A research team led by U.S. and Korean scientists deployed three moorings with hydrophones attached seaward of the Nansen Ice Shelf in Antarctica’s Ross Sea in December of 2015, and were able to record hundreds of short-duration, broadband signals indicating the fracturing of the ice shelf.

The “icequakes” primarily took place between January and March of 2016, with the front of the ice sheet calving into two giant icebergs on April 7. The day the icebergs drifted away from the shelf coincided with the largest low-pressure storm system the region had recorded in the previous seven months, the researchers say.

Results of the study are being published this week in Frontiers in Earth Science.

“It appears that while the icebergs had broken free of the main ice sheet, they stayed nearby until the combination of high winds and a strong low-pressure storm combined to break them loose,” noted Bob Dziak, a research oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and lead author on the study.

“The processes behind the unpinning and breakup of Antarctic ice shelves is not fully understood, and our study suggests that storms play an under-appreciated role in their breakup,” Dziak said.

Next January, Dziak and researchers from Oregon State University and the Korea Polar Research Institute will return to Antarctica to replace the three hydrophones near Nansen, and deploy addition acoustic sensors near the massive Thwaites Glacier, called one of the most important — and dangerous — glaciers on the planet.

The huge glacier has developed a large cavity from rapid melting under the glacier because of climate change. It contained an estimated 14 billion tons of ice with most of it melting over the past 3-4 years. Since it is thought to “hold back” other glaciers, its collapse could have a significant impact on global sea level rise as well as the structure and environment of West Antarctica.

Dziak, who has a courtesy appointment in Oregon State’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, said hydrophones provide a new source of data for scientists studying Antarctica.

“Even though the leading edge of the Nansen Ice Shelf broke free, the icebergs remained in place for several months, so it wasn’t clear from the GPS sensors or satellite images that a large piece of the shelf had calved,” Dziak noted. “But our undersea hydrophones recorded the sounds of the shelf breaking apart months earlier.

“We hope that deploying additional underwater sensors in Antarctica will give us similar warnings if the Thwaites ice shelf begins to calve.”

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Materials provided by Oregon State University. Original written by Mark Floyd. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Researchers found that maternal education did play an important role in predicting the amount and quality of the mother’s language use and the child’s language development. This is significant because earlier studies have shown that children of parents with lower socioeconomic backgrounds and education levels have lower language skills when entering school, but those studies included parents with higher incomes who were primarily white and parents with lower incomes who were primarily black. As a result, educators and other child professionals were not able to distinguish between race, income or education as the cause of the language gap until now. These new findings were published in the journal Child Development on July 17, 2019.

“Over time, there were summaries of this early research that misrepresented the data. Many of these summaries suggested that black and African American mothers, especially those with lower-incomes, provided less and lower quality language to their children than white mothers,” said Lynne Vernon-Feagans, Ph.D.

“Our findings represent a big shift from previous thinking that race-based differences in maternal language play a significant role in children’s language outcomes,” said Mary Bratsch-Hines, Ph.D.

Researchers Lynne Vernon-Feagans, Mary Bratsch-Hines and Elizabeth Reynolds of Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute teamed up with Michael Willoughby, Ph.D., of RTI International on the study to determine if and how much a mother’s race or her education played a role in her child’s language development.

Researchers were also able to determine that maternal education was very related to children’s later language at school age regardless of maternal race, and that mothers’ early language input quality and complexity were even more related to children’s later language at school age.

These new discoveries will help improve parent, teacher and school system efforts by shaping their understanding of the importance of maternal education for both black and white children and allowing experts to focus available efforts and resources in better ways to improve child outcomes.

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Materials provided by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The APOE gene creates a protein, apolipoprotein E, which packages cholesterol and other fats to transport them through the bloodstream. There are three versions, or alleles, of APOE. One of those is the APOE4 allele, present in about 15 percent of the population. APOE4 carriers are up to three times more likely to develop late-onset Alzheimer’s disease, which occurs in people 65 and older.

It’s been demonstrated the gene is linked to changes in cognitive ability that are noticeable as early as one reaches his or her 50s. But new research from UCR professor Chandra Reynolds and her colleagues holds that APOE4 starts manifesting much earlier — before adulthood.

In the journal Neurobiology of Aging, Reynolds asserts that those carrying the APOE4 gene score lower on IQ tests during childhood and adolescence. And the effect was stronger in girls than in boys.

The study involved analysis of three to four decades-old studies, the Colorado Adoption Project and the Longitudinal Twin Study, that included genotyping data from 1,321 participants when they were 6 ½ to 18 years old. Gender among participants was split almost evenly, and 92 percent of the participants were white, with 8 percent from other races. The findings are based on three IQ assessments between childhood and adolescence.

Overall, Full-scale IQ scores were lower by 1.91 points for each APOE4 allele individuals may carry. Boys scored .33 points lower on IQ tests, and women scored almost 3 points lower for each APOE4 allele. The traits most affected related to reasoning. The effect of E4 on IQ performance multiplies with each E4 allele present: a person can have up to two APOE4 alleles.

The IQ difference seems small. But long-term, Reynolds said the findings can mean fewer cognitive reserves as the APOE4 carrier ages, with the disadvantage becoming progressively magnified. Cognitive reserve is the brain’s ability to navigate problems and improvise. Cognitive Reserve Theory holds that people with fewer reserves have more trouble withstanding disease as they age.

Research has also shown an association between lower childhood IQ and increased biological aging — cell and tissue damage — and cardiovascular disease before age 65.

“Our results suggest that cognitive differences associated with APOE may emerge early and become magnified later in the life course, and if so, childhood represents a key period of intervention to invest in and boost reserves,” Reynolds wrote in the paper, titled “APOE effects on cognition from childhood to adolescence.”

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health. In addition to Reynolds, authors include Elizabeth Munoz of UCR, and Andrew Smolen, Robin Corley, Naomi Friedman, Soo Hyun Rhee, Michael Stallings, John DeFries, and Sally Wadsworth, all of the Institute for Behavioral Genetics at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

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Materials provided by University of California – Riverside. Original written by J.D. Warren. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.