Extreme warming of the South Pole

Illustration of Earth centered on Antarctica.

The South Pole has been warming at more than three times the global average over the past 30 years, according to research led by Ohio University professor Ryan Fogt and OHIO alumnus Kyle Clem.

Fogt, professor of meteorology and director of the Scalia Laboratory for Atmospheric Analysis, and Clem coauthored a paper with an international team of scientists published in the journal Nature Climate Change on the findings. According to the study, this warming period was mainly driven by natural tropical climate variability and was likely intensified by increases in greenhouse gas.

Clem, a current postdoctoral research fellow in climate science at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, is the lead author of the study and studied under Fogt for both his bachelor's and master's degrees at Ohio University.

"I've had a passion for understanding the weather and fascination of its power and unpredictability as far back as I can remember," Clem said. "Working with Ryan I learned all about Antarctic and Southern Hemisphere climate, specifically how West Antarctica was warming and its ice sheet was thinning and contributing to global sea level rise. I also learned that Antarctica experiences some of the most extreme weather and variability on the planet, and due to its remote location we actually know very little about the continent, so there are constant surprises and new things to learn about Antarctica every year."

The Antarctic climate exhibits some of the largest ranges in temperature during the course of the year, and some of the largest temperature trends on the planet, with strong regional contrasts. Most of West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula experienced warming and ice-sheet thinning during the late 20th century. By contrast, the South Pole -- located in the remote and high-altitude continental interior -- cooled until the 1980s and has since warmed substantially. These trends are affected by natural and anthropogenic climate change, but the individual contribution of each factor is not well understood.

Clem and his team analyzed weather station data at the South Pole, as well as climate models to examine the warming in the Antarctic interior. They found that between 1989 and 2018, the South Pole had warmed by about 1.8 degrees Celsius over the past 30 years at a rate of +0.6 degrees Celcius per decade -- three times the global average.

The study also found that the strong warming over the Antarctic interior in the last 30 years was mainly driven by the tropics, especially warm ocean temperatures in the western tropical Pacific Ocean that changed the winds in the South Atlantic near Antarctica and increased the delivery of warm air to the South Pole. They suggest these atmospheric changes along Antarctica's coast are an important mechanism driving climate anomalies in its interior.

Clem and Fogt argue that these warming trends were unlikely the result of natural climate change alone, emphasizing the effects of added anthropogenic warming on top of the large tropical climate signal on Antarctic climate have worked in tandem to make this one of the strongest warming trends worldwide.

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A cosmic mystery: ESO telescope captures the disappearance of a massive star

Very Large Telescope complex.

Using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have discovered the absence of an unstable massive star in a dwarf galaxy. Scientists think this could indicate that the star became less bright and partially obscured by dust. An alternative explanation is that the star collapsed into a black hole without producing a supernova. "If true," says team leader and PhD student Andrew Allan of Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, "this would be the first direct detection of such a monster star ending its life in this manner."

Between 2001 and 2011, various teams of astronomers studied the mysterious massive star, located in the Kinman Dwarf galaxy, and their observations indicated it was in a late stage of its evolution. Allan and his collaborators in Ireland, Chile and the US wanted to find out more about how very massive stars end their lives, and the object in the Kinman Dwarf seemed like the perfect target. But when they pointed ESO's VLT to the distant galaxy in 2019, they could no longer find the telltale signatures of the star. "Instead, we were surprised to find out that the star had disappeared!" says Allan, who led a study of the star published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Located some 75 million light-years away in the constellation of Aquarius, the Kinman Dwarf galaxy is too far away for astronomers to see its individual stars, but they can detect the signatures of some of them. From 2001 to 2011, the light from the galaxy consistently showed evidence that it hosted a 'luminous blue variable' star some 2.5 million times brighter than the Sun. Stars of this type are unstable, showing occasional dramatic shifts in their spectra and brightness. Even with those shifts, luminous blue variables leave specific traces scientists can identify, but they were absent from the data the team collected in 2019, leaving them to wonder what had happened to the star. "It would be highly unusual for such a massive star to disappear without producing a bright supernova explosion," says Allan.

The group first turned the ESPRESSO instrument toward the star in August 2019, using the VLT's four 8-metre telescopes simultaneously. But they were unable to find the signs that previously pointed to the presence of the luminous star. A few months later, the group tried the X-shooter instrument, also on ESO's VLT, and again found no traces of the star.

"We may have detected one of the most massive stars of the local Universe going gently into the night," says team-member Jose Groh, also of Trinity College Dublin. "Our discovery would not have been made without using the powerful ESO 8-metre telescopes, their unique instrumentation, and the prompt access to those capabilities following the recent agreement of Ireland to join ESO." Ireland became an ESO member state in September 2018.

The team then turned to older data collected using X-shooter and the UVES instrument on ESO's VLT, located in the Chilean Atacama Desert, and telescopes elsewhere."The ESO Science Archive Facility enabled us to find and use data of the same object obtained in 2002 and 2009," says Andrea Mehner, a staff astronomer at ESO in Chile who participated in the study. "The comparison of the 2002 high-resolution UVES spectra with our observations obtained in 2019 with ESO's newest high-resolution spectrograph ESPRESSO was especially revealing, from both an astronomical and an instrumentation point of view."

The old data indicated that the star in the Kinman Dwarf could have been undergoing a strong outburst period that likely ended sometime after 2011. Luminous blue variable stars such as this one are prone to experiencing giant outbursts over the course of their life, causing the stars' rate of mass loss to spike and their luminosity to increase dramatically.

Based on their observations and models, the astronomers have suggested two explanations for the star's disappearance and lack of a supernova, related to this possible outburst. The outburst may have resulted in the luminous blue variable being transformed into a less luminous star, which could also be partly hidden by dust. Alternatively, the team says the star may have collapsed into a black hole, without producing a supernova explosion. This would be a rare event: our current understanding of how massive stars die points to most of them ending their lives in a supernova.

Read more at Science Daily

Major new paleoclimatology study shows global warming has upended 6,500 years of cooling

Glacier collapse

Over the past 150 years, global warming has more than undone the global cooling that occurred over the past six millennia, according to a major study published June 30 in Nature Research's Scientific Data, "Holocene global mean surface temperature, a multi-method reconstruction approach." The findings show that the millennial-scale global cooling began approximately 6,500 years ago when the long-term average global temperature topped out at around 0.7°C warmer than the mid-19th century. Since then, accelerating greenhouse gas emissions have contributed to global average temperatures that are now surpassing 1°C above the mid-19th century.

Four researchers of Northern Arizona University's School of Earth and Sustainability (SES) led the study, with Regents' professor Darrell Kaufman as lead author and associate professor Nicholas McKay as co-author, along with assistant research professors Cody Routson and Michael Erb. The team worked in collaboration with scientists from research institutions all over the world to reconstruct the global average temperature over the Holocene Epoch -- the period following the Ice Age and beginning about 12,000 years ago.

"Before global warming, there was global cooling," said Kaufman. "Previous work has shown convincingly that the world naturally and slowly cooled for at least 1,000 years prior to the middle of the 19th century, when the global average temperature reversed course along with the build-up of greenhouse gases. This study, based on a major new compilation of previously published paleoclimate data, combined with new statistical analyses, shows more confidently than ever that the millennial-scale global cooling began approximately 6,500 years ago."

Earlier this year, an international group of 93 paleoclimate scientists from 23 countries -- also led by Kaufman, McKay, Routson and Erb -- published the most comprehensive set of paleoclimate data ever compiled for the past 12,000 years, compressing 1,319 data records based on samples taken from 679 sites globally. At each site, researchers analyzed ecological, geochemical and biophysical evidence from both marine and terrestrial archives, such as lake deposits, marine sediments, peat and glacier ice, to infer past temperature changes. Countless scientists working around the world over many decades conducted the basic research contributing to the global database.

"The rate of cooling that followed the peak warmth was subtle, only around 0.1°C per 1,000 years. This cooling seems to be driven by slow cycles in the Earth's orbit, which reduced the amount of summer sunlight in the Northern Hemisphere, culminating in the 'Little Ice Age' of recent centuries," said Erb, who analyzed the temperature reconstructions.

Since the mid-19th century, global warming has climbed to about 1°C, suggesting that the global average temperature of the last decade (2010-2019) was warmer than anytime during the present post-glacial period.

McKay, who developed some of the statistical approaches to synthesizing data from around the world, notes that individual decades are not resolved in the 12,000-year-long temperature reconstruction, making it difficult to compare it with any recent decade. "On the other hand, this past decade was likely cooler than what the average temperatures will be for the rest of this century and beyond, which are very likely to continue to exceed 1°C above pre-industrial temperatures," McKay said.

"It's possible," Kaufman said, "that the last time the sustained average global temperature was 1°C above the 19th century was prior to the last Ice Age, back around 125,000 years ago when sea level was around 20 feet higher than today."

"Investigating the patterns of natural temperature changes over space and time helps us understand and quantify the processes that cause climate to change, which is important as we prepare for the full range of future climate changes due to both human and natural causes," said Routson. He used an earlier version of the database to link Arctic warming to a reduction in precipitation at mid latitudes (see related article).

"Our future climate will largely depend on the influence of human factors, especially the build-up of greenhouse gases. However, future climate will also be influenced by natural factors, and it will be complicated by the natural variability within the climate system. Future projections of climate change will be improved by better accounting for both anthropogenic and natural factors," he said.

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Asteroid impact, not volcanoes, made the Earth uninhabitable for dinosaurs

Illustration of dinosaurs and asteroid.

Modelling of the Chicxulub asteroid impact 66 million years ago shows it created a world largely unsuitable for dinosaurs to live in.

The asteroid, which struck the Earth off the coast of Mexico at the end of the Cretaceous era 66 million years ago, has long been believed to be the cause of the demise of all dinosaur species except those that became birds.

However, some researchers have suggested that tens of thousands of years of large volcanic eruptions may have been the actual cause of the extinction event, which also killed off almost 75% of life on Earth.

Now, a research team from Imperial College London, the University of Bristol and University College London has shown that only the asteroid impact could have created conditions that were unfavourable for dinosaurs across the globe.

They also show that the massive volcanism could also have helped life recover from the asteroid strike in the long term. Their results are published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Lead researcher Dr Alessandro Chiarenza, who conducted this work whilst studying for his PhD in the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial, said: "We show that the asteroid caused an impact winter for decades, and that these environmental effects decimated suitable environments for dinosaurs. In contrast, the effects of the intense volcanic eruptions were not strong enough to substantially disrupt global ecosystems.

"Our study confirms, for the first time quantitatively, that the only plausible explanation for the extinction is the impact winter that eradicated dinosaur habitats worldwide."

The asteroid strike would have released particles and gases high into the atmosphere, blocking out the Sun for years and causing permanent winters. Volcanic eruptions also produce particles and gases with Sun-blocking effects, and around the time of the mass extinction there were tens of thousands of years of eruptions at the Deccan Traps, in present-day India.

To determine which factor, the asteroid or the volcanism, had more climate-changing power, researchers have traditionally used geological markers of climate and powerful mathematical models. In the new paper, the team combined these methods with information about what kinds of environmental factors, such as rainfall and temperature, each species of dinosaur needed to thrive.

They were then able to map where these conditions would still exist in a world after either an asteroid strike or massive volcanism. They found that only the asteroid strike wiped out all potential dinosaur habitats, while volcanism left some viable regions around the equator.

Co-lead author of the study Dr Alex Farnsworth, from the University of Bristol, said: "Instead of only using the geologic record to model the effect on climate that the asteroid or volcanism might have caused worldwide, we pushed this approach a step forward, adding an ecological dimension to the study to reveal how these climatic fluctuations severely affected ecosystems."

Co-author Dr Philip Mannion, from University College London, added: "In this study we add a modelling approach to key geological and climate data that shows the devastating effect of the asteroid impact on global habitats. Essentially, it produces a blue screen of death for dinosaurs."

Although volcanoes release Sun-blocking gases and particles, they also release carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. In the short term after an eruption, the Sun-blockers have a larger effect, causing a 'volcanic winter'. However, in the longer term these particles and gases drop out of the atmosphere, while carbon dioxide stays around and builds up, warming the planet.

After the initial drastic global winter caused by the asteroid, the team's model suggests that in the longer term, volcanic warming could have helped restore many habitats, helping new life that evolved after the disaster to thrive.

Read more at Science Daily

New 3D model shows how the paradise tree snake uses aerial undulation to fly

When the paradise tree snake flies from one tall branch to another, its body ripples with waves like green cursive on a blank pad of blue sky. That movement, aerial undulation, happens in each glide made by members of the Chrysopelea family, the only known limbless vertebrates capable of flight. Scientists have known this, but have yet to fully explain it.

For more than 20 years, Jake Socha, a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics at Virginia Tech, has sought to measure and model the biomechanics of snake flight and answer questions about them, like that of aerial undulation's functional role. For a study published by Nature Physics, Socha assembled an interdisciplinary team to develop the first continuous, anatomically-accurate 3D mathematical model of Chrysopelea paradisi in flight.

The team, which included Shane Ross, a professor in the Kevin T. Crofton Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering, and Isaac Yeaton, a recent mechanical engineering doctoral graduate and the paper's lead author, developed the 3D model after measuring more than 100 live snake glides. The model factors in frequencies of undulating waves, their direction, forces acting on the body, and mass distribution. With it, the researchers have run virtual experiments to investigate aerial undulation.

In one set of those experiments, to learn why undulation is a part of each glide, they simulated what would happen if it wasn't -- by turning it off. When their virtual flying snake could no longer aerially undulate, its body began to tumble. The test, paired with simulated glides that kept the waves of undulation going, confirmed the team's hypothesis: aerial undulation enhances rotational stability in flying snakes.

Questions of flight and movement fill Socha's lab. The group has fit their work on flying snakes between studies of how frogs leap from water and skitter across it, how blood flows through insects, and how ducks land on ponds. In part, it was important to Socha to probe undulation's functional role in snake glides because it would be easy to assume that it didn't really have one.

"We know that snakes undulate for all kinds of reasons and in all kinds of locomotor contexts," said Socha. "That's their basal program. By program, I mean their neural, muscular program? -- they're receiving specific instructions: fire this muscle now, fire that muscle, fire this muscle. It's ancient. It goes beyond snakes. That pattern of creating undulations is an old one. It's quite possible that a snake gets into the air, then it goes, 'What do I do? I'm a snake. I undulate.'"

But Socha believed there was much more to it. Throughout the paradise tree snake's flight, so many things happen at once, it's difficult to untangle them with the naked eye. Socha described a few steps that take place with each glide ? -- steps that read as intentional.

First, the snake jumps, usually by curving its body into a "J-loop" and springing up and out. As it launches, the snake reconfigures its shape, its muscles shifting to flatten its body out everywhere but the tail. The body becomes a "morphing wing" that produces lift and drag forces when air flows over it, as it accelerates downward under gravity. Socha has examined these aerodynamic properties in multiple studies. With the flattening comes undulation, as the snake sends waves down its body.

At the outset of the study, Socha had a theory for aerial undulation he explained by comparing two types of aircraft: jumbo jets versus fighter jets. Jumbo jets are designed for stability and start to level back out on their own when perturbed, he said, whereas fighters roll out of control.

So which would the snake be?

"Is it like a big jumbo jet, or is it naturally unstable?" Socha said. "Is this undulation potentially a way of it dealing with stability?"

He believed the snake would be more like a fighter jet.

To run tests investigating undulation's importance to stability, the team set out to develop a 3D mathematical model that could produce simulated glides. But first, they needed to measure and analyze what real snakes do when gliding.

In 2015, the researchers collected motion capture data from 131 live glides made by paradise tree snakes. They turned The Cube, a four-story black-box theater at the Moss Arts Center, into an indoor glide arena and used its 23 high-speed cameras to capture the snakes' motion as they jumped from 27 feet up -- from an oak tree branch atop a scissor lift -- and glided down to an artificial tree below, or onto the surrounding soft foam padding the team set out in sheets to cushion their landings.

The cameras put out infrared light, so the snakes were marked with infrared-reflective tape on 11 to 17 points along their bodies, allowing the motion capture system to detect their changing position over time. Finding the number of measurement points has been key to the study; in past experiments, Socha marked the snake at three points, then five, but those numbers didn't provide enough information. The data from fewer video points only provided a coarse understanding, making for choppy and low-fidelity undulation in the resulting models.

The team found a sweet spot in 11 to 17 points, which gave high-resolution data. "With this number, we could get a smooth representation of the snake, and an accurate one," said Socha.

The researchers went on to build the 3D model by digitizing and reproducing the snake's motion while folding in measurements they had previously collected on mass distribution and aerodynamics. An expert in dynamic modeling, Ross guided Yeaton's work on a continuous model by drawing inspiration from work in spacecraft motion.

He had worked with Socha to model flying snakes since 2013, and their previous models treated the snake's body in parts -- first in three parts, as a trunk, a middle, and an end, and then as a bunch of links. "This is the first one that's continuous," said Ross. "It's like a ribbon. It's the most realistic to this point."

In virtual experiments, the model showed that aerial undulation not only kept the snake from tipping over during glides, but it increased the horizontal and vertical distances traveled.

Ross sees an analogy for the snake's undulation in a frisbee's spin: the reciprocating motion increases rotational stability and results in a better glide. By undulating, he said, the snake is able to balance out the lift and drag forces its flattened body produces, rather than being overwhelmed by them and toppling, and it's able to go further.

The experiments also revealed to the team details they hadn't previously been able to visualize. They saw that the snake employed two waves when undulating: a large-amplitude horizontal wave and a newly discovered, smaller-amplitude vertical wave. The waves went side to side and up and down at the same time, and the data showed that the vertical wave went at twice the rate of the horizontal one. "This is really, really freaky," said Socha. These double waves have only been discovered in one other snake, a sidewinder, but its waves go at the same frequency.

"What really makes this study powerful is that we were able to dramatically advance both our understanding of glide kinematics and our ability to model the system," said Yeaton. "Snake flight is complicated, and it's often tricky to get the snakes to cooperate. And there are many intricacies to make the computational model accurate. But it's satisfying to put all of the pieces together."

"In all these years, I think I've seen close to a thousand glides," said Socha. "It's still amazing to see every time. Seeing it in person, there's something a little different about it. It's shocking still. What exactly is this animal doing? Being able to answer the questions I've had since I was a graduate student, many, many years later, is incredibly satisfying."

Socha credits some of the elements that shaped the real and simulated glide experiments to forces out of his control. Chance led him to the indoor glide arena: a few years after the Moss Arts Center opened, Tanner Upthegrove, a media engineer for the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology, or ICAT, asked him if he'd ever thought about working in the Cube.

"What's the Cube?" he asked. When Upthegrove showed him the space, he was floored. It seemed designed for Socha's experiments.

In some ways, it was. "Many projects at ICAT used the advanced technology of the Cube, a studio unlike any other in the world, to reveal that which could normally not be seen," said Ben Knapp, the founding director of ICAT. "Scientists, engineers, artists, and designers join forces here to build, create, and innovate new ways to approach the world's grandest challenges."

In one of the center's featured projects, "Body, Full of Time," media and visual artists used the space to motion capture the body movements of dancers for an immersive performance. Trading dancers for snakes, Socha was able to make the most of the Cube's motion capture system. The team could move cameras around, optimizing their position for the snake's path. They took advantage of latticework at the top of the space to position two cameras pointing down, providing an overhead view of the snake, which they'd never been able to do before.

Socha and Ross see potential for their 3D model to continue exploring snake flight. The team is planning outdoor experiments to gather motion data from longer glides. And one day, they hope to cross the boundaries of biological reality.

Right now, their virtual flying snake always glides down, like the real animal. But what if they could get it to move so that it would actually start to go up? To really fly? That ability could potentially be built into the algorithms of robotic snakes, which have exciting applications in search and rescue and disaster monitoring, Ross said.

Read more at Science Daily

Consumers can distinguish between bitter tastes in beer -- doesn't alter liking

Although most beer consumers can distinguish between different bitter tastes in beer, this does not appear to influence which beer they like. It seems they just like beer, regardless of the source of the bitterness.

That is the conclusion of Penn State sensory researchers who conducted multiple studies with more than 150 self-identified beer drinkers to see if they could differentiate bitterants in beer. But the question of whether humans can discriminate between types of bitterness remains controversial, according to researcher John Hayes, associate professor of food science.

"Given that countless craft breweries around the country have been very successful in selling a near-endless variety of India pale ales -- better known as IPAs -- we wanted to move past testing bitter chemicals in water to see if consumers could differentiate different bitters in a real food such as beer," he said.

To determine beer drinkers' ability to distinguish between bitter chemicals, study participants in blind taste tests were given commercially available nonalcoholic beer spiked with hop extract Isolone, quinine -- the ingredient that makes tonic water bitter -- and sucrose octaacetate, a food additive so bitter it has been used as a nail-biting and thumb-sucking deterrent.

Participants, about half men and half women, most in their 30s, took part in three experiments. In the first, researchers asked subjects to rate the amount of bitterness and other beer flavor attributes in samples using an intensity scale, to ensure the beer samples were equally bitter.

In the next experiment, beer consumers rated how samples differed from a reference on a seven-point scale. Then, to understand how each sample differed from others, participants checked attributes on a list of 13 descriptors to describe the samples.

In the final experiment, beer consumers tasted the beer samples, rated how much they liked each sample and provided a forced-choice ranking for best-liked to worst-liked.

According to Hayes, who is director of Penn State's Sensory Evaluation Center in the College of Agricultural Sciences, most participants were able to discern differences in bitterness -- even though the samples had been matched for bitterness intensity.

"But our results also show that, despite being able to differentiate between the different bitter chemicals, they were not able to verbally describe these differences, even when provided a list of attributes," he said. "Further, we found no consistent effect on liking or preference. The source of bitterness did not influence which beers they liked."

In the sampled beers, researchers attempted to match the flavor profile of a pale ale style beer, in which high bitterness is not only accepted but desired by consumers, noted lead researcher Molly Higgins, who will receive her doctoral degree in food science this August. Higgins explained that she recruited regular beer consumers because they are more likely to be aware of the various flavor profiles of beer and respond positively to the bitter qualities of samples during testing.

"What we found was unsurprising in hindsight -- beer consumers simply like beer," she said. "So, it seems that for consumers who drink IPAs, a beer just needs to have a bitter profile. For them, it's about bitterness in general, not the specific bitter quality -- if it's there, they will like it."

Higgins suggests that this finding may help in quality assurance at breweries. "Beer consumers may be more forgiving than previously believed when it comes to small variations across batches," she said.

Higgins noted that some breweries use highly trained expert tasters to evaluate each batch. If these experts detect any off notes or flaws in the final product, they may throw out an entire batch. "When breweries can establish an acceptable range for sensory attributes for their final products, they can make better decisions about how much variation is tolerable," she said.

However, there are many segments of beer consumers, Higgins added, and within the craft beer market there is a unique subgroup of consumers who are devoted to their IPAs. Those beer drinkers, she explained, doubtlessly pick up on more of the finer bitter notes created by novel blends of hops. Those consumers patronize craft breweries and are willing to try many different beers.

The bitter beer tasting study, recently published in Nutrients, was part of a larger research project conducted by Higgins at Penn State for her dissertation. Because of its sensory complexity and wide acceptance by many consumers, she contends, beer is a good model food to explore the capacity of people to perceive bitter taste.

Higgins said when people ask her why she would do this kind of a study, she points out that it's not about beer.

Read more at Science Daily

Responses to cyberbullying

It is well-known that victims of bullying can have higher risks of future health and social problems. However, different victims experience a broad range of responses and some may not suffer at all. Researchers felt this implied there might be factors that could protect against some consequences of bullying. In a study of over 6,000 adolescents in Japan, they found a strong candidate in the moderation of what is known as emotional competence.

Online bullying, or cyberbullying, is not a new phenomenon, but as the world becomes more dependent on online communication, it does become a greater threat. Lead author Yuhei Urano, Associate Professor Ryu Takizawa and Professor Haruhiko Shimoyama from the Department of Clinical Psychology at the University of Tokyo and their team investigated protective factors for the adverse effects of cyberbullying victimization. They analyzed data from 6,403 adolescents aged 12 to 18 (1,925 male, 4,478 female) for their study.

"We chose users of a social networking app as participants of the study, because they were likely to experience more online interactions than others," said Urano. "The surveys explored instances of cyberbullying victimization and a cross section of other personal and social information. These allowed us to investigate whether the ability to handle emotions, called emotional competence, correlated with the severity of the repercussions of cyberbullying."

What the researchers found may at first seem counterintuitive, but after careful analysis, their results showed that higher emotional skills were not always associated with better mental health; they may actually make things worse depending on the social context. It depends on the individual's specific emotional competence, defined as the ability to identify, understand, express, regulate and use emotions. There is intrapersonal emotional competence, the ability to handle one's own emotions, and interpersonal emotional competence, the ability to handle others' emotions.

"We thought that intrapersonal emotional competence showed buffering effects against cyberbullying, because the ability to handle one's own emotions is known to have a positive impact on our mental health," said Urano. "On the other hand, we thought interpersonal emotional competence showed the opposite effect. Because the ability to understand emotional states in others may encourage individuals to dwell on the bully's intentions."

The researchers hope this study could pave the way to investigations about the different roles of intrapersonal and interpersonal emotional competence, both the positive and negative effects they may have. However, given the inherent complexity of the topic in question, they suggest that in order to correctly determine the causal relationships behind their results, more longitudinal studies should be conducted in the future.

From Science Daily

Humans and monkeys show similar thinking patterns

Rhesus macaque

Humans and monkeys may not speak the same lingo, but our ways of thinking are a lot more similar than previously thought, according to new research from UC Berkeley, Harvard University and Carnegie Mellon University.

In experiments on 100 study participants across age groups, cultures and species, researchers found that indigenous Tsimane' people in Bolivia's Amazon rainforest, American adults and preschoolers and macaque monkeys all show, to varying degrees, a knack for "recursion," a cognitive process of arranging words, phrases or symbols in a way that helps convey complex commands, sentiments and ideas.

The findings, published today (Friday, June 26) in the journal Science Advances, shed new light on our understanding of the evolution of language, researchers said.

"For the first time, we have strong empirical evidence about patterns of thinking that come naturally to probably all humans and, to a lesser extent, non-human primates," said study co-author Steven Piantadosi, a UC Berkeley assistant professor of psychology.

Indeed, the monkeys were found to perform far better in the tests than the researchers had predicted.

"Our data suggest that, with sufficient training, monkeys can learn to represent a recursive process, meaning that this ability may not be as unique to humans as is commonly thought," said Sam Cheyette, a Ph.D. student in Piantadosi's lab and co-author of the study.

Known in linguistics as "nested structures," recursive phrases within phrases are crucial to syntax and semantics in human language. A simple example is a British nursery rhyme that talks about "the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built."

Researchers tested the recursive skills of 10 U.S. adults, 50 preschoolers and kindergarteners, 37 members of the Tsimane' and three male macaque monkeys.

First, all participants were trained to memorize different sequences of symbols in a particular order. Specifically, they learned sequences such as { ( ) } or { [ ] }, which are analogous to some linguistic nested structures.

Participants from the U.S. and monkeys used a large touchscreen monitor to memorize the sequences. They heard a ding if they got a symbol in the right place, a buzzer if they got it wrong and a chime if the whole sequence was correct. The monkeys received snacks or juice as positive feedback.

Meanwhile, the Tsimane' participants, who are less accustomed to interacting with computers, were tested with paper index cards and given verbal feedback.

Next, all participants were asked to place, in the right order, four images from different groupings shown in random order on the screen.

To varying degrees, the participants all arranged their new lists in recursive structures, which is remarkable given that "Tsimane' adults, preschool children and monkeys, who lack formal mathematics and reading training, had never been exposed to such stimuli before testing," the study noted.

"These results are convergent with recent findings that monkeys can learn other kinds of structures found in human grammar," Piantadosi said.

Read more at  Science Daily

Sled dogs are closely related to 9,500-year-old 'ancient dog'

Sled dogs

Sledge dogs are much older and have adapted to Arctic conditions much earlier than previously thought. In a new study from the QIMMEQ project, researchers from the University of Copenhagen show that ancestors of modern sledge dogs have worked and lived with humans for over 9,500 years.

Dogs play an important role in human life all over the world -- whether as a family member or as a working animal. But where the dog comes from and how old various groups of dogs are is still a bit of a mystery.

Now, light has been shed on the origin of the sledge dog. In a new study published in SCIENCE, researchers from the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen, show that the sledge dog is both older and has adapted to the Arctic much earlier than thought. The research was conducted in collaboration with the University of Greenland and the Institute of Evolutionary Biology, Barcelona.

"We have extracted DNA from a 9,500-year-old dog from the Siberian island of Zhokhov, which the dog is named after. Based on that DNA we have sequenced the oldest complete dog genome to date, and the results show an extremely early diversification of dogs into types of sledge dogs," says one of the two first authors of the study, PhD student Mikkel Sinding, the Globe Institute.

Until now, it has been the common belief that the 9,500-year-old Siberian dog, Zhokhov, was a kind of ancient dog -- one of the earliest domesticated dogs and a version of the common origin of all dogs. But according to the new study, modern sledge dogs such as the Siberian Husky, the Alaskan Malamute and the Greenland sledge dog share the major part of their genome with Zhokhov.

"This means that modern sledge dogs and Zhokhov had the same common origin in Siberia more than 9,500 years ago. Until now, we have thought that sledge dogs were only 2-3,000 years old," says the other first author, Associate Professor Shyam Gopalakrishnan, Globe Institute.

The Original Sledge Dog

To learn more about the origins of the sledge dog, researchers have further sequenced genomes of a 33,000-year-old Siberian wolf and ten modern Greenlandic sledge dogs. They have compared these genomes to genomes of dogs and wolves from around the world.

"We can see that the modern sledge dogs have most of their genomes in common with Zhokhov. So, they are more closely related to this ancient dog than to other dogs and wolves. But not just that -- we can see traces of crossbreeding with wolves such as the 33,000-year-old Siberian wolf -- but not with modern wolves. It further emphasises that the origin of the modern sledge dog goes back much further than we had thought," says Mikkel Sinding.

The modern sledge dogs have more genetic overlap with other modern dog breeds than Zhokhov has, but the studies do not show us where or when this occurred. Nevertheless, among modern sledge dogs, the Greenland sledge dogs stands out and has the least overlap with other dogs, meaning that the Greenland sledge dog is probably the most original sledge dog in the world.

Common Features with Inuit and Polar Bears

In addition to advancing the common understanding of the origin of sledge dogs, the new study also teaches the researchers more about the differences between sledge dogs and other dogs. Sledge dogs do not have the same genetic adaptations to a sugar and starch rich diet that other dogs have. On the other hand, they have adaptations to high-fat diets, with mechanisms that are similar to those described for polar bears and Arctic people.

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Mystery of solar cycle illuminated

Sun's surface

Solar activity fluctuates in a rhythm of about eleven years, which is reflected among other things in the frequency of sunspots. A complete magnetic period lasts 22 years. Scientists have long been puzzling over what causes this cycle. It must be related to the conditions beneath the "skin" of our star: A layer of hot plasma -- electrically-conductive gas -- extends from the surface to 200,000 kilometers below. The plasma within this convection zone is constantly in motion.

A team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, the University of Göttingen and New York University Abu Dhabi has now succeeded in drawing the most comprehensive picture of the plasma flows in nort-south-direction to date. The researchers have found a remarkably simple flow geometry: the plasma describes a single turnover in each solar hemisphere, which lasts for about 22 years. In addition, the flow in the direction of the equator at the bottom of the convection zone causes spots to form closer and closer to the equator during the solar cycle.

The number of sunspots on the visible solar surface varies; sometimes there are more, sometimes fewer. The distance between two sunspot maxima is about eleven years, after 22 years the sunspots are again magnetically polarized in the same way. During the maximum not only large sunspots appear, but also active regions. In addition, impressive arcs of hot plasma reach far into the solar atmosphere, particles and radiation are hurled into space in violent eruptions. At the activity minimum, however, the sun calms down noticeably.

"Over the course of a solar cycle, the meridional flow acts as a conveyor belt that drags the magnetic field along and sets the period of the solar cycle," says Prof. Dr. Laurent Gizon, MPS Director and first author of the new study. "Seeing the geometry and the amplitude of motions in the solar interior is essential to understanding the Sun's magnetic field," he adds. To this end, Gizon and his team used helioseismology to map the plasma flow below the Sun's surface.

Helioseismology is to solar physics what seismology is to geophysics. Helioseismologists use sound waves to probe the Sun's interior, in much the same way geophysicists use earthquakes to probe the interior of the Earth. Solar sound waves have periods near five minutes and are continuously excited by near surface convection. The motions associated with solar sound waves can be measured at the Sun's surface by telescopes on spacecrafts or on the ground.

In this study, Gizon and his team used observations of sound waves at the surface that propagate in the north-south direction through the solar interior. These waves are perturbed by the meridional flow: they travel faster along the flow than against the flow. These very small travel-time perturbations (less than 1 second) were measured very carefully and were interpreted to infer the meridional flow using mathematical modeling and computers.

Because it is small, the meridional flow is extremely difficult to see in the solar interior. "The meridional flow is much slower than other components of motion, such as the Sun's differential rotation," Gizon explains. The meridional flow throughout the convection zone is no more than its maximum surface value of 50 kilometers per hour. "To reduce the noise level in the helioseismic measurements, it is necessary to average the measurements over very long periods of time," says Dr. Zhi-Chao Liang of MPS.

The team of scientists analyzed, for the first time, two independent very long time series of data. One was provided by SOHO, the oldest solar observatory in space which is operated by ESA and NASA. The data taken by SOHO's Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI) covers the time from 1996 until 2011. A second independent data set was provided by the Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG), which combines six ground-based solar telescopes in the USA, Australia, India, Spain, and Chile to offer nearly continuous observations of the Sun since 1995.

"The international solar physics community is to be commended for delivering multiple datasets covering the last two solar cycles," says Dr. John Leibacher, a former director of the GONG project. "This makes it possible to average over long periods of time and to compare answers, which is absolutely essential to validate inferences," he adds.

Gizon and his team find the flow is equatorward at the base of the convection zone, with a speed of only 15 kilometers per hour (running speed). The flow at the solar surface is poleward and reaches up to 50 kilometers per hour. The overall picture is that the plasma goes around in one gigantic loop in each hemisphere. Remarkably, the time taken for the plasma to complete the loop is approximately 22 years -- and this provides the physical explanation for the Sun's eleven-year cycle.

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