It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, March 07, 2025
GIFs helping footballers to sleep better
A recent study led by the University of Kent’s School of Natural Sciences has found that short animations known as GIFs (Graphic Interchange Format) can improve the sleep of professional female footballers.
A recent study led by the University of Kent’s School of Natural Sciences has found that short animations known as GIFs (Graphic Interchange Format) can improve the sleep of professional female footballers.
Poor sleep quality is common among elite athletes, with sleep environment and bedtime routine often to blame. Many professional athletes look to sleep coaches to help improve their sleep, which can have a big impact on their performances and wellbeing, but this new research demonstrates that simpler sleep enhancement strategies could actually be adopted.
Dr Julie Gooderick and her team of researchers worked with professional footballers from the Women’s Super League (WSL), the highest level of women's football in England, to assess self-reported target areas of sleep hygiene that needed improvement in individuals. Sleep hygiene can be defined as practicing habits that facilitate sleep. GIFs were then designed with the purpose of giving a singular sleep hygiene message to each individual. The message was accompanied by a purposely short text to facilitate a high engagement rate. Messages included ‘Screens away 30 minutes before bed’ and ‘Replace caffeinated drink with non-caffeinated herbal tea or water’.
All participants received their bespoke messages daily across a two-week intervention period at a consistent time of 8pm, with the intention of them actioning the sleep hygiene prompt.
Following the GIF interventions the professional footballers reported improvements to their sleep by the end of the nine-week study. Even more impressively, these improvements happened mid-season, which is typically associated with higher stress in footballers than during pre-season.
Dr Gooderick said: ‘Working with professional female athletes for this study not only allowed us to help improve their sleep quality, but it also helped us to identify a new time- and resource-efficient method of sleep enhancement.
‘Initial evidence highlights a promising strategy using GIF messaging as an individualised sleep hygiene education intervention. This strategy may provide the opportunity for sport coaches and athletes to access specialist advice in sleep without the potential constraint of resources or location for both themselves and sleep specialists.’
The research paper ‘The use of individualised, media-based sleep hygiene education for professional female footballers’ is published in the European Journal of Sport Science. doi: 10.1002/ejsc.12247
(a) It consists of three layers: the EV environment layer, the learning-based algorithm layer, and the application layer. D3QN: dueling DDQN; CQL: conservative Q-learning; BCQ: batch-Constrained Q-Learning; SB3: stable-Baselines3; RLlib: reinforcement learning library; (b) Training pipeline of LearningEMS: First, choose an EV environment, users can create new environments or add modules to existing ones. Then, select an algorithm and dataset. Finally, start training. After training the policy in simulation, it can be directly deployed into the controller, enabling hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) or vehicle-in-the-loop (VIL) experiments.
A new study published in Engineering introduces LearningEMS, a unified framework and open-source benchmark designed to revolutionize the development and assessment of energy management strategies (EMS) for electric vehicles (EVs).
The automotive industry has recently undergone a transformative shift fueled by the growing global emphasis on sustainability and environmental conservation. EVs have become a crucial part of the future of transportation. However, effectively managing the energy in EVs, especially those with complex power systems like battery EVs, hybrid EVs, fuel cell EVs, and plug-in EVs, remains a challenge. An efficient EMS is essential for optimizing the energy efficiency of these vehicles.
LearningEMS provides a general platform that supports various EV configurations. It allows for detailed comparisons of several EMS algorithms, including imitation learning, deep reinforcement learning (RL), offline RL, model predictive control, and dynamic programming. The framework comes with three distinct EV platforms, over 10 000 km of EMS policy dataset, ten state-of-the-art algorithms, and over 160 benchmark tasks, along with three learning libraries.
The researchers rigorously evaluated these algorithms from multiple perspectives, such as energy efficiency, consistency, adaptability, and practicability. For example, in the benchmark test results, they found that discrete action space algorithms like DQN and D3QN perform well in simple EMS tasks but are less efficient when dealing with complex control parameters. On the other hand, off-policy algorithms with continuous action spaces, like DDPG, TD3, and SAC, show great potential in optimizing energy efficiency and maintaining consistency across different driving conditions. The on-policy algorithm PPO, however, exhibits significant performance variations in different vehicles or operational conditions.
The study also delves into important aspects of RL in EV energy management, such as the design of state, reward, and action settings. The researchers discuss how these elements can significantly impact the overall performance of the EMS. Additionally, they introduce a policy extraction and reconstruction method for deploying learning-based EMS onto real-world vehicle controllers and conduct hardware-in-the-loop experiments to prove its feasibility.
According to the researchers, LearningEMS has the potential to improve energy efficiency, reduce vehicle operating costs, and extend the lifespan of power systems. The open-source nature of LearningEMS encourages further research and innovation in the field, allowing engineers and researchers to develop more advanced EMS algorithms.
The paper “LearningEMS: A Unified Framework and Open-source Benchmark for Learning-based Energy Management of Electric Vehicles,” authored by Yong Wang, Hongwen He, Yuankai Wu, Pei Wang, Haoyu Wang, Renzong Lian, Jingda Wu, Qin Li, Xiangfei Meng, Yingjuan Tang, Fengchun Sun, and Amir Khajepour. Full text of the open access paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eng.2024.10.021. For more information about the Engineering, follow us on X (https://twitter.com/EngineeringJrnl) & like us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/EngineeringJrnl).
Climate change is rapidly reducing the ability of banana producers to supply one of our favourite fruits.
New research from the University of Exeter, published in Nature Food, has found it will be economically unsustainable by 2080 for many areas across Latin America and the Caribbean to continue growing bananas for export, because of rising temperatures caused by climate change.
Bananas are a key export crop worth $11 billion (£8.9 billion) annually and are crucial for the economies of many countries. Yet in just over half a century, 60 per cent of the regions currently producing bananas will struggle to grow the fruit unless there are urgent interventions to tackle climate change.
The study also found that socioeconomic factors, such as labour availability and infrastructure, significantly constrain climate change adaptation. Most banana production occurs near densely populated areas and ports, limiting the potential for relocation to more suitable regions.
Professor Dan Bebber from the University of Exeter led the study and said: “Our findings are a stark reminder that climate change is not just an environmental issue but a direct threat to global food security and livelihoods. Without substantial investment in adaptation, including irrigation and heat-tolerant banana varieties, the future of export banana production looks uncertain.
“Bananas are one of the world's most important fruits, not only for consumers but for millions of workers in producing countries. It’s crucial we act now to safeguard the industry against the dual threats of climate change and emerging diseases.”
The researchers developed a new method using satellite imagery to map banana production in Latin America and the Caribbean at very high resolution and then estimated the climate under which bananas are preferentially grown. Their findings showed climate change will reduce the best areas for banana growth and yields in many important producer countries, as well as increasing worker exposure to extreme temperatures.
Countries such as Colombia and Costa Rica will be the most negatively impacted as they are expected to become too hot for optimal cultivation. Ecuador and parts of Brazil are among the few areas to remain as important producers, as climate change is projected to be less severe there.
The researchers propose several adaptation strategies, including expanding irrigation infrastructure, breeding heat- and drought-tolerant banana varieties, and supporting banana producers to manage climate risks.
This species was discovered and named by John Kress, an emeritus curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and one of the authors of the new study.
Heliconia plants are famed for their flowers, which come in a variety of vivid hues, including intense yellows, fiery oranges and rosy reds. Their reproductive structures are composed of waxy, elongated leaves called bracts. Many Heliconia flowers resemble the striking plumage of birds-of-paradise. Others evoke lobster claws or toucan beaks.
A new analysis from researchers at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History reveals that nearly half of the genus Heliconia, a group of tropical plants popular for their bright, beak-shaped flowers, are threatened with extinction. The findings, published today, March 7, in the journal Plants, People, Planet, reveal that many of these imperiled plants are not found within protected areas or botanical gardens, making additional conservation action crucial to saving these charismatic, horticulturally important and ecologically significant floras.
The new work places Heliconia among a select group of plants to undergo a detailed, comprehensive conservation assessment. Traditionally such an effort requires countless hours of demanding fieldwork. Instead, the new project relied on previous field work conducted by research botanists like John Kress, an emeritus curator at the museum and one of the authors of the new study, who spent decades collecting Heliconia plants in the tropics. These efforts yielded thousands of dried specimens and data-rich labels that are housed in herbaria around the world, including the museum's United States National Herbarium.
“The data that is stored in the herbarium is a scientific treasure that makes a project like this feasible,” said botanist Gary Krupnick, who heads the museum’s Plant Conservation Unit and is one of Kress’ coauthors on the new study. “We built upon the valuable time and resources that past researchers have spent going out into the field and counting plant populations.”
Emblems of the Tropics
The genus Heliconia contains 187 species of tropical plants related to bananas. While a handful of Heliconia species are native to western Pacific islands, the majority live in rainforests throughout tropical Central and South America. Here, the plants are important ecological resources for a variety of creatures, including bats and hummingbirds, which are the primary pollinators for many Heliconia species. The plants produce nectar to entice the birds, who then spread pollen to other flowers as they flutter about.
Heliconia plants are famed for their flowers, which come in a variety of vivid hues, including intense yellows, fiery oranges and rosy reds. Their reproductive structures are composed of waxy, elongated leaves called bracts. Many Heliconia flowers resemble the striking plumage of birds-of-paradise. Others evoke lobster claws or toucan beaks.
Gardeners have cultivated Heliconia species for centuries as striking ornamental plants. This popularity has put some species at risk of overexploitation and poaching. In addition, Heliconia plants are threatened by habitat loss and fragmentation, invasive species and climate change.
Until now, little was known about Heliconia populations in the wild. Only a few Heliconia plants have undergone conservation assessments, and just 21 species of the charismatic flora are currently listed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species.
Herbarium Labels and Spatial Software
During the pandemic, Krupnick spent time sifting through herbarium sheets on the museum’s online collection database. While in-person access to the herbarium itself was limited, all Heliconia specimens in the museum’s collection had been fully digitized and were available online.
Krupnick became interested in exploring how Heliconia populations were faring in the wild and collaborated with Kress. At the time, Kress, who first encountered these plants in 1972 and became fascinated by their vibrant flowers during field work in Peru, was working with a group of scientists to publish a detailed description of Heliconia’s evolutionary history.
Kress and Krupnick used the dataset from this prior study and analyzed nearly 10,000 Heliconia specimens. Many of these dried plants, which Kress collected, were housed in the museum’s herbarium and mounted on large sheets of paper alongside labels that contain key information on when and where each plant was collected.
“As a conservation biologist, I’m most interested in the data on the label, which tells us the what, where, when and why,” Krupnick said. “This helps us track how populations change over time.”
The team used a spatial software tool called GeoCAT (Geospatial Conservation Assessment Tool) to calculate factors like range size and the abundance of plants occupying certain areas. The team then examined how human activities in these areas have impacted forest coverage using resources like satellite imagery. They also pinpointed which Heliconia populations occur in protected areas and which species exist in botanical gardens and could potentially be reintroduced into the wild.
Imperiled Plants
The team discovered that 87 Heliconia species (47% of the genus) are threatened with extinction, nearly half of the entire group. Alarmingly, all but one of these threatened species are found in only a few protected areas in the wild. And a relatively small number of these imperiled species exist outside their native ranges. The team discovered that the majority of Heliconia specimens growing in botanical gardens represent species of least conservation concern on the IUCN Red List.
The work also revealed that certain lineages within the Heliconia genus are particularly endangered. According to Kress, more work is needed to determine what makes these subsets of related species so vulnerable. But the overarching takeaway is clear.
“When you realize that whole evolutionary lineages of life with multiple species may be similarly threatened with extinction, it makes you stand up and notice that something is really happening here,” Kress said.
The researchers list 45 Heliconia species that they consider top priorities for additional protection. These include species that reside outside of protected areas and are not well represented in botanical gardens. It also highlights species that are adapted to thrive in fragile environments, such as high-altitude cloud forests that are particularly susceptible to change.
“This study provides a blueprint for how to save this group of plants, starting with this list of priority species,” Krupnick said.
Kress and Krupnick will attend an international meeting of Heliconia scientists and commercial growers in Hawaii at the end of March to contribute to efforts to conserve these plants. By raising public awareness and promoting responsible tourism, they hope to mitigate unsustainable production and demand for these plants. This would help alleviate pressures on wild populations of Heliconias and other endangered plant species.
The researchers also hope this project will inspire similar efforts to study other botanical groups. To date, less than 20% of all plant species have undergone conservation assessments. And without understanding the threatened statuses of certain groups, it remains difficult to chart a path forward.
“Now that we know the conservation status of every one of the 187 species of Heliconia, we can construct a coherent plan of how to protect them,” Kress said. “That does give me a tidbit of hope.”
The National Museum of Natural History is connecting people everywhere with Earth’s unfolding story. It is one of the most visited natural history museums in the world. Opened in 1910, the museum is dedicated to maintaining and preserving the world’s most extensive collection of natural history specimens and human artifacts. The museum is open daily, except Dec. 25, from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Admission is free. For more information, visit the museum on its website and blog and Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.
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A Heliconia atratensis specimen in the United States National Herbarium at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, representing one of 45 Heliconia species listed for protection in the newly published Plants, People, Planet study.
The new work places Heliconia among a select group of plants to undergo a detailed, comprehensive conservation assessment. Traditionally such an effort requires countless hours of demanding fieldwork. Instead, the new project relied on previous field work conducted by research botanists like John Kress, an emeritus curator at the museum and one of the authors of the new study, who spent decades collecting Heliconia plants in the tropics. These efforts yielded thousands of dried specimens and data-rich labels that are housed in herbaria around the world, including the museum.
Credit
Smithsonian
Heliconias planted as ornamentals in a garden in Panama.
Gardeners have cultivated Heliconia species for centuries as striking ornamental plants. This popularity has put some species at risk of overexploitation and poaching. In addition, Heliconia plants are threatened by habitat loss and fragmentation, invasive species and climate change.
Smithsonian researchers will attend an international meeting of Heliconia scientists and commercial growers in Hawaii at the end of March to contribute to efforts to conserve these plants. By raising public awareness and promoting responsible tourism, they hope to mitigate unsustainable production and demand for these plants. This would help alleviate pressures on wild populations of Heliconias and other endangered plant species.
