The researchers computed air conditioning requirements in 60 of the world’s most populous cities — with the additional ventilation required due to COVID-19. Then, they compared the energy costs with their cooling method, using the chilled panels and natural ventilation.

The results, published in the COVID-19 edition of Applied Energy, showed that the alternative solution can save up to 45 per cent of the required energy, while ensuring building occupants are comfortable and rooms are adequately refreshed.

Dr. Adam Rysanek, a professor in the school of architecture and landscape architecture at UBC and co-author of the paper, notes that many public health guidelines, as well as building industry bodies, recommend increasing the flow of fresh, outdoor air into buildings in order to reduce the risk of spreading COVID-19 and other diseases.

“However, if we continue to rely on conventional HVAC systems to increase indoor fresh air rates, we may actually double energy consumption. That’s the nature of conventional HVAC.”

“Alternatively, we can encourage people to install new types of radiant cooling systems, which allow them to keep their windows open even when it’s hot outside. These alternative systems can provide a sufficient level of thermal comfort, increase protection against disease while lessening the impact on the environment,” noted Rysanek, director of the Building Decisions Research Group at UBC’s faculty of applied science.

Rysanek and his colleagues earlier demonstrated their cooling system in the hot and humid climate of Singapore. They built a public pavilion featuring a system of chilled tubes enclosed within a condensation-preventing membrane. This allowed occupants to feel comfortable, and even cold, without changing the air temperature surrounding the human body.

“You can think of it as lean A/C — or, even better, as a green alternative to energy-guzzling air conditioning,” said Rysanek.

Toronto is one of the cities included in the latest analysis, as are Beijing, Miami, Mumbai, New York and Paris. In all these regions, peak summer temperatures can soar past 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit).

“A key impact of climate change is the accelerating rise in average and peak temperatures, particularly in urban areas. We are expecting the appetite for indoor cooling will ramp up in the years ahead. Yet, if we want to mitigate urban heat and ensure people are healthy and comfortable while reducing our energy use, we need to seriously consider revolutionising our historical approach to air-conditioning,” adds Rysanek.

Rysanek notes that, though chilled panel systems have been around for decades, adding the special membrane devised by the research team could be the key to making it a commercially viable alternative to traditional HVAC systems in all climates.

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Little Foot’s shoulder assembly proved key to interpreting an early branch of the human evolutionary tree. Scientists at the Keck School of Medicine of USC focused on its so-called pectoral girdle, which includes collarbones, shoulder blades and joints.

Although other parts of Little Foot, especially its legs, show humanlike traits for upright walking, the shoulder components are clearly apelike, supporting arms surprisingly well suited for suspending from branches or shimmying up and down trees rather than throwing a projectile or dangling astride the torso like humans.

The Little Foot fossil provides the best evidence yet of how human ancestors used their arms more than 3 million years ago, said Kristian J. Carlson, lead author of the study and associate professor of clinical integrative anatomical sciences at the Keck School of Medicine.

“Little Foot is the Rosetta stone for early human ancestors,” he said. “When we compare the shoulder assembly with living humans and apes, it shows that Little Foot’s shoulder was probably a good model of the shoulder of the common ancestor of humans and other African apes like chimpanzees and gorillas.”

The apelike characteristics will likely attract considerable intrigue as science teams around the world have been examining different parts of the skeleton to find clues to human origins. The USC-led study, which also involved researchers at the University of Wisconsin, the University of Liverpool and the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, among others, was published today in the Journal of Human Evolution.

The journal devoted a special issue to Little Foot analyses from a global research group, which looked at other parts of the creature’s skeleton. The process is somewhat akin to the story of blind men and the elephant, each examining one part in coordination with others to explain the whole of something that’s not fully understood.

The Little Foot fossil is a rare specimen because it’s a near-complete skeleton of an Australopithecus individual much older than most other human ancestors. The creature, probably an old female, stood about 4 feet tall with long legs suitable for bipedal motion when it lived some 3.67 million years ago. Called “Little Foot” because the first bones recovered consisted of a few small foot bones, the remains were discovered in a cave in South Africa in the 1990s. Researchers have spent years excavating it from its rock encasement and subjecting it to high-tech analysis.

While not as widely known as the Lucy skeleton, another Australopithecus individual unearthed in East Africa in the 1970s, Carlson said Little Foot is older and more complete.

The USC-led research team zeroed in on the shoulder assemblies because Little Foot provides the oldest and most intact example of this anatomy ever found. Those bones provide telltale clues of how an animal moves. In human evolution, he said, these parts had to change form before our ancestors could live life free of trees, walk the open savannah and use their arms for functions other than supporting the weight of the individual.

The scientists compared the creature’s shoulder parts to apes, hominins and humans. Little Foot was a creature adapted to living in trees because the pectoral girdle suggests a creature that climbed trees, hung below branches and used its hands overhead to support its weight.

For example, the scapula, or shoulder blade, has a big, high ridge to attach heavy muscles similar to gorillas and chimpanzees. The shoulder joint, where the humerus connects, sits at an oblique angle, useful for stabilizing the body and lessening tensile loads on shoulder ligaments when an ape hangs beneath branches. The shoulder also has a sturdy, apelike reinforcing structure, the ventral bar. And the collarbone has a distinctive S-shaped curve commonly found in apes.

Those conclusions mean that the structural similarities in the shoulder between humans and African apes are much more recent, and persisted much longer, than has been proposed, Carlson said.

“We see incontrovertible evidence in Little Foot that the arm of our ancestors at 3.67 million years ago was still being used to bear substantial weight during arboreal movements in trees for climbing or hanging beneath branches,” he said. “In fact, based on comparisons with living humans and apes, we propose that the shoulder morphology and function of Little Foot is a good model for that of the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees 7 million to 8 million years ago.”

The scientists were able to achieve remarkably clear images of the fossils. That’s because the bones, painstakingly excavated for many years, are in good condition and uniquely complete. The scientists examined them using micro-CT scans, which can detect minute features on the surface of an object, peer deep inside a bone, measure the density of an object and generate a 3D model without harming the fossil.

Using a new approach to ice-penetrating radar data, Stanford University scientists show that this melting left behind a contiguous layer of refrozen ice inside the snowpack, including near the middle of the ice sheet where surface melting is usually minimal. Most importantly, the formation of the melt layer changed the ice sheet’s behavior by reducing its ability to store future meltwater. The research appears in Nature Communications April 20.

“When you have these extreme, one-off melt years, it’s not just adding more to Greenland’s contribution to sea-level rise in that year — it’s also creating these persistent structural changes in the ice sheet itself,” said lead study author Riley Culberg, a PhD student in electrical engineering. “This continental-scale picture helps us understand what kind of melt and snow conditions allowed this layer to form.”

The 2012 melt season was caused by unusually warm temperatures exacerbated by high atmospheric pressure over Greenland — an extreme event that may have been caused or intensified by climate change. The Greenland Ice Sheet has experienced five record-breaking melt seasons since 2000, with the most recent occurring in 2019.

“Normally we’d say the ice sheet would just shrug off weather — ice sheets tend to be big, calm, slow things,” said senior author Dustin Schroeder, an assistant professor of geophysics at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). “This is really one of the first cases where you can say, shockingly, in some ways, these slow, calm ice sheets care a lot about a single extreme event in a particularly warm year.”

Shifting scenarios

Airborne radar data, a major expansion to single-site field observations on the icy poles, is typically used to study the bottom of the ice sheet. But by pushing past technical and computational limitations through advanced modeling, the team was able to reanalyze radar data collected by flights from NASA’s Operation IceBridge from 2012 to 2017 to interpret melt near the surface of the ice sheet, at a depth up to about 50 feet.

“Once those challenges were overcome, all of a sudden, we started seeing meltwater ice layers near the surface of the ice sheet,” Schroeder said. “It turns out we’ve been building records that, as a community, we didn’t fully realize we were making.”

Melting ice sheets and glaciers are the biggest contributors to sea-level rise — and the most complex elements to incorporate into climate model projections. Ice sheet regions that haven’t experienced extreme melt can store meltwater in the upper 150 feet, thereby preventing it from flowing into the ocean. A melt layer like the one from 2012 can reduce the storage capacity to about 15 feet in some parts of the Greenland Ice Sheet, according to the research.

The type of melt followed by rapid freeze experienced in 2012 can be compared to wintry conditions in much of the world: snow falls to the ground, a few warm days melt it a little, then when it freezes again, it creates slick ice — the kind that no one would want to drive on.

“The melt event in 2012 is impacting the way the ice sheet responds to surface melt even now,” Culberg said. “These structural changes mean the way the ice sheet responds to surface melting is going to be impacted longer term.”

In the long run, meltwater that can no longer be stored in the upper part of the ice sheet may drain down to the ice bed, creating slippery conditions that speed up the ice and send chunks into the ocean, raising sea levels more quickly.

Polar patterns

Greenland currently experiences change much more rapidly than its South Pole counterpart. But lessons from Greenland may be applied to Antarctica when the seasons shift, Schroeder said.

“I think now there’s no question that when you’re trying to project into the future, a warming Antarctic will have all these processes,” Schroeder said. “If we don’t use Greenland now to better understand this stuff, our capacity to understand how a warmer world will be is not a hopeful proposition.”

The research was supported by a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

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Materials provided by Stanford University. Original written by Danielle Torrent Tucker. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

With widespread job loss in the U.S. during the pandemic, many state and local governments temporarily halted evictions last spring, and just as these protections were about to expire in September, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) declared a national eviction ban.

However, the order is only extended a few months at a time and is under constant challenge in the court system, including debates about whether such measures control infection transmission.

The research team aimed to study if eviction bans help control the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, explains Alison Hill, Ph.D., an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins.

In a bid to document the potential impact, Hill and Michael Levy, Ph.D., of the University of Pennsylvania, teamed up with experts in housing policy from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Hill and Levy specialize in using mathematical models to study how infections spread.

A report on the research was published April 15 in Nature Communications.

In the new report, the investigators say they used simulations to predict the number of additional SARS-CoV-2 infections in major U.S. cities if evictions had been allowed to occur during the fall of last year.

They estimated, for example, that in a city of approximately 1 million residents with evictions occurring at a heightened rate of 1% of households per month, an additional 4% of the population could become infected with SARS-CoV-2, which corresponds to about 40,000 more cases. Even with a much lower eviction rate of 0.25% per month, which is similar to the pre-pandemic level in cities such as Atlanta, Detroit and Tucson, Arizona, estimates were for about 5,000 additional cases.

To make these predictions, the researchers first calibrated their math model to re-create the most common epidemic patterns seen in major U.S. cities in 2020. The model took into account changes in infection rates over time due to public health measures, and it was tailored to match reported COVID-19 cases and deaths. The researchers used the model to track the spread of infection in and out of households. Then, they ran another version of the model in which eviction bans were lifted, to estimate how the bans have affected transmission of the virus.

Hill and her colleagues found that without eviction bans, people who are evicted or who live in a household that hosts evictees have 1.5 to 2.5 times more risk of being infected with SARS-CoV-2 than if the eviction bans were in place.

“People who experience eviction often move in with other households, increasing the density of people living together,” says Hill. “Households are known to be an important setting for SARS-CoV-2 infection, so this can increase transmission rates.”

The researchers’ computer simulations also found that without eviction bans, the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection would rise for all residents of a city, not just those who are evicted.

Even when the researchers evaluated a different version of the model, in which a city is divided into neighborhoods of different socioeconomic status and evictions are restricted to certain districts, evictions still could cause increases in infections with the virus.

“Some opponents of eviction bans say that evictions only affect a narrow part of the population, but our simulations indicate that evictions not only put disadvantaged households at risk of infection, but entire communities as well,” says Hill. “When it comes to a transmissible disease like COVID-19, no neighborhood is entirely isolated.”

When the researchers used this data to examine how evictions would specifically impact Philadelphia residents, they found that people in all neighborhoods of the city would experience increased COVID-19 levels due to evictions.

Teaming up with researchers from Northeastern University who used de-identified information about how city residents travel throughout neighborhoods, the researchers estimated that, without eviction bans, there could have been approximately 5,000 more COVID-19 cases in Philadelphia if evictions occurred at pre-pandemic levels, and up to 50,000 additional cases if evictions were five times more frequent.

An early version of this research was cited in court cases challenging eviction bans in Philadelphia, and in the CDC’s national eviction order.

To alleviate infection risk and reduce economic burdens, the researchers say, governments should consider not only extended eviction bans but also financial assistance for both tenants and landlords, as well as resources for households to reduce transmission of the virus within the home.

Funding for the research was provided by the National Institutes of Health (DP5OD019851, R01AI146129), the CDC’s COVID Supplement, Google Cloud and Google Cloud research credits.

In addition to Hill and Levy, researchers who contributed to the study include co-first authors Anjalika Nande from Harvard University and Justin Sheen from Princeton University; Andrei Gheorghe and Ben Adlam at Harvard University; Julianna Shinnick and Maria Florencia Tejeda at the University of Pennsylvania; Emma Walters, Andrew Greenlee and Daniel Schneider at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; and Brennan Klein, Matteo Chinazzi, Samuel Scarpino and Alessandro Vespignani at Northeastern University.

Their numbers appear to be increasing, following a long period of absence linked to population decline, according to research led by Cefas and the University of Exeter.

Marine scientists in the UK and Ireland have analysed multiple datasets, spanning a 16-year period, to document the increase in bluefin, which arrive into the waters of the Celtic Seas and off South West England, the Scilly Isles, and North West Ireland to feed in late summer and autumn.

The research is part of the Defra-funded “Thunnus UK” research project.

Thunnus UK was established to improve knowledge of this species, as an essential first step in ensuring a positive future for Atlantic bluefin tuna around the UK.

Central to the project’s success has been a concerted effort to share and combine important data on where people have observed Atlantic bluefin tuna.

This will help to identify where and when these fish are found in UK waters.

Nearly 1,000 unique observations were recorded between 2013 and 2018 by citizen scientists, scientists, fishers and eco-tour leaders.

Researchers found that Atlantic bluefin tuna begin to arrive in May and stay as late as January.

However, peak numbers were recorded between August and October each year.

The research draws on five key data sources:

• The general public: A total of 80 sightings recorded by the public and submitted to http://www.thunnusuk.org
• Eco-tourism: three eco-tourism vessels collecting data on more than 1600 boat tours off the SW coast of England between 2008 and 2018.
• Opportunistic scientific surveys: 40 days of surveys with >2500 km of effort conducted by Cefas and University of Exeter experts off the Northwest Coast of Ireland and SW England in 2016 and 2018.
• Fisheries independent surveys: (1) data collected by MarineLife during the Peltic survey by Cefas between 2013 and 2015, and (2) data collected by the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group during the Irish Marine Institute’s Celtic Sea Herring Acoustic Survey between 2014 and 2018
• Bycatch in commercial fisheries: Bluefin tuna were accidentally caught (bycatch) in the Irish commercial fishery for albacore tuna between 2003 and 2017.

Lead author Tom Horton, of the University of Exeter, said: “Atlantic bluefin tuna are once again a feature in nearshore waters off the UK and Ireland.

“We’ve been able to document this story by using data from a wide variety of sources.

“We need to work together to ensure a future for Atlantic bluefin tuna, both in the UK and Ireland and more broadly throughout their range in the Atlantic Ocean.

“This is a really exciting study and the return of these fish suggest an important role in the UK’s ecosystem.”

Jeroen van der Kooij, Principal scientist and Peltic Survey Lead, Cefas, said: “The unique data collected during our annual pelagic ecosystem survey of SW English waters is fundamental to this research.

“Marine animal observers from MARINELife on board our research vessel recorded not only the arrival, but also a subsequent year-on-year increase in sightings of bluefin tuna in the area.

“We will continue to collect this information, which, in combination with data on their prey fish and habitat collected during the same survey, will hopefully increase our knowledge of these exciting yet enigmatic animals.”

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“Education is not the equalizer that many people think it is,” says Anna Manzoni, author of the study and an associate professor of sociology at North Carolina State University.

The study aimed to determine the extent to which a parent’s social status gives an advantage to their children. The research used the educational achievements of parents as a proxy for social status, and looked at the earnings of adult children as a proxy for professional success.

To address the research question, Manzoni examined data from people who were interviewed as part of the National Survey of College Graduates between 2010 and 2017. Specifically, Manzoni focused on United States citizens between 35 and 67 years old who reported on their wages and parental education. The final sample size was 56,819 individuals: 32,337 men and 24,482 women.

The analysis found that if a son gets a degree similar to the degree that a parent had, the son will earn more money than if his parent did not achieve the same level of education.

For example, imagine that Son A becomes a doctor, and he had a parent who was also a doctor. Meanwhile, Son B also becomes a doctor, but his parents only had bachelor’s degrees. The study found that, in general, Son A will earn more money than Son B, even though they have the same degree.

This effect also exists for daughters, but it is much weaker.

“The effect we see here essentially preserves social stratification for sons — less so for daughters,” Manzoni says. “We like to think that if someone makes it to college, becomes a lawyer, becomes a doctor, they have ‘made it.’ But what we see is that even earning an advanced degree is unlikely to put you on the same professional footing as someone who earned the same degree but started higher on the social ladder.

“One take-away is that expanding access to education is valuable, but education alone is not enough to resolve our society’s challenges in regard to inequality,” Manzoni says.

“This work shows that social origin matters, but it’s not clear what drives this structural inequality,” Manzoni adds. “Is it social capital? Access to networks? Differing financial resources? Is parental background becoming more important as a larger percentage of the population is getting a college degree? Is the advantage at the beginning of a child’s career? There is still a lot of room for additional research on this subject.”

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