Ancient Iowan superpredator got big by front-loading its growth in its youth

Fossils found only at the Field Museum reveal the growth history of Whatcheeria

Peer-Reviewed Publication

FIELD MUSEUM

 

IMAGE: CO-AUTHOR BEN OTOO STANDING BY A LIFE-SIZE ILLUSTRATION OF A LARGE WHATCHEERIA SPECIMEN AT THE FIELD MUSEUM. view more 

CREDIT: COURTESY OF BEN OTOO

The Field Museum in Chicago is home to the best, most-complete fossils of a prehistoric superpredator-- but one that lived hundreds of millions of years before SUE the T. rex. Whatcheeria was a six-foot-long lake-dwelling creature with a salamander-like body and a long, narrow head; its fossils were discovered in a limestone quarry near the town of What Cheer, Iowa. There are around 350 Whatcheeria specimens, ranging from single bones to complete skeletons, that have been unearthed, and every last one of them resides in the Field Museum’s collections. In a new study in Communications Biology, these specimens helped reveal how Whatcheeria grew big enough to menace its fishy prey: instead of growing “slow and steady” the way that many modern reptiles and amphibians do, it grew rapidly in its youth.

“If you saw Whatcheeria in life, it would probably look like a big crocodile-shaped salamander, with a narrow head and lots of teeth,” says Ben Otoo, a co-author of the study and a PhD student at the University of Chicago and the Field Museum. “If it really curled up, probably to an uncomfortable extent, it could fit in your bathtub, but neither you nor it would want it to be there.” 

That’s because Whatcheeria was a top predator. Bony grooves in its skull for sensory organs shared by fish and aquatic amphibians reveal that it lived underwater, and its sturdy leg bones could have helped it hunker down in one spot and wait for prey to swim by. “It probably would have spent a lot of time near the bottoms of rivers and lakes, lunging out and eating whatever it liked,” says Otoo. “You definitely could call this thing ‘the T. rex of its time.’”

While Whatcheeria looks like a giant salamander, it isn’t one-- it’s a “stem tetrapod,” an early four-legged critter that’s part of the lineage that eventually evolved into the four-limbed animals alive today. “Whatcheeria is more closely related to living tetrapods like amphibians and reptiles and mammals than it is to anything else, but it falls outside of those modern groups,” says Ken Angielczyk, a curator at the Field Museum and co-author of the study. “That means that it can help us learn about how tetrapods, including us, evolved.”

Since the Field has so many Whatcheeria specimens, scientists are able to use them to study the animal at different phases of its life. “Most early tetrapods are known from just one skeleton, if you're lucky-- in a lot of cases just a fragment of a single bone,” says Angielczyk. But with so many individuals at the Field, researchers have been able to spot variation within the species: some Whatcheeria are six and a half feet long, while others are much smaller. That means there was an opportunity to study how they grew.

“Examining these fossils is like reading a storybook, and we are trying to read as many chapters as possible by looking at how juveniles grow building up to adulthood,” said Megan Whitney, the study’s lead author, a professor at Loyola University in Chicago who began working on the project at Harvard University. “Because of where Whatcheeria sits in the early tetrapod family tree, we wanted to target this animal and look at its storybook at different stages of life.”

To see how Whatcheeria grew, Otoo and Angielczyk offered up thigh bones from nine Whatcheeria individuals ranging from juvenile to adult. Whitney and her advisor, Harvard University’s Stephanie Pierce, took thin slices of bone and examined them under a microscope. When an animal is growing, it creates new layers of bone every growing season, says Otoo. “You might see a seasonal pattern where the animal is growing a lot during the spring and summer and then stopping in winter and resuming the next spring,” they explain. “By examining how thick the growth rings are over the course of an animal’s life, you can figure out if the animal’s growing continuously throughout its lifetime, perhaps with some temporary interruptions, or basically growing to an adult size, then stopping.”

In modern tetrapods, some animals grow a lot as juveniles and then stop when they reach adulthood-- birds and mammals, including us, are like that. However, other animals like crocodiles and many amphibians keep growing bit by bit their whole lives. The researchers expected that Whatcheeria would be more like reptiles and amphibians, growing “slow and steady.” But in examining the bone slices, Whitney found evidence that Whatcheeria grew rapidly when it was young, and then leveled off over time. She even found evidence of fibrolamellar bone, which is primary bone tissue associated with fast growth.

“I have a very distinct memory of jumping on Slack with Stephanie Pierce and saying, this breaks all of the rules that we thought of for how growth is evolving in these early tetrapods,” said Whitney.

The discovery helps illuminate what some elements of Whatcheeria’s life were like. “If you’re going to be a top predator, a very large animal, it can be a competitive advantage to get big quickly as it makes it easier to hunt other animals, and harder for other predators to hunt you,” said Pierce. “It can also be a beneficial survival strategy when living in unpredictable environments, such as the lake system Whatcheeria inhabited, which went through seasonal dying periods.” 

However, there’s a trade-off: growing really big really fast takes an enormous amount of energy, which can be a problem if there’s not enough food and resources for the growing animal. It’s easier to get just enough food to get a little bit bigger, the same way it’s easier to make smaller monthly rental payments than it is to save up for a big downpayment on a house.

In addition to helping give us a better sense of the evolutionary pressures on early tetrapods, researchers say the findings are a reminder that evolution isn’t a neat stepwise process: it’s a series of experiments.

 “Evolution is about trying out different lifestyles and combinations of features,” says Angielczyk. “And so you get an animal like Whatcheeria that’s an early tetrapod, but it's also a pretty fast-growing one. It's a really big one for its time. It has this weird skeleton that's potentially letting it do some things that some of its contemporaries weren't. It’s an experiment in how to be a big predator, and it shows how diverse life on Earth was and still is.”

  

A Whatcheeria skull in the collections of the Field Museum, with its many sharp teeth visible

Co-author Ken Angielczyk with a drawer of Whatcheeria specimens behind the scenes at the Field Museum

CREDIT

By Kate Golembiewski, Field Museum

Some of the many drawers containing Whatcheeria specimens and other fossils from the Iowan quarry where the animal was discovered

CREDIT

Kate Golembiewski, Field Museum

JOURNAL

Communications Biology

DOI

10.1038/s42003-022-04079-0 

ARTICLE TITLE

Fossil bone histology reveals ancient origins for rapid juvenile growth in tetrapods

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

28-Nov-2022

Astrophysicists hunt for second-closest supermassive black hole

Peer-Reviewed Publication

HARVARD-SMITHSONIAN CENTER FOR ASTROPHYSICS

 

IMAGE: THE ULTRA-FAINT MILKY WAY COMPANION GALAXY LEO I APPEARS AS A FAINT PATCH TO THE RIGHT OF THE BRIGHT STAR, REGULUS. view more 

CREDIT: SCOTT ANTTILA ANTTLER

Cambridge, Mass. – Two astrophysicists at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have suggested a way to observe what could be the second-closest supermassive black hole to Earth: a behemoth 3 million times the mass of the Sun, hosted by the dwarf galaxy Leo I.

The supermassive black hole, labeled Leo I*, was first proposed by an independent team of astronomers in late 2021. The team noticed stars picking up speed as they approached the center of the galaxy — evidence for a black hole — but directly imaging emission from the black hole was not possible.

Now, CfA astrophysicists Fabio Pacucci and Avi Loeb suggest a new way to verify the supermassive black hole’s existence; their work is described in a study published today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“Black holes are very elusive objects, and sometimes they enjoy playing hide-and-seek with us,” says Fabio Pacucci, lead author of the ApJ Letters study. “Rays of light cannot escape their event horizons, but the environment around them can be extremely bright — if enough material falls into their gravitational well. But if a black hole is not accreting mass, instead, it emits no light and becomes impossible to find with our telescopes.”

This is the challenge with Leo I — a dwarf galaxy so devoid of gas available to accrete that it is often described as a “fossil.” So, shall we relinquish any hope of observing it? Perhaps not, the astronomers say.

“In our study, we suggested that a small amount of mass lost from stars wandering around the black hole could provide the accretion rate needed to observe it,” Pacucci explains. “Old stars become very big and red — we call them red giant stars. Red giants typically have strong winds that carry a fraction of their mass to the environment. The space around Leo I* seems to contain enough of these ancient stars to make it observable.”

“Observing Leo I* could be groundbreaking,” says Avi Loeb, the co-author of the study. “It would be the second-closest supermassive black hole after the one at the center of our galaxy, with a very similar mass but hosted by a galaxy that is a thousand times less massive than the Milky Way. This fact challenges everything we know about how galaxies and their central supermassive black holes co-evolve. How did such an oversized baby end up being born from a slim parent?”

Decades of studies show that most massive galaxies host a supermassive black hole at their center, and the mass of the black hole is a tenth of a percent of the total mass of the spheroid of stars surrounding it. 

“In the case of Leo I,” Loeb continues, “we would expect a much smaller black hole. Instead, Leo I appears to contain a black hole a few million times the mass of the Sun, similar to that hosted by the Milky Way. This is exciting because science usually advances the most when the unexpected happens.”

So, when can we expect an image of the black hole? 

“We are not there yet,” Pacucci says. 

The team has obtained telescope time on the space-borne Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico and is currently analyzing the new data. 

Pacucci says, “Leo I* is playing hide-and-seek, but it emits too much radiation to remain undetected for long.”

 

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About the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian is a collaboration between Harvard and the Smithsonian designed to ask—and ultimately answer—humanity’s greatest unresolved questions about the nature of the universe. The Center for Astrophysics is headquartered in Cambridge, MA, with research facilities across the U.S. and around the world.

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JOURNAL

The Astrophysical Journal Letters

DOI

10.3847/2041-8213/ac9b21 

ARTICLE TITLE

Accretion from Winds of RGB Stars May Reveal the Supermassive Black Hole in Leo I

Earth’s many new lakes

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN - FACULTY OF SCIENCE

 

IMAGE: THE FIGURE SHOWS THE CHANGES IN LAKE AREAS DURING THE INVESTIGATED PERIODS (FROM THE RESEARCH ARTICLE IN NATURE COMMUNICATIONS) view more 

CREDIT: FROM THE RESEARCH ARTICLE "MAPPING GLOBAL LAKE DYNAMICS REVEALS THE EMERGING ROLES OF SMALL LAKES" IN NATURE COMMUNICATIONS

The number of lakes on our planet has increased substantially in recent decades, according to a unique global survey of 3.4 million lakes that the University of Copenhagen has taken part in. There has been a particular increase in the number of small lakes, which unfortunately, emit large amounts of greenhouse gas. The development is of great importance for Earth’s carbon account, global ecosystems, and human access to water resources.

Bacteria and fungi feeding on dead plants and animals at the bottom of a lake emit vast amounts of CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, and other gases. Some of these gases end up in the atmosphere. This mechanism causes lakes to act like greenhouse gas factories. In fact, freshwater lakes probably account for 20% of all global CO2 fossil fuel emissions into Earth’s atmosphere. Forecasts suggest that  climate change will cause lakes to emit an ever-greater share of greenhouse gases in the future.

This is just one of the reasons why it is important to know how many and how big these lakes are, as well as how they develop. Until now, this information was unknown. Scientific researchers from the University of Copenhagen and other universities have now prepared a more accurate and detailed map of the world's lakes than has ever existed. The researchers mapped 3.4 million lakes and their evolution over the past four decades using high-resolution satellite imagery combined with artificial intelligence.

The survey shows that between 1984 and 2019, the area of global lake surfaces grew by over 46,000 km2 – slightly more than the surface area of Denmark.

"There have been major and rapid changes with lakes in recent decades that affect greenhouse gas accounts, as well as ecosystems and access to water resources. Among other things, our newfound knowledge of the extent and dynamics of lakes allows us to better calculate their potential carbon emissions," explains Jing Tang, an Assistant Professor at the Department of Biology and co-author of the study, which is now published in Nature Communications.

According to the study's calculations, the annual increase of CO2 emissions from lakes during the period is 4.8 teragrams (10^12, trillion) of carbon – which equals to the CO2 emission increase of the United Kingdom in 2012. 

Small lakes, large CO2 emissions

More and more small lakes (<1 km2) have appeared since 1984. The number of these small lakes is especially important according to the researchers, because they emit the most greenhouse gas in relation to their size. While small lakes account for just 15% of total lake area, they account for 25% of CO2 and 37% of methane emissions. Furthermore, they also contribute to 45% and 59% of the net increases of the lake CO2 and CH4 emissions, respectively, over the period 1984-2019.

"Small lakes emit a disproportionate amount of greenhouse gases because they typically accumulate more organic matter, which is converted into gases. And also, because they are often shallow. This makes it easier for gases to reach the surface and up into the atmosphere," explains Jing Tang, who continues:

"At the same time, small lakes are much more sensitive to changes in climate and weather, as well as to human disturbances. As a result, their sizes and water chemistry fluctuate greatly. Thus, while it is important to identify and map them, it is also more demanding. Fortunately, we’ve been able to do justify that."

The mapping also reveals that there are two main reasons for Earth’s many new lakes: climate change and human activities. Reservoirs account for more than half of increased lake area – i.e., artificial lakes. The other half are primarily created by melting glaciers or thawing permafrost.

New figures sent to the UN

According to the researchers, the new dataset offers a range of regional and global applications. 

"I have sent our new greenhouse gas emission estimates to the people responsible for calculating the global carbon budget, those who are behind the UN's IPCC climate reports. I hope they include them in updating the global emission numbers," says Jing Tang.

She adds:

"Furthermore, the dataset can be used to make better estimates of water resources in freshwater lakes and to better assess the risk of flooding, as well as for better lake management – because lake area impacts biodiversity too."

 

FACT BOX 1:

• In the study, researchers mapped 3.4 million lakes (with the lowest lake size down to 0.03 km2) and how their sizes developed between 1984-1999, 2000-2009 and 2010-2019.
• The GLAKES dataset constructed in this study is based on high-resolution satellite imagery and a deep learning algorithm. The dataset is publicly available.
• The research results have been published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.
• The first authors of the study are Xuehui Pi and Qiuqi Luo from Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China and The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China.
• Yang Xu, Rasmus Fensholt and Martin Brandt of the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management also contributed to the study.

 

FACT BOX 2:

• 49.8% of the total global lakes and 23.6% of the global lake area lies above the 60th parallel north.
• Lakes created by melting glaciers or thawing permafrost make up 30% of the world's lake area. Hotspots for these types of lakes include Greenland, the Tibetan Plateau, and the Rocky Mountains.
• Also observed during the period under review, were lakes that shrank due to drought and the consumption of water resources, among other things. These were observed across the Western US, Central Asia, Northern China, Southern Australia and elsewhere.

 

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DOI

10.1038/s41467-022-33239-3 

ARTICLE TITLE

Mapping global lake dynamics reveals the emerging roles of small lakes

Research England invests in UK-Ukraine university twinning scheme

Research England has teamed up with Universities UK International (UUKi) to support an innovative UK-Ukraine University Twinning Initiative.

Grant and Award Announcement

UK RESEARCH AND INNOVATIO

Research England has teamed up with Universities UK International (UUKi) to support an innovative UK-Ukraine University Twinning Initiative.

The scheme, which Research England is backing with a £5 million investment, is led by Cormack Consulting Group and UUKi, and is designed to support Ukrainian universities and researchers.

It is intended to help UK and Ukrainian universities share resources and assistance in a collective gesture of solidarity and reciprocity to benefit Ukrainian institutions, staff and students. 

Research England’s investment, which will be awarded through UUKi, will see partners collaborating on and building their capacity in research and innovation into the future.

It will also mean UK universities can:

• scale up and sustain their commitment to working with their Ukrainian partners
• provide new cross-sector resources that will make responding to future crises easier for the UK sector

On the ground, work will include:

1. partnership development workshops
2. seed funding for future bilateral research collaborations
3. researcher support and summer schools, access to training and development for research management staff
4. support for research infrastructure and kit
5. data processing and access to research services and e-resources
6. access to UK postgraduate researcher and early career researcher training and skills programmes
7. researcher and postgraduate researcher visits and capacity building

Science Minister George Freeman said:

“Science and technology are increasingly key to geopolitical soft power: as levers to hit the Russian state as part of our sanctions in the spring, and to support science through our Ukrainian research project and harness innovation in rebuilding Ukraine’s economy.

I’m delighted that through our new twinning programme, Ukrainian universities are able to collaborate with UK universities to develop strong partnerships that will benefit both nations, while addressing global research and innovation challenges.

Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine has devastated much of the country. Our support for Ukraine’s research community is an important part of the UK’s ongoing efforts to use our science, technology and innovation for global good and support the Ukrainian people and their economic reconstruction.”

Professor Dame Jessica Corner, Executive Chair of Research England, said:

“This £5 million investment being made by Research England, on behalf of the UK government, not only builds a strategic research and innovation response but supports the UK-Ukraine twinning initiative established by Universities UK International earlier in the year.

The partnerships being created through the scheme are hugely important to support and build both longer-term research and innovation collaboration and capacity between our 2 countries.

The injection of funding will be vital in enabling UK universities to increase and strengthen their commitment to supporting their Ukrainian partners allowing them to address research and innovation challenges; while also providing new resources, which will enable the UK higher education sector to respond to future crises.”

Jamie Arrowsmith, Director of Universities UK International said:

“The funding announced today by Research England will help UK and Ukrainian universities involved in the twinning initiative to build new research and innovation partnerships, and will facilitate access to research support and vital resources.

The universities involved in the scheme have all made a long-term commitment to their partnerships that will contribute towards the recovery and reconstruction of Ukraine, and help ensure that the UK benefits from the new, deeper relationships that have been developed. Together, these partnerships will make a positive contribution to both our higher education communities.

It’s amazing to see our universities collaborate through this scheme. We hope that this investment will further strengthen the relationship between our 2 countries and signals the UK’s continued support for Ukraine throughout and beyond the current conflict.”

UUKi will use Research England’s investment to manage a programme of competitive grants available exclusively to UK universities to use in the context of the twinning partnerships.

Outcomes are expected to include:

1. UK universities will have resources to build long-term strategic partnerships with their partners in Ukraine that support both institutions’ and UK and Ukraine-wide research and innovation priorities
2. shared resources and capabilities that will better position UK universities to respond to future crises
3. partnerships that are able to build shared research and innovation projects that will position the UK sector as a global leader in crisis response
4. Ukraine’s university-based research and innovation ecosystem will be supported through and beyond the current crisis

Research England’s £5 million investment would cover 3 elements:

• grants to twinning partnerships to address research and innovation (R&I) challenges (UK-Ukraine R&I twinning grants scheme): the grants would support bespoke programmes of work mutually agreed between the twins that address the reciprocal needs of UK and Ukrainian institutions and researchers
• strategic cross-sector activities to build capacity and resilience: a number of cross-sector consultancy projects to build future resilience and capacity to respond to crises, based on insights from twinning partnerships. This will include a cross-sector review of the UK higher education sector’s response to the Ukraine crisis, identifying lessons for future responses
• coordination, management and lessons learnt: this will include the management of cross-sector activities and an event to share best practice between twinning partnerships

Launched in summer 2022, the UK-Ukraine Twinning Initiative has seen the creation of 100 partnerships between UK and Ukrainian universities. Partnerships include:

• Cardiff University and National University Zaporizhzhia Polytechnic
• Queen’s University Belfast and Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University
• St Andrews University and National University of Ostroh Academy
• University of Cambridge and Kharkiv National Medical University

Further information

UUKi campaign, #TwinForHope, has been broadly communicating the impact the twinning initiatives and the partnerships are having. The scheme is created by Cormack Consulting Group. The campaign aims to engage more universities, from the UK and beyond, to join the scheme and attract more investment for the initiative, and to continue to deliver impact.

Watch a feature film about the initiative and read impact case studies from twinning partnerships.

Learn more about the twinning projects.

ENDS

Contact

UKRI press office: press@ukri.org

UUK Press office: press@universitiesuk.ac.uk

Notes

1. Research England shapes healthy, dynamic research and knowledge exchange in English universities. It distributes over £2bn to universities in England every year; works to understand their strategies, capabilities and capacity; and supports and challenges universities to create new knowledge, strengthen the economy, and enrich society.  
2. About UK Research and Innovation  

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is the largest public funder of research and innovation in the UK, with a budget of around £8bn. It is composed of seven disciplinary research councils, Innovate UK and Research England.  We operate across the whole country and work with our many partners in higher education, research organisations businesses, government, and charities.  Our vision is for an outstanding research and innovation system in the UK that gives everyone the opportunity to contribute and to benefit, enriching lives locally, nationally and internationally.   Our mission is to convene, catalyse and invest in close collaboration with others to build a thriving, inclusive research and innovation system that connects discovery to prosperity and public good.  www.ukri.org  

1. Universities UK is the collective voice of 140 universities in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Its mission is to create the conditions for UK universities to be the best in the world; maximising their positive impact locally, nationally and globally. Universities UK acts on behalf of universities, represented by their heads of institution. www.universitiesuk.ac.uk
2. Universities UK International has case studies available demonstrating the impact the twinning initiative has driven to date. Please contact press@universitiesuk.ac.uk for more information or visit https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/what-we-do/creating-voice-our-members/campaigns/twinforhope-uk-universities-standing/our-impact.  
3. Quotes from twinned institutions:

Dr. Kostyantyn Kyrychenko, Rector's Assistant for International Relations and Head of International Affairs department at Sumy State University said:

“It was so helpful; it was a light at the end of a tunnel. [The twinning initiative] sounded so appealing and made students and staff more optimistic and enthusiastic. We understand that our battlefield is education and we do contribute to the victory of Ukraine, to support the country through our active cooperation.”

Vitalina Shevchenko, a student rector at Kharkiv National University said:

It’s always better when you are not alone, you feel a sense of support, you can share your experiences and the two universities can combine forces. I’m convinced when this war finishes, we still will be in partnership with York University.”

Rachel Sandison, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, University of Glasgow

“Through our developing partnership, we’re exploring joint teaching and learning opportunities and research collaboration. The twinning partnership for me, has become a real beacon of hope.”

Professor Saul Tendler, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, University of York

“We’ve put in place a range of twinning links between academic departments and also the students’ union. It’s really important that universities support other institutions around the world when they are in trouble. It’s really important that we signal that we stand with Ukraine.”

1. Research England’s commitment is for a period of one year.

Why silly distractions at work can actually be good for you

Short positive interventions can help you deal with unloved tasks and negative emails

Peer-Reviewed Publication

TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN

Positive interventions that distract us from difficult tasks actually help to reduce our stress levels, according to new research from WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management and Trinity Business School. 

The research, conducted by an international team of researchers, shows that short positive interventions, such as watching a funny YouTube video, can help you to overcome daily demands like dealing with annoying emails or the tasks you dread. 

In turn, this allows you to be more engaged, creative, and helpful toward your coworkers.

The research was led by Vera Schweitzer from WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management with co-authors Wladislaw Rivkin (Trinity), Fabiola Gerpott (WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management), Stefan Diestel (University of Wuppertal), Jana Kühnel (University of Vienna), Roman Prem (University of Graz), and Mo Wang (University of Florida).

So, according to this research, next time you find yourself secretly laughing at a hilarious video your colleague sent to you during the lunch break, you should embrace it. This will help you to recover from a stressful morning and prepare you to make the rest of the day a success.

Professor Vera Schweitzer, researcher at WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management, explained: “Our study shows that experiencing feelings of positivity throughout your workday can help you to remain effective ­ particularly when daily work demands require you to invest a lot of self-control, that is, regulatory resources to control your temper.

“Trying to stay calm after reading an annoying email, for example, is typically quite depleting for employees. Consequently, they might struggle to demonstrate self-control throughout the rest of their workday, which, in turn, would hamper their engagement, creativity, and behavior toward their colleagues.

“This is where positivity comes into play: Watching a funny video increases feelings of positivity. Such positive emotions allow employees to protect their regulatory resources even after dealing with resource-consuming self-control demands. In turn, this positively affects their effectiveness at work.”

Dr Wladislaw Rivkin, Associate Professor in Organisational Behaviour, Trinity Business School, added:“Today’s work environments are increasingly demanding, but we have limited understanding of what organisations and employees can do to prevent the stressful effects of self-control demands such as negative emails or unloved tasks. 

“Our research shows that short positivity interventions can help employees make the best of their day and that employers and employees should consider incorporating more positivity into the workday! For example, organisations could provide employees with recommendations about short funny videos via a daily newsletter or post a ‘joke of the day’ on the intranet. By doing so, employers can help mitigate the negative effects of self-control demands.” 

The researchers gathered their results by examining 85 employees over 12 workdays, who received a daily text- or video-based positivity micro-intervention. 

The paper, entitled ‘Some positivity per day can protect you a long way: A within-person field experiment to test an affect-resource model of employee effectiveness at work’, was published recently in the journal ‘Work & Stress’ and is available on request. 

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JOURNAL

Work & Stress

DOI

10.1080/02678373.2022.2142987 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Survey

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Work & Stress

New ‘Faraday Cage’ research facility to help combat digital crime

Business Announcement

UNIVERSITY OF HUDDERSFIELD

 

IMAGE: CERTAIN COMPUTER FORENSIC TEST PROCEDURES OF ELECTRONIC SYSTEMS REQUIRE AN ISOLATED ENVIRONMENT FREE OF ELECTROMAGNETIC INTERFERENCE KNOWN AS A ‘FARADAY CAGE’. NOW, A BESPOKE DIGITAL FORENSICS RESEARCH FACILITY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF HUDDERSFIELD – ONE OF THE FIRST TO BE INSTALLED AT A UNIVERSITY – HAS MIRRORED THE SAME TECHNOLOGY ON A LARGER SCALE TO RESEARCH AND DEVELOP NEW TECHNIQUES IN ORDER TO COMBAT DIGITAL CRIME. view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF HUDDERSFIELD

CERTAIN computer forensic test procedures of electronic systems require an isolated environment free of electromagnetic interference known as a ‘Faraday Cage’.  Now, a bespoke digital forensics research facility at the University of Huddersfield – one of the first to be installed at a university – has mirrored the same technology on a larger scale to research and develop new techniques in order to combat digital crime.

Professor Simon Parkinson, Director of the University’s Centre for Cybersecurity, has been leading the installation of the new facility, aptly named the ‘Faraday Cage’, located in the University’s newly refurbished Laura Annie Willson Building.

“This new facility allows us to accelerate the development and testing of new digital forensic processes to help law enforcement meet the huge growth rate in digital crime,” explained Professor Parkinson.

“We are one of the first universities in the UK to have this bespoke facility installed providing us with an exciting opportunity to create a research test environment and expand our forensic research to other pertinent challenges such as mobile phone forensics,” he said.

Professor Parkinson, Dr Saad Khan, and Dr Monika Roopak have been using the facility to research ways of assisting police forces and law enforcement agencies to meet the huge demand of viewing, processing and analysing digital evidence.

One of these areas has involved investigating instances containing the storage and distribution of illegal images.

“Developing software to reduce the human-hours involved and discover identity during investigation not only provides a timelier response to victims but could also protect police officers from the impact of having to personally view explicit images.”

Professor Simon Parkinson, Director of the Centre for Cybersecurity.

In the UK alone, Professor Parkinson has witnessed the number of cases rising from around 2,106 in 2002, to greater than 31,746 in 2020.  In addition, he said investigators can be presented with more than 60TB of data per case, meaning the length of time it takes in computer processing to extract, search and match known illegal content typically requires over two weeks per case.

In an effort to tackle these problems, Professor Parkinson and his team have applied new facial recognition methods to quickly enable early insight into the presence of illicit content, before utilising artificial intelligence planning techniques to handle the concurrent processing of multiple cases.

“Timely victim identification is essential, otherwise perpetrators can continue committing and victims are left vulnerable,” he said.

Work is currently underway with Loadstar platform, Kurch Consult Ltd, and West Midlands Police Force, to benchmark and evaluate the new techniques but Professor Parkinson is confident they will reduce processing times and help police forces to keep pace with increasing case numbers.

“Developing software to reduce the human-hours involved and discover identity during investigation,” he said, “not only provides a timelier response to victims, but could also protect police officers from the impact of having to personally view explicit images.”

The facility and its research are also being used to teach students studying the Computer Science with Cyber Security BSc and Cyber Security and Digital Forensics MSc degrees, meaning students can be assured they are learning the very latest techniques being used to combat digital crime.

THE MAGICKAL MIRROR

Researchers take first step towards controlling photosynthesis using mirrors

Peer-Reviewed Publication

LUND UNIVERSITY

With the help of mirrors, placed only a few hundred nanometers apart, a research team has managed to use light more efficiently. The finding could eventually be useful for controlling solar energy conversion during photosynthesis, or other reactions driven by light. For example, one application could be converting carbon dioxide into fuel.

The sunlight that hits Earth for one hour is almost equivalent to the total energy consumption of mankind for an entire year. At the same time, our global emissions of carbon dioxide are increasing. Harnessing the sun's energy to capture greenhouse gas and then convert it into fuel is a hot research field. 

A research team at Lund University in Sweden was previously able to show that with ultrafast laser spectroscopy, and the help of advanced materials, it would be possible to reduce the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere in the long term. In their latest study in Nature Communications, the team has made new progress when it comes to taking advantage of light.

“We have inserted so-called photosynthetic antenna complexes between two mirrors that are placed just a few hundred nanometers apart as an optical microcavity. You can say that we catch the light that is reflected back and forth between the mirrors in a kind of captivity”, says Tönu Pullerits, professor of chemical physics at Lund University.

The study shows that in this way, a strong interaction is achieved between the light and the antenna complexes. This can create a ripple effect, that can speed up the energy transfer process. In order for the photosynthetic light harvesting to function optimally, and to be used to, for example, produce fuel, all steps in the intricate process must be very efficient.

“If we can make the first steps of photosynthesis faster and more efficient, we can hopefully also make the light energy conversion of other systems more efficient”, says Tönu Pullerits.

How can these results be useful? Tönu Pullerits hopes that the findings can be used in the future to develop larger units used on a global level, to utilise the energy of sunlight for absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and converting it into useful chemicals. It could be one of many solutions to overcome the climate crisis we are facing.

“We have now taken a couple of initial steps on a long journey. You can say that we have set out a very promising direction”, concludes Tönu Pullerits.

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JOURNAL

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-022-34613-x 

ARTICLE TITLE

Optical cavity-mediated exciton dynamics in photosynthetic light harvesting 2 complexes

Calcifying organisms, under threat from a combination of ocean warming and acidification

According to a new study led by the ICM-CSIC, many of these animals will become more vulnerable to ocean acidification as seawater temperatures rise.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

INSTITUT DE CIÈNCIES DEL MAR (ICM-CSIC)

 

IMAGE: A BRYOZOAN, AT 32M DEPTH AT SIGNY ISLAND, ANTARCTICA. CREDIT: DAVID BARNES, BRITISH ANTARCTIC SURVEY view more 

CREDIT: CREDIT: DAVID BARNES, BRITISH ANTARCTIC SURVEY

A new study led by the Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC), with colleagues from the British Antarctic Survey, the Institute of Oceanology, the Polish Academy of Sciences and the University of Gdańsk have also participated has revealed that global warming and ocean acidification threaten marine organisms that build their skeletons and shells with calcium carbonate (chalk) such as corals, bryozoans, molluscs, sea urchins or crustaceans.

The work, recently published in the journal Ecography, focuses on organisms with calcium carbonate skeletons from around Antarctica in the Southern Ocean. Calcium carbonate is more soluble in more acidic waters which contain more carbon dioxide (CO2), such as the colder waters of the polar regions, making it harder for these creatures to build their skeletons.

Bryozoans, key for understanding the global change impacts on calcifying organisms

To carry out the study, researchers analysed the skeleton of a group of marine creatures called bryozoans (commonly known as moss animals), which are small filter-feeding invertebrates that live on the seafloor and can create complex habitats that enhance biodiversity.

“Like corals, bryozoans can live in colonies and build calcium carbonate skeletons, but they are more distributed geographically, especially in Antarctic waters. They make skeletons with a very diverse composition and are important carbonate producers in the Southern Hemisphere, making them excellent animals to study the effects of global change”, notes the ICM-CSIC researcher and lead author of the study Blanca Figuerola.

In this sense, the expert explains that the bryozoan skeletons are made of the two main types of calcium carbonate, calcite or aragonite, but they can also incorporate magnesium, which can make the skeletons more vulnerable to acidification.

Through mineralogical analyses, researchers identified the different types of minerals and determined the levels of magnesium found in Antarctic bryozoan skeletons, creating the largest dataset for Southern Ocean bryozoans ever produced. Then, they included these mineral signatures with existing data from almost 500 species found in the Southern Hemisphere and compared the distribution of the different mineral types and levels of magnesium in their skeletons with the temperature of the seawater that they lived in.

“We found a clear pattern showing that species that have carbonate skeletons with high magnesium concentrations become more common with warmer seawater temperatures, and we see this trend on a global scale”, highlights the British Antarctic Survey researcher and co-author of the study Huw Griffiths.

According to Figuerola, "this suggests that many marine species with high levels of magnesium in their skeletons will become more vulnerable to ocean acidification as seawater temperatures rise, and given the rapid changes observed and predicted in the temperature and chemistry of our oceans, these organisms may not have time to adapt to these new conditions".

The scale of the study was possible thanks to the significant efforts of members of the International Bryozoology Association to increase data on skeletal mineralogy in a wide range of bryozoan species from poles to tropics.

Marine calcifiers’ future

Increasing CO2 emissions are changing the oceans, causing an increase in seawater temperature and changes in ocean chemistry. When the oceans absorb CO2, they become more acidic, a phenomenon known as ocean acidification. At the same time, dissolved CO2 reacts with seawater to form carbonic acid, which reduces the concentration of carbonate in seawater. 

As a result, calcifying organisms, which use the carbonate and calcium ions dissolved in seawater to build their shells and skeletons, must cope with the decreased availability of carbonate and increased acidity. It is still unknown to what extent calcifying species are able to adjust their skeletal chemistry in response to the combination of these (temperature and pH) and other global related stressors.

Given this scenario, Figuerola in collaboration with MedRecover members and other researchers is expanding this work, conducted within the framework of the MedCalRes project (Grant PID2021-125323OA-I00, funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe”), to study the possible morphological, metabolic and microbiome responses of calcifying organisms, including bryozoans and corals, to near-future ocean acidification and warming.

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JOURNAL

Ecography

DOI

10.1111/ecog.06381 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Meta-analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Temperature as a likely driver shaping global patterns in mineralogical composition in bryozoans: implications for marine calcifiers under global change