A new look at deep-sea microbes

UD study looks at life inside and outside of seafloor hydrocarbon seeps

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE


IMAGE: MICROBES FOUND DEEPER IN THE OCEAN ARE BELIEVED TO HAVE SLOW POPULATION TURNOVER RATES AND LOW AMOUNTS OF AVAILABLE ENERGY. HOWEVER, MICROBIAL COMMUNITIES FOUND DEEPER IN SEAFLOOR SEDIMENTS IN AND... view more

CREDIT: GRAPHIC BY JEFFREY C. CHASE

Microbial cells are found in abundance in marine sediments beneath the ocean and make up a significant amount of the total microbial biomass on the planet. Microbes found deeper in the ocean, such as in hydrocarbon seeps, are usually believed to have slow population turnover rates and low amounts of available energy, where the further down a microbe is found, the less energy it has available.

A new study published out of a collaboration with the University of Delaware and ExxonMobil Research and Engineering shows that perhaps the microbial communities found deeper in the seafloor sediments in and around hydrocarbon seepage sites have more energy available and higher population turnover rates than previously thought.

Using sediment samples collected by ExxonMobil researchers, UD professor Jennifer Biddle and her lab group -- including Rui Zhao, a postdoctoral researcher who is the first author on the paper; Kristin Yoshimura, who received her doctorate from UD; and Glenn Christman, a bioinformatician -- worked on a study in collaboration with Zara Summers, an ExxonMobil microbiologist. The study, recently published in Scientific Reports, looks at how microbial dynamics are influenced by hydrocarbon seepage sites in the Gulf of Mexico.

Biddle and her lab members received the frozen sediments, collected during a research cruise, from ExxonMobil and then extracted the DNA and sequenced it at the Delaware Biotechnology Institute (DBI).

The samples Biddle's lab group studied were ones collected from deeper in hydrocarbon seeps that usually get ignored.

"Most people only look at the top couple of centimeters of sediment at a seep, but this was actually looking 10-15 centimeters down," said Biddle associate professor in the School of Marine Science and Policy in UD's College of Earth, Ocean and Environment. "We then compared seepage areas to non-seepage areas, and the environment looked really different."

Inside the seep, the microbes potentially lead a fast, less efficient life while outside the seep, the microbes lead a slower but more efficient life. This could be attributed to what energy sources are available to them in their environment.

"Understanding deep water seep microbial ecology is an important part of understanding hydrocarbon-centric communities," said Summers.

Biddle said that microbes are always limited by something in the environment, such as how right now during the quarantine, we are limited by the amount of available toilet paper. "Outside of the seep, microbes are likely limited by carbon, whereas inside the seep, microbes are limited by nitrogen," said Biddle.

While the microbes found inside the seep seem to be racing to make more nitrogen to keep up and grow with their fellow microbes, outside of the seep, the researchers found a balance of carbon and nitrogen, with nitrogen actually being used by the microbes as an energy source.

"Usually, we don't think of nitrogen as being used for energy. It's used to make molecules, but something that was striking for me was thinking about nitrogen as a significant energy source," said Biddle.
This difference between the microbes found inside the seeps and those found outside the seeps could potentially mirror how microbes behave higher in the water column.

Previous research of water column microbes shows that there are different types of microbes: those that are less efficient and lead a more competition-based lifestyle where they don't use every single molecule as well as they could and those that are really streamlined, don't waste anything and are super-efficient.

"It makes me wonder if the microbes that are living at these seeps are potentially wasteful and they're fast growing but they're less efficient and the organisms outside of the seeps are a very different organism where they're way more efficient and way more streamlined," said Biddle, whose team has put in a proposal to go back out to sea to investigate further. "We want to look at these dynamics to determine if it still holds true that there is fast, less efficient life inside the seep and then slower, way more efficient life outside of the seep."

In addition, Biddle said this research showed that the deeper sediments in the seepages are most likely heavily impacted by the material coming up from the bottom, which means that the seep could be supporting a larger amount of biomass than previously thought."We often think about a seep supporting life like tube worms and the things that are at the expression of the sediment, but the fact that this could go for meters below them really changes the total biomass that the seep is supporting," said Biddle. "One of the big implications for the seepage sites with regards to the influence of these fluids coming up is that we don't know how deep it goes in terms of how much it changes the impact of subsurface life."Summers added that these are interesting insights "when considering oil reservoir connectivity to, and influence on, hydrocarbon seeps."

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http://www.udel.edu
More on this News Release
A new look at deep-sea microbes

 #ABIOGENIC #ABIOTIC #ABIOGENICHYDROCARBONS

The abiotic hypothesis is that the full suite of hydrocarbons found in petroleum can either be generated in the mantle by abiogenic processes, or by biological processing of those abiogenic hydrocarbons, and that the source-hydrocarbons of abiogenic origin can migrate out of the mantle into the crust until they escape ...
Abiogenic petroleum origin - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Abiogenic_petroleum_origin

Abiogenic Deep Origin of Hydrocarbons and Oil and Gas ...
https://www.intechopen.com › books › hydrocarbon › abiogenic-deep-ori...

by VG Kutcherov - ‎2013 - ‎Presence of abiotic hydrocarbon fluids in the Mantle of the Earth is scientifically proved evidence. 7. Petroleum in meteor impact craters. Petroleum reserves in ...

Abiogenic Origin of Hydrocarbons - AGU Publications
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com › pdf › j.1751-3928.2006.tb00271.x
On this basis, the Soviet theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins was never the driving force in the discovery of the major oil fields in the Soviet Union as its ...
[PDF]  

n the Origins of Deep Hydrocarbons - Mineralogical Society ...
www.minsocam.org › msa › rim › RiMG075 › RiMG075_Ch14
by MA Sephton - ‎2013 - ‎

ABIOTIC ORIGINS OF DEEP HYDROCARBONS. Deep gas theories. The hypothesis that at least some components of petroleum have a deep abiotic origin.

Abiogenic origin of petroleum hydrocarbons: Need to ... - jstor
https://www.jstor.org › stable
by AL Paropkari - ‎2008 - ‎the origin of petroleum is not 'biogenic', but 'abiogenic'2. The Russian geologist. Nikolai Alexandrovitch Kudryavtsev was the first to propose2 the modern abiotic.

Special Edition on The Future of Petroleum - CSUN.edu
www.csun.edu › ~vcgeo005 › Energy
That hypothesis has been replaced during the past forty years by the modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of abyssal, abiotic petroleum origins which has ...


Origin and Formation of Petroleum
connect.spe.org › blogs › donatien-ishimwe › 2014/09/11 › origin-and-for...
Sep 11, 2014 - Abiogenesis-inorganic origin of petroleum, is an oldest theory which ... That theory, lately became known as the abiotic oil formation (AOF) ...


Richard Heinberg on Abiotic Oil - Richard Heinberg
https://richardheinberg.com › richard-heinberg-on-abiotic-oil
Aug 29, 2004 - The debate over oil's origin has been going on since the 19th century. ... Russian-Ukrainian theory of abyssal, abiotic petroleum

THIS THEORY IS DISMISSED BY AMERICAN COWBOY OIL  GEOLOGISTS 

BECAUSE OF ITS RUSSIAN UKRAINIAN ORIGIN. EVEN BEFORE THE COLD WAR.

MYSELF AS AN AMATUER GEOLOGIST AND ROCK HOUND AS WELL AS HAVING GROWN UP WITH ENGINEERS IN MY FAMILY WHO ASCRIBED TO HUBERTS THEORY OF THE DECLINE OF OIL, WHICH HAS YET TO BE PROVEN. BUT IT ALL ADDED UP TO MY HERESIOLOGICAL VIEW IN LATER LIFE, WHICH LED ME TO THIS THEORY WHICH DESPITE THE WISHFUL THINKING OF MANY AUTHORS HAS NOT BEEN DISPROVEN AT ALL IN FACT THE CURRENT STUDIES OF MICROBIAL HYDROCARBONS IN THE DEEP SEA ADD EVIDENCE FOR THE THEORY .

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

Feeling with the heart 

Scientists find that the brain's sensitivity to sensory stimuli depends on the cardiac cycle and the brain's perception of it

NATIONAL RESEARCH UNIVERSITY HIGHER SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS  

A person's sensitivity to external stimuli depends not only on the state of their nervous system, but also on their cardiac cycle. Usually we do not notice our heartbeat, paying attention to it only in unusual situations, such as in moments of excitement before a performance or while experiencing arrhythmia. The brain actively suppresses the perception of our heartbeat, but as a result, our perception of other sensory stimuli may also be affected. This conclusion was made in a paper by a team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (Leipzig) with the participation of Vadim Nikulin, a leading researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Neurosciences at HSE University.

A cardiac cycle consists of two phases: systole and diastole. During systole, the heart muscles contract, and during diastole, they relax. It has been suggested earlier that a person is more susceptible to various stimuli during diastole and less sensitive during systole.

To find out what happens to the brain during different phases of the cardiac cycle, the scientists conducted an experiment by stimulating the fingers of 37 subjects with a barely perceptible electrical current. After each test, participants were asked if they felt any stimulation. At the same time, their brain and heart activity was monitored with EEG and ECG, respectively.

As expected, during systole, participants often did not notice the presence of stimuli. A decrease in sensitivity was accompanied by a change in brain activity. EEG recordings can show the P300 potential associated with the detection of the stimuli. During systole, this potential was less pronounced. Interestingly, the amplitude of the pre-stimulus heart-beat evoked potential correlated negatively with the detection and localization of somatosensory stimuli. Thus, the greater the potential caused by the heartbeat, the lower the potential of P300, and the more likely the subject would not sense the current.

Researchers believe that the brain predicts when the next contraction of the heart will occur, and suppresses the perception of stimuli more strongly in the systole phase, so that we are not distracted by our heart rhythm or confuse it with an external stimulus.

'These results are interesting since they show that our conscious perception of the external world can change within every heartbeat cycle, which is a rhythmic event that we mostly don't pay attention to,' says Esra Al, the lead author of the study. 'Therefore, these findings suggest that not only the brain but also the body plays an important role in shaping our consciousness.'

The results of the study may provide new insight into the understanding of neuronal processes associated with anxiety conditions. Such conditions are associated not only with a change in the heart rate, but also with a change in one's perception of their heartbeat.

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Aquaculture's role in nutrition in the COVID-19 era

New paper from American University and global working group ponders four likely scenarios

AMERICAN UNIVERSITY

 

Aquaculture,***  the relatively young but fast-growing industry of farming of fish and other marine life, now produces around half of all seafood consumed by humans. A new paper from American University published today examines the economics of an aquaculture industry of the future that is simultaneously environmentally sustainable and nutritious for the nearly 1 billion people worldwide who depend on it for health and livelihoods.

Of the scenarios the paper discusses, included are two approaches that illustrate what aquaculture might look like if nations refocus inward for food and nutrition security in the COVID-19 era.

"Seafood is essential to meeting global food and nutrition security goals," said Jessica Gephart, the paper's primary author and an assistant professor of environmental science at American University. "Under what circumstances, and with what policies, can we maximize aquaculture for its nutrition benefits and sustainability for all who rely on seafood?"

This is a challenging question to answer, especially in the COVID-19 era. As the pandemic is still unfolding, the full scope of long-term damage to food systems is unknown, the paper notes. Yet, the aquaculture industry is suffering major setbacks, as some exports are being halted, workers are being laid off, demand has dramatically decreased, production units are incurring large losses and some countries are reconsidering their reliance on foreign seafood. The authors note that such setbacks "can be particularly long-lasting for a budding sector, with many young farms that potentially lack the capital to weather the storm and the political clout to secure sufficient recovery aid."

The demand for seafood is expected to increase significantly by 2050, the paper notes, if historical trends in income and population growth, urbanization, and diets are maintained. This has prompted researchers to contemplate the future role of aquaculture in meeting demand and supporting nutrition needs. "Nutrition sensitivity" refers to the multiple benefits derived from diverse foods, including improving nutrition, valuing the social significance of food, and supporting livelihoods.

For aquaculture, this means a food system that supports public health through production of diverse seafood, provides multiple, rich sources of essential nutrients, and supports equitable access to nutritious, safe, and culturally acceptable diets that meet food preferences for all populations, without compromising ecosystem functions, other food systems, and livelihoods.

The paper describes and discusses four possible scenarios for the future of the growth of aquaculture, with the first two outlining what an inward approach might look like. Elements of each of these scenarios exist in current production systems from around the world:

Growth-first, nationalistic approach. In this scenario, countries throughout the world turn inward for economic growth and focus on supporting national industries to meet seafood demand. Overall, diversity of seafood available in each country generally declines. Countries with mature aquaculture sectors that already supply a diversity of production technologies, species and product types will continue to meet some nutritional needs, but for a narrower range of consumers and at increased cost, and to a more limited extent.

Sustainable growth, localized approach. In this approach, countries throughout the world adopt sustainable local food production approaches focused on small-holder production. While some traditional production systems are highly productive, in general, global aquaculture production grows at a relatively slow rate - if at all - and total production is relatively low. Countries that have retained a cultural history of developing small-scale aquaculture will see an increase in these production systems, supported by government-backed schemes and extension services. When production is at the household scale, women are more likely to play a key role, increasing the likelihood that nutritional benefits flow directly to the most vulnerable.

Sustainable growth, globalized world. The world fully embraces the application of sustainable development principles, taking advantage of the benefits of globalized food systems while strengthening environmental governance. Global competition and high levels of technology transfer lead to relatively high global inland and marine seafood production. Favoring production of seafood in line with local environmental contexts, this world leads to moderate global species diversity. High global seafood production and low trade barriers enable low seafood prices, improving seafood access in urban areas and areas with transportation infrastructure connections and access to electricity for refrigeration.

Growth first, globalized world. In this scenario, the world moves toward further economic globalization and encourages boundless economic growth. Through genetic selection and modification, as well as technological innovations, the aquaculture industry develops intensive production systems with limited environmental regulation. Production systems rely on globalized supply chains, sourcing feed ingredients internationally, and taking advantage of low labor costs for processing. Through competition, massive production of only a few species results, which are highly traded and spread rapidly (akin to the dominance of four species in the meat market, led by chicken). Targeted policy interventions would be necessary to help nutritionally vulnerable populations.

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"Scenarios for global aquaculture and its role in human nutrition," is published in Reviews in Fisheries Science and Aquaculture. The National Center for Socio-Environmental Synthesis working group, made up of researchers from The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, Soulfish Research & Consultancy, WorldFish, and several academic institutions from around the world, contributed.

*** ONCE AGAIN A SCI FI PREDICTION SETS A DIRECTION FOR SOCIETY AS MUCH AS IT PREDICTS ONE SEE SAMUEL DELANEY'S TRILOGY FALL OF THE TOWERS. AQUACULTURE IS THE ECONOMIC BACKBONE OF THE HOME PLANET IN A STORY OF INTER GALACTIC REVOLUTION AGAINST A FAKE WAR....CONDUCTED BY POETS AND OUTCASTS. 1962-1964 ALSO SEE https://edroxy.livejournal.com/23185.html

Study of giant ant heads using simple models may aid bio-inspired designs

BECKMAN INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

IMAGE: SOLDIER ANTS HAVE GIANT HEADS WITH PINCERS THAT HELP THEM DEFEND THE COLONY. view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO BY ALEX WILD.

Researchers use a variety of modelling approaches to study form and function. By using a basic biomechanical model for studying body form and center of mass stability in ants, new research identifies the benefits of "simple models" and hope that it can be used for bio-inspired designs.

"Most organisms are constrained in their shape and size because they are juggling different needs such as the ability to fly, forage for food, and reproduce," said Andrew Suarez, a professor of entomology and the head of the Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Behavior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"Ants are unique because they live in colonies and divide their responsibilities. Therefore, they don't have the body constraints that other insects do." "Ants have a wide range of head sizes relative to their body," said Philip Anderson, an assistant professor of evolution, ecology, and behavior. "Some ants have such extremely large heads that even though they look like their heads should pitch forward, they don't. To study their body design, I created a simple mathematical model to locate their center of balance."

The researchers, both affiliated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, created a basic model of an ant body by treating it as a series of connected ellipsoids. They used ant body measurements from antweb.org, which has collections of ant pictures put together by the California Academy of Sciences.

The study "'Simple' biomechanical model for ants reveals how correlated evolution among body segments minimizes variation in center of mass as heads get larger" was published in Integrative and Comparative Biology.

"We found that the ants maintain a center of balance over where their legs are," Anderson said. "These models have helped us understand how these unusual forms of ants have evolved and how the rest of their body compensates for it."

"The worker ants are like hopeful monsters. They can play with their body form and produce more variation than other insects. With these models we can see that although they have these exaggerated forms, they are not breaking the laws of physics," Suarez said.

Even though the researchers have focused on simplifying the model as much as possible, there are some limitations "Treating the ant bodies like ellipsoids doesn't accurately represent their actual shape," Anderson said. "Additionally, I assume that every part of the body has the same density, but our co-author Michael Rivera has shown that the head is a lot denser than the abdomen, which changes the calculations."

The researchers are hopeful that such simple models can be used for applications that use bio-inspired designs. "What happens if you need to add weight to the front of a machine? Is it enough to add weight to the back or are there other ways to compensate? Using such models, we can look to nature for solutions to these issues," Suarez said.

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation.

The researchers took part in the symposium Melding Modeling and Morphology: integrating Approaches to Understand the Evolution of Form and Function at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology annual meeting this past January in Austin, Texas. Lindsay Waldrop and Jonathan Rader organized the symposium.

The study "'Simple' biomechanical model for ants reveals how correlated evolution among body segments minimizes variation in center of mass as heads get larger" can be found at https://doi.org/10.1093/icb/icaa027.

THEY GOT THE ANT MAN IDEA FROM SCI FI

Engineers design a reusable, silicone rubber face mask

The prototype mask, which includes an N95 filter, can be easily sterilized and worn many times

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

IMAGE: RESEARCHERS AT MIT AND BRIGHAM AND WOMEN'S HOSPITAL HAVE DESIGNED A NEW SILICONE RUBBER FACE MASK THAT THEY BELIEVE COULD STOP VIRAL PARTICLES AS EFFECTIVELY AS N95 MASKS. UNLIKE N95... view more 

CREDIT: MIT/BRIGHAM AND WOMEN'S HOSPITAL

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Researchers at MIT and Brigham and Women's Hospital have designed a new face mask that they believe could stop viral particles as effectively as N95 masks. Unlike N95 masks, the new masks were designed to be easily sterilized and used many times.

As the number of new Covid-19 cases in the United States continues to rise, there is still an urgent need for N95 masks for health care workers and others. The new mask is made of durable silicone rubber and can be manufactured using injection molding, which is widely used in factories around the world. The mask also includes an N95 filter, but it requires much less N95 material than a traditional N95 mask.

"One of the key things we recognized early on was that in order to help meet the demand, we needed to really restrict ourselves to methods that could scale," says Giovanni Traverso, an MIT assistant professor of mechanical engineering and a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital. "We also wanted to maximize the reusability of the system, and we wanted systems that could be sterilized in many different ways."

The team is now working on a second version of the mask, based on feedback from health care workers, and is working to establish a company to support scaled-up production and seek approval from the FDA and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).

Traverso is the senior author of a paper describing the new masks, which appears today in the British Medical Journal Open. The lead authors of the study are James Byrne, a radiation oncologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and research affiliate at MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research; Adam Wentworth, a research engineer at Brigham and Women's Hospital and a research affiliate at the Koch Institute; Peter Chai, an emergency medicine physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital; and Hen-Wei Huang, a research fellow at Brigham and Women's Hospital and a postdoc at the Koch Institute.

Easy sterilization

The N95 masks that health care workers wear to protect against exposure to SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses are made from polypropylene fibers that are specially designed to filter out tiny viral particles. Ideally, a health care worker would switch to a new mask each time they see a different patient, but shortages of these masks have forced doctors and nurses to wear them for longer than they are meant to be worn.

In recent months, many hospitals have begun sterilizing N95 masks with hydrogen peroxide vapor, which can be used up to 20 times on a single mask. However, this process requires specialized equipment that is not available everywhere, and even with this process, one mask can be worn for only a single day.

The MIT/BWH team set out to design a mask that could be safely sterilized and reused many times. They decide on silicone rubber -- the material that goes into silicone baking sheets, among other products -- because it is so durable. Liquid silicone rubber can be easily molded into any shape using injection molding, a highly automated process that generates products rapidly.

The masks are based on the shape of the 3M 1860 style of N95 masks, the type normally used at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Most of the mask is made of silicone rubber, and there is also space for one or two N95 filters. Those filters are designed to be replaced after every use, while the rest of the mask can be sterilized and reused.

"With this design, the filters can be popped in and then thrown away after use, and you're throwing away a lot less material than an N95 mask," Wentworth says.

The researchers tested several different sterilization methods on the silicone masks, including running them through an autoclave (steam sterilizer), putting them in an oven, and soaking them in bleach and in isopropyl alcohol. They found that after sterilization, the silicone material was undamaged.

The masks are based on the shape of the 3M 1860 style of N95 masks, the type normally used at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Most of the mask is made of silicone rubber, and there is also space for one or two N95 filters. Those filters are designed to be replaced after every use, while the rest of the mask can be sterilized and reused. This image shows a photo of the mask on a mannequin head.

Fit test

To test the comfort and fit of the masks, the researchers recruited about 20 health care workers from the emergency department and an oncology clinic at Brigham and Women's Hospital. They had each of the subjects perform the standard fit test that is required by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for N95 masks. During this test, the subject puts the mask on and then performs a series of movements to see if the mask stays in place. A nebulized sugar solution is sprayed in the room, and if the subject can taste or smell it, it means the mask is not properly fitted.

All 20 subjects passed the fit test, and they reported that they were able to successfully insert and remove the N95 filter. When asked their preference between the new mask, a typical N95 mask, and a standard surgical mask, most either said they had no preference or preferred the new silicone mask, Byrne says. They also gave the new mask high ratings for fit and breathability.

The researchers are now working on a second version of the mask, which they hope to make more comfortable and durable. They also plan to do additional lab tests measuring the masks' ability to filter viral particles.

As many regions of the United States have seen a surge in Covid-19 cases over the past month, hospitals in those areas face the possibility of mask shortages. There is also a need for more masks in parts of the world that don't have the equipment needed for hydrogen peroxide sterilization.

"We know that Covid is really not going away until a vaccine is prevalent," Byrne says. "I think there's always going to be a need for masks, whether it be in the health care setting or in the general public."

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The research was funded, in part, by the Prostate Cancer Foundation, the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering, Brigham and Women's Hospital, the National Institutes of Health, E-Ink Corporation, Gilead Sciences, Philips Biosensing, and the Hans and Mavis Lopater Psychosocial Foundation.

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.

Anatomy of a Fake News Headline

How a series of algorithms whiffed and ended up warning Oregonians of an antifa invasion

By Jeremy B. Merrill and Aaron Sankin July 7, 2020 08:00

Sam Morris
THE MARKUP

https://themarkup.org

Big Tech Is Watching You. We’re Watching Big Tech.

As confrontations between Black Lives Matter protesters and police erupted across the country earlier this month, some Oregonians, mostly older people, saw a Facebook ad pushing a headline about how a Republican politician “Wants Martial Law To Control The Obama-Soros Antifa Supersoldiers.”

Needless to say, there was no army of left-wing “supersoldiers” marching across Oregon, nor were former president Barack Obama and billionaire George Soros known to be funding anything antifa-related. And the politician in question didn’t actually say there were “supersoldiers.” The headline, originally from the often-sarcastic, progressive blog Wonkette, was never meant to be taken as straight news.



Original story published by  with tongue-in-cheek headline.

SmartNews ad on Facebook that presents the headline as fact.

The whole thing was a mishap born of the modern news age, in which what headlines you see is decided not by a hard-bitten front-page editor but instead by layers of algorithms designed to pick what’s news and who should be shown it. This system can work fine, but in this instance it fed into a maelstrom of misinformation that was already inspiring some westerners to grab their guns and guard their towns against the largely non-existent threat of out-of-town antifa troublemakers.

This was just one headline that fed into a sense of paranoia reinforced by rumors from many sources. But deconstructing exactly how it came about provides a window into how easy it is for a fringe conspiracy theory to accidentally slip into the ecosystem of mainstream online news.

The trouble started when SmartNews picked up Wonkette’s mocking story. SmartNews is a news aggregation app that brings in users by placing nearly a million dollars worth of ads on Facebook, according to Facebook’s published data. According to the startup’s mission statement, its “algorithms evaluate millions of articles, social signals and human interactions to deliver the top 0.01% of stories that matter most, right now.”

The company, which says that “news should be impartial, trending and trustworthy,” usually picks ordinary local news headlines for its Facebook ads—maybe from your local TV news station. Users who install the app get headlines about their home area and topics of interest, curated by SmartNews’s algorithms. This time, however, the headline was sourced from Wonkette, in a story mocking Jo Rae Perkins, Oregon’s Republican U.S. Senate nominee, who has sparked controversy for her promotion of conspiracy theories.

In early June, as protests against police violence cropped up in rural towns across the country, Perkins recorded a Facebook Live video calling for “hard martial law” to “squash” the “antifa thugs” supposedly visiting various towns in Oregon. She also linked protesters, baselessly, to common right-wing targets: “Many, many people believe that they are being paid for by George Soros,” she said, and “this is the army that Obama put together a few years ago.”

Perkins never said “supersoldier”—the term is apparently a Twitterverse joke, in this case added to its headline by Wonkette to mock Perkins’s apparent fear of protesters. To someone familiar with its deadpan sardonic style, seeing the hyperbolic headline on Wonkette’s website wouldn’t raise an eyebrow—regular readers would know Wonkette was mocking Perkins. But it’s 2020, and even insular blog headlines can travel outside their readers’ RSS feeds and wend their way via social media into precincts where Wonkette isn’t broadly known. SmartNews, when it automatically stripped Wonkette’s headline of its association with Wonkette and presented it neutrally in the ad, epitomized that phenomenon.

Another SmartNews Facebook ad, this one warning Maryland residents about fake news regarding antifa.Source: Facebook Ad Library

SmartNews’s algorithms picked that headline for ads to appear on the Facebook feeds of people in almost every Oregon county, with a banner like “Charles County news” matching the name of the county where the ad was shown. It’s a strategy that the company uses thousands of times a day.

SmartNews vice president Rich Jaroslovsky said that in this case its algorithms did nothing wrong by choosing the tongue-in-cheek headline to show to existing readers. The problem, he says, was that the headline was shown to the wrong people.

SmartNews, he said, focuses “a huge amount of time, effort and talent” on its algorithms for recommending news stories to users of SmartNews’s app. Those algorithms would have aimed the antifa story at “people who presumably have a demonstrated interest in the kind of stuff Wonkette specializes in.” To those readers and in that context, he said, the story wasn’t problematic.

“The problems occurred when it was pulled out of its context and placed in a different one” for Facebook advertising that isn’t aimed by any criterion other than geography. “Obviously, this shouldn’t have happened, and we’re taking a number of steps to make sure we address the problems you pointed out,” Jaroslovsky said.

Jaroslovsky said Wonkette stories wouldn’t be used in ads in the future.

SmartNews targets its ads at people in particular geographic areas—in this case, 32 of Oregon’s 36 counties.

But Facebook had other ideas: Its algorithms chose to show the “antifa supersoldiers” ad overwhelmingly to people over 55 years old, according to Facebook’s published data about ads that it considers political. Undoubtedly, many of those viewers ignored the ad, or weren’t fooled by it, but the demographic Facebook chose is a demographic that a recent New York University study showed tends to share misinformation on social media more frequently.

This choice by Facebook’s algorithms is powerful: An academic paper showed that Facebook evaluates the content of ads and then sometimes steers them disproportionately to users with a particular gender, race, or political view. (The paper didn’t study age.)

Facebook also doesn’t make it possible to know exactly how many people saw SmartNews’s antifa supersoldiers ad. The company’s transparency portal says the ad was shown between 197 and 75,000 times, across about 75 variations (based on Android and iPhone and number of counties). Facebook declined to provide more specific data.

Facebook doesn’t consider the ads to have violated the company’s rules. Ads are reviewed “primarily” by automated mechanisms, Facebook spokesperson Devon Kearns told The Markup, so it’s unlikely that a human being at Facebook saw the ads before they ran. However, “ads that run with satirical headlines that are taken out of context are eligible” to be fact-checked, Kearns said, and ads found to be false are taken down. (Usually, satire and opinion in ads are exempt from being marked as “misinformation” under Facebook’s fact-checking policy, unless they’re presented out of context.)

Wonkette publisher Rebecca Schoenkopf told The Markup she wasn’t aware SmartNews was promoting her site’s content with Facebook ads but wasn’t necessarily against it. In theory, at least, it could have the effect of drawing more readers to her site.

Ironically, she says, Wonkette has a limited Facebook presence. In recent years, the reach of Wonkette’s posts on the platform had dwindled to almost nothing.


The SmartNews ad—inadvertently or not—joined in a chorus of false, misleading and racist posts from white nationalists in response to Black Lives Matter protests.Lindsay Schubiner, Western States Center

Following the chain of information from Perkins’s Facebook video all the way to the SmartNews ad makes it easy to see how a series of actors took the same original piece of content—a video of Perkins espousing conspiracy theories—and amplified it to suit their own motives. Each of those links created a potential for misinformation, where the context necessary for understanding could be stripped away.

Lindsay Schubiner, a program director at the Portland, Ore., based Western States Center, which works to counter far-right extremism in the Pacific Northwest, told The Markup that, while social media has had a democratizing effect on information, it’s also been an ideal format for spreading misinformation.

“The SmartNews ad—inadvertently or not—joined in a chorus of false, misleading and racist posts from white nationalists in response to Black Lives Matter protests,” Schubiner wrote in an email. “Many of these posts traded in anti-semitism, which has long been a go-to response for white nationalists looking to explain their political losses.”

In this case the ad, she said, potentially promulgated the common right-wing trope that Soros, who is Jewish, funds mass protests for left-wing causes.

“These bigoted conspiracy theories have helped fuel a surge in far-right activity and organizing,” she continued. “It’s certainly possible that the ads contributed to far-right organizing in Oregon in response to false rumors about anti-fascist gatherings in small towns.”

Those conspiracy theories have had real-world consequences. Firearm-toting residents in nearby Washington State harassed a multiracial family who were camping in a converted school bus, trapping them with felled trees, apparently mistakenly believing them to be antifa. The family was able to escape only with the help of some local high school students armed with chainsaws to clear their way to freedom.

Jeremy B. Merrill

Investigative Data Reporter


Aaron SankinInvestigative Reporter

Study: More than half of US students experience summer learning losses five years in a row

These students on average lose nearly 40 percent of their school year gains

AMERICAN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH ASSOCIATION

 

Washington, July 9, 2020--Following U.S. students across five summers between grades 1 and 6, a little more than half (52 percent) experienced learning losses in all five summers, according to a large national study published today. Students in this group lost an average of 39 percent of their total school year gains during each summer. The study appeared in American Educational Research Journal, a peer-reviewed publication of the American Educational Research Association.

"Many children in the U.S. have not physically attended a school since early March because of the Covid-19 pandemic, and some have likened the period we're in now to an unusually long summer," said study author Allison Atteberry, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado--Boulder. "Because our results highlight that achievement disparities disproportionately widen during the summer, this is deeply concerning."

"Teachers nationwide are likely wondering how different their classes will be in the coming fall," Atteberry said. "To the extent that student learning loss plays a larger-than-usual role this year, we would anticipate that teachers will encounter even greater variability in students' jumping-off points when they return in fall 2020."

For the study Atteberry and her co-author, Andrew J. McEachin, a researcher at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization, used a database from NWEA, which includes more than 200 million test scores for nearly 18 million students in 7,500 school districts across all 50 states from 2008 through 2016.

The authors found that although some students learn more than others during the school year, most are moving in the same direction­­--that is, making learning gains--while school is in session. The same cannot be said for summers, when more than half of students exhibit learning losses year after year.

Twice as many students exhibit five years of consecutive summer losses--as opposed to no change or gains--as one would expect by chance, according to the authors.

The pattern is so strong that even if all differences in learning rates between students during the school year could be entirely eliminated, students would still end up with very different achievement rates due to the summer period alone.

"Our results highlight that achievement disparities disproportionately widen during summer periods, and presumably the 'longer summer' brought on by Covid-19 would allow this to happen to an even greater extent," said Atteberry. "Summer learning loss is just one example of how the current crisis will likely exacerbate outcome inequality."

Among the students studied, depending on grade, the average student loses between 17 and 28 percent of school-year gains in English language arts during the following summer. In math, the average student loses between 25 and 34 percent of each school-year gain during the following summer.

However Atteberry and McEachin focus their attention not on average patterns of summer learning loss, but rather on the dramatic variability around those means from one student to another.

"For instance in grade 2 math, at the high end of the distribution, students accrue an additional 32 percent of their school-year gains during the following summer," said Atteberry. "At the other end of the distribution, however, students can lose nearly 90 percent of what they have gained in the preceding school year."

"This remarkable variability in summer learning rates appears to be an important contributor to widening achievement disparities during the school-age years," Atteberry said. "Because summer losses tend to accumulate for the same students over time, consecutive losses add up to a sizeable impact on where students end up in the achievement distribution."

Atteberry noted that more research is needed to better understand what accounts for most of the summer variation across students. Prior research, including a 2018 study published in Sociology of Education, has found that race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status predict summer learning but, together, account for only up to 4 percent of the variance in summer learning rates.

Policy leaders across the United States have experimented with different approaches, including extending the school year and running summer bridge programs, to address concerns with summer learning losses. These need to be further assessed for effectiveness, said Atteberry.

Researchers have pointed to gaps in resources such as family income, parental time availability, and parenting skill and expectations as potential drivers of outcome inequality. Many of these resource differences are likely exacerbated by summer break when, for some families, work schedules come into greater conflict with reduced childcare.

"Our results suggest that we should look beyond just schooling solutions to address out-of-school learning disparities," Atteberry said. "Many social policies other than public education touch on these crucial resource inequalities and thus could help reduce summer learning disparities."

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This study was supported by funding from the Kingsbury Center at the NWEA, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Institute of Education Sciences.

About AERA

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) is the largest national interdisciplinary research association devoted to the scientific study of education and learning. Founded in 1916, AERA advances knowledge about education, encourages scholarly inquiry related to education, and promotes the use of research to improve education and serve the public good. Find AERA on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

About half of health care workers positive for COVID-19 by serology have no symptoms

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER

IMAGE: WESLEY SELF, MD, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF EMERGENCY MEDICINE AT VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER AND LEAD INVESTIGATOR FOR THE IVY NETWORK. view more 

CREDIT: VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER

The IVY Research Network has completed initial studies evaluating the epidemiology of COVID-19 in health care workers and patients.

Among 249 front-line health care workers who cared for COVID-19 patients during the first month of the pandemic in Tennessee, 8% tested positive for COVID-19 antibodies by serology testing, suggesting they had contracted COVID-19 in the first several weeks of taking care of COVID-19 patients. Among these health care workers with positive serology results, 42% reported no symptoms of a respiratory illness in the prior two months. This suggests that front-line health care workers are at high risk for COVID-19 and that many health care workers with the virus may not have typical symptoms of a respiratory infection. These results were published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases on July 6.

"Our results suggest that screening health care workers for COVID-19 even when they don't have any symptoms could be important to prevent the spread of the virus within hospitals," said Wesley Self, MD, associate professor of Emergency Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and lead investigator for the IVY Network.

Investigator Bo Stubblefield, MD, instructor of Emergency Medicine, added, "We are continuing to study COVID-19 in front-line health care workers across the country to better understand what may be done to decrease their risk of infection, such as using specific types of personal protective equipment."

In a separate study, the IVY investigators studied 350 patients across 11 medical centers in the U.S. who tested positive for COVID-19; 54% of these patients reported no close contact with another person known to have COVID-19 in the two weeks before getting sick.

"With over half of COVID-19 patients not identifying a clear source of their infection, this study reinforces the need for practical measures to reduce the spread of the virus, such as social distancing and the use of face coverings when out in public," Self said.

Additionally, 40% of COVID-19 patients in the study remained symptomatic two weeks after a positive COVID-19 test, showing that patients with COVID-19 tend to remain ill longer than with other respiratory infections, such as influenza. The results were published by the journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on June 30.

The IVY Network is a collaborative research group of multiple medical centers in the U.S led by Vanderbilt University Medical Center. It is funded by Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to conduct research on severe respiratory infections, including COVID-19 and influenza.

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Argonne soil carbon research reduces uncertainty in predicting climate change impacts

DOE/ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY

 

IMAGE: ARGONNE SCIENTISTS WERE AWARDED $8 MILLION FROM ARPA-E TO PARTNER WITH STARTUP COMPANIES AND HELP DEVELOP NEW TYPES OF ADVANCED REACTORS WITH DIGITAL TWIN TECHNOLOGY. FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: EMILY... view more 

CREDIT: ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY

DOE and USDA researchers use new global models to study how environmental controllers affect soil organic carbon, changes in which can alter atmospheric carbon concentrations and affect climate. Predictions could benefit industry mitigation plans.

Nature provides a myriad of ways to keep check on its health. One of the more successful indicators is the status of its soil organic carbon, or the concentration of carbon in the organic fraction of soil that consists of decaying vegetation or animal products. A small change in carbon levels can dramatically alter atmospheric carbon concentrations and affect climate.

"Soil organic carbon is important to study because it is the soil property that provides numerous ecosystem services to humanity, such as deactivating pollutants, conserving biodiversity, conserving and purifying water, increasing soil fertility, and mitigating climate change impacts," said Umakant Mishra, a geospatial scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory.

"We believe that the scaling functions we developed in this research ... can improve the spatial representation of soil organic carbon in land surface within Earth system models." -- Umakant Mishra, Argonne geospatial scientist

A collaboration between the U.S. Department of Agriculture and several DOE National Labs, including Argonne, set out to predict and model the effect of environmental controllers, or soil-forming factors -- climate, organisms, topography, parent material and time -- on soil organic carbon at different spatial scales across the continental United States.

The results of the soil organic carbon study are intended to reduce uncertainty in predicting global carbon climate feedbacks and associated climate changes. They also could provide more certainty as to how future climate extremes may impact the activities of numerous industries, from agriculture and crop insurance industries to natural resource conservation industries.

Researchers, for the first time, were able to generate scaling algorithms to account for such a large geographic region by using a large set of recently available field observations, a large number of environmental factors and a machine learning algorithm -- an artificial intelligence method that learns from specific data to progressively improve predictions of new, similar data.

In this case, scale refers to the area across which soil organic carbon properties are assumed to be similar, and scaling takes information collected from one spatial scale and applies it to another. With the region broken down into a pattern of grid cells, the spatial scale used in this research ranged from a finer resolution of 100 m to a more course 50 km between grid centers.

"The soil organic carbon content differs in different sampling locations, that's why we need to sample at representative locations if we intend to capture the spatial heterogeneity of soil properties in the study area," Mishra said.

The scaling algorithms that he and his collaborators created as part of the research are important to Earth system models, like the DOE's Energy Exascale Earth System Model, in addition to predicting changes in climate more accurately.

Scaling, Mishra noted, is an issue which has traditionally been ignored in biogeochemical/natural sciences, where it was believed that properties or processes associated with one spatial scale can be applied at both smaller or larger scales. In reality, however this is not the case.

Current Earth system models, which are used to predict the future global carbon climate feedbacks and associated climate changes, operate at coarse spatial scales (50-100 km) and are currently unable to represent environmental controllers and their effect on soil organic carbon in a manner consistent with field observations.

"The control of environmental factors on soil organic carbon is not consistent with the observations in the current land surface models," he added. "We believe that the scaling functions we developed in this research, which are drawn from numerous samples across a large geographical area, can improve the spatial representation of soil organic carbon in land surface within Earth system models."

Among the results of the team's recent work, models showed that topographic and soil attributes were significant controllers of soil organic carbon at finer scales. At the coarser end of the scale, climatic and land use factors served as important controllers.

###

An article on the study, "Importance and strength of environmental controllers of soil organic carbon changes with scale," appears in the October 1, 2020, issue of Geoderma (published online, June 23, 2020).

Funding for this study was provided in part by the DOE's Office of Science.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation's first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America's scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.

The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science.

Is COVID-19 widening the gender gap in academic medicine?

Study finds fewer women publishing COVID-related papers, especially in early days of pandemic

MICHIGAN MEDICINE - UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

 

IMAGE: RESHMA JAGSI, M.D., D.PHIL. view more 

CREDIT: MICHIGAN MEDICINE

ANN ARBOR, Michigan -- A new study finds that fewer women were first authors on COVID-19-related research papers published in the first half of this year. The difference was particularly striking during the first two months of the pandemic when schools closed and researchers were told to work remotely.

The findings suggest a worsening gender gap in academic medicine as previous research has shown women are underrepresented among authors of medical research. Other studies have shown female physician-scientists spend more time than their male colleagues on domestic tasks. Women are also more likely to serve on clinical and education tracks that were also upended when the pandemic struck.

"The coronavirus pandemic may be creating even greater challenges than before for women in academic medicine," says study author Reshma Jagsi, M.D., D.Phil., director of the Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine at the University of Michigan. "We suspect school closures, limited child care and work-related service demands might have taken the greatest toll on early career women, especially during the height of the disruptions."

Researchers looked at 1,893 articles related to COVID-19 published between January and June whose first or last author had a U.S. affiliation. They compared that to 85,373 papers published in the same journals in 2019.

They found the share of women first authors dropped 14% for COVID-19 papers compared to papers published in 2019. They found the differences were most striking in March and April to compared to May. Looking only at March and April publications, the share of women first authors was 23% lower than for 2019 papers. Results were published in the journal eLife.

While the study does not assess the reasons for this drop, the authors suggest that during the initial shutdown and strict social distancing guidelines, women likely took on a greater share of child care and other domestic responsibilities, while also juggling major changes to their duties as educators and physicians.

"We know that diverse teams are important for solving complex problems like those related to COVID-19," Jagsi says. "It's critical in this time of crisis that we have policies that support the full inclusion of diverse scholars, including transforming attitudes about domestic expectations for women and resources to support all those balancing great demands both at home and at work."

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Additional authors: Jens Peter Andersen, Mathias Wullum Nielsen, Nicole L. Simone, Resa E. Lewiss

Funding: None

Disclosure: None

Reference: eLife, DOI: 10.7554/eLife.58807

Resources:

University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center, http://www.rogelcancercenter.org

Michigan Health Lab, http://www.MichiganHealthLab.org

Michigan Medicine Cancer Ans