$148K project to digitize thousands of rare, native plant specimens

UH Mānoa student Chase Kane prepares a plant specimen to be photographed and digitally accessible to researchers around the world.
Credit: University of Hawaiʻi

A University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa project to digitize tens of thousands of plant specimens from Hawaiʻi, across the vast Pacific Ocean and around the world, received a major boost by the National Science Foundation. The three-year, $148,882 grant will help School of Life Sciences Assistant Professor Karolina Heyduk and her team to digitize and catalog more than 55,000 plant specimens, many of which are extinct, to preserve and improve access worldwide to one of the oldest collections of Pacific plants.

“Our goal for the project is to get all 55,000 plant specimens digitized for the whole world to see and facilitate research on Hawaiian plants across the globe,” Heyduk said. “The herbarium represents a really unique collection that is used by both researchers and also used in classes and teaching on campus.”

Hawaiʻi has some of the greatest biodiversity in the world and there are approximately 1,400 plant taxa (species, subspecies and varieties) native to the state, according to the Hawaiʻi Department of Land and Natural Resources. Nearly 90% are found nowhere else in the world. However, more than 100 plant taxa have gone extinct, and more than 200 have 50 or fewer individuals remaining in the wild.

UH Mānoa’s Joseph F. Rock Herbarium was established in 1908 and is home to many rare and endemic plant specimens from Hawaiʻi and other Pacific islands, some of which have since become extinct. The herbarium serves as a crucial record of biodiversity and is an invaluable resource for species that are extinct, threatened or endangered.

Climate change makes catastrophic flood twice as likely

 Flooding damaged the Oroville Dam main spillway after record 2017 storms in parts of Northern California. ArkStorm-scale events would bring much more precipitation over a wider region.
Credit: William Croyle/California Department of Water Resources

California lives with a sleeping giant — an occasional flood so large that it inundates major valleys with water flows hundreds of miles long and tens of miles across.

Motivated by one such flood that occurred in 1862, scientists investigated the phenomenon in 2010. They called it the “ArkStorm scenario,” reflecting the potential for an event of biblical proportions.

To account for the additional flood-worsening effects of climate change, scientists from UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research have completed the first part of ArkStorm 2.0.

“In the future scenario, the storm sequence is bigger in almost every respect,” said Daniel Swain, UCLA climate scientist and co-author of the paper, which is published today in the journal Science Advances. “There’s more rain overall, more intense rainfall on an hourly basis and stronger wind.”

In total, the research projects that end-of-the-century storms will generate 200% to 400% more runoff in the Sierra Nevada Mountains due to increased precipitation and more precipitation falling as rain, not snow.

The researchers used a combination of new high-resolution weather modeling and existing climate models to compare two extreme scenarios: one that would occur about once per century in the recent historical climate and another in the projected climate of 2081-2100. Both would involve a long series of storms fueled by atmospheric rivers over the course of a month.

Antarctica's Ice Shelves Could be Melting Faster than We Thought

Credit: Andrew Thompson

A new model developed by Caltech and JPL researchers suggests that Antarctica's ice shelves may be melting at an accelerated rate, which could eventually contribute to more rapid sea level rise. The model accounts for an often-overlooked narrow ocean current along the Antarctic coast and simulates how rapidly flowing freshwater, melted from the ice shelves, can trap dense warm ocean water at the base of the ice, causing it to warm and melt even more.

The study was conducted in the laboratory of Andy Thompson, professor of environmental science and engineering, and appears in the journal Science Advances on August 12.

Ice shelves are outcroppings of the Antarctic ice sheet, found where the ice juts out from land and floats on top of the ocean. The shelves, which are each several hundred meters thick, act as a protective buffer for the mainland ice, keeping the whole ice sheet from flowing into the ocean (which would dramatically raise global sea levels). However, a warming atmosphere and warming oceans caused by climate change are increasing the speed at which these ice shelves are melting, threatening their ability to hold back the flow of the ice sheet into the ocean.

"If this mechanism that we've been studying is active in the real world, it may mean that ice shelf melt rates are 20 to 40 percent higher than the predictions in global climate models, which typically cannot simulate these strong currents near the Antarctic coast," Thompson says.

Two Monumental Milestones Achieved in CT Imaging

Conventional chest CT image (left side) of the human airways compared to the new and improved PCD-CT system (right side). The image produced with the PCD-CT system shows better delineation of the bronchial walls. Preliminary studies showed that the PCD-CT system allowed radiologists to see smaller airways than with standard CT systems.
Image credit: Cynthia McCollough, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota.

Two biomedical imaging technologies developed with support from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) have been cleared for clinical use by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Both technologies offer advances in computed tomography (CT).

In one of these developments, project lead Cynthia McCollough, Ph.D., director of Mayo Clinic’s CT Clinical Innovation Center and her team helped develop the first photon-counting detector (PCD)-CT system, which is superior to current CT technology. CT imaging has been an immense clinical asset for diagnosing many diseases and injuries. However, since its introduction into the clinic in 1971, the way that the CT detector converts x-rays to electrical signals has remained essentially the same. Photon-counting detectors operate using a fundamentally different mechanism than any prior CT detector ever has.

“This is the first major imaging advancement cleared by the FDA for CT in a decade,” stated Behrouz Shabestari, Ph.D., director of the division of Health Informatics Technologies. “The impact of this development will be far-reaching and provide clinicians with more detailed information for medical diagnoses.”

A CT scan is obtained when an x-ray beam rotates around a patient, allowing x-rays to pass through the patient. As the x-rays leave the patient a picture is taken by a detector and the information is transmitted to a computer for further processing. “Standard CT detectors use a two-step process, where x-rays are turned into light and then light is converted to an electrical signal,” explained Cynthia McCollough. “The photon-counting detector uses a one-step process where the x-ray is immediately transformed into an electrical signal.”

AI could help patients with chronic pain avoid opioids

Image by Andrea from Pixabay

Cognitive behavioral therapy is an effective alternative to opioid painkillers for managing chronic pain. But getting patients to complete those programs is challenging, especially because psychotherapy often requires multiple sessions and mental health specialists are scarce.

A new study suggests that pain CBT supported by artificial intelligence renders the same results as guideline-recommended programs delivered by therapists, while requiring substantially less clinician time, making this therapy more accessible.

“Chronic pain is incredibly common: back pain, osteoarthritis, migraine headaches and more. Because of pain, people miss work, develop depression, some people drink more alcohol than is healthy, and chronic pain is one of the main drivers of the opioid epidemic,” said John Piette, a professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health and senior research scientist at the Veterans Administration.

“We’re very excited about the results of this study, because we were able to demonstrate that we can achieve pain outcomes that are at least as good as standard cognitive behavioral therapy programs, and maybe even better. And we did that with less than half the therapist time as guideline-recommended approaches.”

Traditionally, CBT is delivered by a therapist in 6 to 12 weekly in-person sessions that target patients’ behaviors, help them cope mentally and assist them in regaining functioning.

Synthetic genetic circuits that could help plants adapt to pressures from climate change

The activity of synthetic genetic circuits that process the presence or absence of specific signals in plant leaves was measured in high throughput by placing leaf punches in 96-well plates. When the correct combinations of inputs are delivered to leaves, they fluoresce green, and the fluorescence can be measured using a plate reader.
Image credit: Jennifer Brophy

Using synthetic genes, researchers at Stanford have been able to modify the root structures of plants. Their work could make crops more efficient at gathering nutrients and water, and more resilient to increasing pressures from climate change.

Increasingly, global food production is being threatened by the effects of climate change. As floods, droughts, and extreme heat waves become more common, crops need to be able to adapt faster than ever.

Researchers at Stanford University are working on ways to manipulate biological processes in plants to help them grow more efficiently and effectively in a variety of conditions. Jennifer Brophy, an assistant professor of bioengineering, and her colleagues have designed a series of synthetic genetic circuits that allow them to control the decisions made by different types of plant cells. In a paper published recently in Science, they used these tools to grow plants with modified root structures. Their work is the first step in designing crops that are better able to collect water and nutrients from the soil and provides a framework for designing, testing, and improving synthetic genetic circuits for other applications in plants.

“Our synthetic genetic circuits are going to allow us to build very specific root systems or very specific leaf structures to see what is optimal for the challenging environmental conditions that we know are coming,” Brophy said. “We’re making the engineering of plants much more precise.”

Brightest stars in the night sky can strip planets to their rocky cores

Artist’s concept of a Neptune-sized planet, left, around a blue, A-type star. UC Berkeley astronomers have discovered a hard-to-find gas giant around one of these bright, but short-lived, stars, right at the edge of the hot Neptune desert where the star’s strong radiation likely strips any giant planet of its gas.
 Image credit: Steven Giacalone, UC Berkeley

Over the last 25 years, astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets around stars in our galaxy, but more than 99% of them orbit smaller stars — from red dwarfs to stars slightly more massive than our sun, which is considered an average-sized star.

Few have been discovered around even more massive stars, such as A-type stars — bright blue stars twice as large as the sun — and most of the exoplanets that have been observed are the size of Jupiter or larger. Some of the brightest stars in the night sky, such as Sirius and Vega, are A-type stars.

University of California, Berkeley, astronomers now report a new, Neptune-sized planet — called HD 56414 b — around one of these hot-burning, but short-lived, A-type stars and provide a hint about why so few gas giants smaller than Jupiter have been seen around the brightest 1% of stars in our galaxy.

Current exoplanet detection methods most easily find planets with short, rapid orbital periods around their stars, but this newly found planet has a longer orbital period than most discovered to date. The researchers suggest that an easier-to-find Neptune-sized planet sitting closer to a bright A-type star would be rapidly stripped of its gas by the harsh stellar radiation and reduced to an undetectable core.

Breast cancer cells use forces to open up channels through tissue

An illustrated microscope view of a 3D culture of cancer cells. A cancer cell generates forces (in red) moving the tissue material farther. The new technique detects the material movement to compute cellular forces.
Image Credit: Juho Pokki/Aalto University

Research to understand how cancers grow and spread has conventionally been done on two-dimensional, flat cultures of cells, which is very different to the three-dimensional structure of cells in the body. 3D cell cultures that incorporate tissue material have been developed, but the methods to measure how cancer cells use forces to spread have been lacking.

Now, researchers have developed a new method for 3D culture to accurately quantify how cancer cells generate forces to spread within tissue. ‘We have applied the method for investigation of early progression of breast cancer,’ says Juho Pokki, a principal investigator at Aalto University who led the research.

This study, a collaboration between scientists at Aalto University and Stanford University, was published in the journal Nano Letters.

Mini donkey gets big boost from pacemaker

Veterinarians at Cornell prepare miniature donkey Nix for her pacemaker surgery.
Credit: Carol Jennings/CVM 

Nix, a miniature donkey with a potentially fatal heart condition, is on the mend after a successful pacemaker implantation by veterinarians at the Cornell University Hospital for Animals – the first surgery of its kind in a large animal species at Cornell.

“It was either do nothing and Nix would continue to get worse and possibly have a painful death – or the pacemaker,” said Mindy Lockwood of Canandaigua, New York, who owns Nix with her husband, Carlton.

Nix’s collapsing episodes and overall lethargy began in the fall of 2020 when she was only a few months old. Her regular veterinarian, Dr. Joan Ayers of Genesee Valley Veterinary Hospital, assessed her condition in consultation with the Lockwoods and Dr. Barbara Delvescovo, clinical fellow in the Section of Large Animal Medicine at Cornell.

In February of this year, Nix’s condition worsened. The Lockwoods saw that Nix was falling again, this time from a standing position, and she staggered even more while walking. “When she fell, she was dazed for a few seconds and then would get back up. Several times she fell and rolled out of the pasture fence, which caused us even more concern for her safety,” Carlton Lockwood said.

Uncovering the Past: Researchers Create 3D Images of Fossils

Aase mounts one of the fossils in the X-ray microscope for imaging.
Credit: Idaho National Laboratory

Idaho National Laboratory is perhaps best known for innovative research that helps shape the clean energy economies of today and tomorrow – and for good reason. But while much of the laboratory’s work is focused on building a sustainable future, INL is also doing its part to preserve the past.

INL researchers recently imaged several fossils using a powerful X-ray microscope. The 3D images will be used to create exhibits for Wyoming’s Fossil Butte National Monument and help experts gain insight into the origins of these and other relics.

The fossils, found in private quarries around Wyoming, were imaged using a technique known as X-ray microscopy. At INL, researchers typically use high-resolution X-ray microscopy to view specimens – such as samples of irradiated nuclear fuel — at a level of detail not possible with conventional microscopes. The depth and granularity afforded by this technique will help paleontologists learn a great deal about these fossils —including an unknown object resembling an insect egg case or pea pod — and the conditions under which they formed.

“You can see the limestone layers as well as submillimeter and thinner organic materials that have been compressed into waxy, pre-petroleum substances around the specimen,” said Arvid Aase, a paleontologist and the museum curator at Fossil Butte National Monument. “These incredibly detailed images will help us determine the organism’s taxonomy and reveal information about its fossilization process, such as how long it was laying on the bottom of the lake covered in microbes before getting buried by limestone.”

The fossilization process may have occurred over a period of months, though the timing still remains unknown, he added.