Curated News: Scientific Meetings

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Ocean predators cannot survive on average concentrations of food found in the water. Instead, they survive by exploiting small patches of food-rich areas peppered throughout the world's waterways. Using active acoustics, researchers found the ocean is widely populated with narrow hotspots of activity. Traditionally, these hotspots are missed with conventional sampling tools, but locating them can provide dynamic layered maps of ocean life. The findings signify ocean food and biota as patchy, varying with depth and location, suggesting animals must find and exploit small-scale aggregations of resources.

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Researchers observed a professional soprano singing with and without six types of masks and found masks effectively block aerosols, forcing the breath to exit at the sides. From there, the aerosols travel upward, rising with the upward flow of body heat from the singer. At low frequencies, masks reduced volume but did not have other effects on the singing. However, masks did reduce the power of higher frequencies, which made the enunciation of words less clear and altered the timbre. Masks had no effect on the pitch.

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Bats use their acoustical abilities to create discrete echo snapshots and build representations of their environments, producing sounds for echolocation through contracting the larynx or clicking their tongues before analyzing the returning echoes. This acoustic information facilitates navigation and foraging, often in total darkness. Echo snapshots provide interrupted sensory information about target insect trajectory to build prediction models of prey location, and by amalgamating representations of prey echoes, bats can determine prey distance, size, shape, and density.

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Converting newly emptied office spaces into podcast studios poses noise challenges not previously realized before hybrid offices began. Offices are less busy and less noisy, meaning recording spaces can be used more often, and newly empty private offices can become podcast studios. But existing spaces present multiple acoustic challenges -- single-glazed windows, nearby noise sources, and limited available surface area, to name a few. Experts recommend considering location, nearby noise sources, and ways to absorb sound to make a studio effective.

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Electric vehicles are so quiet they can create a safety concern. To address this, many governments have mandated artificial sounds be added. In the U.S., regulations require vehicle sounds to be detectable at certain distances for various speeds, and researchers have tested how well people detect electric vehicle sounds in terms of these requirements. Participants in the study were seated adjacent to a lane of the test facility and pressed a button upon hearing an approaching electric vehicle. This allowed the researchers to measure the probability of detection versus distance from the vehicle.

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Filtering and removing the microplastics from water is a difficult task, but acoustic waves may provide a solution. Researchers have developed a filtration prototype that uses two speakers to create acoustic waves. The force produced by the waves separates the microplastics from the water by creating pressure on a tube of inflowing water. As the tube splits into three channels, the microplastic particles are pressed toward the center as the clean water flows toward the two outer channels.

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Press conferences at the 181st Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America will be held Wednesday, Dec. 1, in room 505 at the Hyatt Regency Seattle. The media availabilities will focus on wide range of newsworthy sessions at the upcoming meeting from killer whales spending more time in the Arctic Ocean to knocking over Lego minifigures with time reversal focused vibration. For more information, contact AIP Media.

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A team of scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory used the nation’s fastest supercomputer to streamline the search for potential treatments for COVID-19.

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A team led by Rommie Amaro of the University of California San Diego has used ORNL’s Summit supercomputer to model an aerosolized SARS-CoV-2 viral particle for the first time. The 1.05-billion-atom system is among the largest biochemical system ever simulated at the atomic level.

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Princeton researchers have solved a 54-year-old puzzle about why certain fluids strangely slow down under pressure when flowing through porous materials, such as soils and sedimentary rocks.

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Computer scientists recently examined the performance of dialog systems, such as personal assistants and chatbots designed to interact with humans. The team found that when these systems are confronted with dialog that includes idioms or similes, their performance drops to between 10 and 20 percent. The research team also developed a partial remedy.

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A new measurement of the neutron skin in calcium reveals that heavier types of calcium nuclei are relatively thin-skinned. The new measurement, made by the 48Ca Radius EXperiment (CREX) collaboration at DOE’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, was presented at the 2021 Fall Meeting of the APS Division of Nuclear Physics of the American Physical Society. It is the first highly robust electroweak measurement of the neutron skin in a medium-weight nucleus, and it features a precision of about 0.025 millionths of a nanometer.

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Since the Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater on Mars in February, the rover and its team of scientists back on Earth have been hard at work exploring the floor of the crater that once held an ancient lake.

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Black women are more likely than white women to experience a severe, unexpected complication during labor or delivery, particularly due to systemic inflammation, according to research being presented at the ANESTHESIOLOGY® 2021 annual meeting.

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Study may have implications for other vaccinations, including COVID-19 vaccine.

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Research shows pre-existing severe diabetes and high blood pressure play a role.

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Physician anesthesiologist-led rapid response teams led to a significant decrease in cardiac arrest and death, after a transition from nurse-only rapid response teams at the Anesthesiology Institute, Department of Intensive Care and Resuscitation, Cleveland Clinic, Ohio, according to a study presented at the ANESTHESIOLOGY® 2021 annual meeting.

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Smokers, those with bipolar disorder, depression, pulmonary hypertension at higher risk for persistent opioid use, study finds.

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Providing children oral instead of intravenous (IV) acetaminophen to help manage tonsillectomy pain improves care at lower costs, according to research being presented at the ANESTHESIOLOGY® 2021 annual meeting.

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Patients who experience low blood pressure during surgery are at increased risk for postoperative delirium, according to a large study being presented at the ANESTHESIOLOGY® 2021 annual meeting.