Blue mussels not yet the bellwether of NE coastal environment

Marcy Cockrell installs cages to protect mussels from predators. In Maine, mussels inside cages faired as well as mussels in the wild. In Long Island Sound and Narragansett Bay it was a different story. Credit: Brown University

Ecologists sometimes look to mussel species, a well-studied and foundational genus in estuaries, as model organisms for assessing the condition of coastal habitats, which are crucial for people and well as the broader environment.

But a new study in the journal Ecosphere suggests that the seemingly simple blue mussel, when studied on regional scale from Maine to Connecticut, harbors at least three specific mysteries that must be solved if the mollusks are to serve as the "canaries in the coal mine" of the Northeast coast.

"Mussels could indeed be a good sentinel species for rocky shores, but what our work suggests is that we need to know a lot more about how they behave in these different estuarine settings to use them as an indicator of ecosystem health," said conservation scientist and study senior author Heather Leslie, the Peggy and Henry D. Sharpe Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies.

For the study, Leslie and former students Marcy Cockrell and Joanna Bernhardt monitored and experimented with mussels at 18 sites in the Casco Bay of Maine, the Narragansett Bay of Rhode Island, and the Long Island Sound of Connecticut and New York in 2010 and 2011 (a region spanning about 600 kilometers of coastline). They measured the abundance of mussels both at adult and larval stages, studied the populations of neighboring rocky shore animals and marine algae, and tracked data on ecosystem factors such as water salinity, temperature, nutrients, oxygen, and local human population density. In the experiments, the team protected some mussels with cages to expose the effect that birds, crabs and other predators have on their numbers.

In the end, the research uncovered three intriguing mysteries of mussel life across the region, particularly in Casco Bay:

Generation gaps: Adults were populous but "recruitment" of young mussels from surrounding waters was low in Long Island Sound and Narragansett Bay. The opposite was true in Casco Bay. There, juvenile recruitment was high but adult populations were low. Few Maine predators: The cage experiments showed a significant role for mussel predators in Long Island Sound and Narragansett Bay, but not in Casco Bay. There, unprotected mussels fared about as well as the protected ones. Inner vs. outer: In each estuary, Leslie's team made measurements at sites nestled well within the bay, as well as at sites closer to the open ocean. Prior research suggested that higher levels of food within the bay would promote growth and abundance for the filter-feeding mussels (due to higher levels of nutrients and phytoplankton at the inner estuary sites). The study results were notably mixed across the whole region, however, providing little support for that hypothesis.

Explanations await further research. Genetic studies could determine, for example, whether the young mussels that are so abundant in Casco Bay may be floating up from the more southerly shores. If so, that suggests that mussel population dynamics can only be understood on regional (or multi-estuary) geographic scale.

Meanwhile, understanding why predator activity seems low in Casco Bay might require learning more about the local predator populations there. The findings could shed light on whether the ecosystem is in balance or other factors are at play.

"We did this because we want to understand how these systems work," Leslie said. "Given their accessibility and how well-studied they have been in other locations, rocky shores are logical sentinel ecosystems. They provide an opportunity to investigate how climate change and other more local-scale human activities are affecting New England's coast."

It may take more work to crack open the mussels' mysteries, but the stakes are high enough to make it worthwhile, Leslie said.

Source: Brown University

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UCLA and CASIS to collaborate on International Space Station study of possible therapy for bone loss

A study of rodents on the International Space Station will allow astronauts to test the ability of a bone-forming molecule to direct stem cells to induce bone formation. Credit: Nasa

UCLA has received grant funding from the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space to lead a research mission that will send rodents to the International Space Station. The mission will allow astronauts on the space station and scientists on Earth to test a potential new therapy for accelerating bone growth in humans. 

The research will be led by Dr. Chia Soo, a UCLA professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery and orthopaedic surgery who is member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research. Soo also is the research director for UCLA Operation Mend, which provides medical care for wounded warriors.

The study will test the ability of a bone-forming molecule called NELL-1 to direct stem cells to induce bone formation and prevent bone degeneration. Their work will build upon previous UCLA studies that were funded by the NIH.

Other members of the UCLA research team are Dr. Kang Ting, a professor of dentistry who discovered NELL-1 and is leading efforts to translate NELL-1 therapy to humans; Dr. Ben Wu, a professor of bioengineering and dentistry who modified the NELL-1 molecule to make it useful for treating osteoporosis; and Dr. Jin Hee Kwak, an assistant professor of dentistry who will manage the study’s daily operations.

Prolonged space flights induce extreme changes in bone and organ systems that cannot be replicated on Earth.

The UCLA–ISS team, which will begin ground operations in early 2015, hopes that the study will provide new insights into the prevention of bone loss or osteoporosis as well as the regeneration of massive bone defects that can occur in wounded military personnel. Osteoporosis is a significant health issue commonly associated with “skeletal disuse” conditions such as immobilization, stroke, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, spinal cord injury and jaw resorption after tooth loss.

“NELL-1 holds tremendous hope not only for preventing bone loss, but one day even restoring healthy bone,” Ting said. “For patients who are bed-bound and suffering from bone loss, it could be life-changing.” 

The UCLA team will oversee the ground operations of the mission in tandem with a flight operation coordinated by CASIS and NASA.  

“A group of 40 rodents will be sent to the International Space Station U.S. National Laboratory onboard the SpaceX Dragon capsule, where they will live for two months in a microgravity environment during the first ever test of NELL-1 in space,” said Dr. Julie Robinson, NASA’s chief scientist for the International Space Station program at the Johnson Space Center.

“CASIS is proud to work alongside UCLA in an effort to promote the station as a viable platform for bone loss inquiry,” said Warren Bates, director of portfolio management for CASIS. “Through investigations like this, we hope to make profound discoveries and enable the development of therapies to counteract bone loss ailments common in humans.”

“Besides testing the limits of NELL-1’s robust bone-producing effects, this mission will provide new insights about bone biology and could uncover important clues for curing diseases such as osteoporosis,” Wu said. 

“NIH has been pleased to work with NASA and CASIS to encourage the use of the International Space Station as a unique microgravity environment that can test innovative hypotheses that will benefit human health on Earth,” said Dr. Joan A. McGowan, director of the division of musculoskeletal diseases at the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, part of the NIH.

“This research has enormous translational application for astronauts in space flight and for patients on Earth who have osteoporosis or other bone-loss problems from disease, illness or trauma,” Soo said. “We very much appreciate the dedicated review staff at CASIS and the Center for Scientific Review, the portal for NIH grant applications, who made this effort possible.”

The research is supported by grants from the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space and National Institutes of Health. Additional funding and support are provided by the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA, the UCLA School of Dentistry, UCLA department of orthopaedic surgery and the UCLA Orthopaedic Hospital Research Center.

Source: UCLA

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Why do zebras have stripes?

A mother zebra with a foal in Tanzania’s Tarangire National Park. Credit: Brenda Larison/UCLA

One of nature’s fascinating questions is how zebras got their stripes.

A team of life scientists led by UCLA’s Brenda Larison has found at least part of the answer: The amount and intensity of striping can be best predicted by the temperature of the environment in which zebras live.

In the January cover story of the Royal Society’s online journal, Open Science, the researchers make the case that the association between striping and temperature likely points to multiple benefits — including controlling zebras’ body temperature and protecting them from diseases carried by biting flies.

“While past studies have typically focused their search for single mechanisms, we illustrate in this study how the cause of this extraordinary phenomenon is actually likely much more complex than previously appreciated, with temperature playing an important role,” said Thomas B. Smith, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in the UCLA College and senior author of the research.

Larison, a researcher in UCLA’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology and the study’s lead author, and her colleagues examined the plains zebra, which is the most common of three zebra species and has a wide variety of stripe patterns. On zebras in warmer climes, the stripes are bold and cover the entire body. On others — particularly those in regions with colder winters such as South Africa and Namibia — the stripes are fewer in number and are lighter and narrower. In some cases, the legs or other body parts have virtually no striping.

Zebras evolved from horses more than 2 million years ago, biologists have found. Scientists have previously hypothesized that zebras’ stripes evolved for one, or a combination of, four main reasons: confusing predators, protecting against disease-carrying insects, controlling body temperature and social cohesion. And while numerous previous studies of the phenomenon focused on a single hypothesis, the Larison-led study was the first to fully test a large set of hypotheses against one another.

Analyzing zebras at 16 locations in Africa and considering more two dozen environmental factors, the researchers found that temperature was the strongest predictor of zebras’ striping. The finding provides the first evidence that controlling body temperature, or thermoregulation, is the main reason for the stripes and the patterns they form.
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Separate research by Daniel Rubenstein, a Princeton University professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and a co-author of the Open Science paper, and Princeton undergraduate Damaris Iriondo strongly suggests that boldly striped zebras have external body temperatures about five degrees Fahrenheit cooler than other animals of the same size — like antelopes — that do not have stripes but live in the same areas. The Rubenstein study is not yet published, but it is cited in the Open Science paper.

Larison has studied many zebras during her field work throughout Africa — including in Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Using the fact that their stripes are unique like fingerprints, she is able to distinguish one zebra from another.

In addition to Rubenstein, arguably the world’s leading expert on zebras, the study’s co-authors were Alec Chan-Golston and Elizabeth Li, former UCLA undergraduates in mathematics; Ryan Harrigan, an assistant adjunct professor in UCLA’s Center for Tropical Research; and Henri Thomassen, a former UCLA postdoctoral scholar and current research associate at the Institute for Evolution and Ecology at Germany’s University of Tübingen.

The research was supported by the National Geographic Society Committee for Research and Exploration.

Larison and her research team have also collected zebra tissue samples and have used cutting-edge technology to sequence zebra DNA to try to identify which genes code for striping. The team is continuing to study the benefits stripes provide.

Source: UCLA

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Drug combo supresses growth of late-stage prostate cancer turmors

By Natalie van Hoose

Low doses of metformin, a widely used diabetes medication, and a gene inhibitor known as BI2536 can successfully halt the growth of late-stage prostate cancer tumors, a Purdue University study finds.

Prostate cancer causes the second-highest number of cancer-related deaths in men in the U.S., and methods of treating advanced prostate cancer are limited.

Xiaoqi Liu (pronounced zhow-CHEE' LEE'-oo), associate professor of biochemistry and cancer research, and fellow researchers found that the drugs metformin and BI2536 can work together to suppress the spread of prostate cancer that resists all other available treatments, potentially prolonging patients' lives.

"We've found a promising way to treat late-stage prostate cancer," Liu said. "By combining low levels of two well-tolerated drugs, the progression of this disease could be significantly delayed. Completely curing the cancer at the advanced stage is pretty much impossible, but this treatment might manage it for a while - that's exciting."

A number of treatments exist for the earlier stages of prostate cancer, which grows slowly compared with many other cancers. Because prostate cancer cells need the male sex hormone androgen to develop, one way to treat the disease is to suppress androgen - a process known as castration. If the cancer continues to spread, the patient often undergoes chemotherapy. As a last resort, drugs that block the synthesis of androgen by prostate cancer cells can be used, but these medications only extend a patient's lifespan for several months.

New approaches to treating the most persistent forms of prostate cancer are "urgently needed," Liu said.

Adding to the challenge is the fact that castration treatment can inadvertently encourage the cancer to get tougher. It can heighten oxidative stress on the prostate gland, which increases the expression of Plk1, a gene that has been linked to many cancers. Over-expression of Plk1 can also trigger the synthesis of androgen.

"The goal of castration is to block androgen synthesis," Liu said. "But cancer cells eventually become 'smart' enough to make androgen anyhow, which is why the cancer continues to grow."

Additionally, castration can disrupt the body's metabolism and lead to insulin resistance, which also can stimulate the production of androgen. The cancer will spread until both of these side effects are stopped, Liu said.

Previous studies showed that metformin - an inexpensive, antidiabetic drug that has been commonly used for more than 40 years - is particularly potent to prostate cancer tumors.

Working with fellow researchers from Purdue, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Indiana University School of Medicine, Liu found that a combination of low levels of metformin and BI2536, a drug that stifles the activity of Plk1, could work in tandem to slow the growth of prostate tumors too advanced for current treatments by promoting the self-destruction of cancer cells and preventing androgen synthesis.

The drugs did not impact healthy prostate cells, a "key finding," Liu said. "Ideally, cancer therapy will have minimal effects on normal cells."

Because metformin helps regulate metabolism, it may reverse some of the metabolic damage caused by castration, he said.

The researchers tested the drugs in a classical cell culture assay of prostate cancer cells and in advanced prostate tumors in mice. Low concentrations of the drugs significantly slowed the development of cancer in both trials. The mice tumors were grown from the tumor cells of a late-stage prostate cancer patient, suggesting that the treatment would prove effective in humans.

"Those results were amazing," Liu said. "These are the first data we've generated from a real patient, so I was almost jumping in the air when I saw that it worked."

Liu said that the next step in the research is to test the combination of drugs in clinical trials. Further research is also needed to understand the underlying mechanism of metformin and why it is effective at suppressing prostate cancer

Source: Purdue Univesity

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NASA Launches Groundbreaking Soil Moisture Mapper

NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) observatory lifts off from Space Launch Complex 2 West at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, beginning a three-year mission to map Earth's vital moisture hidden in the soils beneath our feet. Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

NASA successfully launched its first Earth satellite designed to collect global observations of the vital soil moisture hidden just beneath our feet.

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The Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) observatory, a mission with broad applications for science and society, lifted off at 6:22 a.m. PST (9:22 a.m. EST) Saturday from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, on a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages SMAP for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, with instrument hardware and science contributions made by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

About 57 minutes after liftoff, SMAP separated from the rocket's second stage into an initial 411- by 425-mile (661- by 685-kilometer) orbit. After a series of activation procedures, the spacecraft established communications with ground controllers and deployed its solar array. Initial telemetry shows the spacecraft is in excellent health.
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SMAP now begins a three-year mission that will figuratively scratch below Earth's surface to expand our understanding of a key component of the Earth system that links the water, energy and carbon cycles driving our living planet. SMAP's combined radar and radiometer instruments will peer into the top 2 inches (5 centimeters) of soil, through clouds and moderate vegetation cover, day and night, to produce the highest-resolution, most accurate soil moisture maps ever obtained from space.

The mission will help improve climate and weather forecasts and allow scientists to monitor droughts and better predict flooding caused by severe rainfall or snowmelt -- information that can save lives and property. In addition, since plant growth depends on the amount of water in the soil, SMAP data will allow nations to better forecast crop yields and assist in global famine early-warning systems.

"The launch of SMAP completes an ambitious 11-month period for NASA that has seen the launch of five new Earth-observing space missions to help us better understand our changing planet," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "Scientists and policymakers will use SMAP data to track water movement around our planet and make more informed decisions in critical areas like agriculture and water resources."

SMAP also will detect whether the ground is frozen or thawed. Detecting variations in the timing of spring thaw and changes in the length of the growing season will help scientists more accurately account for how much carbon plants are removing from Earth's atmosphere each year.

"The next few years will be especially exciting for Earth science thanks to measurements from SMAP and our other new missions," said Michael Freilich, director of the Earth Science Division of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "Each mission measures key variables that affect Earth's environment. SMAP will provide new insights into the global water, energy and carbon cycles. Combining data from all our orbiting missions will give us a much better understanding of how the Earth system works."

SMAP will orbit Earth from pole to pole every 98.5 minutes, repeating the same ground track every eight days. Its 620-mile (1,000-kilometer) measurement swath allows SMAP to cover Earth's entire equatorial regions every three days and higher latitudes every two days. The mission will map global soil moisture with about 5.6-mile (9-kilometer) resolution.

"SMAP will improve the daily lives of people around the world," said Simon Yueh, SMAP project scientist at JPL. "Soil moisture data from SMAP has the potential to significantly improve the accuracy of short-term weather forecasts and reduce the uncertainty of long-term projections of how climate change will impact Earth's water cycle."

The SMAP team is engaged with many organizations and individuals that see immediate uses for the satellite's data. Through workshops and tutorials, the SMAP Applications Working Group is collaborating with 45 "early adopters" to test and integrate the mission's data products into many different applications. Early adopters include weather forecasters from several nations, as well as researchers and planners from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the United Nations World Food Programme.

During the next 90 days, SMAP and its ground system will be commissioned to ensure they are fully functional and are ready to begin routine science data collection. A key milestone will be the deployment of the spacecraft's instrument boom and 20-foot-diameter (6-meter) reflector antenna. The observatory will be maneuvered to its final 426-mile (685-kilometer), near-polar operational orbit, and the antenna will spin up to 14.6 revolutions per minute.

SMAP science operations will then begin, and SMAP data will be calibrated and validated. The first release of SMAP soil moisture data products is expected within nine months. Fully validated science data are expected to be released within 15 months.

SMAP's Delta II rocket also carried a JPL CubeSat into orbit. The GRIFEX (Geostationary Coastal and Air Pollution Events Read-Out Integrated Circuit In-Flight Performance Experiment) CubeSat was one of three NASA-sponsored CubeSat missions successfully deployed during the launch. About the size of a loaf of bread, GRIFEX will validate cutting-edge detector technology for use in future Earth-observing satellites.

JPL built the SMAP spacecraft and is responsible for project management, system engineering, radar instrumentation, mission operations and the ground data system. Goddard is responsible for the radiometer instrument and science data products. Both centers collaborate on science data processing and delivery to the Alaska Satellite Facility, in Fairbanks, and the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder. NASA's Launch Services Program at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida was responsible for launch management. JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Source: Nasa

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Helicopter Could Be 'Scout' for Mars Rovers

Enter the Mars Helicopter, a proposed add-on to Mars rovers of the future that could potentially triple the distance these vehicles currently drive in a Martian day, and deliver a new level of visual information for choosing which sites to explore.

The helicopter would fly ahead of the rover almost every day, checking out various possible points of interest and helping engineers back on Earth plan the best driving route.

Scientists could also use the helicopter images to look for features for the rover to study in further detail. Another part of the helicopter's job would be to check out the best places for the rover to collect key samples and rocks for a cache, which a next-generation rover could pick up later.

The vehicle is envisioned to weigh 2.2 pounds (1 kilogram) and measure 3.6 feet (1.1 meters) across from the tip of one blade to the other. The prototype body looks like a medium-size cubic tissue box.

The current design is a proof-of-concept technology demonstration that has been tested at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

Source: Nasa

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Atmospheric warming heats the bottom of ice sheets, as well as the top

A 70-meter-deep basin formed near the summit of Greenland’s Flade Isblink Ice Cap in the fall of 2012 when a lake 540 meters beneath the ice surface suddenly emptied. Summer meltwater streams on the ice cap surface (blue) enter crevasses near the bottom of the image. Photo Credit: WorldView-2 Imagery (c) 2014, DigitalGlobe, Inc.

University of Minnesota researchers are part of a national team of scientists that has published a new paper showing for the first time that meltwater from the surface of an ice cap in northeastern Greenland can make its way beneath the ice and become trapped, refilling a subglacial lake. This meltwater provides heat to the bottom of the ice sheet.

These groundbreaking findings provide new information about atmospheric warming and its affect on the critical zone at the base of the ice. The warmth provided by the water could make the ice sheet move faster and alter how it responds to the changing climate.

The research is detailed in a new paper published today online by the journal Nature. The research was led by Cornell University Earth and Atmospheric Sciences researcher Michael Willis, who is also an adjunct faculty member in the geological sciences department at UNC-Chapel Hill's College of Arts and Sciences. The research study’s co-authors are Bradley Herried, University of Minnesota School of Earth Science’s Polar Geospatial Center; Michael Bevis, Ohio State University School of Earth Sciences; and Robin Bell, Columbia University Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory.

“We’re seeing surface meltwater make its way to the base of the ice where it can get trapped and stored at the boundary between the bedrock beneath the ice sheet and the ice itself,” Willis said. “As the lake beneath the ice fills with surface meltwater, the heat released by this trapped meltwater can soften surrounding ice, which may eventually cause an increase in ice flow.”

The researchers were able to pinpoint when the subglacial lake refilled using data collected from high-resolution satellite images from the University of Minnesota’s Polar Geospatial Center, as well as data from NASA’s operation IceBridge for calibration and verification.

The direct link between the surface meltwater and the filling of a lake at the base of the ice has never been seen before. Over the last few years the number of lakes on the surface of the Greenland ice sheet has greatly increased. Surface lakes are also occurring much farther inland at higher altitudes than in the past. If this mechanism of transferring water and warmth from the surface lakes to the bottom of the ice sheet is common then the Greenland Ice Sheet is likely to respond more rapidly to climate change than is currently predicted.

The Greenland ice sheet comprises about 80 percent of the land mass of Greenland and previous studies have documented that the ice sheet is melting at a faster rate due to climate change. The movement of meltwater beneath the ice sheet, from the interior to the ocean, is the topic of many investigations as it can control the speed at which the ice sheet moves. This is the first study to document that surface water can penetrate to the bottom of an ice cap and be trapped in place. Researchers say this process could also occur at other large bodies of ice.

The study was sparked in 2012 when Willis was mapping ice changes around the edge of the Greenland Ice Sheet as part of a study funded by U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to understand how much of the accelerating ice loss in Greenland is caused by melting and how much is caused by the increase of ice moving into the ocean.

During his research, Willis spotted a 70-meter-deep hole (the equivalent of a 10-story building) that had formed when a subglacial lake, far beneath the ice surface, emptied in the late fall of 2011. Subglacial lakes are rare in Greenland, and the presence of such a lake in the far northeast came as a surprise. The ice in this region is much too slow, too cold and too thin to allow melting beneath the ice cap, which is how a subglacial lake usually forms. 

Between 2012 and 2014, Willis watched as summer meltwater on the surface of the ice made its way down cracks around the hole and refilled the empty lake basin at the base of the ice cap. When water was flowing on the surface, the subglacial lake filled. When water stopped flowing on the surface, the subglacial lake stopped refilling.

Each summer scientists see bright blue streams form on the surface of Greenland as warm air melts the ice sheet. What happens to this water when it disappears into cracks in the ice has remained a mystery.

“This discovery that water can be stored in lakes beneath the ice shows how the plumbing on the surface is linked to the plumbing at the base," said co-author Bell.

The Cornell-led team calculated that the lake beneath the ice has filled about half way since its 2011 blowout that originally drove water from the lake at a volume of 215 cubic meters per second (nearly 57,000 gallons—close to the volume of a 30-foot-by-50-foot backyard swimming pool every second.)  As the lake refills, the surface meltwater carries stored heat, called latent heat, along with it from the relatively warm atmosphere to the icy depths. This latent heat reduces the stiffness of the surrounding ice and makes the ice more likely to flow out to sea.

Even though researchers have long known of the existence of subglacial lakes, never before have they witnessed any refilling from the surface. The refilling signals to researchers that Greenland’s ice loss has likely reached a milestone.

"We can actually see the meltwater pour down into these holes and then watch these subglacial lakes drain out and fill up again in real time,” said study co-author Bevis. “With melting like that, even the deep interior of the ice sheet is going to change. If enough water is pouring down into the Greenland Ice Sheet for us to see the same subglacial lake empty and refill itself over and over, then there must be so much latent heat being released under the ice that we’d have to expect it to change the large-scale behavior of the ice sheet.”

Source: University of Minnesota

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NASA's Dawn Spacecraft Captures Best-Ever View of Dwarf Planet

This animation of the dwarf planet Ceres was made by combining images taken by the Dawn spacecraft on January 25, 2015.

NASA's Dawn spacecraft has returned the sharpest images ever seen of the dwarf planet Ceres. The images were taken 147,000 miles (237,000 kilometers) from Ceres on Jan. 25, and represent a new milestone for a spacecraft that soon will become the first human-made probe to visit a dwarf planet.

"We know so little about our vast solar system, but thanks to economical missions like Dawn, those mysteries are being solved," said Jim Green, Planetary Science Division Director at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

At 43 pixels wide, the new images are more than 30 percent higher in resolution than those taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in 2003 and 2004 at a distance of over 150 million miles (about 241 million kilometers). The resolution is higher because Dawn is traveling through the solar system to Ceres, while Hubble remains fixed in Earth orbit. The new Dawn images come on the heels of initial navigation images taken Jan. 13 that reveal a white spot on the dwarf planet and the suggestion of craters. Hubble images also had glimpsed a white spot on the dwarf planet, but its nature is still unknown.

"Ceres is a 'planet' that you've probably never heard of," said Robert Mase, Dawn project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "We're excited to learn all about it with Dawn and share our discoveries with the world."

As the spacecraft gets closer to Ceres, its camera will return even better images. On March 6, Dawn will enter into orbit around Ceres to capture detailed images and measure variations in light reflected from Ceres, which should reveal the planet's surface composition.

"We are already seeing areas and details on Ceres popping out that had not been seen before. For instance, there are several dark features in the southern hemisphere that might be craters within a region that is darker overall," said Carol Raymond, deputy principal investigator of the Dawn mission at JPL. "Data from this mission will revolutionize our understanding of this unique body. Ceres is showing us tantalizing features that are whetting our appetite for the detailed exploration to come."

Ceres, the largest body between Mars and Jupiter in the main asteroid belt, has a diameter of about 590 miles (950 kilometers). Some scientists believe the dwarf planet harbored a subsurface ocean in the past and liquid water may still be lurking under its icy mantle.

Originally described as a planet, Ceres was later categorized as an asteroid, and then reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006. The mysterious world was discovered in 1801 by astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi, who named the object for the Roman goddess of agriculture, grain crops, fertility and motherly relationships.

"You may not realize that the word 'cereal' comes from the name Ceres. Perhaps you already connected with the dwarf planet at breakfast today," said JPL's Marc Rayman, mission director and chief engineer of the Dawn mission.

Powered by a uniquely capable ion propulsion system, Dawn also orbited and explored Vesta, the second most massive body in the asteroid belt. From 2011 to 2012, Dawn returned more than 30,000 images, 18 million light measurements and other scientific data about the impressive large asteroid. Vesta has a diameter of about 326 miles (525 kilometers).

"With the help of Dawn and other missions, we are continually adding to our understanding of how the solar system began and how the planets were formed," said Chris Russell, principal investigator for the Dawn mission, based at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Dawn's mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft. JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

The framing cameras were provided by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, with significant contributions by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research in Berlin, and in coordination with the Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering in Braunschweig.

The visible and infrared mapping spectrometer was provided by the Italian Space Agency and the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, was built by Selex ES, and is managed by Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics and Planetology in Rome. The gamma ray and neutron detector was built by Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and is operated by the Planetary Science Institute of Tucson, Arizona.

Source: Nasa

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Building a Better Weather Forecast? SMAP May Help

SMAP's soil moisture measurements will help with forecasts of precipitation and temperature. Image credit: UCAR

If you were trying to forecast tomorrow's weather, you would probably look up at the sky rather than down at the ground. But if you live in the U.S. Midwest or someplace with a similar climate, one key to a better weather forecast may lie beneath your feet.

Precipitation and temperature are part of every weather forecast. Precipitation comes from clouds, clouds are formed of airborne water vapor, and vapor comes from evaporating soil moisture -- so soil moisture governs precipitation. Evaporating soil moisture also makes air cooler, so it affects temperature. In certain kinds of climate, scientists believe, soil moisture is so influential that better observations of it might improve weather forecasts. These climates are transitional: not too humid and not too dry. For example, the agriculturally productive states of the U.S. Midwest fall into that category.

"Better soil moisture observations lead to better land-atmosphere interaction in weather forecasting models and ultimately to a better prediction of temperature and precipitation," said Michael Ek, leader of the Land Hydrology Team at the Environmental Monitoring Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). "Weather models need good initial observations of the land surface, or you're starting from the wrong place."

Better soil moisture observations are just what the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission will provide. Scheduled for launch on Jan. 29, SMAP will collect the most accurate and highest-resolution soil moisture measurements ever made from a satellite SMAP will cover the entire globe in two to three days. Ek is a member of one of five groups in SMAP's Early Adopter program that have been working for several years on the question of how best to incorporate the new data into national weather forecasting models.

Forecasts will not improve, however, the moment SMAP starts collecting data. U.S. Department of Agriculture research scientist Wade Crow, a member of SMAP's science team, explained that, since closely spaced global soil moisture measurements have never existed before, the mathematical models used in weather forecasting are not configured to include them directly. Getting the best use out of the new observations has been a subject of active research for several years and will require some significant changes in how soil moisture data are assimilated into the models.

Data assimilation is necessary because weather forecasting models all drift a bit, like cars. If you're driving on a perfectly straight road, you still need to keep a hand on the steering wheel or you'll run off the edge sooner or later. Data assimilation in a model serves the same purpose as the slight movements of your hands that keep your car on course.

Drift is not a fatal flaw for a weather forecasting model any more than it is for a car. It is simply a sign that the Earth system is too vast and complicated to model perfectly with the resources available today. To steer forecasts toward greater realism, models ingest, or assimilate, real-world data and use them in sophisticated mathematical techniques. Each time updated observations become available, they are assimilated to improve the starting point for the next forecast.

Closely spaced and highly accurate global measurements are an important part of the process. For soil moisture, however, current observations are not on a fine enough scale to meet the needs of weather forecasting models directly. "Modelers compensate for the lack of direct observations of soil moisture by using more indirect measures, such as estimating it from observations of temperature and precipitation," Crow explained. "As a consequence, modeled soil moisture tends to diverge from reality. SMAP will be directly observing the state that they want, so they won't have to back it out from proxy measurements."

JPL scientist Eni Njoku is working with researchers at another forecasting center, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in Reading, England. Njoku said, "SMAP will provide benefits of higher soil moisture accuracy and spatial resolution than have previously been available from satellites. This could lead potentially to improved regional and global weather forecasts by ECMWF." Environment Canada, the branch of the Canadian government responsible for weather forecasting in that nation, is also working on assimilating SMAP data into its models.

"The numerical weather prediction centers are adapting to the new availability of soil moisture information and thinking of ways they can exploit it," Crow summarized. "It will be really exciting to see what they find."

SMAP is managed for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington by the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, with instrument hardware and science contributions made by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. JPL is responsible for project management, system engineering, radar instrumentation, mission operations and the ground data system. Goddard is responsible for the radiometer instrument. Both centers collaborate on science data processing and delivery to the Alaska Satellite Facility, in Fairbanks, and the National Snow and Ice Data Center, at the University of Colorado in Boulder, for public distribution and archiving. NASA's Launch Services Program at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida is responsible for launch management. JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Source: Nasa

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Switching to vehicles powered by electricity from renewables could save lives - Video

Use of corn ethanol or electricity from coal worse than gasoline for public health

Driving vehicles that use electricity from renewable energy instead of gasoline could reduce the resulting deaths due to air pollution by 70 percent. This finding comes from a new life cycle analysis of conventional and alternative vehicles and their air pollution-related public health impacts, published Monday, Dec. 15, 2014, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study also shows that switching to vehicles powered by electricity made using natural gas yields large health benefits. Conversely, vehicles running on corn ethanol or vehicles powered by coal-based or "grid average" electricity are worse for health; switching from gasoline to those fuels would increase the number of resulting deaths due to air pollution by 80 percent or more.

“These findings demonstrate the importance of clean electricity, such as from natural gas or renewables, in substantially reducing the negative health impacts of transportation,” said Chris Tessum, co-author on the study and a researcher in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geo- Engineering in the University of Minnesota’s College of Science and Engineering.

The University of Minnesota team estimated how concentrations of two important pollutants—particulate matter and ground-level ozone—change as a result of using various options for powering vehicles. Air pollution is the largest environmental health hazard in the U.S., in total killing more than 100,000 people per year. Air pollution increases rates of heart attack, stroke, and respiratory disease.

The authors looked at liquid biofuels, diesel, compressed natural gas, and electricity from a range of conventional and renewable sources. Their analysis included not only the pollution from vehicles, but also emissions generated during production of the fuels or electricity that power them. With ethanol, for example, air pollution is released from tractors on farms, from soils after fertilizers are applied, and to supply the energy for fermenting and distilling corn into ethanol.

“Our work highlights the importance of looking at the full life cycle of energy production and use, not just at what comes out of tailpipes,” said Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering Assistant Professor Jason Hill, co-author of the study. “We greatly underestimate transportation’s impacts on air quality if we ignore the upstream emissions from producing fuels or electricity.”

The researchers also point out that whereas recent studies on life cycle environmental impacts of transportation have focused mainly on greenhouse gas emissions, it is also important to consider air pollution and health. Their study provides a unique look at where life cycle emissions occur, how they move in the environment, and where people breathe that pollution. Their results provide unprecedented detail on the air quality-related health impacts of transportation fuel production and use.

“Air pollution has enormous health impacts, including increasing death rates across the U.S.,” said Civil, Environmental and Geo- Engineering Associate Professor Julian Marshall, co-author on this study. “This study provides valuable new information on how some transportation options would improve or worsen those health impacts.”

The study’s authors are Marshall and Tessum (College of Science and Engineering) and Hill (College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences), at the University of Minnesota. Marshall and Hill are also Resident Fellows of the University’s Institute on the Environment. This research was supported by the University of Minnesota’s Initiative for Renewable Energy and the Environment (IREE), the Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy of the U.S. Dept. of Energy (EERE/DOE), and the Agricultural and Food Research Initiative of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture (USDA/AFRI).

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Source: University of Minnesota

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Cassini Catches Titan Naked in the Solar Wind

This diagram depicts conditions observed by NASA's Cassini spacecraft during a flyby in Dec. 2013, when Saturn's magnetosphere was highly compressed, exposing Titan to the full force of the solar wind. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Researchers studying data from NASA's Cassini mission have observed that Saturn's largest moon, Titan, behaves much like Venus, Mars or a comet when exposed to the raw power of the solar wind. The observations suggest that unmagnetized bodies like Titan might interact with the solar wind in the same basic ways, regardless of their nature or distance from the sun.

Titan is large enough that it could be considered a planet if it orbited the sun on its own, and a flyby of the giant moon in Dec. 2013 simulated that scenario, from Cassini's vantage point. The encounter was unique within Cassini's mission, as it was the only time the spacecraft has observed Titan in a pristine state, outside the region of space dominated by Saturn's magnetic field, called its magnetosphere.

"We observed that Titan interacts with the solar wind very much like Mars, if you moved it to the distance of Saturn," said Cesar Bertucci of the Institute of Astronomy and Space Physics in Buenos Aires, who led the research with colleagues from the Cassini mission. "We thought Titan in this state would look different. We certainly were surprised," he said.

The solar wind is a fast-flowing gale of charged particles that continually streams outward from the sun, flowing around the planets like islands in a river. Studying the effects of the solar wind at other planets helps scientists understand how the sun's activity affects their atmospheres. These effects can include modification of an atmosphere's chemistry as well as its gradual loss to space.

Titan spends about 95 percent of the time within Saturn's magnetosphere. But during a Cassini flyby on Dec. 1, 2013, the giant moon happened to be on the sunward side of Saturn when a powerful outburst of solar activity reached the planet. The strong surge in the solar wind so compressed the sun-facing side of Saturn's magnetosphere that the bubble's outer edge was pushed inside the orbit of Titan. This left the moon exposed to, and unprotected from, the raging stream of energetic solar particles.

Using its magnetometer instrument, which is akin to an equisitely sensitive compass, Cassini has observed Titan many times during the mission's decade in the Saturn system, but always within Saturn's magnetosphere. The spacecraft has not been able to detect a magnetic field coming from Titan itself. In its usual state, Titan is cloaked in Saturn's magnetic field.

This time the influence of Saturn was not present, allowing Cassini's magnetometer to observe Titan as it interacted directly with the solar wind. The special circumstance allowed Bertucci and colleagues to study the shockwave that formed around Titan where the full-force solar wind rammed into the moon's atmosphere.

At Earth, our planet's powerful magnetic field acts as a shield against the solar wind, helping to protect our atmosphere from being stripped away. In the case of Venus, Mars and comets -- none of which is protected by a global magnetic field -- the solar wind drapes around the objects themselves, interacting directly with their atmospheres (or in the comet's case, its coma). Cassini saw the same thing at Titan.

Researchers thought they would have to treat Titan's response to the solar wind with a unique approach because the chemistry of the hazy moon's dense atmosphere is highly complex. But Cassini's observations of a naked Titan hinted at a more elegant solution. "This could mean we can use the same tools to study how vastly different worlds, in different parts of the solar system, interact with the wind from the sun," Bertucci said.

Bertucci noted that the list of similarly unmagnetized bodies might include the dwarf planet Pluto, to be visited this year for the first time by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft.

"After nearly a decade in orbit, the Cassini mission has revealed once again that the Saturn system is full of surprises," said Michele Dougherty, principal investigator of the Cassini magnetometer at Imperial College, London. "After more than a hundred flybys, we have finally encountered Titan out in the solar wind, which will allow us to better understand how such moons maintain or lose their atmospheres."

The new research is published today in the journal Geophysical Review Letters.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. JPL designed, developed and assembled the Cassini orbiter. The magnetometer team is based at Imperial College, London, U.K.

Source: Nasa

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NASA Study Finds Earth’s Ocean Abyss Has Not Warmed

While the upper part of the world’s oceans continue to absorb heat from global warming, ocean depths have not warmed measurably in the last decade. This image shows heat radiating from the Pacific Ocean as imaged by the NASA’s Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System instrument on the Terra satellite. (Blue regions indicate thick cloud cover.) Image Credit: NASA

The cold waters of Earth’s deep ocean have not warmed measurably since 2005, according to a new NASA study, leaving unsolved the mystery of why global warming appears to have slowed in recent years.

Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, analyzed satellite and direct ocean temperature data from 2005 to 2013 and found the ocean abyss below 1.24 miles (1,995 meters) has not warmed measurably. Study coauthor Josh Willis of JPL said these findings do not throw suspicion on climate change itself.

"The sea level is still rising," Willis noted. "We're just trying to understand the nitty-gritty details."

In the 21st century, greenhouse gases have continued to accumulate in the atmosphere, just as they did in the 20th century, but global average surface air temperatures have stopped rising in tandem with the gases. The temperature of the top half of the world's oceans -- above the 1.24-mile mark -- is still climbing, but not fast enough to account for the stalled air temperatures.

Many processes on land, air and sea have been invoked to explain what is happening to the "missing" heat. One of the most prominent ideas is that the bottom half of the ocean is taking up the slack, but supporting evidence is slim. This latest study is the first to test the idea using satellite observations, as well as direct temperature measurements of the upper ocean. Scientists have been taking the temperature of the top half of the ocean directly since 2005, using a network of 3,000 floating temperature probes called the Argo array.

"The deep parts of the ocean are harder to measure," said JPL's William Llovel, lead author of the study published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change. "The combination of satellite and direct temperature data gives us a glimpse of how much sea level rise is due to deep warming. The answer is -- not much."

Deep sea creatures, like these anemones at a hydrothermal vent, are not yet feeling the heat from global climate change. Although the top half of the ocean continues to warm, the bottom half has not increased measurably in temperature in the last decade. Image Credit: NERC

The study took advantage of the fact that water expands as it gets warmer. The sea level is rising because of this expansion and the water added by glacier and ice sheet melt.
To arrive at their conclusion, the JPL scientists did a straightforward subtraction calculation, using data for 2005-2013 from the Argo buoys, NASA's Jason-1 and Jason-2 satellites, and the agency’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites. 
From the total amount of sea level rise, they subtracted the amount of rise from the expansion in the upper ocean, and the amount of rise that came from added meltwater. The remainder represented the amount of sea level rise caused by warming in the deep ocean.
The remainder was essentially zero. Deep ocean warming contributed virtually nothing to sea level rise during this period.

Coauthor Felix Landerer of JPL noted that during the same period warming in the top half of the ocean continued unabated, an unequivocal sign that our planet is heating up. Some recent studies reporting deep-ocean warming were, in fact, referring to the warming in the upper half of the ocean but below the topmost layer, which ends about 0.4 mile (700 meters) down.

Landerer also is a coauthor of another paper in the same journal issue on 1970-2005 ocean warming in the Southern Hemisphere. Before Argo floats were deployed, temperature measurements in the Southern Ocean were spotty, at best. Using satellite measurements and climate simulations of sea level changes around the world, the new study found the global ocean absorbed far more heat in those 35 years than previously thought -- a whopping 24 to 58 percent more than early estimates.

Both papers result from the work of the newly formed NASA Sea Level Change Team, an interdisciplinary group tasked with using NASA satellite data to improve the accuracy and scale of current and future estimates of sea level change. The Southern Hemisphere paper was led by three scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California.

NASA monitors Earth's vital signs from land, air and space with a fleet of satellites and ambitious airborne and ground-based observation campaigns. NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earth's interconnected natural systems with long-term data records and computer analysis tools to better see how our planet is changing. The agency shares this unique knowledge with the global community and works with institutions in the United States and around the world that contribute to understanding and protecting our home planet.

Source: Nasa

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Small change in blood acidity could prove detrimental to kidney disease patients

A University of Manchester scientist has discovered that very small changes in the level of acidity in blood may have a detrimental impact on the health of patients with kidney disease.

Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) is common in the UK.  It is estimated that about one in five men and one in four women between the ages of 65 and 74 has some degree of CKD. The leading single cause of CKD is diabetes which is increasing so it’s expected that more patients will be diagnosed with CKD in the future.

Dr Donald Ward from the Faculty of Life Sciences has been studying the impact of kidney disease on the body. He has found that very small changes in the pH (acidity) level in the blood prevents the body from being able to accurately monitor calcium levels. This leads to too much of the hormone PTH being released which is likely to lead to a greater risk of calcium and phosphate from the bone damaging the arteries. This often proves fatal to patients with CKD. His research has been published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. 

Dr Donald Ward

He says: “It was not realised before that the blood pH changes we see in patients with kidney disease can have an impact on their ability to monitor blood calcium levels. My research has demonstrated that the effect of those changes may be more significant than previously thought and thus might need to be looked at more carefully by clinicians.”

Dr Ward’s research focussed on the high level of parathyroid hormone (PTH) in patients suffering from CKD. This causes the body to release calcium and phosphate from the bones which can then damage their blood vessels. 

Dr Ward explains why this is so harmful: “The diseased kidneys prevent the body getting rid of both excess phosphate and excess acidity. So if that acidity also causes the body to release more PTH then this could compound the problem by releasing further phosphate from the bone. This vicious circle might accelerate the potentially fatal calcification of the arteries.” 

He continues: “What is so important about this research is that we have demonstrated that changes in PTH release can be prompted by very small changes in blood pH level. Before, it was assumed that only a larger change in acidity would cause problems for patients.”

The research was funded by Kidney Research UK. Elaine Davies, Director of Research Operations, from the charity says: “Donald’s work has used novel pharmacological and molecular tools in generating these new findings which increase our knowledge about the complex balance that clinicians need to consider when treating patients with CKD.”

Dr Ward is hoping to take his research to the next step, testing for therapeutic targets that could lead to better treatments for CKD.

Source: Manchester University

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New Stanford research finds computers are better judges of personality than friends and family

New research shows that a computer's analysis of data can better judge a person's psychological traits than family and friends.

Computers can judge personality traits far more precisely than ever believed, according to newly published research.

In fact, they might do so better than one's friends and colleagues. The study, published Jan. 12 and conducted jointly by researchers at Stanford University and the University of Cambridge, compares the ability of computers and people to make accurate judgments about our personalities. People's judgments were based on their familiarity with the judged individual, while the computer used digital signals – Facebook "likes."

The researchers were Michal Kosinski, co-lead author and a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford's Department of Computer Science; Wu Youyou, co-lead author and a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge; and David Stillwell, a researcher at the University of Cambridge.

According to Kosinski, the findings reveal that by mining a person's Facebook "likes," a computer was able to predict a person's personality more accurately than most of their friends and family. Only a person's spouse came close to matching the computer's results.

The computer predictions were based on which articles, videos, artists and other items the person had liked on Facebook. The idea was to see how closely a computer prediction could match the subject's own scores on the five most basic personality dimensions: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

The researchers noted, "This is an emphatic demonstration of the ability of a person's psychological traits to be discovered by an analysis of data, not requiring any person-to-person interaction. It shows that machines can get to know us better than we'd previously thought, a crucial step in interactions between people and computers."

Kosinski, a computational social scientist, pointed out that "the findings also suggest that in the future, computers could be able to infer our psychological traits and react accordingly, leading to the emergence of emotionally intelligent and socially skilled machines."

"In this context," he added, "the human-computer interactions depicted in science fiction films such as Her seem not to be beyond our reach."

He said the research advances previous work from the University of Cambridge in 2013 that showed that a variety of psychological and demographic characteristics could be "predicted with startling accuracy" through Facebook likes.

The study's methodology

In the new study, researchers collected personality self-ratings of 86,220 volunteers using a standard, 100-item long personality questionnaire. Human judges, including Facebook friends and family members, expressed their judgment of a subject's personality using a 10-item questionnaire. Computer-based personality judgments, based on their Facebook likes, were obtained for the participants.

The results showed that a computer could more accurately predict the subject's personality than a work colleague by analyzing just 10 likes; more than a friend or a roommate with 70; a family member with 150; and a spouse with 300 likes.

"Given that an average Facebook user has about 227 likes (and this number is growing steadily), artificial intelligence has a potential to know us better than our closest companions do," wrote Kosinski and his colleagues.

Why are machines better in judging personality than human beings?

Kosinski said that computers have a couple of key advantages over human beings in the area of personality analysis. Above all, they can retain and access large quantities of information, and analyze all this data through algorithms.

This provides the accuracy that the human mind has a hard time achieving due to a human tendency to give too much weight to one or two examples or to lapse into non-rational ways of thinking, the researchers wrote.

Nevertheless, the authors concede that the detection of some personality traits might be best left to human beings, such as "those (traits) without digital footprints and those depending on subtle cognition."

'Digital footprints'

Wu, co-lead author of the study, explains that the plot behind a movie like Her (released in 2013) becomes increasingly realistic. The film involves a man who strikes up a relationship with an advanced computer operating system that promises to be an intuitive entity in its own right.

"The ability to accurately assess psychological traits and states, using digital footprints of behavior, occupies an important milestone on the path toward more social human-computer interactions," said Wu.

Such data-driven decisions could improve people's lives, the researchers said. For example, recruiters could better match candidates with jobs based on their personality, and companies could better match products and services with consumers' personalities.

"The ability to judge personality is an essential component of social living – from day-to-day decisions to long-term plans such as whom to marry, trust, hire or elect as president," said Stillwell.

Dystopia concerns

The researchers acknowledge that this type of research may conjure up privacy concerns about online data mining and tracking the activities of users.

"A future with our habits being an open book may seem dystopian to those who worry about privacy," they wrote.

Kosinski said, "We hope that consumers, technology developers and policymakers will tackle those challenges by supporting privacy-protecting laws and technologies, and giving the users full control over their digital footprints."

In July, Kosinski will begin a new appointment as an assistant professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Source: Stanford university

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