Scientists from the University of California, Davis, found that wand — although it isn’t magic, and it only looks like a wand. It’s an ultrasound transducer, and it can be used to quickly and noninvasively detect when abalone are ready to spawn, according to a study published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.

The technique is expected to help abalone farmers and captive breeding managers produce more abalone, with minimal stress to the animal.

Increasing abalone welfare

Abalone suction onto surfaces and typically have to be pried off for gonad inspection before spawning. For these animals — particularly endangered abalone — the less they are handled, the less opportunity for stress or physical harm.

“There are not a lot of animal welfare methods applied to invertebrate animals, let alone for aquatic species,” said corresponding author Jackson Gross, an assistant professor of Cooperative Extension in Aquaculture with the UC Davis Department of Animal Science. “Here’s a way to increase the welfare of an abalone without bringing added stress to them.”

The United States Navy’s Pacific Fleet funded the research as part of its efforts to conserve federally endangered black abalone and find better ways to assess their reproductive health. Because of black abalones’ low numbers and high vulnerability, the authors used closely related farmed red abalone to test the effectiveness of ultrasounds on abalone.

Gross had used the technique for gonad assessments on sturgeon and catfish, but it had never been tested for sea snails until this study. When Gross saw a video of a veterinarian in Scotland conducting an ultrasound on a large land snail, he felt certain it would work for abalone.

Testing the tech

With Gross’ background, the extensive knowledge of the white abalone captive breeding program at the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory, and first author Sara Boles’ experience studying red abalone, the authors tested the method on 12 farm-raised red abalone and about 100 red abalone raised at Bodega Marine Lab. They monitored the lab-raised abalone for seven weeks to detect seasonal changes in their gonad size.

They found that ultrasounds could differentiate reproductive tissues from digestive tissues. They were then able to create a gonad index score ranging from 1 to 5 that indicates the abalones’ readiness to reproduce. Abalone measuring in the 3 to 5 range could be ideal candidates for spawning. They also found the technology was sensitive enough to detect changes both before and after spawning.

“This is very helpful for broodstock managers when trying to select individuals for a spawning season, whether for production aquaculture or conservation,” said Boles, a postdoctoral researcher with the UC Davis Coastal and Marine Sciences Institute at the Bodega Marine Laboratory.

How to give abalone an ultrasound

So how do you ultrasound an abalone? It’s fairly straightforward.

You submerge the abalone underwater in its tank and place the ultrasound transducer on the outside of the tank by the abalone’s foot. The sound passes through the tank and transmits the image.

Routine assessments using ultrasounds can be conducted without touching the animal at all. Abalone do still have to be handled for spawning events, but ultrasounds can minimize the handling involved.

Abalone are an ecologically and culturally important keystone species for California’s coastal ecosystem. They face multiple, often intertwining threats — from warming ocean temperatures and disease to crashing kelp forests and habitat degradation.

“We’re excited to see how much faster we can use this technology to assess the health of these animals, especially in a world where climate change is making an impact,” Gross said.

The study’s co-authors include Isabelle Neylan and Laura Rogers-Bennett of UC Davis.

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of California – Davis. Original written by Kat Kerlin. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

In bursts that last seconds to minutes, earthquakes have moved the region’s surface meters at a time. But researchers have never been able to reconcile the quick release of the Earth’s stress and the bending of the Earth’s crust over years with the formation of mountain ranges over millions of years. Now, by combining geological, geophysical, geochemical and satellite data, geologists have created a 3D tectonic model that resolves these timescales.

The research, which appears in Science Advances Feb. 25, reveals that more mountain building happens in the period between large earthquakes along the San Andreas Fault, rather than during the quakes themselves. The findings may be used to improve local seismic hazard maps.

“This project focused on linking ground motions associated with earthquakes with the uplift of mountain ranges over millions of years to paint a full picture of what the hazard might actually look like in the Bay Area,” said lead study author Curtis Baden, a PhD student in geological sciences at Stanford University’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth).

Bending and breaking

Geologists estimate the Santa Cruz Mountains started to uplift from sea level about four million years ago, forming as the result of compression around a bend in the San Andreas fault. The fault marks the boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate, which shift past each other horizontally in a strike-slip motion.

Measurements of deformation — changes in the shapes of the rocks — have shown that Earth’s surface warps and stretches around the San Andreas fault during and in between earthquakes, and behaves much like an elastic band over seconds, years and even decades. But that classic approach cannot align with geologic observational data because it doesn’t allow the rocks to yield or break from the stress of the warping and stretching, as they eventually would in nature — an effect that has been observed in Earth’s mountain ranges.

“If you try to treat the Earth like an elastic band and drive it forward too far, you’re going to exceed its strength and it’s not going to behave like an elastic anymore — it’s going to start to yield, it’s going to start to break,” said senior study author George Hilley, a professor of geological sciences at Stanford Earth. “That effect of breaking is common to almost every plate boundary, but it’s seldom addressed in a consistent way that allows you to get from earthquakes to the long-term effects.”

By simply allowing the rocks to break in their model, the study authors have illuminated how earthquake-related ground motions and ground motions in between earthquakes build mountains over millions of years. The results were surprising: While the geosciences community conceives of earthquakes as the primary drivers of mountain-building processes, the simulation showed most uplift has occurred in the period between earthquakes.

“The conventional wisdom is that permanent uplift of the rock actually happens as the result of the immense force of the earthquake,” Hilley said. “This argues that the earthquake itself is actually relieving the stress that is built up, to some degree.”

A neighborhood laboratory

Because the Santa Cruz Mountains neighbor several research institutions, including Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley, and the United States Geological Survey (USGS), scientists have gathered an immense amount of information about the mountain range over the course of more than 100 years.

Efforts to collect geological and geophysical data were especially spurred by major recent events like the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, but the formation of the Santa Cruz Mountains likely spanned hundreds of thousands of smaller earthquakes over millions of years, according to the researchers.

The study authors compiled the existing suite of observations, and also collected new geochemical data by measuring Helium gas trapped within crystals contained in rocks of the mountains to estimate how fast these rocks are coming to the surface from thousands of feet below. They then compared these datasets with model predictions to identify how earthquakes relate to uplift and erosion of the mountain range. The process took years of specifying material properties to reflect the complexity that nature requires.

Seismic implications

The researchers ran their simulation from when the Santa Cruz Mountains started to uplift four million years ago until present day to understand how the evolution of topography near the San Andreas fault through time influences recent and potential future earthquakes.

“Currently, seismic hazard assessments in the San Francisco Bay area are largely based on the timing of earthquakes spanning the last few hundred years and recent crustal motions,” Baden said. “This work shows that careful geologic studies, which measure mountain-building processes over much longer timescales than individual earthquakes, can also inform these assessments.”

The scientists are currently working on a companion paper detailing how hazard risk maps could be improved using this new model.

“We now have a way forward in terms of actually having a viable set of mechanisms for explaining the differences between estimates at different time scales,” Hilley said. “The more we can get everything to fit together, the more defensible our hazard assessments can be.”

Study co-authors include David Shuster and Roland Bürgmann of UC Berkeley; Felipe Aron of the Research Center for Integrated Disaster Risk Management (CIGIDEN) and Pontificia Universidad Cato?lica de Chile; and Julie Fosdick of the University of Connecticut. Aron and Fosdick were affiliated with Stanford when they conducted research for the study.

This study was supported by NSF Career Grant EAR-TECT-1108 105581, Fondo de Financiamiento de Centros de Investigación en Áreas Prioritarias ANID/FONDAP/15110017-Chile (CIGIDEN) and the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation.

Now a new study has shown that it is possible to test the effectiveness of interventions designed to foster safer behaviour in order to slow the spread of a virus.

The study, led by the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany, with collaborators at the University of Plymouth, UK, and the IESE Business School, Spain, found that the most effective approach was a message that directly appealed to the public, contained moral reason, and was clear and consistent.

The research, published in Science Advances, asked seven groups of 100 people each in a cross section of the US population to take part in games designed to emulate virus transmission.

How did the game work?

The game was presented in a neutral framing, replacing terms associated with pandemics by references to neutral colours. Blue players represented healthy individuals, and purple players infected individuals.

All 100 players in each game started as blue; then eight randomly selected players were switched to purple (this represents the initial outbreak).

In each of 25 rounds, players decided between two actions: action G offering low risk and low reward (8 points) and action H offering high risk and high reward (40 points). All players were randomly paired. Blue paired with purple players may switch to purple; the transmission probability was between 0.05 and 0.25 and was determined by the riskiness of the pair’s chosen actions.

Finally, scores summed across all rounds were translated into payoffs for blue players only, at a rate of £1 per 200 points — so if they took more risks and managed to stay blue, they got a higher reward.

However, if they got ‘infected’ and turned purple, they lost everything.

What was being tested?

The research tested the effectiveness of different types of interventions in preventing risk-taking behaviour.

The scenario was purposely chosen to be separate from COVID-19 to ensure that participants were at the same level of experience. The interventions implemented principles of several methods used by countries and media outlets worldwide, and found that people reduced their risk-taking behaviour as follows:

• The most effective method was a message with the simple imperative (ie giving an instruction) with a moral explanation: “Choose action G to protect your and other players’ bonus money.” On average, participants also earned the highest amount of money in this condition.
• Second most effective were illustrations of the spreading consequences of early transmission.
• Third most effective was a simulator tool that allowed participants to observe the outcome of simulated games with different levels of risk-taking behaviour.
• Not at all effective was sharing (purple) case rate numbers: Based on the results, people did not anticipate exponential growth in transmissions and under-reacted to initial increases.
• Worse still was the communication of ‘descriptive norms’ describing other participants’ behaviour (eg 60% of participants chose the safer option) — this actually led to a slight increase in risk-taking behaviour.

Lead study author Dr Jan Woike, Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Plymouth, said: “Nonpharmaceutical interventions — such as wearing masks, maintaining physical distance, and reducing contacts — require large-scale behaviour change, which depends on individual compliance and cooperation. The behavioural sciences offer cognitive and communicative tools to help, but the effectiveness of the methods to increase compliance has rarely been tested in controlled scenarios that still reflect the dynamics of infectious outbreaks.

“What’s so important about this framework is that it allows to test the effectiveness of an intervention before implementing it in a real pandemic with health consequences for participants.

“It was interesting to note that the most effective intervention was not the one that participants liked the most. Clear and consistent messaging worked best in reducing risk-taking behaviours.

“We don’t know if and when the next pandemic, or even the next concerning variant in this pandemic, may arrive, but policy-makers need to know which interventions are most likely to promote socially advantageous behaviour, and this is a step to making that possible.”

The study, published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research and funded by theBritish Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, found that almost one in five people with ADHD exhibited clinically significant levels of hoarding, indicating there could be a hidden population of adults struggling with hoarding and its consequences.

Hoarding Disorder is a recognised condition that involves excessive accumulation, difficulties discarding and excessive clutter. The disorder can lead to distress or difficulties in everyday life and can contribute to depression and anxiety.

Previous research into Hoarding Disorder has mainly focused on older females who self-identify as hoarders and have sought help later in life. This new study, led by Dr Sharon Morein of Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), recruited 88 participants from an adult ADHD clinic run by the Cambridge and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust.

The study found that 19% of this ADHD group displayed clinically significant hoarding symptoms, were on average in their 30s, and there was an equal gender split. Amongst the remaining 81%, the researchers found greater hoarding severity, but not to a degree that significantly impaired their lives, compared to the study’s control group.

The researchers asked the same questions, about ADHD symptoms and impulsivity, levels of hoarding and clutter, obsessive compulsive severity, perfectionism, depression and anxiety, and everyday function, on a closely-matched group of 90 adults from the general population, without an ADHD diagnosis, and found only 2% of this control group exhibited clinically significant hoarding symptoms.

They then replicated this with a larger online sample of 220 UK adults to see if similar patterns were found, and similarly only 3% of this group exhibited symptoms.

Dr Morein, Associate Professor in Psychology at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), said: “Hoarding Disorder is much more than simply collecting too many possessions. People with diagnosed Hoarding Disorder have filled their living areas with so many items and clutter that it impacts their day-to-day functioning leading to a poorer quality of life, anxiety, and depression.

“Overall, we found that people who had been diagnosed with ADHD had a higher likelihood of also having hoarding symptoms. This is important because it demonstrates that hoarding doesn’t just affect people later in life, who are typically the focus of much of the research so far into Hoarding Disorder.

“Our findings also indicate that Hoarding Disorder should be routinely assessed in individuals with ADHD, as they do not typically disclose associated difficulties despite these potentially impairing their everyday lives. Likewise, it is possible that many people who are currently being treated for Hoarding Disorder might also have undiagnosed ADHD.

“Greater awareness amongst clinicians and people with ADHD about the link between ADHD and hoarding could also lead to more effective long-term management, as hoarding often gradually worsens with time.”

Story Source:

Materials provided by Anglia Ruskin University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have developed an entirely new type of catalyst material, called a metal hydroxide-organic framework (MHOF), which is made of inexpensive and abundant components. The family of materials allows engineers to precisely tune the catalyst’s structure and composition to the needs of a particular chemical process, and it can then match or exceed the performance of conventional, more expensive catalysts.

The findings are described in the journal Nature Materials, in a paper by MIT postdoc Shuai Yuan, graduate student Jiayu Peng, Professor Yang Shao-Horn, Professor Yuriy Román-Leshkov, and nine others.

Oxygen evolution reactions are one of the reactions common to the electrochemical production of fuels, chemicals, and materials. These processes include the generation of hydrogen as a byproduct of the oxygen evolution, which can be used directly as a fuel or undergo chemical reactions to produce other transportation fuels; the manufacture of ammonia, for use as a fertilizer or chemical feedstock; and carbon dioxide reduction in order to control emissions.

But without help, “These reactions are sluggish,” Shao-Horn says. “For a reaction with slow kinetics, you have to sacrifice voltage or energy to promote the reaction rate.” Because of the extra energy input required, “The overall efficiency is low. So that’s why people use catalysts,” she says, as these materials naturally promote reactions by lowering energy input.

But until now, these catalysts “Aare all relying on expensive materials or late transition metals that are very scarce, for example iridium oxide, and there has been a big effort in the community to find alternatives based on Earth-abundant materials that have the same performance in terms of activity and stability,” Román-Leshkov says. The team says they have found materials that provide exactly that combination of characteristics.

Other teams have explored the use of metal hydroxides, such as nickel-iron hydroxides, Román-Leshkov says. But such materials have been difficult to tailor to the requirements of specific applications. Now, though, “The reason our work is quite exciting and quite relevant is that we’ve found a way of tailoring the properties by nanostructuring these metal hydroxides in a unique way.”

The team borrowed from research that has been done on a related class of compounds known as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), which are a kind of crystalline structure made of metal oxide nodes linked together with organic linker molecules. By replacing the metal oxide in such materials with certain metal hydroxides, the team found, it became possible to create precisely tunable materials that also had the necessary stability to be potentially useful as catalysts.

“You put these chains of these organic linkers next to each other, and they actually direct the formation of metal hydroxide sheets that are interconnected with these organic linkers, which are then stacked, and have a higher stability,” Román-Leshkov says. This has multiple benefits, he says, by allowing a precise control over the nanostructured patterning, allowing precise control of the electronic properties of the metal, and also providing greater stability, enabling them to stand up to long periods of use.

In testing such materials, the researchers found the catalysts’ performance to be “surprising,” Shao-Horn says. “It is comparable to that of the state-of-the-art oxide materials catalyzing for the oxygen evolution reaction.”

Being composed largely of nickel and iron, these materials should be at least 100 times cheaper than existing catalysts, they say, although the team has not yet done a full economic analysis.

This family of materials “really offers a new space to tune the active sites for catalyzing water splitting to produce hydrogen with reduced energy input,” Shao-Horn says, to meet the exact needs of any given chemical process where such catalysts are needed.

The materials can provide “five times greater tunability” than existing nickel-based catalysts, Peng says, simply by substituting different metals in place of nickel in the compound. “This would potentially offer many relevant avenues for future discoveries.” The materials can also be produced in extremely thin sheets, which could then be coated onto another material, further reducing the material costs of such systems.

So far, the materials have been tested in small-scale laboratory test devices, and the team is now addressing the issues of trying to scale up the process to commercially relevant scales, which could still take a few years. But the idea has great potential, Shao-Horn says, to help catalyze the production of clean, emissions-free hydrogen fuel, so that “we can bring down the cost of hydrogen from this process while not being constrained by the availability of precious metals. This is important, because we need hydrogen production technologies that can scale.”

The research team included others at MIT, Stockholm University in Sweden, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and Institute of Ion Beam Physics and Materials Research in Dresden, Germany. The work was supported by the Toyota Research Institute.