British Trust of Ornithology researchers call for better monitoring of soil invertebrates after new research, collating 100 years of data, suggests significant and previously undetected declines in UK earthworm abundance could have occurred.
This week, the United Nations is meeting in Montreal for the UN Biodiversity Conference. The conference brings together leaders from around the world to discuss how to prevent loss of biodiversity and how to restore habitats that are already hurting.
Soil microbes decompose organic matter into simple carbon compounds – what soil conditions do these microbes prefer and where do they work most efficiently?
More action is urgently needed to safeguard the world’s precious mountain ecosystems, according to a University of York researcher whose policy brief is being presented at this month’s United Nations Biodiversity Conference (“COP15”) in Montreal, Canada.
Studying whether animals possess additional language-related skills can help us understand what it takes to learn speech and reveal the history of its evolution. Andrea Ravignani and colleagues studied seal pups' vocal plasticity, or how well they can adjust their own voices to compensate for their environment, and found that seal pups can change the pitch and volume of their voices, much like humans can. Ravignani will discuss his work linking vocal learning with vocal plasticity and rhythmic capacity at the 183rd ASA Meeting.
At the 183rd ASA Meeting, Kenton Hummel will describe how soundscape research in day cares can improve child and provider outcomes and experiences. He and his team collaborated with experts in engineering, sensing, early child care, and health to monitor three day care centers for 48-hour periods. High noise levels and long periods of loud fluctuating sound can negatively impact children and staff by increasing the effort it takes to communicate. In contrast, a low background noise level allows for meaningful speech, which is essential for language, brain, cognitive, and social/emotional development.
At the 183rd ASA Meeting, Brendan Smith will describe how hydrophones can listen to the sounds of deep-sea hydrothermal vents, informing the environmental impacts of deep-sea mining and assisting with interplanetary exploration. He and his supervisor David Barclay have developed noninvasive ways to study the vents that are sustainable in the long term because they work from a safe distance. Understanding the acoustics in the vicinity could help predict and prevent environmental impacts.
KICT and Deltares conducted a research on prediction of the future changes in river landscapes using an eco-morphodynamic model applied to an actual river. According to the study result, the vegetation cover increases continuously until 2031, and the area covered by willow trees occupies up to 20% of the river area.
Modern movie sound mixing uses techniques like impulse responses to reproduce dialogue and other sounds. These methods are crucial to align what moviegoers see and hear and keep them engaged in the story. At the 183rd ASA meeting, Jeffrey Reed of Taproot Audio Design will demonstrate the behind-the-scenes audio engineering required to re-create the acoustics of movie sets and locations, sharing short clips of film to compare the original recording to the studio mixed product.
"I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now." With these words, Alvin Lucier begins a fascinating recording where his voice warps and becomes indistinguishable over time, solely because of how sound reflects in the room. For physics students, this audio can be used to reveal details of the surrounding room and teach important lessons about acoustic resonance. Andy Piacsek, of Central Washington University, will discuss how he employs Lucier's project in the classroom during his talk, "Students are sitting in a room."
For musicians, sound designers, and other audio professionals, a text-to-audio model opens avenues of creative application and exploration and provides workflow-enhancing tools. At the 183rd ASA Meeting, Zach Evans will present his team's early success in generating coherent and relevant music and sound from text. They employed data compression methods to generate the audio with reduced training time and improved output quality, and they plan to expand to larger data sets and release their model as open-source option for others to use and improve.
Louis Urtecho and his team hope to study dust devils in the Mojave Desert on Earth, then extend the analysis to scale for the different atmosphere on Mars. Based on microbarometer data from the Mojave, they built an algorithm to look for the pressure activity indicative of a dust devil. The vortices have a distinct drop in pressure near their centers, and their pressure fluctuates to look like an electrocardiogram signal over time. The team hopes to learn more about the convective vortices and how they move, which will improve the accuracy of Martian weather models.
At the 183rd ASA Meeting, researchers will describe "The evolution of Blackbird Studio C," a space designed to provide an accurate and immersive mixing and production environment. They wanted to create a unique, ambient anechoic space that would allow ambient sound to decay equally across different frequencies and be free from interfering reflections, making it sound like an indoor forest. So they covered the walls and ceiling with primitive root diffusers. This technology causes sound energy to diffuse and radiate in many directions.
At the 183rd ASA Meeting, Markus Mueller-Trapet will describe experiments designed to simulate and measure the perceived annoyance experienced from noisy neighbors in multi-unit residential buildings. He and his team provided a living room-like situation and recorded impact sounds of objects dropping and people walking. They then presented the recordings to study participants, using different playback techniques and virtual reality, and created an online survey. The team hopes to provide guidance to architects and building code developers.
At the 183rd ASA Meeting, Gautam Shah will discuss plans to test a supersonic aircraft with technology to alter how supersonic shock waves behave and reduce sonic booms. NASA will conduct a series of flights over various communities across the U.S., and Shah and his team will measure the sound of the aircraft and conduct public surveys to understand the public response to different noise levels. By providing this information to regulatory agencies, the group hopes to inform an overland supersonic sound standard.
Creating 3D-printed, low-cost, durable violins for music students, researchers have explored the factors that result in the best violin sounds and performed a concerto composed specifically for 3D-printed instruments. The violin was created in two sections. The body is made of a plastic polymer material and designed to produce a resonant tone, while the neck and fingerboard are printed in smooth ABS plastic to be comfortable in the musician's hands. The result is a violin that produces a darker, more mellow sound than traditionally made instruments.
Researchers describe how a noninvasive microphone sensor could identify bowel diseases without collecting any identifiable information. They tested the technique on audio data from online sources, transforming each audio sample of an excretion event into a spectrogram, which essentially captures the sound in an image. The images were fed to a machine learning algorithm that learned to classify each event based on its features. The algorithm's performance was tested against data with and without background noises.
Researchers have developed a machine learning algorithm to identify cough sounds and determine whether the subject is suffering from pneumonia. Because every room and recording device is different, they augmented their recordings with room impulse responses, which measure how the acoustics of a space react to different sound frequencies. By combining this data with the recorded cough sounds, the algorithm can work in any environment.
Researchers present an app that creates playlists to help listeners care for their emotions through music. The app could be used by people who may not want to receive counseling or treatment because of feelings of shame, inadequacy, or distrust and aims to leave them more positive and focused than they were when they began. Users take three self-led questionnaires to measure their emotional status and the app then creates a customized playlist of songs using one of three strategies: consoling, relaxing, or uplifting.
In a crowded restaurant, the sounds of conversations bounce off walls, creating background noise. Each individual wants to be heard, so they end up talking a little bit louder, which increases the overall din. Eventually – barring an interruption – the system gets loud enough to reach the limit of the human voice. Braxton Boren will discuss this cycle, called the Lombard effect, and how it can be disrupted in his presentation, "A game theory model of the Lombard effect in public spaces."
The conference brought together scientists, postgraduate and undergraduate students and representatives of the business community to discuss current research in microbiology and the latest biotechnological developments.
The Public Policy Committee of the American Society for Cell Biology selected George Langford to receive the 2022 Public Service Award for his 50 years of service to the ASCB and science. A short video of the presentation will be shown on Saturday, December 3, during the Cell Bio 2022 Keynote in Washington, DC.
Cell Bio 2022—the annual joint meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) and the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO)—will convene at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC, December 3-7. As the world's largest gathering of cell biologists, this unique meeting focuses on cell biology as the fundamental basis of biology and sessions on emerging interdisciplinary topics.
Needhi Bhalla, Professor of Molecular, Cell, and Developmental (MCD) Biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), will receive the 2022 American Society for Cell Biology Prize for Excellence in Inclusivity award. ASCB will recognize Bhalla on Saturday, December 3, before the keynote of the Cell Bio 2022 meeting in Washington, DC.
Rebecca Heald, Professor, and Co-chair in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, has been awarded the 2022 Sandra K. Masur Senior Leadership Award from the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB). Heald will present the talk “Molecular conflicts disrupting centromere maintenance contribute to Xenopus hybrid inviability” during the Centromere Structure and Function Special Interest Subgroup Wednesday, December 7, at Cell Bio 2022. The Masur Award is presented on Tuesday, December 6.
The American Society for Cell Biology honors David J. Asai, Senior Director of Science Education for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), with the 2022 Bruce Alberts Award for Excellence in Science Education. Asai will receive the award on Monday, December 5, during Cell Bio 2022 in Washington, DC, where he will present the talk “Lessons from the Little Red Hen.”
Juan Salvador Bonifacino will present the Keith Porter Lecture Monday, December 5, at Cell Bio 2022 in Washington, DC.
The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) is excited to honor Don Cleveland with the 2022 E. B. Wilson Medal. Cleveland will present the E.B. Wilson lecture, “Genome instability in cancer: chromothripsis and extrachromosomal DNA,” during Cell Bio 2022 in Washington, DC.
The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) is pleased to announce that Renato J. Aguilera of the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) will present the 2022 E.E. Just Lectureship Award. On Sunday, December 4, during Cell Bio 2022 in Washington, DC, he will present the talk “From the Study of DNases to Cancer Research: an Unexpected Scientific Journey.”
Diagnosing early-stage lung cancer with low-dose computed tomography (CT) screening drastically improves the survival rate of cancer patients over a 20-year period, according to a large-scale international study being presented by Mount Sinai researchers at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.
Irvine, Calif., Nov. 17, 2022 – Researchers at the University of California, Irvine have discovered that the safe operation of a negative pressure room – a space in a hospital or biological research laboratory designed to protect outside areas from exposure to deadly pathogens – can be disrupted by an attacker armed with little more than a smartphone.
Mobile devices that use Bluetooth are vulnerable to a glitch that could allow attackers to track a user’s location, a new study has found.
University of Washington researchers examined 44 3D tours in 44 states across the U.S. to look for potential security issues when personal details were included in the tour.
An app developed by Cornell researchers uses augmented reality to help users repeatedly capture images from the same location with a phone or tablet to make time-lapse videos – without leaving a camera on site.
Randy D. Blakely, Ph.D., Florida Atlantic University’s Stiles-Nicholson Brain Institute executive director, recently received the Society for Neuroscience’s (SfN) 2022 Science Educator Award at the organization’s annual meeting in San Diego.
The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) will hold its 183rd meeting Dec. 5- 9 at the Grand Hyatt Nashville Hotel. ASA183 will be an in-person meeting with several hybrid sessions where remote attendance will also be possible. Reporters are invited to attend the meeting at no cost.
An international group of marine scientists has published a letter in Science that is a call to action for policy makers, government agencies and ocean conservation groups to take major steps to preserve Egypt’s coral reefs, which generate billions of dollars annually from tourism and tourism-related commerce.
The closing plenary session at ANA2022 spotlighted neurologic health inequities and presented new research finding that neighborhood disadvantage strongly predicted likelihood of death from neurologic conditions independent of individual wealth and demographics.
Neuroscientists from Cedars-Sinai will present—and are available to comment on—cutting-edge brain research at the sixth International Human Single Neuron Meeting Nov. 10-11 at UCLA, and Neuroscience 2022, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, Nov. 12-16 in San Diego.
A team of leading University of Bristol researchers on hot topics, ranging from climate change policy to adapting to a warming world and ensuring the transition to a net zero economy is fair, are poised to join the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference.
Experts in quantum information science and engineering will come together on November 14-15 in Chicago to share their insights and experiences from the forefront of this growing field. The fifth annual Chicago Quantum Summit, hosted by the Chicago Quantum Exchange, will convene academic, government, and industry leaders in quantum information science and engineering.
A research team based out of the University of Waterloo has developed a drone-powered device that can use WiFi networks to see through walls.
Cardiologists, cardiothoracic surgeons and interventionalists from the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai are presenting an array of innovative research data and leading discussions on medical breakthroughs during the American Heart Association (AHA) Scientific Sessions, taking place in Chicago, Nov. 5-7.
U.S. deaths from heart disease spiked in 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic after a steady decline from 2010 to 2019, reversing a public health success, according to preliminary research to be presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2022.
Comparative physiologists studied how two aspects of climate change—warming temperatures and increasingly acidic waters—may affect the ecologically important Pacific blue mussel (Mytilus trossulus), a foundational species in the intertidal environments of the northern Pacific Ocean.
New research into oil spills’ effects finds surviving the initial event does not guarantee success for the popular sport fish mahi-mahi (Coryphaena hippurus). Exposed fish faced temporary increased predation and did not spawn for the entire observation time.
Higher temperatures spurred by worsening climate change increased the growth rate of fish and consumption of their yolk sac—a structure that provides an embryo with food and helps develop important structures, such as blood cells.
A South American marsupial with ties to an ancient line of animals may go extinct in the next half-century due to warming temperatures. Researchers from the Universidad Austral de Chile will present a mathematical model of the monito del monte’s survival predictions this week at the American Physiological Society (APS) Intersociety Meeting in Comparative Physiology: From Organism to Omics in an Uncertain World conference in San Diego.
Digger bees lose large amounts of water during flight, which compromises their activity period and survival in the desert heat. Researchers from Arizona State University will present their work this week at the American Physiological Society (APS) Intersociety Meeting in Comparative Physiology: From Organism to Omics in an Uncertain World conference in San Diego.
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