The Grumpy dwarfgoby, Sueviota aethon. Credit: Viktor Nunes Peinemann
A team of researchers at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology and the University of Washington has discovered a new species of fish that seems perpetually displeased. The researchers decided to call this new species the grumpy dwarfgoby.
Despite its small size of less than 2 centimeters, the grumpy dwarfgoby has a surprisingly menacing appearance. Its large canines and fierce expression give it a rather intimidating look for such a small fish.
LucÃa Pombo-Ayora, who gave the species its grumpy common name, comments on its distinctive appearance, “I imagine in its own tiny world, it is a fearsome predator. Its grumpy expression and large canines certainly make it look the part, despite its small size.”
The species’ bright red coloration actually helps it blend into its natural habitat. It can be found on the walls and overhangs of coral reefs, covered in red coralline algae. There, it lives in small holes and crevices, using its large canines to capture tiny invertebrates. The grumpy dwarfgoby appears to be a relatively rare species, which is likely why it remained undiscovered until now.
The researchers found the first specimens in the Farasan Banks in Saudi Arabia, with additional specimens later found near Thuwal in the Red Sea. It was researcher Viktor Nunes Peinemann who first found it during a diving expedition to explore the coral reef fish diversity.
The Grumpy dwarfgoby, Sueviota aethon. Credit: Viktor Nunes Peinemann
A CT scan of the skull of The Grumpy dwarfgoby, Sueviota aethon. Credit: Viktor Nunes Peinemann
Initially, the researchers thought they had rediscovered the fiery dwarfgoby, Sueviota pyrios, which is only known from a single specimen collected in 1972. However, upon closer examination, they realized they were dealing with an entirely new, undescribed species.
“The ongoing discovery of distinctive new species like this grumpy dwarfgoby shows how much biodiversity remains undiscovered in the Red Sea,” Nunes Peinemann explains. “This is concerning given the recent environmental changes in the region. In some cases, species could go extinct before we even describe them.”
The region is known for its high levels of endemic species and the Grumpy dwarf goby is another addition to this unique fauna. Much of the Red Sea has experienced major disturbances resulting from climate change in recent years, including widespread coral bleaching and mortality. The fact that new species are still being discovered in this rapidly changing environment highlights the urgency of continued research and conservation efforts, the researchers believe.
They have published their discovery in the journal ZooKeys.
More information:
Viktor Nunes Peinemann et al, The Grumpy dwarfgoby, a new species of Sueviota (Teleostei, Gobiidae) from the Red Sea, ZooKeys (2024). DOI: 10.3897/zookeys.1212.121135
Citation:
New ‘grumpy’ fish species discovered in the Red Sea (2024, September 16)
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Simulation of a scenario in which emergency responders are planning to rescue an injured hiker. From a central point, the authors chose 1,000 random destinations and mapped hiking routes using two different models: one that only accounted for slope steepness, and one based on STRIDE. STRIDE (right, red) reused established paths as long as possible before branching off, identifying the routes most intuitive for somebody on the ground. The slope-only model (left, blue) generated few overlapping pathways with little regard for roads or trails. Credit: Scientific Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-71359-6
You’re a hotshot working to contain a wildfire. The conflagration jumps the fire line, forcing your crew to flee using pre-determined escape routes. At the start of the day, the crew boss estimated how long it should take to get to the safety zone. With the flames at your back, you check your watch and hope they were right.
Firefighters mostly rely on life-long experience and ground-level information to choose evacuation routes, with little support from digital mapping or aerial data. The tools that do exist tend to consider only a landscape’s steepness when estimating the time it takes to traverse across terrain.
However, running up a steep road may be quicker than navigating a flat boulder field or bushwacking through chest-high shrubs. Firefighters, disaster responders, rural health care workers and professionals in myriad other fields need a tool that incorporates all aspects of a landscape’s structure to estimate travel times.
In a new study, researchers from the University of Utah introduced Simulating Travel Rates in Diverse Environments (STRIDE), the first model that incorporates ground roughness and vegetation density, in addition to slope steepness, to predict walking travel times with unprecedented accuracy.
“One of the fundamental questions in firefighter safety is mobility. If I’m in the middle of the woods and need to get out of here, what is the best way to go and how long will it take me?” said Mickey Campbell, research assistant professor in the School of Environment, Society and Sustainability (ESS) at the U and lead author of the study.
The authors analyzed airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data and conducted field trials to develop a remarkably simple, accurate equation that identifies the most efficient routes between any two locations in wide-ranging settings, from paved, urban environments to off-trail, forested landscapes.
They found that STRIDE consistently chose routes resembling paths that a person would logically seek out—a preference for roads and trails and paths of least resistance. STRIDE also produced much more accurate travel times than the standard slope-only models that severely underestimated travel time.
“If the fire reaches a firefighter before they reach safety, the results can be deadly, as has happened in tragedies such as the 2013 Yarnell Hill fire,” said Campbell. “STRIDE has the potential to not only improve firefighter evacuation but also better our understanding of pedestrian mobility across disciplines from defense to archaeology, disaster response and outdoor recreation planning.”
The study was published on Sept. 13, 2024, in the journal Scientific Reports.
Credit: University of Utah
Airborne estimates of on-the-ground travel
STRIDE is the first comprehensive model to use airborne LiDAR data to map two underappreciated factors that inhibit off-road travel—vegetation density and ground surface roughness—as well as steepness. LiDAR is commonly used to map the structure of a landscape from the air, Campbell explained.
A LiDAR-equipped plane has sensors that shoot millions of laser pulses in all directions, which bounce back and paint a detailed map of structures on the ground. The laser pulses bounce off leaf litter, gravel, boulders, shrubs and tree canopies to build three-dimensional maps of terrain and vegetation with centimeter-level precision.
The authors compared STRIDE performance against travel rates gleaned from three field experiments, in which volunteers walked along 100-meter-transects through areas with existing LiDAR data.
“Getting travel times from a variety of volunteers allowed us to account for a range of human performance so we can make the most accurate predictions of travel rates in a diversity of environments,” said co-author Philip Dennison, professor and director of ESS.
The first field trials were in September of 2016. At the time, LiDAR datasets were relatively rare in the western U.S. Over the last decade, the U.S. Geological Society has developed LiDAR maps covering most of the country.
“When we first started looking into wildland firefighter-mobility a decade ago, there were lots of people studying how fire spreads across the landscape, but very few people were working on the problem of how firefighters move across the landscape,” said Campbell, then a doctoral student in Dennison’s lab at ESS. “Only by combining these two pieces of information can we truly understand how to improve firefighter safety.”
That study, published in 2017, was the first attempt to map escape routes for wildland firefighters using LiDAR. The second trial took place in August of 2023 in the central Wasatch Mountains of Utah to capture a wider set of undeveloped, off-path landscape conditions than did the first experiment, including nearly impassibly steep slopes and extremely dense vegetation.
The final experiment was in January of 2024 in Salt Lake City to test the STRIDE model in an urban environment. In total, about 50 volunteers walked more than 40 100-meter transects of highly varied terrain.
Volunteers were timed walking 100-meter transects chosen to represent off-path landscape conditions, including nearly impassibly steep slopes and extremely dense vegetation. Credit: Utah Remote Sensing Applications Lab
Putting it together
The study compared STRIDE against a slope-only model to generate the most efficient routes, or the least-cost paths, in the mountains surrounding Alta Ski Resort in the Wasatch Mountains, Utah. Geographers and archaeologists have been using least-cost path modeling to simulate human movement for decades; however, to date most have relied almost exclusively on slope as the sole landscape impediment.
The authors imagined a scenario in which emergency responders are planning to rescue an injured hiker. From a central point, they chose 1,000 random locations for the hiker and asked both models to find the least-cost path.
STRIDE chose established roads around the ski areas, followed trails and in some cases major ski slopes, to avoid patches of forest or dense vegetation. STRIDE reused established paths as long as possible before branching off, reinforcing the idea that STRIDE identified the routes most intuitive for somebody on the ground.
“The really cool thing is that we didn’t supply the algorithm with any knowledge of existing transportation networks. It just knew to take the roads because they’re smoother, not vegetated and tend to be less steep,” said Campbell.
In contrast, the slope-only model had few overlapping pathways, with little regard for roads or trails. It sent rescuers through dense vegetation, dangerous scree fields and forested areas.
The authors believe that STRIDE will have an immediate impact in the real world—they’ve made the STRIDE model publicly available so that anyone with LiDAR data and gumption can make their work or recreation more efficient, with a higher safety margin.
“If you don’t consider the vegetation cover and ground-surface material, you’re going to significantly underestimate your total travel time. The U.S. Forest Service has been really supportive of this travel rate research because they recognize the inherent value of understanding firefighter mobility,” said Campbell.
“That’s what I love about this work. It’s not just an academic exercise, but it’s something that has real, tangible implications for firefighters and for professionals in so many other fields.”
The authors recently used a slope-based travel rate model to update the U.S. Forest Service Ground Evacuation Time (GET) layer, which allows wildland firefighters to estimate travel time to the nearest medical facility from any location in the contiguous U.S. Campbell hopes to use STRIDE to improve GET, allowing for more accurate estimates of evacuation times.
More information:
Michael J. Campbell et al, A singular, broadly-applicable model for estimating on- and off-path walking travel rates using airborne lidar data, Scientific Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-71359-6
Citation:
Comprehensive model uses airborne LiDAR data to predict walking travel times with unprecedented accuracy (2024, September 16)
retrieved 16 September 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-09-comprehensive-airborne-lidar-unprecedented-accuracy.html
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Psychologists at the University of Stirling have carried out research that shows wild bumblebees make the same memory errors as humans.
The paper, titled “The constructive nature of memories in insects: bumblebees as a case study,” was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
When presented with a variety of stimuli, the bumblebees were found to misremember, a key component of the episodic memory system which many psychologists argue is uniquely human.
The wild bumblebees were presented with colored objects soaked in sucrose, such as an orange strip of paper or a yellow, rounded paper stick.
After a short period of time, the bees were presented with four objects—one which was presented previously; one made up of two of the features of the objects presented previously; one with only one feature of the objects presented previously; and a completely new object.
Episodic memory
The bees then selected one of these objects by exploring it with their antennae or proboscis. Across a range of randomized trials, the bumblebees often remembered to go to the original object to seek out the sucrose, but they also made mistakes by selecting a similar stimulus of a different shape or color.
The bumblebees made the same mistakes that humans make in similar tasks. These memory errors are characteristic of a type of memory argued to be uniquely human, episodic memory—the ability to remember past events, for example our recent holiday.
Dr. Gema Martin-Ordas, who carried out the study at the University of Stirling, said, “In humans, the recombination processes that are critical for memory recollection are argued to make memory prone to errors that arise from mistakenly combining elements of stored episodes.
“In this context, memory conjunction errors are usual forms of memory distortions, and the results presented here show evidence of bees spontaneously making memory conjunction errors.
“If conjunction mistakes made by bees in the present studies indeed arise from erroneously merging elements of the to-be-remembered items, then one would be tempted to conclude that bees’ memories are also constructive.
“It is completely plausible to expect that these types of errors are present in bees because their natural lifestyle involves encoding and retrieving features from several stimuli, for example flowers.”
Constructive processes
The experiments involving 50 bumblebees were conducted in June and July 2022. The objects were presented to bees housed in transparent plastic tubes, and all of them were released back into the wild.
Dr. Martin-Ordas, who is a senior lecturer in the University of Stirling’s Faculty of Natural Sciences added, “The findings tantalizingly suggest the presence of constructive processes in bees’ memories, although more research is needed.
“Memory error paradigms, like the one presented here, offer an interesting avenue of research to examine episodic memory from a new approach, since constructive processes can be used to combine and recombine elements of past events to imagine future ones.
“The comparative field of episodic memory is, therefore, ripe for being taken beyond our established paradigms and old debates, and into a more mature and constructive phase.”
More information:
Gema Martin-Ordas, The constructive nature of memories in insects: bumblebees as a case study, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2023.0405
Citation:
Researchers find evidence that bumblebees make the same memory errors as humans (2024, September 16)
retrieved 16 September 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-09-evidence-bumblebees-memory-errors-humans.html
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Illustration of the theory used to model quantum gravity: The lattice simulates a curved space-time—near the boundary, the lattice is denser due to the curvature. The interacting electrical signals (yellow, red and blue lines) in the bulk simulate the gravitational dynamics. The dynamics in the bulk and at the outer boundary correspond to each other. They are consistent with the AdS/CFT correspondence. Credit: Erdmenger/JMU, Böttcher/Alberta
Gravity is no longer a mystery to physicists—at least when it comes to large distances. Thanks to science, we can calculate the orbits of planets, predict tides, and send rockets into space with precision. However, the theoretical description of gravity reaches its limits at the level of the smallest particles, the so-called quantum level.
“To explain the Big Bang or the interior of black holes, we have to understand the quantum properties of gravity,” explains Professor Johanna Erdmenger, Chair of Theoretical Physics III at the University of Würzburg (JMU) in Bavaria, Germany.
“At very high energies, the classical laws of gravity fail. Therefore, our goal is to contribute to the development of new theories that can explain gravity at all scales, including at the quantum level.”
The central theory of quantum gravity
The AdS/CFT correspondence, a central theory of quantum gravity, plays an important role in the development of new models. It states that complex gravitational theories in a high-dimensional space can be described by simpler quantum theories at the boundary of that space.
AdS stands for Anti-de-Sitter, a special type of spacetime that is curved inward, like a hyperbola. CFT stands for conformal field theory, which describes quantum physical systems whose properties are the same at all spatial distances.
“This sounds very complicated at first, but it’s easy to explain,” says Erdmenger. “The AdS/CFT correspondence allows us to understand difficult gravitational processes, such as those that exist in the quantum world, using simpler mathematical models. At its heart is a curved spacetime, which can be thought of as a funnel.
“The correspondence states that the quantum dynamics at the edge of the funnel must correspond to the more complex dynamics inside—similar to a hologram on a banknote, which generates a three-dimensional image even though it is only two-dimensional itself.
Proof of concept for realizing gravitational dynamics in the laboratory
Together with her team, Erdmenger has now developed a method to experimentally test the predictions of the previously unconfirmed AdS/CFT correspondence. A branched electrical circuit is used to mimic curved space-time—the electrical signals at the individual branch points of the circuit correspond to the gravitational dynamics that would be found at different points in space-time.
The study is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
The theoretical calculations of the research team show that in the proposed circuit, the dynamics at the edge of the mimicked spacetime also correspond to those inside—and thus a central prediction of the AdS/CFT correspondence can be realized by the circuit.
As a next step, the Würzburg research team now plans to put the experimental setup described in the study into practice. In addition to significant advances in gravitational research, this could also lead to technical innovations.
“Our circuits also open up new technological applications,” explains Erdmenger. “Based on quantum technology, they are expected to transmit electrical signals with reduced loss, since the simulated curvature of space bundles and stabilizes the signals. This would be a breakthrough for signal transmission in neural networks used for artificial intelligence, for example.”
Citation:
Theoretical physicists develop method to model a central theory of quantum gravity in the laboratory (2024, September 16)
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Marine scientists have been taking samples from whale shark skin to try and determine the effect of pollutants on whale health.
Researchers from The University of Western Australia and Flinders University examined the condition and health of whale sharks at Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia.
Lead researcher Dr. Mark Meekan, from UWA’s Ocean Institute, said some whale sharks had strange white patches on their skin, and there was concern this was an indication of skin disease and poor health.
“Whale sharks are giant filter-feeders that forage by sieving small shrimps and fish from the water using specialized plates over their gills,” Dr. Meekan said.
“Unfortunately, this mode of feeding makes these animals uniquely vulnerable to pollutants that humans discard, particularly plastics and organic chemicals such as flame retardants.”
Researchers took samples of the microbiome on the whale sharks’ skin as well as small tissue samples to analyze for the presence of pollutants, using underwater ultrasound scanners to measure body condition.
“This is probably the most detailed look at the health of whale sharks that anyone has ever attempted,” Dr. Meekan said.
“We took a multidisciplinary approach to measuring the condition of the free-swimming species in the wild, which is no small task when you are dealing with an animal that averages 6-to-7 meters in body length and you’re swimming alongside as fast as you can to collect samples.
“Fortunately, the animals don’t seem to have any objection to us doing the health check, they just seem to regard us as part of the entourage of other fish that accompany them at Ningaloo.”
Dr. Michael Doane, from Flinders University, will lead the analysis of the microbiome samples collected over the coming months to provide a snapshot of whale shark health.
“The genomic and biomolecular markers in the microbe community of the whale shark will show if the white patches are a sign of disease, and if so, provide insight into the cause,” Dr. Doane said.
Dr. Charlotte Birkmanis, from the Jock Clough Marine Foundation and UWA’s Ocean Institute, said whale shark tourism was a major contributor to the economy of the Exmouth region.
“We need to increase our understanding of the condition and health of our marine ecosystem, including iconic species such as sharks,” Dr. Birkmanis said.
“Ningaloo Reef is such a unique environment and on our doorstep, so through this type of research we can ensure that the animals inhabiting this World Heritage region are here for the long term.”
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Are white patches on whale shark skin cause for concern? (2024, September 16)
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