Great apes make sophisticated decisions
December 30, 2011
Chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas and bonobos make more sophisticated decisions than was previously thought. Great apes weigh their chances of success, based on what they know and the likelihood to succeed when guessing, according to a study of MPI researcher Daniel Haun, published on December 21 in the online journal PLoS ONE. The findings may provide insight into human decision-making as well.
The authors of the study, led by Daniel Haun of the Max Planck Institutes for Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen) and Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig), investigated the behaviour of all four non-human great ape species. The apes were presented with two banana pieces: a smaller one, which was always reliably in the same place, and a larger one, which was hidden under one of multiple cups, and therefore the riskier choice.
The researchers found that the apes’ choices were regulated by their uncertainty and the probability of success for the risky choice, suggesting sophisticated decision-making. Apes chose the small piece more often when they where uncertain where the large piece was hidden. The lower their chances to guess correctly, the more often they chose the small piece.
Risky choices
The researchers also found that the apes went for the larger piece – and risked getting nothing at all – no less than 50% of the time. This risky decision-making increased to nearly 100% when the size difference between the two banana pieces was largest. While all four species demonstrated sophisticated decision making strategies, chimpanzees and orangutans were overall more likely to make risky choices relative to gorillas and bonobos. The precise reason for this discrepancy remains unknown.
Haun concludes: “Our study adds to the growing evidence that the mental life of the other great apes is much more sophisticated than is often assumed.”
Contact: Daniel Haun
daniel.haun@mpi.nl
49-341-355-0815
Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
President Obama and leading GOP presidential candidate support health research
December 28, 2011
Research!America’s new national voter education initiative, Your Candidates-Your Health, features responses from President Obama and Republican Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich on important health research and prevention issues. Among the highlights: both Obama and Gingrich agree that research to improve health and prevent disease is part of the solution to rising health care costs, and boosting investment in medical research creates jobs that benefit a wide variety of industries. Their positions on embryonic stem cell research differ.
“For too long, patients and families have suffered from debilitating, incurable diseases and we know that stem cell research offers hope to millions of Americans across the country. I am committed to supporting responsible stem cell research now, and in the future,” said President Obama in his response to the questionnaire.
“I strongly support adult stem cell research,” said Gingrich. “I will oppose at every turn any process of destroying embryos.”
In the area of global competitiveness, Gingrich said, “Considering today’s American tax and regulatory systems, it is increasingly likely that the full implementation of the new [scientific] knowledge will first occur outside the United States and be imported by us. This will be tragic for Americans in lost health opportunities, lost jobs and prosperity, and unnecessarily higher healthcare costs.”
“To compete for the jobs and industries of our time, we have to make America the best place on earth to do business and out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world,” said Obama. “I have called for a level of research and development we haven’t seen since the height of the Space Race and sent budgets to Congress that helps us meet that goal.”
Obama and Gingrich also responded to questions about support for the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, science, technology, engineering and math education, and government investment in health research for military veterans. www.yourcandidatesyourhealth.org. All presidential candidates were invited to participate.
The responses from Obama and Gingrich largely reflect public sentiment on federal support for research. In new public opinion poll data, a vast majority of Americans (86%) believe investing in health research is important for job creation and economic recovery and (54%) say research is part of the solution to rising health care costs. Seventy-seven percent believe the U.S. is losing its global competitive edge in science and innovation. However, 60% say they are uninformed about their representatives’ positions on medical, health and scientific research.
“Unfortunately, many elected officials and candidates have failed to elevate these issues in their campaigns,” said Mary Woolley, president and CEO of Research!America. “The poll underscores Americans’ willingness to make research a high priority to address our economic and health challenges.”
In other polling data, most Americans say it’s important to increase funding for federal health research agencies — (86%) for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), (79%) for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and (75%) for the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
“Americans realize that massive spending cuts for federal agencies like the NIH would move our country in the wrong direction,” said Research!America’s chair, former Illinois Congressman John Porter. “A strong investment in research will yield more scientific discoveries, boost our global competitiveness and help lower health care costs. We need elected officials who will aggressively support and expand research and development.”
Additional findings from the public opinion poll include:
- 85% think research and innovation is important to their state economy.
- 48% say there is not enough government investment in health research for the benefit of military veterans and service members.
- 82% say it’s important to conduct medical or health research to eliminate health disparities.
- 73% believe the federal government should place more emphasis on increasing the number of young Americans who pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
- 61% favor expanding federal funding for research using embryonic stem cells.
About the Poll: Research!America commissioned JZ Analytics to conduct an online survey of 800 adults nationwide in October 2011. The sample is representative of the nation’s demographics, including geography, gender and ethnicity, with a theoretical error of ±3.0%. The full results can be found at http://www.researchamerica.org/uploads/December2011PollRelease.pdf
For more information about Your Candidates – Your Health, visit www.yourcandidatesyourhealth.org. Supporting partners include the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, Alzheimer’s Association, Pfizer, American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, American Association for Dental Research, Assurant, Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, Charles Drew University, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Food Allergy Initiative, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, Lovelace, National Alliance for Eye and Vision Research, National Alliance for Hispanic Health, New York-Presbyterian, Northeast Ohio Medical University, Society for Neuroscience, University of Michigan, University of North Carolina School of Medicine and Washington University School of Medicine.
About Us: Research!America is the nation’s largest not-for-profit public education and advocacy alliance working to make research to improve health a higher national priority. Founded in 1989, Research!America is supported by member organizations representing 125 million Americans. Visit www.researchamerica.org.
Contact: Suzanne Ffolkes
sffolkes@researchamerica.org
571-482-2710
Research!America
Supersized market economy, supersized belly: Wealthier nations have more fast food and more obesity
December 23, 2011
New research from the University of Michigan suggests obesity can be seen as one of the unintended side effects of free market policies.
A study of 26 wealthy nations shows that countries with a higher density of fast food restaurants per capita had much higher obesity rates compared to countries with a lower density of fast food restaurants per capita.
“It’s not by chance that countries with the highest obesity rates and fast food restaurants are those in the forefront of market liberalization, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, versus countries like Japan and Norway, with more regulated and restrictive trade policies,” said Roberto De Vogli, associate professor in the U-M School of Public Health, and lead researcher of the study.
For example, in the United States, researchers reported 7.52 fast food restaurants per 100,000 people, and in Canada they reported 7.43 fast food restaurants per 100,000 people. The paper reported the obesity rates among US men and women were 31.3 percent and 33.2 percent, respectively. The obesity rates for Canadian men and women were 23.2 percent and 22.9 percent, respectively.
Compare that to Japan, with 0.13 fast food restaurants per 100,000 people, and Norway, with 0.19 restaurants per capita. Obesity rates for men and women in Japan were 2.9 percent and 3.3 percent, respectively. In Norway, obesity rates for men and women were 6.4 percent and 5.9 percent, respectively. The relationships remain consistent even when researchers controlled for variables such as income, income inequality, urban areas, motor vehicles and internet use per capita.
Obesity research largely overlooks the global market forces behind the epidemic, De Vogli said.
“In my opinion the public debate is too much focused on individual genetics and other individual factors, and overlooks the global forces in society that are shaping behaviors worldwide. If you look at trends overtime for obesity, it’s shocking,” De Vogli said.
“Since the 1980s, since the advent of trade liberalization policies that have indirectly promoted transnational food companies we see rates that have tripled or quadrupled. There is no biological, genetic, psychological or community level factor that can explain this. Only a global type of change can explain this.”
Researchers chose one fast food restaurant to use as a proxy measure for how many fast food restaurants were present per 100,000. The study is in no way an indictment of that restaurant, De Vogli said, but rather an indicator of fast food density in a particular area.
Fast food refers to food sold in restaurants or stores with preheated or precooked ingredients, and served to the customer in a packaged form. A typical fast food meal includes a hamburger, fries and a soft drink, the paper said. Fast food is usually high in fat and calories, and several studies have found associations between fast food intake and increased body mass index, weight gain and obesity. Obesity accounts for approximately 400,000 deaths each year in the United States alone. Fast food consumption is also related to insulin resistance and type II diabetes, another major worldwide public health threat.
The paper, “Globesization: ecological evidence on the relationship between fast food outlets and obesity among 26 advanced economies,” will be published in the December print issue of Critical Public Health. The study was funded by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council.
For more on De Vogli: http://www.sph.umich.edu/iscr/faculty/profile.cfm?uniqname=rdevogli.
The University of Michigan School of Public Health has been promoting health and preventing disease since 1941, and is ranked among the top public health schools in the nation. Whether making new discoveries in the lab or researching and educating in the field, our faculty, students, and alumni are deployed around the globe to promote and protect our health. http://www.sph.umich.edu/
Contact: Laura Bailey
baileylm@umich.edu
734-764-1552
University of Michigan
How to break Murphy’s Law
December 23, 2011
Murphy’s Law is a useful scapegoat for human error: “If something can go wrong, it will.” But, a new study by researchers in Canada hopes to put paid to this unscientific excuse for errors by showing that the introduction of verification and checking procedures can improve structural safety and performance and so prevent the application of the “law”.
Engineer Franz Knoll of Nicolet Chartrand Knoll Ltd., based in Montreal, Quebec, writing in the International Journal of Reliability and Safety explains that faults and flaws in any industrial product almost always originate from human error, through lack of attention, communication, or competence. Unfortunately, humans do not like to admit their mistakes and invoke all kinds of spurious excuses to explain a problem: software bugs, computer glitches, acts of God, and, of course, good-old Murphy’s Law.
Knoll points out that scientific testing and analysis are increasingly removing any doubt as to what is to blame for problems and errors that arise. Natural events can be quantified and the probabilities of their occurrence predicted. While early-warning systems for earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunami and volcanic activity are in place, it is often human shortcomings that lead to the worst outcomes during and after such events.
When it comes to the construction of buildings and bridges, human failings are often most apparent. As Knoll says, in the construction industry, and elsewhere, management would like the company to deliver the “Rolls Royce” for the low price of a “Volkswagen Beetle”. From the top down, however, human shortcomings trickle so that inferiority ultimately leaks from the bottom, as workers endeavor to comply with strict budgets under pressure to perform well. Corners are cut and Murphy appears on the scene at the most inopportune moments.
“In the pursuit of quality in building in the sense of an absence of serious flaws, a targeted strategy for the apprehension and correction of human errors is of the essence,” Knoll says. In this context an absolute requirement is that at critical stages during construction, highly qualified and experienced engineers must attend to the task of checking for mistakes so that problems are not buried in concrete or plastered over only to resurface later. Such personnel being in short supply would suggest that directing them towards the details that matter, rather than encumbering them with administrative chores would be appropriate. Unless, their name is Murphy, perhaps.
“Of reality, quality and Murphy’s law: strategies for eliminating human error and mitigating its effects” in Int. J. Reliability and Safety, 2012, 6, 3-14
Contact: Albert Ang
ejournal@inderscience.com
Inderscience Publishers
How skin is wired for touch
December 23, 2011
Compared to our other senses, scientists don’t know much about how our skin is wired for the sensation of touch. Now, research reported in the December 23rd issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication, provides the first picture of how specialized neurons feel light touches, like a brush of movement or a vibration, are organized in hairy skin.
Looking at these neurons in the hairy skin of mice, the researchers observed remarkably orderly patterns, suggesting that each type of hair follicle works like a distinct sensory organ, each tuned to register different types of touches. Each hair follicle sends out one wire-like projection that joins with others in the spinal cord, where the information they carry can be integrated into impulses sent to the brain. This network of neurons in our own skin allows us to perceive important differences in our surroundings: a raindrop versus a mosquito, a soft fingertip versus a hard stick.
“We can now begin to appreciate how these hair follicles and associated neurons are organized relative to one another and that organization enables us to think about how mechanosensory information is integrated and processed for the perception of touch,” says David Ginty of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Mice have several types of hair follicles with three in particular that make up their coats. Ginty’s team made a technical breakthrough by coming up with a way to label distinct populations of known low-threshold mechanoreceptors (LTMRs). Before this study, there was no way to visualize LTMRs in their natural state. The neurons are tricky to study in part because they extend from the spinal cord all the way out to the skin. The feeling in the tips of our toes depends on cells that are more than one meter long.
The images show something unexpected and fascinating, Ginty says. Each hair follicle type includes a distinct combination of mechanosensory endings. Those sensory follicles are also organized in a repeating and stereotypical pattern in mouse skin.
The neurons found in adjacent hair follicles stretch to a part of the spinal cord that receives sensory inputs, forming narrow columns. Ginty says there are probably thousands of those columns in the spinal cord, each gathering inputs from a particular region of the skin and its patch of 100 or so hairs.
Of course, we don’t have hair like a mouse, and it’s not yet clear whether some of these mechanosensory neurons depend on the hairs themselves to pick up on sensations and whether others are primarily important as scaffolds for the underlying neural structures. They don’t know either how these inputs are integrated in the spinal cord and brain to give rise to perceptions, but now they have the genetic access they need to tinker with each LTMR subtype one by one, turning them on or off at will and seeing what happens to the brain and to behavior. Intriguingly, one of the LTMR types under study is implicated as “pleasure neurons” in people, Ginty notes.
At this point, he says they have no clue how these neurons manage to set themselves up in this way during development. The neurons that form this sensory network are born at different times, controlled by different growth factors, and “yet they assemble in these remarkable patterns.” And for Ginty that leads to a simple if daunting question to answer: “How does one end of the sensory neuron know what the other end is doing?”
Contact: Lisa Lyons
elyons@cell.com
617-386-2121
Cell Press
Skeletons point to Columbus voyage for syphilis origins
December 20, 2011
Skeletons don’t lie. But sometimes they may mislead, as in the case of bones that reputedly showed evidence of syphilis in Europe and other parts of the Old World before Christopher Columbus made his historic voyage in 1492.
None of this skeletal evidence, including 54 published reports, holds up when subjected to standardized analyses for both diagnosis and dating, according to an appraisal in the current Yearbook of Physical Anthropology. In fact, the skeletal data bolsters the case that syphilis did not exist in Europe before Columbus set sail.
“This is the first time that all 54 of these cases have been evaluated systematically,” says George Armelagos, an anthropologist at Emory University and co-author of the appraisal. “The evidence keeps accumulating that a progenitor of syphilis came from the New World with Columbus’ crew and rapidly evolved into the venereal disease that remains with us today.”
The appraisal was led by two of Armelagos’ former graduate students at Emory: Molly Zuckerman, who is now an assistant professor at Mississippi State University, and Kristin Harper, currently a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University. Additional authors include Emory anthropologist John Kingston and Megan Harper from the University of Missouri.
“Syphilis has been around for 500 years,” Zuckerman says. “People started debating where it came from shortly afterwards, and they haven’t stopped since. It was one of the first global diseases, and understanding where it came from and how it spread may help us combat diseases today.”
‘The natural selection of a disease’
The treponemal family of bacteria causes syphilis and related diseases that share some symptoms but spread differently. Syphilis is sexually transmitted. Yaws and bejel, which occurred in early New World populations, are tropical diseases that are transmitted through skin-to-skin contact or oral contact.
The first recorded epidemic of venereal syphilis occurred in Europe in 1495. One hypothesis is that a subspecies of Treponema from the warm, moist climate of the tropical New World mutated into the venereal subspecies to survive in the cooler and relatively more hygienic European environment.
The fact that syphilis is a stigmatized, sexual disease has added to the controversy over its origins, Zuckerman says.
“In reality, it appears that venereal syphilis was the by-product of two different populations meeting and exchanging a pathogen,” she says. “It was an adaptive event, the natural selection of a disease, independent of morality or blame.”
An early doubter
Armelagos, a pioneer of the field of bioarcheology, was one of the doubters decades ago, when he first heard the Columbus theory for syphilis. “I laughed at the idea that a small group of sailors brought back this disease that caused this major European epidemic,” he recalls.
While teaching at the University of Massachusetts, he and graduate student Brenda Baker decided to investigate the matter and got a shock: All of the available evidence at the time actually supported the Columbus theory. “It was a paradigm shift,” Armelagos says. The pair published their results in 1988.
In 2008, Harper and Armelagos published the most comprehensive comparative genetic analysis ever conducted on syphilis’s family of bacteria. The results again supported the hypothesis that syphilis, or some progenitor, came from the New World.
A second, closer look
But reports of pre-Columbian skeletons showing the lesions of chronic syphilis have kept cropping up in the Old World. For this latest appraisal of the skeletal evidence, the researchers gathered all of the published reports.
They found that most of the skeletal material did not meet at least one of the standardized, diagnostic criteria for chronic syphilis, including pitting on the skull known as caries sicca and pitting and swelling of the long bones.
The few published cases that did meet the criteria tended to come from coastal regions where seafood was a big part of the diet. The so-called “marine reservoir effect,” caused by eating seafood which contains “old carbon” from upwelling, deep ocean waters, can throw off radiocarbon dating of a skeleton by hundreds, or even thousands, of years. Analyzing the collagen levels of the skeletal material enabled the researchers to estimate the seafood consumption and factor that result into the radiocarbon dating.
“Once we adjusted for the marine signature, all of the skeletons that showed definite signs of treponemal disease appeared to be dated to after Columbus returned to Europe,” Harper says.
“The origin of syphilis is a fascinating, compelling question,” Zuckerman says. “The current evidence is pretty definitive, but we shouldn’t close the book and say we’re done with the subject. The great thing about science is constantly being able to understand things in a new light.”
Emory University is known for its demanding academics, outstanding undergraduate experience, highly ranked professional schools and state-of-the-art research facilities. Emory encompasses nine academic divisions as well as the Carlos Museum, The Carter Center, the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Emory Healthcare, Georgia’s largest and most comprehensive health care system.
Contact: Beverly Clark
beverly.clark@emory.com
404-712-8780
Emory University
First Earth-sized planets found
December 20, 2011
Astronomers using NASA’s Kepler mission have detected two Earth-sized planets orbiting a distant star. This discovery marks a milestone in the hunt for alien worlds, since it brings scientists one step closer to their ultimate goal of finding a twin Earth.
“The goal of Kepler is to find Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone. Proving the existence of Earth-sized exoplanets is a major step toward achieving that goal,” said Francois Fressin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).
The paper describing the finding will be published in the journal Nature.
The two planets, dubbed Kepler-20e and 20f, are the smallest planets found to date. They have diameters of 6,900 miles and 8,200 miles – equivalent to 0.87 times Earth (slightly smaller than Venus) and 1.03 times Earth. These worlds are expected to have rocky compositions, so their masses should be less than 1.7 and 3 times Earth’s.
Both worlds circle Kepler-20: a G-type star slightly cooler than the Sun and located 950 light-years from Earth. (It would take the space shuttle 36 million years to travel to Kepler-20.)
Kepler-20e orbits every 6.1 days at a distance of 4.7 million miles. Kepler-20f orbits every 19.6 days at a distance of 10.3 million miles. Due to their tight orbits, they are heated to temperatures of 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit and 800 degrees F.
In addition to the two Earth-sized worlds, the Kepler-20 system contains three larger planets. All five have orbits closer than Mercury in our solar system.
They also show an unexpected arrangement. In our solar system small, rocky worlds orbit close to the Sun and large, gas giant worlds orbit farther out. In contrast, the planets of Kepler-20 are organized in alternating size: big, little, big, little, big.
“We were surprised to find this system of flip-flopping planets,” said co-author David Charbonneau of the CfA. “It’s very different than our solar system.”
The three largest planets are designated Kepler-20b, 20c, and 20d. They have diameters of 15,000, 24,600, and 22,000 miles and orbit once every 3.7, 10.9, and 77.6 days, respectively. Kepler-20b has 8.7 times the mass of Earth; Kepler-20c has 16.1 times Earth’s mass. Kepler-20d weighs less than 20 times Earth.
The planets of Kepler-20 could not have formed in their current locations. Instead, they must have formed farther from their star and then migrated inward, probably through interactions with the disk of material from which they all formed. This allowed the worlds to maintain their regular spacing despite alternating sizes.
Kepler identifies “objects of interest” by looking for stars that dim slightly, which can occur when a planet crosses the star’s face. To confirm a transiting planet, astronomers look for the star to wobble as it is gravitationally tugged by its orbiting companion (a method known as radial velocity).
The radial velocity signal for planets weighing one to a few Earth masses is too small to detect with current technology. Therefore, other techniques must be used to validate that an object of interest is truly a planet.
A variety of situations could mimic the dimming from a transiting planet. For example, an eclipsing binary-star system whose light blends with the star Kepler-20 would create a similar signal. To rule out such imposters, the team simulated millions of possible scenarios with Blender – custom software developed by Fressin and Willie Torres of CfA. They concluded that the odds are strongly in favor of Kepler-20e and 20f being planets.
Fressin and Torres also used Blender to confirm the existence of Kepler-22b, a planet in the habitable zone of its star that was announced by NASA earlier this month. However, that world was much larger than Earth.
“These new planets are significantly smaller than any planet found up till now orbiting a Sun-like star,” added Fressin.
Contact: Christine Pulliam
cpulliam@cfa.harvard.edu
617-495-7463
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
New racism in ‘reasonable accommodation’
December 16, 2011
It seems history has once again repeated itself. The recent introduction of a ‘statement of values’ by one of Quebec’s biggest cities, Gatineau, harkens back to the 2007 outbreak of race anxiety when the village of Hérouxville drafted its own code of conduct for newcomers.
The intolerance and racism unleashed by the Hérouxville charter and its subsequent reasonable accommodation controversies, which coloured the 2007 provincial election, saw ethnic minorities painted as a threat to Québécois society.
Yet research from Concordia University, published in the Canadian edition of the Global Media Journal, says those flames have been smoldering since the Quiet Revolution. The hostilities were merely stoked by politicians and media eager to trumpet new instances of ethnic hostility to “reasonable Québécois” norm.
According to Alan Wong, a doctoral candidate in Concordia’s Special Individualized Programs, the Quiet Revolution solidified an idea that Quebec was a society bound by democratic values, language and culture. “The ‘reasonable accommodation’ debates, as they happened in the province, maintain this façade of a unified collective Québécois identity. Those identities presumed not to correlate with that value system are therefore different, ‘other,’ and not of Quebec,” says Wong.
There were a number of events in 2006-07 that led to ‘reasonable accommodation’ dominating the public discourse. A young Sikh was permitted to wear a ceremonial dagger to his classes. The École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS) was ordered by the Quebec Human Rights Commission to provide prayer space for Muslim students. Some female members of a Montreal YMCA objected to the decision to install frosted windows out of consideration for the members of the Orthodox Jewish community from a nearby synagogue.
At some point, politicians took notice. Mario Dumont, former leader of the provincial Action démocratique du Québec party, adopted the slogan of “Nos valeurs communes,” which he pledged to defend. Liberal leader and Quebec Premier Jean Charest, as well as then Parti Québécois leader André Boisclair, made similar statements. All three agreed that, in Charest’s words, “recognizing the other doesn’t mean effacing oneself before the other.”
Wong says media were happy to push the narrative of “unreasonable” immigrants insisting on special privileges to the detriment of Québécois values – a practice that has been dubbed “The New Racism.” Coverage from newspapers such as the Montreal Gazette and Le Devoir reinforced the idea of majority culture values as being “reasonable” and immigrants, particularly non-white immigrants, as being “unreasonable”. Special accommodations requested by non-majority yet white groups went unreported by media.
“The press privileged white voices and their perspectives on ‘others’, and favoured their absence when it suited the overall narrative,” says Wong.
Although Wong sees some signs of improvement since 2007 – the Bouchard-Taylor Commission on reasonable accommodation being a positive development – he says much of the assumptions of the discourse of that year have become normal. In addition to alienating already marginalized immigrant and minority groups, this represents a lost opportunity.
“This debate diverted attention away from more significant issues, such as poverty, homelessness and unemployment – issues that affect the everyday lives of the disenfranchised in Quebec,” Wong says. “Immigrants have been harmed in multiple ways by this debate – directly, through the new racism, and indirectly through neglect of life-and-death issues.”
Related links:
Cited study: http://www.gmj.uottawa.ca/1101/v4i1_wong.pdf
Concordia’s Special Individualized Programs: http://graduatestudies.concordia.ca/SIP
Media contact:
Fiona Downey
Media Relations Advisor
Concordia University
Phone: 514-848-2424, ext. 2518
Cell.: 514-518-3336
Twitter: http://twitter.com/concordia
Concordia news: http://www.concordia.ca/now
Novel device removes heavy metals from water
December 16, 2011
An unfortunate consequence of many industrial and manufacturing practices, from textile factories to metalworking operations, is the release of heavy metals in waterways. Those metals can remain for decades, even centuries, in low but still dangerous concentrations.
Ridding water of trace metals “is really hard to do,” said Joseph Calo, professor emeritus of engineering who maintains an active laboratory at Brown. He noted the cost, inefficiency, and time needed for such efforts. “It’s like trying to put the genie back in the bottle.”
That may be changing. Calo and other engineers at Brown describe a novel method that collates trace heavy metals in water by increasing their concentration so that a proven metal-removal technique can take over. In a series of experiments, the engineers report the method, called the cyclic electrowinning/precipitation (CEP) system, removes up to 99 percent of copper, cadmium, and nickel, returning the contaminated water to federally accepted standards of cleanliness. The automated CEP system is scalable as well, Calo said, so it has viable commercial potential, especially in the environmental remediation and metal recovery fields. The system’s mechanics and results are described in a paper published in the Chemical Engineering Journal.
A proven technique for removing heavy metals from water is through the reduction of heavy metal ions from an electrolyte. While the technique has various names, such as electrowinning, electrolytic removal/recovery or electroextraction, it all works the same way, by using an electrical current to transform positively charged metal ions (cations) into a stable, solid state where they can be easily separated from the water and removed. The main drawback to this technique is that there must be a high-enough concentration of metal cations in the water for it to be effective; if the cation concentration is too low – roughly less than 100 parts per million – the current efficiency becomes too low and the current acts on more than the heavy metal ions.
Another way to remove metals is through simple chemistry. The technique involves using hydroxides and sulfides to precipitate the metal ions from the water, so they form solids. The solids, however, constitute a toxic sludge, and there is no good way to deal with it. Landfills generally won’t take it, and letting it sit in settling ponds is toxic and environmentally unsound. “Nobody wants it, because it’s a huge liability,” Calo said.
The dilemma, then, is how to remove the metals efficiently without creating an unhealthy byproduct. Calo and his co-authors, postdoctoral researcher Pengpeng Grimshaw and George Hradil, who earned his doctorate at Brown and is now an adjunct professor, combined the two techniques to form a closed-loop system. “We said, ‘Let’s use the attractive features of both methods by combining them in a cyclic process,’” Calo said.
It took a few years to build and develop the system. In the paper, the authors describe how it works. The CEP system involves two main units, one to concentrate the cations and another to turn them into stable, solid-state metals and remove them. In the first stage, the metal-laden water is fed into a tank in which an acid (sulfuric acid) or base (sodium hydroxide) is added to change the water’s pH, effectively separating the water molecules from the metal precipitate, which settles at the bottom. The “clear” water is siphoned off, and more contaminated water is brought in. The pH swing is applied again, first redissolving the precipitate and then reprecipitating all the metal, increasing the metal concentration each time. This process is repeated until the concentration of the metal cations in the solution has reached a point at which electrowinning can be efficiently employed.
When that point is reached, the solution is sent to a second device, called a spouted particulate electrode (SPE). This is where the electrowinning takes place, and the metal cations are chemically changed to stable metal solids so they can be easily removed. The engineers used an SPE developed by Hradil, a senior research engineer at Technic Inc., located in Cranston, R.I. The cleaner water is returned to the precipitation tank, where metal ions can be precipitated once again. Further cleaned, the supernatant water is sent to another reservoir, where additional processes may be employed to further lower the metal ion concentration levels. These processes can be repeated in an automated, cyclic fashion as many times as necessary to achieve the desired performance, such as to federal drinking water standards.
In experiments, the engineers tested the CEP system with cadmium, copper, and nickel, individually and with water containing all three metals. The results showed cadmium, copper, and nickel were lowered to 1.50, 0.23 and 0.37 parts per million (ppm), respectively – near or below maximum contaminant levels established by the Environmental Protection Agency. The sludge is continuously formed and redissolved within the system so that none is left as an environmental contaminant.
“This approach produces very large volume reductions from the original contaminated water by electrochemical reduction of the ions to zero-valent metal on the surfaces of the cathodic particles,” the authors write. “For an initial 10 ppm ion concentration of the metals considered, the volume reduction is on the order of 106.”
Calo said the approach can be used for other heavy metals, such as lead, mercury, and tin. The researchers are currently testing the system with samples contaminated with heavy metals and other substances, such as sediment, to confirm its operation.
The research was funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, a branch of the National Institutes of Health, through the Brown University Superfund Research Program.
Contact: Richard Lewis
Richard_Lewis@brown.edu
401-863-3766
Brown University
Why do people defend unjust, inept, and corrupt systems?
December 12, 2011
Why do we stick up for a system or institution we live in – a government, company, or marriage – even when anyone else can see it is failing miserably? Why do we resist change even when the system is corrupt or unjust? A new article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science, illuminates the conditions under which we’re motivated to defend the status quo – a process called “system justification.”
System justification isn’t the same as acquiescence, explains Aaron C. Kay, a psychologist at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, who co-authored the paper with University of Waterloo graduate student Justin Friesen. “It’s pro-active. When someone comes to justify the status quo, they also come to see it as what should be.”
Reviewing laboratory and cross-national studies, the paper illuminates four situations that foster system justification: system threat, system dependence, system inescapability, and low personal control.
When we’re threatened we defend ourselves – and our systems. Before 9/11, for instance, President George W. Bush was sinking in the polls. But as soon as the planes hit the World Trade Center, the president’s approval ratings soared. So did support for Congress and the police. During Hurricane Katrina, America witnessed FEMA’s spectacular failure to rescue the hurricane’s victims. Yet many people blamed those victims for their fate rather than admitting the agency flunked and supporting ideas for fixing it. In times of crisis, say the authors, we want to believe the system works.
We also defend systems we rely on. In one experiment, students made to feel dependent on their university defended a school funding policy – but disapproved of the same policy if it came from the government, which they didn’t perceive as affecting them closely. However, if they felt dependent on the government, they liked the policy originating from it, but not from the school.
When we feel we can’t escape a system, we adapt. That includes feeling okay about things we might otherwise consider undesirable. The authors note one study in which participants were told that men’s salaries in their country are 20% higher than women’s. Rather than implicate an unfair system, those who felt they couldn’t emigrate chalked up the wage gap to innate differences between the sexes. “You’d think that when people are stuck with a system, they’d want to change it more,” says Kay. But in fact, the more stuck they are, the more likely are they to explain away its shortcomings. Finally, a related phenomenon: The less control people feel over their own lives, the more they endorse systems and leaders that offer a sense of order.
The research on system justification can enlighten those who are frustrated when people don’t rise up in what would seem their own best interests. Says Kay: “If you want to understand how to get social change to happen, you need to understand the conditions that make people resist change and what makes them open to acknowledging that change might be a necessity.”
For more information about this study, please contact: Aaron C. Kay at aaron.kay@duke.edu.
Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, publishes concise reviews on the latest advances in theory and research spanning all of scientific psychology and its applications. For a copy of “On Social Stability and Social Change: Understanding When System Justification Does and Does Not Occur” and access to other Current Directions in Psychological Science research findings, please contact Divya Menon at 202-293-9300 or dmenon@psychologicalscience.org.
Contact: Divya Menon
dmenon@psychologicalscience.org
202-293-9300
Association for Psychological Science