Category: Science

A new battery-free GPS wildlife tracker runs on kinetic energy, the energy generated when the animal moves.

The wolf’s comeback in Europe has preoccupied people all across the continent over the last years. Where is it? What is its range? What does it live on? The only way to get solid answers to these questions is through GPS tracking.

In December, it was a cause for celebration when a GPS collar was fitted onto a wolf for the first time in Denmark. Only three months later, the signal stopped.

GPS trackers that stop working or run out of power prematurely are a frequent problem and source of frustration among researchers who want to track mammals for longer periods, says biologist and postdoc Rasmus W. Havmøller of the University of Copenhagen. Typically, batteries are the problem.

“When studying wildlife with GPS technology, the biggest limitation is always going to be the battery. It’s enormously frustrating. It is not uncommon that one gets to track an animal for a few months at most before the GPS device goes dead. But tracking an animal for a longer period of time is often important, as in the case with wolves here in Denmark. Therefore, we need a more reliable power source,” Havmøller says.

“Solar cells work fine for birds, but solar cells are so fragile that mammals tend to crush them. Moreover, many mammals are nocturnal. So we needed to come up with an alternative. I had long thought about the cleverness of the automatic wristwatches that many of us wear, which harvest energy from our own body’s movements,” Havmøller says.

“It sure as heck works! The more an animal moves, the more energy it generates and the more GPS location messages it sends. Unless the equipment itself breaks, it will work throughout an animal’s lifetime,” says Havmøller. “At the same time, it only weighs 150 grams (about 0.3 pounds)—significantly less than most other GPS trackers—so it can even be fitted onto small mammals.”

Further, the wildlife tracker device costs less than a tenth of traditional GPS collars, which run up to €3,500-4,000 (about $3,700) apiece.

Havmøller and his colleague, lead author Troels Gregersen, are assembling the GPS trackers themselves in a small laboratory at the Natural History Museum of Denmark.

The device, dubbed “KineFox” has been fitted onto one of the Danish Nature Agency’s wild horses and has been sending data on the horse’s position for the past six months. The tracker has also been tested on dogs and a bison. The plan is for it to be long-term tested on several animal species.

Rewilding is one area that the researchers envision the GPS tracker making a difference. The lack of supervision of animals released into the wild is a problem that has given rise to heated debate in recent years.

“The systematic human supervision of wild horses and cattle, to keep them from starving for example, is extremely resource intensive. Our tracker is ready to address this task,” Havmøller says.

Because the tracking unit contains an accelerometer that measures how an animal moves, wildlife managers can get a glimpse of an animal’s condition through its activity pattern.

“Studies with cows and pigs show that they begin moving differently when ill. In this way, it is likely that the tracker will also be able to tell something about an animal’s health. This means that you can comply with supervision legislation without having to get people out there every single day to find and inspect animals,” he says.

Havmøller points out that Kinefox can also lend a hand to endangered species, wherever knowledge about the way they live and move about is lacking.

“There is no good alternative to this GPS device when it comes to serious long-term studies and studies of how animal species disperse. Because either the equipment is too big, too heavy, or too fragile. But it’s really important to understand how a species moves from one place to another, and where they are shot or poisoned, for example—not least if we want to protect them better.”

Havmøller has been frustrated by GPS devices whose batteries died suddenly while studying both endangered leopards and wild dogs.

“There are endangered species where we know incredibly little about what they do for most of their lives. These include tigers, which can travel thousands of kilometers, as well the Asiatic wild dogs and leopards that I’m involved with.

“When wild dogs reach sexual maturity, leave their mother, and set out on their own, they are very vulnerable. But from that moment on, we know nothing about what they’re up to and why some die while others make it. It is a black box. I hope that this invention can remedy that,” he says.

Havmøller and his research colleagues are now in contact with several potential stakeholders about the long-term testing of Kinefox on various animal species.

The research on the tracker appears in PLOS ONE.

Additional coauthors are from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, DTU Engineering Design and Product Development, and the University of Copenhagen.

Source: University of Copenhagen

Time-restricted eating may reduce the risk of developing type 2 diabetes and improve overall health, according to a new review.

This type of fasting means having regular but fewer meals, cutting out late-night snacks, and not eating for 12 to 14 hours (often overnight).

After a comprehensive review of published, peer-reviewed studies, the researchers found a connection between number of meals and obesity and type 2 diabetes.

“What we’ve been taught for many decades is that we should eat three meals a day plus snacking in between,” says Krzysztof Czaja, an associate professor of biomedical sciences in the University of Georgia’s College of Veterinary Medicine. “Unfortunately, this appears to be one of the causes of obesity.”

The three meals and snacks style of eating prevents insulin levels from going down during the day, and, with the amount of calories and sugars Americans consume on average, that can overload the body’s insulin receptors. That leads to insulin resistance and often type 2 diabetes.

“That’s why it’s so hard to lose body fat,” Czaja says. “We are not giving our bodies a chance to use it. Having fewer meals a day will allow these fat deposits to be used as an energy source rather than the sugar we keep consuming.”

The researchers found that time-restricted eating allows the body to relax and lower insulin and glucose levels, which in turn can improve insulin resistance, brain health, and glycemic control. It can also reduce calorie intake by around 550 calories per day without the stress of calorie counting.

Previous studies have shown disruptions to sleep and meal schedules can change both the type and amount of bacteria and other microorganisms in the digestive tract. But fasting may positively alter the gut microbiome, potentially staving off inflammation and a variety of metabolic disorders.

Additionally, the review suggests time-restricted eating can help regulate hormones responsible for appetite regulation and energy levels.

Regular meal schedules, eating breakfast, and decreasing meals and snacks can help guard against obesity and type 2 diabetes, according to the study. And not all breakfasts are created equal. Aim for healthy fats and protein, like eggs, and avoid the sugar-filled breakfast cereals and pastries.

Although time-restricted eating appears to improve health, the researchers found that other types of restricted eating, such as fasting for days on end, provides few benefits.

More than four in 10 Americans are clinically obese, meaning their weight is higher than what is considered a healthy range for their height. Almost 10% are severely obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Obesity may lead to a variety of health conditions, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and even some cancers.

“Obesity is an epidemic right now, especially in the United States,” Czaja says. “It is a preventable disease. When we started looking at the research, we found that ancient humans didn’t eat every day. That means our body evolved not needing food every day.”

The modern approach of three meals plus snacks became popular decades ago, and it’s a hard pattern to break.

The researchers caution that eating is not a one size fits all situation. Smaller, less active people need fewer calories on average than taller athletes, for example. So for some, one meal of nutrient-rich food might be another while others may need more.

But one thing was very clear from the literature: Fewer meals of high-quality food is a good guideline for individuals at risk of developing type 2 diabetes and obesity.

“Also definitely avoid late-night eating,” Czaja says. “Our midnight snacks spike insulin, so instead of us going into a resting state when we sleep, our GI is working on digestion. That’s why we wake up in the morning tired—because we don’t get enough resting sleep.”

Source: University of Georgia

Newborns delivered by cesarean section who are swabbed with the vaginal fluid of their mothers after birth, a process called vaginal seeding, have beneficial bacteria restored to their skin and stools, researchers report.

In the first randomized study of its kind, researchers found vaginal seeding definitively engrafted new strains of maternal bacteria in the babies’ bodies. These strains normally wouldn’t be present in the newborns because, during C-sections, infants are directly extracted from their mothers’ wombs, bypassing the vaginal canal.

“Our study is the first double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial to determine whether vaginal seeding causes maternal bacteria to engraft in the skin and stool of neonates,” says Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello, professor of microbiome and health it the biochemistry and microbiology department at the Rutgers University School of Environmental and Biological Sciences and an author of the study published in mBio.

Neonates are infants who are younger than 28 days old. In the randomized, blinded study, neither the participants nor the study’s facilitators knew which of the subjects received the material being studied—in this case, the participating mothers’ vaginal fluids—and who was given a placebo.

“Despite some limitations in this early study, including a small sample size and only two samples taken over time, we observed significant effects of vaginal seeding on the neonatal microbiota,” Dominguez-Bello says.

The term microbiome refers to the collection of genomes or essential genetic material from all the microorganisms in the environment. The word microbiota usually pertains to microorganisms—bacteria, viruses, and fungi—found within a specific environment, such as on the skin or in the gut. Scientists have found over recent decades that these collections of microorganisms play a pivotal role in human health, interacting with metabolism, the immune system and the central nervous system.

Numerous studies have shown substantial differences exist between the microbiomes in neonates delivered by C-section and those born in a vaginal delivery. Some scientists, such as Dominguez-Bello, theorize that babies born via C-section may miss out on the exposure to the first live microbes meant to colonize their bodies and sustain their health.

An increasing body of research demonstrates that this thwarting of microbial colonization during critical early-life windows of development alters metabolic and immune programming and is associated with an increased risk of immune and metabolic diseases—including asthma, food allergies, obesity, and diabetes.

In the study, the scientists took samples of microbiota from the skin and stool of 20 infants during two periods—when the babies were one day old and when they were one month old. They found evidence the maternal microbes had been engrafted in the infants. They also found that, when compared with the babies that received a placebo, the infants that received vaginal seeding hosted a different bacterial population on their skin and in their stool. Their microbiomes included a pattern of bacterial diversity that was more characteristic of those babies who have been breastfed and have been delivered vaginally.

As part of a continuing study, the researchers will assess the microbiomes of the babies for the next five years, as well as tracking their growth patterns and whether they develop any markers of metabolic or immune-related disease.

The scientists also are continuing the study to increase the number of babies and to assess infant health outcomes.

“There is now a critical need to evaluate the health benefits and safety of vaginal seeding in large randomized controlled trials,” Dominguez-Bello says.

Additional coauthors are from Johns Hopkins University; the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; Inova Children’s Hospital and Inova Women’s Hospital in Falls Church, Virginia; and Rutgers.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ Intramural Research Program and a grant from the NIH National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute funded the work.

Source: Rutgers University

NEW YORK — The World Economic Forum (WEF) has released a new set of guidelines intended to reduce the creation of orbital debris with the support of some, but not all, major satellite operators.

The Space Industry Debris Mitigation Recommendations document, released by the WEF June 13, outlines recommendations to avoid collisions that can create debris by limiting the lifetime of satellites in orbit after they have completed their missions and improving coordination among satellite operators.

Among those recommendations is to establish a success rate for “post-mission disposal,” or removal of satellites from orbit after the end of their missions, to 95% to 99%. That disposal should be completed no more than five years after the end of each satellite’s mission.

Current international guidelines, often incorporated into national law, set a post-mission disposal timeline of up to 25 years, although the U.S. Federal Communications Commission adopted a new rule last September that will reduce it to five years for satellites that are licensed or obtain market access from the agency. Even with the 25-year guideline, compliance has been below 50% by some metrics.

“We wanted to push the envelope a little bit on some of these concrete, specific targets,” said Nikolai Khlystov, lead for the WEF’s Future of Space initiative, during a panel at the Secure World Foundation’s Summit for Space Sustainability here June 13. It was intended, he said, to build on past work by the WEF, notably the development of the Space Sustainability Rating that assesses how satellite systems meet best practices for safe and sustainable space operations.

Other recommendations in the document call for satellites to be maneuverable, preferably though onboard propulsion, when operating at altitudes above 375 kilometers. Satellite operators should answer “all reasonable and legitimate requests” for space traffic coordination from other operators and share orbital data.

The document calls on governments to adopt the new post-mission disposal guidelines and mandate the use of active debris removal systems for space objects that cannot comply with them, once such systems are “practical and commercially affordable.” It also recommends increased investments in space situational awareness capabilities and encourages sharing of data on orbits of space objects.

The audience for the document, Khlystov said, is as much stakeholders outside the industry as it is satellite operators. “You can take this document to policymakers, investors and other stakeholders and say this is where a significant part of the industry is at.”

Twenty-seven companies endorsed the document at the time of its release. They include companies that operate large satellite constellations, such as OneWeb, Planet and Spire, as well as a mix of other established and emerging space companies.

Among them is GHGSat, a Canadian company that has nine smallsats in orbit to monitor greenhouse gas emissions. “Even before engaging in this discussion, we needed to come up with new practices” on space sustainability, said Bryn Orth-Lashley, technical operations and service delivery manager at GHGSat, during the panel. “It wasn’t that much of an uphill climb.”

He noted the company’s satellites do not have onboard propulsion but are able to maneuver by alternative means, such as differential drag, to comply with the guidelines. The company will continue to operate satellites after the end of their commercial missions, including performing avoidance maneuvers, until reentry.

Some major companies, though, have not signed on. They include SpaceX, which operates by far the largest satellite constellation with its Starlink system, and Amazon, which is developing its Project Kuiper constellation. Even some satellite operators that have espoused the importance of space sustainability, like Viasat, are not included.

Khlystov said the WEF undertook a “pretty comprehensive effort” to engage with as many satellite operators as possible. “If some actors didn’t sign on, I don’t think it’s a sign that they are against these standards,” he said, noting there was some “pretty significant input” from operators not included among the 27 signatories.

“I was very encouraged by the process,” he continued. “We had very good discussions. Not everybody who was part of the discussions came on board, but they were all very engaged.”

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The discovery of tiny salt grains in an asteroid sample provides strong evidence that liquid water may be more common in the solar system’s largest asteroid population than previously thought.

The smattering of tiny salt crystals discovered in a sample from an asteroid has researchers excited, because these crystals can only have formed in the presence of liquid water.

Even more intriguing, according to the research team, is the fact that the sample comes from an S-type asteroid, a category known to mostly lack hydrated, or water-bearing, minerals. The discovery strongly suggests that a large population of asteroids hurtling through the solar system may not be as dry as previously thought. The finding, published in Nature Astronomy, gives renewed push to the hypothesis that most, if not all, water on Earth may have arrived by way of asteroids during the planet’s tumultuous infancy.

“Once these ingredients come together to form asteroids, there is a potential for liquid water to form.”

Tom Zega, the study’s senior author and a professor of planetary sciences at the the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, and Shaofan Che, lead study author and a postdoctoral fellow at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, performed a detailed analysis of samples collected from asteroid Itokawa in 2005 by the Japanese Hayabusa mission and brought to Earth in 2010.

The study is the first to prove that the salt crystals originated on the asteroid’s parent body, ruling out any possibility they might have formed as a consequence of contamination after the sample reached Earth, a question that had plagued previous studies that found sodium chloride in meteorites of a similar origin.

“The grains look exactly like what you would see if you took table salt at home and placed it under an electron microscope,” Zega says. “They’re these nice, square crystals. It was funny, too, because we had many spirited group meeting conversations about them, because it was just so unreal.”

Zega says the samples represent a type of extraterrestrial rock known as an ordinary chondrite. Derived from so-called S-type asteroids such as Itokawa, this type makes up about 87% of meteorites collected on Earth. Very few of them have been found to contain water-bearing minerals.

“It has long been thought that ordinary chondrites are an unlikely source of water on Earth,” says Zega who is the director of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory’s Kuiper Materials Imaging & Characterization Facility. “Our discovery of sodium chloride tells us this asteroid population could harbor much more water than we thought.”

Today, scientists largely agree that Earth, along with other rocky planets such as Venus and Mars, formed in the inner region of the roiling, swirling cloud of gas and dust around the young sun, known as the solar nebula, where temperatures were very high—too high for water vapor to condense from the gas, according to Che.

“In other words, the water here on Earth had to be delivered from the outer reaches of the solar nebula, where temperatures were much colder and allowed water to exist, most likely in the form of ice,” Che says. “The most likely scenario is that comets or another type of asteroid known as C-type asteroids, which resided farther out in the solar nebula, migrated inward and delivered their watery cargo by impacting the young Earth.”

The discovery that water could have been present in ordinary chondrites, and therefore been sourced from much closer to the sun than their “wetter” kin, has implications for any scenario attempting to explain the delivery of water to the early Earth.

The sample used in the study is a tiny dust particle spanning about 150 micrometers, or roughly twice the diameter of a human hair, from which the team cut a small section about 5 microns wide—just large enough to cover a single yeast cell—for the analysis.

Using a variety of techniques, Che was able to rule out that the sodium chloride was the result of contamination from sources such as human sweat, the sample preparation process, or exposure to laboratory moisture.

Because the sample had been stored for five years, the team took before and after photos and compared them. The photos showed that the distribution of sodium chloride grains inside the sample had not changed, ruling out the possibility that any of the grains were deposited into the sample during that time. In addition, Che performed a control experiment by treating a set of terrestrial rock samples the same as the Itokawa sample and examining them with an electron microscope.

“The terrestrial samples did not contain any sodium chloride, so that convinced us the salt in our sample is native to the asteroid Itokawa,” he says. “We ruled out every possible source of contamination.”

Zega says tons of extraterrestrial matter is raining down on Earth every day, but most of it burns up in the atmosphere and never makes it to the surface.

“You need a large enough rock to survive entry and deliver that water,” he says.

Previous work led by the late Michael Drake, a former director of the Lunar and Planetary Lab, in the 1990s proposed a mechanism by which water molecules in the early solar system could become trapped in asteroid minerals and even survive an impact on Earth.

“Those studies suggest several oceans worth of water could be delivered just by this mechanism,” Zega says. “If it now turns out that the most common asteroids may be much ‘wetter’ than we thought, that will make the water delivery hypothesis by asteroids even more plausible.”

Itokawa is a peanut-shaped near-Earth asteroid about 2,000 feet long and 750 feet in diameter and is believed to have broken off from a much larger parent body. According to Che and Zega, it is conceivable that frozen water and frozen hydrogen chloride could have accumulated there, and that naturally occurring decay of radioactive elements and frequent bombardment by meteorites during the solar system’s early days could have provided enough heat to sustain hydrothermal processes involving liquid water. Ultimately, the parent body would have succumbed to the pummeling and broken up into smaller fragments, leading to the formation of Itokawa.

“Once these ingredients come together to form asteroids, there is a potential for liquid water to form,” Zega says. “And once you have liquids form, you can think of them as occupying cavities in the asteroid, and potentially do water chemistry.”

The evidence pointing at the salt crystals in the Itokawa sample as being there since the beginning of the solar system does not end here, however. The researchers found a vein of plagioclase, a sodium-rich silicate mineral, running through the sample, enriched with sodium chloride.

“When we see such alteration veins in terrestrial samples, we know they formed by aqueous alteration, which means it must involve water,” Che says. “The fact that we see that texture associated with sodium and chlorine is another strong piece of evidence that this happened on the asteroid as water was coursing through this sodium-bearing silicate.”

Source: University of Arizona

Fewer than 1 in 4 people with or at risk for heart disease use wearable health trackers, and only half of those who wear them do so consistently.

Wearable devices, such as those made by Apple and Fitbit, are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their ability to track heart rates, physical activity, and sleep, and obtain electrocardiograms, and several other measures—capabilities that can be especially helpful for monitoring the health of people with cardiovascular disease (CVD).

The population-based, nationally representative study, published in JAMA Network Open, included 9,303 participants from the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS). Eighteen percent of people with established CVD and 26% at risk for CVD reported using wearable devices compared with 29% of the general population.

“We are so used to seeing data that lives in the health care setting, but increasingly people in the community have access to these devices and technologies that can provide a very well-rounded set of data points that can inform their clinical care,” says senior author Rohan Khera, assistant professor at Yale School of Medicine, and director of the Cardiovascular Data Science (CarDS) Lab.

“We wondered if we looked at a national survey of individuals, could we figure out who are the people who are actually using these devices? And if we looked at a specific population, those with cardiovascular diseases, what are we seeing?”

Older age, lower educational attainment, and lower household income were associated with significantly lower odds of wearable device use, likely due to these populations having less access to these devices or discomfort with using the technology.

“The people who stand to benefit the most tend to use them the least,” says Khera. “I think part of it is awareness. People may not recognize the potential value that these devices can bring to the health side, especially since the evidence for their value to health is still evolving.

“And the other piece is of course their cost and the fact that people who have health disorders might have actually other costs to take care of, so these things may seem frivolous for them.”

Identifying the obstacles among people who could benefit from wearable devices but aren’t using them ultimately led the researchers to consider whether strategies should be put in place to ensure equitable adoption.

“If we are increasingly recognizing the health worth of these devices,” says Khera, “should we start having a societal debate about whether it remains a concierge technology only for the wealthy? Or do we start thinking about it as a medical intervention and therefore under the purview of insurance coverage and so forth?”

Source: Christina Frank for Yale University

The influx of Ukrainian refugees across Europe will improve long-term gross domestic product for European countries that invest in infrastructure and other capital improvements, according to a new study.

However, countries receiving Ukrainian refugees will likely face significant costs in the short term.

“The economic impact of the Ukrainian refugee crisis across Europe will vary significantly, depending on which part of the workforce you look at,” says study coauthor Luca David Opromolla, a professor of international economics in North Carolina State University’s Poole College of Management and College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

“It’s important for us to understand these potential impacts so that governments and industries can make informed decisions about policies and investments in the face of an ongoing humanitarian crisis. Ideally, studies like this one can help to minimize social disruption and ultimately improve long-term outcomes for both refugees and the countries providing them with refuge.”

When the researchers began their study, there were more than 7 million Ukraine refugees after the invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces. (The number is now more than 8 million.) More than 4 million of those refugees were of working age, and largely distributed throughout Europe.

To assess the economic impact of Ukrainian refugees, the researchers first collected data from several sources. Data on labor market skills and employment status was drawn from the 2018-19 European Labor Force Survey. Production and trade data was drawn from the most recent World Input-Output Database. Data on Ukrainian refugees’ skill, age, employment status, and country of destination came from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The researchers used that data to run an empirical analysis, guided by a theoretical model, that allowed them to study the impact of the Ukrainian refugees on production, international trade, and migration flows across 23 European countries, all of which are members of the European Union.

The model also determined the impact on household consumption, which served as a proxy for the welfare of residents in those 23 countries. In addition, the researchers were able to use the model to assess the impact that various levels of capital investment would have on all of those outcomes.

The researchers found there will be different impacts on three different parts of the workforce: low-skill labor, high-skill labor, and owners of capital.

“Low-skill workers largely benefit in the short term because most of the refugees from Ukraine are high-skill workers,” Opromolla says. “The refugees are not competing with low-skill workers, they’re effectively complimenting them and making them more productive.”

For the same reasons, high-skill workers will not benefit in the short-term—Ukrainian refugees will compete with them for high-skill jobs. However, this isn’t necessarily true in the long term.

“Owners of capital benefit in the short and long term,” Opromolla says. “In the short term, this is because there is increased competition for high-skill labor, and increased access to high-skill labor means there is increased demand for capital. If you own the capital, you benefit from this. What’s more, if you see increased production in the long term, you benefit from that too.”

The extent to which the GDP of individual countries will benefit from the presence of Ukrainian refugees in the long term depends in large part on the extent to which those countries are able to invest in capital structures.

Capital structures are factors other than labor that influence production, such as infrastructure, manufacturing equipment, and so on. The more a country’s government and private sector are able to invest in capital structures, the better able that country will be to take advantage of its increased access to high-skill labor.

“If a country does see investment in capital structures, and there is a resulting increase in production, that will benefit the high-skill labor in that country,” Opromolla says. “In which case, you will effectively see benefits across the workforce from the presence of Ukrainian refugees.”

The study is published in the journal AEA Papers and Proceedings. Additional coauthors are from Yale University, Penn State, and the University of Bologna.

Source: NC State

A large-scale genomic analysis of Setaria, foxtail millet, advances understanding of the its domestication and evolution, as well as the genetic basis for key agricultural traits.

“Foxtail millet is considered to be the foundation for early Chinese civilization,” says Michael Purugganan, professor of biology at New York University and NYU Abu Dhabi, and the study’s co-senior author. “Moreover, because it is a crop that can grow across a wide range of environments—including arid lands—it has the potential to be important for food security under climate change.”

Foxtail millet is one of the oldest domesticated grain crops in the world and humans have been growing it for roughly 11,000 years. It held a dominant position in Chinese agriculture before the introduction of high-input agricultural practices like irrigation and chemical fertilizers.

The protein-rich grain—which employs C4 photosynthesis, a highly efficient form of photosynthesis that helps it adapt to different environments—is resilient to drought and able to thrive in low-nutrient soils.

“C4 plants constitute only about 3% of flowering plant species, but they surprisingly contribute to approximately 25-30% of global biomass production. The complexity of the genomes of most C4 species has posed challenges for fundamental studies and breeding, but Setaria serves as an ideal model system for studying C4 photosynthetic plants in genomics and genetics research,” says Xianmin Diao, a professor in the Institute of Crop Sciences at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, the study’s co-senior author, and the scientist who organized the study.

In their study in the journal Nature Genetics, the researchers established the Setaria pan-genome—the entire set of the species’ genes—by assembling 110 representative genomes from a worldwide collection of 1,844 Setaria species. They performed large-scale genetic studies for 68 traits across 22 environments in 13 geographical locations, each with distinct climactic conditions, identifying potential genes and marker-panels for how foxtail millet has evolved and improved at different geographic sites. For instance, the researchers found that the gene SiGW3 regulates grain yield of foxtail millet.

They also constructed the first graph-based genome sequence of Setaria, offering insights into genomic variation across wild and cultivated Setaria. This deeper understanding of the comprehensive genomic variation equips researchers with valuable genetic tools to pursue biological research and breeding efforts.

“This paper is a significant milestone, as it paves the way for the next generation of comparative genomics studies that can help to decipher the molecular mechanism of C4 photosynthesis. The large-scale comparative genomics, genome-wide association study, and genomic selection studies of Setaria not only provide opportunities for gene discovery and breeding advancements in foxtail millet itself, but also offer insights for other crops to enhance global food security,” adds Diao.

“Understanding the genetic basis underlying the domestication and improvement of foxtail millet, along with these important agricultural characteristics, holds significant potential for its enhancement. With our graph-based genome, we can estimate grain quality-related traits and potential yield, providing avenues for foxtail millet breeding for climate change adaptation,” says Qiang He, a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute of Crop Sciences at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the study’s first author.

Purugganan’s research had support from the National Science Foundation Plant Genome Research Program, the Zegar Family Foundation, and the NYU Abu Dhabi Research Institute.

Source: NYU

To help solve hunger and malnutrition while also slowing climate change, some farmers could grow seaweed, a study suggests.

Producing and selling seaweed could boost incomes for farmers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), particularly in coastal regions of Africa and Southeast Asia, says Patrick Webb, professor of nutrition at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University and senior author of the study.

Webb and coauthors reviewed research papers, existing databases, United Nations and World Bank Group reports, and more. The findings appear in the journal Global Food Security.

A more sustainable alternative to raising livestock, seaweed cultivation requires no land, freshwater, or chemical fertilizers, and could become particularly profitable as demand for nutrient-rich seaweed products grows around the world, the study finds. Those profits would mean more buying power for those households and communities who produce, process, package, and export the microalgae, which in turn would translate into healthier diets.

“One of the biggest problems of food insecurity in LMICs is the unaffordability of healthy diets,” says Webb, who also serves as director for the Food Systems for Nutrition Innovation Lab at Tufts. “There are roughly 3.5 billion people in the world who can’t afford a healthy diet even if they choose local foods at local prices. For many of those people, cultivating and selling seaweed would lead to higher incomes and improved nutrition through purchases on the market.”

Seaweed and climate change

A friendly crop for both farmers and the environment, seaweed has been grown in parts of Asia for centuries using fairly simple techniques, according to the study.

To start, farmers attach long lines of rope to the roots of the algae, which nourish the plant by absorbing nutrients from the water. Six to eight weeks later, they gather the seaweed by hand and dry it in the sun. “A lot of what we’re looking at on the farming side is not about finding new crops or different kinds of crops. It’s about what’s already being grown that could be scaled up cost-effectively,” Webb says.

On top of being relatively easy to grow, seaweed has a miniscule carbon footprint, and may even help lower the ocean’s carbon levels. Though little is yet known about how much CO₂ seaweed releases during harvest, research has found that perennial brown algae farms absorb up to ten tons of CO₂ per hectare of sea surface per year. In addition to its “carbon sinking” powers, when added to livestock feed, seaweed could help dramatically reduce methane gas emissions.

“Unless we get significant warming of the oceans, cultivating seaweed offers a way that is not just climate friendly, but climate proof,” says Webb. “We don’t know how soon the industry will start to experience the negative effects of climate change, but the potential looks good. By farming seaweed, it’s not going to accelerate those negative effects. Whereas cutting down trees and adding more livestock certainly would.”

Seaweed farming challenges

Although seaweed farming helps the environment, climate change itself may present barriers to growing more of it. Ocean water is becoming increasingly acidic, which is not ideal for growing healthy, edible seaweed, the authors say.

Additionally, seaweed’s primary value as an export would be for its extracts as ingredients, rather than as a sea vegetable to be eaten whole, according to the study. And while countries with higher average incomes that produce and export brown, green, and red seaweeds in large quantities already have the infrastructure needed to effectively process, test, and regulate what may eventually land on consumers’ plates, most LMICs do not.

Research into processing bottlenecks is limited, and what little data exist on factors such as consumer patterns are the property of the food companies that collect it, Webb says—which means governments and entrepreneurs in many LMICs have had few resources or incentives to invest in aquatic plant farming.

“The steps taken between the farm and the fork, that’s what we need to focus on,” Webb says. “We need to work more closely with governments and the private sector to figure out where the bottlenecks are and how to overcome them.”

Success in Indonesia

The seaweed aquaculture industry has flourished in Indonesia, where seasonal labor is steadily available and farms can achieve industrial-level economies of scale (in contrast to the family-run farms of, for example, India and Tanzania). Indonesia is now a key exporter of two seaweed species from which carrageenan, a thickener found in nut milks and meats, is extracted.

“There are many different types of seaweed, and they all require somewhat of a different environment in which to grow. The vast coasts of Africa and Asia, not all of it will be prime real estate,” Webb says. “But much of it will be.”

For seaweed farming to expand in these places, governments must take it seriously and create food safety regulations and an overall environment where it can happen, Webb says. Local and international investment interest will also be key. “If it doesn’t happen tomorrow, with the right conditions, it could happen the day after tomorrow,” Webb says.

It’s early days for seaweed production in LMICs, but Webb is confident about its promise for farmers. “The Ministry of Agriculture, or even the Ministry of Fisheries in these countries probably never discusses seaweed,” he says. “What if they did? They might discover a goldmine.”

The lead author received financial support from the United States Agency for International Development as part of the Feed the Future Food Systems for Nutrition Innovation Lab. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the United States Agency for International Development.

Coauthors are from Tufts and the Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research.

Source: Tufts University

WASHINGTON — United Launch Alliance carried out a static-fire test of its Vulcan Centaur rocket June 7, one of the final milestones before the vehicle’s first launch.

A Vulcan rocket fired its two BE-4 engines in a static-fire test called the Flight Readiness Firing (FRF) at 9:05 p.m. Eastern from Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 41. The engine start sequence started at T-4.88 seconds, ULA said in a statement an hour after the test, with the engines throttling up to their target level for two seconds before shutting down, concluding the six-second test.

The test appeared to go as planned. “Nominal run,” Tory Bruno, president and chief executive of ULA, tweeted moments after the test.

“This is a huge milestone. This is as close as you can come to launching a rocket without actually launching the rocket,” Mark Peller, vice president of Vulcan development at ULA, said on a company webcast shortly after the test.

The test exercised all the vehicle and ground systems up through ignition of the engines, stopping just before releasing the rocket. “It’s our last major milestone on the path to launch,” he said. “So, a big accomplishment.”

ULA planned to carry out the FRF May 25. However, the company called off the test several hours in advance after detecting a “delayed response” in the ignition system for the booster’s engines. ULA rolled the vehicle back to the Vertical Integration Facility to correct the problem, although the company did not disclose further details.

In February, Bruno said the FRF would be the final major test milestone before the launch of the rocket on its inaugural flight, called Cert-1. After the test, the rocket will be rolled back to the VIF for final preparations, including integration of its payload, before returning to the pad for launch.

However, there was an incident in late March during testing of a Centaur upper stage at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Hydrogen leaked from the structural test article and ignited, creating a fireball.

Bruno said in a May 16 interview that the company was still investigating the source of the leak and what corrective actions, if any, were needed to fix it. If ULA determines no changes are needed to the upper stage, the Cert-1 launch could take place later in the summer. That would slip to later in the year if ULA decides it needs to make modifications to the Centaur.

An additional factor is that the primary payload for the Cert-1 launch, the Peregrine lunar lander by Astrobotic, had launch windows open for about four to five days a month. ULA will also have to work around other Atlas launches at the pad, although one potential conflict, the first crewed flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, has slipped from late July because of spacecraft issues.

Other payloads on Cert-1 are the first two demonstration satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband constellation, as well as a payload for space memorial company Celestis.

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