Voluntary UK initiatives to phase out toxic lead shot for pheasant hunting have had little impact

Pheasant
Photo Credit: Julie Mayo

The pledge, made in 2020 by nine major UK game shooting and rural organizations, aims to protect the natural environment and ensure a safer supply of game meat for consumers. Lead is toxic even in very small concentrations, and discarded shot from hunting poisons and kills tens of thousands of the UK’s wild birds each year.

A Cambridge-led team of 17 volunteers bought whole pheasants from butchers, game dealers and supermarkets across the UK in 2022-23. They dissected the birds at home and recovered embedded shotgun pellets from 235 of the 356 pheasant carcasses.

The main metal present in each shotgun pellet was revealed through laboratory analysis - conducted at the Environmental Research Institute, University of the Highlands and Islands, UK. Lead was the main element in 94% of the recovered shot pellets; the remaining 6% were predominantly composed of steel or a metal called bismuth.

Australia’s rarest bird of prey disappearing at alarming rate

Researchers analyzed 40 years of sightings by citizen scientists to uncover concerning population trends.
Photo Credit: Chris McColl

Australia’s rarest bird of prey - the red goshawk - is facing extinction, with Cape York Peninsula now the only place in Queensland known to support breeding populations.

PhD candidate Chris MacColl from The University of Queensland’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences led the research project that made the discovery and was shocked by the hawk’s dwindling numbers.

“Over four decades the red goshawk has lost a third of its historical range, which is the area that’s it’s previously been known to occupy,” Mr. MacColl said.

“It’s barely hanging on in another 30 per cent of regions it has previously been known to inhabit.”

Mr. MacColl said the species is now considered extinct in New South Wales and the southern half of Queensland.

Let's get wasted and apply some deep thinking to rubbish

Photo Credit: John Cameron

Artificial intelligence has made a giant leap into our rubbish bins thanks to new technology being deployed at the University of South Australia.

Using algorithms to analyze data from smart bin sensors, UniSA PhD student Sabbir Ahmed is designing a deep learning model to predict where waste is accumulating in cities and how often public bins should be cleared.

“Sensors in the public smart bins can give us a lot of information about how busy specific locations are, what type of rubbish is being disposed of and even how much methane gas is being produced from food waste in bins,” Ahmed says.

“All that data can be fed into a neural network model to predict where bins in parks, shopping centers and other public places are likely to fill up quickly and, conversely, which locations are rarely visited.

“This can help councils to optimize their waste management services, schedule bin clearances and even relocate rarely used bins to where they are needed most.”

Researchers Uncover How Photosynthetic Organisms Regulate and Synthesize ATP

The redox regulation mechanism responsible for efficient production of ATP under varying light conditions in photosynthetic organisms has now been unveiled by Tokyo Tech researchers. They investigated the enzyme responsible for this mechanism and uncovered how the amino acid sequences present in the enzyme regulate ATP production. Their findings provide valuable insights into the process of photosynthesis and the ability to adapt to changing metabolic conditions.

ATP, the compound essential for the functioning of photosynthetic organisms such as plants and algae, is produced by an enzyme called "chloroplast ATP synthase" (CFoCF1). To control ATP production under varying light conditions, the enzyme uses a redox regulatory mechanism that modifies the ATP synthesis activity in response to changes in the redox state of cysteine (Cys) residues, which exist as dithiols under reducing (light) conditions, but forms a disulfide bond under oxidizing (dark) conditions. However, this mechanism has not been fully understood so far.

Now, in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers from Japan, led by Prof. Toru Hisabori from Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), has uncovered the role of the amino acid sequences present in CFoCF1, revealing how the enzyme regulates ATP production in photosynthetic organisms.

New Study Shows Archery Appeared in Europe Thousands of Years Earlier than Previously Thought

Laure Metz making experimental bow and arrow shots with arrows armed with Neronian light points.
 Photo Credit: Ludovic Slimak

The use of bow-and-arrow technology gave humans an edge over Neanderthal neighbors in hunting game

A new study published in Science Advances contextualizes the traditions and technological knowledge of early, pioneering Homo sapiens. The study demonstrates the mastery of archery by modern populations and extends the evidence of archery in Europe back by about 40,000 years.

The researchers analyzed lithic artifacts from a cave in Mediterranean France called Grotte Mandrin, which reveals the oldest occupation of modern humans on the European continent. The study focuses on a very rich level, attributed to the Neronian culture, and testifies to Homo sapiens occupations dating back 54,000 years, interposed between numerous Neanderthal occupations in the cave before and after the modern humans. That’s roughly 10,000 years earlier than what had been previously believed to be the earliest occupation of modern humans in Europe.

The research was directed by Laure Metz, an associated researcher at UMR 7269 (UMR LAMPEA, CNRS, Aix-Marseille University), and Ludovic Slimak, CNRS researcher (UMR 5608 TRACES, Toulouse Jean Jaurès University). Metz is a UConn-affiliated researcher and former post-doctoral researcher in the UConn Department of Anthropology Deep History Lab led by Professor Christian Tryon.

Custom, 3D-printed heart replicas look and pump just like the real thing

No two hearts beat alike. The size and shape of the heart can vary from one person to the next. These differences can be particularly pronounced for people living with heart disease, as their hearts and major vessels work harder to overcome any compromised function.

MIT engineers are hoping to help doctors tailor treatments to patients’ specific heart form and function, with a custom robotic heart. The team has developed a procedure to 3D print a soft and flexible replica of a patient’s heart. They can then control the replica’s action to mimic that patient’s blood-pumping ability.

The procedure involves first converting medical images of a patient’s heart into a three-dimensional computer model, which the researchers can then 3D print using a polymer-based ink. The result is a soft, flexible shell in the exact shape of the patient’s own heart. The team can also use this approach to print a patient’s aorta — the major artery that carries blood out of the heart to the rest of the body.

To mimic the heart’s pumping action, the team has fabricated sleeves similar to blood pressure cuffs that wrap around a printed heart and aorta. The underside of each sleeve resembles precisely patterned bubble wrap. When the sleeve is connected to a pneumatic system, researchers can tune the outflowing air to rhythmically inflate the sleeve’s bubbles and contract the heart, mimicking its pumping action. 

SLAC, Stanford researchers make a new type of quantum material with a dramatic distortion pattern

This illustration shows how an electronic tug-of-war between the layers of a new quantum material has warped its atomic lattice into a dramatic herringbone-like pattern. Scientists at SLAC and Stanford who created the material are just starting to explore how this 'huge' distortion affects the material's properties.   
Illustration Credit: Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Created by an electronic tug-of-war between the material's atomic layers, this ‘beautiful’ herringbone-like pattern could give rise to unique features that scientists are just starting to explore.

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have created a new type of quantum material whose atomic scaffolding, or lattice, has been dramatically warped into a herringbone pattern.

The resulting distortions are “huge” compared to those achieved in other materials, said Woo Jin Kim, a postdoctoral researcher at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES) at SLAC who led the study. 

“This is a very fundamental result, so it’s hard to make predictions about what may or may not come out of it, but the possibilities are exciting,” said SLAC/Stanford Professor and SIMES Director Harold Hwang. 

“Based on theoretical modeling from members of our team, it looks like the new material has intriguing magnetic, orbital and charge order properties that we plan to investigate further,” he said. Those are some of the very properties that scientists think give quantum materials their surprising characteristics. 

The research team described their work in a paper published in Nature today.

WVU physicists give the first law of thermodynamics a makeover

Research findings led by Paul Cassak, WVU professor and associate director of the WVU Center for KINETIC Plasma Physics, have broken new ground on how scientists can understand the first law of thermodynamics and how plasmas in space and laboratories get heated. In this photo, argon plasma glows a bluish color in a Center experiment.
Photo Credit: Brian Persinger / West Virginia University

West Virginia University physicists have made a breakthrough on an age-old limitation of the first law of thermodynamics.

Paul Cassak, professor and associate director of the Center for KINETIC Plasma Physics, and graduate research assistant Hasan Barbhuiya, both in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, are studying how energy gets converted in superheated plasmas in space. Their findings, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation and published in the Physical Review Letters journal, will revamp scientists’ understanding of how plasmas in space and laboratories get heated up, and may have a wide variety of further applications across physics and other sciences.

The first law of thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but it can be converted into different forms.

“Suppose you heat up a balloon,” Cassak said. “The first law of thermodynamics tells you how much the balloon expands and how much hotter the gas inside the balloon gets. The key is that the total amount of energy causing the balloon to expand and the gas to get hotter is the same as the amount of heat you put into the balloon. The first law has been used to describe many things — including how refrigerators and car engines work. It’s one of the pillars of physics.”

Trawlers intermix with whale ‘supergroup’ in Southern Ocean

Fin whales surround the research vessel National Geographic Endurance in January 2022.
Video Credit: Eric Wehrmeister

Trawlers working amidst a whale ‘supergroup’ raise red flag about human-whale conflicts in a changing ocean, Stanford study says

Scientists observed close to 1,000 fin whales foraging near Antarctica, while fishing vessels trawled for krill in their midst. Without action, such encounters are likely to become more common as this endangered species recovers and krill harvesting intensifies in the Southern Ocean.

Once driven nearly to extinction, the second-largest animals of all time have recently been spotted in big numbers in the Southern Ocean, competing directly with industrial trawlers for prey, according to research led by scientists from Stanford University and Lindblad Expeditions.

Published in Ecology, the study focuses on scientists’ sighting of an enormous “supergroup” of fin whales foraging for shrimplike animals called krill northwest of the South Orkney Islands in January 2022, with four commercial fishing vessels trawling among them for the same tiny creatures.

The researchers, led by Matthew Savoca of Stanford and Conor Ryan of Lindblad Expeditions, estimate at least 830 and possibly more than 1,100 fin whales were present. This ranks among the largest groups of baleen whales ever recorded since commercial whaling decimated their populations last century.

New zirconia-based catalyst can make plastics upcycling more sustainable

A representation of the zirconia catalyst. The teal shows the mesoporous silica plates, the red represents the zirconia nanoparticles between the two sheets. The polymer chains enter the pores, contact the zirconia nanoparticles, and are cut into shorter chains.
Illustration Credit: Courtesy of Ames National Laboratory

A new type of catalyst breaks down polyolefin plastics into new, useful products. This project is part of a new strategy to reduce the amount of plastic waste and its impact on our environment, as well as recover value that is lost when plastics are thrown away. The catalyst was developed by a team from the Institute for Cooperative Upcycling of Plastic (iCOUP), a U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Frontier Research Center. The effort was led by Aaron Sadow, the director of iCOUP, scientist at Ames National Laboratory, and professor at Iowa State University; Andreas Heyden, professor at the University of South Carolina; and Wenyu Huang, scientist at Ames Lab and professor at Iowa State. The new catalyst is made only of earth-abundant materials, which they demonstrated can break carbon-carbon (CC) bonds in aliphatic hydrocarbons.

Aliphatic hydrocarbons are organic compounds made up of only hydrogen and carbon. Polyolefin plastics are aliphatic hydrocarbon materials composed of long chains of carbon atoms linked together to form strong materials. These materials are a big part of the plastic waste crisis. Wenyu Huang said, “More than half of produced plastics so far are polyolefin based.”