In fact, ponds lose more carbon via gas than they store in the muck, a new University of Florida study found.

“That finding means some ponds are doing us an ecosystem ‘disservice,'” said Mary Lusk, a UF/IFAS assistant professor of soil and water sciences. “Globally, we expect that as urbanization continues, there will be more and more of these small human-made ponds in urban landscapes.”

This research will inform scientists’ attempts to estimate how much carbon is entering the atmosphere from these ponds on a regional basis, said Lusk, a faculty member at the UF/IFAS Gulf Coast Research and Education Center.

“Then, once people start to understand that better, we hope they will take stormwater ponds into account for policies related to carbon control,” she said. “Stormwater ponds are everywhere in Florida. But they are understudied in terms of how they are impacting local ecosystems. Because they are human-made parts of the landscape, they sort of get overlooked, and people might assume they’re not very important ecologically.”

The sheer number of ponds compelled Lusk to study if they could have larger environmental effects than people think. She originally wanted to focus on nitrogen and phosphorus in ponds, but one of her graduate students, Audrey Goeckner, wanted to study carbon.

“When I learned that I had the chance to work in stormwater ponds, similar to what I had grown up in around in my neighborhood, I immediately asked myself, well what about these little urban ponds? How do they compare to other aquatic ecosystems?” asked Goeckner, now a Ph.D. student in soil and water sciences on the main UF/IFAS campus in Gainesville. “Turns out that despite their small size,

they can rapidly store and process carbon, which adds up when you consider how many of them exist in developed landscapes and how many continue to be built.”

For the study, done as part of her master’s thesis at GCREC, Goeckner designed a way to measure the amount of carbon leaving ponds. Although Goeckner studied ponds in Manatee County, her findings hold implications for pond carbon emissions globally.

Goeckner took two canoes (attached to each other) into the ponds. She and a lab technician each sat in one canoe to balance the weight. Goeckner then collected muck from the bottom of the ponds and measured the depth of muck above a sandy layer of sediment, indicating when the pond was constructed and the amount of organic carbon stored in it.

That’s how Goeckner found the amount of carbon buried in the ponds.

Secondly, she modified a chamber that is normally used to measure greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide and methane — from soil. Instead, Goeckner used the chamber to measure these gases from the surface of the ponds.

She found the quantity of these gases that escapes from the ponds each year, and then compared carbon stored in the pond muck vs. carbon lost via gaseous loss. As a result, scientists now know that ponds give off more carbon than they store and that the amount lost changes over the lifetime of a pond.

As Florida continues to grow, it’s going to become more urbanized. With new development often comes new stormwater ponds, which are not as good at storing carbon as older ones, Lusk said.

As ponds age, their sediment and biogeochemical properties may promote the amount of carbon stored, rather than emitted as a gas, Goeckner said. That translates to better storage efficiency of organic carbon that enters the water.

“Our results suggest that when they’re new, they emit large proportions of carbon from the landscape and potentially increase storage over time,” Lusk said. “This means the older ponds are doing less of an ecosystem disservice to us than the younger ponds. But if you think about the rate of new housing development in Florida, and how fast new stormwater ponds are being built in all that new development, it means we will always have a fresh new batch of young ponds that are just pumping carbon out to the atmosphere.”

That’s why a team of researchers, including one at the University of Missouri, utilized a motion-sensor video game, Recovery Rapids, to allow patients recovering from a stroke to improve their motor skills and affected arm movements at home while checking in periodically with a therapist via telehealth.

The researchers found the game-based therapy led to improved outcomes similar to a highly regarded form of in-person therapy, known as constraint-induced therapy, while only requiring one-fifth of the therapist hours. This approach saves time and money while increasing convenience and safety as telehealth has boomed in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“As an occupational therapist, I have seen patients from rural areas drive more than an hour to come to an in-person clinic three to four days a week, where the rehab is very intensive, taking three to four hours per session, and the therapist must be there the whole time,” said Rachel Proffitt, assistant professor in the MU School of Health Professions. “With this new at-home gaming approach, we are cutting costs for the patient and reducing time for the therapist while still improving convenience and overall health outcomes, so it’s a win-win. By saving time for the therapists, we can also now serve more patients and make a broader impact on our communities.”

Traditional rehab home exercises tend to be very repetitive and monotonous, and patients rarely adhere to them. The Recovery Rapids game helps patients look forward to rehabilitation by completing various challenges in a fun, interactive environment, and the researchers found that the patients adhered well to their prescribed exercises.

“The patient is virtually placed in a kayak, and as they go down the river, they perform arm motions simulating paddling, rowing, scooping up trash, swaying from side to side to steer, and reaching overhead to clear out spider webs and bats, so it’s making the exercises fun,” said Rachel Proffitt, assistant professor in the MU School of Health Professions. “As they progress, the challenges get harder, and we conduct check-ins with the participants via telehealth to adjust goals, provide feedback and discuss the daily activities they want to resume as they improve.”

Nearly 800,000 Americans have a stroke each year according to the CDC, and two-thirds of stroke survivors report they cannot use their affected limbs to do normal daily activities, including making a cup of coffee, cooking a meal or playing with one’s grandchildren.

“I am passionate about helping patients get back to all the activities they love to do in their daily life,” Proffitt said. “Anything we can do as therapists to help in a creative way while saving time and money is the ultimate goal.”

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Materials provided by University of Missouri-Columbia. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

A team led by Roya Zandi, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Riverside, has developed a theory and performed a series of simulations that may help explain how a virus finds its native genome and how capsids form around it and not around other RNAs in the cell.

“A better understanding of how capsids form is of vital importance to material scientists and a crucial step in the design of engineered nano-shells that could serve as vehicles for delivering drugs to specific targets in the body,” Zandi said.

The researchers’ work, published in ACS Nano, shows that the interplay of the mechanical properties of proteins, the size of the genome, and the strength of the interaction between the genome and capsid proteins can significantly modify the symmetry, structure, and stability of the capsid.

When a virus enters a cell, the capsid breaks open to release the genome, which then uses the cell’s reproductive machinery to replicate. The newly formed genomes begin to acquire their capsids, a process mainly driven by the attractive electrostatic interaction between the positive charges on capsid proteins and the negative charges on the genomes. But how the virus selects and packages its native RNA inside the crowded environment of a host cell cytoplasm in the presence of many nonviral RNA and other polymers has remained a mystery.

The simulations run by Zandi’s team show that capsid proteins could, in theory, pick any nonviral genome to encapsulate. But the viral genome, she said, is best suited for capsid proteins to form a shell around due to an interplay of energies at the molecular level.

“The stress distribution of the capsid proteins is lower when the capsids encapsulate their own genome, the one for which they were coded,” Zandi said. “The energy of the whole system is lower. While smaller nonviral RNAs are available in the cell in plenty, the capsid proteins are inclined toward forming a shell around a viral RNA because the resulting soccer ball-like shell has a lower stress distribution.”

Zandi said the work lays out a systematic comparison of theory and experiments, which will allow a better understanding of the role of RNA in the capsid assembly pathway, stability, and structure.

“A deeper understanding of the role of the genome in virus assembly mechanisms could lead to design principles for alternative antivirals,” she said.

The new work is an early step in understanding viral assembly. The process is not well understood because viruses measure in nanometers and the assembly occurs in milliseconds.

“Theoretical work and simulations are necessary to understand how a virus grows,” Zandi said.

Zandi was joined in the research by graduate student Sanaz Panahandeh at UCR; Siyu Li at Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory in China; and Bogdan Dragnea at Indiana University, Bloomington. Li is a former graduate student at UCR.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Story Source:

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

To highlight the common view that men aren’t deemed sexist when they’re rude to both men and women, researchers asked subjects to share their perceptions of tweets from former President Donald Trump lambasting men and women, fictitious stories of managers’ treatment of male and female employees, and surveys of sexist behavior. 

According to the study, being a jerk to men creates “an illusion of impartiality, giving sexist perpetrators plausible deniability.” This can lead people to falsely conclude that gender bias doesn’t underlie rude behavior, making them less likely to recognize sexism. 

“We found that a man does not seem sexist if he treats everyone — both men and women — poorly,” said Peter Belmi, associate professor of leadership and organizational behavior at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business and lead author of the study. “This is problematic because sexism and rudeness are not mutually exclusive. Men who are sexist can be — and often are — rude toward other men.”

The research shows that gender blindness can be exploited to refute accusations of sexism, he added. For example, perpetrators may highlight instances in which they’ve been rude to men as evidence that they aren’t sexist. 

A popular understanding of sexism is discrimination toward women based solely on their sex. Under this definition, a man would not be sexist if he were a jerk to both sexes. The researchers defined sexism more broadly, however, as attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors that reflect, foster, or promote negative or pejorative stereotypes about women.

“Men may believe that rather than ‘supporting women,’ an alternative solution to creating gender parity is to ‘treat everyone horribly,'” Belmi added. 

He emphasized that previous research has focused on gender blindness’s benefit in fostering workplace gender diversity and inclusion. The current study highlights the shortcomings of this ideology. 

The researchers conducted a series of studies, using online participants and students from professional schools, to determine whether sexism is tougher to recognize when men express rudeness to other men as well as women. 

A two-part survey of about 1,100 employed men measured their self-reported rudeness toward male and female colleagues at work and their attitudes and beliefs about women. 

Another study asked participants to read tweets written by Trump during his presidency that contained sexist comments about women; some participants also read tweets that berated men. 

Next, the researchers asked participants to read a series of stories, some about managers making sexist comments to female workers and others about managers speaking rudely to male subordinates, too. Participants were also asked to identify whether those managers needed gender-bias and anger-management training. 

In each experiment, participants failed to recognize sexism when the perpetrator was rude or berating to men. However, they identified sexist behavior when only women were treated poorly. In other words, “equal-opportunity jerks” were viewed as gender blind. Also, the more participants perceived an offender being a jerk to other men, the more they diminished the need for gender-bias training. 

“When a sexist manager is rude toward men, it may appear as though he is not sexist,” Belmi said. “Thus, women victimized by his behavior will have a more difficult time proving that he is sexist. Rudeness can therefore protect perpetrators.”

The findings show that rudeness across genders creates a barrier to addressing sexism. The researchers suggested that future studies should examine whether rudeness can conceal other types of discrimination — for example, by creating illusions of colorblindness or authenticity.

“Blatant, unambiguous, and obvious forms of sexist conduct continue to exist,” Belmi said. “Our findings suggest that one reason for their persistence is that observers may not recognize that everyday acts of rudeness can serve as a convenient mask for bias against women.”