Pain, pain go away, help our children run and play

Pain management techniques for young children

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA

Like it or not, bumps and bruises are an unavoidable part of childhood. But while no parent wants their child to feel pain, teaching children about pain when they’re young can help them better understand and respond to pain when they’re older.

In a new study from the University of South Australia researchers identified five key approaches that parents and caregivers can use when talking with young children about ‘everyday’ pain, and that can help their recovery and resilience after injury.

In Australia, as many as one in four children, and one in five adults experience chronic pain, making it a vital topic for public health.

In this study, researchers investigated ‘everyday’ pains in young children (aged 2-7 years-old), asking experts from child health, psychology, development, resilience, as well as parents and educators, what they thought would promote children’s recovery and resilience after minor pains or injury.

With 80 per cent consensus across all experts, the most important messages were to:

• Teach children about the meaning of pain – pain is our body’s alarm system.
• Validate children’s pain – ensure they feel safe, heard, and protected, but don’t make a fuss.
• Reassure children after an injury - let them know that their body will heal, and the pain will pass.
• Support children’s emotions – let them express themselves but encourage them to regulate.
• Involve children in their recovery – encourage them to manage their pain (eg. get a bandaid).

Lead researcher, UniSA’s Dr Sarah Wallwork, says parents and caregivers likely play a critical role in helping children learn about pain.

“Whether it’s falling from a bike or dealing with the often-dreaded vaccinations, everyday pain experiences are opportunities for parents to promote positive pain-related beliefs and behaviours,” Dr Wallwork says.

“While it’s important to teach children that pain is our body’s alarm system and that it’s there to protect us, it’s equally important to understand that pain and injury do not always align.

“As adults, one of the greatest pain management challenges is that we hold fundamental, life-long beliefs about how pain and recovery works. Often, when we get an injury, we believe that pain must follow; and conversely, if we feel pain, then we must have an injury - but as research shows, this isn’t always the case.

“In children, pain can be influenced by their emotions – for example, fear, hunger, or tiredness can exacerbate symptoms, even though this is not pain itself.

“Teaching children that they can have some control over their pain - and that how they feel on the inside can influence this - empowers them to actively engage with their own pain management. 

“This can be age-appropriate too. So, for a very young child, empowerment might be getting a bandaid or a wet cloth, rubbing the area and distracting them, then telling them their injury is protected by the bandaid and that it is now safe to move on and play. For an older child, the process can be more involved.

“The key is to demonstrate that the child is the healer and they that are actively involved in the healing process.

“By helping children learn about pain when they are young, we’re hoping to promote lifelong ‘helpful’ pain behaviours that will actively encourage recovery and prevent future pain problems.”

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JOURNAL

European Journal of Pain

DOI

10.1002/ejp.2008 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Case study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Communicating with children about ‘everyday’ pain and injury: A Delphi study

COI STATEMENT

GLM has received support from: Reality Health, ConnectHealth UK, Kaiser Permanente, AIA Australia, Workers' Compensation Boards and professional sport-ing organizations in Australia, Europe and South and North America. Professional and scientific bodies have reimbursed him for travel costs related to presentation of research on pain at scientific conferences/symposia. He has received speaker fees for lectures on pain and rehabilitation. He receives royalties for books on pain and pain education. SBW and MN have no conflicts of interest.

Robotic sensors could help transform prosthetics

Business Announcement

UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST OF SCOTLAND

 

IMAGE: SENSORS COULD TRANSFORM ROBOTICS view more 

CREDIT: N/A

A pioneering project to develop advanced sensors for use in robotic systems, could transform prosthetics and robotic limbs.

The research project – led by University of the West of Scotland (UWS), Integrated Graphene Ltd, and supported by the Scottish Research Partnership in Engineering (SRPe) and the National Manufacturing Institute for Scotland (NMIS) Industry Doctorate Programme in Advanced Manufacturing – aims to develop sensors which provide enhanced capabilities to robots, helping improve their dexterity and motor skills, through the use of accurate pressure sensors which provide haptic feedback and distributed touch.

Professor Des Gibson, Director of the Institute of Thin Films, Sensors and Imaging at UWS and project principal investigator, said: “Over recent years the advancements in the robotics industry have been remarkable, however, due to a lack of sensory capabilities, robotic systems often fail to execute certain tasks easily. For robots to reach their full potential, accurate pressure sensors, capable of providing greater tactile ability, are required.

“Our collaboration with Integrated Graphene Ltd, has led to the development of advanced pressure sensor technology, which could help transform robotic systems.”

Made from 3D graphene foam, which offers unique capabilities when put under mechanical stress, the sensors use a piezoresistive approach, meaning when the material is put under pressure it dynamically changes its electric resistance, easily detecting and adapting to the range of pressure required, from light to heavy.

Marco Caffio, co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Integrated Graphene said: “Gii, our novel 3D graphene foam, has the capability to mimic the sensitivity and feedback of human touch, which could have a transformative impact on how robotics can be used for a whole range of real-world applications from surgery to precision manufacturing.

“We know the unique property of Gii makes it suitable for use in other applications like disease diagnostics and energy storage, so we’re always very excited to be able to demonstrate its flexibility in projects like this one.”

Dr Carlos Garcia Nunez, School of Computing Engineering and Physical Sciences at UWS added: “Within robotics and wearable electronics the use of pressure sensors is a vital element, to provide either an information input system, or to give robotic systems human-like motor skills. An advanced material like 3D graphene foam offers excellent potential for use in such applications, due to its outstanding electrical, mechanical and chemical properties.

“Our work shines a light on the significant potential for this technology to revolutionise the robotics industry with dynamic pressure sensors.”

Claire Ordoyno, Interim Director of SRPe, added: “The SRPe - NMIS Industrial Doctorate Programme brings together ground breaking academic research with industry partners to drive forward innovation in engineering. These collaborative PhD projects not only enhance the Scottish engineering research landscape, but produce innovation focussed, industry ready PhD graduates to feed the talent pipeline.”

The next stage of the project – funded by UWS, Integrated Graphene Ltd, SRPe and NMIS – will look to further increase sensitivity of the sensors, before developing for wider use in robotic systems.

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DOI

10.4028/p-oy94hj 

Earliest known brood care in insects found in Daohugou Biota

Peer-Reviewed Publication

CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES HEADQUARTERS

 

IMAGE: ECOLOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION OF K. POPOVI. view more 

CREDIT: NIGPAS

Parental care refers to the protection, care and feeding of eggs or offspring by parents. It has evolved independently multiple times in animals, e.g., mammals, birds, dinosaurs, arthropods, and especially various lineages of social insects. 

Brood care is a form of uniparental care where parents carry eggs or juveniles after oviposition and provide protection, enhancing offspring fitness and survival. However, very few fossil insects directly document such ephemeral behavior. Among Mesozoic insects, the only two direct fossil cases of brooding ethology are from the Early Cretaceous Jehol Biota and mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber.

Recently, a research group led by Prof. HUANG Diying from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS) systematically studied the water boatman Karataviella popovi, a representative insect from the Middle-Late Jurassic Daohugou Biota of northeastern China. Of the 157 examined K. popovi fossils, 30 adult females were preserved with a cluster of eggs anchored on their left mesotibia. 

This discovery represents the earliest direct evidence of brood care among insects, indicating that relevant adaptations associated with maternal investment in insects can be traced back to at least the Middle Jurassic, pushing back by approximately 40 million years evidence of such behavior. 

The results were published online in Proceedings of the Royal Society B on July 13. 

The true water bug superfamily Corixoidea, commonly known as the water boatman, is a common aquatic Hemipteran insect and occurs in various freshwater ecosystems worldwide. Extant water boatmen commonly deposit eggs on various subaquatic substances such as leaves or stems of aquatic vegetation, stones, and even on snail shells, carapaces of terrapins, and the exoskeletons of crayfish. 

The Jurassic water boatman K. popovi from the Daohugou Biota has a relatively large body, with body length ranging from 11-15 mm. 

The specialized protarsi of K. popovi, combined with the five patches of setae on the head that form a trawl-like feeding apparatus, reflect highly specialized predatory behavior. Anostracans and the water boatman K. popovi, both found in the same layer of the Daohugou beds, represent precursors and dominators, respectively. 

After the analysis of more than 700 anostracan eggs, the researchers hypothesized that the abundant seasonally produced anostracan eggs in the Daohugou Biota probably were the food source for K. popovi. 

The egg clusters of K. popovi are compact and arranged in approximately five to six staggered rows, attached to and throughout the left mesotibia of adult females by short egg stalks. As inferred from the arrangement of the eggs, each row seems to have six to seven eggs. The diameters of eggs (without stalks) range from 1.14 to 1.20 mm. 

"Due to the potential high predation risk caused by abundant salamanders in the Daohugou Biota and seasonal food resources, K. popovi may have been exposed to fierce ecological pressure in the Daohugou Biota," said Prof. HUANG. 

The brooding behavior developed in K. popovi probably reflected adaptations to habitat or an evolutionary response to changes in the ancient lake ecosystem. The brooding behavior of K. popovi most likely provided effective protection for eggs by largely avoiding the risks of predation, desiccation and hypoxia. Such behavior had important effects on its evolution, development and reproductive success.  

To our knowledge, carrying a cluster of eggs on a leg is a unique strategy among insects. However, it is not unusual in aquatic arthropods, where such carrying behaviour can be traced back to the early Cambrian Chengjiang Biota. 

This discovery highlights the existence of diverse brooding strategies in Mesozoic insects, thus helping scientists understand the evolution and adaptive significance of brood care in insects. 

CAPTION

Morphological characterstics of K. popovi.

CREDIT

NIGPAS

CAPTION

Brooding in K. popovi

CREDIT

NIGPAS

CAPTION

Specialized filter-capture apparatus in K. popovi

CREDIT

NIGPAS

JOURNAL

Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences

DOI

10.1098/rspb.2022.0447 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

The earliest known brood care in insects

Modeling reveals how dwarf planet Ceres powers unexpected geologic activity

Peer-Reviewed Publication

VIRGINIA TECH

 

IMAGE: THIS ILLUSTRATION MODELS THE TOPOGRAPHY (IN METERS) OF CERES FROM NASA’S DAWN PROJECT, WITH GREEN AND BLUE COLORS. SOME OF THE DWARF PLANET’S MAJOR CRATERS ARE LABELED. A RULER IS BELOW THE IMAGE OF CERES SHOWING, IN METERS, NEGATIVE 8,000 TO POSITIVE 8,000. view more 

CREDIT: VIRGINIA TECH

For a long time, our view of Ceres was fuzzy, said Scott King, a geoscientist in the Virginia Tech College of Science. A dwarf planet and the largest body found in the asteroid belt — the region between Jupiter and Mars speckled with hundreds of thousands of asteroids — Ceres had no distinguishable surface features in existing telescopic observations from Earth.

Then, in 2015, the hazy orb that was Ceres came into view. That view was stunning to scientists such as King. Data and images collected by NASA’s Dawn mission gave a clearer picture of the surface, including its composition and structures, which revealed unexpected geologic activity.

Scientists had seen the general size of Ceres in earlier observations. It was so small it was assumed to be inactive. Instead, Dawn discovered a large plateau on one side of Ceres that covered a fraction of the dwarf planet, similar to what a continent might take up on Earth. Surrounding it were fractures in rocks clustered in one location. And there were visible traces of an ocean world: deposits all over the surface where minerals had condensed as water evaporated — the mark of a freezing ocean.

A professor in the Department of Geosciences, King, who mostly studies larger bodies such as planets, wanted to know how a body as small as Ceres could generate the heat needed to power that kind of geological activity and account for the surface features picked up by Dawn.

Through modeling, he and a team of scientists from multiple universities as well as the United States Geological Survey and the Planetary Science Institute found that the decay of radioactive elements within Ceres’s interior could keep it active. Their findings were recently published in American Geophysical Union Advances.

King’s study of big planets such as Earth, Venus, and Mars had always shown him that planets start out hot. The collision between objects that form a planet creates that initial heat. Ceres, by contrast, never got big enough to become a planet and generate heat the same way, King said. To learn how it could still generate enough heat to power geologic activity, he used theories and computational tools previously applied to bigger planets to study Ceres’s interior, and he looked for evidence that could support his models in data returned by the Dawn mission.

The team’s model of the dwarf planet’s interior showed a unique sequence: Ceres started out cold and heated up because of the decay of radioactive elements such as uranium and thorium — which was alone enough to power its activity — until the interior became unstable.

“What I would see in the model is, all of a sudden, one part of the interior would start heating up and would be moving upward and then the other part would be moving downward,” King said.

That instability could explain some of the surface features that had formed on Ceres, as revealed by the Dawn mission. The large plateau had formed on only one side of Ceres with nothing on the other side, and the fractures were clustered in a single location around it. The concentration of features in one hemisphere signaled to King that instability had occurred and had left a visible impact.

“It turned out that you could show in the model that where one hemisphere had this instability that was rising up, it would cause extension at the surface, and it was consistent with these patterns of fractures,” King said.

Based on the team’s model, Ceres didn’t follow a planet’s typical pattern of hot first and cool second, with its own pattern of cool, hot, and cool again. “What we’ve shown in this paper is that radiogenic heating all on its own is enough to create interesting geology,” King said.

He sees similarities to Ceres in the moons of Uranus, which a study commissioned by NASA and the National Science Foundation recently deemed high priority for a major robotic mission. With additional improvements to the model, he looks forward to exploring their interiors as well.

“Some of these moons are not too different in size from Ceres,” King said. “I think applying the model would be really exciting.”

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JOURNAL

AGU Advances

Super-earth skimming habitable zone of red dwarf

Peer-Reviewed Publication

NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF NATURAL SCIENCES

 

IMAGE: THE GREEN REGION REPRESENTS THE HABITABLE ZONE WHERE LIQUID WATER CAN EXIST ON THE PLANETARY SURFACE. THE PLANETARY ORBIT IS SHOWN AS A BLUE LINE. ROSS 508 B SKIMS THE INNER EDGE OF THE HABITABLE ZONE (SOLID LINE), POSSIBLY CROSSING INTO THE HABITABLE ZONE FOR PART OF THE ORBIT (DASHED LINE). view more 

CREDIT: ASTROBIOLOGY CENTER

A super-Earth planet has been found near the habitable zone of a red dwarf star only 37 light-years from the Earth. This is the first discovery by a new instrument on the Subaru Telescope and offers a chance to investigate the possibility of life on planets around nearby stars. With such a successful first result, we can expect that the Subaru Telescope will discover more, potentially even better, candidates for habitable planets around red dwarfs.

Red dwarfs, stars smaller than the Sun, account for three-quarters of the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, and are abundant in the neighborhood around the Sun. As such, they are important targets in the search for nearby extra-solar planets and extraterrestrial life. But red dwarfs are cool and don’t emit much visible light compared to other types of stars, making it difficult to study them.

In the infrared wavelengths red dwarfs are brighter. So the Astrobiology Center in Japan developed an infrared observational instrument mounted on the Subaru Telescope to search for signs of planets around red dwarf stars. The instrument is called IRD for Infrared Doppler, the observational method used in this search.

The first fruits of this search are signs of a super-Earth four times the mass of the Earth circling the star Ross 508, located 37 light-years away in the constellation Serpens. This planet, Ross 508 b, has a year of only 11 Earth-days, and lies at the inner edge of the habitable zone around its host star. Interestingly, there are indications that the orbit is elliptical, which would mean that for part of the orbit the planet would be in the habitable zone, the region where conditions would be right for liquid water to exist on the surface of the planet. Whether or not there is actually water or life are questions of further study.

To have the very first planet discovered by this new method be so tantalizingly close to the habitable zone seems too good to be true and bodes well for future discoveries. Bun’ei Sato, a Professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the principal investigator in this search comments, “It has been 14 years since the start of IRD’s development. We have continued our development and research with the hope of finding a planet exactly like Ross 508 b.”

These results appeared as Harakawa et al. “A Super-Earth Orbiting Near the Inner Edge of the Habitable Zone around the M4.5-dwarf Ross 508” in Publication of the Astronomical Society of Japan on June 30, 2022.

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JOURNAL

Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan

DOI

10.1093/pasj/psac044 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

A super-Earth orbiting near the inner edge of the habitable zone around the M4.5 dwarf Ross 508

Job insecurity affects mental health

According to a study by the UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country, job insecurity, understood from a multidimensional perspective, is associated with poor mental health

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF THE BASQUE COUNTRY

A study conducted by the Opik group on Social Determinants of Health and Demographic Change has analysed the relationship between job insecurity, measured by dimensions and as a multidimensional index, and the mental health of wage-earning men and women in the Basque Country. “We believe that job insecurity needs to be addressed from this more multidimensional perspective; otherwise, you may leave out many things that could be job insecurity and which are not being analysed," said Erika Valero-Alzaga, one of the group’s researchers.

In order to address job insecurity from a multidimensional perspective and to understand the relative importance of each of its dimensions, the research was based on the EPRES job insecurity scale, which consists of six dimensions: impermanence, wages, disempowerment, vulnerability, rights and capacity to exercise rights. So each of the dimensions that comprise it was analysed separately, in order to identify those that potentially exert the greatest impact on health, based on a sample of the 2018 Basque Autonomous Community Health Survey.

According to the findings of this study, job insecurity is significantly associated with poor mental health in both men and women. “We saw that there were some dimensions that appear to exert a greater impact than others on mental health,” said Valero. Wage level among both sexes, or vulnerability among women appear to be significantly and independently related to a poorer mental health status. “Interestingly, one of the most striking features of the Spanish labour market is its impermanence. We can see that if we neutralise the effect of other variables, such as educational attainment or socioeconomic status, this variable per se does not seem to affect mental health,” said the UPV/EHU researcher. “This may be due to the fact that in some sectors with high temporary employment rates in our context, for example in part of the public sector, this situation is not always experienced coupled with a high degree of uncertainty about job continuity, which does not mean that efforts should not be made to stabilise workforces.”

Ensuring access to decent employment and adequate wage levels

Socio-economic and political transformations “have resulted in a significant deterioration in the quality of employment and a transfer of risks and insecurity from employers to workers. Moreover, job insecurity is not evenly distributed across the working population,” said Valero. Women tend to be in lower quality jobs, have fewer permanent contracts than men, have lower wage levels and are over-represented in part-time jobs. Similarly, job insecurity is more concentrated among young people and those with a lower socio-economic status. “Job insecurity has hugely significant negative effects on mental health, so considering the impact that work in general (paid work and domestic and care work) has on people's lives, it should be a priority at the policy level,” added Valero. “So far, the concern has been to end unemployment, as it has also been seen to exert a negative impact on health; but it is not only about ensuring access to employment, but also about ensuring access to decent employment and adequate wage levels.”

The researcher takes the view that, “the results of this study, based on a large, representative sample of the wage-earning population in the Basque Country, could help to identify the most unfavourable aspects of job insecurity for mental health and thus implement various socio-political measures to deal with them”. However, the researcher acknowledged that this is a cross-sectional study that “prevents us from establishing a causality principle between job insecurity and mental health”, and stressed the need to “promote further research to adapt and analyse the EPRES scale in self-employed workers, as well as in people who do not have an employment contract”.

Bibliographical reference

Erika Valero, Mireia Utzet, Unai Martín
¿Cómo afectan las distintas dimensiones de la precariedad laboral a la salud mental?
Gaceta Sanitaria
DOI: 10.1016/j.gaceta.2021.11.006

 

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JOURNAL

Gaceta Sanitaria

DOI

10.1016/j.gaceta.2021.11.006 

ARTICLE TITLE

¿Cómo afectan las distintas dimensiones de la precariedad laboral a la salud mental?

 New study used marine monitor radar system to monitor California marine protected areas

Findings suggest fishers cluster outside MPAs to potentially benefit from better fishing opportunities

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MAR COMMUNICATIONS

 

IMAGE: MARINE MONITOR (M2) RADAR SYSTEM MONITORED ACTIVITY NEAR THE PIEDRAS BLANCAS LIGHT STATION IN CENTRAL CALIFORNIA. view more 

CREDIT: PROTECTEDSEAS

Palo Alto, CA—Aug. 2,, 2022—A new study found that boaters often cluster along the edges of marine protected areas (MPAs) off the coast of California. These new findings suggest that fishers are aware of the MPA boundaries and cluster just outside them to potentially benefit from better fishing opportunities by "fishing the line."  

The study, recently published in PLOS ONE, used the ProtectedSeas Marine Monitor (M2) autonomous data collection tool to continuously monitor vessel activity 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for a year in the vicinity of five state-managed MPAs near San Diego, Santa Barbara and Cambria. The M2 systems, which combine marine radar with custom software, were deployed to record the movement of boats on the water, allowing researchers to measure boat activity continuously in and around MPAs for the first time. 

The network of M2 systems in California are managed by ProtectedSeas and site partners based at each location.

The researchers identified specific boat movements and found that overall, 40 percent more boating activity occurred in the vicinity of MPAs compared to the surrounding areas. A well-documented benefit of MPAs is the “spillover” of marine life from inside an MPA into the surrounding areas. 

"Most activity occurred at or beyond MPA edges, and not within the area itself,” said ProtectedSeas researcher Samantha Cope, the lead author of the study. “This suggests that boaters are aware of the MPA and that the areas are serving their purpose of creating safe refuges for ocean life regeneration. Fishers see a benefit from spending time near the area because MPAs are working.

The researchers found that boating activity clustered at MPA edges occurred at all five locations. Clustering intensified  at the southern California MPAs during both commercial and recreational spiny lobster seasons, a valuable fishery in the state. During the commercial spiny lobster season, clustering was 30 times greater also at the Campus Point State Marine Reserve near Santa Barbara.

"Conservation work needs to be driven by data, and M2 helps us understand trends in what's happening in MPAs," said study co-author Jess Morten, a researcher with the California Marine Sanctuary Foundation, a site partner with M2 in California.

MPAs in California primarily restrict fishing activities to conserve valued species and habitats. When fishing activity is concentrated at MPA edges, it suggests that fish may be more abundant closer to the MPA compared to elsewhere in the local area. Monitoring human activity can help managers evaluate both the ecological and community benefits of the MPA, detect patterns in boat activity and other human uses, and ensure MPA regulations are followed.

The M2 system provided researchers with an independent method for continuously documenting activity. "We specifically designed M2 to monitor important marine places at a cost that was realistic for local managers,” said M2 Product Manager and study co-author Brendan Tougher. "This research shows that M2 is an accessible and robust tool for monitoring MPAs."

The state's first MPA Decadal Management Review is currently underway to evaluate the existing network of MPAs. Investigating human activity near MPAs is important for evaluating the success of current ocean protections.

There are currently 18 active M2 systems globally, with six of them in California, and many deployed internationally in developing countries. 

"As a 'low-tech' solution for more efficient MPA monitoring, M2 is especially valuable for anyone with limited technical experience or resources since people can be quickly trained on how to use and interpret data from our systems," said Tougher.

Hot spots of activity occurred at MPA boundaries, and this activity was generally most common at mid-day and on weekends. There was less activity overall at the site in central California that monitored the Piedras Blancas State Marine Reserve and State Conservation Area, likely due to its remote location. But hot spots at MPA boundaries were still present.

# # #

The mission of ProtectedSeas is to provide open data and monitoring solutions to enhance awareness of and compliance with ocean protections. Learn more at: https://protectedseas.net/

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JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Coastal radar as a tool for continuous and fine-scale monitoring of vessel activities of interest in the vicinity of marine protected areas

Department of Energy announces $10 million for research on environmental systems science

Projects address the role of plant-mediated water redistribution, wildfires and floods, and fungal networks on environmental system processes

Grant and Award Announcement

DOE/US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $10 million in funding for 12 projects to universities, academic institutions, federal research labs, and nonprofits within the area of Environmental System Science (ESS) research. Grants will focus on studies intended to improve the understanding and representation of the impact of wildfires and floods on ecosystems and watersheds, as well the role of plant-mediated water redistribution and fungal networks in shaping ecosystem and watershed function. 

“The DOE invests in Earth system science by tightly coordinating field-based experimental research with system modeling,” said Gary Geernaert, DOE Acting Associate Director of Science for Biological and Environmental Research (BER). “This approach enables more rapid progress in scientific discovery and improves our ability to advance climate predictions for extreme environmental conditions.”

Current models lack appropriate representation of important interactions among physical, hydrological, biogeochemical, and ecological aspects of the Earth system. By coupling experiments, observations, and models, interdisciplinary teams of scientists will work to unravel these complex processes to improve understanding of the structure and function of watersheds and ecosystems across spatial and temporal scales. It is expected that the grants will advance critically needed observational and experimental research and model development aimed at improving the accuracy of today’s Earth and environmental system models and predictive capabilities.

Projects include research funded under three topical areas:

• Plant-Mediated Ecohydrology projects will investigate plant hydraulic redistribution and its influence on ecosystem/watershed function.
• Wildfire or Floods and System Processes projects will improve understanding and model representation of the impacts and responses of environmental processes following wildfires or floods.
• Fungal Network Shaping of System Function projects will investigate fungal-mediated plant-soil interactions in response to environmental factors or stresses.

The projects were selected by competitive peer review under the DOE Funding Opportunity Announcement for Environmental System Science sponsored by the BER program within the Department’s Office of Science.

Total funding is $10 million for projects lasting up to three years in duration, with $10 million in Fiscal Year 2022 dollars and outyear funding contingent on congressional appropriations. The list of projects and more information can be found here.

When particles move

A deep dive into the relationship between cohesion and erosion

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - SANTA BARBARA

 

IMAGE: THE POLYMER-COVERED SPHERICAL GLASS BEADS USED IN THE EXPERIMENTS. THE GRAINS AT THE TOP HAVE A VERY THIN COATING AND NO COHESION; THOSE AT THE BOTTOM HAVE A MUCH THICKER COATING AND ARE COHESIVE. view more 

CREDIT: UC SANTA BARBARA

Landslides are one striking example of erosion. When the bonds that hold particles of dirt and rock together are overwhelmed by a force — often in the form of water — sufficient to pull the rock and soil apart, that same force breaks the bonds with other rock and soil that hold them in place. Another type of erosion involves using a small air jet to remove dust from a surface. When the force of the turbulent air is strong enough to break the bonds that hold the individual dust particles, or grains, together and cause them to stick to the surface, that’s erosion, too.

In the pharmaceutical industry, cohesion/erosion dynamics are immensely important to successfully process powders to make medicines. They also play a key role in another, rather far-removed, example: landing a spacecraft on a surface, such as the moon. As the spacecraft lowers, the exhaust of its engines causes the granular material on the surface to erode and be transported. The displaced material forms a crater, which must be of the correct dimensions; too narrow or too deep, and it will cause the spacecraft to tip over.

We often encounter divided materials that are composed of small particles — think sand on the beach, soil, snow and dust — that can be affected by more than just frictional forces, sharing some additional cohesive forces with their neighbors. While cohesion acts only between a particle and its immediate neighbors, it also produces macroscopic effects; for instance, causing divided bits of material to aggregate and adding additional strength to the composite. Cohesion is what causes powders, such as flour, to clump and enables us to make castles on the beach by adding a small amount of water to dry sand.

Alban Sauret, an associate professor in the UC Santa Barbara Mechanical Engineering Department, is keenly interested in these processes. Published in the journal Physical Review Fluids, his group, including first-year Ph.D. student Ram Sharma and colleagues in France, present new research examining how cohesion between particles can influence the onset of erosion. Using a recently developed technique that allows them to control the cohesion between model grains and then running experiments in which they used a jet of air to displace the grains, they were able to gain a better understanding of cohesion, which holds particles together; erosion, which causes them to separate; and transport, which involves how far the displaced particles then travel.

The research offers an approach for quantifying how the magnitude of cohesion changes the amount of local stress needed to start erosion. This understanding could be used in civil engineering, say, to measure the strength and stability of soil in an area where construction is planned. But the researchers also hope that their model will provide empirical evidence for a physical theory of erosion that includes cohesion and is relevant to a broad range of applications, from removing dust from solar panels (dust can reduce energy production by as much as 40%) to landing rockets on other planets.

In the presence of external forces, such as from wind or water, the cohesion between particles can be overcome. The onset of erosion refers to the point at which the drag force, exerted by fluid or air, causes particles to lose contact with the granular bed, becoming separated both from each other as neighbors and from the surface to which they adhere. This captures our fairly elementary, current understanding of erosion: if local external forces on a particle are larger than the forces keeping it in place, it erodes — another way of saying that it is displaced.

As fluids or air apply larger stresses, such as by moving fast enough to become turbulent flows, they can cause greater erosion. An exceedingly broad range of turbulent-flow configurations acting on an equally broad range of materials lead to the erosion we see, at the macro level, in the forms of enormous canyons, worn down over eons by turbulent rivers, and gigantic sand dunes, shaped by turbulent air currents. Surprisingly, given that erosion drives the sediment cycle and constantly reshapes the surface of the Earth, the current understanding of erosional forces is not adequate to explain the rich variety of resulting landforms.

While erosion of non-cohesive grains can be predicted satisfactorily, the interplay between turbulent flows and erosion in the presence of inter-particle cohesion has not been well researched. But it deserves study, Sauret says, because “Cohesion is everywhere! If you are modeling something as simple as how to clean a surface, for instance, and your model does not correctly account for cohesion, you will likely end up taking a wrong approach — and still have a dirty surface.”

To control the cohesion between particles, the researchers applied a polymer coating to identical glass spheres (analog for particles) with a diameter of .8 millimeter. The thickness of the coating could be increased or decreased precisely to increase or decrease cohesion. The turbulent flow is modeled by a variable jet of air aimed at the granular bed.

The experiments enabled the team to determine a scaling law for the threshold at which erosion overcomes interparticle cohesion, regardless of the specifics of the system, such as particle size. By quantifying the relationship between these two forces, the research presents a technique that can be used to predict the erosion threshold for different sizes of grains.

The results of this study, says Sauret, can be most directly applied to the process of removing cohesive sediments, such as dust and snow, from surfaces such as solar panels.

CAPTION

The nozzle (top) creates a flow of turbulent air that interrupts cohesion between particles (below) and the surface, leading to erosion and transport of the particles.

CREDIT

UC Santa Barbara

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JOURNAL

Physical Review Fluids

DOI

10.1103/PhysRevFluids.7.074303 

ARTICLE TITLE

Erosion of cohesive grains by an impinging turbulent jet