“The astonishing predation, off the coast of Mossel Bay, South Africa, represents unprecedented behavior underscoring the exceptional proficiency of the killer whale,” remarks Dr. Alison Towner from Rhodes University, who led an international research team into the discovery.

Their findings are published today in the peer-reviewed African Journal of Marine Science.

The groundbreaking insight is the latest from Dr. Towner and the team, who, in 2022 in the same journal, revealed that a pair of orca were hunting and killing great white sharks off the coast of South Africa since 2017 — managing to drive large numbers of the sharks from their natural aggregation sites.

Orcas are generally known to work together to catch large prey like sea lions, seals, and even other whales — and of course, sharks too. By hunting together, they can surround prey and use their combined intelligence and strength to attack. They can hunt large animals individually. However, this is the first such occurrence on what is one of the world’s largest predators — the great white.

“Again, as previously in South Africa, the orcas are exhibiting a strong preference for extracting and consuming the lipid-rich livers of white sharks — a specialized feeding behavior,” explains Dr. Towner, who has studied great white sharks for the last 17 years, learning about their movement patterns through tagging data.

“But what we witnessed was an orca, nicknamed Starboard — due to his collapsed dorsal fin — performing alone to incapacitate and consume a white shark within an astounding two-minute timeframe.

“Starboard was observed preying on a 2.5-meter (8.2 feet) juvenile white shark, later carrying the shark’s liver in its mouth past a boat.

“This sighting revealed evidence of solitary hunting by at least one killer whale, challenging conventional cooperative hunting behaviors known in the region.

“These are groundbreaking insights into the predatory behavior of this species, and our findings significantly contribute to the global understanding of Killer Whale predation dynamics, enhancing knowledge of marine ecosystems and predator-prey relationships.”

During the observed interactions of this event, at least two white sharks were killed, as evidenced by the discovery of a second carcass measuring 3.55 meters (11.6 feet) nearby.

“The study raises critical questions about the impact of killer whale predation on shark populations in South Africa,” Dr. Towner says. “The displacement of various shark species due to killer whale presence may have implications for mesopredator release and potential trophic changes in the marine ecosystem.”

Understanding the ecological dynamics of killer whale predation is paramount for marine conservation efforts. The authors state that this event “underscores the urgent need for adaptable conservation strategies and vigilant ecological monitoring amidst changing environmental conditions.”

Founding Director and Principal Scientist at Sea Search Research & Conservation, and at the Department of BotZoo, University of Stellenbosch, Dr. Simon Elwen, is an expert in the ecology, behavior, and conservation status of whales.

Commenting on the importance of Dr. Towner’s team’s findings, he says: “The observations reported here add more layers to the fascinating story of these two killer whales and their capabilities. As smart, top predators, killer whales can rapidly learn new hunting techniques on their own or from others, so monitoring and understanding the behaviors used here and by other killer whales in South Africa is an important part of helping us understand more about these animals.”

The involvement of land-based observers, tourists on vessels, and collaborating institutions played a “pivotal role” in capturing this crucial data and footage of the predation events.

This particular event “underscores the benefits of citizen science as a collaborative effort between researchers, tourists, and organizations,” the authors state.

Esther Jacobs, from the marine conservation initiative, Keep Fin Alive, recounts her experience witnessing the predation: “Upon reaching Mossel Bay’s Seal Island, the scent of shark liver oil and a noticeable slick indicated a recent kill. Tracking Port and Starboard near the island, they remained separated.

“Witnessing a white shark’s fin break the surface initially sparked excitement, but that turned to a somber realization as Starboard swiftly approached. The moment Starboard rapidly preyed on my favorite shark species was both devastating and intensely powerful.”

Co-author Dr. Primo Micarelli, from the Shark Studies Centre and Siena University, was on board the vessel White Shark Africa and commented: “Over two decades of annual visits to South Africa, I’ve observed the profound impact these killer whales have on the local white shark population. Seeing Starboard carry a white shark’s liver past our vessel is unforgettable.

“Despite my awe for these predators, I’m increasingly concerned about the coastal marine ecology balance.”

Concluding, Dr. Towner highlights that the new findings on killer whales provide important further insights into how adaptable mammalian predators specialize and diverge ecologically.

“The presence of these shark-hunting killer whales possibly ties into broader ecosystem dynamics. Rapid developments in this phenomenon, make it challenging for science to keep pace, prompting us to publish these timely short communications.”

Galvanized steel containers and surfaces are used for harvested produce because of their durability, strength and lower cost compared to stainless steel. However, bacteria residing in storage containers can cause corrosion.

The new coating will reduce corrosion by at least 70 percent, Akbulut said.

“This material is more durable and doesn’t experience corrosion,” Akbulut said. “The surface itself can repel the bacteria so it doesn’t get germs stuck on it. Normal steel tends to collect pathogens and microorganisms, but the coated steel is overcoming that issue. These are the main benefits of this technology.”

The coating method for galvanized steel exhibits superhydrophobicity and antifouling capabilities, effectively inhibiting the attachment of fungi, bacteria and mud. This research was published in the Journal of Food Engineering.

“This will have an impact because the people that consume fruits and vegetables trust that they’re buying something safe, and it will not affect their health,” Cisneros-Zevallos said. “Right now, the industry does their best to reduce those risks, but you will hear about outbreaks of these contaminations and people getting sick. There are sometimes reported deaths because of these events.”

During the coating process, the material properties, structural properties and mechanical strength of steel do not change. Only the very top layer of the steel is coated, since that is where food comes in contact with the surface, Akbulut said.

Research shows that this coating decreases bacterial strains over seven days and reduces adherence to Aspergillus, a foodborne fungi.

This coating technology can potentially be used on grain storage silos, along with other food-related storage units and containers, according to the article. This is a significant boon to the multidisciplinary fields of food engineering, safety and processing.

The galvanized steel coating will also benefit agricultural farmland, according to Akbulut.

“Many of the food-produced commodities come to the industrial setting in some sort of soil, debris or mud,” Akbulut said. “So, even if the produce is washed, these commodities can cause contamination. With this technology, we are reducing mud-related contamination.”

With the information gathered from the research, Cisneros-Zevallos said they could eventually adapt and utilize these technologies to revolutionize fewer outbreaks and positively impact the food industry.

“Our goal is to make the industry adopt this,” Cisneros-Zevallos said. “Processors will benefit in the sense that they will be handling something that they can deliver in a trustful way to consumers, and consumers will benefit because they will have something that will be safe for them.”

From the field to the consumer, contamination can be minimized by using these kinds of surfaces and avoiding cross-contamination, as explained by Cisneros-Zevallos.

“With this research, we are ensuring that the technological developments from other fields are being pursued and implemented in agriculture,” Cisneros-Zevallos said. “The agricultural field is catching up with other technologies. This coating directly impacts our daily life and the food we’re trying to make safer.”

Contributors to the research include doctoral students Wentao Zhou, Shuhao Liu, and William DeFlorio from the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering, along with Professor Jun Kyun Oh and doctoral students Sang Ha Song and Hayoung Choi in the Department of Polymer Science and Engineering, Dankook University.

A Food Manufacturing Technologies Program grant and Specialty Crop Research Initiative grant from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture supported this work.

This work is also partially supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea grant funded by the Korean government. The Department of Polymer Science and Engineering was supported through the Research-Focused Department Promotion & Interdisciplinary Convergence Research Project as a part of the University Innovation Support Program for Dankook University in 2022.

Divergent thinking is characterized by the ability to generate a unique solution to a question that does not have one expected solution, such as “What is the best way to avoid talking about politics with my parents?” In the study, GPT-4 provided more original and elaborate answers than the human participants.

The study, “The current state of artificial intelligence generative language models is more creative than humans on divergent thinking tasks,” was published in Scientific Reports and authored by U of A Ph.D. students in psychological science Kent F. Hubert and Kim N. Awa, as well as Darya L. Zabelina, an assistant professor of psychological science at the U of A and director of the Mechanisms of Creative Cognition and Attention Lab.

The three tests utilized were the Alternative Use Task, which asks participants to come up with creative uses for everyday objects like a rope or a fork; the Consequences Task, which invites participants to imagine possible outcomes of hypothetical situations, like “what if humans no longer needed sleep?”; and the Divergent Associations Task, which asks participants to generate 10 nouns that are as semantically distant as possible. For instance, there is not much semantic distance between “dog” and “cat” while there is a great deal between words like “cat” and “ontology.”

Answers were evaluated for the number of responses, length of response and semantic difference between words. Ultimately, the authors found that “Overall, GPT-4 was more original and elaborate than humans on each of the divergent thinking tasks, even when controlling for fluency of responses. In other words, GPT-4 demonstrated higher creative potential across an entire battery of divergent thinking tasks.”

This finding does come with some caveats. The authors state, “It is important to note that the measures used in this study are all measures of creative potential, but the involvement in creative activities or achievements are another aspect of measuring a person’s creativity.” The purpose of the study was to examine human-level creative potential, not necessarily people who may have established creative credentials.

Hubert and Awa further note that “AI, unlike humans, does not have agency” and is “dependent on the assistance of a human user. Therefore, the creative potential of AI is in a constant state of stagnation unless prompted.”

Also, the researchers did not evaluate the appropriateness of GPT-4 responses. So while the AI may have provided more responses and more original responses, human participants may have felt they were constrained by their responses needing to be grounded in the real world.

Awa also acknowledged that the human motivation to write elaborate answers may not have been high, and said there are additional questions about “how do you operationalize creativity? Can we really say that using these tests for humans is generalizable to different people? Is it assessing a broad array of creative thinking? So I think it has us critically examining what are the most popular measures of divergent thinking.”

Whether the tests are perfect measures of human creative potential is not really the point. The point is that large language models are rapidly progressing and outperforming humans in ways they have not before. Whether they are a threat to replace human creativity remains to be seen. For now, the authors continue to see “Moving forward, future possibilities of AI acting as a tool of inspiration, as an aid in a person’s creative process or to overcome fixedness is promising.”

The Framingham Heart Study is an ongoing observational study first initiated in 1948 that currently spans three generations.

The Columbia analysis is the first to connect educational mobility with pace of biological aging and mortality. “We’ve known for a long time that people who have higher levels of education tend to live longer lives. But there are a bunch of challenges in figuring out how that happens and, critically, whether interventions to promote educational attainment will contribute to healthy longevity,” said Daniel Belsky, PhD, associate professor of Epidemiology at Columbia Mailman School and the Aging Center and senior author of the paper.

To measure pace of aging, the researchers applied an algorithm known as the DunedinPACE epigenetic clock to genomic data collected by the Framingham Heart Study. The latest findings showed that, according to the yardstick of the DunedinPACE epigenetic clock, two years of additional schooling translated to a two- to three percent slower pace of aging. This slowing in the pace of aging corresponds to a roughly 10 percent reduction in risk of mortality in the Framingham Heart Study, according to previous research by Belsky on the association of DunedinPACE with risk of death.

DunedinPACE was developed by the Columbia researchers and colleagues and reported in January 2022. Based on an analysis of chemical tags on the DNA contained in white blood cells, or DNA methylation marks, DunedinPACE is named after the Dunedin Study birth cohort used to develop it. DunedinPACE (stands for Pace of Aging Computed from the Epigenome), is measured from a blood test and functions like a speedometer for the aging process, measuring how fast or slow a person’s body is changing as they grow older.

Biological aging refers to the accumulation of molecular changes that progressively undermine the integrity and resilience capacity of our cells, tissues and organs as we grow older.

The Columbia researchers used data from 14,106 Framingham Heart Study spanning three generations to link children’s educational attainment data with that of their parents. They then used data from a subset of participants who provided blood samples during data collection to calculate the pace of biological aging using the DunedinPACE epigenetic clock. In primary analysis, the researchers tested associations between educational mobility, aging, and mortality in a subset of 3,101 participants for whom educational mobility and pace of aging measures could be calculated.

For 2,437 participants with a sibling, the researchers also tested whether differences in educational attainment between siblings was associated with a difference in the pace of aging.

“A key confound in studies like these is that people with different levels of education tend to come from families with different educational backgrounds and different levels of other resources,” explained Gloria Graf, a PhD candidate in the Department of Epidemiology supervised by Belsky, and first author of the study. “To address these confounds, we focused on educational mobility, how much more (or less) education a person completed relative to their parents, and sibling differences in educational attainment — how much more (or less) education a person completed relative to their siblings. These study designs control for differences between families and allow us to isolate the effects of education.”

By combining these study designs with the new DunedinPACE epigenetic clock, the researchers were able to test how education affects the pace of aging. Then, by linking the education and pace of aging data with longitudinal records of how long participants lived, the team was able to determine if a slower pace of aging accounted for increased longevity in people with more education.

“Our findings support the hypothesis that interventions to promote educational attainment will slow the pace of biological aging and promote longevity,” noted Graf. “Ultimately, experimental evidence is needed to confirm our findings,” added Belsky. “Epigenetic clocks like DunedinPace have potential to enhance such experimental studies by providing an outcome that can reflect impacts of education on healthy aging well before the onset of disease and disability in later life.”

“We found that upward educational mobility was associated both with a slower pace of aging and decreased risk of death,” said Graf. “In fact, up to half of the educational gradient in mortality we observed was explained by healthier aging trajectories among better-educated participants.” This pattern of association was similar across generations and held within family sibling comparisons: siblings with higher educational mobility tended to have a slower pace of aging as compared with their less educated siblings.

Co-authors are Calen Ryan, Meeraj Kothari, and Alison Aiello, Columbia Mailman School of Public Health and Butler Columbia Aging Center; Peter Muennig, Columbia Mailman School of Public Health; Terrie Moffitt, Avshalom Caspi, and Karen Sugden, Duke University; and Hexuan Liu, University of Cincinnati.

The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health, grants R01AG073402, R01AG073207, and R21AG078627.