By analyzing the dynamics of 12 back-to-back explosions that happened in 2018, researchers describe a new type of volcanic eruption mechanism. The explosions were driven by sudden pressure increases as the ground collapsed, which blasted plumes of rock fragments and hot gas into the air, much like a classic stomp-rocket toy.

Researchers from the University of Oregon, United States Geological Survey and China’s Sichuan University report their findings in a paper published May 27 in Nature Geoscience.

The particular string of explosions at the summit of Kīlauea was part of a sequence of events that included lava flows erupting from lower on the flank of the volcano. Those lava flows destroyed thousands of homes and displaced residents on the Island of Hawai’i for months.

Understanding exactly what happened in past volcanic eruptions, colloquially called “hindcasting,” allows volcanologists to make better forecasts about future eruptions and give more accurate warnings to people in an eruption’s path.

For the most part, explosive volcanic eruptions are either primarily driven by rising magma, vaporized groundwater, or some combination of the two, according to Josh Crozier, who did this research as a doctoral student at the UO. But these eruptions didn’t quite fit the mold.

“These eruptions are quite interesting in that they don’t really seem to involve either of those,” Crozier said. “The eruptive material contained very little that looked like fresh magma that was blasted out, but there’s no evidence for significant groundwater being involved, either.”

The Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, part of the U.S. Geological Survey, keeps close tabs on Kīlauea. The volcano is covered with scientific instruments, from ground sensors that measure the shaking of the earth to tools that analyze the gases released from the volcano.

“A cool thing about these eruptions is that there were a bunch of them in sequence that were remarkably similar; that’s relatively unusual,” said Leif Karlstrom, a volcanologist at the UO. “Typically, volcanic eruptions don’t happen with as much regularity.”

So the team had more data than usual to work with, and they could dig deeper into the specific dynamics of the eruptions.

Putting all that data into a variety of atmospheric and subsurface models, the scientists pieced together a new story about what happened on Kīlauea during the string of events in 2018.

Before each explosion at the summit, magma was slowly draining from an underground reservoir. (This magma was feeding lava flows 40 kilometers away, on the eastern flank of the volcano.) As the reservoir depleted, the ground above it — the crater within the caldera at the volcano’s summit — suddenly collapsed.

That quickly increased the pressure in the reservoir. And because there was a pocket of accumulated magmatic gas sitting at the top of this reservoir, the pressure increase squeezed the magmatic gas and bits of rubble through a conduit and blasted them out of a vent in Kīlauea’s crater.

The researchers compare the eruption dynamic to a stomp-rocket toy, where stepping on an air bag connected to a hose launches a projectile into the air.

“The ‘stomp’ is this whole kilometer-thick chunk of rock dropping down, pressurizing the pocket, and then forcing material directly up,” Crozier said. And the ‘rocket’ is, of course, the gas and rocks erupting from the volcano.

Caldera collapse is fairly common, Crozier notes. So while this is the first time scientists have specifically spelled out this specific stomp-rocket mechanism, it’s probably not the only time it’s occurred.

The study was able to link geophysical observations to the properties of the volcanic plume in the atmosphere.

“This link is very rare,” said Joe Dufek, a volcanologist at the UO. “It points to new ways for us to observe eruptions and to combine sensor measurements with computer simulations to better assess hazards from eruptions.”

The fact that this was a series of smaller eruptions may have made it easier to see the underlying mechanism, Dufek said. Other complex processes weren’t overshadowing the stomp-rocket component.

But that’s not to say that Kīlauea is simple. A typical textbook drawing of a volcano shows magma moving upwards through chambers at different depths. But it’s rarely that straightforward, and a volcano like Kīlauea, decked out in scientific instruments, provides an opportunity to dig into the details.

“This is an example, and there’s an increasing number of these, where the pathways of magma ascent are quite geometrically complex,” Karlstrom said. “It gives us a much more nuanced picture of what volcanic plumbing systems look like.”

“If you frame it as an either/or question, it’s too simplistic,” says Utah State University evolutionary biologist Zachariah Gompert. “The answer isn’t ‘completely random’ or ‘completely deterministic and predictable.’ And yet, examining short time scales, we can find predictable, repeatable evolutionary patterns.”

Gompert and colleagues report evidence of repeatable evolution in populations of stick insects in the May 24, 2024, online edition of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s journal Science Advances. Collaborating authors on the paper include Gompert’s long-time collaborator Patrik Nosil and other researchers from France’s University of Montpelier, Brazil’s Federal University of São Paulo, the University of Nevada, Reno and Notre Dame University. The research is supported by the National Science Foundation and the European Research Council.

The team examined three decades of data on the frequency of cryptic color-pattern morphs in the stick insect species Timema cristinae in ten naturally replicate populations in California. T. cristinae is polymorphic in regard to its body color and pattern. Some insects are green, which allows the wingless, plant-feeding insect to blend in with California lilac (Ceanothus spinosus) shrubs. In contrast, green striped morphs disappear against chamise (Adenostoma fasciculatum) shrubs.

Hiding amongst the plants is one of T. christinae’s key defenses as hungry birds, such as scrub jays, are insatiable predators of the stick insects.

“Bird predation is a constant driver shaping the insects’ organismal traits, including coloration and striped vs. non-striped,” says Gompert, associate professor in USU’s Department of Biology and the USU Ecology Center. “We observed predictable ‘up-and-down’ fluctuations in stripe frequency in all populations, representing repeatable evolutionary dynamics based on standing genetic variation.”

He says a field experiment demonstrates these fluctuations involved negative frequency-dependent natural selection (NFDS), where cryptic color patterns are more beneficial when rare rather than common. This is likely because birds develop a ‘search image’ for very abundant prey.

“At short time scales, evolution involving existing variations can be quite predictable,” says Gompert, who received a National Science Foundation CAREER grant in 2019 to support his research. “You can count on certain drivers always being there, such as birds feeding on the insects.”

But at longer time scales, evolutionary dynamics become less predictable.

“The populations might experience a chance event, such as a severe drought or a flooding event, that disrupts the status quo and thus, the predictable outcomes,” Gompert says.

On long time scales, a new mutation in the species could introduce a rare trait, he says. “That’s about as close to truly random as you can get.”

“Rare things are easily lost by chance, so there’s a strong probability a new mutation could disappear before it gains a stronghold,” he says. “Indeed, another species of Timema stick insect that also feeds on chamise either never had or quickly lost the mutations making the cryptic stripe trait. Thus, the evolution of stripe is not a repeatable outcome of evolution at this long scale.”

Gompert notes replicated, long-term studies from natural populations, including research on the famous Darwin’s finches, are rare.

“Because most of this work is restricted to one or few populations, it is difficult to draw inferences on repeatability among multiple evolutionary independent populations,” he says. “Such studies are challenging to implement not only because they take concerted effort, but also because you can’t rush time.”

Gompert, who is designated a High Ranked Scholar by ScholarGPS, has developed, with USU colleagues, a research-intensive, interactive introductory biology laboratory class to introduce undergraduates to research. He and colleagues also developed an interactive presentation about evolution for all ages, called “Nabokov’s Butterflies,” that was presented at the USU College of Science’s Science Unwrapped public outreach program in 2022.

In a new study of 11 affected individuals, researchers from Newcastle University, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the Great North Children’s Hospital, and their collaborators were able to link mutations in the NUDCD3 gene to Severe Combined Immunodeficiency and Omenn syndrome¹ – rare and life-threatening immunodeficiency disorders. These mutations prevented the normal development of diverse immune cells needed to combat different pathogens².

The findings, published today (24 May) in Science Immunology, open opportunities for early diagnosis and intervention for this condition.

Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID) and Omenn syndrome are both rare genetic disorders that leave children without a functional immune system and at risk of life-threatening infections. Without urgent treatment, such as stem cell transplants to replace the faulty immune system, many affected will not survive their first year.

While newborn screening methods can flag T cell deficiency, knowledge of the specific genetic cause increases confidence in the diagnosis of SCID and informs the choice of curative therapy. Currently this remains out of reach for at least 1 in 10 affected families.

In this new study, researchers from Newcastle University, the Wellcome Sanger Institute and their collaborators studied 11 children across four families, two of whom had SCID while the other nine had Omenn syndrome. All had inherited mutations that disrupted the function of the NUDCD3 protein, which had not previously been linked to the immune system.

Using detailed studies of patient-derived cells and mouse models, the team demonstrated that NUDCD3 mutations impair a crucial gene-rearranging process called V(D)J recombination, essential for generating the diverse T cell receptors and antibodies needed to recognise and fight different pathogens.

While mice engineered with the same NUDCD3 mutations had milder immune problems, the human patients faced severe, life-threatening consequences. Two patients did survive, however, after receiving a stem cell transplant — reinforcing the importance of early diagnosis and intervention.

Dr Gosia Trynka, author of the study at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and science director at Open Targets, said: “For babies born with high-risk immunodeficiencies, early detection can mean the difference between life and death. These diseases leave newborns essentially defenceless against pathogens that most of us can easily fend off. The identification of this new disease gene will help clinicians to make a prompt molecular diagnosis in affected patients, meaning they can receive life-saving treatments more quickly.”

Professor Sophie Hambleton, senior author of the study at Newcastle University and practicing paediatric immunologist at the Great North Children’s Hospital, said: “SCID and Omenn syndrome are devastating disorders, requiring complex and timely treatments. The more we can understand about its underlying causes, the better we can look after affected babies. Our research is aimed at filling in the gaps so that families can achieve a molecular diagnosis while we continue learning more about how the immune system works in health and disease. We are deeply grateful to the families whose invaluable participation in this study will help future generations.”

Notes

1. Children with severe combined immunodeficiency disorder completely lack the T cells needed to combat infections, while those with Omenn syndrome have abnormal T cells that not only fail to combat infections but also mount attacks on the body’s own tissues. They require urgent infection management and treatment.

2. Specifically, the mutant NUDCD3 could not regulate RAG1, a key enzyme needed in V(D)J recombination. This caused RAG1 to get trapped within cell nucleoli instead of facilitating the gene rearrangements that build immune diversity.

While not possible yet, new research by a team of CU Boulder scientists could potentially lead to such advances.

Published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers in Ankur Gupta’s lab discovered how tiny charged particles, called ions, move within a complex network of minuscule pores. The breakthrough could lead to the development of more efficient energy storage devices, such as supercapacitors, said Gupta, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering.

“Given the critical role of energy in the future of the planet, I felt inspired to apply my chemical engineering knowledge to advancing energy storage devices,” Gupta said. “It felt like the topic was somewhat underexplored and as such, the perfect opportunity.”

Gupta explained that several chemical engineering techniques are used to study flow in porous materials such as oil reservoirs and water filtration, but they have not been fully utilized in some energy storage systems.

The discovery is significant not only for storing energy in vehicles and electronic devices but also for power grids, where fluctuating energy demand requires efficient storage to avoid waste during periods of low demand and to ensure rapid supply during high demand.

Supercapacitors, energy storage devices that rely on ion accumulation in their pores, have rapid charging times and longer life spans compared to batteries.

“The primary appeal of supercapacitors lies in their speed,” Gupta said. “So how can we make their charging and release of energy faster? By the more efficient movement of ions.”

Their findings modify Kirchhoff’s law, which has governed current flow in electrical circuits since 1845 and is a staple in high school students’ science classes. Unlike electrons, ions move due to both electric fields and diffusion, and the researchers determined that their movements at pore intersections are different from what was described in Kirchhoff’s law.

Prior to the study, ion movements were only described in the literature in one straight pore. Through this research, ion movement in a complex network of thousands of interconnected pores can be simulated and predicted in a few minutes.

“That’s the leap of the work,” Gupta said. “We found the missing link.”

A University of Washington team has developed an artificial intelligence system that lets a user wearing headphones look at a person speaking for three to five seconds to “enroll” them. The system, called “Target Speech Hearing,” then cancels all other sounds in the environment and plays just the enrolled speaker’s voice in real time even as the listener moves around in noisy places and no longer faces the speaker.

The team presented its findings May 14 in Honolulu at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. The code for the proof-of-concept device is available for others to build on. The system is not commercially available.

“We tend to think of AI now as web-based chatbots that answer questions,” said senior author Shyam Gollakota, a UW professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “But in this project, we develop AI to modify the auditory perception of anyone wearing headphones, given their preferences. With our devices you can now hear a single speaker clearly even if you are in a noisy environment with lots of other people talking.”

To use the system, a person wearing off-the-shelf headphones fitted with microphones taps a button while directing their head at someone talking. The sound waves from that speaker’s voice then should reach the microphones on both sides of the headset simultaneously; there’s a 16-degree margin of error. The headphones send that signal to an on-board embedded computer, where the team’s machine learning software learns the desired speaker’s vocal patterns. The system latches onto that speaker’s voice and continues to play it back to the listener, even as the pair moves around. The system’s ability to focus on the enrolled voice improves as the speaker keeps talking, giving the system more training data.

The team tested its system on 21 subjects, who rated the clarity of the enrolled speaker’s voice nearly twice as high as the unfiltered audio on average.

This work builds on the team’s previous “semantic hearing” research, which allowed users to select specific sound classes — such as birds or voices — that they wanted to hear and canceled other sounds in the environment.

Currently the TSH system can enroll only one speaker at a time, and it’s only able to enroll a speaker when there is not another loud voice coming from the same direction as the target speaker’s voice. If a user isn’t happy with the sound quality, they can run another enrollment on the speaker to improve the clarity.

The team is working to expand the system to earbuds and hearing aids in the future.

Additional co-authors on the paper were Bandhav Veluri, Malek Itani and Tuochao Chen, UW doctoral students in the Allen School, and Takuya Yoshioka, director of research at AssemblyAI. This research was funded by a Moore Inventor Fellow award, a Thomas J. Cabel Endowed Professorship and a UW CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund.

The team’s research findings, representing the genomic analyses of over 280 specimens from 17 countries and six continents, show that this species evolved some 2,100 years ago from an outside species in Asia and were released this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

One may think by its name that its origins are in Germany. But it is not native to any wilderness in that country. In fact, it doesn’t seem to have any home in the wild anywhere in the world. To date, populations have never been found outside of structures.

Following its evolution, the German cockroach spread from Southeast Asia, hitchhiking around the world in association with humans. In addition to rapid spread, it evolved a resistance to a variety of insecticides, making it extremely difficult to control using over-the-counter products.

According to Booth, the German cockroach is a major public health issue due to its links to disease spread, the contamination of food, and its role in triggering asthma and allergies.

About Booth

Warren Booth is an associate professor of urban entomology in the Department of Entomology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. He is also an affiliated faculty of the Fralin Life Sciences Institute at Virginia Tech.

His research interests include:

• Population and evolutionary genomics of indoor urban pest insects
• Insecticide resistance evolution
• Influence of socioeconomic disparity on urban pest population dynamics
• Mitochondrial heteroplasmy and recombination
• Invasion biology and ecology
• Urban pest management
• Urban evolutionary biology/genomics

The work was led by Joseph Karpie, a postdoctoral associate in the Center for Theoretical and Computational Physics (Theory Center) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility.

He said that this decades-old mystery began with measurements of the sources of the proton’s spin in 1987. Physicists originally thought that the proton’s building blocks, its quarks, would be the main source of the proton’s spin. But that’s not what they found. It turned out that the proton’s quarks only provide about 30% of the proton’s total measured spin. The rest comes from two other sources that have so far proven more difficult to measure.

One is the mysterious but powerful strong force. The strong force is one of the four fundamental forces in the universe. It’s what “glues” quarks together to make up other subatomic particles, such as protons or neutrons. Manifestations of this strong force are called gluons, which are thought to contribute to the proton’s spin. The last bit of spin is thought to come from the movements of the proton’s quarks and gluons.

“This paper is sort of a bringing together of two groups in the Theory Center who have been working toward trying to understand the same bit of physics, which is how do the gluons that are inside of it contribute to how much the proton is spinning around,” he said.

He said this study was inspired by a puzzling result that came from initial experimental measurements of the gluons’ spin. The measurements were made at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, a DOE Office of Science user facility based at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. The data at first seemed to indicate that the gluons may be contributing to the proton’s spin. They showed a positive result.

But as the data analysis was improved, a further possibility appeared.

“When they improved their analysis, they started to get two sets of results that seemed quite different, one was positive and the other was negative,” Karpie explained.

While the earlier positive result indicated that the gluons’ spins are aligned with that of the proton, the improved analysis allowed for the possibility that the gluons’ spins have an overall negative contribution. In that case, more of the proton spin would come from the movement of the quarks and gluons, or from the spin of the quarks themselves.

This puzzling result was published by the Jefferson Lab Angular Momentum (JAM) collaboration.

Meanwhile, the HadStruc collaboration had been addressing the same measurements in a different way. They were using supercomputers to calculate the underlying theory that describes the interactions among quarks and gluons in the proton, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD).

To equip supercomputers to make this intense calculation, theorists somewhat simplify some aspects of the theory. This somewhat simplified version for computers is called lattice QCD.

Karpie led the work to bring together the data from both groups. He started with the combined data from experiments taken in facilities around the world. He then added the results from the lattice QCD calculation into his analysis.

“This is putting everything together that we know about quark and gluon spin and how gluons contribute to the spin of the proton in one dimension,” said David Richards, a Jefferson Lab senior staff scientist who worked on the study.

“When we did, we saw that the negative things didn’t go away, but they changed dramatically. That meant that there’s something funny going on with those,” Karpie said.

Karpie is lead author on the study that was recently published in Physical Review D. He said the main takeaway is that combining the data from both approaches provided a more informed result.

“We’re combining both of our datasets together and getting a better result out than either of us could get independently. It’s really showing that we learn a lot more by combining lattice QCD and experiment together in one problem analysis,” said Karpie. “This is the first step, and we hope to keep doing this with more and more observables as well as we make more lattice data.”

The next step is to further improve the datasets. As more powerful experiments provide more detailed information on the proton, these data begin painting a picture that goes beyond one dimension. And as theorists learn how to improve their calculations on ever-more powerful supercomputers, their solutions also become more precise and inclusive.

The goal is to eventually produce a three-dimensional understanding of the proton’s structure.

“So, we learn our tools do work on the simpler one-dimension scenario. By testing our methods now, we hopefully will know what we need to do when we want to move up to do 3D structure,” Richards said. “This work will contribute to this 3D image of what a proton should look like. So it’s all about building our way up to the heart of the problem by doing this easier stuff now.”