can be achieved.

"Most fabrication approaches are predominantly manual due to a lack of standard tools," said SUTD Assistant Professor Pablo Valdivia y Alvarado, who led the study. "But 3D printing or additive manufacturing is slowly coming into play as it facilitates repeatability and allows more complex designs--improving quality and performance."

According to Dr Valdivia y Alvarado, embedded 3D printing--wherein various material inks are extruded in a supportive matrix--is especially suited for fabricating soft robots made of multiple materials or composites. However, to ensure that these robots are optimally designed, the team turned to topology optimisation (TO), where mathematical models are employed to design bespoke structures within a set of constraints.

By automating these two key steps in a single framework, the authors hoped to develop an integrated workflow for creating customised soft robots and minimise potential errors along the way. For the study, the group used a swimming autonomous robot inspired by batoids. The workflow starts by defining the robot's fin geometry, after which TO is used to generate the desired structure with desired properties within prescribed material and motion constraints. The optimised design is then transformed into a code that is read by the team's custom-built 3D printers, which in turn fabricate the robot.

The batoid-inspired soft robots were designed to survive the marine environment's harsh conditions and the approach focused on tailoring their fin composition and assessing how these changes could impact the fabricated robot's swimming performance.

Specifically, three types of fins were created--with two fins respectively made of soft and stiff materials as well as a third fin designed through TO combining the two materials. Unlike the first two fins, which were fabricated using traditional methods, the third composite fin was made following the integrated workflow.

Incredibly, the soft robot with the optimised composite fins was 50 per cent faster than its counterpart with the traditionally casted soft fin, with a speed slightly higher than the robot with the hard fin. The same prototype with the composite fin also turned roughly 30 per cent faster compared to the soft fin and had the smallest turning radius among the three robots--making it better at maneuvering through water.

Having successfully demonstrated the effectiveness of their approach, Dr Valdivia y Alvarado noted that their workflow for fabricating optimised, multi-material soft robots can be universally applied to design other soft robots.

"For example, if we're building a sensor, our objective in TO could be to tailor the electrical conductivity of certain portions of the structure," said Dr Valdivia y Alvarado. "Customising optical, thermal, electrical, as well as other physico-chemical properties would also be interesting for other applications."

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How seeds know it's a good time to germinate

New work reveals a protein that plays a critical "go, or no-go" role in the germination process

CARNEGIE INSTITUTION FOR SCIENCE

VIDEO: ELECTRON TOMOGRAPHIC RECONSTRUCTION AND SEGMENTATION OF MEMBRANE-BOUND ORGANELLES (IN BLUE) OF AN ARABIDOPSIS EMBRYO CELL. view more 

CREDIT: VIDEO IS COURTESY OF JANNICE G. PENNINGTON AND MARISA S. OTEGUI.

Palo Alto, CA--Dehydrated plant seeds can lay dormant for long periods--over 1,000 years in some species--before the availability of water can trigger germination. This protects the embryonic plant inside from a variety of environmental stresses until conditions are favorable for growth and survival. However, the mechanism by which the baby plant senses water and reactivates cellular activity has remained a mystery until now.

New work jointly led by Carnegie's Yanniv Dorone and Sue Rhee and Stanford University's Steven Boeynaems and Aaron Gitler discovered a protein that plays a critical "go, or no-go" role in this process--halting germination if the soil's hydrological conditions are less than ideal or allowing it to proceed if the chances of survival are good. Their findings have major implications for understanding plant ecology in a warming world and for the possibility of designing drought-resistant crops that can survive climate change and fight world hunger.

Their work is published in Cell.

Dorone, Rhee, Boeynaems, Gitler, and their colleagues--including Carnegie's Benjamin Jin, Shannon Hateley, Flavia Bossi, Elena Lazarus, and Moises Exposito-Alonso--used molecular, physiological, and ecological research techniques to reveal a previously uncharacterized protein that they named FLOE1.

"Despite the extraordinary toughness of many seeds, plants are still at their most vulnerable during this stage of their lives, because germination must be precisely timed to ensure the greatest chance of survival. Once germination starts, the plant cannot go back into its hibernation state--the genie can't be put back in the bottle," Dorone explained. "So, a protein like FLOE1 is crucial to a plant's ability to walk the tightrope between too soon and too late."

The key to FLOE1's capabilities is a recently discovered biophysical phenomenon that's a hot research topic right now called phase separation. This mechanism allows cells to dynamically compartmentalize biomolecules into membrane-less assemblies, rather than cordoning them off in a cellular organelle surrounded by a membrane.

"Think of an organelle as an office building where components of the cell are assigned to complete their physiological jobs; whereas, these phase-separation-enabled assemblies are more like a maker faire or hackathon, where proteins can come together to accomplish a task and then disburse when it's complete," Rhee said. "We found that FLOE1's ability to very quickly initiate this type of temporary gathering is crucial to its functionality."

When a dormant seed senses moisture in its proximity, FLOE1 almost instantaneously assembles in the cell to test the waters, so to speak, and determine whether the conditions are good for the seed to reactivate and start growing. Because the FLOE1 aggregation is temporary and reversible, it can act as a go or no-go signal, halting germination if water availability is determined to be less than optimal, or allowing it to proceed if the environment has enough water to support successful growth.

"We believe that this is the first study that provides information on how seeds can directly perceive their hydration state and act upon it," Rhee added.

The authors say that their discovery could lay the groundwork for engineering crops that are able to harness FLOE1's abilities in order to withstand the detrimental effects of climate change. This type of enhancement will be increasingly important to combat hunger around the world.

Although their work was conducted using the experimental mustard green Arabidopsis thaliana, Dorone, Rhee, Boeynaems, and Gitler found found that FLOE1 is present throughout the plant kingdom, even in plants that precede the evolution of seeds, meaning it could play many additional roles in plant cellular physiology, which could have additional bioengineering potential.

"What's more, FLOE1 is the first known protein to reversibly phase separate over hydration-dehydration cycles, but it's likely that similar processes occur in other organisms that have desiccated periods of dormancy, including human pathogens," Dorone concluded.

CAPTION

A 3D reconstruction of an Arabidopsis embryo. Different colors are used to annotate different cells.

CREDIT

Image is courtesy of George W. Bassel.

Other collaborators on the research team were: Eduardo Flores and Shahar Sukenik of University of California Merced; Janice G. Pennington and Marisa S. Otegui of University of Wisconsin Madison; Emiel Michiels, Mathias De Decker, Katlijn Vints, and Pieter Baatsen of KU Leuven; George W. Bassel of University of Warwick; and Alex S. Holehouse of Washington University in St. Louis.

This work was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. National Science Foundation, a Stanford Graduate Fellowship in Science and Engineering, the Carnegie Institution for Science, Brigitte Berthelemot, EMBO, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

The Carnegie Institution for Science (carnegiescience.edu) is a private, nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with three research divisions on both coasts. Since its founding in 1902, the Carnegie Institution has been a pioneering force in basic scientific research. Carnegie scientists are leaders in the life and environmental sciences, Earth and planetary science, and astronomy and astrophysics.

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Engineered protein inspired by nature may help plastic plague

NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF NATURAL SCIENCES

Research News

IMAGE: MUTATIONS OF A PET HYDROLYZING ENZYME PET2 RESULTED IN A 6.7 DEGREES C INCREASE IN THERMAL STABILITY AND A 6.8-FOLD INCREASE IN PET HYDROLYTIC ACTIVITY. TM REPRESENTS MELTING (DENATURATION) TEMPERATURE... view more 

CREDIT: NINS/IMS

Cheap to produce and long to degrade, plastic was once a manufacturing miracle. Now, plastic is an environmental plague, clogging landfills and choking waterways. A Japan-based research team has turned back to nature to develop an approach to degrading the stubborn substance. Similar to how a protein binds to cellulose in plants or to chitin in crustaceans to initiate decomposition, an engineered protein is on its way to binding to plastic particles in an effort to more efficiently break them down.

They published their results on June 29 in ACS Catalysis, a journal of the American Chemical Society.

"Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is produced and used in large quantities in modern society due to its low cost and ease of processing," said paper author Ryota Iino, professor of the Institute for Molecular Science (IMS) in the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS). "However, in recent years, from the perspective of realizing a sustainable society, the complete recycling of PET in industry and the removal of PET from the natural environment have become global issues. To resolve these issues, it is very important to understand how to degrade PET efficiently."

The researchers investigated and engineered an enzyme cloned from a library of genetic materials collected from nature. This enzyme -- called PET2 -- was found to facilitate the degradation of PET by accelerating the reaction between PET's chemical components and water.

Using single-molecule imaging analysis, the team found that the way the enzyme binds to the surface of PET actually limited the rate of degradation.

"We also revealed that by introducing positive charges on the surface of PET-degrading enzyme, the binding rate to the PET surface can be increased," Iino said.

The positive charges react favorably to the PET surface, so more of the enzyme can bind and more effectively degrade the PET. The researchers also found that while engineered PET2 showed high thermal stability and highest activity at 68 degrees Celsius -- slightly lower than most residential kitchen ovens can go -- it may be more effective at higher temperatures where PET's molecular bonds become more flexible and breakable.

"Our ultimate goal is to create a bacterium that can sense PET in the environment, move toward it, and degrade it," Iino said. Such a bacterium would then be able to turn the degraded PET into energy useful for other organisms, effectively acting as an automated recycling center for plastic. "In nature, chitin and cellulose are recycled in this way."

Iino is also affiliated with the School of Physical Sciences at The Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI). Other contributors include Akihiko Nakamura, Department of Applied Life Sciences, Faculty of Agriculture, Shizuoka University, and the Shizuoka Institute for the Study of Marine Biology and Chemistry; and Naoya Kobayashi and Nobuyasu Koga, Exploratory Research Center on Life and Living Systems (ExCELLS), NINS. Koga is also affiliated with IMS, NINS, and SOKENDAI.

The Leading Initiative for Excellent Young Researchers, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology of Japan, the Sumitomo Foundation, and the ExCELLS Special Collaboration Program supported this research.

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Slow music in tunnels can keep drivers focused and safe

Study is proof-of-principle that well-chosen background music can improve road safety

FRONTIERS

Research News

Driving through a tunnel is a challenging and risky task. Drivers need to lower their speed and adapt to poor light, while the enclosed space may make them anxious. Preventing accidents is a public health challenge that uses insights from engineering, psychology, physiology, and neuroscience. Here, in a virtual reality (VR) study in Frontiers in Psychology, scientists from China, Canada, and the USA show that playback of slow music inside tunnels can reduce tension and fatigue in drivers, making them less prone to speeding and overtaking. These results imply that well-chosen background music can help improve road safety.

"When drivers go through a tunnel, they need to process a large amount of information quickly. We wanted to find the best way to use sound to keep drivers alert and focused inside tunnels. We here compare the effect on brain activity and physiology of different types of sound: slow versus fast music, warning sounds such as sirens, and a voice reminding them to drive safely," says corresponding author associate professor Yanqun Yang from the Transportation Research Center in College of Civil Engineering at Fuzhou University, China. "We show that the best solution is to play slow music inside the tunnel, but to play alarming sounds like sirens at the entry and exit or during emergencies."

Rate of accidents depends on location within tunnels

Previous research has found that accidents are less frequent in tunnels than on open roads, but that accidents that do happen inside tend to be more serious. Nor is the rate of accidents the same along a tunnel's length: for example, accidents are more likely just before or after the entrance. Once drivers are acclimatized to the special environment inside, they tend to reduce speed and move away from the tunnel wall, causing the rate of accidents to decrease. Accidents become more likely again over the middle stretch in long tunnels, because drivers may relax their vigilance from boredom.

The authors here studied whether background sounds and music might help to keep drivers relaxed but focused over the length of a long tunnel. With immersive VR, they simulated a 5100-m-long four-lane tunnel with traffic in both directions, driving between 80 and 100 kmph. They recruited 40 young women and men to act as experimental drivers - these people watched the VR on screens while inside a console that continuously recorded the pressure on the pedals, the steering wheel's angle, driving speed, and acceleration.

Yang et al. used wireless sensors to compare the drivers' neurophysiological response to five experimental sounds: a recording from a real tunnel, the slow music song "Canon" with 72 beats per minute (bpm), the fast song "Croatian rhapsody" with 96 bpm, a police siren, and a female voice warning "Please turn on the lights, slow down, and no-overtaking" or "Here is an accident blackspot, please turn on the lights and slow down."

They measured skin electrical conductance as a proxy for 'arousal', which encompasses attention, vigilance, and memory storage. Measures of heart rate and its variability served as proxies for emotional state, stress, mental load, and fatigue, while EEG measures of the brain's activity were used as proxies for wakefulness, fatigue, relaxation, and nervousness.

Slow music stimulated drivers to drive safely

Drivers drove fastest in response to fast music, and slowest in response to slow music. Comparisons of heart rate variability - typically low in people who are stressed - indicated that the drivers felt most relaxed, with a minimal mental load, when listening to slow music. This was consistent with feedback from drivers, of whom 63% chose the slow music as their preferred background.

Comparisons of the drivers' β brain waves - typically elevated in persons who are nervous or excited, and hence prone to fatigue - indicated that slow music reduced nervousness in the drivers, while voice prompts, fast music, and sirens increased it. Comparisons of the relative patterns of α, β, and θ waves - often combined in research to yield measures of fatigue - indicated that the voice prompt was most effective in preventing tiredness.

Best solution: combination of slow music with occasional sirens

The authors conclude that safety would increase if slow music would be played as a background in tunnels, while sirens should be played only at the entry, exit, and during emergencies.

"We find that slow music played as background throughout the tunnels, replaced by sirens only at spots and times when the risk of accidents is highest, is best to keep drivers alert, at ease, and not tired, while stimulating them to be extra vigilant and focused when needed," says coauthor Dr Wei Lin from the Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering and Construction Management at the University of Cincinnati, USA.

"There still a long way to go before more specific design and management recommendations can be proposed. For example, future studies should test the effect of a greater range of sounds on drivers who differ in age, driving experience, hearing sensitivity, and degree of fatigue. But our study is a proof of principle, which pushes our knowledge on road safety a step forward."

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Greater investment and innovation in educating children about environmental issues needed to help future generations respond to the climate emergency, experts urge

UNIVERSITY OF EXETER

Research News

Environmental education provision needs greater investment and innovation if future generations are to be able to respond fully to the climate emergency, experts have said.

The deepening environmental crisis will continue to worsen if there is not significant support and investment in environmental and science education, researchers have warned. Reforms would help young people to address the complex, interlinked and dynamic issues of our contemporary situation.

The experts argue Governments and other organisations must direct more funding to education innovation in response to consistent warnings from scientists about trends in the deteriorating state of ecosystems, biodiversity and climate, amongst other environmental issues.

Writing in Environmental Education Research, Alan Reid, from Monash University, Justin Dillon, from the University of Exeter, Jo-Anne Ferreira, from the University of Southern Queensland and Nicole Ardoin from Stanford University, who are senior editors of the journal, say environmental education is a "cornerstone for the social and environmental changes" needed in the future.

Environmental and science education helps people to identify fake information and ideologies, and understand and respond appropriately to warnings about the climate emergency.

They add that consensus on our environmental predicaments is not simply a matter for scientists, however. It must be supported by those in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, and wider society. Only then will contemporary calls by organisations such as UNEP and UNESCO that 'environmental education be a core component of all education systems at all levels by 2025', have a chance of gaining the multilateral and multileveled support the situation so urgently requires.

The academics highlight international surveys that show many governments continue to fail to support and invest enough in environmental and sustainability education across pre-school, school, college and university settings.

Professor Ferreira said: "The research base is clear about the superiority of whole-school approaches to quick curriculum fixes for addressing topics such as the climate emergency. The existential risk aspects also mean we need to look at investment and innovation in lifelong learning and non-school based provision, alongside examining the focus of current initial teacher education and continuing professional development."

Professor Reid said: "The popularity of outdoor education centres and activities are testament to the broader base of interest in environment and nature, as well as when arts, media and civil society addresses the climate crisis. Flagship environmental and science communication documentaries by the likes of David Attenborough examining the causes and effects of the climate emergency whet many people's appetites for understanding more from credible sources. Sir David's own learning journey in coming to understand the urgency of the situation underscores the rich learning opportunities available to us all, particularly in the run up to COP26 in Glasgow."

He added: "Ensuring any form of environmental education is relevant, coherent, fit for purpose, funded appropriately, and available to current and future generations within and beyond the curriculum will be crucial to addressing sound and pertinent warnings from scientists."

Professor Dillon said: "Global leaders should be discussing how to reimagine, recreate and restore environmental education to reduce the consequences of the environmental crisis. Countries should embed environmental and science education throughout society in ways that make sense locally."

Professor Ardoin said: "Only by investing in education--and especially environmental and sustainability education--will it be possible to radically alter the course we are currently on, and thus demonstrate to ourselves and future generations that sufficient heed was given to our warnings."

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