Learning with all your senses: Multimodal enrichment as the optimal learning strategy of the future

Many educational approaches assume that integrating complementary sensory and motor information into the learning experience can enhance learning, for example gestures help in learning new vocabulary in foreign language classes. In her recent publication, neuroscientist Katharina von Kriegstein from Technische Universität Dresden and Brian Mathias of the University of Aberdeen summarize these methods under the term "multimodal enrichment." This means enrichment with multiple senses and movement. Numerous current scientific studies prove that multimodal enrichment can enhance learning outcomes. Experiments in classrooms show similar results.

In the review article, the two researchers compare these findings with cognitive, neuroscience, and computational theories of multimodal enrichment. Recent neuroscience research has found that the positive effects of enriched learning are associated with response in brain regions that serve perception and motor function. For example, hearing a recently learned foreign language word, may elicit activity in motor brain regions if the word was associated with the performance of a congruent gesture during learning. These brain responses are causal to the benefits of multimodal enrichment for learning outcome. Computer algorithms confirm this hypothesis.

"The brain is optimized for learning with all the senses and with movement. Brain structures for perception and motor skills work together to promote this type of learning. We hope that our deeper understanding of the brain's learning mechanisms, will facilitate the development of optimal learning strategies in the future," explains Brian Mathias.

Katharina von Kriegstein adds, "The results of the literature we reviewed contribute to our understanding of why several long-used learning strategies, such as parts of the Montessori method, are effective. They also provide clear clues as to why some approaches are not as effective. Recently uncovered neuroscientific mechanisms may inspire the updating of cognitive and computational theories of learning, providing new hypotheses about learning. We anticipate that such an interdisciplinary and evidence-based approach will lead to the optimization of learning and teaching strategies in the future, for both humans and artificial systems."

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Researchers complete first real-world study of Martian helicopter dust dynamics

Mars is a dusty planet. From tiny dust devils to vast storms that shroud the planet, dust is a constant challenge for research missions. That was especially true for Ingenuity, the rotorcraft that since February 2021 has been exploring Mars alongside NASA's Perseverance rover. Now, researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology, the Space Science Institute, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have completed the first real-world study of Martian dust dynamics based on Ingenuity's historic first flights on the Red Planet, paving the way for future extraterrestrial rotorcraft missions.

The work, reported in the December 2022 issue of Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, could support NASA's Mars Sample Return Program, which will retrieve samples collected by Perseverance, or the Dragonfly mission that will set course for Titan, Saturn's largest moon, in 2027.

"There's a reason that helicopter pilots on Earth prefer to land on helipads," said Jason Rabinovitch, a co-author and assistant professor at Stevens. "When a helicopter lands in the desert, its downdraft can stir up enough dust to cause a zero-visibility 'brownout' -- and Mars is effectively one big desert."

Rabinovitch has been working on the Ingenuity program since 2014, joining the Jet Propulsion Laboratory soon after the concept was first pitched to NASA and creating the first theoretical models of helicopter dust lifting in the dusty Martian environments. At Stevens, Rabinovitch continues to work with JPL and investigates plume-surface interactions during powered descent of a spacecraft. He also models supersonic parachute inflation and geophysical phenomena, such as plumes on Enceladus.

Studying dust dynamics on another planet isn't easy, explained Rabinovitch. "Space is a data-poor environment. It's hard to send videos and images back to Earth, so we have to work with what we can get."

To overcome that challenge, Rabinovitch and colleagues at JPL used advanced image-processing techniques to extract information from six helicopter flights, all low-resolution videos captured by Perseverance. By identifying tiny variations between video frames, and the light intensity of individual pixels, the researchers were able to calculate both the size and the total mass of dust clouds kicked up as Ingenuity took off, hovered, maneuvered, and landed.

The results were within striking distance of Rabinovitch's engineering models -- itself a remarkable achievement, given the limited information available to the team way back in 2014, when Rabinovitch and his colleagues were writing back-of-the-envelope calculations intended to support the original design of Ingenuity.

The research shows that, as predicted, dust is a significant consideration for extra-terrestrial rotorcraft, with Ingenuity estimated to have kicked up about a thousandth of its own mass (four pounds) in dust each time it flew. That's many times more dust than would be generated by an equivalent helicopter on Earth, though Rabinovitch cautions that it's tricky to draw direct comparisons.

"It was exciting to see the Mastcam-Z video from Perseverance, which was taken for engineering reasons, ended up showing Ingenuity lifting so much dust from the surface that it opened a new line of research," said Mark Lemmon, senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute Mars Science Laboratory and first author of the study.

"When you think about dust on Mars, you have to consider not just the lower gravity, but also the effects of air pressure, temperature, air density -- there's a lot we don't yet fully understand," Rabinovich said. Still, he added, that's what makes studying Ingenuity's dust clouds so exciting.

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Just one quality conversation with a friend boosts daily well-being

Conversing with a friend just once during the day to catch up, joke around or tell them you're thinking of them can increase your happiness and lower your stress level by day's end.

These are among the results of a new study co-authored by University of Kansas professor of Communication Studies and friendship expert Jeffrey Hall.

"Quality Conversation Can Increase Daily Well-Being" was published in the journal Communication Research by Hall and co-authors Amanda Holmstrom, Natalie Pennington, Evan Perrault and Daniel Totzkay. The study was informed by and provides further support for Hall's Communicate Bond Belong (CBB) theory of relationships. Hall is the director of KU's Relationships and Technology Lab.

"This paper was an attempt to define quality communication in the context of relationships," Hall said."The types of communication we chose to study were ones shown in past research to make people feel more bonded through conversation."

There were seven:

•    Catching up
•     Meaningful talk
•     Joking around
•     Showing care
•     Listening
•     Valuing others and their opinions
•     Offering sincere compliments

Over 900 study participants from five university campuses -- before, during and after pandemic lockdowns -- were directed to engage in one of the seven communication behaviors on a single day, and then reported back that night about their feelings of stress, connection, anxiety, well-being, loneliness and the quality of their day.

As it turned out, Hall said, it didn't matter which of these quality conversations someone had. The very act of intentionally reaching out to a friend in one of these ways was what mattered most.

"One of the take-home messages of this study is that there are many paths toward the same goal," Hall said.

He said the study was also designed to explore the impact of both the quality and quantity of daily communications.

"There's a lot of good research that says the number of interactions you have as well as the quality of interactions are both associated with being a less lonely, happier and more connected person," said Hall. This study found that once is enough, but more is better. Participants who chose to have more quality conversations had better days.

"This means the more that you listened to your friends, the more that you showed care, the more that you took time to value others' opinions, the better you felt at the end of the day," he said.

"The experimental design means that it's not just people who are already having fulfilling lives who have higher-quality conversations," Hall said. "This study suggests that anyone who makes time for high-quality conversation can improve their well-being. We can change how we feel on any given day through communication. Just once is all it takes."

The study also brought in Hall's past research on different ways to connect in the era of social and mobile media. The study found high quality face-to-face communication was more closely associated with well-being than electronic or social media contact.

"If at least one of their quality conversations was face-to-face, that mattered," Hall said.

The paper also explains why quality communication makes people feel better. CBB theory claims that people use conversations with friends to help get their need to belong met.

"Across these three studies, quality conversation mattered most for connection and stress," Hall said. "This supports the idea that we use communication to get our need to belong met, and, in doing so, it helps us manage our stress."

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Sugar is processed differently in the brains of obesity-prone vs. obesity-resistant rats

On a diet? Perhaps you're avoiding sweets or carbs altogether or curbing late-night munchies. These are examples of behavior modifications and when it comes to food, avoiding those diet triggers can be pretty hard to do.

To understand what drives people to overeat, scientists are looking more closely at a brain structure involved in motivation, called the nucleus accumbens. This small region drives reward-seeking behaviors underlying the pursuit of sex, recreational drugs like nicotine and alcohol, and food.

"These brain motivation centers evolved to help us survive; finding food and having sex are essential to the survival of an individual and of a species," said Carrie Ferrario, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Pharmacology at U-M Medical School.

"What was advantageous when food was hard to find has become a disadvantage and unhealthy in the current food dense environment. This is compounded by the over-abundance of over-processed, low nutrition foods that may satisfy our taste but leave our bodies unnourished. People don't tend to find it difficult to turn down an extra serving of broccoli, but just one more french-fry or making room for a bit of chocolate dessert...that's a different story. The real challenge is overcoming these urges and changing our behavior when it comes to food," Ferrario added.

Given the immense toll obesity takes on virtually all body systems, Ferrario, Peter Vollbrecht, Ph.D., of Western Michigan University, and their colleagues are using rat models to understand potential brain differences between animals who are prone to over-eating and obesity and those who are not.

Previous research from Ferrario's lab pinpointed differences in the nucleus accumbens in obesity-prone and obesity-resistant rats. Their latest study, published in the Journal of Neurochemistry, tracked what was happening in real time in the brain when these animals were presented with glucose, a type of sugar, labeled with a tracer. The tracer allowed the researchers to measure this new sugar in the brain.

Sugar is the brain's main fuel source and once there, the molecule is broken down and used to create new molecules such as glutamine, glutamate, and GABA, each with an important role in influencing the activation of neurons in the brain and nervous system.

"Glucose that is consumed gets broken down and then its carbons get incorporated into neurotransmitters. We see those labelled carbons showing up in those molecules -- glutamate, glutamine, and GABA -- over time," explained Vollbrecht.

They found that glucose was taking longer to get into the nucleus accumbens of obesity-prone animals.

Furthermore, when measuring the concentration of the glutamate, glutamine, and GABA, they discovered excess levels of glutamate, an excitatory neurotransmitter. This, said the team, implied a defect in a neurotransmitter recycling process, typically maintained in the nervous system by star-shaped cells called astrocytes.

Normally, astrocytes will pull glutamate out of the space between neurons, called the synapse, convert it into glutamine, and then shuttle it back to cells that produce GABA or glutamate. This sequence is crucial for turning neurons off and on. "The findings suggest that we're getting too much glutamate and it's not being taken out of the synapse," said Vollbrecht.

Ferrario added, "The balance between glutamate and GABA (the main inhibitory transmitter) is really important for brain function and will influence activity of the neurons in the nucleus accumbens."

This balance, and therefore brain activity, is different in obesity-prone vs. obesity-resistant rats.

The fact that these rats are either prone to obesity or not is important for disentangling cause and effect, says Vollbrecht. "It allows us to remove diet as one of the variables."

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Scientists release newly accurate map of all the matter in the universe

Sometimes to know what the matter is, you have to find it first.

When the universe began, matter was flung outward and gradually formed the planets, stars and galaxies that we know and love today. By carefully assembling a map of that matter today, scientists can try to understand the forces that shaped the evolution of the universe.

A group of scientists, including several with the University of Chicago and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, have released one of the most precise measurements ever made of how matter is distributed across the universe today.

Combining data from two major telescope surveys of the universe, the Dark Energy Survey and the South Pole Telescope, the analysis involved more than 150 researchers and is published as a set of three articles Jan. 31 in Physical Review D.

Among other findings, the analysis indicates that matter is not as "clumpy" as we would expect based on our current best model of the universe, which adds to a body of evidence that there may be something missing from our existing standard model of the universe.

Cooling and clumps

After the Big Bang created all the matter in the universe in a very hot, intense few moments about 13 billion years ago, this matter has been spreading outward, cooling and clumping as it goes. Scientists are very interested in tracing the path of this matter; by seeing where all the matter ended up, they can try to recreate what happened and what forces would have had to have been in play.

The first step is collecting enormous amounts of data with telescopes.

In this study, scientists combined data from two very different telescope surveys: The Dark Energy Survey, which surveyed the sky over six years from a mountaintop in Chile, and the South Pole Telescope, which looks for the faint traces of radiation that are still traveling across the sky from the first few moments of the universe.

Combining two different methods of looking at the sky reduces the chance that the results are thrown off by an error in one of the forms of measurement. "It functions like a cross-check, so it becomes a much more robust measurement than if you just used one or the other," said UChicago astrophysicist Chihway Chang, one of the lead authors of the studies.

In both cases, the analysis looked at a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. As light travels across the universe, it can be slightly bent as it passes objects with lots of gravity, like galaxies.

This method catches both regular matter and dark matter -- the mysterious form of matter that we have only detected due to its effects on regular matter -- because both regular and dark matter exert gravity.

By rigorously analyzing these two sets of data, the scientists could infer where all the matter ended up in the universe. It is more precise than previous measurements -- that is, it narrows down the possibilities for where this matter wound up -- compared to previous analyses, the authors said.

The majority of the results fit perfectly with the currently accepted best theory of the universe.

But there are also signs of a crack -- one that has been suggested in the past by other analyses, too.

"It seems like there are slightly less fluctuations in the current universe, than we would predict assuming our standard cosmological model anchored to the early universe," said analysis coauthor and University of Hawaii astrophysicist Eric Baxter (UChicago PhD'14).

That is, if you make a model incorporating all the currently accepted physical laws, then take the readings from the beginning of the universe and extrapolate it forward through time, the results look slightly different from what we actually measure around us today.

Specifically, today's readings find the universe is less "clumpy" -- clustering in certain areas rather than evenly spread out -- than the model would predict.

If other studies continue to find the same results, scientists say, it may mean there is something missing from our existing model of the universe, but the results are not yet to the statistical level that scientists consider to be ironclad. That will take further study.

However, the analysis is a landmark as it yielded useful information from two very different telescope surveys. This is a much-anticipated strategy for the future of astrophysics, as more large telescopes come online in the next decades, but few had actually been carried out yet.

"I think this exercise showed both the challenges and benefits of doing these kinds of analyses," Chang said. "There's a lot of new things you can do when you combine these different angles of looking at the universe."

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Evolution of wheat spikes since the Neolithic revolution

Around 12,000 years ago, the Neolithic revolution radically changed the economy, diet and structure of the first human societies in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East. With the beginning of the cultivation of cereals -- such as wheat and barley -- and the domestication of animals, the first cities emerged in a new social context marked by a productive economy. Now, a study published in the journal Trends in Plant Science and co-led by the University of Barcelona, the Agrotecnio centre and the University of Lleida, analyses the evolution of wheat spikes since its cultivation began by the inhabitants of ancient Mesopotamia -- the cradle of agriculture in the world -- between the Tigris and the Euphrates.

The authors of the study are Rut Sánchez-Bragado and Josep Lluís Araus-Ortega, from the UB Faculty of Biology and Agrotecnio-UdL; Gustavo A. Slafer, ICREA researcher at the UdL School of Agrifood and Forestry Science and Engineering, and Gemma Molero, from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico, currently a researcher at KWS Seeds Inc.

A cereal that changed human history

The cultivation of wheat -- a grass that became basic food -- represented a turning point in the progress of human civilisation. Today it is the world's most important crop in terms of food security, but EU data warn that the impact of climate change could significantly increase its price and modify its production process in certain areas of the world.

Throughout the domestication process of wheat, the plant phenotype has undergone both rapid (within a few hundred years) and slow (thousands of years) changes, such as the weakening of the rachis, the increase in seed size, and the reduction or disappearance of the awns. In particular, awned and awnless wheat varieties are found all over the world, although the latter tend to be abundant in regions with arid climates, especially during the final stages of cultivation in late spring, a condition typical of Mediterranean environments.

"It is important to conduct studies that show which wheat varieties are best adapted to different environmental growing conditions, especially in a context of climate change. Studying the past retrospectively can give us an idea of the evolution of wheat cultivation over the millennia since agriculture appeared in ancient Mesopotamia," says Rut Sánchez-Bragado, first author of the study, who got a PhD at the UB.

"Awns are organs of the spike that have traditionally been associated with the plant's adaptations to drought conditions," says Josep Lluís Araus, professor at the Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences of the Faculty of Biology.

"However, archaeological and historical records show that the wheat spike has existed predominantly with awns for more than ten millennia after the domestication of wheat. It is not until the last millennium that evidence shows in many cases the absence of awns, indicating a selection by farmers -- probably in an undirected way -- against this organ," stresses Araus, one of the most cited authors in the world according to Clarivate Analytics' Highly Cited Researchers (2022).

"The role of wheat awns in their performance remains controversial despite decades of studies," says researcher Gustavo A. Slafer, corresponding author of the study.

Spike awns: beneficial for the plant?

Is the presence of awns on the spike beneficial for the plant and the crops? Although there is no scientific consensus, "everything suggests that in conditions where the plant does not suffer from water stress, the extra photosynthetic capacity of the awns does not compensate for other potential negative effects (reduced susceptibility to fungal diseases, limitation in the total number of large ones that an ear supports, etc.)," says Araus.

"However, in wetter climates the awns accumulate moisture and can promote the spread of diseases," says Rut Sánchez-Bragado. "So, as the world's population is continuously growing, it is necessary to investigate the role of the awned spikes in the changing conditions of our climate in order to meet the world's demand for a primary food commodity such as wheat."

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Hubble directly measures mass of a lone white dwarf

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have for the first time directly measured the mass of a single, isolated white dwarf -- the surviving core of a burned-out, Sun-like star.

Researchers found that the white dwarf is 56 percent the mass of our Sun. This agrees with earlier theoretical predictions of the white dwarf's mass and corroborates current theories of how white dwarfs evolve as the end product of a typical star's evolution. The unique observation yields insights into theories of the structure and composition of white dwarfs.

Until now, previous white dwarf mass measurements have been gleaned from observing white dwarfs in binary star systems. By watching the motion of two co-orbiting stars, straightforward Newtonian physics can be used to measure their masses. However, these measurements can be uncertain if the white dwarf's companion star is in a long-period orbit of hundreds or thousands of years. Orbital motion can be measured by telescopes only over a brief slice of the dwarf's orbital motion.

For this companion-less white dwarf, researchers had to employ a trick of nature, called gravitational microlensing. The light from a background star was slightly deflected by the gravitational warping of space by the foreground dwarf star. As the white dwarf passed in front of the background star, microlensing caused the star to appear temporarily offset from its actual position on the sky.

The results are reported in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The lead author is Peter McGill, formerly of the University of Cambridge (now based at the University of California, Santa Cruz).

McGill used Hubble to precisely measure how light from a distant star bent around the white dwarf, known as LAWD 37, causing the background star to temporarily change its apparent position in the sky.

Kailash Sahu of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, the principal Hubble investigator on this latest observation, first used microlensing in 2017 to measure the mass of another white dwarf, Stein 2051 B. But that dwarf is in a widely separated binary system. "Our latest observation provides a new benchmark because LAWD 37 is all by itself," Sahu said.

The collapsed remains of a star that burned out 1 billion years ago, LAWD 37 has been extensively studied because it is only 15 light-years away in the constellation Musca. "Because this white dwarf is relatively close to us, we've got lots of data on it -- we've got information about its spectrum of light, but the missing piece of the puzzle has been a measurement of its mass," said McGill.

The team zeroed in on the white dwarf thanks to ESA's Gaia space observatory, which makes extraordinarily precise measurements of nearly 2 billion star positions. Multiple Gaia observations can be used to track a star's motion. Based on this data, astronomers were able to predict that LAWD 37 would briefly pass in front of a background star in November 2019.

Once this was known, Hubble was used to precisely measure over several years how the background star's apparent position in the sky was temporarily deflected during the white dwarf's passage.

"These events are rare, and the effects are tiny," said McGill. "For instance, the size of our measured offset is like measuring the length of a car on the Moon as seen from Earth."

Since the light from the background star was so faint, the main challenge for astronomers was extracting its image from the glare of the white dwarf, which is 400 times brighter than the background star. Only Hubble can make these kinds of high-contrast observations in visible light.

"The precision of LAWD 37's mass measurement allows us to test the mass-radius relationship for white dwarfs," said McGill. "This means testing the theory of degenerate matter (a gas so super-compressed under gravity it behaves more like solid matter) under the extreme conditions inside this dead star," he added.

The researchers say their results open the door for future event predictions with Gaia data. In addition to Hubble, these alignments can now be detected with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. Because Webb works at infrared wavelengths, the blue glow of a foreground white dwarf looks dimmer in infrared light, and the background star looks brighter.

Based on Gaia's predictive powers, Sahu is observing another white dwarf, LAWD 66, with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. The first observation was done in 2022. More observations will be taken as the deflection peaks in 2024 and then subsides.

"Gaia has really changed the game -- it's exciting to be able to use Gaia data to predict when events will happen, and then observe them happening," said McGill. "We want to continue measuring the gravitational microlensing effect and obtain mass measurements for many more types of stars."

In his 1915 theory of general relativity, Einstein predicted that when a massive compact object passes in front of a background star, the light from the star would bend around the foreground object due to the warping of space by its gravitational field.

Exactly a century before this latest Hubble observation, in 1919, two British-organized expeditions to the southern hemisphere first detected this lensing effect during a solar eclipse on May 19th. It was hailed as the first experimental proof of general relativity -- that gravity warps space. However, Einstein was pessimistic that the effect could ever be detected for stars outside our solar system because of the precision involved. "Our measurement is 625 times smaller than the effect measured at the 1919 solar eclipse," said McGill.

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New ice is like a snapshot of liquid water

A collaboration between scientists at Cambridge and UCL has led to the discovery of a new form of ice that more closely resembles liquid water than any other and may hold the key to understanding this most famous of liquids.

The new form of ice is amorphous. Unlike ordinary crystalline ice where the molecules arrange themselves in a regular pattern, in amorphous ice the molecules are in a disorganised form that resembles a liquid.

In this paper, published in Science, the team created a new form of amorphous ice in experiment and achieved an atomic-scale model of it in computer simulation. The experiments used a technique called ball-milling, which grinds crystalline ice into small particles using metal balls in a steel jar. Ball-milling is regularly used to make amorphous materials, but it had never been applied to ice.

The team found that ball-milling created a novel amorphous form of ice, which unlike all other known ices, had a density similar to that of liquid water and whose state resembled water in solid form. They named the new ice medium-density amorphous ice (MDA).

To understand the process at the molecular scale the team employed computational simulation. By mimicking the ball-milling procedure via repeated random shearing of crystalline ice, the team successfully created a computational model of MDA.

"Our discovery of MDA raises many questions on the very nature of liquid water and so understanding MDA's precise atomic structure is very important" comments co-author Dr. Michael Davies, who carried out the computational modelling. "We found remarkable similarities between MDA and liquid water."

A happy medium

Amorphous ices have been suggested to be models for liquid water. Until now, there have been two main types of amorphous ice: high-density and low-density amorphous ice.

As the names suggest, there is a large density gap between them. This density gap, combined with the fact that the density of liquid water lies in the middle, has been a cornerstone of our understanding of liquid water. It has led in part to the suggestion that water consists of two liquids: one high- and one low-density liquid.

Senior author Professor Christoph Salzmann said: "The accepted wisdom has been that no ice exists within that density gap. Our study shows that the density of MDA is precisely within this density gap and this finding may have far-reaching consequences for our understanding of liquid water and its many anomalies."

A high-energy geophysical material

The discovery of MDA gives rise to the question: where might it exist in nature? Shear forces were discovered to be key to creating MDA in this study. The team suggests ordinary ice could undergo similar shear forces in the ice moons due to the tidal forces exerted by gas giants such as Jupiter.

Moreover, MDA displays one remarkable property that is not found in other forms of ice. Using calorimetry, they found that when MDA recrystallises to ordinary ice it releases an extraordinary amount of heat. The heat released from the recrystallization of MDA could play a role in activating tectonic motions. More broadly, this discovery shows water can be a high-energy geophysical material.

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To know where the birds are going, researchers turn to citizen science and machine learning

Computer scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in collaboration with biologists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, recently announced in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution a new, predictive model that is capable of accurately forecasting where a migratory bird will go next -- one of the most difficult tasks in biology. The model is called BirdFlow, and while it is still being perfected, it should be available to scientists within the year and will eventually make its way to the general public.

"Humans have been trying to figure out bird migration for a really long time," says Dan Sheldon, professor of information and computer sciences at UMass Amherst, the paper's senior author and a passionate amateur birder. "But," adds Miguel Fuentes, the paper's lead author and graduate student in computer science at UMass Amherst, "it's incredibly difficult to get precise, real-time information on which birds are where, let alone where, exactly, they are going."

There have been many efforts, both previous and ongoing, to tag and track individual birds, which have yielded invaluable insights. But it's difficult to physically tag birds in large enough numbers -- not to mention the expense of such an undertaking -- to form a complete enough picture to predict bird movements. "It's really hard to understand how an entire species moves across the continent with tracking approaches," says Sheldon, "because they tell you the routes that some birds caught in specific locations followed, but not how birds in completely different locations might move."

In recent years, there's been an explosion in the number of citizen scientists who monitor and report sightings of migratory birds. Birders around the world contribute more than 200 million annual bird sightings through eBird, a project managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and international partners. It's one of the largest biodiversity-related science projects in existence and has hundreds of thousands of users, facilitating state-of-the-art species distribution modeling through the Lab's eBird Status & Trends project. "eBird data is amazing because it shows where birds of a given species are every week across their entire range," says Sheldon, "but it doesn't track individuals, so we need to infer what routes individual birds follow to best explain the species-level patterns."

BirdFlow draws on eBird's Status & Trends database and its estimates of relative bird abundance and then runs that information through a probabilistic machine-learning model. This model is tuned with real-time GPS and satellite tracking data so that it can "learn" to predict where individual birds will move next as they migrate.

The researchers tested BirdFlow on 11 species of North American birds -- including the American Woodcock, Wood Thrush and Swainson's Hawk -- and found that not only did BirdFlow outperform other models for tracking bird migration, it can accurately predict migration flows without the real-time GPS and satellite tracking data, which makes BirdFlow a valuable tool for tracking species that may literally fly under the radar.

Read more at Science Daily

Study links adoption of electric vehicles with less air pollution and improved health

Electric vehicles are widely hailed as a key way to mitigate climate change through reduced emissions, but research on the dual benefits of reduced air pollution and improved health has been largely hypothetical.

A team of researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of USC have now begun to document the actual impact of electric vehicle adoption in the first study to use real-world data to link electric cars, air pollution and health. Leveraging publicly available datasets, the researchers analyzed a "natural experiment" occurring in California as residents in the state rapidly transitioned to electric cars, or light-duty zero emissions vehicles (ZEVs). The results were just published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

The team compared data on total ZEV registration, air pollution levels and asthma-related emergency room visits across the state between 2013 to 2019. As ZEV adoption increased within a given zip code, local air pollution levels and emergency room visits dropped.

"When we think about the actions related to climate change, often it's on a global level," said Erika Garcia, PhD, MPH, an assistant professor of population and public health sciences at the Keck School of Medicine and the study's lead author. "But the idea that changes being made at the local level can improve the health of your own community could be a powerful message to the public and to policy makers."

The researchers also found that while total ZEVs increased over time, adoption was considerably slower in low-resource zip codes -- what the researchers refer to as the "adoption gap." That disparity points to an opportunity to restore environmental justice in communities that are disproportionately affected by pollution and related health problems.

"The impacts of climate change on health can be challenging to talk about because they can feel very scary," said Sandrah Eckel, PhD, an associate professor of population and public health sciences at the Keck School of Medicine and the study's senior author. "We're excited about shifting the conversation towards climate change mitigation and adaptation, and these results suggest that transitioning to ZEVs is a key piece of that."

Benefits for health and the climate

To study the effects of electric vehicle adoption, the research team analyzed and compared four different datasets. First, they obtained data on ZEVs (which includes battery electric, plug-in hybrid, and hydrogen fuel cell cars) from the California Department of Motor Vehicles and tabulated the total number registered in each zip code for every year between 2013 and 2019.

They also obtained data from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency air monitoring sites on levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2), an air pollutant related to traffic, and zip code level asthma-related visits to the emergency room. Asthma is one of the health concerns long linked with air pollutants such as NO2, which can also cause and exacerbate other respiratory diseases, as well as problems with the heart, brain and other organ systems.

Finally, the researchers calculated the percentage of adults in each zip code who held bachelor's degrees. Educational attainment levels are frequently used as an indicator of a neighborhood's socioeconomic status.

At the zip code level, for every additional 20 ZEVs per 1,000 people, there was a 3.2% drop in the rate of asthma-related emergency visits and a small suggestive reduction in NO2 levels. On average across zip codes in the state, ZEVs increased from 1.4 to 14.6 per 1,000 people between 2013 and 2019. ZEV adoption was significantly lower in zip codes with lower levels of educational attainment. For example, a zip code with 17% of the population having a bachelor's degree had, on average, an annual increase of 0.70 ZEVs per 1,000 people compared to an annual increase of 3.6 ZEVs per 1,000 people for a zip code with 47% of the population having a bachelor's degree.

Past research has shown that underserved communities, such as lower-income neighborhoods, tend to face worse pollution and associated respiratory problems than more affluent areas. If ZEVs replace gas-powered cars in those neighborhoods, they could stand to benefit substantially.

"Should continuing research support our findings, we want to make sure that those communities that are overburdened with the traffic-related air pollution are truly benefiting from this climate mitigation effort," Garcia said.

More to learn

While climate change is a massive health threat, mitigating it offers a massive public health opportunity, Eckel said. As one of the first studies to quantify the real-world environmental and health benefits of ZEVs, the research can help demonstrate the power of this mitigation measure, including possibly reduced health care utilization and expenditures.

The findings are promising, Garcia said, but many questions remain. Future studies should consider additional impacts of ZEVs, including emissions related to brake and tire wear, mining of materials for their manufacture, and disposal of old cars. The researchers also hope to study additional types of pollutants and other classes of vehicles, in addition to conducting a follow-up study of the effects of the ever-growing share of ZEVs in the state.

Moving forward, transitioning to ZEVs is just one part of the solution, Eckel said. Shifting to public transport and active transport, including walking and biking, are other key ways to boost environmental and public health.

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